Don’t be dull. B2B different

with Joerg Klueckmann

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcriptions service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes.00:03
Dom Hawes

Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. This is a podcast about the business of marketing. How to create value, who's doing it well, and how you can help your business win the future. Have you heard of Misophonia? It's a disorder in which certain sounds trigger extreme emotional or physiological responses that others perceive as unreasonable. I have it. One of my triggers is the sound of an apple being eaten. I feel unreasonably violent when someone eats an apple near me. Crisp packets, popcorn, and mobile phones on speaker have the same effect. But recently, it's not just sounds that are triggering emotional responses in me. Phrases are starting to do it too. Data driven decision making is a phrase that makes me reach for the nearest shop object.

00:56
Dom Hawes
Sales and marketing alignment makes me want to run away and work in a beach bar. And on the agency side, OOH rate card makes me rich. What happened to the magic in marketing? What happened to creative leadership? Are we really doomed to a dystopian destiny driven by data and auditor like Marketers? Bring me the mavericks. Show me the things I can't comprehend. Wow me with lateral thinking and nonlinear results. That's how I feel, and it's why we're in the studio today. We were speaking today's guest about our dilemma, and while were shooting the breeze, he said,

01:39
Joerg Klueckmann
So many organisations are drowning in a sea of sameness.

01:42
Dom Hawes
And that really resonated with me. I mean, it did it immediately. And then he said,

01:47
Joerg Klueckmann
Would it be good if a CMO came with a creative vision?

01:49
Dom Hawes
And I knew at that stage I absolutely had to get him in the studio. So here we are with a podcast about how creative vision can drive performance forward looking businesses. In a few moments, you are going to meet Joerg Klueckmann, head of marketing at the world's largest financial technology company. Finastra started his career in tech, working for the gorilla in the e commerce space around the millennium, a business called Intershop. And you know what? I remember them well. They were the first standard for Ecommerce, and they are still going today. Sadly, Shopify has taken the market, but, man, I remember them. They were great. Anyway, Joerg spent the next 15 years working through product marketing to product management through gotomarket and brand management, ending up as VP demand generation at Software AG. You're going to love our conversation.

02:39
Dom Hawes
So let's go to the studio right now and meet Joerg. Hey, thank you very much for coming in, and welcome to the Unicorny Project.

02:46
Joerg Klueckmann
Thanks for having me, Dom. Happy to be here.

02:48
Dom Hawes
There aren't many people I speak to in this studio that come from a product background, and I think product marketing, even in technology, is way overlooked these days. You know, we find a lot of people who come into marketing on the lead gen or demand gen side and stay there through that. And through your Cloud GTM experience. You've got product, you've got price, you've got place. And now, obviously, the Growth Marketing promotion comes more to the fore.

03:09
Joerg Klueckmann
And Dom, you're spot on. I think it's super helpful to start a product. Because you need to understand what you sell. If you don't have that understanding, you will struggle to identify market segments. GEOS personas, messaging. So you need to understand what are the pain points we solve with our tech? And I think it's a great starting point for a marketing career coming from product, understanding how value is being created, how problems are being solved on the customer side, I think it's absolutely keyB2Be a good marketer. What sets organizations apart is product. And that's one thing I also like about the take. That Vista, the private equity who owns Rich owns Finastra. What I like about Vista is they put product in the focus. So product and development is the most important thing for a B2B tech company.

03:57
Joerg Klueckmann
Because if your product is bad, you can have the best marketing, the best sales in the world. The company will fail. They have a great product. A really good product. Your marketing cannot be as good. Your sales cannot be as good. It will still be successful because the product is key. So me saying that as a marketer is a bit hard. But I believe product is absolutely key. And everybody that goes to an organization or joins an organization should go through intense product training.

04:18
Dom Hawes
I think that should be a prerequisite. But I think also the discipline that you learn as a product marketer when you're looking at feature sets, when you're looking at how you're going to wrap a product and how you're going to package it and take it to market, I think that leads you into another level of understanding that those who adjust in lead gen maybe don't have. For example, what is your customers compelling reason to Buy your product at whatever stage of the lifecycle they're at? And I don't think many marketers think like that these days.

04:42
Joerg Klueckmann
You're Right.

04:43
Dom Hawes
When were in our warm up call before this podcast, you said, wouldn't it be great if a CMO came into role with a creative vision for the business? Can you help me understand? Define creative vision. And the way you said it felt like you feel that. That's absent from today's market. So what's a creative vision? And when did you first feel that it was lacking?

05:03
Joerg Klueckmann
I can be very concrete. There was a situation not too long ago where I clicked on an ad from a competitor because I thought it's ours. I was a little bit shocked because I could swear it's one from the company I was working for back in the days really made me think And I looked at the post and I saw that the colors were pretty similar back in the days. It was light blue. Everybody had light blue. The imagery was pretty replaceable. Stock photography, a man and a woman sitting at a desk laughing, having a laptop in front of them. The copy was very similar. So I looked at it and it became very obvious to me that we are not on the right way in marketing. We do a lot of A B testing, we do a lot of data driven decisions.

05:48
Joerg Klueckmann
But over time this led to the Sea of Sameness.

05:51
Dom Hawes
The distinctiveness then that you're striving for. Is that because it's easy to copy? Or is that because everyone knows you are successful and wants to emulate that?

05:59
Joerg Klueckmann
I think it's both. But there are more reasons to it. I believe the major reason is it's very easy to kill a crazy idea these days. If you get into a meeting with senior executives and you want to discuss an idea that might be a bit different, could be a content format, could be creative, could be text. That is different. It will be provocative because it's different and it's easy to shut it down. It's really easy to shut it down. Also, innovation projects. People can ask a question how many marketing qualified leads will it bring? How much pipeline will you source with it? And you probably can't tell because it's an innovation. You don't know. You can make stuff up, but then people say, oh, you just made it up. Prove it with data.

06:38
Joerg Klueckmann
How would you have the data to prove it if it's a new idea? So I think what happened over time is marketing started as an art. When I started my career said 2000 at Intershop, marketing was an art. You could do creative stuff, you could do crazy stuff. There was less talk about data and performance, which I mean, it was the other side of the extreme. I don't want this word back, don't get me wrong. But over time, this art really turned into science. And I see it in my own career. Over time, I spend more and more time in performance reviews, marketing performance, campaign performance reviews and quarterly business reviews. Talking about conversion from MCL to Mel to MQL to SS one to SS two. SS two value all that good stuff, right? And it's good because it's database decisions.

07:23
Joerg Klueckmann
You got to do it. But over time, I think this led to the fact that the innovation and the creative part kind of disappeared almost because this is stuff you can't really measure. You can't measure how creative is this? You can't base that on data. And yeah, that led to many companies doing the same thing.

07:41
Dom Hawes
The audit mindset is really important if you're an auditor. Doesn't really help you much if you're a marketer and all you're doing is looking backwards trying to analyze data. And I get what you mean about that sort of sea of sameness, that there are many businesses, you cannot identify them from their communication online. It's impossible. So how do you think marketers can incorporate a creative vision into their strategy then without alienating those stakeholders? Anything that's done by committee is always dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. It can't just be about braveness.

08:10
Joerg Klueckmann
Well, Dom, the way I do it is I have my budget and I have my team, right? Best team I ever had. Really mean it, right, really great people. And what I do is I reserve a certain percentage for innovation. I should probably not use the word, but I'll do. It's the playground where we say we test stuff. And it could be something like Finastra TV that we launched our own streaming channel, I believe. I talk about it later a bit. Or could be some new creative or new content format we're going to play with. So they really say, we have that budget available. And this is the test balloon. This is where we try new stuff and we see if it works or not.

08:46
Joerg Klueckmann
The important thing is if I say we see if it works or not, is how much time do you give? You need to make sure you give an innovation enough time to flourish. Because if you kill it too soon, right. You will never know if it would have been successful or not. So you need to understand, okay, I give it a year or two or three years to redecide if it's successful or not. If it's not successful, you got to be bold enough to kill it and to try something else. But you have to give it a time.

09:07
Dom Hawes
That experimentation mindset should be a core part of a marketer's arsenal.

09:12
Joerg Klueckmann
And it is, but more on a micro level these days. So we do this experimentation with AB, testings and campaigns with media activation, all that. We do that, right, with creative attacks and all that.

09:23
Dom Hawes
But that's micro, as you say, it's micro.

09:25
Joerg Klueckmann
Exactly. It's not on the strategic level. On the strategic level, I don't see that happening too often. And I think what a CMO has to have in mind, at least in my definition of a CMO, is what's the next big thing for us? And US is not marketing, us is the company. And this relates back to the understanding of products and roadmap and markets. So the CMO needs to understand this is the next big thing. That's the next tech, that's all big, bad. And then that person needs to think about what can we do to make that stick out? What can we do to cut through that noise to be seen in the sea of sameness? What is that can be channel, could be media format, could be a provocative statement. But I think this needs to come back.

10:06
Joerg Klueckmann
Marketers need to think, how can we differentiate? How can we be unique? And I think not everybody is there yet.

