Salesforce today announced a major update that integrates Slack more deeply into its platform. The idea is to let teams work in a unified environment—whether they prefer using Salesforce or Slack—without losing visibility into the full customer picture.
Slack will now be the conversational front end for Salesforce. That happens through Salesforce Channels, specialized Slack channels tied to Salesforce records like accounts, opportunities or custom objects. These links are maintained through a shared metadata layer that syncs everything.
Users can jump into these channels from either platform, so they’re not limited by where they work. The channels are also set up to capture structured CRM data and unstructured content like chat threads, creating a centralized knowledge base. Adding that knowledge to Agentforce lets AI agents act with more context and relevance.
Salesforce says this is the new way to keep teams aligned. Everything from customer data to agent collaboration happens in one place, so teams don’t have to dig through disconnected systems.
Dig deeper: Is your CRM lying to you? The hidden costs of dirty B2B data
One example in action: a marketing team can use a dedicated Campaign channel to coordinate everything around a launch—from planning and creative reviews to legal approvals, all in one space, helping them move faster and stay on track.
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Want to know how to make a website on Canva? It’s pretty easy to be honest. And while it’s not necessarily the best website builder for small businesses (more fitting as a web builder for artists, really) it is a great choice for independent creatives; particularly if you’re already familiar with Canva, the original design app.
You see there’s Canva the design tool, and then there’s Canva Websites, a platform with a vast template library and user-friendly approach. You can choose from hundreds of professionally designed templates, customise them with your own images and content, and publish your site within hours rather than weeks.
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It might be perceived as a sign of uncertain economic times that agencies are doing their best to stay lean by keeping full-time staff at a minimum and relying more heavily on freelance help in areas where the lift is needed.
But from speaking with the principals at two agencies, it’s as much a means of flexibility at a time when maximum optionality is needed. As well as offering the freedom to customize one’s shop to the needs of each client without breaking the bank.
Chris Mele, managing partner and founder of Siberia, an independent design studio/agency based in Brooklyn, runs a foundation of five full-timers who handle design, product management, engineering, and talent management — while he stands in as head of strategy, as well as sales and marketing.
Mele likens the setup to classic rock “band” Steely Dan, which in reality was primarily comprised of two founding members, Donald Fagan and Walter Becker — who hired any number of professional session musicians to record their albums in the 1970s. Known for being production perfectionists, they sometimes ran through different players before finding their sound. The shop then leans on a roster of 30-40 freelance people of differing skillsets to flesh out what’s needed for each client.
“When we started this iteration of the company, our intention was, let’s do this and figure out how to flex and only flex,” said Mele. “We have a couple of clients that have longer term contracts where it’s made sense to convert a very select few people who are also very senior … Most of the people that are in our roster are sort of career-committed to being contractors.”
The pandemic certainly helped “shake the box” of agency work, added Mele. “For some reason, in our corner of the world, it wasn’t quite as prevalent,” he noted. “I do think that people just kind of burnt out a little bit [at the time]. Whatever the percentage was before, there’s a much larger percentage now of folks that really don’t have that much interest in being part of a full time team and being committed to company culture.”
Adam Kleinberg, founder of Traction, an agency he now describes as a marketing accelerator company, believes in what he calls a “liquid workforce.” Kleinberg actually set up Traction’s current means of working before the pandemic — it’s currently at about 20 full time personnel, but about 100 freelancers, or “perma-lancers” as he calls them.
Traction’s roster of perma-lance keeps expanding because, as Kleinberg explained, they tend to beget one another through recommendation. In fact, moments after he hung up with Digiday for this interview, he got a message in his LinkedIn from one of his perma-lancers suggesting another potential person to add to his team. “It’s not too hard to keep a bench when you get intros like this all the time,” he said.
There are some downsides, Mele explained, including the perception of instability, the prospect of not having the right people available at the right time. He said Siberia lost a potential client because they didn’t believe Siberia could scale sufficiently on a project without more manpower. And both Mele and Kleinberg spoke of the significant effort it takes to onboarding freelance or perma-lance talent, which can backfire if that person turns out to be a dud (it happens even after considerable vetting).
