Content at scale with Loni Stark
On this episode of The CMO Show, Mark is joined by Loni Stark, VP of Content and Commerce at Adobe, leading global product strategy, product management, and marketing.
Marketers are always looking for better insights about customers in real-time. What’s the best way forward for brands? Dive in to find out.
Consumers today expect information in real-time. As a result, brands are challenged to produce more content with less budget and provide experiences across more channels than ever before.
So, how can brands meet customer expectations and deliver great experiences?
Loni speaks to the fast-moving digital-first environment and the tools that companies are fast adopting to prioritise customer experience – starting with creativity.
“It's about asking the question, ‘How are marketers able to create the kind of content that is delightful and useful to their audience?"
"Because every artist creates to align with their brand or who they are, but they're also creating for audiences. You go to a museum to look at art, right? There's an element where it is the viewer, it is the receiver," Loni says.
Loni and her team at Adobe have since expanded into helping businesses drive their digital traffic.
"Every business does want to be creative. They want to tell their brand story. They want to connect with their customers, and it's very much an element that artists want to do as well. So, it's questioning how to replicate that, but at scale,” says Loni.
Tune in to find what it takes to experiment as a marketer, and most importantly, how you can do it with the best results in tow.
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Credits
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The CMO Show Production Team
Producer - Pamela Obeid
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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Transcript:
Mark Jones:
Let’s face it – consumers are impatient.
We want information and data, we want great service, and we want it now!
On the other side, marketers and CMOs want better insights about customers in real-time so they can deliver better experiences and drive growth.
So what’s the best way forward? How can brands and CMOs meet customer expectations and deliver great experiences?
[Music]
Hello, Mark Jones here, you’re listening to The CMO Show, thanks for joining us.
The CMO Show is a podcast made for and by marketing leaders, created by ImpactInstitute, and proudly supported by Adobe.
Now, it’s tough to know what your audience is after, but it’s even harder to constantly hit the mark.
We all know how important customer experience is, but how can we continue to optimise and grow, grow, grow?
My guest today might have the insight you’re looking for.
I’m thrilled to introduce you to Loni Stark, VP of Content and Commerce at Adobe.
Loni leads global product strategy, product management, and marketing, and she’s also a cracking artist if I do say so myself.
Loni lives in the Bay area and she and I and I chatted here in Sydney, during a trip to Australia, and we chatted about everything from the rise of Gen AI to the world of cat videos, and we had an absolute blast. Let’s jump right in.
[Music]
Mark Jones:
Thank you for joining us.
Loni Stark:
Thank you, Mark, for inviting me.
Mark Jones:
You're in Sydney. What brought you here?
Loni Stark:
We have a lot of customers and a team in Sydney, and also the weather. I know it's winter, but I love it. I love the chill and yeah, I love coming to Sydney and speaking to our customers here.
Mark Jones:
That's great. Let's talk about customer experience and talk about some other trends that are going on at Adobe. Okay. So pets.com had this great idea that on the internet we could sell pet food and people would buy it and then we'll send it to them and the trouble was they didn’t do a business plan, they just failed and they didn’t keep their costs under control, and they had this sock puppet, which was their mascot. And I just thought that really amplified everything. They were really quite silly about marketing at the time. And they weren’t connected to a value proposition or even a great idea. In fact, back in the day, creatives just, by my estimation, made it up, don't you think?
Loni Stark:
Yeah. I think back then, it was... What was the other one? Travelocity with the gnome.---
Mark Jones:
See?
Loni Stark:
Some of them did work though, back then.
Mark Jones:
And Geico still to this day, has that-
Loni Stark:
That lizard.
Mark Jones:
Lizard.
Loni Stark:
It must work.
Mark Jones:
Okay.
Loni Stark:
Right? So I think that's a piece where I do think people still connect with other people or characters. That's why I think social influencers are so important to the marketing mix these days because of that. People still connect to people or little lizards, but I do think that a big discovery was made when there was a whole thing, if you remember, with social media where people said, "Hey, is social media worth it? Is all the tweets, is it adding up to anything?" And that's when I think measuring really... Measurement of web, of social and just saying, "Can we get some insights and data on... Are things working or not?"
Mark Jones:
Yes. And I think Twitter started in around the 2005, '06 kind of time, right? I remember some conversations with execs and they were like, "This thing, firstly, is not going to do anything or amount to much." Right? Wrong. And yes, how do we measure this thing and what's the point of it? Right?
Mark Jones:
And don't you think it's the same thing? It's interesting because you are creative and an engineer. How does that happen?
Loni Stark:
As an engineer, you take a problem and you break it down to ones and zeros. I find on a creative lens, I'm doing more additive, just building up ideas. And I think that, I don't know how it happens, but I feel like when I'm doing one or the other, it's just different ways of thinking about problems and solving them, it's another tool set in your head.
Mark Jones:
Tell me about Adobe's perspective on that? Because maybe that's why you've been at Adobe for so long, just by the way, is this mix of art and science. Is that not a simplistic way to look at the company? Because the early days of being a PDF company and being creative and all that sort of... And they'd be, "We need to grow up, we need to do enterprise stuff, we need to be serious." Right? And they're bringing in more engineers, and look at you guys today with AI and really doing some incredible bleeding-edge stuff, right? Do you think that's the heartbeat of the company?
Loni Stark:
So I feel like I love being at Adobe because I have that appreciation for creative. And I'm biased, but I love Adobe's products and the mission of helping people be more creative, but I think that it's the same thing around how do you run your digital business and how do you do that? You have to cut through the noise and you have to somehow, at scale, be creative. And some of the companies I've been speaking to are in highly regulated industries. They have all of these things they have to watch out for because the products they produce are really ones that people depend on and those regulations and everything, and they want to be able to tell their brand story. They want to be creative, they want to connect with people on a very personal level.
And that part of it, I think, permeates that mission. I think it's because of that, Adobe has accumulated all these different capabilities and products that you were saying that seems unique in that combination, but I think it's that mission that's drawn us to say, "Hey, we have creative tools. We have tools that allow you to even..." One of our early days is the fonts and being able to represent fonts well, and we want to be able to have a way to scale up delivery of emails or websites and things like that, that actually, when people visit are relevant." So that mission, I think, permeates across the investments we've made in these technologies and the innovations.
Mark Jones:
I'd love to know what you've been learning from customers as you tour the region in the context of creativity and scale, and obviously the AEM products and others that you're working on? Because one of the existential challenges I think for anybody with a creative mind is limitations and false walls, as it were, like, "You can only be creative as long as you're in this sandbox," and the artist within you says, "No, I don't want to. How dare you?" Right? There's a whole stream of art that is just focused on that whole avant-garde space. The really wacky stuff we see is rebellion against metaphorical sandboxes, right? But in corporate life, we need it.
Loni Stark:
A couple of things. So first, if I were to put on my artist's brain or whatever, I would say every single movement in history was a rebellion against the previous, right? If you think about we love impressionist art now, and we're like, "Wow, Renoir," and things. At one point, they were detested. It was like they were the scoundrels outside of the museums trying to put on that stuff. Right?
Mark Jones:
You call that art.
Loni Stark:
Exactly. Exactly. So you see that kind of human spirit in art. Then I also think about, I'm going to butcher it, so you're going to need to figure out, but there's a Disney quote about how creativity is about having those constraints and thinking about ways to rebel against those constraints, but having that constraint in place.
Mark Jones:
An example?
Loni Stark:
One of them has to be, we have people who are creative in our company, and we need more of that, those ideas, the images, videos to make it to our audiences and people who are most relevant. But they're spending so much of their time doing admin aspects, emailing things around, reviewing things with people and there's a lot of... They call it mundane tasks that need to be done.
Mark Jones:
Busy work.
Loni Stark:
Busy work.
Mark Jones:
And friction, by the way.
Loni Stark:
Exactly. And so that's the area that we spend a lot of time is how do we speed up that part of it and how do we streamline those parts of it so that people can be creative? And the other aspect is that it's not just the traditional creatives that are expected to be creative. There's a lot of discussion around other roles, marketers, support, others. How do they become more creative? And I think when we talk about that, it's about how are they able to create the kind of content that is delightful and useful to their audience?
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Loni Stark:
Because every artist... They create to align with their brand or who they are, but they're also creating for audiences. You go to a museum to look at art, right? There's an element where it is the viewer, it is the receiver. And so I think that happens with a brand. So that's one of the areas, is how do I help all my teams become more creative?
Mark Jones:
Yes.
Loni Stark:
By taking away some of the mundane tasks that they need to do and streamlining that, including how do I make the review process less arduous as well?
Mark Jones:
Yes. And that's one of the ideas I took away from Summit when I was there watching a lot of the demos, was just how much AI is changing the way we think about the work we do, because not only is it streamlining and really making a lot of that stuff easier. It's actually giving us prompts and ideas and suggestions to do things in more creative ways that we wouldn't have thought to do. Particularly if you're an engineer who mistakenly believes they don't have a creative bone in their body or a leader or a business person. We have these limiting beliefs about, "Well, I can't do that," but it goes, "Well, here, have a look at this. Do you like that?" Right?
Loni Stark:
Yes. And I think that that's an important thing is if you think about GenAI, AI, while we at Adobe had research in this area for the last decade, it's really still a new area more broadly. Right? And so everyone's learning, right? Everyone, I would say is learning new applications for GenAI, AI. That's definitely true because it got launched in the world and everybody was trying to figure it out, and I think more the talent I look for even on my team is people who are just curious and they're learning and they're not putting themselves into the standard roles of what does it mean to be a marketer, or what does it mean to be a creative? But thinking about what are the skillsets we need to really create or do the role more effectively using the new tools that we have.
Mark Jones:
The interesting thing about this current era of marketing in the AI context, if you like, and you talk about doing it at scale, is that we are now, as marketers starting to think about this creative expression that you've alluded to and stories in particular, and brands having to mean something more or at least tap into a bigger feeling and an emotive idea in society. It's a pretty fascinating space. What are you seeing maybe firstly from the tech side of things? How are you trying to enable that? And the reason you got me thinking about that was this idea that we're all figuring it out. There's this current theme at the moment. If you're not doing an AI course or learning how to prompt engineer, you're going to get left behind.
Loni Stark:
Thinking about AI, GenAI, you have to look back. We were talking about what's one of the key things from Adobe that you thought was really interesting was our move to the cloud. And at some point, people were figuring out cloud and that piece of it. So I think that there is a certain learning and figuring out that needs to happen, that experimentation around it. So if you think about how we build products in the past, you would say, "This is a button, you click on it. It does something." So it's very much predictive.
Mark Jones:
Monkey see monkey do.
Loni Stark:
Exactly, exactly. And with AI, there's a probabilistic element of it where you have models, you're learning around a pool set of content or data, and you need to almost test it out and experiment and learn, is there efficacy? So is there something we're building in this, in the latest capabilities around content variations? How do we have prompt templates? How do we learn the brand, knowledge of a company in a way that can predictably turn a higher quality content that's on brand, and works so that it is adding value? So that requires testing experimentation.
The other part of it I think is also why it's important to innovate and connect in this area is because there's also a change management of people within the organisation as well. And I've seen that even with my product team, but also with other customers we work with, is that there's a lot of questions about what is the role of AI? How do I work with AI? How is it a co-pilot? Where can it really help me? And so that kind of learning and culture shift around this is also something that doesn't happen overnight, that organisations need to get ahead of. So it's not just, "Oh, I'm going to plop some technology in here." It's how do you bring people along? That takes time, and that's where that you said the left behind is figuring that out, but doing it in a thoughtful way too. So you're not just looking at what's being said in the media and just applying it blindly.
It's about saying where are the areas of value? And I see in two places, both efficiency and creativity. So efficiency of streamlining things that others... Like creating backgrounds for merchandising or for a campaign is something that could make things more efficient, but also ideation and as a jumping off board for new ideas of maybe experiences or ways to connect with customers.
Mark Jones:
So what's coming down the pipe in terms of the product side of things? And specifically, I think I have an intuitive sense that AI really is changing the way you think about product release cycles.
Loni Stark:
Our innovation cycles are faster, but also, why having well-understood boundaries between what is our code and what is our product and what is the parts that the has put in place is so important because of that.
Mark Jones:
So then if you go back to the 2010s and we got all excited about MarTech and tying everything together with proverbial digital sticky tape, hoping the thing won't break. So at one level, we're going to have this problem of keeping all this stuff together. What are your thoughts on that?
Loni Stark:
I think that's a common IT challenge. There's a lot of different needs and maturity of what people want to do in different parts of their MarTech stack. I think it's also a reflection of the different departments and groups and geographies that need to work with this stuff. What we've done at Adobe is ensure that our stuff works well together, and this is a big part of what our customers demand is that making sure our stuff works together well, so that some of that can be simplified. But at the same time be respectful that there are going to be things that they have in their MarTech stack, whether it's because their unique industry or business need that they want to make sure there's an easy way to integrate and plug into the stuff they have from Adobe. So that's always something we are mindful of.
Mark Jones:
What do you think AI more broadly will do to that bigger problem of keeping all this stuff working?
Loni Stark:
Because of the products and having different aspects of it, to understand is having the AI start to learn the knowledge bases in these areas so that... Because it's hard for one individual to be expert at every part of the system. So I think this idea of having AI be able to triage and to pinpoint and respond to questions, that's something we're experimenting with internally, but is something that we see making available more to customers as well.
Mark Jones:
Can I say that sounds a bit like, "Tell me what I don't know about my system and let it do the hard work of diagnosing false connections?"
Loni Stark:
Exactly, being the proactive part of it as well. The second is I think we released something called the Experience Platform AI Assistant, there's a lot of data that flows through for our customers on all the customer interactions, profiles, and being able to query an AI with natural language, to gain insights, versus having to do the analysis is another area we see. And then a third is around Experience Manager our product. Right? And someone has their entire website there or their mobile app content is how do we use that to also then surface missing content or other content that could be created based on the grounding and training from those assets already in place? So all the investments that our customers have made in making sure their data and content is current and they have rich assets, all of that is now a great training ground for being able to help them create better content or new content.
Mark Jones:
Right. So you might get suggested prompts like, "Did you know all your customers care about this topic?" "You should do something there. Do you want me to go ahead and create you some content for that area?" And you'd be like, "Yes." Press a button and it goes, "Here you go. It's something I prepared earlier."
Loni Stark:
Mark, you're on the same brainwave. Yes, that would be it. And then obviously going through the review curation process, but yes, that is a great jumping off point.
Mark Jones:
Right. And I have this other idea that... Do you remember in the early days, and this is fun by the way, jumping between eras of tech, but back in the early days it was more, "You need more content on the internet, you got to game the system, go in the search engine really ranks you better based on volume of content?" And then we went, "You know what? It needs to be quality of content." Guess what? With AI, it's back to more. So we've come full circle in the sense that if more of your content is being hoovered up by different AI engines, you're more likely to get better ranking, so to speak. What do you think about that?
Loni Stark:
I think things go in cycles, and I think there's always a flight to quality at some point. So I liken it to when YouTube first started, and when it first started, it was just amazing because before that, it was hard to actually publish video content online, and that made it easy to publish content. And you would get cat videos and you would get videos that people take, then the iPhone contributed to it. But then now if you look online, on YouTube, and it just... I'm making that example because we've all been on YouTube, is you see that there's really almost broadcast quality, shows that are like you would get on TV. And those are actually getting a large viewership and they're starting to be platforms. And it went through a cycle, I felt, of lots of content and then it's people's attention, and people look for quality signals because before, when there was few YouTube videos and things were starting to happen, we were looking at everything because there was just the novelty of it, and then got to a point where there was a masses and you want to stand out. And so I think the same thing with more is more, you were saying, is that there will be more content being created, but there will be a flight because it's the quality content. I think what determines quality is human engagement and attention and purchase even. And this is the part where actually talking to companies, they're wanting to scale up content, but they also want to make sure their investments are leading to, "Is this leading to the engagement with the customers I want? And is it actually, "Is it going to work? Is it is a purchase? Is it engagement?" So I think it's a cycle.
Mark Jones:
It is a cycle, and the hyper personalisation at scale idea is being talked about a lot by Adobe and when I think about the future of the CMO role and the future of marketers as these strategic enablers within the business, and we've got this mindset where we're thinking about creativity, we're thinking about our tech stacks, we're thinking about really sophisticated ideas around enabling enterprise infrastructure. They have to do all of this, the CMOs, in a way that creates competitive advantage. And I'm just interested in your thoughts on how you see that CMO role evolving? What's the mindset or the approach to thinking about all of these intersecting trends we've been discussing?
Loni Stark:
Yeah, I think actually, there's a real opportunity for CMOs or any C level that wants to be in this position where as more of the interactions that people have move to digital and this idea of trying to segment customers, trying to even get to one-on-one personalisation, that really then becomes the lifeblood of a business, if you think about it, right? So if you think about how the CMO role has gone from, "I'm going to come up with cute critters or sock puppets or whatever," to, "Now I really want to be able to capture the signals, to understand what's resonating? What isn't? What messages? And hence the problems that people are connecting to, reaching out to customers." And it becomes the whole part of your digital business to be able to do that, to stand out, to acquire customers, to drive that loyalty, that part of it. The CMO with the data and the content becomes a strategic role. And it's the growth of CMO, but also the shift into digital that everybody has been making over the last two and a half decades, I guess.
Mark Jones:
I agree but to that experience again because it’s interesting for you with your mix of art and science. Experience is in the digital universe, partly about my expectations as a customer being met on the connection between a great story through to a purchase or some sort of conversion rate, but it's also less obvious things like how it feels, the intuitive sense of what it was like to be in that moment. And we see this in our day-to-day. If you go to the theatre or a show or something, it's an experience, right? And it's kind of, "Take me away, entertain me. Let me think about something else outside of my universe." The consumers think a lot about those sorts of things... It's when you say experience, it's like, "No, make it meaningful." We've seen the rise of the different, I think emerging C-suite titles thinking about experience. What's your sense of how well CMOs are going to be able to do that in the digital environment? Because it has its limitations.
Loni Stark:
Actually, this has been a topic that has emerged, and it ties actually this experience to impact on the business, this intersection of what it means for businesses that a lot of the investments that have been made in digital has been around utilitarian. Such as if I'm an airline and I'm producing an app, the first couple of apps were really bad when it was started, but it's gone great at the app... Getting you to efficiently do what you need to do in the app. Right? You can go and you can book tickets, you can change your seat, you can do all those things. And similarly, in other industries, the focus on successfully completing things efficiently. So the focus has been around that, or even shopping, being able to one-click, get what you need off of a site. The challenge has been that with incumbent companies or companies that have had the offline experience is that what has been a trend is that while digital is growing and you need to invest in digital to be there, the order value or the amount of products or whatever is less than the average order value of something in an in-person channel. And that's been something... I don't know if applies to every company. So it's something they're listening to this, you should check it, is that yes, you're growing in terms of volumes, and the reason is because if you think about it in person, you have that element of an experience sometimes. And I think there's been a transformation in merchandising, retailing in the physical space where they have transformed stores and things to be more of experience, a discovery. To be able to discover, maybe you go in for a certain product, but you then discover other things. You learn about things you hadn't thought about that is the part that in the digital space, I'm seeing more CMOs thinking about, is what's the discovery part, what's the inspiration piece of it? So moving from the table stakes of, "Yes, I can book a flight. Yes, I can change a seat," to, "How do I help someone discover an additive experience to my flight or a new destination that I need to think about the next time I'm flying?" And so t hat part of it has been a new area.
Mark Jones:
And the seeds of that, by the way, are within the Amazon recommendation engine. For example, "You read this book, maybe you might like these 10 more.”
Loni Stark:
Exactly. But figuring out that part of it is an important area.
Mark Jones:
And it's non-trivial. I also wonder, and again, seeing this part of the CMO role, is when you say online and offline, the CMO often doesn't control the offline experiences in a retail context. And there are other people who think about those things, but actually, the bigger customer-centric version of experience should be every single possible touch point should feel the same emotively. Regardless of whether it's digital or not. So CMOs have got to get their fingers into a lot more pies by my estimation. Is that right?
Loni Stark:
I've also seen the CMO role, but also the Chief Digital Officer, the Chief Customer Officer. So I've seen those, and maybe you've seen as well, where I was visiting one of our customers, a retailer while I was in Melbourne, and they had just reorganised so that there are folks responsible for the customer journey.
Loni Stark:
And it is both physical and digital, and they're looking at different segments or different personas they have and thinking how do they marshal their content, their experiences across all those, and of course, on the website, mobile app, wherever they are in person, all those touch points? So that's another thing is that change of the C-level roles. I think the biggest thing here is experiment. It's a contact sport, marketing is, and with AI, it is as well. And I think being able to experiment, play with it, play with it as a team, you'll get to come up with new possibilities. That's really important.
Mark Jones:
Just briefly, what kind of courage, mindset, attitude is required to experiment? A lot of companies find that pretty confronting.
Loni Stark:
Yeah, I was actually just speaking to someone about this, they were asking about. I think there's a couple of things. One is experiment something that is a safe place, meaning a low risk. So one of the experiments we started with around AI had a $10,000 upside and downside. And for our business, it was small. It was something that we could try out. So don't pick the biggest thing to experiment with because then it would have the highest risk. I think that's one thing.
Mark Jones:
Right.
Loni Stark:
The second is that think a little, but don't think too hard. And what I mean by that is, especially things that can be disruptive like AI or cloud in the past, is that all your past models, well, they're valuable and you learn a lot from it. They'll all apply in the new world. It's like new role. So being able to actually drive down that road and learn what maybe limitations or assumptions or constraints you used to have that may break down. It's like I was saying to someone, if we lived in a world of horses and we were debating on how fast a car would go, we could debate all day, but nothing is the same as stepping into a car and pressing the gas pedal and then being like, "Okay..."
Mark Jones:
Yeah, then figure it out.
Loni Stark:
Yeah. So I think that's the second thing. And then I think the third thing is as leaders, showing that you can in front of your team, experiment and fail at something or learn.
Mark Jones:
And not be afraid to do that.
Loni Stark:
To be able to highlight that and celebrate that in others as well, I think is important. Because sometimes you could say, "Oh yeah, I want to experiment." But then if it's a culture or as a leader, you're not celebrating the learnings, then you're saying, "Yes, experiment, but you better be successful," which no one's going to take you up on that.
Mark Jones:
Loni Stark, I'm going to have to press pause on this conversation hoping that we can pick it up again another time. Thank you so much for your insights, and it was a really great note to end on, right? On those three ideas and how to think in new creative ways. You've certainly brought truckloads of that to this conversation. So Loni Stark, thanks for your time.
Loni Stark:
Thank you, Mark.