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Robert Berkeley 0:01
Welcome to another episode of Inside Jobs the podcast served up just for you, creatives who work at or with in house agencies brought to you in association with IHAF, an content production partner Express KCS. We meet creative leaders who work directly for brands learn about how they got to where they did and understand what drives them. Amy Strickland runs Sam's clubs in house agency by the numbers. A journey that started in the New York music industry of the 1990s took her to San Francisco for both the.com boom and bust. undeterred, the experience she gained from a very varied career led her to be asked by Walmart Sam's Club to set up and run their new in house agency. So Amy, welcome to the Inside Jobs podcast.

Amy Strickland 0:47
Thanks, Robert. I'm glad to be here.

Robert Berkeley 0:49
And I'm glad to have you here as well, because we met up in New York, I think it was gosh,

Amy Strickland 0:54
It was May the beginning of May at the dam New York creative operations conference, Henry Stewart's lovely event,

Robert Berkeley 1:00
Henry Stewart's lovely event which you flew halfway across the, the world. Well,

Amy Strickland 1:04
all the way all the way across the country. Yep. I love I love that show. And I did live in New York, in earlier in my life. So I love any excuse to go back.

Robert Berkeley 1:13
Yeah, no, I love the city as well. So just just quickly tell us, what do you do at Sam's Club?

Amy Strickland 1:18
I am currently the Senior Director of Marketing operations and creative operations for Sam's clubs, omni channel marketing and creative organisation. So I have two types of teams. The creative operations team is probably more of the in house agency analogous side of the house. And then my marketing operations team owns the budget and tools and processes for everything that we do.

Robert Berkeley 1:45
I'd say okay, all right. Well, let's, let's set the scene a little bit. But let's go back you grew up across on all, all areas of the Central Time Zone. How did that work out?

Amy Strickland 1:55
Yes, my parents. Instead of travelling internationally at the time with four kids, I just like to move around a lot. My dad was a Lutheran pastor at that time. And what he liked to do was start churches and communities that didn't have one in one at one. So we spent a year or so in many different places, mostly in the Midwest, and then what I would call settle down as much as it got in Minnesota. So I consider Minnesota to be my home state. I finished high school there and went to college there.

Robert Berkeley 2:27
were about two Minnesota,

Amy Strickland 2:28
Twin Cities area.

Robert Berkeley 2:29
Okay. So you you grew up there and you're you've somehow got yourself into the position you're in now and I want to go on that journey a little bit. Your LinkedIn profile is, I think, quite fascinating. Actually. The story there, so so lead us through because it seems you you started off with a hankering for the music industry. Was that something that you wanted to do right from the beginning?

Amy Strickland 2:54
Sort of? Yes. You know, I was always a big music fan. My mom is a music teacher. I had my own list of things to do and listen to

Robert Berkeley
What did you listen to back then?

Amy Strickland
I was a punk rocker. For a while I did some slam dancing, lots of new wave. My high school and St. Paul was a a magnet school. And there was a wonderful man named Ben, who has since passed, but ran a recording studio down in the basement. So I started taking those classes. And I just fell in love with being around musicians and learning how to splice tape the old school way. I don't know that many people do that anymore.

Robert Berkeley 3:31
I went through that apprenticeship myself. I started out in a radio station and spent a lot of time splicing tape. And so you you enjoyed a lot. Yep.

Amy Strickland 3:39
Oh, yeah. I loved it. And I thought that that's what I would do for the rest of my career. So I looked at Berklee College of Music because they have a well renowned audio engineering programme. And they said, Great. What instrument Do you want to spend your first two years with? And I said, none. I just like the engineering part. So instead of doing that, I went to a liberal arts college in Minnesota called St. Olaf. Many people recognise it because one of the Golden Girls allegedly went to that school,

Robert Berkeley 4:12
Right? Yes. I thought the name sounded familiar. Yeah. So it does exist.

Amy Strickland 4:16
And at the time, they still had a vestige of an old 60s type of programme where you could make your own major. So I made my own major in broadcast media.

