David Corns on The Impact of Great Thinking and a Bias Toward Action
The CMO of Opendoor discusses pivoting into the brand side of the industry, leveraging innovation to build stronger brands, and shares how today’s agencies can be more effective partners.
David Corns is the Chief Marketing Officer at Opendoor, where he leads dynamic communications and marketing teams. His team of full-funnel marketers is responsible for marketing strategy, brand marketing, performance, creative, media, sponsorships, lifecycle CRM, and product marketing. His communications team leads consumer press initiatives, corporate communications, executive communications, and internal communications efforts.
David has an impressive background in the advertising industry, having held leadership positions at R/GA, Venables Bell & Partners, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and Wieden + Kennedy. His work on brands such as Reddit, Audi, Burger King, and Nike has received many global awards and recognition for effectiveness and creativity from the Effies, Cannes Lions, and the Clios. Throughout his career, David has demonstrated a remarkable ability to create iconic brands and execute innovative campaigns that drive awareness, conversion, growth, and brand loyalty.
The Continuum sat down with David to discuss the switch from the agency side to the brand side, what agencies should be doing for their brand clients, why the most essential quality in a team is a bias toward action, and what “brandformance” means.
You started on the agency side. Can you tell us how you got into advertising? Was this something you set out to do?
I went to art school and received a degree in photography. I guess I should have gone the creative track, but that’s not how I got into advertising. Toward the end of my college career, I experimented with a few things in the creative world and naturally discovered an interest in advertising. I had an entrepreneurial bent and liked how creativity and business could work together. I was willing to go anywhere as long as I could keep doing that type of work.
I grew up in Buckinghamshire, England, and had never been to the United States. After college, I received an offer from Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. I knew nothing about Minnesota, but I took the job and hopped on a plane. I landed in New York and spent a couple of days there; it was just like the movies. I thought this could work for me. Then I flew to Minneapolis, and that’s how it began.
I started my job in account management. I was definitely a square peg in a round hole in account management because most people came from a business background. I had a creative background, but I quickly began to see how that could be very beneficial. So, I continued down that path and went from Carmichael Lynch and then TBWA in London to Wieden+Kennedy, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Venable Bell & Partners, and then my last agency before I made the move over to Opendoor was R/GA.
That’s an impressive run of agencies. Do you have any favorite projects over the years?
All of my agency work cemented my point of view that marketing should be newsworthy, highly creative, and drive business impact. I don’t know that there’s a specific favorite project, but two accounts in particular were key in shaping my point of view.
First, I was lucky to work at Wieden on Nike. I got to learn from the best creatives and marketers in the world about how to build an iconic brand. When I was at Crispin, I worked on the Burger King account. It was our role to make sure that the brand consistently made the news, and it taught me that ideas — especially newsworthy ones — are currency.
What was it about agency life that you really liked?
What I loved about agencies is the sense of “good stress” always there. It’s an agency's job to say, “Here's an idea that's never been done before. How are we going to sell the client on the idea, and how are we going to pull it off?” That thinking breeds a kind of optimistic viewpoint: You dream it, believe it, then make it happen. It also leads to a bias toward action, which I love.
I look for that mindset when I build teams. When I was EVP Managing Director at R/GA, I built multiple teams, offices, and departments — from engineering to strategy to marketing sciences to creative to design. My process for building teams is to find people who run toward the fire and build around them. It’s back to that bias toward action: If you have it and you realize you’re running in the wrong direction, you can pivot quickly. But, if you don’t have it, it’s hard to build momentum. I always look for that when meeting with candidates or investing in existing talent.
Another thing I love about agencies — which was both the best part and worst part of agency life — is pitching. Mostly, I love that you could have an objective point of view on a business, do some research, formulate an opinion, share it, and then shape the future of the business. It’s always quite thrilling. Another big part of my job as EVP at R/GA was shaping an approach to pitching new business. We had an 87-91% win rate for new business, and it was because we always went in with a solid point of view that we weren't beholden to. That way, we could shapeshift easily to get to the right answer collaboratively.
What made you want to leave and switch over to the brand side?
I was lucky to get to a place in my agency career where I could build a roster with multiple clients and fix and build things for them — but I wasn't ever able to create a brand from scratch. Enter Opendoor. It was an amazing product with a solid team that was disrupting a very traditional category. Real estate has been done the same way for over 100 years. It felt like all the right ingredients were in place, but it wasn’t a nationally recognized and beloved brand yet. There was a real opportunity to come in, set a purpose and plan for marketing, and begin to build it out. That energized me.
They already had a great performance and lower-funnel marketing organization in place, so the challenge was to capitalize on that and fine-tune it while also building the brand side of the marketing strategy. It was a great opportunity for me to build a robust marketing department that could create awareness, drive consideration, and also drive conversion. Two years later, the brand-building and real estate marketing reinvention continues, and it’s been some of the most rewarding (and thrilling) work of my career.
“It’s back to that bias toward action: If you have it and you realize you’re running in the wrong direction, you can pivot quickly. But, if you don’t have it, it’s hard to build momentum.”
Had you had any experience in real estate before?
I’d bought a house.
So, no?
One of the things I uncovered when looking at Opendoor’s marketing strategy is that real estate isn’t really about real estate. The reality is that most people move not because they're looking for a bigger home or white picket fence but because their life is changing. They're getting married or having kids and need a bigger yard. Or they’re relocating for work. Life is the impetus for the need to move.
I guess it’s fitting because, as a leader, I deliberately try to hire people without category experience. Mixing up categories often leads to fresh thinking. If you just hire someone who has been on automotive accounts for your newest car client, the chances of innovation are far less than if you bring in someone who has a different way of thinking about the problem. This thinking has helped our work transcend the obvious and focus more on the “why” behind a real estate decision.
Can you explain the Opendoor model and what makes it different from other real estate services?
Opendoor is a simple and certain way to sell your home. What used to be a lot of hassle and stress of fixing and staging your home is now simple. We buy it from you in cash. With our algorithm, we can give you an instant offer on your home just by getting your address. All you have to do is do a video walk-through using your phone, and we finalize the offer. What used to take months now takes days.
We take the stress of selling your home and make it an easy digital transaction. We’re also very flexible about closing dates. If the selling of your home and the purchase of a new one don’t line up, we can help so that you don’t have to make accommodations. Our model is really about putting the consumer first.
People can buy our houses directly with us, or use their real estate agent like they would for any other house.
Interest rates are higher right now than they’ve been in years. Is that changing the housing market?
People move because of changes in their life. The market may slow down for a period because of inflation or interest rates, and it may speed up for other reasons. Regardless of what’s happening in the macroeconomic environment, people will continue living and always have a reason to move.
“What makes being in-house so amazing is that you can see the impact you and your team can have on the business, on awareness, on brand, and on the marketing industry”
How do you like being on the brand side?
What makes being in-house so amazing is that you can see the impact you and your team can have on the business, on awareness, on brand, and on the marketing industry. You get to be strategic, creative, and scientific every day. You get to see the output of strategy in real results.
As CMO, working with other teams with complementary — but different — skill sets has been wildly beneficial. For example, I get to partner with some of the best data science brains and say, “Can you help show us that this hypothesis is either correct or incorrect based on performance?” Those analytics inform my decisions on what to do and when. Partnering with our data experts to see the broader picture of how business is growing in one region or how the consumer acquisition cost is changing helps validate our work.
Another favorite part of the brand side goes back to work I’ve done in past roles: building teams. I get to build great groups that are highly collaborative with minimal hierarchy. To steal a line we used to use at Crispin: The best idea is the boss. You put a high value on great thinking, and then everyone surrounds it and makes it happen. That was the most rewarding part on the agency side and the most rewarding part of being a CMO.
At the Continuum, we always talk about brand and demand. How do you balance long-term brand building with performance marketing?
If performance — the lower funnel that asks how to nudge and capture consumers that are already in the funnel and convert them — is physics, then brand is quantum physics. If you do that well, it will ultimately do what the lower funnel channels do and set you up for the future. So, what I’ve tried to do with the team is call it brandformance. It’s delivering today but setting you up for tomorrow.
“So, what I’ve tried to do with the team is call it brandformance. It’s delivering today but setting you up for tomorrow.”
What are some of the marketing activities that Opendoor is doing, both long-term and short-term?
We worked on a contextual spot for March Madness about a basketball player who gets traded and needs to move. Rather than focusing on the trade, he’s focusing on the stress of moving until a reporter introduces him to Opendoor. We also had a spot that ran in Atlanta during the Super Bowl. Atlanta is one of the hardest markets to sell a home right now. So, we did the world's first commercial where someone sells their home live on TV. During the first break, we followed someone who gave us a virtual tour of their home, and during the next break, we bought it. We got to show in real time how easy it is to use Opendoor.
We’re also doing a lot of brand building, and we have a great CRM lifecycle team for re-engagement emails. As you can imagine, we use direct mail as a key channel in real estate. There’s more room for innovation there — and we have some ideas.
Your product obviously relies on AI because the algorithm helps you determine a fair price for a house. How else are you using AI in your work?
We’ve had AI since 2014. It’s a different generation of AI, but it's been there from the beginning.
We’re trying to find new ways to integrate AI to provide even better customer service, but we're only doing it where there's a benefit to the consumer. We want to make sure that consumers always have options, whether that’s a human, a machine, or a combination of both. Some people choose to basically never interact with a person; they want to do it all online. But it’s obviously very emotional to sell your home. We always say, “You buy a house, and then it becomes a home.” Selling your home can be hard, and we understand that sellers want to make sure someone is going to care for it.
We are beginning to explore ways to use AI in marketing as well, but again with caution. It’s increasingly clear from a content standpoint what AI is and what it isn’t. With generative AI, I think there’s a risk that you end up being generic pretty quickly in a business where creativity is an advantage.
There are ways to use it, though. Quick story: The other day, my son was building a Dungeons & Dragons character. He would ask AI to draw something, and then he’d tell it what he liked and what to change. He was given options, and he kept going through different iterations. In the end, he said, “That’s exactly what I had in my mind.” I asked him whether he had created it or if AI had. He said, “I did: I directed to what I wanted it to be, and it exists because of that.” I thought that was pretty poignant and could be a way for all of us to use AI creatively.
“Your best agencies are both a friend and partner who treats you that way in return.”
Now that you’re on the brand side, what do you think agencies should be doing to be more effective partners?
Your best agencies are both a friend and partner who treats you that way in return. The best agencies are aligning on your OKRs or KPIs. They know what you are trying to achieve in the bigger picture and are constantly thinking about helping you deliver. They’re thinking outside the scope. That’s good for the client because you have a real partner who's considering how to make you successful over the long term. And it's good for the agencies, too, because they grow the business without the formality of pitching. Send a text asking for a 15-minute meeting to discuss a big idea, and nine times out of ten, the scope is going to grow.
Gone are the days when a client could plan their following year and say, “These are the creative campaigns I'm going to need, and this is the media I'm going to need.” Today’s work is going to be much more organic. As an agency, the way you succeed in that world is by being ahead of the pitch. Bring clients opportunities.
The best relationships are informal, where you don’t know where the agency ends and the client begins. You’re just part of the same team.
April 30, 2024
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