From Music to Marketing: A Global Journey

In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Learn how enterprise B2C organizations gather customer insights from around the globe for marketing, product and advertising insight on this Marketing Over Coffee

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Brought to you by our sponsors:NetSuite and Wix Studio

Bringing Hubspot to the rest of the world!

Starting out in music and then becoming and interpreter

CSA Research, SmartLane

Opening Hubspot Tokyo

NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Working with Global Consumer Brands at Zappi

Tracking trends like the Sephora 10 Year Old

The three main categories of consumer insights

Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

At what growth point do orgs usually engage Zappi?

Connecting insights across silos

The Consumer Insights Revolution, based on work done by Pepsi and Zappi

Music from Sting (Sorry, I wanted to build a Spotify playlist but they don’t have Fragile in Portuguese)

Follow Nataly on LinkedIn!

Sign up for the MoC text line at 617-812-5494

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Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Transcript

John Wall – 00:18

Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today I’m very excited. We’ve got a guest with us who has done a bunch of different stuff internationally, doing product marketing, global marketing. Natalie Kelly is chief marketing officer of Zappi. She has experience at HubSpot. We’re going to talk about that, talk about Boston. We’ve already talked about the music scene and staying a little bit. But, Natalie, thanks for joining us today.

Nataly Kelly – 00:40

Thank you for having me, John. It’s lovely to be here.

John Wall – 00:42

So the first thing that I’d love to see is that you’re a CMO, but you have history at HubSpot. We’ve followed HubSpot forever. I mean, Mike Volpe sponsored Marketing Over Coffee over a decade ago, which is just insane to think about. And you came up through that system. Now you were doing international stuff. So were you actually in Cambridge even, or were you somewhere else? Like, where were you working then?

Nataly Kelly – 01:01

I was in Cambridge. In fact, I moved to the Boston suburbs because I wanted to be closer to HubSpot and go into the office. And back then we did not have much of a hybrid culture, so most people were in the Cambridge office every single day and worked maybe remotely on Fridays, long time before the pandemic. And yeah, I worked in that, you know, Davenport office and sat next to Mike, sat next to Brian Halligan for a while. Worked with all of the early HubSpot folks and was a big part of that culture and crew and it was great. I joined just after the IPO, so I got to help grow things. I originally started as a VP of marketing there.

Nataly Kelly – 01:40

I had previously worked at another SaaS company as a VP of marketing and I was leading the LatAm team and trying to help bring inbound into all the other languages that we wanted to go into, which is a pretty tough challenge, you know, to take the whole inbound philosophy and all of that content marketing muscle into other languages and cultures so that I spent a good part of my early time at HubSpot doing that.

John Wall – 02:05

Right, okay. And so you were brought in at VP though. So take us back a little bit further. Like, what did you go to school for? And then as you got into marketing and international, what was that path like?

Nataly Kelly – 02:14

Yeah, well, so my background is a little non-traditional for a marketer. I went to school for music composition and Spanish on a piano scholarship. I ended up dropping my music composition major to focus just on languages and business and international communication. So I got out of school, didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I spoke fluent Spanish by then, so I decided to be an interpreter. So I became a Spanish interpreter and I joined a company called AT&T. They have a little division called Language Line Services where you can get an interpreter remotely over the phone anytime for hospitals, courts, insurance companies, 911. And so I did that and I became a manager there, went through AT&T management training. Then I moved and stayed within the translation space and global business space.

Nataly Kelly – 03:06

Moved to a market research firm eventually where I did a lot of market research. Some ex-Forester people had founded a boutique market research firm in the Boston area called CSA Research. So I worked there for a while and then I became chief research officer there. And then I moved to a tech company called Smartling based in New York. That was my first SaaS company, and that led me to HubSpot. And from there I ended up at Zappy. So that’s kind of longer than you needed to know about my backstory.

John Wall – 03:37

No, absolutely. That’s what—that’s exactly what we want to hear because there’s so many interesting things in there. Like we see the music tech connection all the time. You know that’s very common and is interesting to hear. And it does put into focus now that language and international, like that’s the real power. You know, you’re a Boston area tech, so you’ve got that understanding and kind of know what’s going on in that space. But when you layer the international on it, that’s what makes things open up a different set of doors for you and places to go. So now you said you’d come on at HubSpot just as the IPO. How many years were you there and at what point did somebody from Zappy say, “Hey, we want to steal you away?” Or how did that happen?

Nataly Kelly – 04:12

So I was there for almost eight years and I saw a lot of change over that time because working in the international area of HubSpot, you not only see the growth that most people see from the outside, but a higher growth level because international was fueling the growth of the global company. So it was growing at an even higher pace of growth. So we had a ton of interest and demand coming from all parts of the world to HubSpot because when you have an online and digital and content marketing focus, you attract traffic from all over the world. So anybody who speaks English basically can find your content. And you know, and so we knew there was demand there, so we needed to figure out how to scale it.

Nataly Kelly – 04:57

And so that was the beginning of localizing the product, localizing the website, creating campaigns in other languages. And so when I came in, I—I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing other than generally helping with localization there as a VP of marketing, because they mostly needed marketing localization. But when I got there on my first day of orientation, the person next to me said, “Oh, you’re Natalie. I’m on your team. I’m an intern for the Brazil market.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, great. Yeah, of course you are.” I totally pretended that I knew. And I said, “Oh, who told you that, by the way?” And she said, “Oh, Sam.” So I went and looked for Sam. Sam, by the way, is currently working on agents, AI at HubSpot, you know, with the HubSpot folks and with Dharmesh and others.

Nataly Kelly – 05:44

Same Sam from all that time ago. And I went and talked to Sam and I said, “So, what’s the story?” He said, “Oh, you’re going to take on Latin marketing as well.” So even post-IPO, we were pretty scrappy and moved fast and did things like—and you had to just be that kind of person who could tolerate that level of change. So I was like, “Okay, fine, just off my Spanish, and here we go.” And I had a team to manage, and we grew that LatAm Marketing hugely, had an incredibly talented team, loved working with them. Then I was kind of asked to help us launch offices in other countries and lead international operations for a while, and I did that, and that was fun, but I still had to build that localization muscle as well. So, yeah, busy times.

John Wall – 06:28

Yeah, that’s very cool because we’ve talked to a number of marketing executives where we hear a similar story. You get that opportunity where, you know, in the US they’re like fighting to pick up another 5% or 2% of market share, but your team is going into some country where they’ve never ever been, and you can get 20, 40, 50% growth, you know, right out of the gate and really have a good time. And yeah, if you’re kind of willing to take on that risk. Now, it’s interesting though, so you’re spending a lot of time with localization, you know, getting the product into that, the language for the market and being able to describe the features and have the marketing programs in the right language and correct for those markets.

John Wall – 07:04

But did you have to spend a lot of time in those markets or was this kind of like, it’s all digital, all virtual. So you weren’t having, you know, rack up a million miles a year on your, you know, frequent flyer.

Nataly Kelly – 07:15

Most everything was digital. The interesting thing is we did have to open up hubs in most of those countries in order to scale. So while we could grow for a certain time from, say, the United States with Spanish speakers selling into Latin America, we eventually needed to open up a hub in Colombia to hire locally, to have people in time zone who knew the market, who were close to the market for sales, for marketing, for customer success, for all this role. Same thing in Japan. My first office that I launched at HubSpot, that I oversaw the launch process, obviously is a huge team of people involved across all functions was our office in Tokyo. So our chief operating officer and president said, “Natalie, we’d like you to help us run this, run international operations, and Japan’s going to be our very first.”

Nataly Kelly – 08:05

That was a very daunting one because Japan is not an easy market, and we had six months to do it. We needed to get the office live up and running, get the website localized, you know, product localized, everything in that time period. And we did it, managed to do it, but we learned a lot along the way. It was tough. And one of the kind of fun anecdotes is if you know HubSpot, you know that we tend to feature our employees on the website and in a lot of our content, and we didn’t have any employees yet that we could feature in Japan. So when we’re localizing the website into Japanese, we didn’t know how. We were in a hurry. Myself and our head of web dev at the time went onto, like, a stock image site.

