Author: Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Emir Zecovic - CMO

Emir Zecovic, an experienced marketing professional in the B2B and SaaS space, joins Mike for a discussion about how to market B2B technology products.

Emir highlights how marketers often miss opportunities by not focussing on large non-English speaking markets like South America and India. He shares why marketers should be data-obsessed to understand what influences the buying journey, and why working within start-ups may offer new marketers greater career opportunities.

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About TextGrid, 12min and OpenGraph

TextGrid offers communication APIs for SMS, MMS, voice and email. With cloud communications, businesses are empowered to build, scale and innovate.

12min is a platform that chooses, reads and summarises the most important non-fiction books.

OpenGraph generates meta tags and social media previews for any URL on the web in a few simple steps.

About Emir

Emir Zecovic is CMO at 12min and is currently also in transition between roles as CMO at TextGrid and Senior Business Development Consultant at OpenGraph. He is a determined, data-driven and versatile marketer with over 7 years of experience in managing teams, devising and implementing growth strategies for SaaS B2B and B2C companies.

Time Stamps

[00:51.1] – Emir shares how he got to this point in his career.

[04:46.8] – Emir discusses why it is important not to overlook non-English speaking markets.

[08:49.7] – Emir shares his approach to marketing as a CMO.

[16:27.0] – How does Emir encourage form fills?

[20:26.8] – What impact is AI going to have on the industry.

[23:58.1] – Emir offers some career advice to new marketeers.

[26:42.9] – Emir’s contact details.

Quotes

“Trying to be as international as possible in a business is always a good idea, don't underestimate countries you're not familiar with.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.

“I've heard people say that they don't like Google Ads or Facebook ads or SEO, but I doubt anybody has ever said that they regret having a good email list” Emir Zecovic, CMO at 12min.

Follow Emir:

Emir Zecovic on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emir-zecovic-074882166/

TextGrid Website: https://textgrid.com/

TextGird LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/textgrid/

OpenGraph Website: https://www.opengraph.xyz/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Emir Zecovic - TextGrid/OpenGraph

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Emir Zecovic

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Emir Zecovic. Emir is currently in transition as we record so he has been working at text grid. But now he is moving across to a new position at OpenGraph. So we're going to have an interesting conversation with him about how to market B2B technology products. Welcome to the podcast, Emir.

Emir: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Mike: Great to have you on. So I mean, obviously your career is in a bit of transition. But can you just tell us you know how you got to this point now in your career?

Emir: Yeah, it's actually an interesting start. So probably you saw on Lincoln, I was born in sculpin. Nord must Estonia. Honestly, nothing about the background was nothing hinted that I will be interested in marketing, just how it happened. I started studying and got interested about when I was 20. And I started doing freelance work and got very interesting. And somehow I don't even know how I got involved with 12 Min, which I'm also there as the CMO. The tolzman actually was founded by Devo Gomez, who is currently the founder of rock content, the biggest B2B SaaS company in all Latin America, somehow promoted to the chief marketing role after two or three years, three years if I'm not wrong, and it just took from there. Meanwhile, I did four, I actually got my master's degree from University of Sheffield. Actually, it didn't travel to the UK for that, because they have international faculty presence in almost, if I'm not wrong, in Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Romania. But maybe I'm wrong for some of the countries. And I don't want to dwell too much on that. Because at the end of the day, it's more like practice. I don't think that the formal education has a huge role or anything of the kind. But it was a great experience. Actually, I learned a lot while it shuffled specifically. And right now I'm here. I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I was like to work at to play someone. I love, b2c, and B2B. So that's why I currently have kind of like two roles. It's fun. I don't know, I don't know why else would they did. Definitely fun.

Mike: That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned 12 Min. So let's just, you know, look at that for a minute. I understand that that's a bit like Blinkist, which might be a more well known brand name to our listeners, because I think our listeners are generally North America and Europe. But tell tell me a little bit about 12 Min.

Emir: Yeah, actually, we are direct competitors. So blinkers we kind of started at the same time, if from what I know, Linkous currently is more focused on US and Germany, while we are more focused on South America and Central America, are also expanding, we have us burners, which is great. It actually was founded in 2017, early, like I said, by Guillermo Gomez, who is also the founder of rock content, a huge company very successful one. And it it kind of, I believe, he was looking for ways to read a lot of books, which sounds a bit cliche, but that's exactly how he got the idea. And at that time, he couldn't find anything in Portuguese, or or in Spanish. So he thought, okay, maybe this will be a good idea. I don't know if at that time blinkers was already established, I think yes, if I'm not mistaken. But Pokemon started primarily for the Brazilian market and then moved Spanish and got to English. And now even the our English bases expanding. And we're also looking there to go into B2B, which is also very possible. And it requires a different set of strategy altogether. It's very different than just selling high ticket software, compared to 1000s. of subscriptions. And I don't know if you know, the but the average subscription price on the stores is $40. So I'm you cannot go super high. Like I would say the top markup that you can sell in in countries like Singapore, or the US, which are, let's say, more prosperous. It's 70 to $80 Max, and you have to be very careful what you're doing developing countries and so on. It really depends on the market.

Mike: That's fascinating. And I think, you know, it highlights something that perhaps people like myself who come from an English speaking country, sometimes we're not so aware of what's going on in other countries, particularly if it's not an English language product. And certainly South America is a gigantic market. And I think all too often overlooked.

Emir: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I'll just give you an insight. Do you know the average cost per click mean the difference is 10 to one compared to the US and sometimes even 15 to 108 If you compare, in Great Britain, it's in my opinion, it's even more expensive than the US for some industry. So you can compare that. If you have a conversion rate, that's two times less than what you have in first world countries, so anything from Germany to the UK or US, you can make a tonne of money and the profits, the profit margin is much greater actually, even though it sounds counterintuitive, but the sheer competition in in the US, for example, is crazy. You get high conversion rates, but you also get good lifetime value, whether you're going into B2B or b2c, but the acquisition costs for both of them are super high. Like I remember when we were running ads for things where it's for classic comparison based landing pages with highest, okay, someone might disagree, but they're one of the best converting landing page models out there. Without a doubt, at least in my experience, the average cost per click was $20. If you do the same thing in Brazil, is between 0.5 and $1. In the conversion rates, the conversion rates are somewhat similar with the US having two to one advantage. Now, of course, your order value, if you're running an E commerce shop, or you're providing service of any kind, is going to be lower, you cannot charge the same rates. But just the verified is 20 times cheaper to advertise, it already gives you a huge advantage. So you can you can adjust the price to fit the market, of course, but the advertising costs allow you room to lower your service fees, or I don't know, whatever you're selling, give ecommerce or even a software. So it's a it's an advantage, especially Brazil with with one with 200 million people.

Mike: That's a great point. I mean, I love that I think trying to be as international as possible in a business is always a good idea. And don't underestimate countries, maybe you're not familiar with.

Emir: Absolute in India is also a situation where I think everybody who misses out on India especially or Bangladesh, is missing out on a lot good conversion rates, very low cost per 1000 impressions for both Facebook and Google ads or anything else, for that matter. Yeah.

Mike: And that's a great point, too. I think, you know, there are other markets that perhaps people tend to underestimate. I'd like to move on to where you're going to see, you're moving to Open Graph, I'm not sure that, you know, all our listeners will be familiar with that company. So can you just briefly describe what the company does?

Emir: Yeah, I don't know if they're familiar with the Open Graph, man attacks, which were built in the early 2000s, and tense while I was still in high school, but it allowed that preview function of sharing information, like for example, if you wanted to share an article on Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube, it gave that metadata, you just extracted the metadata from a website or from a link. And it just made things a lot easier. So you can scrape the web, you can do all sorts of things in a much more efficient way, then I don't know then if you try any alternative use, but if they Google, for example, what's an Open Graph meta tag, they will understand just by the preview of how it would look if you remove the metal tags of a link or if a website, so OpenGraph does that.

Mike: That makes sense. And I think, you know, we probably don't need to dig too deep into exactly what the company does. What I'm really interested in as you as a marketing executive going in and looking to drive the marketing strategy, when you started a company or when he even you look at a new year. I mean, how do you approach building a marketing plan as a CMO?

Emir: I think the first thing that, for example, I never heard anyone say especially not in Marketing School, and not even at shovel that you have to be data obsessed, and other main data drives kind of like cliche, I mean, literally obsessed with, we always use this analogy. It's like being lost in the Amazon forest. And unless you're nowhere you're going, you better not move anywhere, you better stay where you are. So the price you might pay if you don't know where exactly you're going is higher than if you just stay where you are. So the first thing that I always do is I obsessively analyse the data. And by that I don't mean just the marketing. I mean, the business data. So you have how many touchpoints to conversions. What's the average lifecycle? Well, how many months days weeks does it take for a product qualified lead to get to a sales qualified position from a sales qualified to actually become a client? And I'm trying to find patterns? Where exactly what where's the elephant in the room? So for example, if you were to Google Open Graph, you would notice that in this you're gonna find his data but I'm saying the traffic like most most of the traffic is run through ads. So you have definitely a problem in the top of the funnel, it's very clear. So you have huge opportunity there. Next, you can move on. And there you think about how the the lifecycle goes, What's the conversion rate on the page, what actually, if someone converts from what was the previous page from where they converted, to become, let's say, subscriber to the newsletter or anything else, for example, we we have a sort of a freemium model, which is you have a free service, but we try to convert you slowly nurture you, and then push you into the one of the two paid plans. But it's not always the case. For some businesses, the main priority is a call immediately, you need a call, ASAP. So I would say, my way of doing things is always, at least in the first week or two, if more is needed, that's fine. Just obsess over the data and tried to find issues. And I mean, all sorts of issues from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom, what channels are being used, was the performance. And especially if there are data problems, whether that's the the forces of data, where's the data stored, or there's, like, I don't know, if you notice, but the most common problem, for example, is in which is kind of so the little bit is tracking, where we will always find the same problem, the tracking is wrong, you would think everybody would be focused on tracking, make sure that the solid, no errors, but it's not the case. And if you have tracking problems, my advice, put the 110% into, into fixing it as soon as possible. So that's, that's how and then from that point onwards, I usually would go with my round and square the huge Board have everything that they found, and I started crafting my plan. Based on the resources, of course, sometimes you just cannot do what you want to do. Because there's there are limited resources, so you have to take that into account. But I would attack first the low hanging fruits. And I can give you an example, in SEO, you go away, and you have, let's say 510 15 keywords that rank from position 10 to 20. Those are low hanging fruits, you go there, you improve the content. And those things rank in two, three months. So my strategy first and foremost, is to attack the low hanging fruit. While we are working on the, let's say, not long term, but like midterm strategy, which I would say it's between three to six months. And the that's usually how I divided zero to three months, three to six months and long term six plus. And but first you target the looking for so that you get the most possible in the shortest time possible.

