Kirk McDonald of Sundial on Human Connection, Culture as a Signal, and the Future of Brand Trust

Jeanniey Walden: I’m here with Kirk McDonald. Kirk, thanks so much for coming on.

Kirk McDonald: Absolutely, thank you. Really excited.

Jeanniey Walden: You are a busy man, not just personally with all the content you’ve been creating and the conversations here at POSSIBLE, but also as a business icon.

Kirk McDonald: Wow, I got an icon label. That’s too much. Do you have to be dead to be an icon? I’m still hustling.

Jeanniey Walden: You’re still hustling.

Kirk McDonald: One of the best hustles in the world. We’re very fortunate in this industry to do what we do. Think of all the different things happening in the world right now, and to really think about how people make connections with content and connections with each other. I’m excited to be here at POSSIBLE. So much of our industry uses these events. It’s almost a calendar sync, the one place you know everyone is going to be.

Jeanniey Walden: I think everybody who watches and listens to our show wants to understand why you’ve made the moves you’ve made, why from GroupM to Sundial, why the partnership you just announced.

Kirk McDonald: I would blame it on drinking, except most people know I don’t drink, so that’s not going to fly. I feel fortunate that all of my career decisions were driven by curiosity. The whole thing was this fascination with content consumers and the connections they made. At every stage of my career, if I had an opportunity to say something, I would talk about the type of content, the platform or technology, and the quality of the connections made. That took me into the print industry, when print magazines were how you decided what school your kids went to or what the fashion trend was to wear. Even now, days before Devil Wears Prada 2 comes out, there was this power of an editorial voice that said, let me tell you the way, let me tell you the future, and people followed, and then brands said, let’s ride along. My whole career was continuing to follow that. As print evolved into digital, that was an early thing to jump into, then how do we make it more efficient and effective, and programmatic came, and I went down the programmatic path.

Kirk McDonald: One of the places I hadn’t done was the buy side. I’d done the sell side and the technology underpinnings, but never the buy side. So this opportunity, leaving AT&T, Xandr, and Warner Media, where we had built that up, the pandemic was there and I became fascinated with really learning what the buy side looks like. That was a great run. I really enjoyed my time at WPP, primarily because it was a scaled environment to influence so many buyers to think differently about the space, their role as educator and evangelist, and also shaping the future. I think it’s led me to this. I’m still curious about human connections, and when Richelieu Dennis and I got to know each other, he has a passion for human connections, and he said this is less than a media company, it is a human connections platform. It’s a company built around experiential connections, content connections, and community connections. Then, how can we take all of these assets and give a value proposition to brands so they can be authentically connected? It’s the authenticity of that connection, and now the trusted connection, that I think is what’s driving me.

Kirk McDonald: Given the emergence of so much synthetic content and so many choices for a consumer, the role of curation, trusted curation, and trusted human connections are going to matter. We still see it at our experiences, like the Essence Festival of Culture coming up, and we see it in more than just who’s on the main stage, in the things that happen as the community gets together and all the empowerment programs. We see it when we do something like Black Women in Hollywood, or a lookbook for Refinery29. So I keep chasing my curiosity, but that’s the whole thing.

Jeanniey Walden: It’s fascinating that you use authenticity, that you use trust. Everything I’ve done in my career has been focused around what I call AIR: Authenticity, Inspiration, and Relatable.

Kirk McDonald: I love that. Can I borrow that? Do I owe you five dollars every time I use it?

Jeanniey Walden: We’ll trade, because you’re doing this interview, but then I’ll come knocking on your door. It’s so true, because you can’t be successful unless you have all three together. Everything you’re talking about makes so much sense for being authentic, and you are an inspiration. Everything you’re doing with your events and initiatives pulls in that relatability to like-minded groups you can connect with and relate to, and that creates trust. Trust creates belief, and then there you are, you’ve got a business that comes out of it. Do you feel, because I’ve heard a lot around the event, that people feel AI is creating a resurgence of humanity?

Kirk McDonald: Yes, and I’m excited if that’s what’s going to happen. Technology that is going to process information faster and rely heavily on pattern recognition to automate the parts of this that require just memory, if you can actually move your resources to the authenticity of connections, I think that’s a huge opportunity. For us, we get very excited about it. I do think our brands, Refinery29, Essence, AfroPunk, Beauty Con, our Unbothered product, all have this ability to convene people around values, around their interests, around content and services, and then create new opportunities for brands, and the role AI plays there is to power that. At the center of everything we do going forward is this idea, and it’s one of the reasons we partnered up with Audience Path, and another company called CultureHive.

Kirk McDonald: We have what we call the SMART platform. It’s Sundial’s marketing, automation, research and technology platform, SMART. It is made smart by 100 years of creating content for women, 56 years of Essence, 20-plus years of Refinery29, on and on across the portfolio, a lot of it created even before it was digitized. So we’ve got footage, we’ve got audience surveys, all of those things come to life to give us a perspective of her dialogue, the codes of her communication with each other, in ways that you don’t get and the large language models have not captured. If we can use that to power insights we share with brands, the way we build relationships with talent and creators, the way we program our stages for entertainment and content, even our content itself. Our editors have a development platform they use internally, powered by SMART, which co-writes and co-develops ideas for them so they can write on top of that. Think of it as data that informs their instincts.

