5 Minutes with… Melissa Wildermuth
Melissa Wildermuth is a 26-year vet of Minneapolis food behemoth General Mills.
For the past two-and-a-half years, she has been its global creative director – and first woman in the role. She leads a cross-functional team that's responsible for creating, developing and championing ideas across the General Mills portfolio, such as the limited-edition collection of Lil Yachty-designed Reese’s Puffs, the Betty Crocker and Barbie collaboration supporting STEM, and the first-ever GMI-created NFT behind the launch of Chocolate Dunkaroos. Melissa and her team manages over $1 billion of gross sales in licensed products and General Mills' advertising partners around the globe.
Melissa's leadership style is all about starving egos in favour of feeding vulnerability and empathy. "I feel like my job is almost to become obsolete," she tells us. When it comes to working with the agencies that create work for General Mills' more than 100 brands, Melissa takes a similar approach, aiming for it to feel more like a partnership than agency and client.
To find out more, LBB's Addison Capper spoke with Melissa.
LBB> You've been at General Mills for over 20 years. How does that experience feed into how you represent the brand creatively?
Melissa> I have kind of grown up at General Mills, and the employee base and helping build a creative culture internally is so important to me. I feel like the people that I serve internally aren't the executives running the company, but the person that is one year in or a few years out of school, because I'm trying to set them up for future success. Holistically, creativity really is just solving problems and doing it in a unique way that is meaningful for the person actually experiencing the problem. If I can help teach that and instil a culture where people feel that they can come from all diverse backgrounds, all diverse thoughts, all diverse experiences, but come in and feel like they belong, that's the best tone for people to actually be able to contribute creatively. Creativity isn't a function. I lead a creative team, but I really think creativity is found in every role.
LBB> Can you tell me more about your team and the make-up of the in-house agency?
Melissa> So, we don't necessarily call it an in-house agency. But it's interesting because I think a lot of creative directors and big companies actually just do the advertising. We do manage our creative roster of amazing agencies, but we also lead all partnerships and licensing. Last year we did over 100, and that could be anything from LeBron James or other individuals to brands, like Reese's, which we licence from Hershey for our Reese's cereal. So, it's all across the board. And we're not organised by brands, instead we're organised by cultural pillars. We have music, fashion, sports, food is obviously big for us, which allows our team to look externally versus looking internally, and I think that's a really good balance that ends up doing really well for us. My team has experts in things like gaming, versus having experts on the brand, which we already have a ton of.
LBB> You were on stage at Cannes earlier this year discussing the importance of creative risk taking to build brands. As a client, how do you interact and deal with risk at GM?
Melissa> Humanity – being a human – inherently means you're taking risks. We're taking risks all the time. I think you need psychological safety and to feel like someone else is in it with you. Right now I work for our chief brand officer, who is an amazing guy who always makes me feel like he's in it with me. Him setting that tone allows me to set that tone for my team and for the people that I work with. When you're constantly trying to help push people, it's easier to take the safe way, but I think showing teams that we're looking for unique ways to solve problems, and you're truly thinking about the consumer that you serve, makes it easier to mitigate that risk in a way.
LBB> Creatively, how would you define how you work internally at GM? And how is it unique?
Melissa> We want a diversity of voices, so I try to be open to people that work remotely 100%. That was never an option before covid, and ideally General Mills looked for people that are in Minneapolis. But I really believe if I'm going to have a team that is looking externally, and it's really responsible for understanding entertainment, gaming, etc. that they should be able to live anywhere they need to in order to do their best work, and for us to be able to have trust in them that they are doing that work. That is a significant change. You can't get diversity of thought, experience, background, race and ethnicity if you're all going to just be in Minneapolis. I think that's key to having really good creativity.
We're really trying to help skill up people in the practice of ideation so that they're constantly and comfortably bringing in a quantity of ideas. I'm a huge believer in quantity because with quality you get too caught up and you get too in love with one. Then when it dies, you kind of die with it. When you really focus on quantity, you always have the next idea if one doesn't work, which helps us deal with failure too.
LBB> How do you ensure you stay nimble, despite being a very large, legacy brand? And why is that important?
Melissa> We're trying to get so tight on the brand strategy, and what each brand's north star is in the world. Being able to crystallise that is so important. I was talking to the marketing director on Annie’s the other day, and asked him to summarise the brand. He said, "It's kid joy." Knowing that is extremely helpful to make decisions and move quickly. Looking at other brands that do this well, I love Dove. 'Real Beauty' - two simple words. But when covid hit, they asked themselves, what is real beauty in this moment? In something like six days they had made an amazing commercial. That's my aspiration - that we continue to crystallise those strategies in a way that help us executionally continue to refresh.
LBB> What’s the role of creativity in driving business value, growth and solving problems?
Melissa> It's critical and a huge competitive advantage. Without creativity, you won't get that growth. I think there's upper-funnel creativity and lower-funnel creativity, and you’ve got to bring them together. And you can have long-term brand building and short-term sales, but you need to be able to drive both together. With the rise of performance marketing, and companies understanding it better, the importance is in merging it with a creative solution. But it's a solution that you can deliver either more easily, quicker or personalised. But it all stems from that insight and that idea. That work does not change. It's just the delivery that I feel like can be much quicker.
LBB> How do you see yourself as a creative leader? And how do you allow creativity in your department to flourish?
Melissa> I feel like my job really is that of a teacher and coach. Sometimes creative directors are known for coming in the room, they know it all, they pontificate, and then leave. That's just so not how I'm wired. I'm really wired into helping people see the solution themselves. I feel like my job is almost to become obsolete, so that you have a bunch of creatives in the company versus one creative director. If I do that well, I'll have a lot of people understanding how to continue to build ideas and finding a lot of fun and joy in that.
LBB> How does GM also work with agencies? How do you work together with them? And what kind of projects are best suited to an agency or GM internally?
Melissa> We don't have any AORs, we're very project based. The benefit of that is really matching the task to the talent, and having a very open and honest conversation with the agencies about what they are interested in, what audiences they feel like they really know. So, it feels like more of a partnership than a transactional agency relationship. Hopefully that's a benefit I bring from leading partnerships. Working with Reese's or working with Travis Scott is no different than working with an agency in terms of how we collaborate in the best way. Listening is so critical to marketing and we forget about that a lot because I think we all just like to talk and marketing is communication. But the best way to do that is to really listen and understand that. So, I hope our agencies feel like they have partners in us versus clients. I think there's a big difference.
LBB> The economy in the US is in a tricky position and inflation is really high. Many people I speak to mention the price of groceries now. General Mills has so many brands that are part of Americans' everyday lives, so how are you thinking about these issues from a creative standpoint?
Melissa> One of the things that we're really focusing on that we haven't focused on in a while is the idea of value and what value looks like. Of course, there's price value, which is very critical and really important for a lot of people. But there's also value in other ways that can differentiate our brands that may not necessarily mean discounting. For example, Yoplait yoghurt can be a very healthy and inexpensive breakfast for you – that's convenience. Convenience is a huge piece of value. Meal replacement is a huge piece of value. Snacks that your kids love, and you know they love and will not go to waste is a huge way to demonstrate value. I think value will become more and more relevant for us – price value, but also other values that will help us differentiate. That's really important in the society we live in right now.
You're right. We are in people's homes, and I take that as a privilege and a responsibility to make sure that we're in their home in a meaningful way.
