Building Big Brands | Jenny Levine

Today we have quite the interview - I introduce to you Jenny Levine.

She’s worked with brands like TikTok (CapCut), Amazon Music, and ABC News. Her resume is full of fascinating experiences.

Without further ado, let’s get into her journey and lessons she’s learned along the way.

Q: You’ve worked in both small companies like Fullscreen media and massive corps like Amazon, what are some differences you’ve noticed between the two?

The way I describe it is like full screen was like College 2.0 where I had some of my best friends. The network itself is still super connected. But that was like my training wheels for corporate, for marketing, for social media, for YouTube.

After Fullscreen, I transitioned to Fender. I knew what I was getting into because Fender was our client at full screen, and they wanted me to come in internally, to really help them break ground and reach some of their goals.

But I was only there for under a year because my boss was like I got a job at Amazon, I'm going to leave, but I want you to come with me and I was like, okay.

I thought she'll reach back out in, like six months or something but she sent me the job application within her two weeks notice. Going to Amazon felt like we're in the big leagues. This is like what I was aspiring to since being at full screen.

My goal was always to work at a big tech company because I felt like that would fulfill my pursuit and kind of also show me what there is and I feel like that was kind of like everybody's dream working at full screen at that time, too.

Although it was tough I'm not going to lie. Like Fullscreen was very hands on onboarding hand holding where the training wheels are fully on. Whereas in Amazon they’re fully off.

I don't recommend starting at a company like Amazon right out of college because I just think it's too much to be thrown into the deep end and figure it out on your own when you might not know.

Q: You said there wasn’t much data or existing processes to go off of when you joined Bytedance, how did you build a strategy from the ground up and navigate the uncertainty?

Yeah I mean, it was hard because I really got nothing from our leadership and also our entire team is pretty much in China. So that was another hurdle.

I'm kind of familiar with working with an international team as at Amazon we had a lot of different counterparts in a lot of different regions of the world. But having a boss directly in China was completely different.

I wouldn't say there's a language barrier with my boss, but maybe a little bit of cultural differences or trying to understand how each other works. I kind of just took it upon myself to collaborate with my counterpart on the social team understand what her needs are.

I also think something I learned at Fullscreen which is really hard for a lot of people who are not in social to understand. It's not like a leap or a jump to get to where you want to go. It's going to take time. Especially if you need to grow.

So like at full screen, we would always say it's like a run, crawl, walk. We're not going to just start running. If you were going to start exercising and you hadn't exercised in five years if you went to a CrossFit class, you're going to die, right.

You can't just start posting a million things. All at once to get to where you want to be. You're going to over inundate your audience and that's something that's like one of the things that we have to teach our leadership.

Because they’re very goal oriented, quarterly goals are mentally important and so we're close to the end of the quarter almost in December and we're close to our goals, but we're not at our goals.

So our lead is like, well, why don't we post more? Why don't we do this, why aren't we doing XYZ thing and It's like you have to have some trust in that we're not just doing nothing. We're doing things for a reason in order to gradually get to where we want to be.

Money always goes a long way, an extreme paid media budget will get you there quicker but that's not always the reason to do things because it's also not sustainable. We could pay for a huge holiday campaign, a New Year's campaign.

But can we sustain that for the rest of 2024 at that level? Probably not. So that might not be like the smartest thing to do unless we have a really genius creative idea that can keep people's attention and retention.

Q: What are some practical marketing lessons you’ve learned along the way?

1. Have a plan

Sounds really basic but you'd be surprised how many people just want to do a bunch of different things because they have a great idea and it's hard because some people are like, we'll just do it this is a great idea.

There's usually too many cooks in the kitchen and everybody has these great ideas and they lose track of how do we work smarter together and that's something I'm experiencing now.

For example, like a go to market for holiday just didn't really happen or I don't know what exactly did happen. It seems like there's just a bunch of different teams doing a lot of things for holiday, but it doesn't ladder up into this cohesive strategy and like a core vision.

So I don't sit on my laurels and then wait for someone else to do it. That's a huge thing. You have to have a strategy. You have to have a plan because otherwise you could be wasting your resources, and you could be working smarter and not harder.

2. Do what feels right

I would say for marketing on social don't ever feel like you have to do something because your boss is telling you to do it, or because this thing is popping off on social media, and you want to jump into that trend.

More often than not I've seen it like crash and burn or even have blowback and I think it's harder now because there's so much video content that goes viral that you can jump in on as a brand.

I think a lot of brands are also seeing the fatigue of that from an audience and so it's like, do what feels right for your brand. Go back to what are your brand core values? How do you look and feel and move as a persona on social.

Take a minute and think about does this make sense for us? Is this going to work out for us in the long run? And if not, you don't have to do it and that's okay.