Are machines making marketers more human? - Interview with Elizabeth Maxson of Contentful

0:00So, welcome to the next edition of the PunkCX podcast. With me today, I have Elizabeth Maxson, who is the CMO of Contentful, who's going to come and talk to me about all about Contentful and what they're up to, but also a recent piece of research that they released called When Machines Make Marketeers More Human. I just want to say, Elizabeth, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Nice to see you. Yes, nice to see you. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. Now, sometimes I do a bit of a bio intro and then ask people if they want to add anything, But this time, I'm going to ask you, you know, can you tell me a little bit about you and give us a bit of background or a bit of a thumbnail sketch on the work that you do?

0:39Of course. Well, first, I've been a marketer my entire life and really got my start on the experience marketing agency side, working with all different technology and automotive companies. Then I moved into corporate where I spent more than a decade at Salesforce. Had a lot of opportunities working from strategic events, corporate messaging, leading marketing for major strategic technology partners with AWS, Apple, Disney Plus, and Alibaba. And then I became the CMO of Tableau and then moved over to Contentful. So I'm a two-time CMO, but also a four-time mom. I have four kiddos under eight and my family and I live in San Francisco.

1:22Nice. Wow. I mean, like, is that more than one full-time job, I think? Yeah, it feels like a lot. But my main full-time job is focusing on Contentful. And for those that are not well-versed and Contentful, we are a leading digital experience platform that really helps modern businesses meet and grow the demand for engaging in personalized content and really doing that at scale. and you probably have actually interacted with our platform and maybe not even have known it, whether you are shopping online, you're ordering food on a tablet at your favorite restaurant, or maybe you're checking your favorite team game day stats.

1:58We really support 4 ,200 customers, including Kraft Heinz and KFC and Ruggable to really help all of our customers deliver digital experiences across all channels. Nice. Now, when I started the intro, I said that, I mentioned that you'd, Contentful had just recently released a research report called When Machines Make Marketeers More Human. So first of all, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the research. And I wonder if you could tell me how it came about and what are some of the main headlocks? Yeah, I think one of the things that's happening right now in AI is that there's a lot of doom and gloom out there.

2:37Marketers are feeling in fear that their jobs are going to be replaced by AI. and we've had a hypothesis that, you know, maybe that's not actually the case. And we partnered up with The Atlantic. They have an amazing research insights team. And we surveyed over 425 marketing decision makers, specifically just over 100 of those were CMOs across all industries, company sizes. This was a global effort. And what we found is actually in a lot of cases, AI can help amplify the marketer and not take their jobs away. And we felt this was really important to shed this light and really give some more positivity out into the world of how an exciting time it is to be a marketer versus living a little bit more in that fear base.

3:22Thank you for that. I mean, there was a couple of things that when I went through the report, there was a couple of things that stood out for me. And I wanted to sort of dig into it, if I may, just to get your perspective on it. And one of the things that the report said that it talked about marketers moving beyond experimentation with some of these tools. and moving into production and workflows. But it sort of suggested that they're not quite there yet. And they were still sort of struggling with a bunch of pain points or challenges and stuff. I mean, can you help us understand what some of those main pain points and challenges are?

3:56I mean, so there's always the age-old do more with less, right? That is not new to any marketing team or marketing leadership. But I think with AI, there is this immediate need to want to move fast. Teams want to move fast. In fact, 40 % of marketers say fast and efficient execution is really going to define their success. And another part of that is also delivering quality content. 42 % rank high quality content and consistency is really going to be important for marketing teams to succeed. I think what we're coming to this pivotal point right now is AI is changing so rapidly. Maybe a tool you started using this summer, which maybe was not great, is now wildly different now in the fall.

4:37And I think there is trying to think about how can tools seamlessly integrate into your tech stack is a big question to really get out of that experimentation phase. phase, but also less of kind of one-on-one experimentation and more about what are ways you can actually deeply embed AI into your workflows to help create that speed and efficiencies. And for us on the content side, I mean, the best marketers in the world don't just use AI to produce more content. I think that's another, it's a whole nother podcast we can do on that. We really believe that more content doesn't equal better content, better content equals better content and really having that human in the loop creating that content is going to be really critical so you know i really see the catalyst to be able to move to more informed decisions and move ideas to concept into the market faster is really going to use ai to help amplify that creativity on the human side to really make marketers more effective yeah no i think that's that's interesting but i also got another you talked about like how things are just exploding and it's like you talked about there's a tool that was like yeah it's okay it's kind of interesting and then it's like yeah but not quite useful and then it it just matures so quickly but there's an explosion of these sort of things i mean i always refer to i think it's uh scott brinker and franz weisman's kind of like martech landscape sort of report that that comes out and the number of tools that are available to marketeers and other connected professionals is just quite alarming.

