The Evolution of Marketing Leadership through AI and Analytics – with Greg Stuart | S3 E42

Greg: 1:09

Comes around 13 year cycles. Pc was 1991, Internet web was 1994, mobile was 2007,. Ai is 2020. There's a standard pattern recognition here of 13 year cycles. So until 2023, AI will be the dominant transformational opportunity here. So I wouldn't hesitate. People, I try to figure out as fast as I can.

Joeri: 1:32

Welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm excited to be joined by Greg Stuart. Hi, Greg, how are you doing?

Greg: 1:46

Joeri, how are you doing, my friend? Could definitely talk to you.

Joeri: 1:49

Yeah, great, it's. Sometimes there is a waiting list, Greg, for people to come on the show and I'm really happy also that you are available to be a guest. But, guys, if you don't know who Greg is. Greg welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. Greg is a CEO of MMA Global. He's a visionary in marketing. He shaped the industry's future through innovations analytics since 1993. Greg pioneered the multi-touch attribution measurement and transformed ad standards globally. His insights, captured in AdH Bracebook, along with his rolling companies worth $5.5 billion, making him a transformative figure in marketing, expect groundbreaking perspectives in this episode. Greg welcome, but if you want, you can start. If people don't know MMA Global, explain a bit. What are you guys doing?

Greg: 2:50

Yeah, maybe let me give you a little orientation ad. I appreciate this setup. It's always so embarrassing to hear your own bio read back to you. But whatever, listen, we're a nonprofit trade association based out of the US but operating in 15 countries around the world and in Europe not in Belgium, sorry, but the UK, France, others and fundamentally we work for CMOs and basically we're trying to architect a new future of marketing. Our fundamental belief is that marketing is lost. It's lost its thread, it's lost control. It doesn't have the stature and gravitas that it should, in particular for the amount of money we spend. And the worst stat I've had that we released is that marketers today have given their marketing departments. If you ask them on average, they're given their marketing department a net promoter score of a negative 2%. That means marketers don't even like marketing. That's horrible. That's what we're out to fix. My job as a nonprofit is to make the world of marketing and marketers and their contribution to the business so much better than it is today.

Joeri: 3:57

I love that mission and, as you say, sometimes, indeed, marketers are seen as not always on the positive side. But yeah, that's great, that's a mission to try to change that.

Greg: 4:08

CMOs lose their jobs too often. I think they were sometimes made fun of behind their backs. Listen, just to be fair to the two of you, let's. Just because they don't know me, by the way, I'm a marketer, so I'm talking about me. I've been doing this for over three decades. At this point, I'm a big believer in the impact it can have, but there's nobody out there really fixing it, and that's our job, yeah.

Joeri: 4:31

I read somewhere that the typical duration of a CMO at the company is 18 months, something like that, yeah.

Greg: 4:38

I think it's actually longer than that and it's unclear the importance of data. But if you look at comparison, like CEOs, the CEOs tend to be in their jobs twice as long. My thesis is that when things are going well, the CEO fires a CMO, but we still nonetheless and here's what's really bad about it, Joeri there are some basic underlying dynamics of marketing that really could be better understood, and there's a bit of it, and that's what the research that the MMA does. It's not impossible. It's hard, it's not impossible. Just nobody was doing it and we're out to fix as much as we can and really raise. I've got four things that we can do that literally can improve the stock price of almost any public company who choose to execute them. That's a pretty big deal. That's a lot of room for gain, and I've just been on this mission. Although I've been here at the MMA for almost 10 years, we've been on this focus of the mission really in just the last five, six years.

Joeri: 5:31

But also these days, marketers, there are a lot of evolutions happening. We are at the Web3 CMOS Stories podcast, a big part of that today is Ai. Lots of things are changing all the time. What are your thoughts on all these new evolutions, including AI, in the marketing landscape?

Greg: 5:53

I'm probably going to do what you never should do, because I'm from New York. I'm going to say something that your listeners' audience isn't going to appreciate, so if you get negative blowback on this, you can just say you didn't know me. Okay, I'll just say that.