But neither founder would ever go back to a full-on staff operation again. “When we define who we are, we proudly state this liquid workforce model,” said Kleinberg. “And clients say, oh, that’s smart.”
Kind of like Steve Gadd’s famous drum solo at the end of Steely Dan’s legendary song, Aja.
https://digiday.com/?p=579879
From the mind of motion design and animation studio Noodle, Form + Fidget is an experimental digital fidget playground created as an excuse to explore Rive – an interactive digital tool. “We were curious about how far we could push interactivity beyond traditional motion design,” creative director of the Chicago-based studio, Doug Alberts, says. “I remember asking my wife to test one of our early experiments and her face lit up with a genuine ‘wow,’” he continues. Following such a positive reaction, Doug continued developing – and experimenting – with what became Form + Fidget, excited by its point of difference compared to standard scroll-and-swipe interactivity as an satisfying instrument that intuitively responds to clicks and taps.“It was like we had tapped into a new kind of storytelling,” he says, “one where people don’t just watch, they play.”
Playfulness and intuition are fundamental to Form + Fidget, both in terms of its development and engagement. In developing a series of “bite-sized interactive moments”, the tool becomes a digital playground with the not-too-serious intention of having a nice time. “A little moment of joy, honestly,” Doug says, answering what he’d like people to take from interacting with the project. “We’re so used to interacting with screens in functional ways like scrolling, tapping, and closing pop-ups,” he continues, “but Form + Fidget is just… for fun, no instructions, no goal, just a chance to mess around.” It’s a refreshing tool, especially when so many digital experiences designed for joy end up being monetised. “It’s like a digital exhale,” Doug adds, “with low stakes, and high charm.”
MSNBC’s time at 30 Rock is quickly coming to a close. The network has shared an updated timeline for when it will be moving out of the historic building.
MSNBC and CNBC will both separate from the NBCUniversal News Group family in the coming months to join Versant, a collection of spun-off linear assets owned by their parent company, Comcast.
Jeff Mayzurk, Versant’s president of operations and technology, has shared the latest plans with staffers, which reveals that MSNBC’s temporary New York headquarters will be located at 229 West 43rd Street. The expected move-in date will be in August.
Known internally as the “Summer Camp,” MSNBC’s temporary location was previously Buzzfeed’s former office space and is currently Snap Inc.’s home. Mayzurk said the building was chosen due to its studio and production space and its central location.
The company is still working on securing a permanent headquarters in New York City and is also finalizing plans across its global footprint.
The memo outlined additional office plans across the Versant universe, with some affecting MSNBC. The network’s Washington, D.C. office space has undergone renovation and will be located on the 8th floor of 400 North Capitol Street—the same building as NBC News’ D.C. operations.
CNBC will continue to call its longtime Englewood Cliffs location home, which will also serve as Versant’s technical operations hub. Some of MSNBC’s technical staff will also be based in New Jersey.
The media company officially adopted the name Versant in early May, after being known internally and across the industry as SpinCo.
CEO Mark Lazarus described the choice of name as “a blueprint for versatility, growth, and innovation.”
Investment in martech to improve personalization is the core of many CX and digital transformation strategies. However, capturing the benefits of personalization for businesses and customers comes at a cost.
Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs prioritizing personalization in marketing initiatives allocate more of their budget to marketing technology—25.4%, in contrast to 21.8% for those with a lower emphasis on personalization. To make matters worse, 70% of marketers acknowledged that “measuring ROI on marketing activities and campaigns” posed a moderate or significant challenge.
Journey orchestration likely enhances personalization’s value exponentially, growing with each customer interaction. However, its advocates often overlook or are unaware of the substantial costs involved. To address the cost-to-value dilemma effectively, journey orchestration must evolve from an art form to a systematic and industrialized discipline.
