In this episode of Masters of Max, host Tom Butta welcomes Julie Ask, a renowned expert in consumer digital experiences and a former analyst at Forrester Research. Julie's extensive background as a futurist and digital product strategist sets the stage for a great discussion on the challenges brands face in orchestrating seamless digital experiences.
In this episode of Masters of Max, host Tom Butta welcomes Julie Ask, a renowned expert in consumer digital experiences and former Principal VP analyst at Forrester Research, Inc.. Julie's extensive background as a futurist and digital product strategist sets the stage for a great discussion on the challenges brands face in orchestrating seamless digital experiences.
During the interview, Julie highlights the evolving landscape of consumer digital experiences, emphasizing the importance of immersive interfaces on mobile devices and the growing trend towards “invisible” experiences that anticipate and fulfill consumer needs. While in the past, most consumers would actively pull information from brands when desired, Julie emphasizes that now consumers expect brands to push relevant offerings to them.
As the discussion progresses, Tom and Julie explore the impact of AI on digital experiences, touching on the complexities of using generative AI and the need for brand authenticity and control. They address the critical importance of trust in gaining customers willing to provide information to brands as well as the challenges organizations face in stitching together data silos to orchestratie cross-channel interactions spanning different business functions. Julie underscores the need to break down organizational silos to deliver cohesive interactions because ultimately: “the customer doesn't want to see functions within your brand, the customer wants to see your brand.”
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Guest Bio
Julie Ask is a technology futurist and digital product strategist who has advised hundreds of global brands on how to design effective consumer engagement strategies to drive business outcomes. Her work defines the evolution of consumer digital experiences and inspires brands to take action.
During her 20+ years as an industry analyst at Forrester, she researched, developed insights, and wrote hundreds of pieces of research on consumer mobile and digital experiences; delivered dozens of speeches and webinars; appeared regularly on Bloomberg TV; and co-authored a book, The Mobile Mind Shift.
Her most impactful work included: visions of future digital experiences, realistic assessments of emerging technologies and their capabilities, decision frameworks, consumer behavior models, maturity assessments, technology portfolio recommendations, consumer mobile engagement strategies, and operational- and design best practices.
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Guest Quote
"There is going to be more of a demand for orchestration, not just across marketing, but for operations and customer care service as well. Orchestration is probably one of the most difficult challenges that brands are facing as we look at the future of consumer digital experiences. Marketers are going to need to play a very important role in helping solve that problem because they tend to own the outbound messaging channels. Whether it's email, push, SMS, or otherwise. It's a really hard problem to solve.” – Julie Ask
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Time Stamps
*(01:10) Who is Julie Ask?
*(02:04) What is changing in the world of digital experience?
*(05:24) Where does AI fit into the equation?
*(07:49) The challenges brands are facing today
*(10:02) It always comes back to data
*(15:31) Why trust is critical to unlocking consumer engagement
*(17:55) What tools marketers can employ to set themselves up for success
*(20:40) Moments vs. Experiences
*(24:17) Who is responsible for the brand // customer relationship
*(25:15) Overcoming silos
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Links
[00:00:00] Julie Ask: Orchestration is probably one of the most difficult challenges that brands are facing as we look at the future of consumer digital experiences. And marketers are going to need to play a very important role in helping solve that problem, because they tend to own the outbound messaging channels, whether it's email, push, SMS, or otherwise.
[00:00:26] It's a really hard problem to solve.
[00:00:30] Voiceover: Welcome to Masters of MAX. A mobile app experience podcast. Please welcome your host, Tom Butta, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship.
[00:00:42] Tom Butta: Welcome to another episode of Masters of MAX. It's absolutely my pleasure to welcome Julie Ask to the show. Julie, welcome.
[00:00:49] Julie Ask: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:50] Tom Butta: So Julie, you've got this great set of credentials. You know, you're an author. Everybody aspires to write a book. So you're an author. Congratulations.
