CMO Talks

Fatima Israel joined ITWC CEO & CMO Fawn Annan for an installment of CMO Talks, a podcast series designed by ITWC to showcase strategies for gaining a competitive edge through the intersection of marketing and technology.

Stefano Volpetti of Philip Morris International joined ITWC CEO & CMO Fawn Annan for an installment of CMO Talks, a podcast series designed by ITWC to showcase strategies for gaining a competitive edge through the intersection of marketing and technology.

Vin Turk joined ITWC CEO & CMO Fawn Annan for an installment of CMO Talks, a podcast series designed by ITWC to showcase strategies for gaining a competitive edge through the intersection of marketing and technology.

Christy Marble joined ITWC CMO Fawn Annan for a January 2023 installment of CMO Talks, a podcast series designed by ITWC to showcase strategies for gaining a competitive edge through the intersection of marketing and technology. 

 Steffen Hedebrandt spoke enthusiastically about the importance of knowing the true time to revenue when he joined ITWC's CMO Fawn Annan in November 2022 for an episode of CMO Talks.

Ramanathan has always enjoyed helping marketers take their game to the next level. Priorities have shifted with the pandemic, and the economy may have stalled, but he still judges success by whether customers ask Aventi to extend their initial engagement and take on more work. 

Nagaswamy joined ITWC CMO Fawn Annan in September 2022 for an installment of CMO Talks, a podcast series designed by ITWC to showcase strategies for gaining a competitive edge through the intersection of marketing and technology. Details of his first quarter at Mitel highlight a strong focus on unified communications.

One of the first marketing reporters to cover digital media, Cathy Taylor from WARC joins ITWC CMO Fawn Annan for an episode of CMO Talks. Their lively discussion focuses on meeting the challenges of a future without cookies.

This episode, featuring PandaDoc's CMO, Nate Gilmore, is the age-old story of how David is taking on Goliath in the world of SaaS dynamic documents with a focus in the SMB space. This is also a story of hyper specialization and how you use such a differentiator from a marketing perspective to go from a start up to a super scale up. And don't forget how you are using your technology stack to drive growth.

A customer experience champion focused on building high performance teams, Tangerine's CMO Nicole German joined ITWC's CMO Fawn Annan for an installment of CMO Talks.

Podcasting has become an increasingly effective way to build brand and attract customers. An entrepreneur and revenue leader with a focus on podcast thought leadership, Colgan joined ITWC CMO Fawn Annan for an installment of CMO Talks.

We speak to a marketing maverick, Scott Todaro, co-founder and CMO of a hot three-year-old scale-up, Plannuh Inc., that focuses on marketing budget management that helps CMOs, marketing operations and budget owners connect the dots.

Katherine Bond-Debicki and Nastaran Bisheban have a front row seat to the magic that happens when marketing and technology pull together. Their discussion with Host Fawn Annan centres around the strategic alliance of marketing and technology, and its critical importance in growing KFC in Canada with the new generation of consumers.

Host Fawn Annan talks with Ingrid Burton, Chief Marketing Officer for Quantcast, about the business of global ad tech and why it helps companies do advertising better, as well as the unfolding cookie-less future alongside emergent technologies that are taking more prominent positions in a marketer's success.

As Sugar CRM's Chief Marketing Officer, Clare Dorrian oversees the company's overall integrated marketing strategy. Clare is a storyteller with a passion for people and communications. This episode will explore how Clare shaped her enthusiasm to help reposition SugarCRM as an excellent brand for mid-size companies positioned for growth.

In this episode, we welcome Celia Fleischaker, Chief Marketing Officer at Verint, a nearly $1 billion publicly traded provider of customer engagement software used by 85% of fortune 100 companies and thousands of companies worldwide. Today, we will explore the blending of the CMO role and technology against the backdrop of new, powerful customer engagement tools.

Host Fawn Annan explores “addressable TV,” a relatively new category for reaching a more targeted audience with Cathy Taylor, US Commissioning Editor at WARC.  Ms. Taylor shares information on the growing prominence of addressable and its attractiveness for large to smaller buyers first entering the TV advertising marketplace.

In this episode, we speak to Aaron Ballew, VP, Global Demand Generation for Ping Identity, also known as its Chief Identity Champion. He is a new type of precision-based marketer that thrives on numbers. Aaron holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, so you might ask how he ended up in marketing leading Ping's demand generation business. Aaron is all about the “math” and data to make the right business decisions based on the statistics required to meet sales funnel demand.

