The Big Impression

Heritage sports brands may be tempted to rely on their history to appeal to a new generation that wasn’t there to see it. But in the fast-moving digital attention economy, that’s a mistake, says Antonio Gnocchini, chief marketing officer at Diadora.
He joins The Big Impression podcast to explain how the iconic Italian brand is reclaiming its spot in the performance market. By leaning into a challenger brand mindset during the Paris 2024 Olympics — without the price tag of official sponsorship — Gnocchini and his team are shifting the focus from nostalgia to high-performance innovation.
 
Episode Transcript
Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.
Damian Fowler (00:00):
I'm Damian Fowler, and welcome to this edition of The Big Impression. Today, we're looking at how a heritage sportswear brand carved out its own spotlight at the Paris 2024 Olympics without being an official sponsor. My guest is Antonio Gnocchini, Chief Marketing Officer at Diadora, the iconic Italian brand known for its made in Italy craftsmanship. In the lead of the Paris, Antonio and his team launched a global brand campaign built around Diadora's roster of Italian athletes from Trackstar, Larissa, Yapacino, defensers and speed skaters, all while showcasing innovations like the Atomo Running Shoe. That's the first high mileage running shoe made in Italy in three decades. We're going to break down how Diadora timed its campaign to maximize the Olympic moment, how it differentiates itself from giants like Nike and LVMH, and what this strategy says about building awareness in a crowded high-stakes marketing landscape. So let's get into it.
(01:07):
Antonio, can you tell us about why the Paris Olympics was such an important moment for Diadora as it sought to elevate its brand name again?
Antonio Gnocchini (01:18):
So if you are a multi-category sport brand, Olympics is certainly the big event, the main event, your main catwalk of the main show. And you prepare for it for a long time because you need to be in one of the most competitive environment with the best product, competitive athletes. Everything needs to be perfect. And it's also one of those moments in which you can go deeper with attention, with messages. If you are serious about sport and you want to communicate, sport brand values, what you really stand for, it's not easy, especially today in moments in which the attention is not much, few seconds from everybody. Channels are very fast and flattened messages very easily. The Olympics is a moment in which for a few weeks you have the attention. You have people connected and engaged. You have people who care. And so it's a perfect environment to talk again about what you stand for.
(02:41):
And so going back to the Olympics was a statement to say, we actually are a competitive sport brands, a performance brand, not only lifestyle of it. And so yeah, it was such an important environment for us. Also, these Olympics was maybe one of the first ones that I've seen since I started doing this job when you could see some challengers brands activating and being visible.
(03:15):
In the past, this was really an event only for main sponsors and official sponsors mostly. Now this is a moment of challengers. And if you find the right way and if you had a good connection with your outlets, you could be doing a successful marketing campaigns and actions.
Damian Fowler (03:35):
That's really interesting to hear you say that. And I think, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. Is the kind of media environment that we exist in now, does that make it possible for challenger brands to find a way to reach audiences that they otherwise might not be able to find back when it was the main TV channels and big glossy mags, there are more niches now in many ways.
Antonio Gnocchini (04:00):
There's a very interesting report that Business of Fashion and McKinsey release every year. And the most recent one was a study from McKinsey, which they were showing displaying how the sport market, which was dominated by only few incumbents. And you could see that at Olympics, still today, the most recent one, the usual suspects are dominated most of the sports. But in this past few years, there is a change going on in which incumbents are really under pressure from Challengers brand in the sport industry. They're gaining momentum. Challenges are gaining space, gaining market share, and also visibility. And you can say that maybe this is linked to the explosion of running as a global movement, but it's not only that. Running certainly as contributed, because running is one of those categories that is really extremely democratic. And yeah, sure, track and field main athletes, famous names help, but you can become a successful running brand without having only the most amazing hundred meters runners.
(05:37):
You can be successful by working in other ways. And you see brands starting to become more visible through running in the sport industry.
Damian Fowler (05:47):
What's interesting about Diadora is that it has this very significant legacy as a sports brand. I mean, I think back to my childhood when I used to absolutely love Beyond Borg. And as soon as I saw the name Diadora, I remember Borg. And of course there's other soccer legends like Roberto Baggio or Francesco Totti. But in recent years, it's been a little bit maybe eclipsed by bigger brands that you just mentioned. So you're a challenger brand, but you're also a legacy brand. Could you explain a bit more of the context around the history of the brand?
Antonio Gnocchini (06:24):
If you are passionate about sport, when you land at Diadora and you visit the museum, it is a kid in a candy store. That was my experience at the museum is you could see in real life the objects of desire of your youth. In my bedroom, I had posters of all these heroes and there's a moment, there's a scene in King Richard with Will Smith, in which you hear for a moment in the movie, you hear Venus and Serena Williams coach telling Richard Williams to wait on the Nike offer because the perfect offer for any tennis player at the time was the one Jennifer Capriati was getting from Diadora. When I watched the movie, I was like, whoa. So we wear really the tennis brand and the brand that was in relation with athletes, especially tennis athletes. We were the tennis athletes brand. What happened?
(07:34):
I think that the brand, the company really focused for few decades on product, product marketing, sports marketing contracts, traditional marketing actions. While in the meantime, other brands, other sport brands have become very sophisticated, very innovative in their marketing strategies, films where Nike's main language and they were exciting product of their marketing department. I think the brand here, the Theodo has been focusing on other things and lost the engagement with consumers globally. And then for a few years, as I was saying, the focus had been really on capitalizing on its legacy and becoming more of a lifestyle brand. But in reality, the market can tell you that if you're not serious about sport, you lose your credibility as a lifestyle of sport brand.
Damian Fowler (08:42):
Yeah. So the new campaign or the more recent campaign is about reasserting that sports connection. How else would you define the brand as it is now?
Antonio Gnocchini (08:57):
I think that what we needed to do ... So the first thing that I wanted to do is to prove that the sensation, the feeling that we had was correct. So we run a long and insightful brand health monitor study, and the results of that study was showing that, yes, that we were a legacy brand, people recognized the name, but they couldn't really link it any longer to specific performance product, and they were not buying performance product any longer from the Adora. So we were also associated linked to values like being Italian, but at the same time, it was this idea of romantic Italian, quaint, Italian, traditional. If you want to be successful in sports, you have to talk about innovation, you have to be recognized for your capacity of being a technological advanced company. And so the main effort for us in the beginning was to go back into making sure that our research and development center was up to speed and that the marketing department was capable of telling these type of stories because these stories were in fact very important for our consumer, for our focused consumers, the focus of our target, a younger consumer that wanted to talk about sport, they wanted to be capable also of discovering innovative brand sports.
(10:44):
So even if we were not one of the main incumbents by being authentic in sport, especially in running and in other categories, by being authentic, we could engage with this young consumers who was interested in discovering new brands that have an innovation angle that was really relevant.
Damian Fowler (11:11):
Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I'm interested to hear you talk a bit more about that audience group that you really wanted to reach and the profile of that group. And presumably there's an element of conquesting going on because you've got to get them from some of the bigger names that we've already talked about.
Antonio Gnocchini (11:29):
Yeah. As I was saying, running has become one of those category, goes beyond just track and field, goes beyond the daily jogger, goes beyond ... It is really something that touches wellness, fashion is playing into running a lot. Everybody is doing running collections today, not just the usual suspects. We wanted to make sure that in this environment in which you had a lot of noise, we could be recognized as authentic, as separate from the noise. So we wanted to talk with a niche and then make sure that that authentic young athlete was putting the mileage out. So it wasn't talking about running, but putting also the miles and the sweat in running. There were those consumers that were scheduling all their weekends around the run, around the race, so the real authentic runner could recognize that we weren't distracted by all this running noise. We were serious.
(12:48):
So our messages were we run a campaign that is called Normalize iMileage that was directed only to that type of consumers that could recognize the acts and the gestures and the typical struggle of that type of runners. Even if that meant alienating for a little bit a wider audience, because we know that with a wider audience, we had less capacity of rich. We didn't have the muscle for them. But we see today that when you are authentic and strong with that type of niche, that niche creates expansion and creates influence, and then you start to resonate also in other markets and with other type of consumers.
Damian Fowler (13:39):
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about how you set the stage leading up to Paris to build that buzz that's going to resonate across all these different outlets?
Antonio Gnocchini (13:51):
Yeah. We decided, as you can imagine, getting attention is ex extremely difficult, especially today. The new channels are flattening everything and everything is so few fraction of a seconds between your thumb and in your face, it's very hard to go deeper with messages. And if you want to go deeper, you need to find ways in which you can. And for us, our strategy was, okay, we need to stop their attention, stop their eyes for longer.
Damian Fowler (14:35):
I'm curious now to see, given the kind of media exposure that you started to establish, how did it play out during and after the Olympics, and how did you capitalize on it essentially?
Antonio Gnocchini (14:49):
So we monitor during the main events at the Arsenal, we made sure that all the guests and all the people, all the stakeholders of sport were well-informed and also capable of giving the right message out with the proper information. And then we started collecting and amplify this type of information, then feed them also to our partners in the market, retailers, key accounts. All of this helped us make sure that the product was properly displayed and also was selling out in the right moment in time. And by being nimble and agile and fast, we had a great success on this. The content that we had created, we noticed that they were getting a completion rate of 97, 98%. We never had completion rates so high. So we knew that we had something that was resonating. We only needed to be insisting on it and fasting the reaction by feeding athletes, giving the same content to them, and that's it.
Damian Fowler (16:08):
And you mentioned that 97% completion rate on videos and things like that. That's obviously an important metric. What else did you do to measure brand buzz? And then maybe then how did you connect that to sales?
Antonio Gnocchini (16:21):
Every year we do a brand study, a brand health monitor in order to understand the feeling and how our values are perceived by consumers. If there is any change in what we're doing that is affecting their point of view on the brand. Then we do social monitoring on a daily base, especially when we post and when we have athletes performing our.com and a good connection with key accounts, get us data on results and how what we do resonates on the market. That's pretty much what keep us informed and get us a good understanding of what we're doing.
Damian Fowler (17:05):
How did this push around Paris help define the current market right now? And what does it also tell you about where you should build next?
Antonio Gnocchini (17:15):
It is a confirmation that it is a challenger moment. It is a confirmation that if you establish a conversation with your consumers, you can expand and you can gain market in a market that was completely polarized and dominated by only a few brands. It is also confirmation that if you are authentic, at times, maybe even very vertical in your attack to the market through the category, we don't do every sport. We only are focusing now on few sports, but to do them with authenticity, this is also resonating a lot and you have to be ready for sport moments, which means every sport moment that it's not only Olympics, even minor sport moments, if you're capable of being ready and capitalize on it with your athletes, it's a great tool.
Damian Fowler (18:20):
You talked about using innovation, being on the cutting edge to reach a new generation of fans, but do you also still infuse that with some of the golden age narrative that Diadora has? Yes,
Antonio Gnocchini (18:33):
We do. We balance. We try to balance the messaging in that sense, but I think what I've learned in this past few years here is that this is no longer the sneaker culture generation where you could go and have long session and education and talk about the history of that specific model, and you would have this passionate nerd of Sneakers that would then storytell the whole thing to Hollist friends and everybody were buying into it. Everybody was buying into it. I think every time we preach about our history, every time about we try to give lessons, especially the younger generation, it doesn't seem to be interesting and doesn't like it also. But what we see that they like is what they discover. So we have to be ready with the right information. We have to give them a story that is compelling in term of product, in term of innovation, and then let them discover the history behind it, the art, let's say, the origin of the whole story, and where is this coming from?
(19:54):
So maybe one thing that I'm seeing that it's also a learning is the fact that brands ... I've seen brands just trying to capitalize on the fact that one product story has to be successful because it's linked to this specific moment in time, and you consumers should know about it and should buy about it because of that. It doesn't really resonate to consumer any longer. You need more than that. And so, yeah.
Damian Fowler (20:27):
I love that. I think it's so interesting to hear you say you can't preach to consumers, but you can allow them the opportunity to discover. I think that's such a great insight. I think that goes for any storytelling, to be honest.
Antonio Gnocchini (20:45):
I think you're right, but I think it's specifically more valid now in which I believe that you need to have your story perfect and you need to have the details of your story needs to be really well done. People think that you can simply post in every second and be very fast in making sure that consumers will see fresh things every second, digest it very quickly, and then post new ones. Especially for us, this doesn't prove to be right.
Damian Fowler (21:24):
I had a good guest on this podcast a few editions ago who talked about how brand messaging is in everything, the tactile element of the brand. He used Harley Davidson as an example, it's not just a bike, it's everything you encounter in the showroom, the quality of the materials. And I'm getting that sense when I look at Diadora and the Diadora site that their brand messaging comes through in the product line.
Antonio Gnocchini (21:55):
This is very true and very valid. Again, if you want to be serious in your relationship, in your conversation with that niche audience, it means that every touchpoint, every single touchpoint needs to tell something about that story, otherwise they will immediately perceive that it's not authentic
Damian Fowler (22:21):
Any longer. So let me ask you big picture here. So for marketers listening, what's the lesson here that you can tell? You came from Nike, but now you're at Diadora. So you've seen what the big heavyweight brand has done and can do, but what can a smaller brand learn from your experience, I guess, whether it be about future forward channels like CTV or retail media or programmatic or social? Sorry, let me just ask you ask that more simply. What can a marketer learn from your experience trying to market this, bring this brand back into view? I
Antonio Gnocchini (23:04):
Think the most important thing for us has been to be capable of focusing on doing few things and do them perfectly, or at least as perfect as we could do. You are challenged to be very active and be reactive and also try to capitalize on every single product you have in the line and every sport that is played is an opportunity of doing something. The reality is if you want to start to resonate, you need to establish a valid conversation with your core focused consumers. And to do that, you need focus. And this means also at times being capable of saying no to things that you could be doing or that you get pressure from anybody or everybody in the company to do, and also the pressure from the market many times. Again, let's remember that this was a market in which you were supposed to drop a new product every few weeks, so we don't do that.
