Preparing CMOs for CES - Cort Irish

0:25Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. at CES episode. This is the first in a series of conversations we're recording before, during, and after CES to give CMOs practical perspective on what matters most right now and what's coming next. Today, I'm joined by Court Irish, head of marketing at Claritas. Claritas works with agencies like Publisus, Horizon, and Dentsu. Brands including Walgreens, Verizon, and GM, and partners across media and data like Amazon, Comcast, and Google. and Adobe. Claritas is graciously supporting this entire CES series, helping make these conversations possible so CMOs can hear directly from peers and partners throughout the week.

1:10Court, it is so great to have you. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. It is an absolute pleasure to connect with you today. And I know CES is right around the corner. So excited, real excited about this. Yeah, we are recording this a few days before, and it'll be here before we know it. And I want to just jump right in. And I want to start with about Claritas and what CMOs should understand about the company's role, your role and the company's role in helping them drive growth today. What should they know about Claritas and CMOs? The focus for us, we're an outcome-obsessed AI-driven marketing optimization platform.

1:46That's who we are. So blending the industry's most trusted data foundation with a proprietary identity graph and advanced AI optimization engine, our focus is on driving results. And so what does that mean? I'll unpack that a little bit here. From a marketing perspective, where we help that community is helping them identify their highest potential customers with rich identity based audience intelligence. We also help them activate precision targeted campaigns across multiple channels like email and CTV, audio, broadcast TV even. And then we measure the true impact of every impression with our advanced multi-touch and incremental attribution.

2:22And then And sort of across that entire spectrum, we optimize performance using some very patented and advanced AI that we've got to help them optimize ROI across the entire journey, every stage from audiences to creative to media in that full attribution feedback loop. So that's who we are. Thanks, Corey. That's fantastic. And I really am interested in your take on this next question because I have my own thoughts and I talk to CMOs all the time. But I'm really interested in your take on looking back over the past, say, 12 to 18 months. What are some things that have changed in what CMOs are asking you for?

3:00The biggest changes have come from how do we take all of these amazing AI tools that exist? How do we apply these various tools and everything that's happening on the AI front to our business, to our marketing strategies, to our marketing activation? So I think the biggest thing that's changed is just this movement from taking a bunch of disparate AI platforms and technologies that are out there and using them as various tools within siloed buckets, but being able to kind of integrate all of those into the full marketing stack, right? From audiences to creative, to media decisioning, to measurement.

3:37And then, as I'd mentioned previously, that full optimization loop. And so I think the thing that's changed the most is you have all this stuff that's out there. Everybody's talking about it. We have 50 tools that come out new every single day that are AI focused. How do we harness that to better the campaign strategy and the outcomes that we deliver? That is where we played such a large role in helping. So it's really not about adding another tool, per se. It's about fixing how decisions get made. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah, it's not about adding a tool. It's more about the orchestration of the various tools to come together to deliver a campaign from start to end, right?

4:14And I think that's where the biggest change has come because now there's platforms and there's tools that sort of help bridge those gaps. It might be, you know, media or marketing strategy development. We use AI for helping us with briefs. There was separate tools available to optimize creative and optimize measurement methodologies, right? That's all great. But the ability to pull that together and orchestrate it into one succinct campaign that learns from all the elements and the measurement from those campaigns, that's the thing that's changed the most. And that's what we're excited about. When you used the term AI-driven optimization, so put that in like day-to-day terms.

4:54What does that mean in a day-to-day life of a CMO? It is to focus on the optimization across everything that you're doing from a marketing perspective. So when you think about the marketing workflows that people like myself and yourself and others go through that live in the world of marketing, right, they're historically in different buckets. You've got the marketing strategy and the planning bucket, right, area of focus. You've got the media buying and the planning. You've got the creative development. You've got the activation. Where are we going to run campaigns across, you know, digital and non-digital channels?

