← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#847: Acquia CMO Jennifer Griffin Smith on MarTech that delivers beyond the hype
00:29:55
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- [00:01]
Strayer University Announcer
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- [00:30]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Lets talk groceries. Specifically your groceries. With Instacart you want your groceries just the way you like them, right? Well, the Instacart app lets you do just that. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences up front, helping guide their choices. Instacart get groceries just how you like
- [00:57]
Greg Kilstrom
hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand and here's a question for you. Now that AI can generate endless content, what's the true strategic value of a human LED content strategy? Agility requires more than just adopting the latest tools. It demands a foundational strategy that allows you to integrate new capabilities without disrupting the core customer experience. This means being able to distinguish between a promising innovation and a distraction. Today we're going to talk about moving beyond the hype cycle to build a marketing technology ecosystem that actually delivers. We're going to explore how to treat content orchestration not as a task, but as a core strategic discipline. How to make AI a practical asset rather than a science project and why so many CMOs are re evaluating what they truly need from their platforms and their partners. 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. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom 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 adoption. For more information go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. Tell me discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome Jennifer Griffin Smith, CMO at Acquia back to the show. Jennifer, welcome back.
- [02:33]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Thank you Greg. It's nice to be back, I think. Last time I was here, neither of us really knew what we'd be talking about in 18 months time. Right?
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Greg Kilstrom
I know, right? It's. Yeah. Crazy world we live in.
- [02:46]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Crazy world. I was actually thinking about that and I went back and looked at it and I thought, wow, if only we'd known, we'd have been a little bit ahead. But I'm excited to be back. Thanks for having me.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, absolutely. And for those that didn't catch our last conversation, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Acquia?
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Jennifer Griffin Smith
Sure, sure. I'm the Chief Market Officer here at Acquia. I've been at Acquia for about three years. We are a technology platform that allows marketers, it teams digital marketers to create the most amazing digital experiences using content so that they can connect with their audiences more powerfully. That's everything from content management solutions, digital asset management solutions, optimization tools for your website, all the things that I have worked with for years and my team get to use every day. So it's very exciting. I love it. And I think last time we spoke we were talking about accessibility and the need for building accessible sites and content and we talked about making it accessible for everyone around the world and regardless of needs. And it got me thinking that we didn't talk about agents and now we have to make our content accessible for agents. They're like another audience as part of that. So it kind of all connects. Although we might not have known about it 18 months ago. So excited to be here. My title is Chief Market Officer, which I am thoroughly proud of because I actually think this new age of AI takes away the in of marketing and actually has us focus on market. So because our AI agents can do the ing. And I think that's a really exciting time to be in marketing.
- [04:19]
Greg Kilstrom
I love that. That's great. Yeah, nice. So, yeah, let's dive in here. And definitely you're totally right. The accessibility that takes on a whole new, a whole new approach with agents. And I know we'll get into some of that as well. I want to start with looking at content orchestration really as that strategic discipline. So starting from that strategic mindset here, how do you see the most successful brands shifting that mindset from this idea of simple content creation to a more holistic content orchestration across that increasingly complex customer journey? You know, what does that operational shift look like?
- [05:02]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
It's a great question. The word orchestration, it sounds kind of jargony, doesn't it? But what does it really mean in practice? So when I think about it, it's like content production is humans doing the work with AI helping them around the edges. So we always talk about there's an AI writing assistant here and there's an image tool creation here. And it helps, but it's not incremental. Like your org still stays the same, your marketing organization stays the same, and the bottlenecks stay the same. And in fact, most of what we hear about in marketing organizations is the burnout. Right? And actually Forrester talked about that in their Pulse survey last year that 25% of marketing leaders were citing burnout as a major team concern. And that's because I think we're not using these tools as strategically as we can. So for me, content orchestration shifts us to a totally different realm. Right. And it means that humans set the direction, they define standards, they make judgment calls, but AI can handle the mechanical volume. So teams are creating, but they're thinking more strategically, they're having more points of view while everything else, the formatting, the versioning, the multi channel assembly, all that ING that we talk about, that is taken over by AI. And that's what I see. You know, I'm lucky because we have a very large global customer base. And one of the things I love about my job is that I get to talk to CMOs every day, CMOs that are doing this and we're sharing experience. And some of the most successful brands that we talk to and that we look at are really restructuring roles around that idea where mid level managers are becoming workflow architects. Their job isn't to review, it's to really build these automated pipelines so they can ensure quality and consistency. And senior people, I refer to it in my team as kind of the Delta. Right. How do we focus on the Delta? And that's the. Those bold insights, that creativity, that point of view that AI generally doesn't do as well as we do. And so I think that's really exciting and important. And so that's how I see this difference now. Moving from kind of just efficiency into orchestration.
