Susan
More to marketing. Welcome to more 2 marketing, our podcast on marketing, product and everything in between. I’m your host, Susan and today I’ve got a special guest. Jody has come to join us to talk all about Martech. She is an expert in this field and has been doing it for over 20 years. I’ve actually had the privilege of working with her in the past, so I first hand. Have knowledge of how amazing she is and I’d like to welcome Jodie. Hi, Jodie.
Jodie
Hi, how are you?
Susan
Going well and I’m so happy to have you here. A lot of people out there probably don’t even understand what it is you do. So maybe could you just give us a bit of a background about your recent career and then we’ll start talking about Martech itself.
Jodie
Yeah, sure. I’m. I’m happy to. I mean, obviously, when we were together, that was like right in the middle of my career when I was coming out of kind of what I call career 1.0. And that was my E commerce. You know, work that I was doing, but I actually started just as a marketing graduate. So I did marketing honours at university and then I wanted to get into digital marketing. And it turns out that the companies that were doing digital marketing at that time didn’t have really great budgets. So you had to learn how to do it yourself. And then suddenly you were doing. And then this kind of new role emerged that was in between the marketing team and the technology team and it became kind of like a translator and helping both teams work together. Yeah. The customer experience up and running. So most recently I’ve been working in consulting. So for some of the big consulting companies, but then also in house at one of the major banks and really looking at. How you assemble your martech technology to deliver the customer experience, so never really losing sight of the whole fact that it’s about the customer and what the customer is experiencing, not just. About the tech.
Susan
Yeah. And for those that don’t know what my tech is, it’s actually marketing technology. And I do a little bit of research myself just. To find out. What it was for me when I did my Google, it said that the four pillars was CMS, marketing, automation, CRM and reporting. So all those important keys that come together for your analytics as well. So you can get the best decisions to make for customer interactions and make it the best. Experience. But for you, Jody, what is? What is my take for? You.
Jodie
I I think those four pillows are really important and I think they’ll probably extend it a little bit too. Now they include things like decisioning under that analytics and reporting heading. CMS is of course really important because that’s what drives your website, your content management system. But then also we’ve got all these new tools around managing content velocity so. Producing lots of content for the website and all of the other marketing channels. It’s all in. Sync and then we’ve got the workflow tools on top of that, which then take that same bit of content and you can use it in your CMS or you can use it in your email automation platforms and you’re really getting that whole single story out to the customer. But I would just say that my check is or marketing technology. Is any technology that the market I have to use to get the job done and to to do that, I guess you have to define what the marketers job is and in that way I would say it’s really about delivering that customer experience end to end. And I think now more than ever it includes things like service communications and. Every touch point that the customer have, even how you handle complaints and how that translates into your NPS score and things like that. So it’s not simply just about sending out an email and asking people to click on the button to get 20% off or something like that as it used to be. It’s really evolved to be that whole end to end.
Susan
Yeah, it’s it’s just. The whole story itself, from beginning to end, how any customer interact with you is now. But that digital marketing focus that you can add to it and make it better.
Jodie
So an example in that in the reverse is where you’re putting an iPad into the hands of somebody in the store. So you could be going to Mecca. And sales assistant has that iPad has that understanding of what your likes. And dislikes are as. Well.
Susan
I think that’s one of the most powerful tools now. Is that personalization that you can really get in this technology? Space. Now that we never really could in the past, even just like for me. I don’t. It’s a bit creepy, but the ability for cookies to then find more information and bring it back into your system so you get even a bigger array of what people are interested in can really cater it down to what a customer might actually want and realise they want.
Jodie
Yeah. I mean, personalization’s really interesting because we started doing that a long time ago and then we couldn’t get it to make money. Because by itself. Being able to pinpoint a piece of data and turn a communication around doesn’t really do it by itself. It has to be part of that greater experience and it has to be something that you build your brand on and so then it increases loyalty and that’s how you make the money. You don’t make the money by sending out an email that has your first name. It’s like much more than that.
Susan
Exactly. And what’s one of your favourite examples that you’ve ever done in the martech space? Can you think of one big one that really stood out, either from results or customer interaction point or even just from a satisfied client that you can talk about?
Jodie
Ohh look, the most exciting piece that I ever did from a technology piece of point of view was working with Accenture Digital Studios and they programmed a robot, actually a canning robot. So imagine like a low tech robot. That used to put lids on cans. They programmed him to be able to him. He was a he.
