Marketing planning season: Unpacking lessons learned & predictions for the year ahead with Guy Kawasaki

Roll back to roll forwards: A look at some of the key trends we have seen play out in the last year and what the year ahead has in store.

 

Here's we covered...

 Under the microscope
  • Unpacking 2022's key market trends
  • Marketing lessons learned
 
 Into the time machine
  • Fast-forward 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, what will every marketer wish they knew now?
  • Practical planning for advice the year ahead
 
💡 Plus insights on:
  • Working w/ Steve Jobs
  • The early days of Apple
  • And wisdom gained from interviewing remarkable podcast guests such as Gary Vee and Marc Benihoff.

Video transcript

Carlos Doughty  0:07  
Hello welcome everybody to a very special anti con LX dial up. For those who don't know me, I'm Carlos Doughty, I'm the founder and cost instructor here at Aleksei or some light still notices Martic lions are old company name by mega excited today. Today we have Guy Kawasaki joining us Guy is amazing to have you with us. Thank you so much for joining

Guy Kawasaki  0:29  
us. Thank you, thank you very much. It's a little early. But you know, the early bird gets the worm as they say.

Carlos Doughty  0:37  
I could sit here probably for a full 30 minutes and talk about your entire history. But what I'm going to do, I'm going to summarise guy is an absolute marketing legend. There's a bunch of highlights, there's too many to talk about. The best thing I would say is go grab a copy of his amazing book wise, I have to say it was just enlightening. It was amazing. And I couldn't believe one story after another I was just like how can one person has had this illustrious career. You and for anybody that doesn't doesn't know you want to give some highlights give us the two or three things that people should know about you?

Guy Kawasaki  1:11  
Well, I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, I now live in California. I've worked for Apple, Google, and Canva in my career. I'm also the host of the remarkable people podcast and my current position is Chief Evangelist of Canva.

Carlos Doughty  1:30  
Fantastic. And that leads us into a lot of the fantastic questions we've had. So in the build up, what we do is we want to we want to run amazing events. But we think that the best way to do that is to ask our community. So we went out to our lovely, fantastic, amazing community across Asia Pacific and said, Hey, join for the mining session, but rather than we tell you what it's going to be about you tell us so we literally had over 78 questions and the build up, we've hand picked some of those best questions

Guy Kawasaki  1:58  
78 in 30 minutes, we're gonna be talking worry. So

Carlos Doughty  2:03  
we've had to cut down unfortunately, and there was a there were some interesting questions, but we've had to handpick the very best. And we're gonna get into those. As Brian mentioned, we got 30 minutes of your time. And so sadly, we won't cover everything. But we also have a fantastic panel joining after this. And there'll be digging into some of these other areas. The key thing we're going to bounce into today, though, is lessons learned and predictions for the year ahead. It's marketing planning season. And so we're gonna get into it we've got, he has an amazing history and career that we're going to tap into and really understand what marketers can take away to make sure they're ready for 2023 and beyond. So guys, let's get at it. First and foremost, here, we've got one for you, marketers can be guilty of focusing on the new shiny thing, what timeless marketing lessons do you have?

Guy Kawasaki  2:53  
The most important, timeless marketing lesson is empathy. I think that empathy should basically govern all marketing, and really all product development, meaning that, you know, how can you be a good marketer? How can you be a good innovator if you don't have empathy for your customer and prospective customer? And it is there's several levels of empathy. So one level of empathy is you think of yourself as an empathetic person, and you're imagining yourself in the shoes of your customer. Well, that's better than nothing. But and, and then there's the next level, Toyota has this concept of go and see. So rather than just remaining in your corporate headquarters, you go into the field, and you see it Oh, in a car manufacturer sense, you go and see what it's like to drive your minivan, you go and see what it's like to get service at the dealer. I would push it one more level, which is you go and be and go and be means that rather than watch your customers get service at the dealer, you actually be a customer getting service at the dealer. And I would think that as the highest form of empathy. My friend Martin Lindstrom had a great example where a large pharmaceutical wanted to, quote get closer to the customer. And it typically when a large company says that they hire a consulting firm and they do market research, Martin Lindstrom did something much, much simpler and more effective, which is he forced the marketing executives of the company to breathe through straws. And after a few minutes, and obviously that's difficult for many people. He told him well, you're a pharmaceutical company, many of your customers have asthma. This is what it's like to have asthma 24 by seven by 365. So the short answer is the most important principle is empathy.

Carlos Doughty  5:10  
I really like that. And I like the conceptualising it that way, you know, is it your own dog food is and to your point, I think a lot of marketers can be guilty of the best way to get close to the customer is to have somebody else tell us versus go and be so fantastic, really, really insightful?

Guy Kawasaki  5:27  
Well, I think the problem with cold having somebody tell you is that, you know, that becomes data. And it's so open to self fulfilling prophecies that, you know, I think very little data truly shows what the customer is thinking, well, maybe the only data that does that is to just look at sales results. Because obviously, when you have sales results, the customers really did take the action, right. But short of that, let's take a market research favourite like focus groups. I think focus groups may help you evolve a product or evolve your marketing to give you insights into slight improvements. But the problem I see with focus groups is that, particularly when you have let's say, five or 10 people in a room, you just don't know what's going on in the mind of those customers in the focus group in that context. And let me give you an example. So let's say that there's a really hot guy, or really hot girl in the focus group, right? And so the question is, what would you like in your next phone? And, and you're sitting next to this hot guy or gal and you're thinking, What can I say that will impress him or her, which is very different than what you really want? So I think that kind of social effect will just really throw off on focus group.

Carlos Doughty  7:22  
Absolutely. We've got to look out for those brands. Switching gears slightly, we had another fantastic question, best marketing advice you've ever been given? I'm really interested the answer to this? Because obviously, you've worked with amazing Steve Jobs. You've been at Apple, you've been at Google. And so you must have had the pleasure of being around some amazing marketers. What's some of the best advice you've been given in your career?

Guy Kawasaki  7:47  
Well, I think first of all, we need to take Steve Jobs off the table, because there's only been one Steve Jobs. There's only one Steve Jobs. So to try to emulate Steve Jobs is a really kind of dangerous concept. You know, he's just, he's a unicorn who farted pixie dust. I mean, you just can't base your life on emulating unicorns farting, pixie dust. So I think maybe the most valuable advice I've been given is never ask your customers to do something you wouldn't do. Now, this presumes they're not a psychopath. So let me give you some examples. So as a marketer, let's suppose that you institute some kind of capture system to ensure that bots are not creating accounts, right. So this means that you, you put up some four by four, picture and you say, All right, so select all the ones that have a bus in them. I don't know about you, but every time I encounter one of those systems, it takes me at least three or four tries. So I can't believe anybody likes to do that. So why would you make your customers do that? You don't want to do it. Why would you make your customers do that? And so, you know, let's take something really simple like packaging. So let's suppose you buy some consumer electronics, a headphone, a remote control, or you know, a Roku, whatever. And I don't know about you, but lots of times you encounter packaging that I swear you need a hacksaw to open it. I mean, you really you really do need a razor blade or a knife to open up that packaging. And I suppose there's really good reasons like I don't know what prevents shoplifting steals against moisture. I don't know what there's got to be some rational someplace. But I'm telling you when when it takes a hacksaw to open up the package to get to your headphone, something is wrong. And you probably hate that when you buy a headphone or when you buy a laptop. So why are you making people do that?

Carlos Doughty  10:19  
I love those small examples, but they're all part of the experience right there. Ultimately, the customer experience is not just the product is the pre the post. And those things have a lasting memory, that frustration, that emotion that you experience in well on the way through,

Guy Kawasaki  10:33  
I mean, you know, you Okay, so let's suppose you get past the packaging, well, then you open up a whole nother can of worms that you brought up with the product itself. And now we may be going outside of the narrow confines of marketing. But again, you know, somebody should go and be or at least go and see. So I think a very good example is digital cameras, right? So let's say you get past the packaging, hallelujah, now you have the camera in your hand. And they present you with a series of menus. That is absolutely confounding it is just, you know, let's say some things that you need to do all the time, which if you're smart, you format your SD card, right. And the format, the SD card is on the fifth level of the fifth menu. Now, this is something you probably should do every time you turn on your camera for a photo session, you want to format that SD card. So you know that the file structure is all great, right? But on the fifth menu of the fifth menu, oh my God. And so you look at that, and you say, like, you know, was Hiroshi? Or was, you know, Yuki, working in Japan, the engineer who created that menu structure, like what was he or she thinking, and I'll give you another you see, you're really gotten me going here. So I'll give you another example. So let's say that you have a waterproof action camera. Okay. And so you know, you're surfing or your paddle boarding. And that's what this camera is built for. But I swear, if you look at the user interface for those kinds of cameras, it is as if an engineer is sitting in a dry environment with no wind, no water, no waves, no nothing, you wearing white gloves, going through the menu structure. And it's just like, that's not how your cameras use, you can't make it so that you have to have a perfectly dry index finger with no wind, no water, no waves, no sharks coming at you. It's a completely different world. It's clearly a case where those companies they didn't go see they didn't go be for sure.

Carlos Doughty  13:18  
Like that a lot. We've got a different question. But this one, I would expect it to come up. Let's let's be honest, you're a master in storytelling. I think few would disagree with that. So let's jump into the art of storytelling. And here's the question for you in with more platforms and more contents. How can a marketers message really cut through? Well,

Guy Kawasaki  13:43  
I think that you and your audience are gonna think I'm gonna start getting boring here. But you know, what you should put in your content is not what you want to put. It's what your customers want to consume. And those two things are very different. You may want to have a sales pitch in your content, unlikely that your customers want the sales pitch. They want something that's information, they want something that's inspiration, or they want something that's entertaining. You want to ram your product down their throats, those two things are in direct opposition. So I call this the NPR or Wikipedia model. NPR is the public radio system in America. So NPR and Wikipedia, both basically have a no advertising strategy. And so how do they raise money? Well, they raise money by having these pledge drives. And let me say these pledge drives are it It's not your favourite time of year, when Wikipedia or the public radio is doing their pledge drives, because it's kind of intrusive. However, those programmes are very successful raising 10s of millions of dollars. And how is it that they're successful? It's because they have been providing value to their customers all year long, right? Imagine a world without Wikipedia or public radio. So they provide this great value all year long. So you have earned the right to promote and ask for money. But the sequence of events is, you earn the right you ask? Not you ask, and then you earn the right. And I think that is a that's the, you know, underlying principle of content, that you provide what people want to consume. And you also earn the right by providing valuable content to then ask for the sale.

Carlos Doughty  16:04  
Like that. And it's definitely definitely true that far too many marketers have that back to front. They will they or not even back to front, just all they do is ask or they will do is ask for, for sales. And we make sure Steve Jobs earlier, he's clearly come up again, he was gonna come up today. So in your book, you talk about Steve Jobs, mental models, and one of the ones that really jumped out was engineers as artists. Can you say more about Sure? Sure.

Guy Kawasaki  16:37  
So many companies think of engineers as cogs in the wheel. It uh, how many lines of code can they produce per day? You know, how a project management, all this kind of efficiency and stuff. But Steve Jobs attitude towards engineers was that they were artists, you know, there's an art to making software, there's an art to even designing a digital or analogue board inside a device. And so he approached them as artists and it artists that they have paint, they have spray cans, they have tools for sculpture, while engineers have compilers. And I think that is a much healthier attitude. Now, admittedly, if you're writing printer drivers, yeah, maybe that might not be the highest form of software programming art. But, I mean, there are also people who are the I guess, it depends on how you want to look at the world, right? So let's take something like let's say that you're in the home construction business. Specifically, you put the tiles on floors and bathrooms and kitchens, right? So you could look at it like that is truly a mundane thing. You get a square piece of ceramic, you put some cement behind it, and you stick it in the wall. Or, and I've met some there are some tile people who are truly artists. And I think that it's much better to consider people artists than sort of cogs in the wheel. Because I think there is an art to almost everything.

Carlos Doughty  18:26  
I think is, isn't it? We've Apple, they're famous for inside the machine. They said it's got to be beautiful to it can't just be the outside. It's got to be even though nobody will ever see it. It's caring enough for it to be a thing of beauty. Yep. Talking about artists, let's this takes us very nicely into remarkable people. So you have your amazing podcasts. You've met some really remarkable people. But and this is probably an unfair question, but I'm super intrigued. Who's the most remarkable and what made them so,

Guy Kawasaki  19:03  
man this is you know, the remarkable people podcasts. We're in the business of finding 52 remarkable people a year. And we've had, we've had remarkable athletes, entrepreneurs, marketers, academic positions, you name it. But I have to say I started off my podcasts with a bang. Like nucular level Bang, which is I started off with Jane Goodall. And it is hard to top Jane Goodall, let's face it. So she's now been on my podcast twice. I just saw her last week in San Fran actually in Oakland. And I would say that she maybe is numero uno on that list of remarkable people

Carlos Doughty  19:59  
and What made you so what made her because to your point?

Guy Kawasaki  20:04  
There's so much to her, right? So it's the kind of work that she does. She's she's all about uplifting society and really saving the world in a sense and environmental sense. And she's humble. And she's very funny. She she has a great story of humility that, you know, you would think that Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall because she had a PhD in biology or zoology, and her entree was an Oxford degree. Well, her entree into the Leakey institution in Africa was that she has secretarial skills. Her first job came about because the secretary for the leaky organisation was leaving, and Jane happened to be there and happen to have secretarial skills. So that's how Jane Goodall started. You know, most people would think, Oh, you need a PhD in biology to do that. So I just love that kind of story. And she gave my podcast a short little promo where she said, you know, Hi, I'm Jane Goodall. I've been on remarkable people twice. Now I really enjoy this podcast, and I hope you'll listen to it, especially my episode. But the other episodes are pretty good, too.

Carlos Doughty  21:33  
I like that boldness. Fantastic. We've got another one. I'm conscious of trying to make sure we cram in all these amazing questions. Changing gears again. I could have written this question. I love this question. Someone's clearly read your book. And this might be a horrible question. But can you talk us through your $5 billion mistake? Sorry, sorry to ask it. But I want to, you know, read the words, but

Guy Kawasaki  22:00  
I think it's more like 2 billion. But you know, there it adds up. So many years ago, I had moved to San Francisco. This is after my first stint at Apple. So I had moved to San Francisco and I was just having a wonderful life writing, consulting, speaking. And Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital. And Sequoia Capital is arguably the most successful venture capitalist ever. They've Chris created, you know, I think one or $2 trillion of market cap. So he calls me up. And he tells me about a company down by Stanford that he wants me to interview for the CEO position. Now Stanford to San Francisco, on a good day as a one hour drive on a bad day, while on a bad day. Could be two hours. But anyway. So I tell them, you know, Mike, I'm married, I have a kid now. I just don't want to drive that far every day. And I looked at the company, and it's just a collection of two guys favourite website. So I don't see what's useful there. I don't see what's defensible there. I don't see how you can monetize that. And come to find out that company was Yahoo. So you know, I could have been the probably second CEO, probably the first CEO was Jerry Yang. So the second CEO of Yahoo. And you know, I would have got that and let's say five to 7% of Yahoo. And 5%, five, excuse me, and five to 7% of Yahoo. At its peak, would have been billions of dollars.

Carlos Doughty  23:56  
Well, and does that keep you awake at night now? I don't know when annoying people like me ask the question.

Guy Kawasaki  24:06  
What keeps me awake is people like you asking me about how I lost 5 billion.

Carlos Doughty  24:14  
I couldn't ask it just I had to hear it from from you directly. But let's, let's move on briskly from the 5 billion or the 2 billion as we put it there. Let's jump back into marketing. And let's take a little look at the crystal ball. So can we get your one marketing prediction for the year ahead? There'll be lots in 2024 2025 and beyond. But let's just next year, well, it's your one month now addiction.

Guy Kawasaki  24:41  
First of all, I don't consider myself a visionary. Secondly, I think most visionaries are full of BS anyway, that they just make a lot of predictions. And then if one or several of them come true, they only highlight the ones that came true. And they ignore the ones that they said would come to true and didn't come true. I I also in my speeches, I cite several examples where seeming experts said something would not happen, or that something would happen. That didn't happen. And the founder of IBM allegedly said there'd only be five computers in the world. And Western Union said that the telephone had too many shortcomings. And so 20 years from now, I don't want to be the guy that they're quoting saying that the back in 2022, Guy Kawasaki said that cyber currency would never ever succeed. I happen to believe that, but so that's what's dangerous about making predictions. And in I guess, I would say that it's, it's not so much about making predictions as reacting fast. I think that, you know, trying to predict the future is very difficult. Basically random, and, and so rather than setting yourself up for a very difficult goal of predicting the future, I think you should set yourself up for being a very quick reactor. So when you see the future, you jump on it. And let me give you the maybe best anti example, actually, I give you two. So one anti example is that blockbuster was approached by Netflix, Netflix wanted blockbusters to buy the company, Blockbuster was very successful and had 1000s of brick and mortar outlets where you could rent DVDs. Netflix, as you can imagine, from the name, wanted to stream movies over the internet. Netflix wanted blockbuster to buy it, Blockbuster refused, twice. Oops. And an even better example may be that in 1975, an engineer at Kodak invented digital photography. And let's just say Kodak did not embrace digital photography, and Kodak invented digital photography, the world would be very different today. You know, none of us are using Kodak cameras. And so if Kodak had embraced digital photography, well, it would have made a lot of money making digital cameras, it probably would have perfected digital sensors. And it would be the sensor inside every iPhone and inside every Android phone. And, you know, someone who is born 15 years ago would know who Kodak is, which is I don't think true today. So yeah, that's a case where, in a sense, the future was in their laps. Right? I mean, you invented digital photography, the company that was inventing streaming video, tried to sell itself to you. But you insisted on brick and mortar stores, and you insisted on making film. I mean, you don't need to be a visionary when you're presented with the future. Now, you know, of course, you could say that, well, how would they know that digital photography would take off? And how would they know that streaming video would take off? And that is a fair point, because everything that's presented to you is not necessarily going to succeed.

But again, I think we go back to the E word, which is empathy. So if you think about it, it a Kodak was not in the chemicals business. I think it thought it was in the chemicals business. But Kodak truly is in the preservation of memories business. So if you're in the preservation of memories business, with a little bit of empathy, you might say to yourself, so you know, what's better, that you shoot something, you take it someplace, you drop it off, they treated with chemicals, you can't really see what you shot for a week, you know, et cetera, et cetera, or you can instantly see the photo. I mean, you got to believe that that's obviously superior. But listen, I fully realised it's easy for me to say of course, I would have recognised that. So they're in line So the if it was easy to predict the future, trust me more people would do it.

Carlos Doughty  30:06  
But that sound advice, the being prepared to cannibalise your own business? Yes,

Guy Kawasaki  30:11  
for sure. That is an underlying? Well, that's one way of looking at it, which is yes, you know, there are two guys in a garage to gals in a garage or a guy and a gal in the garage. And they don't give a crap about your business. They just want to destroy you. So it arguably, I would make the case that if they're not two people in a garage, who wants to destroy you, you probably you probably are not worth destroying. So you should self cannibalise. And that the the concept that only the Paranoid Survive is not a bad concept.

Carlos Doughty  30:51  
I like that guy, absolutely fantastic. But I think we might be out with our time with you. It's been an absolute pleasure. You've been on my hit list, I'm not gonna lie. I've been wanting to chat with you for a long time, and you didn't fail to deliver some really, really insightful takeaways there for everybody. So thank you so much for your time today. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you.

Guy Kawasaki  31:15  
Listen, thank you very much for having me. And if your audience is interested in becoming even more remarkable, if I can plug my podcast one more time, telling you with total certainty, that my podcast is the best work that I have ever done in my career. And my podcast is not about me. It's about my guests. So it's 95% Jane Goodall talking and Neil deGrasse Tyson talking and Bob Cialdini talking and Marc Benioff talking and Steve Wozniak talking, it's not Guy Kawasaki talking.

Carlos Doughty  31:53  
Can I do it? Can I add a recommendation for people that are gonna go and check it out? Your interview with Scott Galloway was fantastic. I'm a big fan of

Guy Kawasaki  32:02  
not hard to interview, Scott Galloway. All right.

Carlos Doughty  32:06  
Thank you so much, all

Guy Kawasaki  32:06  
of you.

Carlos Doughty  32:08  
Thank you. Thank you. Bye, bye.

Wow, what fantastic insights there from Gaia really, really fascinating. I don't think anybody's surprised to hear such great stories from him. Given his amazing history and backgrounds. I wanted to pause here for a moment to give a very special thank you to our sponsor storyplot. For making this possible. We can only bring together amazing people like the panel we have now. And people like like our saqi. We have amazing sponsors like story block. So please do support us by supporting them. Right, but we run out of time. We have some amazing questions, but we couldn't cover them all we've got but better still. We've got an amazing expert panel lined up now. So joining me here we have Thomas Thomas is joining me as VP of marketing from storyblocks. Welcome to us.

