Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Brand Collaboration with Scott Moore

Veteran Twin Cities marketer, Scott Moore thinks he’s found that most elusive of opportunities. A new way for businesses to reach the parts and touch the hearts of customers that the $300bn US ad industry simply cannot.

After a storied and successful career beginning at the legendary Fallon agency, rising to the top of marketing at Best Buy and then as CMO of Wynn Resorts, Scott has invested billions of dollars on every form of marketing and has seen every enduring and ephemeral 21st century trend.

Which makes his latest move one that we should all stand up and pay attention to.

Last year, bitten by the collab bug and smitten by the business opportunity, Scott left corporate marketing behind to launch Colaboratory with his co-founder Brian Bispala, formerly the CTO of Code 42.

Colaboratory is a marketing automation platform that makes it easy for brands of all types and stripes, shapes and sizes to meet, match and execute brand x brand collabs to drive growth and enhance brand perception.

In today’s episode Scott explains how;

• Brand collabs cut through the digital clutter to create impactful and effective marketing in an age when marketing has been increasingly commodified. 

• Collabs will counter a cookie-less future promising less creativity and a return to “bigger-takes-all” message bombing.

• How a “collab marketplace” solves many of the friction points stymying brands as they try to get in the game.

• Collabs are now available to all brands not just a tool that has been mastered by culture-forward brands in Food, Fashion, Sports and Entertainment.

• Collabs help brands, “share and square” their equity across platforms and touchpoints, dimensions and domains.

• Brand collabs enable brands to divide the effort and multiply returns as they expand customer perception and accelerate new product and promotional opportunities.

Today’s show is an insider view on how the best marketing brains are developing this new muscle, and masterclass on how you can too.

Brand-to-brand CoLab and innovative partnerships go beyond just creating a funny ad, like you see in the Super Bowl. That’s creative, but that’s ephemeral. It’s art. 

These Colabs that are being built today are conceptually interesting. They’re not just visually arresting.You’re like, wait a minute. What’s that? It catches your attention. 

We interview Scott Moore who is building solutions where you don’t have to be Jay-Z or the CEO of Nike to do a collab.

You shouldn’t have to be the president of Ralph Lauren. All brands should be able to say, Hey, these are my customers. This is what I’m trying to do with them. Who can I partner with to grow my brand.  

Unlock and Unleash the power of Brand to Brand Colaborations 

The Talk Summary

• Scott is co-founder and CEO of Collaboratory, a venture back startup that helps brands connect to brands to grow their market more efficiently, more effectively with their partners.

• I’m a former marketer, started an advertise, was the COO of a marketing tech company, sold to private equity, and then was the CMO of wind resorts. I’m now the CEO of High Alpha, a new business with my partner Brian Bisk.

• Scott: I hired the team, defined a big space where such that if you win, you really win, and then went build products and experiences that meet your customer’s needs.

• Scott says that if someone slaps you at a high frequency, it hurts. Brent says that he used to say the joke in the preamble and have a little laugh track that goes on behind it, but then he decided to just start telling the joke to the listeners.

• Scott: I worked for Win, Wind resorts, and Encore, and they’re all world class companies. Encore Boston Harbor is like a full on Vegas style hotel at wind level of execution, five minutes from downtown Boston.

• Brent: I’m interested in the collaboration space and Andy Hel has been helping me get informed and learn about it. We could also talk about entrepreneurship and getting funded, and yesterday I was sat next to a venture capital backed company who is going for his second round of funding.

• Brand partnerships are more than just having your JBL stereo in your Pontiac Sunfire. They can be as big as McDonald’s Monopoly and Best Buy. Scott: It came to light through proximity, existing relationships, or serendipity. I don’t know how Senator Serendipity works, but it doesn’t fit to a 21st century world or 21st century marketing in any way.

• In the market for love, the way we solved it was meet your, best friend’s sister. In the market for jobs, the way we solved it is through Indeed, and in the market for collectibles, Etsy does the same thing.

• Scott: I can do better segmentation to figure out should they target you or me, and then I’ve got amazing pipes into your life. But I don’t remember a single ad from today, and that’s an age old marketing problem.

• Scott says that he’s never bought a Clinique product in his life, but he has bought a lot of Crayola, and he noticed that the two brands have a shared audience. He says that if you can find relevant audience connections, you can fill in the gaps.