[00:00:58] You're an analyst. So it's all [00:01:00] based on some form of data. That's really interesting and inspiring, but you're also a public speaker. So tell us a little bit about. How you would characterize yourself.
[00:01:10] Julie Ask: Yeah. So thank you, Tom. And thank you again for having me here to the podcast. So when I think about myself and what I've been doing over the past 30, 35 years or so, I really think about myself as a bit of a futurist, a creative futurist.
[00:01:22] I really thrive at the intersection of consumers and technology and business. And I've spent the past 25 years or so defining the future of mobile and mobile experiences and really consumer digital experiences, which is how we get to today. Um, there's a lot going on with consumer digital experiences today that we're going to dive into, but one of the really core components of that is mobile messaging.
[00:01:45] And I would actually kind of classify myself as a bit of a mobile messaging nerd, uh, because they're so key to also the important of future. Digital experiences.
[00:01:53] Tom Butta: Wow. So you're always sort of forward leaning. Yes. Is that accurate? Yeah.
[00:01:58] Julie Ask: Yes.
[00:01:58] Tom Butta: So, so given [00:02:00] that the world is changing, what are you seeing?
[00:02:04] Julie Ask: So when we put this into context of consumer digital experiences, there's two big phenomenon going on.
[00:02:11] And I like to use this paradigm or framework when we think about the glass. The glass is the thing that consumers touch or interact with. And so on the glass, These interfaces are evolving and becoming more immersive. So we're seeing a lot more conversational interfaces that are more human like and more natural.
[00:02:31] We're seeing more with extended reality, augmented or virtual reality. And if you think about the Apple Vision Pro, it's certainly given a boost. And then, you know, far, far off in the future, there may be something called a metaverse. And so on the glass, these experiences are becoming incredibly immersive.
[00:02:48] And that's where consumers interact. And then below the surface, there's a very different phenomenon going on where experiences are becoming more invisible. So despite the glass, Just like [00:03:00] glass. Yeah. So, but what I mean by invisible is brands are going to do more to anticipate the needs of consumers and push out information or make suggestions or take action on their behalf.
[00:03:11] Because if you think about it, when I want to be entertained or I'm trying to learn something, then a really immersive experience is what I want and what I need. But when I'm trying to get stuff done or buy toothpaste or see what time my husband's coming home from work, I don't want to spend time. I don't want to engage.
[00:03:30] I want those experiences to be more invisible. And so that's also where mobile messaging will ultimately play a big role.
[00:03:37] Tom Butta: It's interesting when I had a different interpretation of what you meant by invisible. I actually thought you were going to talk about sort of marketing, as it were, or messaging.
[00:03:47] Julie Ask: Yeah.
[00:03:48] Tom Butta: That doesn't actually feel like it's marketing or messaging. Maybe it's, it's just purely functional or it serves, you know, the specific purpose, but what you don't realize as consumers actually is being put [00:04:00] out there for you by, you know, a marketer or, you know, someone who's driving messaging.
[00:04:04] Julie Ask: Yeah, because marketers are really some of the creative strategists in this role.
[00:04:08] Because if you think about engagement, right, and especially engagement within the context of an app, a marketer is really trying to build the value of a consumer and keep them engaged over this entire customer lifecycle. So there are some, there is some mobile messaging where it orients towards getting somebody to pay attention, to download an app.
[00:04:29] There's promotions, there's specials, there's deals, there's exclusive inventory. And a marketer is going to lean into all of those things. But then the marketer also wants to keep the customer engaged through the purchase and the use of the product to ultimately get back around to driving loyalty. And so when I already own the product.
[00:04:50] Then there becomes a different set of use cases that the marketer wants to use. They want to nudge me. They want to create convenience, right? Because some of this is about what I want in the moment. [00:05:00] And sometimes it's really convenience that I want the marketer to give it to me. I want them to make something easy for me.
