I'm driven by the ability to leave a lasting impression on people. If you really look at the audience behavior and you look at how people buy and what happens, bold, big creative bets are more effective. You know, highly targeted data sheets don't leave lasting impressions. You don't wake up and think about things. I really love this data sheet that I just had and I think that you've got to get to a point of humanity with, with your work and they're humans on the other end of your data sheets. There are humans on the other end of your marketing.

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Hingel, I run the marketing team here at marketing Architects and I'm joined by my co hosts Angela Voss, our CEO Rob Demars, our chief product architect and we're joined by a very special guest, Colin Fleming. Colin is currently executive vice president global marketing at Salesforce where he leads more than 600 marketers worldwide responsible for brand events, advertising, partnerships, customer marketing, social insights and more. Before he joined Salesforce over twelve years ago, he ran brand marketing at event Pro strategies and led the marketing team at EsoL's custom footbeds. And before that he had a successful career as a Formula One professional racing driver, which included driving for Red Bull. We're so excited to have you on the show. Welcome Colin.

Thanks for having me. We should have some fun today.

You are way too cool for us.

You got to play it cool. Okay, we're just starting the interview. We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results. We asked Colin to join us today to talk about the b two b marketing revolution. How has Salesforce succeeded by investing in brand? How do they measure success? And why should more b two b marketers follow suit? We'll cover all of that and more today. But first I'm going to kick us off with a quick article from Marketing Week by Neve Carroll. This one's titled top 100 b two b firms have 1 trillion of untapped business value in their brands. A study from brand finance found b two b companies are lagging behind their b two c counterparts in terms of brand contribution to business value. Specifically, despite the top 100 global B two B brands having a combined brand value of 2 trillion, these same companies have around 1 trillion worth of additional untapped business value in their brands. And to get to this number, brand finance used what's called the royalty relief methodology. This estimates the future revenue attributable to a brand and calculates a royalty rate charged for its use.

So it's essentially determining how much a company would be willing to pay to license its brand. And according to the study, there's a huge opportunity for b two B brands to capture untapped brand value. And today we're talking about Salesforce, a brand successful in that effort. It's no surprise that Salesforce is one of the top 100 global B two B brands. They're ranked within the top five Internet and software brands next to companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe. And they were referenced by brand finance as an example of a brand whose investments in advertising have propelled its share of voice and market gains significantly in the past decade. And we consider ourselves lucky to have the marketer who helped Salesforce achieve this success with us today. So Colin, thank you again for joining us. We can't wait to dig into your b two B marketing experience. But first, I can't help but ask about your racing background. And I've heard you ask this question in interviews before so we're trying to put a little bit of a spin on it. How have the skills that you developed as a Formula one racing driver translated to running brand marketing at Salesforce?

It's usually the top two or three questions that comes up when people look at my background. So all good? Yeah, I think it's true. You see a lot of really strong professional athletes that enter into the marketing sphere. It's not just know there's great examples. Nick Drake at Google, former professional rugby player I think number two in marketing at Google and I think there's a couple reasons why that know the attention to detail and rigor and ethic, work ethic that has to be in place for you to operate in the top 1% or 0.1% of any sport is pretty unprecedented and I think that's number one. So you see a lot of grit and determination and passion and focus and I think that's really awesome to see. And my team would probably say that I exhibit all of those qualities, maybe good and bad ways at any given day. Number one is passion. It's my number one core value as a human. It's just like whatever I'm focused on I have to be passionate about in my story. Specifically what's really unique about motorsports is it's a very expensive sport. You can't be in the car driving every weekend.

You might be able to do running or football or something like that. And so I actually spent majority of my time in my late teens and early twenty s in front of cmos, raising personal sponsorship. I'd raised $15 million in personal sponsorship by the time I was 21. So I was in boardrooms pitching cmos, understanding what they're looking for at a very young age. And that made my transition into marketing a little bit more seamless. I mean, the idea of waking up and badging into an office every day was a pretty foreign experience for me. But the qualities and what I had learned from some world class cmos of Daimler and Daimler Chrysler and Western Union and Red Bull and things like this, I still turn to today, 20 years later. And I think that's been a really awesome exercise to be able to pull on that experience at such a young age. So I got my MBA in marketing at a very young age, and getting a lot of no's and understanding why those no's existed and why it didn't make sense for that time. And their focus more on demand at the time or their priorities were elsewhere.

But I learned the different parts of marketing by just hearing lots of no's. And yeah, I got the occasional yes, which was always fun, and got to activate that through the motorsport side. And so I think there's a lot of passion that exhibits. But I do think mine was unique, which led me into marketing.

That's so cool that you got to really learn about the value of brand and convince someone of the value of investing all their marketing dollars in yourself as a brand early on. And I'd imagine too, the amount of focus and calm that you need to be a professional race car driver probably helps in the CMO seat, because it's definitely one of the maybe craziest of most unpredictable seats in the C suite.

I often argue that my adrenaline is higher now than it was when I was a professional racing driver. Just the ups and downs.

Do you show up in the boardroom with a helmet on?

It's actually a funny story. When I first joined Salesforce, I sort of shunned my motorsports background. I wanted to fit in. I didn't want to be the stereotypical, use that too much. Right. I wanted to be known for my marketing prowess less so than my background. But it's funny, now that I have arrived at more of a senior marketing leadership role, I find that I shouldn't have ever done that because the qualities that I'm able to learn from and the uniqueness of the story. Look, we're all storytellers. People are fascinated with a racing story. They want to know how I went from the motorsports to the cloud and things like this and so it just finds, it's a fascinating story. So I've gone on my own journey here and it's funny. Salesforce is now involved in Formula one again and I have had some role in that, but it's like my worlds have completely combined and I have refallen in love with the sports marketing world because of that sort of hiatus that I went on. So it's been an enjoyable experience.

I was thinking you probably timed that well with the rise of drive to survive too. Now people know more about formula. I don't know how you feel about drive to survive is how it captures. I love the racing experience.

Wonderful. It's been wonderful for the sport. Yeah.

Colin, we heard your interview with John Evans a couple of months ago and that's what really inspired us to reach out and see if we could get you on the show. We all respectively cheered when you shared your interest in marketing effectiveness for b two B. And we wish there was more attention here in the US to marketing effectiveness, especially in b two b because we know it helps support bold marketing moves like the ones you've made at Salesforce. But we could talk about marketing effectiveness for hours. So I'll just ask this, if I'm a b two B marketer and I'm at the beginning of my effectiveness journey, what core principles do you think I should be aware of?

Yeah, I think every company has its own unique journey here. I joined and took over the creative team at Salesforce about seven years ago. You know, one of the pieces of advice I got, I have my own little personal board of directors that kind of guides me and mentors if you will. And one of the things that they imparted upon me was two things. One is if you're starting a new journey, the best thing you can do is snap a chalk line and figure out where you are, good, bad, ugly, figure out what situation you find yourself in. And so the second piece of advice they gave me was, it's really interesting. Salesforce has become quite a large company now. Seven years ago we were several billion dollars of revenue. You don't have a brand marketing function. Why is that? And we've been very successful product marketing, going to market by product and we've built some of the largest software and service offerings in the world. But it didn't add up to anything at the time. It just was sales cloud and service cloud. And we were known for our quirky character or whatever it may be, but we didn't have a presence or a brand.