Todd Wilson, the Chief Strategist for Red Hat Canada, is a change agent that delivers success through open-source collaboration in partnerships and innovation with Red Hat customers and prospects. This episode explores how Todd envisions leveraging the CMO function to gain pre-sales opportunities in two new markets, the Public Sector and Health. Sharing responsibility for the customer experience is an underlying theme throughout this episode's podcast.

Noah Elkin, Gartner's Co-Chief of Research for Marketing and Communications practice, covers its recently published results for The Gartner Digital Marketing Survey 2021 in this episode. Noah shares the first iteration of Gartner's bi-annual work based on a limited number of longitudinal questions carried over from prior studies. Highlighted are 2019 vs. 2020 marketing challenges with the onset of COVID-19. Most importantly, this work highlights the responsibilities of digital marketing leaders as the world market evolves due to continuous disruption.

This episode features Danny Sachdev from TrueQC, who gets to the heart of quality control when outsourcing lead and demand generation services. TrueQC is a Dubai-based go-between broker, ensuring the client and third-party provider delivers on the promise of top quality leads. This interview begins with the procurement stage of what questions marketers should ask to what you need to review during and after the campaign is executed. Danny leaves no stone unturned covering the good, the bad and the ugly.

Today's episode focuses on the knowledge required to justify procurement decisions for Martech offerings for and through the CMO office. CEO Mike Couch provides insights as a technologist and digital marketer from Couch and Associates. With over 7,000 new marketing tech solutions available, such technology decisions must make every marketing dollar count. Findings must address the business problem and correlate with why you are choosing the solution. A complete decision tree process is outlined with tips and pitfalls when procuring Marketing Technology solutions.

In this episode of CMO Talks, Fawn is joined by two exceptional collaborators weaving digital award-winning campaigns to grow both fan and sponsorship numbers at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. MLSE is a global juggernaut representing some of the best-known teams, such as the Raptors and Toronto Maple Leafs, whose real currency is based on engagement. This fascinating conversation explores how the CTO and CMO professionally blend their highly competent forces to create out-of-the-box experiences that continue to delight all stakeholders. 

On this episode of CMO Talks, we explore intelligent marketing analytics for Retail's future, including the current landscape, with Jon Duke, Vice President of Research, IDC Retail Insights. His most recent global survey covers merchandising, marketing, and analytics solutions and divides the findings into three significant buckets: planning, execution and measurement. Stay tuned and find out why this is a digital journey that is still early in the realm of retailers.

If you ever wanted to know what IBM Canada's emphasis is as they go to market, its CMO, Jay Badiani, does not disappoint in this episode. Jay shares how he is moving the business forward during massive change and how this highly strategic function helps set a new normal for customers and partners. From the CMO's perspective, it's all about helping the customer. His goal is to drive preference for IBM as the Digital Reinvention Partner for enterprises across Canada. Jay covers how to optimize and emerge from a world pandemic as a brighter and more resilient business for the digital future

In this episode of CMO Talks we discuss next moves for CX Services Providers coming out of an explosive 2020 environment with multiple pivots and new strategies required for both the enterprise client and agency services customers. We are joined by Douglas Hayward, worldwide digital strategy and agency services research director, who details the new ways of working on both a vendor and client side and some winning adoptions for client engagement.

CMO Talks is excited to welcome Claudine Dumont, uber Brand Builder at APTUM as the Head of Marcom and Brand. This episode explores how expert communications help to relaunch a legacy brand into a modern entity, incorporating and reflecting its transformative go-to-market changes. From the former Cogeco Peer 1 to rebranding as APTUM after a successful merger and acquisition, Claudine shares the execution journey to onboard employees to customers to shareholders in setting a new table on a new stage with great support from all. 

As marketing leaders earn a more significant share of an organization's promotional budget, they are tasked to take on greater responsibility in the revenue pipeline. This means marketing leaders are continually developing new strategies, capabilities and methods to meet the changing nature of demand building. In this episode, Fawn speaks with Warren Lane, an analyst with IDC's CMO Advisory Services, about digital interaction and customer engagement. Lane brings context to the issue by sharing insights from IDC's 2020 Tech Marketing Benchmark report.

This episode features Jason Rose, Global CMO for Pure Storage.  Jason shares a new disruptive and innovative business model in delivering storage-as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, as he steps us through how marketing is providing a modern data experience by giving customers what they want. Within an ever-evolving model, we also explore the multiple customer personas required to laser-focus on the customer preferences.

