← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#794: LiveRamp CMO Jessica Shapiro on building brand trust while automating at scale
00:29:06
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The agile brand.
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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 poised to generate nearly infinite.
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Content, personalization and experiences is the single most important thing marketers should be focused on. Actually something that can't be automated at all. Agility requires not just adopting new technologies, but knowing when and how to double down on timeless human principles. It's about integrating the power of AI without losing the soul of the brand. Today we're going to talk about the paradox of the AI revolution. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable of creating, personalizing and automating customer interactions at scale, the most critical differentiator for a business isn't a better algorithm, but a stronger, more trusted brand. We're going to explore why brand is becoming the essential human edge in an increasingly automated world and how leaders can harness AI not to replace their brand, but to amplify it.
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To help me discuss this topic, I'd.
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Like to welcome Jessica Shapiro, Chief Marketing Officer at Liveramp.
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Jessica, welcome to the show.
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C
Thanks Greg. It's great to be here.
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Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a timely topic here. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself.
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And your role at Liveramp.
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Absolutely. So CMO at Liveramp and spend like the first half of my career doing consumer marketing at companies like Microsoft, Starbucks, Zulily, and then made a shift to the B2B side where I was at SAP and now I'm here at Liveramp.
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Love it. Love it. And for those that may not be as familiar with what Liveramp does, maybe give a little background and what do you do and what are the primary customers?
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Right. So Liveramp is a data collaboration company. We work with the biggest advertisers in the world to bring together first, second and third party data securely in clean rooms. So so they can better understand their audiences and create better experiences for their audiences. So we are helping those great brands like United and Hershey and Netflix, Spotify deliver really informed experiences.
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Nice, nice. So, yeah, let's dive in here. And I want to start with the kind of the strategic view of things and what I touched on in the intro and just this idea of brand in the age of AI. So you've noted that we're seeing a resurgence in the importance of brand as a direct result of AI. Can you unpack that for us? In a world saturated with AI generated content, why does a strong, trusted brand suddenly become more critical than ever?
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This is the topic that I have been fascinated by. I've always been a lover of brand and the power of brand. And it's interesting to see how things are evolving in the world of AI as AI has made it possible for companies to proliferate so much content, it's hard for consumers and businesses to make decisions for people to make decisions. So if I were to take a common example, I want a pair of running shoes. Tell me the best pair of running shoes. I ask AI. I'm going to get this huge list and I'm probably not going to have time to go read through all the content that each brand is able to create. So I will go to the brands I trust. I'm a Brooks running shoe person. I will go and pick my Brooks. If I trust Brooks. I've had a good experience. And so when there is so much noise, the importance of brand goes up. The importance of trusting brands. That's what stands out in this very crowded world of AI and the content created through AI.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And you know, it is kind of that, that paradox. I mean, again, it's so easy to create all of that. I mean, some of it's the, the AI slop stuff. It's not all slop, but you know, it's, it's so easy to create. And yet, you know, to your point, it's, it's some, some of these things, the, the brand is more powerful than ever. Right.
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So yeah, there, there's so much noise that the, the signals that are really meaningful to you, like the value of a brand, it's stand out more.
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Yeah, yeah. And so alongside of this, many if not all CMOs are constantly being asked to prove the ROI of everything.
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Right?
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And brand building can often feel less tangible than performance marketing or, you know, growth marketing, all of that, you know, lot lots of energy around, around that these days, for sure. How do you make the business case to a CEO or a CFO that investing in brand is the most strategic defense against commoditization that AI can create?
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Yeah, and this is an age old discussion, but I really try to shift the conversation from, you know, the defense that a brand or company needs to take to the offense. You know, building brand is building long term value. It's increasing customer lifetime value. Companies that people who believe in a brand and trust that brand are most often going to come back and repurchase. And so then it comes to how can you measure the value of the brand? There are lots of ways you can measure whether there's the health of the brand, brand preference, but you should also be able to measure how quickly does someone make a decision. If they know your brand, they're going to make a faster decision. The shopping, the buying cycle is shorter. And so there are a lot of indicators you can look at and point your CEO or CFO to, to show that investing in brand is a smaller, smart, short term and long term decision. And it doesn't have to live in conflict with other growth driving activities like immediate demand gen. It lives in concert with it.
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Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it seems like, and you know, I've had, I've had a few conversations along these lines. I mean it does seem like it works best when it's not either or. It's a, it's almost a continuum, right?
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean you really can't do one without the other. When I was working at Starbucks, Starbucks is a really well known brand. People have an affinity for it, they recognize it, they have certain associations. But Starbucks still has to have a promotion of a new beverage to actually like drive you into the store or a treat receipt or some activity to get you to drive that incremental transaction. So it is about, you know, that overall strong brand that really supports the health of the business and then making sure that you're making it easy and frictionless for people to buy and that you're increasing those buying moments.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So I want to get a little more tactical here and focus a little on, you know, certainly I think there's a lot of pressure from the boards on down to use AI. And you know what that can mean a lot of things in a lot of different contexts. But there's just a lot of pressure to, you know, for, for AI enablement and things like that. And so there is also a growing, what I keep referring to is just like AI, like tool sprawl, whatever, whatever you want to call. There's so many choices, there's so many things. And yet you've said getting the most out of AI can often be more about focusing and cultivating the proper mindset around, around that focus. How does a philosophy like this translate to the creative process? For instance, you know, like how do you, how do you get human teams plus AI to produce authentically on brand work and not just feel like more of that AI stuff we were talking about earlier?
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Yeah, Greg, I think you hit on it even with your question. It's it. I really believe it is about the human and the AI coming together. That combination is where the magic happen. So you know, if you take like the creative brief process, in the creative brief is that contract between the strategy and the execution of that strategy. If you're using AI to develop your creative, you have to spend more time up front making sure that you are really precise about the insights that you're bringing to that brief. You're really precise about that target audience and what you want to accomplish. So I think it ends up that, you know, if you use more human power and strategy from the human brain at the upfront and then you can let the AI go, you're going to be more efficient, you're going to be able to get that creative that AI is developing, you're going to get that wonderful media plan. But you have to make sure that it's working well and that you don't let it just run without the, the right direction.
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Yeah, yeah. I might have said this on the show before but you know, I feel like I think of myself as a fairly process oriented person. I work a lot in the, on the marketing ops side of things and so, you know, tend to think through processes. But I feel like using AI has forced me to be, to think even more kind of to, you know, exactly to your point. Actually, you know, I think through what I want even more than I normally would and unless or if I don't, I get terrible results because AI will just go off in some random direction or whatever. So yeah, it seems like when done well it's, it is actually forcing the humans to do that strategic thinking more. Right, yeah.
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And I also think there's like that using AI at the outset, you know, asking AI to challenge you with the most difficult questions so that you can even think more strategically. So you know, before you lock in that brief, there can be a lot of discussion with people and with AI so that you get that great outcome. And then you know, of course there is the checking to make sure did it go the way that I wanted it to go. So I think that there is so much noise about we gotta use AI, we have to use AI and we do and that's how we get scale. But it's about using it the right way and making sure I think about this. How do I continue to hone my skills? How do I continue to teach my team and help them up level and hone their skills and not depend on AI, but to work with AI?
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Another thing that you've done with your team is encourage them to experiment with AI. I think that part is so important just leaders that are willing to allow some experiments because I'm sure you would agree not every experiment is 100% successful, otherwise it wouldn't be a test. Right. But you know what, what is experimentation look like in practice with with your teams?