Today’s high costs partially stem from the manual crafting of campaigns, which hinders growth. Marketers are already boosting campaign activity, with an average 30% increase in campaigns in 2024 compared to 2023. If this trend continues, by 2034, you’ll be managing 10 times as many campaigns at perilously higher labor and technology costs. These rising costs are a hidden risk to journey orchestration ambitions.
However, there’s a solution that many have overlooked: treating journey orchestration like a factory at an industrial scale.
Dig deeper: Half of ecommerce brands lack the support to scale personalization effectively
What does it cost to deliver one personalized email? Most organizations don’t capture the fully loaded costs of email marketing, often stopping at vendor contracts for messaging alone. Capturing the full cost of a multichannel marketing campaign requires breaking down the process steps and analyzing accrued technology, data, content and labor costs to determine all production costs. Economists call this activity-based costing.
Analyze each platform involved in a personalized campaign or journey, considering fees from contracted costs or pay-as-you-go models. Establishing unit costs for activities allows you to forecast monthly costs, adjusting for seasonal spikes or dips in expenses.
To transform your campaign operations into a scalable production line, map your process to the seven steps of multichannel marketing, each with a specific output used by the next step.
When martech teams examine ongoing costs, they typically focus on vendor costs—software licensing or consumption—overlooking the reality that time spent activating a campaign through software adds to its cost and inhibits scale. Therefore, at each step, capture the labor, technology, data and media costs to assess the price of an individual unit of delivery.
This exercise might leave you breathless, but don’t despair. It’s best to start small, make assumptions where needed and get an initial v1.
Based on technology benchmarks from prices paid by Gartner clients, a straightforward individual channel marketing campaign targeting 1.4 million customers had a unit cost of about $6,240. In contrast, a more complex multichannel campaign, including digital advertising activation, resulted in over $56,464.
Making certain assumptions about click rates, digital commerce conversion rates, and average order value, the campaign is projected to have a revenue impact of only $27,000. When accounting for costs, leaders are wise to question the campaign’s return on effort. At scale, spikes in organic activity or a few dazzling campaigns can further obscure the growing drag on martech ROI.
Dig deeper: Smart appliances are great for marketers, if they’re useful for consumers
To identify and combat these inefficiencies, address the primary driver of skyrocketing orchestration costs—labor—by creating a roadmap that emphasizes team upskilling, streamlines workflows with genAI and encourages more efficient working methods at each production stage. Incorporate journey cost optimization into your martech framework, alongside regular audits and roadmap updates, to continually assess the value of journey orchestration.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 34% of marketing teams encountered unexpected additional fees beyond what they believed was covered by their agreement. In an era of shrinking budgets, CMOs can’t afford such surprises.
Yet, vendors increasingly adopt consumption-based pricing models in agreements with marketers. This shifts cost away from a base license toward consumable units tied to the activities of — for example, the campaign factory. As martech tools transition to consumption-based pricing, the baseline cost drops significantly. However, every marketing activity—running predictions, requesting AI prompts, or building AI agents—will incur charges, often aggressively.
Dig deeper: Your 4-step guide to local marketing success
Understanding unit costs lets you manage expenses across technology stacks and vendor contracts, adapt to new pricing models and mitigate risks associated with consumption-based pricing. When judged collectively and with insight into the actual costs, much of the work of multichannel marketers may be unprofitable—get command of your unit economics before that happens to you.
Benjamin Bloom is a VP analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, specializing in martech stack optimization, personalization and customer data management. He presented live on this subject and others at the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, June 2-4, 2025, in Denver, CO.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
For chief marketing officers of retail brands and businesses, knowing which channels and campaigns deserve the marketing budget can directly impact the success and length of their tenure.
But in today’s omnichannel environment of walled gardens, customers engage with your campaigns (and other assets) multiple times before converting.
Since there is no perfect conversion tracking or attribution, you need a system to decide where to spend your money.
Too many marketers still rely on outdated or overly complex attribution models, incomplete data, or pure guesswork.
Common side effects include over-investing in either the upper or lower funnel, while underfunding channels and campaigns that balance demand generation and demand capture.
