Marketing Mayhem & AI Magic with Steve Rotter

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest today is Steve Roeder, CMO of Deepol, a global communications platform that enables over 100 ,000 businesses to transform communications, reach new markets, and improve productivity.

0:38Steve is an entrepreneur, evangelist, and author. He brings over two decades of tech marketing leadership experience to his role as CMO of Deepo. A two-time founder, he's had three successful exits, and three-time unicorn, Steve is deeply passionate about innovative marketing, AI, and branding. Now, prior to Deepo, Steve served as CMO of Four Kites, where he spearheaded remarkable growth and revenue increases through targeted account-based and PLG strategies, serving industry titans like Coke, Walmart, and Ford. His expertise extends to CMO roles at OutSystems and AcroLynx, where he drove Unicorn Growth, established category leadership, and facilitated successful acquisitions.

1:20He's also held tech-leading, excuse me, leading tech industry marketing positions at Adobe, Motorola, and BrightCove. Wow. Steve Rotor, welcome to the show. Steve, it's an honor to be here. Thank you so much for hosting this, and thanks for having me on. Absolutely, my friend. We had an absolutely amazing off-air chat. And I'm going to tease the listeners, Steve, if you don't mind. But you and I are going to very well potentially collaborate on something and we'll leave it at that. There we go. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, so much synergies. I think we talked marketing, hockey, and coffee. Probably three of my favorite topics, not necessarily in that order either.

1:59We'll put those three in a book. It's a bestseller. There you go. Okay. The C doesn't stand for chief and chief marketing officer is caffeinated. I love that. I may steal that one. Go for it. Okay. Let's jump in. Okay. A lot to talk about, right? And one of the first things is, and you said this to me off air and I wanted to talk about is marketers are under so much pressure to do more with less and brand consistency is a key to success. So let me start with the first part of that. If you don't mind me breaking it down into two parts about marketers under pressure to do more with less. Now, the devil's advocate in me is going to go, but Steve, has it not always been the case?

2:36Is that true? Or do you feel it more now? Yeah, I think it's always been the case, but I think it's certainly more acute for a couple of reasons. One is the budget pressure is getting more and more obvious. But I think the bigger reason is that marketers have a much stronger role to play in driving top line growth. I mean, whether it's a B2B company, a B2C company, you see that pressure put on the chief marketing officers to be the ones driving revenue. And it's no longer a supporting cast in the world of a direct sales team. It's like, hey, you have a revenue number attached to your business and to your function.

3:12So, yeah, I see that as being something that's putting pressure on marketers all day long. That makes sense. But when you say do more with less, so what's the less? Is it strictly less budget? I think it's resources on both sides. Budget, certainly. I think it's probably headcount as well. I think the post-COVID era, especially in tech, the companies that I've been involved in, there's been a tremendous sense of right-sizing. I mean, you see it all day long in the news, whether it's layoffs and headcount reduction. So I think that's been certainly a familiar pattern for a lot of chief marketing officers out there.

3:48Okay. So do more with less, which we all have to do at one point in our career or another, right? What are the extenuating... We're going to get to AI in a second. So excluding AI, what are the challenges that are adding to this pressure for marketers right now as you see it? Probably three things. One, certainly the increasingly shortest attention span of the target audience. I think the ability to capture and captivate someone's imagination with a product, a new product or brand, it's hard. I mean, every chief marketing officer out there, every CMO is going to say, yeah, it's just noisy. There's constant noise on channels, social advertising.

4:26My ability to reach my audience is very, very difficult. I think the second thing that's making it, I'll say this one's kind of a mixed blessing, right? But it's this concept of this technology explosion in and around the world of MarTech, right? And you go back, rewind the tape five years ago and there was maybe a couple hundred, maybe a thousand MarTech, you know, marketing technologies out there to help aid this. Now there's well over, you know, 10 ,000. I think if you look at the latest Loomiscape on this or the, you know, the chief MarTech report on this, I mean, it's just, it's overwhelming how many are out there.

