Sometimes, all it takes is an email.

While working for Free People’s marketing team in 2013, Kathryn O’Connor, a frequent visitor to La Colombe’s original café in Philadelphia, reached out to the brand’s founders, Todd Carmichael and JP Iberti. O’Connor had seen the amount of PR the brand was getting, and she told them via email that she wanted to learn more about the brand’s aspirations. The message led to more conversations and, eventually, a job offer. O’Connor has now been leading La Colombe’s marketing for nearly 10 years, and she became the brand’s first-ever CMO in 2023.

“The first year has been a whirlwind,” O’Connor told us.

In the time since she joined the company, La Colombe has expanded nationwide as both a café and a CPG brand with products like its canned draft lattes. Last year, the company debuted a sweet chai canned latte, ran its second national ad campaign, and rolled out La Colombe K-Cups with the help of an investment from Keurig Dr Pepper. The biggest announcement, however, came in December, when Chobani acquired the coffee company for $900 million.

As she approaches her first year as CMO, O’Connor told us that she’s excited for the brand’s future as it brews its future plans.

Continue reading here.—KH

When you’re building a business or charting your own path in your career, it can be difficult to discern when roadblocks are challenges to push you further…or redirections that are begging you to go down a different path.

In this episode of BOSSY, Tara and Katie break down the most masterful business comebacks, accelerating out of stagnant career slumps, and when it’s time to rebrand “quitting” to “pivoting.”

For decades, marketers have made the pilgrimage to Las Vegas for CES each January for a number of reasons. Among them: They just can’t wait for upfronts season.

With many media companies, brands, and agencies gathered on the strip, it’s inevitable that they’ll discuss advertising plans for the year ahead, and CES serves as a logical place to hold pre-upfront talks. Last year, economic uncertainty clouded those conversations. This year, the tone was brighter.

“The vibe check around our partnership discussions has gotten increasingly optimistic,” SVP of Disney Advertising Sales Wendell Scott told Marketing Brew at CES.

Other media execs agreed, citing not only a more positive vibe in their pre-upfront talks, but also a focus on maturing ad formats and measurement options, as well as increased competition in the ad-supported streaming space.

Halftime for streaming? One reason for the optimism during this year’s CES conversations was the fact that last year’s anticipated recession never really came to be. Recession or not, the ad-supported streaming space at the beginning of 2024 was even more crowded compared to a year ago: Last January, Netflix with ads was in its infancy, while Disney+ didn’t announce its ad-supported streaming offering until March. And while ads still haven’t hit Amazon’s Prime Video, its own ad-supported tier is set to go live by the end of this month.

Last year, “advertising was not a major point of discussion” for Prime Video, Andrew Bennett, the company’s VP and head of global video partnerships, said before the conference. This year, he said it would be “the focus of our advertising conversations with partners.”

• While there were more voices in the pre-upfronts mix at CES, more competition also means it’s increasingly difficult for the big media companies to “overperform” in the streaming space, according to Chris Vollmer, a managing director at media and marketing consultancy MediaLink.

Keep reading here.—AM

CMOs, your report cards are in.

For the past three years, independent marketing agency Boathouse has surveyed CEOs about their perspectives on their top marketers. The third annual survey of 150 US CEOs, conducted between Sept. 9 and Oct. 4, found that more chief executives gave their CMOs an “A” grade performance review for 2023 than 2022, according to a report published this month.

“During Covid…CMOs got wiser to [the fact that] they have to help manage all the audiences,” Boathouse co-founder and CEO, John Connors, told Marketing Brew. “They had to help with employees; they had to help with DE&I initiatives; they had to help with community groups [and] other stakeholders. So I think increasingly, because CMOs helped bail out CEOs with all those other audiences…they grade them differently.”

Good grades: When asked to grade their CMOs on an academic scale from A to F, 26% of CEOs gave their CMOs As for their overall performance in 2023, up from 16% in 2022, according to the report.

• Almost half (47%) gave their CMOs Bs, compared to 55% in 2022.
• Similar shares of CEOs gave their CMOs Cs in 2023 as in 2022 (25% versus 23%).
• Just 2% gave Ds this year, and 1% gave Fs (sorry to this CMO).

On a positive note for CMOs, the share of CEOs who said their company’s marketing is “best in class” increased for the second year in a row, Boathouse found, up to 49% in 2023 from 24% in 2022 and 20% in 2021.

Continue reading here.—AM

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Predictions: Investment bank Luma expects there to be more M&A activity in the digital media and marketing space this year.

Tips: Here’s a guide to writing copy that doesn’t mention AI.

Guide: TikTok published a best practices guide for ad bidding. Now if we could only get our ring light to work…