Greg: 6:05

No, here's the thing. Listen, I'm not a huge believer in Web 3. The concept of it, yes, but as a communications vehicle for transforming marketing, I'm not there yet. It just doesn't have. From what I've seen, I don't know if it has the impact or not. That we don't know yet because I've not done the research. But I don't know that it has the scale, okay.

Greg: 6:27

But we do believe MMA's thesis is that AI will be the most important thing that ever happens to marketing. This might be a truly transformational opportunity for us to really both improve, basically, what AI is doing. It's going to either dramatically improve productivity, efficiency, do what we can do we do cheaper. It's a big deal and it should raise the impact dramatically. What we don't know is where the game-changing idea is. Yet Right now we're being repetitive to the things that are, let's say, improving upon the things we've done already, but we don't know the really big stuff. So MMA is and the board has asked me to be all in on AI to really lead the entire marketing industry in the advancing of AI's application to marketing, and I talked more. I don't want to go on and on about that, but that's basically the thesis of where we're at. I don't know. Do your listeners think that Web 3 is the? Do they see Web 3 as a big marketer? Implementation at this point Execution I'm curious.

Joeri: 7:30

It all depends how you define Web 3, of course, you have people that are seeing it really in the sense of blockchain and NFTs and so on, and I don't see it like that. I see it as a new technology that's there, a new generation of the internet where a couple of technologies will converge, like you have blockchain, you have Web 3. That has some benefits this decentralized aspect, the fact that it's secure, immutable and then you have those virtual worlds, VR AR, which is coming, even if people are less talking about it, and next to that you have AI and all of that is coming together and I believe in that. But, yeah, and there are lots of opportunities for marketing when we're talking about AI.

Greg: 8:19

100%, but that's where the gains should come from and the way, we've done so. By the way, I agree with your thesis there. I definitely agree with blockchain and its revolutionary. I think it's the metaverse thing that doesn't have to scale, and marketing isn't retail. We've all heard retail's fundamental 3R location, location, location, right, I think, in advertising, marketing in advertising in particular that R3R scale, scale, scale in order to be successful to date. Now, that's a little bit of a blanchard instrument and somebody could debate that point, but I think that's what it is. But I do see and we've done research now with AI experiments over the last year, and it's the craziest, most powerful thing I have ever seen, and I think we've just gotten started.

Joeri: 9:03

Yeah, I think too, and I think that we could go faster. But people are already scared of maybe what is possible. Already you remember when the internet came and websites came and social media came, cell phones came, mobile phones came. People are always what is happening there and there. And now we have all these new technologies and it goes even faster. And so I even know a lot of marketers that are like afraid of how fast it goes.

Greg: 9:34

I think that's. If a marketer did that on my team, I'd fire them immediately. I'm not interested in Go Slow, not interested. This is a transformational moment. You have a responsibility to the shareholders. Now, granted, you need to do that with your management or your board's approval and support, because the board's ultimate dynamic in a business is to manage risk, and new has risk. But I think you'd be insane to Go Slow at this point. You're going to get crushed by somebody else and rightfully you should get hurt in that situation. No, no, no, there's no. Go Slow, there's no. Be safe, knock that shit off, stop it. That's bad thinking, that's bad business. Do not do it.

Joeri: 10:13

Yeah, that's what I'm telling you when I give my talks about don't miss the wave like a surfer. If the wave is over, then it's done, you're done. You want to be ahead of the wave, but it's not always easy, because you are ahead of the wave to explain to people what you're really doing, even with AI and stuff to explain this to others but you have a few people in the organization that see the benefits and want to be the leader. I think that can be really good.

Greg: 10:37

No, I mean, listen, let's remember that, and it says true in all parts of the business right Advantage opportunity is only created by getting to something before somebody else, because once everybody else gets there, then we're just at parity and then we're just keeping pace. So if you think that your CEO or the rest of the C suite is incentivized to go slow and to be overly cautious and to that, you don't understand how business works. It is all about getting competitive advantage, so we'll last for a period of time. You have to come up something new. Listen, I've had to now transform the MMA business. Oh, that was funny, as I saw I have a little this funny story. What, but the listeners can't see, is this video You're? You don't put video, do?

Joeri: 11:19

you. It depends about.