6:15I mean, how many different tools are they using? Well, I'll be honest. This is the one part of the report I was a little bit more shocked by. We found in the report that the most successful teams that are optimizing their existing tech stacks, on average, use six to 10 tools. Now, I'll be honest, in my own team, we have about 30 AI tools that we are still using. However, I was at a CMO dinner in New York last month, and I was sitting next to a CMO in healthcare who thought 10 tools was too many. So it's like this very interesting place. And I think that's also deciding where are you at? Are you still in experimentation?

6:55I think once you get into fully embedding AI into the workflows, that is when you're taking that step in reducing into that six to 10 range. but in the end listen that the tools are fleeting it this is more about building a culture that embraces ai and i think that's a really important step that a lot of companies are missing right now and is it that the um are we not in danger as well because because it's all this explosion of tools like you talk some people kind of like say 10 some people say 15 some people say 30 and then my blood starts to drain from my face and i think about that and i just think that's feels like it's adding you know this level of tech sprawl and complexity kind of it's almost like a layering on another kind of problem to the existing adoption understanding utilization move to productivity sort of like uh thing as well and so what would you say is what are you learning and what you're seeing in terms of what what's going to help people get to the that cutting them down and getting focused on these are the ones that we use for now and then we'll review kind of later kind of what do they need what do people need to do just decide to cut because i mean i know that in organizations like in life general generally it's always easier to add things than it is to take things away yes i mean i'm a big less is more fan so i definitely uh live that That said, I think maybe what teams are not doing is setting proper goals.

8:29And again, this is all about having more of an AI culture. So for example, you know, everyone's testing, experimenting, but for what end goal? So if I want to say to my design team, you know, hey, listen, I want you to cut$100 ,000 of our agency costs to deliver our next three video content. That is a goal. That's a mission. It's, you know, allowing them to use tools to get to that. But obviously, it's helping me from a cost perspective to then use those dollars for something else. So that is something that we've really been thinking about in our team is how to be more goal focused, and not just using tools for the sake of using them and trying to find these speeds.

9:07I think it's really hard for teams to track right now. I mean, we're just doing a simple tracker ourselves. of what's the use case and is it saving us time or is it saving us money or maybe both? And how are we tracking that? And then are there use cases that have become trends in my team that I'm like, okay, it's very clear that we are getting this from this tool. This is a tool we really need to start investing in and making this fully embedded. So I think maybe taking a more holistic approach at the tools, making sure that it's focused on goals and actual outcomes can help really bridge that gap that I think a lot of teams are having right now of making that decision.

9:44Where do they decide? I think that's what they need to start to do. I mean, I'm always kind of one that advocates for, you know, that old saying, like start with the end in mind or like to ape Steve Jobs back in 1997 where he says like, you've got to like, you know, describe the customer experience and then work backwards to the technology. I mean, it feels like, I mean, I've always advocated for that from a design and a customer's experience. or an experience that you want a customer to have. But we also know that kind of the employee experience is a key part of driving kind of positive customer outcomes.

10:22And maybe we need to sort of apply that discipline to ourselves as they always step back and make some time. And I know it's hard just to go, let's describe how we would like things to work and then work backwards to the technology. Maybe that will help us decide what's the best tool for the best part of that whole process. I love that. I think, you know, you're reminding me of a speaker coach that I've had for many years. And whenever I'm, you know, about to get on a keynote stage, for example, she always says, what do you want the audience to think and to feel and to take away from that moment?

10:56And I feel like we can almost apply the same thing to marketers. It's like using these tools. What do you want them to do? What do you want them to feel? They want, you know, they want to feel empowered. They want to feel accomplished. They want to feel like moving fast they want to feel like they're impacting the business you know they want to be able to be living you know those attributes along the way so i think that's a great perspective that all marketing teams could share nice and so the so we talked about this tool proliferation or call it what you will and and people are using kind of tons and tons of new kind of tools or experimenting with these new tools i mean what is the research also telling us about i guess skills and capability gaps because it's a bit like it feels a bit like somebody's just going to like show you oh like here's a new type of car now go and get in the car you've learned you know how to drive this car a combustion engine but this is a completely different type of car which has a completely different set of controls and all sorts of different things now you go and drive that you can drive this therefore surely you can drive that that's a massive assumption right so what's the research telling us about some of the skills and capability gaps that we're going to see and how are marketers keeping up?

