If one had followed Jesse Abrams on a walk through the halls of General Mills when he was the company’s digital marketing lead, they would have heard friendly calls of “Twitter!” and “Facebook!” coming from of the cubicles.
In his four years with General Mills, Abrams earned a reputation as the go-to digital expert, so much so that his co-workers took to calling him not by name, but by the social networks he helped oversee as part of the company’s marketing campaigns.
“They thought it was funny,” laughs Abrams, who also served as a digital consultant for the company’s U.K. and Australia offices and hosted 19 lunch and learns on topics such as SEO, social media and integrated marketing.
This digital acumen, paired with his understanding of the client perspective, earned Abrams, 28, a director of client services position at Engagement Labs this past June. At Engagement Labs, Abrams has been tasked with overseeing the sales team, bringing in new business and enhancing his team’s understanding of what clients like RBC, Cineplex and Google need.
Anthony Wolch, chief creative officer at Engagement Labs, says Abrams was everything the agency was looking for in a new director: he’s charismatic, excels with data and social media, and can straddle the line between agency creativity and marketer demands.
“He’s been on the other side of the table and he knows exactly what keeps clients up at night,” Wolch says. “He knows specifically what clients don’t want to see. He understands the narrative and how to build the narrative in a meaningful way for clients so you’re not blowing hot air in a room.”
Abrams got his start working as an account coordinator at Proximity Worldwide Canada, where he was promoted to account executive within his first year and worked on a slew of award winning projects including M&M’s “Find Red” campaign, which won three Cannes Lions in 2011.
Shortly after the festival he was head hunted by General Mills to take on a planner position and quickly worked his way up from associate marketing manager to digital marketing lead. Just four months into the role, he was charged with overseeing the company’s digital brand, Life Made Delicious – a lifestyle site that promotes General Mills products.
He grew the initiative’s social following by 300,000 and led a million dollar responsive redesign of the site. Partnering with Amazon and Walmart, he also introduced ecommerce. By selling directly from Life Made Delicious, Abrams helped General Mills see the direct sales impact of its investment in the site.
Abrams was a catalyst for change at General Mills. When he started at the company, its digital account was split across several agencies. Convinced the strategy wasn’t cohesive enough, he made the case to put out an RFP to find a single partner with strong digital prowess and sold the idea up the chain.
Approval wasn’t easy. For 19 years, Cossette handled the bulk of General Mills’ advertising and the focus had always been TV. Suddenly, a brash 24-year-old was waving the flag for change. After much debate, he got buy-in and led the RFP, with General Mills ultimately selecting Tribal Worldwide on a project basis.
Soon after adding Tribal to its agency roster, the company started launching big digital campaigns to great acclaim including Nature Valley’s “Field Trip,” which prompted a 23% jump over baseline sales, and Cheerios’ “The Cheerios Effect” and “How To Dad,” the latter of which started as a digital campaign, then went above the line and was picked up in the U.S. (All three helped General Mills land Marketing’s Marketer of the Year honour in 2014.)