- [07:28]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so in addition to some of the data and the systems that orchestration certainly includes, it also implies connecting maybe disparate teams. So content with data, with channel owners with it. What are some of the common organizational hurdles that you know, now that the marketers are able to focus on some of these things and not just kind of focused on just getting the ING done. To your point, what are some of the organizational hurdles that maybe prevent true content orchestration from being as successful as it could? And how can a cmo, help break down those silos.
- [08:11]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Yeah. Marketing has always been a cross functional role. I've always said to marketing teams, if you want to be in marketing because you want to own one thing and just get praised for one thing, you're in the wrong team. Right. Because what we do stretches everything. It goes across product and customer success and customer service and sales. And so it's always been at the center of all of those things. What has stopped us being successful in the entire time I've been in marketing is not the people. It's not that you have people that don't know how to work across those. It's the systems that have created. And we have spent years recruiting people, whether they be in marketing and marketing operations, in revenue operations and customer success. We have recruited people to fix the underlying problem of these systems. And I'm not even going to name them, but we all use a lot of systems that you have to buy systems on top of the systems because systems actually don't work properly. And it kind of drives me crazy. So the first thing that I think we have to think about is how we connect or use AI that actually take over those systems and do we even need them anymore? And so I think about a couple of things. I think about teams needing to or like audit time. That's where I say spend. You've got to think about output. But if you asked a team, where do you spend your time? If I think about what I did last week, what my team did last week, what is stopping us being more efficient? It's generally not the people. It generally comes down to the amount of time they're spending on these disconnected systems, tagging, integrating, informing other team members. And so when you understand that you can think about how to connect them and then you start thinking more about the outcome. And I think our systems need to be much more outcome based. So not it is just a repository for holding things. But why am I thinking about, oh, I'm going to build a webpage and I'm building a webpage because I'm running an event. Why wouldn't you have a teammate, a digital teammate that you would say, build me the marketing tactics. I need to get 300 people at an event which would include, oh, now I know you need a landing page and you need some social media and you need some, you know, that's output based systems and there's very few of them right now. And then the biggest, the third challenge I would say, which is probably the biggest one that I'm seeing more and More, you know, every day there's all these things in the news about AI and security and governance. And I think governance is the one thing that is not giving enough attention right now. As AI agents are drafting and publishing and optimizing, who's responsible for ensuring the brand is still safe, coherent and is. There are many examples of bots that have done things and said things for brands. Compliance is really, really important. And I would encourage everybody, when thinking about AI, we all get a little bit wrapped up in all of the greatness. But governance of these, not just connecting these systems, but governing them and governing what the output is, even when your team are able to do more, is really important.
- [11:35]
Greg Kilstrom
And I want to go back to your, to your earlier point. I want to, I want to get to the governance piece as well, but to your earlier point about the outcomes and outputs driven. And I think that's a really powerful concept here because, you know, I think since it feels like forever, but it's, you know, since late 2023 or what, you know, since chat GPT really, you know, came onto the scene, we've all been talking about content generation and you know, the, the power there and, but there's certainly a lot of other use cases beyond and in addition to content generation that AI can, can really help with. And you mentioned several of them already. But I, I do think to me one of the powerful things is for marketers to be what, what you just said, which is let's think about the outcomes that we want to achieve as opposed to kind of being freed from some of the, the tactics and you know, that, that a marketer, again, the, the ING and the marketing thing that you mentioned earlier, you know, what, what are you seeing as far as, you know, some of the, some of the most valuable and practical applications of AI, you know, beyond, again, beyond some of those things that we've certainly been talking about for a while.
- [12:54]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
So I'll go back to governance, the first one, Governance at scale. So AI can automatically audit content, right? It can audit it for accessibility. Our last conversation, brand compliance accuracy across pages. If you use it properly and train it, then I think that is really powerful work. The other piece for me is, and it's a little underrated is content restructuring for AI discoverability. Most of the time we have so much content and the bigger the marketing team and organization, the more content is created across all of the silos. And, and so how can you use AI to structure content correctly for LLM readability? It's not necessarily, you don't necessarily think oh, that's glamorous. But it can really expedite output. Right. And I think we forget about that and it's been so hard to do in the past that it's kind of been left. But we have a lot of content and the structuring of that content to be found by LLMs is really important. And then just as we talked about, you know, content operations layer, this formatting, versioning, multichannel assembly, the stuff that buries our strategists, AI can handle that really well. And then the other piece, which if we get past some of that is also operational, is thought leadership. You know, I'm learning to use AI even now as a partner, not a, as a thought leader partner, where I am getting pretty tough with it in responding to it and asking it for ideas and asking it what is not right, with what I may have given it, with what I've missed, with what I've. That is super powerful, you know, and I encourage teams to do that when we're, you know, you might think, oh, I can use it to run a set of data to look at campaign performance. And you can, you can consolidate data like nothing I've ever seen. I mean, forget all the other analytics systems we're using. It is so powerful. But then say, what have I missed? And then say, what is wrong? And then say, if you were a top performing 1% consultant in this space, what would you have spotted? Right? That's, so that's where it, I think it's very, very powerful.
- [15:31]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. Well, because to your point, I think we're getting, we're getting beyond, you know, simply measuring for clicks and conversions and, and things like that. I mean, again, when teams are stretched, then you kind of look at the dashboard that's in front of you and you report on it. Right. But you know, we have the, we have the ability now to dig a bit deeper to do what you just said, to ask those critical questions. I, I've had a lot of success with that myself and just, okay, here's my best thoughts now. Now be a tough critic on me and tell me what, tell me what I did wrong. You know, and it's, it's, it's interesting once I think, once you get past the agreeableness of the, and to actually get them to be, you know, big. A tough critic. Right? What is this change about measurement and, you know, and, and how marketers are even grading their own work, but even looking at how content and other things are performing, like how, how can this change things?
- [16:35]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Yeah, great question. For anybody like me that's been in marketing for a long time, it's like, dare we mention the word funnel. Right. Because everybody, you know. Right, right. I just, we talk about this so much if we think about how we engage. You know, if I want to go and search for I would like a blue office chair, I would have put into Google and I would have put blue office chair. Right. And I would have as a marketer been dying for those blue links and stuffing words in for those blue links. And as a consumer, I would have got back a bunch of links. Right. And I would have. And now what I will probably put in is actually I am looking for a blue office chair that is rated at least four stars, that is under $400. I want it in this location, I want assembly, I don't want to have to assemble it myself. And I'm not getting, I'm not getting clicks back. Right. I might get some images that I decide to click through, but I've got all the information. And so just the way, and that's just one example, you could put that across students searching for courses, you can put that across E commerce, you can put that across B2B buying. And so the way the journey is very different and therefore the measurement has to be very different. And so I think we as marketing have to get the rest of the organization feeling okay with that measurement. Because if one more person asks me for how many more leads we can generate, you know, you think about it, do you fill in a form? No. Like that's not how it's working. So I think we have to measure different things. So things like AI citation rates. Right. Are we looking at whether content is being serviced and trusted by LLMs? I think I mentioned we spent 20 years optimizing for search ranks. In the next 5 years are going to be about winning the answer battle. That's what I think. I think that will be very different. And we did some research end of last year with Teen Voice because you have to think that when you're measuring these outputs, demographic and generations are a big impact. Martine has always been focused on segmentation, audience segmentation, but now, so more than ever when we looked at, we commissioned a survey with over 500 teens between 13 and 19. And actually some of the responses we got on what they trust of companies in their websites and their content was really eye opening because you'd think that age group would happily give over their data for anything valuable they get back. Not the case at all. 44% said that keeping their information Private was a non negotiable and was most important for them. So that gets me thinking about, okay, so you're measuring your LLM visibility but you've also got to really make sure that data is being protected and then you've got to measure the transactions or the engagement of people of different types of people and your segmentation along the buyer's journey and think about engagement and at what point engagement becomes whatever the new term for conversion is. You know, I heard something this week that was. Your website isn't an educational place anymore because they've already done the education before they get there. Your website has to be a transaction. Not doesn't matter what industry you're in because all of the pre work has already been done. So if you get them there, it's because they're going to transact in some way. Even if that's just the engagement or download of content, it's not education anymore.