Susan
He’s giving a. Male name. So Yep, Yep, Yep.
Jodie
How did you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was through machine learning, learning. He was taught how to like, play musical instrument. It was custom built musical instrument for him and he played on stage at the Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as part of an Adobe event. And so while my role in that was quite.
Susan
Amazing.
Jodie
Small. My role was to work out how the audience could interact with the robot. So inside your mobile phone there is a piece of technology that can track whether you’re waving your phone. So we had everybody in the audience turn their lights on, wave their phones for the music. The robot would pick up on the frequency. That people were waving and then adjust the music.
Susan
Ohh wow, that’s.
Jodie
Amazing. Not just the orchestra he was playing with, but also the the audience reaction as well and. And so that was a really like getting that technology to work, getting getting the analytics in the phone to get that information, send it back to the robot that was. Probably a career highlight.
Susan
That sounded that sounds pretty cool as well to do that, not just with a robot, but also in such an iconic location as well. The Sydney Opera House. I I understand why that one is a big one on your list.
Jodie
Oh yeah. Yeah. And it’s funny because for the like, that was almost 10 years ago now and it probably meant didn’t make sense to people then. But now that we’ve got the language to talk about this kind of stuff, and I can say that, you know, so he was machine taught and people understand what that means now.
Susan
Yep. Yep, I know what you mean. It’s amazing how technology is just. Come about and leaps and bounds in such a short period of time of 10 years. That is significant as well for the general public to be able to understand that terminology. But as far as this, this took the reverse. What one is one that you would have loved to have seen succeed, but unfortunately the technology wasn’t there yet, or it just wasn’t the right mix to make it happen.
Jodie
Oh. That’s a really hard one. Because I think like the.
Susan
You’ve been able to adapt, yeah.
Jodie
See you. OK. Yeah, I think that’s the thing about digital marketing, because if you set up the measurement and you’re able to for want of a better expression, fail quickly, then you can always optimise it and you’ve got that information like when you’re dealing with customers.
Susan
M.
Jodie
You’re on a face to face basis. You don’t have that feedback all the time. But in digital space, you shouldn’t should be able to react kind of quickly and turn things around. Like I know lots. Of mistakes I’ve made, like accidentally pressing wrong buttons and sending out, you know, vouchers to hundreds of people that weren’t eligible and things like that.
Susan
I think that’s a common occurrence.
Jodie
I think all email marketers have done that once or twice and you know back that kind of thing. But in terms of actually having an experience spot like I can’t think of anything off the top of my head and there’s been some that haven’t had the results we wanted. But then just going in and changing and changing the audience, changing the coffee or whatever, just to refine it. And then improve it.
Susan
So probably one of the key outtakes there is with my tech, you can actually do lots of pivots to be able to adjust where required. If you can’t do exactly what you want to originally, you’ve got other options. And then to also going back in and saying, OK, what is the new target either of the customers or our number target that we should be looking at? Because of XYZ and being open and honest about it, throughout the whole process. I.
Jodie
Like that? Yeah. I think one of the things too, like working in banking, which is where I’ve spent a lot of my time. Like you know, and maybe and probably in other industries too, you don’t want to give money away for the sake of it when you’re running offers. And I think that’s probably, you know where you start, you start giving away money to people who might have already bought. And being able to understand where you’re doing that so you can refine your programmes is really important because that’s ultimately creating the ROI on the technology that. You’ve bought as well.
Susan
Exactly. It needs needs to be able to have that ROI to benefit not just the customer, but also the organisation that it’s within. Or else why do it? And that comes back down to that white piece.
Jodie
Yeah. And martech. Yeah, I’ve. I’ve been lucky enough to work across the spectrum. So I’ve worked with, you know, solo entrepreneurs who are using the male chimps of the world. And then other organisations that have the full Adobe, your Salesforce suite. But it’s, it’s always the same. Like, it depends what you’re doing with it, how you get the most out of it. Like you could. Throw so much money down that hole and not use the products properly and get the benefit that they designed.
Susan
For Yep, Yep. No, completely understand. That’s a really great point. So one of the trends coming out right now is the use of conversational AI like chat bots and virtual assistants. What are your thoughts of this of the now and where they’re going to lead to in the potential future when it comes to martech?
