Amanda Gandolpho: Don’t Brief a Format, Brief a Feeling

Amanda, you've built your career around Unilever, Mondelez, DDB and Swapfiets, and now you're head of content and design at Rituals, one of the fastest growing premium wellness brands in the world with over a thousand stores globally. Can you take us through your journey? Well, when I was a little girl... no, but honestly, since I was a little girl, I really always wanted to do marketing and advertising even before I knew what that was, which is quite interesting, right? Because I was a seven-year-old person just going around trying to sell things to people out there. I would cut out magazines and try to sell them, like, "Hey, do you like this picture?" Very entrepreneurial. Very entrepreneurial. And after one hour doing that, my mom would be like, "OK," she would give them five euro or something. "But can you please buy something from this girl, because she's really into this." So I've always loved this idea that brands, people, we have a way that we are perceived in the world, our energy, what we say, what we do and how beautiful it is that you can use that to help people take decisions towards things that are better for them, better for the environment, better for the planet. And I've always also committed my whole career to only work for companies and brands that I believe are doing better for the world. So that's a commitment I've made from a very young age. And that's why you see companies like Unilever. I've worked for Dove in the self-esteem program. I've worked for Hellmann's in a food waste, or trying to get families to reduce food waste at home. Swapfiets, which I'm going to tell you all about, and our Rituals. And it was also a conscious decision from... I'm a very curious person. So I wanted to check how is life on the agency side, on the corporate side, more client side. After ten years in corporate, I decided I needed somewhere a bit, an environment that was a bit more entrepreneurial, fast-paced, also having more responsibility, because when you are in a corporate, regardless of your title, there's always a boss of the boss of the boss always deciding. And I was like, "Oh, I think I have enough experience now to be the boss." Yes. So that's why I moved to Swapfiets, where I stayed for four years, there, shaping the brand and the creative department. So cool. And, and more recently I moved to Rituals. Indeed. So I'm one month old. Yeah. So it's going to be a beautiful journey. I'm sure. I hope so. I hope so. And yeah, very excited. And I think what I love about Rituals is how indeed they have as their mission, as their purpose to bring out more moments of pause to people, which is something so, so necessary and very close to my heart. So, yeah, that's a bit. I have to say I adore Rituals and I have so many products in my house, and it's literally like my moment to... OK, it was a long day. I have to unwind. So let's do that. So I love it. Let me treat myself. Let me treat myself. I deserve it. So I absolutely love it. And exactly on that point, like Rituals has a very strong sensory, emotional brand identity, and it's built around transforming everyday routines into something meaningful, I just said. So what can video do that other formats simply cannot? Interesting to know that Rituals, one of the biggest drivers behind the growth, I think, besides the beautiful products and the beautiful brand that they've created, it's also the retail experience of Rituals. So they've grown a lot through that retail experience. I've heard from many people before I joined, they were like, "Oh, please go wash your hands in a Rituals store." I'm like, "OK." I didn't know this was a thing, but apparently it is. OK, I have to try it now. You have to go there. Try everything, the scrub, the foam, the whatever. So it's a beautiful brand experience, and I think it's also proof that this human connection within retail can also drive a lot of the growth. Surprisingly, and I said I'm one month old there, so I'm still learning exactly how they do brand currently and what are the pivots that we need to make for the future. Video, I believe, is a bit under-leveraged in Rituals. We use it, of course, especially to show the beautiful products, the textures, the moments of pause, but I haven't seen yet within the company a brand point-of-view video. Or a strong one. Of course they have it, maybe a reel of two, three minutes explaining their mission and stuff, but I've never seen a campaign yet where they, in a bold way, in a courageous way, communicate fully their purpose. I think it should come. There's room for that. So there's room for that. And the way me as marketing leader and shaping video in other companies, I think in Unilever and Swapfiets we've used video a lot. So I've done from Super Bowl until five-second scrappy organic social. We already understand that one of the best ways to connect and to indeed get people to identify themselves with you, to choose you eventually, is indeed via video. right? There's no better tool, I believe, besides the human face-to-face connection. Of course, that can never be substituted. Yeah, exactly. But at scale, to the scale that we need to really drive behavior change, it's really video. It's where you play with the layers of visual, of what you hear. And yeah, this has a higher impact in the brain as well. It's so interesting to hear about all the different things that you've experimented, that you've worked with. And having worked in so many different brand contexts, Yeah. what each of these experiences have taught you about how video fits into a brand's communication? It's so interesting because as a brand marketeer, I don't think about video, static, CGI. I don't think about production methods. I think about what are we trying to do here? What is the intent of the communication? What is the brand standing for? What is the feeling that we want people to resonate with? And then we want, at the end of the day, after they've seen all these pieces of content that we're putting out there, what is the feeling and the connection that I want them to get out of it? So I give you an example. When I arrived at Swapfiets, I started analyzing what's out there. I always like to see, OK, what people are seeing. Let me put myself in the shoes of consumers. And I realized that in the bike industry, there was a lot about freedom content. Oh, you're going to go on a bike and your hair is going to flow. And it's all this freedom thing. Go around all the city and whatever. And I was like, hmm, interesting, because all the bike brands are doing that. So how can we, and we're not a normal bike brand. We are a subscription-based company. We take away worries that other bike brands do not. So how might we communicate that? What is the feeling that we want people to feel? Is it freedom? I was like, no guys, it's not freedom. It's reassurance. We want to give people the reassurance that all the shit, excuse my French, that