Thomas  33:06  
Hi, Carlos. Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting us.

Carlos Doughty  33:10  
Fantastic. Then we have Ryan Wallman, Creative Director and Head of copy Wellmark. Ryan, welcome. Hello, thanks. Really great to see you. Again. we've chatted some time ago now with your I recommend your book to absolutely every single marketer is should be the delusions of grandeur is just exceptional to this day. I every single person that joins our team, I buy a copy for they have a good read of it is fantastic. Thank

ryan wallman  33:36  
you, I'll send you that check.

Carlos Doughty  33:40  
For endorsement. That was it as a quick plug. Fantastic. And next we have Sasha Sasha joins us as former VP of Citibank where he was covering marketing optimization capability and change. Sasha. Welcome.

Sasha  33:54  
Thanks, Carlos, grinning from Sydney.

Carlos Doughty  33:57  
So Sasha is another, another fantastic person to be following in the marketing space. He's presented a few of our other events in the past and actually is one of our sort of brand ambassadors. It's a really great to be chatting to set your

Sasha  34:10  
pleasure, right. Happy to help brands.

Carlos Doughty  34:13  
Let's get on it, though. We've got loads of questions. Thomas, I'm going to find your way first and foremost. So we're looking at lessons learned and kind of key takeaways and what do we need to know as marketers in this planning season? As we're looking at 2023? Where do we need to narrow in? And with this in mind, we've got a fantastic question here around personalization. What's your core advice for marketers looking to drive personalization at scale? In 2023?

Thomas  34:40  
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such an important Moser big topic, right personalization. And I'm a marketer myself, I used to work in many different b2b and b2b, b2c businesses where personalization would come up at some point right and people would start asking questions around how can we scratch As around building a personalization strategy, how can we personalise our user experiences that we have? And I think I would like to start with one statement, personalization is still very hard. And I think there are various statistics out there and Dynamic Yield, for example, published, I think it was last year, a statistic that only 6% of businesses are truly able to deliver personalised contextual experiences across various channels. So you, like when I read that statistic? I was like, Wow, just 6%? What is everybody else doing right? Like? What are we getting wrong, that we're not able to personalise our user experiences? So I think we need to pause there for one moment and recognise a few things and a few developments that happened in the last few years. And one is, the number of channels right has exploded, like the number of devices, the number of front end experiences, our customers, our users, our employees use these days, has just grown meaningful if we just not only think about mobile web, but also thinking about like smartwatches AR experiences, we our experiences, voice, like voice interfaces have become a thing. We we've done, actually, like a study around the state of content management and which channels like are used these days, both in the APEC region, but also globally. And it's a whole range of those mentioned channels, right? So first and foremost, I think personalization is still very hard because of the number of channels that have happened in the last few years. And so it's businesses, keeping up with those channels to be able to deliver those personalised experiences. But the second thing is the content, the number of content, the content volume also has exploded in the last few years, not just thinking about text, video, audio, images, visuals, and so on, and so forth. And I think we've reached a point. Because you've asked me for an advice, I think we've reached a point where we, as marketing teams realise that we need to rethink our content strategy, we need to rethink technology, we need to rethink our processes. And we need to rethink how we collaborate across the different teams when it comes to content. Because when we speak about personalization, that foundation is we want to send personalised content to different channels that are contextually like that are contextually dependent on the user audience, the segmentation, the user behaviour, and so on. And we are only able to do that if we have a clear understanding of our content strategy. If we have a clear understanding, where does the content come from? Where where is our content hub where we want to personalise that content experience, and then we have that cross team visibility across the different teams. Because only if those three things are in place, I really believe that you can build personalization on top of it. So my advice to marketers would be, start with the basics, start with a content audit, where does the content said start with week questioning and looking at your content architecture, thinking about structured content, because content that should go out on an Alexa skill is obviously a different format than the same content going out as a website promotion, for example. So think about structured content and how you can define defined content in in a more structured way that then allows you to build personalization on top of it that allows you to push that content to various different channels.

Carlos Doughty  38:39  
Sound advice there? Yeah, I think if you don't have those foundations in place, and start with things like an audit, you know, all too often more content, more content, more channels, more data, more things. And it's kind of almost like a headless chicken. It's just another piece of it, just spitting it out there versus having that nice, structured approach.

Thomas  38:57  
And I think it's, it's, I mean, we've seen that in the last few years that as marketing teams wanted, we wanted to launch new channels fast, right? We pursued new markets, we pursued new channels, bead, mobile or voice, for example. But that led to content be content silos, and that content being siloed, from other parts of the organisation, and that, again, lead to a lack of collaboration that, again, lead to lack of visibility. And I think, therefore, a lot of businesses realise that that's really blocking them from personalised experiences and being able to deliver them in a in a good and real time manner.

Carlos Doughty  39:39  
Absolutely. Yeah, I think we did some research earlier this year, we found I think it was 52% of CMOS cited having more 10 or more channels in play. And so if you've got those 10 or more, it's very easy to end up in those content silos and be more of a multi channel versus omni channel. So it's kind of these personalization In pockets versus a contextualised integrated communication cross channel, so you have the awareness of what your messaging from one channel to another? Yeah, absolutely. I don't leave you out, right, we've got a nice one that follows over to you. The quantity versus quality. I'm interested with this, knowing your work, I'm gonna guess I know the answer. But I want to hear it firsthand. There's a bit of a quantity versus quality debate when it comes to content. The more you publish, the more you learn, or, or you refine and perfect when you publish, what's your take? You know, there's some people, which will be like, just get it out there just 1000 pieces of content a day. That's it, just keep doing it, you'll get better. Or there's a pause, more strategic, more structured approach. What's your take? Yeah, well,

ryan wallman  40:53  
I think, you know, touching on what Thomas has just spoken about there, I think there really needs to be a strategic approach to these things. If you know, as far as you can do that, there's such a plethora of communication channels, and they seem to be exploding all the time. So you do need to take sort of a step back, I think, and, and I will generally advocate for quality over quantity. And I don't know if that's the answer you're expecting. But certainly when it comes to paid media, I think that's true in marketing, communications, the quality should take priority over quantity. On Twitter, at the moment, there's a viral thread that's kind of doing around that compares kind of old 70s and 80s apps to current ads by the same brand, a bit of a how it started, how it's going thing. And I think it's fair to say that the current ads don't come out very well. And I think that at least partly speaks to a decline in creative craft, or at least the commitment to creative craft. And I think that, in turn is partly attributable to, you know, a prioritisation of, of quantity over quality with since the advent of digitization and all these other channels that we get. And I think you can become very scattergun. And that's a problem. But having said that, I think when it comes to, to owned media, there is much more of a place for, for experimenting, and seeing what works. You know, based on my personal experience of writing blogs, and social media and those kinds of things, I think you can or I have anyway refined my approach over time, and hopefully improved it, I think, now I look back on some of the stuff that I wrote 10 years ago and cringe. So there, somehow that process has worked, to some extent. And so I think there's no doubt that you can hone your skills, particularly, you know, within particular channels over time, and kind of perfected over time. But, you know, I do think that's much more appropriate for, you know, that interview process is more appropriate for owned organic media rather than paid because I think, you know, those brand campaigns, long term brand campaigns consistency really is the key. And that's when you need to focus on the quality.