(24:23):
And we try to talk about innovation only when we have real innovation to communicate. And then when you do build an authentic story and a strong story with every touchpoint connected in the right way, this to me proved to be successful.
Damian Fowler (24:44):
Going back to Paris, that was obviously a huge high watermark for sport last year. As you look ahead to next year, is there anything that's on your calendar that's one of those moments where brand and moment have that synchronicity?
Antonio Gnocchini (25:01):
Olympics is not something that you prepare the season before. So next Olympics is already something that we are studying, preparing for, sweating about. We have to prepare all our innovations. We have to be ready with the right messaging. We have to find the right athletes, and we have to have a strategy on what type of messages we want to focus on. So LA Olympics is certainly something that we look at and we dream of.
Damian Fowler (25:40):
Let me turn to the last section here and just ask you some quick fire questions, if I may. One of the things I wanted to ask you is, is there a sports marketing trend that you think is overrated?
Antonio Gnocchini (25:51):
Maybe there is something that is a bit underrated, which is the fact that some lesser known sport events and maybe not the main athletes, but the local athletes, they are underrated. You can build excellent engaging campaign through those.
Damian Fowler (26:17):
What matters more in the next five years? Heritage, innovation, or cultural storytelling?
Antonio Gnocchini (26:24):
If I may try to put them in order, I would say cultural storytelling for me, then innovation and then heritage. If you do cultural storytelling well, I think your legacy, your heritage is probably already well told in there, but I think that you, again, it's a moment in time which I will never stop stressing the fact that you need to be capable in storytelling properly.
Damian Fowler (26:57):
Is there anything missing in the ad marketplace today that you perceive?
Antonio Gnocchini (27:01):
Data that goes beyond just the reach of a campaign. And even the reach at times is not really ... And not everything is so perfect and reliable. If you could find a way ... You remember where you were studying marketing and the sentence from Wanamaker, I don't know which half of my money spent is wasted. I go back to that. I've been promised by these new tools and these new digital tools that I will know better, but it seems that to be capable of really reading through the noise and getting valuable data that goes just beyond rich, it's still hard and it's still at times not that reliable. And then the other thing is I see an inflation in the attention economy that makes me think that I need to find new ways and new channels and not only finding great storytelling. The reality is my stories, if I even have a great way of telling, if even when I have a great story, at times I need to change it and distort it in order to be played in these new environments, in new digital channels.
(28:40):
These channels at times distort the values of my brand, and I want that not to happen. So I need to find better ways and better channels.
Damian Fowler (28:55):
And that's it for this edition of The Big Impression. This show is produced by Molten Heart. Our theme is by Love and Caliber and our associate producer is Sydney Cairns. And remember.
Antonio Gnocchini (29:04):
I think the most important thing for us has been to be capable of focusing on doing few things and do them perfectly.
Damian Fowler (29:15):
I'm Damian, and we'll see you next time.

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As Dish Media’s new head of programmatic partnerships, Kristinnsson is helping turn advanced TV into a single, addressable marketplace. 
 
Episode Transcript
Please note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.
Damian Fowler (00:00):
I'm Damian Fowler.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):
And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.
Damian Fowler (00:02):
And welcome to this edition of The Big Impression.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):
Today, we're joined by Liam Kristinnsson, head of programmatic partnerships at Dish Media, where he's helping shape how the company connects advertisers with premium audiences across both linear and digital environments.
Damian Fowler (00:23):
Dish has been pushing hard into the programmatic space. From Dish Connected, it's addressable solution across the ecosystem to Advantage, which links programmatic buying with linear inventory in real time. It's all part of a broader move to bring automation and accountability to advanced TV.
Ilyse Liffreing (00:39):
We'll talk with Liam about how Dish is tackling fragmentation, what premium really means in a mixed green world, and where the next phase of programmatic growth is headed.
Damian Fowler (00:51):
So let's get into it.
Liam Kristinnsson (00:57):
Dish Connected has really revolutionized our product in the marketplace. We've been able to convert an additional four million to five million households into tangible CTV devices across real-time bidding systems across the industry. And it's kind of given us a leg up against some of our more linear competition where we now have full autonomy over our inventory and can enable and provide transparency downstream to any client.
Damian Fowler (01:28):
That's amazing. I mean, there was a moment there where there was a sort of either all linear or CTV, but this is something that's kind of connecting those
Liam Kristinnsson (01:38):
Two worlds. I think this is the start of the convergence. I know it probably truly started post-pandemic, I would say, but the reality is now that what is perceived as underutilized impression-based audiences are now becoming tangible and kind of overlapping with their traditional legacy linear purchases. And there's much more value to it because we are not enabling people to find attribution in a more roundabout extrapolated way, but we can provide meaningful real time results to third party attribution vendors or measurement vendors.
Damian Fowler (02:20):
And that brings us to Advantage, which you introduced in May to Power Programmatic and Linear at the same time. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
Liam Kristinnsson (02:30):
Yeah. So the beauty of Advantage is it really expands upon what we've already built for Programmatic in Disconnected, but it provides solutions across the whole suite of products we have. Our addressable business can tap into real-time kind of innovations, real-time optimizations against audiences, ensure that we are better delivering across the target audience and finding that incremental reach that in the past may have been next to impossible to verify. And now we have all that inventory in one place. It's kind of like a grocery store when I think the industry has become accustomed to going to a bodega. That's very New York with me, I understand. I like that. But sometimes bodegas have eggs, they have a deli, they might have milk, but they might not always have milk and seltzer and all the little things that you want on a day-to-day basis. And the reality is something lacking when it comes to you being able to actually fill your fridge.
(03:35):
Now we have all those components that the customer or the client is looking for.
Damian Fowler (03:40):
Yeah. I like that analogy.
Ilyse Liffreing (03:41):
It's a good one. Yeah, no, I like that. And now Liam, I'm curious about the advertisers you're working with. Is there a new segment of buyers that Programmatic is really opening the door to here? What is basically your sense of that cohort?
Liam Kristinnsson (03:58):
Yeah, I think it really has grown overnight programmatic in general, but I think it allows us to have expanded exposure across all clients that are looking for that more meaningful kind of results. I think we are seeing a lot of success in generating a lot of traction across the CPG world, the direct to consumer world. And I think we're finding a nice overlap from a category perspective of what we traditionally looked at as direct IO or addressable business, but maybe not all those brands or clients in maybe like a pharmaceutical vertical would tap or earmark dollars for commitments early in their planning phase. Now they have the liberty and the luxury to find that right audience and enable dollars downstream where we're just not hunting in that lane and now we can kind of, instead of spreading ourselves thin, the technology can enable us to really kind of tap into all those brands, whether it be the CPG or the pharmaceuticals.
(05:05):
Now on the CPG side, I would double down further. I think because in the linear world, traditionally there's a level of fragmentation when you were to buy linear and you're only getting a percentage of the marketplace. Now the transparency and data that we're passing downstream really changes that, right? Because now these CPG brands are looking to trade off their kind of gross rating points, but kind of understand, all right, am I serving a family that would buy my products? And now we're freeing up the inventory and making it available to those brands that maybe were not always keen on addressable or linear didn't provide enough eyeballs. We're compensating for that with the data we're
Ilyse Liffreing (05:49):
Providing. Do you have an example of a brand you're working with?
Liam Kristinnsson (05:52):
Yeah. So I mean, more specifically, even though that wasn't in some of the categories I called out, there was one or two major financial brands that we've been able to elevate our profile quite significantly with and then partner with them around some of their initiatives on the backend. And I think it kind of shows some of the flexibility that a publisher can now provide brands that I don't think they ever associated with a conglomerate or a media company like ourselves.
Damian Fowler (06:23):
On that point, there is a perception that the space is fragmented and that there's linear here and then there's streaming here. Do you think that that is changing that perception, maybe thanks to some of the work that you're doing?
Liam Kristinnsson (06:36):
I think that's a lot of our goal. I think that we are simplifying the process and enabling a household or a device level, right? And the device level tends to be at the unique user level and we have the ability to kind of triangulate that and make sure that we're providing good and strong data down to our partners. I think that as a marketplace holistically, I think the fragmentation has changed and I think a lot of that's around some consumer behavior that has changed or specifically around the way consumers are watching more free content or there's pockets where they're not required to provide a subscription. And I think that there's still a gap there and we do have some front porch access to our apps, but we are looking on our end to continue to develop and then enable through Advantage how we can kind of provide those, specifically those returning viewers, that clean look to the advertisers on the back end and really kind of leveraging deterministic data and first party signals to really define that audience more cleanly in some ways that competitors of ours maybe can't do.
Ilyse Liffreing (07:53):
Overall, how would you describe your measuring the success of these programmatic partnerships?
Liam Kristinnsson (08:00):
Yeah. So I think that that's a really unique place because that's something that has been our bread and butter. We have our own targeting and attribution team. They've worked very diligently on the direct IO side. I think a lot of the legacy information that they've been able to provide clients and the insights and the ways that we've been able to either cut our inventory or kind of group or the target audiences for these clients have helped demonstrate the programmatic partners the value in not just our audience, which I think is somewhat being underserved because Dish tends to be middle America and maybe they have less apps or maybe they leverage less apps. So they have been underserved. We have a legacy of success around specific verticals and we're able to kind of provide that to these brands. I think the challenge is it's a little bit of a black hole sometimes of how they tie it back to each other.
