132 | TTMP 2024 Wrapped: The crew's top picks

Harry Radcliffe: Welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. A super special one. An emotional one. Because we got Nia Turner.

Jon Busby: Why is it emotional? Oh yeah, because we've got Nia. Nia's actually turned up to this one.

Nia Turner: Why does that make it emotional?

Jon Busby: It's just,

Harry Radcliffe: just jerks my tears.

Jon Busby: Well, that's not making it in the actual recording. Um, or maybe it is, or maybe it isn't. We'll see what happens.

Harry Radcliffe: Busby's got a Christmas jumper on with a carrot nose. He's looking good. You might have heard in the intro, he's upset that it's not a, it's not a video podcast. Yep.

Nia's looking more autumnal than festive.

Jon Busby: That's very valid. I'm just

Harry Radcliffe: looking down for

Jon Busby: her. Actually, no, but I think it is emotional because Nia is always the one behind the scenes, Harry, that keeps me and you organized. Absolutely. Um, like none of this happens unless Nia makes it happen.

Laugh: Right, right. And

Nia Turner: .

It's more than organization as well, just to clarify, it's the talking point as well of what we're actually going to talk

Jon Busby: about. Yep. Yep. Yep. It's all right. I just, I, I've, you're probably about the third person I've insulted today

um, right, let's, what are we talking about today?

We're talking about the, uh, Like, we're talking about the podcast episodes that we remembered the most over the last 12 months, right? Yeah, I

Nia Turner: think our favourite clips, the most insightful crisps, crisps, crisps.

Jon Busby: This is why you're not invited on the podcast anymore.

Nia Turner: This is why I don't come on. Um, clips, our favourite clips from the year, favourite guests.

Jon Busby: How many do we need? How many are we supposed to have? Three? Are we going to say three each?

Nia Turner: No, two each. Oh, but

Jon Busby: I've got, I've got three.

Nia Turner: How are actually sitting down to listen to our Christmas special?

Jon Busby: We're going to find out. Like, we're going to listen to numbers and then probably cry into our mince pies.

And brownie butter. Uh, on, on Christmas day. Um, Yeah. So,

Nia Turner: so it was supposed to be two clips each, so I obviously can't be paired with two clips. And Harry, how many clips do you have?

Harry Radcliffe: I've got no clips as of right now.

Nia Turner: Lovely. I did listen

Harry Radcliffe: back to one of the podcasts I thought would have some good clips in it, but actually it didn't.

Oh. That's

Jon Busby: so bad. Okay, mine, mine is not based on the amount of clips, but I'll go first because I've got three of them. And then you guys can, can, can go on. Sure thing, Buzzy. You can catch up, right? But they're, um, mine's actually based just on the guests, right? Because at the end, at the end of the day.

Yeah, it's all about, it's all about the guests that we have. And so I've got three guests that I want to acknowledge that have left a lasting impression on me to me this year, but I'm going to start with the one that I probably had the most fun with. And that was Mike Smite. Like he, he turned up. We, we, we, we get a huge variety of different people on the podcast, right?

We get veterans that have recorded hundreds of podcasts and we get people that have never done one. And he turned up so humble, so open and yet, and poured his heart out with some incredible stories, um, about how he has, You know, about how he started, um, his, his life in the channel, how he started his career, um, with his, you know, with his family.

Um, and really what he ended it on, because I did listen to the whole podcast, is probably a piece of advice we can all take forward into 2025, which is we should all take more risks. And I just listened to that and just thought this, you know, that one line, Mike, probably is going to leave a lasting impression on me.

So yeah, thanks very much, Mike. That's the one that, that, that I'm going to, pick out was my first one today.

 

Jon Busby: Mike, if you were to give a piece of advice to a future channel or alliance leader, let's say back, you know, someone that's driving a forklift now in a warehouse. Yep. Um, delivering a box shifting boxes. What would you what would you give them?

Take risks.

Mike Smythe: Okay. Never be, never be afraid to take risks. When have you, can you give me a memory of when you've taken a risk? Oh, I've, I've, I've, I've taken lots of risks. Have they always paid off? No. Good God, no. Um, excuse, excuse the language, but no, absolutely not. Um, I, you know, I've, I've taken risks, um, that have paid off.

I've taken risks that haven't paid off. I think some of the ones, um, that paid off tremendously. You know, I, I was at Central Inc. I think when we, when we first met, um, I left a, you know, comfortable job that I've been promoted in relatively recently to join AWS. Big, big, you know, unknown, um, at the time that was just, that was before COVID.

Um, Obviously, when went through the pandemic, um, I changed roles a couple of times at AWS, ended up running the, um, or being in the team that ran the relationship between AWS and Salesforce. Um, and I chose to leave and everybody thought I was crazy. Um, why, why would you possibly leave AWS? You know, this was, this was two years ago.

Um, but I wasn't growing anymore. I, I wasn't finding those opportunities to grow. to do things differently and to forge my own path. And I think that was, that was a big risk, you know, leaving. People are often, um, don't leave AWS for their own benefit. reasons, um, but I did and, and it's, for me, it's paid dividends so far.

 

 

Nia Turner: I think I've actually heard you talk about that more recently as well, Busby. I feel like it's, it comes up a lot like taking risks. Uh, it was in one of our, um, a clip of you from actually one of our other podcasts as well.

So you clearly have brought it forward. But then the first party data strategy piece. Like the biggest risk you can take is not connecting your data. That's gone. That's popped off.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I'd completely forgotten. He had said that until I re listened to it. And I just, I just think it's so true.

Nia Turner: It's become entrenched in your,

Jon Busby: Nia, what's your first one?

Nia Turner: Um, my favorite clip. I think I'm going to have to go with, uh, Kate Rogers. Now, Kate Smiley, actually, um, who we met at the Master of Marketing Conference this year. Um, She's definitely left lasting impression on me. I think not just because of her, like, amazing, smiley attitude. Like, she was just an absolute joy to be with, wasn't she?

Like, so lovely to spend time with. But, I think not just that, but, kind of, her journey, um, with GE Healthcare and how they started. And just she had this real focus around storytelling, which I think probably anyone who works in content quite a lot like I do, you know, storytelling is one of the most important facets of that.

But I just, I just love the way that they had applied that at GE and how they had to pivot their strategy from being really product focused during COVID and coming up with this. Storytelling centric approach, it's just an amazing story. So I'd say that's definitely one of my top lessons of the year. For sure.

Jon Busby: Was there, was there a particular element that Kate? Cause I remember, I remember Kate's energy, right? She had, she had some, some punchy energy and she, she also was worth noting from any of our listeners. I think she had to fill in for her boss. Like her boss couldn't make it to the, cause of the storm when we were recording all those podcasts.

So I think she had to do the presentation about brand. Yeah. And fill in for a boss, which is, you know, that's no mean feat, right? And then she got a fantastic response from the audience. Um,

Nia Turner: I think she actually had to do that twice. I think there were two separate speaking sorts that she had to fill in for, like, not even just one, two.

Jon Busby: Um, but yeah, was there a particular element that she said that stood out for you, Nia?

Nia Turner: I don't have one specific line. For me, it was, it was that whole story that, that she kind of, well, literal story that she wove around how they started implementing storytelling at GE Healthcare. So I've got that very specific clip.

So play the clip now.

 

Jon Busby: something you mentioned.

Storytelling earlier. Yeah. Like how do you align the brand storytelling with something like demand generation? Yeah. Like how do you bring, how do you blend all of that together?

Kate Rodgers: I love it. It should be blended together, like it should feel natural enough. A good story will transcend just one place, right?

So if we have an amazing customer story or an amazing patient story, I love when we combine the two. Absolutely. You can create all sorts of materials and storylines and proof points far beyond just a brand campaign. So maybe we start with a video some social posts, but then how do we turn that into owned articles?

Can we take that clinician and make white papers? How can we really weave this thread all the way through, educate people when they're out of our, when they're not ready to buy, which for us is most of the time. But they're interacting with our products every day and in a way that our customers are connected to their work is through patients.

So brand storytelling has been an extremely powerful tool for us. And I would tell you that we were so product focused, like historically always, and then the pandemic happened. And We were like, Oh no, what are we going to do? Because we can't sell products right now. We literally, we had so much demand. We couldn't even meet the demand of how many products we needed, but it was just also not a time in the world as a healthcare company to be trying to sell our products.

So we had this whole strategy that we had to throw away and essentially redefine. And we had all these marketing dollars that we had for trade shows and like in person events, all these different things. Now, what are we going to do with it, right? And what we decided to do was really lean into that storytelling angle of our people who were working on the manufacturing floor the collaboration that we did with Ford to help produce ventilators.

And it just created this like huge blooming effect. And that was one of those times where we had to pilot it because of a crisis, but it. It became a North Star for us, way beyond that and it was really powerful to see that, firsthand.

 

Jon Busby: Harry, over to you. I

Harry Radcliffe: liked Silly Ting, she was good. I liked the bit when she spoke about Johnny Walker. She just liked whiskey. Yeah. I liked Brownsville Soul. You know, that was interesting. I'm a brand man. I like it when we talk about brand, rather than nitty gritty. I like a little bit more of the abstract myself. We, me

Jon Busby: and you used to go very abstract with the podcast, actually.

Yeah,

Harry Radcliffe: real experimental with it.

Jon Busby: And talking, talking, as you're talking about bringing Mike Smythe back, he did also bring a dating analogy into his podcast as well, which he did completely unprompted. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Which, uh, which we're always quite, we're always a big fan of, aren't we, Harry? Always.

Nia Turner: Haven't had many of those from you recently, though, Harry.

