Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, on Why Earnings Calls Are Stories About Demand

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1:18Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. Before AI, we were already in a complete content overload world, right? Like, you know, so many of my roles, I talk about the content vomit, and we're just putting more information out there. but it's not what people actually want, right? Drowning in the vomit.

1:55AI can make that worse. And I think in some places - That's a beautiful image you've painted for us. You know, I try and make it stick so people remember what I say, Seth. So there you go. I think, should we title the episode Drowning in the Vomit? That's up to you. You're the tastemaker on this one, so. I appreciate it.

2:21Welcome back to Create or Destroy. It's a business show, a marketing show, and a show that argues they've always been the same thing. On this week's episode, I'm talking with Amazon Web Services CMO Julia White, who spent 25 years inside enterprise tech, including a 20-year tenure at Microsoft, where she led product marketing for both Office 365 and Azure, before leaving to become chief marketing and solutions officer at SAP. 25 years later, Julia says the features and functions she spent years believing were the most important things actually don't matter if you're not hitting the deeper human need on the other side of the product and B2B desk.

2:58And this shift in her thinking from product truth to human truth is the foundation of value creation. It runs through everything we discuss from why B2B decisions are emotional ones made by humans, not businesses, why she believes an earnings call is one of the most important brand building or brand destroying moments an enterprise has, despite most companies treating it as a financial reporting exercise, and why the way companies store and govern customer data is a marketing decision that nobody making it thinks of that way. Let's get into it. Here's where I want to start with you, Julia, if I can, which is you're like OG modern generation enterprise tech.

3:36You've been inside the broad category for 25 years. You've been at Microsoft, at SAP. Now you're at AWS. And inside each of those companies, right, broadly, the definition of what creates value has shifted, right? Mobile shifted it. Cloud shifted it. AI is changing it again. And so I'm wondering if you can share with the audience, as you lived and look across those shifts, Has your own understanding of how value gets created and or destroyed evolved? And kind of as a follow-up, which I'll remind you of because this is a long preamble to short questions, is there something that you believed earlier in your career about what creates value that you don't anymore because of these experiences?

4:27Yeah, I'm going to start with maybe the latter part because it's all related, actually. I would say, you know, you're right. I've seen so many different big technology generational waves happen, right? I mean, I actually started my career when the internet was first birth. I've certainly lived through multiple technology waves, right? I've seen my first, my very first job was right when the internet was becoming mainstream. That's how old I am, Seth. How young you are to me. God bless. That's amazing. I was around when Edison first conceived a light bulb. And you look so good, Seth, despite that.

5:01It's amazing. It's the Botox. Obviously. It's doing wonders for you. But I think early on in my career, and even longer in, I would say I continued to really believe that it was the tech features, the functions, the capabilities that were so important, right? The RFP and nailing that and the benchmarks and getting the magic quadrants nailed. And not that those aren't important, but the reality is B2B, just like B2C and consumer, it's really a human and emotional decision that's being made. And I think the longer I've gone on in my career, the more I realize that it's about whether it's the decision maker or the developer or whoever we're speaking to.

5:43It's about how this affects their ego, their career outcome, their probability of getting fired or not. Like that actually is what matters. And the features and functions are necessary and important and relevant, but it doesn't matter if you're not hitting on that deeper human need on the other side of your product. So listeners and watchers of the show have heard me cite one of my favorite ads of all time, which is this 1974 IBM mainframe ad that says nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. And the brilliance of it is that it was speaking to, you know, it was speaking to Maslow, it was speaking to fear, it was speaking to the human, not the enterprise at the other end of that decision.

6:30And I'm wondering if we just take two of the things you talked about, because you mentioned not getting fired and you talked about ego. Well, they're a Venn diagram. One is about lifting me up and one is about keeping me from failing. How do you identify which one is at play when you are selling in? Right. Well, I think they're always both at play. You know, right? We all have our managing our egos and our dreams as well as our fears and concerns. And so, but I do think there's different moments to embrace and respect one versus the other. And like, let's take right now in the time of AI where there's just, it's so new, it's moving so fast.