In this article, we’ll break down how CMOs and marketing leaders can use conversion tracking and attribution data to:
Running a Google Ads or paid media campaign without native conversion tracking is asking for trouble.
Not only will your account operate with blinders that prevent the system from finding improvements and patterns, but you won’t also have any in-platform metrics to measure your own database against.
I also see some accounts can take several weeks for reporting data to be attributed fully, primarily because of the click-to-purchase duration.
Google may not be fully accurate with all metrics, but you want it to understand what actions are meaningful to your business.
With leads, there is a challenge in terms of reconciling what is recorded online and what happens outside of the Google ecosystem.
Google’s system knows it got you a certain number of form fills, chats, or calls. It needs to know how many of those were good quality leads. How many of those went on to become actual sales?
That would lead you to create a “next step” in the process, such as qualified leads, and feed this back into Google. You can also then bid against those or use them as observations, but they will be in the system as a positive funnel event.
Read more: Building A Lead Generation Plan
For ecommerce, it’s typically a lot simpler to track the right events, but it’s trickier to rate their value to the business.
Google can record purchase transactions as an event, but it lacks your backend data on which locations have the fewest returns or exchanges, which products lead to higher rates of subscription and repeat purchases, and what each product’s margin is.
If you’re using Shopify, they have a Google and YouTube app that does pretty much all the heavy lifting you need to do to link the two platforms and track ecommerce sales.
“I know which channels and campaigns are providing the best ROI” is verbal gold for a CMO.
Being able to quantify the impact of where they spend their marketing budget positions them to make smarter decisions and increase their value to the business that employs them.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Here are some ways to think through the more common hurdles that get in your way as a marketing leader.
Once you set up tracking and make sure you’re getting good performance data in, you can use it to inform attribution and omnichannel strategy.
My methodology is different from how many marketers approach this. I’m of the mind that attribution is not something that can be fully solved, and over-relying on third-party tools will set you in the wrong direction because they all have different biases.
Certain tools can’t see the actual power of YouTube, for example.
One study by Haus showed that YouTube in-platform reporting is three times less than what they see. So many third-party attribution tools can’t see view-through or engagement data for YouTube, so they end up with a higher-than-ideal margin of error on the reporting.
Some other tools can see the click and view attribution for Meta, but only click attribution for Google. What I like to do is optimize each campaign in-platform based on that platform’s data.
When we come across situations where different platforms show us conflicting attribution data, we use overall sales reports and tools like TripleWhale or Northbeam to help validate that data.
This helps us understand directionally, if we put another 20% of our budget into a specific campaign type, how does that impact the overall revenue?
It’s really about looking at blended numbers – some people call it media efficiency rate (MER) or blended return on ad spend (ROAS) – to see how that data changes over time with different campaign and marketing changes.
We use this to allocate budget according to what really moves the needle as far as revenue and profit are concerned. This is much better than just relying on what a platform tells you.
With lead generation, this is less of a problem because most lead form fills happen pretty quickly after the initial click.
If the user submits the form on the same page they landed on, you will very likely capture UTM and GCLID parameters.
For lead gen, we typically look to verify that the number of leads in the customer relationship management (CRM) is within 10% of what Google attributes to itself.
One thing many people forget is that with visibility and success in digital advertising, you pay a price in terms of incremental headroom.
In other words, you have much more untapped opportunity at 30% impression share than you do at 85%. Getting from 30% to 85% is going to probably be much less expensive than going from 85% to 90%.
If you look at Google Ads’ own attribution, there’s a finite amount of headroom with Search and Shopping.
Once you hit the top of that, it usually tapers off somewhere between 70-80%, and you’ve got to start finding other campaigns/platforms to start feeding the funnel. That could be other Google properties (like YouTube) or channels like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.
Fortunately, Google is now starting the rollout to show you this data for Performance Max in addition to Search and Shopping. This means you can take advantage of benefits like finding new advertising opportunities while still applying optimization tactics that you’re used to.
The other thing that’s really important, especially for newer advertisers, is not to expect the same performance from every campaign type.