Mike: I love that, you know, going for quick wins, I think is always a good strategy. And it kind of clears away some of the things you could do and actually focus on perhaps some of the more difficult tasks. I'm interested when you're you're building a plan, do you look to use his broader mix of tactics as possible? Or do you feel that there are some primary tactics that really worked well for you? And that those are kind of your go to things?

Emir: Yeah, that's a amazing question. I love that. I've been debating that with people in the industry for so long. I remember I was reading an article maybe two or three months ago that said, and correct me if I'm wrong, it is. But I think that the email has 29 to one return on investment compared to paid advertising. I'm trying to say that, if there's anything that has proven to never fail, is that you need to build your email list. Now, I'm not saying that's the only way or the only focus. But if there is, any channel that you can never fail, if you do it right is definitely the email. I mean, we always look for shiny object syndrome. So let's say what AI can do, or what that can do, or this can do. Email never fails, the average person opens their email at least 10 times a day. It's a channel that they prefer. It's a preferred method of communication, especially in in B2B, I will always use a broad approach. So I would I would split them between inbound marketing and outbound see where we can go with cold. But the problem with cold outreach is that at some point, it eventually just hits a wall cannot scale more. You can always expand the persona or build a new one, you have different products. Some companies don't have that. Now if you're an electrician and other know if you do something other on the side. Yeah, maybe you can expand and then instead of targeting just one group, you go after another but if you're running just one product line or division, you certainly will hit a wall at some point. And then the question is what now? But if you have an email list, I don't I've never I've heard people say that that they don't like Google ads or Facebook ads or SEO. But if nobody has ever said that they regret having a good email list. There has never been such a As in history, so there's a reason for that is a reciprocal relationship because you're giving something for free in exchange of the user did. They don't feel like you're selling something to them? You're nurturing them. So it's reciprocal. We're not asking for something while giving nothing in return, so as long as you provide something of value, of course, they're going to reciprocate. And that's something that they found it works crazy. Well, to be honest, the only I've never said that's the only strategy far from it. But I'm saying, if you're building your email list, by very definition, you also need to work on paid ads, conversion funnels, data, front, and of course, you need to optimise the landing page copywriting, it just carries with it. Five, six different, completely different areas. In lead gen demand gen, all of that. You just create so much work. But if you nail it, I didn't doubting that anyone has ever said that they regret building their email list.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think that's great advice. Obviously, the challenge is really building that that list and getting the tactics right to encourage people to sign up. So I'm interested in how you do that, how you actually encourage people to fill in that form or to hand their details over so you can actually add them to the list. Do you have approaches for that?

Emir: Oh yeah, absolutely. Till 2020. Most of the companies, both in b2c and B2B use to one step approach. So what you do is send them to a page, you try to create as much value as possible to Beijing in exchange for their information. This is public knowledge, but I'm going to share something with you, we have something called the bread crumbs approach, which is 20 steps, our average landing page to lead currently is 35%. The average industry is like four or 5%. Of course, it requires testing, I'm not saying everybody should have 20 days, but a good test would be like this. So let's say you have four elements on the forum. So you have name, email, phone number, and I don't know maybe something else, but let's say company, email, or whatever, it's whatever is mandatory. But if you flip that with four steps, which means four separate steps, not all in one form, and the US first for the less intrusive ones. So it could be like, what's your name? Or where do you work with or what's your age, whatever, it's an issue. So as long as a person commits more, it will psychologically make them commit. Further, as you demand more personal things. So let's say their phone number, or their email, or maybe some company information. So what we generally use, and what I would advise is that whatever is the most difficult thing to ask, leave it for less. So as long as they invest in the form, in our case was the Select plan. So if you want, for example, let's say if you have a if you're running a b2c, this is the same actually with B to B. But if your conversion model is most of the sales happened between zero and three days, for example. So you need them to convert past. So how do you do that? So that's how you do it, you make them select the plan endl? And the last step, will having them commit to 15 Steps beforehand. And they're much less likely to abandon it. If the investment is high, as the counterintuitive argument is, is something like why would anyone bother to go through so many steps? The crazy part is that they will rather do that, than just give you all the information into let's say, a single page form with everything was done. In I've tested this so many times, and there has never been one case where the single page four outperforms the breadcrumbs. So in B2B, you don't need 20 steps, because you don't, nobody requires that kind of personalization. But if you find a way to split them, if from one to five, six, leave what you need the most last and tested. And I I mean, I have the one that I don't want to over promise, but it works on us.

Mike: I'm not sure we'll all get 35% conversion rate, but if we could all move it up from the low single digits, I think everyone would be happy.

Emir: Absolutely. Absolutely. The key is to be better than yesterday. Not not for some random industry to average plus the b2c is kind of a bit deceiving, because you cannot measure the B2B and b2c investment in forms. In b2c. The last I saw the average ones like 10% in B2B is between three and five.

Mike: that's great advice. I mean, I think that's interesting. And bread crumbing is certainly something you know, people are not familiar with, they should look at. It's something that I know a number of guests have talked about on the podcast. Emir, I'm interested to look forward. Now. I mean, you've talked about what you're doing today. How do you see marketing changing over the next few years? I mean, is AI going to completely transform things? Or is it going to stay, you know, much like it is today?

Emir: Yeah, that's, if you look at now than the main AI tool. So I don't know if you're familiar with magics. A, it's a company out of Tel Aviv. I don't know I don't want to sound biassed, but in my opinion, they have the best marketing automation software for paid advertising. Maybe I'm biassed I've tried a couple of them. I really liked them. I think the company was founded in Israel, if I'm not wrong, or in Austria, I think it was in Israel. It's actually an amazing software. And right now they even created something called marketer AI is interesting, because you don't see a lot of AI tools actually doing the thinking for you. So usually what AI is focused on is cutting your time. So what does it mean? So let's say if you are running a CRM, or an email marketing software, or at Creative AI, powered software, so what they usually do is that they try to cut the manual work. What I'm trying to say is that what I see is that AI will certainly reduce the need for copywriters for marketing research, anything that was previously done manually, but it requires human input to a much greater degree. Magic has one of their tools is actually that they give you recommendations based on your ads performance. AI based so it says, Well, this was happening the last seven days, I recommend that you do X or Y or Z doesn't matter. So it tries to replace the thinking process. That's revolutionary. So it's not just some task that they're trying to replace, as far as marketers focus on data interpretation, that cannot be easily replaced by AI. But as long as their primary focus is a task, or very tight niche, so let's say link building outreach. Now, you can definitely improve that using AI. But if your focus is interpreting what happens, once you get those links, and how those links transform your rankings, that's not something AI can do. Or at least not not as well as someone who's experienced can do so my focus will be to simply focus on things that AI cannot replace, which is interpreting the results of your strategies. And moving slowly away from things that are repetitive, so including you and to an extent copywriting because if almost every software out there now has an AI assistant, so that you can churn out emails, and usually they're very well written. So it's not something that that you can compete, and plus it cuts the cost for employers, that that will be my worst. That's why they think that AI will definitely impact and I don't think they will impact marketing jobs a lot. Because marketing is still a very creative industry. So it still requires a lot of human potential.

Mike: I think that's that's great insight to the future. And certainly, you know, everyone, check out magic, can you just give the URL for that so the listeners can find it?

Emir: Madgicx.com.

Mike: Perfect. And I think people would want to check that out. So thank you for that. I mean, it's been really interesting, this discussion, you seem very positive about the future of marketing. I mean, presumably, if somebody was young was thinking of entering the industry came to you, you'd be, you know, quite keen for them to become a marketer. So I'm interested in what would be your advice as to how to successfully start a marketing career.

Emir: Probably the best advice that I can give them is that too, especially at the outset to avoid working for big companies. And I know it sounds counterintuitive, but you will usually be just a hog in like hogging the machine. And you won't get enough exposure to real problems. So if you're starting out and all you're given is a task and you're not allowed to question the system, which something that happens super often, you will never get enough exposure to problems to grow as a marketeer. And it creates a problem because AI will replace most of the repetitive things. So I'm not saying that, of course every business is different than it STEM is different. How it operates is pretty much unique. My advice would be to find someone that is willing to throw them in the fire. And at least for the first couple of years to work for either a startup and I know it's not very popular because startups can get really demanding and sometimes They don't have that same kind of work life balance. But starting out, I would definitely give that advice. Because everybody who has worked for a big company, what they usually receive is a set of tasks they perform, not getting exposed to real problems. So you can learn and grow. And even if you want to get exposed, you're not allowed to because the system is already created, you cannot challenge it without creating a mess on for other different areas. So that will be my advice to girls. And the second one is to read a lot, especially understand data. It may sound crazy, but what I would advise them to do is that they take any channels, whether that's SEO, Google ads, LinkedIn doesn't matter. And try to understand the KPIs read all of them, and understand how it impacts further down the funnel. So if you have for example, let's say you haven't a lot of new visitors, but at the same time your bounce rates goes up. So what does it mean? It means probably are getting a lot of referral traffic. And that interpretation of the data is a I remember what I was reading one book about the CHS old intelligence in the world means nothing unless you have someone to act on it. You can have all the data, all the intelligence, if you don't know what it means you cannot act on it. So it's meaningless. Pretty much data doesn't do anything by itself.

Mike: I love it. That's brilliant advice. I mean, Emir, this has been fascinating. You've been very generous with your insight and your advice for people. I mean, if anyone's listening and they'd like to get in touch, what would be the best way to reach you?

Emir: Probably with LinkedIn. I mean, that will be one way and a via email. Zitzewitz Emir 199 four@gmail.com, which is my personal email. Awesome.

Mike: That's very generous. Emir, this has been fascinating. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for being a guest on the podcast.

Emir: It was a pleasure. And thank you a lot for the opportunity actually to be here.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Sean Campbell - Cascade Insights

Sean Campbell, CEO and Founder of Cascade Insights, is the latest guest to join Mike Maynard for the Marketing B2B Technology podcast. Sean discusses the benefits of using market research platforms, explores the pros and cons of qualitative versus quantitative data, and talks about the challenges of getting research responses within the B2B industry.

