Beers With Friends 🍻

Cheers to the 200+ marketers we’ve spoken with over the past year who told us Beers With Friends 🍻 was a great idea - you were right. 😉 james wood and I are so honored to be featured in this Ad Age story about agencies putting sprints at the heart of their offerings. We know firsthand that brand marketers crave agility and de-risked ways to try new things. It’s great to see the list of alternatives growing. 🏃🏽♀️ A huge thanks to Ad Age's Brian Bonilla for chatting with us. 🙏 We're also grateful for our partnership with Jessica Serrano at DIG. We're so glad this piece shared behind-the-scenes insights from Jessica about our first 5-Day Beer Run together that's now blossomed into an ongoing partnership. 🙌 Shout out to Lynne Collins and Pat Sloan for your support along with Chris Cassidy for the headshots.🍻 And most importantly, thank you to our roster of launch clients who said ‘yes’ and jumped into a new way of working to do more, better, and much, much faster.👇 🍴 DIG.: Jessica Serrano, Kayt Bennett, Megan Zilenziger, Sophia Feleke 🚀 Virgin Galactic: Chelsea Chang, Chloe Taylor 💯 Perfect Snacks: Meredith Diehn   🪩 GORGIE: Michelle Cordeiro Grant, Madi Lieber 👩🎤 Hally Hair: Kathryn Winokur 📱 Thoughtful: Elizabeth Cordry Shaffer, Marc Lore 🟰 #DontBanEquality & McPherson Strategies: Susan McPherson

cooking up something good with DIG. 🍻 x 🍠

Advice for brands on working with small agencies — hot off the presses from the Ad Age Small Agency Conference 📰 👇 I’m back in NY after 3 days in Boston at the Ad Age Small Agency Conference. As a longtime marketer turned agency owner, there’s so much I am learning from the “other side” that I wish I knew when I was brand-side. So, here you go — my takeaways for marketers on how to best leverage the flourishing small agency landscape. 1️⃣ See the BIG in small 💪 The small agency community is united in its collective mission to help small win big. The value that small partners can offer is clear — agility, flexibility, an entrepreneurial mindset, a fresh perspective, and of course, great work. So, don’t just save the “strategic projects” for big agencies. Small is smart, strategic, scrappy, and a sound investment. The best creative talent is lining up to join small shops, and small agencies are winning big accounts to prove it. Every marketer should make sure to have small agencies in the RFP process and on the roster (how’s THAT for creating small agency FOMO 🤣). 2️⃣ Look for creativity in the face of constraints 💡 Some of the most inspiring case studies from the conference featured creativity that was born from constraints, including navigating highly regulated industries like cannabis and traditionally taboo topics from below the belt. It’s easy to be creative when the sky’s the limit. But I don’t know of a single client who is constraint-free (I certainly never was). So, as I always say (actually, I just came up with this line but I really love it) ➡️ You can’t make it if you can’t make it. Look for partners who have the passion, expertise, and tools to always find a way to make it. 3️⃣ Buy The Why ❤️ Many agencies often seem to be doing the “same thing” and have similar capabilities. But capabilities are only half the battle. Choosing an agency partner is also about people, process, and vibes — and those all stem from an agency's Why. It’s easy to see branded ideation sessions and trademarked processes as gimmicks and hooks (we have ours too at Beers With Friends 🍻 like Beer Runs & Happy Hours). But they do reflect something deeper about agencies and what drives them beneath the surface. -- Thank you so much to Judann Pollack, Jeanine Poggi, Brian Bonilla, and Tim Nudd for a wonderful conference. I came for the content and community but left with an unexpected party favor -- continued conviction, clarity, and drive to keep on building 🏃🏽♀️. Hi to my old & new friends. Cheering you on! Allison Miceli, Michael Lasky, Samantha Rothaus, Hollie Rapello, Andrew Sexton, Alyssa Siegel, Steve Sapka, Mikayla Caprio, Karan Dang, Claire Eisenberg, Alyssa Stevens, Alison Monk, Chloe Cotoulas, Aliza Freud, Lori Murphree, Christy Hiler, Carrie Kerpen, Mike Palmer, Samantha DiGennaro, Helene DeVries, Al Merry, Simone Oppenheimer Mandel, Rachel Segall, Frances Lumpkin Webster, Karan Dang, Rachel Huff, Caroline May, Adrienne Scordato.

