Discovery Diaries: Toni Skidmore

journey-further-colleagues

"Everyone wants to win, our job is to help them do that"


This installment of our Discovery Diaries Q&A series sees us sit down with Senior Director, Client Experience, Toni Skidmore, who tells us what the shift to discovery looks like for brands, from aligning siloed teams to helping them turn a fragmented customer journey into a discovery growth strategy.

 

Describe in as few words as possible what brand discovery means to you


Being found before you're searched for. 

 

What do you believe makes a brand genuinely understood?


The answer to being genuinely understood isn’t better or more ads, it’s consistency. 

Gone is the era when brands could figuratively shout about themselves into the void and control the way their own narrative is heard. Instead, there’s now a plethora of signals that shape how people understand a brand: LLMs, creator content, reviews, conversations in a group chat and countless other influences.

Core messages need to hold up whether someone finds a brand through paid search results, a TikTok, or an LLM result. Salesforce Research recently found that 73% of consumers say they’re extremely or somewhat likely to switch brands if a company provides inconsistent levels of service.

Most brands have more touchpoints than they think, and few of them are actually saying the same thing…

As my colleague Lydia put it, consumers encounter brands in fragments, across platforms and contexts. 

 

When it comes to discovery, what’s one insight or approach you’ve learned that others often overlook, and how can brands use this to their advantage?


Can I have two?

The first is something I’ve been saying for a few years, but is now too important to be anything other than a necessity. We need to stop thinking about channel/performance as separate from brand and creative, and we need to stop treating channels as separate disciplines. The brands winning at discovery aren’t choosing between brand and performance, they’re leveraging each of them to the benefit of the other, and connecting channels to match the fragmented user funnel. 

Take the British athleisure brand Gym King for instance. We worked collaboratively with them to prove the commercial case that media investments needed to be utilized as part of a broader growth strategy.

My second is (maybe) a hot take, but showing up in an AI answer, and being understood are completely different things. 

Being present in AI doesn’t equal growth. So instead of asking “are we appearing?”, brands should be asking “what does it say about us when we do?” 

 

How do you think brand discovery has evolved over the last five to ten years?


The answer to this runs through everything I've said above, the shift has gone from linear brand building to a fragmented, multi-platform reality where third-party signals carry as much weight as what a brand says about itself. Discovery used to be something you could engineer and control. Now it’s something that’s part controlled, part influenced and part completely out of your control. Think about your own journeys, it’s rare now that you’re not shopping via search, researching via a video, searching for recommendations (whether that’s a review site, an LLM, a TikTok or a friend)... 

A brand needs to be present in most, if not all, to be discovered, but let’s be honest, all brands want to be chosen too!

 

What do you believe the difference is between visibility and actually being chosen as a brand?


I mean, for our clients, the difference is YoY growth.  Visibility is showing up but that alone isn’t going to keep that line chart going up, or those numbers in the green, because being the first result just isn’t enough any more (or at the top anymore). Your customer is looking everywhere and rarely purchasing on the first result alone. 

Being chosen is what happens when someone finds you, makes sense of you, and feels confident enough to act. 

The gap between the two is messier than ever. Achieving both feels harder than ever, but it can be done. If your business partner isn’t talking about that shift, it’s likely that sometime soon you’ll really feel the impact. 

 

What is a campaign you’re particularly proud of that you’ve overseen that has truly unlocked brand discovery as far as you see it?


Our work for Liberty London stands out for me. Not because of the numbers, though they were strong, but because of what it proved. Liberty is a heritage brand, famous for its physical store, and we helped them unlock serious online growth during their quietest season; their brand was discovered in a completely new context by an entirely new pool of customers.

What made it work was the same thing I keep coming back to: we stopped optimizing for the wrong thing. Once we built a profit-first model that taught the algorithm what actually mattered, the brand reached the right people at the right moment. New customer growth came in at 26%, well above target. 

 

In this non-linear world, what from your experience are some of the main symptoms that a client's legacy performance marketing strategy has hit a wall? 


What a great question! And the answers are nuanced and many, but the simplest is, rising costs for the same or worse return. It’s a common story that Paid Search/Social is expected to continue doing the heavy lifting in a space that is way  more diverse and, arguably, expensive. If things are feeling harder, that’s a symptom you should be leaning into. 

Beyond that, I think the obvious is that if your channel mix still looks the same as it did five years ago, then you’re running on legacy, not reality. Even if you think your audience isn’t active on social, they are, whether prolifically or not. The same can be said for platforms like VOD or YouTube; who these days isn’t on a subscription service, or consuming content on YouTube? If you’re not active here, or even testing the benefits, you’re truly missing out on a huge presence piece and a real chance that would benefit all your activity, not just the KPIs from those channels. 

 

Lots of brand marketing teams are still structured in silos - how do you guide clients through the internal friction to adopt a unified discovery approach?


I could write a thesis on this, but the title would be: how to use your siloed teams’ KPIs to knock down walls.

We often think that people don’t want to help because they’re apathetic, and when we do that, just like we fall into sometimes with the consumers we’re targeting, we forget everyone is operating in their own context, and a little empathy for that goes a long way. I actually wrote an article on this for Performance Marketing World, about how we treat our relationships with our clients like their relationship with their consumers, the core principles are the same. 

I’m also a huge sports fan, so  I break it down practically into fairly simple actions at the start. 

  1. Understand, unsurprisingly also given my current role in Client Experience and my previous roles in strategy, what is the overall client goal, what are we aligning to in our entirety?

  2. Then it’s about understanding how each silo is working towards that;  how are people using their budgets, approaching conversations, reporting back? 


Then it’s really about engineering how each component plays a role in reaching the larger goal, and how we can support them in doing that. For us that’s looking beyond channels, or isolated measures, and diagnosing whether you’re being seen, understood or chosen, rather than focus on channel-only performance.

It’s important to remember, everyone wants to win, our job is to help them do that. Discovery is our framework for it, and roots our recommendations in data, the rest is about helping people see it and getting their feedback to make it even better.

Related Insights