Two Key Trends That Will Shape the Future of Marketing with Joyce Kim, Twilio

I've just released a book, from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small, all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike to Saster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents.

Every day I see articles and I talk to VCs who say they're only funding AI startups or AI. There's no question that generative AI has truly taken a leap forward in how we think about it. Especially as a startup that's coming up. I think you're going to see a lot of the tools that you use today inject the AI into it. And that's natural, right? We're doing the same. We're putting more AI into our CDP and our communications platforms so all the tools that marketers use will start to integrate AI into it. But if you think about newer things, especially leveraging generative AI, I always look at does this solve a very specific problem? Do they specialize in building the best algorithms? Are leveraging that AI technology to address a very specific pain point? And so depending on what it is that you're looking to solve, I try and look at it that way. If I see companies that are generically AI to a big, big problem area, to me that usually spells okay, it's hype. So I think the players that come out with something differentiated will be those that solve a very niche specific problem.

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Hey folks, our guest today is Joyce Kim, CMO at Twilio. With a market cap of more than 10 billion, Twilio is the leading industry platform that powers customer engagement. From voice to video to SMS and email. Joyce brings more than 20 years of experience scaling commercial innovation and growth in the technology sector through large scale digital transformation and brand elevation strategies. Previously, she served as the CMO for Genesis ARM and Wrike and held leadership Positions at Microsoft and Google. Today, Joyce and I are going to dive into the key trends that'll shape the future of marketing, specifically generative AI and first party data. Welcome to Traction Joyce. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Super excited about this session.

But let's start with your background.

You've had a very impressive career. CMO at a number of places, leadership positions at Giants and now CMO at Twilio. What led you to Twilio? Give us your backstory.

Yeah, an accidental marketer is the way that I describe it because I actually started my career as a programmer so I was developing and writing code and fell into product management and then product marketing. And as I looked back at my career, I've done the full stack if you will. So from processor designs to operating systems to applications, and when I looked at the key domain areas of what Twilio does, it's like throughout my career I have pretty much spent in each area of the business. So when this opportunity came, it was almost like a culmination of everything where video messaging, WebRTC and CDP. It was most recently a genesis with the customer experience platform. It was just really resonant to me with what the company did and how it brought everything together. So that's the story.

I interview maybe a hundred CMOs, the top companies and the majority of them have their start as engineers, either studied engineering or started in programming. I'm an engineer myself and went into product and growth and then became a founder. But is it that engineers are disloyal or just engineers make better marketers? What is the story that what are your key learnings for anyone else following along?

For me, I do believe that having more depth in the technology and the products, especially if you're a marketer in the tech industry, makes a difference and some of us gravitate towards more outbound and so we're like naturally more extroverts or something. And so when you put the combination together it does make an interesting marketing background. And so for me that's what really spurred me my journey going into them. I also think if you're passionate as a product or developer engineer, you want to tell the story of what you're trying to build. And so marketers do that. And so if you transition there and you've got the firm grasp of what you are trying to do, it does I think make a big difference.

Any advice or learnings from your journey that could serve as an inspiration for others who are early in their careers trying to move from engineering to product to then maybe marketing leadership someday.

To me it's just try it. I remember the fear of you think oh, I can't do that or this seems so different or maybe it's not something I want to do for a career. I think instead of thinking through the big picture, even if you decide to just give it a try, it will help you be a better product manager or a developer. So just having that open mind, I think is the biggest advice I'd give someone earlier in their career.

Well said. Openness is the biggest enabler of growth. You've had a 20 year plus career across industries, across departments and you've seen it all probably in marketing. What legacy marketing tactic you think is going to fade away as we look into the future today?

I actually haven't polled like how many companies are doing this, but it was pretty norm for you to think about what I call traditional audience segmentation based on some demographic or location or whatever it is. There's just a way that marketers thought about our target audience and I think that's going away. I think that's changing and it's been changing for a long time. And so if you're looking at big blocks of target audiences, that's probably a tactic that will become very obsolete very quickly.