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About Cascade Insights

Cascade Insights empowers B2B technology companies with customized market research and marketing services. For over a decade, we’ve served Fortune 500 enterprises like Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Dell Technologies, AWS, and Google as well as mid-markets and startups.

In an industry that’s ever-changing, we deliver the tools and resources to help businesses navigate the market and seize opportunities for growth. Want to learn how well your brand resonates with buyers, or why your superior product keeps losing to a competitor? Maybe you need updated messaging to win more deals and generate more leads.

About Sean

Sean has been training, mentoring, and educating all his life. An exceptionally well-regarded conference speaker and author, Sean has delivered talks for Fortune 50 companies and top-tier conferences. He has also been the author of several books on technical and business topics.

Sean has also been a professional services firm owner for over 20 years. He is passionate about running a remote-first company, and has been doing so long before it was cool – dating back to the 20th century!

His professional services work has spanned consulting engagements with the Fortune 50 and startups you have heard of; the sale of his first professional services company, and the growth of delivery, sales, marketing, and operational practices inside professional services firms.

 Time Stamps

[00:41.5] – Sean discusses his career and what lead him to market research.

[03:54.0] – Sean talks about Cascade Insights, what it is and its capabilities.

[06:09.8] – Sean discusses why he chose to focus on the B2B industry.

[16.10.4] – What are the benefits of using a market research platform vs in-house research?

[19:39.7] – Sean shares how he thinks market research is going to change in the future.

[21.59.7] – What advice would you give to someone joining the profession?

[26:07.2] – Sean’s contact details.

Follow Sean:

Sean Campbell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell/

Cascade Insights website: https://www.cascadeinsights.com/

Cascade Insights on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cascade-insights/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Sean Campbell - Cascade Insights

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sean Campbell

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Sean Campbell. Sean is the CEO and founder of Cascade Insights. Welcome to the podcast, Sean.

Sean: Thanks for having me.

Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, what we'd like to do first off is just find a little bit about people's background. So keep telling me a little bit about your career and how you ended up founding cascading sites.

Sean: Well, first thing is I didn't, I didn't want a business. I always thought the kids who went to business school classes at 8am for accounting were just boring. I don't know why they would go do that. I was a liberal arts grad. My classes started at six at night. But no, I was actually going to go be a college professor. Then I met a girl that I was worried about being broke. She wasn't God bless her. But like I said, Well, maybe I should go do some other form of teaching. At the time, I wasn't sure if that was a temporary diversion or not. But I ended up teaching Windows for Workgroups in Microsoft Word when a mouse was a new thing when people would use it as a foot pedal. That's a true story. By the way that actually happened in my classroom, somebody put it on the ground and tried to use it as a foot pedal, like it was a sewing machine or something. So I ended up becoming a technical trainer, teaching networking, databases, programming, and then I decided to go become an independent trainer, started a first company with two other guys, that company grew and eventually got sold. Then I started cascade with one of those two guys, he has now moved on to other things cascade solely owned by me. And I've owned cascade for 17 years now, first company out for about seven. So I'm on your 24 of self employment, basically, at this point.

Mike: Not a bad record for somebody who never wanted to do it.

Sean: Well, the funny thing is, I look back, right. And I still love teaching, like all my hobbies are teaching. I'm basically incapable of learning something and not wanting to teach it. Like I've just like, if I find a new thing, I want to go turn around and teach it. And there's a lot of learning if you have the right orientation to a business, like I know. And I know people get into it for different reasons. It's why I struggle with somebody's like, so what are your growth plans? And I'm like, learning. And that's worked for me. I mean, you know, our first business, we got up to like, 25 people, this business, I've got 15 people, so it's not just like me learning. It's like, I feel like I built an organisation that learns and then go figure. What do I end up doing? The first company did what we used to call technology evangelism work back in the day from Guy Kawasaki, but nobody calls it that anymore. And then this company was a market research firm, which is, oddly enough, something professors do, too. So I have this kind of weird circular thing, I think is kind of happened career wise. And at the same time I, I've had the opportunity to be an adjunct in an MBA programme. I still like teaching and volunteering. And so it's it to me, it makes a lot of sense. And obviously, I should say this, I mean, so nobody thinks it's Pollyanna have I had to learn things like what's p&l? Have I had to learn accounting? Have I learned to learn business and operational processes? Have I learned all the vagaries of HR policies by state in the United States? Yes, I've either hired someone to do that. And or I've had to learn that myself. And if I read contracts long enough to put the most caffeinated person to sleep, yes, I've done that, too. But like, there's plenty of running a business that I had to learn. But no, I didn't even really think I was going to do it. At the start. No, I love it. I love everything about it, mostly. But if I said I loved everything about it, you shouldn't believe me. But mostly, I love everything about it.

Mike: That's great to hear. It's worked out. Well. So you mentioned cascade, is the market research firm? Can you just unpack that and tell us a little bit more about what you do and who you work with?

Sean: Yeah, I say we get hired for pain or opportunity. So we either get hired because a competitor has done a better job selling or marketing or building products. Or you've done a poor job selling and a poor job marketing, and a poor job building product, or we get hired for opportunity. So somebody who wants to move into a new market, they've got a brand new products, that doesn't really have a market yet, or there's like, you know, industries they want to move into. And you go one layer below that. We do a lot of qualitative and quantitative research to answer the questions that fall out of those pain and opportunity buckets. Because clients will sit around a table or virtually or otherwise in their office and say, We really need some market insight to make this decision effectively. And so they'll come to us. And I think of us is like great recommenders right. We're certainly really good plumbers we understand how to conduct research really well. But fundamentally we get hired because we produce great recommendations. And the reason we do that to kind of bring the circle all the way Around, is we only work with B2B technology companies. So if you're a business to business oriented company, and you have a technology based solution, and the reason there's a little asterisk there is like, you know, we wouldn't work with Merck, talking to surgeons about cancer drugs, but we might talk to Merck, about a life sciences oriented solution that is SAS based to manage clinical trials, right. So like, there has to be like a strong technical underpinning which in this era of cascade, you know, your 17 predominantly means cloud based solution. So if you're a cloud based solution, kind of regardless of the vertical you're in, that's a great choice for us. On the other hand, if you were like, selling H back solutions to high rises, which we get a lead like that, every once in a while, they'll say, Well, we're technology. And I'm like, Yeah, but not the technology we work with. You know, you're absolutely technology, and you're absolutely B2B, but it's not what we would work with.

Mike: And that's interesting, you've got such a clear focus of what you do, because, I mean, there's this view that B2C, you know, consumer does a lot more market research than B2B. So why did you pick B2B?

Sean: It's more interesting. I mean, that's part of it. I mean, for sure, part of it's, it's more interesting, it's chewier. Now, I know there's a B2C researcher out there, that's like, but there's so much into like, whether they pick the rose coloured phone or the gold phone? And I'm like, Yeah, but it also feels kind of manipulative. So like, I wouldn't really get excited about that. And I'm not trying to be dismissive of the army of people to do consumer packaged research and like, what colour the Clorox box should be, I mean, I understand it's valuable. But it's just different. I also feel like it ends up being a lot more focused, you know, our audiences are very narrow and B2B that we go after, right? We don't serve a, you know, the swath of millennials, right? You know, it's very rare for us to do a study that would be based on like demographic characteristics, it's a lot more like, what are you using? What is your day, like, you know, what is your title? Like? What are the business problems you're trying to solve? That's how we target people. So I just find there's kind of a richness to it. And I think the other thing is, and this is honestly part of the entrepreneurial journey, so try to make this really short. But it's, it's fundamental to what happened to me, our first client in the first business was Microsoft, in 1999. And if somebody listening thinks of market dominance in tech, you don't really understand what it was like, except if you worked with Microsoft. And when they own 97% of computing, that doesn't exist. Now. There's not 97% of iPhones, AWS doesn't have 97% of cloud compute, you know, there's nobody, there's 97% of laptop sales, Microsoft and Intel, were something that's just probably never going to be seen again, unless, like, open AI does it to us, right? You know, or something like that, where you got like, 97%, of something happening in one building. And I say only that for this one reason. We ended up working with their developer division at that time, a lot. And they were very business to business focus. And so I ended up getting I didn't know it at the time, I didn't even think about it that way. At the time, I got this incredible education, on what it meant to do business to business marketing and business to business product development, just because we lucked out is our first account as these guys. Right. And it's it's almost like a version of graduate school for me that I didn't really think about it the time, but that's what was happening. And again, that analogy would hold true even for B2C. I mean, I know those people who like, you know, hung around a big CPG company, and they're like, as a vendor, they just ended up being educated in the world of that, and God bless them. That's great. But for me, I just got drawn into it. And before I knew it, that was the space that I really felt like I could provide a lot of value. And there's some fringe benefits. I'd say, too. I mean, I think the research is, well, I don't want to say it's monetized better, because that's not really maybe the best way to put it. It's not even really what I think it's just really chewy and rich. And that creates one problem, I'd say it's a huge one maybe that falls under the like when I send it like the job mostly is it can be very challenging for us to get feasibility on a study. I mean, one of our perennial problems is cmo wanders up to us of technology company and says, I want an n of 1000 survey. And we go nope. And they go, why not? And then there's this like math problem, we have to explain to them and they're like, I don't understand. And you're like, it's hard to get B2B research respondents. It's really hard. And it's probably the biggest day to day challenge we face in our business at least. So

Mike: I'm going to ask you that because obviously, I think most B2B marketers have tried research at some point or another. And most of them have come across this, you know, situation where they go, we want you know, even if it's a couple of 100 responses, that's really tough and B2B. So how do you go about trying to get higher responses from B2B surveys? Or do you do market research a different way for B2B? Well,

