How to Create Inclusive Content Online to Drive Action Offline

Hi, guys. Hi, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Madison Utendahl. I'm head of content and social at museum of ice cream. And I'm here to talk to you guys today about driving action, specifically ticket sales through online content. But before we begin, and I do this with every single presentation I've ever given, I like to ask questions to my audience. So you can just raise your hand if the question applies to you. It's not a therapy session. Not going to ask you anything about your family. I just want to get to know you a little bit better. All right, three questions. Please raise your hand if the following applies. Is ice cream or would you consider ice cream to be your favorite food? How many of you. Ah, we got a lot of ice cream lovers in here. Okay, how many of you eat ice cream once a week? Okay, what about once a day? Come on, no one here eats ice cream once a day. I don't believe that at all. Oh, okay, there we go. We got one honest person in the room. How many of you know someone who says that their ice cream's number one fan? Right. They're convinced. This is a statement I get all the time. I have people come up to me and they're like, madison, let me tell you, I am ice cream's number one fan. And I've written down pretty much every time someone has said that. I'm at 107. Okay, that's a lot. That's a lot of people who say that they're the number one fan. Now, the reason I like to start my presentations this way is that all of us, or most of us in this room are strangers. Right? We assume that we're here for multiple reasons, but we don't actually know each other. But in this moment, as we all just saw with the amount of hands that were raised, a lot of us share a common interest. That's ice cream. Ice cream takes many different variations. We have tons of associations with it. But you are now connected to this person. You have a shared interest, and that's this food. So you guys just told me a bit about yourself. Now, I feel that I have a big secret and responsibility. I gotta tell you something about me, and if we could just keep this within this room. So I am not even just a little. I am severely lactose intolerant, like lactaid's number one client. You know, everyone's saying that, like, ice cream is ice cream's number one fan. I am lactaid's number one fan. Promise. And the reason I'm telling you this is that how is it possible that the person who's head of content and social at Museum of Ice Cream like myself, can't eat the product of the museum to which she works? How is that possible? Does that make any sense? Well, the reality is that ice cream means and is so much more than just a delicious treat. There are emotional qualities and sentiments that we all associate with ice cream autonomy. How many people remember the first time they were able to purchase ice cream from the ice cream truck by themselves? A lot of us. Right. I remember very clearly being in my kitchen table at like 8 years old and hearing the truck come by and looking at my mom in panic. And she was in the middle of doing something, was super busy. She pointed to the counter, I ran over, grabbed $3, ran outside, got to the truck, ordered my favorite, favorite popsicle, because again, lactose intolerant. But you know, ordered my favorite popsicle and stood there and realized, holy crap, I just bought something by myself. I did that alone. And that's an association that a lot of us have with ice cream. We also think about it as a source of love. How many of us have enjoyed ice cream with somebody we care about? Yeah, a lot of people. Comfort. So I eat a lot of vegan ice cream as a result of being lactose intolerant. Yes. And it's pretty damn good, especially coconut ones. And I went through a breakup about two and a half years ago and I ate so many full frickin pints. Okay. That was the best comfort food ever. It got me through heartbreak. Ice CREAM and Netflix BEST CURE Reward how many of us had a fall as a child, got up, were taken to an ice cream parlor? Some of us. What about when you won a game? Sports game, Right. Parents take you to an ice cream parlor? Or you know what, you just killed a presentation at work, you've been dieting. Screw the diet. You go out, you reward yourself, you get that ice cream. Right? And last but not least, many of us associate ice cream with nostalgia. We think about ice cream as having a connection to childhood. As an adult, there's very few opportunities and moments in our lives where we have no responsibilities. But when we think about childhood and we think about the moments that feel good, a lot of them involve ice cream. Ice cream is a universal language. There are interpretations and variations of ice cream. And everywhere in the world, it's also the same reason why you and you are able to communicate about a common interest after you leave this room. What's Your favorite flavor, right? What type of toppings do you like? Do you like Museum of Ice Cream pints or Ben and Jerry's? You know the answer, but I'm just going to give you guys that, you know. And so at Museum of Ice Cream, we use the emotional sentiments, the connections, the qualities that ice cream