Robert Berkeley 4:25
Yeah. Wow.

Amy Strickland 4:26
ran the college radio station. I had a couple of shows myself, I wrote a thesis of sorts on what it's like to run a college radio station. And then I parlayed that into a job in New York, which is where I really wanted to be at a college radio, music magazine, and showcase event that happened once a year wound up being their Director of Sales and Marketing for their music magazine called CMJ. New Music monthly

Robert Berkeley 4:54
Girl. This was mid 90s. Was it?

Amy Strickland
Oh, yes, indeed.

Robert Berkeley
Right. So that was the British Invasion happening. Wasn't it wasn't that Britpop,

Amy Strickland 5:01
and this was a little more like, the the the onslaught of the Nirvana years.

Robert Berkeley 5:06
Oh, okay. Yeah, right. Okay, good time though for music.

Amy Strickland 5:10
Absolutely. For music not so much for the music business, a lot of things were changing. I was watching a lot of my friends at labels get pink slips because suddenly no one knew what they were doing anymore alleged.

Robert Berkeley 5:22
Yeah. But it's a tough business music and it's indicated.

 

Amy Strickland
Yeah,

Robert Berkeley
Well, even tougher now although there are people making money in it, but it's in different ways, isn't it? The whole the whole industry is turned upside down. And and the revenue streams are from different places, but there's still money in music? I believe

Amy Strickland 5:39
there is. Yeah. A lot of it is in March these days and touring.

Robert Berkeley 5:44
Yeah, yeah, that's right. If you can afford to spend the time doing it, of course. And so the music industry gave way to what more kind of agency related?

Amy Strickland 5:54
Yeah, yeah. So I decided to leave the music industry at that time and and actually decided to leave New York, which basically meant leaving the music industry.

Robert Berkeley 6:03
Why? Why did you Why did you do that? In New York,

Amy Strickland 6:07
I'm a Midwestern girl. And and I found myself elbowing old ladies on the subway and decided that I wanted to be

Robert Berkeley 6:15
okay, do you remember the first projects you worked on?

Amy Strickland 6:17
I did a lot of media buying in magazines like fire chief,

Robert Berkeley 6:21
fire chief magazine, I wonder but still being published?

Amy Strickland 6:24
Yeah. Who knows? Who knows?

Robert Berkeley 6:26
There's still a lot of Fire Chiefs around. So I mean, there's a market there, I'm sure. So a bit of a learning curve for you, especially media buying as well, wasn't it?

Amy Strickland 6:35
Yeah, yeah, we did. We did creative work through a third party. So I did manage a lot of that. And I was sort of my first taste at where I wound up.

Robert Berkeley 6:44
Were you buying any internet media at that point? I just hadn't come anywhere near Did you aware of it as a potential advertising platform, or it just was kind of beyond the scope of what you were doing at the time?

Amy Strickland 6:55
You know, some of our clients may have been dabbling in it. I wasn't really as exposed to it as much. I mean, certainly, I had a computer and I had email. But I don't know maybe this audience wasn't quite ready for to be the avant garde.

Robert Berkeley 7:09
So anyway, you were there in Tucson, Arizona. And where did you go from there?

Amy Strickland 7:15
I had a choice. I had a friend with a spare bedroom in San Francisco, and I had a friend with a spare bedroom back in New York. So that's how I wound up here in San Francisco. My first job here in San Francisco was also at an agency quite quite a bit bigger than the one I was with in Tucson. But this was the height of the .com. Boom,

Robert Berkeley 7:33
yeah,

Amy Strickland 7:34
shortly there after followed by the .bomb. So we we focused at that point on internet clients. Most of our clients were startups,

Robert Berkeley 7:44
was there a lot of money sloshing around for these elite marketing budgets,

Amy Strickland 7:47
almost unlimited funds, as I recall, or that

Robert Berkeley 7:50
lead to any excesses on the part of the account directors at all? I am sure.

Amy Strickland 7:53
Not at all. Pretty much anything we would propose at that time would would be approved. Because there there weren't many limitations on how that money was spent.

