Harry Lowes is the Director of ANZ Mid-Market in the Global Business Group at Meta. After long stints at CommBank and Telstra in Australia and being based in Singapore with Meta for the past six years, Harry discusses with Anton the big changes and exciting opportunities for marketers in an AI-fuelled landscape: speed and customisation at scale, better measurement techniques, and the evolving experiences with wearables.
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Gen Z or Gen Alpha have switched off advertising, and no one wants to see it.
Transcription:
Anton:
Hi there, I’m Anton Buchner, Business Director at TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy. Welcome again to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and big opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
Today, I am talking with Harry Lowes, the Director of Global Business Group within Meta. I’ll probably just stop there, Harry, because whenever I mention the word Meta to people, they’re like, “Wow, what are they working on? What are they doing?”
And they throw all sorts of questions at me: “You’ve got to ask him this or got to ask him that.” So, welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, Harry Lowes. Harry, how are you?
Harry:
Awesome, Anton. Thank you for having me, mate. I’m super excited about this conversation.
Anton:
Yeah, pleasure. And we chatted a little bit earlier. You’re fresh back from Hong Kong on a personal level, a bit of rugby.
Harry:
I am, Anton. I had the pleasure of guiding two under eight teams and two under tens teams, one of whom was successful in winning the Hong Kong comp, which was…
Anton:
Ah, well done.
Harry:
…a lot of fun. But wrangling 80 kids around two different stadiums and events through Hong Kong sounds glamorous but it is far from it in reality.
Anton:
It’s hectic. Well, a more glamorous life would be coming fresh out of the Meta Festival, which was recently held here in Sydney. So, we might touch on that as well in a minute around some of the interesting things Meta are doing there.
Harry:
Yeah, I must say, just quickly touching on that, it was just fantastic to see. We had 800 people coming through, both practitioner streams and keynotes that we had and hosted, and we touched on subjects from creators and how to work with them to cross border trade and how to leverage the opportunity that is the global dynamic that we are operating through, and we’ll probably talk about that a little later.
We talked about signals and data and how to leverage that for your business, AI and the capability that exists through different AI tools often labeled from an Advantage+ perspective for customers, so there’s just a lot to cover.
And then we sort of brought that to life in terms of how we see the business transitioning and the opportunity that represents, and we’re a business that’s focused on driving the connectivity and the connection between consumers and the messaging environment. And as part of that, we want to make sure that we’re enabling businesses to have the best tool set to capitalize on that.
So, when you think about a company who’s building the future of human connection, we want to make sure that that connection is live and rich both from a consumer perspective, also from businesses who want engage with those consumers. And for me, that’s what’s just been so exciting about this role in the last five years, is just to see the scale. And we announced last in our earnings report, we’ve now got 3.4 billion people connecting daily on the platform. It is just amazing.
I’ve been lucky enough to work at some really sort of foundational businesses across Australia and globally in CommBank and Telstra, and I must say I still try to work out how I got there from running a wine business before those two, but that’s something for me to ponder for my future. That’s probably future cat sessions with someone who’s smarter than me.
Anton:
Well, just on that, I mean, we met back in the early days knowing you through CommBank and through Telstra, you’ve done long stints there, then you’ve been up in Singapore for the past six years, or with Meta for the past six years now, is it?
Harry:
Yep. Yes, it is. Yeah, 2019, I moved up.
Anton:
I’d love to know, I sort of ask people who join a new company. I guess it’s not as new anymore, but what were your first impressions coming into Meta, and then maybe jumping to today, what have you worked on and what areas are you focusing on?
Harry:
So, I originally moved up as part of the agency business and helping to look after the independent agency network within ANZ and that was a fantastic experience. Just the ability for independent agencies through really their deep understanding of the tools and the capability of the Meta platform offers are able to help accelerate businesses growth, and that was a really exciting journey.
I’ve then moved on to the sort of direct side of the business, and I now look after the ANZ mid-market business. And as part of that, I work with a really diverse range of businesses from independent companies, sort of just founder-led, really driving business growth to multinational corporations.
