← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#783: Typeface CMO Jason Ing on the paradox of hyper personalization and brand consistency
00:28:30
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The agile brand.
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B
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. What happens when your brand has a million different voices speaking to a million different customers? Is that the pinnacle of personalization or is it just brand chaos? Agility requires both the speed to personalize content for every individual as well as the control to ensure that every one of those interactions faithfully represents the core brand. Today we're going to talk about resolving one of the biggest paradoxes in modern marketing, achieving hyper personalization at massive scale without sacrificing brand governance and consistency. We're going to explore how generative AI is moving from a creative novelty to a core operational engine for enterprise marketing, enabling brands to craft unique stories for every customer while ensuring they're all on the same page. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Jason Ng, CMO at Typeface. Jason, welcome back to the show.
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A
Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
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C
Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to talking. And you're a returning champion here. So good to have you back on the show. Always love that. For those that didn't catch your other episode and to talk a little bit about what you're doing now, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Typeface?
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A
Certainly so. I am a career marketer. Started my career at Proctor and Gamble. Cut my teeth marketing Pampers and IAM's pet food. Great place to start my career, but I realized, you know, I wanted to focus on areas particularly technology, where I just had a lot of interest. So I spent nearly two decades almost equally between Microsoft and Amazon. I worked on everything from the early days of online gaming at Xbox to video streaming at Prime Video and helping drive mainstream cloud adoption at aws. And AWS was really where I saw firsthand how technology can fundamentally reshape what teams and businesses are capable when remove the friction and make it easy for users to adopt technologies. When we last talked, I was at gusto helping re accelerate their growth across their suite of HR products from payroll benefits and so much more, as we like to say, and just building the early brand and demand gen work that you may have seen in some of their national campaigns. And you know, now I'm really excited to be at Typeface. I get the fun job of marketing to marketers and it comes at this rare moment where brand creativity and AI are all converging. My focus here is leading marketing through that major category shift, moving from a world of AI tools to AI teammates to fully AI augmented brand systems that help teams work faster and create better work overall. And it's just a very energizing place to be right now.
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D
Yeah, I love it.
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C
Yeah, let's dive in then. So we're going to talk about a few things today, but want to start with from the strategic perspective here, talking about brand voice and value. So you've talked about establishing a brand system of record. And for a CMO at an enterprise company who's used to brand guidelines, living in PDFs and PowerPoints and places like that, what does that concept mean in practice? And why is building this brand system of record a foundational step before scaling personalized content with AI?
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Yeah, so like as you mentioned, a lot of these brand guidelines sit in, you know, what they refer to as a brand book, which is, you know, a really thick PDF or PowerPoints that sit somewhere in an intranet. And sometimes they get used or sometimes they don't, but they generally say static and buried and quite honestly, not used as much as they ought to be. And what happens is people tend to do their best to interpret them if they can find them. But a lot of times, especially over time, these aren't living, breathing documents per se. And that interpretation naturally drifts, especially when you have dozens of creators working across different channels or different geographies. And so a brand system of record is really the opposite. It's what we consider a living brand brain, for lack of a better word. And it captures your tone, style, examples, your language, terminology, visual ID layouts, all of the things that makes your brand distinct and it turns it into something that AI can use in real time. So when content is created, it's not about it being close enough. It's actually checked and shaped by the Brand agent to make sure that everything is consistent, safe and on voice. And this is a critical foundation for scaling personalization. If you don't have it, you end up with a lot of volume, but you lose the identity and the consistency when you end up with just a ton of content that doesn't match your brand. And so when you have this at the core of your system, AIs can finally trust that the AI will scale a lot of that content across all different creative and content types. And because the system is grounded in the brand's DNA. And so that's why we start there.
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C
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I want to talk a little bit about, you know, we've been talking about personalization for years and I think there's, there's a broad definition of it and then there's doing personalization a little.
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In a little more advanced way.
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C
Let's say, you know, a lot of brands are calling it personalization, but really just substituting, you know, first name here or, or things like that, maybe recommending similar products. Some, you know, technically personal personalization, but rather, rather simple ways of, of doing things versus how Netflix recommends shows to watch or Spotify recommends music to listen to. How would you recommend and how do you help brands cross that threshold from that? I would almost call it just substitution rather than personalization. But you know, crossing that threshold from basic personalization to creating content that genuinely feels like a valuable and you know.
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Curated for the customer.
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Yeah, so what you described is what I consider old school personalization. It's still personalization, but it's more of what I consider deterministic. So if you like X, then you'll like Y. It's very much functional and grounded in some rules based logic and it doesn't really reflect how a brand really understands and what it knows about you. And so the opportunity now is just much bigger. It's about delivering content that feels like it was created with you in mind. So it's human. It's reflective of someone's preferences, cultures, behaviors and needs over time. And that requires a system that understands both the brand and what it stands for, as well as its audience. And so for us within Typeface, we have a suite of agents called ARC agents. And that's where it comes in. And it takes your brand rules and your audience insights and it generates variations across different channels and geographies in a way that feels very intentional, not, not like a template as you described. And it's continuous. So you're not manually creating version A and version B anymore. You're running a system that can adapt at scale. So a great example is we worked with a national grocery retail chain and they used our ARC agents to produce localized, culturally relevant campaign variations for different regions. So if you imagine a local supermarket, you know, what I see in Seattle might be very different than what someone should see in Texas because of, you know, different patterns in food consumption, for example. And so in the past I might take weeks of back and forth type of work, but they did it in hours. And the work not only just felt better and more relevant, but it was done at a much faster speed.