[00:05:05] Tom Butta: Yeah, certainly that's, I think you're aware of the study that we did last year of 11, 000 mobile consumers and conveniences of use, save me time, those were the top three, right?
[00:05:15] Julie Ask: Yeah, and those are really important things to do. And so like a marketer is going to own all of that if they're ultimately going to own the entire customer journey and lifecycle with a brand.
[00:05:24] Tom Butta: So how, how is AI factoring in? I have to bring, bring it up early in this conversation, but how is AI factoring into this in terms of serving you with things that are suggestive or optionality for it?
[00:05:39] Julie Ask: Right. So I think that's a really important question because AI is accelerating. these transitions both on the glass and below the glass.
[00:05:47] You know, and certainly there's a lot of different flavors of AI, right? AI is not just one thing. There's some deterministic, there's some probabilistic things that marketers have been using for years to predict churn and to help them design and [00:06:00] execute on campaigns. But what's really new and really game changing today is certainly generative AI.
[00:06:05] And so generative AI plays a role in a number of spots. On one hand, we think about what I said about being on the glass, gen AI is facilitating. Facilitating and accelerating consumers or marketers ability to access services, access information through a conversational interface. If you think about how folks were designing chatbots before, it was pretty tedious and they were, everything had to be programmed, every use case had to be programmed, every answer had to be programmed, and so generative AI is accelerating that as well as the ability to use generative AI to create images and video and animation will accelerate health.
[00:06:44] So we're going to talk about how far into virtual worlds we can go and how to what extent there'll be an interface.
[00:06:48] Tom Butta: That all sounds really wonderful. Of course, sounds like a bit of automation with creativity built in and Intel and intelligence. My question is, how do you control that?
[00:06:59] Julie Ask: Oh, yeah, I [00:07:00] think, I think there's a lot of work that has to be done because right, as you go from these models that are deterministic, very well understood, very explainable to something that's probabilistic, it's less explainable.
[00:07:11] It. usually works. We can usually explain what's going on degenerative. I don't think folks are really entirely sure how those models work. So there are a lot of risks, right? I think people always think about the hallucinations. It can be slow. The quality may not be high. And certainly while it's fun to use one of these apps from OpenAI or from Microsoft or for Google as an alternative to search or to get answers, it's a really different thing when you want to create content that is the tone of your brand and consistent with the business rules that you may have or the policies that you may have.
[00:07:46] Very, two very different things. There's a lot of risk still, let alone the cost of it.
[00:07:50] Tom Butta: So you, you've, you've got this interesting challenge, I think, for on the brand side is, you know, you need people who are technology savvy, right? It's like they [00:08:00] understand how they could potentially use it, but at the same time, they have to put these kind of controls in place in order for it to be on brand as it were.
[00:08:07] And I think that's a lot of, that's a lot of new learning, isn't it?
[00:08:11] Julie Ask: Yeah, I think it's absolutely a lot of new learning. People talk a lot about this idea of like prompt engineering, and I think putting the word engineering into that phrase is scary just on its own, but there's a couple of things that go in.
[00:08:23] I think. On one hand, you know, language isn't always going to be the easiest or most efficient way for us to get anything done. And so when you're purely using language and sometimes images to put into one of these applications to get something out, I think there's an entire skill associated with that.
[00:08:40] And then on the other hand, you know, when we talk about especially putting experiences in front of consumers, whether it's going to be images or text or copy for an email, we always talk about this idea of having humans in the loop. So that there are eyes on what's being created. And there's a bit of a, you know, a checkpoint there before it goes out to the consumer.
[00:08:59] Tom Butta: [00:09:00] Is anyone doing it well today? Any, uh, any brands that you were aware of?
[00:09:04] Julie Ask: No, not that I know of. I've had the opportunity to spend a lot of time talking to marketers and to folks that are talking about Gen AI and thinking about what to do with Gen AI. And I think if you were to go out and run a survey amongst your clients and talk to your marketers, you'd probably have like three quarters of them saying they're planning to use Gen AI.