People who have been around the block in PPC know, for example, that a 5x ROAS on branded search is realistic, but for YouTube, it might be 1x or even less.
You need to be okay with that, as long as you can get all the numbers to line up in terms of your total costs versus total revenue and margin.
Conversion tracking and attribution are essential parts of the CMO toolkit, but they mean little without the skill and literacy to interpret performance data in the context of a business.
If we were to sum up the most important part of this thought process, it would be:
Ultimately, your ability to optimize campaigns hinges on a central, unbiased source of truth that isn’t influenced by the incentives of any single ad platform.
Google or Meta are businesses built to serve their own business objectives and those of their shareholders, which don’t always align with those of your business.
By owning your data and attribution strategy, you set your brand up to make smarter, more confident marketing investments instead of pinning all your hopes on a long shot that’s rarely (if ever) accurate.
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It finally happened: The New York Times signed an AI licensing deal. Not with Perplexity, or Google — and definitely not with OpenAI or Microsoft — but with Amazon.
The agreement will allow Amazon products, like Alexa speakers, to use summaries and short excerpts from NYT stories and recipes, as well as to incorporate this content in the training of its proprietary AI models.
It’s a sign of the times: even The New York Times, long known for its staunch defense against illegal content scraping and its high-profile legal battle with OpenAI, has signaled that it’s open to an AI licensing deal — if the terms are right.
The deal, announced by NYT last Thursday, is akin to both Amazon and the publisher openly declaring they too are all-in on the AI race.
The New York Times is signaling to other AI tech companies, “We’re open to being at the table, if you’re willing to come to the table,” one former NYT executive told Digiday on condition of anonymity. “Until [this] announcement, they’ve been sort of hiding in the shadows. Now they’re saying, ‘we’re open for business under the right terms and conditions.’”
The same exec said they believe the agreement with Amazon represents a “new wave” of deals between large digital publishers and AI licensing deals to come. Digiday understands that at least one other publisher cut a licensing deal with Amazon last year, and that more will emerge in the coming months. But Amazon has kept its negotiations with publishers under lock and key.
Amazon’s courting of news publishers for potential AI licensing partnerships to feed quality content into a smarter version of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant product, was first reported last December. Alexa currently provides answers to news queries from sources like Reuters, Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, but not in real time.
But The New York Times’ announcement was vague on whether its content would help power the new Alexa+. “Amazon’s use of editorial content from The Times could extend to the Alexa software found on its smart speakers,” it read.
The fact that The New York Times’ content will now be used to train Amazon’s AI models could strengthen its copyright case against OpenAI. It implies that using this content without a deal in place “may not be a fair use,” according to Aaron Rubin, partner in the Strategic Transactions & Licensing group at law firm Gunderson Dettmer.
“It also further establishes that there’s a market for licensing this content for model training purposes, so any party that trains its model with [The Times’] content without licensing it is undercutting that market,” he said.
The New York Times declined to answer questions about the differences between its differing associations with OpenAI and Amazon, and why it would sign with Amazon and sue OpenAI. Amazon also declined to comment.
Amazon may seem like an unlikely partner for The New York Times’ first AI licensing deal. The New York Times is arguably in a league of its own, with a large and growing subscription and digital advertising business. And Amazon’s large language model Nova isn’t exactly a household name – at least not as popular as OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s LLama. (Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic.)
Naturally, without further detail being disclosed, it’s hard to say for sure. But Amazon uses its AI models primarily for voice products like Alexa, and for its Amazon shopping assistant Rufus – not text-based products like Google or OpenAI’s search products, said a publishing exec at a large digital publisher who requested anonymity. Whereas, Google’s AI Mode or ChatGPT “are both more likely to cannibalize material traffic,” for The New York Times, they said.
The New York Times has a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, so a partnership with either of those companies would’ve been quite the one-eighty. Perplexity has been actively pursuing deals with publishers, but for a wider range of publishers, such as its revenue share agreements with Time to Blavity.