comes from biking, the repairs, the hassle, et cetera, that we take that away. So I was like, if this is a strategy and we're talking about this worry-free, how might we through all the pieces of content, including video, bring that worry-freeness to life, but from the reassurance perspective. So that's a bit the thinking process that I go through. And again, whether it's going to be static or video, there will always be a role for both. There will always be a role for longer form, short form, more emotional hooks, more commercial hooks. But I think understanding what you're trying to do as a whole. So the brand experience feels coherent. I think that is the very misunderstood or overlooked part by many marketeers. Absolutely. And while you're here at TwentyThree Summit, because you're taking part of a panel, right? This will be Video: the marketing leader's perspective, which is a conversation, right? About how senior marketeers think about video ownership, investment in different parts of the work with video. So I was going to ask about Rituals, but maybe you can explain that to the other companies that you worked, for example, at Swapfiets. What does video actually look like from an organizational point of view? Like, is there a dedicated team? Do you do it in-house? Do you work with externals that join when you have a specific project? How does it work? It really depends on the size of the company, of course. One trend of the past five years is moving from agencies to in-house creative teams. I've seen that happening a lot in Unilever. This definitely happened in Swapfiets, and in Rituals we do most of the things in-house. We do tap into external experts on video. For example, for Swapfiets, when we needed to do the biggest campaign of the year and I wanted a higher level of concept, production, etc., we tap into video outside. But for the day-to-day and most of the things, you really want to work with creatives that understand and even breathe the brand 24 hours, because it's just easier and everyone is talking about the same language. So the coherence feeling that I was talking about, it's easier to achieve. Of course, you could work with agencies on a retainer, that's also super valid. But I'm a big fan of teams that are together trying to achieve something, and not just hiring agencies left and right to, "Oh, hey, just do this video for me." Because every human being, to be the best creative they can be, they need to have context, they need to understand where. And this is not as fast to achieve, especially when you're touching on so many nuances with video content, right? Of course, consistency and context. It's, I think it's a bit easier in a static environment. Yeah, you have the logo, you have the pack shot, you have the whatever image that you're working with, taglines. And in video, each scene, each second is so precious. Yes. So you do want someone or a partner that understands that. So I would say it varies: in-house, external, and depends on the need. No, that makes sense. And I was also curious, is there any topic, any conversation or any approach to video that you think marketeers are missing, and you have been working on already, and you think it's a conversation that people are just missing out? Could be about formats or topics. In my time at Unilever, we used to work a lot with pre-testing, in-situation testing, post-testing. So I have seen from qual, quant, with AI, without AI, and it's not that I'm the biggest fan of testing, because a lot of marketeers use the test to push what they want down the throats of other people. I think this is something, human behavior, but it happens. So I'm like, you shouldn't hide behind your test. You should use the test to get to a better outcome, to something a bit more optimized. But I'm a huge fan of behavior science. So understanding how the brand works, how the brain works, how people make decisions. And I think that is a must for any marketeer to understand that before they start creating content. Yes. And also, I'm a big fan of understanding the emotional part of video. So whether we like it or not, it will always trigger some sort of emotion. It could be boredom, could be like, "I don't care at all about what you're telling me," but it triggers something, right? So I think we need to also be very mindful of the images that we're putting in front of people, the wording, the music, etc., because all of that together will generate the results. And we know that 70% of campaigns are really driven by the creative. So a lot of marketeers are also optimizing and optimizing for, you know, maybe the wrong metrics, and they are not looking back at the creative. Many marketeers also put creatives out there and never look at them again. Then they keep looking at the results or changing the strategy of the campaign, while sometimes it's a... yeah, it's a creative optimization that needs to happen. And when creatives are not hitting the points, or you're briefing your agency and the wrong thing keeps coming over and over again, or when you're having too many execution-focused discussions, like, "Oh, it should be green, it should be blue," man, go back to your strategy. Step back. Probably there was something either not very clear in the briefing, not very consolidated in your strategy. Because we should move, between marketeers and creatives, the discussion past the pure execution of the detail, and more on what are we trying to do, and then let's go together towards these objectives. It was so good. It makes perfect sense. My last question for you is, if you could say one thing for a person here at TwentyThree Summit 2026 that is about to go back to the organization and wants to push video forward, wants to work more with video, what would you say? Be courageous to take a stand. Video, if I think about different forms of communication, so you might be writing articles, you might be doing static pack shot images, etc., video requires the brand to show itself, or the founder, or the whatever. And if you're not courageous enough and you don't know what you stand, what is your tone of voice, what is the backbone of the brand, you're always going to be shying away from your full potential, and you're probably going to produce something a bit wallpaper, as I say it, right? That just doesn't cut through. So I think every person and every brand are unique, and we need to do more work as marketeers to understand what makes you unique. If, if the world... if your brand would go away, and it does, it would, yeah, your company would go bankrupt, would people miss you? So I think asking those questions within your company to get as an output better video and better results, I think this is a must. Diving back into the DNA, understanding that, right? And, and this applies for brands, for companies and for humans as well. I love it. Yeah, thank you so much, Amanda. Obrigada. It was great to have you. Obrigada. Double Brazilian, double Brazilian on set.