Episode 209 / Madlen Nicolaus / SAP Concur / Former VP Marketing EMEA
Podcast: Revolutionising Marketing with ChatGPT
It might seem strange that we’ve taken so long to discuss ChatGPT as a Shiny New Object - it’s Madlen Nicolaus’ choice on the latest episode. The former VP Marketing EMEA at SAP Concur thinks that ChatGPT is one first step towards a revolution in content writing. While it’s not able to produce unique, original content, it can play a great role as a personal assistant.
For all the email replies you don’t know where to start and for all the presentations where you feel like you just don’t have the bandwidth to think about right now, ChatGPT can be your friend, says Madlen. Artificial Intelligence generative tools can’t be original, but they can offer a place to start for the busy marketer.
For Madlen, ChatGPT has become akin to a personal assistant. She knows she needs human input to create great content. However, for small day-to-day tasks and unblocking writer’s block, OpenAI’s tool is perfect. As long as marketers learn to balance personal input and harness the power of AI, ChatGPT can be an invaluable tool.
However, there is no hiding from its limitations. Madlen thinks she can already spot the repeated, mediocre content when it’s not been polished at all - especially in LinkedIn posts. What she’d like to see is the evolution of ChatGPT into a tool that can accept past creative input for each of us, learn our writing style, and then at the very least refer us back to relevant past work when we need to reuse or repurpose content.
All of this leads to time savings and increased efficiency. It’s something that Madlen, a busy mother of 3 who holds a senior position in tech, wants to use as much as possible if it means keeping and attracting women in tech. In her own experience, having flexibility in her work thanks to her job at SAP has made all the difference to staying and progressing in her career. This is another one of her passions: keeping flexibility in how jobs are created and offered.
How do ChatGPT, flexible working, and a commitment to data-driven marketing combine to help Madlen in her career? Learn more on the latest episode here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Madlen Nicolaus 0:00
Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.
Tom Ollerton 0:16
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative and it's my great pleasure to record this podcast every week that investigates the future of our industry. And I am on a call with Madlen Nicolaus, who is VP Marketing EMEA at SAP Concur. Madlen, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do. Can you give us a quick background?
Madlen Nicolaus 1:34
Of course. Thanks for having me on the podcast. So I have been now and it sounds scary when I say that almost 20 years in marketing and I've had, you know, different roles. My career actually started at PR agencies, and from there I then did the jump on the client side because when I worked for Ketchum it was actually the time 2007 When in Germany as well, I wasn't based in Munich at the time... Social started and Kodak was was globally one of the first brands really embracing social media, they had the first social media policy. And so with that I had the pleasure of starting their social media strategy first for Germany and rolling it out to multiple countries across EMEA. And that's how I then did the jump over to the client side and became actually the first one of the first social media managers in Europe. I remember because I was interviewed by like magazines like the workshops where they were like, what do you do all day in that kind of job. And then from there, I interestingly moved... at Kodak i was responsible for both b2b and b2c. And I, we were, for the social media monitoring and engagement, we're using radian six. And that was actually then the reason I jumped over to Salesforce because they just had acquired radian six. And they needed someone to lead EMEA marketing for them. And so they I had a fantastic opportunity of actually establishing what the marketing cloud you know, as a new category is because we went in through additional acquisitions of Buddy Media, ExactTarget. And so Salesforce was launching the first marketing cloud before then everyone else started copying it. And so I then worked at Salesforce for a number of years and multiple roles. At the very last I was leading the European product marketing team for Salesforce. And then I moved over to Concur. And interestingly, so there's always a little bit of a thread between the different roles. I was always using Concur as my travel and expense tool, and, and so they were then looking for a head of EMEA marketing in 2017. And yeah, that's where I am today, almost six years with the company. And so I'm leading the field marketing team, on an EMEA level, which covers 21 countries, which is broken down in 11 market units. And so we are mainly focused on the demand generation part of the business.
Tom Ollerton 4:10
And in that career, what new belief or behavior has had the biggest impact on your work life.
