5 Minutes with American Express’s Reanna Gross

How does a premier legacy brand like American Express balance honoring its 174-year legacy, while also positioning itself for the future? In her role as the head of OnBrand, American Express’s internal creative agency, Reanna Gross actively negotiates between those two things. From recent partnerships with Formula 1 — AmEx’s first new sports partnership in more than a decade — to expanding its loyalty programs to give card holders exclusive access to things like concerts, the global payment company is certainly not complacent in its heritage when it comes to its creative vision.

Gross sat down with The Current’s editor-in-chief, Stephanie Paterik, to discuss what keeps her up at night, how her team makes sense of data and how her team’s natural agility helps them stay ahead of the curve on trends.

What's the biggest challenge facing your space at the moment?

This industry is so dynamic and there's so much content across so many channels that a lot of it is how you guarantee that your content is consistent and high quality, while preserving this 174-year-old brand that I have the privilege to be the steward of in the way that protects and preserves it every day. And that balance is essential.

How do you as a leader see what's coming next? I love this about creative leaders. You're tapped into culture, you're tapped into people and consumers and what they want and their experience. So how are you staying ahead of the game on that?

A lot of it comes with research and data, and a lot of it is just natural agility. Change, I feel, is the only constant. A mentor years and years ago [told me] that ‘when the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills.’

And I like to think that at OnBrand, we're adapting to change and innovation so that we're being proactive to garner that power through a windmill of learning and opportunity to drive our business growth versus staying fixed like a wall.

The financial services sector and everything around money has changed so much just in the past decade. I'm curious what innovation you see coming online that you think is going to be most transformative in the next year or so?

For me, it's been a lot about data. I always tell my teams, if you can measure it, you can move it. And right now, with the abundance of data and personalization, the ability for us to just work more efficiently, but also serve our customers with the right personalized content is transformational if we use it in the right way.

Personalization is coming up so much lately. I'm curious what that looks like for you all. How are your customers experiencing personalization?

A lot of that [personalization] is in terms of channel, segmentation, data and the offers that we have that are really about our brand promise of powerful backing in our customers, our communities, our colleagues. And how we could garner that trust, service, security through the right content at the right moment and the right channel.

You've mentioned data a few times. How do you help your team make sense of data?

A lot of it is: How do you inspire your colleagues with a clear agenda and mission, and then that data help them do their job better? How do you facilitate in the right way so that they're more efficient, they're creating content faster, they're able to review faster and produce?

And so, the ways in which we're able to collect the data and empower them to use it in the spirit of ‘you come to OnBrand and when you leave this role, you should be better than when you arrived.’ And we're going to coach and develop you, and the data and the tools we have should help you do your job as best as possible.

Final question for you, I'm curious to know what your hot take is on media right now?

Like I said earlier, the landscape is so dynamic and changing. And I think the traditional ways we define what is above the line, middle funnel, below the line, it's blending a bit. And that's what gets me really excited also to lead OnBrand because we have the opportunity to define that white space in a way of new channels surfacing and ways we reach customers.

That is a new frontier, and I think there's a great opportunity ahead for us to lean into that.