represents to create an experience. Most of you know Museum of Ice Cream as MOIC Museum of Ice Cream, but it also stands for movement of imagination and connection. Many of you know and associate Museum of Ice Cream as this a pink Instagrammable heaven for selfies, right? That's what you think, that's what you, you hear about it. You watch some sort of read some article, look at a post, get annoyed, scroll through, see your cousin, all of a sudden you're on your second grade teacher's best friend's boyfriend's page and they're at Museum of Ice Cream, right? And you're like, gosh, what is this? You might know that we opened our first location two years ago in New York City, followed by six months later opening in Los Angeles, San Francisco. If anyone's in the Bay Area, we're about to hit our one year anniversary. Thank you. That's because of you guys. Yeah, Miami. You may also know that we've had over a million people in two years come to Museum of Ice Cream. We've had a billion press impressions and 250 people have worked at Museum of Ice Cream. How, how have we been able to do this? One, it's the experiences. It's actually create an experience that makes you feel. And two, it's my job. My responsibility as head of content and social is to drive tickets, to drive action. And the way that we are able to sell out and have a million people come through our doors is through these three things. I call this the Museum of Ice Cream Content Bible. Every single piece of content and social that I put out on our channels has to hit one of these three things. The first one is reminding myself that and my team, that we create the rules. There has been nothing like Museum of Ice Cream before Museum of Ice Cream. All of us have unconventional paths. There's nothing in my history, which I'm about to go through and tell you guys a bit about that says from an outside perspective that I should be in this position. I'm 27 years old. Every single day is the biggest day of the biggest job I've ever had. So in order for me to be able to do this, I have to constantly remind myself and our team has to constantly remind each other that we have to create our own rules. Number two is we inspire through imagination and creativity. We utilize our spaces, we utilize installations of other incredible artists, and we utilize social as a means to inspire our audience. And last but not least, we believe in uplifting community. We drive ticket sales by these three things. An uplifting community, in my opinion, is the most valuable because we empower anyone and everyone who's come through Museum of Ice Cream. So whether you're a fabricator, to someone who's just visited, to somebody who's just stood on the outside and looked in, you're a part of this community. But I need to give you guys context as to who the hell I am. As of right now. I've told you about my dietary restrictions, which is like, not that it's somewhat informative, but there's a lot more to me. I would hope so, at least. I come from an unconventional background to do social media, marketing, and content. I am born and raised New Yorker. Is any born and raised New Yorkers in here? All right. Awesome. I'm a born and raised New Yorker, and I come from a family of New Yorkers. We are very, very. We're intense people, New Yorkers. Right. We feel so much. We're convinced we're the best, and we support each other. So much so that my dad's here today. He flew up just from New York. Yeah, that's that New York hustle, that New York blood. Supporting each other to the end. But what I learned about being a New Yorker, and one thing my dad always used to say to me is the best part about living in New York is that everyone's got a story, and somebody's got a story greater than yours. And that, to me, is awesome. That means there are tons of people every single day in New York who has a story to tell. And their story is going to be crazier and more complicated and exciting and thrilling than my story. And rather than looking at that as, like, a weakness or a foe, I think that is incredible energy. It's the way that I wake up in the morning because I believe that storytelling is the way that we all connect as people. So as a kid, I used to say, I want to be a storyteller. People would say, what the hell does that mean? All right, this girl, creative, whatever. They didn't know what I was talking about. And I actually didn't know what I was talking about either. But I was so inspired by the people I was around all the time and the culture of New York that I knew that storytelling and pursuing whatever storytelling meant would be my life goal. I ended up going to Brown University. Does anyone here go to Brown? Yes. Awesome. Great. So I went to Brown University, and it's at Brown that I learned in that you could turn storytelling into an actual profession. At Brown, I studied film and art history. I learned about incredible filmmakers and artists who took stories and passions and things that they loved and created brilliant work that have inspired a lot of us. And when I graduated from Brown, I knew I wanted to go into film and video. I knew I wanted to use film and video as a medium to tell stories that would impact the world. And I got a job of a lifetime