Carlos Doughty  43:13  
Definitely, yeah, I think there's that balancing act. And I think that's a really great point around the owned versus paid. Yeah, that continuity. I think you mentioned around ads, I think. I don't think I've met anybody that doesn't miss the economist ads. You know, why? They were just gold. There was no need to change or throw away that beautiful work. Yeah, but that's almost like a whole nother debate or rent more like, right, Sasha? heading your way. Right, we got one for you, which is what tech tools drive great journey design, and drive deeper engagements and error, you know, particularly well,

Sasha  43:57  
that's a good question. I think a good segue and listening to Thomas from a personalization and Ryan talking about quality and quantity. I want to place a.on This on that. So how do you actually place the data in motion to provide that experience? And you know, when you look at providing the quality, and personalised element in Journey, orchestration and design, what you look at is, we have all the required data points, and how do you enable the missing data points to get a personalised experience in a journey construct in real time or in batch? And what you're really looking at is how do you actually use the data to help the customer to get to where they want to get to, or the path you as an organisation want the customer to take. I want to take an example from a banking industry, for example, the goal of trying to apply for a credit card, the end goal is really either you have an approved application, and number two is start using the product. And if you look at the sequence of events that happen from a transaction perspective, you've got a car delivery, you got car activation, you got car transactions, And you may not have credit card transaction because of some reasons, and you have a period of card inactivity, and then you basically stimulate another set of activity happening through. So in that process, what's really important is that understanding your transactional data to understand the drop offs, and we'll look at your tools to your data becomes your tool, and your drop off becomes not the end part of your journey, but actually the start of your journey. And that ignites the fact of what interventions you need to have be undefined your blockers to get things back on track. So that would be from my perspective, in terms of tools, I would say, really focusing in data and really pushing the data in motion across and Ryan. And actually Thomas talked about multiple channels, and you said, you know, an organisation looking at different turnover, about 10 different channels. So how do you get that data across all those 10 channels and orchestrate a journey? That would be the critical point for me.

Carlos Doughty  45:56  
Thank you so much for back your way. I like this question, especially when you take a little look at the year and review. We don't need to mention names or you can if you want to, but what what are the what have been the major marketing Fails of the year just gone past or going past? Well,

Thomas  46:16  
I'm I'm definitely not mentioning names, I definitely want to keep it positive. I think like if we if I reflect on the last year, or maybe in the last two years where like obviously COVID is to some degree still around in some countries. I think from from as a technology vendor as a content management system, that story block we've we've seen like how COVID accelerated the digitalization, right, how businesses went digital, how they rethought processes, how the results collaboration, how they rethought building content strategies that we mentioned before for the different channels for the different use cases. And, obviously, that there has been a tremendous acceleration. But I think we are now at a point in regards to fails, or maybe things that we should rethink where businesses, like the last few years really pushed for those new channels pushed for new incentives push to invest. And I think we're now at a time where, where people and businesses look at that and ask themselves, what's what's the what's the business ROI, right? Like, what's the long term impact of us investing in new channels is investing in new content in new content marketing, initiatives, marketing in general. So I think a lot of conversations that I have with customers, partners and people in this space is really around. Taking a stop taking a stop and looking looking what worked and what didn't work, screwed up pandemic. And I think in regards to failures, I think the most failure that I see out there is a lack of collaboration and how traditional businesses who moved into into the digital space invested hard on that and also screw lockdowns when we're not able to collaborate across the teams. So I think like in our like state of CMS survey that we've done earlier this year, a few months ago, we've realised that a lot of departments lack visibility into other departments, content initiatives. And we've also learned that content, we speak so much about content today, and data is not solely a marketing thing, right? It's we all as marketers, and I'm a marketer, myself, we believe, well, we own the topic, right? We own content, we own the marketing content, we build two different campaigns around. But if you look at your business, there are so many other teams and departments involved in what I would call content operations, thinking about HR, operations, sales, and so on and so forth. So we've also seen that on average, there are six to seven teams who run content operations or who are involved in content management. So back to the topic of failure. I think the biggest failure I've seen is a lack of collaboration between those teams and how that led not only to content silos, but also how that again led to outdated content, how that led to, to efficiencies, and how that really became became a big pain point for many businesses who suddenly were prompted with a situation of actually not knowing where certain content assets at speed for sales enablement beat for marketing, or whatever it really is. I think it's not really a fancy failure, I guess. But I guess I really want to emphasise that because that lack of collaboration, like I think COVID made it obvious that the teams are disconnected to some degrees and we're now realising that that lack of collaboration lead to a lot of inefficiencies with regards to content silos in regards to teams are being siloed. So yeah,

Carlos Doughty  50:08  
no sexy failure, but it's a good failure. I think it's a great point. Yeah, I think it's that operations piece, right. If you're not collaborating, there isn't the opportunity to capitalise and it's the Ferrari on the drive that, yeah, someone's driving some of the time versus the 14 Engage and using it, but

Thomas  50:29  
I think as marketers we like we like to fancy new things, right. We like to talk about VR experiences, we'd like to talk about the Mita horse. But at the end of the day, I recently published an article on that. I think we need need to fix the basics first. Like we really need to go back to the drawing board and look at our content operations before we before we started investing in those new shiny new tools. Shiny new Ferraris. Were out there.

Carlos Doughty  50:57  
Brian, you're really big on the metaverse, and that's your bag all day long. Right. What about failures? Your side? Have you got any others? What have you seen this year? That's been a bit of a marketing failure or last year?

ryan wallman  51:10  
Yeah, well, unlike commerce, I will No, no. I reckon it's really hard to go past. Zuckerberg Metaverse video. I mean, I think you know that things aren't going well, when you become you know, meme worthy within a day or whatever it was. You know, and obviously, a lot of people have, have kind of really killed the aesthetics of it, and the graphics and all that kind of thing. But I think what does touch on its deeper underlying problem with with matter, and that is, you know, to touch on your point about this connection, I suppose, Thomas is that they just seemed so out of touch with their consumers at the moment. And whether that sort of persists, I guess, remains to be seen. But funnily enough, I said, I often get an ad on my Facebook feed, which has the headline, be your true self in the metaverse. And it always makes me laugh, because I just think it seems beyond parody, because if anything, the metaverse will be you know, your true self things like the absolute last thing that will happen to so yeah, I do think that there's a problem with with market orientation there at least an issue with it. And, you know, on that subject, Bob Hoffman wrote a quite scathing piece as you would imagine, in his last newsletter, about meta any question whether it's the worst rebound in history, given that you know, they've lost 60% of their value or whatever it is since since the rebrand so I think he's probably got a point. The only the other one that sort of comes to mind I suppose is ticked off sorry, Instagrams mimicry of tick tock, then they went to the full screen video, and full disclosure, I know nothing about the intricacies, because it's not my bailiwick, really. But yeah,

Carlos Doughty  52:57  
yeah. Right on tick tock.

ryan wallman  53:01  
Yeah. But yeah, what I would say, you know, is that in general, it's not a great idea to blatantly copy your competitors, particularly if they're a first mover with something. So yeah, wouldn't have seemed to be a good idea.

