← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#797: Vitam CMO Lisa Avvocato on AI's Growing Role from Search to Transaction
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit, subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in with AI like ChatGPT now handling the customer journey from search to potentially the entire transaction. Are we about to witness the end of the brand website as the primary point of conversion? Agility requires not just reacting to new technologies like AI, but proactively redesigning the core operating model of the marketing organization. It demands a shift from mastering a set of fixed channels to building a flexible system that can learn, test and scale with entirely new platforms for discovery and engagement. Today we're going to talk about how AI is fundamentally rewriting the playbook for marketing from how customers discover brands in the first place to the very nature of content creation and the operational realities of building a team and a tech stack that can keep up. It's a topic filled with both existential threats as well as massive opportunities. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Lisa Avocado, Chief Marketing Officer at Vitum. Lisa, welcome to the show.
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Hi. Thanks for having me.
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Yeah, looking forward to talking about this, this topic with you. I, I, I, I guess I set the stakes pretty, pretty high there in the, in the intro there. But before we dive in, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role as a marketing leader?
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Yeah. So I have spent the majority of my career in product marketing and marketing leadership, mostly working for retail tech companies out of New York City. So I always like to say I started working in AI before AI was cool, kind of back in the earlier days of programmatic advertising and media performance. And then I spent some time at past companies working on, helping train a lot of these LLMs. And so now I've kind of taken a little bit of a shift and I'm actually on the brand side and taking everything that I've learned and to my role at Vitam to help grow and scale the company there.
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B
Great, great. So I want to start at the, at the strategic level here and really just kind of talk about how we are redefining at least some aspects of strategy in this, this age of conversational commerce and starting at the highest level, when platforms like ChatGPT can both answer a user's need as well as facilitate a purchase without them ever needing to visit a brand's website. What does brand discovery even mean anymore? You know, how does, how does this change the fundamental strategy for a consumer brand like Vitam?
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A
Yeah. So generative AI has obviously really shifted what brand discovery truly is. Right. So I, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was really about who spends the most on ads, and now it's much more about who is the most relevant, who the most critical or the most credible and ultimately the most useful in that moment. So we've seen this shift to getting hyper targeted with personalization. And generative AI has just 10x that. Right. And is really 10x that in terms of brand discovery, which is super exciting for a lot of the smaller brands. It's really democratized this whole concept of, of brand discovery because it's not just a budget factor anymore.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, this suggests that simply creating SEO optimized blog posts, kind of the spray and pray or just, you Know, kind of volume over quality is kind of, you know, approaching its expiration date. You know, what new forms of content or data should brands be creating to ensure that they're the source of truth that these AI models reference as well as recommend?
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Yeah, so I think that's one of the misnomers, that content itself is going to go away. Right. I think content is still king and a lot of those fundamentals haven't changed. Right. It's still about providing value to your customers and being relevant. I think the biggest change that's happening, and this is where companies and brands need to start making this shift, is it's not just about the words anymore. Right. You really have to consider the structure of content, which as marketers, this is a really big learning curve for some of us. Right. Like five years ago, if you would have asked me what a JSON file was, I would have told you it was a typo. Right? Now it's this fundamental part of our growth strategy. So, you know, making sure that every time you're creating content, you're making sure that that content is structured and accessible and easy for the AI models to understand, you're going to have a much higher chance of being quoted. Now that doesn't mean that you can just, you know, put out a bunch of AI generated slop. Right. You still need to provide valuable content, but you also need to make sure that it's being structured properly. Properly. And I think the other kind of piece around this is, you know, really focusing on your PR strategy. I think this is where the third party credibility becomes even more important because these models as they're learning, you know, it's kind of the same with the Google backlinks and domain authority. Right. But it's just taken to another level because they're actually forming these answers from these different news articles or interviews or things that you're doing. Right. So it's much more powerful and much more impactful. And I think the companies that are going to succeed and rank higher in a lot of these models are ones that are having a very strong PR strategy and getting quoted in these high quality publications. Right. Again, it's not those kind of pay to play advertorials that's not going to have as much of an impact. But you know, if you're in like the Wall Street Journal, right, And Financial Times and some of these big publications that are still important, talking about what's going on in your industry, that makes a huge difference with these models.
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Yeah, yeah. So getting into the, you know, operationalizing this, you know, as you, as you mentioned, you know, it's, it's tempting to use AI to simply scale content production. Certainly it can do a lot of. But then we get into the AI slop stuff and everything. So, you know, where do you draw the line between leveraging AI for efficiency, which is very good use of AI, but also maintaining that authentic brand voice and the quality that builds trust? You know, how do you operationalize that distinction?
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Yeah, so I think a lot of marketers and content creators right now are kind of on, you know, they're high horses, Right. I'm saying it's so easy to identify AI generated content, but I think the reality is, is you can't identify more than you think. Right. And it really comes down to how much time you have spent training your individual model. Right. So if you're just going into ChatGPT and you're asking it to write a blog post, you're going to get that AI generated slop that everybody can tell, Right. But if you have spent, you know, the time of uploading, like, let's say I'm going to upload my, my past hundred LinkedIn posts, my top performing LinkedIn posts, right. My version of ChatGPT is going to learn my voice and I can still come up with the ideas and I can still kind of help refine that output, but it's going to sound a lot more like me and, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell if it was me or not. You know, I think one of the stories that's kind of funny is, is they ran the, the Declaration of Independence through one of those AI fact checkers, right. And it came back as AI generated.
