EVP, GM, or CMO—why choose one if you might be all three? 

On this episode of Advertising and marketing Vanguard, Keisha Taylor Starr, EVP, CMO, and normal supervisor of Scripps Networks at The E.W. Scripps Firm, proves that intersectionality and a various skillset can take your advertising and marketing sport to the following degree. 

Tune in for his or her dialogue on how strategic repositioning can drive record-breaking viewers engagement, why entrepreneurs should stability artistic threat with monetary rigor and the management strikes required to form an trade constructed for numerous voices. 

What you’ll be taught:

  • Find out how to transition from CMO to Common Supervisor by gaining P&L possession
  • Why sports activities franchises are important programming investments
  • The technique behind rebranding a legacy community for brand new audiences
  • Find out how to stability artistic ambition with monetary rigor as a CMO
  • The significance of numerous illustration in management and decision-making
  • Find out how to broaden sports activities definition and create inclusive programming

With a profession spanning company work at BBDO, management roles at CNN, Turner Broadcasting, and Warner Bros. Discovery, in addition to expertise in collegiate sports activities advertising and marketing, Keisha has constantly pushed progressive transformations throughout information, leisure, and sports activities properties. 

Her management in ION’s rebrand right into a normal leisure community with pioneering ladies’s sports activities programming has resulted in record-breaking viewers engagement and Google TV’s most-watched free reside channel designation in 2024, demonstrating how CMOs can stability artistic imaginative and prescient with monetary accountability. 

Episode Highlights: 

[05:53] Connection Is Your Aggressive Benefit in a Fragmented Media Panorama — Keisha emphasizes that the fashionable media setting calls for a basic shift from competing on content material quantity to competing on viewers connection, explaining that in an period the place viewing is asynchronous and audiences scatter throughout infinite platforms, connection turns into the differentiator that conventional networks can now not assure. Her strategic response is to anchor programming round common connectors, whether or not that’s native information, reside sports activities or experiential occasions, that create real causes for audiences to collect. 

[08:08] Make Early Strategic Bets on Underserved Audiences Earlier than Rivals Do — Keisha demonstrates how profitable model repositioning requires figuring out viewers gaps and committing assets earlier than market saturation happens. Whereas many networks had been nonetheless discussing ladies’s sports activities as a pattern, Scripps made the calculated determination to construct franchise-level programming, i.e., their devoted WNBA broadcasts on Friday nights and NWSL video games on Saturday nights, creating structural shortage in premium programming time. This early mover benefit addressed an actual shopper friction level: Sports activities followers battle to seek out their groups throughout fragmented broadcast rights and platforms. The outcome was record-breaking engagement, together with seven WNBA broadcasts averaging over 1 million viewers—metrics that had been beforehand unattainable outdoors conventional sports activities.