• Scott: We want to build solutions where you don’t have to be Jay-Z or the CEO of Nike to do a collab. We want to do it in a software data-driven, technology kind of way.

• Scott: In the past, a lot of these collaborations have been incidental or by accident. But now, as social media matures, influencers are still pretty strong, and Adidas knows their business and they can do it.

• Scott: A TicTacs on TikTok is on fire, so leave that alone. The maturation means you’re paying a CPM cost per thousand when you buy media.

• A partnership between any two brands can be very interesting. You could pick ’em, and the other brand may have an equal set of assets, but they may have a different spin on the customer audience.

• Scott: There’s a lot of brilliant, creative marketing people across all organizations of all sizes, and there are ways to bring data to this work. Brent: There are risks and rewards to collaborations, but the ones that are well constructed tend to perform better.

• Scott: Those ones tend to outperform Who I happen to know from high school. Brand partnerships and collaborations are the way to grow strategically, and we’re saying just let us, let’s role play back. Scott: Sometimes we smarty pants people get over our skis with all the rational, and we need to go back to the local third grade classroom and see if they even understand our strategy.

• Scott: Let’s go to the third grade class. They can vote on whether or not to partner with the Rolling Stones, Justin Bieber, or Athlete A. And there’s no math.

• Scott: I think collaboration opportunities have always been there, but they’ve been viewed tactically and opportunistically, not strategically. I think collaboratory is uncovering these opportunities, and it’s emanating from culture leading categories like sport, music, culinary fashion of course.

• In my past life I worked with a RUM brand that had a partnership with the Boston Red Sox. I think that was a strategic rather than opportunistic collaboration, and the Red Sox are very strategic in how they grow.

• Scott: That doesn’t sound super strategic, although it’s intuitively right. The Red Sox are very analytics focused, and if they said, Hey, look at what’s happening in our audience, aside from the fact they we’re performing, and we have the trend you just talked about, the twins, that is also true.

• Great commerce and digital properties do three things: they create demand, they capture demand, and they help brands grow. The Red Sox need to create demand, and they need to tell brands and partners what they’re interested in.

• We have a tool called partner capture tool that gets put on in people’s emails, on their websites that says We’re open to co. partner with us. We take all this demand, capture it, organize it so they can go through it quickly.

• Scott: I know I’ve seen more than my fair share of bad ideas, but I also know what to do with them. The good ones we just sort calmly off they go.

• Scott: So we have demand creation, demand capture, and demand activation. Once we decide two brands, they have to meet, assess, agree this match, go do these things, and then go mobilize whatever they’re gonna do.

• Scott: I don’t know who has what capabilities, but Coca-Cola can do something in stores better than I can, and Netflix probably has better content creation. We collaborate with agencies, design firms, TikTok, makers, email, but it’s more based on the customer’s needs.

• Scott: The biggest advice I would give a CMO or a cro or a CEO who wants to get started in a collaborate collaboration is that it’s not to start with hey, our first collab should be the Rolling Stones or don’t start. Start one.

• Scott: You can get started in Collaboratory with a quick start. You can use the marketplace to capture signal, find like-minded partners, and capture signal back from the partners and their customers, and you’re just gonna be smarter. Scott would like to plug his book, but I can’t tell if that was on Coth.

• Scott says that he’s building a business that connects brands, but he also needs to build a community of collaborators. Scott: People who think this way, who care, are massive inveterate connectors, like I just connect people all the time. I don’t really worry about the payback we used once a year, but I would connect you in general.

• Andy Hele is leading the cultivation of a community of collaborators. If you’re interested in this topic and want to play, reach out to us and let’s make match.com smarter so you can stop targeting supermodels and start finding people whose interests are more like yours.

• Going back to the rules of marketing, Scott says measuring is one of the three big things you need to do. He also says there are thousands of potential collaborations, including Mrs. Meyers soap and some scrubbing, something.

• I wanted to build a relationship with Brady for that other purpose, but I thought TB 12 should be at the wind. Two years later, I run into their leadership team and guy comes up, he’s sky, we’re at the wind.

• Scott: I’d much rather be paid a commission, but I felt some inherent joy in saying, Hey, this is a good idea. Brent: I think we need to take this seriously, use data, use a platform, be pay it forward in this, and trust that you’re gonna meet more innovative people.

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