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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#772: Contentful CMO Elizabeth Maxson on AI-augmented human creativity in marketing
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- [00:00]
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- [01:13]
Greg Kilstrom
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. With increased AI adoption, is the most valuable skill for a modern marketer? Empathy with customers? Or is it successfully prompting contentful? In partnership with Atlantic Insights, the Atlantic's marketing research division recently conducted a study of over 425 marketing decision makers, including 103 CMOs. This study, when Machines Make Marketers More Human, challenges the notion that AI will replace many marketing functions and instead demonstrates how AI can amplify marketers effectiveness, creativity and impact. Today we're going to talk about how AI is reshaping the very definition of a modern marketer. We'll explore the shift from simply automating tasks to augmenting human creativity, the rise of the full stack marketer and what skills are becoming non negotiable in An AI driven world. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Elizabeth Maxson, CMO at Contentful. Elizabeth, welcome to the show.
- [03:08]
Elizabeth Maxson
Hey Greg, thanks so much for having me.
- [03:11]
Interviewer
Yeah, looking forward to talking about all of this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself
- [03:16]
Greg Kilstrom
and your role at Contentful?
- [03:18]
Elizabeth Maxson
Yeah, let's do it. To start, I've just been a marketer my entire life and a big part of my experience first started on the experience marketing agency side working with many different customers and clients from automotive to technology. And then I moved on the corporate side where I spent more than a decade at Salesforce and a variety of different roles throughout marketing and, and through that job I became the CMO of Tableau. And I am now running into year two now at the as a CMO of Contentful. So two time cmo. And I also like to joke that I'm a four time mom. I have four little kiddos all under the age of eight and my family and I live in San Francisco.
- [03:59]
Interviewer
Nice, nice, that's great. And you know, to give our audience a little context for the conversation and maybe for those that are a little less familiar with Contentful, could you talk a little bit about, you know, what's, what's the platform's core focus and the types of marketing and leaders that you work with?
- [04:17]
Elizabeth Maxson
Yeah, I bet a lot of everyone listening to this podcast actually interacts with our platform without even knowing it. So whether you are ordering food from your favorite restaurant on an application or you're shopping online, you're getting your favorite game day stats in an application, you are likely working or being on Contentful. Because we are a leading digital experience platform that helps modern businesses meet their growing demand of engaging personalized experiences. We have over 4,200 customers ranging from Heinz to KFC to Ruggable, and we help our customers really deliver digital experiences for customers at scale.
- [04:57]
Interviewer
Love it. So yeah, let's, let's dive in here and we're going to, we'll start with the strategic aspect of this and talking about how AI has the potential to augment marketers, not simply replace them. You know, I know, I know there's a lot of talk and, you know, a lot of people concerned with jobs and things like that, but, you know, the idea that AI can make marketers actually more human is a bit counterintuitive. But how do you see AI acting as a catalyst for marketers to lean more into the uniquely human skills like strategic thinking and creativity, rather than just becoming faster content producers.
- [05:40]
Elizabeth Maxson
Yeah. So I think it first starts with there's just a lot of doom and gloom narratives out there right now about this fear that marketers are getting their jobs replaced by AI. And we thought this report in partnership with the Atlantic was a great way to really have a positive take on what's really happening in the industry. And when I take a step back and really look at the core problem, it's that teams just want to move fast. You know, 40% of marketers say that fast and efficient execution is really going to define their success, but it also means that they want to deliver quality content. And the way that I look at it is the more that I can handle the mundane tasks that marketers don't want to be doing, that really gives them that time back to be more human and really driving creativity, empathy, and even judgment. And gives them really that flexibility and capacity to have that strategic thinking and building creative campaigns. So when you think about the power of AI and also the use of AI insights and analytics, those types of data analysis comes now in more the strategic side and not just the end of optimization and performance. So, again, I think that marketers are having more use of AI through their entire content life cycle to really be driving success across every campaign that they are creating.
