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Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
451: Best of 2024: How can we Trust AI? with Jacqueline Woods, CMO at Teradata
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- [00:01]
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Alan Hart
You know, I've been talking about earned.
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Jacqueline Woods
Media value for quite some time on this podcast. My friends at Eisenberg have just raised the bar on earned media benchmarks with their Social index. So Social Index now gives you globally earned media values across growing list of six geographies for all your KPIs across the top seven social Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. You can now visualize these values for deeper analysis and they have a look back window over two years of historical comparisons. Social Index is updated daily. Don't get stuck with old data. Over 1000 companies have used the social index to understand the ROI of their social campaigns. And if you work with a social agency, you should demand they incorporate earned media values into your reports. Get your earned media value for social content, visit earned mediavalues.com Allen Again, that's.
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Alan Hart
Earned mediavalues.com A L A N hey.
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Jacqueline Woods
There Marketing Today listeners. This is Alan Hart and from all of us here at Marketing Today, we want to wish you a happiest of holiday seasons. As we wrap up another incredible year, we're taking a moment to celebrate by replaying one of our most popular episodes from 2024. It's a special episode that our listeners have told us they absolutely loved. Packed with insights, innovation and the kind of marketing wisdom that makes our community really so remarkable. Whether you're spending the holidays with family, catching up on some well deserved rest, or even sneaking in a bit of professional development, we hope this episode brings you joy, inspiration and maybe a little fresh perspective to kick off the new year. So grab a warm drink, settle in and enjoy the holiday replay of one of our most beloved episodes of the year. How can we trust AI with Jacqueline woods, the CMO of Teradata Happy holidays. And here's to another amazing year in marketing.
- [02:57]
Ryan Reynolds
For all of us. It's about predicting where the consumer is going and getting half of it right.
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Alan Hart
One of the things we want to.
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Jacqueline Woods
Do is create ads that don't suck.
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Embracing change creates great possibility.
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Alan Hart
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today.
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Jacqueline Woods
Today on the show I've got Jacqueline Woods. She's the Chief Marketing Officer at Teradata. Jacqueline joined Teradata from Nielsen IQ where she was a member of the executive leadership team and global Chief Marketing and Communications officer, leading the revitalization of that company's brand image perception. Previously, Jacqueline was with IBM for nearly 10 years as CMO of IBM Global Partner Ecosystem Division where she focused on building cloud data, AI and SaaS based strategies. Before that, she was global head of customer segmentation and Customer experience at General Electric. Jacqueline also held roles of increasing responsibility for Oracle for 10 years as well as the leadership roles at Ameritech and gte, or now known as Verizon. On the show today, we talk a little bit about Teradata. We also talk about AI, how it's all the rage and you really can't avoid it. And where does trust fit into the equation as we pursue AI initiatives and implementations? What do leaders need to know before launching an AI initiative? And how can AI boost efficiency and productivity? And maybe most important, why other black female business leaders and other underrepresented people should take advantage of AI now and get involved. That and much more with Jacqueline Woods.
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Alan Hart
Jaclyn, welcome to the show.
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Jacqueline Woods
Thank you. It's great to be here.
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Alan Hart
I'm excited to have this conversation. I think it was the last time we spoke. This notion of empathy for people and where they're coming from was something we talked about. And from your perspective, I thought we could start there. What does it mean to you to have empathy for other people?
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Jacqueline Woods
I think for me, empathy really means trying to understand where someone else may be and also where they're coming from. I have a friend who I will attribute this to her, and I'm sure she isn't the first person who said it, but she often says seek first to understand as compared to being understood. And I love that because it to me embodies empathy. Because if you're seeking to understand what's going on with someone, seeking to understand their perspective, seeking to understand context, I think that makes you a better listener. But I also think it makes you more sensitive to what you're hearing. And you can have a more open mind as you listen because you're starting from the perspective of wanting to understand. And through that understanding, I think that allows someone to be more empathetic.
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Gotcha.
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Alan Hart
Gotcha. It makes a lot of sense. And I feel like for marketers, on top of everything else, we also need to be expressing our empathy muscle, both to understand the people and the teams that we work with, but also the people we're trying to serve a hundred percent.
