What'cha Drinkin'? with Michelle Grushko
Editor's note: Automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Hello and welcome to What’cha Drinkin’? holiday edition. My name's Emily Koenig Hapka and I'm the digital content editor at Quirk’s. Today I am joined by Michelle Grushko. Michelle is a data scientist at the marketing Insights and analytics team at Twitter. So, Michelle was a finalist for our 2020 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards and Client Researcher of the Year. And in addition to that, Twitter was the co-winner with EyeSee for the advertising research project. Hi Michelle, thanks so much for joining us today.
Michelle Grushko:
Hi, glad to be here. Thank you so much.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
So, congratulations on both accounts and to start things off because it is Quirk’s What’cha Drinkin’? What are you drinking today?
Michelle Grushko:
Thank you so much. Today I'm drinking an iced coffee. I am team iced coffee even when it's below freezing outside. And this is a New Orleans style cold brew from Rook. They're pretty local to Monmouth County in New Jersey and I love them so much and it's always my go-to for coffee.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Fantastic. I am also team iced coffee all year round. I had an iced vanilla latte yesterday. Today I am drinking just my usual Peace Coffee, but in a Christmas mug and it's like a peppermint.
Michelle Grushko:
Oh wow.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
I usually add just a little half and half but I was all out and this is honestly mostly creamer. So.
Michelle Grushko:
Yeah, it's very holiday spirited.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Exactly. Have to do anything in 2020 to bring out the holiday spirit more. I will basically go and buy the pretty packaging, all the better.
Michelle Grushko:
Oh, for sure.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
So, I just was wondering if you could share some of the highlights of the project that won the advertising research award this year?
Michelle Grushko:
Yeah, definitely. So, we were super excited to partner with EyeSee on this project. Basically, the idea of this project came from the Women's World Cup where we were seeing there was a gender pay gap in terms of how much women were paid compared to men. And so, we wanted to take a deeper dive into advertising, specifically sports advertising, to see how gender stereotypes play a role. So, we decided to test a few different advertisements, which portrayed both men and women in both traditional and non-traditional types of roles. So, for nontraditional, imagine a really large football player, baking cupcakes or something like that. And so, with EyeSee, we partnered with them to look at things like eye tracking, attention, as well as a virtual shopping exercise to see the impact that these types of ads had on these metrics. And really cool that we were able to find that non-traditional roles actually perform pretty well. And in addition, just having women in ads in general, people see it as pretty empowering and it lifts across a whole bunch of sales metrics.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's fantastic. So, what was your background in starting that project personally?
Michelle Grushko:
Yeah, so I consider this a personal passion project of mine at Twitter. Before Twitter, I was in academia. So, in grad school I was always looking at traditional and non-traditional roles in general, whether that be in the political space or in the advertising space. And so, when we partnered with EyeSee, we had this idea kind come to life. I was the first one to jump on board and I was all up in the advertisements trying to find examples, looking at previous literature that's been released in the past on this particular subject. So, I think it was really nice that I got to use my academic background as well as my career background to put this project together with them.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's fantastic. I did have the opportunity to read through that the whole proposal and nomination and it was really fascinating and exciting to see you guys win from after the judges' review. So, congratulations.
Michelle Grushko:
Again. Thank Yeah, I really appreciate that.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
So, before we log off I do want to ask about your favorite holiday tradition.
Michelle Grushko:
Oh yes. Well tonight is the second night of Hanukkah. My family celebrates both Christmas and Hanukkah, but particularly tonight we're making some potato latkess, which I'm so excited about. We make them every single year. There's a ton of oil involved and mess all over the place but I love to top them off with some sour cream and chives and I'm really looking forward to that tonight.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Nice. So, you do everything homemade, put it all together?
Michelle Grushko:
Yeah, everything homemade. I think especially now during 2020 and quarantine, we've been baking and cooking so so much. So, everything has been from scratch and it's been really, really nice and fun.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
That's so fun. Yeah, we do so much cooking usually as an extended family and just with more individualized families, single households. We’re doing a cookie exchange this year with our family, so I'm excited about that. We're baking cookies this weekend.
Michelle Grushko:
What kind of cookies?
Emily Koenig Hapka:
So, I am doing, so I've already made molasses cookies. That was my grandma's recipe. And so, I'm making these chocolate cookies I've never made before. And then because I have a three-year-old, we are doing chocolate covered pretzels because that's just kind of an easy, he can get his hands all dirty and everything, but we'll probably keep those for ourselves because a three year old made them.
Michelle Grushko:
So good.
Emily Koenig Hapka:
Well thank you so much again for joining me and I hope you have a wonderful holiday season.
Michelle Grushko:
Thank you so much. You too. I really appreciate it.