STARTING OUT
“I really came into the workforce in 1999, and that was when connectivity and the internet and the Googles of the world having websites was starting to become something that happened at scale,” says Melissa Bannon, currently LG’s Sr. Director of Customer Experience and Direct to Consumer Sales
“I had a degree in creative writing and I got a job at a small advertising agency as a research assistant, and that agency made TV commercials and one of their clients asked them to make a website,” says Bannon of the first hints of the journey into the digital realm that would make up the rest of her career so far. “And none of the writers or creative people wanted to work on that website because they’re like ‘What’s this boring internet thing? It’s never going to go anywhere.’”
Needless to say, Bannon was happy to work on the website, and it was that choice – something nobody else wanted to do – that began to inspire her future.
“From there, I went on to work in very digital-first types of agencies. And of course, that bubble burst around 2002.”
THE PAPER OF RECORD
From there, Bannon took a job at The New York Times, where she worked for four years. And sure enough, because they knew of her work on that nascent website, Bannon ended up the go-to person whenever anything technical came up.
“I operated the first streaming camera inside of the New York Times newsroom,” she tells us. “The New York Times actually switched from DOS to a Windows based editing system, which nobody in the company wanted to have happen. I was part of the task force that rolled that out and helped explain to everybody why those choices were good choices.”
After that – sometime around Google’s 2005 IPO – Bannon knew the time was right for her to dive headfirst into tech and advertising. She moved to RGA, one of the country’s top digital advertising agencies.
“And then my career really progressed from being a copywriter into a person who people say, ‘Hey, this person knows something about digital content strategy.’ I have always been a person willing to work inside of an organization to help manifest change?” she says. “So I moved into content strategy, and really content strategy is much more than people think. It’s really the taxonomy and understanding where content is stored in massive enterprise-based systems.”
This is what Bannon says she’s done since she started her career: helping a company understand how to go from a very small microsite into a very complex system.
“In 2010, I was working on a website was a U. S launch for a multinational company as part of a digital innovation team. That’s around the point when technology really started to ramp up, because it was the rise of mobile and smartphones,” she Bannon remembers. “And all of a sudden it wasn’t just good enough to use technology or think about digital as a tool to be innovative. It has to be innovative in service of something.”
It’s at this point that manufacturing companies like LG begin to understand that the digital properties they were building were themselves products. Facebook had introduced the “Like” button, proving inescapably how technology was influencing consumer behavior.
“This was accompanied the rise of the citizen journalist, when all of a sudden, anybody could take a picture, anybody could start to comment on what they see on the street,” Bannon says.
The disruption didn’t stop with journalism. Tourism was rapidly changed soon, among other industries.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
“So I’m moving from digital disruption into digital transformations at this point, “she says. “And I know there’s a lot of people who don’t like the term digital transformation. But I actually prefer that term compared to innovation or disruption because it is about being transformative. That way, you’re talking about a goal or an end. You’re taking something that exists and looking at it in a new way and transforming it into something that is better.”
The desire to better service customers is driven these days by personal information data gathered from website customers – a part of the way the world works now that many harbor often baseless suspicion on. It is, after all, at attempt to refine the process of advertising for both business and customer.
“Yes, there’s a lot of cynicism out there about what companies do with that personal information,” Bannon says. “But you actually use that personal information to better understand your customers and learn about what their behaviors. And my case, it helps us help them shop on our website, right?”
Bannon was recruited to LG based on past experience by Chris Hong, current LG Chief Digital Officer, with whom she had worked “back when it was still called digital innovation,” she jokes. But it’s no joke that the heart and soul of what digital transformation is really is a continuation of what makes digital innovation so wonderful.
“We often talk about how we are on the same mission and on the same path that we were in 2010, “ she says. “We just have better tools and we have better talent and more of that talent in order to better accomplish these goals.”
Bannon’s first mission at LG was helping to build out the digital transformation team that she now heads.
“Transformation is being innovative at scale. I’m not by nature a disruptive person,” she says. “The great thing about transformation is that it’s something that you can get real scale on because in order to do it, from a technical standpoint, you’re really just connecting systems. And you’re creating these back-end systems that enable a lot of information to flow to your end customers that is relevant to them and meaningful to them.”
HOW THE CONSUMER BENEFITS
Bannon says that the customers at the end of the process will benefit from LG’s attempt at lending a sense of humanness to the online shopping algorithm storm popularized by companies like Amazon.
“We talk about this concept of welcome home and making sure that we are very welcoming to all of our customers, and that we prepare them to welcome the products into their houses. And it just so happens that worked really during COVID because everybody was at home,” she says. “But it’s actually something that we really believe in whether it was during COVID or not.”
“We have a concept here and it’s called OX,” Bannon says. “There’s CX and then there’s also OX, which is really about the ownership experience and it’s really starting to be able to pull together that sales experience into that ownership experience, right at the point of sale and preparing folks for what’s to come. I think that that is exciting.”
CANDIDATES
“We are a team of subject matter experts. So I have content strategists, information architects, business analysts, and UX designers on my team. I just interviewed somebody for a logistics role on the team today,” Bannon says of the kind of people that LG attracts and needs.
As far as any other intangibles that might exist for Bannon when hiring for her team, she says she has an approach she uses to determine whether a candidate is of a certain valued personality type.
“I feel like if I can find somebody who might be a little bit junior, but is really hungry for the role and willing to do the work to grow into it and grow with us and be ready to change, that’s going to be a really good fit for this team,” she says. “That is definitely the differentiator. LG is incredibly loyal to its employees. There are many people who have worked here for a very long time and it is a great path. And If you’re a person who likes large organizations and wants to learn how to navigate those and wants to work with people from other countries, you can’t beat this.”
