Brand strategist Jess Lewis shares what most companies get wrong about rebranding—and how to do it right.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Jess Lewis, CEO of The Rebrand, live from Monetize Talks in Beverly Hills. Jess recounts her leadership role in Meta’s historic rebrand, lessons from her time at Netflix and Meta, and how she now empowers founders to align brand with evolving vision—not ego.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I am in Beverly Hills, California. I’m at the 16th edition of.
David Rivera’s monetized Talks. And let me tell you, this has quickly become one of my favorite monthly events. I do not miss them. Um, if you wanna check out and learn more, go to monetize talks.com. And I was able to snag one of the speakers, uh, from today’s monetized talks who let me tell you when we get into her background and what she’s worked on and what she’s working on now.
Oh my gosh. You’re gonna be excited. So first off, Jess, welcome to the show. Hi. Thank you for having me. Alright, so, uh, I know you got it going a little bit so I won’t hold you too long. I know they’re gonna be calling you to the stage any moment now. But just to get kicked off here, maybe start by telling us a little bit more about your background.
Sure. Um, varied as I’m sure a lot of people can relate to. I actually started my career as a theater producer. Mm. Which was like a whole other life. Um, made the leap from theater to high tech, which I know is not a traditional path. No, that’s obvious. That’s obvious. Of course. Like yeah, I went from finance to podcast.
It’s obvious. Whatcha talking about? So, um, I was a theater producer, uh, all over the world actually. Yeah. And then moved to Silicon Valley, believe it or not, no one wants to hire you there with a theater background. So it was sort of a long road to kind of get into tech. Um, but wound up landing at Netflix, uh, which was sort of my first foray into all things.
Ai. Mm-hmm. And product and engineering and, um, digital marketing and all of that. So, was at Netflix for a couple of years. Yeah. Was there, um, and part of the team that helped them go global, um, in the us, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and parts of Western Europe. Um, and then moved over into Meta. First launched Facebook Watch was the first marketer in actually on the product.
Wow. Yeah. It was me and engineer. Engineer. Remind us what face, just because this is gonna live forever, so Facebook watch, remind us what that is. It was Facebook’s, uh, fairly short-lived attempt at doing original content. Mm-hmm. It was supposed to be a YouTube originals, like tv Yeah. Competitor. And then once COVID hit and they kind of.
Pivoted away from putting a lot of emphasis on that and then just sort of opened the platform back up to all, all video being under the banner of Facebook watch. Um, I moved over into the brand marketing team, which was a very fledgling team at the time. People were very surprised to know that, that there’s only a few, a handful of years that Meta’s, um, brand marketing team even existed, which really kind of drummed up after Cambridge Analytica, um, and had the opportunity to work on some unbelievable campaigns.
I had this incredible canvas. I actually did the rebrand from Facebook to Meta in 2021. The 2020 election where we registered over 4 million new voters. Wow. Uh, the first Olympic sponsorship was under my banner. All things metaverse. Again, that was also fairly short lived, but at the time, you know, it was sort of all the rage.
Um, so it was really great. And then by absolute utter accident, I wound up going out on my own. Um, and now hold on. Before that, wait, wait, wait. Before that. The rebrand from Facebook to Meta, like, that’s pretty insane. You gotta gimme some more on that one. Sure. What does that even look like? I’m like, let me, hold on.
Let me tell you our big rebrand story for those that have been watching for a long time, myself and Chirag went through this huge, massive rebrand from our original company. Money Matters, top Tips to, uh, to Mission Matters. And we spent all of nine days on that. So. We spent a little bit longer, although people are surprised because we were, it happened to be at a time when meta was in a really gnarly press cycle.
Happens a lot with. And when we announced the rebrand, which miraculously we were able to keep a secret, we thought for sure it would leak. That’s true. We had to engage. Just like I didn’t think about that. How did that there parties? Yeah. Um, well, I mean, even I, as an employee there had to sign about 16 NDAs.
I Bett. It was a bet a very relative to the size of meta. Sure. A tiny tiger team that was picked to actually work on this from all facets. Pr, marketing, creative, you know, the whole lot. Social. That’s insane. And we had been working on it for about. Six to seven months. Yeah. But when it came out, everyone was like, oh, you know, met is in a bad press cycle.
They, so they’re gonna rebrand the company just to sort of shift, you know, the conversation. We’ve worked this for a very long time. Yeah. Yeah. 2, 4, 7. Wow. But yeah, I mean, mark at the time, I know things again have since pivoted, but he, um, wanted to really take the company in a brand new direction. Yeah. And I think that the way that we did the rebrand was very much an example of a rebrand, rebrand done correctly.
Mm-hmm. So I think. The only, in my opinion, the only time one should rebrand is if you change visions for the company. That’s interesting. That’s smart. Yeah. And not just because you need a better logo or you want, now everything’s ai, so we gotta throw an AI like it has to be Go, go ahead, continue. That’s what you’re saying though, right?
I wanna make sure I understand exactly. A lot of people use the mechanism of a rebrand almost as a crutch. Yeah. If things aren’t working, they feel like, you know, they, they improve sales or like be more attractive or they need to get into the press somehow. They need to make a splash or, you know, Jaguar?
No, I’m j Oh, sorry. Sorry, Jaar. You sounded not making me so No, I didn’t say, oh, I did. Hold on. You got receipts. Dang it. So the people I think when they are desperate Yeah. And or need attention. Mm-hmm. And or kind of don’t really know what else to do. Yeah. Let’s just. Put a new veneer on, right? Yeah. Let’s just re re side the house kind of a thing.