Jon Busby: What's running a podcast like? Can you make an analogy to dating apps? Now, what's our new

Harry Radcliffe: podcast? Like, yeah, well, what's more like arranged marriages?

Jon Busby: That's actually quite true. We've moved from where we were never quite Tinder. We're more like Bumble. Except we were the girl. Is that right? Yeah,

Nia Turner: but actually, that's not all true now. Because people have started messaging us, asking to come on our podcast.

Which, that really is a step forward. So, I don't know Harry, What dating app does that make us now then?

Harry Radcliffe: Uh, I think that makes us Instagram. Hang on, is that a, is that now seen as what? Actually, Jon, you and me did get propositioned on Instagram, didn't we? We did! I forgot about that! I had to make my, I had to make my Instagram post.

Nia Turner: On Instagram?

Harry Radcliffe: Yeah.

Nia Turner: What happened? Story time.

Harry Radcliffe: Well, I can't remember exactly who was messaged or whether both of us were messaged or just me or just you. It was both. One of our fans was. It was both. They wanted some of this action. It's actually a true story, true story. I need to find that actually.

Nia Turner: Who was the

Harry Radcliffe: fan?

Shout

Nia Turner: out if you're listening.

Jon Busby: That

Harry Radcliffe: is absolutely true. Very

Nia Turner: tricky though.

Harry Radcliffe: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. We're a wombo combo. We come as a package.

Nia Turner: Merry Christmas. So

Jon Busby: many, so many, so many comments I could make, but just would not make this recording. Um, I'm gonna get to my second one, which is also one from the NAs, Nia.

Which was Jonathan Knowles. There is those rare moments in life where you end up being in a room with someone that is just on a different level. And he maybe used parts of my brain.

I didn't know I had. Um, and it was just it was just an incredible conversation. There's probably not a week that goes by where I don't think about something he said or some piece of research that he's done. And I don't think about Jonathan. And that's not just because he doesn't have a fantastic first name.

Um, but it's he's just. You just so just so incredible. Um, and that research they did for the N A's and we'll probably play the clip now of the, you know, how we use the golf analogy of, we want to try and hit the ball in the hole in the fewest number of strokes. Um, it doesn't really do it justice because there was so much data behind that.

And he was just incredibly passionate about all of it. So, yeah, he definitely goes into my, uh, into my top list.

Nia Turner: Yeah, absolutely. And he's a brilliant speaker as well. I really enjoyed that.

Jon Busby: Yeah, yeah, he was just, just incredible.

 

Jon Busby: Let's talk about this report that you've been creating for the ANA. Tell But let's try and summarize the report in kind of one, how would you summarize it in one analogy, let's say?

Jonathan Knowles: It's about accountability. And how a finance person looks at accountability, because we think accountability just means give me a financial number.

And so the report is really designed to do three things. To demonstrate the marketers care about business impact. To demonstrate that they understand how the business makes money. So it's not just caring, it's actually competence. And then the third thing is showing that marketing is actually a set of processes.

And so the report really covered two main topics. The first was really about industry structure. So we looked at There seems to be a near infinite variety of business models, but when we broke it down, there were really five business models. Yeah, 150 sectors that we looked at condensed down to five business models.

And then we looked at the literature, which again, there was a huge diversity, but within that, hows. So you asked for an analogy I'll give you the golf analogy, which is this idea that. You've got a CEO who wants to win in the marketplace. So let's call that, let's get the ball into the hole.

That's the purpose of golf. You've got a CFO who's saying, oh yeah, but we, I want you to use as few strokes as possible. And you've got where does the marketer fit in? And the marketer fits in by saying, depending on the stroke we need to play it You know, we are going to choose a pitching wedge or we're going to use a driver, and maybe that's what we should do.

We should describe marketing as a set of clubs and use that analogy.

Jon Busby: The way, actually, I remember speaking to some of our previous podcast guests that were involved in the research. They, when they first explained, We were trying to achieve here. It just, every conversation I had from then on, I couldn't, I just couldn't get it out of my head.

This concept that we, as CFOs, you have a, You have generally agree to account gap principles, right? Principles that, when I take, say profit, everyone knows what that means. But as CMOs we tend to talk in completely different languages. So me, 10 different CMOs that wanna say 10 different things.

So what your research is really trying to do is say, let's condense it down to a set of six clubs. Six, six ways of doing business that we can then all agree on and use as a set of agreed accounting principles, is that right?

Jonathan Knowles: Yeah. I, ideally we would get to

what I would like to get to is the CMO operating manual.

Jon Busby: I really like that visualization of the CMO operating manual because I think that is something that's missing. But one thing that really struck me was. No, you your comment there around, you must understand how the business makes money.

Yes. Some of the people that were included in your research and other speakers at the event today, you've got Jeff Lowe, chief commercial officer, not CMO. You've we've got Dina, who is chief growth and disruption officer not CMO, is the end goal of a CMO. Not no longer a CMO. Are we seeing an evolution in organizational structures and roles?

Are we finally seeing sales and marketing coming together? To me, they're all CMO

Jonathan Knowles: roles. And I think what we've, what we're moving towards is a much better understanding of the context of the CMO role. And if we want to change the CMO title, I'm fine. I'm fine with that. So in, in the research, we identified these six foundational models that if you're marketing a product.

You know the thing is the thing, and you are likely to have a chief product officer. . They're gonna be the cm, the CMO in the context of a ProductLink business. Yeah, you might be. If you are you are doing an FMCG. You might call yourself the chief brand officer. You're still the CMO. You could then go to the, service led business and you might have the chief customer officer or the chief customer experience offer officer.

I see these all as flavors of CMO. And if we want to change our title to communicate more clearly what it is, the role that we're playing in the business. So disruption or commercial, I, if that's effective, I'm totally up for it. With it. But what I don't want to hear is, Oh, we're abolishing the CMO title.

No, we're adapting the CMO title

 

Jon Busby: nia, who's next on yours?

Nia Turner: Next on my list is, um, Andy Baraclough from SAP, who we had on way back at the beginning of the year.

Um, yeah. I really, really love that conversation. That was an in person recording that we did in London as well. Um, there are, I want to say, Claire Davidson, Executive Strategy Director?

Jon Busby: That is correct. That is her title. But look, Andy, I think Andy was the one, and I referenced it actually in a recording we did this week.

I think he was the one that said B2B marketing is more emotional than B2C. Was it Andy? I'm fairly certain it was Andy. Could

Nia Turner: have been Andy.

Jon Busby: Like, there's definitely a few, I mean, we're trying to pull that quote. If he did, if he did do it, if he didn't, then I'm sorry, Andy, I've missed misattributed you. But like, yeah, he, he did.

He was a fantastic, really good speaker. Really good speaker.

Nia Turner: The clip, the clip that I pulled from this episode is around how that as marketers, we need to start speaking the same language as the CFO and kind of changing the type of Words that we're using and the things that we're saying so that we can make that connection with other people in within the business.

So Yeah, I think it's an amazing clip. It's absolutely it's it's not long. This clip I pulled is about Six or seven minutes maybe but it's just absolutely jam packed with So, yeah, Andy is definitely my number two pick for the year.

 

Claire Davidson: it's about the language marketers use as well, isn't it?

We use a lot of. Acronyms that might be relevant for us, but not for the other parts of the business, whether it's click through rates or cost per leads. But also that there's a lot of marketing press around what marketers need to do to talk to the CFO, but it's almost assuming the CFO is not a human.

You know, cause it is why they need to know the metrics and it's like, well, no, actually they want to know what value you can help to drive the business forward. What's your experiences around that?

Andy Barraclough: Well, the first part on the metrics is I think even within marketing we don't understand half of it, between one specialization and another.

Yeah. You know, you go and talk to a field person about the digital metrics or the digital person, and at times we don't even understand our own language. So your funnel is really fragmented. And it's not a linear funnel, but we don't need to go into that. CFO, like, you know, back to the top of the conversation is understand this.

Every CFO is different. Some are pure numbers driven, all about the bottom line, and that's what they get excited by. Others are humans to use your, your terminology. And, you know, they, again, they've got different challenges of, of managing complexity, but again, your role is to show. How the investment that they've made returns in the same way, whether, you know, in the same way that any other function would need to do that.

And that's a conversation that is, you know, I think just as you would do with an MD or a sales leader or whatever else, it's tell me how you run the business. Tell me what numbers you look at, what matters most, what are we worried about? What can we do? And then, you know, how does marketing play into that?

I think there's a kind of a perspective. Oh, if you're talking to, it's all about numbers. It's all about finance. There's a bias there, understandably. But in any role I've been, it's always about the numbers. It's, you know, whether you talk into the sales leader or the ops person or the CFO or the end, it's, it's a numbers business.

So

Andy Barraclough: in some respects, yeah, you have to understand what. That individual kind of getting to looking at and you know be confident as well most of the time Marketing's return on investment is really good. Mm hmm. If you look at okay, if you take total cost versus total return In a simplistic way, you go, that's pretty good, right?

Most, most of the time, it's pretty good. And so in reality, that could be a friend, depending on what kind of business you're in. Some of the budgets are set and all this kind of stuff. In other businesses, they might go, well, it's a bit more. Why wouldn't we do that? Actually, we can't afford, you know, we've, we've, our plans are maxed out, but we can see the return here, and the business can see the value.

We've all agreed it. Well, CFO can put his hand in his pocket, right, and make a decision at that point. So they should be a partner alongside everybody else.

Jon Busby: How can you make that CFO's decision easier? Like what information can you, because you know, as marketeers we tend to hide behind some metrics sometimes, and I, that piece, you know, around is, even if our metrics are green, if the businesses are green, we've not done our job, like how can you make their, how can you translate it to make it easier for them?

Andy Barraclough: It's translation and I'm making it sound dead simple, but understand how they think and what makes them work and how they look at the business. They will have a different view of the business to the head of sales, right? So the head of sales is just looking at the top line number, but these guys are looking at, you know, all the elements within it, you know, profitability levels, all the kind of stuff.

And

Andy Barraclough: then you can articulate the value you bring in a different way, right? And it's not necessarily always about the number, but it might well be about profitability. If we talk about, you know, the sales motion and how marketing can, improve win rate, improve conversion rate, not of marketing, but of the business can improve customer sat so that customers come back and buy more your retention rate, you know, you're, you're kind of

Jon Busby: customer lifetime value,

Andy Barraclough: reduction in churn, those things, you know, one point reduction in churn is huge for any business.

If you can, you know, so if you're working on advocacy and retention and community. that gives the customer again that belief they've made the right choice, they bet on the right company, they've got other people they can talk to. That pays for all marketing. Most business, if you can reduce churn by 2%, huge,

huge.

So

Andy Barraclough: again, but marketers need to think in that language and be able to then go, look, not to turn up with a calculation, let the CFO do that, but kind of go I think by doing this, we could achieve the following. So, it's the same as it would be for any audience, I think.

Jon Busby: I think part of the challenge that I've heard there from speaking to, you know, every level marketeer, you know, you look, a CFO, if you talk about profit That means pretty much the same thing across every business.

While marketing, you know, an MQL can be very different in one organization to another. You know, there's always the gap between that and sales. Like how, how do you try and reconcile some of those differences in the language? Like how do you, is there an education you need to, you need to do with the board?

Is it, or do you just go, you know what, we're not going to talk about marketing. Like you say, we're going to use their language and use their KPIs.

Andy Barraclough: So I think that's again about, depends on the business, you know, a pack of systems. You know, we sold complex transformation opportunities to, to large customers.

That was, that was the target market for us. And each of those accounts often had multiple teams on them. And we, you know, my team and I, we introduced account based marketing on a one to many basis. Then we went to one to one. And over time, we change the conversation from leads to how much in the pipeline are we actually supporting.

And there's an argument in that particular business. We, we didn't do, it's not a high volume business. It wasn't big, it wasn't a big number of deals and it wasn't a lot of net new customers always. It's like if I generate a lead in one of those companies where you've got a truckload of sales resource, pre sales resource, partner resource crawling all over it.

You're not doing your job. For me to find somebody, one person, with budget authority needed timescale in that environment, that's not how, as you said, it's not how the buying process works anyway. So, that's about understanding the business. So kind of we went from, you know, traditional metrics to still looking at that, but actually the, the value was how much of the, the, the pipeline we were actively engaged in either progressing, accelerating or closing.

And then you have a very different conversation.

 

Jon Busby: Harry, what's your number two?

Nia Turner: Harry, just really quickly go and look through our episode list. That's what

Harry Radcliffe: I'm doing. Find

Nia Turner: a name as anyone you remember talking to.

Jon Busby: I'm actually going to bring up Buzzsprout for a second. Are we back 3%? I didn't realise we were back. No, no. Did we drop to top 5?

Nia Turner: Yeah, we did 5. Oh,

Harry Radcliffe: for fuck's sake. Uh, I want to give it to Amanda Fitzgerald. What about Amanda Fitzgerald? Because she was on a lot of podcasts. Yeah, I'm just going to give it to her.

That cheeky little so and so. I enjoyed her company a lot. What was the one we did, um, I bloody loved doing it at the, at that event where, um, we had that table and we had like four or five.

Jon Busby: Oh yeah! That actually wasn't this year. That was last year. Why don't I

Nia Turner: remember this?

Jon Busby: You were there. Both of you were there.

I

Nia Turner: had

Harry Radcliffe: to go and do a talk at another venue. It was the time that, uh, we almost stole that crate of vodka. Um, Alex Snobbery It was raining like you wouldn't believe. Mm hmm. It was in Windsor.

Nia Turner: Are we at a CMU?

Harry Radcliffe: CMU event. It was a CMU event. Yeah, I remember we had a guy from Samsung on. Exactly. Yeah.

Nia Turner: That was ages ago.

That was with Adam Brown.

Harry Radcliffe: Yeah. There was lots of cool cats on that.

Nia Turner: Yeah, that was fun.

Harry Radcliffe: Tony Conde, did you already do him? No, we haven't known Tony Condi. I like Tony. Tony Condi.

Nia Turner: Actually, Tony Condi said, uh, DMS kind of went out style, but dms are coming back. Dms are, are back again

Jon Busby: actually. And I

Nia Turner: have seen that all over the place now.

Dms really are back. Tony was right

Jon Busby: actually to Tony. Tony did make me go back and reread a book. Um, he's, any podcast guest has made me go and do that so far. Um, so yeah, actually shout out to Tony. You made me reread a book. Yeah, I was gonna say.

But no, it was good. Um, mainly to prove a point, because I'm sure we debated if there was a certain comment in there, and it definitely was in there.

So I was right, Tony. Um, but no, it was, it was, I'm glad you went back and read, to read that.

Nia Turner: John, this isn't a platform for you to prove that you're right all the time. No, no,

Jon Busby: no, no. I know it's not, I I'm gonna use it that way anyway. Um, no, he, no, he did, he actually, the one lasting thing about Tony is he, um, Uh, he used to work for a guy called Stephen Covey or Stephen Covey, who, um, wrote The Seven Habits of Highly Affected People.

Right. So that was that. I went back and reread that book as a result of it because it reminded me like, actually it's about time I, I, I read it again. Um, so yeah, thanks for that, Tony. I wouldn't have done that if it wasn't for that podcast.

Nia Turner: Mm-hmm .

Jon Busby: Not that the rest of the podcast wasn't really insightful, but that, that definitely left a lasting memory for me.

Nia Turner: Well, we've both taken different things from that episode.

Jon Busby: Now I'm going to pick one, which is David Everett. And he was, he used to work for Cisco. I actually, this podcast got me so riled up after I recorded it that I went and called the rest of the leadership team, um, which is not something I do lightly.

Or really actually ever at all. Um, and I, I was like, guys, this is like the, this is the combination of like everything that we should be like what he made happen, right? He brought together, like essentially it was, it was a dinner that he had with a partner and he brought together. Cisco, a partner and a charity to basically save.

I mean, if I extrapolate it out, like every rhino's life in the world mm-hmm . Like, it's, it was amazing. Um, oh, it's exactly like if, if we try and embody what we are as an agency, um, I don't think I've ever heard of a better example of that. I'm just disappointed I wasn't a part of it. Um, so yeah. Like I got and something

Nia Turner: so close to our own hearts as well.

Jon Busby: Yeah. I got so excited about that. Me and Da, me and David have been talking about it since to figure out how we can do it again. Um, we haven't figured out how yet. We might have a bit of a framework. So there's a bit of a sneak peek there, but we know like that combination of big brand plus partner, plus, plus doing something, you know, making the world a better place, um, which sounds a bit cliche is just never seen it embodied so well in anything ever before.

So that was, that was a great podcast. And yeah, David, thank you for joining us.

 

David Evert: So there's this moment in time when a world topic is around endangered species poaching, uh, You know, all of this illegality, there's a problem we have.

And so that's what I'm pitching to these marketers. The entire world's eye is on this problem right now. We have the potential of solving it with really cool technology that, Oh, by the way, we can't garner the interest that this story has garnered nor a use case that, that proves how powerful this technology will eventually be.

To then get the 30 minutes to say, Oh, by the way, you can do this, this, and that. So it went well. We got some resources. Um, we had a stealth mode, university focused technology group that was always exploring brand new technologies. They had a bunch of PhDs from Stanford and things like that. They, they loaned us a few engineers, myself and the other person, uh, Steve McGar, who I worked with, uh, managing the partnership.

Um, and a couple other folks, uh, Dave Ward, uh, who has now moved on to be CEO of a number of other companies, was running that stealth mode, um, piece. We all got on some planes and, uh, headed down to the headquarters of Dimension Data, which conveniently, and not surprisingly with the way things were going, is in, um, Johannesburg, South Africa.

but what I don't want your listeners to come away with was, oh, well, this minuscule little partner in South Africa, of course they were engaged with the World Wildlife Fund because they're out there in Africa with lions. Dimension Data at the time was our largest channel partner. Responsible for 7 percent of our sales.

They had operations that yes, we're headquartered out of South Africa because that's where they started, but it covered all of Asia. And really what they did was kind of like wherever Cisco was direct sales force was really strong. They kind of weren't. Very strong. They were there, but they weren't real strong.

And where we were kind of weak, Asia, Middle East, Africa, they were really strong. They had brought a company called data craft to get their feet in the Asia door. They eventually were acquired by NTT, obviously, you know, huge, Worldwide system integrator, um, from Asia. So, um, yeah, they were massive. They were second only to Cisco's internal sales force in sales.

And in fact, when I left the partnership, they were responsible for over 3 billion in revenue for, for Cisco. So they were huge. And they just happened to be in South Africa, which is, there's an interesting story that goes with that one too,

Amanda Fitzgerald: so talk to me about how that solution. Got incubated and got developed into a deliverable solution for WWF.

David Evert: We had the right resource. We didn't have a huge number of resources. We had the right resources, and we had the right focus. Um, and we also had a, a, another really lucky benefit.

One of the founders of Dimension Data was a landowner in the Sabi Sands Game Reserve. It's the Sabi Sands Game Reserve is, um, a premier reserve right next to Kruger National Park, but where as a landowner, think of your neighborhood homeowners association or a condo association, uh, the 33 landowners within that reserve, whose purpose really is to preserve those animals.

And there's, it's very, very regulated as to how many visitors are allowed to come into that reserve at any given time and how many vehicles can be out on the disturbing the animals, very, very much of a conservation focused reserve. Um, as a landowner, he was able to, you know, garner the interest and permission of everyone for us to come in and take a look at how they're currently fighting poaching and how we thought we could.

Improve it. And so we get out there, um, to the Sabi Sands Reserve. It's a, uh, it's a fenced reserve. You know, we had all these ideas of putting, you know, um, net guards and things like that. We'd already now pivoted our thoughts towards rhinos. There were a couple issues with putting devices on. One, um, rhinos are a very tough critter, right?

And they can, they can be very tough on equipment, right? So, uh, there had been attempts to do that and they'd been, you know, uh, anything external, they could rip off one way or the other. Um, there'd been ideas about putting a chip in the horn, right? But you're causing trauma to the animal. And the real problem was, uh, Great.

You know, we can measure their heart rate and detect if they're, you know, all of a sudden they go into a panic and things like that, and then go try to incur. But the reality is you're detecting the poaching as it's happening and not really preventing it. And you can catch one poacher, but it's a little bit like the war on drugs, right?

You take one trafficker out and another one takes his place. So we needed to figure out something better. And, um, I'll cut to the chase. What we figured out were really two things. There were two ways that poachers got into the reserve. One way is they would actually cut through the fence line and they would get in, and that's the sexier of the solution, so I'll save that for the second one.

The other way that they would get in is work crews. So you might have a pickup truck with 18 workers and all of their bags of tools, and they would come in to repair thatched roofing. Work on, you know, um, whatever, right? You have 33 landowners with buildings and outbuildings and lodges and all that sort of thing.

You get a pickup truck with 18 guys stuffed in the back of it, go off to a worksite, and when it comes out, there's 17, do you notice? And then the truck comes back the next day with 17 and 18 leave. And that 18th in his bag of tools. Is a rhino horn and nobody knew it. So one of the things we did was just really track that.

Well, so we put in biometrics, um, it wasn't about, you know, anything with you, you could fake a credential, you could fake a pass card, all that kind of stuff, but we actually put in, you know, fingerprint hand biometrics, facial recognition, type of the stuff so that we, you know, we could control that part of who is coming in and coming up.

That was pretty good. Um, the other one I think is really cool. What we did is we did, we actually did the devices. So we put motion detecting devices on the fence line all around the park at fixed distances. We used at that time, LIDAR, which was a very new, um, transmission protocol for, um, low energy. And it was all for, you know, it was so that you could use devices that didn't need to have so much energy to produce such a strong signal.

And then basically you could, uh, biangulate, so we can all think about triangulate, you know, find where somebody is from a bunch of angles. Since we're only talking about two dimensions, it's a fence line, it was biangulate. Um, and along with that ability and the unique digital vibrational signature of someone snipping a wire, We could identify exactly that a wire had been cut and within a meter because of by angulation where that wire was cut.

Uh, and I don't mean like a current wire. I mean like the actual, you know, chain link fence wire. And by the time a poacher had snipped his very first snip, We could be sending an alert to a helicopter crew to go in and intercede, um, on that incursion. Um, whereas that helicopter was usually used to just run patrols and hope for the best.

And obviously things are happening at night. So it's difficult to see. And it's a, just, it's a case of resources. You know, if we had 20 helicopters, that would work fine. Um, the great news is they went from. Uh, I believe they had had, I think they were averaging in that very small reserve, two poachings a month to zero.

It immediately stopped. Um, they were able to catch poachers before they'd actually cut through the fence. Um, there, the government had some very aggressive, how you can deal with poachers. When they're caught. Um, so yeah, they stopped the incursions immediately with that technology, which is pretty exciting

Jon Busby: from two to zero.

That's amazing. Um, I mean, yeah, I was gonna ask like, what impact did it have? But to be able to call that out? Um, how? How many times? How many trips did it take out there to build these? To build these solutions.

David Evert: So we took two trips out, but I got to be honest, dimension data ended up working on that solution on a more consistent basis.

We went back with whatever we needed to do with hardware designs and things like that. Um, uh, I would say it happened over the course of about 60 days, what we decided on, what we deployed and what we were able to shut down. So, like I said, we had, we had few resources, but very smart and dedicated resources.

And then, um, and then honestly, so, so we solved that problem. We hadn't really solved Cisco's problem, but the agreement with our CMO was if you can, if you can really solve this problem, if I can get in front of press and not be lying, when I say we have, eliminated poaching. If you can really solve the problem, then we're game.

And, um, we ended up, we ended up, uh, God, I would say the entire global marketing team at our back, um, when this happened.

Amanda Fitzgerald: So once the solution got delivered, they then turned it into a halo campaign. And

David Evert: I don't, I don't want to misinterpret. I mean, it's not that they weren't So, uh, we're going to start rooting for us and providing us the resource we'd asked for.

It was like, when this is real, then we're going to go for it. We, so what we ended up doing from a business perspective is we decided to build our banner campaign. So I don't mean like a lead generation campaign with Dimension, I mean our global, you know, on ESPN during the final four, you know, I'm sorry, I just

Amanda Fitzgerald: said a bunch of

David Evert: American things.

Amanda Fitzgerald: It's a huge success story. Absolutely. Yeah.

David Evert: We're going to do our, our big brand campaign around. There's never been a better time. Our lead story is going to be to save the rhinos. They went out to the field to try to find five more stories, which they did. So it became our brand campaign. It was the first brand campaign that we'd ever launched with a partner.

You know, it's your brand campaign is about you. But again, I'll go back to partners were so ingrained as the way we went to market and they were so important for this, that we decided for the first time ever to involve, um, you know, the by name dimension data and our other partnerships have them be able to leverage that brand campaign in their regions.

Um, we had those other stories. And, um, you know, I don't know exactly how we measured the massive success of, of that brand campaign, but it did solve the problems I talked about. We were suddenly, you know, right in the epicenter of smart devices. IOT and what we ended up calling connected and any number of other things and this became connected conservation.

Um, there is a foundation around connected conservation now. we have now deployed that solution in over 50 parks and the whole idea. And what's beautiful about it is that, um, we've created safe havens. For these species.

So when the demand side does disappear, the supply side to, to repopulate will be there and we do it without ever touching the animals, without ever, you know, stressing them. Uh, and we're doing it all across Africa and we're doing it for other, you know, there's a lot of other species that benefit from that, um, that could be poached as well.

Like elephants, like lions, um, that, you know, it's a safe Haven. It's not rhinos only.

 

Nia Turner: Well, that's making me excited for 2025.

Jon Busby: Oh yeah. What are

Nia Turner: you going to put out the work, sir, John?

Jon Busby: Oh, I don't know. I'm still figuring it out.

Nia Turner: Oh, right. I can also tell you that that is, uh, Lucy Dell's favourite episode as well. So, David, you're on multiple favourite lists, sir.

Jon Busby: Is it? How did she bring that up? Did she just go, I really like David? Or what was the reason why? No, because she,

Nia Turner: Lucy was covering one while I was on Spastical.

Jon Busby: Yeah, it was such

Nia Turner: So, Lucy was handling that one.

Jon Busby: It was such, it was such a good, such a good podcast. Um, and I, like I say, I actually got off the phone and was like, this is what we need to do.

I called up the rest of the leadership team. I'm like, make this happen. And everyone's like, yeah, okay. And so yeah, that's what we're trying to do. Um, it's not the only thing we're trying to do next year, but it's, it's one of the things. It's on the list.

Nia Turner: Exciting.

Jon Busby: Harry, any more podcast episodes you want to highlight?

No. Harry,

Nia Turner: I get the feeling you don't want to be here.

Jon Busby: No, I do. I love, I love spending time with you guys. Our first podcast for last year, by the way, looks like, what was it? It looks like it was an Abby podcast, was it? Yeah, it was. What a strong start to the year having Abby kicking us off. Yeah. Um, so yeah.

You know, I

Nia Turner: absolutely love having Abby on the podcast because she always seems to be able to explain things that I know nothing about. So clearly, and I always come away from those episodes Understanding exactly what she said. And I don't know if it's just me, but that doesn't always happen. So, shout out to Abby as well.

Jon Busby: It's not just you. And I'm probably the one that confuses you the most, Nia. But no, that is, uh, that was a strong start. So, yeah. Well, yeah, I guess there's nothing really else to say other than I hope you've enjoyed Uh 2024 from the tech marketing podcast and we're all excited for 2025 Maybe you could

Harry Radcliffe: say merry christmas.

Jon Busby: Merry christmas and a happy new year. Yeah. Yeah. Um, when is this going out harry? That's just going out there

Nia Turner: Um, it's gonna be going out, uh, do you know what it might go out on the 18th

Jon Busby: Of January?

Nia Turner: No, of December. Okay, fine. That would be very Christmassy. Could also go out on the 1st of January, so, let's find out!

Harry Radcliffe: Let's find out. Happy New Year if it does.

Jon Busby: Yeah.

Nia Turner: Yes, Happy New Year if this is the 1st of Jan.

Jon Busby: If you're listening to this and it's the 1st of January and you're hungover, then you I'm very sorry. If you're listening to this on the 18th of December, then happy Christmas. And I'm also very sorry. Um,

Harry Radcliffe: finesse. Absolutely phenomenal podcasting there.

Thanks, Harry.