How AI can help challenger brands beat the competition

Ben Walker  00:04
Hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM Marketing podcast. And you know, all of those little jobs that we as marketers have on a daily basis that add up, in aggregate, to being very big, long jobs. How do we think that new technologies, particularly AI, can help us with those if it can help us, it's going to give us a great dividend. And to find out a little bit more about that, I've got a very special guest with us today. DG, who is co founder of Dojo AI, he joins us from his office in southwest London. DG, how are you? I'm very well Ben. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you on the show. You know, it is one of those things in business, isn't it? Marketing is an old business. Oh, it's just a little job. It's a small job. The trouble is, these small, short jobs add up to being a lot of time over the course of a week, over a course of a month, over the course of a year, don't they?

Duarte Garrido (DG)  01:01
They do indeed, there's nothing bigger is there, especially because it compounds, and it ends up actually taking time from marketers, days and weeks and months, to do what they actually prefer doing and what they're best at, which is being creative, being strategic, not really being sort of tool operators or operators in general, right? I don't think that's the dream of any marketer. Is to put together intricate workflows, look at Excel sheets all day, or try to decipher through really complex dashboards in places like GA4 or meta business manager

Ben Walker  01:41
you can, of course, hire to get people to do that, but that's a very large cost, and also people don't necessarily want to have a job that involves just doing these so called Small routine tasks. So marketers face limited budget and indeed, limited appetite from people to come and do those jobs, which is perhaps where technology can help. If we can automate some of this routine stuff, if we can mechanise some of the jobs, which actually start off with little job, but in aggregate become a large time sink, we can presumably unleash our creativity to do the things where we can really enjoy our jobs and add value.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  02:23
I believe so. And I believe it's, yes, it is about efficiencies. It is about releasing creativity in marketing, or at least recovering creativity and marketing, but it's also about levelling the playing field, because I think for too long, creativity has been in the hands of those who have enough resources to be have the luxury to be creative. The big media powerhouses, the very large corporates, the brands like Coca Cola, which I've worked for before, those will always have room for creativity. They'll always have teams agencies just dedicated to that. But the small and medium businesses, the startups, the scale ups, the what I call the Challenger brands, the ones that want to beat the incumbents, but don't yet have the resources to do so those rarely gets to be creative. And if you're a marketer at a startup or a scale up or a medium sized enterprise, even you've probably often been told that brand and creativity is not part of your main function, right? You're here to deliver results. You're here to create pipeline. You're here to sometimes manage ads, do SEO, create corporate content or email cadences or nurture sequences, and you rarely have time to just stop take a step back, think about the consumer at the other side of the service or product that you're selling. What do they need? What do they want? How you position your product perfectly for it, how you appeal to their either emotion or need or urgency, and actually do what marketers are really good at doing, which is understand people, and you don't get to do that because you're in a race against time, you know? And we've been talking about technology serving as an equaliser for a long time. I don't think it's ever done that. My background was big Corp, big brands, you know. I worked at Coke, I worked at standard chart, at Sky, always leading big global marketing teams, and then when I pivoted to started working with startups and scale ups, what I saw was not a level playing field. It's almost like a race against the clock, where we're putting the little resources, the little headcount that we have. A little budget that we have in just trying to catch up with the companies that have a larger slice of the industry. And when it comes to technology, and more specifically, marketing technology, I actually saw it as a hindrance, because most marketing technology, I think we're now over 15,000 tools in the ecosystem. They're point solutions, and they've been opportunistically built for large enterprise because that is kind of the founder's playbook. You're pressured to do that by VCs. You're pressured to build enterprise products. So you do it and you build something that's for large corporates. So those tools are usually siloed, overly complex to manage, and they do that on purpose, right? Because they need either specific job roles to be operating that tool so that they can have scale, or sometimes even small departments, or they need agencies to come in and help, or sometimes the tools are so difficult to manage and so obscure that the vendor themselves sell services on top of them. I have a few in mind that I'm not going to name and shame that do that a lot, and that leaves small teams with little resources in a very tough situation, because they have too many tools that they don't have specialised roles in house roles to manage. If they bring in the agencies, that's when things start to really go sour between them and senior leadership, because questions start to arise. You know, what are they paying them for? If everyone in the marketing team has an agency to work for them. You know, you have the PR person with a PR agency, you have the content person with a Content Agency, social, paid media, SEO, the overhead starts to become too big, and questions start to come in. So these smaller teams, they can't operate the tools. They don't have the internal know how, they don't have the bandwidth the time, but there's still pressure to deliver the same sort of results and to compete with teams that are 510, 20 times the size. That's a real problem. And like I said, I haven't seen any proof that technology has helped. So right now with Gen AI, it's different. We have a real opportunity here, and with all the conversations around Gen, AI, is it going to replace critical thinking? Is it going to replace creativity? Is it going to take all our jobs? What AI is actually going to do is level the playing field. What AI is actually going to do is give enterprise capabilities to smaller teams without the enterprise cost or complexity that comes with it.