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Oh, wow.
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So like AI is not, it's not infallible. Right. But how you make it your own is really spending the time to, to train it to understand your voice and to kind of give it direction. Right. This whole concept of prompt engineering, which, you know, we could spend a whole hour talking about, but it's incredibly important. And that's what helps find that line between using AI to become more efficient. Because the reality is we have to, we have to as marketers, Right?
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Yeah.
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And just generating kind of AI slope, well, gross content. Right, Right.
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Yeah, well. And you know, another big thing that's, that's moving forward very quickly is just the, you know, whether it's agentic or just fully autonomous AI, and you know, even fully autonomous AI influencers is something that is moving from some, you know, sci fi thing to, to reality. You know, what's Your take on the ethical guardrails that marketing leaders need to establish around technologies like this to completely erro, you know, avoid eroding consumer trust.
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Yeah. I think there's a really fine line here right now between efficiency and exploitation. It's honestly, it's a little scary. Right. When you start to see some of these a high influencers on Instagram. You can't tell the difference between a real person and when AI content is being presented as human, especially when it's mimicking peer recommendations. There's a lot of trust and disclosure issues. Right. And I think eventually the FTC is going to step in as gen AI or AI generated endorsements scale. They just have to. But the absence of regulation doesn't equal permission. Right. And marketing leaders shouldn't wait for this enforcement to define these standards because there's going to be a huge lawsuit one day. Right. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when somebody is going to feel like they have been taken advantage of because of AI generated content and the brands or whatever company it is. Right. Is going to be the one that's being held liable. So, you know, a lot of these technologies are great and it's super exciting to see how fast AI is improving, but we also need to keep our moral compass in check. You know, trust is a compounding asset. Right. So some of these short term gains from undisclosed AI content can risk damaging your brand in the long run once customers feel like they're, they're being misled. Right. And so yeah, I think that's just kind of the thing that you need to keep in the back of your mind. The temptation to just jump on this AI train is real. But the brands that are going to win are going to be the ones that balance speed with transparency.
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Yeah. Because I mean it's not just about falling afoul of regulatory or compliance stuff. It's also to your point, it's the brand trust and it's hard to win that back. Right?
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Yeah.
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You know, I talk with a lot of marketing leaders and you know, certainly everyone is using AI to some degree and their teams are using it. But there's often not a clear strategy and a clear plan to, you know, at how to adopt and building their AI marketing stack. What have you seen that's worked? And you know, I'm sure every, you know or I know that every organization is different but so I'm sure that there's different approaches for different types of teams. But you know, there's when you think about like Going all in on a major platform, taking a more like best of breed approach. You know what, what have you seen that works?
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So the explosion of AI tools can be really paralyzing for marketing leaders. Right. Even trying to answer this question right now, just everything starts flying through my brain because there's so many different places and to start and the reality is chasing everything usually results in nothing. So I work with a lot of early stage organizations as part of my fractional CMO practice, part of my advising practice. And what I always say to them is start with a business process that's draining the most budget time or headcount today. Right. It's not necessarily the tool that's trending on LinkedIn. Right, right. It's really figuring out what business process within your marketing organization. I mean it's true for any part within your organization. Right. But we're focused on marketing right now. So maybe it's the content creation, maybe it's the marketing ops. Right. Really figure out where you're struggling and start with that piece and then you can scale from there. Right now, AI is very much a best of breed ecosystem. There's not really any true end to end platforms that are going to solve everything well. So you can find these niche little platforms that are going to solve this one problem that you're having that's going to scale your revenue growth. So kind of my advice is start with today's problems, with today's best tools and go from there. But don't try and just look at everything as a whole because you're quickly going to get overwhelmed. And then that's where you're going to say, well, we're just going to push this down the road. I don't have time to deal with this today. And that is going to be the paralyzing mistake is not getting started.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, and you, you also mentioned needing to learn how to read JSON files and you know, some, some of these things that ten years ago marketers would never, would never need to need to do. How do you think about the upskilling or even reskilling of, of marketing teams that needs to happen to best take advantage of some of these, these AI tools and just some of the opportunities that, that are, are provided now. You know, what's, what are maybe some, some critical skills that marketers need to develop soon?