And what will that get replaced by? What is the innovation there?

Well, it's the data and AI and machine learning that's changing that. It's obviously much more recent from a pure AI perspective, but we've had this notion of data and how to leverage data for so long. I think it was what, three years ago or two years ago when the cookies were going away for the next year or the next year. And so it became a big deal for companies to think through, like how do I leverage my data? And then that naturally leads to the question of what do you do with it? And so I think that's what's driving this change.

Certainly we're in an exciting time and the more people I talk to, they're not prepared with this cookie less future. And now everyone's been hit with generative AI and they're jumping on that bandwagon. And I feel like people barely recovered from web 3 and all of the buzz from the last couple years. In your view, what are the real trends that'll shape the future of marketing?

The things you just said, they feel separate but they're actually quite related. Right. So cookieless feature, as I talked about, it's been a sync. Like most marketers, if you're in the digital age, will Know what? That is? Now the urgency has faded a little bit, but even today, right, it's slated to really phase out by the end of 2024. That's not a lot of time unless.

Google pushes it out, pushes it again.

Yeah, but I think at some point they have to not push it out. And even if they do push it out, the genie's out of the bottle. Now every marketer should be conscious of the fact that they need first party data. We relied on third party data for so long, and this is what I said about big blocks of segmentation that's really based on third party data, because that's all customers. Now companies need to understand their customers. And so this is the importance of what I call first party data. And you'll now hear about zero party data, which is collecting insights from your own customers just by polling them or asking them. It's amazing what companies can do with data today. And I think AI can only be effective if you have the data. If you don't have the data, you cannot leverage AI and machine learning.

Garbage in, garbage out. In 2013, I was working on a startup that was building a chatbot on top of Zendesk, and in tests that we ran, it was 99% accurate. As we put it on Zendesk, people would say, make this thing stop. It would respond like a real human. And then we realized finally that, you know what, Zendesk has really small customers back then and they didn't have enough historical data. So it was just spitting out gibberish. Right. And so rightly said, AI won't work if you don't have significant amount of data. But let's get into the definitions for our audience that perhaps doesn't know what are the key differences between first party data and third party data and how do they impact a marketer's ability to understand and engage with their audience.

Like I said, first party data is typically what you as a company collect from your customers, their web activity or social engagement or everything that they do and interact with you. If you are able to actually collect that about that customer, that is first party data. Third party data is typically what's collected by a third party provider like a Google. They do that across many companies, typically using cookies, but they don't actually have a direct relationship with that customer. They just harness that data and then give that generic view to companies so that you can target specific audiences. And as I said now, another big sort of trend is zero party data, which is my ability to contact and engage my customers for very Specific things and they voluntarily give it to you. So having first party data really helps you understand your customers. And this is where you don't have to treat customers like a target audience block. They're individuals, you can understand their journey, you can understand what they're doing and what they might be interested in or how they like to interact with you. And so these are critical things for most marketers.

So end of 2024, third party data is going away. So what I gathered is you can't rent audiences, you can't borrow audiences, you need to own that relationship and if you don't have at the basic level list, then you're out of luck. What are some ingredients for an effective first party data strategy? What are some things people should be doing right now to collect more and do it authentically? Because just because you decided to go first party doesn't mean people are going to give you that information.

It's actually more than just collecting the data. And I would say from a first party data strategy, you have to think about what kind of data do you want to collect and then what are you going to do with it, how are you going to analyze it? Because the worst thing is to collect all this data and then be overwhelmed by it. Most people don't have a bunch of data scientists laying around that they can crunch through it and give you stuff. And the other thing is if it takes time to develop the analysis and the insights, then it's not that useful. So the trick for anyone thinking through, like how do I actually deploy this, is to figure out how you're going to collect that data. And it could be from websites, your mobile content, events, all of these things that you are putting out there. You want to know your prospects and customers and what they're doing with it, what's the sequence, how are they consuming and engaging or not, and then figuring out, okay, what is my technology platform that's going to ingest that and help me understand what the profiles are. Today you have companies that have customers coming in. I could be using my Gmail. There's so many different ways I could have come from a different company and move to another company. This identity resolution is a big deal. So I think understanding how to activate that data before you even collect it is one of the key strategies people need to think about.

Certainly now let's say you want to run ads. Can you take your email list and upload it to the ad platforms still and create an audience out of it? Or that's going away too.

You can do that. The worst thing is sending an ad to somebody like, I'm sure you have bought a pair of shoes and then you get the ads for those pair of shoes and you're like, I just bought those shoes, why are you sending me the ad? Right. Company is paying money to send you that ad. And so what first party data can help you do again in real time is to say, oh my God, you just bought that pair of shoes. I don't need to show you that data. So even though you're on my list, I'm going to suppress it. That just saved me money. This is true ROI from leveraging your first party data.

Dynamic suppressing or real time suppressing of that information.

Yeah.

How does Twilio help with all of this or where does Twilio sit? Because you guys control email, voice, video messaging, the whole spectrum. Right.

And we also have a cdp. So customer data platform is the underlying mechanism in which we try and provide a greater level of value to our customers. So if you're trying to send SMS marketing messages, emails, whatever it might be, you want to make sure you have this first party data that you're able to understand these profiles, create these journeys and then activate the right channel for each of these customers, depending on what they're doing.

Could you share some successes or case studies of companies that have successfully migrated? What are some steps they took A to Z to get there?

Yeah, an online example, Tradeseek, it's a peer to peer marketplace for luxury clothing and accessories. Right, Typical. Like I'm selling stuff on the web, of course I'm going to use third party cookies and Google Analytics to understand customer behavior on the websites and searches and things like that, which is great. But they said, look, we want to improve our conversion rates and really better understand what should we show our customers. Right. Because they're a website, you log on, they know who you are. But they're like, okay, how do I better do product recommendations and things like that? So they implemented Segment cdp which is Twilio's CDP platform. And we were able to collect so much more data as first party data for them. So they could really look at, hey, if a customer looks at these shoes and they go here, they're typically going to buy. Why do they not buy? Do they come back? Where do they come from? There's so much more contextual data that they were able to collect specifically about each customer. And it's scalable to the fact that you can look at each detailed profile, leverage the machine learning to detect patterns. And so this helped Them do much better product recommendations so that you had actual conversion rates at much bigger scale than you would have. Just looking at the traditional third party data mechanisms. The way that I describe it, it's you've gone to Amazon page, they have unlimited number of products, but they're going to show you something very different than they're showing me. And they've got an army of people that can analyze that data to be the best online retailer in the world. Smaller companies don't have that capability to deploy that kind of army, but this kind of technology can help you do just that. That's the beauty of a cdp.

And had they not leveraged this, what would be the downside? What would be their struggles? Because they're trying to be piecing this all together, probably not react in real time wasting money on ads.

Exactly. And I would be classified as a middle aged female, you know what I mean? Not a mother or not a professional. There's things that I do that are very different from the block that I may sit in. And I think that level of precision is expected today. That's the only way that you can actually win in digital. So to me it feels like any company who's not looking at how to do this is really missing out on just overall business goals.

I was having a chat with my cousin who's an ad exec at some of the top firms and he was saying the biggest issue with B2B is they don't market like B2C. They don't collect data like B2C and consumer brands, they win and they build these iconic brands and cult like followings because they really leverage data and know how to react. And it's not done to that level in B2B. And B2B is still CMO of Twilio or co founder of Boast or Traction. It doesn't go beyond work, email and the GEO and the title because people do business with people. I am a person, you are a person. Like you said, mom, dad, kids, and there's personal preferences and I think understanding the consumer beyond their work will help you build stronger connections and talk about that a little bit. Have you seen people leverage that personal or that granularity of data to enhance their B2B campaigns?

