As the first chief marketing officer of Rocket Cos., the Detroit-based entity that owns Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Homes and Rocket Loans, Jonathan Mildenhall has a clear priority: unify the marketing voice of all the Rocket brands.
Podcast: Marketer's Brief
Jonathan Mildenhall’s Rocket marketing agenda—and why the company is sitting out the Super Bowl
New CMO breaks down his priorities and offers Big Game advice
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Rocket Cos. has a new CMO and set of priorities.
Credit:
Rocket Companies
Hired earlier this month, the marketing veteran, who has had high-profile brand marketing gigs at Airbnb and Coca-Cola, said he is up to the task. As group CMO, Mildenhall plans to “help create strategic and marketing sense of the diverse bunch of companies and services under Rocket,” he said, speaking on the latest episode of Ad Age's Marketer’s Brief podcast. “And that means that I have to create, with my team, a new, unique and distinct marketing playbook for Rocket Companies at large,” he added.
He plans to use his past brand experience to create a new marketing playbook at Rocket to make it one of the most “culturally significant” brands in North America. That means consolidating and integrating all brand teams into one marketing and communications unit over the next several months. Mildenhall also plans to dig into how the teams run strategic workflows and creative ideation along with their go-to-market plans.
Jonathan Mildenhall has worked on 11 Super Bowl spots.
As he researches, plans and prioritizes, Rocket will sit the Super Bowl out this year, despite being a regular advertiser in previous years, including winning the coveted USA Today Ad Meter in 2021 and 2022 with ads from Highdive. But this marks the second straight year Rocket has bypassed the game.
“I value what the Super Bowl represents, but we’re not ready to be in the Super Bowl this year because, candidly speaking, we haven’t done the work to define the strategic idea for the brand and ultimately the creative idea for the brand,” Mildenhall said. “We’re skipping this year and we might be back next year.”
Read more: New and returning brands in Super Bowl 2024
The CMO has worked on 11 different Super Bowl ads, including Coca-Cola’s famous “America Is Beautiful” campaign, in his decades-long career. Yet there is more to a 30-second, $7 million TV spot in the Big Game than most consumers are aware of, and brands need to plan their goals before they invest, he noted.
“The brands who approach Super Bowl with the mindset that they need to entertain America are the brands that get the least value in return,” Mildenhall said. He advised that the most successful Super Bowl advertisers pursue a certain philosophy.
“They’re ensuring that the idea and the conversation can be so liquid that it engages in many, many different subsets of their communities, but they will always remain completely linked to the bigger idea of the brand,” he said.
On the podcast, Mildenhall also discusses AI and his predictions for marketing in 2024.