10:12
Dom Hawes
Can you think of companies whose work you admire creatively in the bB2B space.

10:18
Joerg Klueckmann
Well, I like the stuff that Monday.com and ClickUp are doing. It's WorkOS platforms or task management platforms. Very creative, very different. Also, if you see a Monday.com booth at the big conference, you'll see it's Monday. It always looks a bit crazy, but I mean, those are SaaS companies, almost like I mean, I wouldn't say Monday is a startup anymore. They are public, so it's a big company. But you can tell they carried some startup mindset over.

10:43
Dom Hawes
How do you think a big creative vision translates into metrics? I'm in kind of Benetton field territory here. The long and the short of it. There's a lot of evidence now that brand campaigns, brand marketing has an immediate impact on short term objectives. Do you think that applies in B, two B as well as it does in B to C?

11:01
Joerg Klueckmann
Yes, I think so. If you find a way to cut through the noise to be seen, I believe it will have a positive impact on your top of funnel metrics. Could be metrics to measure in your social media engagement, could be website traffic. Also, if you measure advocacy, metrics in your organization could have an impact there as well. I mean, ultimately it all comes back to the point do something that creates awareness, where people say, oh, I want to understand what that is. But then you need to make sure that the positive impact on top of funnel metrics translate down to middle of funnel and bottom of funnel. And again, this goes back what we said in the beginning.

11:36
Joerg Klueckmann
Don't just start with coming up with a crazy cool idea and something that looks different, where people say, oh wow, I want to figure out what it is, and then it breaks. Then you need to be able to understand, okay, this person comes from a certain segment, it's part of a certain cam constraint. Addressable market is relevant for my organization. What's the pain point the person might be facing? What's our solution to that pain point? And move that prospect into a right campaign bucket demand chain talking now. Yeah. So it's too short to say let's just do the crazy stuff. Let's just go to the playground and do something what marketing likes. It needs to be the big thing for the business that needs to be integrated. The great crazy idea needs to be integrated with sellable products.

12:16
Dom Hawes
Yeah, I love that. The link, as you move down the funnel, really understanding how you're changing the opinion in the minds of your prospects. You may have heard Daniel Priestley. Actually, the week before last, he had a really nice way of phrasing that. Which was when he communicates, when he's pitching in his verbiage, he asks himself the following question what do I want the people I'm communicating with to think differently about when they go to bed tonight than they did when they woke up this morning. And I think kind of if we always have that front of mind, the thought what are we trying to change or how am I going to change that in this particular communication? You can probably then thread everything together, can't you?

12:51
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, it's a good way of saying it.

12:53
Dom Hawes
So it's one thing for a small startup or a nimble business that it's in the early stage of its life to have a creative vision and then work it. But when you are the biggest financial technology business in the world, that comes with an enormous amount of complexity. So then with a creative vision, how do you make sure that vision permeates through the teams? Because also a lot of marketing is done by people without marketing in their job title these days.

13:19
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, it's a good question because you can have the best vision. If it's not being executed, it's completely pointless. So execution is absolutely key. The way I do it, we use a platform called ClickUp, which you just talked about. It's a task management software SaaS product. Can really recommend. It similar to Money, which I worked in the past. What I do in ClickUp is I build the Eisenhower Time Management metrics out for my team members, for my direct reports. Is it important and is it end urgent? Do it now. Is it important? Not urgent. Schedule it. If you don't know it, Google it. It sounds pretty simple, but it's really good way to manage tasks. And this is how my team and I manage our tasks. And we use that metrics, we go through it and categorize tasks and prioritize them.

14:06
Joerg Klueckmann
So we are always on the page who needs to do what until when. And they do it with their teams as well. So this is kind of like a technical tool that really helps us with that. But ultimately the way I break it down is I try to formulate a marketing strategy for the next year for the different functions I run. This strategy is then being discussed with our four different business units lending, Payment, treasury and Capital, Market and Universal Banking. They look into that, they approve stuff, they disapprove stuff, they add stuff, they take stuff out so that everybody understands what's our marketing strategy and then what adds some complexity to that. We obviously have kind of a company layer finastra with some umbrella campaigns. Finance is open is our big mantra.

14:48
Joerg Klueckmann
So we are one of the front runners for that finance soap movement. But as said earlier, this should not just stay on the umbrella level. It needs to be integrated with the campaigns from the business units. And that's why we make that connection from awareness to demand gen long answer to summarize that yearly strategy where we understand, okay, what are the key campaigns from the business units, what are the markets, what are the personas, what's messaging we share, what we plan to do in central, what's the tech we're going to add? What umbrella campaigns do we're going to run? Do we onboard new agencies or not? What are new services we can add like intent based marketing, something like that. Then we bring all of that together and then we make it operational by managing our tasks in ClickUp.