- [06:55]
Interviewer
Yeah. And so for those leaders out there listening, you know, some of this is also a mindset shift. I mean, again, we hear a lot about the efficiency play part of this, which is not, you know, not untrue. You know, there's. There's a lot of efficiencies to be gained. But, you know, how do you, as a leader shift a team's mindset from seeing AI as, you know, simply a replacement for tasks to seeing it as an amplifier for their own talent and
- [07:25]
Greg Kilstrom
even their own judgment?
- [07:27]
Elizabeth Maxson
I mean, honestly, it really starts with driving a proper AI culture. That's the one thing I don't think enough leaders are talking about right now. They're very focused on the tools. What tool are you using for this? What tool are you using for that? And I don't think anyone's spending enough time actually looking what is the culture that you're trying to drive in your organization. You know, we found, for example, mandatory training is really critical. 45% of orgs are now offering AI training. I don't think anyone should be using AI unless they've been properly trained to make sure that they are doing that in a safe and ethical way. And then I think another big part of this is also sharing one of the things that I find with a lot of tools that I use myself is it's a very one to one experience. Right. There's not a place where we're currently collaborating in, you know, prompts or chats together. And so how are we sharing what we're learning? If anything, I think we're all have been untapped as this new learners. Right. And so an example that we do at K tenfold is we actually started what we call the AI prompt playground and it's a channel within Slack and it's a way to really share what's working and also what's not working and really help make some really great connections across the company. One example I'll give, I know all marketers can resonate with is we call it the NASCAR slide. The slide that has all your customer logos on it. Right. That is for a product marketer, it's the pain to create that slide and pull all those logos takes a lot of time. And so our new go to market leader is new to the company. He wanted to make some updates and he did this using AI and so he shared it on the prompt playground and instantly I tagged our, our customer marketing team saying okay, advocacy team, what do you think of this? They're like, oh, these are all the wrong logos. So but, but what was great about it was he had a great idea, he was solving a problem, but he needed to take it to the next step. And what that was is, okay, now let's leverage this AI engineer that we are hiring and get them to build a data connector to Salesforce and make sure that in Salesforce we have all of our approved logos to help feed into that content. So my point of this is when you drive a culture that's really sharing this learning, you can help. You know, the good, the bad, the ugly, it's, it's what are people getting out of it, what are they learning from it? And that really starts with having a proper AI culture.
- [09:43]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, part of that is, you know, people learning new skills. I mean obviously they have, they have to know marketing, they have to know creative, they have to know brand. But there's new skills that need to be learned. I mean, you know, in addition to things like prompt writing, you know what, what do you see as maybe one or two of the less obvious AI enabled skills that you see becoming critical for marketing teams to start cultivating right now?
- [10:12]
Elizabeth Maxson
Well, I put this in two buckets. First from our research prop optimization that you've already mentioned, that's an obvious one. But there's three other skills that marketers actually do rank that are really important to them and that is data analysis is digital experience, design and personalization. But I also feel the second bucket are soft skills. For example, being more curious, empathetic, trying to think through lived experiences and cultural resonance. Those are all skills that AI will never give you. And so really bringing your own human element to the table is really going to be critical. And I think it gives us an opportunity as leaders to start thinking about how to hire differently. How do you hire for someone that is more curious, that wants to be asking a lot of questions? And again, that whole learning growth set mentality I think is really going to be an unlock for a lot of marketers.
- [11:01]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. And that's that kind of points to the research that you mentioned, points to the rise of a full stack marketer as, as, as it's termed. And you know this, that, that idea, the full stack marketer and this also this idea of, you know, evidence based creativity requires a new workflow. Could you maybe define some of those terms a little bit as well as how you see these teams kind of being embedded within the creative process?
