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There are lessons entertainment marketers can learn from top marketers who work in other business sectors. 

Amanda Lucey is CEO of Atlanta-based The Partnership, a 360 agency that offers everything from advertising and marketing to PR and crisis communications. The Partnership works in such areas as healthcare, agriculture, hospitality and more. But regardless of sector, Lucey says every brand needs to have a story to tell that connects with consumers emotionally and authentically. Whether you’re selling milk or medical services or television shows, consumers need a reason to come to your product. 

Read on to get Lucey's point of view on how to build brands that constantly resonate with audiences.

‍Spotlight: Tell me about The Partnership and what you consider to be its unique selling point. 

‍Lucey: The Partnership is a privately held marketing and brand communications agency established in 1979. We've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 brands and a lot of nonprofits. We do work in healthcare and consumer packaged goods (CPG), agriculture, economic development and retail. We have multiple verticals, but we're brand storytellers, so we lead with insights data. We have a platform called Partnership 360 and we believe insights and data lead to the best strategies and creative and communication solutions.

‍Spotlight: Your bio mentions that The Partnership is one of the fastest-growing female owned agencies in the Southeast. To what do you attribute your fast growth?

‍Lucey: I acquired The Partnership seven years ago, and the founder had built a really solid foundation. Our headquarters is in Atlanta, but we have team members in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and a location in Naples, Florida. We have some fantastic partners – and we call our clients partners. We're a smaller organization, but we believe that it's important to lay out our strategic plans so that we can develop KPIs to execute against those plans. 

We operate a little bit differently than a lot of agencies. We're more of a consultancy, and we align ourselves at the very beginning with new business all the way through to the completion of a project to make sure that we are looking at all the pain points, and trying to help solve them. 

When I first started my own company, before acquiring The Partnership, I wanted to have this anti-agency approach where it isn't about being transactional, it's about building relationships and helping solve problems together. That's the fun part, and why we've had so many partners for so many years.

‍Spotlight: How did you get your start in marketing and how did you get to the place where you launched your own company, and then decided to acquire The Partnership? 

‍Lucey: I started out as a journalist and I have a great deal of respect for journalism and storytelling. I was the editor of my newspaper at my university, which was a lot of fun. It was like running a small business, because we had our editorial team and our advertising team, and we had a weekly newspaper. That was really where I kind of cut my teeth into communications and media. But I was an economics major, and I ended up working in state, federal and international government. I worked at the British Embassy at one point.

I've done crisis management for more than 22 years. That’s one of my unique skill sets that I bring to The Partnership. 

Anyway, I worked in government, I worked in nonprofits, and then I was head of marketing and communications for the American Dairy Association. I got to work with the National Dairy Council and the regional Dairy Council. I traveled a lot, and I got to a point where I thought, ‘you know what, I am working almost seven days a week, and putting in a lot of hours, and maybe I should step up and be a consultant and do my own thing.’ I started my consultancy, and it started quickly growing, where I was hiring people and staffing up. In the early days, we were doing a lot of website design and development, a lot of social, obviously, PR communications, strategic communications, but we weren't doing as much advertising. In an effort to continue to build and grow and be an integrated agency, in 2018 I acquired The Partnership, which was a brand strategy advertising agency. 

‍Spotlight: To me, functions like advertising, brand storytelling and brand insights are a lot different than PR and crisis management. You generally don’t see those things as part of one agency or if you do they are separate divisions. 

‍Lucey: I think you're absolutely right. We’ve launched Partnership 360, which is our digital proprietary dashboard, and we have lots of partners who work with us on that. It's a platform where you can look at your earned, owned and paid media. From a reputation management perspective, the world's gotten smaller, so it's helpful to have one place where you can look at everything. You can even look at your board or your executive leaders and how their brands, from a PR perspective, are impacting your paid efforts. I think that intersection point, that integration, is becoming more and more important. 

‍Spotlight: How do you define brand storytelling, and why do you think it's so important?

‍Lucey: Brand storytelling, at the core, builds trust. You want to engage your audiences. Oftentimes, if done properly, brand storytelling should create emotional connection with your audiences and consumers, understanding what the emotional triggers are. I think making sure that you're leading with some cultural relevance is very critical for building long-term relationships, brand ambassadors and brand believers, for whatever it is that you're selling. It has to be nurtured over time. 

The other thing is that just because we've crafted a brand story and launched a campaign, it's not one and done. It has to be ongoing. The best campaigns and the best brands know how to constantly be engaging their audiences with the right brand stories.

‍Spotlight: Do you have any examples?

‍Lucey: A few years ago, the floodgates opened up and we could work with college athletes, which was never allowed before. We were one of the first agencies to do that. And we went to the University of Georgia, and we found Stetson Bennett, who was the quarterback at the time. His nickname was ‘The Mailman’ because he delivered. 

One of our partners at the time was the dairy industry. We asked Bennett if we could change his name to ‘The Milkman’ for a period of time, and do some brand storytelling around the benefits of milk when it comes to hydration. We were able to tell a story that really aligned with the nutritional benefits of dairy and why it's so important that milk delivers. In this case, Bennett became ‘The Milkman’ who was delivering. We were using a brand ambassador, somebody who was really popular in the Southeast, and leveraging the campaign to tell a brand story that laddered up to the right messaging, that delivered the right content for our partner. 

That was a very successful campaign. There wasn’t a huge media budget behind it, but it told the right story and it was creative. The creative team did a great job of selling the concept to him and getting him on board and then propelling that message forward. Instead of just doing a traditional media buy, we really got him out there promoting that story on behalf of our partner and it was really effective.

‍Spotlight: You mentioned brand building and brand trust. Do you think that when you work with an influencer like Stetson Bennett that because people are having a sort of parasocial relationship with that person, that builds trust, maybe even without people realizing what's happening?

‍Lucey: I think that's absolutely right. In other situations, trust is completely eroded. I mentioned we do a lot of crisis management work, and sometimes that's a point of entry for us, where we come into an organization that's dealing with a crisis, and we help them with a strategy and managing the issues in crisis communications, working with whatever task force they have in place or group they have in place to manage the crisis. 

Last year, I co-authored and published a book with the CEO of Naples Comprehensive Health (NCH) called Upheaval. The book covers a time when the brand was in significant upheaval. They had accepted the resignation of the CEO and the chief of staff. They had – and this is all in the book, of course – they had doctors and donors leaving. People were very disenchanted. There was a lot of distrust with the brand and the moniker had become very negative. I don't want to repeat what it was, but the moniker of the brand and what it stood for was not positive in health care at all, and people didn't want to go there for their care. More than 30% of the residents were getting on planes and leaving southwest Florida to get care somewhere else. 

In brand storytelling, you really are doing some reputation management. If trust has been eroded, it takes time to build that back up. And so the significance and importance of brand storytelling becomes even more critical. At the root of that, you have to have people who can be brand ambassadors for you. You need to know who you are, and what your mission is, what your vision and your values are and where you're headed. You need a messaging platform and a brand book. For NCH, none of that existed, so we had to build all of that. As we went through the rebrand, we also had to train spokespersons on the right messaging to make sure they could also tell stories out in their community, whether they were at the golf course, at the golf club or at a Little League game. 

I think oftentimes as marketers, we just think about what our paid strategy is going to be. What's our media budget, where is this going to live? But if you think about a lot of industries, often it starts locally. From a resource perspective, some of your best dollars are spent on having an inside-out strategy, starting with your employees and internal stakeholders, and making sure they are telling the brand stories you want them to be telling.

Companies frequently launch campaigns and make big pivots, sometimes communicating these new things in the marketplace before talking about it internally. Employees often see something for the first time in the newspaper, on TV, on radio, or on social, and they had no idea it was happening. That is a big challenge, and the bigger the organization gets, obviously, the more difficult it can be. For emerging brands who are looking to really maximize their investment from a marketing and communications perspective, it’s really a best practice to leverage your internal stakeholders first.

‍Spotlight: Quickly going back to something you just mentioned, do you ever feel like there's a risk of hitching your ride to an influencer and then having that relationship go sour? 