[00:09:23] And then if you ask them how, that number would drop way off. And they're probably hoping it's going to be embedded in some of the marketing tools that they're buying. So I think there's a big gap between what people want to do and what they're actually doing today. But as they think about Gen AI, what it is forcing them to do is really think about their data strategy.
[00:09:44] Because again, we go back to this conversation. I can't, I mean, you could take a very general model, but you know, what companies ultimately want to do is to use that as a basis or some kind of a foundation, but they want to train their applications on their own data, their own tone, their own language. And [00:10:00] that's still something that, you know, there's still a long ways to go there.
[00:10:02] Tom Butta: Yeah, and zero party, first party data. I mean, there's, there's a lot of things obviously we're doing to help encourage brands to interact in real time and in non intrusive ways just to get information to check in, see how things are going. That's hugely valuable. And that's all data that can only enhance that experience, right?
[00:10:20] Julie Ask: Right. And I think, I think the point you break up is really important because I can't really use Gen AI effectively in the ways that are really going to make a difference in my business unless I have a really strong data strategy. Right. And if you think about data, I'm going to do creative and interesting and new things.
[00:10:39] If I have data that other people don't have. And so that's where you really get into the zero party data that you suggested is that's where I'm beginning to ask consumers, what do they like? What don't they like? Do I own a dog? Do I own a cat? Do I like to drink red wine or. White wine, you know, what is it that I like to eat?
[00:10:57] Because when you have that zero party data and you [00:11:00] begin to really learn who I am, then I think, you know, beginning to use these models becomes a lot more interesting.
[00:11:06] Tom Butta: How do you connect that, right? That, the importance of having that zero and first party data. Especially these are reporting data where you truly know your customer as if they're the only customer, right?
[00:11:15] And you can serve up personalized, relevant offers, content, suggestions, whatever it might be. How do you do that when we as consumers are operating on different types of glass, right? We're operating on the handheld device, the mobile device, right? Which is the pane of glass with apps, etc, etc. But we're also operating on the web, and many times the web is either on mobile web or it's even on desktop.
[00:11:42] And then there's experiences that we have in real life, right? In stores, in venues. How do you Aggregate the data such that every one of those touch points feels like it was meant for you.
[00:11:56] Julie Ask: So that's the end game, right? That's like the thing that's going to be really [00:12:00] hard to get to. Right, because I think there's like two really big things that you said in there that are important.
[00:12:04] So one is identity or identity resolution. Like, how do you know who I am? Right. And so brands are always going to try to get me to, you know, and this is really where the importance of onboarding comes. If you can get me to download an app, if you can get me to build, you know, create an account with a username and do preferences, knowing who I am is one of the first steps.
[00:12:26] And that's one of the first steps that marketers have. And then on the other side of it, right, I think generally what you're talking about is context and how much context can a brand or how much context can one of these models hold about who I am and what my past interactions are. And that's something that's very hard to do.
[00:12:47] Right. And that's one of the things they talk about with the evolution of these models and they're becoming more and more sophisticated is how much context might one of them be able to hold, or if a brand were to build a profile of me [00:13:00] over time, whether it's my purchases. My location, what I've done in the store, how I've interacted on the web, how I've interacted within a mobile app, what all of those things are that you just said.
[00:13:11] It takes a fairly robust model to feed in that to create context and prioritize what's important to me today to then decide, okay, this is the next thing that we should do for Julia, the next thing that we should do for Tom. But that context and holding it and prioritizing it and knowing what's important in the moment is a hard problem to solve.
[00:13:29] Tom Butta: Yeah, I love that. I love it. So it's a first establishing the identity, right, of who the individual is, right? And then the second is providing context, having enough information that can enable you to, to be contextual and what it is you're going to serve.