And I think that that weaponizes, mm-hmm. The mechanism. Really, the only time you should rebrand is if you have a new vision. Yeah. In my opinion, if you’re doing a true rebrand, if you’re just wanting to update your logo to make it look more modern or things like that, that’s different. And so what’s funny about that is when we looked at, so when Schrock and I made the final decision to rebrand, the reason was because we looked at the content and originally my background’s in finance, so we thought it was gonna be like a money platform.
I managed a couple hundred million dollars and we thought everybody would come to us for that. But we look back, and I’ve probably done over 3000 interviews at that point, and maybe only 20% of the interviews were about money. And we, and we found that the common like line was actually mission. Mm-hmm. And then we spent an enormous amount on Mission matters.com and then it, it all, once we did that, we didn’t lose the money part by the way, but we segmented all the audiences.
So now there’s eight different shows and there’s a money show. There’s a. Like it goes down the line. There’s a money show, there’s a business show, there’s an entertainment show, there’s a luxury and lifestyle show, there’s a tech show, there’s a marketing show. So all of the different shows are for the segmented audience, but they’re all under the mission matters because even within those money interviews, we were still really honing and zeroing in on the mission of, okay, you manage money.
Okay, but what? What does that mean? Like what? Like what happens? Like are you affecting the lives of individuals? Are you affecting commerce? Like, why do you do what you do? So that was our rebrand and I didn’t, I didn’t have your knowledge or understanding of rebrand, but um, I align with it. It makes a lot of sense.
Well, and I think, you know, what you’re touching on is something that I think a lot of people also don’t really know and can be quite freeing as you’re building your business versus feeling like you are stuck. Yeah. Which is very much like. Us as people, we are always growing and evolving. Yeah. And that doesn’t really stop until we stop.
Mm-hmm. Your business is a living, breathing organism in the same way. Yeah. It will evolve, it will grow. You will have to revision. Mm-hmm. And that revisioning doesn’t mean I sell hair dryers and now I’m going to be a SaaS company. Yeah. Yeah. Revisioning just means exactly what you just said is we had a North Star.
Mm-hmm. Which was to focus on money and then we actually realized that we could. Expand the aperture. Yeah. And raise it up an altitude and build a bigger halo around it to actually be something even bigger than that, of which money plays a part for sure. But there are other parts to it too, and that is just a reflection of growth.
Mm-hmm. And I think that if people, which I think brand can be really intimidating for a lot of people because it’s something that’s even really difficult to define. Yeah. If you Google what is the definition of a brand, you’ll get 13 different definitions. For sure. For sure. It’s really hard to build something that you can’t define.
Yeah. Or we collectively have not defined and. Because I think people find it scary because it’s this amorphous thing. They don’t really know how to wrangle it. Yeah. A lot of people don’t even, they know it’s important, but they don’t even know the function that it serves in the business. So it’s hard to really lean into something when you’re not even really quite sure how it’s supposed to serve you.
That people don’t do anything and they get paralyzed by it. And I think that what meta did really well, mm-hmm. That we, we were able to do really well at the time was use. The mechanism of rebranding. Mm-hmm. For the way that it is supposed to be utilized to actually be leveraged for the betterment and expansion of the business.
Yeah. Mark wanted to take the company from being a 2D social media company through a to a 3D Metaverse company. Yeah. And that is a new vision. And so when it landed, we actually got incredible feedback. And this was at a time where meta was not very popular. Yeah. And so. I think that the rise in brand sentiment that we were able to achieve was because we used the vehicle correctly.
Mm-hmm. But then when you look at a company like X, for example, when they rebranded from Twitter to X Yeah. There was really no new vision for the company, or at least in so far as it was clearly communicated. It just seemed like Elon Musk had come in, wanted to sort of make it his own. Yeah. Change it up to sort of fit his e, his ecosystem of other brands with the X.
Mm-hmm. Yep. And people just got confused. They were like, but. For how many decades have we been conditioned to tweet? Yeah. And there’s a whole vocabulary around it. There’s a little bird. We love the bird. Of course, of course. You know, and so people felt like, I think they were held in contempt a little bit.
Mm-hmm. Because it just became an inconvenience for For what end. Yeah. Right. And I think that if people understood that. Your brand is ever evolving. Mm-hmm. Right. It is a very natural thing for that to happen. So not to be intimidated mm-hmm. To revision the company as you grow and expand, but know exactly when and how to implement.
Yeah. A rebrand, I think it would be very freeing for people and also, um, prevent a lot of heartache by just. Pulling it out of your pocket. Like you think it’s a, a rabbit in a hat. Yeah. If you’re desperate Yeah. To get you back on track or, you know, get attention or whatnot. Because as we saw with X, you can also have a lot of negative feedback.
Mm-hmm. You know, if not really done with the right kind of finesse, with the right intention. Yeah. Well, Jess, I know you got it. You’re speaking in a couple minutes so I know I gotta let you go. But last thing I want you to do, I want you to look into the camera Okay. And tell everybody where they can follow you, how they can connect with your work.
’cause I know you got a whole lot more to offer. Yes, thank you. Yeah. So, um, LinkedIn is the best place to find me. I’m linkedin.com/in/the rebrand where you can just look me up. Jess Lewis, the rebrand, um, my. Brand strategy and brand architecture consultancy and would love to connect and see what you’re working on and meet you.
Fantastic ity watching, just so you know. We’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you can just click on the links and head right on over. And. Speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show.
Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and just so happy we could do this. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. Bye everyone.