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D
Yeah, yeah.
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C
And so in addition to the typeface ARC agents that you mentioned, there's also been some new salesforce integrations as well. And with that it seems like the AI is then getting even closer to the customer data and as well as some execution channels. How do you ensure that this automation that there's a human in the loop, in other words, that the automation doesn't run amok? And what kind of guardrails and human.
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In the loop processes are essential for.
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Marketers to maintain control while still we're.
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Doing personalization at scale?
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Yeah, well, I will say speed without governance and guardrails is just very dangerous and enterprises can't afford to do that. And our customers are a lot more savvy, especially as AI content has become much more prolific, that they can see something isn't quite right. And so for us, we build that governance into our system from the start. Everything again runs through those brand rules. That's ground zero. There's compliance checks, permissions and audit trails. And so the brand agent enforces tone, voice, naming and legal requirements without anyone having to manually police it as long as you set those rules properly when you begin. And you have that human in the loop who's always overseeing things to make sure that things are what they need to be. And so our Salesforce integrations content is created inside the customer's governed environments using approved data and approved workflows. And that means you don't have rogue messages or off brand assets popping up somewhere in the system. And more importantly, marketers stay in control. So the AI drafts people approve. So you get the speed, but you also get safety and consistency. And that balance is what makes the whole thing work.
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C
So let's talk about measuring success here as well. And so certainly investing in any platform but you know, investing in a platform like Typeface, it's certainly a creative and a marketing decision, but there's also, you know, we've got to prove ROI and anything that that's invested in. So you know, what are some of.
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The KPIs that marketing leaders should be.
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Tracking to measure ROI of AI and you know, Gen AI and this personalization, you know, are we looking at things like content velocity, conversion, lift, you know, just what should marketing leaders be looking at?
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There's an element of all of the above, but I always tell leaders measure outcomes not Just outputs. So yes, you'll produce 10 times more content and it may be 50 to 100% faster. But production gains aren't the KPI. Those are things that I consider enablers or input type metrics. The real impact shows up when you look at, you know, incremental engagement lift or conversion lift, or your revenue per message or how personalization performs better across different segments. Amongst the things that you would typically measure in a campaign. So start with a use case, a lighthouse use case, and measure the before and after. Don't try to boil the ocean. Pick one workflow, run it end to end and capture those gains. The other piece that becomes really important as well is brand consistency. As content volume multiplies, drift becomes a real risk. So tracking consistency, which is how often content passes governance checks on the first try, becomes part of your overall ROI story. And then there's the operational impact. Faster approvals, fewer revisions, reduced dependencies on agencies, and the ability to scale personalization without scaling headcount. Those are all material financial outcomes.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And then, you know, beyond some of.
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Those, maybe a little more intangible, but still important. The idea with freeing up resources to not have to do maybe hyper repetitive work or some of these things is that they'd be freeing up creatives to focus on higher level strategy versus, you know, again, repetitive roles or things like that. You know, how do leaders know if these tools are are doing that?
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One of the clearest signs you'll see is a lot in the anecdotes of just what your team tells you. But more importantly, what they often will tell you is just how their priorities and their time shifts and when the tools are working well. Teams spend less time on production tasks, be it resizing, versioning, formatting, and more time on those what we call higher bandwidth conversations around strategy, storytelling and insight. And what we find is creative teams generally will get more cycles of ideation because the cost of iteration drops dramatically. You can try 10 ideas in the time it used to take to produce one and that changes the culture. And people start building that muscle of speed and experimentation again. And what you end up seeing is like better briefs, tighter alignment, fewer revision loops because the system is really enforcing that clarity as a mechanism up front. And then there's a human side to it as well. Burnout goes down. People aren't stuck in menial mechanical tasks all day. They feel more ownership because they can ship more work. And that work tends to be of higher quality over time. And when teams shift from, you know, makers of assets or producers to Shapers of ideas. You really begin to feel that shift in your culture and just how your team works and how people show up to their work.
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D
Yeah, yeah.
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And I think all of this is touching on, you know, really the evolving role of marketers versus, not versus, but maybe marketers and the tools that they use, let's say, and AI becoming a tool. You know, it's. I've heard people say it's almost like a team member. I've heard others saying it's not almost like a team member, but depending on who you ask, they may have different versions of this. But it's all. It's all part of an evolution of how the role of the marketer is changing. So, you know, as you shared at the beginning of the show, you have experience across some really great brands, you know, AWS Gusto and others that you mentioned. How do you see the role of the marketer evolving over the next few years and what skills become less important.
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And what skills become absolutely critical?