Greg: 11:21

These episodes will be audio here what the listeners didn't see is I. Every time I hold up two fingers, a Bunch of balloons appear in my video for some reason. I'm not clear where those are coming from. I'm gonna find that so to get rid of it. So it's just happening. You're a night, but no listen there, silly, whatever the listen. There's just. There's so much opportunity here and let's forget, let's not forget to that the promise of AI, which is what you said.

Greg: 11:44

Personalization, which, by the way, I would put out, the categorization of productivity. But what's interesting about personalized personalization is that everybody wins, everybody wins. The consumer wins, the marketer wins. It's just, you've made the whole world better. The problem I used to say this all the time about it.

Greg: 12:03

Listen, I'm a big advertising media guy. I've been in New York City for like is it over three decades on working on business like this, and what we can get is that what TV, in particular, did. The worst of it is that they taught consumers to ignore television advertising. They would put up ads that were irrelevant. They were repetitive in the same pod, sometimes a little on in the same show they were, which doesn't work. That's just. That's a complete waste of money to run ads close that close to each other doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's inefficient and ineffective and there's just so many bad practices we had, all of which was we were asking consumers for their time but then disrespecting that time.

Greg: 12:41

So AI has the potential to do that. In fact, the exercise is the research that we've been doing over the last year is around AI Personalization. In fact, we did the original design of this research saying, ooh, if cookies get deprecated by Google or the browsers? So some have done already. Could we still figure out how to personalize ads just using contextual signal? And if we could personalize ads, then did that provide a boost in performance? And the big reveal here is that we have seen, on average plus a hundred and ninety five percent improvement in marketing performance when AI personalization is done.

Greg: 13:18

Now, be too fair. That point. That's based on five studies. So far, no studies were done by Kroger's general motors ADT Business called Monday comm. One of those studies was zero performance improvement. So we now know why things don't work, which is just as valuable when they do work. But if you came to me and said, greg, I could triple, double, even Part of your 10% of your business, I would drop everything. On that day I would clear my calendar for the rest of the week and I would do nothing but focus on that. I'm a business owner and it satisfies to my compensation to be able to beat those goals and I like to win, so to not run at that as fast as you can. You're, I don't know. I don't know who's in charge, who's making decisions, but that seems crazy to me.

Joeri: 14:05

Yeah, it is and and you mentioned it also yeah, okay, you measure it. So analytics is important. I had a business analytics company before I went into marketing, actually, so analytics is really important. It's also something that you are into marketing analytics.

Greg: 14:23

I'm a big measurement guy. Yeah, all facets of it, I agree. Yes, sirs.

Joeri: 14:27

So how do you see for marketers? How should they use analytics in the best way effectively?

Greg: 14:36

okay, so that's a very complicated question. I'm gonna try not to give a long answer here and I want to point something else to your listeners. Just because I'm a Non-profit trade association working for CMOs, I don't have anything to sell. I don't care. I don't care if you buy AI. I don't make any money from you. Buying AI doesn't matter. My job is to help advance an industry and a holistic think tanks it away.

Greg: 14:56

To your question of analytics I've often said that measurement is the most abused word in marketing, partially because mark measurement actually means five different things and until you understand which one you're talking about, it's a hard conversation. So I think when you're using words like analytics, you're now getting into sort of marketing productivity how do we measure the effectiveness? And then optimized against marketing's performance? I think, as we're here going and Listen, I'm a big believer in multi-touch attribution, not because and you gave me credit earlier for saying I didn't really I want to be Clay didn't found multi-touch attribution. I made it a new standard of marketing. Just be clear, the guy who actually did the technical behind that was a guy named Rex Briggs, and but Rex had come to me when I was running the IB, trying to develop online advertising at the time as a business back in the early 2000s, and we needed a new ways to measure. Internet couldn't be measured marking mix through medium mix modeling and and Rex came to me with a new approach. We loved it.

Greg: 15:50

I ultimately then, over the next five years, spent seven million dollars to help do studies to prove that and then to Validate it and get support for it in the industry. That's what we're doing, and so I've had the unique experience of doing a bunch of MTA studies again Not selling the MTA, just trying to understand how the world work better, how modern marketing mix would look like. And I've done a similar series here around mobile when mobile was new the MMA. We're again. Just to summarize back to your question, I really do believe in my experience that MTA is the answer. It's hard, but you got to get there. So is that the question your? Is that the question you're asking when you say things like and yes, I was, thinking whether, and maybe for listeners, explain a bit more what MTA exactly.

Greg: 16:33

Yeah, sorry, yeah, it's funny. I've asked that question and people you've anything who should know, don't? So a multi-touch attribution what it's on does what it foundation is that you're basically measuring individual and individuals media exposure magazines, tv, open web, mobile, ctv, I don't, I don't care. You should measure all, has to measure all channels, otherwise it's not as helpful. Okay, so it's major individual media exposure combined with their attitudinal Shift. So you know, do they know the brand? Can they repeat the brand attributes as a number of components that go into brand and and combined with their sales data. When you understand those two components at an individual level, then you can roll that up into an aggregate and start making some assumptions about how the world works and when you can find opportunity. What I think you're doing predominates you're looking to see how do you optimize application of either between media channels or Application of actual creative, because you should be measuring the individual creative. How do you optimize that? Because they all have their own sort of curves and you're trying to optimize Against those curves. That's ultimately what you're trying to do and within that then you also find out all sorts of other things about your business, if you can especially tie to somewhat of a consumer journey to understand somewhere the go.

Greg: 17:56

The challenge is obviously of those who know. Is it? Mta is really hard. In fact, I'll give you the stats of the big mark, because an MMA works for the biggest markers. Like my, board includes GM and Ford and AT&T and Kellogg's and the biggest companies. The challenge you run into there is that it's very hard to collect all that data and I don't think we've ever really validated or perfected exactly what analytical techniques are best used. And so currently, big marketers 52% of them have an empty solution that they use. The problem is on a net promoter score basis, it has a negative 10%, which means those who have it the 52% have it Don't really like it. There's a bunch of reasons for that, so it's still complex, but it is ultimately the way that marketing Performance and the boost in performance of marketing needs to be accomplished as M2MTA.

Joeri: 18:50

Yeah, I think people that want to know more about that. I'll put for sure some information in the show notes.

Greg: 18:57

Sure, yeah and send them to Maze website. We have a lot of information around that. We're big again. I don't make any money from MTA. Matters nothing to us, other than we think it's the right thing to do if you buy MTA or don't. But we've built up a lot of guides, customer journey map, a bunch of stuff to really help market be successful, because it is very hard. We don't underestimate how difficult it is to do, but it is the answer and we think it's the obligation you have to To your business to go figure that out.

Joeri: 19:23

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned guys said also be ahead of the wave, don't hesitate, look at these new technologies and so on. For certain people it can feel as a risk leaving. Actually, I did it a bit to. I left the social media marketing, which is it's. Everyone understands that there is a lot of work, a lot of Things going on there. But looking at yourself, at your career so you have all these other experience what was one of the biggest risks that you have taken? That has paid off and, yeah, maybe some tips about.

Greg: 19:58

Hmm, the biggest risk I took. Well, you know I'm not. That's a hard question for me. I'm not sure I'm really big on assessing. Well, wait, as a CEO, my job is to assess risk and understand situations. I tend to like to maybe, from the tone I earlier answered, kick down the door and keep going. I don't care.

Greg: 20:16

I will say, though I am fortunate, yori, if I was to give any help and support for your listeners let's assume that many of them are younger than I am. Let's just kind of go with that for the moment, by percentages, that's going to be a fact. I wouldn't get too focused on risk. Let's go, everybody Balls and play games on. Life is going. Let's make it happen.

Greg: 20:37

And I think and, by the way, I was very early on the internet I was at Y&R running an interactive group there at Yunga Room, the ad agency, running an interactive group there in 1993. And, if everybody remembers, it was 1994 that Mosaic was introduced, not the internet but the web. And I was very early on mobile. And now I'm going to be here early in AI, as best I can. As best I can, although I realized that AI started a little while ago. So I think those are where the opportunities are presented themselves. So I wouldn't say I wouldn't approach from risk. I would say lean into the future.

