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Kasumi Mihori has always made her own way in entertainment marketing, whether it was starting her own agency right after graduating from Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, working closely with branding guru Lee Hunt at Razorfish, or creating in-house agencies both at Turner and Sony. 

Over her years in the business, Mihori has seen all kinds of leadership up close while developing her own approach to building and leading teams. Today, she knows that the best brands set a course and stick with it, no matter how difficult the path may become. 

Mihori and her husband, Mark Johnston, are both working full time at their own agency, Duo, which takes all of the lessons the pair have learned over the years and applies them to their strategic branding and creative design services. Mihori joined Spotlight to talk branding, leadership, strategy and more. 

Spotlight: At both Turner and at Sony, you created internal agencies. Why did you think that needed to be done? What did you think you could get out of that versus giving work to an agency? 

‍Kasumi Mihori: There were a few major reasons. The way my brain works is really about trying to find the white space. It's the combination of creative and business strategy. I like living in that in-between space. 

What I saw was a real need to bring agency-level creative in-house. You often have to go outside to get these massively creative ideas, but you can have the same level of creative options internally, you just need the right people. 

The advantage to that, both at Turner and at Sony, was that the in-house group sat at the intersection of all of the different businesses. If you position it correctly, it has the opportunity to save the company literally hundreds of millions of dollars year over year. That's a huge cost savings, but it can also generate revenue, which I think is not where most in-house groups go. If you're smart in that way, you actually set up the business as a little micro-boutique hybrid agency that not only ideates and produces the work, but also works with external partners. It also serves as a go-between, offering real client services to all of the partners within the company. If the brand is strong enough, creative can be used as a driver to unlock revenue opportunities.

We operated truly like partners, both at Turner and Sony, with all of our business units. We were right there on the lot, in close proximity to where production happened, where the celebrities came or where the live audiences were. There's a real opportunity to take advantage of the proximity and leverage that geographic closeness. 

When I was at Sony, I also stood up a social editorial vertical where I hired journalists on staff as our social team, not your traditional social managers, because I really wanted to run that as a newsroom. That’s a completely different process than traditional broadcast or editorial work, because there was a real opportunity to monetize it. A lot of the narratives that we were authoring really focused on taking legacy brands and making them digital forward-brands – setting up a martech stack, and then being able to monetize that and collect first-party data. This was a new approach for legacy television brands. We focused on revenue generation and growing audiences. Again, there was white space where I could hire different kinds of talent to bring different capabilities in-house.

‍Spotlight: I think this idea of setting up a social editorial vertical is really smart, because I think so much of where marketing is going, at least in the entertainment space, is on social. Can you talk a little bit about how that worked, and do you think that is where marketing is going, or is that more of a case-by-case example?

‍Mihori: I do think it's a little case by case. I think 10 years ago things were absolutely swinging that way, some 70% to 80% of marketing budgets were going towards social and paid media. This was happening even when I was at Turner. And we had like 100 editors or something on staff, so I said we’ll just edit specifically for social. And these editors were like, ‘we don’t know how to edit for social.’ This is so ironic now, but I had to tell them, ‘yes, you do. You completely know how to tell a story. It’s just going to be in a different format.’ In whatever position or job or role I had, I was always trying to leverage time with efficiency and talent.

There was a real opportunity to think about structure a little bit differently. I was constantly doing financial analysis between what we were spending on external agencies compared to the cost of bringing that talent in-house. And the answer was that we could control and do social in-house for less money. 

At Sony, I also really wanted to have journalistic rigor attached to the storytelling and the fact-finding. I think that journalists are amazing and really great storytellers and writers who can cover anything with speed and accuracy. It just made sense to me to bring that mentality in-house. 

‍Spotlight: In light of all of the corporate branding that you’ve done, I wanted to ask you about Warner Bros.’ recent decision to revert the name of Max back to HBO Max, something that a lot of marketers seem to have reacted to with derision. What are your thoughts about it? Do you see it as a symptom of general confusion in corporate branding? What does it signify that Warner Bros. felt that needed to be done? 

‍Mihori: I think in this marketplace, in this climate right now – and  I've never seen anything like it – everyone is making decisions out of fear. Everyone's afraid of losing their jobs. Everyone's afraid of making waves. Horribly bad decisions come out of that mindset. If that's the impetus of all of the decision-making from the top down and from the bottom up, then everything's going to suck, essentially.

‍Spotlight: Because everything is reactive ...

‍Mihori: Yes, nothing's proactive. Everything is completely motivated by fear and by short-term gains. Branding in general is a long-term strategy. Branding is an additive long-term mission and goal, while marketing is short-term strategy. In marketing, you have these milestone events you have to hit – you have to get butts in seats, you have to get eyeballs onto this, you have all of these KPIs and goals. But branding is very different. And for HBO and HBO Max to ignore the equity of that HBO legacy, to turn your back on that is just super short sighted. 

This is where brand architecture really comes into play, and how you actually strategize an open brand architecture to house all of the things – whether that’s the holding company, or, in this case, the mother brand, or the media conglomerate. It's always going to be a co-branding issue when you work with companies that are that large, so you have to take that into account. But you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

‍Spotlight: Let's talk about data. I’ve been hearing people say that they have stopped relying on data when it comes to creative. Do you think here’s a trend of moving away from data? For the past 10 years, I feel like all I’ve heard is about data leading, data informing and the creative reacting to data. Do you feel like people are still interacting with data in these ways?

‍Mihori: I think it depends on what organization you’re sitting within. I think from a marketing point of view, people would like to think they're completely driven by data. But data can be scrubbed in many different ways, and manipulated in many different ways, so the data can be read to the KPIs that you're trying to set and be completely interpreted however you want. So I personally always take data with a grain of salt. I love a data dump. I love all of the information. I have my teams conduct a ton of research. That's really, from a creative standpoint, the foundation of what you really need to see in the marketplace. Yes, the data matters. Who you're targeting and all of those things matter. But the real breakthrough is not the data. The real breakthrough is what you can actually take from the data and the insights and how you actually make it into actionable creative. 

There's a magical bridge there. And then how do you prove that after it's launched? How do you make sure that the KPIs that you're setting are strategically aligned with what you're actually trying to do? I think that takes a bit of holistic, strategic thinking and organization. 

The data are not the drivers. The design, the creative, the marketing – all of that are really the drivers. You can’t have anything if the creative isn’t good. The data informs, but it’s never the end all be all. 

‍Spotlight: How much weight do you feel is placed on marketing teams in terms of making something successful? 

‍Mihori: I think a huge amount of weight is put on it from people who are non-marketing executives. My whole thing is always about ‘why are we measuring for this?’ What is really the business goal of what we're trying to do, and how does it align to what the actual business objective is? 

I think more often than not non-creative executives put a lot of weight on the data and the KPIs and the insights, because it's a slide in a PowerPoint presentation that they can go back and point to, but it doesn't capture any of the emotional resonance, the active sharing and building, the more intangible effects of what those campaigns and what brand awareness does in the world. 

It's like lightning in a bottle. It's a very difficult thing to capture, but you know when you don't have it, and you know when you do have it. It's completely about being consistent with your brand.

‍Spotlight: As somebody that started as a creative but moved into leadership and strategy, what advice would you give to leaders in the marketplace today as they deal with this difficult environment? What do you think is the best way for them to navigate their way through this? 

‍Mihori  I think you have to ignore the noise, all of that external gossip and fear-based chatter, and people trying to predict the future – whether it’s your own future or the future of the company, it's just impossible.

As a leader, you have to be able to lead with intention. What are your core values? Determine what they are, literally, map them out on a wall. What are the things you really believe in, the things that piss you off, the things that you just find completely meaningless and that you want to avoid. All of those things are incredibly valid. You want to be able to hone in on the five or six top things that are deal breakers for you. Your core values might be about leading with honesty and transparency or leading with integrity or creating an environment that is a safe creative space.

Creative work takes a very particular type of leader who can create a culture and environment where creatives can actually thrive. It sounds so straightforward, but it takes so much energy and time, and patience and thoughtfulness to create that type of safe space.

I think, as a leader, when you're leading with integrity and intentionality every day and that's your North Star, you have to be able to compartmentalize and focus on what really matters. Decisions made based on insecurity, as opposed to decisions made on sound business principles, are very hard to define. It takes time, and it takes a lot of conversation and a lot of communication. 

‍Spotlight: I think all of that is imperative on the one hand, but on the other hand, unless you are placed within an organization that supports that from the upline down, it's hard to do. You can't be an island of integrity unto yourself, if you as leader are getting politically battered around all the time. So it's helpful if you're placed within an organization that supports that.

‍Mihori: I think it's imperative to act. It's got to start somewhere. It doesn't necessarily start from the C suite. It should, but it doesn't always. It’s about knowing who you are, and what you stand for, and then as a leader, it’s also about building coalitions. You have to be able to work an organization, work a room, and navigate and build consensus. 

I just think you have to be able to lead with intention. I think it's so incredibly important, particularly in this environment, because there's so much noise that it's easy to get distracted and derailed.

‍Spotlight: OK, last question. What's the coolest creative thing you've seen lately? 

‍Mihori: The coolest thing I've seen lately is a film called Hundreds of Beavers. Everybody should check it out. It was at Sundance or something in like 2022 and then it was on YouTube, but it’s been so successful that it's getting a nationwide theatrical release, and it'll be on Apple and Amazon. It is crazy creative, and it was done on like 150 grand, like on a tiny, tiny budget, and the guy who is the writer, director and star is very Buster Keaton. It's just a wonderfully funny, entertaining surprise that I think all of us need.