The Future of Marketing with Ed Breault, CMO of Aprimo

EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of The Next CMO podcast, we speak to Ed Breault, the CMO of Aprimo, a leading provider of digital asset management and work management solutions for marketers.

 

EPISODE NOTES

Aprimo offers industry-leading digital asset management and work management solutions that help teams spend their time and effort on content and marketing strategies to drive business outcomes and reach customers in the right channels. Aprimo’s powerful content operations platform provides organizations with a single source of truth to optimize the way they plan, develop, govern, and deliver exceptional brand experiences at scale.

 

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Produced by PodForte

 

Peter: The next CMO podcast explores topics that are on the minds of forward thinking marketing executives from leadership and strategy to emerging technologies. And we bring these topics to life by interviewing leading experts in their fields. The next CMO is sponsored by Planful for Marketing, a leading marketing performance management solution that automates marketing, planning, financial management, and ROI optimization, and hosted by me Peter Mahoney, an experienced cmo, ceo, board member, and executive advisor.
Hey Ed, thanks so much for being on the next C M O podcast. I’m really excited for this conversation. And to get started, why don’t you give the [00:01:00] listeners a little bit of info about who you are and who a primo is.
Ed: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Peter. Excited to be on and share. My name is Ed Brit, chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo. Aprimo is market leader in digital asset management for customer experience. And marketing resource management. Those are the two product categories that Gartner and Forrester put out there.
And we happen to be on the leaders quadrant in la. Very nice place, very top, far right in it. And yeah, so, companies like the Home Depot when you think about all that content that flows through the Home Depot from early stage ideation, workflow processes storage of the content, and then having it flow out on.
Multiple channels, web, cms, in store, you name it. The wonderful mobile app that they have. That whole supply chain of content, that’s what Aprimo really powers for. For brands
Peter: Awesome. Great. And I suspect almost all of our listeners will at least know a little bit about a [00:02:00] primo. And I think, did you just have your quarter century kind of anniversary start founded in 98? Right. So I just looked that up cuz I knew that we actually, when I was back in the early two thousands, I think literally in 2000.
In 2001 we were a very early customer of what a primo was back then, was actually something a little bit different. But the company’s been around for a long time, and certainly an established leader in in the space. And actually I just looked and I was snooping on your LinkedIn profile, and I realized that you did two tours of duty at Aprimo.
Is that accurate, ed?
Ed: I am gonna call it more than two. I’ll call it five or six. And yeah, Primo was founded in 98 and really excited. Yes. Silver anniversary this summer. We’ve got some really cool shirts that say 25 on the back and we’re, everybody gets their last name on it, so yeah, we’re gonna celebrate that this summer.
I’ve been with Aprimo for 17 years, so, You saw a primo then, not a primo, and then a primo [00:03:00] again. And that’s really a really cool story. Started in, during like early, you know, startup years rapid growth acquisition. That’s when it. A primo brand. Everything was, we shut it down and it was part of a, another larger multi-billion dollar company than they were accumulating building up their marketing technology assets.
About a billion dollars worth of acquisitions. Acquired us in 2011 and then they were getting attacked by Amazon and the big move from move to the cloud with Redshift. And so they divested. We went through a divesting process and that’s, so I was really with like a primo 1.0, 2.0 rapid growth 3.0.
As within another company 4.0 at when we carved out in 2016. And then you know, we carved out who do we want to be? Aprimo again, had to relaunch the company, the brand, the product. And then we went through a I’ll call it a, [00:04:00] getting the unit economics of the business in really strong shape. And now we’re in this, I’ll call it sixth iteration, or sixth tour of duty, which is scale.
Peter: Awesome. Awesome. It’s it’s funny I did a long time at one company. It wasn’t quite that long. It was actually 13 years though that a company that also went through a lot of transformations over the years through m and a mostly mostly in gobbling things up. It’s a company called Nuance that made voice and AI stuff.
We did a hundred acquisitions during my time. And it’s really interesting Because we also have these same sort of layers in the company over years. These eras that you could see, you know, through through like the slicing the ground in geologic time right. Kind of thing. You can see you, you can see how things change and it’s really interesting.