‍Lucey: I will use the same success story that I just shared with you on how it can go south. So Stetson Bennett, beloved football player, amazing quarterback, kind of your great American All-Star, goes out to Texas. I get a phone call on a Sunday that he's been arrested. As you can imagine, the dairy industry is pretty conservative. Every single time you're inviting an influencer to work with you, that's a huge risk. They go get a DUI, or they do something inappropriate, or they say something inappropriate, and that can really hurt your brand. That’s definitely something that concerns some of the bigger brands we work with in a lot of heavily regulated industries. It's something we have to be very conscious of and make sure that we're really picking the right influencers. 

‍Spotlight: Is the risk worth it? 

‍Lucey: I think it's something that we have to continue to look at, because building out influencers, especially from a social perspective, is a very effective marketing tool. 

‍Spotlight: You have mentioned entertainment-first branding. What does that look like when you aren’t first and foremost an entertainment company? 

‍Lucey: Attention spans continue to shrink. We hear that the average American's attention span is less than a goldfish’s. And so traditional ad formats are always going to have to work harder to break through the clutter. It's going to require brands to find more and more new ways to engage audiences. When we think about branding, an entertainment-first approach appeals to consumers who are seeking value from brands and from their products. They may include connecting with experiences they've had with the brand or deeper storytelling. Entertainment-first branding is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and I think it's more effective when it aligns, obviously, with the brand identity and target audiences. 

‍Spotlight: Where do you think traditional media fits into this picture? 

I certainly think there's a place for it. What we're hearing and seeing is that there might be a shift back to more traditional media, because people are so bombarded with so many other things. Traditional media might become even more effective. There was a shift for a while in which out-of-home advertising did not exist. But it's coming back. In crisis communications, we say that people need to hear something three to five times to retain it. Now, the average person has to see that message seven to 10 times before they take action. 

‍Spotlight: How challenging is it to keep your clients or partners on target in terms of sticking with the agreed media strategy? Or do you find that people are wanting to run off to the latest and greatest platform? 

‍Lucey:  I think it's easy to want to be first and to want to understand what's going to be the next big thing, what's going to be the next TikTok. 

I would say our partners are working collaboratively with us to lay out the media strategy and to execute the implementation of plans. It's so important to measure. We need to measure everything. And if it's not working and we're not getting the results that we wanted, then we have to pivot and think about doing other things. 

To your point, there's something emerging every day, and it’s important that we’re testing those things, to see what's working, what's not working and what we think is going to stick. I think that's a big part of our responsibility – being a great partner and bringing solutions to the clients that we serve.

‍Spotlight: You’ve mentioned having an AI task force at The Partnership. What role is AI playing in all this?

‍Lucey: Gosh, isn't that the question of the hour? I think that AI is rapidly propelling us forward and forcing us to think about ways that we can work more efficiently. We've always heard the adage, work smarter, not harder. AI is absolutely propelling us forward and making us do that. So we are integrating AI into everything we do from copywriting to graphic design to processes to using it to generate thought starters. There are a lot of tools that can make you work much quicker and more efficiently, but what we're learning is trust but verify. AI is still very new, and there are a lot of challenges, and we can't rely on it alone. We absolutely have to be questioning it and reviewing it and making sure that we're utilizing it in the right way. 

I think independent agencies like us have a bit of a competitive advantage, because we're a little bit more nimble. We can pivot faster, and we can integrate these things pretty quickly to make sure that we're really utilizing and being early adopters of AI. We can also help our partners leverage it, and be a resource for them on how they can utilize it in their workflows and with their teams. It's changing constantly, so we have to keep our finger on the pulse of it and make sure that we stay on top of it. 

‍Spotlight: OK, last question: what’s a campaign or marketing effort that you've seen lately that thought was really cool? 

‍Lucey: CPG categories are really struggling in a lot of ways right now. Cereal has had declining sales, and that's a category that's been challenging. Kellogg’s just launched a campaign called “See You in the Morning” that reminds people of the company’s 117-year-old history and features a giant version of their mascot, Cornelius the Cockerel, marching through a European city to Jurassic 5’s ‘Jayou.’ It’s about getting people back to breakfast. I think it’s very subtle, very clever and kind of nostalgic.