MarTech Interview with Erik Huddleston, CEO @ Aprimo

Erik Huddleston, CEO at Aprimo talks about AI and how it’s democratizing content creation and content management:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Erik, tell us about yourself and your time as CEO at Aprimo.

Thank you for having me! As CEO of Aprimo, I’ve had the privilege of steering the market leader in Content Operations from budgeting, planning, and content execution to digital asset management and generative AI governance.

How are you seeing the demand for DAM platforms evolve today? What are some of the in-demand features of DAMs that are gaining more popularity by users?

Covid and the recent challenging macro environment moved every enterprise to digital first and drove home a hard ROI focus for omnichannel strategies. At the same time, generative AI promises to slash the time to create experiences and the cost of creating them. This is creating an explosion of content and a focus on content performance to feed training data sets.  Because of this, there are new bottlenecks in the content creation process and new challenges that didn’t exist before.

Demand for AI governance including AI influenced content detection and AI policy management are new features that are really popular. Likewise, content discoverability features like semantic search, AI-powered content tagging, and model training are all surging in popularity. Content review and annotation, often informed by AI, are also popular because of the increased workload for things like brand safety and compliance.

Can you talk about the impact of AI in digital asset management and your thoughts as to how this will influence the space more?

Digital asset management is ground zero for the current AI surge in marketing. AI is democratizing content creation, removing old budgetary bottlenecks created by limited agency and in-house creative resources. This moves more resources from a creator to editor role, moving more work downstream from the creative tools to the process execution tools like DAM. Upstream, while creating campaigns and experiences are getting cheaper and faster, the actual cost is getting more unpredictable because of training costs and the challenge of budgeting token and similar AI costs. Downstream, the explosion in content makes discoverability harder. Asset tagging and management as well as dealing with organization and expiration of all the AI generated renditions creates budgetary and search challenges. It is also now imperative that content performance and ROI data is tracked (not just campaign performance) driven by the closed-loop requirement for training data. We are just at the beginning of AI’s impact on DAM.

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In the B2B tech sales and marketing arena, AI Is playing a big role in redefining the state of martech and salestech. How do you feel this will deepen in the next few years?

AI’s role in martech and salestech is just scratching the surface. Over the next few years, there is not a single process in sales and marketing and not a single martech or salestech category that will not undergo a foundational redefinition. This will include more sophisticated lead scoring models, enhanced customer segmentation, and predictive customer behavior models. Every customer touchpoint will become completely personalized as a baseline expectation. The cost models and budgets associated with sales and marketing are going to be upended. It is as exciting (or more) than the early 90s at the dawn of digital.

It’s not about adapt or die; I prefer to think of it as adapt and thrive. I mean, make no mistake, if businesses don’t embrace these massive shifts, they will be rendered obsolete in short order. But they stand to gain so much by embracing the growing pains that come with these changes. With AI, businesses can anticipate changes more rapidly and tailor their approaches in ways that were previously unimaginable.

How can B2B marketers and salespeople use AI more effectively to drive processes and results?

We are very early on here so sophistication can come with time and vendor maturation. Right now, the go-to building blocks are vector databases and math, transformer models, and transformer-based image transformations. These are baked into the early tools we are seeing come to market, many of which are already useful out of the box, but there is innovation to be had with just a little bit of IT work.  Segmentation and lead scoring leveraging nontraditional data sources, all text-based work from copy, AB testing, to translation, and image manipulation from formats and renditions to lightweight personalization for specific segments by swapping out elements or generating natural product placements in stock images are all low-hanging fruit.

Can you talk about some of the leading brands you feel have a robust marketing presence and framework (and why)? What are the key takeaways from these picks/choices?

Several brands stand out for their robust marketing presence and framework. I’ve been incredibly impressed with BP, which has done some amazing things with AI at a scale that can only be done in the F500, but with the agility of a nimble startup. Likewise, I witnessed a surprising (and amazing) marketing engine at Hachette Book Group (the company that originally published The Catcher in the Rye and traces its roots back to the 1800s) that has a digital content supply chain that would make any consumer brand or cutting-edge tech company envious. I think the takeaway I have learned is that competitive advantage accrues based on how well you execute vs. your competitors, so there is huge opportunity for companies in sectors not known for their marketing and sales innovation.

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