Sean: Well, so that's interesting. So a couple of things in that one underlying that question, you're getting at something that I want to pull out which is that me Many marketers in B2B have to recognise that they might not get a quant study, they might end up with a call study. Just because of the math, right? Even things like a brand study that you would really traditionally want as quant, you might just not have enough people at the top of the funnel. Another classic example of that is competitive studies. You know, somebody says, I would really like a quantitative survey of XYZ competitor customers, and it's like, okay, we'll just do the math, right? I mean, if you want an end of 200, and your response rates are in the low single digits, you need a lot of people at the top of the funnel, and somebody has to have that whole list of competitor customers, that's going to be hard to find. And if you try to organically sourced that list, well, now that's nowhere near the cost that you thought that study would be right, which is a lot of times why the CPI, you know, the cost per respondent can be like, really, really high. And that creates some challenges for client. Basically, I'll give you a short version of how we find people, we could dig into it more if you want, because it's it's definitely an area we could do a whole show on. But like, the short version is don't use a panel, use an expert network, or somebody that is preferably which expert networks do but they don't do always sourcing participants organically, like they're actually going out and looking at LinkedIn and their or some other tool. And they're trying to find people who have exactly the right profile. And then they screen those individuals. Because the problem with the panels are there may be all right for B2C. But they tend to break down very quickly for B2B for one simple reason that I can give you a short analogy on that is absolutely true, and is the heart of the problem. We even have a short video on the website that somebody on the team here did wants that we call B2B Brian, that's kind of a cute way of putting it together. But like so B2B, Brian is 53. And he likes baseball and pasta equally. And at 54. He likes baseball a little more and pasta a little less, you can track that somewhat in a panel of a bazillion consumers and send out surveys. The challenge is the timeliness of it breaks down with business because you are in a study this year, because you work for big Corp, Microsoft, and you are an HR benefits leader. And in a week from now you're going to quit and go be an HR benefits leader in a startup, you're not even in the same study anymore, you're solving completely different problems. And the reality is we do have a database, it's live and out there all the time. It's called LinkedIn the tracks that for us, but that's not the same thing as having a proprietary database. And then you have the the one factor that the barbarians are at the gate, meaning you know, if you can get 50 bucks or 75 bucks as a research participant to fill out a 15 minute survey, you will try desperately to fake and be whoever that person is, there's just a massive amount of challenges there. And whereas in B2C, they get paid a lot less. So there's kind of this like Cold War always going on with like professional survey takers. And you solve a lot of that by recruiting organically because you're going to someone who is most likely to they are they have the background, all that stuff anyway. So wait a little longer on that than I intended. But that's that's basically it. And we just have to constantly be staring at the vendors we work with for recruit and figure out you know, you're good with this audience. You're good with that audience, you're great with this audience. And that's how it plays out. But the short answer is just for the love of God, don't use panel, because you will end up with a survey that you may not even know you shouldn't trust, but you shouldn't trust.

Mike: I think that's that's really interesting advice. I'm gonna have to ask, What about focus groups in B2B? Do they work? Or are they hard to be effective?

Sean: They work? I think they work honestly. Great. We try to steer clients slightly away from them. Because like, I really tried to ask why are you asking for a focus group is it preference that you come from B to C, here because there's some dynamics, maybe this is what you're alluding to, in B2B focus groups that you have to kind of watch for right and things that are harder to create dynamic wise, because people might be a little more reluctant to share, especially on certain topics, because they don't really know who else is in the focus group, it can be a little harder to just collect the focus group participants at the same date and time. And it's also one of the reasons that, at least in our experience, we have a lot more success with virtual focus groups in B2B, that if we tried to do it in person, the only exception to that is like when we run them at a conference. Like for example, we've run focus groups for AWS at reinvent, but there's 10s of 1000s of people already there for you to grab. So that's not a really fair test that you know, in person focus groups work all the time. It's just the nature of a conference draws them in in a different way. But yeah, we don't really have a huge issue running them in short, I think you just have to factor in a little different dynamic that plays out and the places we would use them. Message testings a call Number one, that's probably the most common. I would say it's sometimes shows up in crossover studies, maybe like an ICP study, you know, and I'd say one of the thing about it one thing, just and this is probably more personal preference, I tend to steer people away from them a little bit, because I don't know if it's necessarily the best bang for your buck, because I think people over index on the popcorn thing that will happen in the focus group, which all happens in like 90 minutes. And they don't think about, well, if I turned all that cost of running a focus group, and I did X number of interviews that I could listen to, I could read the transcript, I get a much more longitudinal feel. And I can tune the study as it goes along in a different way, for roughly the same amount that you might have run a single focus group. But that's maybe more personal preference than anything else. I'd

Mike: I'd sounds like good advice, though. I mean, it sounds like a very sensible approach. I mean, one of the things a lot of companies do is they try and do I mean, what they see as being very informal market research, but try and do something in house, maybe ask the sales team to go talk to a couple of customers. I mean, what do you see as the issues behind companies running market research in house?

Sean: Well, first thing is, I think it's great. I think if you have a mindset that you want to learn about your market, whether you hire a firm or not, I will just say you're probably ahead of half the people you're competing with, right at that moment of you making that decision, whether you hire a research firm or not to do it. The second thing is it has a lot to do with how you staff, the team that's going to do that research. Have you given them actual time to do it? Do you as a leader understand some of the dynamics we've already discussed? You know, if you go say, go run a survey with our current customers, do you understand response rates? Do you understand that you can't just like say, Oh, they're our valued customers, I'm sure they'll respond to our survey, you have to understand some dynamics that are just like, everyday realities for somebody that runs a research firm. And some companies are good at that, you know, and I think that's great. As far as the specific example of talking to customers, or talking to the sales team, I'd split the two a little bit, I think it's great to talk to you to our customers, I don't think you necessarily need a research firm as an agnostic intermediary. I don't think you'd need it, I think that it can be very helpful because the discussion guide and some of the things that you're going to develop might be canted to meet the needs of a particular stakeholder group and might not necessarily be as balanced as it could be. And that's definitely a rule that we take on. And I would say from the, you know, salesperson standpoint, I actually love it. When we talk to sales books, I say that they are running a never ending qualitative research project. And they need to be interacted with as such. Now on the other hand, they can sometimes be a poor research participant, because they might generalise a lot from a specific or the last deal they closed. But you contrast that with they're sending messaging downrange all day long in a complex B2B sale. And they are understanding where where it comes from, and where it lands a perfect example of that. And I should emphasise this a complex sale, I'm not talking about somebody like selling selling e signature solutions and waiting for the next lead to show up on their screen. And they're just reading a script. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the more complex side of B2B. But like there was a stakeholder meeting, we were in one time with a recognisable fortune 100 tech company and the sales guy pops off when one of the marketers said I think we should test digital transformation is a phrase and the long standing sales guy, probably comfortable poking everyone in the eye, because he probably kept selling a lot. Said, I think there should be a swear jar around here every single time somebody utters the phrase digital transformation, and they're forced to put $100 in it, because it just drives people batty when you say it in a sales conversation. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're here, right? I mean, and I like I said, I think there's this misplaced notion that sometimes talking to the sales team is invaluable. And I think done right? It's, it's a goldmine. It's an absolute goldmine. So I think we provide a lot of value. And I could get into that. But that's probably not the best use of a listeners time to hear a commercial where our value is, but I would inspire people to say, yeah, go learn back to what I said earlier. Like, if you're learning about your market and your competitors, you're way ahead of probably half the companies out there just by making that decision alone. That's

Mike: That's a really positive view of what people can do, Sean. So I really appreciate that. You know, one thing I'm interested in about market research is, obviously today it's quite a labour intensive activity. How do you see market research changing in the future? Do you see technology really affecting what you do? Yeah,

Sean: Yeah, I think in terms of the future market research, there's probably two things I would point to, although there's a tonne of things, one is synthetic respondents, which hold a lot of promise and certain amount of risks, but I'm excited about it. I think, you know, if you're a craftsman of any sort, you shouldn't be worried about new technology. Right, you know, the analogy I've used with a lot of the AI tools around here is that it's more like it's a supersuit, right, or it's like a nail gun versus a hammer, you know, houses were built with hammers for millennia. And then some guy came around with a compressed air tank and a big hefty nail gun, and somebody was dismissive of it. And somebody else said, I think my customer just wants a well built house, and they'd like it a little sooner. And now it's rare to go to any job site and not see guys like putting the house together with nail guns doesn't mean that it's a worse house. So synthetic respondents are a big one. There are some risks and rewards to that, like I said, but I think they're going to be a really interesting adjunct to the the more kind of human centred research that I think we're still going to continue to do. The other thing is AI tools for qualitative analysis, we've always had tools that can help go through quantitative results. But I think the place where it's more interesting is around analysis of qualitative survey, qualitative data where you have a tonne of transcripts and textual data that for all of the vendors who build solutions that would analyse that pilot tax, they weren't nearly as good as some of the tools I see that are AI based now. And that takes a lot of manual labour out of the equation that takes a lot of the time out of the equation, that leads to some consistency when it comes to coding and analysis. You know, back to what I said earlier, I ultimately, nobody's working with us, because they care what tools we use. As long as those tools are appropriate. They want to buy the house, they want to have great recommendations, they want to have a way to change their business. And if we can get to that quicker through some of these AI based tools, I think that's fantastic.

Mike: That's great. And that's a super optimistic view of the future, which I love. As we come to closer podcasts, it's always a couple of questions we'd like to ask, and the first one is around people thinking of entering marketing, or in your case, maybe market research. What advice would you give to someone thinking of entering the profession?

Sean: Well, if I was to give very specific advice to market research, I would say spend time looking at qualitative research. You know, I think it's a real common misstep and mistake to kind of look at market research as surveys. And I think schools sometimes do an injustice there, too. I think when I even taught in the MBA programme, it felt like every student assumed that what I did all day was right, and send out quantitative surveys. And they miss the richness and understanding that comes from qualitative. So I would say that's a big piece. And it also sometimes inhibits somebody who's looking at a market research as a career, right? Because if they see themselves as somewhat of a behind the scenes person, or someone who wants to look at the data, and analysing qualitative research puts you right in touch with the customer. And I think that's going to be ever more important. As we get more and more data from AI based solutions, right? That we have this kind of ability to talk to customers in their element human to human. I think that's like really, really going to be critical. I've even seen some organisations start to emphasise a lot more qualitative research, even technology organisations, because they see the same gaps starting to develop, you know, mountains of data, but not a lot of qualitative research being done. So that's being and a more meta level, I would say read stuff you disagree with. It's it's a general piece of advice. If somebody asked me like, what's the major piece of advice I'd give anybody, business or otherwise read stuff you disagree with? You don't have to agree with it when you're done. But if you really ask yourself, How much do I read that I disagree with? Do I watch the news channel that I don't like? Do I read the articles that I don't like? Do I read books from business authors that just based on the cover, I might not necessarily agree with? One of two things is going to happen. Either you're going to have your own views kind of positively reinforced by engaging with something that's different, or they're going to be changed somewhat. And that's good. So those are the two big things. That's

Mike: That's awesome advice, Sean, I think not just for people new to the industry or thinking about the industry, but also people who've been in the industry a while. So really appreciate that. Thank you so much for your time and all your insight, Sean, is there anything you'd like to sum up with or anything you feel we've missed?