4:58And I can tell you as a CMO, I get pinged every single day by someone trying to sell me something new and it all looks great. But it's like when you go to one of those buffets where you just can't eat it all and you got to figure out what, what will have the biggest impact on the business. And then I think the third thing that ultimately is making it harder is just the rate of change out there. And I'll kind of, I guess I'll preview to the world of AI, but just in addition to that, so much change going on, impacting the market. That's one thing for CMOs. We're resilient. We've been through change.

5:29We get it. But the reality is that trickles down to the target audiences in a way where they're sitting now and the person you're trying to reach and tell them that your software is the best or your technology is the best or your product's the best they're just being bombarded and bombarded with stories news all day long on the things that they need to change so to cut through that noise and actually get their attention it's tough it's tough and it's it's kind of oxymoronish or ironic or whatever because as cmos are getting inundated cmos also have to then consider what they're selling to other people and promoting other people and how they dare be.

6:07Yeah. I mean, there was that, uh, I'll go back in time a little bit, but it was kind of that, uh, that famous Doug Kessler slide deck that was going around, uh, several years back about the growth of content marketing. It was all about this, just like, we're about to be overwhelmed with crap. And, and, and that, that story did come true because in many ways, just the rate of content creation and how that was being used as a mechanism to drive growth, uh, certainly became, I'd say, overwhelming, or at least past that tipping point, you add AI into the mix, you had the ability to kind of generate content at scale.

6:40And now all of a sudden, you're just multiplying that. So I think this, you know, again, I'm an optimist, I'll say, you know, I'll put that spin on it, that it's challenging, but in many ways, for good brands to be authentic, to be real, to be to really leverage the language of their brand, it's an amazing opportunity. It really is. I mean, it's a very, very, for many reasons, unique time in our world, meaning the world of marketing. And again, we're going to get to a really big seminal moment and what's changing with AI in a second. But I want to go back to something I said earlier about the second part of that statement, which was brand consistency is key to success.

7:16Now, when I read that, I went, man, that's the most obvious thing ever. But then I said, why is it so hard to be that consistent brand message across all the channels? So elaborate on why, how, and why is brand consistency? So, and what do you say to somebody who goes, well, of course it is, Steve. Yeah, I think there's the obvious, you know, hit yourself in the head and say, of course we do that. But then you really dig down to that next layer and challenge yourself and say, do we really do this? Are we consistent in our language? Are we consistent on our brand? I think many times companies mistakenly associate brand with, yeah, my colors, my logos, my style guides, all of those are consistent.

7:55So therefore we are a consistent brand. Really, nothing could be further from the truth, right? So going back on some stats, right? So brand impact report 2024, conflicting brand usage leads to a 56 % decrease in brand recognition, confusion among consumers. I mean, you see this even with some huge, huge companies. I think there's a couple that I highlighted. I won't name names, but one company that had a slogan, finger licking good, translated that into eat your fingers off. in another language, in another culture. So, I mean, these things happen. And I don't think it would be too hard to find hundreds of examples of brand missteps, whether they're big ones like that, just little ones where the CMO kind of says, yeah, probably could have done this better when we translated this article into this other language, this other culture.

8:49But when we ran this campaign and we felt that sentiment was really strong in our US market where we know our customers or we've been around forever. But when we brought that to Latin America, you kind of scratched your head and said, you know, this doesn't really work for us. This isn't an expression we would use or this isn't even a sentiment we would want our customers to use. So again, I think that consistency issue is critical, but it's that, I guess, cultural adaptation as you start bringing those things to market. Yeah. I think a word I would add to is contextually as well. Meaning don't, and it goes back to the, you know, I have a belief that marketers don't give consumers and buyers enough credit just to start.

9:32And what I mean by that is in the, in the scheme of, they know that we have data on them. They know, you know, our, right. Whether it's to cookie, whether it's to what we bought, whether we brought, whatever the case may be. And then when we show them something that's not contextually relevant, hence the lack of consistency, that's another big problem. Yeah. I mean, I think it holds true to every dimension. And this actually goes back to what one of your first questions, which is why is it getting so hard? Think of all the channels you have to be consistent on. Right. And even though each one of those, let's take a take a look at social channels.