(08:56):
And I think there needs to be a little bit more assistance on our end. And by us, I mean the royal we across the industry of like providing some of those insights that I kind of alluded to earlier, whether it's, are we targeting and talking about unique users? Are we looking at success at a household level? And there is some innovation that's required there in the industry, but I think what we're doing is really at the forefront of enabling that.
Ilyse Liffreing (09:23):
Are there any particular channels that have surprised you in terms of performance or even advertiser adoption?
Liam Kristinnsson (09:31):
Sure. I mean, I think I imagine everybody talks about the success of sports. Sports has been a real catalyst to the boon of CTV enablement in general, but I think that I'd be remiss not to call out that a lot of our entertainment brands have shined, but not in the ways that traditionally they've been leveraged, right? Even though certain pockets of inventory is not super desirable in the marketplace at times, like news, there are a ton of clients that we've seen a lot of traction there and like pick up incremental success and really drive reach by anonymizing the content that they buy and focusing on the audience.
Damian Fowler (10:20):
That's interesting. Is there still some resistance to the idea of being around current affairs and news?
Liam Kristinnsson (10:26):
Yeah. I think I myself came from the website world years ago and I saw firsthand when a certain brand would be next to a certain type of content. And I understand the urgent need to not expose a valuable legacy luxury brand to something that may or may not be bad, right? Yeah. But the reality is often there is a disconnect from the content being consumed and the pod of commercials that's watched, right? Yeah. And while we often, and I'm sure we ... My mother certainly will watch news for hours and hours upon day, which is maybe not healthy for her lifestyle, but I think what's great about it, specifically when she goes to sit down, she is glued in to the TV. And that's something I think that a lot of people are trying to figure out, are people watching? Are they tuned in? Are they walking away?
(11:30):
And that's the black box of advertising, but I know that people that watch news are glued into the TV and consuming the content between segments. It's kind of like sports, right? Yeah.
Damian Fowler (11:43):
I think that's true. And I think that's true across all channels as far as I know people reading digital news as well, but I don't want to go off on a massive digression about news, but anyway. But it is fantastic. Can we pull back and look at the big picture a little bit? And we were wondering if there were any precedents or points of inspiration inside or outside of media that inform how you think about programmatic partnerships at Dish?
Liam Kristinnsson (12:10):
Sure. I mean, I think that back to what I was saying about evolution, I think often in the media industry, we look at things like baseball teams are run today. Not to use a sports analogy. I know you guys are probably sick of them, but- We love sports analogies here. Nelly said the trade death.
(12:32):
But the reality is these days people want home run hitters. And I think back in the day, that's a little bit of a cyclical history. People always want home run hitters and like big stats, but you win championships with diversity. And I think what partnerships means today is not what it maybe meant 12 or 13 years ago. I think there's a ... We're becoming a world where people, we're all playing Tetris and there's a way to make it all fit together if we cooperate and enable each other. So it's not one size fit all fits all. I think there's a lot of small partnerships and that's good for the competition of the industry and it doesn't take away from the value of these big partnerships. And I think I don't think in my time in TV there's ever been more opportunity there than there is today.
Ilyse Liffreing (13:28):
Something we often write about at the current is the value of like premium content versus maybe like user generated. For instance, what would you say is the importance of premium and I guess what kind of premium content is most popular? I mean, you brought up sports, but are there any others?
Liam Kristinnsson (13:50):
Yeah. I mean, I think premium content, I'm sure many people discuss across the course of ad week or just in the industry and in general, how valuable, unique and what's deemed as traditionally primetime TV is. But the reality is it's even more valuable than that because you are in a lot of ways demanding an eclectic audience to watch your spectrum of content and you can't always guarantee that in other places. There is also, sure there's some oversaturation for specific channels and maybe the product that they air, but the reality is it is not what everybody is consuming these days, right? It's Halloween. Everybody can find a bunch of great horror movies or Halloween's coming up, I should say. Everybody could find a bunch of great horror movies across the board, can't always guarantee what is in that content, how glued in they are versus just kind of like, "Oh, it's in season." I think with premium content, specifically around live TV, there's 365 days a year of people competing against each other from a content perspective, but it demands eyeballs.
(15:07):
And I think we're also starting to see a surprising jump in the youth getting app fatigue, I suppose, that is better enabling that premium content to ensure eyeballs there, but they're paying attention and I cannot stress that enough. In a world of a short attention span, they want to know what's going on and they consume
Damian Fowler (15:28):
It. I would almost say it's short form content fatigue to a certain extent. There's something nice about a long form, a game,
Liam Kristinnsson (15:41):
A
Damian Fowler (15:41):
Football game,
Liam Kristinnsson (15:42):
A soccer game, or a movie. To that point, right? I was probably part of the problem with TV from a consumer point of view. I became like a cinephile which didn't help a company's ability to monetize myself, but the more meshed I get into the industry and the more, I don't know, popular I get, the less time I have to go find a film, right? The more time I have to maybe watch a drama about women in New York and I will watch the rerun that I just saw the week before at eight o'clock in anticipation of what's going to happen at nine o'clock, but really because I want to see the reunion or the interview at 10 o'clock, right? So now I'm consuming the same content twice, but I'm even more engaged in the live TV and there's something afterwards that is actually, maybe taped, but it feels live, right?