Sean: I know, I think we hit a lot of things. I mean, I would just say, you know, my career has been blessed by just an emphasis on wanting to learn approach problems from that mindset. And I'll leave you with one personal example. Let's just say people are watching the US presidential election, this time around with a certain degree of interest, perhaps not just in the United States, much like they did on the last few elections. And I saw that I'm a citizen here in the States. And the last election happened and I said, you know, I want to learn more about US presidents. I want to learn more about the process around electing presidents and all that and I said, you know, one of the coolest things I think I could do is I'm going to go read a biography on every single US President. So alongside of us bunch of other reading over the last three years. I did that. And I just finished it up a couple months ago. And I can tell you I learned a tonne, I was at times surprised by how our own electoral processes changed. I was somewhat surprised also why things are the way they are. And that led to all kinds of interesting thoughts around, you know, what presidents were good, which presidents were bad, what made a good president? You know, what was the typical characteristics of a president? Well, I don't think everybody needs to do that to vote. I think having a lien to learning more about the process than just talking about it. I think he's the biggest piece of advice I could give anybody, both personally and professionally.

Mike: That's amazing, even if the thought of reading a biography of every American President seems just a little challenging at the moment.

Sean: Well, it was it was actually pretty fun. But I'm a history buff, so but not everybody has. Anyway, anyway.

Mike: Also, Sean, thank you so much. It's been such an interesting conversation. I mean, you've talked a lot about loading if people want to learn more, or maybe even get you to help them do their next market research project. How can they get in contact with you?

Sean:  Just check out cascade Insights.com. You know, thankfully, to the heart efforts of our marketing team, if you just type cascade Insights in Google, I think you're gonna find this pretty quick. So that's, that's the fastest way.

Mike: That's, that's amazing and nice and simple. Sean, thanks so much for being a guest on the podcast. I've really enjoyed our chat. Thanks

Sean: Thanks for being here, man. Take care.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Rob May - BrandGuard

Staying within brand guidelines can be a challenge, and as the use of AI in marketing rises, this will become increasingly difficult. Rob May, founder of BrandGuard, explains how solving user challenges transformed his platform from what was initially an advertising platform into an entirely different product that uses AI to identify branding issues.

He shares his career journey, how the rise in generative AI drew him back into the start-up space, how different AI models work, and the impact he believes AI will have over the next five years.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About BrandGuard

BrandGuard is an AI-powered brand governance platform that helps ensure brand consistency in customer facing assets, such as advertisements, generated by both humans and machines.

About Rob

Rob May is the founder and CEO of BrandGuard and is a leading figure in the field of generative AI and brand safety. With his extensive background in entrepreneurship and angel investing, Rob brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the table.

Time Stamps

[00:43.3] – Rob discusses His career journey and why he founded BrandGuard.

[01:47.5] – Rob goes into detail about BrandGuard, its beginnings and what it does.

[12:33.0] – Rob explains some off the issues with branding in AI content.

[16:10.0] – Who can use BrandGuard? Rob discusses what businesses can benefit.

[18:45.6] – Rob shares his thoughts on how AI is going to change marketing.

[22:59.8] – Rob’s contact details.

Follow Rob:

Rob May on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay/

BrandGuard website: https://www.brandguard.ai/

BrandGuard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brandguard-ai/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Rob May - BrandGuard

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Rob May

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I've got Rob May, who's the founder and CEO of BrandGuard joining me. Welcome to the podcast. Rob.

Rob: Thanks for having me.

Mike: 

It's great to have you on. So, you know, you obviously founded BrandGuard. But let's start off by taking a little step back and finding out how you got to the point of, you know, wanting to found the company. So, can you tell me a little bit about your career journey?

Rob: Yeah, so I am a electrical engineer and a chip designer by training. So that's where I got my start. And I always knew I wanted to get into startups. So I, after a couple years of doing chip design, I joined a startup, then joined another startup, then started my first company back in 2009. And so that in 2014, the first one did really well, otherwise, I don't know that I'd still be doing it. So then I started a second company, the second company did not go well. Then I went into VC for a couple of years. And I saw this generative AI wave happening and decided I had to come back out of VC and do a little more operating. So started my third company, which actually spawned the technology that became BrandGuard. It wasn't the focus initially of the third company, but it led to the creation of Vanguard.

Mike: That's great. And obviously, all the great people started electronics engineers, I don't know if you know, I started my career as an electronics engineer as well during board level design.

Rob: Exactly. That's awesome.

Mike: Can you tell me a little bit about how you decided to apply AI? And what brand God does?

Rob: Yeah, well, we started with the idea that you could use generative AI to create hyper, personalised marketing and scale. So think about the idea that, you know, you're going to sell a pencil, you know, if you were going to sell them a nice mechanical pencil, you have a couple of personas, you're going to write ads for those personas. But what if you could speak to everybody differently, right, a 19 year old college student who's really into mechanical pencils in the Pacific Northwest, may want a very different image and freezing in their ads than a 75 year old, you know, writer who loves to use mechanical pencils for nostalgic reasons, who lives in, you know, southern Florida or whatever. And so, imagine if you could really use your vi as Chet GPT, here's 1000 different personas to buy my pencil write me a different ad for everyone. So that's kind of what we created. And it worked really well. But there were two problems. One problem was that it became obvious that the platforms were gonna do this in cells. So Google and Facebook, were going to build in this functionality. And the second problem was that we would show this to CMOS, and they would say, see, I'm not a brand person, I'm an enterprise software person.

So I didn't realise that, like, if you're a brand person, you obsess over minutiae about how things look and how things are phrased. And so you might say, if you sell bottled water, you might say, we'll say purified, but never filtered. Right? Or you may say, you know, you have a certain imagery of the model that you're using in an ad. And you may say, like, no, no, she can, she can have a wrist tattoo, but not an arm tattoo she could like, are people that were catering to look like this and not like this, and like, these minor things matter, you know, she, she would sit with her legs this way at the table, like all these, all these little things. And so what would happen is we would show our tool to these markers. And they would say, well, that's great, you're gonna create 5000 Hyper targeted ads for me, that's awesome. I have to review them all you've created work for me. So we took a step back, and we were like, well, could we teach machines to understand brands and branding? And it turns out, you can, it's a very hard problem, what we what we did was, we built a series of tools you can think about, it's not like a machine learning model. It's dozens of machine learning models. And we ingest brand guidelines, previous versions of, of content that a brand has produced. And then we built what we call a brand governance platform that takes these things, breaks them down into models, and in the models check, is the stuff you produced on brand is it meet the brand guidelines, you know, it started as a feature of this ad product, like we're going to create ads and the ads are on brand. And it just became the whole platform. We don't do any ad generation anymore. We just whether humans create the ads or machines create the ads, we just run them through our series of models. We provide scores and feedback and analysis and all that kind of stuff. So it's it's pretty cool technology.

Mike: So you're doing that checking of 5000 different ads that the person who's responsible for brand didn't want to do. Yeah,

Rob: or even we, you know, even even people that just are don't have an AI process and are just doing hundreds of ads per month. We frequently hear but so let's say you're using an agency and the agency designers are working on lots of different projects. They don't have your whole Till 10, or 40, or 80 Page brand guidelines memorised in their head all the time that they're working on, you know, they make mistakes. And we constantly hear that about a third to half the time people are looking at content saying like, no, this doesn't meet the brand guidelines, go back and do it again. And what they want is they want a tool that takes that first pass. So now the humans would say, don't send it to me for approval until it's past BrandGuard.

Mike: Okay, so you're actually doing that first pass before it appears with humans? I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting from this is, do you think this world where everybody gets a personalised email is actually going to happen? Or do you think enterprises they actually want to preserve their brand? They want some consistency on brand. And they actually don't want these hyper personalised emails being sent out?

Rob: Well, I think they're, I think they're trying to do both, right. So we'll, we'll see if it works. But the way you can think of it as like, they might use similar phrasing, like, obviously, you know, Nikes tagline is just do it. And they're not going to change that tagline for me and you or anybody else. But a lot of their imagery is like people running in the Pacific Northwest, where there's Nike, or in Colorado, where a lot of athletes train, but might they benefit from showing people running in, you know, the beach, or, you know, I'm in New York and downtown Manhattan, Central Park, you can see that having an impact without changing a lot of what Nikes trying to do. So So I think there's gonna be a lot of experimentation to get there, I think it will move the needle. But there's going to be a counterweight, right, which is, humans get tired of these things. I mean, every time something becomes a best practice, like, oh, man, these notifications, and these NPS scores, kill me. Because the more products you use, the more people have you that just want you to take a one minute survey. And it's like, I can't take 91 minute surveys in a day just because I interacted with that many products. So we got to find better ways to give and get feedback and interact with customers in ways that respect what they're doing. So it'd be interesting to see how these multiple forces evolve in this scenario.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think it was interesting. I've now got visions of everyone in the UK getting pictures of people running in the pouring rain from Nike. Yeah. I hopefully won't get to that. Anyway, going back to BrandGuard. So something you mentioned earlier that I found quite interesting was that you fed the AI system, you trained it on the brand guidelines, but also on past content. So presumably, one of the things you found is that there are explicit brand guidelines, things that, you know, are written down are very clear. But there's also kind of tacit brand guidelines that are kind of held within the heads of people. Is that what you're trying to address and understand?

Rob: Yeah, so there's a lot of lot to unpack in that question. We see people with 150 page, well defined style guides, and we see people who barely have anything written down except a handful of brand guidelines. One of the things we hear a lot of times from agencies is, can you help us help the clients better define their brand, because they know what they want, they haven't been explicit about it. We're building a module into BrandGuard called Brand Builder that allows you to define and capture those rules. But we already do a creative job of capturing three simple rules, like the spacing around the logo has to be displayed, a logo can't be turned this way, right. And there's more complicated rules, I think we've seen some fun ones, like no images can show a child using technology without an adult present. That's a hard brand guideline to teach a machine. And so we have an entire synthetic data pipeline that will create pro and con images that put them into a model so that the model can learn that rule. But yeah, you know, it's one of the interesting things about this space, compared to a lot of other use cases of AI is there a lot of ways where AI is going to get better than humans. But in this case, humans sort of define the brand. And maybe we'll get to the point where AI can make suggestions about how you might want to move your brand, which directions which attributes or values, you might want to focus on more than others. But by and large, humans will define brands, brand values, training and datasets for the brand related models. And so I think it's a really good place to be if you're working in AI for that reason, because like you said, so much of it is in people's heads and, you know, you need workflows to sort of get that out and capture as much of it as possible. We also do it through the regular feedback, right? You could we could score something high or low and you could dispute it you can say no, no, this should have been scored a different way and here's why.