7:14There's so much ambiguity about what's happening and where it's going. And I think right now, there's a lot of fear, right? There's when uncertainty brings fear, right? And so leaning more into that we're here to help and help make you feel confident about the decision you're making, more hitting on the, like, how do you help manage people's fear in this moment of unknown? Certainly there's aspiration parts of it, but I think you kind of earn your way there once you've addressed the underlying concerns of it. And so I think there's different marketing tones and messages and campaigns to be had in different times and places.

7:49I think they're always both at play, but dialing one up or down, depending on kind of where you are, in my case, in a technology cycle, is certainly top of mind. It's so top of mind. I mean, I like your choice of words, the ambiguity of it, right? When I was younger, I was starting at CAA, and I was starting the marketing group there, and I said to the general counsel, who I'm about actually to quote again in a minute, I was like, what's it going to take to be successful here? And he said, a high tolerance for ambiguity. And I think a high tolerance for ambiguity is a prerequisite for anybody in today's world, right?

8:29Because AI is maybe the most common discussion point and conversational point about where there's a great deal of uncertainty, but it lives in our sociopolitical macro-microeconomic environment too. Given that, and given that that wasn't always the case, right, at least to this degree. So my question is, and I talked about this with Lorraine Tuhill, you know, the legend that is Lorraine, the CMO at Google on my old show, The CEO's Guide to Marketing, which is the role of a marketer inside product-driven organizations. You're still inside product-driven organizations, even as your belief about the primacy of product has shifted.

9:14And I'm wondering, in a balance that I'm sure is in constant fluctuation, how do you determine when product features are playing a supporting role or a starring role in the story that the individual who's your buyer is telling themselves? Yeah, I think the, again, the features, they do matter. I don't want to say they're irrelevant, right? And I think the job of a great kind of product marketer to really hit on that side of it is looking at the incredible product innovation coming out and finding the most differentiated capability we have that matches most closely to the customer need. And that could be a need to, you know, not get fired.

9:57It could be the need to achieve something they've never imagined before and match that together. So I think product marketing is such an incredibly important discipline within marketing and a product-led organization and tech in general. And that's that art form of how do I see all the different capabilities? You know, and your engineering partners, like, they love all their capabilities. They're all amazing. And at some level, they are, right? But there's some that matter more. And it's about curating and finding those. And sometimes they're not even the engineering team might think is the most interesting, right?

10:27But they somehow showcase this a possibility or the governance or the security that someone needs to feel great about what they're deciding to buy or use on that. And I think that's sometimes a underappreciated art form in marketing, but that matching of really product truth understanding and mapping it to this customer need state. And not the, this will get us to the top of the benchmark. Again, that's a, those things, people use those things to not get fired, to prove that I picked the thing that was third party validated. That to me is like, oh, okay. So when someone, when it doesn't work, if it doesn't work, you're not going to get fired for that.

11:00Right. Yeah. But like, how do you curate this new capability that maybe speaks to, you didn't think you're going to be able to get this done? and now you're going to be able to do something in your career you didn't think was possible, right? Like that's a higher need state. So if we ladder up from kind of the individual and the personal assessment of value creation and the prevention of value destruction, right, which is not getting fired, to the enterprise level, has your perspective on, because I think this, it may be the same answer about product, but I think your perspective on what creates, I'm wondering if your perspective about what creates enterprise value, given the shifts you've seen, has been modified at all over time.

11:44I think the other angle that I think you're scratching at is a good one is it's really about consistency over time. Particularly in enterprise systems, whether that's an application like an ERP or cloud provider or now an AI provider. These enterprise decisions come, they're like decade-long decisions. In the case of an ERP, there might be like five decade long decisions ultimately, right? It's like backbone of how you measure your finances. And that consistency over time and how we engage, how we show up, the stories we tell them and the way we act around that is hugely valuable, hugely valuable.