Kirk McDonald: That feels to me like using the technology not to replace ourselves, not to replace our real value, but to move our value to the authenticity of it, the human part. Again, we’re a human connections platform, so you’ll hear that resonate in all the things we do. We think we’re in a moment where that is going to matter more, and this role of curation, to cut through the noise and filter out the distraction so we can spend more time doing this, matters a lot.

Jeanniey Walden: It’s fantastic to see people wanting to get together. We all survived COVID, where for a few minutes we took a deep breath and a break because we didn’t have to rush to meetings, and then we got panicked because there were no meetings, and then we got used to it, a little lazy from my perspective. But now I see people getting back out and doing the networking, conversations, and communications that build that level of trust you can’t just get through content.

Kirk McDonald: Nothing replaces it. I love a Zoom meeting or a Teams call, however 7,500 people here for POSSIBLE says human connections do matter, and if they matter at the business level, then let’s remember they matter at the consumer level. When we do the festival, we get north of 250,000 to 300,000-plus people who find a reason to be in New Orleans for Fourth of July weekend. They come from all across the country and the world. They fly in, they drive in, all around this idea that I get to be at a place where I feel like I belong. I get to experience food, art, culture, music, and entertainment, in a place where I share values and life experiences. That’s a cultural moment, and the rarity, substance, and value of those should never be taken for granted. We feel proud that we’re in a position to do those for these communities, and to bring our partners into that conversation too.

Kirk McDonald: The partnership with CultureHive will introduce a scoring mechanism to start scoring the quality of creative and culture, media strategy and culture, how brands show up in culture. The ability to work with Audience Path to extend this and find those audiences where they’re informed or gathered by the similarity of the semantics that brought them there, as opposed to a personally identifiable signature. We’re not going to rely on that, but rely on the context that brought them together. Those are all things we think lean toward our relevance and importance in the future.

Jeanniey Walden: How exciting it must be, in this relationship with Audience Path, to get signals that are real time and intent-based and focused on honesty, versus aggregated data that suggests something and you’re trying to interpret results and take a guess.

Kirk McDonald: You just nailed it. Our behavior is a revealed honesty about ourselves that sometimes you can’t capture if you only look at my statistics, because my statistics don’t reveal as much as my behavior. It’s a very powerful signal. For Audience Path to allow us into this partnership, we feel fortunate. This is more than inventory extension. It’s about how do I actually scale like-mindedness, scale interest and values, in a way that lets me bring a brand a more complete and full solution. Here’s what it means to be at a place like Black Women in Hollywood, here’s how your brand shows up, and since we use our experiences as studios, we capture all of that content, and now let me distribute it to that like-minded audience, because they’ve revealed what makes them aligned. One thing I think we’ve missed on is that we did not prove and bring data to support the importance of cultural relevance. We’ve accepted it to be important, and every panel here will talk about it, but where’s the Nielsen score for cultural relevance? In the absence of that, we felt it needed to exist. The combination of the two changes our conversations with brands in a very meaningful way.

Jeanniey Walden: Brands are absolutely looking for it too. I’ve been on the brand side and the agency side. As a CMO at a big brand, you are always looking for where you can have the most impact with the audience that means the most to your business. When you’re looking at a sea of technology or data solutions, it becomes very muddled. So I think you’re bringing clarity, opportunity, and direction to a world that very much needs it.

Kirk McDonald: I hope so. At AT&T we launched the Relevance Conference, back in 2018, so you’ll see some themes across my career. It’s the quality of connections and the relevance and resonance in a connection. We’re in this fortunate moment where, if we get the right signals and relay them properly, we can continue this transformation moment we’re all in. We’re dealing with a consumer that is more sophisticated than they’ve ever been, so we’re not fooling them with the content we produce anymore. They also know when content is brand supported, even from creators. If we really respect them and want to meet them on their terms, we need to adopt their language, speak to them, not at them, speak with them so they’re part of the conversation. This idea of big distributed reach models is going to be replaced by engaged participation models. For brands who now have to reflect, is it enough to buy cheap reach, or do I need to buy trusted connections? We want to show up as the pathway to trusted connections for brands.

Jeanniey Walden: I love that. Last question. If you’re going to give a young, up-and-coming rockstar business person three pieces of advice for their career?

Kirk McDonald: That’s a big question. A career should be thought of in three stages. Be someplace where you’re learning more than you’re giving in the early parts of your career, and don’t chase the money, chase the learning. Let your curiosity lead the first chapter. At some point, you’ll be able to give more than you were getting. At that point, transition, become a manager, and give away everything you’ve got, completely give away all of it, because it won’t be relevant anyway, it’s changing too quickly. Then you get to this third chapter, which I feel fortunate to be in, where what I’m looking to do now is get out of the way of those coming behind, because I confidently believe they’re smarter. But if I can guide a little bit on my way into whatever I’m doing now, that’s fine. So, to a younger person coming up, chase that curiosity, because if you’re learning now, you’re in a great spot. When you feel it’s time to give, give knowing you don’t have the answer yet, but give all of it. And then figure out the last one. I’m still figuring out chapter three. I’m a work in progress.

Jeanniey Walden: Work in progress. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Kirk McDonald: Thank you. This was all Sean Black and Audience Path, so we’re just here as their guests. Very grateful.

This conversation was recorded for Liftoff with Jeanniey Walden at POSSIBLE and lightly edited for readability.