Jodie
Yeah, it’s really interesting. So Adobe launched a product directly in this space last week called Firefly, which is a that’s an imagery product that sits in that space. And they had a really cool demo where they had a stock image. Have a tent and then suddenly they, you know, the tent suddenly behind the tent they generated multiple different backgrounds, so we had and they were. They were not real backgrounds. So we had a desert in quotation marks because it’s not a real picture. It’s not a photograph. It’s. And AI generated background and a data etcetera and like from that point of view that will.
Jodie
Marketing teams jobs so much easier because it then decreases the amount of photography you have to do. It increases, you know the. Relationship you have between your imagery and your brand because you can always you can put controls in there to make sure that it suits the brand and you’re not veering off off the path and. And so I think the imagery space is really exciting for marketers. I think in the content and the generating of text, it depends.
Susan
Hmm.
Jodie
What the application is? You’re still going to have to run in most cases. You’re still gonna have to run your marketing copy through. Legal. Yes. And you know those. Requirements about understanding what you can and can’t say to customers you know, even just how you use that information, all of those kind of constraints, I don’t think the chat bots at the moment. You know, have that programmed in by default.
Susan
It’s like that language and tone. Yeah, it’s a language and tone that’s missing.
Jodie
So there are products that do that though. So you know, as IBM have a product that will take I think originally it was designed to translate by language, but then they also translate by tone as well. So you could have, you know, I think I remember them saying that you could kind of base the time, so you could have like a Donald Trump tone.
Jodie
And not to get any and that you getting an email saying your account is overdrawn in the Donald Trump tone versus your account is overdrawn. And I don’t know, like a Mother Teresa tone or something like that, you know account.
Jodie
So those those products exist, but again they’re taking that base base text to be able to do that. So I think it’ll be interesting. There’s a lot. Of you know, in terms of just improving your punctuation and the way that we write and things like that, there’s a lot of advantage there. It’s going to save people time. It should save people time proofread. Even if the machines are the ones. Doing the proofreading. And you know, like a auto correct on steroid, but we also all know how annoying auto correct can be. When it gets it wrong, right?
Susan
So yeah, I’m even thinking there about the translation. If we then use these tools for translation and don’t go to a translation service to check it. The areas that could potentially happen there could be quite devastating as well.
Jodie
Yeah. So I think there’s always no at the moment, you know, maybe at some point there’s not always gonna need to be human interval intervention. But at the moment I can’t see a way that we can get around it.
Susan
One one of the points I wanted to get your view on. I’ve I’ve read an article not too long ago in regards to imagery and AI and being created out of thin air copyright. Who owns it? I I find that one a really fascinating one, because we know right now today for photos down, it’s usually owned by the photographer or whoever company they sold it to. But what about the future when it comes to the AI imagery and who owns the rights to that? I think that’s going to be a fascinating thing to watch over the next week, while too. What do you think?
Jodie
Yeah, I think it is true. And there’s a lot of talk about these new roles that are going through this. So you could have a role as an AI prompter. So that never came up. You know, when I was at school, thinking about Chris and like that person’s job is to feed the right information. Into the AI tool to get the. Results. And I’ve been, like, doing just playing around with chat, GT, GPT and it’s like, if you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. And so those people are going to become really sought after.
Susan
Definitely. And and they’re almost like little visionaries and brand spokespeople all-in-one with all these other skills as well. So it’s gonna be a real mixed type of individual that goes to those roles. So they’ll be able to do something a bit more exciting than your standard behind the desk roll, which is quite exciting too, to see the future.
Jodie
Yes, and move on from cut and paste.
Susan
Very true. So is there any other type of trends that you think are worth talking about right now for martech that people should just be watching, or at least checking out every so often?
Jodie
I think the big thing in my check is the CDP at the moment. So customer data platform and. Different organisations have different motivations for getting a CDP and some people I’ve observed are probably using it as a as a silver bullet where it’s not so they might be using a CDP to plug gaps in their data infrastructure so their core data infrastructure isn’t set up so they can put all the data in the one place that they’re using. CDP as a stopgap. And that’s OK, because that’s it. It works and it will do that. But you really should be fixing those core platforms and your CDP for what it’s made for. And in terms of what it’s made for, you know it’s all about creating those real time customer profiles. So you don’t necessarily need the history. You need this at this point in time. This is what Susan looks like. Back in the last 10 minutes, these are the events that she’s done, and therefore we’ve been able to trigger off communications through other channels. And and then obviously. I think CDP again is like a little bit of a stopgap in this demise of cookies and 1st party data. So at the moment we need the CDP to route the data into those platforms, so into our data cleaning rooms into the walled gardens into Facebook, etc. We need some kind of mechanism to do this on scale, and the CDP is in today. But will it be in the future? I don’t think anybody kind of has the answer to that because there’s a few options. But then the other reason that it’s good to have the CDP, of course, is about that privacy and data protection and having that built in and being a little bit idiot proof compared to some of the other methods like uploading Excel spreadsheets and things like that.
Susan
And forgetting to put passwords on things come on. People. Exactly, yeah.
Jodie
Yeah, for sure.
Susan
Yeah. I think one of one of the most interesting things there that you were talking about was about interactions. And I I personally feel that there’s still nothing out there that is huge in the space of connecting Susan with every type of digital interaction she does in a way that makes it. So meaningful, so personalised, so for Susan to be able to predict my. Next. Move. So that that’s something that I think is a bit lacking, but is there something that’s similar to that right now that you’re aware of cause this is all new to me, I’m loving this.
Jodie
Yeah. So predictions really interesting and. I think like. I was listening to Guy Kawasaki talk and like the closest we can ever get is prediction. We can never actually understand a customer’s intent as much as we can try and presume what the customer’s intent is. Ohh sorry not not understand it. We can’t even know it we can. We can surmise it, and we can guess it, but we can’t even know it because we can never literally be in the customer’s. Head. And so that’s why we’re left with this. Fiction and the obsession with prediction. And there are, you know, like in the data world. There are some amazing tools and methods that you can use to get prediction really quite to the point. And one of the things that has kind of stopped that in the past. Then rules like GDPR, so you can opt out and then your data isn’t included in the model and then the model is basically biassed towards people who have. Now.
Jodie
And if that opted out, group becomes like a large enough percentage, for example, you know they share another characteristic, then your whole model is really biassed and not worth using. But now we have these synthetic data sets. So instead of using the customer’s real data, we use AI. To generate similar data across the entire data set that we’re allowed to. And so then you can feed that synthetic data in, you can do digital twins and things like this, which allow you to get better at that prediction. Mm-hmm. So it’s. Almost like a double prediction, right? Because you’re predicting the data that you data set and then you’re predicting the customer actions.
Susan
That.
Jodie
On top of the data.
Susan
Ohh. I’m definitely glad I’m not in my. Text slide. That would just confuse me a bit too much. Going down. That path. I’ll leave it to you.
Jodie
Yeah, I mean this is a bit where the data scientists do their really clever work. And if you think about where data scientists come from, they didn’t start marketing, you know, they’ve been doing work in one of my friends, she used to work for. He went and she was doing Ghana on data science on global resources in terms of, you know, how much oil does the pilot have left and stuff like that. And so we’re taking these disciplines and then turning them into use for marketing. So they already have all of this capability and the.
Susan
Passing.
Jodie
Some of the one of the hardest things is just, you know, to be in a room with the data science, just explaining to them. But you know you can’t do that purest stuff because they’ve got all these rules around how and when we can contact customers and what we can talk to them about. We can’t just slam them with communications.
Susan
They may never respond to us and go away. We. Don’t want that.
Jodie
Yeah, we don’t want to create fatigue and unsubscribe and all that kind of thing. So those I think those conversations that are happening with the data scientists and mixing data science and customer experience is really exciting at the moment. Yeah. And things like AI just generate those conversations even further.
Susan
Yeah, I I think I think for me one of one of the things I interact with. Quite a lot is the Woolworths. So for me, I know I don’t know a lot about, but I know there’s a lot of technology behind the scenes on that one, but for me, I. Think some of what? What it’s doing at the moment when it comes to me personally, it’s failing, so I’ll give you an example and then you can you can talk about it. I make purchases. I have children. I go from Baby Formula One. They grow up baby formula two. I stop buying one. I keep getting served. Buy #1 formula, buy #1 formula, then I move on my but my purchase behaviours changed. I’m buying 2. I then moved about baby formula Three. I’m still getting served baby Formula One. And I think I think that’s something that like for Willis as this example. That they need to become like, get, get them a tech to start focusing on changes in behaviour or life cycle changes dependent on certain purchases. Because that one there, you could easily predict. I’m gonna start buying baby formula four because I’ve gone through the brand 123, but they’re still trying to sell me #1. I I find that really interesting to see when that’s going to change, particularly for me having that every day. Or not every day. Every two week interaction with Woolworths, what are your views and thoughts on that one?