Yeah. B2B has been challenging from a data perspective because you're not necessarily an individual. Right. B2B is targeting a company which is comprised of many individuals. And so I think account based marketing has been the big aha, moody. But if you supplement that to do better account based marketing, you have to understand the individuals that make up that account. And so from that perspective, I think B2B has had less pressure to understand the individuals who make up that buying center because it is role based and it tends to be transient. You could be here today, but somebody else is going to be in your seat tomorrow. And so we take a little bit more of an aggregate view in the B2B, but it's just as important today to understand the individuals, I think. And having first party data will allow you to characterize that account in a way that just roles and an entity will not. B2C, as you said, has always focused on individuals and it's always been at scale. So that has been the core problem. But even there they still have things that they can improve upon. You asked about customer example. Famous one for us internally, which we love is Domino's. They were a customer and they did a lot of direct mail because it's hey, the discount on pizza, typically on the weekend now you're able to say, hey, these guys like to order pizza on a Wednesday because the mother doesn't like to cook. And it happens to be this particular geographical area. And so you can really get a granular level than previously.

Shifting to generative AI here because we talked about collecting first party data. Without the data you can't really do much with AI. There's this huge boom, there's this huge influx of startups focused on AI right now. And every day on Instagram, on LinkedIn, hundreds of people are sharing thousands of tools I've personally indented. So I can only imagine what others are feeling here. What is your advice for people in terms of making sense of generative AI and tooling or equipping their marketing stack?

I think you're absolutely right. Every day I see articles and I talk to VCs who say they're only funding AI startups or AI. There's no question that generative AI has truly taken a leap forward in how we think about it, especially as a startup that's coming up. I think you're going to see a lot of the tools that you use today inject the AI into it. And that's natural, right? We're doing the same. We're putting more AI into our CDP and our communications platforms so all the tools that marketers use will start to integrate AI into it. But if you think about newer things, especially leveraging generative AI, I always look at does this solve a very specific problem? Do they specialize in building the best algorithms or leveraging that AI technology to address a very specific pain point. And so depending on what it is that you're looking to solve, I try and look at it that way. If I see companies that are generically AI to a big, big problem area, to me that usually spells okay, it's hype. So I think the players that come out with something differentiated will be those that solve a very niche specific problem.

In terms of best practices for integrating AI into marketing and customer experience tactics. What are you guys doing at Twilio? What are you advising your teams or even other companies you may be advising?

There's two things that I that we did. One, I started actually internally. If you really want to understand how it can benefit your marketing, I think you have to experience it. So looking at your teams like PMM and content marketing teams, there's no question and I remember telling the teams you are not to write anything from a blank sheet of paper anymore. You shouldn't. There's no reason to write. Try it. See what it gives you. Now what we have found is it gives you a very strong first draft but there isn't the Twilio voice, there isn't specifically how we want to come and the details that make us unique. And so that's the part that marketers can focus on leveraging these types of things. The other thing, if you look at customer experience, you want to make sure you're leveraging these tools to make it better for them. Not so much today, at least for us. It isn't an internal productivity kind of exercise. At the end of the day, if I could do more with less, but I want to genuinely use this to try and come up with better content or more engaging stuff that my customers would like instead of doing 10 people to work with.

2 I've just released a book from grassroots to greatness 13 rules to help you build iconic brands with community led growth. We cover stories from big brands and small all the way from Harley Davidson to HubSpot to Nike Disaster to Gainsight to give you the frameworks to build a community led business that will take you from an obscure idea to a movement to a cult like phenomenon. Check it out at 4 from grassroots to greatness.com the digital copy is on for 99 cents.

Given the timing of the buzz hitting the market and the marketing market being in this turmoil, this recession, everyone's defaulting to I can do more with less. But what they're missing is like you said, it still doesn't contain your voice entirely and it gives you a lot more ideas. It gives you A starting point. Most people don't know where to start. It at least gives you a starting point that you can refine and push out more personalized content, but you can't take out the human in the loop yet at least I feel for sure.

And I do think there is a boost in productivity for every person that you have, so there's going to be a benefit from that. But today, and probably for some near future, I don't think we're at a place where it's going to replace us for the kind of scary scenarios that we hear about. I definitely think that sometimes if you are open to what it can do, you will find ways. So another thing that I'm doing with my team is I put out a challenge to the entire team and I said, hey, you guys come up with a way. I can't think of everything and I'm not going to just limit it to function. Tell me your creativity and whoever can come up with the best way that they have leveraged this technology will have some prize for. So it's something that engages them, it encourages them to think outside of the box and really test out some of the creative ways that they can leverage it.

What are your favorite use cases right now with AI in marketing? Maybe different functions you're touching across the customer journey with your role. Maybe it's creative, maybe it's copy, maybe it's lead scoring or just generating whole campaigns. Where are you having the most fun or you're most excited about?

There's two or three areas that I see huge potential and opportunity for. If you think about us and what we do at Twilio, it's all about customer data, harnessing that data and activating that data. Right. So you have this capability to really understand individual journeys. Now the hardest thing has been applying those, you know who to activate it to. Imagine if you could write 5 million individualized emails or text messages or whatever, it's going to be tailored to that person physically, human wise, we couldn't do that today. I think AI and generative AI can help you do that. So we can take a generic message and then it can help us tailor it specifically to every single person I'm trying to reach. That to me is super exciting in the potential and the possibilities. I think another one is the fact that some stuff may be completely irrelevant. You mentioned lead scoring and optimizing campaigns and us doing a B testing. If AI is genuinely based on the right data and it is able to learn as it should, that kind of stuff won't be needed because it's going to be automatic. And so these traditional ways of thinking and how we improve and optimize, that's what the machine learning will do. Our goal is to make sure we have the right data and we're collecting the right data so that the machine can learn and it can actually use AI to do it better. And so to me, those two possibilities are amazing.

I'm looking forward to a world where I can either via voice or chat ui, give a prompt that says create a campaign for XYZ audience in XYZ category demographic and optimize it until you get X conversion. Do the creative, do the copy, run it on these platforms, here's my budget and just go launch it and self optimize it and see a pouring of leads. That is exciting to me. And I see a lot of presentations these days where it's generated from midjourney or Dali and it's very interesting. It looks cool actually because it's unique. But I'm also concerned that over time the saturation will take away some of that uniqueness. With so many people flooding the market.

Today, we have the ability to do things that would take such a specialized skill that you couldn't actually make it happen. Those benefits are the ones where as a brand you have to think about what makes you unique and how you want to represent it as a human being. And so again, you're still talking to other human beings. And so that part probably won't change. Even the example you just talked about where AI is actually creating the campaign, you still want to train it and reinforce it with what you want it to do. And so the key is not forgetting about it, but it's really teaching it. And I think they're calling it human reinforced learning, where you want these machines to be learning about what's unique about you and your business and your customers. And so that still remains the responsibility of human beings.

How can marketers ensure as they're creating this AI driven marketing campaigns that they're able to add the authentic voice of their company, their personal brand? What are you guys doing in that regard?

Like I said, I think today the technology is still early enough to where it's not able to automatically do that. Now as we progress the technology, I want it to learn what it is. And I think it's not just the company as a blob itself, it's the people, the creatives and the minds that we have. Right. You want to try and inject some of that uniqueness into it because that still to me remains the differentiator. Now whether AI progresses to the point where it does become reflective of that or not I think is to be seen. But to me, the way that we can keep true to that is to make sure we are leveraging whatever it is, the creative or the thoughts or the content. Like I said, it's the starting point, it's not the end point. And that's where I think we have to keep going at it to make sure that we use it as a tool, not let it be the outcome.

Exactly, because eventually everything will start to seem cookie cutter if you're not injecting some of your own voice in there. What are your favorite tools so far in everything you've seen?

Every tool we're using is now, oh, we have AI. To me, one of the tools that we love is six Sense. That has been great for us and our sales team. They're now leveraging AI and machine learning to do that better. I personally like the content generation tools that have come out. You've got Jasper, you've got a bunch of stuff that actually creates these content for you based on what you're trying to do and the topics you're trying to cover, which is amazing. And we just talked about images. I personally use Canva now. I can do things with image generation that I couldn't do before. It's no longer, oh, take this stock background. I can create stuff without having to be an expert in doing that.

There's no more excuses to have crappy looking presentations.

Even personally, I was working on some project for my kids school and I used Canva to do it and they were like, oh my God, this is fantastic. I'm like, yeah, it took me 20 minutes.

So you're happy with Canva's image generation capabilities?

There I am again. It's just one of those things where we're just not used to it. Sometimes I'd have to go and ask one of my graphic designers for a favor. I don't have to do that anymore.

And you have the creativity at your fingertips at least to take you to 80%. And in most cases 80% is good enough. I've been playing with this tool called Personal AI and you should check it out. It's a free tool. What it does is you train it with your data. So historical data, maybe your videos, your voice, your blog posts, your LinkedIn, everything that you've done in the past 20 years. And it'll create like a Joyce GPT. You could have it on your personal website and people can interact with that Joyce GPT without you being in the room. And it would be your voice. It's really cool. I'm thinking of using that for some of our attraction speakers, probably in the fall as a project. But imagine if somebody wants to speak with the executive suite at Twilio. And now you have this right 24, 7. In terms of metrics, what are some things that people should track and keep in mind or I guess nothing really changes from that perspective.

I don't think the goals and the metrics change. I think the ability to improve them at a greater scale is what kind of tells you, are you leveraging it to make a difference? There should be the change and the improvements. Not that's just incremental. To me, that will be the time when we say, hey, we're actually making a fundamental difference here.

Any potential risk or downsides you're looking out for that people should watch out for and mitigate early.

To me, I want to rely on it as a tool, but I don't want to rely on it any more than that. And that's one I think we should really check ourselves on. Right. You still, even as the technology progresses to the point where it isn't a good first draft, but it is a wonderful final draft. Right. You still want to make sure you as a marketer understand your customers, that you know what you're trying to do and not just rely on the technology. To be the expert, to be involved is still important. And so I hope that this technology doesn't divorce us from that.

With this AI boom, we're seeing thousands of startups focus on AI. How can these startups differentiate themselves? Everything is AI, everything is generative AI.

It is, and like I said, I don't know that you can truly differentiate because again, everybody is injecting it into what they already do. But what new problems can you solve? I fundamentally believe AI at this nascent stage is all about a specific problem. We are not at the point where it's more general to a large function. It becomes content, it becomes ad spend, it becomes something very specific because they have developed that specific capability of the algorithms to do that. And so I look at what one thing can I solve with AI and deploy a solution to that and you'll build on it from there and the things that you've already got that's working for you will inject AI into them. And so there's a cross pollination effect that will eventually come. But I think the best thing is to think through what is the one thing I Want to try and solve.

For that now in all your career, what has been your favorite campaign?

I may have some recency bias here, but when I think back at something really that I just felt from the heart was amazing. When I was with arm, we had this program called Generation Z and the whole idea was to really tap into the next generation and how they think about technology. They're the future and they're the ones that are really going to use what we're doing. And so we featured these 12, 13, 14 year old kids who were actually CEOs of companies and one of them was building an app to care for the elderly because she saw her mother struggling with her grandmother. Another one was insecurity. To feature these kids and the way they think and to give a perspective to be leadership today was fascinating. We had them on stage at Mobile World Congress, I think in 2019. Literally every single keynote referenced those kids. So to have these young minds be an inspiration was truly enjoyable for me. That's something I'll never forget.

Now, in terms of your biggest marketing failure and what lessons we can learn from it, anything come to mind.

I launched a competitive campaign at a company and it flopped. And I remember it was almost offensive to the group. And the thing I learned is you can't deploy a tactic in a generic way. Like you really have to know the audience and understand what's going to resonate and what's not. And so the lesson for me is since that day forward, I've never looked at, hey, what did I do in the past? And then just try and do it at a different company or a different target audience. I've always looked at it like, let's start from the customer backwards, not what do we normally do and then apply it generically.

You advise a lot of companies, founders, you've been around the block 20 years. Is there a piece of unconventional advice that founders and marketers ignore but shouldn't?

A long time ago there was a smaller startup company told me, don't overthink things. And I think most people, and maybe coming back to our starting point, because so many marketers have been product managers or developers, we're actually much more analytical than you would think. And so we have a tendency to overanalyze or overthink things. And we don't often keep it simple, stupid kind of thing. That's probably one piece of advice that I don't think any marketer should forget. We know way more than the external world does and so we want to think through every angle. We want to make sure everything is buttoned up. And sometimes you just have to keep it simple and go with it. The best sort of example is I remember I was at an interview one time and somebody said to me in one sheet of paper, give me your marketing ideas. And I remember sitting there thinking through, okay, how many fonts, how do I expand the margins? Because you're trying to get every thought out there and be as creative as possible. And then I remember thinking, keep it simple. And I just wrote in big letters, get X for 50% less. Whatever that core value prop was, it was a aha moment where that was the thing that was going to drive all the marketing activities and I could keep it that simple.

Fantastic. There's so much noise on social especially. And so if your Tribe is on LinkedIn, then maximize for where your tribe is. It's been a great conversation. Joyce, any parting words of wisdom on generative AI or cookieless future or what's new coming out from Twilio that you want the audience to be excited about?

I would say today there's so much technology that can overwhelm. There's a thousand companies coming at you. Keep it simple. Pick the one thing and just start. If you don't and you let it overwhelm you. And we've talked about cataclysmic changes in the technology industry before. I genuinely think this is a new frontier. We're not going back. The faster that you can embrace something and feel comfortable with it, the better if you're not already doing something. I highly encourage everyone, whether it's like I'm spending money on ads today, there is no CMO that is not under pressure to reduce costs. Return on ad spend is the number one thing you can do. And the technology is simple. It exists. So just do one thing and get started.

Love that advice. Just get started. Do one thing right. Success in many ways is compound interest on doing one or two things consistently well over time. And then one day it's an overnight success.

Success failure is inevitable. Right? So yes, you're going to do one thing, you're going to do it right. You might try another and it may not work out, but that's okay because that can teach you too. So I know that today, like a lot of companies are into failing fast or whatever it is. We've actually never rewarded that behavior. When you think about it, like, we do get penalized for failing, but I do think in marketing you have the luxury. We're trained and used to AB testing. We know that's part of our process. So we should embrace it and not feel like we can't fail because it's part of the journey and the test that we're doing.

A lot of our audience is early startups C through series A B maybe when is the right time to bring on a VP marketing or cmo? Let's say a series A company bringing on a VP marketing or cmo. What are the traits that they should look for in a person to fill that role?

I've been at small startups as well as very large companies and the one thing I can tell you that big difference is you have to be hands on at a smaller company. So if have never actually done and built a campaign or created and written a piece of content or written your own press release or blog post or whatever it is. To me a series A startup CMO has to almost be the head of marketing but you can almost play any of those roles and you have to be ready to roll your sleeves up and dig in. You cannot rely on a team of people to do everything. You have to understand how to choreograph all the things that you're doing as a marketing team because typically you're at a growth stage where it might be digital demand gen. That expertise you've got to dig deeper and actually do it versus larger companies. You do have a fairly large team and so it's really making sure all the moving pieces are moving in the direction at the right pace that you want to go to drive something much bigger. So it's a different skill set. One can move from the other. I remember telling somebody 10, 12, 15 years ago when the digital demand gen using digital performance marketing was a big deal and I didn't really know it because I was at big companies and so I don't have to go get leads from Microsoft. They would come. So I went to a startup because I wanted to learn, I really wanted to understand how do you do this? What is conversion rate optimization? What is all of this stuff? So to me it's that's the difference between like a VP of marketing at a startup versus a CMO at a multibillion dollar company.

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