Hear Alan Webber share the Worldwide Future of Customer and Consumer 2021 Predictions from IDC. As a leading global analyst, Alan touches on several facets relating to the new business context and its drivers and impacts for marketers over this year. Several new focuses are emerging with being a digital-first organization and entering the advanced stages of digital transformation. Ranging from consumertainment, to new mobile applications that focus on humanizing the digital experience, this episode is chock-full of great insights. 

This week's episode explores how marketers such as Dee Anna McPherson, CMO for Invoca, are building out a very fast-growing category of active conversation intelligence platforms. Dee Ann shares her philosophy and lessons learned on building and scaling technology-based businesses, which is contributing to Invoca holding the #1 spot in this market category.

This episode will delve deeper into IDC's Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer 2021 Predictions with Gerry Murray, a significant contributor to the IDC Future Scape report. Gerry will dive deeper into consumer brands using AI-enabled contextual sentiment and brand equity tied to privacy and trust policies. The year ahead will also witness up to 42% of enterprise marketing applications on the chopping block as large organizations streamline their martech stack. “Digital has become the preferred domain for customer interactions of all kinds…and CMOs must adapt their teams, technology and practices to accommodate accelerating transformations in buyer behaviour.”

This episode explores the business of technology distribution and the power of “smarketing” for not only growing your customer base and ensuring excellent customer experiences. Jennifer Villers, Marketing Head for Ingram Micro Canada, covers a myriad of aspects in her job, from targeting the new opportunities with SMEs to future investments in ecommerce and the collection of intelligence and analysis. Together we explore marketing alignment to the rest of the leadership team, which includes ingenious ways to pivot for building relationships and growth.

In this episode, Fawn takes a look back at some of the highlights of her 2020 podcast interviews, and she takes Lars Goransson, Managing Director with IDC along for the ride. Together they look at recurring lessons that bubbled to the surface around the use of AI, data analytics, and the need to stay focused sharply on the customer experience.

As the future of live events remains unclear, marketers are continuing to scramble for ways to create the connections that generate business relationships. In this episode, Fawn talks with Laurie Buczek, Vice President, CMO Advisory Practice at IDC, about the organization's annual benchmarking survey and a “hybrid” approach many companies are adopting to integrate virtual events into their programs. Are live events dead? Listen to the podcast to find out.

Host Fawn Annan speaks to the CMO of a hot B.C.-based software company that's helping marketing organizations plan strategically and spend efficiently. Julia Stead explains the tools her company offer are not just about managing resources, but also managing the performance of those resources. Integrated directly with an organizations financial system, she says marketers can see the performance of every dollar they spend in real-time. While this may be the “holy grail of marketing” she warns Fawn that people still need to come first. "People make decisions, technology can't do that for us…and I don't see that changing.”   

In this episode host Fawn Annan talks to IDC AI Software research analyst Hayley Sutherland from IDC about AI-powered visual search, as well as speech-to-text software that is improving customer intent and brand sentiment analysis. Hayley shares stories about several promising new technologies that are allowing marketers to take a deeper dive into intelligent insights and the discovery of customers' preferences. She explains how the new precision in measurement is changing the way brand owners are going to market.

In this episode of CMO Talks, host Fawn Annan explores why audible search is making YouTube a hot format for video podcasts. Praised by pundits as game changing for marketers, audible search is providing outstanding recognition of key words from videos that was previously impossible. Digital pioneer Phil Bliss, founder of Perceptible Group, takes Fawn through the mechanics and ROI of using audible search. Visit CMO Talks

In this episode, host Fawn Annan explores why IT service provider marketing specialists should pay attention to their Net Promoter Score as they market into digital transformation initiatives to improve customer satisfaction. Tom Seal, a Senior Program Director for IDC's European Services Group, joins in the discussion, offering his perspective.

Tina Tuli takes host Fawn Annan into the purposeful world of real-time alerts as envisioned by a start-up out of Edmonton, Alberta. Launched globally with enterprise customers in the UK, the US and Canada, Tuli says it is being embraced because it delivers alerts with visuals eight times faster than any other global alert system. SamDesk is in a category so new it has yet to be defined. Articulating a new product class is part of this CMO's go-to-market ploy, describing an IoT solution on an AI platform that uses natural language processing to find catastrophic occurrences such as the Beirut bombing.

In a return visit to the podcast, IDC's Gerry Murray discusses the new tool he predicts CMOs will be using for measurement in the future. He tells host Fawn Annan the Data Promoter Score, or DPS, will ensure marketers maximize their current performance while preparing for the future by focusing on brand equity and buyer behaviour, rather than customer satisfaction. This in-depth discussion covers all the questions you might have in implementing DPS for your company.

CMO Talks host Fawn Annan will explore IDC's recently published report AI StrategiesView 2020 with the guidance of Ritu Jyoti. The conversation will touch on global adoption levels of artificial intelligence and trends among technology buyers. Ritu will explain why delivering a better customer experience was identified as the leading driver for AI adoption by more than half the large companies surveyed, but a similar number of respondents indicated that AI's most significant impact is in helping employees get better at their jobs. The duo will discuss the challenges of building and deploying trustworthy and ethical AI, and why it remains critical for the CMO role using AI and Machine learning. 

CMO Talks discusses funding customer-centric strategies for new ventures with Bev Altberg, Executive Vice President for the Chandaria Family Holdings which is one of the largest and earliest private investors in the Blackberry Partners Fund. Investments cover a range of industries from consumer packaging goods, to cannabis and other consumable sectors. Technology and a consultative approach help execute a going to market formula in building new brands' values. Emphasis is always placed on great interaction with the customers' best interest in mind.

CMO Talks features Steve White, IDC's Program Vice President for the Channels and Alliances Team who will cover in-depth issues around strategic alliance investments for the partner ecosystem within the current Canadian channel marketing landscape. The discussion covers MDF funding and portal strategies for both large and smaller channel marketers with insights in how they can receive better vendor support for their marketing programs.

As more companies embrace Artificial Intelligence to get the most from their data, it's important to ensure the information that's analyzed is trustworthy and free of bias. In this episode Orchid Jahanshahi shares how bias has led to concerns in the financial industry and healthcare, but how the development of a new trust index will give both industry and governments renewed confidence in the AI processes they use.

As companies increasingly turn to apps as a way to engage customers and drive collaboration and efficiency with their own staff, CMOs should be involved from the design prototyping stage to its release. In this episode, Peter Marston tells Fawn Annan that CMOs offer a 360 -degree view of the client that is critical to the success or failure of the app initiative. Join Fawn and Peter as they exploret he best practices in prototyping mobile app development and the unexpected ways marketers can influence the process and the business goals the apps seek to achieve. Visit CMO Talks

In the latest episode of CMO Talks, host Fawn Annan speaks with Pouneh Hanafi, VP Marketing at Tulip, a cloud-based software provider focused on mobile solutions for retail stores. In that conversation, they talk about how to view customers' preferences through their data and how companies must use that data to tailor their offerings - especially online. While supporting data analytics and automation to develop the experience, Hanafi also preaches on the value of consumer webchats and video chats as customers look for more human interaction.

When budgets get tight, CEO's often look to cut marketing budgets. That's one reason why IDC's Karsten Weide, Program Vice President, Media & Entertainment, tells host Fawn Annan the push for automation in advertising is huge. Where once 85 per cent of marketing was a directed spend, now 85 per cent is automated. Weide explains how the pressure on marketing to deliver more with less spurs on the use of data to target and retarget consumers – occasionally  brushing against social norms when it comes to privacy. The pair also discuss the uneven impact of COVID-19 on various media and the impact of  voice-based assistance and mainstream augmented reality that are just a few years down the road. With no display and no keyboard, what's going to happen to advertising?

In the latest CMO Talks, ITWC CMO Fawn Annan and Kira Systems CMO Vinay Nair discuss the importance of AI and machine learning (ML) to sales and marketing. Nair talks about how emerging tech is helping companies deliver the most impactful messages, and how AI and ML are swiftly moving from great ideas to practical tools for success.

In an age where technology allows anyone with a good idea and an Internet cable to become your next competitor, how do ensure superior customer experience? ITWC CMO Fawn Annan discusses how a “good experience” has overtaken price or product as a key focal point in transactions. They also explore how AI and mobility are enabling a more frictionless experience.

ITWC CMO Fawn Annan and Wipro Canada's global marketing leader discuss the challenges and opportunities of working as a CMO in a global matrix organization. The pair also touch on marketing in the age of COVID-19 and the role of CMO as “guiding light”, the driver of change, and the connector of dots to ensure an organization does not become siloed.