- [20:12]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's, that's definitely lots of shifts there. Right. You know, everything from the, you know, the, the SEO, you know, such a focus being put on SEO over the last few decades at this point to, you know, so that's, that's a, that's a big change from big change, Greg.
- [20:30]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
But I do want to say one thing on that because I've been pointed out on this too. We also need to remember that the hard job of marketing right now is you've got to run parallel because the biggest amount of traffic still to my site is through SEO. The LLM percentage is still small, although it's growing. But right now our challenge is we have to manage both. Right. So you can't, it's not one or the other, it's really both.
- [20:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. So I also want to talk about, well you know, the, the Martech landscape is you know, famously crowded. So you know, there's the, the infographic with all the. I don't, I, I don't know if they, they, there's like 10,000 plus platforms on the, on that one super graphic or whatever. But you know, from your perspective, what's the fundamental disconnect between the all in one platform kind of dream that's often sold and the practical day to day needs of, of an enterprise marketing organization.
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Jennifer Griffin Smith
The all in one dream is just overselling simplicity and underselling complexity and expense every time, every time. I don't really care who the vendor is or what the solution is. There is no one stop shop for this. And I think it's the same in with AI tools And agents too. So what I would tell any CMO evaluating platforms right now is to think about three especially AI, three specific things to look for. And I've learned this and you know, I'm lucky, I deal with it every day. But one, it has to be LLM agnostic. Right. So the, you just, it just has to be second, open source, open collaboration. As we've said, one size, one tool cannot do everything. We have to be able to integrate and collaborate tool by tool, agent to agent. And that has to be done in a way that you don't need to have a computer science degree in order to do it right. So the you know, user friendly, open and intuitive and then I think right now composable and orchestration friendly because things are changing so quickly and we see now, you know, I mean we can buy tools on a six month contract. You know I could tell you about three different systems writing tools that my team looked at that a year ago. You know, number one was king and then six months ago the other one and then last week it was like hey, we've all found something different. So I think if we can be flexible, possible have open, composable, orchestration friendly platforms that are LLM agnostic that will be beneficial. The newest vendors aren't necessarily the best because we have to make sure back to that governance that there's human oversight and that we can feel safe with the data that has been put into these, these tools. It's also tricky for a lot of organizations. I talk to a lot of companies whose marketing teams are struggling because they can't even get the first step forward because they're in a regulated industry or a headquartered company that is so concerned about security that they can't even get access to use AI tools. We have to figure that out for those companies because they will be left behind.
- [24:14]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's definitely, I mean there's so much interest and a lot of, a lot of companies I talk with is same thing is they're, they're worst case scenario there's people doing workarounds which are not, would not be advisable either especially in, in highly regulated industries and stuff. But yeah, the, the, the marketers and others want so much to be able to use these tools. They, they know the benefits or potential, potential benefits of them. But yeah, the, the internal governance on, on, you know, allowing access to those tools definitely is, is a barrier and it's a, it's a competitive disadvantage. Right. If they, if they can't solve it for themselves. Yeah. One last Thing I want to talk about here is just this. You know, you talk with a lot of marketing leaders as well and just this idea of moving away from being a, you know, quote unquote customer of a Martech vendor towards being more of a partnership. And you know, some of this goes back to, you know, a lot of things we touched on briefly here as well. But, you know, what does a healthy, productive partnership between a brand and a technology provider actually look like in practice?
- [25:27]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Yeah, I don't know that this has changed much. We've all had partners, vendors that we've worked with in the past that have done really good job and we've had those that haven't hit the mark. I think right now, truth and open and honesty, we're getting into a world where there are tools that will be able to analyze the technology that you are providing so you can write whatever you want on your marketing ad. Right. But it will get found out very easily. So I think being open about roadmap, I think looking for best practices because the world is changing so much that what we've done in the past is definitely not going to be what we do in the future. But we all haven't been through it either. So, you know, I think people are looking for those vendors that can say and tell me what others are doing and show me what has worked and what has not worked. So I think that's really important and I think it's very important to walk the talk. And it's why I actually love my job every day here at Acquia because I am marketing and selling something that I use and we are customer zero. And let me tell you, we give our product team a hard time because our expectations are up here. And I also hear from customers what they want. And I think you have to, to be living and breathing it, you have to understand what your buyer is going through. And if I were, and that's what I ask, you know, I like nothing more than talking to the marketing team of somebody that I might be acquiring tech from about how they've been using it, about what they've seen and then other customers. And I, I think that's really important. And I pride myself that I would say 80% of my team could talk to a customer and talk about our solutions and how we use them because they use them every day.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, that's great. Love that. Well, Jennifer, always great talking with you. I got a couple questions for you as we wrap up here. First, in a couple days, Acquia Engage Denver is coming up so what are you most looking forward to about that?
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Jennifer Griffin Smith
Yes, the event cycle hasn't changed in the world of AI. Actually we have three events coming up. We do Denver, London and Paris. I'm really excited because I get to be in the field talking to customers. We are going to be launching a significant update to what is Acquia Source, which is our next generation content management digital experience platform. The key is kind of one pane of glass for all things, which is Acquia AI, which provides insights and recommendations so you don't have to run those reports. It's telling you what actions you need to take on your content, on your website, on your campaign, which we are just loving and very excited about. So I'm so looking forward to showing people that and talking to customers.
- [28:32]
Greg Kilstrom
Nice. Nice. Love it. And 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?
- [28:40]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
Oh, consistently. I'm not sure is there anything consistent anymore? I force myself. I actually don't even have to force myself now. I think about it every week I find myself asking people in our organization, my own team across our product and R and D team what I don't know about. Just like teach me something, something basic, get on, you know, screen share and teach me what I could be doing differently because I learn every day something new which I love. Every time I dread doing a piece of my work because I know it's time consuming and it's evening and I want to go spend time with my children. I think how can I do it differently and I use AI to do it. And I will say it's been a little life changing but I think every day it's just asking something new. It's listening to podcasts like this and, and just being open and hearing what people are doing. I can't say that I'm a great book reader because I don't have a lot of time. So anything that can come to me fast and furiously, especially if I can listen or it's a quick, you know, a three minute video then I love that. That keeps me informed.
- [29:43]
Greg Kilstrom
Love it. Love it. Well again I'd like to thank Jennifer Griffin Smith, CMO at Acquia for joining the show. You can learn more about Jennifer and Acquia and Acquia Engage 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 @tech techsystems.com that's Tek systems.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 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.
- [30:50]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
The Agile Brand. And Doug there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [31:07]
Greg Kilstrom
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird.
- [31:09]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
What is this, your first date? Oh no.
- [31:11]
Greg Kilstrom
We help people customize and save on
- [31:13]
Jennifer Griffin Smith
car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league. Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent. Liberty Liberty, Liberty Liberty.
- [31:26]
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