[00:13:47] Julie Ask: Right, and I think that's where you come back to what a hard job the marketer has, because you have to, as a consumer, first I have to be aware of you, and then I have to adopt or use your brand, right, which [00:14:00] may be on the web if I'm very new, and it could be on a mobile app, but then a marketer has a really hard job to do, again, of getting me to establish my identity, spend enough time to be observed, maybe even offer up some zero party data through Preferences or questions and begin to not only build this profile, the other part of it is you can't just be in a mode of like take, take, take from the consumer.
[00:14:24] Because if they ask me for a bit of information about what pets I own, and I say I own a dog and a cat, I expect them to use that information almost immediately to provide some kind of value to me. In fact, I might not even give them that information if they don't tell me what the immediate value exchange is going to be.
[00:14:40] But if they do something worthwhile with it, then I'll trust them. And then when they come back around the next. Next time I think, well, how old is your cat or how old is your dog or what kind of animals are they? I'm going to give them a little bit more, right? And you begin to spin up, you know, what we might call like a value flywheel.
[00:14:54] But a marketer has to have that trust and has to have that ongoing engagement with the [00:15:00] consumer to be able to, you know, create that engagement flywheel and generate that value.
[00:15:06] Tom Butta: Yeah. I think I always think, think of it as, as it's a relationship that's forming, right? Yeah. You ask some questions, you get some information, it leads you down a certain path, you provide some information, and then hopefully you get something of value back, and it just keeps going in that, in that exchange, as you point out.
[00:15:25] But I think the key word that you used is trust. It doesn't take much to erode trust.
[00:15:31] Julie Ask: No, it doesn't. And I think it's really such an important issue and it only becomes more important as we look into the future, especially when you think about Gen AI and what are the possibilities. Bad actors have always been able to dupe consumers or do deep fakes to misrepresent a brand.
[00:15:48] But what's possible now with Gen AI is. People can do that at scale. I mean, not literally everyone can do that on their smartphone yet, but it becomes just so much easier for anyone to do [00:16:00] that and to misrepresent a brand or to try to get data from consumers.
[00:16:04] Tom Butta: It's hugely interesting because not only can you impersonate a brand, you can impersonate a person, you can impersonate a place, you can impersonate information.
[00:16:13] It's just, it's really. Fascinating. And I just wonder, like, are there things that brands could do to, you know, to sort of get on top of this, to manage through all this change you're talking about as the futurist?
[00:16:24] Julie Ask: There probably are tools. You're probably going to develop tools. The next generation of messaging, RCS, which we hope Apple is going to support this year.
[00:16:33] will help authenticate brands so that consumers know who the message is coming from. And then it's truly coming from the brand. Literally, my niece told me that bad actors on LinkedIn are using Gen AI to create fake job listings. They're accepting applications, and then they're either calling or using technology to do interviews with the candidates to collect more information about like who they [00:17:00] are, their name, their address, their interests, this and that.
[00:17:03] And then reselling the information to third parties or using it for bad actors. And it's a whole new level, but I think it reminds folks that as we go from what Gen AI is today, which is a tool that can help us with coding and it can get information for us and it can help us write emails. And we evolve in this direction of, you know, artificial general intelligence where this intelligence has judgment and it can sense and.
[00:17:31] It can, you know, we've somehow authorized it to make suggestions or take action on our behalf. There's a lot of, you know, there's possibly a lot of risks associated with that.
[00:17:43] Tom Butta: There are. So there's, there's a lot that people can do to protect against that in terms of setting up the right data privacy disciplines and security, et cetera.
[00:17:55] But what about the kinds of tools that say marketers need today to actually put themselves in, [00:18:00] in a position to win? Like, are they, are people taking advantage of. You know, the whole, I wish I can operate at the speed of mobile, but I can't because I have to toss it over the wall to have developers work on it.
[00:18:10] This idea of low or no code.