And if you think about that, Think about the brand evolution over time from the very early days to the end. Is there anything that’s a through line [00:05:00] that you can say that this is sort of the essence of a primo that was from 1998 to 2023?
Ed: Absolutely. And you know that when you’re in those early stage, I’ll call it startup years, and you’re going through rapid growth, that passion and fire for for what a prima was, we had this, and I’ll go back to a really cool campaign that we ran back then which was called The Marketing Revolution.
And and at the heart of the marketing revolution. Where marketers, I’ll call it, taking the power back and really empowering their customers and doing that through you know, More advanced marketing strategies, becoming more bringing on new capabilities and new ownership of data and data really driving you know, the outcomes of the business.
And then whenever we divest, we carved out in, you know, 2016 and I took back over [00:06:00] as head of marketing. I had to go and find that essence back. So did a lot of You know, interviewing and sit downs with customers. I had some of that, the continuity of that essence from, you know, having, you know, been with the company for 17 years and it’s a very deep passion for leaning into change and being a transformational marketer and you know, confronting challenges and doing that in a very, like, informed way, I would say.
And, Also in that is storytelling. You know, the essence is very much around you know, having marketing and content tell great stories. So these are, you know, the through line is fiery passion to drive change and really cut through the noise and really disrupt default thinking and disrupt and pattern disrupt.
Bad, you know, uninspiring [00:07:00] marketing, like that’s really the through line that we were able to find. Having gone through the rebrand and it’s still that torch is still burning today.
Peter: Well, I must say that you have a lot of untapped market potential if you’re in the business of getting rid of uninspired marketing because there’s a lot of it that’s out there still. There’s of course, some great, amazing stuff going on in the world, but there’s a lot that, that needs a lot of help.
I if you look back You know, if you look back through your 17 years, which is a little mind blowing for most people it, you know, I think some of our listeners were probably in grade school 17 years ago. And but think from the beginning there what’s the most surprising change if you look forward and said, Hey, you know, 15 years from now, the world is gonna be like this.
What’s the thing that’s sort of the most surprising to you about how things are different today versus they were when you started working with a primo back in the back in, you know, the Jurassic era.
Ed: Yeah, exactly. The put the, do the, get the [00:08:00] soil sample, go down and pull the plug out. I would say that one of the biggest things that’s different is we’re in this new era of media. We have, when you think about marketing, back then, we didn’t have. People, individuals generating media that you were competing with for attention?
We, you know, we have user generated content. We have you know, social media is huge now. Like before it was just like this new thing. So everybody’s media generating center anymore, and it goes out in this world and there’s now all of this. Attention that’s trying to be grabbed, that’s trying to be earned, that brands are now having to cut through all of this new noise.
It’s very noisy and I like to call it digital pollution that’s out there. And doing so. And then also, you know, you know, this new era now has, you know, we’ve gone through [00:09:00] marketing marketers and brands generating content to You know, individuals generating content in the new media era now we have machines generating content on demand and needing the helpful hand of the human to, you know, to make sure that it’s authentic.
So we didn’t have all of this. We, I would, and I would say that, You know, before, in order to deliver great marketing to deliver, do great content marketing, even we had content scarcity cuz you know, we’re lacking resources to great content. We’ve got a, that problem is over. We’ve got a content abundance and overabundance now.
So the new problems on the other side are we’re trying to solve for as marketers, experience leaders is how do we. Deal with this content abundance and efficiently, effectively generate experiences that are really, you know, hitting the mark. That’s really what’s different.[00:10:00]
Peter: Yeah it’s really fascinating, ed, to think about the two major shifts that you alluded to in that last discussion. One is the transition of control from brands to brands to fans and sort of. User generated, social media generated kind of content going out there and then of course going yet another level into machines being able to do this.
And if you think about that first transition that had to be, you know, a huge deal, of course. And there was a huge challenge in In sort of maintaining, figuring out one, can you control it? Can you maintain it? Can you find a way to sort of create value from it? Is it the same kind of sets of challenges that you see now that we have more AI generated content out there?
Or is it different issues that you’re dealing with in this sort of second major shift?
Ed: I’m seeing it as different because, and I almost think that the first, that first set is harder because [00:11:00] it’s out of your control as a brand. You know, it was you. Set your content free, you know, or set, you know, set your brand free. But now you have all of that content being generated and it’s completely out of your control.
Now with machines generating content, if you’re doing it right, you can still have the guardrails as long as you keep it under control and, you know, manage brand protection so that you’ve got this, you know, there’s user generated, and I’ll call it synthetic content generation. You can still manage very effectively synthetic content generation within your organization.
If you put in the right guardrails and you’re able to identify what was machine generated versus human generated that is controllable. It’s still very different. Both are hard and now we’re dealing with both. So that’s the, I’ll call it the nuance there. Impossible to control, but you have to let [00:12:00] play out and then, Very much under your control.
If so, if you choose to responsibly manage synthetic content generation in your supply chain of content.
Peter: So it’s basically a very different set of brand guidelines. You know, one is sort of the guidelines for the machine. It’s a customized model that you’d apply to a an, you know, an open AI kind of system that says, Hey, use this rule. It’s You know, write my homework in a, you know, Shakespearean sonnet that as if it was written by Snoop Dogg, same thing, but you know, by your brand guidelines, et cetera.
So you can give it those things. Now the, but the other thing that’s really interesting is that there are multiple sides to this discussion. There’s the idea. Of using these kinds of tools to create new content. But then I just saw that you recently announced some new capability at a primo that’s really taking it from the other direction.
Right, which is, I’ve got this [00:13:00] content now I can actually use some of these tools to describe it, which is pretty amazing, right? Cuz it’s really about it. Sounds like append metadata and sort of categorizing and describing and making it much easier for you as a brand to identify the stuff that you may already have.
Is that the right way to think about it?
Ed: Absolutely. And I love what you said when you first started talking about brand guidelines because every marketer out there, your brand guidelines, go get ’em and crack ’em open and put in a new section and call it prompt management there. AI is going to be in your content supply chain, your brand as you’re managing your brand, you’re going to want to have.
Brand branded prompts that you’re going to use within AI to to, I’ll call it, you know, whisper to whisper to ai. So that’s one thing. And then yeah, absolutely. We, you know, right within the platform have capabilities for simplifying language [00:14:00] making tone more friendly, if that’s your brand voice making content more concise.
For you know, whatever the wherever that content’s going to go. And then where we found a lot of power is within. The ability to test variants of whatever kind of content you need you know, testing is massively important and it’s always been hindered by the ability to generate the different variations that you wanna test and do proper AB testing.
That’s all. That’s so much more simplified now where we can speed it up within seconds, not days. Rely on a machine to give you that start and then humanize it. So we’ve built a lot of that right in the platform. And then it’s also tracking it knows exactly what was machine generated versus human generated.
And then what’s, here’s what’s cool and here’s what. I’ll call it very well regulated brands. Brands with high degree of compliance, whether it’s brand compliance or[00:15:00] medical, legal, regulatory. You know, whatever your organization needs will put it right into a workflow. So a workflow process where you go through your.
Your content generation and where you create your variance of content and you could put it right into a certified workflow process that goes to the humans that need to look at it and verify its compliance for whatever dimension of compliance you need to manage that, then that’s all tracked. So that’s really what we wanted to do was create, you know, with, you know, Microsoft and you know, they’re one of the most and we want to be as well.
You know, one of the one of the companies who really does AI in a, you know, in a very responsible way, you know, responsible ai. And so we take on that responsibility as well to not just put the capabilities in, but then also allow the brands who use our platform to, to be responsible in so doing as well as, you know, best practices and content there.
So that’s [00:16:00] been our approach. Responsible ai and help brands. You know, protect themselves.
Peter: So if you were a CMO and a brand today and. Not sitting in your perch, right? Where you’ve got now this incredible perspective over the world of content management, content generation and asset management, et cetera. What advice would you give to, to a marketing executive who I is just thinking about how do I deal with this new world era?
Where do they start? Is it reading and educating? Is it thinking about systems? Where do they begin?
Ed: Yeah, I mean, you know, if you are in those roles, you’ve already must have the growth mindset be super curious. So you’re probably on it already. And I would say the first actions would be to, you need to get a generative AI strategy in place. Part of that strategy could be, you know, on the very front end, which is like a deep discovery, understanding and learning.
It’s [00:17:00] moving fast. And even, you know, as we, you know, are talking today and this broadcast will go a lot of this, you know, may be dif will be different. It’s literally changing on a daily basis. So I would say get your generative AI strategy in place. Really understand your risk profile for artificial intelligence within your org catalog, the existing artificial intelligence or generative AI that you already have.
Inside your firewall or you know, however you wanna put that into terms inventory, all of that. And you’re gonna probably realize, wow, I’m already leveraging or consuming within the brand, a lot of generative ai. So it’s not so scary. But then, you know, get your generative AI strategy in place, put teams together that own the problem of the discovery and.
I imagine we’re gonna, and I’ve actually started to see this, but we’re gonna see more and more [00:18:00] AI or generative AI go into titles of folks within organizations. You know, could we see chief AI officers emerge? Whether they go by that, you know, title or not, you know, somebody could assume it, but you know, really put some you know, ownership into this.
This these emerging opportunities.
Peter: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Thinking about, you know, the C A I O not
to create another C
but
Ed: we need one. Yeah.
Peter: Exactly, but it’s kind of, I suspect that some chief digital officers may be thinking about these issues right now, chief Legal Officers, and I suspect you’re not an attorney and won’t represent yourself as one on the call, but can you talk about the kind of IP related issues that CMOs need to think about when they’re starting to grapple with AI generated content?
Ed: absolutely. I made up a new term the other day, or this could exist, but I just started using it. I would call it firmo, [00:19:00] graphically identifiable information. Should be redacted from your inputs of open source. Like if you go into chat g p t right now, don’t put any firmo graphically identifiable data in there.
You need to be intellectual, you know, intellectually aware of what’s IP and what’s not, and know that it’s going into, and it’s training up a large language model. So. You know, immediately, and then back to your regional question, you need to put policy in place immediately. You know, generative ai policy practices, you know, established not in departments, but literally at the top of the company.
You need to put that in place. Know that what you put in these open source large language models is something that you know, You’re relinquishing like control of you’re putting that out there for it and it’s, you’re not getting it back. Like it’s going into, and it’s always [00:20:00] been a bit of a I don’t wrong word, but like a black box of what’s going on in there and, you know, once it goes in, how’s it come out?
And that’s out of my under, you know, knowledge and understanding. But I would say that, and you gotta use a lot of. Common sense when doing so, you know, but there are applications where we can create like sort of private training large language models within organizations where that might not be such a problem, or we’re doing that right now.
Within our Prima Labs team, we’re training up a bunch of models that we know are we’re training them on our digital asset libraries right now. We’re training them on things like as simple as, you know, we were looking at our product our help and we’re training a model on that.
So we can have a very you know, prompt output experience with that. But I would say be careful with the, you know, the public models, you know,[00:21:00] and use a lot of common sense. Yeah. We saw a lot of news pop up here recently on. Folks not practicing that I’ll call it common sense intellectual property handling.
Peter: Yeah. What’s your prediction, ed? When’s the first big public. Firing gonna happen from someone who has done something wrong or inappropriate or irresponsible with generative ai and what’s gonna be the reason for the firing? Any theories?
Ed: Oh, that’s a good one. I’ll bet the act already happened. I’ll bet it’s going on right now. I bet there’s a, some very deep investigations going on right now. That, that’s a tough one to predict. I just know that there’s a lot of folks that have access to information that came online so quickly.
Organizations didn’t respond quickly enough to put protocols in place. It could be code You know, source code that folks have put out there. That’s my guess is like the first thing that’s gonna have [00:22:00] significant commercial consequences. If I would guess it would be source code for for products.
Peter: Yeah, like I IP leakage in some way, whether it’s source code or something else. But yeah, it, it makes a lot of sense and it’s one of the reasons why I think most companies should, if they haven’t already start to establish in their legal organization a set of policies, at least around this.
So it’s we’re, of course, in the. In the very early days of this, you know, rapid acceleration of the market. So I’ve been around the market for a long time as we talked about I spent a lot of time at a company that did voice and AI stuff, and we made like these small incremental improvements over time, but then all of a sudden, bang as compute power got so incredibly so incredibly broad and available.
And then just the work of. Of, of open AI that has been put to this, we’ve seen just this rapid acceleration. Any thought around how [00:23:00] different the world will be for CMOs in a year when it comes to the effect of some of these capabilities that are just hitting the market?
Ed: Yeah, for sure. And we can always, I love going back to history cause it tends to repeat itself. You know, there were days before data was a big marketing thing, right before big data marketing before Marketers had to be very data driven. They were very, you know, brand centric, creative. And then data showed up on the scene, you know, and now generative AI has shown up on the scene.
And then, you know, in their, you know, content has moved to the center. So I think right now a lot of CMOs leaders of marketing are looking at these opportunities from generative ai and how does that play into their teams? How does that augment their teams? How does it reshape roles? You know, you’re, you know, one of the things that I’m doing personally right, right now is I have my team, we’ve managed our team with objectives and key results or OKRs.[00:24:00]
They’re all focused in on that. They’re doing deep research. They’re looking what they used to do in or do today, and how does generative AI assist them in their work? And then how do they, the big, I’ll call it outcome on that is, Not just quality, but cycle time, both quality of outputs and cycle time into market, cuz we all know that is, that could be a superpower for organizations.
So, my whole team’s looking at that where it fits in and you know, we’ve made it part of our marketing strategy, which is, you know, generative ai, augmented workplace within the team. And it’s definitely a cultural. Cultural shift. Folks have to come to terms with what it can do. Now, the skills they used to need to do every day, they don’t need, necessarily need to with everything.
It’s okay to outsource some of this out, outsource some of your brain. And honestly I believe, and I’m [00:25:00] seeing within my team it’s making them more human. Because what they were doing before that was, I’ll call it a little bit more mundane. They don’t need to do anymore. So feel good about that.
And you know, get up on it like a wave and ride that thing and, you know, have it, you know, lift you even higher than you were before. We will always be augmented by, you know, technologies the world. You know, we look, we would look back at technology changes, you know, technology. Humans like to change linearly.
Technology is exponential. That’s hard for folks. But we think of also like changes. The world became more flat once we laid down all this infrastructure for data to flow. Now it’s so much more deep within us. It’s in within our houses. It’s on our bodies, it’s in our bodies. It’s all around us metering metricing and metering everything.
So the same is gonna happen within our professional lives in our professional roles. So I think that we need to have [00:26:00] folks on our teams skill sets who are open to the idea of adoption here, and having it you know, drive the value that we’re, you know, commercial values that we’re looking for, and getting creative with the two.
How can it speed up our work? How can the quality of outputs be much better? How do we scale with it? And then at the same time, what new space has it created for you to add more human level value? Back into your work. So that’s, it’s introspective and it’s a conversation that needs to have. And yeah.
CMOs and, you know, future CMOs need to think about that being a key pillar of their leadership.
Peter: Yeah it’s really interesting if you look at the different eras there. Of disruption in marketing. There have been lots of them, right? Where people said, ah, you know, marketing’s to everyone. It’s democratized now. So, so all of a sudden it ba way back in the nineties when they had desktop publishing for the first time, right?
You don’t need to. To be a print set [00:27:00] designer kind of thing. And then of course, with the early development of the web and and then fast forward to tools like Canva and then all of a sudden there are all these things out there that are lots and lots of reasons for predicting that the demise of marketing a as a function.
And obviously, you know, marketing has survived and thrived by taking advantage and leveraging some of those tools in a meaningful way. But if you think. Looking forward. Ed, as you look to hire on your team, think about what are the core skills that you look at when you’re trying to hire, you know, just strong marketing athletes for a primo.
Looking forward, what are the key things that you look for?
Ed: I love that. And I like how you said athletes as well. Cause it takes a great deal of persistence, resilience depending on the role, whether, you know, it’s business development who is on my team. They’re dealing with rejection every day. They’re whether. Creative folks who are dealing with they want [00:28:00] feedback so much like to feed their the work product that they put out there.
Demand gen marketers who are, you know, constantly on the grind as well and measured by results. It’s resilience. It’s extremely strong teamwork. It’s the growth mindset of. Always learning, educating, super curious. I need folks on my team who are asking questions of legacy. Why do we do it like that?
And here’s a better way. Coming to the table with solutions is super important. And you know, folks with high RPMs is what I say. Folks who can move quickly back to that we were talking about earlier on cycle time. Folks that can do it now, cuz it’s not gonna, you know, pushing it to tomorrow isn’t gonna help you out.
It’s still gonna be there, you know, so the idea of cycle time and throughput and just having having really just an RPM rotations, you know, per minute skill [00:29:00] set.
Peter: Yeah I think that there’s that and one of the things that you mentioned there was this idea of being sort of voracious learners, I think is in curiosity, I think is incredibly important for for marketers and I find that the people who can. Understand what they’re doing and sort of apply very specifically to the business outcomes they’re trying to generate is a really important thing.
So people understand the broader world that they’re operating in versus having sort of that myopic view is important to, to be able to connect those dots and understand the context that they’re working within versus just doing the thing. And that’s where having this idea to have. Really strong peripheral vision is incredibly important for marketers at all levels.
Because if you don’t, you’re gonna miss the things going on in, in the periphery and the adjacency that may be incredibly important. And that’s why, you know, the animals that survived in the wild, they’re the ones who have some of those good [00:30:00] instincts over time. Not to compare us to wild animals, but hey, what are you gonna do?
Ed: Need to be.
Peter: Exactly. Well, but believe it or not, ed we’re actually getting to to the end of our time here, unfortunately, and this has been a fascinating conversation. And and I would love to spend more time talking about the application of these things, about a primo overall, about the way marketing functions there, about your career and what you want to do next.
And all these great things, but we’re running out of time. So maybe I’ll just wrap it up and ask you, the one question that we ask everyone to finish on is, what advice would you give to current and aspiring CMOs?
Ed: Yeah, and you started hitting on it too. Enterprise mindset. Enterprise mindset is you, is the marketer thinking about the rest of the organization, not just marketing, you know, sales, finance CX product. One of the things that, when I think, when I look at my career, I’ve been in with even at a primo, multiple different roles, multiple [00:31:00] different departments, the thing that’s allowed me to be successful and be, you know, head of marketing for.
Going on seven, seven years is having this concept of enterprise mindset where when I’m speaking with the cfo, I’m not speaking marketing, I’m speaking like the cfo, I’m talking to Mike, and I’m talking about ebitda and I’m talking about unit economics of the business. I’m talking about cac, payback period.
When I’m talking with my head of sales, I’m talking about pipeline. I’m talking about what I’m doing for sales, how I’m building that. When I’m talking with my ceo, I’m talking about How we’re growing, how what I’m doing is how is it generating value for the business and and how I’m, what are the growth levers that I’m employing to grow.
And then when I talk to our head of product, you know, I’m, we’re. I’m very much into using the product myself and talking about the user experience of it. And within our CX organization, you know, once you become a customer, you know, the marketing [00:32:00] responsibility doesn’t end. So it’s looking at that full customer journey being able to understand the various different departments and why they are doing what they need to be doing and how marketing can benefit them, and making sure your team is you know, speaking the languages.
Of those other departments, not just the marketing speak you’ve got to translate and have a strong enterprise mindset.
Peter: Well, awesome. That is Sage advice, and it’s no no surprise that you’ve lasted about three times longer than the typical C M O because you’ve figured out how to a, adapt in the world and communicate to your peers around the executive table in the language that Is meaningful to them. So fantastic advice.
Ed, I really wanted to thank you for your time in sharing your great insights with our listeners. If you and the audience have any ideas for topics or guests that you’d like us to consider, just drop us a note at the next cmo@planful.com. [00:33:00] Make sure you follow us on all those social media things like Twitter and LinkedIn, most notably and appreciate your time and ed, thanks again and have a great day.
Thanks,