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I think it's very hard to predict the future, especially with AI progressing though at the rate it is. What will happen? Exactly. But I'll share my point of view in terms of how I've seen other shifts take place and how I would imagine things really changing, knowing that the pace of. And the acceleration of that innovation. Like, you know, I was blown away with that Gemini 3 demo that I saw earlier today and what it's capable of that I could never imagine was possible. But what I would say is, you know, in the past, marketers have always been structured by their function like or by their channel. For instance, like you were a search marketer, you were a comms person, you were product marketer and you operated, or marketers operated within their channel. I see less of the. Less of that. A lot of those silos between roles kind of breaking down and marketers having to adopt a much more systems point of view and being more of a systems orchestrator of these AI tools as opposed to being a user of a point point solution that does X for you. So instead of, you know, in the marketing context, manually executed campaigns, they'll design the logic, the goals and the audience strategy that the AI or the agent will carry out. And the tools will handle the lift. But marketers will handle the clarity of thinking that goes into those workflows and skills like taste, judgment, narrative, craft will become the differentiator. So those who do that well today will only become more valuable, not necessarily those that are just working on the production of it. And natural language interfaces will change the job. And you will be guiding agents, setting objectives and shaping stories instead of just, you know, pushing tools and turning dials across a number of different tools. And I see us ending back in a world of like old school marketing. So think of like, you know, David Ogilvie or Madman, the show and those type of skills mattering much more, which is taking human storytelling insight that just comes from lived experience and creative instinct. And as production becomes much more of a democratized motion, those fundamentals become the thing that will set brands apart.
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Yeah, yeah, I love it.
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So let's take it up then to the brand level. And given everything that you're saying there and the increased use of generative AI and other tools in the marketing workflow, what do you think is the biggest opportunity for brands that get this stuff right versus the risk for those that fall behind?
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I see the biggest opportunity is in marketing becoming very real time and dynamic. It's multi segment, it's personalized in a way that feels very crafted and authentic, not some sort of template. And the brands that get this right will move faster, they'll stay more relevant and create systems that are constantly learning and improving continuously. And you're creating these loops, these systems where it's not only the content, but it's the data from how that content performs, where you will have sort of this self reinforcing flywheel of dynamic creative that optimizes itself. I see the biggest risk is just being continually stuck in pilot or wait and see mode. A lot of the companies that experiment, experiment endlessly, but they never operate operationalized because they're nervous. Or they'll scale content without governance and end up with a messy, inconsistent brand and they'll just give up or. This is probably the most common thing that I see as teams adopt change management practices to adopt more AI and that is they're not changing the way they work and how their workflows are designed. And I would see organizational inertia as the biggest blocker to realizing any kind of return from AI or any kind of technology. So this gap from being an early adopter to a laggard will widen fast. And this isn't really a nice to have. This is a structural advantage and that's why it's constantly talked about in the news media. Because this is where we will begin to see the decisions and bets being made now separate who wins versus who doesn't in this generational shift.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, as, as we wrap up here, got a couple last questions for you. If we were having this interview one year from now, what is one thing we would definitely be talking about?
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Yeah. A year from now we'll be talking about the shift from when people used to prompt ChatGPT to orchestrating agents. Marketers will set goals, the systems will create and adapt across channels without any kind of constant steering or tweaking. And these agentic workflows will become the standard. They'll be autonomous, but governed. And creative quality will become the main competitive differentiator since content volume will essentially be unlimited. And so we'll see a lot more of those that closed loop marketing that I describe, where the content creates performance data, the AI uses that data to generate the next best creative and that cycle will get tighter and smarter and brands will design not just for humans, but also AI agents that are increasingly consuming and interacting with that content. And websites is a great example where, you know, websites won't only be designed with humans and people in mind, but the agents that are crawling through the websites and to determine how to surface metadata and information on answer engines. And I think that's going to reshape a lot of the assumptions that we're making about marketing today.
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D
Yeah, yeah.
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C
Well, Jason, thanks again for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. 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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Well, for me, it starts with waking up every morning and recognizing that I know nothing and that I need to constantly relearn and re educate myself and not let pattern matching or things that I've done in the past kind of weigh me down in terms of how I can learn, but staying very hands on so that I can really bring in a beginner's mindset to everything I do. And as it relates to AI, you know, I use it, you know, personally in small, everyday ways. I planned a family vacation all in AI to Japan and so it did a really good job of really telling me where I need to be, what I need to be watchful for and just helping show my kids and educating them on like, okay, this is how AI can be used across everyday things. Except for cheating on your tests and homework. I don't, I don't tolerate that too much. But you know, as it comes back to marketing, I, I do always rely though on making sure I'm fundamentally sound, on understanding my customers, knowing what great storytelling looks like and knowing that stories that really resonate with people and winning hearts as well as minds with customers is really the thing. No matter what happens in technology, it's always going to be true in marketing, and so I go in trying to learn as much as I can while staying true to some of those principles that will never change.
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Yeah, love it.
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Well, always great to talk with you Jason. Again, I'd like to thank Jason Ng.
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CMO at Typeface for joining the show.
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You can learn more about Jason and.
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Typeface by following the links in the show Notes thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.greggkillstrom.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 creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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The Agile Brand.
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Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500, tech systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more@techsystems.com that's T E K systems.com now let's get back to the show.