Mike: So it's interesting to continually retraining that model. I'm interested when you try and build that that style guide in the AI if you like in the AIS head I don't know if that's the right way to express it. Does it help to have things that are off brand and on brand or do you just feed it the past content that's been approved?

Rob: It helps to have things that are off brand as well. So a lot of times we'll pull some public competitor data, you know, from Nike, we would pull Adidas, just to contrast because that's, you know, I don't know how deep you go in the AI space, but these things are basically mapped to a mathematical space that focuses on similarity. And so if you can say, these things shall be similar to each other in this mathematical As a nice should not you can think of us as drawing a brand boundary in that mathematical space around what's on brand? And what's not.

Mike: And I mean, you've mentioned a few things. But is there any limit to the kind of content that the system can, you know, assess for compliance with brand guidelines? Can it go through to tweets and, and things like that, as well as articles and images?

Rob: I would say it's built first and foremost for marketing materials, primarily advertisements, but we can do a lot of stuff, you know, tweets, tweets are a little bit harder, because they're so short. And the less information that you have, the less accurate you're going to be about if something's on brand or not. Twitter, social media platforms are also an area where you try to be a little maybe more kitschy than you would be in other, you know, types of marketing materials, you're trying to be funny, you're trying to tie to memes, we can pick up on some of that, you know, is this a meme that your brand should want to tie to or not? We do a lot with some of the Instagram influencer use cases, we've been asked to do some some things we're not we're not working on this actively. But we've looked at doing PowerPoint presentations. If you're a consulting firm or real estate firm, you're doing a lot of presentations to people about things, right, you want to make sure those are all on brand for your firm. And you know how people get in and walk around with PowerPoint and change everything. So even if you have templates, it's not right, we've been asked to do product packaging and, and other use cases like that. There's a big use case around licencing as well. So if your sports team and you're, I'm licencing you my logo so that you can use it, I probably have to approve the product shot and the marketing materials around it. And that's very time consuming if you're doing a lot of licencing. So we've we have some customers that have that use case as well.

Mike: Presumably, what you're doing is you're coming back with a score rather than necessarily, yes, it's on brand. No, it's off. I mean, there's always Shades of Grey. I mean, how do you do that? Do you literally provide a score? We do

Rob: we provide a score and some feedback on specific models. So you can decide what to do with that we give you an overall score. But sometimes it could be like, everything's great. But you know, maybe you have a rule that the logo always has to be in the upper left hand side of the page, and it's in the bottom right. And so maybe it scores at 9%, everything's good, but the logo totally fails, we highlight that information for you. And then you can drill down and see where the asset fail.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, I'm intrigued, you know, people are starting now to use generative AI to create some content marketing content. Do you see humans as being better at staying within the brand guidelines? Or would AI actually be more likely to stay within those guardrails?

Rob: Probably humans. And the reason is that the way that most of these generative models work, and this may change, right, people may come up with a better way that these generative models work. But today, the way they work is you take this world of information and you compress it down into a space. So you can think about a you can think about a song that's compressed, and it's lost some of its fidelity. So think about these ideas, or these images with these words that have done that. And now when you ask it to generate something, it finds an area in that mathematical space that we talked about, and it expands it by introducing some randomness. And so by that randomness, you can never tell what's going to come out. It's a big problem. One of the one of the early examples that we used to do is we would prompt chat GPT with the Tesla style guide and test the rule number one is do not use the word luxury Tesla's not a luxury brand. It is a high performance brand. And then you would we would ask chat, GBT, right, some ads for me to sell Tesla's to rich people and the first one every time they would come out and be like, blah, blah, blah, don't you love luxury, even when you prompted it with the brand guidelines, because luxury and rich are so tied together statistically, in these models, which is how these models work, it's hard for them to break, you can't make it part of the model generation itself. So you need filters over top of it. And I just we don't think it makes sense for every generative AI company to do their own filtering regarding your brand. Because now as a brand manager, if you have 30 tools in your stack, and you have to go through and be like, Okay, well, you know, I'm using open AI and Jasper and WordPress and HubSpot, and figma and Canva. And I have to manage my brand governance piece at all of them. And they'll have slightly different models. So it's not consistent like this, it's not going to work. It's why we've really tried to integrate it with everything because you need one tool that's like this represents my brand to an AI. So we're very heavy on the integration side. We work with figma and Canva, and a whole bunch of other tools today.

Mike: I'm gonna guess we started that that answer talking about, you know, some of the issues around generative AI and it getting a little bit of peace, you know, partly because of the randomness. I mean, how consistently good can I be at enforcing brand guidelines? You know, we hear a lot about hallucinations in generative AI. Do you have the same problem in brand God? We

Rob: don't because we are not generative models we are what's called discriminative models. So we are choosing between things we are not creating things and the hallucinations come from the randomness sits inserted in the creation process. So that's why we sit on top of all these generative models, we can get really, really good. But we can only get as good as the data that we're given to discriminate. And as you know, like brands, an area where sometimes even people on a company, senior people may argue over some aspects of the brand. And if something's on brand or not, there's somebody you know, we see people that have companies that have like usual, big lovable nerd is a brand voice concept. It's like, well, like what does that mean, that's open to interpretation. So that there will always be a little bit of that, we try to focus on providing easy, quick, automated rejection, for stuff that doesn't meet the brand guidelines, and human in the loop approval for stuff that does or may be on the margins.

Mike: That sounds good. And I thought it was a great explanation of the difference between what you're doing and guarantee of AI, I think it's all too common for people to you know, see my eyes just one thing when it's lots of different things. One of the things I'm intrigued in this, you're actually effectively building custom models for each and every customer, which is obviously time consuming. Does that make brand garden expensive products? Is this like only for the largest enterprises? Or is it something can be used by a broader range of customers?

Rob: Well, that most of the process for training models on a per customer basis is automated. So we've gotten pretty efficient at that. So even though we do build different models per customer, they're based on similar workflows, you input your data, and we can we can sort of get there. So that doesn't really drive the cost as much as how much inference you want to do, which is how many things do you want to test to see if they're on brand. So it's, it's a product that starts at about $20,000 a year for small to mid sized customer, and goes on up to you know, mid six figures, maybe for really big brands that to a lot of stuff have multiple brand hierarchies. I think over the years, this will become best practice for everybody. But right now we primarily see most of our customers are, I'd say, like fortune 5000 brands right there, the brand matters a lot to them, we've had CMOS tell us, they can estimate how much revenue they lose if an ad goes out with the wrong font. So, you know, really big companies with a lot of data on the impact that brand guidelines have on their brand and on and on customer perception. So that is the majority of our market now. But I do think it's coming down market over time. And

Mike: I mean, one of the questions, I think people, you know, interested in the product might wonder is how would they go about evaluating the product. I mean, obviously, you can't just run a, you know, one week test, you've got to build the models, is there a way for someone to experiment without having to commit to a year subscription? We do, we have test

Rob: accounts you can play with. So we use flex brothers a lot, we have a Brooks Brothers demo account where you can read the brand guidelines, you can upload stuff, and that'll give you a general feel for how the tool works. And then what we normally do is we normally move to some sort of paid pilot that might be like 10, grand, maybe a little bit more, depending on how big you are, where we take in some of your data and train up some models, that process normally takes about 48 hours to get that going. And then people can try it out for a couple of months and play around with it. You know, the bigger challenge tends to be internally, how do you build it into your workflows? Your workflows have probably been mostly human based approvals? How do you migrate those over to a tool like this?

Mike: That's amazing, because I mean, 48 hours to get up and running seems very quick. So you know, sounds like it's actually not a difficult tool to evaluate and test and play with them. Certainly, the Brooks demo account sounds fun. Yeah,

Rob: it is, it is pretty easy to get going. And I just mentioned, there's multiple ways to use it. There's a web app, there's a Chrome plugin, there's an API. So we have people that use all those

Mike: awesome. I'm, you know, you're obviously a big believer in AI. And, you know, you found an area of marketing that really benefits from Ai. I mean, how do you think AI in the next five years is going to change marketing,

Rob: I think you're gonna see every marketing stack become more automated and more AI powered. And I think what that's going to do so if you look at a lot of the research around AI, it doesn't improve the top, it brings up the bottom. So here's a very interesting example, think about chat, GPT. Chat GPT does probably not make your world class writers much better. Maybe it'll inspire them here and there with some ideas, but it makes your poor writers average, much, much better, right? So so take the bottom half of writers, it makes them average, take the you know, next quartile makes them a little bit better take your best writers, it doesn't do that much for them. So now, what does that mean? If you translate AI into your automated marketing stack, it means that if you look at your marketing, operational excellence, and your creativity and all kinds of stuff, all the people at the bottom are going to now be up here. And so your, your difference between the best and the worst is going to shrink, mainly because the bottom comes up. Not that not because the top comes down. It's going to be easier to be a competent sort of performance marketer or, you know, brand marketer just from these tools. It'll always be hard to be great because you have to have something special. You have to have a process or an insight or things that other people don't have But I think a lot of what's gonna go away is a lot of your operations are going to be automated, it's gonna do a couple things. Number one, it's gonna make brand strength more important. So focusing on building the brand, really honing those attributes and values and how they connect to the customer. And what they mean in the mind of the customer is gonna be really important, even for smaller companies that maybe thought less about their brand before. And then I think the second thing is, marketers are going to become more and more strategic planners, trainers for the AI models, strategists continually being creative and coming up with new ideas to test and innovate and, and stuff like that, and less of the right me 10 more Google ads for this persona.

Mike: That's fascinating. I mean, one of the things we'd like to ask all our guests is, what advice would they give if someone said, Should I go into marketing someone just leaving college or entering college? I'm intrigued, it sounds like it's potentially gonna be tough, you know, particularly if you're in that, that bottom half of marketing ability to, to really stand out, would you would you say that marketing's a career that's got a lot of opportunity going forward? Or do you think AI is going to make it more and more difficult to stand out?