And so those two kind of things came up to me and I said, okay, first thing we're going to do is the brand equity study. And it turns out we had a huge gap between aided awareness and unaided awareness. People knew of us but they had no idea what we did. And so that became our team's charter and we turned a creative team into a brand marketing function by just saying we're going to help the world, help understand relevant awareness or situational awareness or what we do. And so that has been the mantra of my team since that minute of just realizing we found a problem. And we realized that we needed to pull some levers in order to solve that problem. And that has become a pretty wild journey along the way. But the first thing I did was like, foolish Colin was like, I'm just going to go tell the leadership team that we have a massive problem. And first thing I did was, I remember vividly, I remember like, we've got these problems. Here's the report, here's what I'm finding. And I'll never forget a very senior leader at the team who at the time, no longer with the company.

You'll know why after I repeat the story, which was kind of walks me out and was like, Colin, never show that data again. Because it was like an inconvenient truth, right? The levers that had gotten us to the point of where we are now and growing 30, 40% year on year weren't going to get us forward. And so it became a bit of a mission of mine. I'm like, okay, we're going to go build this. And we sort of maybe disregarded that feedback and went and built a brand marketing function and found the way to resource the investment pitched for the additional investment. We rebranded the company to get back to our roots and our personality. And over the last seven years, we're pretty proud of the results we've seen. But it really came from stopping that initial chalk line and saying, let's quantify the problem. I think people had realized like, oh, we don't have a brand yet, but we needed to find something tangible to attach ourselves to. And there's something to be said for any marketing leader or any marketer. Like, you've got to be inspired by a certain problem you're going to solve.

We're all storytellers, we're all problem solvers. And unless that problem is really clear, you're going to have people going a million different directions. And so one of the things that we did, which I think we're very fortunate to find is a very common sound bite that we could repeat and attack and use that as our north star. And with seven years we've closed that gap, but we're never going to be done with it. And I think that's what the beauty of it is.

That's such great advice, Colin. So much of what we need to do in leadership in general, regardless of whether or not you're in the marketing field, is creating a movement and like this belief system, something know what we're trying to do versus just pushing media out there. We don't have brands, so how do we try to do that? And I feel like there's been a lot of momentum in the past couple of years regarding marketing effectiveness. We just saw John Lombardo and Peter Weinberg obviously have been great for the B two B field. Now they're leaving the LinkedIn, which is a little bit of a tear, but also excited about what's to come.

I also shed a tear on that one.

Yeah, I know. It was kind of like, oh, I don't know how I feel about that, but of course super excited for them. I feel, and I'm sure you've heard from others as well, that marketers can get stuck between wanting to create that long term demand and needing to meet the objectives, right of the board or the shareholders today. And even if they do fully believe in that movement that they've created, that their big play is really winning the long game, that share of mind, they're sort of stuck between how to go from short term to long term or something in between. Perhaps you could offer some advice for how Salesforce has looked at how to measure the impact of brand marketing investment.

Happy to. One of the things that we looked at is we follow the inner brands and the brands and the kentars of the world just kind of see how the world looks at our brand. And one of the things I realized pretty early was the brand valuation, if we started to punch above our weight, could be more valuable than the entire intellectual property of the company. And now you're talking to the CFO about big numbers, right? You're like this investment, the Salesforce brand is now I think $38 billion brand. It's a lot of money actually. It's a lot of value that we've created along the way. And that's been the whole company. Of course, not just one function, but now you have a seat at the CFO table and you can say investments here can lead to long term enduring power. And really one of the things you mentioned, Peter and John, formerly of the LinkedIn B two B institute, which is also still a remaining good partner of ours, really looking at this 95 five rule and just really understanding that very few people are in the market to buy what you're selling at any given time.

And there's a market for that. We have performance marketing and we have all the things demand gen lower funnel things that Salesforce is really great at, by the way. We're very good at those things, but we found better opportunity or additional opportunity in that 95% of people that are out of market. And so how do we make sure they love us? First off, we got to make sure they know what we do. Then we've got to make sure that they love us and admire us. And if we do that, I think we're pretty confident and our data has borne that to be true, that they'll find their way to Salesforce something. 90% of the time purchasers purchase the first brand that comes to their mind. So if you're not part of that initial consideration set, you're not going to get bought. And it seems so simple to say that. But when you get in the rigor of a day to day marketing function and you're looking at mqls and you're looking at attribution models and these things, and we have a wonderful attribution model. But I've sort of been known in these contexts for attacking attribution models.

They're not representing humans. Humans buy products, not attribution models. And so I think we have to realize that, that there's a humanity aspect here. And that's one of the things I've been sort of chartering within my team as well as within b two b marketing overall is we need to stop reducing b two b to some lower tier of performance from what b two c is. We're selling the same people. Right. I'm a purchaser of consumer products and I'm a purchaser of business products, but I'm just calling and I exhibit the same purchasing traits and I think that's really the unlock that we had to find within the company is taking bets that are longer than 90 day, quarter by quarter scenarios. And I think that's really important. One of the things that we really watch very closely inside the organization, we have a wonderful brand equity study with put for us and I watch it like a hawk. And we've actually been tried to contextualize that into a unique model we call the of for what, by whom, from where approach. And so it's not just that we're driving awareness, but we're driving awareness of Salesforce.

Right. So it's important that we know what it's for, for specific tendencies, for CRM, for data, for AI, these key areas, by whom and specific set of business decision makers, and then from where to make sure we're targeted on these particular markets that have the most value to us. And so we're always looking at pulling levers within that framework to ensure that I have a large brand marketing budget, but it's not infinite. And we've got to put our dollars where we think the biggest return is. And so a lot of is making sure we're speaking to humans. Our message is bold enough to stand out amongst a very crowded environment and then it's focused efficiently so that we can show the return. And I think those things are where I would focus. Any brand marketer anybody listening to kind of think about making sure that those fundamentals are sufficiently strong.

Yeah, I love that. We've talked a lot about how when we think about b two b buying decisions, the framework makes total sense. And when we compare and contrast between b two b and b to c marketing, you could actually make an argument that the buying decision for a b two B marketer is potentially even more emotional. Meaning brand might matter even more. Right. My job is on the line. I've got pressure from my colleagues. I'm not just buying a pair of shoes that I can either like or not like, and it's really only me that I have to answer to. So the context there and what you're dealing with in terms of those decision factors and how emotional it might be for that person make a lot of sense.

It's funny because you're absolutely right that it is far more emotional when you put it in that context. And it's also more voluminous too. So I think also LinkedIn research has articulated that in a b two B purchasing journey, there's usually eight decision makers involved or eight people in front of the buying committee. So within that cohort of eight people, you're thinking about more emotional purchases, you're thinking about maybe more rational decision makers. You've got to appeal to both sides of that. So we're very good at the rational. Like here's the speeds and feeds of whatever we're trying to sell at a given time, but also speaking to the bet they're making with their career and the humanity aspect of it. So I think it's a question of balance. Anybody who thinks that they can only do one of those things in a b two b environment is probably fooling themselves.

Well Colin, speaking of balance, you teed us up well for this next question. You mentioned that Salesforce is full of great brand marketers, but you're also very good at digital performance marketing. So one question we had for you is how do you think about that balance? Because Salesforce invests heavily in both. So internally with your teams and with your investments, how does Salesforce balance brand versus performance?

I go back to that 95 five rule we mentioned before and in our particular category it's more 90 ten. And by the way, 90 ten is not our balance of media or marketing spend. It's not that. But I do think that we look at making sure that that 10% of people that are in market ready to buy is well covered and we've got every conceivable scenario and opportunity for people to engage with us is checked. So we do look at that first and we want to make sure we capture the in market interest right now, but we don't exclusively spend there. And I think it's where a lot of b, two b companies do go wrong. It's like well I can measure all of the money I spent in this area so let me just go do that. And by doing so you lose a massive long tail of potential opportunity for us and it makes everything more expensive. You can spend all the money on search engine marketing and capture in market interest, but it's far more effective and far more efficient to build a thoughtful content marketing strategy that builds content domain authority that builds all the things you need to have a long tail and be known as the expert in the space so that people don't have to click on your SEM ad.

