00:00Just last fall, I joined the company, and obviously this is a great legacy brand that needs some revitalization.
00:08So, first of all, and very importantly, finding a complete new North Star of where to take it and how to sound.
00:16And really, I mean, we have a new platform that is, yes, JCPenney, because it's an attitude.
00:21Instead of feeling sort of embarrassed or indifferent to the brand, we want people to own it.
00:27Like, I was just walking down the quiz set, and someone complimented my dress, and I said, JCPenney, yes, JCPenney.
00:34So, that's it.
00:35That's the idea right there.
00:37And what I believe is once you get really clear, then actually the clarity allows you to take more risks and a little bit.
00:47It's like that old freedom in a framework idea.
00:50And we had a program that we started in the fall called Really Big Deals.
00:53And the team did it before I arrived, and they were these singular big deals one weekend only.
01:01We did them on Thursday Night Football.
01:03We had a big media platform, and they were quite successful.
01:06We used celebrities in the advertising like Shaq, who's a partner, Martha Stewart.
01:10Okay.
01:10And then we're like, well, we want to do it in spring.
01:12There's no Thursday Night Football.
01:15There's nothing like that.
01:16Are we going to be able to find a way to do it differently but cleverly enter the conversation with Rita's team and our agency, Dentsu X, who I'd like to give credit to as well, because they said, you know, these deals debut at midnight Thursday night.
01:33What if we did something in late night?
01:36So I'll keep going, but I'll pause if you want to jump in and start talking about the creativity your team brought to it.
01:43Totally.
01:43What I love about this is you're absolutely right.
01:47It's the last place you would think about promoting anything women's fashion on Jimmy Kimmel.
01:53And so if you watch the spots, they're hysterical.
01:57They're unexpected.
01:59They have Guillermo, who's the funniest sidekick on late night television.
02:03And what I think you find is laugh-out-loud moments that really inspire.
02:09But the wonderful thing of Jimmy Kimmel is Jimmy Kimmel kicks off at midnight on ABC, but Jimmy Kimmel is also on Hulu.
02:16Jimmy Kimmel is one of the biggest brands on YouTube, and he has massive following.
02:20Huge social platform.
02:22Huge social following.
02:23And then that gets pushed out across our entire social ecosystem.
02:25So to me, it was the perfect brand to speak to generations of audiences in their native platform, however they consume Jimmy Kimmel, with laugh-out-loud exactly the type of moments that you want in that show.
02:39And Rita, I mean, I should say this was, when we say spots, this was an in-show integration.
02:45I mean, these were skits that we gave control to Jimmy's writing team, and we said, here are the deals.
02:53And by the way, they weren't just women's fashion, because we want you to see deals across the whole store.
02:57So one week it was towels, another week it was earrings.
03:00I mean, we really had some fun with it.
03:04But talk about an exercise in both having a vision and letting go, is to let go enough to allow ourselves to have fun with our brand, not fun at the expense of our brand.
03:18And I think that's part of making a brand likable again.
03:22And as Rita said, Guillermo is so endearing.
03:26The fact that he's Latino, we have a strong Latino population, it's almost just like a little bonus point.
03:32And cherry on top, but it was scary, by the way, to allow, like, some of that, when I would read the scripts, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is brave even for me.
03:41But we were just really happy with how it worked out.
03:45And they loved it. The other thing is, the team loved it.
03:47Like, there are many times that you would bring ideas to them, and they're like, okay, they loved this.
03:53And I think they loved it, because they were like, I don't know how this is going to work, but we're going to make it work.
04:02We're going to make it work, but we're going to make it work.
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