If it's been a while since you had a reaction like this to the work your agency shared with you, we should talk. And if you want to see what we came up with in just 5 days that got this reaction, lmk. 🍻 -- 🙌 Jessica Serrano DIG. Beers With Friends 🍻 Dana Hork Elizabeth Cauvel MK Luff Mike Jacobson

I got to do something completely new last week -- build a brand personality for an AI-powered chatbot. 🤖 Turns out that briefing an LLM for voice & tone has many similarities – and many differences – to briefing a human copywriter. But of all we learned in our 5 day Beer Run at Beers With Friends 🍻, my biggest takeaway is summed up so nicely in this timely HBR article. ➡️ Anything new, and especially hard, calls for the skills and mastery of an expert plus the openness and curiosity of a beginner. Feeling so grateful for our clients who hire us to bring both to bear, and very appreciative of our expert network who joined us on the journey. 🙏 Enjoy the read 👇 and call us if you need help on building a brand to brief your bot, too. ☎️

Had a blast co-hosting the first NYC Startup Marketing Network Meetup of 2024 last Thursday! A great time was had by all. We're already looking forward to our next installment - stay tuned for details! Thanks so much to my co-hosts Prasid Pathak, Amy Chen, and David Brown for your help with putting together an awesome event. 🙏 Also thanks to Brian McInerney from Customer.io for sponsoring the food and drinks 🍷 and to Alice Inchauspé and the Left Lane Capital team for letting us use your amazing space 🌆 , and (last one I promise) to Dana Hork and james wood from Beers with Friends 🍻 for their great lightning talk! See you all again soon 📈 If any fellow digital marketers want to join our Slack channel shoot me a message. It's a great community and an awesome source of knowledge and industry news.

A thoughtful, prescriptive and *timely* guide to taking the leap into starting your own business by Amy Shoenthal featuring excellent advice from Farrah Bostic Christina Wallace Dana Hork Abby Falik Ruth Ann Harnisch Marina Khidekel Janki Bhoti Kim Rittberg 🚀 Makes me wish I had a corporate job to leave!

How do you teach the next generation of brand builders? Put your Brand in a Can 💥. On Tuesday, I was back at Harvard Business School – this time, as a CEO and Guest Lecturer 🥳. james wood and I were tapped by Professor Christina Wallace 👩🏫 to co-teach 110 first-year MBA students enrolled in HBS Startup Bootcamp. In this select intensive program, students learn the skills, tools, and best practices of rigorous, experimentation-driven startups by building their own pilot companies (roughly 30 in total across the group). So, how do you teach business students everything they need to know about brand building in an hour? You create a framework that neatly fits on a beer can. And you call it Brand In A Can 🎯. We distilled our years of experience building brands (including together for Walmart and now at Beers With Friends 🍻) into three key components: 1️⃣ INGREDIENTS: What’s IN the can – like your target audience truths, product benefits, and personality traits. Think of this as your internal brand DNA. 2️⃣ IDENTITY: What’s ON the can – like your distinctive assets and differentiating actions. This is how you translate your internal DNA into what you show and do in the real world. 3️⃣ IMPRESSION: What’s it taste like – driven by relevance, resonance, stickiness, fandom, and currency. This is the lasting impression you leave with your audience.  💃 We led with a deep dive into Taylor Swift (2023’s biggest brand) and all her distinctive brand assets and participatory brand behaviors. 👀 We also shared countless real-world examples of how brands control how they look, sound, feel, and act. ✏️ Lastly, we created an online tool enabling every student to build their own Brand In A Can for their budding entrepreneurial ventures. 110 brands built in 1 hour. No sweat 😅. If you want to see the full framework, shoot me a DM. Thank you to Christina Wallace, DJ DiDonna, and Lindsay Hyde for having us 🙌. And shoutout to Evgenia Eliseeva for the awesome pics 📸. #brand #marketing #entrepreneurship #startups