Nataly Kelly – 08:49

We’re like, okay, Asian models, let’s find some that kind of look HubSpot-y. And so we picked some out, we put them in the web, replaced the images, and then we showed it to the Japanese employees that were hiring. They’re like, “These are not Japanese models. These are Asian, but they’re not Japanese, and we can tell, and you guys obviously cannot tell because you’re ignorant Americans.” And even though I have a lot of global knowledge and local expertise, that just blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, no, we screwed up.” But the funny thing was you couldn’t even get Japanese models in these stock image sites back then. So we had to then basically organize a photoshoot with all our new hires who hadn’t even started yet, and asked them, “Would you be okay if we put you on the website?”

Nataly Kelly – 09:36

And they’re like, “Sure.” So we did the same thing. We took all these images and many of them are still on the HubSpot website all these years later. The same employees, same model, same images. They’ve still been using them all these years because they’re actually pretty good.

John Wall – 09:51

We want to dig in and talk about what you’ve got going on at Zappy, but we just have to take a second. We want to thank NetSuite by Oracle for their support of Marketing Over Coffee.

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John Wall – 11:19

Okay, so you get a chance to ramp this and I am flabbergasted that getting Japan up and running in six months is the first like that. I don’t know from other places in the world I’ve worked, that’s just nuts. I’d just be like, come on, why don’t we go for Canada? Let’s get an easy one under our belt.

Nataly Kelly – 11:33

Before, well, in fairness, I will say we had other offices. We had an office in Dublin which is our international head, was our international headquarters and that’s our MEA headquarters, HubSpot’s AMIA headquarters. I’m still a shareholder. I still say “our.” But we also had an office in Australia. We had launch offices in English-speaking markets. We just hadn’t done a non-English speaking market and one that far away. So we had other markets.

John Wall – 11:59

Oh yeah, well, and then even that too. It’d be like, well, how about Spanish? Like that goes a lot of places. Getting, you know, reading, writing, and kanji and culture. That’s a huge load to take on. Okay, but so let’s leave that in the past now moving forward. What brought you to Zappy then? How did that change happen?

Nataly Kelly – 12:16

Yes, well, I was looking for another opportunity to be part of a company that was on its way to scaling similar to when I joined HubSpot. And Zappy has an incredible culture that reminded me so much of HubSpot in the early days that I was really attracted to it. Even in our office in the seaport in Boston, it reminds me of the Davenport Port office and everybody who comes and visits me there because I have a lot of HubSpot friends that come and visit. They’re like, “Oh, this reminds me of like the early days of HubSpot and it has a lot in common.” So it’s also in a kind of similar area in martech and you know, making sure that we can provide consumer insights to our customers.

Nataly Kelly – 12:54

It is very different though because HubSpot is mid-market focused and this is very enterprise large global brands that use Zappy. So we have a lot of customers—McDonald’s, Heineken, Mars, you know, many large global consumer brands. So our customers are B2C for the most part, and that’s a really interesting difference from my time at HubSpot.

John Wall – 13:17

Right, and so tell us about product. You know, what does Zappy do? And you know, what do your customers get out of it?

Nataly Kelly – 13:23

Yes. So Zappy is a disruptive technology. I know a lot of companies say that, but we really are because we’re disrupting the consumer insight space. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do a market research project, John. Have you ever encountered that where you had to like, you know, outsource market research to an agency and you tell them like, “Here’s the types of customers that I want you to find and here are the questions I want you to ask.” And so you commission a study and they do it and they come back to you with like a report and it shows you the results and gives you recommendations.

Nataly Kelly – 13:54

So what Zappy has done is taken that and put it into a platform so that you can basically not just pay once to have an agency, do that work and then throw it away and then start the process again the next time. You can basically store that data in the same system. So let’s say you need to test an ad or you need to develop a product or track your brand. You don’t just have to do a single point in time analysis. You can keep that data in there and test more continuously in an agile way so that you can see how consumer trends are changing over time.

Nataly Kelly – 14:28

So like if you know, one ad you tested showed it performed poorly because of this trend that’s happening or this particular thing that’s happening in society, or I’ll give you an example, I have an 11-year-old and you might have heard of this trend called the Sephora 10-year-olds. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

John Wall – 14:46

No, no.

Nataly Kelly – 14:47

So this trend is now a lot of marketing has hit younger and younger kids and so they’re—they want to go into Sephora, they want to buy like facial masks and things like this for self-care reasons more than it is beauty. And so there’s this whole trend around this. Well, how can any brand be ahead of that trend and know that’s happening and how can they shape the trend? They can’t do that if they’re just doing singular point in time reactive testing and learning about consumers in a very slow and human-centric way, like manual way, I should say. If they can put that data in a platform where they are continuously testing, continuously gathering insights, then they can see the trends over time, how they’re changing.

Nataly Kelly – 15:33

Also, since we just spoke about geographies and differences in different markets, how do you know if a trend that’s happening in Korea is going to hit the US or how do you know if a trend that’s emerging in one part of the world might suddenly move over to another part of the world? You can’t do that if you’re outsourcing every project to an agency here, an agency there and it’s not stored anywhere centrally.

Nataly Kelly – 15:53

So a lot of our customers, these large global consumer brands like PepsiCo, which is a major customer that we just launched a book with last week in Times Square and It’s a Number One Amazon Best Seller Now, we partnered really closely with PepsiCo to help them centralize all of this data and consumer insights into our platform so they can leverage it across all the different product lines, all the different brands that they have in their portfolio. So it’s really, I think a disruptive way of changing the way people do things in market research and consumer insights.

John Wall – 16:29

Okay, and so what’s the breadth of that then? So like I totally see the great value in having all the results in one place and you’re being able to segment them by geos and things like that. So it’s—you’ve got a data store. How about, you know, the actual surveying process and the people that are designing the surveys and things like that. How much of that is included in it?

Nataly Kelly – 16:48

So all of it is basically in the same central platform. So we have pre-built type questionnaires, surveys, norms that you can use in order to survey around those different—segment your audience however you wish. So it’s actually all part of the platform and there are a couple of areas of the platform. So we have consumer insights in three main buckets. One is Advertising Insights. So if you’re going to test an ad that you can capture that consumer data, consumer insights and store it in the platform. Another is Innovation Insights. So if you’re developing a product which a lot of these CPG marketers, product development actually lives under them. So it’s a different type of structure.

Nataly Kelly – 17:30

And so a lot of them actually are developing the products with our software to figure out, okay, if we want to develop a salty snack for women over 35 who want to relax in the evenings with Netflix, but they are maybe calorie-conscious, but they want to be clean eating trends and all this. Okay, let’s develop a concept like that. We actually have AI tools that will take that prompt and develop some concepts and you can tweak them and it will generate a full—the ingredients, it will generate the packaging, it will show a display, it will show all of these things so that the marketers can fast track that process.

Nataly Kelly – 18:12

And then if, let’s say that they launch that product to market, it’s a huge success and they want to advertise it, you know, they can test their ads in our platform as well using some of that same data that they saw when they were developing the product. And then once that brand is starting to take traction, they can also measure the brand and see how they’re tracking against competitor brands and they can track their competitors, and they can do all of that with our new—our latest brand tracking product which is in beta now. So yeah, it’s a pretty cool platform. I love learning how our customers are using it each and every day.

John Wall – 18:43

Yeah, I want to dig into it a little bit more. I have a bunch of questions from that because it’s fascinating how it covers a number of areas and you’ve got all this data that you can leverage. But before we do, we just want to take a second. We have to thank Wix Studio for their support of Marketing Over Coffee.

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John Wall – 19:36

We’ve seen with most companies that there’s kind of a life cycle to this kind of thing where it’s, you know, startup and under 10 million or 10 to 50 million. You know, maybe they’re spending 10 or 15k with some kind of agency to do some of this research, but they’re not, you know, they’re just scratching the surface and then that usually kind of grows till they get maybe around the point where they have like 250k in budget to be doing some real research. And then they’re trying to decide like, okay, do we bring somebody in house or do we stick with a bigger agency? At what point do you guys come in? Because this is obviously enterprise grade. This is not small to medium business.

John Wall – 20:06

So do people even engage with you kind of before that quarter million thing or is it where there’s already like a market research department and all this stuff is going and they’re saying like, okay, we need to even get a level above that?

Nataly Kelly – 20:16

Yeah, it’s usually once they have a six-figure budget for market research, insights and doing that site, that type of testing, usually there’s going to be an insights team at the company in order to properly take advantage of our product because there needs to be a certain threshold of how much data they can leverage. And so usually it’s going to be an insights team. However, there are cases where you’d be surprised. There might be a brand that only has one insights manager, or sometimes those insights teams are shared across multiple brands, or sometimes they’re shared across multiple geographies. It just depends on the structure. Every company is so different and we have a lot of, you know, consumer packaged goods brands that use our software.

Nataly Kelly – 21:00

We also have a lot of Big Tech companies, pretty much all the top ones that you and I could name. And then also we have financial services is another big type of customer that uses us. But they usually do have a large budget for marketing because they are mass marketing to a lot of consumers. And so that is usually our sweet spot is where we can help them the most because they have the most data and they want to leverage it and they want to make good use of it.

John Wall – 21:27

Is there anything as far as when customers first engage, you know, you’re dealing with companies, they’ve been doing their own thing, they come to you. Do you see anything as far as, okay, when the product gets put in, they’re given these additional insights or they get some new understandings. Are there milestones that you see as far as things that they do with the way they change, the way they’re doing business or the way they’re able to accelerate? What kind of successes do you see?

Nataly Kelly – 21:48

Yes. So our whole mission is to help our customers connect their insights. So usually they are already doing market research in different silos and the goal is to get them to centralize it in a single platform so that they can take advantage of all that collective knowledge and data and insights that they’re gathering. And so the stages are usually that companies come to us and their insights are quite disconnected. They might even be using kind of ad hoc tools to do different things. You know, maybe they’re doing an—using an ad testing tool over here, maybe they’re using a, you know, something to optimize their packaging, you know, or some sort of technology to do that, but they’re not storing it in an these central platforms. So that is really the value.

Nataly Kelly – 22:32

And so what we often end up doing is helping our customers drive that change agenda within these huge organizations, because it’s not usually if you’re just in charge of insights market research for one area or one brand or one business unit, you might not have the ability to get all those other brands to go come along for the journey and put everything in a central platform. So a lot of what we do is a lot of education and try to help them understand why they should systematize. We actually introduced a maturity model to help shepherd them through this process because the earliest stage of maturity is when insights and consumer data are disconnected and fragmented all over the place.

Nataly Kelly – 23:14

And then they move from where they’re completely disconnected to where they start to have pockets of teams that are working together internally and collecting their data in maybe at a geo level or at a couple of brands unifying coming up together. Like one major cosmetics company that I just met with recently talked about how, oh, they’ve just acquired a few cosmetics brands in the United States. It’s a large Asian, one of the largest in the world, cosmetics manufacturer and they’ve acquired quite a few in the US but those are viewed as like, oh, those are our small brands, those are our emerging brands. So those brands might, for example, get together and decide, hey, we’re targeting kind of different audience consumers in the United States, not in Asia.

Nataly Kelly – 23:58

Maybe we should get together and share what we’re learning from each other in our market research studies and our tests and all the things that we’re doing. So as they go on that journey, they start to centralize, systematize and we help them with professional services to do that. We have a pretty large customer success team that supports all of that process because it’s very time-consuming, it takes years. You know the journey for PepsiCo that we just wrote about in our book—it’s called The Consumer Insights Revolution, we just launched it last week. They take the reader, our authors from PepsiCo and Zappy take the reader on the journey of what that looks like to transform consumer insights as such a large global organization. And it’s a multi-year journey. It’s not something that can happen overnight.

John Wall – 24:44

Yeah, that’s fantastic. And so tell us more about that book as far as the process for that. You know, did you—were you guys working through it and you just said, “Hey, we’ve got enough stuff here that we should do a book on this to be thought leaders?” Or where did that come from?

Nataly Kelly – 24:56

Yeah, so our CEO and founder Steve Phillips and our president Ryan Berry and our two customers from PepsiCo, the Chief Insights Officer Stefan Ganz and Kate Shart—they are executives over at PepsiCo on the insights side within marketing globally and they support global teams all over the world. They worked with each other for many years and finally just got together and decided, “Hey, let’s write a book about this because what we’re doing, we know is transformative and it is cutting edge.” And even though you would think that a company like PepsiCo might say, “You know what, we’re just going to keep this for this secret to ourselves,” they didn’t do that. They actually said, “Look, we believe we can transform consumer insights and the more companies do this, the better it is for all of us.”

Nataly Kelly – 25:43

And obviously Zappy wants to make sure that more companies have access to our software too to enable that change to happen. So they came together to write a book about it and I came in to Zappy just in January of this year. So when I came in, they did mention, “Hey, we have a book that’s currently in the process and we’re going to launch it this year.” And because I am a published author, it made a lot of sense that, hey, I know how to launch a book. I’ve done that a couple times. So it was great. And it was so much more fun to launch a book that I’m not the author of, launch my own book because it’s kind of hard for me to market my own books, but I’m loving it, doing it as a CMO. It’s way more fun.

John Wall – 26:24

Right. Well, but so we have to talk about now because part of the thing that got this whole interview going was that were talking about some topics and immediately I was just like, “Oh, yeah, you know, past HubSpotter market analysis, like, this is definitely in the bullseye.” But at the same time, Kogan Page had already given me their false—their spring solicitations. And so I saw your book Brand Global, Adapt Global, which is not going to be out until right now. The date is June 28, 2025. So that’s way on the horizon. I mean, we’ll have to have you back when that comes around. But so I already had you on the list as far as author that were going to do some stuff with. So that was just funny. So, yeah, you know, all right, so you’re already marketing one book.

John Wall – 27:00

You’ve done a past book, but you did decide to write one more, so it didn’t kill you at least. But, you know, what’s the story with this next book?

Nataly Kelly – 27:08

Well, so the next book is actually the lead author is Catherine Melchior Ray, and she is an incredible CMO who has led marketing at a lot of companies, including Shiseido, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Grand Hyatt Hotel. She’s been at a lot of B2C brands, and she’s incredible. And you definitely should have her join the podcast sometime—she’d be a wonderful guest. I love working with her. She actually had this book deal with Kogan Page and invited me to join her on the book because I am coming in with kind of the B2B perspective as well as the tech background and the digital, you know, because if you’re marketing digital products or software products, it’s a very different type of marketing. And so we wanted to make sure with this book that we can address those different angles. But she brings in so many incredible experiences.

Nataly Kelly – 28:04

I actually remember learning about her from a Wall Street Journal article many years ago and thinking, wow, what a cool job she has. I’d love to be like her someday. And now she teaches at an MBA program and Berkeley Haas, so, you know, teaches marketing. And she reached out to me ironically, and I was like, “Wow, I had my mini celeb moment,” like, “Oh, this is one of my marketing heroes, you know, heroines.” And I’m just so excited to be working with her. So this book is going to be an incredible book for marketing leaders to read because it has so many great examples, different companies, different journeys, and we’re interviewing a lot of CMOs as well and including their perspectives in the book. So it’s going to be a pretty fun read and it is coming out in June of next year.

John Wall – 28:52

Okay, so what’s on the horizon for you as far as technologies or trends based on where you’re at and what you’ve seen? Is there anything in the next six months or year that’s on your their radar that you’re saying, “Hey, we got to pay attention to this?”

Nataly Kelly – 29:04

Well, I’m going to give you the answer that probably everyone’s giving you lately, which is AI. I mean, Zappy was early in this AI world, long before it became like a megatrend, you know, so we’re doing a lot of stuff with AI before most companies were in the martech space. And in fact I was working with AI tools and machine learning and machine translation a long time ago because I was in that space of translation localization. So we did some pioneering things at HubSpot with machine translation and machine learning in localization for, you know, a lot of our knowledge-based content and a lot of—and there’s a lot publicly available about that. So I’m not sharing anything that people don’t know.

Nataly Kelly – 29:47

But we had, you know, when you’re dealing with a lot of content, you have to quickly learn how to get that into other languages continuously. And you know, HubSpot’s not just agile development, it’s CICD. It’s continuous integration, continuous deployment, releasing code thousands of times a day, all kinds of changes continuously. What that means from a marketing perspective is that you have to be able to stay on top of all the content that stems from that, all the training materials, all the content marketing assets, all the product marketing assets. And so how do you do that continuously? You have to use technology to make that possible. So did that at HubSpot and did that in my background. And now as Zappy, it’s so cool to see how we are leveraging AI tools to, you know, now it’s just evolving so quickly. It’s fascinating to me.

Nataly Kelly – 30:42

You can have a concept development agent that talks to, you know, this other type of agent that goes back and optimizes here and we have different agents talking to each other and working together, which is super cool because I love that it’s not just, you know, one agent that a human is interacting with. We’re actually bringing insights teams together and having them work with multiple agents. It’s like the power of multiple humans and the power of multiple agents working together. We just did last week our first customer conference that was the Connected Insights conference, and we had our customers do a panel on how they’re working with consumer insights and AI and using our software to do that.

Nataly Kelly – 31:23

And we had people from Mars, Pet Care, from Johnsonville, from other companies and a lot of our customers who were in attendance from these large global brands participated in a workshop where they actually got to use our AI tools hands-on and have that experience in a group setting, in breakout groups. So it was pretty fun to watch. So I’m super excited about AI and the potential that it has to help marketing teams, specifically our customers, B2C brands at these large global companies develop better products, launch better ads and develop better advertising over time. It’s pretty fascinating to me and I’m learning so much. I just love it.

John Wall – 32:02

That’s great. Okay, and so we’ve talked books. We’ll have a link to the current book. People can check that out. The new book is on the horizon. We will follow up with that later, but nothing on that now. How about before we get out the door though, any other, you know, books, movies, entertainment, anything else you can recommend for our audience?

Nataly Kelly – 32:17

I mean, we’re just talking about Sting. So I have to say, even though I know I’m dating myself and revealing my age, I absolutely am a Sting fan. And so I highly encourage everyone to check out a song that he wrote in Spanish and in Portuguese and in English. You know, it’s just so cool to hear a lot of these American and British pop stars when they sing in another language. So as a musician, I love that stuff.

John Wall – 32:48

That sounds good. We can throw a link to that too. Spotify. I’ll get the whole list going. And yeah, I did know a huge Police Instinct fan, so I totally get that. Thank you for that, Rekka. We will check that out if people want to learn more about what you’ve got going on or Zappy what’s the best place for them to check out.

Nataly Kelly – 33:03

Our website, zappy.io. You can also go to connectedinsights.com if you’re interested in learning more about the book. And you can go to our website and check it out. We’ve got lots of stuff there. I also have my LinkedIn, so if anybody wants to engage with me there, feel free. Always happy to add you as a connection and start a conversation.

John Wall – 33:23

All right, Natalie, thanks for joining us today.

Nataly Kelly – 33:25

Thank you, John. Pleasure to be here.

John Wall – 33:27

All right, that’ll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.

Nataly Kelly – 33:31

You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters and you can find it at Musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.

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