When Aron North, chief marketing officer of Ryan Reynolds-owned Mint Mobile first started at the brand almost five years ago, he says it was very uncomfortable to work “at the speed of culture.”
“But I love it now. I absolutely love it.”
Mint is known for their irreverent ads that incorporate pop culture in a playful and topical manner. They teamed up with The Exorcist’s Linda Blair for a spot that illustrates the horrors of “big wireless” billing. When Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain, Reynolds did story time with Winnie the Screwed, a tale in which the Hundred Acre Wood friends deal with high wireless bills. The brand has also resurrected 80’s alien life form (ALF), partnered with MLB star Bobby Bonilla, invented a fake Mint Mobile Plus, collaborated with Jack in the Box on a Mint Mobile Milkshake and contributed $15 to a dog named Max who was running for reelection as mayor of Idlewild, CA.
“I love to operate at these moments and be part of culture,” says North. “We like to create a very small but very cool cultural moment where everybody’s like, ‘This is awesome.’ We don’t force the message too hard. We try to have fun with it.”
Mint Mobile entered the wireless mobile phone service industry in 2016 with a direct-to-consumer business model that offers consumers a wireless phone service for only $15 a month, a key number in many of its ads (i.e. Max the dog’s campaign contribution). T-Mobile recently announced plans to acquire the brand for $1.35 billion in March, but the efforts to disrupt have not stopped.
North says he just shot a commercial in New York that had 17 scripts, new ones handed to him as he was headed to set. “When you give creatives license, the creativity never stops,” says North. “I don’t think CMOs really appreciate and embrace that idea. How many times have you heard, let’s get to a meeting and present the three concepts and then we’re done. I go into a meeting and I look at 17 scripts a round. I’m like, ‘You guys, we can’t produce all this.’ They’re like, ‘Oh, if we love them all, we’ll find a way.’”
“It’s the little things that separate excellent creative from really good creative because the team wants it to be excellent, because they’re having fun doing it,” adds North.
Prior to joining Mint Mobile, North held senior roles at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Young & Rubicam Brands. Brand Innovators caught up with North from his office in Costa Mesa, CA to talk about sponsoring Iowa State Fair’s hog calling contest, Mint Mobile milkshakes and operating at the speed of culture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What makes you excited to get out of bed and go to work every morning?
How much time do we have? First off, I have a hard time going to sleep, it is so exciting what we’re doing. Oftentimes, I will end up in my garage because I don’t want to wake up everybody in the house. When Mint started seven years ago, you could not even buy wireless online. We’ve been growing like crazy, trying to do something really distinctive in this space. We were the pioneers of multi-month plans. Today, every single wireless network has some multi month discount program or discount plan.
We have driven pro-consumer change in the marketplace. That’s the kind of thing that gets me excited when I wake up. We grew from a seven person marketing team to 130 folks. We have hired the cream of the crop, super smart people and also genuinely fun and amazing people to be around. We just had the biggest October in company history. That’s the fun stuff you get to do when you’re a hyper growth company and embrace that growth mindset of trying new things.
We are really focused on building the brand equity and the brand narrative and doing things that aren’t necessarily sales motivating, but putting pennies in the brand bag. To have an organization that embraces both sales overnight and brand over time is another thing to be excited about.
The brand is known for disruptive and irreverent advertising. How do you bring these stories to life?
We never stop. One of the crazy things is that we do planned and unplanned work. When Jury Duty became the crazy hot show on Amazon, we were the first to reach out to Ronald [Gladden] and do an ad with him. We get to break the clutter. We get to operate at the speed of culture. That Ronald program may not have delivered sales growth, but that’s okay, it was fun to do. Our brand is young enough in its lifecycle. We’re still growing rapidly on the awareness side and doing things like this gets us into the conversation. Because Ryan Reynolds is our owner, we have unique access to some of the things he’s doing.
Our sales promotion that just ended was a deflation promotion. With inflation raising the rates on everything, and our competitors raising their rates, we lowered ours. We launched this promo as a competitive response to Verizon and AT&T raising prices last year. This year, we ran it again and put it on steroids. It broke all kinds of records for growth.