Google would have made sense as an AI licensing partner for The New York Times, given it’s already signed large, multi-year deals with The New York Times and made an agreement in January with The Associated Press to bring its news to Google’s Gemini chatbot.
The New York Times isn’t the only publisher to offer a carrot in one hand and a stick in the other. News Corp signed a licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024. Five months later, its Dow Jones and the New York Post businesses filed a lawsuit against Perplexity
In an earnings call in November 2024, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said the company would “seek to challenge AI companies misusing and abusing our trusted journalism.”
“We have indicated in the past that we would prefer to woo rather than sue artificial intelligence companies, hence the alliance with OpenAI, but we have reached a point where litigation is also essential,” he continued. “Perplexity… is selling products based on our journalism, and we are diligently preparing for further action against other companies that have ingested our archives and are synthesizing our intellectual property.” News Corp did not respond to a request for comment before publishing time.
Regardless, The New York Times is no longer in the increasingly short list of large digital publishers that haven’t signed an AI licensing deal yet. Bustle Digital Group, CNN and Bloomberg to name a few.
“I think that the bigger picture is that everyone’s open for business at the right price. The question is, what’s the right price?” said Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall. “This is not the first deal of this nature to be cut and it sure won’t be the last.”
Jessica Davies contributed reporting.
The former American football player Matthew A Cherry’s last film was a huge success. Hair Love began with a Kickstarter campaign that set a new record for a short film on the platform and went on to win the Oscar for best animated short in 2020.
The heartwarming story and beautiful animation broke stereotypical depictions of Black fathers and sparked a conversation about the beauty of Black hair. It even led to a spin-off TV series, Young Love, which debuted on Max in 2023.
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Character art for Melody and Harmony in Matthew A Cherry’s Time Signature (Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
Oh yeah, for sure. After a successful project – especially something like Hair Love winning an Oscar before I turned 40 – there’s a real pressure to top yourself. You want to show growth, prove that it wasn’t a fluke. And in that pursuit of perfection, I’ve definitely slowed myself down at times. There are projects I probably could’ve moved forward on that were solid, but I held back because they didn’t feel ‘better than the last thing’.
On top of that, I tend to jump around a bit – if one project gets tough or gets bad feedback, instead of powering through, I sometimes pivot to the next shiny idea. And right now, the industry’s just not as wide open as it was even a few years ago. Getting jobs, getting greenlights – it’s all harder. So yeah, the struggle to stay inspired, to stay steady, and to stay working is real. But it’s part of the creative journey.
Definitely. I lived both – played in the NFL and then transitioned to filmmaking – and I can tell you, the mindset overlap is huge. Sports and art are both about discipline, performance, vision, and emotion. But society often separates them, especially for young people.
With Time Signature, I want to show that creativity can be just as powerful and transformative as athletic success. And for Black kids especially, that’s a narrative we need more of.
In Time Signature, Melody discovers an unfinished piece of sheet music in her late grandmother’s piano (Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
Always. Animation has a way of cutting through all the noise and hitting straight to the heart. As for influences, I look up to Spike Lee for his fearlessness and his innovation – he’s always pushing the medium. Barry Jenkins inspires me with his patience and perseverance. It took almost ten years between Medicine for Melancholy and Moonlight, and he’s always carried himself with humility and grace.
Jordan Peele has also been a huge influence. Working at Monkeypaw and watching him evolve into a titan – while still lifting others up – has been powerful to see.
On the music side, Janet Jackson’s early innovation is something I really admire. Same with Outkast, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Jay-Z – all top-tier artists constantly evolving. That mix of discipline, vision and cultural resonance is something I strive for.
Hair Love was more grounded. Time Signature leans into magical realism – it’s about time travel, music, memory, and healing. I describe it as Coco meets Back to the Future, but rooted in Black culture and modern music. Animation gives us the freedom to fully explore those emotional and fantastical layers.
We haven’t really had that modern Black animated musical yet. Soul was beautiful, but the lead was a ghost for most of it. Princess and the Frog had a similar issue. We haven’t had a story where a Black girl gets to be fully herself – expressive, creative, emotional – for the entire film.