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Jacqueline Woods
I think if you look at brands today and companies today that have leaned into that and perhaps done it well, whether that's understanding the needs of their workforce and employees that work for them to create better workspaces so they end up with better outcomes for innovation, they end up with more productivity, they end up with better products. I do think it's because they've created a space where people can be more empathetic. I also think they've created a space for people to not just be themselves. I think it's in some ways jargony when people say, bring your authentic self, because a lot of times it's. I don't know if people really mean that. I do. I think that became a thing like people bringing their authentic self. But I don't think that people really meant that or understood what that meant. It doesn't mean someone, quote, wearing their hair in a natural style. If you happen to be an African American female. It doesn't mean that. That. Yes, that is part of your authenticity. Absolutely. But bringing your authentic self also means when someone has maybe said something that is off color, that you can express that that bothered you and that is taken in a way that does not put the burden of the comment on the receiver of the comment, which often happens. Which is why people don't necessarily think they can bring their authentic self. Because bringing their authentic self means I get to tell you when something has happened in the environment that may have made me feel uncomfortable and I should be able to do that, and I should be received for doing that. Right. In a way that doesn't carry any other stuff with it other than it is what it is. You said something, you may have offended someone, apologize, understand that it happened, and try to do better next time. And that is what it means to be empathetic. Right. Because then I'm understanding that whatever I did, even if I could have thought that it was funny and I could have not been intentionally harmful, that was never my intent. But if I'm being empathetic and the other person on the other side is being authentic with me, they can express that I can receive it. And then I can adapt and adjust so that I can create a space for empathy. And I just think it makes a more trusted environment, whether that be personal or whether it be work.
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I love that.
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Alan Hart
I love that from empathy. I'd love to talk about your career track. Where did you get your start in business so I can better understand your background, et cetera. And then what was some of the highlights or path and stops along the way to become the Chief Marketing Officer at Teradata?
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Jacqueline Woods
It's interesting because I started my career in finance and accounting, which I think is not maybe the natural path for someone in marketing, but for today's marketer, I think it's really positioned me quite well. First and foremost, I love math. Love, love math. I've always liked numbers, I've always liked data and analysis. And I think at some point that wasn't as popular as it is now, because I think that in the past when people talked about marketing or people talked about people being creative, they never made it so that people could use their left and right brain. They always made it seem like you had to be glowingly creative. And that's not true. I think people who. There are two people, two types of people who really love mathematics and that is using math to solve problems. And that requires quite a bit of creativity. And so after I got my mba, I literally had, in my own head, I wanted to go and specifically be focused on really the start of the process for selling something as compared to being at the end of that process and counting the results and talking about why something happened, whether what happened was good or bad, we made our numbers or we didn't make our numbers. And so for me, I wanted to be at that point where you're at the precipice of talking about why is this product important and why should someone care about it and what does it mean for someone's world or their life. And interestingly enough, I started my career in telecommunications. And so when you think about dial tone and you think about just the notion of someone in the past, before we all had mobile phones, you picked up a phone and there was dial tone and that meant something to you, that meant that you were going to be able to connect with someone else for whatever the purpose was. And so it's not something you could taste, it's not something you could smell, it was only something you could hear. And so just the notion of having to create stories and conversations on why that connectivity was important, whether it be for security, whether it be for a grandparent, whether it be the Lifeline of the business. Those are all reasons that people needed phone service and needed kind of all of the things around phone service, whether it was call waiting or forwarding or all the things that became really important capabilities and features that companies could charge extra for. So that was the first part for me of moving from kind of finance and looking at the results of quote, how much dial tone did we sell to? Why is this actually important for someone in their life? And how do you make that connection or connectivity? I then was recruited from there to go to Oracle, and that's really how I got into technology. And even when I was in college, I had taken the math that was for engineers, because I just love math. And I had taken a number of computer science courses, but it wasn't like I wanted to be a software engineer, and it wasn't even like I wanted to be an engineer, but I did enjoy the space. And so when I got recruited from telecom to go to Oracle, I thought, hey, this is cool, because I can combine what I really love doing, which is this conversation around marketing and how to get someone interested in something that's somewhat esoteric with my quantitative background and how I was able to do that. And then from Oracle I went to ge and I thought that was a great opportunity to just really be in a number of different industries that Oracle essentially had sold into. GE at the time was like in everything. They were in banking, they were in retail, they were in oil and gas, they were in electronics, they sold appliances, for God's sakes, airplanes, airplane engines, like they sold locomotives. So it's one of those things when I look back on that experience, because I really think that people don't really understood how many businesses that General Electric was actually into. So if you think about Thomas Edison and this whole light bulb and going from someone who did that to owning as much as they did in the swath of businesses that they ran. It was really a great time for me, particularly coming from a software company, because we sold into ge and this allowed me to really apply what I had learned more from that space to a company that clearly wasn't as technologically advanced as Oracle. And then from there I went to IBM, where we focused on cloud and AI and analytics and data. And those were really where I first got my two divisional chief marketing officer jobs. And so that was a really good time for me to learn how to be a chief marketing officer. And then I went to Nielsen for a couple years and then came to Teradata at the end of 2021. So that really is my journey. We're really focused on artificial intelligence, generative AI, large language models, the trust that's required for what people are looking to do with AI and how does our platform ensure that we're able to do that? And really the ability to. To do really great storytelling around not just this technology, but why is it important and how can we leverage it really for the betterment. And this sounds grand, but it's true, but the betterment of mankind. And at the end of the day, we as a company, and the way that we talk about it is we believe that people thrive when empowered with better and trusted information. And our technology seeks to provide that to the companies that we do business with.
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Alan Hart
It's a. It's pretty. It is a lofty mission. The betterment of mankind. Maybe we can talk just a little bit about Teradata and you talked about AI and that's a big focus now. But just give us a sense of the, like, size and scope of the business. Like what, what are. If you can, like a little bit of what you guys are doing and where you're doing it.
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Jacqueline Woods
We, we sell into what we would call the global 10,000. So companies that generally are 750 million up to a billion and above. And so anyone from think of your largest banks to your largest airlines, like American Airlines as an example, your biggest healthcare groups like United Healthcare, those are some of our, what I would call preeminent customers that we do a lot of work with and obviously rely on our platform for their cloud data and analytics workloads. And we really focus. And this is not new to us. Teradata has been a steward of trusted data and information since the company's founding, which was about 40 years ago. It's always been in this space. Those companies have relied on us to. If you think about some of the world's largest banks and think about some of the toughest challenges that they are undertaking, particularly now, it would be around risk and fraud. And so you have to think about, with the speed at which a technology has to analyze, are you really who you say you are when you're making a transaction to ensure that they're both protecting their consumers as well as the businesses that they work with, as well as the banks themselves. And so those are just some of the types of business operations that we would be supporting at some of the very largest banks. If you think about American Airlines, and it happens today, for once on the east coast, we have, like, awesome weather. It's been awesome for the past three days. And When I tell you it is extraordinarily beautiful outside. It is extraordinarily beautiful outside. It's the first, like, first three days of sun. Sun that we've had probably in months. But that is not the case on the West Coast. They are having some tremendous storms this week. It's been all over the news. And if you think about how that disrupts air travel, you can imagine what it takes to get planes from point A to point B, people from point A to point B, and ensuring that they have options and alternatives. And if you look at some of the use cases that we even detail this on our website of how American Airlines uses our technology to efficiently run 28 of their most important business operations at the airline, which includes the kind of movement of their planes, it includes their loyalty program, it includes kind of ground operations and things like that. So those are some of the things that I personally am really proud of, particularly for a person who flies over 100,000 miles a year. If you're a person who does that, then efficiently getting from point A to B safely is really important. And if you travel a lot, how much weather impacts your ability to travel and just what an airline has to do to navigate around that is really incredible. When you look at the number of flights and people that they are routing around every day. Yeah.
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Alan Hart
No, you're touching, like, so many of those core businesses that make economies and societies run. So amazing.
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Jacqueline Woods
Yeah, I said it was seismic.
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Alan Hart
You weren't kidding. You mentioned at some point earlier in the conversation, and you really cannot avoid that term these days.
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Jacqueline Woods
You cannot avoid it.
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Alan Hart
No. But to your point around, like, trust and trusted source of information. Trust is a concern when we think about AI. Like, how do you think about businesses and leaders being able to ensure that AI outcomes can be trusted? How do you think about that?