Madlen Nicolaus 4:16
So it's really something that I realized, because moving from Germany over to the UK and also moving into a European role, which meant my counterparts weren't just sitting with me in an office anymore. My reality living and working in Germany and I know that from still a lot of colleagues, even today was very much focused on kind of the, you know, nine to five and you had to be office presence and the moment I moved to the UK in 2010. I, of course had an office but I was automatically working flexible because I had to travel a lot to the different countries. I had to visit the agencies a lot. And so I had this flexible working really for the last 13 years and so there was always a couple of Office days, but I really very much planned that around how it worked for, for the job I had to do, but also my personal schedule. And, and it's really interesting that what the pandemic meant for SAP was also that they then introduced what they call a pledge to flex over the last three, four years, which really means that as an employee, you need to confirm with your manager, how you would like to work. And of course, you need to, you know, be there for the important meetings and do your work, but you have a lot of flexibility to say, No, I actually prefer to be working from home or, you know, home is basically my main location, or I'd rather prefer to be in an office or even, I had team members who relocated further away, you know, moved somewhere more into the countryside, because they could make that work better for their family life. And what really, that helped for me, I'm a mother of three. And I would say the only reason I can have the career I have, and I was still able to have a family and build a family and not drop out was that flexibility that I always had in my job since since I moved to the UK. That doesn't mean it was always easy. And it doesn't mean... I had weeks where I had five days in the office because we had important meetings or all the traveling I had to do but I had the flexibility to make it work and arrange it. And I'm quite passionate about this topic. Especially like I am a woman working in tech. And I have seen in my career so many colleagues, friends, team members, which dropped out because they started a family and they couldn't make it work. They they had to be the ones picking up the kids from nursery in the afternoon, their husband had no flexibility. And so they ended up staying home or sometimes, you know, depending on the type of job, it just also didn't make sense in terms of comparing this with the nursery fees. As we know, there's a huge debate in the UK at the moment about kind of that it's the country with the highest cost for childcare. And so you also have to weigh that up and where you lose a lot of talent and where I still see it today, I built a fantastic career and colleagues who started with me who are now you know, their kids might be 9-10 years old, and they're still at home, they haven't actually managed to make that step back into their working life. And on the other hand, I'm leading like a large team, it's almost 100 people and I have so many women on my team, and where I can see how they thrive and how they perform. But thanks to that flexibility, and also, thanks to the tools that we have today that, you know calls are being recorded, if they can't make the call because they have a sick child or they just have other commitments at that moment. Well, it's recorded, they can still catch up on it, they can still do their job. And and so in our line of business, it's fantastic. And I think it's a huge leap forward to hopefully helping more women get into tech and stay in tech even when they decide to start a family.
Tom Ollerton 8:24
So what is your top marketing tip, what is a bit of advice that you give most often to your team?
Madlen Nicolaus 8:31
So my biggest marketing tip, and that's also what I live by is marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed. And, you know, social media scientist said that once. And so I think that is so true, and I live by that so for anything. I find that, you know, if you can't measure you can't make actually any decisions. And so that's how I've been leading, you know, my team. So we have achieved fantastic sales alignment, because we are, you know, closely aligned with them. In terms of the KPIs that we measure, we have regular monthly interlocks where we're looking at the KPIs, where we take actions, where we can mitigate any you know any underperformance or also share any you know positive performance and then we can see okay, what can we learn from that, what should we be doing more of and really achieving also that agility in our marketing execution across the region where the teams are constantly basically having an eye on their campaigns and their performance and are able to switch it ON OFF tweak or alternate depending on the performance because we are so sophisticated with the way how we track everything. We are also in a very lucky position that we have the right tools to be able to have you know, those insights and be able to really be data driven, but not even just for general performance and managing our, you know, our marketing campaigns and ensuring we, you know, we're hitting our business targets, but even for making decisions in terms of how I structure the team. I've always based it on data, I would always do first internal surveys, and ask for feedback and based on that, you know, make decisions or do the internal surveys and then also speak with, you know, external experts who have even a broader scope like serious decisions, or Forrester and comparing, wait, what are the general trends? Are we in line with that? And how can we learn for that when we making any organizational changes and we restructuring or things like that. So I think, both right from a people and team leading perspective, but also for of course, how you performance manage the programs and the campaigns that everyone's running.
Tom Ollerton 11:04
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Tom Ollerton 11:41
So now we're going to talk about your shiny new object, which is Chat GPT. So you're the first person to talk about this, which is an interesting data point in itself. So can you firstly, very succinctly describe to anyone who isn't clear on what ChatGPT is and why it's your shiny new object?