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So I will say the learning curve is real and it is scary. I literally spent an entire day trying to read JSON code and I had to call one of my, my former engineering coworkers for help.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But you have to keep at it, right? So these things that used to live squarely within engineering are going to be coming standard in marketing. And the focus right now is in upskilling since there are no real experts. Right. You're going to see a bunch of people on LinkedIn claiming that they're experts in this, but the reality is maybe they have six months worth of background, right? Maybe. Maybe a year. But there's. There's not a ton of true experts. 18 months from now, though, there's gonna be experts and people are gonna be hiring for that expertise. So if you haven't started yet, and this is kind of what I was saying with not. Not starting is gonna be the thing that's gonna cost you your career, whether you're a junior marketer or whether you're a CMO. Right. And I think as CMOs, it's really easy to just say, oh, I don't want to learn this right now. I'm just going to pass it down to, to my team. There are going to be people that are maybe five years behind you in expertise, that are going to know the ins and outs of every piece of AI strategy, and they're going to be able to come into these brands five years from now, and they're going to out architect any campaign that you could possibly put together. Right. And I don't to say that that creativity of marketing and that strategic aspect is going to go away, but marketing is eventually going to become this blend of creativity and growth architecture. And the best marketers are not going to be choosing between, you know, storytelling and structure. Right. They're going to be designing campaigns and strategies that work simultaneously together. And if you're not learning that now, you will be left behind. And it sucks. It's hard. It's scary. Right? Right. Like, I, I'm not gonna lie. There were probably a couple days where there were tears involved and I was ready to throw my computer out the window. But every day got a little bit easier, Every day got a little bit better, and now I can look at a JSON file and it doesn't scare me. So that's exciting.
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Right? Well, and, and I mean, I think, to, to your point, it's. I think there's been many things over the years that a cmo, you know, svp, marketing, whoever can, can kind of delegate down and be like, okay, you know, do this, learn it, and they'll be fine because they understand the fundamentals of marketing and they're driving, you know, the CMOs are driving the marketing strategy. This does feel a little different. I mean, it, it always reminds me of like, early days of the Internet of like there was something big happening. And it wasn't just there was lots of hype, of course, back then also, but there was also a lot of real things that were changing and the nature of how, you know, consumers relate to brands was changing. This feels similar to that as well. For those CMOs that may, you know, even be listening to this and being like, oh, well, do I really need to learn to read JSON? You know, stuff like that. Like, what would you recommend? What's a starting point for them to, you know, in, in the next, you know, 30, 60, 90 days? Just, they've got to do something. But what, what, where can they start to just get in the right. Even if it's just the right mindset for some of the things that you're talking about.
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Yeah. Pick an area and, and start is is kind of the best answer, right? I will say that there are some people out there that have a little bit more experience and, you know, know, reach out and have somebody kind of help you give that direction, right? So even reaching out to a consultant who has this AI expertise or a little bit more AI expertise than you and can kind of come in and can talk to you and point you in the right direction of, okay, this is the business process that I think you should automate first. This is what's going to be the easiest thing to do, right? And you can have somebody guide you, maybe you can have your team guide you, right? Of. Of where they're experiencing the most challenges. And you invest in whatever platform or technology you decide to go with first. But don't just leave it to somebody or your team to kind of like set it in and forget it, right? Go in and create your own workflow, right? Go in, create your own campaign, create an automated email, right? One of the simplest AI kind of infrastructures that you can put together, these kind of concept of AI agents that you can put together is an, is an email management one for your inbox. And for me just, I mean, it took me a week. It was, it was hard and it was horrible. But once I got it done, it was such a sense of accomplishment and then everything else after that got a little bit easier. So I guess kind of that, that short answer is, is again, don't wait. I know that it's overwhelming. I know that sitting on LinkedIn and just being bombarded with all of these opinions is going to get just clutters the field. But if you really take a step back, I think you inherently know where or a process to start and then just do your research, ask questions. Right. Be the one that's talking to these technology providers. You'll learn a lot and it just gets easier from there.
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Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Lisa, as we wrap up here, a couple, couple last questions for you. If we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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I think it's going to be out be about how AI content is becoming nearly indistinguishable. I think the conversations around those ethical guidelines are really going to accelerate. And you know, there's going to, there's going to be some, some backlash. Right. So again, you have to do it. You have to start using AI. You have to start using AI to create content, but just make sure that you're being ethical and not misleading. I think Coca Cola actually, to me, does a really good job with this of using AI to generate their holiday ads. So they're transparent that it's AI. And you know, last year was the first year they did it and they got a ton of backlash. You know, there was, there was a lot of issues. They did it again this year and there's a couple people complaining about it, but not many. Right? Yeah. And, but they use it for more of this kind of cartoony animated approach. Right. Like they're not using AI to mimic real people. And I think that's where, where that line falls, at least right now.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks again for, for joining today. Last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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The biggest thing is just not being afraid. Right. I mean, I said this before, learning new skills is hard. It's scary. It's so easy to stay in your comfort zone. But you try, you fail, and that's okay. It's better than staying stagnant. Right. Like some of the biggest companies in the world, like, there's just case study after case study of companies that were led by people who just wanted to stay in their, their comfort zone and they're no longer here. So this is the next Internet, this is the next industrial revolution, whatever you want to call it. Right. It's. Our jobs are not all going to go away. They're not all going to be taken by AI. But we're going to have to adapt and it's scary. But you will be okay. Yeah, we will all survive.
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I believe that too. Love it well. Again, I'd like to thank Lisa Avocado, Chief Marketing Officer at Vitam, for joining the show. You can learn more about Lisa and Vitamin by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co. Op. From ideation to to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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