B2B Innovator Awards

CATEGORY

Content Creative

Keith Gormley

VP of Social Media Marketing and Communications

Keith Gormley is a social media guru — while working at Abrams Research, he headed social media programs for big-name brands such as the Ritz Carlton Hotels, Coca-Cola and AMC Television. Today, Gormley serves as the VP of Social Media Marketing and Communications at Prudential Financial. He oversees a team tasked with utilizing social media to humanize the company’s B2B and institutional thought leadership program, as well as drive awareness for Prudential’s lesser-known institutional businesses.

Under Gormley’s leadership, the program has grown to feature over two dozen senior executives with nearly 50,000 followers. Posts are also cross-promoted on Prudential’s social media accounts, which has amassed more than 11,000 Instagram followers and 147,000 Twitter followers. The result? The program has driven high impression and engagement rates and helped to increase the visibility and credibility of the Prudential brand and its executives.

Can you share any particular achievements you are most proud of in your current role?

I’m proud to have led the launch of Prudential’s social media executive visibility program, which aims to humanize our 140-year-old brand and connect the important work we do for our clients and partners every day to the inspirational business leaders that make it all happen. The effort has gone a long way in showcasing an approachable and innovative Prudential. To date, we’ve activated dozens of senior executives and thought leaders at the company, including the CEOs of our life insurance, annuities, retirement, group benefits and investment management businesses.

I’m also proud to have played a role in the reintroduction of Prudential’s asset management business to institutional investors through a dedicated social presence for their new brand name: PGIM. The PGIM social footprint has grown followership at a rapid pace, reaching nearly 100,000 connections across LinkedIn and Twitter, while engaging institutional investors globally with real-time market commentary and other relevant thought leadership.

Can you share any details about how your team, or individuals on your team, have helped drive innovation? How has your whole team helped achieve results?

Social media targeting that is available to brands today is incredibly powerful. Through a combination of platform, first-party and third-party data, we can customize engaging and personal experiences in ways that can have an enormous impact on brand reputation and business outcomes. We’ve worked over the last year to implement a sophisticated multi-touch program for our B2B efforts on social media designed to spark engagement and drive warm leads where possible. In partnership with our media, analytics and data teams, we’re bringing the rigor and complexity of a consumer demand marketing program to Prudential’s B2B practice.

Do you feel like B2B marketing needs to shake things up a bit to avoid being boring and dry and how have you tried to address this?

B2B audiences engage with media and content the same way that B2C targets do — because, surprise, they are people too — so when my team creates social experiences to reach, for example, financial advisors or institutional investors, we make sure to respect both the subject matter and the medium. We don’t force-fit a format where it doesn’t belong, and we focus on presenting appropriate messages in ways that are natural for the platform and that would be engaging for any audience. And you can still have fun with it: in 2018 we launched a Q&A “bot” designed to engage a variety of audiences on social to help them with simple tasks related to our business.

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Som Puangladda

VP of Global Marketing

Som Puangladda is a skilled marketing and sales expert with more than 14 years of global experience under her belt. But Puangladda doesn’t just stick to tried-and-true industry tactics. Instead, she embraces innovation and creativity and encourages collaboration among her team to bring these ideas to life. Puangladda’s out-of-the-box thinking has helped GumGum curate unique experiences for clients and drive millions of dollars in revenue.

One of her recent ideas was a “Hamptons House” experience for Tier 1 customers, who could spend a week networking and learning about in-image advertising solutions at a decked-out house in the Hamptons. More than 125 customers attended the event, which resulted in millions of dollars in opportunities and 4x the average ROI.

In addition to driving company success, Puangladda also works to empower other women in tech. She leads the Women of GumGum group, as well as the LA chapter of +Women’s Round Up, which aims to provide a support network for women at start-up tech companies.

Can you share any particular achievements you are most proud of in your current role?

Besides the “Hamptons House,” another resounding success was the “Bring Cannes to You” event. We brought a Cannes Lion Festival themed event to seven cities around the world, which were attended by more than 500 people representing 27x average ROI in the first three months.

Another Tier 1 ABM that we recently launched is hosting an onsite “Turbo Tour” event. This is a huge ABM activation for automotive clients in which GumGum will place an arcade driving game at five agencies to compete for prizes and points. We were able to secure meetings and onsite visits from the event. ABM campaigns require a lot of resource and time with sales reps as we try to understand the target audience and what kind of innovation to fit the needs of the client.

Can you share any details about how your team, or individuals on your team, have helped drive innovation? How has your whole team helped achieve results?

Our senior creative manager, Bryan Bartlett, is the mastermind and idea child behind many of our ABM ideations and corporate brand awareness campaigns. He’s successfully incorporated automated reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into the majority of our activations and our success rate with these ABM campaigns has reached 80%.

Our overall creative design team helps to transform Bryan’s ideas to life. We then work closely with sales rep to move them through the presentation, opportunity and ROI tracking through marketing leads in each region that I manage. It’s a big team effort and we do 15 of these every quarter! 

One project that recently went viral is our Art.ificial Campaign, which juxtaposes human-created art with AI-created art and invites people to judge which is which. The project has given us a lot of brand awareness as an innovative company in our space.

Why do you think innovation is important in today’s B2B marketing landscape? Do you see a need for traditional approaches to be transformed?

We blend both. We still do some email marketing — not much — and use a direct-mail approach for our ABM campaigns. What stands out most is our innovation as a B2B tech company. We need to show that we are ahead of our clients and teach them to be innovative as well. So, all our marketing campaigns have an element of personalization that showcases our ability to think outside of the box. 

Any fun facts/interesting personal notes you would share that other B2B peers may find interesting?

I run the Women of GumGum group to help empower women in tech internally. The group provides a space to receive mentorship and career advice, as well as opportunities to bond with other women through events and our newsletter. I also lead the LA Chapter of +Women’s Round Up, which aims to help women at First Round Capital startups build a community and thrive in a male-dominated tech world.

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