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Jacqueline Woods
I think the way that we like to think about it is in a couple ways, because it's clear that AI is all the rage. It became the rage, I would argue, at the end of 2022, when maybe ChatGPT was officially launched and people could see it, like they could experience it. And your average person can go get an account and kind of ask some questions, and answers came and they're like, oh, my God, that is so cool. But this notion of trust is, like, not for the faint of heart. Right. Because when you think about artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence, it means that something is being generated from patterns. There are patterns of data and information that are out there in the world that are on the Internet. Some of those patterns are factual and some are non factual. And so the ability to scrape through and understand that and have systems that can do that and learn in a way that is able to extricate the things that are true from the things that are false is going to be really incredibly important. It's not an automatic which means that machines aren't the only thing here that have to be part of the context of getting to the right answer is people first. AI itself is not responsible. AI is a technology. Machine learning is a technology. What has to happen and what has to be trusted is the people have to be able to take ownership for the responsibility for the models that they are creating, whether that be a large language model or not, whether it be a model or a pattern or an algorithm that they are building, they're the ones that have to be responsible for that and they're the ones that have to be the critical thinkers to make sure that the patterns that are being seen are being looked at and really having the right type of inspections, the right type of governance, the right type of compliance to ensure that we can trust the output that is coming out of a model that would be based on AI. Those things are the things that are extraordinarily important.
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Got it?
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Alan Hart
When you think about leaders and before they launch those initiatives and you talk about the people, and it's the people that are critical to making sure that this new technology is leveraged in the right ways. How do you think about those things that maybe you have to do at Teradata even as well, to help put the right. Maybe I don't know if the right word is guardrails in place, but the things that you need to do before launching an AI initiative, I think that.
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Jacqueline Woods
What anyone really needs to think about is starting with the data. Everything starts with data. And I don't think I can emphasize that enough about how important that is, because as a reminder, the data is what is used to train an AI model. So AI gets trained on something and then it can analyze patterns, and then from those patterns it makes decisions. Right? So it's only going to be as good as the data that it is essentially being trained on. If you think about all the data that's out there in the world, and this is an analogy that I shared a few times in a few different forums, I really think of data like water. In the past, you would hear people talk about, oh, data is like oil. And the reason that they said that is because it was the commodity of oil is extraordinarily valuable. And so I think people were trying to make this alignment to if you have this very valuable resources, this is really important. And so it's like oil. I actually think it's more like water because there is so much of it. And if you think about our planet is over 70% water. And if you think about the amount of water that is usable on this planet, of that percentage, I think it's only about two and a half to 3% of the water that's actually usable. And of that water which is usable, you can only get to. I think it's less than 1. I think it's 3/10 of 1%. So imagine you have this thing that is extraordinarily plentiful. We have no shortage of actual water. We do have a shortage of usable, pristine, clean water for humans to consume or to be used for the types of activities that we would need that kind of clean water for. That's only 3, 10 of 1% of all the water on this planet. And so when you think about data is similar, there's no shortage of how many zettabytes by 2026, I think it's 183,000. It's some extraordinarily large number that I can't even think of the number of zeros that go with it. It's so this number of zettabytes of data that's out there, it's doubling every X so many years. Or days or whatever the metric is that people are using. At the end of the day, the usable portion of that data is quite small, extraordinarily small. And so you have to be able to get to that clean, pristine data to effectively train your models so that your patterns can be seen from something that's clean. That's the only way that your pattern or your outcome in many ways can be trusted. If you're using dirty data, it's like washing your clothes in dirty water. I don't think you can expect them to become clean. And so it's extraordinarily important for people to really grasp that and understand that their results are only going to be as good as the inputs that they're using in order to determine those outputs.
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Alan Hart
No, that makes sense. That makes sense. I love the analogy of water and the fact that you got all the way to a fraction of a percent that was usable. I'd never thought about that before, but it is, it's a great analogy of what we're looking at and how we need to be focused on getting to the best part, if you will.
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Jacqueline Woods
Correct.
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Alan Hart
Yeah. When you think about using AI yourself or with teams or companies to boost both efficiency and productivity in the marketing world, it's everywhere, right? Like you can write your content, can write your emails. How do we remain authentic to the brand or the voice that we're trying to stay true to?
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Jacqueline Woods
It's interesting that you asked this question because I was talking to one of my CMO colleagues over at Snyder Electric and we were having this conversation and he said, hey, I'm looking at some use cases around AI that will help us with content. And it wasn't that the company was abdicating its responsibility to build content. What he is really looking at is can I create my own LLM of the type of content and the way that we talk about it at this company, such that I can, if I have to go across multiple channels, how something shows up on Twitter is different than it shows up on Facebook, is different than it shows up on LinkedIn, is different than it shows up on TikTok. And I don't just mean the short form of the content and it has X amount of characters. I actually mean Twitter is more newsy. LinkedIn is very so business oriented. Facebook is different than that. Like they all have their own place in the world and how the content shows up in those different channels. And imagine a world where if you had your basic content and you wrote something that was specific for LinkedIn, you got and you said, I'm just pretending that I'm the person that wrote it and I now put it in my own model to pop something that says, what would this sound like on Twitter? How does this work? On what recommendations for TikTok? What does this look like on Facebook? Then you know that you're propagating the information in a way that would be consumed by the way that content gets consumed on that platform. I actually think that's extraordinary. Right. I don't think that's quote, taken away anyone's job. I think that you would have more time to be much more specific and creative with the type of information that you could put in all of these different places in a way that was consistent and truer to your brand. And so I think those are some of the opportunities that you can use AI or gen AI to essentially be more efficient and help you boost productivity. I don't think you should just jump into AI for AI sake. I think you need to really think about what are some of the ways and the vehicles that I could use this to improve productivity. And one of the data scientist that works for me, one of the reasons why I hired him actually was because he had given me a use case where he it was working with health care and working with the state of California and he had done all this analysis and then he showed, yes, you've saved this amount of money, but if you reinvest vested here and here are some other outcomes and benefits that you're going to achieve. And the way that I think about this is we as marketers would be in a great place if we are using our dollars more efficiently and optimizing them in a way that we aren't able to do today because we're having to use those levers more independently when all of those levers should really be working together. And even if you have a firm that does your media buys for you, it's still not the same as how does all of this content work together, how do all my campaigns really work together and how do I think about that in a way that could clearly be faster than my doing that across the board with kind of four different organizations and groups. I could now do that more quickly and then I could use those resources to do something even more valuable to the company or the organization.
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Alan Hart
It's definitely a, maybe a workforce multiplier to some degree.
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Jacqueline Woods
I think it's going to be a workforce multiplier, I think. And think about if you're in the US and just think about in comparison, the US has I Think it is the highest productivity country. I believe that is still the case. But think about how many hours Americans work in comparison to other countries. Right there. Other countries have decided that having leisure or free time is not a bad thing. And that is important. And imagine if you could specifically have more time, more quality time, more time to think, more time to not do perfunctory work, but do work that is more accretive to your own brain power. Imagine how much more valuable that would be. I think it would be.
- [36:41]
Alan Hart
Yeah, it would be awesome, for sure. Well, I know we've been talking a lot about technology, what you guys are doing at Teradata. I want to switch gears just a bit and talk about. I know you have a passion about supporting other black female business leaders and other underrepresented people, and that's important to you. Are there advantages for these groups to take advantage of AI as well?
- [37:11]
Jacqueline Woods
I think so, because I think anytime that you have a technology that clearly is going to be part of what we do going forward as human beings, I think it's important for us to be engaged and be part of the conversations. Because for one thing, there is bias in the world. And that bias doesn't go away with AI because AI is using patterns that already exist. And so I think you would have to work doubly hard to make sure that you don't have bias in some of the models that are out there. And the only way to do that is to include people who the bias has often been against. And that would be, particularly in the US that would be people of color, whether you happen to be Hispanic or whether you happen to be black. If you're for women, I think it particularly black women and women of color were just underrepresented in technology, full stop. And so ensuring that as new technologies are coming online and there will be new roles, whether those are ethicists, whether it is someone who's a data and analytics specialist, it will be important for people to participate in this because it's going to be an important part of the economy overall and because it's going to change how we work and how people will be impacted. You want to be before you're, quote, impacted in a way that could be perceived as harmful. You need to be part of the conversation to ensure that all points of view are heard and that you can ensure that you can take advantage of that. I think that's extraordinarily important. And I think you and I talked about before, you know that I have been. Have completed a manuscript that I will be publishing that talks about not necessarily the role of AI, but talks about how black female leaders and women of color, how do they essentially really navigate corporate America? I think there will be more data available to help to understand that, and that AI will play a role in that as well. So I think those are really important opportunities that people need to lean into and not lean away from.