working for this guy. When I got the job to work as an assistant on at the time was called the John Oliver Show, I had no idea what I was signing up for. John had just gotten a contract with hbo, and when I sat down to interview with him, he said, so I have no idea what I'm doing. Do you want to come and join me? And I was like, I guess. I don't know. Sure. You're pretty funny. You seem like you're a good storyteller. I saw his stand up when he was a correspondent on the Daily show, and I just knew I wanted to work for hbo. I would have done anything to work for hbo. So I said, yeah. And working for John changed my life. John taught me two things. He taught me that people are inherently curious, that as human beings, we have an innate desire to learn. And he also taught me that people always want to feel good. And if you combine the two, that's a recipe for people to digest and understand anything you put in front of them. After a couple seasons at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, I got a job working for this amazing woman. This is Pierre Gilardi. She's the executive creative director and co founder of Refinery 29. And I was her right hand. She taught me so much about what it meant to tell a good story. And for anyone here who doesn't know what Refinery 29 is, it's a multimedia platform catering to women. And they tell brilliant, brilliant stories that empower women every single day. What Piera taught me about good storytelling is that there needs to be a cohesive brand identity and brand mission. She always used to say that. She used to want to look and see a piece of Refinery29 content anywhere in the world and know it was Refinery29 without a logo on it. In order to be able to do that, that meant that every single piece of content had to have A strong mission and to tie back to the goal of Refinery and have a cohesive color identity. It was at Refinery 29 that I started to craft my own stories. I became a producer. I created two shows. One called Last Week, Not Last Week, Tonight. One called, yeah, okay, I'm the creator of Last Week Tonight, Guys. One called Smart Sips, which is a show where I interviewed everyone from Rosie Rios to Nate Berkus to Martha Hunt to Marcus Samuelson about things that people didn't ask them, Right? They had these careers. They had the professions. For example, Martha Hunt. Most people know her as a Victoria's Secret supermodel. Most people don't know her that she has an organization dedicated to scoliosis and goes to Congress multiple times a year to fight for it. Nate Berkus is another incredible interior designer. Many of you might know him from the Oprah Show. Most people don't know anything about the fact that Nate Berkus is a survivor of the student tsunami in 2001 and how that's impacted his life. After my time at Refinery 29. Well, I should say during my time at Refinery 29, I was sitting at my desk one day crafting an episode for a show, and I got a call. I got a call from my friend at the time named Mary Ellis Bunn, who's still my friend, but Mary Ellis Bunn, as many of you know, is the founder of Museum of Ice Cream. And she called me and she goes, matt, what are you doing? I said, I'm sitting at my desk. What do you mean? I'm doing what I do every day. She goes, I quit my job. And I go, you know the whole shtick that we all tell our friends when they quit their jobs? Oh, man, I'm here for you. Go, girl. Pursue your dreams. You got this right? Move. Yes, right. Well, we tell our friends because we do believe that genuinely, if you care about them, you actually want those things. She goes, yeah, no. So I'm going to. I'm going to start this thing, and I really want to know if you wanted to join me. I go, okay, sure. What is it? She goes, I'm going to start a museum, and it's going to be dedicated to ice cream. And I go, I verbatim said, are you on crack? And she goes, I'm like, I think you're a little delusional because you quit your job. Emotions are high. I feel you, girl. Just chill. Figure it out. Call me later. Let's meet after work for a drink. She goes, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, you don't understand. I've never been more certain about anything in my entire life. I go, okay, great. I'm happy for you. Go for it. She goes, no, I don't have that much time. I'm calling you for a reason. I said, okay, what is it? She goes, I want you to tell stories. I want you to own the narrative on social about this museum. I laughed. I said, okay, you really, I don't know. Call me later, girl. You're really losing it. She goes, no, no, no, no. You're the best storyteller I know. And right now I just have an idea. And all I know is that ice cream means these things to people, but I don't know how to tell this story. Are you up for this challenge or not? I sat there and I was like, I'm lactose intolerant. What are you talking about? I literally. You called the wrong person. Check your phone. Are you sure you're meant to be calling me? And she goes, it's fine. You know what? Don't worry about it. If you're not into it, I'll figure somebody else. I just thought you loved to take on challenges. I thought of my dad, man. What he taught me, what he teaches me every single day, is that you take a challenge and you look at it as an opportunity. And you always support your friends, always there for you. You should be there for them. So that night I got home and I called Mary Ellis back and I said, you know what? God damn it, I'm going to help you do this, okay? I've got a full time job and you have to bear with me. My schedule's gonna be really crazy, but just bear with me. I'm gonna figure it out. So I decided I had to create my own rules. I had nothing that told me how to do this. Not a social media manager, did not go to business school, not a marketer. I'm a video producer. I'm a writer. I'm a storyteller. I had to pave my own path. So what I started to do is I started to take the things that John and Piera told me. I took what John said, educate and inform people are inherently curious. I took what Piero told me. Brand mission, brand identity, color cohesion. Everyone should know this is a Refinery29 piece of content because of the colors and the style guide. And I took what both John and Piera taught me. You empower the creative work of others. Refinery 29 is not a solo project. Last week. Tonight is not a solo project. This is what the first couple posts that I did for Museum of Ice Cream looked like. If you look at the far this one with three ice cream cones or three ice cream scoops, I started to think, ok, what do people not know about ice cream? How do I educate and inform? What are cool colors that look cohesive? Who are the artists that are making work right now related to ice cream? That's how this happened. For example, did you know that Elvis Presley's last meal was three scoops of vanilla ice cream? Don't even pretend none of you knew that, okay? None of you knew that. I sure as hell did not know that. And then the feed looked like this. This is what our first couple weeks in Museum of Ice Cream looked like. This was me sitting at my desk as a producer at Refinery29, crafting this story, taking what John told me, taking what Piera told me, thinking about my dad, my family, my mom, New York Brown, everything. Bam. That's it. And before we knew it, we had sold out without a single actual image of our experience because we created our own rules. I didn't have a path that said I should be doing this, and I followed my gut. The second rule for content at Museum of Ice Cream is to inspire through imagination, creativity. How many of you have been to Museum of Ice Cream? Okay? How many of you have seen a post about Museum of Ice Cream that's like, yeah, that's what I'm talking about. So we inspire through imagination and creativity. After a couple months into doing posts about facts and colors, one, I realized I could be a part of the National Dairy association with the amount of knowledge I have on ice cream. Too much. Ask me any question. I got you. I can tell you anything about ice cream, but that people need more. You couldn't just have an experience that didn't show images of the experience. We couldn't just talk about facts about ice cream. I kept thinking to myself, ice cream means so much more to people. There's so much connection involved in ice cream. We all just realized we learned something about each other because of that. So I said to myself, we got to start posting content that inspires and uplifts and uses imagination and creativity in order to do so. These are the three tenets under this rule for inspire through imagination and creativity. We make sure that we use inspiration, motivation and aspiration to create content. Inspiration. We talk about spaces and places and commission artwork from people to showcase that if you put your mind to anything, it can all look a lot brighter. Motivations. We showcase the work of other installation artists and creators who are making projects in this world that are also fostering the same sentiments as Museum of Ice Cream. And last but not least, we push out our own content and our own experiences. We showcase that Museum of Ice Cream is an accessible, achievable, aspirational place that you can actually attend. Here are three posts that we did at Museum of Ice Cream that speak to these three things. This first one I'll get into in a bit. The second one ties into motivation. This is Seven Magic Mountains, which is an art installation in Las Vegas by Ugo Rondin. You can go and look at it and see it yourself today. Who says that we should only showcase what we do? The only reason we're able to do what we do is because there's a community of other people doing something very similar, creating spaces to inspire. And last but not least, we showcase our own spaces. We showcase the power of creating achievable and accessible spaces that have depth and substance. You might know about this Rainbow Room in Museum of Ice Room San Francisco. It's a unicorns rainbow, but did you know that those unicorns are named after Harvey Milk and Gloria Steinem? That when you walk in, our amazing Team NYC guides tell you the history of these incredible public figures and speak to how this is our homage to San Francisco space and a place that is about equality, depth, substance. Here's an example of how we use inspiration. This is the exterior of Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco. And this is an incredible rendition that we commissioned by an artist named Ramsey Masri, who on Instagram is Space Ram. What I love about Ramsey's work is he takes buildings like this, which to some of us is an incredible structure, right? Some of us have had the privilege of being able to look at this and say, okay, this is influenced by Greek and Roman art, has ancient qualities to it. That is a very educated way to look at that building. A lot of people also look at this building and think, great building, cool columns, whatever. Depends on your perspective. But what Ramsey does is he shows us, no matter how you look at this building, whether you're inspired as it as is or. Or if you think about it in a different way, that anything, depending on how you choose to look at it, can be vibrant and fun. So again, this is content that we push out. This is commission content that speaks to imagination, it speaks to creativity, and it speaks to Museum of Ice Cream. The third tenet of our Commandment Bible is uplift the community. Now at Museum of Ice Cream, we are A team of 12, our senior team, and we're all under the age of 30. Every single day, we have no idea what we're doing. It's just a fact. Every single day. But that's insanely exciting. And we can either play to these strengths of not knowing what we're doing and looking at it as a positive, or we can say it's a weakness. We're not backed by some big conglomerate, we're privately owned. And there's so much that we learn every single day just by waking up and showing up. But the reality is this whole experience, Museum of Ice Cream exists because of the community that has believed in this dream and has believed in all of us. We're not unaware of the fact that we're young. We're not unaware that we do things wrong. But rather than saying, gosh, let's just be cookie cutter imperfect, we like to show those things. We like to show that we're humans and that we are figuring it out. So the tenets underneath Uplift community are self expression, individuality and accessibility. Self expression. We will do pieces of content that are dedicated to our team members who utilize makeup and accessories to showcase who they are. And we show how at Museum of Ice Cream, yes, you have a uniform if you work as a guide, but you can add whatever you want to your uniform to make you feel great. Individuality. We showcase our behind the scenes. We showcase paint chipping off the walls, we showcase scaffolding. We showcase the people that build our spaces. And because we are not trying to be perfect, we are trying to be real because ice cream has real emotional qualities. And last but not least, accessibility. We like to showcase stories about people who come through our spaces, who've had an amazing experience, who've been able to understand the sentiment of what we're trying to do. And we believe that their words stand alone and are powerful. Self expression. This is Team MOIC. We have had 250 people, as I said earlier, work for Museum of Ice Cream. Everyone in this team is a disruptor, a creative journalist, bankers people. We've had mothers who have, who are stay at home moms who when their kids are at school, work at Museum of Ice Cream because they just want to do something fun and different. There is no cookie cutter person who works at Museum of Ice Cream. There's no one person that fits the mold. I have tattoos, I have a nose ring, I don't wear pink and I'm lactose intolerant. Okay. Like everything on the exterior would say that I'm not right for this. But that's a misconception. It's a massive misconception. And in order to tell these stories, to showcase that Museum of Ice Cream, as a team of diverse and eclectic people, we showcase content about the things that make them unique. This is a young man named Alex. He works for Museum of Ice Cream San Francisco. And every single day, he adds pins and makeup to his uniform. And he finds that every single day, people come up to him and they say that they have that pin, that they connect with him because of his ability to express himself in his uniform. And rather than shy away from that and say, we don't want you to have your individuality. We don't really want you to add this flair to uniform because it won't look cohesive. We let it rock. And every single day, Alex comes in with a new look. And once a month, we showcase members of our team. More than once a month, members of our team are social, and the response is incredible. People feel. It leads to people coming to our open calls. It leads to people applying for their jobs because they feel that human quality in the people that work for our team. Individuality. We showcase the behind the scenes that grit the hard work that goes into Museum of Ice Cream. When we were in San Francisco, there was a. There's a swing for those of you who've been in San Francisco, a yellow swing. And one night, our contractor wasn't feeling well, so he left early. And Mary Alice turned to me and was like, okay, you gotta put up the swing. I was like, what? What do you mean? Are you crazy? At this point, the things that she say just goes off my head. I'm like, whatever, I'll do it right. She's a genius. And so I spent the night setting up this swing, and I