Robert Berkeley 8:04
Is anything stick in your mind as being kind of wildly?

Amy Strickland 8:07
Oh, sure. Yeah, we did a a very personalised piece, or telecom of sorts. That was a da Vinci book, hollowed out. And with a piece of paper foam, I guess, inside with all of the tools that Da Vinci made, and these were hand delivered to specific executives.

Robert Berkeley 8:30
Cool. Have you got any of those still?

Amy Strickland 8:32
I do. Actually. I have the book, but I don't have the insert?

Robert Berkeley 8:36
Oh, okay. All right. Well, it sounds beautiful. What a nice thing. But yeah, people don't have the money to spend on that kind of thing anymore. So So you were presumably about this time now getting around to San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, I guess with all the .com stuff going on. And and as you say the .bomb, but you survived the .bomb you have wanted to do?

Amy Strickland 8:55
Yeah, I had decided I knew that digit design was based here in the Bay Area. And because of my love for audio, I did everything I possibly could to get in there. And I did.

Robert Berkeley 9:06
So that led you was that the thing that led you to Apple briefly?

Amy Strickland 9:10
Sort of Yes. You know, at Digi I was able to get my feet wet and marketing programme management. I did a few stents there and an opportunity came up at Apple and you know, great brand.

Robert Berkeley 9:23
So you were aware of the iPhone before it was launched.

Amy Strickland 9:26
We knew something was happening, but it's a very secretive environment there.

Robert Berkeley 9:30
But it sounds like you're kind of studying marketing from the ground up Really? Indeed. Yeah.

Amy Strickland 9:36
Indeed. Yeah. I have my own little mini MBA I guess in marketing programme management operations and on the creative side as well.

Robert Berkeley 9:43
So the creative bit came in where

Amy Strickland 9:45
it also came in at Digi my role as a marketing programme manager was focused on marketing programmes end to end so that included the creative piece, and that's when I really started to gravitate towards towards that work.

Robert Berkeley 10:00
Work. Yeah, I know what you mean. I do know absolutely what you mean. I haven't got a creative bone in my body. But I always I love technology and in technology and creative people

Amy Strickland 10:13
I love I love the whole thought process. I've never been a designer nor a musician, nor do I have any desire to be one. But I, I, I just love the, the creative energy.

Robert Berkeley 10:23
Yeah, me too. Me too. So you went from Apple to avid?

Amy Strickland 10:27
Yep. spent another couple of years there in marketing operations building an operations function there. That scope included the video side of the business and sports in news and broadcast and storage.

Robert Berkeley 10:40
We're not at the end yet. there's a there's a couple more, you went to Autodesk and Dolby after that we wound up at Sam's Club. Was there, was there anything driving you beyond?

Amy Strickland 10:48
No, I don't I don't think there was a grand idea. You know, I was opportunistic, I guess, about what opportunities presented themselves to me. You know, what, what else was it adding to my arsenal. And that was one of the reasons that I wound up at Sam's Club is I had a desire to learn e-commerce, how to how creative is done in a very different type of environment than in a traditional Creative Services type of shop.

Robert Berkeley 11:12
So tell us how about Sam's Club opportunity came along for you and what they were looking for what you were looking for, and what you started out doing there?

Amy Strickland 11:20
Yeah, so at the time, the website Sam's club.com, was still largely operating out of the mothership in Bentonville, Arkansas, which is where all the Walmart properties are based, however, the digital properties were already operating out of San Bruno, you know, that tends to be the Silicon Valley talent pool is broader and deeper. So a decision was made to bring the operations of the site largely over to California. So I got a call and was asked if I would be interested in building up this creative operations function essentially from scratch.

Robert Berkeley
Oh, wow.

Amy Strickland
area.

Robert Berkeley 12:00
So what what what objective did they give you apart from building a creative operations? What what what did it have to encompass? And how did you negotiate the budget for all of this,

Amy Strickland 12:09
I won't say we had no budget, but we had whatever we needed to get the thing up and running and make sure that the first task was people. So you know, what was the right personality type, you know, based on how the the hired team was evolving, very focused on balance and building this team.

Robert Berkeley 12:26
And that worked out did it as a strategy.

Amy Strickland 12:28
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It did. The vast majority of those folks are are still with me,

Robert Berkeley 12:34
and the How are they tasks divided then?

Amy Strickland 12:37
So it's over there on a variety of levels, from producer, to senior producer to creative operations manager, and essentially, they are all producing work. The beauty of building a balanced team is that we're able to juggle the work that comes in, and any one of the folks on the team can can handle those business owners and and those decisions.

Robert Berkeley 13:00
They it's sounds to me like you're aiming to give the individuals in the team some autonomy.

Amy Strickland 13:05
Oh, absolutely. We don't have an account management function, or client management or service function. So they act as client service as well as producer, trafficker, project manager, cat Wrangler.

Robert Berkeley 13:21
Okay, so the so the work comes from marketing. The work

Amy Strickland 13:25
The work comes from a number of places we have a omni channel marketing team, which handles we have a digital marketing team, we have a module

Robert Berkeley 13:35
located in the same building, and

Amy Strickland 13:37
most we do, we do have some stakeholders and business partners in in the home office in Bentonville. Most of the merchant organisations are there. We also service the site merchandising team, oh, that the the membership team, you know, Sam's is a membership organisation. So that's how we make our money. So there's a team that markets memberships acquisitions,

Robert Berkeley 14:00
oObviously think of Bentonville when you think of Walmart, you're in San Francisco, how do you how do you communicate? Is it are you doing a lot of video conferences and stuff like that? Or is it just a lot of plane travel or just phone? How do you get day to day?

Amy Strickland 14:13
A little bit of both? I would say you know, like anywhere our primary way is is email. We do have you know, internal instant messaging. But not everyone uses that so it's it's more reliable to email and see see the world and make sure you captured everybody.

Robert Berkeley 14:30
Yeah, anyway, you must have been doing something right. You created you set up a creative operations. Did anyone mentor you for this? Or did you just kind of figure this out as you went along?

Amy Strickland 14:40
I figured it out largely. I I largely figured it out on my own. I did have a counterpart on the walmart.com side and certainly I learned a lot from her, particularly about how to operate in in Walmart.

Robert Berkeley 14:54
Do Did you you find yourself taking some wrong turns and having to back out or is it pretty pretty seamless?

Amy Strickland 15:00
I wouldn't say it was seamless, but I can't think of anything I entirely had to back out of, you know, there, there are some things I might have done differently. And particularly in terms of the way we rolled out tools, it's very hard to get tools at Walmart because of data security and and hosting issues. So I made a choice to go with something that was readily available and didn't cost me anything and was already approved by the organisation. And

Robert Berkeley 15:30
they obviously asked you to take on marketing operations. That was creative operations. Now you also marketing operations and creative operations, right? Yeah,

Amy Strickland 15:37
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I've been doing this, this additional piece for just over a year. And by poacher

Robert Berkeley 15:44
Poacher and gamekeeper at the same time, it does,

Amy Strickland 15:46
It does it's an interesting position to be in. I mean, sometimes I'll be honest, my two teams are in conflict with each other, right is the nature of that beast. You know, I sit in

Robert Berkeley 15:57
You sit in a very, very big chair between them. And just when there's when there's a lot of noise and tell them all to be quiet, and they try to,

Amy Strickland 16:05
I try to disappear and let them figure it out.

Robert Berkeley 16:09
Is that smart management or cowardice? I'm not quite sure.

Amy Strickland 16:12
I like to think it's smart. I trust their judgement. So I have faith that they'll come to the right conclusion without me most of the time.