5:29And then you've got the measurement piece of it. Historically, that's been very fragmented. And I think that's one of the challenges that I should have mentioned previously. It's very fragmented historically. I think AI optimization, from our perspective, is the ability to tie all of those together and have AI help us inform the decisions that are made across all of those workflows. Where in the past, they've been done in sort of separate, disparate buckets. It's sort of combining all that to get the best outcome and performance-driven ROI that you can get by integrating all of that together. So less fragmentation, more integration.

6:06Tell me if this is a fair thing. A synonym when you say fragment and fragmented is siloed, right? Siloed. Yep. Great term. Yep. Exactly. Very siloed. Which we all know, I jokingly say there's a reason it's a four-letter word. Because it's the death. You know this. And now with AI-driven optimization, those walls, hopefully, right, come down. Yep. Absolutely. So this really is different from optimizing one campaign at a time then, right? We're talking way past that now. Definitely. Yeah, we're talking about multiple campaigns happening in real time. So it's really sort of changing the definition of optimization.

6:42Yeah, and it's fascinating where this is going. Okay, so let me pivot into the platforms that are currently out there. And Lord knows as we speak, in the time this is done, 500 new ones will come out, right? It's crazy. But as we stand right now, Court, where do most AI platforms stop short, if you will, once things get complex? Yeah, good question. Where I feel they stop short is a lot of the AI that's in marketing in our ecosystem today is really more assistive driven, meaning it's built to help with specific tasks, one task at a time. You know, I'd referenced it earlier in the podcast, but we focus on the orchestration.

7:24So I think that's where some fall short is just being more focused on the system. Our AI is designed to understand who the customer is, how they behave across channels, what creative is resonating with them, and where media drives outcomes. And then optimizing across all of that together. So that's sort of that full optimization loop. And I think today where some things fall short is they might do one or they might do two or maybe they do two or three of those things, but they're missing the fourth and the fifth bucket. And so really it's about the orchestration of all these various tools as opposed to using them in different assistive capacities.

8:03You know, and I mentioned creative briefs. A lot of people use ChatGPT for copywriting and people will build custom GPTs for very specific workflows, you know, internally. All of that stuff is good. I think the part that's lacking is the ability to take those and integrate it into a larger optimization driven campaign. So that's probably where things lack today. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you. We're going back to that word again, silo, right, where they're not connected. Yep, yep, exactly. I think that continues to be the biggest struggle for marketers is just everything sort of still sits in silos.

8:39is people are doing a much better job today than they have. I mean, much better job in the last month, two months, six months than they were in the early part of 2025. And as AI continues to evolve, people will still start getting better at it, but it still is a challenge. Yeah, that's exactly, which is where they lean on companies like Claritas to help them understand because the noise is just getting louder and louder. I know I'm being Captain Obvious here, but it's where we're at, right? It is. It is. And it really feels like it's more of a shift in the operating model that versus just better tech, if you will.

9:17That's 100 percent right. I mean, I think it's the it's the approach that marketers are taking when they when they log in every day. Right. It's sort of the how are you going to approach? And it may not be a full campaign. It may be building out a thought leadership piece around a certain topic. But even in that scenario, while on the surface it might feel siloed, there's an orchestration that you can take or should take as it relates to developing that. How does that content piece tie in with the other campaigns? What does it do to deliver on the KPIs as an overall organization that you have?

9:48Does it? Does it not? So that's sort of the difference in thinking as opposed to just saying, you know what, today I'm going to build a thought leadership piece on X, Y, and Z, and then hopefully we'll see if it works and make sure it's aligned with the campaign. The hope and pray. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I know from talking to CMOs, one of the biggest struggles is how to operationalize AI. Right. From where you sit, where do CMOs struggle most when they're trying to operationalize AI? Where the biggest struggle from my perspective is, you know, it's not the technology, as we talked about just a second ago.

10:21There's an abundance of technology. It's the fragmentation. Right. It's the siloed. marketers have data in one place over here. They've got media sitting in another area. Creative is definitely in somewhere else. Measurement typically, unfortunately, still lags behind a little bit. And so AI can't optimize what's not connected. What we help brands do and others is to align the teams, the data, the partners around a single optimization framework. So AI drives the decisions, not just generates the insights that never get activated, if that makes sense. It does. And I love what you said, and I'm going to see if I summarize it correctly.

10:58What you said is AI can't optimize silos. Things can get connected, obviously, connecting data and different other platforms, but it struggles to optimize to the extent that's needed to drive the KPIs at every decision point. Because all of those separate silos, there's different decision points within each of those, whether it's media planning, whether it's creative optimization, or even measurement and how that measurement and those insights push back to refining the audience selection as an example. AI struggles if that full optimization is not built out and throughout that entire connection.

11:32Yeah. So let's pivot to how when things look good and present day success, if you will. And when this is all working, what does success look like for a CMO right now? I would categorize success in three ways. speed, right? So the ability to move faster from generating insights into activation. As an example, understanding the insights from an audience that may be converting from a campaign or may not be converting. Historically, that's done through various reporting mechanisms that are more of a manual basis, but leveraging AI to help understand and dig through and make sense of the insights from a campaign and the people that convert and taking those insights to optimize audiences to scale the campaign that look like the best customers that are converting, or in some cases, move campaigns away from customers that are converting.

12:27These insights and these signals that come from the AI can help optimize those. And that's just one example. I think efficiency is another one, right? So less waste across media and creative. The more tightly you can refine and develop it more intelligent based campaigns for optimization, the less waste across media, right? So there was a world in which we used to live in. I'm going to date myself as a media buyer in my early days where it was a spray and pray scenario, right? Like we didn't have all these great tools and insights at our fingertips, right? So there was a spray approach. But the problem with spray and pray is you're wasting a lot of money.

13:02So the ability to use this optimization process to help refine where you should be allocating media dollars versus where you shouldn't, how much you should be spending. When a channel has hit its max and you need to start shifting dollars to another channel. That's all critical now. And same thing with creative, right? Well, creative can get very expensive, right? It's the costs for developing creative have come down, you know, thanks in large part to a lot of the AI capabilities that exist today. But without using the data and the insights to refine what that creative looks like based on what the AI is picking up is working and not working, how Steve reacts to an ad that's different than how court and what my insights and my demographics and psychographics are compared to yours.

13:44Same brand might be reaching us both, but the creative to me might be slightly different or drastically different than it is to you. That's all stuff that historically things like DCO and other processes could help optimize, but it can't necessarily be done on the fly like what AI can do. And so from an efficiency standpoint, being able to make sure the right creative hits the right audience at the right time is really a huge advantage. And then, you know, I think the third one would be the confidence, right? So decision making that's backed by real data. So not intuition, not I think this or, you know, here's what I think happened six months ago.

14:20And so that shouldn't play necessarily a role into the decisions to optimize. Making these real-time decisions based on real data in real time is critical. So I think the confidence in that, the execution and what your campaigns are doing is, and the strategy is the right one. All those three points are so, oh my gosh, they're so relevant for obvious reasons. But as you're saying them, I keep playing in my head, and everybody knows it. What I'm about to say is CMOs on average have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. And it's a well-known fact. There's many reasons I have my own, but those three points you just touched on.

14:59If I'm a CMO of a brand, especially, you know, like a, whatever, a brand, a retail brand, for example, I'm sleeping better at night knowing that I'm working with a Claritas that's going to give me speed, efficiency, and confidence. Yeah. 100 % agree. And you're right on. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's exciting, but challenging time to be a CMO, you know, in this, in this industry. Right. And when I say industry, it's across publishers and brands and agencies. It's just, it's a, you know, but at the same time, there's tremendous opportunity, you know, if people sort of embrace this, right? And yes, you know, we are, love Claritas, right?

15:38Love what we're doing, love our forward thinking and innovative technology and the optimization platform approach that we have. It's great. And there are others out there. I think from a marketing standpoint, it's just more about the right approach. And the right approach, meaning don't just adopt the tools, adopt the process, right? And so understand what tools exist, but more importantly, understand how those tools can be combined and integrated to ensure that your campaign strategy, implementation, audience selection, optimization, creative, it's sort of all tied together in a database, database optimization approach.

16:16I think that's where the rubber really meets the road. And from a CMO perspective, it's the thing that helps me sleep at night is to have the ability to do that. And, you know, the other part of that, too, it's understanding the different stakeholders within an organization, right? And so I think what you're seeing another big shift of is the KPIs that marketing is measured against are a lot of the same ones that we've always been, whether it's conversions, whether it's visits to a website, whether it's, you know, you know, somebody goes to my website, signs up for a newsletter. A lot of these KPIs still exist.

16:49But the beauty of where we're at today is not only are those KPIs great, but they're sort of a baseline, right? Understanding how an audience, a channel, an audience and a channel are really impacting a single conversion and how to optimize that on the fly is where it gets really exciting today. And that's all stuff that's doable with the tools that are out there and the companies that exist. And I think that goes a long way in some of the other internal conversations with stakeholders, because at the end of the day, you know, the conversation that I have with, you know, my boss, who is the CEO and chief growth officer here at Claritas, might be a little bit different from a KPI perspective than it would be with our CFO, who looks at KPIs and metrics in a slightly different capacity.

17:35capacity. It might be a different metric in terms of how I'm talking to our board of directors who have a bit different KPIs. And so the ability to broaden sort of the KPIs that you're measuring from a marketing standpoint and how to really show the true impact that your marketing's making on all of those different KPIs is critical. And so I think that's where a lot of these new AI technologies and capabilities are coming into play as well. You can actually get those tangible KPIs in hand and not just guess that that one point you just made i i would invite you to the highest mountaintop to scream it because having that ability to interact not interact because you already do with the rest of the c-suite but to put things in those i'm using this for a bottom line right because we all know the bottom line is the bottom line to show your ceo to show your cfo to cellular chief growth, those direct correlations to spend, to return.

18:32Yep. Yep, exactly. And, you know, AI, you know, in turn, I'll just give an example, you know, so we have a, you know, a super agent that we've built here at Claritas in-house, right? And this is an agent that it's not just applicable to marketing or sales or data science, it is holistic in its capabilities, right? And so the ability to understand our customers, our campaigns that we're running, the products that we're rolling out, updates within our product suite, all these different variables are sort of captured in this agent. So as an employee of Claritas, if you're a salesperson or a marketing person or the CFO or the CEO, the ability to engage with this AI to ask questions very specific to the things that you're looking at exist, and that exists within our walls.

19:20And I think you're also starting to see more organizations build similar tools in-house. Many of them today might be sort of siloed in terms of this one we built to develop content or this one we built to analyze spreadsheets and do research, all well and good. But combining those into more of a singular super agent type capacity for internal purposes would be strongly suggested. So that's an example of leveraging AI more from an internal tool perspective, but it's pretty exciting what the capabilities are today. It's incredible. Well, I could go, we could go on and have a whole show just about that one topic for sure, but let's, let's move to CES.

19:58Yeah. What are you looking for this year? Any themes? Like what, what, what should people listening to this? What should they be on the lookout for? What are you looking for and what should people be on the lookout for? Yeah, I think, I think there's three main ones that come to mind. I'm sure there's, there's, there's many more that others would, you know, add onto this, but from my perspective, the three, it's not going to be a surprise. AI will be everywhere again. But I think the difference with what I'm expecting and with CES is it's not about the fact that AI is everywhere and there's all these tools.

20:29I think it's more about the fact that now it has to work, right? So I think we're moving past this AI hype into AI that delivers real outcomes across devices, platforms, and experiences. And I think that's the key difference here. Not that conferences and other events weren't doing a decent job of it before, but I did feel like a lot of them in 2025 were just AI is everywhere. It's all over the place, but less about how to embrace those and adapt them into the very specific needs that you have as an organization, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's data science, accounting, or whatever.

21:03I think this year, the focus is going to be more on how AI can be leveraged to deliver real outcomes. So that would be one. Second one would be, you know, ecosystems over point solutions so i think the the story there you know ces isn't necessarily anymore about a bunch of individual products that exist yeah some new shiny toys will be rolled out and all of that that happens every year um which is fine but it's it's less about the shiny new toy and more about how everything connects and so how that shiny new toy whatever it might be connects data, devices, platforms, and experiences, sort of what we've talked about throughout this podcast, is how do you connect and integrate all that together?

21:47And so I think there'll be a lot of focus on that in the panels that you see, even in the product demonstrations that are probably going to be shown for certain. I think it's more about how everything connects together to deliver very specific outcomes. And then one final one would be experience-driven differentiation. So So, you know, whether it's smart home technology, mobility, retail, media, brands are competing with how seamlessly and intelligently they can engage consumers across channels. And so I think the brands are recognizing the need to integrate this together, but it's more about the personalization and the experience with the consumer at every touch point throughout the day.

22:26You know, whether it is smart home device or some of the advanced, amazing technology and cars that it's rolling out, it's how you as a brand continue to have that experience with that customer across all of those touch points throughout the day. You know, it isn't so much more just about the media channels that we select, be it social, email, digital, you know, podcast. Those are all critical, but it's that plus, right? So how else are we engaging with consumers on a regular basis based on all this new technology? Again, going back to my previous ecosystem over point solutions, it's about that interconnectivity.

23:00Yeah, I think it's safe to say that integration is now officially table stakes. Agreed. I would agree. And if you're not comfortable hearing that, well, sorry, but it is. Yep. I would agree with that. A thousand percent. I want to pivot a little bit quickly into now what comes out of CES, what they mean for CMOs once they're quote unquote back after the show. What are some things they should be expecting or looking to do post-CES? One big thing that I would suggest continues to be a focus is on unifying identity and data foundations. And so what I mean by that is focused, like you can't optimize across channels without knowing who your customer is across multiple touch points, right?

23:42So I think that identity, that data unification will continue to be such a critical foundation to everything that we do in marketing. Yep. Because at the end of the day, it's about knowing and understanding your customers, who your next customers are, down to the most granular level humanly possible. while also understanding that that will continue to shift again. So what I know about Steve as an example today might be different than tomorrow, right? Just based on how consumer habits continue to evolve and change. So I think that ability to unify that data on a regular basis in real time, keep it current and act upon it is going to be critical.

24:24Another big one would be, you know, the focus on AI driving actions, right? not just the insights. And I know we've kind of talked a lot about that throughout the podcast, but if AI is not directly influenced your media buying and planning strategy, your creative development and optimization and the investment decisions from a media standpoint, and just the overall strategy, if you're not leveraging AI to do a lot of that for you based on insights and data, then it's definitely underperforming for you. I mean, that doesn't do away from all the amazing tools that exist today that people use internally within various departments from an AI perspective, but being able to take that AI capability to the next level to help it drive and inform the decisioning related to your media planning, just marketing strategy in general and everything that follows that from an implementation.

25:10And then ongoing optimization, I think, is the other key piece of that. So that kind of gets my third, if you will, suggestion to focus on from a marketing perspective, which is, you know, invest in measurement that closes the loop, right? So optimization only works when measurement feeds back into the activation continuously, right? So it's awesome if you have all this data and these insights from your campaign and what's working and what's not working. But if you're not connecting that to its ability to optimize the audiences that you're targeting, optimize the overall media buying and planning strategy if needed.

25:44If those insights are not captured to help inform that, then you're missing out, right? And so I think that optimization piece, I can't undersell it is such a critical aspect to it. And there's a lot of tremendous measurement capabilities and products that are in the marketplace today. But getting that deep insights and attribution, incremental lift, multi-touch attribution specifically is out there and available. It's one of the things that marketers are coming to us on a more regular basis for just because they're starting to understand how critical that piece is to driving the ongoing optimization across all campaigns.