Armin Molavi on Amplifying Brand Impact Through Effective Media Strategy
The CEO of I’m In The Lobby reflects on his established career in marketing and advertising and shares how today’s marketers can optimize their media strategy to strengthen their brand and cultivate brand loyalty.
Armin Molavi is a marketing executive and strategist known for his ability to tackle some of the messiest and most challenging brand-building, marketing, and growth challenges. His career includes industry experience in financial services, retail and CPG, telco and media, hospitality, and travel. His work has focused on all aspects of marketing and advertising, including eCommerce, consumer insights, global audience segmentation, go-to-market, strategic partnerships, and media strategy/planning.
Armin’s consultancy—I’m In the Lobby—offers strategy for a diverse clientele struggling with complex growth challenges. He frequently works with private equity PORTCOS in the financial services, hospitality, and consumer goods sectors on brand development, product development, and strategic roadmaps.
The Continuum recently sat down with Armin to discuss marketing and media strategy, the challenges of working for a global company that owns dozens of brands, and how he chose his company's interesting new name.
Did you set out knowing that you wanted a career in marketing and advertising?
If you asked my mom, she’d say yes. Apparently, when we were watching TV and a commercial for Depends came on, I looked at her and said, “A lot of old people must watch this show.” I don't know if I believe my mom or if it’s a classic Iranian parent bragging about her child thing, but that’s what she still tells everyone.
I swapped majors a few times in college and ended up in marketing. But when I graduated, I got a job in finance. I hated it so much that I quit after three months.
I had four bosses, all industry analysts in the healthcare sector. One of them was a former quarterback for the Navy. One day, the market crashed, and the biggest loser of the day was one of the stocks he was always promoting. I saw him that day sitting in his office crying and immediately thought, “This is not the industry for me.”
I spent a quick year at BCG, then made the jump to advertising and got a job at what is now Digitas in 1999. When I told my mom I got this job building websites, she said, “Oh, the internet is a fad. I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
As you say, these were the early days of the internet and digital marketing. What were you working on?
We did a lot of things for the first time. We stood up Bank of America's email marketing. I launched their first consumer-facing email and was responsible for convincing people to sign up for bill pay. It was a big change for consumers. We sent out postcards to people to encourage them to sign up for online bill pay. At one point, we offered customers $100 if they would pay two bills online. And I was involved in all of it. I was the person listening to the recording of your call with customer services for “training purposes” because I needed to understand all the concerns people had about what was “a concerning technological advance” back then.
I also worked on a campaign for AT&T’s long-distance service. It’s hard to remember it now, but there was a lot of competition back then between long-distance carriers. I remember we sent out a direct mail piece that started with, “Dear so-and-so, it saddens me to lose a great customer, and that’s why I’m reaching out today.” That one really worked. We changed the rest of the letter frequently and constantly tested messages, but that headline worked. Ask anyone who worked at Digitas, and they’ll remember the AT&T champion’s letter.
The mix of clients gave me the chance to learn all that was happening on the internet as it was happening, but it also taught me the power of brand. Here we are 20+ years later, and you can algorithmically optimize every piece of your strategy, but if you have a meaningful brand to consumers, you will always have the advantage.
“Here we are 20+ years later, and you can algorithmically optimize every piece of your strategy, but if you have a meaningful brand to consumers, you will always have the advantage.”
You spent a lot of your career at both Digitas and Havas. At some point, you jumped over to the media side at Havas. Having come from digital advertising, branding, and CRM, what did you learn by working in media?
The Chief Operating Officer at Havas Media asked me to help him change their strategic offering. I’d never worked on a media campaign or negotiated a media buy, so I started fresh and really learned the business from the ground up.
The biggest thing I learned is that many brand-side marketers underestimate the power of a great media strategy. A great media strategy is not just the vessel for the creative; it needs to amplify the creative and the brand strategy in a way that engages the consumer. It needs to be more proactive than “I’m going to buy the first pod for 60 Minutes and push an ad at you.”
Media can drive brand. The right media strategy and the right media partnerships enhance the brand. I changed the way we worked to put strategy at the center. We evolved our offering and approach on small clients and it worked. I was very fortunate in that I won a lot of new business at Havas, including Tracfone, the prepaid wireless company, which was the biggest new account for the company in 10 years.
After leaving Havas, you became the Global Head of Media Strategy for Hilton Hotels. What was that role, and what were the challenges?
I rebuilt their global media practice and their lower funnel media e-commerce strategy. The challenge with Hilton is that it has a very broad portfolio, and it’s franchised. Hilton doesn’t own any of its properties. If you’re the owner of the Hampton Inn in Buffalo, you want me to drive as much traffic to your location as possible through the global Hilton brand. I want to do that, but I also need to ensure the entire network—all of the brands and hotels—does well because that will make the Hilton Honors program more interesting to travelers. 7,000 plus property owners means 7,000 plus stakeholders you need to please.
As you have great stays, you're more likely to stay at another Hilton. This then drives the profitability of those Hilton locations up, so when the development team tries to convince developers to build with Hilton instead of Marriott, we have the performance to prove it. That helps our Hilton network grow bigger and makes it more interesting to you, the traveler, because we have more properties for you to choose from. And so it goes. That’s the flywheel of Hilton.