Greg: 21:10

There's these rare moments that come along and, by the way, if your listeners don't know, it comes around 13 year cycles. Pc was 1981, internet web was 1994, mobile was 2007,. Ai is 2020. There's a standard pattern recognition here of 13 year cycles. So until 2023, ai will be the dominant transformational opportunity here. So I wouldn't hesitate people, I'd try to figure out as fast as you can. That's where the opportunity, that's where the big gains and, if I've been to say anything, I think that's where I've gotten the most, both excitement in my career interest and for me, but also what has paid off the best at some levels. Like you mentioned, I was early. I was a dot com guy, learned, figured out venture capital at some level. I'm not an expert like VCs are, but I understand enough how to navigate around. I've raised money for companies a few times. I understand how that all works. That's all future stuff. You want to learn that future stuff? I think it's really important.

Joeri: 22:06

You talk about learning future stuff. Where do you go yourself to keep up to date with all of these new evolutions that are out there? Any specific sources that you recommend?

Greg: 22:19

Yeah, I don't know if I see the sources. I think MMA is the source of what's new in marketing, so I don't know that's a little bias.

Greg: 22:26

I told you I had no bias. Then I come up with that the answer. But it's true, that is our job. Listen, I'll give a couple of just really quick examples here, and so you've managed me for time.

Greg: 22:33

But like, one of the biggest questions in marketing, in major markers today, is what's the relationship between long and short term, between brand and performance market? Well, yori, the problem with that is that there is no off the shelf methodology to do that measurement, and that is a math problem. That is a not a cold fusion or go to Mars problem. We don't need new technology, we just need to be able to. And MTA, by the way, is the answer to understand that question. And when I took a, I heard this again. I heard every mark, honestly, every I talked to you know 100 plus CMOs a year Everyone said that's a discussion inside. I'm go. Why the hell isn't somebody answering this question? This is insane.

Greg: 23:06

So about three and a half years ago, unfortunately prior to pandemic, and then we shut it down the middle pandemic, and then we restarted. But we built a methodology to assess the relationship to the long or short term, and I now have two studies, one behind Kroger's and the other one behind Ally Financial Bank, and so we are starting to understand that actually. So I got the balloons again for those and listeners can't see but Yori and I are smiling each other, so like these balloons up here on the screen. Oh, that's pretty funny. Whatever, I have to stop that. It's distracting. But the idea is that is that we built a methodology of actually do studies and now I can tell you the value of brand and the way a CFO is going to appreciate it. I can tell the CFO, if you spend this amount of money today and you get this back in sales today, you will, and our research shows you will get somewhere between one and a half additional one and a half to almost five time multiplier on that revenue long term.

Greg: 23:57

Yori, nobody knew the answer. Question, and brand is where the fundamental basis of marketing? And we didn't know the answer to that. That's insane. So that's what? So again I turn to. I think it's the research and the insights that the board, the boards at CMOs, helped support us in figuring out. I really do think that's where the best information.

Greg: 24:15

Now, if you're asking me, I get my information, though, from listening to those CMOs talk about that and where it goes and what it means to them and what they don't understand. In fact, I, as you may have noticed, I run a podcast that's called Building Better CMOs and the fundamental question in that podcast is marketers, cmo. Tell me what you don't understand, that you don't think the world understands, about marketing. What do you think we get wrong? I'm just fishing around for new ideas to go research there that we can go figure out and bring a little bit of insight and knowledge, because there's just there's too many unanswered questions to mark. That's what we have. We get too damn much money and not enough stuff. That's fact for the amount of money we get.

Joeri: 24:54

, when you said that have your podcast, I also like to do the podcast because then I get other questions and to learn on my podcast. Actually.

Greg: 25:03

Exactly. We started a podcast for AI. It's called to code in AI and marketing. For the same reason, I'm not an expert in AI, but I'm hoping. What are you? Up to 100, almost 150 episodes an hour. Yeah, do you feel like you've just learned a ton.

Joeri: 25:17

Yeah, at a certain point my podcast was called CMO stories, so I was talking about broader marketing subjects. I decided, okay, let's niche down to Web3 and then metaverse and AI and so on. Because of that, my guests were also talking about the subject and now I get to speak on stage because I am also the expert, not because I talk to experts.

Greg: 25:39

And you believe the same thing I did. You focused on the future, not just old line CMO stories. But what does the future look like? How do we evolve? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, so I agree, I don't know if everybody gets to start a podcast. Maybe it's listening to you. Maybe the advice is that they should listen to you, your podcast and my podcast. That's the advice I should offer to them.

Joeri: 26:00

That's the advice and also read books. I would say you have your books. I will also mention the show notes. I have also a few myself. This one is the most amazing marketing book ever. I work together with Mark Schaefer and a number of other marketers. There is also Joe Pulizzi who will bring out the book. People don't know it yet. And then I'm also thinking about writing a new book, but this will be announced later. Okay.

Greg: 26:27

Okay, okay, I'll be anxious, yeah.

Joeri: 26:29

So a lot of content, creating content, talking to people, reading that really helps. What do you really like to do, or is it listening to a podcast?

Greg: 26:38

The question I had from listening to a couple. I didn't get to listen to, obviously, all your episodes, but I listened to a couple. Who do you think is the smartest in AI around marketing today that you've interviewed? Anybody caught your attention that you thought was really good?

Joeri: 26:53

I must say Greg, I was already using AI before chat GPT, so I give courses myself and stuff, so I always learn from people to see how they are doing stuff. I learn from everyone something.

Greg: 27:07

Yeah, it's interesting you say that I'm finding the same thing. Most marketers, I don't think, are very far along in AI. We formed this. We formed what is now the largest coalition of markers to work in AI. It's called the AI leadership coalition. It's got 142 companies and 240 some odd people individually all they are to figure it out. So I'm listening to these big marketers that are my members.

Greg: 27:32

Yeah, I'm not hearing anybody with a really clear strategy yet or real orientation to what to do, and so we now have developed a series of. We have this consortium for AI personalization I talked about earlier about boosting market productivity through using AI machine learning to personalize ads. We're also we've just asked the groups to come up with a series of what are use cases they want us to work against. We've started. We have started responsible AI. As much as I was dismissive early about risk, I do have a responsible AI working group. Not foolish, we still need to do the work and we got to be right about stuff. We do want to be careful, but I don't want that to become the dominant conversation for me. And then and we're looking for more research experience and in fact, the thing I put out to your listeners is that if somebody here has a company or a technology or a thesis that they would like to see research done against a consortium of major markers, to work against something, really reach out to me.

Greg: 28:24

I'm Greg at MMAglobalcom, easy enough to find, and we'd be happy to put that into a list of things that we're going to do over the next year to try, in essence, to try to make my market or members smarter. That's obviously where I'm aiming towards. But I think you're right, you're right. There's just not nobody really is correct. We have hired a team and a hired, I say, partner with a team of professors who are developing how to ingest AI into the organization. How do you organize to think about AI, to successfully adopt it and run, obviously, a series of pilots to figure out where you can place bets to really grow your business. But I don't know, it's very exciting Productivity, customer experience, creative productivity against just. It really is just kind of it's really going to set the world on fire for marketing, I think.

Joeri: 29:10

Yeah, I think too, and I think this is I could talk for hours with you. Greg, you mentioned already a few ways to contact you. Is there any ways you prefer that people be in touch with you a bit MMA, or is it already the things you mentioned?

Greg: 29:26

Yeah, just what you said MMAgloba l. com is the actual, that's the site for the nonprofit. And then I'm just Greg at MMAglobalcom, so happy to have you reach out to me and suggest ideas. I mean, you know we're here for the greater good of the industry. I need markers to be stronger, we need to be better respected, we need to be better at what they do for their business and we need to do it for consumers. Like I said, it's the funniest thing, like everybody wins if we do this right. Everybody wins.

Joeri: 29:50

Well, that's a really positive message for now to everyone that's listening to anti-spotcast episodes. So thank you, Greg.

Greg: 29:58

It was a pleasure yeah thank you and thank you, Joeri, for what you do.

Joeri: 30:02

I think this communication needs to get out here what you're doing so good stuff, Thank you, thank you everyone also for listening to this episode, and if you also think, like me, wow, what Greg told, there are some golden nuggets in there, this is really useful for people around you. Well, share it with them. Send the episode to them. If you're not yet subscribed to the show, this is a really good moment to do that, and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.