ADMA Podcast ADMA

IT and marketing are normally seen as different ends of a spectrum, but when the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Information Officer come together, their union can create a culture where teams can work together.

The issue is that brands are increasingly competing for the quality of experiences that they offer for customers attention says Jenny Williams, ADMA marketing lead.

Marketing, digital and IT all have a role to play in delivering great customer experiences. In this podcast we interrogate the issue from the perspective of all three. Our guests include Campari’s IT manager Tim Reid, the former Head of Digital at AMP and Citibank Michael Weeding, and The CMO Council’s Liz Miller.

Today we launch the ADMA's Brave New Marketing Podcast Series, an ongoing conversation designed specifically for marketers. The series delves into the mindset, skillset and toolset that marketing professionals will require to succeed in the future.
Guests in the series will provide local and international perspectives on the most important issues facing the profession today — and that is reflected in the lineup from the very first episode.
On this episode we include insights from Partners in Performance director Gerd Schenkel, the founder of uBank and a former head of digital at Telstra, as well as VJ Gupta, Vice President Strategy and Industries at Sitecore, along with Alison Sainsbury, also from Sitecore. Marcus Marchant, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer at QBE Insurance, and Minter Ellison CMO Diane Gates also joined us in the studio, where all the guests discussed the disruptive forces operating in the market today and the impact they are having on business and on marketers.
Tucker introduces the first podcast by describing the context in which marketers find themselves, in today’s world of seemingly total transparency. “There are no secrets about sustainability or climate policy or treatment of staff and people within organisations. So we now have a really clear lens into organisations, the way that they work, and the way they build their products and take them to market.” More than ever, he says, brands need to walk in the shoes of their customers.
The discussion begins with a deep dive into why so many large incumbent businesses miss their transformational moment, and why their mistakes are often misdiagnosed. To illustrate the point, VJ Gupta describes what everyone gets wrong about the Kodak story.
He tells podcast host Andrew Birmingham, “The common narrative around the business decline is that they missed the digital revolution. The reality is that they did not miss the digital revolution — they actually created a separate arm for digital imaging. And for a very long while they were one of the leaders in digital camera sales. What really led to their demise was the fact that smartphones with cameras emerged.”
This leads to a conversation with Gerd Schenkel about the fact that many incumbents, while skilled at identifying and adopting new technologies, are not always as effective at turning new technologies into disruptive forces and new businesses.
Marcus Marchant describes why it is important for incumbent businesses to partner effectively with startups, and he describes QBE’s own digital transformation journey.
The importance of sophisticated data marketing is also explored in detail by Marchant and Diane Gates, who discusses the always difficult subject of balancing the customer’s desire for more personalised experiences against the need to keep that data safe and to be respectful of how it is used.
Finally, Sitecore’s Alison Sainsbury is the executive in the “Resonate” hot seat, where we interview an industry executive about the topics discussed in the podcast and ask them to describe what resonated most to them.
The first episode of the ADMA Brave Marketing podcast series is available for download now. For Sitecore’s guide to personalisation visit: https://www.adma.com.au/sitecore-path-to-personalisation