(16:37):
Yeah.
Damian Fowler (16:37):
And that's the proposition that Dish is getting into. I'd want to ask you, how's Dish Media building on the momentum that you've already created?
Liam Kristinnsson (16:45):
Yeah, I think right now it's what more can we do and how can we keep providing and enabling inventory for the right providers? I think that the assumption in the marketplace for any new product that comes out is, wow, this is it, it's here. 100% of it's enabled. That's never the case, right? It takes a year to ramp up typically for the average product, sometimes as much as three for us. We've been hitting the gas and I think now we're about to go from fifth to sixth speed and really kind of enable our inventory holistically to the marketplace. So for us, it's a little bit of crawl, walk, run from an enablement perspective and with that comes even greater insights into what are they consuming, what's the audience? How do we help define and clean up that audience downstream and then let others maybe do what they do best.
(17:45):
But we are really in a great position to keep kind of growing that and exposing net new insights about users that I'm not sure everybody's contemplating.
Damian Fowler (17:56):
Yeah, I'm sure.
Ilyse Liffreing (17:57):
Very cool. I have a question here about the economy and as you know, and everybody does, it's on kind of shaky ground, you don't know. How do you see spend evolving in the programmatic space at this time?
Liam Kristinnsson (18:16):
Well, I'm glad you asked that. I think there is marketplace concerns about what is happening on the demand side and a lot of them are valid. A lot of them are maybe being overthought perhaps, but I think there's some rocky roads ahead for specific industries, but it presents a unique opportunity. And I think from a publisher perspective, maintaining the value of inventory and the premium content that they have is absolutely a must because we are going to continue to provide insights and improve products that ultimately will provide better outcomes for backend users. If we kind of enable knee-jerk reactive spend, I think that actually goes against the grain of supply path optimization and increasing outcomes holistically under the guise of potentially lower rates or what have you. But I truly believe that if one category is down, another needs to go up. And I think advertising is like a mutual fund like that where I have lived in Europe in the past and there's a phrase in Scandinavia that like, no matter what happens to our small economy, people will advertise beer because somebody will buy it, right?
(19:46):
And I think that's much more universal than just in a few select small countries. And I think in a lot of ways we saw that in the pandemic, right? Direct to consumer brands, a lot more variety of entertainment companies or hardware products or TVs were able to kind of put their best foot forward and give the consumer options, right? And I think it's some of their responsibility to provide those options. What we, the publishers can do is enable and ensure they're getting the right results for the content and fitting them in the content or audiences that they really can get the best out of them, right?
Damian Fowler (20:28):
Absolutely. Okay. We're going to bring this home now with some quick fire questions, right? And here's the first one. What are you obsessed with figuring out right now?
Liam Kristinnsson (20:38):
Well, this might be a little divisive, but I am obsessed with continuing to improve supply path optimization, but I believe that comes with the slow sunsetting of linear. When I got to Dish, we were still primarily, while our bread and butter was addressable, we were still primarily from a percentage basis, linear, right? Since then, we've completely flipped the script. We are by far and away, mostly impression based. And the reality is I think that we are leveraging too many legacy tools to tell and provide stories on outcomes that are not always as accurate as they should be. We live in a world where transparency is key, maybe not full transparency all the time, but enough transparency where I, the client or brand should be getting a return on our investment or understanding why the audience or the content I was targeting is not working for me.
(21:42):
And I think that's, those are the pockets we need to start exploring and understanding, not so much the, how do I understand foot traffic on a day-to-day basis, but not convert that to sales when I'm extrapolating out 32 families, right? So that's really, really what I think needs to happen. And I think there's a lot of work to be done there and it's not going to happen overnight, but it starts here and starts with an advantage really.
Ilyse Liffreing (22:06):
Wow. And why do you think that the slow death of linear, as you said, has to happen for that?
Liam Kristinnsson (22:15):
I shouldn't say it has to happen. I think there is a time and a place for it, right? I think if I'm going to a bodega and I think I want a soft drink, that's their goal is to make sure that the first thing I think of is whatever the product is, but I think that time and a place is actually creating a lot of noise downstream and creating a lot of challenges for folks on the attribution and measurement side to actually understand and holistically look at their media purchases. And I think it's okay to have gross in terms of volume, ways of looking at how media should be purchased and leveraged, but I believe nine out of 10 clients really, they deserve the insights and the understanding of who is buying their products and how we can figure out how to kind of tie that together and improve into the next year.