12:06Well, to be honest, I think there is a completely new generation of marketers that are on the rise. And that is what we call a full stack marketer. So what I mean by that is a full stack marketer is someone that they are fluent in AI enabled workflows. They're skilled at writing effective prompts. They're navigating these diverse technology stacks and they are embedding tools into their daily operations. And this is really critical as we think about different ways that marketers need to be in all parts of their operations, how they need to be approaching things differently. But I also think a big part of this is not just on the technical side, and it's more of their mindset.

12:45And a lot of conversations I'm having with CMOs are actually talking about what are the different soft skills we need to be hiring for and looking for. So for me, what does AI don't have? AI doesn't have lived experiences and cultural resonance. You and I have that. We're humans, right? We also have curiosity. We have empathy. We have feelings. There's so much more that I think really goes into creating marketing that is really going to be memorable. And if you think about right now, as teams are using generative AI to produce content, a lot of it is all starting to sound the same. It's becoming really generic and marketers are not really differentiating themselves.

13:25This is why they need to keep the human in the loop and really use AI to amplify their human creativity to provoke that human emotion and really start personalizing content that is going to resonate with customers at the right place, at the right time, in the right way. And those soft skills to me are really what's going to have to come into handy as marketers are trying to be more successful. Yeah, and I think it's the, you talk about, I mean, I think the overriding term is AI slop. when people talk about kind of the content. And I think it's, you know, and I actually think there's this, there's something artful about creating a human connection.

14:07And these large language models are getting ever more impressive, but they won't do, I don't think they'll do the different sort of thing because it's all based on kind of what's kind of known and what's already been articulated, right? and it's extrapolating from from from that and it feels like to me you remember that i don't know if you've heard that story where it's about somebody walked into a bar and and saw ernest hemingway nursing a drink at the bar and said and challenged him to write write the shortest short story and um and he was like he took a napkin and he wrote on it baby shoes never worn for sale

14:54and it's a short story in six words and you look at and just go oh that could mean so many things yes depending on how you see that now you could create a derivation of that or something that's like that once that's already written down the known but you're never going to create something which is uniquely different that somebody just makes that connection and goes oh here's a different way of kind of explaining it and i think that's that there's that's where i think we've got also you talked about curiosity and empathy and i would say that there's there's an artfulness that you've got to we've got to lean into as as uh marketeers but also with all the lists of the things that you're talking about they're kind of becoming a full stack marketer i'm a bit like these people sound like they should be featuring in a dc or marvel comic they feel like superheroes yes i think they are going to be superheroes you know a framework that we use internally when we think about provoking that human emotion and really trying to tie into that personalization is the difference between stick it and push it.

15:56So stick it means like you're on message or you've said the right thing. You've said the thing that our product does, right? You've called the thing a thing, but push it is really, what did you make someone feel on the other side? And again, bringing in your own lived experiences to create that messaging and create that content is really going to be important. And that's what I've been driving my team is to push it. And I really do think a lot of marketing leaders need to empower their teams to do the same. Otherwise, the AI slop will just continue on for a long time. Yeah. And I know that in recent years that, you know, people have, and particularly marketeers, have been pushing to create, you know, deliver some more personalized experiences to their customers and they've been making strides in in that but then customers are also being saying oh yeah we want that too but we've got obviously security and data concerns about that i mean and that was sort of mirrored partially on the on the marketeer side they're like not so sure because i remember an old piece of research which surveyed consumers and then surveyed marketers was about personalization and the largest proportion of consumers kind of said yeah look we'd love to have a personalized experience and marketers and yeah sure we want we want that but consumers are also saying we don't need to be creepy but then 60 of the marketeers that were surveyed also admitted saying about kind of like two-thirds of the or something like that of the the campaigns that they put out they would be we'd probably judge them to be a creepy or somewhat creepy and so there's there's lines and bounds and all this sort of like stuff but i want to understand what does the research tell us about the concerns that marketeers have around privacy and security concerns with some of the the the the expansion of some of these new tools and the power of of these new tools i think in the end it's really about just using them in the right way i mean if you think about it personalization is not new right we've been personalizing email for many years.

18:04Even if you got an email that didn't say, hi, Adrian, I'm sure you would immediately delete that from your inbox or how much it gets screwed up when you see customer in a quote. So I think it's about finding the right balance. And a lot of times, talking again to CMOs, they really just don't know where to start with personalization. And it doesn't have to be creepy. You can think big, start small and move fast in very simple ways. a great example that I love to use even on our own website. If you've been to our website before, you're not going to see the same message that you saw the last time.

