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Lara Cohen is SVP of marketing, partnerships, and business development at Linktree. She has also held senior roles at Twitter and at The OutCast Agency.
How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? My job is to bring the products I’m working on to life in a relatable, human way. My preferred technique of doing that is to highlight the way people are using the product in cool and interesting ways, because when people use the product well, it tells a great story for the company. For example, like so many people, I spend way too many hours on my For You page, and I’ve become obsessed with how creators are reinventing how they shop. A big part of the work I’m doing at Linktree is showing how creators are reinventing the retail experience and becoming the storefronts of the future.
Favorite project you’ve worked on? I have a lot of favorites. At Linktree, it’s been orchestrating our partnership with Vote.org for National Voter Registration Day in the US, where we got over 100 Linkers of all sizes and scale from Stephen Curry to Maggie Rogers to Hank Green to hand over their most valuable real estate on the internet—their link-in-bio—to mobilize their fans to register to vote.
At Twitter, I was proud of the “Tweet It Into Existence” campaign, where we flipped the notion that Twitter was only about negativity and highlighted how a bunch of top-tier creators had manifested their dreams earlier in tweets. The campaign did a great job reimagining what Twitter truly was—a place where people put their ambitions out into the world and called their shots.
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What’s your favorite ad campaign? It’s hard to beat Nike. They do a best-in-class job in storytelling via the creators they work with. I loved their “DRIBBLE &_____” campaign featuring LeBron James in response to criticism suggesting that athletes should “shut up and dribble” to show athletes can be much more than just athletes.
One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I came up with the term Bennifer. I was a baby reporter at US Weekly, covering Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez the first time around. I said it in a meeting, and it stuck.
What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? I believe we’re just seeing the beginning of creators being the new engine for marketing. The authenticity that creator content brings to an endorsement of a product really hasn’t expanded yet beyond fashion and beauty; there’s a whole world where creator marketing will change the way we look at travel options, home design, and so many other retail areas.
As for least optimistic, huge celebrity endorsements are over. The bang for the buck that a brand can get from smaller creators doing recommendations with authenticity has so much more value than writing a huge check to a celebrity to do a commercial.
What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? I love to see what my former boss Leslie Berland, who’s now CMO of Verizon, is doing. She was very early to understanding the power of creators and storytelling, and it’s fun to watch her do it on a big scale at Verizon.
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