Listen: Masters of Risk | Episode 11-Michelle Vincent

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Yashi Yadav

Welcome to Masters of Risk. The podcast where we uncover what is top of mind for business leaders today. I'm Yashi Yadav, and I will be your host every month. Let's get started.

Excited to have joining me a very special guest, Michelle Vincent, who is the CEO of MoFilm. Hi, Michelle. Thanks for joining us.

Michelle Vincent

Hi, Yashi. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yashi Yadav

So without further ado, I think I'd love to just get right into it. Can you give me a little bit of background on yourself but also on MoFilm, the firm that you currently work for?

Michelle Vincent

Absolutely. So I have been at MoFilm for -- it will be 2 years in May, after a career that was really grounded in sales, a large part of that focused in the technology sector, which led itself into this creative opportunity at MoFilm as a content creative agency with a global creator community from all walks of life that are powered by generative AI skill sets and expertise in pretty much every realm of creativity in front, behind and around the camera.

And we partner with brands to bring their stories to life, their branded content to life, oftentimes with an authentic touch that our creators make on a brief basis. So it's a lot of fun. We do everything from AR/VR to billboards, to TV campaigns, digital campaigns. It's been a great journey so far.

Yashi Yadav

Wow, that sounds just extremely cutting edge, I think, given everything that we're hearing today about AI and how a lot of different firms are incorporating it into their day-to-day workflows and processes. And I actually hadn't thought about it as much from a creative aspect. I mean, being that we S&P and typically sit within the financial world, it's really interesting to see how you're incorporating it from the creative side. So that's very, very cool to hear.

Can you, I guess, maybe tell me a little bit about your life prior to MoFilm? So I know you said you're coming up on 2 years, so happy almost anniversary to you. But who was Michelle before that? Kind of what was the journey that brought you to where you are today?

Michelle Vincent

What was the journey? It's funny because being a part of this conversation on the topic of Masters of Risk, if I had turned to a 25-year-old version of myself, I would have told you that I was very risk averse. But fast forward to today, I realized that much of my journey was shaped by taking a lot of calculated risks and actually changing directions in a way that I knew was a combination of sometimes a little bit of data, sometimes a little bit of gut.

And that story really started from college. I started out as a premed student. And I thought I was going to be a bilingual-speaking doctor. I had a Spanish major on top of that as well. Probably an ophthalmologist, still wanted to come to New York and never what I have ever imagined that I would find myself working in media and creative.

But back when I was about halfway through that journey, my gut said to me, I really enjoy learning about science. And I have had -- I've been gifted such incredible opportunities to be in this position right now, but this is not where my passion lies in terms of wanting to make this a career for myself.

And that was a very difficult thing not only to admit to myself, but I have parents that came from very humble beginnings, and they worked very hard to be in a place where they were so proud to have a daughter going to medical school. And I was terrified of disappointing them. There was this sort of stable future in medicine that was envisioned for me. And I knew that there was something around business.

There was something around splitting my focus between marketing and finance where I knew this is where I'm going to have fun and this is where some things are going to happen, I think. Let me go ahead and take that risk. And by doing so, I knew that I would juxtapose this position of potential happiness against that more stable and secure path.

And that started my journey in the career in media. Began at Hearst Magazines, started out as a sales assistant making copies, sending faxes. It was definitely a sharp pivot from where I thought I was going to be. But what was interesting at that time was being able to navigate a landscape that was also evolving. So a little bit of right time, right place. I have learned that there were some opportunities cropping up at this little company called Google and it seemed like an interesting place to explore. There were headlines about it in the news.

But more importantly, there was this evolution happening in digital. And so I love the magazine world. I love the publishing world. But another big decision was, do I jump from that and follow this thing that's really interesting, the dot-com bust -- boom and bust are behind me. And perhaps there's something to this little thing in tech and glad I went ahead and made that bet.

And I know we'll talk about that journey a little bit, but that was really where I think that final change defined the rest of my career, being a part of and leading various teams over the course of Google's evolution from 2007 to '17, working with large brands that were initially trying to figure out how do I drive business outcomes by advertising on search than display, the YouTube acquisition happened during my time there.

