In a world of short tenures for CMOs and otherwise, Emily Essner is exceptionally brand loyal.

Essner, CMO of Saks Fifth Avenue’s e-commerce arm, Saks, has been in the company’s family since 2011. She held corporate strategy roles at both Saks Fifth Avenue and its parent company, Hudson’s Bay, before switching to marketing and business operations. When Saks’s e-commerce arm was split off from Saks Fifth Avenue in March 2021, Essner split off, too—and she’s served as CMO of the digital platform ever since.

Throughout her career, Essner told us her goal has always been to be “as close to consumers as possible,” thinking about, “Why are we here? What are we doing, and how is whatever we’re doing better serving our customer?”

Initially, Essner said Saks Fifth Avenue’s marketing was more focused on art and visuals and less on the science behind marketing. Now, she said, her team is “highly data-driven,” incorporating things like machine learning and virtual experiences to heighten the luxury experience while also staying true to Saks’s legacy as a high-touch fashion brand.

Read the full story here.—KH

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Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the fast-food chain Wendy’s—and you’ve probably also munched on a Baconator or slurped down a Frosty.

That doesn’t mean Wendy’s can rest on its laurels, according to Carl Loredo, Wendy’s global CMO.

“The more dollars you have, the higher likelihood you can have to get lazy,” he said on Tuesday at Advertising Week New York.

Wendy’s isn’t the only major brand seeking new marketing strategies to help it maintain market share, especially as the pandemic and inflation have reshaped consumer behavior. Hershey’s also took to the stage to talk about how it keeps consumers coming back and appeals to more demographics.

Continue reading here.—JS

Not all TV programming is equal, as most of us know from channel-surfing or scrolling to find something we want to watch on streaming. The same sentiment applies to advertisers.

For the TV industry, this holiday season may represent a continuation of recent volatility, according to EDO, between the impacts of the recent writers’ and ongoing actors’ strikes, ever-growing streaming options, and a soft upfronts season earlier this year. Still, there’s valuable ad inventory for marketers to take advantage of if they know where to look, according to EDO’s Holiday TV Outcomes report released this month.

Red zone: Retailers that showed ads during NFL games the week of Thanksgiving last year saw a more than 300% spike in engagement rate—aka ad effectiveness per person, per second—compared to the previous week. Ads that aired on any live sporting event held on Black Friday in particular outperformed other programming on that day by 12%, EDO found.

While afternoon Thanksgiving games tend to draw more viewers, the evening slot was better for ad engagement last year, per EDO. Ads that ran in last year’s Thanksgiving prime-time NFL game were 70% more likely to result in engagement than the prime-time average.

“It’s a really sustained lift that [brands] get from being in the NFL on Thanksgiving,” EDO CEO Kevin Krim told Marketing Brew. “Well worth the premium you have to pay, in our view, based on our data, to be in the Thanksgiving NFL games.”

Keep reading here.—AM

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