It's important for Hilton to love all of its brands equally. I can't over-index Waldorf or over-index Hampton because I need all of them. Hilton now has 22 brands. If you're a business traveler who stays a lot at Hampton Inn for work, you want the Waldorf in the portfolio so you can use your Hilton Honors points for something more luxurious. It works in the reverse, too. I would meet these high-end travelers who would stay at the Waldorf for work or vacations, and they’d surprise me by telling me they loved the Hampton Inn. They’d explain that their kid played soccer and the small towns they end up in on the weekends didn’t have Conrads or Hiltons but always had a Hampton. Their brand loyalty extended to the Hampton Inn because they knew the room would be clean, breakfast would be complimentary, and they would be able to get more Hilton points.
“A great media strategy is not just the vessel for the creative; it needs to amplify the creative and the brand strategy in a way that engages the consumer.”
If you have so many brands under one umbrella, how do you make sure you’re properly targeting consumers?
We did a global segmentation project. In theory, you should be able to divide the traveling community into groups based on why they are traveling, what they want in a hotel, and what they want to spend, and use that information to figure out which brand would most appeal to them. Then, you can customize the emails to them and what they see on the website.
Hilton Honors has 110 million members worldwide, so we were able to execute a project on a really big scale—we probably surveyed a quarter of a million people.
The other thing we did with the segmentation was to see if there were groups of customers for whom we didn’t have a product. Some of the new brands that Hilton is launching right now came specifically out of that segmentation project because we realized we had gaps in our offerings.
You left Hilton and started your own consultancy. How did you make that decision?
I was traveling about 140 nights a year. One day, while packing for a trip, one of my twins, who was four at the time, came in and said, “Are you leaving again?” And that was that. That was January 2020.
I didn’t set out to start a consulting company. I was going to get a quote-unquote “real job.” I got a call from Mattress Firm. They wanted me to be the VP of Media. It wasn’t the right fit for a variety of reasons, but I told the recruiter I might be interested in doing it part-time. She thought I was insane, but a few weeks later, I got a call from the CMO.
They hired me as a freelancer, and I worked with them for 13 months, redoing their agency strategy, e-commerce strategy, analytics, and media mix modeling.
I was working part-time for them while still looking for that “real job,” but the funny thing was that because I had revenue coming in, I got really picky about interviewing for anything full-time. I didn’t see anything I wanted. Meanwhile, people just kept sending me more clients. So here I am, four-and-a-half years later, and I just landed my 26th client. I usually come in when a company is having trouble and help them redesign their strategy, analytics, and value proposition. I’ve been doing a lot of work with companies partly owned by private equity firms.
“Media can drive brand. The right media strategy and the right media partnerships enhance the brand.”
You just announced a new name for your company. It’s now called I’m In the Lobby. Can you explain the name?
The name means two things. First, it’s because it’s all me. I’m one person. As I tell my clients, I don’t have a team because if I came in with a team and we fixed everything, there’d be a big vacuum when we left. I want to build a new system with your team so that you can keep going. My hope is that when I leave a project, clients will miss me personally but not professionally. Of course, occasionally, I pull in colleagues and companies I respect, but at the core, you’re engaging me.
The other reason behind the name is a long running joke. The receptionist at every company that I’ve ever worked at would tell me identical stories of a conversation they had that went something like this:
Receptionist: Hello, Digitas.
Caller: I’m in the lobby.
Receptionist: Okay, come up, we’re on the 17th floor.
Caller: No, I’m in the lobby, please.
Receptionist: Yes, I heard you - come to the 17th floor.
Caller: No, no, I’m not there; I’d like to speak to Armin Molavi.
Amazingly, iminthelobby.com was available, and the brand was born.
In addition to your consultancy, you teach a course at Brandeis University. You have many rules and assignments for the course that aren’t necessarily typical for academia. Can you tell us about the class?
It’s a junior-level marketing management survey class that covers everything from brand strategy to segmentation to pricing to corporate social responsibility. I teach it through Harvard Business Review cases, and I specifically only pick cases from industries that I've worked in. My goal is to teach them a little bit more about advertising and marketing so that whether they end up in the industry or not, they'll have a better appreciation for it.
The grade in the course is 25% class participation, which drives them all crazy, but if you can’t participate live, you’re not going to be successful. I also give out homework assignments that cannot exceed one page, and the full case that they have to write can’t exceed four pages. I believe that if you can’t be concise, you don't know what you're saying.
I also make them do the dreaded group presentation. I grade it a little differently; 70% of the grade comes from me, and the other 30% comes from the people in their group who submit an anonymous survey. Of the nine teams or so, there are usually about six where everyone did their fair share of work, two where one person did a lot of the work, and one team that complains that Bobby or Susie or someone did nothing. Welcome to the real world.
Oh, and I added one more thing to the course policy. They’re allowed to use Chat GPT to help them with their assignments, but if they do, they have to give me the assignment and the prompts they used, and I will grade both of them. Like it or not, this is a tool they will be using in their work.
It’s funny; my husband is an adjunct professor of history at a school where most of the students are nursing majors. Someone asked him why they were teaching history to people who knew they would be nurses, and he said it was not necessarily about learning history. It was about learning how to ingest content, deduce conclusions, and write an argument that holds a point of view.
These are the skills you are going to need. I don’t care what you do for your career; you’re going to have to communicate with people publicly in real time, you’re going to have to write concise explanations of your thoughts, and you’re going to have to work with other people. I try to teach those three skills in the context of advertising.
September 24, 2024
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