So really seeing the evolution of digital video coming into play. First is just something for consumers, then later as something that became a critical part of strategies for brands. I spent some time at Meta. In that moment, I was actually encouraged from a former manager at Google that I had worked for to explore the company over there.

Social media was really taking off in an interesting way. So that journey was also one where there were some unexpected twists and turns. Continuing to run some sales teams and media teams across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp was a newer priority for the company at that time. So just really exciting moments to see how some of the platforms we know and love were born.

And then back to Google, again, running some different teams, building other skill sets in new industries, worked on automotive as a lot of the large automotive brands were thinking through their own strategies as the industry was being disrupted by Tesla, by autonomous driving, really exciting but also challenging time for automakers, navigating the teams through COVID and then fast forward to this opportunity at MoFilm today.

Yashi Yadav

Wow. So you've really just been around the entire tech space is what it sounds like. I mean, it's funny because the names that you brought to light, Google, Facebook, which is now Meta, they're all leaders and pioneers of their industry. But when you were starting out there, I would almost characterize -- or would you characterize them in more of a start-up phase?

Michelle Vincent

Definitely. If not start-up, maybe entering their preteen years, if I can say that, right? So yes, I definitely think that they were just trying to grow up, and that was a great time and place to be inside of those companies because that's when you're taking spaghetti, get throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks. Everybody is wearing a thousand hats. Eventually that growth mindset, that mentality, has to grow up a little bit.

And that was a sweet spot that I found myself inside of each organization, actually leaving Google for Facebook for that reason because I knew that there would be something incremental to gain as going in as a manager running teams at a company at that stage versus an individual contributor when I joined Google in 2007. So there was a lot of opportunity to bring incremental value, but also gain it personally for my own career development and return.

Yashi Yadav

Yes. No, that makes sense. I do want to dig in a little bit more to the Facebook leg of your journey. Based on what you've showed over the time that you were there, it looks like it did overlap with the Cambridge Analytica era. And I'm sure when we, again, being on a podcast where we are talking about risk, I'm just curious kind of what was it like at that time and what did you learn coming out of it in the context of risks that maybe you didn't even realize could be present in a business? And how did the world change moving forward?

Michelle Vincent

I love this question. And that particular point in time is an interesting one. As I mentioned, there was something happening in the social media space. And I had been at Google 10 years at that point and had no plans to leave. Like I said, somebody reached over the fence and said, "Hey, it's pretty interesting over here." And the assessment at the time to take that risk to leave was, number one, making sure you leave your company on a high note. So things are going well, leaving the team in a good place at Google was very important.

But also, just as importantly, it was a time of change at Meta when they were starting to set different priorities for the platforms that matter the most. When you're a tech company, especially in that FANG cohort, the expectations for year-over-year growth are high. They still remain high, but growing 15%, 20% year-over-year on a multibillion dollar base is not an easy task. So often what happens are new product lines get launched. I mean I could go on with my stories at Google and anybody remember Google+ and other things were risks that the company took that went away.

That same thing was happening at Facebook before it was Meta. Instagram was a platform where monetization had was -- and the strategy for that was still in very early stages. The go-to-market that needed to be developed for teams to understand how brands could harness the power to achieve business outcomes, again, we're still in early stages.

And then interestingly, the specific industry I was working on at the time, a lot of the travel OTAs that since for online travel agencies, the aggregators that often would bring their leads to the Marriotts, the Avises of the world. The solutions that would work for, let's call it, a CPG brand didn't necessarily work as well for that particular segment of travel in terms of how they thought about ROI and having a more performance mindset versus branding mindset where a lot of other companies were finding success in those early days on the platform.

And so spending a lot of work talking to the different teams and understanding how do we think about the potential for the feedback loop from these brands to inform engineering on what could be possible to make the platform valuable for companies with all sorts of priorities were really important. But eventually, we encountered a moment in time that for those folks that were in the tech world might remember as the Cambridge Analytica incident.