10:07Maybe it's LinkedIn has a certain different tone and tenor than your Instagram channel and so forth. Still being wildly inconsistent doesn't serve you any well. Exactly. Exactly. All right. Let's get to the elephant, as I call it, in everybody's room, the AI, but specifically gen AI, right? And, you know, as you called it, like an explosion of technologies, which it is, right? I mean, you mentioned the MarTech and Loomiscape and all the MarTech options. The AI is just, we're not even, I say we can't even see the iceberg, a lot of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI technology. So I know you are a big believer that marketing and language are extremely linked, right?

10:46Elaborate on that. Sure. I mean, words matter, right? And I think when it comes down to a brand and their identity, oftentimes what we used to rely on, which is a human to human interaction, like a, I go into your store or I talk to your salesperson is now happening through digital channels. And, you know, as such, I mean, you have very limited way to reach those audiences, whether it's through the written word or through video or audio like this. Again, the ability to maintain that consistency or communicate the values that you want in your brand is getting incredibly tough. But again, I think that's an area of opportunity for marketers to shine, be authentic.

11:26I mean, one of my favorite examples, I'll share a story. And this goes back to one of my first weeks on the job at Deepo. I've been here a little over eight months now. And we did a press tour. And we were in Seoul, Korea, sat down with a journalist. Journalists were ready to do a conference with this journalist about, you know, we didn't know what we were going to get. You know, as a former journalist, you know, you might have a question about competition, about funding, about, you know, where's the company going to go? What are you going to open an office here? Any of that? And we were prepared for anything.

11:57I'm sitting there with our CEO and our translator. And the very first thing this journalist says is, thank you. He just paused and was like, okay, why are you sharing this? Why are you saying thank you? And he said, several years ago, as a journalist, a story broke. It was about a Fortune 500 CEO. And we had translated that information. And all of my colleagues used a different translation technology, probably come to mind for many of you. It's a very common tool. And they got the story wrong. He used DeepL. He got the story right. It was a career-making moment for him. But I think it just goes to show that those things matter.

12:34And the accuracy and the precision and the type of language that's used, not only in journalism, but certainly in marketing, has a profound impact. And that's one of the things that Depot has been very proud of is the fact that as a translation technology, we've raised the bar much higher than what I'll say are kind of the household names in this technology. And again, if you're on vacation and you need to translate a menu, those things are great. It doesn't matter. It's not going to make a difference. But if you're translating your corporate brochure, your legal contracts, your product documentation, all of those things, a huge, huge difference in terms of quality and in terms of the impact it'll have on your business.

13:16Before we go on, I have to apologize. I think I pronounced the company DeepL before. It's DeepL. DeepL. Yeah. We even do that internally. It's kind of fun. I just wanted to get that out there. Yeah. But you're so right about the translations of the language AI and especially like, you know, to localize the content, right, which then ensures the brand consistency. And it just snowballs in a good way from there, right, about you're not just taking something that's written in one language and translating it verbatim into another language, assuming it's correct. Exactly. And this is where, you know, one of the big debates that you often hear as it relates to AI is, you know, is it going to replace jobs and things like that?

13:57But for us, this is clearly an area where it's making those professional translators more productive. And it's giving them the ability to perfect the language. But in some cases, it's just accelerating the way in which those companies can get content and information to the market. I mean, all of it is marketers. Time is our biggest adversary. You want to get something out, new product launch. You want to get it in all the markets that you serve. And one of the biggest challenges is, well, we're going to have to localize all those materials. We're going to have to get it out to our internal teams.

14:29We're going to have to do all this. And you add at least a month or two onto your business. What if you could dramatically compress that time and say, you know what? We can do it at the same time. We've got the technology now to do this. We can get it out within days and maybe hours versus weeks and months for a business that is in a very hot and rapidly growing market. That's huge. Yeah, because, I mean, again, I'm going to say Captain Obvious here, but by just going verbatim with the translation. I mean, you run the risk of really, you know, the cultural differences, the alienating the local people and just, and then once you, to me, once you do that once you're pretty much done.

15:04Yeah. And this is an area where I guess, you know, I'll say CMOs maybe have had a, not a direct connection with this topic because for years it was done completely manually and it was almost like a fixed cost. And it might not have even been part of the marketing organization. It might have just been some corporate service or something like that. But for global companies that are dealing with global communication, the ability to accelerate this process in a way that is not only accurate, but secure and incredibly fast is a tremendous opportunity. I'll give you one example. There's a large e-commerce company, a customer of ours in Europe, and they wanted to enter a completely new market in Eastern Europe.

15:46And they had 400 ,000 SKUs. Okay. Just do the math on that. How long would it take to translate the product descriptions on 400 ,000 SKUs? You couldn't do it, right? But now using AI and the ability to kind of systematically translate that information, you could get into that market, start selling the products that you know are going to have the biggest impact, and then gradually get the long tail of products translated over time. So it's just a simple example of that. But we see those over and over again. We have a large news agency that's translating thousands of documents a day into languages that aren't their core market.

16:20And all of a sudden, they're opening up a brand new market. You couldn't do that if it took three weeks to translate that information because no one wants to read news that's three weeks old, right? So all of a sudden, you're able to do this real time. You're opening up an entirely new market for that audience. One of our favorite examples, we just did our customer conference last week. And one of our favorite examples, a gentleman spoke up on stage with us, Harvard Business Publishing. They're talking about how they're using this kind of technology to reach an entirely new segment of audiences.

16:52If you go through any airport, you'll see their publications all throughout. And now all of a sudden, they want to be able to deliver that in multiple languages in multiple regions. It is a great example. Let me take a step back on the AI, make it more holistic to get your thoughts just on AI in general, where it's at in the world of marketing. Where do you think it's going in marketing? Again, not agnostic of DeepL, just in general. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's a great question. If I had the answer, I'd probably be making some bets right now on the future. No, I mean, look, I think for many marketers, we've been through big evolutionary waves or transformational waves.

17:29First, the digital transformation and just going from what would be traditional kind of feet on the street kind of marketing to digital. And then the mobile revolution, if you will. I mean, these things absolutely will have an impact on marketing. When I think about AI, I think you're doing a couple of things. One is you're accelerating your ability to deliver relevant content and images. I mean, the ability to generate just interesting things fairly quickly is great, right? From a marketing perspective, ideation is going to be one of the best and most common use cases. Research, researching new markets.

18:04You know, I could type in something into a tool like perplexity and say, imagine I'm doing a podcast on the CMO Whisperer and these are the three topics, what would I talk about based on 2024 data? And I'd have a really great lineup. So there's all sorts of things like that, that I do think will make people more, certainly more productive. As it relates to the long-term, I think it's anybody's guess. I mean, really, when you think about like, what is two or three years going to look like? I'd hate to say that I have a great answer on that because I'm guessing I would be wrong. I mean, we're coming up on what, two year anniversary of ChatGPT?

18:38Just in a couple of days. So think of how much the world has changed just in that time. Well, like I said earlier, not only can we not see the tip of the iceberg, we can't see the iceberg yet. Yeah. And anybody who says they know, first of all, I call you know what on it. And then I go, thank you, move along. And if anybody who's listening, anybody tells you that, run away because no one knows. Yeah. I think the key right now, I mean, if I were to give any advice at all on this topic, which again, I'd be hesitant to do too vocally, but at least get your team started. One of the things we're doing is we're trying to look at every aspect of our team and say, okay, how can AI and automation help?

19:15Whether it's on our sales development functions and using technology to do that, customer service, right? I mean, we have so many different customers around the world. There are over 100 ,000 different businesses, right? So being able to support them in the language they care about and the topics and the rate of innovation, Our ability to crank out content that's highly relevant in videos in 20 different languages, really hard to do. But you add some AI technology and you could do it quite well. And you could go down the list of all the different ways in which we're seeing that potential. I think the guidance we often give for companies, especially as they think about AI and should we think about a company like DeepL?