12:23And I think it's easy in an annual planning cycle or a campaign cycle to look at it very short term. But the customer is living with this decision over years and years and years, even if the people change out. Like the enterprise is still there ultimately, right? And so I think that, again, this gets a little bit more to like brand and brand marketing and brand strategy execution. But that longitudinal is so critical in enterprise value creation or destruction, right? You lose trust. It's decades before you're running that back in times, right? Sometimes it is. And, you know, I had Eric Reese, author of The Lean Startup and most recently Incorruptible on the show recently.

13:06He said something about trust that is a bit of a tangent, but that is so simple and yet powerful, which is, you know, trust can be used for good or for ill, right? and it just has been so resonant for me that I think about the maintenance of trust and how in a world where the product is, let's just look at AI, where tomorrow's product is completely different than today's, maybe not even hyperbolically, right? The leap changes are so significant. How do you stay consistent when things change so quickly? Yeah. You know, Amazon has these incredible leadership principles. If you've heard about, they're quite famous and maybe one of Jeff Bezos' greatest inventions, in my opinion.

13:55But one of them is earns trust. And it's literally like we write down in long form, what is the definition of what it takes to earn trust? And, you know, we use it internally, we use it externally, but it really gets to that around doing what's right, even when it's hard, right? It's easy to do the right thing when it's easy. Right. But even when it's hard and again, in that showing up and doing working backwards from the customer, what that what is the right thing for the customer, even if it means differences and changes inside. And so those those are those behaviors. And it's true in AI, even though the tech is moving really, really fast and things are changing.

14:32But how we show up, how we engage with our customers, how we behave around it, that level of consistency and transparency about it and candor and being like vocally self-critical, all of those things are what earns trust. And so I think we have a really nice way to explicitly speak about it to ourselves and to our customers as well. How do you know if you're doing it? Or maybe more importantly, if you're failing to do it, right? It's kind of that metaphor of, you know, you're sailing and, you know, you're one degree off and then you're 300 miles off in time. How do you hold yourselves accountable to those definitions of trust to doing the right thing even when it's hard?

15:15Yeah. Well, in a good way, especially like we have a lot of listening systems, like small group and, you know, big quantitative. And I think you see them quickly in those trusted communities. And, you know, gosh, one of the audiences I love the most, Seth, is the developer audience because they're so darn hard. And, you know, you can't buy them. You've got to earn them. And I think our developer community is one of the best at telling us really quickly when we haven't earned trust and when we have. They'll do it both ways. But to me, there's those kind of canary in a coal mine folks that can tell you very quickly.

15:52Other things like big enterprise decisions for multi-year is a much longer signal, and you risk losing them before you realize. And so they are harder. You can have those close communities that will hold up the mirror and be honest with you, and you have to listen to them. But I think that – and the quantitative stuff is okay, but it tends to be slower moving and a little bit lagging indicator, right? But those tight communities and particularly the technologist community, if you're willing to listen and you invite it, they will 100 % tell you whether they like what you did or didn't do and whether it's earning trust or not.

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18:09Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started.

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18:55Yeah, we all need the canaries in the coal mine to provide that candor because you never grow better just because people love what you're doing. As comforting as that may be. It's lovely to hear, but it doesn't keep you sharp. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I want to go from trust to taste. I said a moment ago that I was going to bring up the former general counsel of CAA when I started there. I was there about six weeks and it was my first foray into Hollywood. And there was this one lit agent represented writers, producers, directors who just she may still be there. You know, just brilliant. And she had commercially successful and critically successful clients, artists in her portfolio.

19:51And I said to this guy, Michael Rubel, I asked him, I was like, what makes Beth so good? He looks at me, this one word is like, taste. And I was like, wow, that's awfully succinct and super powerful. Now, you have said that AI is a wonderful thought partner, but it isn't a tastemaker. And I'm wondering if taste then is among what separates work that creates value from work that just kind of fills space. And by the way, it's very hard to create work that works brilliantly all the time. I don't mean to suggest that's a low bar. And I think it is the differentiator. What happens to company value when the tools that kind of can accelerate production, right, don't have the taste and the people who do have the taste are increasingly being either, I don't want to use the word replace, I don't want to get into that conversation, but supplemented, complemented by tools that are cheaper and faster.

20:59And oftentimes just defaulting, giving up their agency for the tool that is cheaper and faster. What's your take on it? What happens? Yes. Well, I think we're in this kind of muddiness right now. And I don't think it lasts forever. I think I already see us navigating through it in a good way. But I realize I sit at the very, very, very edge of it, right? But if that gives you hope. I would say, I mean, before AI, we were already in a complete content overload world, right? Like, you know, so many of my roles, I talk about the content vomit, and we're just putting more information out there, but it's not what people actually want, right?

21:38Drowning in the vomit. AI can make that worse, and I think in some places— That's a beautiful image you've painted for us. You know, I try and make it stick so people remember what I say, Seth. So there you go. I think—should we title the episode Drowning in the Vomit? That's up to you. You're the tastemaker on this one. I appreciate it. I do think like the AI slop world is upon us, right? And, you know, and I'm not, we're not free of it. But I think the practical route and where I see things already going is the areas of marketing, I'm just picking on content, right? Because it's an easy one to understand, of that we could never do in the past was like really, truly, wonderfully personalized, right?

22:22It was always like sales can be highly personalized and marketing be efficient, but you can't ever get the best of both. And now I'm like, well, I don't need AI to tell me what my customers care most about. Like I have great, we have great insights and my humans are the tastemakers of that. But I can use AI to create more personalized versions of that so everyone feels spoken to in the way that matters to them. So that's where I think we can go. But now, right now, we're in the experimenting and slopping and everything in between kind of phase. I don't think we end here. And the thing that I actually aspire and talk to my team about is like right now, if I'm honest with myself, I would say, I don't know, on a good day, 25 % of my human capacity and my team is spent really deeply understanding customer needs and doing beautiful storytelling and connection content with them.

23:15And I would really like that to be closer to like 80 to 90 percent of their time. But instead of that, they're doing things like copying and pasting content from different systems or putting out checkboxes of different MarTech systems that are necessary to do our job and measure our impact, but are not really adding, you know, customer value in that way. And if I can deploy AI and agents against that part of the process, and my humans are freed up to really think deeply about customers' needs, their emotional states, and how we create the right storytelling to capture that, man, we're going to be better.

23:48Man, our customers are going to be happier, too. And there's a, you know, we're not there today, but that's what I see us doing, not the other. So one, I just have to say that you're so consistent and I really love it because so few are with your just your customer focus and just ensuring they feel seen. And it really is, I think, worth calling out as obvious as you and I might consider it as a foundationally. It's worth calling out for our audience that, you know, this is one of the biggest B2B enterprises in the world seeing not enterprises. I mean, you're seeing enterprises, but the humans that are the drivers.

24:34And, you know, please all mimic what Julia is doing. Well, back to your first question. When I first came into B2B, I was told it was like a business. And you're like, well, who's – like a business doesn't make a decision. Like humans make decisions. But it took me a few years in this industry to like unpack that and be like, oh, wait, it's actually just a human. It's literally a human sitting there. It's not a business. So I agree. I mean, as I think a lot about the evolution of capitalism, it makes me crazy when people talk about company X being greedy. It's like, no, that company makes no decisions.

25:09The he or she or they sitting at the top, they're greedy. And what you're seeing is the expression of it in those situations. And, of course, it's not all enterprises. But I want to push a little bit, which is to say, going back to the story I told about this brilliant lit agent, Beth Swofford, if you're listening, I was talking about you. I cannot really guarantee you Beth Swofford is not listening, by the way. But taste is not available in mass supply across human beings. Right. And so, is it really a barrier? I mean, look, the brilliant creators, the brilliant humans, the humans with extraordinary, exquisite taste, recognizing that like value, like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder, They will always find their way through.

26:08But for the rest of us, will we not just default to the LLM's interpretation of what taste is and how it might resonate with our audience? And is that it feels like that's a complement and an incremental strength because humans have had the 80 percent of time you want. We haven't done that much before this and we haven't done that much with it. Interesting. Well, I think you're right. There always are those brilliant minds to your colleague that can see what's next and can spot that trend before it's obvious to everybody else. And I think those, you know, those people and minds and places still hold and, you know, have an outsized effect on everything.