They just think of those two things are always balanced. And let's be honest, there's moments in time when we overindex on demand and then there's moments in time where we overindex on brand. And it really depends. We're always riding the dials of the CMO leadership, let's say and saying okay, now is the time. For example, we're in this moment with AI right now. That is a complete wild, wild west. It's wild to see companies are coming and going. What initially was going to be a small startup dominated field is now becoming dominated by the large cohorts of Salesforce's and the Microsoft's of the world. And that's interesting but we have a small window of time to capture that interest. So we're having your own brand right now for that. And so we're always looking at that. It's not a set it and forget it strategy. You got to make sure you're capturing relevance in the market. You got to make sure that you're on this journey along the way. And honestly, in a given fiscal year for us, we're changing those dials two or three times. And I think that's what any responsible marketing leadership team should be thinking about.

I think a piece of it that is a driver of success in terms of even just winning over the c suite, right. Marketing to the CFO and really creating that movement and telling the story is just what you're talking about here. It's not just pushing. We need a bigger brand. Feels like a fairly lacking strategy statement to an executive team, but tying together how we think, how we buy, even back to the baseline comment, bringing to the CFO how many marketers understand their split of current demand versus future demand. Just that as a starting point is like it opens your eyes to what the big game is. So I love that piece. Another thing that we've heard you talk a lot about is the importance of category entry points, which are those times like in a journey where it might trigger a consumer to think about a product or a service and really play a crucial role in enhancing a brand's mental availability. By associating a brand with these category entry points through distinctive assets, marketers can broaden their reach to all of these category buyers and really reinforce that brand recall and gain that competitive edge.

How does your team strategize around those category entry points? I would imagine it's fairly complex with Salesforce's offering and everything that you could bring to the table there.

Yeah, it is complex. And there's any like eight or nine lines of business that will purchase Salesforce at any given time and they'll have their unique attributes and their own unique category entry points. And within the CIO, for example, there may be 30 or 40 category entry points. So the first part of it is really documenting them and understanding this. And you see this in b to c, for example, like you see this with Airbnb, very thoughtfully documenting their buyer journey or their host journey versus their consumer journey, if you will. And the b to b is really understanding the consumer decision making landscape. And so the first thing is documenting it. We initially documented it within our core business to be 33 category entry points. And I've got those posted my wall here in one of the conference rooms. And it's really focused on ensuring that whatever lever we're pulling whether it be a large event or a brand campaign or a demand and advertising campaign, thinking about where am I focused this and what am I trying to achieve, what category points am I associating myself with? And there's the ones that are obvious category entry points and then the non obvious ones.

And Salesforce, I think, is in this enviable position where we've sort of grown the CRM category to be what it is today. It was quite small when we started the company almost 25 years ago now, but we've pushed it out to be the size of the company that it is now, and yet there's still room to run. But we also recognize that we had to expand beyond that as well. And it's interesting that you see many companies struggle going one product to two product. Well, Salesforce has done that in spades, all within one category generally. But we're now in this place where we're entering into other categories. Slack was an acquisition. We made very strategic data, artificial intelligence that are pushing us outside the boundaries there. So our category entry points have expanded in that sense. And that's been a really interesting journey for us to figuring out where we have brand permission to play. Can we play in this space or can we not? And I think that's been a really fascinating journey for us to making sure that we understand why people buy an artificial intelligence or why people buy data solutions right now.

That's been an education cycle that is probably true for any marketer. Just to ensure that you truly understand the problems people are solving within those category entry points, we often get caught up with. I have this new amazing feature, everybody needs it and I'm going to go sell it to everybody. But not realizing that that feature isn't the way it might be consumed, it might be consumed in another trajectory altogether. And that's why understanding sales plays and understanding that go to market model is ever more important. And that gets to the conversation of sales and marketing alignment that we spend a lot of time listening to. Account prospect calls, if you will, to make sure that the messages we're putting forth are actually being received in the way we want them to be.

Colin. So Elena and Angela, they ask a lot of really smart questions. I, on the other hand, really like to watch cartoons. So obviously Astro and Einstein and your other kind of distinctive assets that you guys have created are really near and dear to my heart. What did that process look like to bring such distinctive assets into your brand ecosystem? And how do you recommend a similar process for other b two B brands?

I probably get too much credit for the distinctive assets we have in Salesforce. Now. 25 years ago this company had a massive personality with no software. I mean literally created a software company. The word software and a big red flash through it, right? The personality has always been there. But as we started selling into large organizations and we started selling bank of Americas of the world, we started to become those companies. We sort of assimilated to this a little bit more corporate, lost some of that personality. We decided somewhere along that journey that having this personality wasn't appropriate for the companies we were selling into. And I am super fortunate to have a world class founder and CEO and Mark Benioff that he just gets brand marketing. And I have been so blessed to know pretty closely with him along this journey to reinstill that personality into the company. And I'll never forget he came to me and said we're not where we want to be on this creative and brand side. Will you go figure this out? And I had zero experience in any advertising agency or any creative agency background whatsoever. And the conversation was like, you'll figure it out.

And one of the only briefs that he gave me was find a way to bring the soul back to the company, bring the personality back. And it was really interesting that in our developer environment, in our developer marketing, this is a funny story that the team had gone a little rogue actually and started creating this world we called trailhead and there was characters and it was in a forest and you're like what the hell is going on? And frankly I was like God, this team's rogue. I got to go shut it down. But then I saw at one of our events, I'm like, oh my gosh, the community is just rallying around like this crazy. And the community has created some of these characters and rebirthed some of the passion of the company. And I sort of remember very vividly we just asked ourselves a very simple question, what if this was the modern interpretation of our personality? And I'll never forget we just made that decision in a one week, two week period. And we challenged it from every way possible and we just decided we're going to go all in. And we went completely all in and goats and bears and all kinds of things that have now built such personalities and they're well known.

There's like tattoos in our community about these characters. It's phenomenal. Wow. A sales leader at the time caught me after one of our events and he goes, what the hell are you doing with these goats bears on my slides and my presentations? I can't sell to XYZ company by doing this? No way. And the person left a couple of years ago and he came to me and he goes, I remember that conversation vividly, but now you would have to pry that from my cold, dead hands. It is so important to the company and it's so valuable. And this is a sales leader, by the way, not a brand marketer. This is a sales leader that is in front of CIOs and CEOs of large companies. It created such separation for us and such differentiation and it brought our personality forward. And it was like this explosion for the company's personality to finally be rereleased. So for me I think it was really fascinating to look at what does a gecko have to do with selling insurance or what does Mayor McChees have to do with selling hamburgers? It doesn't, it doesn't have anything to do, but it's a distinctive asset.

It creates a better association. It brings your personality forward, it builds community around it. I don't think that strategy works at every know bank of America, who I adore is a wonderful company. Can't go do this. A lot of people think, I'm going to go replicate what Salesforce has done or what Uber has done or whatever. You can't do that. You got to find what are the unique dna attributes of a company. And then our job as brand marketing is to expose that in the best way possible. And I think that that's all that we have done is just taken the unique personality of the company, which is pretty well documented and found moderate interpretations of that. It was interesting. One of the options on the table is to go, oh, let's just go back to bring in the no software idea and we'll just go double. The world has moved on. Cloud is imperative for everybody. It's ubiquitous, so you can't rely on that differentiation. We got to go find it now. And I think we found it in spades, which we're very proud of. But that is not a playbook that will work at every company.

Got to find your own.

It's so cool that it came organically from your company. I mean, so often you hire an agency that comes in with the dancing characters and you're like, holy smokes, that's insane. But it actually just came from your dna.

That's so cool. It's been a fun journey. And in fact, you wouldn't believe how many agencies we've had telling us that was a bad idea. They came in like, you don't know what you're doing. This is going to backfire on you a big time. And we sort of just maybe were clever enough and foolish enough perhaps to just say we're just going to do it anyway.

Colin, that's great that you've had that history of making bold marketing moves within Salesforce. I was doing some digging on just the Salesforce brand history and I came across sassy, which was one of your first branded characters, which I just loved. And you mentioned the no software campaign which we actually bring up a lot internally when we talk about category leadership. And I know that category pirates uses Salesforce as an example a lot. So I was going to ask you about Salesforce's past and future, but you did a great job. You just answered my whole question. So I think maybe let's move on. Rob, you had an AI question for.

Mean come Matthew McConaughey. Like he's not just your endorser, he's your like, how cool is that? He's obviously amazing with his book Green Light and everything that he brings to the table just in terms of his personality and his ethos. And watching those commercials that you guys had produced recently regarding AI just introduced such an interesting dialog. It wasn't like, hey, we use AI. It's hey, we kind of are curious as the rest of the world about what are the implications of this. I mean, how do you see AI impacting Salesforce in terms of how you're going to continue to encourage that dialog in the marketplace?

I might sound like a broken record on these a little bit, but it's about going back to the truths of the company, right? Trust has been Salesforce's number one core value since day one. And frankly, we saw a scenario where a lot of these companies, our peers, our competitors were rushing into AI without regard for trust of their customer data or understanding really what was happening. We're on this learning journey. Let's, you know, one of the reasons we ended up with Matt Conahe, who is as advertised and as wonderful as he may appear from the outside, we aligned with him because our values are very similar to company and as an individual for him, we've gotten to know him over the years and we just saw so much of an alignment on the values side. And we started our relationship in 2021 and really did some very values forward work and it was almost without regard for our products and it was just like, here's how we see the world. And then we're very proud of that work. And it's award winning work that I think will go down as the first real purpose driven, hopefully genuine purpose driven marketing that you saw from a b, two b company.

But outside of that, we said, okay, but now this AI spring is coming up, this wild, wild west, if you will, which ended up being one of our spots. And we just know where are the values? The values seem devoid from this moment right now. And we see two primary lenses for Salesforce in AI. One is trust. And it's really great to say, I'm going to write and engage with chat, GBT, or whatever your favorite LLM is and talk, know, write me a funny poem and the style of Matthew McConaughey or whatever it is. But when you start putting customer data inside of it, the conversation becomes very different. And privacy and data residency and all these things become more and more important. And so we just decided to shine a light on, you know, we're not positioning ourselves as some higher being. We're just like, what about trust? Who's the sheriff around here? Very simple, very simple. And this is where Makanai's brilliance comes through. Know, I think we're very adept at communicating with business decision makers really well, but he's even better at communicating with humans very well, as you can see, with the success of his books and whatnot.

And so I think this combination is really valuable. I will come forth and say, hey, matthew, here's what our point of view is. It'll come in from the side with, like, it's really this. And you're like, well, yeah, of course, that's right. And so I think those things are a lot of fun. But I think trust and productivity are two big messages in the market right now. We have two bespoke campaigns, both with Matthew on it. And he's as engaged as any brand advisor I've ever seen helping write the stuff, which is fun.

The AI sheriff spot is just like a work of art in how it uses the kind of the mid journey look and feel and the hallucinations that come with. It's.

It's so cool.

He does seem like a guy, though. If you wanted to get into his inner circle, you can see that he would need to trust you. I think that would be my first thing. I'd be like, he'd be looking at me like, I don't know. Speaking of trust and speaking of television, of course we have to shift in that direction at some point. We are an agency that only works in television, both linear and ctv. And I think most people know that Salesforce is a big tv advertiser. We've seen those Matthew Conahe spots and a lot of others which we love to see, especially as a b two B brand, as we feel there's a lot of untapped potential for b two B marketers in television. Of course tv isn't right for every brand, but I think a lot of b two B brands feel their audience is just too niche for tv. Right. While the beauty of the channel is really its ability to reach all those buyers in the purchase decision and really build that trust drive sales. Of course, we even see impacts to stock price. So what can you share with us about the role that tv plays in the marketing strategy for Salesforce?

It has been a growing part of our media mix that's been tv. I think we often fell into that trap of we're just a shareholder company, what do we have to do on the Super bowl, know NFL football or golf or whatever it may be. But when you start to align the demographics and really looking at the broad reach we have with our audience, it does start to make more and more sense. When you think about the shift we've seen with cookies and the shift we've seen with first party data, I think there's two paths for us. One is racing on the first party data side and we're doing that with things like Salesforce plus and our own content marketing, but also looking at where the audiences are and we see this amazing demographic overlay with our buying committees and tv and sports. And we just decided once we started to get a little bit more serious about brand marketing and started to have ideas and brand marketing ideas that would raise to the level of that it can fit in a television environment or play with the big BBC players, it's starting to make more and more sense and I do think there's a couple of things we see with that.

Number one is, yeah, you can reach I'm not targeting everybody watching these large tv environments. I recognize my target audience as a subset and it's often I get because we're not marketing relatively niche messages around trust and AI that often get commentary like that went completely over my head. I don't know what you're talking about. And I have to be okay with that because I'm reaching 30% of that audience, which is the business decision makers, and they do get it. And I think that. So you got to kind of brace yourself a little bit for a little bit more of a punching bag because you can't be as targeted on the at least the linear side and the connected tv side has brought some of the great targeting that we've been able to bring to the table, and that's where we bring in a little bit more specific messages, targeted their audiences, and it's good. We've seen the levers we pull in television have only increased. And because of that, we've seen our brand marketing measures that we talked about increase. We've seen our unlimited awareness grow. We've seen consideration grow. We're in this race towards generative AI with a few companies, and we're all throwing big ideas at certain things.

And I do think it's been a worthwhile investment for us, and we'll continue to do so.

Yeah, Colin getting to talk to a b two B marketer who believes in marketing effectiveness, believes in brand, and invests in tv. It's like friggin Christmas for us. This has been great. We have so much more we could ask you, but we're not going to hold you hostage today. So I'll end with this. If you could leave us with one piece of advice for a b two B marketer who wants to invest in more creative marketing, what would it be?

First off, you got to know why you would be doing that. Like you make sure that your charter is clear on what you're trying to accomplish. The big thing that I sort of mentioned earlier, but I'll reiterate it again, which is b. Two B marketers have lived in this second tier for too long, and I love saying, can represent b to c, b to b a little bit more aggressively. But I'm not driven by awards. I'm driven by the ability to leave a lasting impression on people. If you really look at the audience behavior and you look at how people buy and what happens, bold, big creative bets are more effective. Highly targeted data sheets don't leave lasting impressions. You don't wake up and think about things. I really love this data sheet that I just had. And I think that you've got to get to a point of humanity with your work. And there are humans on the other end of your data sheets. There are humans on the other end of your marketing. And I think it's the most important part that for some reason I see too many marketers bury their heads in attribution models and really think about the data.

And that's all really important, but don't lose sight of that. There's humans on the other end.

That's it for this episode of the marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Ayanna Clapaki for producing the show and Taylor de los Reyes for editing. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you find our show valuable, please leave us a rating and review. Now go forth and build great marketing.

When you have a really good idea with Matthew. Does he go already? All righty.

I think he's moved on from that. It's always the number one request, but he's personally moved.

I had a bad feeling, Ross.