18:36You've never been there before. These are just very two different audiences, right? Same with if you're an existing customer, I shouldn't have messages on my website of why buy Contentful. You've already bought the product. You should be learning more about adoption of what we have coming in our newest features. Right. So I think a lot of marketers get caught up into overthinking all their personas, all their industries, all of their global, you know, what's localized, what's not, what has this flair, what has that flair. And I think everyone just needs to take a big step back. You know, you can be putting, you know, these personalized engagements in very big buckets, but still have really amazing impact.

19:15Another quick example for you is we've used geotagging to support our field events in just an eyebrow header on our website. So for example, we host this event called Contentful at the Cinema, where we buy out AMCs all over the world, and we host customers for major movie premieres. So we've done this for Formula One, who's a customer of ours, as well as Wicked 2's coming up. That's our next set. And so in the cities that we are promoting these events, and we know from geotagging you're in that city, it'll say, hey, San Francisco, join us here at this event, just on the eyebrow header. And we've increased our registration to those events by 51 % by just adding that eyebrow.

19:55So there's just very simple use cases that I think, again, if marketing leaders can take a step back, they can think big, think of all the things you want to do, or maybe to your earlier comment about, let's start with the customer experience, right? What do you want that end customer experience to be? But I think a lot of people can actually start small and just move fast with these mini experimentations on their website. And And that's already a huge unlock for us here at Contentful. So I've been trying to evangelize our own use of Contentful to really get marketing leaders to be thinking a lot differently to be able to do that.

20:28And that's not creepy. It's just very easy. No, no, no, not at all. It's like people want to find stuff that's relevant to them, right? And if you make it helpful by not being invasive, but just going, here's the thing. And it doesn't necessarily interrupt them. It's just so you're showing it like, oh, hey, you're in San Francisco or you're in Edinburgh or you're in kind of like Warsaw or you're in Nairobi or you're like oh no we've got these things um but then I also kind of know that sometimes a lot of the conversation gets homogenized around everybody's kind of facing the same problems and it's sort of not true it's never true right and I know the great thing about the research that they covered a whole bunch of different geographies and i wanted to understand what the also the research told you about the differences and kind of behaviors and performance that you're seeing let's take kind of you know the difference in emia or yeah that sort of that that sort of time zone sort of spit and also the us or the the americas and stuff and are there distinct differences between kind of marketeer's experiences and their use of kind of ai and and all those things there completely are this is also a really interesting part of the report.

21:43So take European marketers. To me, they're thinking like engineers. They are the ones that are pioneering the governance skills and really thinking through governance. In fact, 32 % are prioritizing governance as a framework. And if you think about the EU AI Act and that reshaping the landscape, there's a lot more care there. Whereas US is really focused on more campaign optimization and testing. In fact, that's higher. It's 37 % in the U.S. focus against 26 % in Europe. So those are some differences there. And then the other thing is also how we're testing tools. So Europe markets seem to be 58 % are testing AI tools selectively and really against a defined plan versus only 43 % in U.S.

22:31teams. So maybe we're a little bit more experimental in the United States and a little bit more purposeful in Europe, which I found interesting. And then just one other stat for you that I found interesting, again, just on a macro level, is how much pressure CMOs have to be using AI. And 96 % of them are absolutely certain AI will transform their business, but only 65 % are actually making meaningful investments. And this is what we call the optimism execution gap, where there's intent, but the actual execution is not happening. So that's another interesting lens across globally, that stat. But I think it's interesting how that breaks down with the different countries as well.

23:11Yeah. I mean, I think it's the, I find that I have this theory and it's a bit of a pet theory right now. And it's based on the story of the race between the tortoise and the hare. And I think there's lessons to be learned from that story. and that there's a lot of people that are running around just trying to be a hare. But it's like havoc. And then there's some people that are being a bit more, as you say, purposeful or a bit more deliberate or considerate and measured in what they do. Then they're advancing, but they know what they're doing and why. And I think we're probably going to see, It feels like it's 80 % hares right now and about 20 % torches, if not 90-10.

24:00And I think that balance might shift a little bit more as things settle and people go, right now, we need to, these are very powerful tools. Now we need to start to deliver and make some very conscious choices about what we're going to do and why. 100%. I completely agree with that story and think that is going to be the big shift. So we'll see where people land. Are you the hare or the turtle? And so one final question for me on the research is what some of the best teams are doing that's going to separate them from everyone else? Because we see here various reports about people experimenting, but not being able to scale, experimenting, but not being able to generate kind of a significant ROI and so on and so forth.