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You know first I think it's really about creating a culture where it is encouraged and then setting some guardrails. So at Liveramp we have clear brand guidelines and we fed that into our AI tools so it catches when things aren't said the right way, said on brand or could be misleading. So we have that guardrail. We also have a really strong partnership with our data ethics team to make sure that we're only using AI that is going to protect our data and keep things safe. And once those guardrails are created it gives people so much freedom to think about use cases where they can experiment and expand what they're doing with AI. There's someone on my team who came up with a brilliant notebook. We have spent a lot of time creating case studies, video case studies, written case studies, because we believe that hearing from the customer in their own voice is always the most powerful way to tell a story. And so we have these great case studies, but it actually takes like a human to be like which case study would be well used right now. Where is that sound bite? Now we have all of our cases in this notebook. Lm. And you can query it and say, I need a quote about this, or I'm looking for three proof points about that, or I'm about to do an interview and I need a video clip that would prove this. And so all of a sudden we're using all of these assets that were just sitting on the shelf. Not only is our marketing team utilizing this huge library of assets, but our sales team is using it as well. They can so easily go in and figure out what they're trying to tell their prospect or their customer and simply query and find exactly what they want to bring into that meeting or exactly what they want to email that customer about.
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Yeah. And I mean, I think that's so powerful because it's also, it's not just one person in a silo doing their thing on some, you know, chat tool or whatever. It's like it's enabling an entire team. Probably, you know, to your point, marketing is using it in one way, sales is using it in a different way, but everyone has access to the same things. Right?
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Right. And we've tried lots of things that haven't worked and, and that's okay. And then something catches buyer, we share it and all of a sudden, like we're getting pinged right and left, people want access to it. And I think celebrating the people who are thinking in terms of what can be done with AI creates this culture of I want to be a winner too. I want my, my work to be shown all over the place. And so I just. All these different ideas keep popping up and there's such positivity around it.
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Yeah, I love that. So I want to get back to talking about brand a little bit and adding in the, the AI layer here as well. And you know, the, the paradox that I talked about a little bit at the, at the very beginning of the show is, you know, we're able to now I feel like generative AI really has enabled us to get close to that one to one personalization that I know everybody's been talking about, I feel like forever. And it was always the North Star. And yet, you know, when enterprises really tried to do it at scale, just couldn't do it. You know, there's not enough people to, to do one to one personalization. Jenny enables that. And yet now we're getting to this point where, okay, we have a million different facets of this brand. How do we measure the strength of a brand trust in a brand? When it's. Everybody sees a slightly. It's still a core brand. But are traditional metrics like brand recall and sentiment and other things still the way we should be measuring this? Are there new KPIs? How do we think of this when brands are just simply a little more nuanced than they ever were?
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Yeah, I think about this a lot because Liveramp is about creating those personalized experiences for major brands. And that brand asset is so valuable. I think it's about keeping the traditional brand measurements around brand favorability, brand awareness, but then adding KPIs. So if three people are each having three distinct experiences with the brand, that's okay. If it's really what suits them best, it's going to be the most satisfying experience. But they still have to have the same take away from the brand. They still have to have the same sense of trust, the same attributes standing out, the same brand personality, feeling. And so I think it's important that in the aggregate you're measuring the brand, but then you're also going down to the person level and both quantitatively and qualitatively making sure you're inspecting that the brand is giving off consistent brand attributes.
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Yeah, yeah, makes sense.
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It's a whole new world. It's, it's really, it's really exciting. I also think that with all the personalization, it's figuring out like what level of personalization instills trust and, and delights someone versus at what point does it get creepy? You know, like you don't want someone to know everything about you. And so I think that's a big thing that brands are thinking about. You know, where is that line and being really careful to not cross that line. People's data is their data and they need to feel like their data is being held securely.
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Yeah, yeah. And also it, it also seems like if, if everyone, if everyone is looking at a slightly different view of the brand, the brand is still, there's still a core there. But does that help in a way to define what that core is or does it just make it more challenging to figure out what it is in the first place?
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I think that a core of a brand is a really strategic process where you're uncovering in deep insights about consumer needs, the how the brand is going to meet the business needs thinking about how that brand comes to life, how it instills trust. And, and I don't think that the core of it organically changes. I think it strategically can change and I think that the perimeter of it might organically be shaped by these personalized experiences. Someone in their 50s might need a very different experience than someone in their 20s with their Brooks Running shoes, but they still have the same core beliefs about the brand.
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Yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess that's the measure of a strong brand. Right. Is that it can, it can have those facets but also still, you know, have the core that is, that is meaningful to both the 50 year old and the 20 year old. Right?
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Yeah. That brand flexibility, the ability to show different size of the brand and still have it. Go back to the same emotional brand. Truth.
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Yeah, yeah. And you know, another component of that is also trust. And certainly, you know, there's a data component to that, to that trust. There's lot, you know, lots of, lots of facets of trust as well. What do you see as some of the biggest risks when you know, we are talking about AI and personalization and things like that as well? You know, what kind of guardrails should marketing leaders be putting in place to protect that, that brand? Trust.
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Yeah, I mean it, I think it all comes down to trust. In our business at Liveramp with data, it is all about trust. And I, that creates a much higher bar for what we're going to put out into the world. So I think that people, there's so many applications that are available to us. There's AI creates so much capability, but there is an onus on brands to really make sure that they're testing solutions, that they're thorough with solutions before they're letting them go out to the market. So I'm a big believer of test and learn and fail, but you have to do that in a safe place. I was just actually ordering holiday cards and I won't name the brand but I got stuck and I was asking the chatbot around, are the, the return addresses going to print on the envelopes? And I got into this really horrible like loop with the chatbot and it was just so frustrating. And it ended up that my envelopes arrived without the return address label. And then, you know, my trust for that brand goes down and I used their technology, I used what they were offering me and it didn't work. And so I think brands really have to think about what they're putting out there and are they Going to feel good about the experience people have?
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Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you know, this, the show we're airing right at the beginning of a new year here, and I want to get your thoughts on a few things. Just looking ahead. And as a cmo, I want to get your. Certainly lots of changes in the world of marketing and marketing roles. Just wanted to get your thoughts on, you know, what does the next 12 months look like for CMOs? And, you know, are there skills or other, you know, what, what, what should CMOS be cultivating to navigate the months ahead?
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Yeah, I, I think it's. Frankly, it's going to be really messy. I think it's going to be messy and fun. The landscape is changing. You know, if I were to think about 12 months ago, we were thinking about AI a theoretical way. Now we have concrete use cases, but the pressure to save money and to do things more efficiently is there. And that's going to create like a weeding out of different solutions. We're going to try things, Some things are going to work, some things we want to fail fast. And there's also an overlapping that I'm seeing of different AI providers and the solutions that they provide, they're. They're all kind of creeping into each other's space. So I think there's going to be a shakeout. What does your marketing tech stack look like? Maybe you've been building it up and I can see us tearing it down a bit in the next year because we want to get to just the products we need and nothing more.
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Yeah, yeah, I definitely saw, you know, there was the whole composable trend and now I feel like everything is just sprawling out, like everybody's doing anyway. That's a whole, whole other topic for a podcast. But yes, absolutely. But, yeah, definitely. So, you know, couple, couple things as we wrap up here. Beyond the, the roles of CMOs. We were having this interview one year from now. What's one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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I think that we would be talking about, you know, the winners and the losers in, in the AI world. I think there are going to be some surprise hits and they're going to be some surprise fails. And as a cmo, we have to be talking to each other. I find that I am talking to my peers more than ever because we're all like, are you trying that? What's going on with that? And it's about being curious and exploring. And so I think in a year from now, we're going to be surprised by some of the things that we didn't really even think we could do and some of the things that just are cluttering the space like now we've created all this content, we don't really need it. So maybe it's going to be like a cleaning house and celebrating the winners.
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Nice.
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Nice.
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Love it. Well, let's we'll have to have you back on and talk about it, so that would be great.
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We love that.
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Well Jessica, thanks so much 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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I think I got into this role because I'm just a curious person and I feel like I'm always just looking around and feeling inspired by people, by different conversations, by being in the world and it always sparks something that comes back to marketing. It's all around us. So I don't find it hard to be inspired. In fact, I find it hard to kind of shut down and not be inspired. And being curious and being perseverant with the ideas that you think are the winning ideas.
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I love that. Well, again I'd like to thank Jessica Shapiro, Chief Marketing Officer at Liveramp, for joining the show. You can learn more about Jessica and.
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Liveramp 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 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 Latino owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Content until next time, stay curious and stay agile. The Agile brand.