How can retailers and brands harness the power of AI to transform customer experiences? Sara Sullivan, Contentful's Global VP of Solution Engineering, explains how companies like Kraft Heinz, Klarna, and Ruggable are scaling content creation, streamlining workflows, and using LLMs to deliver hyper-personalized messaging at scale. Tune in for insights into workflow automation, team restructuring, and the future of marketing technology.

Key Moments:

• [00:00] Introduction to Sara Sullivan and her background.
• [02:33] How Contentful empowers brands with scalable personalization.
• [06:25] The "creative graveyard" problem and how AI addresses it.
• [14:32] Kraft Heinz’s success with geotargeted content campaigns.
• [21:10] Ruggable’s use of AI for landing page personalization and efficiency.
• [25:28] Klarna’s LLM-powered innovations saving $40M in support costs.
• [30:25] Predictions for the future of AI and retail personalization.

#personalization #aiinretail #retailinnovation

Music by hooksounds.com

*Sponsored Content*

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy

Sarah Sullivan: 00:00:00

Foreign.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:08

Welcome to another exciting and elucidating episode of the Omnitok Ask An Expert series.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:13

I'm one of your co hosts for today's interview, Anne Mazenga.

Chris Walton: 00:00:16

And I'm Chris Walton, and we are.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:18

The founders of omnitalk, the fast growing retail media organization that is all about the companies, the technologies and the people that are coming together to shape the future of retailers.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:28

Chris, we have heard from just about every single retail executive we talked to in the last year.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:34

When we're talking to them about Gen AI, one of the number one places they're applying that to and seeing rapid success and transformation is personalization.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:44

Would you agree with that?

Chris Walton: 00:00:46

Yes, Ann.

Chris Walton: 00:00:47

And personalization, as you know, is my favorite word.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:50

It is.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:51

You're one of your favorite words.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:52

One of them.

Chris Walton: 00:00:53

One of them.

Chris Walton: 00:00:54

I have many favorite words.

Chris Walton: 00:00:56

You're right.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:56

Yes, fair.

Anne Mazenga: 00:00:58

But the reason that they are enjoying this so much is that they're able to create such special personalized content for their customers.

Anne Mazenga: 00:01:07

So we thought we'd dive even deeper to kick off this year to learn how retailers and brands are doing this successfully.

Anne Mazenga: 00:01:15

And we've brought in Contentful's Global Vice President of Solution engineering, Sarah Sullivan to help the break this down for us.

Anne Mazenga: 00:01:23

Chris.

Anne Mazenga: 00:01:24

So, Sarah, we'd like to give you a big warm welcome to omnitech.

Anne Mazenga: 00:01:28

Hello.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:01:30

Well, well, hello and nice to meet you and spend some time with you.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:01:33

Anne and Chris, pleasure to be here.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:01:35

Hopefully everyone that's listening is coming off some really strong numbers of, you know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals as they think about coming into the new year here.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:01:44

I hope everyone's wondering, you know, proud of what they did and trying to figure out how they're going to top it for next year.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:01:49

So hopefully we can inspire them today on how they might do that.

Chris Walton: 00:01:53

Yeah, right.

Chris Walton: 00:01:53

Yeah, hopefully.

Chris Walton: 00:01:54

Everybody had a great close to the holiday season here as we start January, so.

Chris Walton: 00:01:58

And Sarah Sullivan.

Chris Walton: 00:01:59

I gotta, I gotta, I gotta admit, I love the alliteration of the name.

Chris Walton: 00:02:02

It's fitting with Omnitalk.

Chris Walton: 00:02:04

Sarah Sullivan.

Chris Walton: 00:02:05

That's a, that's a good SS dynamic there.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:02:07

So.

Chris Walton: 00:02:08

All right, well, before we get started, just a quick reminder.

Chris Walton: 00:02:11

For those watching live on LinkedIn, feel free to ask your questions of Sarah and the Contentful team at any time via the chat session window in LinkedIn, which is just to the right of your screen if you're on your desktop computer.

Chris Walton: 00:02:24

All right, Sarah, let's get started with this.

Chris Walton: 00:02:26

Let's start like we always do with our guests, like give us a little bit about your Background and what Contentful does?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:02:33

You bet.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:02:33

Well, I'll start with Contentful.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:02:35

So Contentful is a digital experience platform that now offers personalization capabilities.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:02:41

So this is a perfect topic and timing for for all of us to be speaking here today.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:02:46

Contentful is really about empowering brands to deliver digital experiences quickly, efficiently, at scale for what they're based on how their customers expect them to be messaged and tailored to them as an audience.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:00

Our platform helps teams structure and manage, personalize and scale content across global brands and regions and products, all while leveraging AI.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:11

And we work with key brands like Ikea, Ed, Vodafone, Ruggable Bang and Olufsen and a whole bunch more.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:19

And we'll share some of those stories with the audience here today.

Chris Walton: 00:03:22

Awesome.

Chris Walton: 00:03:23

And what's your background?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:24

Yeah, yeah, I'm based here in Los Angeles and I lead, as you mentioned, our global solution engineering team.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:30

We're all about focusing on how customers can leverage our platform to really drive and accelerate value.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:37

I've been with Contentful four years now, and for the last year, I've really spent a lot of time focusing on AI and how our customers can leverage it in their marketing operations to really speed things up.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:03:48

So we'll try to share some ideas and examples today on how some of our customers are doing that and how organizations can be thinking about doing that here in the near future.

Anne Mazenga: 00:03:57

Sarah, that's awesome.

Anne Mazenga: 00:03:58

I mean, I think I'm almost curious, like, you've been doing this for a while and like I said in the beginning, AI is really something that we're hearing.

Anne Mazenga: 00:04:07

So many brands, so many retailers have success with, but maybe give us a little bit of kind of where it's been, where it's going, and how retailers should start to think about approaching leveraging something like AI to help them further personalize content for their customers.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:04:27

Yeah, I think before any organization can even think about AI and what it means to their teams, it first starts with the foundation of how you operate today.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:04:38

And because I'm hoping there's a lot of brand and creative people on the phone today, I'm going to start with.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:04:43

It starts with idea generation.

Anne Mazenga: 00:04:46

Okay.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:04:46

We talk to so many brand and creative folks where, you know, it's.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:04:50

They come up with all of these amazing ideas of campaigns and experiences that they want to create.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:04:57

And it's all about how do you drive engagement with the audiences.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:01

But for so many brands, they talk about this idea of like, these creative ideas go to die because they don't have the solutions in place to actually bring Them to life.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:10

Life quickly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:11

One of our customers is audible.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:13

Abby McInerney there.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:14

She's the senior brand creative director at Audible, and she was sharing with us.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:19

Unfortunately, it's a terrible.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:20

Not a terrible term.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:21

I love the term.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:21

It's a.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:22

It's a unfortunate consequence.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:24

She talks about the creative graveyard.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:27

She's like, my team comes up with all of these amazing ideas, but because our solutions don't, we can't work fast enough.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:33

We can't bring these experiences to life fast enough.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:36

She talks about how these creative ideas go to this creative graveyard to die.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:40

And she's like, it's so frustrating because, yeah, she's like, my team is amazing at what they do.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:45

And so they came to us a few years ago, and this was the problem they were ultimately trying to solve.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:05:50

They wanted to have a platform in place that allowed them to move faster, that allowed them to bring all of these amazing ideas live, you know, bring them to their consumers and engage with their customers in new, exciting ways.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:04

And that's ultimately why they deployed contentful, and they've seen tremendous success as a result.

Anne Mazenga: 00:06:09

Explain that a little bit, too.

Anne Mazenga: 00:06:10

And, like, how that's like, in the day to day, like, what is that changing for the creative teams then now that you're saying work faster, but, like, if you can explain even more, like, what's the team at Audible doing now that they couldn't do before?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:25

Well, I'll go back to one of the core challenges that a lot of these, most organizations have is that they want to be able to bring an experience to life and have it be consistent across all of their digital channels, right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:38

And so think about.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:39

Think about a consumer's journey with you as a brand.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:42

They might start on social media.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:44

Maybe we're.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:44

We're scrolling and we see an ad pop up that piques our interest and we click through it, right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:06:50

And as we click through it, maybe we're dropped into your brand's website, and now we're scrolling through the website, and maybe something pops up at the top that says, hey, would you like to download our mobile app?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:00

Well, sure, yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:01

That probably creates for a better shopping experience.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:04

So maybe I download that mobile app and now I'm scrolling through, I add the cart.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:08

I check out, as I finish that checkout process, I get an email.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:13

And all of a sudden, if you think about that, I've just gone through four different digital experiences.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:20

Social, web, mobile, and email.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:23

And for most organizations, those are four separate technologies, four separate teams, four separate experiences.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:32

And if across those four different experiences, it's very easy for content and look and feel and experience to get out of sync because they're managed by different teams and different solutions.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:44

And this channel is so real.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:47

And so what I look at, like, why do customers come to Contentful?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:51

It's because they want to have this consistent look and feel and experience across all of their digital channels and they need to be able to do it in an efficient way.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:07:59

And this comes back to this very simple concept of create once, reuse everywhere.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:05

Create once, reuse everywhere.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:07

If you publish an experience, you should only have to create it in one place and it should automatically replicate out to all of those different channels.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:14

And so when I look at customers like Sephora, they want a consistent experience across web, mobile and email.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:21

When I look at Ann Taylor, they came to us because they wanted the same experience across digital as well as in store.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:27

When you walk in one of their stores, they have big digital signs.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:30

It's the same content being presented in both places.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:33

Doordash, another customer of ours, they came to us because not only do they want to control the experience on the mobile app, but when they integrate with third party apps like restaurants and other ordering solutions, they want that same content to be reused across all of those different platforms.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:50

That is a challenge for most marketing teams.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:08:54

The ability to do this quickly and have it consistent is not easy for most organizations and it's because they're not set up in the right way to truly do it.

Chris Walton: 00:09:03

So, Sarah, the consistency part makes sense 100%.

Chris Walton: 00:09:06

Like, I'm totally bought in on that.

Chris Walton: 00:09:07

The other part of this too though, that I want to make sure that if it's happening, I want to make sure we're calling it out too.

Chris Walton: 00:09:12

So there's making it consistent across all the different touch points, but then there's also doing more of it as well.

Chris Walton: 00:09:18

Is that a piece of the contentful platform as well that you can help the retailers and brands actually get to those ideas, those creative ideas that end up in the graveyard, so to speak, that you can actually do more of them and then also make all of those additions more consistent throughout the entire user experience as well.

Chris Walton: 00:09:34

Is that right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:09:35

Absolutely.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:09:36

And I think the biggest challenge to more is not only the creative idea part and we can talk a little bit later about, like, how does AI come into play and help help stimulate that process.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:09:48

Yeah, but I actually think it comes down to scale for most organizations.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:09:52

They're trying to operate across multiple brands, multiple locations, and in many cases across multiple products.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:00

And for most organizations, organizations, there's this Kind of push and pull.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:04

There's the corporate side of it that's saying, well, hey, we want to have a consistent brand and experience across all of our different regions and locations.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:12

And they want a certain amount of control and governance.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:16

But when you talk to the people in the fields that are operating in those regions and locations and products, you know, they also want to have some control.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:24

Right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:24

They want to be able to take the corporate elements and then tweak them, modify them for their specific needs for the audiences that they're trying to serve.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:31

And so you get this, this push and pull between large organizations that if you don't have the right solution in place, it's very hard to manage that consistency at scale.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:42

A great example of this is one of our customers, UiPath.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:45

They came to us a few years ago and at the time they were operating across 20 different product lines.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:52

And the way they described how they internally worked is every product line operated independently.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:10:58

And so if they wanted to make a change at the corporate level, maybe there was some kind of change in the way that their brand was going to be brought to life.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:05

They had to basically set up 20 work streams, one with each product line, to go get those up sites, even just to their website.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:14

It was a huge maintenance issue.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:16

It was a big program management problem.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:19

And they came to us and they said, oh my gosh, there has to be a better way to make these kind of corporate changes and, but still allow the product lines to operate in the manner that they want to operate.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:31

Right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:31

They should be able to make changes to a product page without having to get developers involved.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:35

They should be able to make a change on a product page that reflects a new feature or function or capability or value statement that's coming out.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:42

And so they're like, we need to be able to have a solution that allows us to manage this push and pull between corporate and then, you know, the regional or the, or the product line aspects.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:11:54

That's ultimately what Contentful allowed them to do, to create these things once automatically have them filter down across all of the regions, the locations, the product lines, but yet allow those, those separate entities to also have the flexibility that they need.

Chris Walton: 00:12:11

So, Sarah, that all seems pretty straightforward, you know, when you, when you explain it that way.

Chris Walton: 00:12:14

But is there anything else that keeps brands from, you know, taking action to the degree that you're describing?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:20

I think the other challenge.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:22

So there's obviously a technology aspect to it.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:25

I think there's also a solution and the way that teams are structured, if you separate your teams into Web versus mobile versus email versus social.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:39

They're going to all look at this problem differently and want to solve it in different ways.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:43

And so when I think about themselves.

Anne Mazenga: 00:12:44

And their old medium.

Anne Mazenga: 00:12:45

Yeah, yeah.

Anne Mazenga: 00:12:46

They're not concerned about the omnichannel approach to getting to the customers.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:51

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:12:52

And so it's like a good organizational leader will look at this and say, like, do we need to rethink how we're structured and how we operate?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:01

And so, yes, there's a technology aspect to it, but there's also this change management aspect to it that comes into play.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:09

The other thing that oftentimes comes to mind for me is cpg.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:13

I think CPG oftentimes looks a little bit different than retail.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:16

Oh, 100%.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:17

Yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:18

So CPG is oftentimes this, you know, they're, they're operating in this mode of like B2B2C.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:24

Right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:24

Where they're selling to distributors who are then selling with the end consumers on their behalf.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:29

And we hear so many organizations come to us with this challenge of like, hey, I want to engage with my end consumer.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:37

I want to own that first party data.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:39

In many cases, they have no first party data at all.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:42

No step.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:43

Step one is get some first party data and then step two is figure out how to engage with it and get them to like, interact with you.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:13:50

A few years ago, Kraft Heinz came to us with this exact problem of, you know, they knew they needed to start having a better conversation with that end consumer, but they knew they needed a solution to be able to solve this.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:14:03

And so it was this combination of like cdp, like some way to actually store this first party data and then some way to be able to stand up experiences really quickly and be able to do that across all of their digital channels.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:14:14

But most importantly, being able to do it in a way that they can actually talk to the audience and actually have different messages depending on who the audience is, where they're at, where they're coming from.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:14:25

So that was extremely important for them when they came to Contentful to help them solve this problem.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:14:29

And they've, they've had tremendous success doing it.

Anne Mazenga: 00:14:32

Well, Sarah, one of the things that, you know, we deliberately call out several brands here that you've helped, you've mentioned, mentioned several that you've helped with this.

Anne Mazenga: 00:14:41

But one of the things that you just talked about that I want to dive a little bit deeper into is the ability to, you know, at scale, create assets that then the individual, whether it's individual stores, if you're a cpg, like Kinds and you're, you're distributing content to everybody around the entire U.S.

Anne Mazenga: 00:14:59

or if you're a retailer that's really trying to personalize, you know, different messaging for your customers across different geographies across the country.

Anne Mazenga: 00:15:09

That's, that's what I'm hearing from retailers.

Anne Mazenga: 00:15:12

Like core examples, like we put a mason jar in this ad that went to our customers in the south and put the lemonade in that versus, you know, a lowball glass, which we did on the east coast, like, those kinds of messages are resonating better with some of their consumers.

Anne Mazenga: 00:15:28

So maybe if you can dive into, like highlight a couple brands here that you've really seen, can get into that regional messaging and can really, you know, see the results from, from the stuff that you're talking about here when, when they've deployed contentful craft.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:45

Heinz.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:45

I'll stay on that story here for a little bit.

Anne Mazenga: 00:15:47

Yeah, let's do that.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:47

Yeah, that's similar to what you just talked about.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:49

You talked about geo, right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:51

Kind of geotagging and recognizing where is the audience come from.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:55

They had a very similar observation.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:15:58

So when they came to us, one of their comments was, hey, we recognize one size does not fit all.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:02

Like, one message is not going to work for every audience.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:06

And it's sort of this kind of foreshadowing of where AI is going to come in.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:09

But they came to us and they said, okay, great.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:12

How do we set up different landing pages, different engagements, different experiences depending on these different segments of our audience.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:21

And they specifically wanted to start with geotagging.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:24

And what they recognize that if a consumer is coming from, say, Los Angeles, like me, maybe they want to advertise to me, I don't know, organic mayonnaise, maybe they think that product would resonate great with me.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:38

But if an audience is coming from the east coast, for example, maybe they want to advertise their mustard.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:45

And so what they did is they basically utilized our platform to set up different landing experiences depending on the geotag.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:16:53

And then they utilized our personalization platform so they could very easily capture where is the audience coming from and serve up the right landing page, the right tailored experience based on the location of that consumer.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:07

Like, how many are we talking about here?

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:09

Just.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:09

Sorry to interrupt you, but, like, just how are, how many versions are we talking about people being able to do?

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:15

Like, I think East Coast, West Coast?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:17

Sure.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:17

But I think that's the thing that, you know, when we first started talking to you at Contentful, like, that was the thing that really shocked me.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:23

It's like it's not just you know, four total, it's like multitudes.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:28

Like there's so much to that you can do.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:31

Well, I love that you asked this question because in their case they've done this for over 100 different GEOs.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:37

Yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:37

And by doing so they saw a conversion rate grow by 78%.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:41

Like that's a meaningful amount.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:44

But this goes back to old school versus new school.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:47

Old school.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:48

Oftentimes these solutions sat into different teams.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:51

You had to have developers involved in order to set up an experience.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:17:55

You had to have marketing people creating 100 different experiences.

Anne Mazenga: 00:17:59

Yes.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:18:00

Really, really time consuming and a lot of labor in order to do that.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:18:04

And so organizations need a faster, more efficient, easier way to be able to set up that customized content or tailored content and be able to automatically generate those audiences on the fly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:18:17

That's where we leverage AI because our AI can actually start suggesting to a marketer hey you have a series of of your audience over here that looks like this, that has this kind of personality or this kind of of of of tagging elements to it you and then we can suggest, we think they would respond to this kind of content.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:18:40

And so it starts to give the, the marketer almost like this sidekick, like a coach like hey, try this experiment with this, see if it works and if it works then deploy it at.

Anne Mazenga: 00:18:52

Scale and be able to do it.

Anne Mazenga: 00:18:54

I mean I think that's the thing.

Anne Mazenga: 00:18:55

You get a lot of teams like well like you said, ideas that go in the graveyard.

Anne Mazenga: 00:18:59

But it's like this could work or this could work and there's just, there's not.

Anne Mazenga: 00:19:03

You don't have the bandwidth to do it.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:05

Yep.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:06

Another great example I think you talk about team size is kind of where your mind is going.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:11

Another one of our customers is ruggable and they looked at this for them it was a less about geo but it was more about paid ad, paid keyword searches.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:23

A lot of organizations do this, right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:25

We buy Google Ads based on keywords and what they recognized.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:29

Oh for those folks that don't know what ruggable is, it's a fantastic solution.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:33

It's washable rugs.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:35

I have a couple in my house.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:36

I have cats.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:37

Fantastic.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:38

We're just picking the top up, throwing in the washing machine.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:40

They wash up beautifully.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:42

If you don't have one, I highly recommend checking it out.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:45

And, and in their case they wanted to.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:48

They first experimented with keyword buys on rugs for cat owners and rugs for dog owners.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:56

Right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:56

If you think about it, right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:57

Different needs you know, right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:19:59

To different things.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:01

And so they would buy those keywords and then drop the experience, the individuals or the consumers into landing pages tailored with content for either dog owners.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:10

So maybe it's a picture of a beautiful rug with a dog sitting on it, or maybe it's a picture of a rug with a cat sitting on it, depending on which keyword you came in by.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:20

And with that particular campaign set, they were, they saw conversion rates increase by 25% just by being able to leverage the keyword ads that they were buying and dropping people into customized and tailored experiences.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:35

They do that with a team of less than two people.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:38

And so it's just, you don't need huge teams in order to set these things up.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:42

They can set up a new landing page in under an hour and they can then, you know, set up the, the marketing campaign or the, the personalization campaign in a couple of minutes because marketers can do it.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:52

They don't have to get developers involved.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:54

They can actually do it themselves right in the platform.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:20:58

So where you create the content is where you also set up the experiment and the personalization campaign.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:21:03

It's very simple, super easy, and it allows teams to really try things out very quickly to see what's going to work.

Chris Walton: 00:21:10

Yeah, that's, yeah, that, that, that is the power of AI.

Chris Walton: 00:21:13

So I want to, I want to get the brass tacks on that then.

Chris Walton: 00:21:15

Sarah.

Chris Walton: 00:21:16

So, like, you know, we always talk about people, technology and process on this show.

Chris Walton: 00:21:20

Right.

Chris Walton: 00:21:21

And in order to make this type of thing happen.

Chris Walton: 00:21:23

So, you know, you've, you've alluded to companies restructuring their teams to kind of go after this idea.

Chris Walton: 00:21:29

But, you know, what have you seen work in terms of the restructuring and also, like, what are the metrics that different organizations are starting to use to understand their progress in this arena?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:21:41

Yeah, of course, I'm going to come back to.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:21:44

It starts with the solution, right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:21:46

Like, do you have the technology in place to actually solve this?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:21:49

And you know, to me, it's a modern technology platform that actually allows you to move quickly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:21:54

We hear so many organizations, organizations say they have these legacy solutions or these web page builder solutions.

Anne Mazenga: 00:22:04

Web pagers, just the name is antiquated.

Anne Mazenga: 00:22:09

Yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:11

And they have two challenges.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:12

Guess what the first one is they're built for the web and they're not.

Chris Walton: 00:22:15

Built for alternative web builders.

Chris Walton: 00:22:17

Yeah, right.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:17

Yeah, right, yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:18

And then the other one is they force teams to work in a siloed manner.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:22

And you can start to hear this kind of recurring theme that we've been chatting about is like Teams can't work in silos anymore.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:30

They have to, yes, they have to have control and governance, but they have to be able to operate as one.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:36

And when you think about like some of these legacy solutions, there's a team that manages the web and then there's a team that sets up personalization and experimentations.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:44

There's another team that does all the analytics and the analysis of the data.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:48

And it's like that should be available to everybody or definitely available to the marketer.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:22:54

They're the ones who are like, empower them to make decisions with good information and tools that allow them to move quickly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:00

And so this, this legacy mindset seems to be falling short and folding organizations back in terms of being able to do more and speak to those audiences in a tailored kind of personalized way like organizations want to.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:14

So that's number one.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:15

So start with the right foundation.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:17

And then number two, I think it comes down to, is scaling how your team works.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:23

And this, to me the answer is AI.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:26

You know, you need a solution that actually has AI built into the platform that actually allows you to move quickly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:33

And I'll, I'll give you an example.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:35

One of our customers is Klarna.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:37

And so if you're not familiar with Klarna, it's a payment option, kind of like a pay over time option.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:43

It's very common in retail websites as a, as a payment option when you're checking out.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:49

Klarna came to us a couple years ago and they actually started with kind of an unnormal use case for us that like we want to stand up a knowledge base.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:23:59

And a knowledge base for them was basically kind of an FAQ blog site, a place for consumers and customers to go and get answers to questions.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:09

Great use case to start with.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:11

So they started there and then when AI came onto the scene, they recognized that they were sitting on a ton of content that had structure and meaning that they could use to go tune an LLM.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:24

They chose to tune a version of OpenAI so their own private LLM that's been tuned with their own content.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:31

And as a result of tuning that LLM with their own information, what they saw is that the results that came back out were of high quality on brand.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:42

They could tailor them with their voice and they could make sure that they were accurate and consistent.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:47

And so because they had started with this one use case of just putting content in contentful, they now could tune an LLM very quickly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:54

Why?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:55

Because we're API first.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:24:56

It's very easy to extract that content out to tune an LLM.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:01

And now they have high fidelity results coming back out of their AI engine.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:05

And they've now used this AI engine in a variety of ways across their company.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:09

The first use case they used it in was in a customer support option.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:14

So what they found by putting it into their customer support operations, the first year alone, they are estimated to save over $40 million in support costs.

Chris Walton: 00:25:28

And how, like, what are they doing differently?

Chris Walton: 00:25:29

Like, yeah, what are they doing differently in their customer support function?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:32

Now, as questions come into the customer support operations, this engine is answering 75% of them with 100% accuracy.

Chris Walton: 00:25:40

Got it.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:40

So it's just, it's just cutting down the need for labor to be able to support that part of the organization.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:45

But they haven't stopped there.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:47

They've taken the same tuned LLM.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:49

They use it as part of an employee bot to answer questions internally.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:53

Their legal team is using it to write contracts.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:25:57

Their marketing team is using it to do sentiment analysis.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:01

Their marketing team is now actually leveraging it back in contentful to generate copy.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:06

So when we talk about creating messages tailored to the audience, they're doing that why?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:12

Because the AI engine can suggest recommendations to a marketer.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:16

Hey, for this audience, this is what the content should look like, or here's what, the message should be tailored for that audience.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:23

Now, their marketers are still in control, because I oftentimes get this, oh my God, is it running autonomously?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:28

And the answer is no.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:29

Their marketers are still in control, but they're leveraging AI, generative AI, to do 80% of the labor, the work for them so that they can look at it, review it, tweak it, modify it, and then publish.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:43

They're using it also to translate content on their websites.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:47

And I think if I was a marketer sitting out there going, where do I get started?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:52

To me, translation feels like the obvious place to start.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:26:56

These LLMs do translation extremely well.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:27:00

And many organizations have multimillion dollar budgets in place with third party service providers that they're using to translate content.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:27:09

This is a prime spot for where you could begin to leverage generative AI and save your organization a whole lot of money.

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:19

So Sarah, the former producer, project manager at a retailer and me is like thinking through the process of how this all happens.

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:28

I mean, is this, is this like a dashboard then?

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:32

So like, how is this changing?

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:33

I guess the workflows?

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:35

Because in my mind, with, you know, legal being a part of this and the brand teams and the marketing teams and all these things like putting all this data in Here and being, having all the use cases that you just outline, like how are, what does this look like for me in that producer role or project manager role?

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:51

Like am I, am I actually having people like go in here to kind of approve things too?

Anne Mazenga: 00:27:56

Like, is this, how is it, how is it working?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:00

Well, you've nailed it, Ann.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:01

And it's exactly that.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:03

And so this idea of workflows becomes extremely important.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:08

Organizations are going to demand, they're going to need a couple of things.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:12

One, the ability for workflow to be automated to automatically engage all of these constituents along the way when they're needed in order for this to move quickly and efficiently.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:23

And so being able to set up those workflows, number one, is really important.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:26

But it's also things like collaboration tools that we've all become accustomed to using.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:31

So I think about like editing a document even with you all.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:34

As we're preparing for today, we need things like commenting right on the page that's important and essential in order to operate quickly.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:43

That's what's built into contentful is the ability to comment, the ability to mention like, hey Chris, can you review this section that I just built out?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:50

Does this look right for you?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:52

Or hey, legal, I know I got some legalese terms in here.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:28:55

Will you take a look at this to make sure that I haven't, you know, manipulated this in a way that's not effective.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:00

So that's extremely important is having those collaboration tools built in.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:05

It's got to integrate with where we all live and breathe.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:07

So it integrates with slack Microsoft Teams because let's not get around, that's where we all spend 90% of our time most days anyway.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:15

So like it's got to automatically alert me in my, you know, my day to day tools to let me know something to do.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:21

Right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:21

Those are the collaboration tools that we know and expect and have to have in these solutions.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:27

And then the last is the auditability.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:30

Right?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:31

Like at the end of the day we need to be able to track and understand who did what along the way.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:36

And a lot of these kind of early stage solutions that we see in our space, they're great with some of these, you know, basic features, but they really struggle when you get into the corporate governance, auditability, security features.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:29:50

And so this is where I encourage organizations that, hey, if you're preparing for the future, make sure you're looking for these things in your platforms.

Chris Walton: 00:29:59

All right, Sarah, well, let's close out with this.

Chris Walton: 00:30:01

And whenever we get a guest, we always like to see if we can you know, we like to tell our audience a little bit about what, what else is coming.

Chris Walton: 00:30:07

Like, where's this going next?

Chris Walton: 00:30:08

That's kind of a hallmark of how we try to end our shows wherever possible.

Chris Walton: 00:30:12

So, you know, in that vein, like, what would you tell people in terms of how they should prepare for what is next when it comes to the further evolution of the technology as you've been discussing it here for the last 20 or 30 minutes?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:25

Oh, let's predict the future.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:28

Is that what we're doing?

Chris Walton: 00:30:29

Yeah, of course.

Chris Walton: 00:30:30

100%.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:30

Okay.

Chris Walton: 00:30:31

Yeah, easy, Nostradamus.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:33

Yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:34

Well, I think the first one I'll go to, which we started to allude to, which is if you think about personalization at scale, scale, I think there's a near future not very far away.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:46

I'm talking months, not years, where personalization is no longer going to be human to human interaction and it's going to be system to system.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:55

And we've.

Chris Walton: 00:30:56

What does that mean?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:30:57

Yeah, well, we've kind of coined this term of your solution needs to support infinite flexibility because we're not very far away from a future where you're going to put in a core content message and the solution will be able to at a high fidelity result, so high accurate result, be able to automatically take that content and create variations based on all of your audiences.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:21

And so what most organizations today struggle with is being able to get beyond 4, 5, 10 audiences because it just takes too much labor to do that.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:29

The future is near where solutions are going to be able to do personalization on a one to one basis.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:34

That is not very far away.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:37

The second one I is you got.