24:48or people just experimenting and they don't get beyond experimenting into production at all. It almost becomes a bit of a false start. And so is there anything in the research that's helping you can understand what the best teams are doing that's kind of allowing them to create that gap between them and everyone else? Yeah, I mean, I believe the best teams that are going to succeed are really keeping humans at the center, both their employees and their end customers and really prioritizing what those authentic human connections are. One of the things we believe here at Contentful is not B2B, not B2C, but B2H, business to human.

25:26And how are we really driving that connection to every human across every channel? And one of the last parts of the report, and this is actually one of my favorite topics, is this idea of evidence-based creativity. so think about as a marketer you know you you're you're creative but also data analysis is really a top skill that is highly ranked and being able to be powered with ai insights to drive that creativity is really going to be the unlock for a lot of marketers to succeed so that's like one of the things i definitely think is also on the rise as being part of that full stack marketer nice so elizabeth that's all i have in terms of make um questions around digging into the the report i'll make sure i put a link to the report and the show notes everything so everybody should go and check it out um but is before we move on to sort of some quick fire questions yes anything else that you'd like to highlight or add before we kind of dive in yeah i mean listen i think this is the most exciting time to be a marketer and this goes back to why we did this report, also thinking through the skills that marketers are ranking right now.

26:36It's data analysis, it's digital experience design, prompt optimization, and personalization. And if marketers go after that and they nurture that, as well as those soft skills of really leaning on those human experiences, the cultural resonance, that empathy and curiosity, those are the marketers that are going to really leave the pack. So I think that's important to consider. awesome now here's the quick fire questions now the first one and this was all about your best advice and the way that because we've talked about a bunch of things and now i want to kind of like you know you're an you're you're an experienced kind of like person and you've you know you've you've been around for for a little while and so you've probably got like wells of experience to draw on so here's what i'd like to do i'll be asking people to boil it down by completing this sentence.

27:27And the sentence is, if you want to improve your customer experience, Elizabeth says, do this. So I would say that in this world of AI, you can't lose sight of authenticity and the ability to connect with customers on a human level. And if you leverage AI to make your marketers more human, you are able to do that. Awesome. Now, second one is a punk one, obviously. I love this. Yes. So here's a question. What company or brand do you think takes a more punk approach to customer experience and why? Well, first of all, I believe personalization done well. That is what punk is. And a customer that does it really well is actually ruggable.

28:15So they've completely taken personalization to a new level and they've been segmenting their customers just in two categories, dog owners and cat owners. Again, very simple, right? Big, start small. So visitors who land on Ruggable's website via a dog-related campaign, all of the rugs then have dogs pictured on them. Whereas if you came from a cat-related campaign, then as a cat owner, you're seeing rugs that are specific for cats. So this has been huge for Ruggable. They've actually increased their conversion rates by 25%. and it's been really awesome for them to see where they started from experimenting with personalization and really driving impact across our company so to me personalization is punk wow that's cool like you knew i think if you can't and dog pictures depending on like where they are would improve your conversion rate by 25 exactly that's wild and and so my final question before we kind of like we wrap up is that i've been for the last number of months i've been asking people to share with me a good news story because i wake up every morning and i can't help doom scrolling and then i kind of like slap myself and go like go do something a bit more positive so elizabeth tell me there's some of the one of the most interesting positive or exciting things that you've seen the last week i think this makes you smile i mean honestly my oldest daughter turned eight yesterday and she's in second grade i can't tell you how curious this child is.

29:47I just like the life of a second grader every day, the types of questions that they ask and driving his curiosity, what, what it really meant to me and why it makes me smile. She's just starting to build momentum on her lived experiences. And again, that is something AI will never have. And I think about, you know, my kid's life and, and how they're all going to grow up in this AI era. That's very different than you and I experiencing it today. And it's going to be very life-changing in different ways, but I hope she never loses that curiosity. So that was, I was thinking about that in the last 24 hours celebrating her birthday.

30:22And that has really resonated with me and has been keeping a smile on my face. Perfect. Well, cheers to Elizabeth's daughter and kind of maintaining the kind of the, uh, the curiosity and happy birthday to her too. Thank you. And so Elizabeth, that's all I have. I just want to say thank you for, well, congratulations on the research i think it's a really insightful piece of work thank you for sharing your time and your insight and your experience and expertise with us today that's been awesome thank you i really enjoyed this conversation thank you so much for having me you're very welcome

30:59wow what a great interview i hope you enjoyed it i know i did find out more about me and the work that I do at adrienswinsko.com. Do leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you have any comments, feedback, or questions about the podcast, then feel free to send me a message to podcast at adrienswinsko.com. And do tune in again. Thanks very much.