[00:18:12] Julie Ask: I think the question you're asking is really important about marketers because it also takes into account, right, this data strategy. There are some things and some data about me that's very static. My name, my age, well, I guess my age changes every year, but my gender, you know, where I live, those are pretty static things.
[00:18:29] But as we think about. Proactively, when we think about these invisible and we think about serving consumer, anticipating their needs and serving them more proactively in the moments, you're absolutely right that we want to rely more on real time data. We want to rely on location or the temperature. or what I'm feeling in the moment, or right, there's going to be a lot more sensors in our environment that provide data and marketers are going to want to be able to access that real time data.
[00:18:56] When we think about how data is used to push out [00:19:00] messaging or to push out content to consumers, there's four ways it's used, right? It's used for decide what content, what person, When and in what channel and there's a lot of dynamic factors in place and we're no longer going to be operating in an environment and marketers can't operate effectively in an environment where they're relying on developers to update apps or to do the work or there's somehow in a queue that's weeks or months long, the environments that consumers are going to expect because I expect if I'm going to share this data, I expect an environment to be.
[00:19:34] Yeah. Very personalized to me, there's going to be dynamic assembly. And marketers have to have tools to build those rules and automation and use artificial intelligence to dynamically assemble these elements and serve me in these moments. It sounds a bit abstract, right, but it's kind of like if you know that I'm walking into a store, you know, what are you going to do now?
[00:19:57] Tom Butta: Well, it's sort of wasted moments,
[00:19:59] Julie Ask: [00:20:00] right?
[00:20:00] Tom Butta: If you're not prepared. Right. And especially if you've given information, the expectation is, so what's coming back, right?
[00:20:09] Julie Ask: Right. And if I share my location, what's the value that I get in exchange?
[00:20:14] Tom Butta: Yeah. 100%. If I
[00:20:15] Julie Ask: share data from my watch, if I share data from sensors in my living room, you know, what do I get in return?
[00:20:21] So I think part of it is, you know, marketers also have to be smart. It's not about just getting like all the data I can, but it's really thinking about like, what are these really important moments? and the journey that the customer has with me that I, where I do want to engage them. And then what data do I need to gauge them effectively?
[00:20:40] So a moment is just like a time and place when a brand engages with a consumer, right? And experiences are essentially the sum of moments and where a moment is like the time and place when a brand engages with a consumer. And marketers are all, you know, every brand should want to own as many moments as they can.
[00:20:57] And when I own a moment, that means the customer comes to [00:21:00] me, they're on my website, on my mobile app. And that's awesome because that's where marketers have the most control over the experience a consumer has. But sometimes they also have to manufacture moments. So they have to generate reasons or create reasons to pull the consumer in to their brand.
[00:21:16] And then the third category, which is so important to marketers and to brands today, is what we call borrowing moments. And this is where they engage with the consumer on a third party site. One of the places where consumers, certainly social media. It's one of the most important third party platforms where consumers engage with brands.
[00:21:33] But after that, another one of the most important ones, especially when consumers are spending money is on wallets. The wallet is a, whether it's in Google or it's an Apple, the wallet is such an important platform because it's not only where I store So things like credit cards, but increasingly it's my identity, it's boarding passes, it's coupons, it's tickets, it's, you know, so many things, even how I may or may get, you know, get access or entry into a building.
[00:21:58] And so wallet becomes such an [00:22:00] important tool that marketers have when they're borrowing monets. The other thing that really helps wallet stick out is it's a native app that's shipped with most phones. It's not something a consumer has to go and download. Everyone's got one. Almost everyone uses it.
[00:22:13] Tom Butta: Mm hmm.
[00:22:14] Yeah, that's really cool. I love that. Yeah, owned, owning moments, borrowing moments, manufacturing moments. I love that.
[00:22:22] Julie Ask: Thank you.
[00:22:23] Tom Butta: How do you orchestrate across these different platforms? You know, between, across app, or across web, or across email, or across SMS? Like, how do you How do you orchestrate a very personalized journey for me or you?
