Marketing in the age of AI with Adobe Enterprise CMO, Rachel Thornton

0:00Rachel Thornton:Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. This episode is brought to you in partnership with my good friends at Adobe, who last year invited me over to their summit. Now, this year I could not make it, but instead I've managed to get a hold of their enterprise CMO, Rachel Thornton, to find out all about how Adobe do B2B marketing, what new products they're launching, and how AI is actually impacting marketing, to find out the fact from fiction. Great episode. There's lots in it. Some really useful advice from Rachel. You'll enjoy it. Here it is.

0:35Rachel Thornton:Rachel it's great to have you join me. No it's great to be here thank you. Well I had an amazing time last year at Summit. It was a truly spectacular production that you put on. I mean I guess the expectations must be very high given it is Adobe of course but how has Summit been for you this year? Oh it's really been amazing. We've had 14 ,000 folks join us here in Las Vegas. We've had I think 40 ,000 people join us online. It's been a great lineup of keynotes, of customer speakers, of sessions. I'm sitting in our Adobe Pavilion, which is a place where you can get hands on with our technology as well as our partner technology.

1:17But yeah, I just, I think it's been really great. We've had some great announcements that we've done. So, you know, good show overall.

1:24Rachel Thornton:Great. Well, it's very, I remember being very impressed when I was there last year. So So congratulations on another fine show. Just to introduce yourself to everyone listening and watching, you've had a very impressive resume. You've worked for some highly impressive companies. Just give us a taste of your career. And maybe if you can, tell us what you think makes a successful CMO. Let's see. I've always actually been in the technology industry. So I started years ago at Microsoft, actually did what's known as field marketing. I think a lot of your B2B audience will know that term. I was there.

2:01I was lucky enough then to work at Cisco Systems. Then I worked at Salesforce. So that was exciting. Did a lot of great stuff there. Always marketing, you know, always. And also marketing often to technology people, CIOs, developers. I was at AWS then. And then while I was at AWS, it was nice because I was actually a customer of Adobe. So that's how I got to really know them and actually really know the Adobe team. So it was fun to come to this role. And I think really exciting because as a marketer to market to other marketers, you really do, you have to keep a high bar so that, you know, because you're dealing with folks who know the craft and so it keeps you on your toes.

2:46Rachel Thornton:I love your phrase, a marketer marketing to marketers, which is very meta, isn't it? And we're talking about that on a marketing podcast as well. So it doesn't get more meta than that. Maybe just what makes a successful B2B marketer, do you think? What are the key ingredients to a successful B2B? I think it's the same as a successful, whether you want to say B2C, consumer marketer. I think it's someone who is, you know, focused on the customer, is innovative. I really, you have to be creative. Even in B2B marketing, I think B2B doesn't necessarily mean it's just boring or stayed. It can be just as creative, just as innovative.

3:26And so I think, you know, being focused on customers, being keen to help customers solve problems, solve challenges, advance their business, grow their business. I think bringing to life great stories. I think that's true across any industry. You know, whether you're Nike or whether you're, you know, AWS or Cisco. It's like, how do you tell that story and get customers really excited about the possibilities, about the potential? So I think that marketers who can bring that to life, who can understand their brand and match, you know, what the customer wants to accomplish, what the brand promises and how you bring those two things together.

4:07I think that makes a powerful marketer.

4:10Rachel Thornton:It really does. Some of the data I've come across actually just really opened my eyes. I think Ehrenberg Bass had this insight that 95 % of people are not in the market in B2B to buy what you're selling at any point in time. And it just made me realize that as marketers, our job is to appeal to a future buyer, isn't it? And buying cycles can be quite long, particularly in enterprise organizations as well, where the decision making takes time and there's lots of people involved as well. So it's really important, isn't it, to build the brand as well as sell the product. Yeah, 100%. And I think sometimes people, they don't always think about that.

4:44They don't always think about the brand concept in B2B, but it is very true. Enterprise selling cycles are long, you know, and sometimes they can be as long as nine, 10 months, maybe even a year or so. But you have to always be thinking, what is the story I want to tell the enterprise buyer? What is that buyer? What are the challenges they're trying to meet? You really have to understand and know your customer, you know, really start with your customer and what are they trying to achieve? And I think because the buyer may not be thinking about, you know, your brand or your product as what they need in that moment, you have to think, how do you stay top of mind?

5:21And that also you have to think through if they're not actively coming to me, how do I go to them? Right. So how am I in the places where they are? So whether it's content, whether it's working with press, whether it's working with analysts, whether it's attending events, whether it's driving thought leadership, you really do have to think, where are my customers and potential customers going to be? And am I showing up there? So to your point, even if they're not in the market at that moment, my brand continues to remain top of mind, my content, my story. Because then when they do realize, all right, I need to make this shift, or this disruption in the market has happened.

6:05Now I need to go talk to Adobe about my content supply chain or brand visibility. So I think that's important, especially for B2Bs, that you are thinking about what is your brand, how are you getting your brand out there, and how are you getting your story out there consistently and in a way that enterprises are able to sort of separate you from the pack, if you will, and say, yeah, I see what your value add is And now I understand when I need this, when I have this need, this is where I'm going to go.

6:35Rachel Thornton:I did some research quite recently, actually, interviewing 75 CMOs to find out what their biggest challenges were. And I was quite surprised at results. I was expecting to see I don't have enough money. I don't have enough resource. I can't get enough talent. The number one thing by far was dealing with the people and stakeholders. And it was quite fascinating. I mean, you obviously work in a large organization now and you've worked for some very, very big ones in the past as well. How important is it as leading a marketing function to be able to kind of engage other parts of the organization to deliver just exactly what you just said?

7:08Oh, it's critical. With B2B especially, you're always partnering with your sales organization. You're partnering with your product team, with your engineering team, because you have to understand that entire lifecycle. You're bringing in the view from what does the customer need? What's the voice of the customer? You're hearing from sales, like how are customers reacting to product? What's happening when you're having that conversation about the product or the pitch? And then working with engineering, working with product to understand, are we bringing in what the customer is looking for, what the customer challenge is?

7:45And then how are we then communicating the product back out to the customer, touching on, hey, this is what, you know, you said you were challenged with. This is what you were looking for. And then making sure that you are understanding product, understanding, you know, ICP, if it will, you know, ideal customer profile and having the product really tell that story. I think that for a marketer, you have to be able to work across all of those teams because those are your big stakeholders in the effort to, you know, drive business, drive engagement with customers. But I also think with marketers, especially now, working then with your CIO, your CTO, working with your team to understand what are the technology investments we're making so that we can do effective marketing, so we can build great customer experiences, so we can build great content, distribute that content, analyze and understand that content.

8:43So you have to be sort of in lockstep with your CIO or your CTO on what do we want our investment roadmap to be or investment in internal product roadmap to be in order to make sure we're delivering for customers.

8:57Rachel Thornton:That makes a ton of sense. Now, we're having this conversation while you're at Summit. You've got 40 ,000 people in the room. It's incredible production. I just wonder from a kind of B2B marketing perspective, what's the role of big events like the one you're hosting now? How important are there and how do you kind of justify the ROI on something like this? I mean, can you even work? Oh, so I will say I can answer both questions confidently. Yes, they are important. What is what is so great about, I think, in-person events, I am a little biased because I've done a lot of them over the years, but people like to get together and and in real life talk with other people.

9:34They like to learn from each other. They like to hear, you know, if I'm a CMO and I have this challenge, what has someone else in my industry done? Or maybe in a slightly different industry, but a similar challenge, what are they doing? And I think nothing beats the chance to have those face-to-face conversations. I mean, we see it in the buzz and the energy and the event, whether we see it in our community pavilion. We also do an executive forum for our CMO customers. So the conversations there are very rich, but you also see it in fun places like in the hallways, as people going from session to session, you know, they bump into each other, they have conversations.

10:09I think, in fact, if you talk to people, they'll say some of the most valuable things they have are those hallway conversations while they're here. And in terms of the ROI, absolutely. In fact, one of the other important stakeholders for any CMO is their CFO, and that understanding, like, what is your investment? So for every dollar, every incremental dollar, what are you bringing in in terms of whether it's new customer opportunities, customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty. In B2B, obviously, there's a focus on pipeline and revenue. So I partner closely with my CRO and we look at this event as how do we get all of our big customer deals here?

10:48How do we get our big customers here? And then how do we literally measure what was sort of the pipeline we came into the event with? How did it progress? How did it close? So absolutely, we have a formula for making sure that the investment here generates the ROI. And then making sure we're telling that story back to the CFO to say, you know, this is why it was the right investment and this is what it generated for our business.

11:11Rachel Thornton:It's a reminder, isn't it? People buy from people still, even in the age of AI, we're still buying from each other, aren't we? She reminds me. So one of the presentations I heard at Summit last year that really blew my mind, actually, was very interesting, was the Coke CEO. And he was asked, you know, from a marketing perspective, where are you placing your bets? And the obvious one was, well, we're leaning into AI, we're experimenting, we're trying to learn how far we can take personalization. The other one to our conversation was we're putting a lot of money on experiential in person because we kind of think two things are happening at once here.

11:46Rachel Thornton:We are using technology like we never have done before, but people also love to have real experiences with brands and experience them in real life. And you see that, I can't remember what the exact data point is, but the amount of money being invested in trade events and shows has increased significantly, particularly post-COVID, I think, as well. It proved to us, didn't it? Now, I've mentioned AI. And, of course, it was a real eye-opener for me, actually, last year just to understand because you guys are at the forefront of AI. I have to say, just being at the conference for three days, I learned so much.

12:20Rachel Thornton:which I think it's the first time I came across the word agentic, which seems a bit wild that in just one year, you know, we've gone from, you know, agentic AI to what we, you know, what we're seeing today. What have been the biggest changes in the past 12 months when it comes to how we're using AI from a marketing perspective? I think there's been sort of two big changes, both internally for marketing teams and then externally for your customers. I'm excited about the potential for AI to help amplify the impact of teams. That's how I think about it is like, how can now my teams be freed up from some work that was, you know, it was maybe time consuming or repetitive or rote.

12:59And now how can I basically say, great, now I have, you know, my team of agents that can do that. And now I can take my marketers and think, what are the new strategies? What are the new campaigns? What are the new ideas we could generate? So I think it really does amplify your team and amplify the innovation and creativity of your team. and help them get campaigns, content creative out there faster. Really for the first time, because you can combine the data you have on your customer with the ability to map content and experiences and touch points onto that customer data, you can build really rich, robust customer experiences.

13:34What sort of held us back in the past was, one, did we have the right data foundation? But two, if we really wanted to personalize that customer's experience with a brand, did we have the right content? And content would be a bottleneck if you had maybe a campaign you created, but it took you months to get that campaign out the door because, you know, doing the creative ideation is one thing coming up with the core of the campaign and then the assets, but now replicating those assets, producing those assets across multiple channels, it took time and so you were perforce limited on just maybe the number of campaigns you could do the number of segments you could create and i think now with ai you can basically say all right i have this campaign like we have this product uh adobe gen studio it can be your end-to-end content supply chain creating campaigns ideating campaigns but then critically producing the assets at scale, which really allows marketers not only to do content that gets really focused on the individual, like on your key customer, but you can experiment much faster, right?

14:49Because you can create the assets faster, you can experiment with what's working, what's not working. So I'm excited about that because, you know, every marketer I know is always keen to say, how do I reach more customers? How do I really give them great experiences? And I think the unlock with AI to help scale personalization is very rich. I think externally, as we think about customers and as marketers think about the traditional work streams that they've relied on to reach customers, I think there's been a lot of disruption with AI with Agentec. If you think about the concept of brand visibility, like how my brand shows up.

15:30It used to be you really focused on SEO, right? That was, you understood how that works, you worked, you knew the content, you understand, you know, what you needed to do to make sure you were ranking. As search traffic has shifted over to LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, as a marketer, you now have to think, what's the content I own that shows up? But more importantly, where is, where are the other sources of content that are feeding those LLMs and how are be showing up, especially in places where it's less about owned brand content and more about your customers or community talking about you.

16:04I read it's a good example. You know, you want to make sure that you're understanding your customers in your community and then your own content to make sure you show up well in search, in brand discoverability. I also look at content supply chain like we just talked about, customer experiences. So we talked a few minutes ago about in-person events. But I do think now with AI, you're able to build much richer customer experiences across a lot of different customer touch points, including in-person. So we can see it's not just this is a standalone event for us, right? This is actually part of a broader experience as we look at maybe new customers who've come in early, or recently, I should say, what have been the touch points they had with us up until this moment where maybe they're at Summit for the first time.

16:51And then post this event, what are the follow-up things? What are the other experiences we're giving that new customer to get them really excited about Adobe and get them into the product? For current customers, they may know us, but when we expose them to different products, different solutions, including the new products we launched here, this event in the context of a bigger journey just gives us a chance to tell a much deeper, richer story. And AI not only helps us create that right content, but really understand the signals back and forth from what has the customer done? How do they respond to a piece of content or an experience?

17:28And what's the next thing we need to give them?

17:30Rachel Thornton:You're so right to talk about discoverability as well. I remember learning from SEMrush last year where they produced this discoverability index. So you're absolutely right. Not only is it about where are people, where are the LLMs learning from and also what kind of content and how genuine it is and what kind of authoritative content it has. It's incredibly important, isn't it? One eye-opener for me was the power of LinkedIn. I hadn't expected LinkedIn to be such an authority, but it turns out that the last five years I've been putting into LinkedIn has paid off. Don't forget to use LinkedIn as a B2B channel, but not just that, but also feeds the LLMs.

18:07Rachel Thornton:How has that changed your own marketing strategy? What have you had to do differently to become more discovered? The emphasis on community, like Adobe has a rich community. We have the Adobe Experience League, which is a lot of our B2B customers are a part of that. We have our Adobe Champions. These are people who are, if you will, power users who love the product, who share their love of the product. But more than ever, the nurturing of that community is critically important because with brand discoverability, you really need to think about it as, what are my customers saying when I'm not in a room?

18:46What is my community talking about about Adobe when we're not in that room with them? And you want to make sure that you have a high degree of confidence that it's going to be positive. And you do that by having robust community, having robust community engagement. So, you know, if there's a threat on Reddit and people are talking about brand discoverability or customer experience, Our customers are sharing what they know about Adobe and it's positive. So you really do have to think, what is my community strategy? I think more so than when, you know, if it was just SEO and that's just very much owned content, you have a high degree of control over that.

19:27I think with community, it's less about control and more about influence and nurture and how do they feel about the product? How do you keep them involved in what's happening, what's going on? But I think that is something that marketers, all marketers, as they think about discoverability, have to really look at and think what our customers are saying about us. How do we think about growing that community? Because the other interesting thing about, you know, LLMs and brand discoverability is if you have, because there is, you know, they can consume a lot of long tail content. If you have a piece out there that maybe is not a great reflection of what you would like your brand or your story to be, that's still going to show up.

20:08And so you have to think, all right, I'm not going to get a perfect result all the time in terms of maybe earned media. So how do I want to make sure I'm arming my experience or my community, if you will, with information, answering their questions, engaging them so they are showing up well for us?

20:26Rachel Thornton:Well, one of the concepts that struck me last year, actually, was the idea that because you're in marketing, you are customer zero of your own tools, aren't you? Which is a lot. I just thought that's a wonderful idea that the first person you try out all your new tools on is you. So I just wondered from your own marketing perspective, where has AI sort of touched and made the biggest impact on how you do your own marketing yourself? I think in sort of three areas on the team. One, as I mentioned, in content creation, production, distribution, and then the analytics, being able to scale content, being able to personalize content, that's made a huge difference.

21:06Because we're more effective with our campaigns, but also we're able to move faster, experiment more, and get campaigns out there. So it allows us to touch more segments, more customers. The other thing that's been interesting is looking at where we might have had teams that either weren't working not so much well together, but maybe it was a serial process. And can we now change it to a parallel process? We have a BDR team, so they help with not only getting content out to customers, but following up with customers. They work with sales. What we learned pretty quickly was there was a long time to create some of the customized, when they would want to get in a meeting with a customer.

21:48It was a chunk of time, like 90 plus minutes they were taking to do some prep. And we were able to shorten that to about 30 minutes. So saving them an hour, which at first you're like an hour, but you're like, great. Well, I have a lot of these folks. So now I just saved 100 man hours. And now what can I help? What can I do with it? Make some more productive. So we look at how AI can shorten some of the work time. Also, how can it make our internal efforts around understanding things like consumption of assets, consumption of resources? We're much better at understanding, hey, we had resources over here.

22:27We were using maybe their agency resources. Maybe they were, you know, partner team resources, internal team resources. What am I, how are those going? What am I spending? How, what's my burndown look like? So being able to understand that much quicker, again, I think the team is much better informed on what we're using, what we're spending. And then it just makes us better to make decisions in the moment if an investment opportunity comes up, like, hey, we want to invest in this campaign or maybe this new event.

22:54Rachel Thornton:And moving to your customers as well, I think I'm right in saying, I read in the press recently that you've just done a big partnership with Tesco. Yes. Am I right? Yes. Yes, which is huge because like Tesco, biggest grocery chain in the UK by a long, long way. And they've got huge amounts of data on how, you know, pretty much everybody in the UK shops as well. So is there anything you can share with us on how they are going to be using Adobe? I think it is definitely. We're excited about it, by the way. It was great working with them. And we're excited for all the opportunity to really help them navigate, you know, customers in certain areas.