Carlos Doughty  53:16  
Some nice examples, Sasha, what about your site? What have you seen,

Sasha  53:20  
uh, one of the thing that strikes wanes through recent activities in Australia is the protection of customer data. I think that's taking a very, very big role in terms of how data is collected, stored and utilised. We just had, I won't read the name, the brand, but we had major telco here, where you had a data hack and personal information for about 2.1 million customers, in some form, or shape was compromised. And what came to light is that they had two levels of personal information. One is more around, for example, the traditional name, email address phone number, to identify a customer to they also have some more deeper personal information, for example, driver's licence number, passport, Medicare. And the idea was that what okay, you need that information to authenticate a person for identity management for driver's licence and passport. But that's only at the acquisition? And do you really need to retain that information in the long term? And how do you actually manage it? So the role around retention and disposal and disposal of personal information, how it's collected and used, I think that is a very important one that I felt is happening, and, you know, marketing permissions as the other one, just to couple with that, again, maintaining the data flavour, how many organisations are sending out customer communications, where they have unsolicited marketing permissions, as well, and they're breaching that so I guess those are the two that strike me that really needs to be taken care of in the future.

Carlos Doughty  54:54  
Yeah, I think there'll be very strong areas of focus in the year ahead. Clearly, more More companies facing fines, legislations only doubling down and I think, yeah, there's sort of, I can't remember this stat off the top of my head, but the amount of different legislations globally country by country now, is, is massive. It's not

Sasha  55:16  
like the the GDPR, the California Act, the Privacy Act, a triple C in Australia. So there's so many to basically look ndpr I think if you're a global organisation, with offices in different parts, different countries, it becomes challenging because you need to comply with all those different legislations across the globe. Afternoon,

Thomas  55:38  
I just want to add some research. Sorry. Yeah, jump in. I just want to add one thing. Absolutely. Like it's not, but it's not only legislations, right. It's also like the real security threats that security breaches that, that you also referred to that out there. And we've like, we've surveyed our customers who regularly see, like more than half of businesses regularly see on a monthly or even weekly basis, security scraps also coming to the content side of things. And I think it's, that's definitely a topic that is probably not too fancy for the marketing teams out there. But something we should we should be aware of.

Carlos Doughty  56:16  
Yeah, I think I think there's, there's one part on this sort of topic here. There's one part of legislation, there's another part of kind of the opportunity or the risk around brand trust as well, because there's, you know, are you fine, but also, how does your customer feel about this? And we've, we've more and more cases being published in greater awareness of how your data is managed? Yeah, it's definitely going to be a stronger area of focus, as we look ahead. Alright, let's keep going on sort of mix between looking back and looking forwards. Winners, winners, winners, winners. Thomas, can you give us some companies use in Excel in the last 12 months? And what common traits do you think they share? Yes,

Thomas  57:01  
absolutely. And I think they're like, I would like to start with the second part, what what common threats looks great. It's great to see there. I think first I see a trend step marketing teams are getting more technical, putting in more technical resources into the marketing organisation, because I think a lot of like, a lot of discussions a lot of topics that we have when it comes to, to content operations, content management, how we how we as marketing team operate our campaigns, with the explosion into growth in terms of front end channels, like devices that are used. The need for us as marketing teams to become more technical has evolved. What do I mean by that? I've seen teams like Oakley, Oakley, a big Swedish, originally from Sweden, but globally known food brand. They actually got rid of a marketing team, they basically have no longer a marketing team that runs their, what you would call typical marketing campaigns beat on the brand side or lead generation side of things. They reworked the team to make it not only more HR, whether it comes to the collaboration with other teams, like the product team, the sales team and so on. But also they've their intention was to bring more technical knowledge into gross those creative departments. Why? Because they are aware that it's no longer about just running a website or just running a mobile app. As we've mentioned before, it's so much more about like you being aware of the different displays different screen interactions that they have with their end consumers. And that could happen at a point of sale interface in the shop that could happen through a mobile experience or through a screw to wear a smartwatch experience. And screw that realisation they really moved towards that setup, where marketing per se is no longer a marketing team. But it's more of a cross functional team having front end developers back end developers, data scientists, UX designers thinking closely about the user journeys and how, how they can optimise those user journeys, as well as the what I would call traditional marketing roles in the same team. So I think when it comes to, to the winners that I've seen, I think Oakley is really a best best case example because they've, they've not only succeeded as a brand globally, and they've been recognised, for example in Webby Awards with with different recognitions on their creative marketing campaigns, but at the same time, they all also have quite a future proof setup when it comes to the marketing team. Now I've seen that with other examples in any industry, be it finance or tech. I'll be speaking next week. Stock Dublin for example with spendesk growing tech company out of France, France. They again, we work the marketing team to make it more cross functional. And so in a nutshell, I think my winners this year definitely have been teams who brought technical knowledge, UX knowledge, data science scientists into the marketing team. Obviously, there are other ways to set up your marketing team. But at the end of the day, I think it's really important as we move into next year that, that we as marketing teams are aware that we need to bring those specialists speed on the UX side on the front and backend side of things in either into our teams, or have a very well aligned HL structure on how we collaborate with those roles outside our marketing department.

Carlos Doughty  1:00:42  
Really interesting, really interesting. And so it sounds like that kind of that blend of capabilities. And also back to your point earlier around collaboration, when that's fully immerse some of the benefits you get. Absolutely. Chin.

Thomas  1:00:55  
Absolutely. And I mean, from both give one example, and I've been there myself and in previous roles, we as marketers would come up with marketing campaigns, a new brand campaign, we will build our experience described, but at some point we would need to buy in from a developer, for example, or a UX designer. And we would end up in those waterfall type mechanism where we would create tickets for the different teams and would have a back and forth and within the different ticketing systems. And that that really leads again to inefficiencies and lack of visibility. And I think a lot of businesses like Oatly spenders candidates realise that are changing the way they collaborate.

