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Thank you. We were CMOs busy gossiping and almost missed my queue to come up on stage. This is what happens when you get people together who I hope inspire one another. So, Don, we'll finish that session later. Good morning everyone and welcome to day two of MWC Barcelona. I hope you had an amazing first day. My mind at the end was definitely buzzing with everything I saw and learned and heard across our halls and our stages. As a marketer, I think this is one of the most exciting times to be around as technology advances faster than ever before. I think marketers are entering what might be our most transformative era yet. It's exciting but not always easy. Today's CMOs are being asked to do several things at once and to do them faster than ever. We're being asked to deliver growth in an uncertain environment, rebuild and protect trust with customers and frankly regulators, and we're being asked to do all of that and modernize data and measurement whilst integrating AI into every part of the marketing stack. All without losing what maintains brand distinction and makes us human and helps us to deliver authentic experiences. This is not a small brief. What's clear is that this moment isn't about one more tool or optimizing one more channel. It's really about rethinking the system, rethinking how data flows, how decisions are made, how creativity and technology can work together, and how accountability can be built from the very start. Today, I'm delighted that we have the opportunity to dive in and explore all of this in depth with four CMOs who I really admire. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Raj Vandenberg, the chief marketing officer at Globe Telecom, Nam Sandu, the chief marketing officer at Vonage, Don McGuire, the chief marketing officer at Qualcomm, and Jean-Marie Kopan, chief marketing officer at Orange Europe. Please have a seat.
Looking around this exhibition floor, it is hard to imagine any of this comes together without marketers. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your exhibitions and for your great thinking and for your continued support. I wonder Nam, maybe we could start with you.
Sure. The marketing landscape is changing so quickly these days. I'd love to get your thoughts on what has changed the most over the past year for you.
Okay. I think maybe sort of bringing in the obvious, it's AI has come into the equation and I think the biggest thing that marketers are focused on and then we hear a lot from the sales teams as well is how AI has changed the landscape from an SEO and SEM perspective. So maybe not as a big picture interesting kind of statement to make but it's our day-to-day reality that it has fundamentally changed. So search now looks at intent, looks at content logic, content clarity and so the buzzwords that we're used to using in marketing are really no longer the focus. We have to really think about authentic content and content that speaks to humans in human language. And it is changing the game and from an internal sell-in perspective, we're also having to think about okay when we're working with sales teams who are maybe our number one client internally, how do we market internally to set the scene that we're moving from volume of leads to quality of leads and pipeline and converting that through the funnel. So AI has fundamentally shifted how the marketing landscape in that sense. One way I'll say it hasn't shifted the landscape, at least from my perspective. I think AI on a day-to-day basis as consumers, we're using AI for not just search, but for content, writing content as well. And I tell my team that's the one place I do not want us to use AI as we're in an environment where trust is so important. You mentioned it in your opening remarks. And with AI, I think content becomes a lot more vanilla and it loses its personality. So that's the one place I would say we are not seeing much of a shift from a tech landscape at least for me and my team.
Well, thank you for that. You started by saying it's maybe the obvious answer. It's a predictable answer at an event like this. I mean AI is a massive part of every single conversation, but still so interesting to hear your thoughts and I couldn't agree more on content. We write so much content for the show. And it would be easy maybe or maybe some people would like us to just go to the easy tool, but it does need to remain distinctive and have some empathy or some emotion throughout the writing process.
Exactly. Yeah. And you see actually there was some news cycles the other day about how OpenAI they're posting jobs for content writers. So that speaks for itself, doesn't it? Feels like a full circle moment in a very quick cycle.
Jean-Marie, AI is front of mind for really all of us at the moment. But from a marketing perspective, where does AI create genuine competitive advantage versus operational parity for your organization?
AI for us at Orange for the marketing, it's first the real optimization of real state-of-the-art customer value management, on real-time customer value management. We are going to hyperpersonalization of the offer. We are going into this orchestration of the omni-channel go-to-market for our customer. On this we have to be aware that it's a change because it does change the way we operate for our customer. We are no more in a marketing of segmentation. We are marketing of one, marketing of hyper-segmentation, hyper-personalization and it's really thanks to the AI that we're doing that. So there is no magic of course because it's about also governance, it's about business rules. It's about operating model and you've got to set that in place and there is no magic and it doesn't replace neither the marketeers. It's also optimization of all of this for low value tasks that will disappear at the end of the day. But clearly compared to what we used to do in the past for our base management, we are going a step ahead and that's really providing a sense of comfort for our customer, a sense of recognition and we want them to trust us about that.
Yeah, this evolution is happening so quickly, isn't it? It's a real challenge to keep up with the change and what can be implemented.
We have to run. We have to keep up with all these changes. But the thing is we've got to respect some rules. Of course because it's not about a full automatization because we've got to respect the brand guidelines because brand is absolutely important for us. We've got also to respect the narrative of what we're doing. But clearly we've got some red line not to go too far because if we are going too far, if we automatize too much at the end of the day we lose the trust of the customer and it's important that we are doing that this hyper-personalization respecting some guidelines but also ensuring that we treat the customer with business rules that are clear, that are fair, that are transparent where there is no gender bias for example, it's important to us where there is no bias linked to vulnerability of some customer including for some cases where there is a credit checking for the ability of the offer that we can do. So it's important to respect all these rules. In the same time staying ahead of the pack in terms of how I use the data of the customer, respecting all the consent, having clear consent but nevertheless moving forward, real-time is of the essence, simplifying on automatization is of the essence but still having some guidelines respecting some part of it is the concern but not only on its race but we've got to do it in the right way.
Yeah, I think what you're describing is it's not a straightforward journey at all is it? There are so many considerations and I appreciate very much your comments about bias both gender bias and then for Orange especially because of your various markets you will be concerned about culture bias built into systems. So that's an interesting area of conversation. Raj, I wonder if there is a kind of single big misconception about AI that you've discovered from a marketing perspective.
Okay there is one. Yeah. The single most, yeah. I know there are actually a lot but if I'm going to pinpoint one it's actually the prioritization for speed over meaning in marketing. As Neil already mentioned earlier where sometimes the AI is equated to content generation or creative automation but content production is the least of it I would say. But it also adds up so for example in the Philippines, one out of three Filipinos are actually into using ChatGPT, right? So can you just imagine the sheer volume of that one? But what I wanted to say is what's really important to debunk actually this misconception is that AI is really important when it's being used in decision-making. That's one it's very important especially when it cuts across the entire customer journey, how it provides value to the customers in terms of your products and services and how we uplift their lives. Again in the context of because I'm the only one here from Asia, in the Philippines we have about 110 million Filipinos and more than 50% are actually our customers at Globe. So it's very important that when we do let's say a precision targeting for example or when we use AI for that matter is we really understand the way it actually works and bring value to their lives.
Right, we could have a whole other conversation about other marketing considerations given the size of your customer base at Globe. It would be fascinating, we'll have to save it for a different panel, but I'd love to come back to that with you sometime and learn. Don, many CMOs are running AI pilots these days, but what does it take to move from experimentation to an AI-enabled marketing organization? This feels like an extension of the conversation we started last year, and what are some of the signals that tell you that an AI-enabled program is truly working before the numbers catch up?
Sure. Well, first of all, we've leaned into AI pretty early. You know, we have a duality of, you know, Qualcomm, right? We've been researching and commercializing AI for about 14 years as a technology, but as an enterprise CMO, I've had to integrate it into my workflows and use it to create more of a modern marketing organization. So, first thing is we start with tools have to be vetted. We have an AI council made up of legal, IT, marketing, all the stakeholders and they have to be vetted for enterprise grade, for how they're trained, right? And for the usefulness. We go into pilot or eval. The good news is that because there's so many AI tools out there that oftentimes these companies are offering evals for free, which is fantastic. We go through evaluators. Super users create FOMO and that's how we scale.
Yeah. And I'd like to go back to something earlier that you mentioned. We absolutely use AI for writing. It has been transformational.
Is that right? Transformational. We have, I have about 400 seats of Writer. Writer has been one of the most amazing tools. And it's not about homogeneous content. It's about establishing consistency and tone of voice. Because as we move from an SEO world to a GEO world, consistency is going to become so important. How you show up in the world because people are getting their information from an LLM, not from a Google search, right? Where you control the journey. They're scraping content from Reddit, from Twitch, from all these different sources. If you show up with different tones of voices in different places, the information that your potential customer is getting is going to be inconsistent. From a brand perspective that's super risky and super important. So consistency is one way, tone of voice is another way. But we have a motto at Qualcomm which is we are human-led and AI-powered. So the human, the people have to be involved throughout the entire workflow from the beginning all the way through the end. That's where you offer editorial content or you editorialize your content to bring that personal touch to it to make sure it doesn't seem homogeneous. But we are saving 2,400 hours a month just from Writer. Giving productivity time back to our people to be better critical thinkers, to be more strategic, maybe have a little bit of work-life balance back in their day and in their life. So it's been a game changer for us and it's really about how you approach this whole transformation with AI. We are going to, and by the way resistance is futile. If you are not enabling AI as part of your workflows from a systems architecture perspective and how you market to the world going forward, you're going to be left behind. We live in a world that moves at the speed of TikTok, right? Keeping up with that is really, really, really hard for any CMO. And I can't hire another thousand people. Like I'm sorry I haven't been given a blank check, right, for my CFO. But in order to scale and keep up with innovation cycles and cadence, you're going to have to integrate it. You have to do it in a thoughtful way. You have to do it in a respectful way. But it is inevitable. And there are a lot of great tools out there, but you have to approach it from a systems architecture perspective. Integrate it into your workflows. Don't hold it outside as a separate thing. And then really train your people on the right way to use it. And if you do that, you can see amazing results.
Some of this I remember you sharing last year like the cross-functional advisory council. Yeah. So a year later, a year more mature into your journey. How important have those elements that you put into place to evaluate to test to play really? How important has that been?
It's been really important. We've avoided I think a lot of potential mistakes right that other brands have had with AI tools that maybe weren't vetted properly. And so I think that's one thing. Another thing is I think it's allowed us to take a more methodical approach to how we deploy and so that's been super helpful as well and it's created a partnership amongst all our key stakeholders. So no longer are we facing barriers to entry but we actually have a really streamlined process where we can bring things through and really early so that they can be properly vetted. And we also have a balanced approach towards you know it may be looking at a tool for something and they may be looking at it to deploy it across the entire enterprise for example like Copilot, right? We're a Microsoft shop and so if you just leave it up to one group to make decisions on which tools you should use they're going to look at it from a macro perspective but they're not going to look at it from a customization perspective so initially we had this debate about Copilot versus Writer for example but Copilot can't do what Writer does and from a marketing perspective we really needed that customization for our business or for our discipline and so having this council enabled us to have those conversations early and then get the right tools deployed for our needs not just take whatever it is giving us right. So that's been super helpful.
Not to bash it, I love it, but some of my own marketing leadership team is in the audience right now and I can see us taking notes like this is actually a very good idea I think.
And they've been a great partner of ours. CMO-CIO relationship right now has never been more important. You need to be best friends with your CIO.
100%. 100%. I also wonder, I'm going off script a little bit if that's okay, but the 2,400 hours that you got back, I would think that there's a cultural shift that you need to be really sincere about as you start employing these tools as well. So obviously Qualcomm has done something clever in that shift to encourage employees to use it to truly give them back the time. Is there a secret behind how you've done that that you could share?
Well, I think the biggest thing, you know, human nature is human nature, right? And when you have people going around and bragging about how much time they're saving and this amazing tool, people start to listen and they start to go, 'Oh, well, I would love to use that.' You know, so this whole super user sort of phenomenon has been very, very, very interesting and super helpful into driving deployment and actually adoptability because you know people are scared right, especially the middle layer. All of my new young employees, Gen Zers that are coming in, they're coming in AI native, right? They're making videos on Sora, right? They're using AI, to your point about ChatGPT, like they're using AI in their daily lives, they already were. So they're not the issue, it's really the middle layer who's been used to doing things a really long time the same way, there's a fear factor there. So we've got to make sure that those folks can feel comfortable. And trying and using these tools. Writer also, you know, the tool matters. The company that you buy the tool from matters. Writer provides a tremendous support system. Weekly trainings, weekly brown bags, lots of people to help you and works with the team on creating agents and customizing them. And so that support mechanism that a lot of AI companies probably don't have if they're startups and things like that, that really matters. Writer's done that phenomenally. And even I would argue even better than Microsoft. So that's really important in order to get people comfortable with using the tools.
Okay, nice. That's a top tip actually given by Don today. Thank you. Back to Raj and Jean-Marie. Speaking of numbers, as marketers, metrics are a critical part of your work, especially as operators. I'm interested to know what sort of metrics do you trust most for the investment decisions that you're making and why?
For obvious reason, of course, you have all those media and creatives, but what's really important is what is the return to business, right? What are the metrics that's important for the growth of the company. On top of that as marketers as well it's very important that we measure the trust index, right? Because especially for AI and in Asia and I think it's all over the world, right? There are a lot of deep fakes, there are a lot of SMS scams and trust once broken and you know we're in that, our business actually trust, right? Our customers trust us for providing them, enabling them to do their livelihood. So the trust index is one that we really like to put in our measurement.
Oh, I like that you mentioned that particularly but also the amount of information especially this year around fraud and scams incredibly important for you to be measuring trust. How do you do that?
Yeah, so we do have our equity checks, right? So it's still in the early stage but it's something that we've been looking at already for I think for almost a year or so on that one definitely because again so we have some vectors I would say so we have some attributes that really connect it to how we do the business and how customers actually choose Globe for example because of the let's say online safety. In fact just to add we actually have a program we call it the Digital Thumbprint program, right? Because again in Asia education is very important, right? Not everything that we see online should be trusted, should be real so we try to embed that in our education space for AI and that's something that we also measure in connection to the trust index.