Robert Berkeley 16:20
So is marketing operations at Sam's Club, that's something that you had to create, or was it already there,

Amy Strickland 16:26
it was not there at the time, either. And it is marketing operations in the process sense not in the demand generation sense,

Robert Berkeley 16:35
mMarketing operations was there to do some back office management for the creative operations. And to assist marketing,

Amy Strickland 16:41
I would call it more of a handoff. So the marketing operations team largely handles the upstream parts of the marketing process, working with marketers to get briefs into a state where they can be reviewed by our executive,

Robert Berkeley 16:56
that's kind of account management that as you said earlier, you don't have account management. But that seems to be an account management type role doesn't it interfacing,

Amy Strickland 17:03
it's more like a help desk role, right? They don't have accountability for the quality of those briefs. They have accountability for making sure that they get to the places in time that they need to be in order for the creative ops team to execute them.

Robert Berkeley 17:21
wWhen we met, not in March. But in May, you were giving a talk a very interesting talk about metrics in marketing, operations and creative operations. So we've been through your career and you've been at Sam's Club for four years, but you clearly have a passion for the numbers. And I'm curious where that came from, and and why you have such a passion for the numbers.

Amy Strickland 17:47
Every once in a while, you're going to be asked to justify your existence and the existence of your team. So I started real fast to love the numbers and learn what I could tell from them, and how I could use them to communicate value and and volume of work out the coming out of those teams. So that was a real deep dive., Ffor me.

Robert Berkeley 18:10
I know with numbers, we did this ourselves that eExpress KCS. Once you start to present numbers, and you present dashboards of numbers, the immediate effect is to make you ask more questions, indeed. Did it just evolve for you?

Amy Strickland 18:23
Absolutely. One of the first things I did when I came to Sam's was put a metrics programme in place with by any means necessary, I might call it. And that is what the talk was about that you're referring to. I started figuring out ways to to count things because I knew that question was going to come up sooner or later. So I hacked a lot of ways to to get to a metrics programme,

Robert Berkeley 18:46
while well the you were very generous in your talk and sharing a lot of what you learned. And I reducing to remember, I think one of the questions that came up was how do you have creative people on the one hand, and you have numbers and metrics and reporting and analysis on the other? Because they're not natural bedfellows?, Amy?

Amy Strickland 19:05
No, they're not. And I think you know, that's one of the places that I have a really hard time hiring for, right? You're looking for a needle in a haystack when you're looking for someone who can understand and work in a creative environment, but also be a numbers and a tools geek to a certain extent. So that's the hardest role I I ever have to fill in what I do. And you know, for that reason, I did a lot of that work myself,

Robert Berkeley 19:33
but you're not doing it. I mean, presumably you're institutionalising this this by the numbers approach, right? They see these numbers. They're expected to report the numbers. They talk about the numbers with you and others, I presume. So. I would guess that if you're leading it and do you have this strong insight and belief in metrics and measurement as a way of solving problems, or at least finding problems and then looking for solutions, I presume you institutionalise this with the people work better, don't you?

Amy Strickland 20:01
I do to a certain extent, I would say on the creative operation side. So I hold them very tightly accountable to making sure that in the tools that we use, whether they be manual or our new automated tools that everything they're doing is recorded and is is correct in those systems so that the output on the other side is also accurate.

Robert Berkeley 20:24
Right, right. And if you would, just to be allowed to have three numbers that you could measure your your business and operations by, which numbers would those be?

Amy Strickland 20:32
That's a great one. I'm not sure I know the answer to that yet. Robert, I count a lot of things. And I sometimes don't know what I'm going to use them for, until a question comes up that my data will allow me to answer the most important numbers that we used last year, we're building out a resource and capacity plan that gave us very good insight into what we were capable of what we were actually outputting. And what, so

Robert Berkeley 21:00
So, this would help your operations manage expectations, I presume with with their clients with marketers,

Amy Strickland 21:06
right? That's exactly right.

Robert Berkeley 21:08
So no one reasonable expectations, at least when the unreasonable expectation comes in, you know, immediately it's unreasonable, rather than accepting it and working on it, and then suddenly realising it's you can predict what what capability you have?

Amy Strickland 21:19
Yeah, that was one of the first things I did when I took over the marketing operations function, because I realised we didn't know how to answer the question. Can you do it?

Robert Berkeley 21:27
Yeah, absolutely. So, um, what else?, then would you say, if you're really going to be starting to get into the numbers and start doing this? Talking about capacity is one thing, what else would you would you urge people to look at as a good place to start?

Amy Strickland 21:40
Well, volume is the easiest one, right? And that relates to capacity, we would love to get to a place where we can measure the quality of the output. And we're starting to do that and experimenting with AB testing online and in emails. And that's sort of the holy grail, as I see it., and everything in between, it really depends on what problems your organisation has, or what your executives are asking you to do or challenging you on?

Robert Berkeley 22:09
Yeah, I think actually, you've just made a strong case for the for in house agencies there as well, because you have access to everything from soup to nuts there, you can actually see how adjusting something at an early stage in the process can affect something right at the end of the process in terms of perhaps click throughs or, you know, activity online, that you simply wouldn't necessarily be able to piece together if you if you're working with external agencies along the way as well, like,

Amy Strickland 22:34
yeah, that's absolutely right. One of our big initiatives this year is to build out a, I guess I'll call it knowledge management function on my team, which is when we for instance, when we write a brief when the marketers write a brief and we do all the work on the creative and they say this programme was intended to drive this much revenue or this much traffic, we are building in discipline on going back and looking at did we actually do that? And that's a fairly new muscle for us. And I'm pretty sure we're not alone in that.

Robert Berkeley 23:04
Okay. So by the way, the presentation you gave at Henry Stewart, is that available online? Is that?

23:09
I believe

Amy Strickland 23:10
I believe it is I don't know the URL, but I did make it available to Henry Stewart. Yes.

 

Robert Berkeley 23:14
Okay. If we find it online, I'll make sure we've got a link to it in the show notes inside jobs podcast.org or actually in the show notes itself. So you mentioned earlier Of course, that sometimes there's a bit of conflict between marketing operations and creative operations and you you like to disappear at those points. Very, very, very politic move. I think, Amy, where do you Where do you disappear to when you can? Well, I

Amy Strickland 23:35
Well, I work from home when I can. It's not very often but I love to be here in my house reading or cooking or entertaining my dog.

Robert Berkeley 23:45
Okay, and but you do like to travel afar for snacks.

Amy Strickland 23:48
I do. I do. My husband and I have started a bad habit, I guess or good habit depending of travelling to go to specific restaurants. We went to Mexico City to go to a place called Beco, we went to Oslo to go to a place called my mo and I would say the most extreme adventure was to a place called favi can in northern Sweden. Last summer.

Robert Berkeley 24:15
Wow. Well, okay, so we'll make sure that that's on my bucket list now. Amy?

Amy Strickland
Great.

Robert Berkeley
And you mentioned reading as well. What are you reading at the moment?

Amy Strickland 24:24
I'm just starting sticky fingers, which is a biography of Yon winner, the publisher of Rolling Stone.

Robert Berkeley 24:31
Oh, yeah, that's right. It's only just come out. Yeah, he This is his unauthorised one.

Amy Strickland 24:35
Yeah, so I'm looking forward to digging the dirt on that one.

Robert Berkeley 24:39
But if people want to talk to you about the way you approach metrics and so on, and they they don't get to a Henry Stewart conference or the I have IHAF conference. How can they get in contact with you, Amy?

Amy Strickland 24:49
Oh, absolutely. I had many people reach out after that. And I'm happy to to answer questions and discuss anything of interest. You can reach me on LinkedIn. Just hit me up there or You can email me at Amy dot Strickland at Sam's Club Comm. Amy.strickland@sam’sclub.com.

Robert Berkeley 25:04
Right, thank you very much, Amy. I'm not surprised people wanted to get in touch with you after that. And it was it was a great presentation very informative. And I circulated it to my team indeed, as well at Express KCS. So Amy, thank you very much for your time, and it's been a huge pleasure talking to you.

Amy Strickland 25:20
Yes. Thanks, Robert. I've really enjoyed it.