So not to go too far down memory lane, but Cambridge Analytica was a time where there was controversy around personal data and that was within the hands of Facebook and whether or not it was being protected in the right way with other stakeholders that wanted to use that data for a number of different purposes. And quite frankly, it was so long ago that the details are pretty far behind me. But the headlines were pretty damaging to the company.

It raised a lot of larger questions around consumer privacy that we're still navigating through today in the wake of cookie deprecation. And a lot of tech companies have been impacted from that specific moment where it really opened up not only brand eyes, but it opened up consumer eyes around the importance of really, I think, having more accountability in terms of how data was handled, the transparency around the handling of data and consumer choice.

And what was, I think, risky at that moment, in my opinion, sat across a number of different organizations at that time. How do we take this information and talk about it with our customers? Again, big growth goals in a year where diversification of the product solutions were the focus to offset the more stable platforms where that growth would be challenging.

How do we address consumer concerns and make sure that engagement at the time, growing that unique user base is still very important according -- in terms of the measures that Wall Street was using to measure the health and future potential of these businesses? So there were a lot of different elements that needed to be factored into executive decision-making.

But at the end of the day, the corporations that we partnered with were really going to make or break the future of being able to continue to grow as a business and some of them raised their hands and we're in the headlines and said, "I'm out until you fix this." And yes, so that was a challenging time. What was also important to address was the morale of the team and how were we showing up for them when they were in the face of Facebook by themselves in a room with clients at that point in time.

And it took reflecting on a similar -- I mean, not exactly the same, but a similar challenge back at Google when YouTube was also in the headlines for some unfavorable reasons and thinking about our approach with brands. And what we found was that, number one, being upfront fast and transparent was critically important in making sure that as things were happening, as we started to understand the details behind what had gone wrong, what was the impact to that particular client?

Was any of the data that touched their brand and the users that were connected to their brands through the platforms impacted? We had to move really quickly and pull a lot of reports and make sure that we were showing up as the trusted partners that we had always intended to be. Call us lucky, my cohort of clients actually were removed from the direct impact. And we were able to hear from them around their biggest concerns being how the company handled the situation moving forward.

I think there was just a different time and place where there was a certain acceptable exchange that went on with data at that time, and it was just simply never a challenge. So I don't know that -- I can't speak for whatever systems were in place or the intent that was behind it, but the importance of figuring out what was going to be important and what was best for the customers and what was best for the consumers in the future was the most important thing.

And to me, balancing that human trust with market education about the emerging risks and compliance with privacy laws as they evolve from there was really critical in guiding teams through these shifts and earning back the trust of customers for the long term.

Yashi Yadav

Wow. Yes, I mean, I think that's quite -- being able to walk away with that perspective, it's just I'm sure on lightning, like hindsight's always 20/20 and you obviously were just kind of in the middle of it when all that was happening.

But I guess all of the lessons that you've learned from your time at Facebook and Google, how are you applying them in this journey when I think about the transition? So you move from these large tech companies to a more boutique opportunity. One, what sparked that shift? And then two, what are some of the largest lessons that you've sort of taken over that line?

Michelle Vincent

Yes. Going from big tech to a small agency with -- we have a creator ecosystem of 10,000 creators, but the full-time employees are only 14 people strong, including myself inside of MoFilm, too.

Yashi Yadav

That was a huge change.

Michelle Vincent

That's a lean team. Yes, but there were still some factors. And again, when I think about how we started and talking about the impact of generative AI and creativity, I mean, we set out to make sure -- last year, we had the largest GenAI-trained creator community on the planet. And we've been working to execute that. And even though there is a small company, there was always this opportunity to make a large impact through creativity.

So working at these tech companies, one of the consistent things -- themes that many of these teams would partner with CMOs of large global multidivisional companies as you're trying to raise the bar on impact year-over-year, the creative really matters. And depending on what study that you look at, I believe one that I saw from Yahoo last year cited 80%, up to 80%. I've seen anywhere from 60% to 80% of the impact of creative assets -- of assets for a marketing campaign come down to the creative.

Bad creative doesn't work. Good creative can make your brand or make whatever message you're trying to get audiences to act on to remember whatever those KPIs are can often come down to what did that creative look like. Was it sticky? Was it funny? If it makes people laugh, there's actually a much higher percentage of somebody being able to retain that content, remember the content, remember the brand that was associated with it.

