Today’s podcast is with Gregory Kennedy, VP of Marketing at Alembic Technologies, which provides AI-powered marketing analytics for C-suite executives. We talk about how Alembic is applying mathematics and AI, developed for identifying causes, treatments, and mortality during the pandemic, to tracing the results of marketing initiatives across the board, what that means for marketers and how they ended up with a series of backers, that include NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former 49-ers Quarterback Joe Montana.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Broken funnels, flywheels and human messaging – Key insights from HubSpot executives at GROW Europe 2024 – and is number 524 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.

Here are the highlights of my chats with Gregory:

• Gregory spent a lot of time at CBGBs in New York back in the day. Anyone who is a fan of punk music will know what that is.
• Alembic is taking on the challenge of trying to measure all of marketing.
• John Wanamaker quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
• For 150 years, people have known that we’re spending on marketing but have found it really hard to determine which parts are effective and which aren’t.
• Digital emerged and provided a lot more certainty and accountability.
• At the highest level, digital offers the ability to measure marketing in a way that you can’t do across other channels.
• However, we can’t do that across all of our marketing. That is the challenge that Alembic is taking on, and has developed a way to do that across everything.
• We like to call ourselves an applied science company.
• Mathematicians and scientists on the team have created the platform where it ingests a client’s first-party data, and then we instrument it to an outcome or revenue layer, depending on what they want to measure.
• On top of that, we access third-party data that measures the impact of advertising, television, radio, podcasts, other social media (if we need it), brand surveys, and the whole suite of a third-party measurement that most marketers are familiar with that they use to measure marketing.
• We take all of this data, and then we combine it and organize it into a time series and lay it all on top of each other to help us figure out what happened day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute.
• We then apply proprietary algorithms and mathematics that have been developed at the company to analyze that data.
• We use things called composite AI that combines a number of different techniques, like LLMs and causal AI and other things, to help do that.
• What’s important on the AI side is that the customer journey is so complicated and fragmented these days AI helps us interpret it. We’re interpreting, understanding, and evaluating the journey that customers go on and using proprietary math to sift through all of that data to understand what activities in marketing are causing revenue impact.
• Alembic’s approach is inspired by the mathematics and AI developed for identifying causes, spread, treatments, and mortality during the COVID pandemic.
• There is a parallel between how a marketing idea or concept spreads and how a virus spreads.
• We develop what we call causal chains, which are a sequence of events that the system has identified that preceded the revenue impact event that we are able to measure. And we use all of those to share with our customers to help them understand the impact that marketing is having. And we can even forecast it going forward.
• A recent McKinsey survey said 71 % of consumers expect personalization or a personalized interaction, and 76 % get frustrated when it doesn’t happen.
• Extreme levels of personalization are expensive, difficult and hard to do. And, to some degree, it’s not always in the incentive of the company to provide that.
• Gregory’s best advice: Think of yourself as a customer. If you want to have great customer service, go and use the tool, be a customer, go to the store, buy something, go and really explore the product as a customer. It will give you a deep empathy with what the consumer experience is and it’ll instantly highlight the areas where you need to improve.
• Gregory’s Punk CX brand: Amazon.

About Gregory

Gregory brings over 20 years of experience leading marketing, content, brand, and communications for high-tech companies like InMobi, AdRoll, and Sojern. Prior to Alembic, he was a Fractional CMO and marketing consultant with his agency BrandZen, where he advised early-stage companies on their go-to-market strategy. Notable customers included startups Ecomedes, Wilderness Labs, Lumanu, and Zingly.ai. Gregory was the fourth employee at TapSense, a mobile app platform acquired by Wish.com. He balances his professional drive with a passion for cycling and espresso.

Find out more about Alembic Technologies here, say Hi to Alembic and Gregory on X (Twitter) @getalembic and @I_Am_GKennedy, respectively, and, finally, feel free to connect with Gregory on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash