Today’s interview is with Vivek Sharma, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of Movable Ink, which empowers marketers with scalable, omnichannel personalization through data activation and AI decisioning. Vivek joins me today to talk about their recent 2024 Audience of One research report, content creation as a key bottleneck in personalisation efforts, how automation through the increased use of artificial intelligence is permitting marketers to take a more strategy-focused approach, how that is impacting metrics like engagement rates, campaign RoI and improved commercial returns and some of the ethical concerns marketers have with new technology.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Agents view agent-assist technology as more important than a competitive salary – Interview with Gopi Polavarapu at Kore.ai – and is number 514 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot, who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Vivek:

• Everyone has an inbox. It knows so much about them. It is their digital wallet. I still go back and find old emails to understand the context of a conversation I’m having now.
• In the past, big email service providers were primarily focused on delivery. How do we get messages out the door at a high throughput, maybe some data management, but content was an afterthought.
• Content: That was the initial inkling of an idea that personalization is failing. We got our start there with an essential innovation that would change an email the moment you open it.
  • The moment you open it, we’d be able to dynamically compose images using data sources and contextual factors like the weather outside, the time of day, the device that you’re on.
• Fast forward about 14 years later wnd what we’re building is an autonomous marketing platform.
• Movable Link recently published a report called 2024 Audience of One, which aims to understand from marketers everywhere, how personalization has changed in their viewpoint.
• There’s this legacy process called a campaign that everything is built around and a campaign calendar.
• The problem is that the email you got this morning may have been planned six months ago.
• This legacy process is from the print era.
• We digitize all these things, we want to achieve personalization, and yet we’re beholden to this campaign process that is decades old, and in many ways holds us back from realizing how to deliver a customer experience that really puts customer over a campaign.
• The idea of autonomy is you’re going to have to give up some control to a machine, but the machine’s going to present options to you about how it’s going to tailor everything for everyone. And you will have oversight.
• This approach uses the campaign as a vehicle and it then reimagines what the campaign is really like using an AI engine that takes this campaign concept but creates a million personalized versions of that for each individual and that thinks about what story do I need to tell each customer on their path of discovery, where they’re going next and whether to introduce them to a new category, much like a personal shopper would do.
• 26% of marketers are currently using AI for content creation.
• When it comes to image generation using AI tools, there’s high bar to clear for marketers, especially in enterprises, when it comes to provenance, copyrights, trademarks and brand alignment.
• An overwhelming majority (95%) of marketers concur that AI’s automation of manual tasks permits a more strategy-focused approach.
• Our customers using our platform and following our approach are seeing lower unsubscribes, greater engagement, awakening of dormant subscribers and revenue increases.
  • Victoria’s Secret specifically achieved double-digit returns in revenue increases, double-digit increases in conversions, much higher click-through rates, the awakening of dormant subscribers and people getting introduced to new categories that they may not have considered before.
• 42 % of marketers are concerned about the absence of human supervision with these systems.
• There’s a transition happening, and it is imperative to move your company into the future.
• Be a change agent. Convert your frustration with the current situation into a desire to create something better.
• We live in very interesting times, and it’s fascinating the changes that are happening in the world and how technology is playing such a big part in it. So, I think everyone will be well served by reading and learning and continuing to be students for life.
• Vivek’s best advice: The only thing that works is walking in the shoes of an employee or a customer. That is the truest way you can learn. The next best thing is to talk to many people directly and understand their experience.
• Vivek’s Punk XL brand: NASA and SpaceX

About Vivek

Vivek Sharma is the Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Movable Ink. He co-founded Movable Ink in 2010 and has led the company through rapid growth to a leading market position with 550+ employees serving the world’s most innovative brands. Through his leadership, Movable Ink is empowering omnichannel digital marketers to personalize every customer engagement through automation and artificial intelligence

Prior to co-founding Movable Ink, Vivek headed Eastern North America and EMEA sales for Engine Yard. Earlier in his career, he held senior engineering roles at Blue Martini and Cisco Systems. Vivek graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Check out Movable Ink and their recent 2024 Audience of One research report, and feel free to connect with Vivek on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay