I'm Matt and Sacking Road. This is Cassie, I'm here with Carl. Carl, how you doing? You're awesome.
Cassie, we're back. This is episode two, but really, it's kind of like meaty episode one of season three, because our first one was just like the intro. So I'm super pumped. I heard it went awesome with Yvonne.
It was great. It was great. So for those listening, what you're going to hear today is an interview I had with Yvonne O'Brien. She's a chief marketing officer is happy.
We got in the brand. We got into creative. We got into differentiation, had a position, your company. We walked through brand activation.
As we talked about on the first episode, this is something I really want to hit this year, is just getting back that old school really strong, fundamental marketing around brand and brand building and laying the foundation for your company as a disruptor. And we talked about all that in this car and more. Cassie, you've been around the block. I don't mean that like, you know, like offensively or anything, right?
It's not an age joke, I promise. But you've talked brand, you've talked to best of the best CMOs. And you've been, you are in executive leadership position. When it comes to marketing and sales, now like what was new for you in this conversation?
Like what stood out one or two things that like stood out as most compelling to a guy that, I feel like knows a ton of shit, you know? You've been there done that. Yeah, it's OK if you just say I'm old, Carl. I get it.
I'm going around. Yeah, I think maybe a little bit is like a relate them on. We were mostly kind of like the that point in our career. But no, really, I really admire.
What I learned in this call is I really admire world-class marketing. And when I think about world-class marketing, I think of like marketing and brand building with a capital M and a capital B. Like you're talking to somebody, like you'd be talking to Coca-Cola or Pepsi or these consumer brands we admire. And you don't see a lot of that in B2B.
So a lot of my conversations with marketing leaders is all about performance marketing and analytics and data. And those are things that I like. It may have been I really appreciate this is old school, marketing fundamentals, brand building, a passion about differentiation. Really from the founder CEO of the company, this was something Yvonne made a really strong point to make.
The brand vision and direction to drive is from the founder CEO. And she's really the steward in making sure that they deliver on that across the company, not just the marketing organization. And so really the light bulb goes on back to like the companies I admire the most and where I've worked with companies who we had a great kind of disruptive brand philosophy. It always started at the top.
This was not a marketing initiative. It was a company initiative. And she echoed that over and over. And we talked through that of like the importance of that.
And just reminded me like this is brand is not about the marketing team. Brand is about what you do as a company day in and day out to build your point of view and trust your relationship with your customer. And it just came out trying true in this conversation. No, that's quite.
You got me jazzed up. I'm excited to listen. So that's an awesome takeaway. I'm sure Yvonne's going to break down again how she did that.
So anyone listening will be able to walk away with actionable insights, not obvious insights, frameworks, how to do this in your own orb, et cetera. So I'm excited to listen. Yeah, for this audience, she said something I thought was great. She said many things that I think the audience is going to enjoy.
She said, without a strong brand foundation, performance marketing is a waste of money. And she even, if you watch the video, she'll talk about like, when you don't have a strong brand foundation, do you spend and you see an uptick in results in performance marketing? Then you see a down tick because there's nothing that it's built on top of. So we talk about this quite a bit.
Like we should think of paid media as a form of distribution. But if you don't have a solid foundation to distribute, then you're wasting your money. And so she brought this up and walked through this in a very elegant way that I thought was just a really a key takeaway for our audience. You know, in the B2B space, we're all kind of obsessed with performance marketing and short term results.
But the point here is like, if you don't have a strong foundation, you're just wasting your money. It's just not great. Is it too reductionist you think to say that the strong? I mean, it feels fluffy, right?
Like brand always feels kind of fluffy. And oh, you have a vision and kind of a brand vision. And you even said it now, I like this foundation. What makes that less fluffy?
Is it like the point of view? That's the brand. Like is it, you know, we've talked about this in the past. It's going to be a big theme of season three, a stack and growth.
It's like the non-obvious insights and proprietary data. Like because brand isn't just, you know, colors and guidelines and et cetera. Animation is like, what do you have on at least an NTU? It's like, what is like the mean potatoes of brand?
What's at the core of that entity? Yeah, we actually walked through this example. And I won't do it justice, but you'll hear it on the podcast in a minute. So the company is kind of positioning is about data for creators.
And it's kind of a new way to do market research and big consumer brands as their product. And this is something they pioneered and they're really disrupting kind of the market research landscape for big consumer brands, like Pepsi, McDonald's, et cetera. So the whole position is data for creators. So we have the Super Bowl recently and as we all know, when we watch the Super Bowl, we're looking at ads.
And you know, the old world, you see many articles out there are people chiming in on, hey, I thought these were the best ads. And it's all anecdotal, like, experience. Or if we're going to do market research on Super Bowl ads, we commission a study and we wouldn't get the results back and anything published for another three or four weeks. Right.
That's the way it works today. But for data for creators, the way they did this is they ran this amazing active day, brand activation around the Super Bowl, where they came out and they said, here were the top 10 ads based on feedback from what consumers said using their platform. So data to inform creative in terms of the result. And they had the results in market in less than 24 hours after the Super Bowl ended.
And so I will show it in the show notes and you go and you read through this. And you can just see the brand personified through this activation. And it's so spot on. And these are the things that frankly you see a lot in the consumer world done really well that you don't see in the B2B world.
And this is an example of the B2B company doing it on a level and scale that I thought was amazing. And she talked through like, how do they do it? And this is the third year they've done it. And, you know, it really comes back to, she made a great point.
It really comes back to like hiring talented people that can conceptualize these ideas and go execute against them. And it's been a journey for them. And as you just see that journey, I'm just like, yes, it's just really good marketing. And it's really on when you say on brand is we have a point of view in a thesis of how we're going to disrupt an industry and we're going to remain true to that in everything that we do as a company.
And this was one example that we talked through. So love it. Can't wait. Yeah.
So that was it. Call with that for the rest of you. Here's my interview with Ivana Brian, CMO is happy. All right.
Welcome everybody back to Sacking Growth. I'm super excited about this conversation. I have Yvonne O'Brien, chief marketing officer of Zappy on the calls today. Yvonne, how you doing?
I'm great. Cassidy. How are you? How are you doing?
I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Good start to 2023. How's it been treating you?
We've had a great start. January's always our best month, actually our second best month after December. And we've had lots of renewals, a lot of customers keeping the faith and we've surpassed it about 2023. Lots to do from a marketing point of view.
But as we say, that's what we're here for. Marking is always a challenge. So yeah, I'm super excited about what we can do this year. That's awesome.
It's great to hear that. It's a there's no better feeling of getting off to a good start versus getting off in the bowl. So I'm happy to do. I'm excited about this conversation.
We're going to talk about brand. You have a fascinating background. I love what you're doing at Zappy and frankly, we need to see more of this and kind of a B2B space. I want to kind of get into that.
You're a little bit about your journey and a little bit about Zappy, kind of past, present future. Who are you? How did you get here? What's the company all about?
Sure. Should I start with myself? Yeah, let's do that. So I've been in TAP for just over three years now.
I started as go to market lead and I became CMO in August 22. No, 21, 2020. So I'm about 18 months into my CMO gig. We all make the joke that CMO has only last four years, two years, three years.
I'm hoping to make it over the three-year market. So prior to SAPI, I had a very quite long career. I'm a seasoned executive as they say politely. I worked in media agencies on the data, insight and analytics practices for two large agency groups.
And a lot of my focus there was on the commercialization of our insight proposition and part that I also held a B2B marketing role. I think where I am now and my role and what SAPI does as a business is the interesting amalgamation of a career that was focused in both B2B marketing and data and insight, because effectively the target market for SAPI is data and professionals in large enterprise organizations. So I was one of those people. I advised a lot of those people.
And now I'm in a position where I'm marketing to those people. To give you a bit more context, SAPI is a self-service insights platform designed for large enterprises to run consumer insight predominantly in the advertising and product innovation space and also shopper insight. And we were set up about nine, ten years ago by R.T. Fakesk and Steve Phillips, who had this unique vision, which he came up with.
He says, maybe this is just one of those stories, but he came up with the idea of SAPI while sitting in his garden once somewhere drinking wine. I think it was white wine, but I can't confirm. And he was his idea at the time was, wouldn't it be anything if we could have an app store for market research? And that's where SAPI was conceived and we built from there.
And we are now about just short three, actually more than 300. There's about 300 people who work at SAPI. And our mission is to make it as the number one self-service research platform for enterprise marketing and insight communities. So that's a bit about SAPI and a bit about myself.
What's fascinating when I look at your career and I obviously look at what SAPI does is it feels like this is a tailor made role for you. Like you were in agencies, you're the data insights person, you had some B2B background, now you're at a B2B company doing data insights for creative folks at big grants. I mean, I don't know if this could align better. Yeah, I'd like to say that that's exactly what I planned for my career.
This was conceived over 20 years. I can guarantee you it wasn't. It was just serendipity that I ended up doing what I'm doing. And I am a believer that sometimes the right rules find you and that's kind of what happened.
And I think I understand the target market, but also having spent a total of 11 years in agencies and working on media strategy, comp strategy, you know, fueling the insight into those objectives. I also understand how to plan media and how to plan media investment for the best return. I think all those things come together and really help me my role today. But I think a margin job is never done, right?
You have to approach every year as if you're starting from scratch. You have to throw away what you've learned before and keep thinking, thinking, thinking about how you're going to innovate, innovate, be more creative, be more disruptive, because that's how you win. The future marketing is not really about the extrapolation of what we did in 2022 or 2021, 2023 is a new year with entirely new challenges. Yeah, we're talking about that off camera.
Just like the relentless nature of being ahead of marketing in a company, let alone one that's fast growing. So speaking of that, you just raised congratulations, like $170 million. And I think the end of last year, what does that feel like as a marketing leader? I mean, like what I assume this comes with a lot more pressure.
People on the outside are probably thinking, man, if I had all this money, you could just go spend the acquired new customers. I guess that's not the reality. You know, what does that do to like your maybe leadership style, your psyche, your company, et cetera, if anything, maybe there's nothing. I think with any big change, and this is a big change for Zappi.
It's a significant investment and a significant voting confidence in our business and our ambition. But it's ebbs and flows truthfully. They bought into the Zappi vision. So I'm talking about some area who are a Silicon Valley based investor.
They bought into our vision. They bought into Zappi's culture and Zappi people and they trust us to run the business and do a good job. The great thing from being a market leader is for being a marketing leader, not a market leader. We're not quite a market leader yet is is new investment investment in talent, the right marketing experience talent to really propel us to the next level and investment in being able to broaden our personas, traditionally our persona and our target persona was inside people.
That will remain our kernel that will always remain a super important part of who we target from a marketing point of view with the increased investment allows us to expand and start talking to CMOs over the next two to three years in a much more meaningful way. And also it enables us to scale our communications. So we obviously work with refined labs. We invest in the refined labs philosophy and strategy, but the increased investment allows us to fuel more one to one contact with a lot of customers.
So our event and real job presence also content, the workhorse of marketing. We want to improve and build greater content for our end user that adds to utility. So having that investment on board is great. It does come with greater accountability.
Zappi is no longer a scabby style startup. We now have to grow up as they say we're not in Kansas anymore, but we're cool with that. It's just a natural evolution. And I can imagine that the type of customer that you've discussed that you go after, you're talking customer in many ways.
This is a big reassurance for them. They're big brands. They're dealing with a start, innovative startup. Then they see, you know, the investment community making the sizable investment.
It kind of not only does it give the signal inside the company that's time to grow up, but like I assume externally people are like, all right, serious company, like I feel better investing in, you know, the company, the technology, et cetera. Have you found that? Absolutely being honest. We put a lot of marketing time into how can we really maximize the news of this investment?
How can you make sure that all our existing customers? And we've got some, we have some very, very low customers who worked with us for five, six years. How we make sure we say thank you to them for their efforts, but also take it as an opportunity to talk to other customers and the market about the social confidence we've got. And it is great.
It's great validation for a lot of customers out there who took a chance with Zappi, right? We weren't always as good as we are today. We've, you know, in a startup, we all have to make those calls. We weren't as we didn't fulfill on our promises.
We're actually a lot of people held faith and going back to them with this news. It's great validation for them as well. Yeah, I can imagine speaking of being thankful. It's been a joint being a partner.
You're we've been able to kind of see the journey ourselves. I want to get into the topic and that is we have an opportunity to see a lot of B&B companies. We work with a lot. We talked to them anymore and I can say there's there's like how Zappi goes the market and positions themselves and then there's pretty much the rest of the B&B industry.
Yeah. And this is a testament I think to both your background or your company came from. But I assume also the stakes are a lot higher because of who you're targeting. How do you see that?
How do you see this kind of notion of brand which could be almost a dirty word in B2B but embraced in the B2C world? How do you think about that in terms of Zappi and kind of like your marketing strategy over the last few years and kind of going forward? Yeah, brand is something I'm super passionate about. I'd like to claim that the Zappi brand came from my thinking and my ideation.
Truthfully, it was all Steve Phillips. He came up the concept of Zappi. Truthfully, Zappi is a disruptor. Right.
Ultimately, we are a disruptor. We have to be competitors. They're extremely well well regarded. They're great competitors.
We have to position Zappi as a true disruptor to how we show up the nature of our brand and the personality of our brand and how distinctive we are. Right. You know, the old adage was you never get fired for fired for using IBM or hiring IBM for our competitors, the same rings true. So we have to capture the imagination of our target market.
And we do that through having a brand that is truly, truly distinctive and truly disruptive in how we behave and how we show up. And one of the parts of my job that I like the most and I take most seriously is the fact that we are brand custodians of Zappi. And Zappi and the brand is a huge asset on our balance sheet. Right.
Our level of awareness in the market, you know, bearing mind we've only really been around for nine or ten years. Isn't as big as the legacy incumbents, but, you know, it does stack up. And we have level of awareness that are well beyond what we would expect given our time in market. I believe above all in brand.
I don't believe in the value of performance marketing unless you're building on a brand foundation. I think that is, I think that's wasted money. I think what you get from that is an uplift that literally just goes like that. Back down.
Right. Doesn't give you sustained growth. It doesn't give you mind share amongst your customers and it's bad value for money unless you're investing in your brand and getting that right before you ever start thinking about pay social events, wherever you're going to show up. And I think one of the things probably that I bring to the role is that I spend 10, 11 years in media agencies and I do worship at the Halo or the ground of Les Bennett and Peterfield who talk about the long and the short of it investing in brand first and foremost, how you grow.
And all those lessons are absolutely true. Whether you work for Walmart, Apple or whether you work for a beta beta business like Zappi, they're the guy who I feel like in terms of how I think about brand. Yeah, I was so good. That was so good.
I mean, thoughts going through my head. One was one of those kind of using your example. When you think about a Walmart or Pepsi or any of any iconic brand. Yeah.
From the outside, my perspective is they're not confused what brand means. And you know, the point like you made the point of it being on your balance sheet. It's on their balance sheet. However, then we had this world of like B2B companies where it's massively confused and confusing.
So the point where people are like, we shouldn't even use the word brand. And I'm like, why? I, so how do I, how do you reconcile this? Because you've had like a foot in both both, both camps, obviously.
When you hear this or you see other companies and I'm sure people you talked a lot of other CMOs and they're on the performance marketing train and they don't have a brand foundation. And they think that's okay, actually. And I'm kind of like, how do you reconcile? Like what happened here?
Is it just like a lack of understanding in B2B marketing community or goals that by venture capitalists? Like, how do you think about that? So truthfully, the other marketing operations that look tend to be in the SaaS world, right? We're a SaaS business.
I tend to look at other SaaS organizations to see how they're innovating and how they're doing things differently. I wonder if Cassidy, if a lot of it is a function of the people who set those businesses up, tend to be very entrepreneurial and tend to have a brilliant idea that may or may not take hold. They may not necessarily come from a classic background, a Unilever or PNG, where you're trained in the principles of brand marketing. Because I've worked on brands ranging from O2, BBC, Microsoft, we never steered away from the fact that if you don't invest in your brand and in brand communications, performance marketing is a waste of time because you're not investing for the future, you're investing for that damn squib of a lift, right?
And back to the title of your podcast, Groesbacking. Groesbacking is about building a brand, building a brand and making sure you're in the right place so that you're capturing that demand when people are ready to buy. And that's what we're trying to do. And I think we have to be distinctive, we have to be destructive, but we also have to add utility.
We have to add value to our buyer, right? Whether that's through the content we serve from a marketing perspective or how we think about the advice we give them or how we support them in their careers. These are all things that we take very seriously in terms of how our brand shows up. I'm not sure that answers your question or if that was just my mini TED talk, but there you go.
Well, I answered the question. It was great. It's interesting. I would maintain a lot of the CEOs I would talk to, even the entrepreneurial ones.
If you really boil down to what do they want? And I think I'm thinking back to the CEOs I used to work for is two things. I want to grow revenue and I want everybody to know about the amazing thing that we're building. I want people to be aware of our brand.
They don't say it like that, right? And so this always gets translated into a very stupid point you're making, which is let's go run performance marketing and have no foundation because I heard revenue growth. But I didn't hear the other thing, which is I want to be admired. I want people to know that we're disrupting the world.
I don't know. Maybe it's because the person on the other side, the marketer, is not conveying and helping educate the new CEO or founder on what that means. It's easier to go spend money on a platform that gives you in theory, a direct response, kind of value back or return back, which we know is not necessarily the case. I see.
I've read a few things recently about that performance plateau, right? You keep investing in performance marketing. After a while, it's not going to keep growing, right? You can't scale it.
After not that long, you're going to have that plateau where even if you pour more money in, you're not going to keep getting the same lift. And people who have a solid brand foundation are less vulnerable to that. Yeah, I agree. We often talk about this when we talk about it more as a company that paid media as a form and distribution, but it all comes down to what you're distributing.
If you have a really strong brand and you're just using it effectively to distribute, then you can maintain and grow that. But you have nothing to say. You're just throwing out money to drive short-term gains. You're going to do exactly.
We see this all the time. It does exactly what you say. There's a peak and then there's a valley. I think I spend more money.
You spend more money. And the return on that spend gets more efficient, but less efficient over time. Yeah, absolutely. And you have to diversify your channel mix.
You have to keep doing it. You have to do it all the time. You have to try one channel, see how it's doing, and then start introducing new things, constantly test and iterate. It's what we use to say to clients when you're in need agency, test and learn, test and learn, and you have to do it in this room as well.
You have to keep trying new touch points, new methods of getting to customers. Interestingly, that's actually the fun part of the job. That's where you're innovating. Your brand is in some ways, your product, and you're innovating on that.
You're getting in finding new ways to delight your customer, the market, to your point, be distinct and different and disrupt. Anytime you have a solution or product that is disruptive, you owe it to the company and investors and yourself to put brand first. That is the ultimate combination of being disruptive and building strong brand foundation. And if you don't, it's just a waste.
Yeah, it's a waste. I don't think the smart brands out there, and we'd be able to talk about the difference we be to be to be. I think smart marketers aren't on that difference. I think smart marketers actually see that you have to appeal to people on an emotional level.
That works whether you're going to be to be space or be to be to be space. A lot of bad marketing, B2B space is when it's a geospased and features, which is based on features. It doesn't personalize the content to the receiver. It doesn't appeal to them on emotional level, and it just doesn't, it's to full paper.
And I think increasingly, I think the lines between B2C and B2B are, you know, from an experience point to becoming more and more blurred. The great thing about B2B is you nothing trumps into personal relationships. If you've got a great relationship with customers, marketing can help you. If customers hate you, marketing can do nothing to help.
Don't even go there, right? But a lot of the lessons from B2C in terms of emotional connection apply equally to B2B in my mind. And in fact, I think the few examples we hold up in B2B, other than Zappy, are companies that have actually struck that corn being emotional and building kind of affinity towards the brand. And we don't really realize that.
We think it's a bunch of other things, but no, if you look back and say, like, why am I buying technology, then we could already is undifferentiated and you want to be to be. But why do I go to one brand over the other? It's because of my emotional connection to the people of that brand or the brand or, you know, how they make me feel, et cetera. And I think, yeah, I mean, what you say strikes the core because I think I said already that getting the investment was great validation for a lot of people who in, you know, took a chance on Zappy five, six years ago.
A lot of those people were disruptors in their own role, right? They were people that weren't happy with the status quo. They wanted a fresh and a different way of doing insight. And that's why Zappy appealed.
The Zappy brand appeals to those people because it was an enabler of that change. It was an enabler of challenge in the status quo and looking for a new way of democratizing insight, doing things fast, doing things much more cost effectively, being really, really able to influence what was taken to market and better advertising. And that's something we need to scale, which of course is super easy. Not.
Yeah. Well, it's a classic classic classic crossing the chasm. This was the early market. You're disruptive.
You found people who want to disrupt in their own world and they gravitate towards solutions like this. And then obviously the growth going forward is like, how do you move into the mainstream market and so forth? And I'm sure you'll do that successfully. What I mean, change direction is slightly not is what does this look like day to day?
So you have, you know, the brand, I love this notion of the brand's stewards for Zappy you have a marketing team. I'm sure it's grown over time and you do a lot of sophisticated things. Like, how do you like, is there a group of people called brand or is it something that is a decision that you make in kind of everything you do or maybe both? Like, how do you need to give like the full structure of the team organization?
Like, how do you think about, you know, kind of this notion of brand and your operation? So I would, if I see your ever listens to this, I'm saying this for his benefit. It's obviously his brand. Right.
Let's be really clear. Steve is the Zappy brand. I'm just babysitting and moving and moving it along. I think the way we organize ourselves and indeed refine ourselves to see in terms of our thinking is we have a demand generation team who are responsible for creating demand.
We have a communications team which focused really laser focused on earned and owned. Right. How do we build up more earned coverage mentions and how do we optimize the channels we have and build share of voice? That is super important to me personally because we have limited resources.
You have to always have to think about paid media also in terms of what you can do in terms of earned and owned. They're equally important. They both play a role but won't cost a lot more money than the other. So you have to balance the two.
Right. But in the center we have a team which we actually call marketing which is it looks after our product marketing and looks after our content because those three things they're all part of our brand. They sit at the center and we have demand gen on one side and we have earned and owned on the other side. So that's how we think about things.
Once we have product marketing, product marketing do the messaging. They think about what's our proposition and what's our thinking. And they also think about how do we bring our brand to life and we have three VPs, one VP for demand gen for comms and one VP who looks at planning and they work seamlessly together to make sure that each of those pieces are connected in the best possible way. So but I'm fortunate in that I work for people who recognize the value of our brand and the distinctiveness of our brand and who never want to dilute that or do anything that will make us vanilla or limit our distinctiveness in market.
That's the most exciting thing about working for somebody is the distinctiveness and how we can really push ourselves. The structure is very clear and when you outline the structure there's one thing that I noticed back in my spend a whole time in the consumer space that I don't ever hear or see in a structure in B2B and that is somebody owning earned in them. And I think that is the reasons are clear why you want to do that and you outline those. It is the fundamental gap.
We see demand gen, we see product marketing, we see the operations, we see the other elements and there's just no thought process put into building an earned and earned strategy in my opinion. That's really interesting insight for me. I think I kind of see it as negligence. That's the way I'm mentally, and I describe it internally as negligence.
I can spend $50 on paid media if we are not simultaneously working on building a long-term investment. I made a comment about the cost but actually paid media is very influential. It's not as influential as getting a piece of Forbes or marketing week or adage and we increasingly we're looking at those things as actual in terms of their value and the impression you can get from both. And in many ways owned and earned we see that as truly a brand investment.
We don't put necessarily targets next to it. We see that as how we're taking our brand to a broader community and influencing a broader community. Yeah, I would say even in, I like your distinction there. What we've tried to talk to a few others, maybe more early stage customers and traditional B2B SaaS spaces.
When you think about community and you think about going on podcasts and you think about these little things, you don't have a strategy yet for PR and comms and getting in a fortune. But all the other things you're doing to try to get into other folks' community and building trusting content to do that without using paid media is a definition of earned and earned and you should embrace that and have a strategy to build that out. Some companies obviously do, but for the vast majority are just over relying on paid media as you mentioned. Without a strong foundation for the brand.
This is all these things stack up. They all give you a share of voice. Exactly. I have a question that you've brought up a few times.
It's your CEO being the steward of the brand and your leadership team buying into the brand and it's fantastic. When you came to Zappi, was that a criteria you were looking for in your next company? Or is it kind of in hindsight, you realize, I imagine now you'd be like, I would never go to another company or advise anybody to go to a company where the CEO and top down were a big believer in the kind of the stewards of the brand where it's like a marketing thing but not a company thing. And occasionally, people pass send you over job descriptions and they look for CMOs who have an expert knowledge of SEO, web metrics, performance marketing and I'm going, they're not looking for CMO.
That's not a CMOs job. And obviously, I would never desire that. I think absolutely I wouldn't. Having people who put brand first and respect the value of brand is super important.
And I think one thing I've been reading a lot of Gartner recently and they talk about brand is no longer just about marketing. Brand is transcends everything we do and CFOs are looking at brand more. And that's welcome news. You never want to be working with people who go.
You spent 10 pounds 50 in a pay dad last week. Where's the return from it? Because marketing's not like that. That's not what marketing is.
Attribution doesn't work in that way either. As we all know, we want to be able to look at everything collectively and see the value of that is kind of the philosophy I have but also I want to work with people who share the philosophy because nobody wants to spend 100,000 USD on an attribution model that takes up more time than they did you to plan the media and comes back with results that you don't even believe anyway. So that's really important in terms of how I think about marketing. The reason I wanted you to outline that so well is we often talk to people who are trying to figure out their next step in their career and how do I evaluate a company or leadership team.
And this can be often overlooked. And so I think the way you articulated that is perfect for people who are looking at their career moving forward. You know, you and I are kind of at the end of our careers but there's a lot of people who are at the beginning and the understanding kind of the importance of this in the founding team or the leadership is instrumental and often over life. So I appreciate you going through that.
Yeah, I think so. You can really. You can convince people. You can get people on a different path and a different journey.
But it doesn't happen overnight. We know that. So great marketing people strive in organizations where the brand isn't seen as pretty pictures in marketing. It's much bigger than that.
So I would love to, if you don't mind, if you did, those of me, to kind of use your recent I'm going to call the campaign around the Super Bowl ads and kind of talk through where this came from. How do you conceptualize it? How do you plan it? How do you put it in place?
How do you execute it? And for those who haven't seen this, we'll make sure it's in the show notes. I'm a huge football fan. Obviously, watch the ads with my kids.
And then I hear a podcast and I read all these articles where people have an opinion on like what the best ads are. And then I see what your team wrote and it was so on brand and so well done, better than anything else I've read. And now I'm not reading everything. And then I was blown away.
And I'm like, this is to me, this is a great personification of owning the brand and being a part of what you're building as app is all about. So with that kind of intro, I'd love to hear kind of just how that idea come about. How'd you go about executing it? What's been the results?
I know it's early days, but this is the third time we've done this. And we haven't touched on and this is a really good option to talk about this talent. My adage is, if you don't have the right talent in your team, you're climbing the mountain and you're under where? I am really fortunate that I have fantastic talent in marketing.
So there's a wonderful woman in our product marketing team. I'm not going to name her because somebody will pull up her, who conceived the Super Bowl campaign. Think about Super Bowl and I know a lot about marketing or I think I do. I know nothing about marketing but what I do know is one of the few moments in the calendar year where people really, really pay attention to advertising.
And if you're one of those brands, that is a hell of a lot of money, you've got to commit. And it is a few days where people are hyperinterested in the advertising and the commentary on the advertising. That is a disruptive brand. We have to demonstrate not just our destruction but our credibility.
So we have lots of people who go, well, I might be relying on one of the legacy comments for insight. Actually, we want to tell them they can also get from Zappi through the Zappi platform. So we want to get that share of mind at a crucial time, but we want to do it in a way that's on brand. We've conceived this is our third generation.
It is without our best. And what we've done is it's multi-channel. So it truly is multi-channel. It's working through our own channels, paid media activation, both in social, but also through a media partnership.
And it's just touching people and providing the relevant insight in a moment where they're hyperfocused and hyperinterested in what's going on. And as you say, we're trying to do it in a way that's through the brand. We're not trying to do it in a way that's like one of the legacy comments. We're trying to do it maybe less seriously and more to us.
But I'd like it. I will relay your compliments to the aforementioned unnamed marketing genius in our team. Please do it. Please do it.
It's really good. And one of the things I really admire about it is I like this, I don't know if you call it a tagline, but like this position of data for creators. And as somebody who loves data myself and has managed creators, I appreciate that data actually unlocks the creativity of your creators. Then as I see that, I have that in my head and I read through what you did here, you literally did that for the ads.
You said this is the rank order, but here's the data behind it. You know about what it uses at the platform. Maybe somehow got 12,000 people to weigh in on this immediately after the game pretty much. It seems like and then you created the campaign and everything's out in like 24 hours or 40 hours, which is incredible.
And I look at that and I just appreciate this as like this is outstanding, top notch marketing and brand building. And as I just read through it, I'm smiling because you just don't see this very often. And so I'm not trying to pump you up because we have relationships genuinely outstanding right on brand reinforces everything. So really hats off.
I mean, this should be an example for any company in terms of like how to what do you want to call the brand activation or campaign or whatever like it's it's so well done. So yeah, please pass along my my. Where did data for creators come from? Is that always kind of in the head of the CEO and the team from the beginning?
Is this something like you iterated on the kind of nail this? I feel like this is tight. This is like when I read this, I'm like, I get it. This is really in three words describes what you're trying to disrupt and who you are.
It came once again from Steve. Maybe he should be same as well. I don't think he truly wants to be same. Oh, it came from really thinking in a more holistic pandemic sense about the people who are targeting and we want to extend our persona targeting not just inside people, but into the marketing community.
As our platform gets better and better and better, what it does is I referenced earlier democratize is inside. It allows inside people to move away from just commissioning research to truly consultants about consumer behavior and it puts more data in the hands of CMOs. We kind of wanted to celebrate that and actually enable our different calls, our different consumer, different personas to give them access to more data so that their chance of success in market is enhanced. And we really truthfully play in the pre the pre launch phase, right?
Most of our tools and our suites on our platform are designed to give creators the best insight into what's going to be a great innovation in market or great advertising market. Truly, that's where insight closes biggest role, right? It's the pre launch data space space. That's where you win and lose, right?
You don't get that right. No amount of post mortems or post analysis is going to make you successful. It's at that point where you need to, you need the right insight. And a lot of what we talk to customers about is key testing.
You can do quickly. You can iterate and iterate until you get it right. And that's kind of where our objective creators idea came from. Truthfully, we've loads more work to do to learn that message.
And that's a big focus for this year. Which is good, though. You kind of want the the North star to be a little aspirational. You need to kind of work towards that and kind of earn it.
When you're maybe this weekend for the audience, like my understanding is like the old, you just described the kind of new world, what should be, you're constantly iterating as you bring something to market, a product, a campaign, whatever. I assume the old world of that is like you said, you commission, like the word commission sounds like it's a heavy process that takes a long time. And I could probably do it once versus I think what your position is like, no, you can constantly be asking, getting feedback throughout your development process. So like the cycle times, different economics are different.
The granularity of probably the feedback you're getting is better. I'm just kind of guessing based on kind of a little bit. I know the people work in detail against it. And the traditional insight model was you were commission a piece of research.
You would spend a few weeks designing that research. You would be in fields for a week or two. And then it would take another few weeks to analyze that data, come up with a hundred slide presentation, which a consultant would present that protectary months to quote a very esteemed leader. Sometimes by the time you've got the results, you forgot why you're commissioning it.
You've got to go. And we've all been there. And we've also here from a lot of customers who go, I might have commissioned this in the past. There's no way we find a note because it's all sitting in, you know, PowerPoint decks in a sub drive up a sub drive that was done by predecessor and I can't find anyway.
So the new world is about much faster, right? The economics are built on being able to iterate and do it quickly and put and being able and people being able to do it themselves. Right. So our users are people who work in inside organizations in Pepsi and McDonald's, dominoes who are users.
They're running the research themselves and they're analyzing the research themselves. And that's down to a few days rather than weeks. Super Bowl, Super Bowl was Sunday. We had those results Monday morning, right?
So it's Sunday evening. We had the results Monday morning. I knew at 10 o'clock in the morning. What the best that's where, right?
It's, you know, it's not instantaneous, but we're down to a few hours. And it's not the few hours for field work. It's that we have it in a format where somebody can look at and go by now, but I know the answer. That's incredible.
And I was hoping you would share that. Yeah. So you had the answers Monday morning. Yeah.
So we had the answers and quite work out the time delay, but we're what? Six, seven hours ahead. We ran all the field work overnight in the space of a couple of hours. And we, I have the charts on half nine, 10 o'clock Monday morning.
This is like, it's such a brilliant proof point to like the new world, because the old world you can see out there, people's opinion, like I'm an expert. So I watch these and this is my opinion or if you were to commission this research, we'd still be waiting for the blog to come out of the summary to come out. Maybe we'd see it in probably two or three more weeks. And here we are.
You have it out the day to Monday morning. You have the South probably Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. It's crazy. It's like, it's such a great proof point.
That's what it's all about. Like that is marketing. It's just by next week, nobody cares about Super Bowl. Right.
You know, the only people probably care of people who didn't have a great Super Bowl. If you're at flop tour, you're just didn't hit home. Then people care next week, but everybody else would have moved on. So you have a window, you've got to get the window.
And so that's what we're aiming to do. So I have to ask you, I think the piece of content I read was like the top 10 ads. Did you do the bottom 10 or do you kind of decide to stay away from that? And yeah, we do.
We do the top 10. We do the bottom 10 and the ones. All right. I'm telling you, I'm not telling you.
It's not that I can't go read that. I can't go read the worst ads of the Super Bowl by that's probably not what you want to say. Here are the 10 worst ads. It's not that what you want to say.
Can I say, it was that? So do you remember you might remember this? Nobody else is listening. Well, do you remember that book?
How to win friends and influence people? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I read it. You should probably take it. We take it.
So I find it sent it to you. Guess what you can happen. All right. I probably will share it with anybody.
All right. Well, I want to be respectful of time. Where does it go from here? Like you guys, it seems like you're got, you know, I love it.
You top down leadership believes in this. I believe in from the start a lot. It's come from the CEO. I love the notion of you being kind of the steward in the company of the brand.
This is the structure of the team, the philosophy. I think this is all amazing for the community. Listen to this. This is what everybody should be doing.
Where do you go from here? Like, you know, you have investment. You're on the hook for the next couple of years and you'll decide what you want to do after that. Like, where do you?
How do you think about, obviously, you can't be specific. But how do you think about the next step in kind of your journey around marketing and branding of Zappi or just maybe even where the industry goes? How do you want to take that question? So I'm really interested in the power of experience and how we can really elevate Zappi and create a much better experience both when people are using our platform, but when we encounter people face to face.
And I really want to do work to enhance that this year. I want to get to a point where marketing is delivering a much bigger part of the pipeline than we are right now and keep growing that. And I want to win more big customers. We have big hairy goals around customer acquisition.
Our early growth, a lot of us inbound, right? We want to get to a place where we're supercharging our inbound growth. People are contacting us because what we're saying is resonating, is differentiating and it's not for people. And that's what I'm thinking about for the next 12, 18 months.
You said we're at the end of our careers. The great thing about being at the end of your career is you don't have to think about five years time. You don't do it. You can just think about this year and next year and work really, really hard in here and out.
So that's the way I approach things. Unfortunately, I work for a great business and a great brand. And we also, we value experimentation. And when we get things wrong, we just start again.
And that's something we should all actively promote and encourage. That's incredible. I could not have wrapped that up better. Beautiful.
Avon, thanks for the time. This has been outstanding. I've really enjoyed it and the audience will as well. So work in people, last question.
Where can people find you if they want to reach out? I'm on LinkedIn. I don't think there's any of our grinds. So I've not encountered another one in marketing anyway.
And you can find me on the zappi website as well. Zappi.io if anybody wants to see our beautiful brand. We'll make sure to link that in the show notes. Thanks again, Avon.
It was a pleasure.