19:56I mean, for us, it's about pick a few areas, play some bets, and try it out. Because I think the age of experimentation, 2023, maybe early 2024, is going to quickly come to a halt where the results are going to be expected. People trying these. They're going to be looking for either ROI. They're going to be looking for more mature solutions. They're going to be looking for what did this do for my business? because it's no longer just, you know, oh, hey, I want to generate some images for social media. Oh, this is great. I got a cat, you know, riding a polar bear. Oh, that was awesome. No, I get it.

20:33I get it. Okay. I want to spend a few minutes on and don't usually do this, and I don't want this to be a sales pitch for the company, but I want people to understand what D-PAL does. And some people might be hearing going, well, I could just use Google and Microsoft. What do I need this kind of specialized translation, if you will, for? So take a few minutes. What's the difference between the general purpose AI versus the specialized? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, you could almost use an example of a Swiss Army knife trained on the garbage of the Internet versus a highly specialized tool trained on language and very specific for translation, right?

21:10I mean, that's at a very basic level, the macro differences of how the models are created. Now, if you turn that into a what, what does that mean for an organization using this? It comes down to three things. One is certainly the security. We're not using customer information to train future models. It's really about the accuracy as well. So the level of precision on translating and translating content well, and I'll come back to that in a second, is critical. But it's also this concept of personalization, the ability to use your brand terms and your style and your tone and your language that keeps it consistent.

21:46I mean, we all, I mean, as surprised as we were at the ability of tools like ChatGPT to generate content, we're also, I think, as humans become very good at recognizing when something's written by AI. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's great. You know, this, you put in the effort and put in the prompt and someone gave you something that you cut and paste into a blog post or something like that. So again, I come back to this idea of authenticity and your style, your brand, your tone will be absolutely one of the defining criteria for brands. Now let's come back to that middle pillar, which is accuracy.

22:18What does that really mean for a company? One of the things, let's say you're translating your marketing content into 20 different languages. Create it in your English and then you're like, okay, we have 20 different markets we serve. Push this through a process, which historically was just 20 different people translating in maybe that language. And today might involve some AI technology getting you started and then humans as kind of tuning and perfecting it, right? So if you think about that as the sequence of events, that last step, edit distance, really critical point, not to get too geeky on like language stuff, but that edit distance is how many things you have to fix as an editor once it goes through this machine translation process.

22:57So let's say that you run it through a tool like you mentioned, I think you said Google or Microsoft, and then you as the final editor in that language, you come down and you say, okay, I've got to fix these 40 things, right? You're using DeepL, you're only fixing 10. It literally is that significant of a difference. And that distance of edit or that edit distance is essentially how many things you have to fix after you run it through machine translation. Now, that might not seem like a lot, but imagine you're doing that every single day across hundreds, if not thousands of documents. You're literally talking about an army of people's worth of work that you're saving just by using this kind of accurate translation on the front end.

23:34So, again, what does that mean for your business? Faster time to market. You can reach your customers better. You can reach them with the content that they care about. That concept of edit distance all comes down to the language, the quality of the translation. Yep. Interesting. All right. Final segment here, if you will. And I lovingly call this the random five. Okay. I'm ready. All right. I'm going to ask you five very, very random questions. It's a get to know you as a person. Okay. People can know your personality. Okay. So if you're ready, strap on. I'm just kidding. Number one, what superpower do you wish you had?

24:07Time travel. Okay. Number two. Is that a superpower? Or is that, is that like, I think it is. Okay. Awesome. I got it. I think it is. And the second question actually kind of ties to that, which is if you could have dinner or I mean, whatever, with any historical figure living or dead, who would it be and why? I'd have to go with, I'd have to go with Jesus. And I think the why, I mean, you know, just again, you could probably come up with a long list of reasons, but you know, certainly, yeah, I would, I'm going to go with that. That is my answer. There's no wrong answer, obviously. Right. Next question.