Distillery Sessions Ep 2 David Keene transcript [00:00:00] Steve Wheen: Welcome back to another episode of Distillery Sessions. I'm Steve Wheen, founder of Distillery. Today, I'm chatting with David Keene, European CMO of Wipro. We're going to dive into all things marketing in the current climate. The state of play around AI, content marketing, and no doubt a whole lot more. Thanks so much for joining me, David. I've been really looking forward to this discussion. Can we kick off with an introduction to Wipro for those who maybe aren't familiar with what you guys do? [00:00:35] David Keene: Yeah, so Wipro is one of the largest system integrators in the world, we have 270, 000 people and we run technology and systems for the biggest names that are out there right now, across the board, across a whole range of things, we run their cloud infrastructure, we run their engineering, we may be dismantling vehicles, for example, [00:01:00] in automotive Factories to actually build all of the maintenance schedules, et cetera, for looking after those vehicles. We do lots and lots of data and AI management for organizations. We do consulting. So there's this huge range of activities that we do across the world and we do it with teams based in India. Based near shore in whichever region we're in. So we have big teams here in Europe who are in Poland and in Bucharest and then on shore with those customers directly. So we might be working with the biggest names that you know out there, and we've got people in their office in Europe and in India running very large parts of their systems, infrastructure, their projects, scaling them up, scaling them down, bringing technology in and delivering really outcomes for those businesses. [00:01:51] Steve Wheen: So you're working across cloud security, digital transformation, data analytics, and more. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role? [00:01:59] David Keene: [00:02:00] Wipro's businesses broken down into four market units. We have two in the Americas. We have one covering the European markets and one covering Asia, Middle East and Africa. So I lead marketing here across Europe and I'm responsible for demand. Brand PR events, the whole scope there and working across the global teams to make sure that we do all the things that we need to do. So there's a whole range of activities we do there, but it's full funnel marketing and brand for Europe. [00:02:32] Steve Wheen: Okay, so can you break it down for me? What does that actually look like? [00:02:36] David Keene: Yeah, so we've got a single set of brand values and a single set of kind of go to market strategies. We then syndicate those strategies from a central set of teams. We work with our local go to market partners, which are the country sales leaders, et cetera. We then iterate around what's working in market and what's not working. So we innovate locally. [00:03:00] We syndicate from the global teams, and we syndicate around really three areas. And this is maybe one learning thought for your listeners and those watching. So we syndicate solution based activities. We syndicate industry based activities. And then we syndicate alliance and partnership activities. So if you think about this almost like a three way matrix. Of cascading campaigns and programs coming down around those three. So we have these global business lines that we run. We have four of them based on different sets of solutions that we work with our customers on. And that's really the primary. Syndication mechanism and then industry goes across that and then our key partners, particularly hyperscalers, but then other big partners like Oracle, like the M well, I guess AP, etc. They then come in across that. So from a B to B, go to market motion. That's how we're putting together this kind of weave of different strategies. [00:03:59] Steve Wheen: It [00:04:00] sure sounds like you're juggling a lot. Now, I was fortunate enough to work for you. On some projects many, many moons ago, can you tell us a little bit more about your journey to becoming a CMO? [00:04:12] David Keene: Sure. So maybe I'll just go back very briefly to the start of my career. So I started off as a programmer, an engineer, not many marketing friends do kind of move from cutting code. And implementing systems into marketing. So I did a whole bunch of coding related roles, project management, and then I moved to actually into join Oracle as a product manager. So building products. From that, my journey took me through product marketing, events, I ended up being one of the guys who was on stage at these big events when they're like, okay, David's going to come out now and demonstrate this new piece of technology for you. David, what do you got to show for me today? So we'd build all those things. We'd have a whole heap of fun. We'd travel around the planet. So my kind of career moved through that, [00:05:00] like moving from product, into product marketing, then moving into the full funnel marketing, leadership, marketing, director, VP, marketing, CMO, et cetera. And I went through Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, then Google Cloud. So that was a fabulous kind of journey. And then I went off and did some startups, which was fun for a little while. And then having got the startup thing out of my soul, decided to move back to something where there was this kind of larger, more complex kind of world to deal with. And I'm here today. [00:05:32] Steve Wheen: It's really quite an inspiring journey. I couldn't have you join the podcast without talking about AI. You're at the center of it, and I'd love to understand how you're integrating AI into what you're working on, and perhaps what pearls of wisdom you're happy to share. [00:05:50] David Keene: AI is this kind of badge that we're applying to everything at the moment. So everything has got an AI badge on it. So it's kind of like, it's the number one thing you can do to get someone to sign up to an [00:06:00] event, a webinar, download a white paper, whatever the tactic is. The reality that I'd encourage friends to think about is. Are you getting conversion from those AI activities or is it just noise? So there's a lot going on there around AI. How much of that is converting into real and genuine business? So we see a range of different business outcomes coming through on AI. So the hottest part of this is generative AI, where we're taking existing corpuses of data and generating new content. So things like chat GPT or the other large language models. New images, you know, things where you're building them, there's less of those coming through as direct business activities than there are things like natural language processing, speech to text, predictive analytics, mining, big data sources that people have. So I'd really encourage marketeers to think about AI and data as being one very large pool. [00:07:00] So inside of Wipro, we call it AI 360. And the reason for that is there's so many different spokes on this AI wheel, of which generative AI is just one of those spokes, an amazing one, an inspirational one, but one that's hard to kind of leverage right now. And I'd encourage people to think about all of the AI and data world that's in there, what their clients can do with it or what they can do themselves internally. And the number one pearl of wisdom I can give you around marketing is to put the customer at the center of all of this. So figure out who is the customer and what are they going to do with this marvelous technology you've got there. And that's where applying any form of AI or machine learning and the appropriated data disciplines and data science disciplines with that, that's where you need to figure out like what would your target customer, your minimum viable customer do with that set of technologies. [00:07:53] Steve Wheen: Have you seen any really stand out examples recently? [00:07:57] David Keene: Some people, if we go back to generative AI, [00:08:00] which is the hot one, clearly, there's some people out there building their own large language models so that they can actually take huge bodies of data and leverage it, particularly for things like customer support, where you're doing automated customer support and you're improving efficiency there. The other areas that I see people with very large data lakes where they're using those data lakes to do predictive. Work where they're using it to kind of customize supply chains and improve their supply chains. We've had a couple of examples recently around energy management and energy efficiency, particularly reducing carbon footprint and energy consumption in those situations by applying AI directly to it. So there's a whole range of big data solutions in the AI solutions. All of the things that sit around this big, big topic of data and AI, and intelligence in general, they are the ones that are really moving the dial. The ones that I love at the moment are, I went [00:09:00] to the Formula E racing when it was here in London, like a couple of weeks back, and the AI teams there, tuning the energy consumption for winning those races, and getting the most out of those cars with the minimal energy. I don't know if you know the way Formula E works, you've essentially got a limited amount of power, a certain number of kilowatts you can use, and you have to manage the car's consumption of that energy, and then recharging the batteries through braking, and using AI to actually implement all of that. That's the funkiest kind of one that I've seen recently. [00:09:33] Steve Wheen: So focusing on your customer centric approach, the 360 approach, what is it that people aren't paying enough attention to in the B2B space? [00:09:43] David Keene: Okay, so people, and I'm going to come back to this, putting the customer at the centerpiece because I think that's any young marketeers that I mentor or support in any way. The first piece of coaching that I give them is around thinking about the customer first and obsessing about the customer. [00:10:00] What does the customer want? What do they need? How do they move forward? Too many marketeers put the sales leaders at the center or their product at the center and the customers somewhere on like somehow to ring there and as a result they optimize for internal factors inside the organization. As a marketing leader, you need to orientate yourself around the consumption path that's going on there and really understand your data all the way from the first click on your website, right the way through qualification into it, turning into sales accepted, lead sales, qualified, lead an opportunity, winning the opportunity, the lifetime value of that and the churn of that. So looking at that data with a lens of how is the customer responding. So you've got all of that analytical data that's coming in there, and then you've got the qualitative stuff that you can get by talking to customers. So number one, put your customer at the center. [00:11:00] Number two, manage your stakeholders so they don't push themselves into the center. And number three, get qualitative insights on your customers by talking to them, understand them, listen to them, hear what they're saying, hear how they're using your product. And then you can really tune your go to market motion and really get amazing insights as a marketeer. [00:11:22] Steve Wheen: David, I wanted to dive a little deeper into something you mentioned as we were prepping for this discussion. You sit on an AI council within Wipro. Is there a specific approach you're taking to AI on that council? [00:11:37] David Keene: Some of this comes back to kind of breaking down barriers and breaking down silos. So often marketing can be the recipient of things that are delivered to marketing and marketing is then asked to actually take them to market. And marketing wasn't involved in the piece. Here at Wipro, we build connections across the different groups that we've got the product teams, the go to market teams, the people [00:12:00] implementing this and doing delivery for our customers. So we get this kind of full 360 view. So the councils that we have internally around AI allow us to sit down together as leaders understand. What's really landing with customers, what's landing in the marketplace from a thought leadership perspective, that's a longer term burn and what's happening around the services we offer, the products that we're working on, the alliance teams that we're engaging with, how Google are doing it, how Microsoft are doing it, how Amazon are doing it. All of those things. So these councils that we have internally really are cross functional scrums almost, I guess, if we go back to an agile set of terminology where we sit down, we agree the sprints that we're going to run and how we're going to take things to market. And it kind of moves us on a marketing scale here, more across to an agile way of doing marketing instead of the kind of, you know, slightly more traditional, longer term waterfall approach that many [00:13:00] organizations still have for marketing. And that's how we pull it all together. Does that make sense? [00:13:05] Steve Wheen: Indeed. At Distillery is a business that provides marketing services. So often we see siloed functions within our clients. [00:13:15] David Keene: It's just an agile marketing methodology. And again, I'd really encourage people to think about how you become more agile and think about agile principles as if you are building software. And maybe it's my software background that gives me that kind of mindset. I'm really comfortable with saying, here's a project, we've got two sprints that we're running right now on this. And then we can have a backlog that we're running and then we bring in a subsequent sprint when one of these is closed down and we've kind of done a retro on that. So think of marketing like software development, get that minimum viable product out, do some testing, get some data, get some feedback from stakeholders and from customers. Don't boil the ocean with the things that you're doing, just make it simple [00:14:00] and connect with as many people as you possibly can. So that agile approach to marketing is really, really valuable. [00:14:06] Steve Wheen: So I wanted to turn the conversation to generative AI. We're a business that is obsessed with measurement, but companies are just churning out so much rubbish content. There's just so much noise. How do you feel about the state of content marketing right now? [00:14:22] David Keene: So look, content marketing is kind of eating the world. There's content everywhere. People are generating content like crazy. They're not measuring it effectively around what's really being consumed. There's a lot of vanity metrics on top of content. So it's kind of like, Hey, 200 people watch the first 10 seconds of this particular video and that's a success somehow. It's not a success. So I would encourage people instead of doing more. And delivering more content, I'd encourage them to do less content, but make it better. Find those amazing pieces that really move the dial for you and that really engage [00:15:00] and get a lot of reach for you. Don't produce low quality materials. There's a lot of discussion at the moment about using generative AI to produce marketing collateral, messaging, go to market materials, etc. Sure, use it to create your skeleton, your draft, your first cut. But then turn it into something amazing. Use your energy, your time, your inspiration to produce something that really, really lands. Don't just send out large quantities of low quality stuff. It's not going to move the dial for you. It really still feels like everyone's shouting. Like how many emails do you get in a day? These long form written emails or like outreaches on LinkedIn. I'm not going to respond to those things, you know, they're polite, they're okay, but actually I've not got the time to read all of your stuff or watch your videos. This idea of doing video marketing to me, like with a personally recorded video of you saying, Hey David, you know, we've got this great website building team [00:16:00] here that can really help you and his, I'm not going to watch that. You've got to research me. You've got to understand me. You've got to find something that's going to move the dial instead of just spamming 5, 000 people with content and then being happy when one person responds, that's not going to produce the results you need. [00:16:19] Steve Wheen: So just looking ahead, obviously. The last 18 months or so has been quite rocky, especially in tech. Where do you think marketeers will be investing in the short and medium term? [00:16:31] David Keene: So I'd split it between B2C and B2B here. So B2C is going to be new approaches, probably based on generative AI and other AI technologies that can do amazing things for people with their phones. Things that will be really transformative for us around automation, personal assistance, all of those kind of fantastic things. They're probably going to be driven by the hyperscalers. You know, it's going to be Microsoft and Google that are going to be [00:17:00] leading those initiatives. And they're going to be putting a lot of energy into them. You can already see it in things like Google Docs with it saying, Hey, you know, how can I help you write this thing? If we look at B2B in the tech space, then. We've pivoted really hard onto AI. I think AI becomes a feature of the other things we're already doing. So if you're selling CRM, AI is then a feature of CRM. You're not selling AI at that point. You're selling CRM that's got a lot of AI built into it, a lot of AI capabilities. If you're selling cloud of some sort, then again, there's a lot of AI capability that would be potentially in that cloud solution that you've got, or that SaaS solution. That you're rolling out there. So I think we kind of pivot back a little bit away from pure AI to AI being a key set of features, set of pillars, a little bit like mobile support was once something that was sold on its own. Now it's required in anything that you [00:18:00] buy. It's like, okay, how does this work on my phone? Let's have a look. You're not just buying something that works on your phone. So people will expect that. The infrastructure they consume the business solutions that they consume will have AI and they'll move back to being solution focused away from being pure product focus and most of the AI stuff now it's product go to market it's not a solution go to market so there's that like move back to help me do something help me do something that I need done. And automate that for me, make it more productive and make it easier to do. [00:18:33] Steve Wheen: There's definitely a theme here, David, your customer centric approach keeps coming through. Now, I wanted to ask you about some great work that you've seen recently. Is there anything that really stands out? [00:18:45] David Keene: I can think of more examples of bad work, to be honest. I'm not seeing masses of amazing work. I'm seeing people reducing their teams, reducing their budgets, kind of running very, very slim and [00:19:00] trying to do a lot more for a lot more stakeholders and kind of reducing the quality of the things that they're doing and reducing the channels as well. I think there's a range of challenges that we face as an industry around how we go to market, where we go to market. If we look at broadcast media, we've got this explosion of channels. We don't have the traditional TV radio or even kind of just the like, Hey, we could put something through, you know, Netflix as a platform. Um, you've got this absolute explosion of broadcast channels. You've then got the issues that we've got with social at the moment, social's kind of on the B2B side, social's being boiled down to being LinkedIn and nothing else, with a little bit of brand work, maybe on Instagram and all the challenges that are over at X right now, you know, and where that's then playing out. People kind of pushing out the drumbeat of emails that you get that then drives unsubscribes for people. One of my bugbears is why aren't these organizations [00:20:00] measuring the engagement rate that they're getting on their emails and like how low those that engagement is? So, I don't necessarily have something that I've seen that I really, really love, to be completely honest. I guess the only one that I would raise, this may be contentious, but I'll raise it for you anyway. The World Wildlife Fund had a fabulous piece recently, which showed the evolution of the Twitter bird, going from this early little kind of like sketch of a bird, through the Twitter evolution, then to an X, and it says something along the lines of, you know, don't let this happen to other animals. I love that creative. It was something that people spoke about, you know, so as marketeers, how do we find those things that really, really land? How do we do that great kind of creative work? [00:20:44] Steve Wheen: So timely, creative and landing a great message. [00:20:47] David Keene: The other one that I really liked was Google did a bunch of stuff around the Women's World Cup and their sponsorship of the UK team. There was a bunch of stuff there that Google had been working with that team for a long time. So [00:21:00] credit you to the team at Google Cloud. around supporting the, and Google in general, and supporting the women's football. And clearly we didn't win, but we got to the final, which is amazing. So I liked some of the stuff that they did there as well. [00:21:13] Steve Wheen: So speaking of great work and delivering campaigns that are measurable and impactful, I wanted to ask you about B2B versus B2C. At Distillery, we're taking the boring out of B2B. [00:21:26] David Keene: Yeah, I think B2B is really exciting. If you're looking for very high end brand creative work, that tends to be more on the B2C side, unless you're with one of the very big B2B brands. But B2B has, there's so much opportunity to bring products to market quickly, deliver kind of amazing things in very short timeframes. If you're selling soap or toothpaste or breakfast cereals. They don't change that much. There's not that much innovation out there. If you look at the tech world that we're in right [00:22:00] now, if you're looking to take AI technologies to customers, if you're looking for cloud solutions, cool things in the SAS world, automation technologies, whatever they may be, They're moving so, so quickly that it's a really, really fun space to be in. So yeah, I'd encourage young marketeers to get out there and just enjoy it. And I guess the other thing I'd say to them would be, don't be afraid of the technology, learn the technology, you know, as a marketeer, learn how to code. Understand how code works. It's important that you can do that because then you can understand your customer and you can sit in the same room as the customer who's thinking about how this stuff works. Differentiate between a Docker container and an API and how they work. You don't need to be able to get down and build something complex, but you need to understand the differences. But it's a cool space to work in. I'd really recommend it. You know the other thing, Steve, that I'd also say on this is When you're young in your career, go hang out with a couple of startups, go and like [00:23:00] experience the craziness that those places live through, like you'll get given such tasks that you wouldn't get given anywhere else and you can learn a whole bunch of cool stuff when you're young and learning. Just get out there. You'll get the exposure that you want early in your career and you've not got a mortgage or a family to look after, et cetera. So you can be a little faster and looser in the whole thing. So yeah, I think that's another good principle. [00:23:23] Steve Wheen: Thank you so much, David. What an insightful conversation from customer centricity, agile, content marketing, measurement, and of course, AI. It's been a super conversation. Thanks for joining me. I'll pop the links below this episode to David's LinkedIn. Be sure to give him a follow and don't forget to follow Distillery Sessions. We've one more episode in this series coming up and you don't want to miss it. Take care for now.
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