Rob: I think it's already playing the stack. I think brand marketing and content marketing, PR com stuff like that is gonna matter a lot more. I think your fast turn stuff like social and performance marketing is going to be more and more automated away. So which is interesting, because if you'd asked me, you know, seven years ago, I'd say well, oh, God, you want to be the person who masters Google, and Facebook advertising, right? Like that's drives so many people's leads. Now, I think you'd be the opposite. I think you want to work on being the most creative, the most experimental, the best at using these AI tools to test and experiment and prove or disprove hypotheses about your customers.

Mike: That's, that's such a fascinating way to look at it. And I think a very positive view of some of the opportunities. Another thing we'd like to ask everyone is about marketing advice. And what's the best bit of marketing advice that you've ever been given? Oh,

Rob: that's a good question. I mean, this is a hard thing to pull off. And not every brand can pull it off. But there was a book that was written probably 20 years ago now called Purple Cow by Seth Godin. And he made this great point that like, you know, if you're a farm that for whatever reason, produces this freakish Purple Cow, you don't have to market it, everybody talks about it, because it stands out. Now. There are certain categories that people just don't care about as much. And it's hard to stand out and be remarkable. But if you can make a product that that's, it's that remarkable, it really markets itself, and that, that that matters quite a bit. And so I think when you can find those opportunities, you should really, really lean into them, because they're very special. Great advice,

Mike: I love it. Rob, you've been really generous with your time, you've given us not only a great explanation about managing brands, and how brands can help, but also think given us a really good overview of, you know, some elements of AI. If people are interested to learn more, either about BrandGuard or contact yourself, what's the best way to do that, feel free

Rob: to visit our website BrandGuard.ai. And then you can email me, I'm just rob at brain guard.ai. I can't get to everybody sometimes. But I you know, I do try to set aside a couple hours a month to talk to people that are interested in AI making career transitions, you know, we try to one of our core values as a company is to be helpful. And that includes people in the AI ecosystem and marketing systems. So we, you know, like I say, can't get to everybody, but I did try to set aside some time to answer questions and help us stuff like that for the, you know, even strangers that email me.

Mike: But that's amazing and very generous. Rob, it's been great. And you know, anyone who's struggling, managing content and making sure it meets brand guidelines. I think, you know, going visiting brand garden AI would be a great next step to take. Thank you very much for being on the podcast, Rob.

Rob: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Sara Madison - Outbrain

Sara Madison, Global Head of Product Marketing at Outbrain, an advertising platform, sat down with Mike to talk all things advertising. She discusses the industry's current challenges, why she believes audience attention will become an increasingly important metric and offers her thoughts on whether LinkedIn is a good use of a B2B advertising budget.

She also discusses her passion for product marketing and how her experience in both large enterprises and start-ups has influenced her career.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About Outbrain

Outbrain is a leading technology platform that drives business results by engaging people across the open internet. Outbrain predicts moments of engagement to drive measurable outcomes for advertisers and publishers using AI and machine learning across more than 7,000 online properties globally. Founded in 2006, Outbrain is headquartered in New York with offices in Israel and across the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America.

About Sara

Sara, who is the Global Head of Product Marketing Outbrain, is a digital media specialist with experience designing and leading strategic initiatives in startups and large organizations. She has a track record helping organizations solve issues, create value, maximize growth and improve business performance with a highly analytical approach.

 Time Stamps

[00:46.1] – Sara discusses her career journey in marketing.

[03:47.7] – Sara talks about Outbrain, what it is and its capabilities.

[06:48.8] – Sara discusses challenges in the advertising industry.

[13:19.2] – Sara shares how Microsoft successfully used Outbrain to support a campaign.

[17:52.4] – Is LinkedIn a good use of B2B advertising budget? Sara shares her opinions.

[26:11.9] – Sara’s contact details.

Quotes

“Approach marketing with an open mind, it's important to be curious and to be open to learning things before committing on a specific path.” Sara Madison, Global Head of Product Marketing at Outbrain.

 Follow Sara:

Sara Madison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-madison-21028434/

Outbrain website: https://www.outbrain.com/

Outbrain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outbrain/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Sara Madison - Outbrain

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sara Madison

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Sara Madison. Sara is the Global Head of Product Marketing at Outbrain. Welcome to the podcast, Sara.

Sara: Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Mike: It's great to have you on. And I think we're gonna have an interesting discussion about what Outbrain does, and some of the things people are doing to increase engagement. But before we start, can you just tell us a little bit about you know, your history and how you've got to the point where you're running marketing at Outbrain? Yeah,

Sara: perfect. I've been working in advertising and marketing for almost 15 years now. I started working in Spain, that's where he did my studies. And now I'm working in in the UK. And in those 15 years, I've really done many different roles within the space. So I worked with brands, creating visuals, and creating good looking collateral. I've worked as sales really working with agencies and pitching to clients. And I've also had more technical positions where I've been working closely with engineers, and actually seeing how they were building the products and really needing to understand the underlying technology that my clients were using. And so all of this experience in different companies, you know, small companies, large companies, really brought me into product marketing, that, you know, having a view of sales, marketing, and how product works, really is that key piece of Product Marketing, it's an extremely cross functional area within marketing. And I really love the strategic aspect of it. So really, on a day to day, I'm using all of my past experiences in product marketing. So that's, that's what brought me into Product Marketing. And today, I am heading up the global product marketing team at Outbrain. I've been here for about a year now. And and yeah, I'm really loving it.

Mike: It works with some interesting brands, I mean, both consumer and also B2B, haven't you? Yes,

Sara: the first role that I had was that Coca Cola and the communications teams are really seeing how you build a brand across traditional media and digital media. I've also worked at Yahoo, and seeing how how they did like branded content selling. My most recent role was at Spotify, where I was working in the product marketing team, and I was the first person in the advertising product marketing team based outside of the US. And so there, I was really establishing and landing the product marketing function for the rest of the world. So also working out what international market strategy looks like. So yeah, I mean, I've definitely worked at many different companies, I've also worked for a few startups that aren't as well known. And so I think it was really great to see how, you know, larger companies that have a larger name or a more established name, work, and also working at startups that aren't as well known in the industry.

Mike: It sounds like you've had, like this incredible range of experience. And you've now chosen to come to Outbrain. So maybe a good place to move on to explain what Outbrain has done. And I'm sure you know, people listening probably will have seen Outbrain out there on the web, or if not, you know, if they don't recognise it would have certainly encountered what you do. So can you explain a little bit about what Outbrain does?

Sara: Yeah, of course. So Outbrain is an ad platform. And what we do is we connect to advertisers with over 1.3 billion users across the open web every day. And so the way that the business work is that on the one hand, we partner with 1000s, of publishers, to help them drive audience development, help them monetize their audience. And we also provide them with tools to be able to diversify their own revenue streams. And so this is an extremely hot topic for publishers today. And on the flip side, we work with advertisers and we connect them with audiences, through ads that really coexist with the content that users are consuming on publisher sites. So that's, you know, our ad platform is really connecting the two. And the differentiation or the strength of the Outbrain ad platform is that we're able to understand and predict what audiences are going to be interested in and what content or ads they're most likely to engage with, and then click on ads. And the way that we do this is with our prediction engine. So for, I think it's like 17 years now Outbrain has been, you know, creating its own proprietary Prediction Engine. And it's something that is extremely powerful. And it allows us to connect with, you know, with users with the most relevant ads and content. And the Outbrain ad platform really does do that combination of things. It helps publishers drive revenues, it helps advertisers reach audiences. And at the same time, it allows users or it really brings relevant content to users. And

Mike: you do this with a slightly different approach to sort of, you know, classic banner advertising, you're kind of recommending content on your both organic content and also paid. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there and why you mix the two? Yeah,

Sara: that's a really key part of our offering, it's it's extremely important for us to balance content or editorial content and ads and finding that that right mix to be able to drive the revenues that we need to drive for publishers and the outcomes that we need to drive for advertisers. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we are engaging the users. And we know that engagement is really driven by content that users are, you know, want to interact with and that they're interested in. So we do really provide that balance between ads and content.

Mike: So it's great that let's look back. I mean, last year wasn't the best year for the advertising industry, a lot of people struggled. But I think also at the same time, you had some high. So do you want to tell me about, you know, what happened last year? And what Outbrain is doing going into 2024? Yeah, definitely.

Sara: 2023 was a tough year for advertising in general, we saw widespread budget cuts. And the cost of living crisis really meant that everyone was really squeezed in the space. So I think that 2023 was one of those years where it just really highlighted the importance of having a strong strategy and really focusing on efficiency. And right now, that's something that Outbrain has really been laser focused on. So, you know, we've seen that in the last year. Roi is, you know, just more important than ever, and advertisers, we want to see real, measurable results. And not just for conversions, but really in every stage of the user journey. And so, while 2023 was a rough year, we also saw it as an opportunity to continue to build on our strengths and start to develop products that are going to continue to address these evolving advertiser needs. And so that's why, you know, in 2023, we launched onyx, which is a new offering that really helps us deliver attention and engagement for brands and agencies. So for enterprise, advertisers. And so with this incorporation of onyx, now, we are able to continue to answer to that growing need for ROI throughout the funnel, delivering cross funnel outcomes with our ad suite.

Mike: And can you just unpack I mean, you talk a lot about attention and engagement. So, you know, what are you doing there? Is it driving people to content through paid? Just explain a little bit about what advertisers get when you talk about those two things?

Sara: Yeah, definitely. Attention, I think is something that that we're really focusing on, especially with our Onyx offering, I can give you more detail into what Onyx is and how we're using attention to drive results for brands. Onyx is really an attention centric offering. As I mentioned, our key segment or the key segment that we're going after is enterprise brands and agencies. With onyx, we're able to allow these advertisers to deliver rich video and display creatives in highly viewable placements with 100% Share of Voice. So Onyx is being delivered in highly viewable placements with experiences that drive great user engagement. And what makes Onyx exciting is our ability to predict audience attention. And so this is where the intention piece comes in. Onyx is powered by our prediction engine or the Outbrain Prediction Engine. So we're using that strength in our ability to look at different data points from across our network and use that to power our prediction engine to be able to deliver outcomes for brands. So what makes Onyx really exciting is that we're able to predict audience attention. And the way that we do this is the backbone or what is powering Onyx is really our prediction engine. It's our ability to look at different data points from across our network to be able to predict certain engagement. And now we are using attention as a data point that we are leveraging to really drive results for brands and agencies. So attention is actually turning into something that we are optimising for, we are measuring and we're optimising attention, the way that we're optimising attention is working with industry providers. So with partners that are measuring attention throughout the open web, and and they are really providing us with these data points that then we can then use to, to drive these, these outcomes. And

Mike: that's interesting, you've got this engine effectively, that is working out what people want to see and trying to feed it the right content, are you building those models, you know, on a per client basis, on a company by company basis, or is it much more about, you know, industries and sectors, the way

Sara: that we that we power our prediction engine is by really collecting all of those data points from across our network. And using that to power, different campaigns that different advertisers are, are setting up. So we will really adapt that prediction based on what the advertisers goals are or what type of content or audience they they want to engage with. So the Prediction Engine will adapt to the needs of the different advertisers and whatever campaign outcomes they they want to achieve.

