Behind the Scenes of my work at MasterClass for Zohran Mamdani's mother, Mira Nair

By now, many across the world know who Zohran Mamdani is - New York City's newly elected Mayor.

But just a portion of you may know his mother, Mira Nair, the award-winning filmmaker behind "Monsoon Wedding" and "Salaam Bombay!"

And even fewer of you may know that she teaches Filmmaking on MasterClass, a brand I consulted for when I first moved to San Francisco from London, UK

What is MasterClass?

MasterClass is an online learning platform that provides video courses taught by world-renowned experts. The courses cover a wide range of topics, including arts, business, cooking, and sports, and are designed to teach specific skills.

I worked on campaigns across 100+ of experts in their field including those standing beside Mira Nair: Jodie Foster, Martin Scorsese, Judd Apatow, Ron Howard, Werner Herzog, Ken Burns and many more, only in the Film and Acting category.

The MasterClass Challenge: Monetizing Genius

I have been consulting for many years and the typical engagement with the Brands I have worked with is to support them as a turnaround expert. 

They will usually face the challenge of having a channel that they highly depend on at the time, and that is underperforming. 

The first step is to run an audit. When I have led the full Marketing scope, the audit is done across all channels but when consulting, I focus on the one element they need to fix asap.

How do I run a Marketing Channel Audit?

Establish clear goals and KPIs

• Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives to evaluate performance against. 

  
  

• With startups, the priority is alignment. With large corporations, the priority is to figure out who does what to get the information you need asap. 

  
  

• Both have their own complexities, but essentially you want to talk to all relevant stakeholders for a faster qualitative assessment.

Gather and validate data 

• Collect data: Access and compile data from all relevant sources, such as website analytics, ad platforms (yes, even if there is an agency in place), and CRM systems.

  
  

• Analyze metrics: Look at specific data points for each channel, such as conversion rates, click-through rates, cost-per-click, and subscriber engagement. It's important to also compare data sources to account for duplication, attribution, etc. The question is, once you have gathered the data, can you trust it?

  
  

• Analyze overall performance: If you can trust it, use analytics platforms to review traffic sources, examine user behavior (time on page, conversion funnels), and track goals. But if you don't have detailed visualization dashboards, develop them. In my case, I opted for GStudio and sprinkled a little bit of the limited SLQ knowledge I have to track in depth Marketing performance.

Analyze and evaluate

• Review strategy, spend, and execution: Assess how well your current strategies are working.

  
  

• Conduct a SWOT analysis: Evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for that channel.

  
  

• Assess competitor performance: Conduct an analysis to see how competitors are positioning themselves and what strategies are working for them. If you don't have the internal resource, do it yourself. I believe there is a lot of value on getting closer to the customer, doing the research yourself can help you properly understand them. And I believe in the customer first business model.

  
  

• Analyze customer data and personas: Review how your marketing aligns with the needs of your target audience. Get as close as you can, beyond Customer Insights. At Decathlon I answered Customer Service calls or worked at the store for 1h every month. At MasterClass, I asked for a lot of details from Customer Service. At PlayStation I constantly asked everyone who owned a PS5 what they thought about different aspects of their experience with the brand.

Develop an action plan

• Identify gaps and opportunities: Find areas of overlap, identify spend gaps, and uncover new opportunities based on your analysis.

  
  

• Formulate recommendations: Develop specific, actionable recommendations to improve performance at commercial level, reallocate budget, or address weaknesses. This usually looks like a table with all the KPIs and metrics that the business cares about and your own POV on every initiatives' impact. I then present the high growth/small lift and high growth/big lift opportunities, we pick the ones we want to focus on and discuss resources and investment.

  
  

• Implement and monitor: Put your action plan into effect and continue to track your progress against your initial goals.

My Main Project for Mira Nair and 100+ Instructors

Understanding the Customer

Define the Journey

• Awareness: Customers become aware of your brand or problem you solve.

• Interest/Consideration: Customers research and evaluate your product or service.

• Decision/Purchase: Customers decide to buy and complete the transaction.

• Retention/Loyalty: Customers make repeat purchases and become loyal advocates. 

Map it to Purchase Barriers

If you don't have internal resource for in depth analysis, run internal and external interviews, collect feedback, get your hands on any behavioural data, social media listening, experience the purchase funnel yourself, look at competitors, evaluate Category and Product Pages and if you want to go even further, heatmap technology. 

 Are we addressing barriers to purchase with the current creative? 

The answer was no. And I developed the full funnel Creative Strategy with a Performance Marketing angle. 

But although I can do a lot on my own and today I can produce very simple Design projects with AI, my expertise is not in that field. I couldn't do it alone. 

And I requested support, which led to getting to know one of the most brilliant Creative Strategists I have ever worked with.

 Developing the creative journey

Awareness

• Objective: Introduce your brand and attract a wide audience.

• Creative: Use short-form (although it depends on the channel, etc), shareable content and eye-catching visuals.

• What needed to change: We had the asset but it needed a revamp from a Performance Marketing perspective. And that means everything needs to be clear in the first 5 seconds of the video. No assumptions, just data. Names, accolades, action vs talk, etc. The rest of the funnel had to be built from scratch.

Consideration

• Objective: Generate interest and build trust by providing valuable information.

• Creative: Offer longer-form content that educates and addresses pain points. 

• Examples: Class snippets, live testimonials, wider category, written reviews, etc.

Conversion

• Objective: Encourage the final purchase or action.

• Creative: Use direct, compelling content with clear calls-to-action (CTAs).

• Examples: USPs vs competitors, high value features, month vs year, discounts within a specific campaign, etc.

 Client sign-off

Once I got the go ahead, we started production and deploying all the creative. A lot of creative. It was incredible. 

 Impact and always-on optimization

• Channel recovery: We started seeing immediate results across the funnel. 

• We don't stop there: Because although performance starts picking up, and data starts gathering, it's important to understand what is and isn't working.

• The Performance Mindset: Every week I would pull creative results to evaluate video improvements and develop new creative that would solve for those challenges.

• Building the Growth Engine: Double digit growth. SOPs in place. My job was done.

"What else have you done?"

Someone said to me once "it's impossible that you have delivered double digit growth consistently across businesses". Well, except one, I have. 

And the typical question after I finalize my project is: What else do you have experience on? Can you fix other channels? Can you grow them? Can you launch or re-launch them?

And the answer is yes. 

The Multi-Channel Approach

After successfully driving significant growth with a single channel, I was offered to lead more on the Paid Media side and later was offered a permanent position. 

What I want you to take away from the next steps is that Performance Marketing can have a much wider impact when we eliminate silos. Channel silos, Market silos, Department silos, Verticals, Categories... the customer doesn't see them. And if we want to provide the customer with a seamless experience, we need to start from the divisions we are, sometimes unnecessarily, creating within our Business.

The End of My Time at MasterClass

I absolutely loved my time at MasterClass and delivering true customer first campaigns for some of the most incredible experts in their field like Natalie Portman, Margaret Atwood, Gordon Ramsay, Shonda Rhimes, Hans Zimmer, Helen Mirren, Samuel L. Jackson, Dominique Ansel, Christina Aguilera, Steph Curry, Usher, Carlos Santana, Serena Williams, Thomas Keller... Mira Nair, and many more.

And it was one of the best experiences I have had in my career. I learned a lot from the brilliant team they had in place and the C-Suite, and it shaped what I later delivered for Sony PlayStation. It shaped my Strategic Vision.