Ben Walker  07:40
So instead of building a bespoke, gigantic enterprise platform for a blue chip organisation, which is what used to happen, because that's where the money was, and that was where the demand, therefore was, we can produce a series of AI tools, Gen AI tools, which can be adopted by a whole bunch of smaller organisations, startups, and will help bring them up to the level of their large scale competition, because they're taking off their hands the routine day to day, mundane tasks which are taking up all of their time.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  08:16
Yes, but I have an even better answer to that. You don't need to bring a series of tools you just need to bring the one that's what we're building at Deutsche we're building what we call an AI marketing operating system. So it's a tool that, in essence, pulls in, connects to all of your channels. So it will connect to your GA four, connect to your social media paid channels. It will connect to SEO data sources, traffic data sources, it'll basically build a digital twin of your whole marketing operation. And with Gen AI and with the genetic AI, you can use a system of agents to cooperate together, almost like a team or an agency with different roles. So you have like a data analyst, agent, a performance marketer, an SEO agent, content producer, and they all cooperate. They pull in data from different sources, they structure the data, clean it, normalise it, and basically give it to the user in a very intelligent, conversational, simple to understand way. So instead of the user having to spend loads of times trying to decipher through various dashboards, tables, charts, no, you can actually just ask questions and not about not just ask questions about your data. Ask questions about what you can do with it, right? So it's not about what is my ROAs on X campaign on Facebook? Yes, the tool can tell you that, but it can also tell you what you should do now, because it will learn how specific types of creative, specific language, specific messaging works on that campaign on Facebook, what audience, how that can be applied to other channels like Google ads or LinkedIn ads or SEO, or even to your positioning, to your product positioning overall. It can measure. Things like brand awareness, brand sentiment. It can understand the qualitative and quantitative aspects of your marketing, the brand and performance side of things, right? It can understand market movements, Voice of Customer, competitive movements, and take, finally, take all of that into consideration. So it does become your the brain of your marketing team. And if your marketing team is 2345, 10, even 20 people, suddenly you have a whole brain that everyone can work on, that you know has all of the context needed for your marketing and your brand. And all these people do, instead of spending time trying to decipher the data, they spend time acting on it. Which is what Dojo allows them to do, which

Ben Walker  10:43
is what you say has been happening a long time, for a long time in large scale organisations with huge, multi million pound marketing budgets and marketing departments, those 20 people, those 50 people, in some cases, are out there talking to the customer, working out how they can act on the data to harness it for the customer advantage, whereas in too many small organisations, or most small organisations, your implication is they a large proportion of the time is simply spent sat at a desk analysing that information rather than acting upon it.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  11:19
That's correct. I mean, I remember when we started, my co founder and I, so we started Dojo a year ago. So we started in August last year. We just then a year old. And when we began, we did a series of interviews with loads of CMOS, VP of marketing in the UK, in the US. So we understood, you know, let's see what the pain really is. Because I had this sort of inkling, I had an idea, but we wanted to hear from the people who would eventually use the tool, right? And I remember vividly one cmo that later became an angel investor of ours, and then one of our first customers. And this was a post Ito company, right? A public company, not that small, around three something people actually it's, I can, I can name it. It's pension B, so it's a relatively big FinTech within the UK and the US and the CMO was saying, like, listen, I spend most of my time either managing people or in board meetings or doing strategic things, but then half of it is also spent trying to decipher what's happening in Google Search Console and Google Analytics and meta and LinkedIn and trying to get into the weeds of the dashboards and the campaigns and and this is not a reasonable or a sustainable model for a big CMO of a big company like this. And we started seeing that echoed by many of our CMOs and VPs that we spoke to. They were like, Yeah, we spend way too much time just trying to understand what's happening in our platforms and our channels and our content in our campaigns, like there has to be a better way than this. And that for us was a kind of a eureka moment, and we knew where we wanted to get. And to your previous point, the bigger companies you were saying, you know, the larger companies, in a way, have been doing this for a long time, yes and no, yes, they have the resources to do it, certainly, but they've been doing it dysfunctionally, right? I lived through that firsthand. So I, you know, during my time as centre chartered in Coca Cola, and it's Thai, I can hardly say that. You know, marketing was being done correctly or in a very integrated way, or intelligent way, far from it actually, because they have, it's almost like they have too many resources, right? There are too many teams. They're all siloed, much like the tools that they use. So the tools don't speak to each other, but quite frankly, now they do the teams. So in the end, marketing isn't done in an integrated way either. And we'll we will eventually help those companies too, but that's just not where we're going to start. And the reality is that whatever happens with Gen AI, big companies will be and stay behind the curve for quite some time,

Ben Walker  14:01
there's a technological phenomenon, isn't there, that actually once technology gets to a certain level of accessibility, smaller organisations adopt it much quicker, because the enterprise solutions are embedded in the company, often not integrated with each other. In some cases, in many cases, I've come across this myself firsthand. I'm sure this is the same for many of the audience today, these enterprise solutions are not used or used in only a very limited way, and employees find other routes around them, using sometimes their own apps and technologies. So you could quite easily envisage a scenario which you've just cast there, which is that actually we talked at the start of the show about a levelling up. There could be an acceleration for smaller, more Footloose companies, because they can adopt these quicker and easier than a large scale

Duarte Garrido (DG)  14:58
corporate. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing that already. So the results are in we're now working with close to 50 companies in most of them in the UK, and the US and a significant number of them have basically just, not just told us, but actually wrote about it on our guest blog, on how they've leveraged a tool like Dojo to basically surpass their incumbents and do a lot with a lot less, right? And because they have this sort of fast adoption, because they are agile, because they can pull in a tool like dojo, I mean, as an example, right? Usually martech sales buying cycles can for big enterprise, they can go from, you know, six months to eight months to 12 months in very radical scenarios, but I've seen that happen. I close it deal in 48 hours. That's the pace that we're going. So I have one call. I show the CMO and the marketing team, or the VP in the marketing team, I show them the tool. They look at the tool, they go like, yes, we're ready. Let's do it. We connect the accounts in five minutes. The next day, they start using Doge. It's as simple as that. I could never do that with a large enterprise. It just wouldn't happen, right? It would have to go through loops and loops of, you know, legal and compliance and 20 different stakeholders and customised integrations. And it would be very complex to do, especially at the stage of company that we're in, which is, you know, we're early stage. We want to move fast. We don't want to have like, 12 month buying cycles. It just isn't interesting to us. And as such, companies like though Joe, will not be offering their tools to large enterprises. So large enterprises will lose one state of the art tech, because they just take too long to buy it.

Ben Walker  16:44
The sales cycle is so onerous that there's no point you doing it. You sell to people who want to buy it, and buy it quickly,

Duarte Garrido (DG)  16:51
exactly, and we'll get to them eventually, but when we do, the challenges will be a few steps ahead of them. Just

Ben Walker  17:00
rather change the role of marketers in smaller organisations. That doesn't it. If you're currently a marketer and organisation, I'll stick a finger in in the air here. Let's say if you're a marketer, fairly middle ranking to senior marketer in a small organisation. You know, an organisation with, say, fewer than 50 employees, probably something like 50% of your time at best is spent on the customer facing, creativity stuff at best, and 50% of the time is spent on the mundane routine stuff, exactly the sort of stuff that you're trying to automate, and colleagues in the AI industry are trying to automate. It does dictate a change in the way that marketers show up, the way that they perceive their jobs and the way that they do their jobs, doesn't it? If you're suddenly going from a sort of 50% creative role at best, maybe maybe 40% you know, let's be honest, it's just something that's around the sort of 80 or 90% your role as a sort of customer facing creative marketer is very different to one that's spending half their time in routine tasks.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  18:08
100% it's inevitable that we'll see a change in the function. It will start from the small to medium business to startups to scale ups. That's where it will start. It usually starts with small group of companies in San Francisco, right? You can see the sort of departments changing, the job roles changing, and then you see that sort of spreading to the UK, to Europe, then to bigger businesses, and eventually the big enterprise start catching up, right? But what we are already seeing is one emerge of marketing and sales. We're already witnessing that, right, and a lot of SaaS businesses. So the role of the traditional marketer versus SDR versus a salesperson, that's going to disappear, and what's going to happen is you will have basically commercial savvy people who understand the product in depth and are highly creative and strategic. They will be using tools like dojo, and they'll be using other sales tools as well to basically be able to do everything a classic marketing department and sales department does today, but they will be merging the two, right? We'll be doing that in unison. There also be a change in art skills. So right now, I wouldn't be basically hiring a marketer just because that marketer has a deep understanding of a channel or a deep understanding of a specific programme or tactic, I'd be hire a marketer because they are highly creative, because they're strategic, because they can adapt quickly, and because they really know how to use AR. And this last point is very important, really knowing how to use AR, because, in essence. The marketer will become almost like a command centre, almost like you're organising or managing a team of agents, a software that is so powerful that you can send it out to do things for you, but you have to retain your critical thinking and your creativity, because that's something that AI shouldn't replace Interesting.

Ben Walker  20:25
Well, what about what about risk? You know, what's the human in the loop? What's the human role, the marketers role in terms of managing risks? Of course, one of the constant trade offs, some people say, or certainly considerations, with AI, is that the more we automate these routine tasks, the more we devolve to machines, the further away we are from the risk management. So concerns over data privacy, the risks of over automation, such as, you know, you send an AI off to work out your socials, to work out your seeding and so on. It goes off and does something and then does something that you didn't expect or that maybe had a negative consequence that no human in the loop had spotted. You know, what is the role? Where is the interface for human marketers with this technology as sort of oversight and risk management?

Duarte Garrido (DG)  21:19
Yeah, so there's going to always be an element of risk with any AI tool, and that's the current state of play today is you've got these agents that are incredibly good at going fetching things for you, giving you the lowdown, advising you it's almost like input tasks rather than output. Once you start using AI tools for output. And I don't just like using the word automation because it sounds deterministic, and I don't think that's what AI is about. It's almost like autonomous, right? Once you start using it for autonomous output, that's when vendors need to be responsible for what they're selling, right? And the reality is this, llms are not the way right now. They're kind of like a halfway house or a segue for marketers to become more comfortable using AI, but you cannot when you should not use a generic AI tool to perform vertical, specific tasks or functions. Wait,

Ben Walker  22:26
this is a bit of a news flash here from DG the llms that you're using. Guys that are useful for you to get used to the concept of AI. They're useful for you to sort of train yourself a little bit in AI, perhaps, but do not see them as an output tool,

Duarte Garrido (DG)  22:43
no, not even an input tool, to be completely honest. I mean, there's some things you can do today, like you can MCP your way into, if you're a very tech savvy marketer, you can MCP your way from, say, Claude into your HubSpot, right, or something like that. And you can even get some data from it that can inform what you're doing, but it's not reliable and it's not in depth and it's not actionable. There's a limit to what it can do for you, and gradually, that's the realisation that we're coming to in AI is that the future belongs to verticalized solutions, right, especially when it comes to B to B. So when it comes to companies using AI and not individuals, right? Individuals, sure, they will use generic AI tools for most of what they need to do, but companies, they will need verticalized solutions that have specific frameworks that know what they're doing, that are that have risk management, that are responsible for the output and for the input, and that they can trust, right? Because they've been trained only on that. They do not hallucinate, they do not make up stuff, but they also don't know how much Mission Impossible did at the box office, right? Because it's not their business to know that. So it limits, it grounds them. It limits their graph. It limits their context and allows them to be much better at whatever job you want them to perform.

Ben Walker  24:06
So with this stuff coming forward, it seems to me there's some key takeaways here. Firstly, this is very real. Now that there is this opportunity, these technologies exist to take away the mundane, to remove the routine, to unleash your creativity as marketers, and spend less time at your desk grappling with, you know, day to day data analysis tasks, and more thinking about how you can help your customers, how you can act on that data, how you can act on that analysis. So that's great news. That's great news for all marketers, but it's particularly good news for marketers and smaller organisations, because it does that levelling up and even may even accelerate them beyond the less Footloose The larger less Footloose organisations, which are sort of embedded in Enterprise Solutions, once you start using AI autonomous. Honestly for output, then that's where the vendor, that's where the human in the loop comes in. You know, you can look at it as an input tool. Let it do its thing. Here's your inputs, here's the data analysis. Once you start asking it as an output tool, this is where you have a key human role as a human in the loop, as a as a risk manager. But there's a great opportunity here, absolutely huge opportunity. But only see the existing off the shelf solutions, the elements, the chat, gpts, the claudes, really is a quasi training ground. You know, once you want to you want to do this, get this stuff working for you, you need to find something that's bespoke marketing. Ai, with those three key takeaways in mind, people listening to this show, what would you advise? Are the key actionable advice, pieces of actionable advice that markets should take to make this stuff real for themselves. You know, let's say they've only dipped their toe in the water, or they're still using llms in a very basic way, or they don't have any real AI role in their organisation at all. What are the key pieces of advice they should take away from this show today? DG, to make some of these opportunities real for them.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  26:13
Look at tools that give you effectiveness, not just efficiency gains. Look at tools that you can show the impact that they have on your marketing almost immediately. Look at tools that augment your role, that augment your skill set, and that augment the impact that you have in the organisation, because it is human plus AI. And if you're a human marketer, and you've got the right AI stack around you, you can become superhuman in your organisation, and you can deliver like a superhuman, and you don't have to waste your time understanding the intricacies of specific tactics or specific channels or specific programmes, you can manage tools that do it for you. So I guess that's a segue into my second piece of advice, which is you will have spare mental space that you should occupy with true, creative and critical thinking, and we've been detached from that for too long, and it's not easy to go back to it, because creativity is beyond sitting down and figuring out how to write a blog post or something like that. No, it's about, how do I reach the right people with the right message at the right time and get them to do something I want them to do for that? I need to understand the people. I need to understand what makes them tick. I need to understand where they live. I need to understand what they consume. AI can give you answers to all of that. You need to ask the right questions, right and then on top of it, you need to augment AI's output. The same way AI augments your skill set, you need to augment AI's output with true human creativity and ingenuity, which AI will not be able to deliver stop looking at AI as a creative brain. It isn't okay. It'll be able to streamline creative operations. It already does that okay. So it'll be able to make you act on your creativity in a much more faster, more effective, easier way to put it badly. But it does not replace creativity, and it will never replace creativity, as far as I'm concerned.

Ben Walker  28:48
Interesting, sage advice. Final question, I mean, I suppose, is the one that lingers in my brain, is how long we talked to the start of the show, sort of the hair and the torsos and the sort of the hair being the large companies with all that free time to go and talk customer, to think creatively, and the tortoises being the smaller organisations who were buried in the mundane, buried in the routine, and we sort of, as the conversation has carried on, that we can see how the tortoise becomes the hare and the hare becomes the tortoise. What's the time scale on that transposition? What's the timescale on that and with the smaller organisations, the startups that have got access, quick access to this stuff, start to catch up, level up, and eventually take over.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  29:29
I think we're starting to see the beginning of that already. I don't know how long it'll take. I think it'll take a lot less time than we think it will, as with anything with AI right now, we usually overestimate what it can do and underestimate how fast it'll do it. So I'm already seeing smaller brands being able to deliver more, and we're seeing that with our own users, with our own customers. I think it's. Probably months, not years, until we start seeing the scale, typically,

Ben Walker  30:05
but we'll see. I hope you'll come back on the show, DG and a bit of an update in a year's time to see where we are. Because it's quite exciting. You know, quite exciting. Lots of marketers, perhaps the majority, work in smaller organisations, so this will be great news for them, and some really interesting advice and takeaways. So please do come back and join us on the show. This is DG, co founder of Dojo AI. It's been great to have you on the show. DG, I hope you've enjoyed it. We certainly have, and I'll wish you luck with the projects, and wish all marketers that are using this technologies the best for it. Thank you very much indeed.

Duarte Garrido (DG)  30:39
Thank you very much. Ben, have a good day.

Ben Walker  30:42
That's all the time we have for this episode of the CIM Marketing podcast. You can find detailed show notes and links to additional resources mentioned by our guests at cim.co.uk/content-insights. If you enjoyed this episode and find it helpful, please consider supporting the show by leaving a rating and review. It really helps grow our reach. The CIM Marketing Podcast is hosted by me Ben Walker, and produced for CIM by Brindley Walker, no relation. Thanks again for tuning in to the CIM Marketing podcast. We'll catch you next time.

Karen Barnett  31:21
Secure your ticket today, cim.co.uk/events. We look forward to seeing you there. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for you.