(23:10):
That's how their products are going to build, especially with some of this like in certain categories. There's maybe too many brands or too little, right? Better data will inform beyond individual clients, but it'll enable people to start unique businesses that can compete in an area where there's clearly a lot of eager consumers,
(23:35):
Right?
Ilyse Liffreing (23:36):
Very cool. What's one piece of wisdom you'd pass on to other media leaders navigating the shift to programmatic?
Liam Kristinnsson (23:43):
Yeah. So I hate to say the same thing twice, but if I were to give one piece of wisdom is value your inventory that is going to be the future of your business and there are ways that you can improve your product and enable and improve a third party client or vendor's product, but racing to the bottom for what is happening tomorrow will not enable you next year. And it's a real concern in the marketplace, but my concern is actually twofold that it doesn't actually just hurt publishers, but it ends up ultimately hurting the brands and the people buying the inventory because they are going to receive exponentially more noise, right? And I think that as an industry with a lot of noise, we should really think about like how we can kind of isolate it into, and harness it into, into actual meaningful outcomes.
Damian Fowler (24:48):
If you could pick one brand that's really nailing programmatic right now, who would it be?
Liam Kristinnsson (24:53):
Without explicitly calling out a unique brand, but I'll give you two types of folks that are really nailing programmatic. One, I think is second tier auto brands where they are unlocking, and I really think Disconnected plays a great role here. They are unlocking and understanding how they can better access inventory for the right audiences, period. That could be isolating and understanding how I could serve ads from a reach perspective across the city of Des Moines, or it can be somebody looking for blonde-haired men that have two boxer dogs. Secondly, and I think this is part of the paradigm shift across the industry. I think there's quite a number of CPG brands that legacy-wise have really had outstanding success reaching mass eyeballs, whether it's through billboards, radio, traditional linear television. But now again, like they are able to fill a void across the whole ecosystem by getting better, more dynamic insights into the audiences that they're selling to, but also they're actually getting insights, period.
(26:13):
Retail data, you're talking about? Retail data, yes. And I think if I'm a chip brand, sometimes I want people to know my name first. And that's great. There's a need for that, but eventually you have to start focusing on how you can get money back from that. It's not just about getting your name out there, or it could be diversified. Maybe your name is out there, but now other names have come in, right? Now, how do you leverage the dynamic component of programmatic to diversify your creative and your ability to deliver to the same audience? It'll change the way we think and look at maybe traditional frequency capping or traditional exposure, but now the brand through Programmatic can really lead the new age of creative storytelling and how people understand or change the way people think they know products.
Damian Fowler (27:13):
And that's it for this edition of The Big Impression.
Ilyse Liffreing (27:15):
This show is produced by Molten Heart. Our theme is by Love and Caliber, and our associate producer is Sydney Cairns.
Liam Kristinnsson (27:22):
And remember ... We're also starting to see a surprising jump in the youth kind of getting app fatigue, I suppose, that is better enabling that premium content to ensure eyeballs there, but they're paying attention.
Ilyse Liffreing (27:37):
I'm Damian. And I'm
Damian Fowler (27:38):
Ilyse. And we'll see you next time.

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Editor’s note: This episode of The Big Impression was recorded prior to Jessica Bryndza’s departure from Lyft.
For years, ride-hailing has been optimized for speed, price and efficiency. Jessica Bryndza believes that’s only part of the story. During her tenure as Lyft’s vice president of brand marketing, she focused on reminding people that getting from Point A to Point B can still be personal — shaped by emotion, culture and the everyday moments that happen along the way.
That philosophy is at the heart of Lyft’s new “Check Lyft” campaign, which launched last fall in San Francisco and New York City. The work reframes transportation as something human and choice-driven, not just transactional.  
Bryndza argues that the future of mobility won’t be defined solely by technology, but by how intentional and human the experience feels when you’re actually inside the ride.
“I’ve cried in the back of Lyfts; I’ve laughed with friends,” she says on The Big Impression. “We have this spectrum of emotions.” Rather than treating mobility as a pure utility, Check Lyft taps into those moments — the small trade-offs, the waiting, the savings and the lived reality of getting around a city.”
Bryndza also discusses how Lyft’s founding DNA continues to influence its brand voice, why empathy matters more than ever in the battle for attention and how the campaign comes together across out-of-home, social, in-app and hyperlocal executions, with no “AI slop” in sight.  
“There’s a lot of slop out there,” Bryndza says. “How do we respect our customers enough to not put crappy work in front of them?” 

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In conversation with The Big Impression, Brian Monahan, SVP of retail media at Albertsons Media Collective, explores how shopper insights, creative storytelling and omnichannel strategies intersect.

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CMO Kimberly Ito shares how Mitsubishi, a challenger brand, drives big impact through audience insight, digital precision and a redefined spirit of adventure.

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