[00:22:36] That seems really hard because there's different groups that manage those different functions typically.
[00:22:42] Julie Ask: Yes. I think you're describing one of the most, like the biggest challenges that are facing marketers and digital experience professionals as we look forward. Because while Oh, Yeah. Mobile apps and websites form the core [00:23:00] of, you know, of platforms where consumers are going to engage with brands.
[00:23:04] There's so many more channels or interfaces that come into play, whether it's moments or it's push notifications, or it's in app or it's a puff of air, or whatever it may be. And as it becomes more of a push environment of marketers and brands pushing out information and suggestions and taking action, and less of the pool where the consumer visits me whenever they feel like they have a need.
[00:23:28] There is going to be more of a demand for orchestration, not just across marketing, but for like operations and customer care service as well. And so orchestration is probably one of the most difficult challenges that brands are facing. As we look at the future of consumer digital experiences and marketers are going to need to play a very important role in helping solve that problem because they tend to own the outbound messaging channels, whether it's email, push, SMS, or [00:24:00] otherwise.
[00:24:00] It's a really hard problem to solve because it's political. There's so many facets of it that are hard.
[00:24:06] Tom Butta: Oh, for sure. In your opinion, if the customer is quote, King, right. And everybody's trying to drive better conversions and optimize the value, the value provided. In exchange for the value received, who ultimately owns that, if anyone, that relationship, or all of those relationships?
[00:24:28] Julie Ask: So I think we could start a debate about who ultimately owns that and if there should be a new role. And in the research that I've done in the past, where we've surveyed, Professionals say, well, is it marketing? Is it customer experience? Is it an operations? Is it customer care? It's very fragmented.
[00:24:47] Ownership is very fragmented. And I think that's at the core of the problem. The data is fragmented. There's like little, what do we call them, Tom? There's like little like tech silos all over the company with like a little Text, little data silo, and then [00:25:00] some logic silos, then an engagement silo, and this is where brands get into trouble because there's too many little silos competing for the customer's attention.
[00:25:09] And the customer doesn't want to see functions within your brand. The customer wants to see your brand.
[00:25:15] Tom Butta: Wow. You just talked about the biggest challenge brands face today, which are operating in silos. How is that possible to overcome?
[00:25:23] Julie Ask: So overcoming that is an enterprise challenge. It's not a functional or a department challenge by marketing, even though marketing has the opportunity to lead.
[00:25:34] In the research that we've done, we've identified dozens of competencies that brands will need to develop to deliver on this unified experience for consumers, especially one that depends more on proactive engagement and less on sitting back and waiting for the customer to come to them. A lot of these competencies are rooted in data.
[00:25:57] So whether it's data strategy, data management, [00:26:00] data quality, Certainly privacy and security are part of the mix. Even like things like zero party, first party data, personalization, use of AI tools, right? There's what I call like all, like just dozens of these competencies, identity resolution that would be in the mix.
[00:26:17] And then when you think about a competency, a competency isn't just about buying technology or buying a solution. It's about having a strategy. It's about operational best practices. What is the talent that I need? What are the metrics I'm going to use? What are the processes are we going to use to work together?
[00:26:34] And then there's also a technology component of it. So to your point, like how are enterprises going to get this done is you've got to believe in a future that isn't siloed, isn't just about just the web or just apps. And then you've got to think about like, how do we do that? So the consumer sees one brand and not the functions within my brand.
[00:26:56] Tom Butta: So you have to believe in this idea that a unified experience [00:27:00] across app, across web, and everywhere in between is actually important.
[00:27:06] Julie Ask: Yes, you do.
[00:27:07] Tom Butta: Julie, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation.
[00:27:09] Julie Ask: Thank you for
[00:27:10] Voiceover: having me. Thank you for listening to Masters of MAX, a mobile app experience podcast brought to you by the team at Airship.
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