And through the spectrum of those conversations, I get to see some really interesting ambitions in terms of how companies want to grow, their strategies around growth, the different technologies and capabilities they’re going to utilize that. And often, the differences in terms of how companies manage supply chains and what their different pricing products strategies and roadmaps are, and everyone is different.
But it is I think our responsibility to help those businesses leverage the capability that Meta has to be able to help them with their growth ambitions. And for me, it’s just been amazing starting five years ago to where we are today in terms of A, the growth from a platform capability in terms of just the surfaces and the interconnect-ability of those.
And by that, I mean threads, I mean, wearables, the glasses, messaging is just the growth of sort of huge acceleration, especially in APAC and the regional exposure I get to that is fantastic, because ultimately, what you see is that businesses and consumers want to connect, they want to talk, and they want to have live experiences. And you can see through Thailand and Vietnam the growth of messaging as an actual direct to consumer sales channel.
And then sort of being able to then help businesses understand what that connectivity means, both from a sort of platform perspective, but then also the capability that we bring to the table and the evolution of that from an AI perspective has just been absolutely rapid.
We, a couple of years ago, launched what we call Advantage+, which is effectively the brand from a business perspective that businesses are able to leverage to be able to drive the capability that we’ve got from an AI perspective.
We’ve been using AI for many years in terms of utilizing it to analyze and understand content that’s on the platform to be able to drive recommendation into feed for customers, and we’ve been super focused on making sure that from a customer experience perspective, they get a great experience in feeds or in Instagram or in the type of content that gets exposed to them.
And for us, we’ve been able to then turn that capability towards businesses to be able to enable them to seamlessly interact with customers and integrate into the environments where people are inherently being social and sharing content. And so, that makes it a much richer and we think far more effective experience, both from a consumer perspective but also from an advertising as well.
Anton:
That might be interesting to touch on, because I think there’s not a marketing plan today that we wouldn’t see with Meta in some form being utilized. And businesses have trialed and tested many different opportunities with Meta over the last decade, I guess now, or couple of decades.
But that AI field world you talked about, and I guess everybody’s grappling with this racehorse that’s out of the gates and running in all sorts of different directions, and you just have to go into LinkedIn and see someone drop an AI post.
But what are you seeing in there in terms of targeting or creative, in terms of targeting for businesses and the opportunities now with the sort of AI field world? And you’re right that we probably haven’t realized it’s been in there in the background, but now, it’s at the foreground. What are you seeing on the meta side of things in terms of targeting?
Harry:
Look, just taking a step back, I saw a really interesting step in terms of just how businesses start to think about AI, it’s almost all encompassing now. It’s a CEO question, it’s not a risk issue or a marketing issue.
It’s actually, AI now encompasses all parts of businesses, and you can see the growth in terms of the number of different business units within one business that is using AI is incrementally growing, and 60% now have two plus parts of their business using AI.
So, for me, I see AI as just it enables a huge amount and you can see what it’s enabled across our business in terms of your ability to understand what’s happening across the business at scale and I think most importantly, to make informed decisions about what you want to do with that information.
And so, what we’re trying to do from a business perspective is really open up AI to consumers. And we launched overnight the Meta AI app, which I think is a really great way for consumers to be able to use the power of Meta AI from an assistant point of view-
Anton:
I’ve been talking with it overnight and was talking with it this morning.
Harry:
Yes, I’m not going to lie, and I hope my son doesn’t listen to this podcast, but it has planned a 10-year-old’s birthday party on Saturday where I’ve just realized my wife is away, and I do need a very detailed plan for 30 boys in the pool.
And it’s given me a great plan, but to be honest, there’s now almost a billion users of that Meta AI app, and the functionality that that enables. So, when you sort of think about the scale that that opens up, there’s a really interesting opportunity for businesses to be part of that conversation.
And how I see that translating from a business perspective is and how they leverage the AI tools that we offer, we have, as I said, Advantage+. So, from a targeting capability on the platform, we are able to infer interest and intent from a number of different sources and a much bigger data set than has ever been possible before.