15:31
Dom Hawes
And is your instance then, if it's being managed through ClickUp, that's kind of where you're managing your playbooks. Is that the whole of the marketing organization? Everyone has access? And is everyone also putting all of their campaigns in or is that something where the content is centrally driven?

15:45
Joerg Klueckmann
The name for ClickUp is our central go to market control tower. It's kind of like two purposes. One is task management, the other one is really to have a consistent view on our go to market. As said, our structure is pretty sophisticated with four different business units and then the horizontal layer. So we need to understand who is planning what when, where, because we need to avoid conflicting campaigns. It could be that there's a lending campaign and a payments campaign going after the same persona at the same time and we have to avoid that. So that's why we need that control tower and we need to run impact analysis to see is there a problem or not. When I started my career again, going back in the days, you would have like 20 different PowerPoints describing marketing plans.

16:29
Joerg Klueckmann
Those PowerPoints would be outdated the next day when they were created. You wouldn't find them anymore these days because they either in SharePoint or you store them somewhere else. Right. It would be a mess to say, show me which campaigns are running in Asia Pacific in Q. Two for a certain product would take you weeks to find it out. Once you found it's outdated, that's a nice thing. With a tool like ClickUp or Monday, whatever it is, you just create your dashboards and your filters and everybody adds in the content. I mean, this is absolutely mandatory. Then you see with a click of a button what's going on.

16:58
Dom Hawes
Yeah, I think it's really interesting the way productivity tools have come on and SharePoint, as you say, it's impossible to try and manage any kind of activation activity which is actually just a file server mentality ported into the cloud. But when it's task led, it makes a great deal more.

17:13
Joerg Klueckmann
Absolutely. I started to work with money, I believe now five years ago, six years ago, and it was eye opening for me. I played with that with a free trial and thought about what I can do with it with my team and I implemented that at Software AG back in the days was the largest money implementation in Germany and the full marketing team ran on it. And what was really a sheer beauty was to see how people discovered after some time the value such a tool adds. In the beginning they would be hesitant, oh, we do that in spreadsheet, right? Oh, we do it in PowerPoint, we don't need it. But if you put all your tasks in a repository, you put some reports on top.

17:51
Joerg Klueckmann
It does not just help youB2Better organized yourself, it also helps you to visualize the work you do. Because you can put dashboards on top and show, oh, those are the number of activities I did for the business unit A or business unit B or for that campaign. Look at all the things I'm doing. It helps you to show what you're actually doing and it's not even talking about cross team collaboration. So I could not think of an organization, modern marketing organization, distributed virtual marketing organization such as mine, functioning without a tool like that, could not see it.

18:25
Dom Hawes
I'm sure the Sea of Sameness Jerk describes will be no stranger to you. I started today's show with a little rant about my mizophonia, or more particularly the phrases that make my teeth itch. I mentioned that sales and marketing alignment is one of them and I know I'm going to get some flak for that. So let me explain. Marketing and sales should only come into contact when a great deal of marketing has already taken place. There's a really good infographic from a group called the Proper Marketing Club that's been doing the rounds on LinkedIn for about a year now, and I'm going to put that graphic or a link to it in the show notes. Anyway, it visualizes marketing as a journey with three starting points. One is marked many businesses start here and the starting point is product.

19:08
Dom Hawes
One is marked most marketers start here and the starting point is promotion. The last is marked proper marketing starts here and the starting point is market orientation. In between the proper starting point and promotion is where most of the marketing takes place. Things like research, segmentation targeting, competitor analysis, positioning and more. Right at the end of the marketing process, that's where you find promotion. And that's the bit that bumps into sales. And by the way, it's only misaligned if the previous work hasn't been done and your sales leaders haven't been brought into that process. The sea of Sameness I'm seeing in the market today is the same I saw in the again in the early 2010s. It's what happens when marketing, or I should say the business, focuses marketing on promotion and features.

20:02
Dom Hawes
Coming up Joerg blows me away when he talks about Finastra TV. It is an incredible story and while you may be thinking, yeah, but we haven't got the budget for that kind of thing, follow the thought process, not the output. You may not be able to start your own TV channel, it might not even be right for your market. But follow the process, not the output and you might come up with some interesting ideas because you know best how to target and position in your market. Especially if you've done your research. You know how successful your promotional communication will be ahead of time because you understand the personas you're marketing to. And if you've included your sales leaders in the process, alignment comes bundled.

20:44
Dom Hawes
Now, before speaking about Finaster TV, I wanted to pick up on the trend we first encountered with Andrea Clatworthy when we talked about is marketing transformation the next big thing? So one of the things, when we had our chat online before this, that really struck me is that you're implementing a trend that I've seen in a couple of enterprise businesses at the moment, where you're both centralizing and decentralizing at the same time. We're calling this on the Uniquardi project, the big marketing transformation. It's new, I think, and it's enabled by exactly this kind of technology, where the brand and the core corporate messages are controlled quite tightly from using a control tower type. But you're decentralizing loads of the decision making for your GTM into the divisions or geographies or however your matrix is working. And I think it's an interesting trend, this.

21:34
Joerg Klueckmann
It absolutely is. I've seen a few companies now these days that I worked for in the past that are doing the same thing and I think it's the right thing to do. At Finastra, the reason for breaking into the full business unit wasB2Bundle everybody that needs to have domain expertise for a certain topic. Lending treasury universal Banking payments. I mentioned it. So if you're in the business unit, you have to have the payments or lending domain expertise. You need to understand the market, the trend, the tech, all that. Now, horizontally, we also have domain expertise, but not for payments and lending. We have domain expertise for buying media, for campaign execution, for creative on howB2Build a brand, how to have a great digital user experience on our web entities, the tech stack, right? What capabilities do we need to add?

22:20
Joerg Klueckmann
Do we have redundant capabilities that we could phase out? So this is the domain we are having. So ultimately, it's a metrics of a product. Again, coming back to product domain knowledge in the bu and marketing domain expertise horizontally across the bun. I think it's a superior model, for sure. But if you have that model, it comes with a certain complexity that you have to manage. And that's why you're absolutely right. You need tools like that. There's another complexity layer I need to add. So I hate to do it, but I'm German and we have to add complexity all the time. It's the post COVID, virtual distributed team management thing. So my team is distributed across the globe. I got a big population in Manila, so if you hear that, Hello, Team Manila.

23:01
Joerg Klueckmann
I have a population or a team in Bucharest, in Romania, then obviously here in London in Paddington, then I have team members in the US. Funnily enough, nobody in Germany. But it's a very distributed team. And the only way to keep that together is through teams. Ms teams helps a lot, but task focus collaboration in ClickUp on Monday task management platform, otherwise it wouldn't work.

23:24
Dom Hawes
Are you running your team effectively as an internal agency? Like the old model might have been, that you'd have generalist marketers in house and you bring specialist agencies into support as you need them. But part of the marketing transformation we're seeing is like the activation works being done in some of these enterprise businesses we're talkingB2By an internal agency. So the stuff you'd normally put an agency on a rate card for, like, why put them on a rate card? Get that stuff done internally? Is that a direction you guys are going in?

23:49
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, you could say we are an internal agency. You could say we are the best fintech marketing agency on the planet. Of course, right? Being in finastera. No, it's exactly the way you could see it. We are an internal agency and the business units, or friends from the business units come to us when they say, hey, we have, I don't know, let's say a product launch or a campaign we want to run. We understand what the personas are, we understand what messaging is, we understand what the content is. Let's discuss what would be a good execution strategy. What are the channels we should go after? What should be the cadence? What should the budget be? What should be the metrics we're going to measure? And coming back to a creative vision?

24:27
Joerg Klueckmann
What could be a creative or a format or a channel that sets that apart, that makes that stick out? What is that? It's probably not the 20th getty image that you use. It's probably something else. But then again, being horizontal, you have to tie that together. You got to make sure that over time, the four B used don't do completely different stuff. That's not completely crazy. It still needsB2Be consistent. If you look at your LinkedIn feed. But that's exactly the way how it runs right now.

24:53
Dom Hawes
Let's talk about data. The implication with drowning in a sea of sameness and yearning for creative vision. And we mentioned it a little bit at the beginning that we've slightly lost our way and we're slightly over focusing on data. And by definition, data is almost always backward looking. There's no leading indicator side to it. What do you think the risks companies run are if they focus too heavily on data and not enough on creative intuition?

25:17
Joerg Klueckmann
So, I mean, don't get me wrong, I think data is important these days. You can't do marketing without data. You need to prove value. I'm a big advocate of data. We have a CMO dashboard where we measure our top ten right now, top ten metrics for top of funnel. Then we have our top six metrics, middle of funnel, and top four metrics bottom of funnel. We measure all that conversions, all super transparent. Of course. But if you limit your added value as a marketing lead, as a marketing executive and organization, on managing the data and interpreting the data, I think you miss a trick. I think marketing still has the task to do something creative that sets an organization apart. Because if marketing is not doing it, who would do it? The CFO wouldn't do it. The COO wouldn't do it.

26:04
Joerg Klueckmann
The CRO wouldn't do it. Nobody would do it. It's the task of marketing. And that's kind of the I'm not sure if conflict is the right word, but the conflict of a data driven marketing function and a creative take to it, because creative part, as said earlier, might come with some risk. It might not work because it's too different. People can shoot it down in a second, saying, hey, how much pipeline you're going to generate with building your own streaming channel? I don't know. Nobody has done it before. Or if you don't know, we kill it. Yeah. So I believe with the focus, like the 200% focus on data over time, it killed slowly, creativity.

26:39
Joerg Klueckmann
And also what I'm seeing is a lot of the creative teams I'm seeing in some of the companies I worked for, a lot of those jobs were almost outsourced to pretty junior designers that would be limited to, hey, here's a template, here's a picture database. Bring something together, something like a creative mastermind. I don't see that too often in organizations anymore. They probably got cut over time.

27:04
Dom Hawes
I definitely want to talk about an awesome creative vision, which is Finastra TV. Like, how on earth does a financial technology company decide it's going to create its own TV channel?

27:13
Joerg Klueckmann
It all started, obviously through pandemic, and it started what I said earlier. I clicked on an ad from a competitor, and I said, it's got to stop. We got to do something different. So we got a few smart people in the room. We discussed, hey, what could we do to tell our stories better than we do today? And in the past, we told our stories in I don't ebooks and white papers and fun story. When I joined Finastra, I downloaded like 1020 white papers to read through it, to prep myself. And I'm now there for two and a half years, still didn't finish white paper one, because my attention span is like a minute for half a page. I pass out. I can't digest it anymore. So he said, well, it's probably not written text. It's probably video. Let's go.

27:52
Joerg Klueckmann
The way that Disney went to tell stories, let's make videos. Let's really bet on video content to tell stories from our customers, from our ESG initiatives like financial inclusion or fighting bias or financial education. Let's do that. And I said, all right, let's do it. Let's put 10% of the innovation budget on videos. But then the next question came up. Where do we host those videos? And everyone said, of course, YouTube, of course you put it on YouTube. And then went to our YouTube channel and we just played it through and see how the customer journey felt like. And obviously you got ads, then you got a promotion from videos from competitors. Then you got distracted by other videos that were featuring cat content, which I can't hesitate to click.

28:36
Joerg Klueckmann
And after some time I said, I'm not sure if this is the right platform to almost waste the cool video we're going to produce. Why don't we build the Netflix for the financial services industry? Why don't we build a streaming channel that brings together thought leaders from Payments, Lending, Treasury, Universal Banking? We said, okay, let's do that. We looked around a bit. If there's a packaged application, there wasn't, so we hadB2Build it ourselves. We run on Drupal, so we did that with the help of an agency and we built the channel out. So what's the benefit of the channel? The benefit is we can place first party cookies because it's our digital entity big advantage with the death of the third party cookie whenever it will happen.

29:17
Joerg Klueckmann
So major advantage, second advantage is we control the digital user experience and we can integrate it with our corporate website, which also runs in Drupal. Give you an example, we see that somebody comes, or somebody comes on Finastra TV, watches a video on green Lending, then goes to our website. We understand that person based on the cookie, has an interest in green lending, comes to the homepage, we'll find more information on green Lending or vice versa. Starting from the website. Maybe the payment section goes to Finastra TV. We feature payments videos. So that's the nice part of the integration. And what we could also do, and I really love the way that turned out, is we said we have our streaming channel and we're going to function like Netflix. We're going to produce different series, payment, Lending, treasury, et cetera.

30:02
Joerg Klueckmann
Each series will feature around ten episodes. Episodes should not be longer than 2025 minutes because of the attention span issue I'm facing. If we have speakers that are a little less entertaining, we do a little bit more with like illustrations and play a little bit with data, do that kind of stuff so you can watch the different episodes. When we promote content, we start the promotion on the serious level, like the landing series, similar to Stranger Things or Breaking Bad. Then we promote the individual episodes, episode one, two, three or four. And then we zoom into an episode and take Snippets out and promote that. And what we are trying to do is each year to launch another season. So it's Lending season two, payment season two, et cetera. So that worked out quite nicely. A big benefit of the platform as well.

30:46
Joerg Klueckmann
And then I shut I promise.

30:48
Dom Hawes
No, no, keep going.

30:49
Joerg Klueckmann
If you register for like, you can watch two or three videos for free. Then you got to register. But you don't register for webinar. You don't register for a single video. You register for the channel. Like with Netflix, all the content unlocks. And that means with each episode, with each series we add, you get actually more incentive to sign up because you get access to all the great content.

31:11
Dom Hawes
My mind is literally blown. There are so many you might have seen me writing notes. There are so many things hitting my mind here, one of which is and I hope the people are responsible, listening. So back in the day in 2008, 2009, I was tryingB2Build a cloud product based on Drupal to allow businesses to create their own TV channel.

31:29
Joerg Klueckmann
Is that true?

31:30
Dom Hawes
Using Brightcove as our CDN?

31:33
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah, dom, we have Bright Cove is our streaming.

31:36
Dom Hawes
Okay? So we had this vision to create this thing called Cloud Channel, which would allow anyone to create a TV channel. And you know what? No one's done it until you've mentioned, I've gone all tingly all over. But what you're doing, I think, is A, amazing talk about a creative vision that's B and C is like, properly the future. Nuts and bolts, though. When you create a season now, do you drop them as a box set like they do on Netflix, or do you schedule them over weeks?

32:00
Joerg Klueckmann
Both. If we launch a series, it needs to have ten episodes, and that's quite an effort to produce that. If we do that, then it's launched as a new season. But what's happening in between very often is we have a great event and we have a great customer there, and we say, all right, we use opportunity. We'll film the customer there, we launch an episode, and we might add it to an existing series if the content fits, and then we promote it. One mistake we did in the past, we said, all right, we have a big event. Let's just use it. Let's build up three or four cameras. Let's film people on stage. Let's use the content, put it on Finastra TV.

32:33
Joerg Klueckmann
It didn't work particularly well because those presentations were delivered to people sitting in a room that couldn't leave, and it would be on for, like seriously, such.

32:43
Dom Hawes
A great observation there. If you've got a trapped audience. Yeah, you don't haveB2Be particularly honest.

32:49
Joerg Klueckmann
It's absolutely that if you got 45 minutes, it take 45 minutes, even if it just takes five minutes. What you actually wanted to say. It's like with those American business books very often, where you could say, okay, everything I need to know, you could put on three pages. But there are so many examples that it fills a big book that you spend money for that it's similar. So we put the content on Finastra TV. Engagement was super low. Super low. We saw that people were tuning out or closing the player after a few minutes. Because it was a person running around the stage talking stuff, not coming to the point. So we don't do that anymore. What we do is we use events as a vehicle. We say, all right, we have 1015 great speakers. There internal, externals, customer, whatever, thought leaders.

33:27
Joerg Klueckmann
We build up a studio and we say, the presentation you just held on stage, 45 minutes. Please do it in 15 minutes or 20 minutes. And what I find super interesting is for most of the speakers, it's a relief because they say, you know what, I have to make all that stuff up to fill 45 minutes. I don't need that much time. And then they talk, maybe just ten minutes. But it's super engaging because it's straight to the point. It's very direct, and they understand nobody has time, so it needsB2Be condensed. And this is it. That works.

33:56
Dom Hawes
And this is what we do these days, production values. Right now, it looks like a TV channel. Obviously, the output is super professional. Was it always like that, or did you start with minimum viable broadcast, if you like, and then iterate from there?

34:09
Joerg Klueckmann
No, we said we do high quality video production. There was a discussion, do we do like, very authentic iPhone style videos? But we said, no, let's tell great stories with proper production. We also have a proper production company, if I may mention them, corridge Media really great. Hello, Lloyd. If you listen to that. So they help us with the production. They do really good jobs, great audio quality, great video quality, great post processing. So we said, no, it needsB2Be good quality.

34:35
Dom Hawes
So through the launch of that channel, you've done something very different. You've managed to claim a lot of attention over a season. Do you see a decay rate, or are you finding you're keeping people consistently engaged?

34:46
Joerg Klueckmann
You see that over time, you see that when you launch a series, you get a lot of interest. Over time, it goes down. And what we do is we look at stats, we look at consumption data, and then we make decisions. What content should be produced next? And again, it's pretty similar to what Netflix is doing. They see, oh, Stranger Things work particularly well, or Breaking Bad, maybe you should launch season two or three or five or six. So we function pretty similar. We look at what content was consumed, and then we try to produce more content that is relevant for our audience. But one of the biggest challenges we face is actually attention span. And not attention span in the sense of how long can I digest a video?

35:27
Joerg Klueckmann
But internal attention span for launching such a channel, because once you launched it, everybody's very excited about it. Oh, there's a new thing. It's so great. And then over time becomes commodity. And then people are like, oh, yeah. Finastra TV. What's the next thing we're going to do? It's the same if I look back in my career, it was always the same. When you launched like a corporate blog, everybody's like, oh, I write content. After a year, nobody would write anymore. So it's very important to do your media planning, your production planning a year or probably one and a half years ahead to make sure you schedule that and to keep that going. Because the most important thing for the success of such a channel is consistent content releases.

36:04
Dom Hawes
Same for podcasts, actually, as well. Absolutely same. You build your audience over time. There is no quick fix.

36:10
Joerg Klueckmann
Yeah. And it won't work if you say, oh, I launched a series now and then, I don't do anything for the next two years, and then I launch something again.

36:17
Dom Hawes
Yeah, we tried that, it didn't work.

36:20
Joerg Klueckmann
Okay, confirmation. Very good.

36:21
Dom Hawes
So look, it feels weird talking about the future when we've just been discussing it, but it is that time of the show now where we ask our guests to look forward, and we like to phrase that around a quick and dirty pest analysis. So I'm going to ask you to think about the future, particularly as it pertains to senior executives and particularly as it pertains to senior executives in marketing. With today's conversation as a lens, what advice would you give to marketers who want to capture a creative vision for their own businesses in the next twelve to 18 months? Like, where do they start?

36:52
Joerg Klueckmann
Make sure you understand what you market. Right? So that's kind of the foundation. Look what the competition is doing. Understand why there is the seam of sameness, what's the same stuff that everybody is doing, and then derive what you could do differently. And that can be many things. It could be a channel, it could be a form, it could be text, it could be a provocative statement. But make sure you spend enough time on your creative vision to formulate that. And you don't need to do that for each and every campaign, but for your flagship campaigns, for your big umbrella campaigns, make sure you do that. And one thing I learned in the past, when you work on a campaign, that's pretty detailed now, but when you work on a campaign, you work on the assets and the activation channels and all that.

37:31
Joerg Klueckmann
Make sure you spend enough time with the creative team on the creative concept for the campaign. What's the creative concept for the campaign? What are the visuals we're going to use? It's goingB2Be illustration. Is it goingB2Be pictures? Are there certain colors we're going to use? What's the creative concept of a campaign? And very often in B, two B marketing. This is kind of like dropped. Just make a ticket for the design team. Oh, I need a creative for LinkedIn that promotes a white paper and then they do something.

37:56
Dom Hawes
It's a stock image out of Getty, isn't it? I'm guilty if you're lucky, it's getty if you're lucky. If you're lucky. Yeah, it's probably one of the free ones. Yeah. Well, what a show. I don't know if you could feel the energy and enthusiasm as we started getting into the meat of the show today, but oh my God, I absolutely loved recording that. Now there were two things in the second half that I just got to focus on and as always, we'll write full show notes on Unicorny Co UK and there will be abridged show notes on this Pod platform. The first thing is marketing transformation. It is the trend that we're starting to see in Enterprise.

38:32
Dom Hawes
Now, we run short interviews before people come into the studio and we kind of mentioned marketing transformation in that short interview, but we didn't go into any great detail. And so it was really interesting to me to hear that the trend that we're seeing centralising and decentralising at the same time, using technology to underpin a more command and control approach to your brand, but a locally enabled execution, that's what we're seeing in Enterprise. And invariably there's some type of internal agency which changes the relationship that big brands then have with their external agencies like the ones that work in our group. And I'm going to come back to that theme of marketing transformation because I think that is goingB2Be one of the big defining changes that we see in how marketing is done over the next few years.

39:25
Dom Hawes
But what really struck me in the second half, and you probably got it from the animation in my voice, is what they're doing with Finastra TV. To have that boldness of vision, to have the braveness, to commit not insignificant resources to creating a whole TV channel. And the way they've executed it is literally, astounding you can probably hear, I'm lost for words even now. He's just walked out of the studio and I'm still blown away by the approach they've taken, how closely they've modelled the success of TV channels and how they think about their content production and its distribution. If you're looking to sail out of a sea of sameness, allocate 10% of your budget to innovation, give your people freedom to think the unthinkable your job, come to work with a creative vision and inspire your colleagues to greatness.

40:20
Dom Hawes
I'm sorry to say that is all the time we have today. You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalised business books. If you've enjoyed the show, why not hit follow? We'd love you to rate or review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify and it only takes a few seconds, but it means a lot to us. Or if it's easier for you, please recommend us to a friend or post on LinkedIn tagging at unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairley is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant. Pete Allen is the editor and Ornella Weston and me. Dom Hawes are your writers? Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.