Jodie
Yeah. Like I I think that takes some potential in that space for sure. And it’s not just Woolworths who could do better. There’s a couple and.
Susan
Hmm. Just my example I happen.
Jodie
To have, but I I think part of it is really around. The segments at the top are still really big and so you know we always talk about going on this journey to 1 to one, yes, and micro communications and things like that. And we’re not there yet. And in marketing it’s probably harder than service like in service. It’s definitely happening because. In service you can almost predict what a customer’s gonna ring and complain about if you have enough digital experience because you you know you know that Google the. Problem that they’ve got. They haven’t got a resolution, so now they’re gonna ring the call set up. So you have that really, like, neat path. And it’s quite fun night as well. Whereas in when we talk about, you know, human behaviour and how volatile we are and the decisions that we made, it’s really hard because for. A machine to to work that out and to be able to do, to be able to do that at the individual basis, the computer processing power it needs is huge as well. So I feel like we cut corners to save costs.
Susan
Hmm.
Jodie
Whether that be on how detailed the model gets or having the iterations we do, and then that’s where it like you know fails for the customer.
Susan
I think probably one thing that I’m I’m hearing come through that you’re you’re not saying yet, but is that we need to be patient. We’re not some of it. We’re not there yet for but it will come but be patient to see when it does come cause it’ll be exciting when it’s here.
Jodie
Yeah, I think so. I think the technology is probably here. It’s just not hooked up. The data is not going in it into it. In the velocity that it needs to to be able to find all of those patterns. So you know like a. A model to predict exactly what products you’re going to buy when you probably buy. I don’t know how much is in an average basket, but it’s probably like 100 different products in there. It’s a really hard calculation compared to working out, you know, predicting when a customer is going to change his. Home line, yeah.
Susan
Yeah, there’s there’s good time off, yeah.
Jodie
Because you’ve only got one data point. Yeah, you’ve only got one data point to it to in. That in that. Status. But then again, like you think about how much Amazon has in terms of data like it’s huge and it still gets its recommendations on too. Definitely, definitely.
Susan
This has been absolutely fantastic. I’ve I’ve really enjoyed this discussion. I’ve learned so much. I’m sure others have too. I’ve got my final question for you. My last question I asked. One, if you were a brand, what brand would you be and why?
Jodie
OK, so I’m I’m gonna fess up here. I knew this question was coming and I.
Susan
And I didn’t tell you you listened to my podcast, so thank you.
Jodie
That’s right, I did. So I knew it. Yeah, exactly. So I knew the the question was coming. And so I reverse engineered it and I put the qualities of the brand that I wanted into ChatGPT to see. If you could brainstorm together. And I’m really happy with the result. I’m gonna go with the brand Lego.
Susan
Ohh lovely, I like it.
Jodie
And I shared that with one of my colleagues. This morning and then like, oh, that’s. Totally you and. Because, you know, you think about Lego and. Lego it’s like the all. Round. Good guy. Yeah, like.
Susan
Until you step on it.
Jodie
Yes, as moms of boys we both. Very familiar with that feeling, but yeah, it has that fun and joy factor in it. And then, you know, when they when there’s issues that have arisen for that brand over the past, they’ve taken it and they’ve owned it you. Know like. They’re on a path to sustainability. They’re gonna get rid of all that messy and plastic, and then the other thing. It really kind of fit my personal brand as well because they’re about bringing. You know, diversity into the picture as well. So they were heavily criticised, criticised for not having enough, you know, women role models for aiming at boys and you know they’ve done quite a bit to address. That. I saw in the news this week that they were distributing Lego to. Indigenous remote communities as part of the deadly Science project and I didn’t realise that this has actually been going on. For years and so.
Susan
Ohh wow.
Jodie
So the whole point is to get the kids interested in stem. They get a Lego set and you know they can think about careers that they might not have thought of in the past. And these, these are young kids that getting that exposure at that early level. So that really kind of fits into, you know, the the extracurricular activities that I do.
Jodie
Outside work and so. I thought no. Like I a good beat.
Susan
Ohh, beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. I I do agree. I think Lego is great and it does fit you quite well too. So I agree with your colleague. You spoke to. Thank you so much again, Jody, for your time today. I really appreciate learning more about my tech and some of the different ways that it’s being used today and potentially in the. Very near future. Thank you. I’d also like to say thank you for listening today. If you wanna hear more fabulous podcasts, don’t forget to follow. More to marketing. More to marketing.