So the opportunity at MoFilm, while it was a lot further away from what I had ever been used to really working on media planning was a great opportunity to harness the deepest level of understanding in this world of creativity that can really make or break a marketing campaign.

And then fast forward, again, call it my -- I'm reading the tea leaves in a fortunate way early in my transition, the metaverse was something that we were looking at a lot. It was something where brands were experimenting, the rise of crypto and blockchain internally. We knew there had to be something there, but we wanted to get our hands on it to better understand it so we could shape a POV and guide our partners on what could be possible.

So again, there was no road map for what was about to happen with the metaverse. All we knew was that, you know what, we need to -- everybody needs to create a wallet and let's get a little bit of cryptocurrency in there and understand this landscape, create an NFT. And so these exercises were preparing us for that, it was just that, that world, the metaverse world, is still a little bit more -- a lot more complex to execute.

And then with generative AI coming into a more public-facing opportunity with consumers being able to get their hands on the likes of tools like ChatGPT, that changed everything. And even more so for the creative industry as the likes of DALL•E, Midjourney, so many tools and systems came to fruition that caused chaos, fear and also excitement with these brands. So even as a -- and also with the creators that serve them in their creative endeavors.

And so the first thing to do was to really understand the fundamentals of what is this technology and how much of a threat is it really? What can we do as a result of this assessment? And what also don't we know, where we are going to have to make some decisions around what do we try and what do we experiment with versus what do we perhaps put on ice because the risks are too high.

And then most importantly, based on those learnings, how do we then hold hands with the clients that we work with to navigate the legal questions? There is no precedent for a lot of the things that we're doing in the creative space as it relates to the risks that one might take in putting a creative idea into a large learning model.

And then having that learning model be trained on your data, that invited the opportunity to have enterprise-level conversations with some of these platforms and seeing what can we do to create the right protections instead of just sitting in that fear.

A lot of -- learning about a lot of legal teams in the creative space, often as they should in their roles, if there's a nonzero chance of any type of risk of litigation for IP infringement, that's another space where the attitude towards that almost had to soften or these companies might be at risk for being left behind and never trying any generative AI platform at all.

And to me, those were all things that continue to keep me here and excited about the role and doubling down on that shift from big tech to boutique doesn't mean that the opportunities become smaller. They're just as big and just as exciting and just as much of an opportunity to navigate unchartered waters and take some really exciting risks and learning from the ones that fail in the safest possible way to continue to grow from there and stay ahead of the curve for what's next.

Yashi Yadav

Yes. I mean, that definitely, to me, it sounds like you've mastered the concept of taking a risk and figuring out how to identify the opportunity within that risk because when you bring up your 25-year-old self, coming from that perspective and moving into where you are today, it's just kind of amazing to see what experience can really bring to the table.

So outside of AI in all of your past experiences and risks that you've identified, are there any -- what makes, I guess, the risk mitigation process kind of different or unique at MoFilm? So I'm not talking about privacy laws or things like that. But for example, diversity is a core pillar of the firm that you work at. Given a factor like that or any other unique characteristics, what are some different ways that you've had to shift your mentality and how you approach doing business really?

Michelle Vincent

I'm glad you brought up diversity because it is a topic that is coming to the surface, especially in today's political and social dynamic right now where the definition and I think the approach is being challenged in some unprecedented ways. And it's still a very important core value to MoFilm's business. And we believe that as some of the larger, I think, challenging conversations around diversity have that dust settle a little bit. There are still a lot of tangible benefits that are really important that we look at today.

And so the data -- and the proof is in the data. So companies with diverse management teams see a 19% higher revenue due to innovation, which has a direct impact on financial performance, a direct impact on creative output, and that comes from bringing multiple perspectives to the table in order to come up with new ideas that an echo chamber otherwise wouldn't be able to come up with.

So sometimes even taking that early step to test what if we bring in somebody that we wouldn't bring in to have a seat at the table, does that actually drive results? And so the higher-level data says that it does. And if you bring that into creative production, you can also look at a lot of very tangible examples of brands that have had many foot-in-mouth moments because of the lack of diverse perspectives in the room.

Even when the intent actually came from a very, very good place by not having the other perspectives in the room to raise a flag that perhaps a certain community might not receive the message in a way that was intended by the people not from the community that need it, that also actually can create more risk in that you might miss the mark and might end up in the headlines for something that you never intended to.

And we can point to a number of different brands that are wonderful brands and I think have done a good job to come back and acknowledge where some of those challenges lie, like we might cite Pepsi and the Kylie Jenner campaign. I think you'll see in social medias and the memes about it is that a commercial that they ran many years ago looked like at the time of the George Floyd issues that were really riling everybody up during COVID, there was a scene that looked like Kyle Jenner had handed a Pepsi to riot police and then suddenly that created piece in the community.

And obviously, the communities that were most sensitive to what was going on did not really connect with that, and it was not a good moment for Pepsi. So again, all of these things can be handled with grace, but those were learning moments around maybe if the crews that we had were more diverse, maybe if the people crafting creative concepts for this campaign came from a wider breadth of experiences, that incident could have been avoided.

There's a number of them that have circulated throughout the media community. And again, I think many of these campaigns were done with the best intent, but the one thing that we have learned is that in MoFilm's mantra, many voices are better than 1 because you can really come up with new ideas, but also mitigate some of the watchouts that otherwise wouldn't happen if you had the right people in the room.

Yashi Yadav

Yes. No, I completely agree, and that's amazing to hear and I love that that's something that your firm is thinking about and is such a driving force behind the initiatives that you guys take. So I guess all of that being said, Michelle, what are your goals for MoFilm? I mean, if you guys are a 14-person shop, that's really impressive. Where are you looking to go in 2024 and beyond?

Michelle Vincent

Well, I mean, we definitely want to continue with our bullish approach around generative AI, partnering with brands to help them really map out what the integration of that technology looks like for them. MoFilm is a part of The Brandtech Group and one of our sister companies is called Pencil. And Pencil is a generative AI tool that can take even more detailed brand guidelines, rules of what is allowed versus not allowed in that creative and at speed and scale, create -- not only create different assets, but also calculate based off of industry benchmarks, the likelihood for that asset to perform.

So we just want to be able to equip more of our partners with tools and technologies like that. It allows everybody to move better, faster, smarter. Content is not going away. It is continuing to proliferate. There is more content out there on most platforms than any of us would ever be able to consume in a lifetime if we sat down and hit play and didn't stop until the day we die.

And so it becomes even more important for those that are building content to find ways to grab attention, get that sort of sticky message across and you need to move faster, you need to be able to understand the impact of that content at a higher clip and then integrate it into your strategies with that. So we'll continue with that from there.

We'll also continue to cast authentically in front, behind and around the camera. The best example that I love from some of our past work is filming for a baby formula campaign, where not only did we take the cast and make sure that we were working with real families in front of the camera. Fun fact, it is much easier to work with babies when mom and dad are the actors in front of the camera.

But also behind the camera, we cast filmmakers who were moms and interviewed for those roles with their babies on their laps. And boy, did that story look different and feel different when you had real parents creating the content story for parents. And those assets ended up becoming a part of the top 2% of highest-performing creative content for the entire global division of Danone, who was the client that we were doing that creative for. So we will absolutely continue to do that because it drives results.

And then last but not least, just keep innovating, right? We don't know what's around the corner. And I think as we've seen, creative continues to evolve so I can't wait to see what happens next.

Yashi Yadav

Yes. Wow, that's so exciting, and I'm really excited for you and wish you the best of luck on continuing this journey. But thanks again, Michelle. It was amazing having you on the podcast. Thanks for coming on to Masters of Risk.

I feel like just being able to engage in this conversation outside of the typical industries and areas that I chat with and really diving into media and what's going on within the media sector and kind of all the experiences that have culminated to what you're building today has just been absolutely fascinating. So really appreciate our conversation, and I'm looking forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Michelle Vincent

Yashi, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it as well.

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