Chris Walton: 00:31:40

More than one prediction.

Anne Mazenga: 00:31:42

I'm still processing the first.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:44

Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:46

The second one is, is less about a prediction and more of the aha.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:51

That I think a marketing leader should be careful of.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:55

I see a lot of these marketing solutions.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:31:57

If you look at a Martech stack for any organization, they probably have 5, 10, 15, 20, maybe north of 20 solutions in their marketing technology stack.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:05

Every single one of these solutions is deploying AI.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:09

But what's happening is behind the scenes is they're all using their own AI model.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:14

Remember when I told you about Klarna and I said the reason they did this, they were so successful, is because they recognized day one, we are not going to go tune 20 different AI LLMs behind all of these solutions.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:27

We're going to tune one LLM because you don't tune an LLM once, by the way.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:31

You have to continuously tune it.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:32

We're going to tune one LLM and every solution in our tech stack is going to point towards that LLM.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:38

That's important because it takes a ton of time and energy to go do these to tune an LLM well and you don't want every solution to have to A, to go do that separately 20 times and B, they're going to produce very wildly erratic results if you tune each of them separately.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:32:54

So I think good marketing leaders should be thinking about and asking their IT team, how are we going to tune one LLM and use that across our marketing tech stack?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:33:05

Which also means when you're going out and buying marketing solutions, you have to ask, can we bring our own LLM?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:33:13

Or how do you tap into and integrate with our core LLM?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:33:17

Because I want to own that as a marketing leader and do that once so that I can control the consistency of the results.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:33:23

So my last kind of tagline or prediction or recommendation maybe is to marketing leaders is think about your strategy and how you're going to tune one LLM versus a whole bunch of these.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:33:34

That will happen.

Chris Walton: 00:33:36

Oh, go ahead and.

Chris Walton: 00:33:37

But that's like I was just going to say real quick, that's like an entirely new muscle to exercise for the average CMO too.

Chris Walton: 00:33:42

Like that's got to be a difficult task for them.

Chris Walton: 00:33:45

But go ahead.

Chris Walton: 00:33:46

Ann.

Chris Walton: 00:33:46

I'm sorry.

Anne Mazenga: 00:33:47

Oh no, I was just going to ask a simpler thing.

Anne Mazenga: 00:33:49

I was like, how many marketing leaders have even that in their vernacular?

Anne Mazenga: 00:33:54

Because that's the thing too.

Anne Mazenga: 00:33:55

Like I, I mean I think of the marketing leaders now and it's, I'm sure they're more well versed in LLMs, but like, are, are they thinking about it this way in, in the examples that you shared today, the Kraft Heinz people, the ruggable people, like, are they even prepared at that point yet?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:34:13

I think the leading edge organizations, the ones that do this well and actually see the results coming in the return on investment.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:34:20

This is how they're thinking and this is how operating.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:34:24

They're going through the hard work of doing the change management to restructure their teams to think about how their solution works across all digital experiences, to think about how do we create content once and reuse it across all of these.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:34:36

Like they're doing the legwork now to prepare them for the future.

Chris Walton: 00:34:42

Yeah, there's a little bit of go slow to go fast in what you're saying as well, which is also important.

Chris Walton: 00:34:46

So that was a great nugget drop, some great, great ending predictions there, Sarah.

Chris Walton: 00:34:50

So, so that was great.

Chris Walton: 00:34:52

So if people want to get in touch with you.

Chris Walton: 00:34:54

Pick your brain, learn more about Contentful.

Chris Walton: 00:34:56

What's the best way for them to do that?

Sarah Sullivan: 00:34:58

Well, a couple of ways.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:34:59

Obviously, we're on LinkedIn here, so feel free to connect with me via my LinkedIn profile.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:35:03

It's Sarah S A R A.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:35:05

My mom always said I was short, so I had a short name.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:35:09

So sara.sullivan.

Sarah Sullivan: 00:35:11

and you can also reach me via email, sarah.sullivanontentful.com awesome.

Chris Walton: 00:35:18

Well, that wraps us up.

Chris Walton: 00:35:19

Thanks to Sarah Sullivan of Contentful for sitting down with us today.

Chris Walton: 00:35:22

And thanks to all of you who joined us live to watch this interview on LinkedIn.

Chris Walton: 00:35:26

And thank you to all of you who may be listening in later as well.

Chris Walton: 00:35:29

And on behalf of all of us at omnitalk, as always, be careful out there.