And what’s really exciting about that is it gives you an opportunity to discover new audiences and new insights about your business that you might not have known before. And being across the customer set that I am, it’s also about not just understanding the ANZ audience, it’s about the global conversation that you can have as a business.
And I’m very passionate about Australian businesses taking on the world. I love to see the success stories that exist. And it’s really interesting at a time like this where there’s tariff uncertainty, there’s global geopolitical issues at play, it’s amazing to see those businesses.
And I do partly think, based on the power of the platform that we provide, are able to pivot their business really quickly into understanding A, have I got the right product set in this environment? Do I need to pivot product or do I need to pivot markets that I’m targeting?
And people are able to quite quickly depending on their sort of logistics capability, able to target EMEA markets or APAC markets, that they might not have previously thought about because there is that uncertainty. And for me, business’ ability to respond dynamically in a time like this is super important.
Anton:
So, speed comes to mind immediately when you’re talking there, the pace of opportunity maybe is a better way of saying it.
Harry:
The pace of opportunity, and then you think about, okay, well how does that speed and that dynamic environment that you are operating in translate to sort of core marketing functions and creative is a great example of that. And to just bring that stat to life, we’ve got 4 million customers around the world who’ve used generative AI capabilities to generate over 15 million ads.
And so, there’s just that sort of opportunity to be able to think differently, and to execute in a really fast way. That doesn’t mean that creativity is dead, it doesn’t mean that it is the end of creativity in that context, it means that you are able to do things and understand and trial things very fast and understand what works and what doesn’t, and then go deep.
And that’s the piece that for me, that I see companies who are able to understand what is relevant to them in terms of how their business measures, and understands what success looks like, and how that translates into a creative strategy. And then trust the platform in terms of, “Okay, we can create opportunities to talk to different audiences through this generative AI capability and to go out and execute on that.”
And then many different businesses have very different processes. Some have creative teams in-house that literally go down to the beach on a Monday and shoot a whole lot of shots, and come back, and sort of launch a new product through that way.
Naked Sundays was a company I spoke to, and it’s a brilliant example of how they just sort of leverage the sort of new different variations of creative that can actually engage with an audience to sort of far deeper, more complex creation of creative but fundamentally, it’s about being able to execute fast and understand what Meta is-
Anton:
It’s a hot topic though, isn’t it? I think there’s been a lot of fear in the market, a lot of opportunity discussion in the market. We haven’t settled, I don’t think anywhere yet, but the idea of creative agencies initially it was, “Oh, they’re all going to die,” and the death of I hate seeing those headlines, but death of the creative idea and generative AI was going to be the future of creation.
I think that’s settled down a bit now to say what you just touched on — it’s the combination of both, the ability to, what we would probably say research and test faster, like you said, and put ideas into market and see if they’re resonating, which segments, which audiences, which cohorts, which platforms has never been a better opportunity.
But your view on sort of the big idea and the use of a creative agency versus testing ideas out and maybe more nimble ideas, what are your thoughts there?
Harry:
So, Anton, my first job was the business development manager at McCann Erickson Worldgroup, and I sat in between the creative agency and the client service team. And I have a deep respect for the creative process. I learned a huge amount sitting next to these guys and girls and just sort of really appreciated the creative process. And I still do. And I think you can see every day the power of a really rich creative execution and insight. And I don’t think that ever goes away.
I don’t think consumers ever want to be engaged in a way that’s not meaningful to them. I think what we are getting to the point though is that there are many different types of people in the world and who want to engage in a lot of different ways. And so, the opportunity, I think, is to understand how we can do that effectively at scale, and I think that the capability and the technology exists allows us to do that.
I don’t think it means that someone still needs to think of the idea, the execution and the variations can come through different technology capabilities. But the idea and the need for the idea doesn’t go away. And I do think that you get the opportunity to trial and test and understand and then to go deeper and I think everyone should celebrate that.
We look very much and have just been talking to the team up here about just understanding the different personality types of the consumers that you’re talking to, and then how do you create different variations for that?
Some people want to understand the detail, they want to understand what’s the different ingredients that make up that product, some want to understand the emotional connection that’s going to happen when they engage with that product. Other people want to compare, other people want to see rich creative variations, other people want to see written content.
And that’s where I come back to the surfaces that we have from a Meta platform allow you to be able to execute across all of those different personality types, but also creative needs and connectivity needs.
And that’s where I get really excited because you can then start to understand how each of those connections happen and the impact of that in terms of your measurement strategy and what that means for your business, and then you can go deeper. And so, there is a lot of opportunity for businesses, I think, to capitalize on that.
Anton:
So, maybe stepping back a really simple question, because we’re going to have all sorts of different marketers and business leaders listening to this podcast. In simple terms, a business wanting to target within the Meta platform, let’s say, what are the top tips to understanding?
Because you talked about whether it’s a one to cohort, one to a segment, whether it should be one to one individually tailored, or should it be one big idea that’s just blasted through whatever region or area or location is relevant, our elections or something like that.
But just the simple tips for targeting what’s changed, because years ago, it could be really simply, I find the demographics some interests, and you target it to those people, to hit their stream if you’re lucky. What’s changing in the targeting now, your top tips for different business leaders?
Harry:
Look, there are a number of different sort of capabilities in terms of targeting on Meta. You can still define your audience, you can still use detailed targeting, you can still leverage lookalikes, you can still utilize custom audiences. But there is also the Advantage+ capability that I mentioned before, the suite of services that I think is very interesting from a consumer perspective.
From an advertising perspective, it takes away some of the more specific targeting capability, but it allows you to define what the outcomes that you want to drive are, whether it’s efficiency and performance, whether it’s automation and control, whether it’s global markets, and then we go and find the audience for you.
So, when we see Advantage+ turned on, you can see a 17% average cost plus, cost improvement in per acquisition, and a 32% on average increase in return on ad spend. So, for me, that as a sort of capability, I don’t know why you wouldn’t leverage it, because we offer that opportunity. You can use it-
Anton:
Sorry, Harry, to that point then, it’s an algorithm, right? At the end of the day, so are we trusting the algorithms, which across many spheres of life, I think we’ve just grown to trust?
Harry:
Yes, you are, you are trusting the algorithm, but I think it’s imperative that you trust the algorithm in the context of the business performance that you want to drive. We have a really, I think, important story to tell in the context of how our auction system works.
We don’t want to have our consumers who are connecting on our platform have a negative experience or see brands that they don’t want to engage with. We don’t want businesses targeting customers that aren’t relevant to them. And the auction model actually looks at those two components to make a decision about the relevancy, the content that we put in front of consumers.
So, I feel like yes, you can trust the algorithm to be able to make an informed decision based on a number of parameters that sort of are indicators that aren’t necessarily available to you to see on a daily basis, but do actually help us drive A, engaged experiences for our customers or for our consumers, and B, for advertisers to get relevant audience types. And so, for me, that adds up to a really rich combination of mutual benefit.
Anton:
So, from a brand safety point of view, I guess I’m thinking here, is there a way of restricting who sees messages, whether that’s based on a specific profile or sentiment?
Harry:
There are a lot of brand controls on the platform and we do make sure that we provide all of those to consumers. There are a number of different ways to do it. You can look at audience controls, you can look interest controls, placements. We do have automated placements across all of the different surfaces, but you can control that.
You can control different creative as well and appearance types. So, I’m confident that the relevant brand protections are available to businesses to be confident that their content is going to appear in the right environment.
Anton:
And what about this keeps getting bandied around the different types of audiences in terms of who wants to see advertising? And we keep reading Gen Z or Gen Alpha have switched off advertising, and no one wants to see it, which of course whenever you say no one, it’s complete rubbish because it’s just a sentiment of a segment.
But have you seen the change in, I guess, what is termed advertising versus what’s content, versus what’s interesting conversation? How do you see it from Meta’s point of view in terms of, well, you’re calling it creative or content, but is it content these days or is it more sparking conversational ideas or thought starters? You want the outcomes, obviously for the brand and whatever the brand’s objective is, but how does Meta see things for businesses?
Harry:
I think we have a pretty broad perspective on it. We have capability and if you think about the creator ecosystem that exists, we’ve got the creator marketplace in Australia, and there is a fantastic partnership between brands and influencers and creators to be able to generate content.
Consumers want to engage content that’s relevant to them. I don’t think they have a stronger version if it’s creative from a brand that is irrelevant to them, to whether it’s a friend’s creative talking about what’s been happening on the weekend. People want relevant information, they want things that engage them on whatever level it is that they want to engage on.
As I said earlier, some people want detail, some people want creative, some people want emotion. I think the ability of businesses to think about those audiences, to be able to create those content experiences is what’s driving great outcomes for businesses, and it’s what continues to drive really rich experiences across all of our platforms and surfaces.
Anton:
And you touched on the AI or the Meta AI app, which is interesting. Do you think with this shift to voice, everything’s essentially turning to conversation. Is that the future for Meta, that it’s not so much a typed poster update or something in your feed, but it’s a conversation with friends or with peers or with cohorts that’s going to drive forward?
Harry:
Look, I think it would be a brave man who predicts the future.
Anton:
Crystal ball, come on.
Harry:
Look, human connection has existed for a long, long time. I think we’re just creating different capabilities around how you drive that connection. I mean, I love the wearables component. I’m a very keen user of it. I took my family skiing, it meant I could message my wife when I was running late for lunch on the mountain, I could take videos without taking my gloves off, and it was a really rich experience with the kids.
Because it meant that we continued to be engaged and it didn’t disrupt us. I do think that connectivity will continue to be evolving over time. I think the less there is a screen involved and it’s more humanistic, the better that connectivity is. There’s nothing better than sitting in a room with people and talking.
And so, we don’t want the tyranny of distance to interrupt that experience. And so, for me, as I see it and the way I see the evolution of the platform and the capability, we are just making better and better experiences for people to be able to do that. And I love the fact that people can talk and understand and see businesses that they might not have seen.
And they might be able to talk and understand more about the creative process for the production of different materials, different skills. And that’s another way for people to bring their brands and businesses to life. So, I know I’m sort of skirting around the question, but I do think connectivity is key and people just will continue to thrive in the environments that they have.
Anton:
I mean, you have it skirted beautifully. I’d put the hook there, but not quite. I think we’re hearing you talk and others in the industry, it’s a quantity discussion because the amount of variation of creative and creative format and content formats that you can now do has exploded and will just continue to explode.
So, I guess the quantity of options that are available, the way you can connect with customers, as you say, whatever those customers are and however they want to be communicated with, is just changing. I mean, who would’ve thought we could do podcasts decades ago? So, yeah, the future is rich.
Ultimately though, from a marketer’s perspective and those listening, measurement has to be critical. And you touched on this earlier, that depending on the brand or business’s objective, whether it’s a brand objective or an acquisition objective or a customer connection objective, what’s changed at Meta or what’s happening there in terms of your conversion metrics?
Harry:
So, I’m really passionate about this point. I’ve probably, most of my career has been spent within the digital space. I set up the digital function within CBA, I helped grow it within Telstra and took on broader customer lifecycle management and base management capability.
And so, measurement and understanding the impact of the work that you do in driving meaningful business outcomes is fundamental to me and my passion for marketing and now for technology and sales. And so, from a measurement perspective, we offer a number of different solutions to the marketplace to make sure that people can understand the efficacy of the work that they’re doing on our platform.
There are very simple tools offered through the site, the platform that offers CPA values, CPM values, but I do think it’s beholden on the business to understand more about what your LTV, what your customer acquisition cost is, and how those relate to your sort of business’s performance.
At Meta, we offer a number of different sort of measurement solutions, whether it’s in platform measurement, so whether you can do split tests, whether you can do aggravated events management to understand what drives outcomes for you.
You can do lift testing so you can understand the brand performance and what brand happens there, you can understand conversion lifts and even geo lifts, and understand different geolocations and what drives performance there.
I think what we spent a long time doing at Telstra and trying to understand through the media mix modeling was the efficacy of the media investment in driving down to a postcode level outcomes at the business, and we continue to be involved in that here. We’ve got a Triple M feed, we’ve also got a publicly available Robin solution, which allows people to leverage market mix modeling capability.
We’ve got third party tool integration, so integrated into Google, into Adobe, we’ve also got ad server tracking, so for third party solutions. There’s a lot of different capabilities. We’ve also got a measurement 360 framework.
So, for me, we do a lot in terms of trying to help businesses understand in the suite of measurement solutions that many businesses have, what the role of Meta is in driving those outcomes. For me, AI adds the capability to digest more of that information, understand what matters, and then AI adds the capability to execute on those insights in a timely fashion.
And timely, I think relates to different businesses in different ways, and that’s where I sort of get really excited because there are businesses that want to execute fast. There are businesses that want to watch and understand and sort of see the evolution from a consumer experience point of view.
And I just think that that capability becomes really interesting. And I think we’re to sort of pivot point from a journey perspective that is unlike any other, and helping businesses take advantage of that is really important for me.
Anton:
And I love one thread that came out to what you just said around the suite of measurement. I think that’s been a fundamental shift. The promise from tech vendors previously was trust us and our measurement is the doyen of measurement.
And as we’ve all evolved here, we realize that’s not right, the customer journey is so fragmented. Unless you’re spending specifically in one channel measuring to e-commerce or m-commerce or whatever, sure.
But we all know that there’s multi-touch, multi-channel attribution, et cetera. Can you reference any case studies or examples where anyone’s cracked that nut in terms of better attribution?
Harry:
So, for me, there’s one case study with Sephora, a business in Australia. Everyone probably knows it. And it’s definitely on my shopping list when I come to Australia to my-
Anton:
It’s on my daughter’s list as well.
Harry:
So, look, I think there’s one thing I would say. From a signals perspective, we have a conversions API capability, which I think is the sort of foundation that businesses need to make sure they have connected to be able to pass back relevant signals to us to be able to make informed decisions about how we optimize content for you and the decisions around which and where, and what drives performance.
And a great example for Sephora was they drove a 22% increase in conversions, a 20% decrease in cost per acquisition, and a 15% increase in return on ad spend when they enabled that capability. And for me, we say trust the algorithm, but it’s not really just trusting the algorithm, it’s enabling the algorithm to be relevant for your business, and that’s, I think, really important.
The quality of information that you pass back to us from a signal perspective enables us to make even more informed decisions about the way in which we leverage your content to drive engaging customer experiences.
So, there are a number of different ways to do that. We’ve got CAPI that can connect with CRM, which allows for even deeper signals to be sent back to the business in terms of what your lifetime value might be.
We’ve got CAPI Gateway, which will allow you to put that data into an environment that can be leveraged by other third-party businesses all in an anonymized data compliant way, but there are a number of different solutions I think that — and to your point earlier, that allow us to make sure that we get relevant information for your business, but also for you to be able to leverage that information across the suite of capability that you might be using as a business that drives relevant outcomes for you.
Anton:
I think for businesses it’s really about that understanding of pulling signal data out, so pulling the data and interaction points from the Meta platforms and analyzing through to whether it’s a loyalty card or a CRM database or whatever data they’re holding. As you say, you can start to now connect the dots in a much richer way which is just exciting opportunity.
Speaking of exciting opportunities, you touched on and I was going to ask you straight away, but the Ray-Ban wearables, Oculus and others have been talked about for a while, but what’s happening? For those who don’t know, you’ve got a partnership with Ray-Ban, is that right?
Harry:
We do. We’ve got a partnership with Luxottica which produces Ray-Bans and other glasses. And I think what you’ll start to see, and we’re really excited to announce a couple of days ago, the partnership with JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman, you can also buy them online in Australia.
And wearables to me, is a really exciting evolution. We talked about the power of connectivity previously, this is another example of where we are taking the screen out of the way and enabling richer, more first-party experiences.
I wore Ray-Ban to the Ray-Ban wearables to a lunch yesterday and I took a photo of the room and I talked a little bit about the experience there. And the [inaudible 00:34:09] came up to me and showed me her Instagram page.
And she uses the wearables to do wine reviews and shows that first party experiences about going and selecting a wine, what she’s thinking about when she’s selecting it, and then she also showed me her partner’s page who’s a magician who is using wearables to capture the moment in terms of the excitement of people’s faces where the magic trick is revealed.
And they’re two different use cases that I don’t know if they ever imagined if they did even more kudos to the team here about the sort of the way they’re building the product. And then I talked to Jose from Motor Culture Australia yesterday, and they use the glasses to film product reviews.
So, they drive by the name of it, motor enthusiasts, they do car reviews and lotteries, and different experiences. They then film car reviews and show you firsthand what it’s like to drive the car and what the experience is.
And I do just think that that’s a great example of how we see the connectivity being enabled and the experiences being shared around that connectivity more broadly. I can just imagine what the different use cases are. I think that score is just such an untapped opportunity. I’m very excited to be able to ask my glasses what iron I need to hit into [crosstalk 00:35:36], it’ll probably tell me you need to get your driver out, you’re an old man now.
But look, I do think that those wearables, I think when you look at Oculus, when you look far out, and you can see Orion and the different experience that augmented reality offers and the type of connectivity you can drive through that is very exciting.
And we’ve got such a rich roadmap and when you add that plus messaging into the equation, and you can see just the explosion and messaging within the Australian marketplace and the APAC environment that people will be messaging and talking to people directly through these channels. And for me, I’m just excited about what that means from a capability perspective.
Anton:
So, on that point, the rethinking of content is interesting. So, if I’m skiing down a slope or I’m at a luncheon with some wine, for example — the wine content, the wine description product description I guess has always been there.
It’s always been there in printed form, it’s always been there in digital form, it’s there on the label. But rethinking how content can be deployed, I guess, is that the difference here that sending to a glass or what the glass is actually deploying up in front of you, in that case on such a small screen, I don’t want too much.
Harry:
I think when you add in the power of AI within that environment, you get really interesting insights. So, what you as a wine business choose to share informs the information that’s available about your product. So, when someone uses the glasses to look at the wine list and look at the food menu and asks, “Which wine would you recommend with this?” It will have the information relevant to making that recommendation-
Anton:
To pair it.
Harry:
Yeah, to pair it. So, I think that there’s that at a very core level in terms of just being able to drive information and connectivity. And then there’s the opportunity that you can use the glasses to build experiences for customers. And the messages that you send to a customer, you can think about that being an audio experience, not just a written experience.
And I loved it from that perspective. To me, 65% of businesses in Australia have used or adopted AI tools and platforms primarily for customer communication. So, you can see that businesses are starting to get that understanding, and then it’s the smarts to evolve that into the multi-touch or the multi touch points that businesses have.
Anton:
That might be a good place to finish off because I think I need to come back in six months and have another catch up, the world’s moving so quickly.
Harry:
Yeah, that’s really cool, Anton.
Anton:
There’s so much happening. I think if there’s one takeaway for marketers listening, what would you throw out to them?
Harry:
Embrace the change. It’s moving fast. I don’t think AI’s going to take our jobs, but someone who understands AI will. And I know that’s an overused statement, but get familiar, get comfortable and get excited because it’s here and it’s here to stay.
Anton:
It’s here. Yeah, I like that. Let’s get rid of this fear and doom and throwing barbs and jump in … the more people I’m speaking to, same sentiments shining through that it can be difficult to understand or we may not understand at all.
But that was the digital world. You can talk about yourself and a brand marketer decades ago talking digital was difficult, talking AI not easy to the C-suite or to a CEO or to a CFO. Jump in, get experts around you and start testing.
Harry:
Jump in. If you are in marketing, you are passionate about connecting with consumers, this is a brilliant way to be able to do that in an informed way.
Anton:
Awesome, Harry, awesome to chat with you again and catch up and let’s do this in six months.
Harry:
I very much welcome the opportunity to come back. Thank you for the time, mate.
Anton:
Thanks again. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Managing Marketing Podcast, then please either like, review or share it to help spread the words of wisdom.
Thanks again, Harry, speak soon.