- [40:10]
Alan Hart
I love it. I definitely want to switch gears now. We'd love to get to know each of the people behind the microphone a little bit better. And my favorite question to ask everyone that comes on the show is, has there been an experience of your past that defines and makes up who you are today?
- [40:28]
Jacqueline Woods
I think the one that defines me most is when I was very young, in my first job out of college, and obviously that was probably 25, 30 years ago, I was in this gorgeous, beautiful building in Westlake Village. The office was even in a movie. It was so gorgeous. And when you could stand in this, what I would argue would be the foyer area, and you could see the entire building. It went up, like, four levels, and it just had this huge atrium. So it was just grand. And every day I would see my first job out of college was in for the phone company, which was GTE at the time, which is now Verizon. So just think Verizon. You're at Verizon, the big headquarters in California. And every day I would see this guy. His name was Mo, and he happened to be like. He was like a biker. He had really leathery skin. It was like he was cool. He had really long hair, used to wear a ponytail. And imagine this guy walking around an office building where everyone else is dressed in suits. Because at the time, there was, quote, not really something called business casual. When I started my career, we all wore suits and high heels. Thank God those days are over. And Mo would. Every day I would see him, and I would. We would have a chat. How you doing? Blah, blah, blah. But his job was like a cable splicer, frame maintainer, which is essentially. This was a guy who climbed telephone poles. But he happened because he was assigned to the headquarters. He was always in this office building. And he said to me one day, I was just talking to him and about my business. He said, do you know why I like you? And I said, no. Why? He's. And he says, because you don't care if someone is a CEO or another executive or someone like me. Because he knew that he was, like, literally coming in boots every day and looking scruffy. He says, you always treat Everyone with dignity and respect. And that always stuck with me because I never imagined that anyone would treat him differently than that. I never imagined that. But he happened to be someone who had. Whether his heritage was. I have no idea what it was, other than his very long hair, which I'm like, maybe. And it was so dark black. I'm like, maybe you could be Native American. His skin was brown and leathery. I'm like, maybe you could be Hispanic. Maybe you could be from the. I had no idea. I had no idea, and I never even thought about it. But when he told me that, it struck a chord with me because it let me know that other people did not treat him that way. Other people saw him differently, and I never saw him differently. I just saw him as a guy that I love to run into and have casual conversations with and shoot the breeze with for five minutes or so and then move on. And it always made me proud of myself that my parents had taught me to just treat people like people, and I never thought anybody noticed that. And so, to me, that is a moment that has always stuck with me and has always made me make sure that I try to do that in my daily walk. And that's always been important to me.
- [44:21]
Alan Hart
I think I'm going to forever remember Mo now, too. Such a great story. Great takeaway as well. And I cannot get the visual of that guy out of my head.
- [44:34]
Jacqueline Woods
So.
- [44:35]
Everybody loves Mo, and trust me, he used to get on his, like, Harley and drive away in front, front of the office building. So I'm telling you, it was like a whole thing. He should be a movie. Like he should be a movie.
- [44:46]
Alan Hart
I almost feel like I would be worried Mo wouldn't talk to me because I'm not cool enough to talk to Mo. But that's funny. That's funny. What advice would you give your younger self if you're starting this journey all over again?
- [44:59]
Jacqueline Woods
I would tell myself that I am enough, that I will always be enough, and I don't need validation from anyone else to make me feel that I'm enough. I would tell my younger self to be your own advocate and that your grit and your belief in yourself will carry you further than any degree or anything else that you have. It is the sticking to it and just staying directed on the path that that has been set out for you. And I like to think that is the path that God made for me.
- [45:37]
Alan Hart
Love it. Is there a topic you think marketers need to be learning more about, or maybe something you're trying to learn more about? Yourself.
- [45:44]
Jacqueline Woods
Of course it's AI I was going.
- [45:46]
Alan Hart
To say we probably talked about it. We probably talked about it. Yeah, it's. It is definitely everywhere.
- [45:53]
Jacqueline Woods
It is I A I Exactly. Well, it's got its own song eventually, just like E I E I O was. It's going to be A I A.
- [46:02]
Alan Hart
I A I I love it. Love it. Are there any trends or subcultures that you follow or you think other people should take notice of?
- [46:10]
Jacqueline Woods
I think some of the trends, clearly, I do think you have to ride this AI wave. I don't think it's. It's not like it's going away. So I think it's going to be here for a while. I think another trend that is going to have its ebbs and flows is the way that we work. And I think that some of the things that I'm concerned with, particularly when I started my career, I got to hang around people. Yeah, we were in the office all the time. But that's how we made friends and developed relationships. When I first got married, literally like half of the office, even though I got married in Northern California, they all drove up to my wedding. And I would like to see people that are early in their careers be able to establish those kinds of relationships and have those opportunities, because that's how you develop a management style. That's how you figure out how to relate to people and get the best out of them. That's how you develop these leadership qualities. And so I think we really have to think really carefully as leaders. How do we create those opportunities for people to develop and be engaged in a way that may not look like it did when I first started working. I don't think everyone can work at home forever. I think you have to have a balance between those two really unique opportunities of when you can, quote, potentially work from home and when you really need to be working in a collaborative environment with people looking at their faces, reading body language, seeing all the things that you don't necessarily see when someone has sweatpants on and pearls, when they're on a zoom call. Right. That's not reality. So I think those are some trends that we need to watch. And I think the companies that figure that out first and do it well will be ahead of those that haven't figured that out. And I think that tide is. We're seeing some of the, what I would call breaks or cracks in the. You can do anything anywhere. I think some of that is. Is. Will change over time. So I think those are some of the biggest trends that that you're gonna see.
- [48:30]
Alan Hart
I love it. What? Last question for you. I guess I should say that what do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers?
- [48:38]
Jacqueline Woods
I think the biggest threat to marketers is being able to explain what marketing does and how to communicate what you're doing, why it's important, and how it's valuable to the company. Marketing is one of those, I think, disciplines that has certainly evolved over time. It's not exactly the same as the four P's from Kotler, right? Your price, promotion, place and product. All of those things are clearly still important. But there are 25 things that hang off of that. Whether it's digital, whether it's like all these channels that we have now. Advertising is different. Everything has changed. And you have a lot of, I think people who think of marketing and brand as people who make advertisements and commercials or people like. There are so many views of what this function or discipline is that I think that can be harmful. Because if you're a jack of all trades, sometimes you're a master of none. And so I do think it's really critical that marketers be able to understand how a company makes its money. From soup to nuts. Here's how a product gets developed, here's the innovation around it, and here's the part that I play in that. Whether that is naming the product or something else, because there is something in a name, right? If you had a product and it was called 4.5 and you came up and named it Alan, then Allen becomes a thing, just like Siri. Siri is a thing. The naming of Siri was critically important. If you just called it, I talk into my phone and it does actions and activities because I asked it a question that's not meaningful. The fact that a marketer came up with some name that sounds like Star Trek, I think is pretty cool. And so there is equity and brand equity in those kinds of things. And we as marketers need to be steely eyed about explaining that value, why it's important. And by the way, no one else can do it. These are specific skills that people have. And just because you happen to be in sales for 10 years and you didn't make your quota, doesn't now mean you should come be a marketer. People in marketing have very strong skills and deep domain expertise. And I think it's critically important that we let everyone know that every single day.
- [51:19]
Alan Hart
I think we leave it there. That was a great ending. Thank you for coming on the show today and spending so much time with us talking about technology and your thoughts on marketing.
- [51:29]
Jacqueline Woods
Alan, it's been amazing and I am really, truly delighted to be here.
- [51:34]
Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Today was created and produced by me with post production support from Sam Robertson. If you're new to Marketing Today, please feel free to write us a review on itunes or your favorite listening platform. Don't forget to subscribe on marketingtodaypodcast.com Tell your friends and colleagues about the show. I love hearing from listeners. You can contact me atmarketing today podcast.com there. You'll also find complete show notes and links to what was discussed in the episode today and you can search our archives. I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today.
- [52:14]
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