CPG and Why The Best AI Projects Start with a Business Problem

Introducing: Decoding AI for Marketing: AI is moving fast, and one of the places it’s most quickly becoming a necessity is in the marketing space. But a lack of basic AI understanding and a lack of the necessary technical acumen is holding many marketers and organizations back. On this show, marketing and AI experts Greg Stuart and Rex Briggs help demystify the intricacies of AI, through conversations with marketing industry leaders and foremost AI experts. Tune in to learn about AI’s potential to amplify marketing’s significance and influence, and risks to watch out for. Decoding AI for Marketing is brought to you by MMA Global, the non-profit industry body architecting a new future of marketing for the world’s smartest CMOs. New episodes drop Tuesdays. by Decoding AI for Marketing

1 min listen

Why Marketers Have a “Seat at the Table” in the Growth of AI: Been hearing a lot about AI but think it’s more something for the CTO to worry about? Think again. Janet Balis is the marketing practice leader at EY Consulting. Hear why marketers, and especially marketing leaders, are poised to play a pivotal role when it comes to how organizations integrate AI into their businesses to gain a competitive edge. It starts, she says, with clean and organized data as the foundation. “Imagine you've got the best recipe in the world and your ingredients are stale in your refrigerator or you got them from a bad grocery store. You're not going to get the right result,” Balis says. She explains that analogy and more of what she’s seeing as she consults with some of the world’s best companies and marketing departments. by Decoding AI for Marketing

33 min listen

Are You Leading an AI-Ready Marketing Organization?: What can marketers learn from digital transformations in the retail space? Ratnakar Lavu became the first ever Global Chief Digital Information Officer at Nike - a job that he took on during the height of the pandemic. Today, he advises startups and brings in his years of experience including his time as CTO at Kohl’s to help think about the future of business - and how AI is a part of that. He shares how to think about your AI ecosystem and remain focused on the needs of customers, even in the midst of transformation. by Decoding AI for Marketing

40 min listen

AI Will Infinitely Improve Localization: Artificial intelligence has been used in both marketing and in the travel and hotel industry for years, but gen AI is a game changer in a number of ways. In this episode, we speak with Michael Menis, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at IHG Hotels & Resorts, about two trends he foresees will change the game in his industry: the ability to localize content at scale in a way never before seen, and the restructuring of the marketing function at global organizations in the travel industry and beyond. by Decoding AI for Marketing

42 min listen

Quick Take: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Board Drama: It’s been a whirlwind week for Sam Altman at OpenAI - where he was removed by the board and has now been reinstated. It’s the biggest news in artificial intelligence this week, and hosts Greg Stuart and Rex Briggs give their takes and share their past experiences with boards making decisions like this. by Decoding AI for Marketing

9 min listen

Designing Effective AI Tests at Ally (and Measuring Results the Right Way): It’s not enough to just be testing out AI on various teams and seeing what might stick. The best organizations are pulling together an AI strategy, designing careful tests across all parts of the company, and gathering data on the results to implement at scale where it makes sense. At Ally, Chief Information, Data and Digital Officer, Sathish Muthukrishnan, works closely with the company’s CMO to ensure that the right tests are being built, tracked, and scaled up - all in a tightly regulated industry. by Decoding AI for Marketing

42 min listen

Is AI The New Bar to Clear for Creative?: AI is already being used by marketers in campaigns they create, but today’s guest, Carlo Maria Ferrari, Global Content & Creators Lead at Sanofi, says the best creative will still be made by humans. Hear why he sees GenAI as a way to check your brainstorms and make sure your ideas are truly original: in a sense, making AI the new bar that great creative needs to clear. Ferrari leads the Global Content team at within a heavily regulated industry, but he’s still aiming to push the boundaries of how AI can be leveraged. by Decoding AI for Marketing

32 min listen

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Building a Smart AI Marketing Roadmap: While many are enthusiastic about AI, few companies have a smart roadmap in place for its development and implementation. Instead, many people either start from scratch and try to build the capability internally from zero, or buy up other AI companies without much of a plan. Jim Lecinski’s approach, outlined in his book "The AI Marketing Canvas: A Five-Stage Road Map to Implementing Artificial Intelligence in Marketing," emphasizes the need for a structured and informed strategy. In this episode he elaborates on what that entails and how organizations can approach AI implementation in an informed way to ensure success for their business. Lecinski is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, he previously spent 12 years at Google. by Decoding AI for Marketing

41 min listen

How AI Startups Can Show Us What’s Next in Marketing: What does the Empire Strikes Back and the Flux Capacitor have in common? They are both analogies that Tom Chavez uses when he talks about just how exciting and challenging this moment is in AI and marketing right now. Chavez previously sold two startups - one to Microsoft and one to Salesforce - but today is doubling down on AI as the technology to push marketing forward. He explains his work at super{set}, dealing with the deprecation of cookies, experimenting across channels, and the roles startups can play in the ecosystem. by Decoding AI for Marketing

34 min listen

The AI Takeover and Why Creative Matters More Than Ever: If everyone has access to the same powerful tools, where can marketers stand out? It comes from the inputs, and the thoughtful creative behind the assets. Alex Collmer is the founder and CEO at VidMob, a creative performance platform for marketing. In this episode, he chats with Greg and Rex about the ways they are using AI to better analyze data and adapt content to audiences. He shares insights on how his team gets the best inputs for AI, and how they can continue differentiating themselves in an infinite content market. by Decoding AI for Marketing

39 min listen

How AI is Helping Us Understand and Streamline Messy Customer Data: Barry Padgett is CEO of Amperity, a company using AI to solve this problem: large companies now have lots and lots of marketing data, but it is all coming from different systems and services. That means you might have inforomation about a customer in different places across your portfolio, without the ability to integrate that data to get a more complete understanding of that customer. Especially as access to third party data diminishes, Padgett explains how the company can help big retailers and more streamline their information and ultimately improve customer experience. by Decoding AI for Marketing

34 min listen

What Walmart is Learning About Marketing Tech and AI: Large retailers like Walmart are in some ways at an advantage when it comes to implementing new technology like AI that depends on data, with insights being constantly aggregated across stores, products and customers. But large companies also come with complexity, and complexity is exactly what Saleel Sathe deals in every day. He’s the vice president of performance marketing at Walmart and has a bird’s eye view on all the ways technology and AI are being adapted at the company. He shares the lessons he’s learned there and from previous roles at Uber and eBay about implementing new technology effectively for internal teams and external customers. We talk about the future of SEO and GenAI, the end of the cookie, the best ways to measure and predict, making a better, more addictive app for the company, and more. by Decoding AI for Marketing

42 min listen

The Age of Agents is Coming and It Will Upend Marketing: Amit Shah, founder and CEO at the startup Instalily.ai, says that the age of AI agents is on the horizon and it will change commerce, marketing, and our lives in all kinds of profound ways. Shah has previously seen major digital transformations while serving as president of 1-800-FLOWERS, among other roles. He explains that the increased use of agents will fundamentally change how marketers go to market, and other ways that AI is accelerating change in the space. by Decoding AI for Marketing

40 min listen

How Salesforce Uses AI and Cloud to Improve Customer Relationships: Marty Kihn, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Salesforce, explains some of the biggest ways that AI has impacted their business in recent years. Salesforce now centers around a Customer Data Platform, or CDP, and Kihn talks through some of the key decisions around data, vendors, and layers of AI models that can change the game for all marketers. by Decoding AI for Marketing

38 min listen

AI's Influence on Marketing: A Ripple Effect Across All Business Verticals: Gopi Kallayil is the Chief Business Strategist for AI at Google, which means he has a bird’s eye view of the technology and its implications at one of the world’s largest companies - and all the partner companies they work with. Author of The Happier Human: Being Real in an Artificially Intelligent World, Gopi had spent a good portion of his professional life focused on the relationship between human authenticity and technology. In this episode he shares the ways he sees AI changing the game at the tactical and strategic level in business. The opinions expressed are those of the guest in his personal capacity. by Decoding AI for Marketing

40 min listen

CPG and Why The Best AI Projects Start with a Business Problem: Lu Cotterill is Global Senior Director, Full Funnel Marketing AI / ML at Kellanova (which spun out of legendary brand Kellogg). As a marketer in the CPG space, she’s always searching for the best data available to inform business decisions. In her current role, she focuses on how AI can help them better reach customers. CPG has its own set of challenges, but Lu has found the best way to test use cases for AI and ML is by starting with a business problem - not the technology - first. by Decoding AI for Marketing

38 min listen

Discover this podcast and so much more

CPG and Why The Best AI Projects Start with a Business Problem

CPG and Why The Best AI Projects Start with a Business Problem

Description

Titles in the series (16)

More Episodes from Decoding AI for Marketing

Related podcast episodes