That’s what Time Signature is doing. And because it’s a proof of concept, we also see this short as a launchpad to a larger feature. We’re hoping this Kickstarter helps us build momentum and show studios what this could be at scale. These days, it helps to show you can do something on your own – it opens doors for bigger support.
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Coco meets Back to the Future, but rooted in Black culture – character art for Time Signature(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)Time Signature spans the 70s, 80s, 90s and is set in the late 2000s(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)We haven’t had a story where a Black girl gets to be fully herself for the entire film, Matthew says(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
Definitely. This one is about legacy and healing. About mothers and daughters. About creativity and generational dreams. Time Signature is meant to ask: how do we support young creatives? How do we make peace with the past to move forward in the present? And how do we celebrate Black girl brilliance without asking it to shrink or apologise? I hope it sparks those conversations – in families, in classrooms, in the industry.
Representation means putting a Black girl in the lead. Presence means making her feel real – giving her full agency, vulnerability, joy, and genius. Melody isn’t just a character to check a box – she’s the heart of the story. The music she creates, the choices she makes, the emotions she goes through – it’s all centered on her journey. That’s what we mean by presence. She’s not here to symbolise something. She’s here to be.
Yes, absolutely. There’s still a long way to go. And the rollback of DEI efforts is honestly disheartening. Animation is how kids form ideas about the world – who gets to be the hero, who gets to be magical, who gets to be loved. So when those doors start closing again, it’s not just about jobs – it’s about imagination and identity.
What we did with Hair Love and Young Love shows that there’s an audience hungry for authentic, joyful, nuanced Black stories. It’s frustrating to see that progress slowed, but it also makes independent projects like Time Signature that much more important. We have to keep creating and keep building our own tables when the system pulls chairs away.
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Matthew was determined to get the aesthetics right – not just in costume and setting, but in feel(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)Scenes include a 1970s prom night… (Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions) …and a concert in the 1980s(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
We’re working with Marcus Williams, who was a huge part of Young Love. He’s incredibly versatile and culturally specific in his approach. One of the things we really pushed in Young Love was capturing the full spectrum of Black life – different hair textures, body types, skin tones – and Marcus brought that to life.
We also have Ed Lee doing background and production design. He also worked on Young Love, and he’s incredible at capturing texture and era. Since Time Signature spans the 70s, 80s, 90s and is set in the late 2000s, it was really important to get those aesthetics right – not just in costume and setting, but in feel. Ed’s ability to create immersive, emotionally resonant environments has been key.
And my producing partner Monica Young is the backbone of this. Her taste level is impeccable, and she’s constantly pushing us to refine and elevate the work. She was a huge part of Hair Love, and continues to be one of the biggest driving forces in everything I do.
This excerpt is from B2B Marketing Fundamentals by Kate Mackie ©️2025 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
Building a consistent brand is increasingly important in B2B.
With so few buyers in the market at any one time, plus a growing number of people in the buying group, you need to build memorable brand signals that can be a shortcut in your buyer’s memory to what it is that makes you distinct.
This individual brand story will then be associated in their minds with your branded assets, freeing up space in communications for you to share deeper messages, e.g., specific product and service details.
It all starts with defining your brand story. What is it that makes you distinct?
This then needs to carry through all marketing communications, bringing your brand to life.
The purpose of a company is its reason for being: What it is that it does every day and what it aims to do across all stakeholder groups it serves.
It should be a statement that resonates with all employees and is the focus of how you deliver your products and services. It is a key part of the culture of the business and needs to be reflected in your brand, marketing, and communications.
It is also at the core of how you drive relevancy to the communities you operate within.
A business or brand purpose that resonates with your employees can be built into their own personal purpose. This alignment gives an even greater sense of belonging to those that work for the business.
There is a traditional Japanese concept, thought to have been first coined in the 7th century, called Ikigai, that is a framework used to enable individuals to find and build a sense of purpose.
It can also be translated to businesses, firms, and organizations, helping you fathom your north star.