- [11:34]
Elizabeth Maxson
Yeah, let's start with evidence based creativity. This is honestly my favorite topic. So what this means is it's the ability to combine human creativity with AI driven insights. I alluded to this a little bit earlier, but if you think about a lot of marketers and when they think about data, they often use data at the end of the content life cycle they want to think about, okay, I've put content out into the world. How did it perform? And what marketers need to start doing is really start with data to inform their campaign strategy. So I think leaders need to take more risks in experimentation based on data insights that can help inform their experiments and overall think through their different strategies and campaigns. By having this AI driven insights at the front of everything that they're doing and, and then allowing the humans to really bring the creativity to drive that and really differentiate yourself from this AI slop that is just happening all over the place.
- [12:28]
Interviewer
Right, right.
- [12:29]
Elizabeth Maxson
One way. For example, at Kitempil we actually saw 23% of visitors to our website click on the login button. Well, of course you could assume if they're going to log in they must be a customer. So why would I then have a homepage where they're logging in be about why buy contentful? They've already bought it. So that was a really great trigger for our web team to think through. Okay. If we know people are logging in, that if they need to start seeing new messages that are not, why by contentful, but what are other things they can be learning about our new features or things that we want them to adopt? So just actually thinking big and starting small, especially in terms of personalization or just thinking through how to use your data more effectively, is really going to help bring that human creativity and drive those campaigns forward.
- [13:18]
Interviewer
So another thing from the data in the report is it's suggesting that AI is making content creation faster, but it's not necessarily reducing team dependencies or leading to massive output gains with fewer resources. What do you believe is the real bottleneck here? And is efficiency even the right metric for leaders to be focused on?
- [13:43]
Elizabeth Maxson
You know what? I don't know that necessarily is what we're finding is what we're calling the optimization execution gap, which means we have found that 96% of CMOs are prioritizing AI adoption. However, only 65% are actually putting meaningful investment behind it. And I think that's really the gap there. Right. It's like we're all being asked to do more with less. That is nothing new to ask of a marketer, but we're asking to supplement that with AI. And I think a lot of marketers are still stuck in this experimentation phase, and they need to start thinking about how are they going to deeply embed AI into their workflows, support their operations, get to a place where their team can really be innovating while these tools are seamlessly part of their tech stack to help them move faster. So this really needs to be a shift away from that experimentation and really find a way to get to a place of a little bit more commitment.
- [14:38]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, if, if AI isn't leading to smaller teams, then, you know, what is it changing about team structures and, you know, team collaboration? You know, are you seeing new roles emerging or maybe a blurring of lines like, you know, between, you know, previously siloed functions like data content, digital experience, you know, what, what are you seeing there?
- [15:04]
Elizabeth Maxson
I mean, of course, there's a lot of talk of how everyone is building their own agents, and agents are teammates. That's kind of one school of thought. Right. But there's also a whole nother set of roles that are emerging. So, for example, an AI engineer, we just hired an AI engineer, as I mentioned earlier, on our team, to really help focus on our Marops and really add our tech stack and how this is going to be more properly integrated. But also, I'm Finding some really neat roles that are coming out of my peers as well. I was at a CMO event last week. One of my great CMO friends, Sydney Sloan, she thought of this idea of a content automation strategist as someone who uses AI to scale content production and personalization and I just really love that. I was like, I hadn't heard that one yet. I was like, okay, yes, every team needs this, right? So, and of course at Contentful, we love content. So anything about content automation strategist sounds amazing to me, but I thought that was a really unique view from her. So I think the big thing about it is I'm still learning these news roles, right? If with every time that I'm talking to new CMOs and CROs and we're thinking about go to market, there's so many new roles that are emerging. And again, I think that's a really exciting time to be a marketer and not really be that fear pace that AI is going to take over our jobs. It's actually new skills and new roles that are emerging across the board.
- [16:23]
Interviewer
You. Yeah, and I mean, I wonder also if it's also expanding. You know, it's like the stuff that you don't get time to do in the day but you wish you could, right? You know, so even content.
- [16:34]
Elizabeth Maxson
Yeah, exactly.
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Interviewer
Content scaling and things like that. Well, if only I had the, you know, two hours a day or whatever to focus on that instead of all of the other repetitive tasks or whatever. So like, I wonder if some of this is really just again making meaningful and expanded roles out of all of those things that, you know, as humans we're creative enough to think about. We just don't have the time to do because of the, you know, whatever it is drudgery or just repetitive tasks.
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Elizabeth Maxson
Yes, 100%.
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Interviewer
So, you know, thinking about the road ahead, you know, a little bit of future proofing the marketing organization. As we continue down this path, you know, marketers become more fluent with AI, you know, agents, copilots, generative tools. How should leaders be thinking about the broader marketing technology stack? Does this demand more tight integration, intelligent platforms, more flexibility, best of breed? What are your thoughts there?
- [17:36]
Elizabeth Maxson
I mean, so our report indicates that that sweet spot is actually between six to ten tools on average. But what I really think needs to happen again is driving that proper AI culture. Another part of that we talked about sharing, but I also think it's about proper goal setting. What is the AI solving for? Is it solving for giving you two hours back in your time? Is it solving by Reducing funding in a different area, let's say maybe an outside agency, you can bring some tools in house. So I think there needs to be a much bigger attention around what is the goals that AI is actually trying to solve. And then finding ways that you can be integrating seamlessly into your tech stack is just going to make it easier for your team. So from us, from Contentful, we're cloud native, we're API first approach, which really gives our customers that infinite extensible platform to really work with and adopt different integrations, be able to customize and do what you need to do to help you move faster.
- [18:34]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, a couple last questions here as we wrap up. Let's say if we were having this interview a year from now, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
- [18:47]
Elizabeth Maxson
100% the evolution of GEO Generative Engine Optimization. This is the one topic that is hot for every CMO that you talk to. And it's the way that your brands and companies show up in LLMs today and how they're ranking, what are those results and what is the content you need to create for the LLMs to crawl that content the way that your brand shows up the way that you need it to. And so it's a huge content strategy shift. These algorithms are changing, I feel like by the day. And again, you know, a lot of marketing leaders were learning what this means for our websites. It's almost thinking about leveraging an LLM as it's a new Persona, it's a new channel, it's just a new way of thinking of getting content out to AI just as you would a person. So I think that I'm really excited to see how this evolves in the next year.
- [19:37]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In a way it reminds me of the old days of SEO with the probably date myself like the Lycos and Alta Vista and you know, all of the. Yes, it's kind of, you know, what am I optimizing for perplexity or chatgpt or whatever. So yeah, let's.
- [19:54]
Elizabeth Maxson
Now we'll know how everyone dates themselves if they start talking about SEO, you know, like.
- [19:58]
Interviewer
That's right. Totally. Totally. Well, we'll have to have that conversation in a bit, so that'd be great. Well, 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?
- [20:15]
Elizabeth Maxson
I mean, I think the biggest thing for me is I really infuse with my team what I believe are these five great characteristics of a marketer and it's being creative, it's agile, as you mentioned, simple. Just call the thing the thing, you know, simple. With our processes, we're persistent and we have passion. And I feel again, in this AI world, everyone has an opportunity to learn and, and we need to be more focused on sharing what those learnings are from. We can learn from each other. And then lastly for us, we're all about provoking human emotion. You know, going back to we have lived experiences and how can we be sharing that and really connecting with customers in a different way? A framework that we love at Contentful is what we call stick it, flex it, push it. You know, stick it means you're on message. Sure. You said what our product does. Flex it means maybe you have a little bit more of our tone of voice and pushes, meaning that you really do provoke some human emotion. And, and that's one of the things that I really try to push my team is to really push our own content to really tie back to that human touch. Thank you, Greg. This is an awesome conversation. Appreciate you having me on.
- [21:16]
Interviewer
Yeah, thank you so much. Well, again I'd like to thank Elizabeth Maxson, CMO at Contentful for joining the show. You can learn more about Elizabeth and
- [21:24]
Greg Kilstrom
Contentful by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech System. 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.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.
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