Can you talk about your approach to storytelling and narrative?
We’re always looking to make sure that the narrative and the storytelling is in the appropriate brand voice for Ryan, while also building on some of the universal truths that the brand has challenged. The biggest one is, how can it be good if it is so cheap? When it comes to narrative and storytelling, we want clear, concise, easy-to-understand messaging that really highlights how great Mint is.
We were sponsors of a very specific piece of the Iowa State Fair this year. It was a hog calling contest. Wives and daughters get up to a microphone in a barn and are screaming for their husbands. We saw it and we loved it. We went and built a partnership with them. We told them we do not want to do anything to hurt the Iowa State Fair. We just want to celebrate this beautiful piece of it, because calling is pretty instrumental to our core service.
We had our people there with T-shirts and hats, but I wouldn’t allow a signage takeover. That’s not what this is about. This is about celebrating this rad moment and telling the story. Let’s have some fun with this great partnership. Our TikToks blew up. It was a completely organic program that got over 13 million views. You don’t have to bludgeon someone with the narrative. You just have to integrate into a story that’s already part of the culture and you find your voice in that.
Can you talk about the idea behind working with pop culture icons like Linda Blair and Rick Moranis?
A big piece of my job is knowing when to shut up. In this seat, you have to let creators create and you have to embrace things that may not feel comfortable. I said to myself out loud, are you going to be the CMO who tells Ryan Reynolds no? Who do you think you are?
The classic CMO operating procedure is to connect the right celebrity to the perfect target customer. Rick Moranis hasn’t done anything in 20 years. Moranis launching a wireless service campaign was a bit unexpected. Alf and wireless, does it make sense? No. Did the way we do it work beautifully? If the work answers the insight, and it’s got a sharp edge, that’s the measuring stick. I don’t mind if they’re not all home runs. Some CMOs believe anything you do with a celebrity or a partner has to be a Grand Slam and that’s just not reality. You want to be able to do work that large audiences love, but if it doesn’t go large, if the niche or the segment you’re trying to target really appreciates it, that’s still a big win.
We did a partnership with Jack in the Box, which is very unexpected for a wireless brand, to create the Mint Mobile shake. To do those things, you have to embrace ideas that at first are uncomfortable or you don’t understand. You have to put your confidence in the creative team. If it answers the brief, and it’s insight-driven, the role of the CMO is to keep the edges sharp and to get out of your own comfort zone.
How have your past experiences helped shape your current point of view?
The first decade of my career, I was at a marketing agency where I learned how to sell. Your job as an agency account person is to listen to the client, understand their challenges, objectives and create marketing programs that solve their business challenges. But at the end of the day, you’re a salesperson, your job is to go in and pitch the creative, sell it in and get the client excited.
We were only getting challenges that were explicit but we thought we could help our clients solve more implicit problems. We invented this thing called Idea Day. We would listen to the client over the course of a quarter or six months and just start pinning challenges on a dry erase board. Then we would let the creative team ideate freely. They would come back with 30-40 ideas. We would set up a session with our clients. ‘None of this work you’ve asked for and you don’t have to buy a single thing but we think we can help you solve problems. If you like the ideas that cost money, it’s incremental.’ The agency wins. But the client also wins.
Then I went client side at Taco Bell and then Mint Mobile. Having that mindset of a salesperson can solve other problems. It helps you take marketing and infiltrate other departments. At Taco Bell, the brand experience team was engaging in packaging, because we were seeing dated packaging but we wanted to create mobile moments because people were sharing food pictures when Instagram was blowing up. So we created step-and-repeats for the food or packaging that was Instagram worthy.
Fast forward to Mint Mobile, I came into an organization that didn’t have marketing as a function. With my salesman mentality, I’ve spent a lot of time engaging with the CEO and CFO and explaining to them sales over brand over time, why we invest instead of harvest and cultivate. We have this insane partnership, where my CEO and CFO are just as interested in the brand metrics that we report on monthly as they are on the sales metrics we report daily. Having that balance in my career has really allowed me to see the full picture.