Mike: That sounds great. I mean, it feels to me a little bit that maybe it's built around very large campaigns, you know, the sort of consumer advertisers, but I think you do work with B2B. So can you talk a little bit about how you can work with B2B and maybe deal with, you know, the fact that some of those budgets aren't quite as big as coke?

Sara: Yeah, definitely. So our brains ad platform doesn't only cater to B2C advertisers, we also are able to deliver solutions for B2B. As I mentioned before, the platform is really able to adapt to different types of advertisers needs. So you know, to give you an example, some B2B advertisers will really prioritise branded content, and this can be very crucial for them. And we can create personalised user journeys that will help attract audiences to that content, and help them you know, using our prediction engine to generate leads, and continue to build brand awareness. And when it comes to the budgets, as you mentioned, we are quite flexible. So it really is, is a platform that can adapt to different needs.

Mike: But I'm really pleased, Sara, you said that you do a lot of B2B because we'd have been trouble if you didn't. But, you know, I think one of the things I'd be interested in is, you know, do you have some examples of maybe how B2B companies have used the platform successfully?

Sara: Yeah, definitely. We ran a very successful Microsoft campaign, Microsoft wanted to to drive leads for their field, one solution. So field one is a service management software that they offer to enterprise. And when they came to us, they were asking to, again, drive leads from their high value audiences. And so for this, they had created a site that was promoting a webinar, where they would provide audiences with information about field one services. So when they came to us, we set up a campaign for them, where we were able to connect relevant audiences to their site and increase their site conversion by 75%. So this was a very effective campaign for for Microsoft. One of the solutions that we use for this was conversion bid strategy. So this is one of our offerings, that does dynamic bidding, to be able to optimise campaigns towards higher performing inventory and audiences so that really was able to drive that growth that Microsoft saw on their sites. One of the most exciting things about this campaign was that Microsoft was running on social media as well. And Outbrain was able to deliver 180% more leads than social and 50% lower cost per acquisition compared to social so we really saw that we were extremely impactful for Microsoft in in that this B2B campaign and also we performs better than their social campaigns.

Mike: That's amazing that that's impressive. And it's good that you're not just talking about driving traffic, you're really looking at conversions. I think that's, that's important for a lot of B2B companies. And I think some people looking at Outbrain see it as being a traffic driver? And obviously a lot more than that. Exactly.

Sara: Definitely, we're not only driving traffic, we're for advertisers, we're generating value for the brands as well. And really looking at that funnel. So what can we do for brands, from awareness to consideration and all the way down to conversion?

Mike: That's brilliant. I'm going to ask you about a potential challenge. Now, it seems like Google, you know, at the time we're talking, is finally starting to block third party cookies on Chrome, having talked about it forever. I know you use a mix of different cookies for tracking. So what sort of impact do you think that's going to have on Outbrain? And I don't know, Sara, maybe do you want to comment on how it's going to impact online advertising as a whole? Yeah,

Sara: I mean, we've been talking about cookie deprecation for a while now, I do have to say that I think that Outbrain is well positioned to navigate this change, we have a data collection system that is coming from our own integrations with publishers, as I mentioned before, we work with 1000s of publishers across the open web. And through those integrations, we are able to collect our own data around the contexts, the interest, the user, even the campaign performance, these are all data points that we are using to be able to drive that prediction engine. So we are able to deliver effective advertising without relying or without having a huge reliance on third party cookies. And so as I mentioned, like, I do think that that's going to be something that is going to help us navigate and continue to deliver true results for advertisers. That said, we are actively exploring additional ways that we can meet advertisers needs and develop strategic partnerships with industry leaders in the targeting space. And we're also looking into developing more first party data solutions. So we are definitely looking into more things that we can do when it comes to targeting. But I would say that, that we we don't have that much of a reliance on third party cookies.

Mike: So that's really interesting. I mean, you're obviously delivering results, as you talked about when you talked about the Microsoft example. Yet we're still seeing in the B2B sector, LinkedIn taking a larger and larger share of display advertising. I mean, why do you think that is? Do you think that's really delivering the results that people want? Or do you think it's just an easy way to spend those advertising dollars?

Sara: I think that many B2B companies are looking at LinkedIn as a space where they could advertise, amongst other things, because it is a social platform. And because a lot of advertising in general is just starting to become very concentrated on the socials. I think that part of this is because a lot of time spent with users is happening on social platforms. And so the market is becoming very concentrated here. And that's not necessarily an ideal scenario for advertisers. I think that it's important to remember that users are consuming different types of content throughout the day, on socials and including on publisher sites on the open web. And the behaviour that users have in each environment is extremely different. I don't think that we can compare the way that users are scrolling through social. And you know, I don't even include LinkedIn, I am definitely scrolling through my LinkedIn feed to the behaviour that a user has when they're on a publisher site. And they are reading through an article, I think that there's an intentionality there, that's not necessarily what you will find on the social platforms. So I think that marketers should think about engaging with consumers in different ways throughout the day. So it's not necessarily choosing one environment over another. It's how can you close the gaps in that user journey and connect with users in in different ways? And, you know, really thinking about the attention that you're able to drive on the open web on publisher sites. And I think that marketers that are able to incorporate that attention from the open web into their media plans, are we going to be able to enhance their overall performance?

Mike: I think that's a great point, Sara, I'm intrigued that she I mean, how the publishers see Outbrain and put particularly interested in the B2B sector because obviously, in B2B, typically those publishers are generating much higher CPMs than maybe some of the consumer sites.

Sara: Yeah, we have great relationships with publishers, and some of our founders are coming from the publishing industry. So it's really part of our DNA. And our success is very tied to theirs. So I wouldn't say that we have issues with integrating with B2B publishers. The reason that I say this is because we have multiple ways that we can work with publishers, as I mentioned before, we work with publishers to drive audience development, monetization, and also revenue diversification. So it's a very flexible suite of solutions that we offer publishers, and so we really adapt to their individual needs.

Mike: That sounds great. I mean, you know, I can understand certainly today publishers being very keen to find additional sources of income. If our listeners are looking to run campaigns, and they want to test something on Outbrain. I mean, how easy is it to run a test campaign on outbound, you have to, you know, spend a lot of time learning and understanding the platform because it's different, or is it fairly straightforward,

Sara: it's, it's extremely straightforward, you can just go to outbrain.com. And choose if you're a publisher, and advertiser and fill in a form where someone will get in touch with you and help you get set up. And for example, for an advertiser, once you have access to our advertiser dashboard, you can go in and set up your own campaign goals, set up different formats, launch test campaigns, our solution is a fully self serve platform. So it's extremely easy to get started, we also have a help centre, and onboarding documents to make sure that the process is a lot easier.

Mike: And presumably, once you're set up, you can run small test campaigns before you start running out major ones, there's not minimum ad spends on those campaigns. Exactly. That sounds great. I mean, you've obviously done a lot of Outbrain to change the way people do digital advertising. I'm interested to know, you know, what's your view as to how advertising on the web is gonna change over the next few years?

Sara: Well, I think that we're all really seeing that the media landscape is fully shifting towards video first, consumption. And a lot of that consumption is happening on social platforms. So I think that open web players really need to adapt to this new reality. And we need to focus on attracting and engaging both audiences and advertisers through video first experiences. So that's definitely something that I think is going to is going to be top of mind for many players in the space. I think that there are also a few trends that we're starting to see that are really landing. We've talked about attention metrics before. But I think that attention metrics are going to evolve from nice to haves to potentially becoming currency. And another thing that hopefully we'll start seeing more of is how we are all starting to reimagine targeting, I think that we'll start seeing more creative targeting solutions that are more focused on things like outcomes, instead of demographics.

Mike: That's great. It sounds like you know, publishers need to pay attention to some of these trends as well as advertisers, I think particularly video is important. Yes. It's been really interesting talking to you, Sara, just like to ask a couple of more personal questions we'd like to ask people well, the first is, you know, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Sara: I've had a lot of great advice. But one thing that I always go back to is that I remind myself to be data driven, and give myself the time for strategic thinking before taking action. I think it's easy to fall into a trap of simply doing things to go with the flow, especially when workloads are high. And we're really focusing on delivering, but taking time to actively use data to guide your decisions and then take really purposeful actions really does make a world of difference. So I definitely say that giving yourself the necessary time to stop, look at the data review, plan. And then act is is key.

Mike: I love adding as great advice. You seem really excited about the future of marketing. So I think the answer the next question would be quite positive. I mean, what would you tell a young person who was maybe considering marketing as a career, would you recommend it?

Sara: Of course, definitely. I mean, I really love marketing, I would say to that person to approach marketing with an open mind. Marketing is a massive field, and it has tonnes of areas of expertise. And I think that when you're coming into it, it's important to be curious and to be open to learning things before committing on a specific path. You know, to give you an example, when I started, I saw myself brainstorming at a creative agency. And now I'm in product marketing, and I'm loving it. And it's, it's a role that can be very technical at times. So really, my point is, don't limit yourself based on your initial thoughts of what you think marketing is. Spend some time to explore, try things out, and then who knows where you might find your passion within marketing. That's

Mike: great advice. I love that. Obviously, you know, if people want to try Outbrain, you've already said go to outbrain.com. But if people are particularly interested by something you've said or want to follow up, is there a way that the listeners could contact you after the episode?

Sara: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, and you just have to search for Sara Madison. Brilliant.

Mike: Sara, this this has been fascinating. It's great to hear how much innovation that there is in advertising. So I think you know, this is a particularly interesting episode. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Sara: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale