Peter Metzinger Knows Marketing PETER METZINGER is the Owner & Managing Director of Business Campaigning, a strategic consultancy specializing in «impossible missions» in branding, marketing, and communications. He’s also the co-founder of evAI Intelligence, helping companies develop tailor-made Artificial Intelligence solutions. Peter’s trademarked business campaigning® model was used at the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Open Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In today’s episode, Peter shares with us his unusual take on the future of marketing: partnering with the customers as the experts in identifying what they want + using AI and technology to customize and enhance their experiences. A Fun Fact About Peter Metzinger I couldn’t resist sharing: Peter has always been a pioneer in using digital tools. In 1987 – this is seven years before launch of the World Wide Web — police were tapping the phone lines of an anti-nuclear network Peter had founded. So what did Peter do? He set up a computer network across many different cities and he wrote an encryption software to be able to continue coordinating campaign activities without the police being able to find out what they were up to. In This Episode In this episode of Level Up Your Leadership with Mr. Mission Impossible himself, Peter and I talk about: How AI and technology will change marketing and communications in the future Why you can’t find the right solution without considering the human element Why it’s important to speak with your audience (and not to your audience) Is AI already using psychology to convince me to buy things I don’t need? Why you, the sales or marketing expert, aren’t really the expert at all. How customers will get even more used to customization… and what lines that might cross on privacy How to solve impossible missions To learn more about Peter, check out his website, connect with him on LinkedIn , or purchase a copy of his book, business campaigning (available in German only). If you’re a marketer OR a consumer (or a human!), you’re going to want to hear about the future of marketing. Tune in to this episode of Level Up Your Leadership wherever you love to listen to podcasts. OR you can read the full transcript below. Enjoy! Lisa If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes or Google Play – your ratings make a big difference in helping others discover Level Up Your Leadership. Want future episodes automatically delivered to your device? Be sure to subscribe. Thanks for listening! Ep. 13: The Future of Marketing is AI + Humans with Peter Metzinger 00:00:00 – 00:05:14 That’s Peter Metzinger speaking, co-founder of evAI intelligence and owner and Managing Director of business campaigning. In today’s episode, Peter and I talked about some really interesting things. Peter is just this fantastic guru of marketing and how marketing is for the people, of the people, by the people. And he is an interesting twist the way he does marketing because he’s spent his entire life being a pioneer using digital tools. And he’s now in this artificial intelligence, AI bandwagon. He’s got this separate company working on artificial intelligence, and he really knows what the future of marketing is going to look like. Instead of telling you about how great he is and all the stuff we talk about, which you can listen to yourself, I wanted to share this fun fact about Peter that didn’t come out in the interview, but is just so cool I wanted to share it with you. So, I mentioned Peter, he’s sort of always been a pioneer in digital tools, way back in 1987. So, you have to imagine this is seven years before the launch of the worldwideweb. Police were tapping into the phone lines of an anti-nuclear network Peter had founded. So what did Peter do? He set up a computer network across many different cities and he actually wrote an encryption software to be able to continue coordinating campaign activities without the police being able to find out what they were up to. What I love about Peter is, he says that business campaigning is a company, a strategic consultancy, they specialize in impossible missions. And I like to call Peter Mr. mission impossible himself because he seems to be able to make everything happen. So enjoy this episode learning from Peter Metzinger. — Welcome back to another episode of Level Up Your Leadership, the podcast exploring how 21st century leaders acquire the skills they need to thrive in the ever-changing digital workplace. I’m your host, Lisa Christen, and I’m here today with Peter Metzinger, co-founder of evAI intelligence and owner and managing director of business campaigning. Welcome, Peter! Hello wherever listening. So Peter and I are having a bit of a funny moment here. I have to admit this to all of you listening. We recorded this entire podcast… except we didn’t record it. So we are currently on take two of this podcast. And we’re going to see does this lead to the same place we went to last time or did more questions open up. Let’s see. But Peter, I do have the same first question to start with which is that you say that business campaigning is a strategic consultancy that specializes in impossible missions. What does that mean? What is an impossible mission? Actually, that’s something that others say about us to repeat because it explains very well what we are doing. We’re finding solutions where others don’t find and it has to do with the approach we are taking. I studied physics I have a Masters in science in physics, and what I learned there was to ask critical questions, to really understand the system. So, very often when people don’t sell something, what they do is they spend more money advertising. But maybe that’s the completely wrong thing. For example, the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 2002, they gave me a call because they had an issue with their brand, with their image. People were on the streets protesting and they didn’t get the message through that their mission was to improve the state of the world. They tried with PR, they tried with advertising, and they didn’t see any change in public perception. They heard about this specialist for “impossible missions” and they called me. And then we applied the business campaigning model. That’s something that I created in 1998. It’s the mixture of processes and checklists that you fill in, in a certain order, and that guides you through the process to ask the right questions at the right time. And the outcome of the analysis and the strategic thoughts was the Open Forum, which is since 2003 platform were NGOs ^, the public, and the inner circle of the leaders of the World Economic Forum, the closed society come together and discuss have a dialogue. And that opened up the whole discussion and helped them to reclaim the image and to get the message through. And what was so different about the way that you engaged people? What’s different about the business campaigning process? I learned in the 1980’s already that the target audience is not somebody you send information to. They are people who help you. 00:05:15 – 00:10:07 So, if you try to sell a product, you send them information and you think, if you send them that information, that will convince them. If you see these people as people who are helping you to achieve your sales goals, you have a totally different approach because you know, if you want somebody to help you, you have to understand that person really well. You need to know how to approach that person, which language, which tonality, at what point of time, through which channel with which message, and it’s a totally different approach. It leads to us having workshops with the target group where the target group develops the strategy, the campaign strategy for themselves. We’ve used that in internal campaigns, named change management projects, and marketing campaigns or PR campaigns, branding. The idea behind it is the experts are the target audience themselves. They know how they receive information, how they process information, what triggers them to which action. And it’s so interesting what you’re describing because you’re not saying, and you’re a consultant, you’re not saying, I’m the expert I come in and I give the information. You’re not saying, I go to senior management, I work on a senior management strategy and we roll it out top down. What you’re saying is, we go to the people. We got to the people who are affected and we work with them because they are the people who know the answers. That’s wild. I love to say we’re experts in being non-experts and we are professionals but we’re non-professional. Because it you’re professional, it’s about a certain profession. So if you studied marketing or advertising, you will be professional in that area. So but, as the example that I gave, if you don’t sell something because it’s not the wrong message or not the the wrong channels, but it’s maybe the organization behind it, you might even get a lot clients out there, but the internal processes don’t allow to sell more. As a professional, you need to open, you need to find a broad variety of tools, also management tools. Once I even had somebody who called me because her sales figures were going down and she wanted an advertising campaign to turn it around. At the end of the discussions, I recommended trauma therapy. Because I knew what trauma therapy is good for. Turned out, it was a small company, 4 employees, it was a headhunter, so it’s a people business. Trust is very important. She had a car accident with whiplash trauma as a consequence and two weeks later, problems in the company started and the sales figures went down. And I thought, there could