Working this through will enable you to think about what it is that drives you and your audiences, aligns to your profession, and makes you money.
The overlap between passion, mission, profession, and vocation is where you need to focus as you develop your own unique purpose that gets to the heart of your own unique value proposition.
The positioning of your brand in the minds of your audience should reflect how your brand sits alongside your competitors, how and what it delivers for your customer alongside how it operates as a company.
It should be built on what your customers know about you, your products and services, and what they feel when they use or consume them.
An understanding of your position against your competitors is key. Looking at the variables relevant to your company, you can plot your position against your competitors by using an established 2×2 block model.
Plotting out variables that are relevant to your business will help you understand the competition and how they position themselves.
Variables might include price plotted against quality as a starting point – this will help you see the perception of you against your competitors as either low or high quality against low or high price.
You will be able to see if there are any gaps in the market you might be able to own – either through an extension of your product or service portfolio – or the development of new offerings for the market.
You need to ensure that your positioning is true to what you actually deliver as a company. Overclaiming or overpromising will only end up with a mismatched customer experience, which can undermine any trust you might have built.
The brand promise is key to developing the value proposition. It is the promise to the buyer or customer that is realized when they purchase your products or services.
It is your distinctive differentiator that details your brand position in terms that are relevant to the market, specifically your target audience, and is a key step in developing your messaging and narrative.
The messaging you create should be aligned to all elements of your brand and able to be used across brand marketing, but it should also be able to be applied to products or services and used as part of campaign assets. These written assets should include credible reasons to believe your claims and your position.
“Reasons to believe” can be a combination of case studies, use cases, data-led intelligence, and other proof points that add credence to the position you are taking in the market.
These insights should be built into your campaigns to back up the execution of the value proposition and should be fundamental to the content used to drive further consideration and purchase of your products and services.
Your brand, product, and campaign messaging should nest like Russian dolls and all align with each other, building throughout to a clear understanding of what each element means to the audience.
The brand messaging should be built for the long term and have durability, whereas your products and services will change more quickly with client and customer feedback.
The messaging and assets for your products and services should therefore be reviewed annually, adding in any new features, benefits, or additional proof points.
Campaign messaging is driven by the current macro context and will likely be themed around short-term delivery targets, so should be reviewed more regularly.
This gives you a useful review time frame that should be built into your impact studies with an ongoing understanding of performance against the targets set for the brand, product, or individual campaign metrics.
Communication across your full portfolio needs to be built around the brand promise, which hits at the heart of your business and is aligned to your purpose.
This will give you the best springboard for delivering authentic, creative executions that resonate with your audiences.
As marketers, we need to tell the story, weaving the proof points and case studies into a narrative that drives a desire to buy the products and services, even if the buyers are not in the market now.
This ensures that you continue to build and drive a connected memory for when the buyers are ready to buy and at the category entry point.
Storytelling is recognized as an important facet of the creative skillset – using stories and allegories to engage audiences, build connection, inspire different types of memory, and build links from how you feel to an association with your brand.
Stories resonate so well that a huge proportion of advertising – in both B2C and B2B – follows the pathway of the “three act structure“.
This is a structure used by playwrights and is often attributed to Aristotle but made popular by Syd Field in his 1979 book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting.1
Think through any adverts you can remember, as it is an often-used concept from B2C, e.g., chewing gum …to much more complex B2B sales.
There are more similarities between B2C and B2B than we acknowledge. Storytelling crosses over and is common to the needs of all audiences.
Brands are as powerful, if not more so, in B2B as your audience is making what often feels like a bigger decision.
If you buy the wrong B2C product, you aren’t putting your livelihood on the line when you make your buying decision.
That is why a strong B2B brand will win every time, as it takes an incredibly confident buyer to look outside the most well-known providers, whose reputations have been built on years of delivery and execution in their specialist fields.
To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the U.S. and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.
1 Field, S (1979, Revised Edition 2005) Screenplay: The foundations of screen-writing, Random House Publishing Group, US
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