thought for a long time, like, oh, my gosh, this is taking me so long. I'm not cut out to do this. Gosh, this is tough. Then I decided, you know what? Why don't we start showing these moments? Why don't we start showing people that things are difficult at times when you're in production or that it's just not always an easy path to get to the final product? And so we started to showcase the stories of people who work behind the scenes at Museum of Ice Cream. The contractors, the fabricators, the lighting guys. And what we saw was an incredible response from our audience. They felt that we were real. So, again, this is uplifting the community by showing real people, real experiences and real journeys. Last but not least is accessibility. We believe it's so incredibly important to showcase our users and what they do or our audience and the experiences and stories that they've had coming to Museum of Ice Cream. Museum of Ice Cream does not exist if no one comes to Museum of Ice Cream, so why wouldn't we showcase what they have to say? Here's a couple that came to Los Angeles and she sent me this post on our Instagram account saying that it was a reminder of when she and her partner first started dating. They hadn't felt that way in so long because they were just doing something different. They were bonding over a unique experience that neither of them had had the opportunity to have before. And with that discomfort of doing something different, they connected even deeper. We showcased her story and got over 10,000 likes. This is one of my favorite stories. A young woman sent us a story about how she came to Museum of Ice Cream with her grandmother and how her grandmother was having a really difficult time prior to their arrival at the museum. And she questioned whether or not it was a good idea for her to come to the Museum of Ice Cream with her grandmother. And she was so wrong. She said when she went through that she witnessed an 89 year old woman exactly where she needed to be. And she thanked us for creating a space that was fun and inspiring for everybody to channel their inner child. And this is a story we posted just as this, just her words, nothing else. Those are the three rules for Museum of Ice Cream's content and social we challenge convention. We don't do things by the book. One, because I don't have a traditional background in marketing and in social, it's impossible for me to think that way. And two, Mary Alice Bunn, the founder of Museum of Ice Cream, took a massive risk in building out this business. If she'd followed convention, she would still be exactly where she was before, sitting at a desk as a consultant. It would be absolutely miserable. But she took a massive leap of faith because she believed that ice cream was a vehicle and an opportunity to bring people together. At Museum Viceroy for Content and Social we create the rules. We pave our own path, we inspire through imagination and creativity, and we uplift through community. I get this question all the time about how to create, how to drive sales for this experiential economy that has popped up right. There seems to be a museum of this and a museum of that, and everyone wants to create the next Museum of ice cream or 29 rooms. The reality is that you can't build out experiences that are made to capture if you don't think about the content that needs to be created from that. What are the stories that you're going to take from going through an experience? The photo with just the emojis and creating something that's just pretty doesn't make an impact. What drives action offline? What drives ticket sales? What makes us sold out, had a million visitors and touched over a billion people through impressions is an online community. Are those three rules now? @ Museum of Ice Cream, our slogan is anything is possible. Because if Mary Ellis had followed the convention and stayed in the path that everyone had said she should have stayed in, the Museum of Ice Cream would not have existed. Every single day she built out experiences connected to this mission to unite the world through imagination and connection. We are an experience first brand. I can do what I do only because of the experience. And the experience was built because of the belief system that anything is possible for content and social. At Museum of Ice Cream, every single day is a challenge. And I can't say this enough. Every single day I am in the biggest day of the biggest job I've ever had and I never know what I'm doing. And it's fucking awesome. Because if you create your own rules and you think about stories last week, tonight exists because of storytelling. Refinery 29 exists because of storytelling. Ice cream brings people together. There are incredible stories and ice cream is just one vehicle. You can find a connection with almost anything if you strip it back and look at the emotional qualities that make people like something and understand why they like something. So next time you come to a Museum of Ice Cream or you see a picture and you think about riding it off as a pink Instagramal paradise, think about how you were connected to you by ice cream. I don't know about you guys, but there's nothing trivial about that. Thank you.