Carlos Doughty  1:01:36  
Really interesting. Sounds like they've been very progressive. Ryan, similar similar line of question for you. In an era of accelerated digitization, and tech idealisation, how do marketers avoid forgetting timeless fundamentals of marketing?

ryan wallman  1:01:55  
Yeah, well, I'm probably going to contradict Thomas to some extent here, as you might have expected, because it happens I actually saw a LinkedIn post on this topic this morning from a woman called Amy came in, you may know she's quite well known in kind of marketing circles. But she was bemoaning the fact really that tech know how is seen as a bit of a proxy for talent marketing. And she actually gave the example of seeing a lot of slide decks marketing slide decks, where they're full of flashing tech trends, and so on, but kind of lacking substance in terms of kind of good ideas and great marketing ideas. So, you know, I think it's self evident that digitalization has obviously changed many aspects of marketing. And Thomas has obviously touched on that there. And of course, it's really important that we do have integration between tech specialists, specialisations and marketing. But what I don't think it changes is the fundamentals, the basic tenets of marketing, you know, so like, David Abbott, once said, check that arrives at the speed of light is still shipped. And I don't think that's fine. As you know, I believe that our industry is infatuation with kind of the shiny new thing. And again, Thomas mentioned earlier, is one of my bugbears. And, you know, obviously, there's nothing inherently bad about new technologies. And they can be, they can offer a huge boost to marketing tactics. But I think we do sometimes get carried away with the latest thing at the expense of some of those fundamentals. You know, and probably the best example I can think of is that week or two, when PokemonGo was going to completely change market forever. And there have been examples since then. So yeah, look, I think there probably are too many people in what I would loosely termed digital marketing, who haven't necessarily had an education in the broader context of marketing and those marketing fundamentals. And obviously, it's not because they don't don't have the capability, it's just because they haven't had the training. And so they can kind of, I think, overestimate the importance of, of new channels and tools, when you know, when it may not be the most appropriate tool, and, you know, how do we avoid it? Well, I'll, I'll refer to Margaret's. And as I usually do, now, my personal view is that the best education that you can get in terms of the broad context of marketing is to do maths, mini MBA, I think it's probably the best value education you can get from a broad marketing perspective. He doesn't need me to sell it for him, by the way.

Carlos Doughty  1:04:31  
I think he doesn't. Right, right. We've we've actually funny enough, we said a few people from our team on that course. Yeah. But on that point, though, is the answer not an either or it's not binary. Is it not about the blend? Is it the example that if you have those techie people that don't have the grounding in marketing, let's say, it's not they don't want it? No, they couldn't have it, but maybe they just want to double triple down and so the example of training let's say they go Yep, I'd rather do a course, a more technical course on UX. Is there not? Is there not a better solution of you know that that core marketer that really understands those timeless fundamental working closely together versus, I suppose, sort of not T shaped, we're trying to be more rounded? Should you? It's a little bit of sort of depth and breadth. At what point do you go, you know what, I'm going to stay mega technical, but I'm also going to listen, I'm just going to make sure I listened to the markets properly. And vice versa.

ryan wallman  1:05:29  
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. As long as you have the right blend of people, you know, and understanding where those, you know, the end of your case where you can't really again, basically, and listening to others, then yeah, that's absolutely fine. I think it's when it's when tech people kind of, you know, supersede the marketing function, that it becomes an issue when they don't necessarily have that grounding. But now I break the integration is crucial.

Thomas  1:05:55  
Yeah, just to add, to add to that, 100% of what you said, like integration is key. And it's not either or kind of question. But I would add one layer to that. And that is communication. Because I think we've we've all seen in a lot of businesses. More like, you know, in a simple way, marketing specialists being not able to communicate with the technical people because of like language barriers, like in the sense of technical knowledge, in the sense of marketers missing the technical knowledge, technical people missing the marketing knowledge. So I think my point earlier, to my point earlier, it's more about bringing those people in the same room on the same level on the same communication layer, to be able to talk to each other and be able to collaborate more efficiently, together.

Unknown Speaker  1:06:43  
Giving them a shared language is important.

Carlos Doughty  1:06:47  
I think that's such an important point. And I think it's almost, I sort of describe it like explaining, like you wouldn't a pub, you know, sometimes market is gonna get too fancy with their language as can technical people, it's like, can we just say, what are we trying to do here? Let's all try and be overly smart and trying to impress and confused. And sometimes it's, it's kind of a facade write for, I just want you to leave me alone. That's, that's something smart over there, versus just putting down the barriers and just getting down to plain simple English.

Thomas  1:07:18  
I mean, at the end of the day, it all comes back what what's, what's the real goal, right? Like, why are we collaborating? What's the real real assumption we have here? And most often, it's, it's like customer centric goals, right? We want to build something want to create something for our end users, for consumers, customers, wherever those audiences are. And I think that's, that's something that's like both groups on the tech side, as well as on the marketing side should never lose the focus on because that's why we exist at the end of the day, right? It's true.

Carlos Doughty  1:07:48  
That's true. Right, Sasha, over to you. We don't want to leave you out. We've got global downturn, this is always going to come up. So we're approaching what we expect to be a global downturn with this in mind, as marketers look to maximise their marketing budget for martech. What advice do you have?

Sasha  1:08:09  
It's a good question. I think commerce and Ryan talked about, you know, the talent and the skill gap. And you know, when I was talking about marketing, I think marketing is not now very much technology enabled, and data analytics and insights really have a big thing to look at, and marketing, technology investment is on the rise. And Carlos, your team has done a bit of a study, where that year last year, we started the total marketing technology ecosystem with about 350 billion or, and if you look at research in terms of 55% of marketers surveyed, actually say they've not been able to get maximum from their stack. At the same time, there was a survey by act one that says 49% of marketers believe they don't really get the true power from their service providers in enabling that tech. And I guess, when you look at, you know, we've talked about the Ferrari, the shiny toy, the form of fear of missing out what my advice would be, is that what's the right platform? What's the use case? What's the outcome that you're looking for? And based on that you should be actually investing in that tech. For example, if you're an organisation that's working on customer journey, you know, it's more about customer lifecycle up acquisition of onboarding customers retaining and growing. There's a separate toolkit for that, as compared to if you're an organisation, which is more b2b. And its marketing activity, which is looking at lead generation lead nurturing, meeting sales and marketing alignment, you have a different capability to do that. So I think a classic example where things get distorted. I was in an organisation where they wanted to do real time messaging and the brief that came from marketing was that we need to have real time messaging so get a product that basically is able to send out alerts pretty much in real time. So as an IT team, we went to go and we called on to IBM transact. This allows you to do one way messaging as alert. And then when we bought that product, they said, Hey, we also need to have that capability for a return response. So the customers were ability to unsubscribe. Now, transact as a product is a one way communication tool. It doesn't allow two way communication, it means that, okay, our business case is now actually a two way communication. So IBM has another protocol interact. And that does two way dialogue, interaction management. So you start plugging in that. So I think, you know, that's where the ownership comes in, in terms of really understanding at the very start, what the use case is, and what the outcome you're looking at. And the other thing that I fail is the total cost of ownership. And if I define the term called cost of ownership, it's actually having four different quadrants. One is the cost of the software licence itself. The second is the implementation costs. The third is the training. And the fourth is the adoption, and Thomas and Ryan class about the training and the adoption with the people in terms of how much money should you be allocating, mature allocating to your technology spend. So give me a classic example. If the $100,000 for your software and implementation, you should actually look at 1/5 of the cost for training and adoption. So those are my you know, my advisors wisdom in terms of if you're actually getting trying to get more from your stack, what you should be doing, and then try to flag the disconnect in your stack with these technical functionality overlap. And you see this A classic example, you buy multiple tools trying to do the same function. So you need to decide to consolidate and where to eliminate. And sometimes also think different teams are actually using different tools to get the same outcome. So we really need to start looking at editing or actually auditing the existing stack and rethinking and revisiting the overlap and looking at where's the best value for money? That would be my advice.

Carlos Doughty  1:11:57  
And I can't not plug our own business here, because we do a mini MBA MATEC, which literally digs into a lot of the parts you mentioned there. I couldn't agree more from the reverse engineer from the real business use case. You know, what we've talked about this earlier a few times is like, what are we really trying to achieve. And if we're investing a lot of time and effort in a technology, to your point, there's more quadrants, it's not just buy it, and it will be done. If you don't invest in the people, and especially that adoption piece, you're not going to get your bang for your buck. I also think that the point you made around, it might be about taking the stack you have you might not need more budget, you might be fine with the budget you have. You might even be fine if they cut it back a little bit, because actually you might have obsolete tech that you're not using. And so some of the opportunity and the cash, you may have sat there in front of you might be about removing some of the unused tech or some of the tech that's overlapping with other features. So yeah, I think even in a downturn, I think markets might surprise themselves at how much they've got available to them if they do that audit piece properly. Yeah. Right. We're in the final rounds for everybody. I've got one question. It's the same question for everybody, which is predictions. It's crystal ball time, if everyone wants to take a little look at their crystal ball for the year ahead, Thomas one marketing prediction for next year?

Thomas  1:13:24  
Yes, I think today we spoke a lot about efficiencies and the other two, such as last point, optimising the tech stack. And how you how you might have so many different systems in place that your team is actually not using is definitely a bit of a big one. I would I would summarise all of that under Content operations for marketing teams will be a big thing next year. As we look at efficiencies. As we look at optimising processes, optimising technology, optimising how we use to those technologies at hand. And with that said, I definitely see a trend for what I would call a best of breed technology, meaning businesses looking for one specific job to be done. And therefore there's one specific solution that helps get that job done. Rather than having an all in one solution that has many jobs to be done. But maybe it's not really efficiently used or too much used. In regards to some of those use cases. That's one way how you can save real money and be more efficient but cancelled operation will become a thing of the best of breed technology will support that.

Carlos Doughty  1:14:37  
Fantastic. Thank you, Ryan, you will said

ryan wallman  1:14:41  
Yeah, well, this is probably gonna sound a bit facetious, but I'll probably suggest that not all that much will change in the next year. You know, to hark back to the fundamentals. Obviously, the marketing fundamentals haven't changed in decades, really. And so I can't really see why anything substantive will happen in the next 12 months. And I but I think probably the caveat to that is obviously the, you know, the rising cost of living potential for recession, and so on. So I think we will inevitably see some companies cutting back their marketing spend. And interestingly, read some wrote a column about this a couple of months ago to really recall and actually recommended, where he made the point of particularly for brand building activities. That's almost exactly the wrong approach. Because, you know, it's been shown that companies who either maintain their ad spend in particular, or increase it tend to do hugely better than their competitors, once economically, conditions kind of improve again. So that's something I think we will see that a lot of brands or companies will cut back, but their competitors who don't will come out of it a lot better. The other thing I would say that is the my particular sector of healthcare, I think there's going to be an increasing push towards digitalization. You know, I think since the since the pandemic, there's been a huge growth in telehealth and digital health kind of more broadly. And I think that's only going to continue because, you know, we're never going back to what it was like in 2018. If you've been to a doctor in the last couple of years, you'd know that. And so but yeah, they'll continue to be digitalization wants to know what the genies out of the bottle. I think that's out a week from now on. And a lot of doctors actually, even from a client that we've worked with recently, a lot of doctors have expressed interest in kind of growing their digital health capability. So you know, it's clearly clearly a trend.

Carlos Doughty  1:16:37  
Yeah, I think the digitalization piece, I think there's a lot of a lot of the sort of core traditional industries or industries that haven't needed to evolve at the same pace that are now going to lead in, you know, I'd say the pandemics had somewhat of a helpful opportunity around that. Did you really need to go to your doctor's to cough on them to splutter to queue up and make someone else sick? Or could you've done it on a phone call? Yeah,

ryan wallman  1:17:01  
I'd Yeah. Look, I think telehealth would have been years and years away without it. So it's been an interesting challenge. Yeah.

Carlos Doughty  1:17:08  
And to your point, yeah, I think I think I caught that article from Ritz. And I think one of the other things was, there's an opportunity, right? In every downturn, there's that opportunity that if you can sort of keep hold of that budget, and you can invest, you might get, you know, twice as much backfill your paid media, because if you're the only one in town, or one of the few in town, that spending, supply and demand adapts, suddenly, you've got greater reach, and you can sort of, you know, soak up market share. Exactly at the same time, it's sort of it's easy, easy to say, from the cheap seats. If you don't have the budget, you don't have the budget, and you can fight for it as best you can. But sometimes it's yes, it's tough going.

ryan wallman  1:17:47  
Yeah, I don't I don't have my own company. So yeah, it's easy to manufacture.

Carlos Doughty  1:17:52  
Yeah, I would. I think it's one of those things. I couldn't agree more. It makes perfect, logical sense. But yeah, when sort of the rubber hits the road, and people have got to also weigh up, you know, is it is it really lose someone in the marketing team? Or is it paid media? There's yeah, there's tough decisions on that front that perhaps are ahead and some

ryan wallman  1:18:10  
definitely trade offs. But yeah, the logic sounds?

Carlos Doughty  1:18:14  
Absolutely. Sasha, what about you? What's in your mystic? Bull?

Sasha  1:18:19  
I think for me, it's reliance on first find our relationships. And then, and we're both we're talking about the cookie company, and we'll be hearing about that happening in 2022. But that never happened that got pushed away for another two years for 2024. But that's privacy first approach and how new privacy laws will actually help marketers, new I call us, I think you touched upon that customer, a consumer trust, and I guess relationship builds trust and trust in the, in the end drives revenue. So I guess when I look at first bite our relationship, it's more around how it's gonna be collected, and the intent of fuels and then the value exchange, so customers will not mind giving. And, you know, Thomas talked about in the opening comment about personalization. So I guess, we look at the intent of use if the customer says, sees an organisation, really collecting that information and putting it to the right use, personalising your offering and, and pushing it out. I don't think so. They have a problem, but the value exchange is more around what's the value for me, in terms of what you're actually asking me. So first party data collection, I guess would be a key in 2023.

Carlos Doughty  1:19:25  
Absolutely, yeah, I think I do actually think like data ethics is a point of differentiation, you know, it can really be a competitive advantage if you lean into it in the right way. Well, actually, obviously, Apple is one of the best examples of this, right. I mean, it's, it's their absolute positioning is around data ethics and privacy. And it's really, especially when you sort of, Brian, you mentioned around meta earlier, I think that point of distinction between them, you know, we don't really talk about the data that's held by Apple, and where or how that might be used, you know, I think we sort of go nope, we trust them. We're we're happy with how it's been and showing us the CES. I think there's more opportunity for others to lean into that in the year ahead as well. Well, look, guys, this has been a pleasure. This has been a pleasure. But I do think we are all out of time. I want to thank you for your time. It's been mega insightful for me, and I'm sure it has been for all our listeners. Thanks again also to storyblocks for sponsoring this and making it possible. But most importantly, thanks for your time. You've been an absolutely fantastic panel and a real pleasure for me to chat to.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:31  
Thanks for inviting us colours was super fun.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:36  
Thank you very much.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:38  
Thank you. Bye