Marketing innovator Omar Johnson tells Culver Academies students they should zag when others zig. (Photo by Adan Fuentes)
Marketing innovator Omar Johnson, who made his name by revolutionizing the industry with his work at Nike, Beats by Dre and Apple, and his new venture ØPUS Intelligence, told Culver Academies students that the key to success in marketing is to be curious and to listen.
“Anytime you are building something for humans your job is to listen and understand how they’re going to use it, what’s going to make them buy it and what’s going to make them buy it again,” said Johnson, founder of ØPUS Intelligence, a generative marketing firm.
That used to mean wading through mountains of data, logging into fragmented software stacks and Johnson’s favorite, in-person interviews. He shared how machine learning is making it easier to listen, synthesize and test.
Johnson spoke Monday, Jan. 13 at two events sponsored by The Ron Rubin School for the Entrepreneur as part of its annual speaker series. First, he spoke at Roberts Auditorium to students taking Strategic Business Management, those students who run the businesses for The Rubin School, and students in Honors in Entrepreneurial Studies, those students who develop a product, service, or venture, telling them that many marketers think the most important thing is to get their message out.
But Johnson told the students the most important aspect of being a great marketer is being a good listener. “The first art in marketing is listening and understanding,” Johnson said.
He gave the example of how he created an advertising campaign for Nike Free, which was billed as providing the strengthening benefits of barefoot running while providing lightweight support for each stride. The first challenge was convincing people who bought running shoes that barefoot running was important.
Johnson handed out shoes along the Charles River in Boston for runners to trial. But instead of just asking runners how they liked the shoes, he asked them in-depth questions about how the spent their mornings, what they planned to do after their runs and what they planned to do that night.
“I built a complete picture of their lives,” he said.
He said he learned a lot more about the runners, their daily journey and adjacent interest and that allowed him to understand how to message them as customers.
“Listening has always been the most important marketing lesson weapon and finding ways to listen to the human elements in the story made all of the difference. Data is data, but the context that you get when you understand the customers full journey is transformative for marketing,” he said.
Omar Johnson talks to Culver Academies students about marketing. (Photo by Adan Fuentes)
Johnson said that the days of going around the room and having each person pitch a great idea that becomes the marketing strategy are over. Instead, he shared that modern marketing ideas are stacked from collaborative processes where people bring their own data points and experiences to build the campaign. He said that’s why it’s important to have
people with diverse set of experiences and views contributing to those ideas.
“If everyone in the room is saying the same thing, then you don’t contribute much,” he said. “But if you can contribute something different based on where you’re from – small town, big town, medium-sized town, in the country, out of the country, one passport, two passports – all those things create a bigger story.”
Johnson then spoke to about 180 students during an hourlong session in the Heritage Room in the Legion Memorial Building, where he talked about how he drove explosive growth in the headphone industry. He told students while most in the headphone industry were focused on engineering and frequency response where 70 percent of the consumers were men, Beats focused on making the headphones an accessory fashion statement that people would want to wear because of its unique design and branding.
“We were cool. We had a community of people who cared about us, and we showed people a new way to listen to music -- to appreciate a product and wear it like a fashion accessory and demonstrate their pride with it,” Johnson said. “None of those things were in the headphone playbook.”
Beats also made headphones an accessory by making them in almost every color possible, with religious and national symbols and other attractive designs.
He said Beats also touted its ability to block out a different kind of noise from brands like Bose who exclusively focused on airplane noise. Beats focused on: roommate noise, girlfriend noise, dog noise and “your mother talking to your aunt noise.” Once he understood the target consumers daily journey, it became apparent that there were lots of opportunities beyond airplane noise.
He said Beats also influenced people to buy Beats through groundbreaking campaigns, such as creating a space at the 2012 London Olympics where athletes could hang out and get free food, free Wi-Fi and free headphones. Beats made customized headphones with flags of all the different countries. Fans saw athletes wearing the Beats headphones, generating billions of dollars in free media. He said that was a big factor in Beats becoming a global brand.
Johnson said he came up with the idea after hearing swimmer Michael Phelps complain about how he hated the Olympic Village, a complaint echoed by other Olympians.
He said his path toward disruption has always been his “zag,” where he studies what brands and agencies do and does something different.
“You have to understand the category to understand what you should do, which also informs what they won’t do. So I think when I say things like NBDB, Never Been Done Before, it’s you finding a new way to express upon
a category. That’s always been the fastest path to disruption,” he said.
Omar Johnson tells Culver Academies students about ØPUS Intelligence, a generative marketing firm he founded. (Photo by Adan Fuentes)
Johnson said friends told him he was crazy when he told them he was leaving Nike to become the CMO for Beats. Back then headphones were a $700 million industry. He said that there were three Nike sneakers alone had $700 million in annual sales.
“I knew that we had a real interesting story, Dr. Dre had a real care for music and consumers were going to listen to me if we told it well and connected to their lives,” he said.
Johnson said he also saw an opportunity because headphones were being made and marketed primarily for men.
“I wanted everybody, and we grew the category by inviting women into the category,” he said.
From 2010 to 2014 sales of Beats rose from a $20 million niche brand to $2 billion and the company grew from three employees to 656. Apple bought Beats for $3 billion.
As an advertising lead at Nike, Johnson also produced some of that company’s most memorable TV commercials including “Rise,” starring LeBron James, “All Together Now,” featuring Kobe Bryant, and “The Most Valuable Puppets.”
ADWEEK called Johnson a brand genius and Business Insider named him one of the most innovative CMOs.
Johnson was prompted by Angie De Otaduy `25 to share how he made it to marketing from biology, saying his curiosity comes from his background in science. He majored in biology at Georgia State University before later earning his MBA at Emory University. He said he thinks he is a better marketer because of his science background.
“I have a fundamental way of structuring the world according to science,” he said.
When asked by a student what he would tell students who are interested in familiarizing themselves with artificial intelligence, Johnson urged students to tinker with AI daily, saying it was fundamentally going to change
marketing. He suggested they start working on prompt generation by manipulating the model to complete basic summary tasks, saying that AI is especially useful in summarizing and finding facts.
“AI can hallucinate and tell you crazy stuff. It does it all the time. So you have to get fluent enough using it so you can decipher a hallucination from something that’s meaningful,” he said.
He then told students to follow that practice with developing prompts that would both create, evaluate and analyze spreadsheets. He was clear that leaders in the business industry need skills in leveraging AI models that will reconnect human capacities to those tasks that only humans can complete like reading the facial expression of a potential customer reacting to a product pitch.
“Start using it above and beyond basic words and notes and letters and documents. Start using it for spreadsheets. Start using it with images. When you start to get fluent in it that’s when you will see huge potential,” he said. “You can’t afford to sit on the sidelines. Not at your age.”
He told the students that it takes a diverse set of skills to succeed in marketing.
“Marketing is not just about marketing. It’s about political science, it’s about storytelling, it’s about technology and computer science. Marketing is a lot of different things,” he said.
Johnson said stories are often the best way to market a product, especially when people can see themselves in the story.
“Stories always work because people can participate in stories,” he said.
He said marketers should always remember they are selling to people, not to corporations.
“Even if that person is a procurement officer at the school, it is a person, who has a job, who wants a promotion, who wants to do well and make their boss proud. It’s how you connect with them and what their needs may be,” Johnson said.
The speaker series is made possible through an endowment established by Ron Rubin ’68.
Omar Jonson talks with Culver Academies students after his presentation. (Photo by Scott Johnson)