Madlen Nicolaus 12:02
Yes. So yeah, I'm super fascinated by it. And I always joke to my team that I have this new personal assistant. So it is effectively like an AI, an artificial intelligence language model. Yesterday, just the latest version ChatGPT 4 came out. So what I've been using, over the last couple of months has been ChatGPT 3 and 3.5. So basically, the earlier version, where it's text based, so you have to imagine it as a, you know, you have a field where you input a query, let's say, how would you phrase X, Y, and Z? Or how could you structure a presentation about X, Y, and Z? And these are the sorts of requests you can put into the tool and you will be astonished by the sophistication of the answer and how good it is. So I the way I have been using it is, for example, I have to read sometimes, you know, a lot of copy internal emails or even social media posts that my team is doing for executives or things like that. And so my head of EMEA PR, she was saying, Madlen you have been really quick in your feedback recently, but it is because I run it through ChatGPT because I'm bilingual only you know, English is not my first language. And so sometimes I will find when I read copies, that a sentence doesn't sound right. And because it's like, our exec comms for the social channels, sometimes, you know, we, I do have to look over that. And so then this is something you can type into, you copy and paste it into the ChatGPT tool and say, Could you phrase this anyway, better? And then, yeah, one second later, you have your answer. And it's really helpful or just when you have to write, I sometimes have to do restructuring internal org announcements, or someone is leaving on a team. And it just makes you so much more efficient. Because you can basically input everything you have so far, or it might be a tricky email you haven't where you're like, Oh, God, I don't know how to respond to that. And you literally, you can copy the email into it and say, you know, I would like to respond in this or that way, and it will provide you with a draft. I mean, what I would say you want to rephrase it, I can, I've been using it that much that I feel like I can read on LinkedIn when someone's using ChatGPT because it is a certain way, how it's structured, you know, sentences and things where you? Yeah, I would say I can notice it now. But just for getting started with sometimes, you know, when when you don't quite know where to start just to help us with a writer's block, I guess. Super helpful. I've been super intrigued. And of course, there's lots of questions around the copyright and it's also a little bit scary how good it is, how quick it is, and where you also think God what's going to happen to all of the writers in the world and Yeah, I certainly have asked myself that as well. But I would recommend everyone and I've done it with my team. I made them all try it, because I think it's Yeah, you should know what ChatGPT is these days, I would say.
Tom Ollerton 12:30
So can you give me some more examples of how you use it? So you talked about social posts and responding to tricky emails and presentation structures, but can you help me understand how you're using it specifically, not just for kind of office use, I guess, but for actual public facing content that isn't just a social post?
Madlen Nicolaus 15:33
You can literally, you can make it write your business plan, you can... not that I need that in my work, but my husband has tested it, and where he was like, Oh, my God, this is so good. It's scary. You can literally... for anything, if you say, I need to write an article about women in tech, or, you know, artificial intelligence, and you give it a few bullet points it will write that for you, you can say how long you can then go back in and say, Oh, can you write this a little bit more conversational? Or can you check? Can you shorten it? Or can you highlight a little bit more key points in this direction? Or that actually, it's literally it feels like it's your own personal assistant? Like your, your editing assistant? And as far as I know, about GPT4, I mean, it literally only came out yesterday, but it will be at the moment, right? What you could do is you type and you get text responses. And the new part about GPT4, and then it's not called Chat anymore, because it's more complex. So GPT4 will allow effectively video or audio input, photos. And so even from that, it will be able with, you know, optical image recognition, and all of that it will be able to transcribe what's in a video and things like that. And I know, you know, Microsoft has a huge stake in Open AI. And you might have noticed for anyone who's using Microsoft Teams, kind of the transcription has gone much, much better. And I think the goal, it's not switched on yet, as far as I know, at least not with the version that I have. But what their goal is to also, for instance, you have meetings, and then the tool will be able to do a meeting summary, right? And this is also where in the background, it's GPT 3 or 4 that Microsoft is using for their Teams tool.
Tom Ollerton 17:42
So how do you defend against mediocrity? Because Chat GPT as I haven't used the new one yet, that came out yesterday... is an amalgamation or a ... what's a better word, it takes lots of examples of things that happened previously to make a suggestion. So for example, if you said, write me a LinkedIn posting strategy, what it would do is pull probably hundreds of blogs, if not 1000s, of blogs, advice how to do that. But that will be what everyone else has done before. And if everyone else is doing the same thing, then you're not marketing, you're not cutting through, you're not being different. You're not being creative. You're mimicking and mimicry in marketing is poor marketing. So how do you use Chat GPT to defend against just being like everyone else?
Madlen Nicolaus 18:27
Exactly. And this is also where I'm like, you want to use it with a pinch of salt. And I'm not what I am not implying is you should use it for building your marketing strategy, but what it can help I find it, it makes you just that more quicker. Because sometimes what a lot of our day we're responding to emails, or we have to create quick posts or where you know, you have to, you might have to copy read something or write internal announcements or whatever it might be, you can, it can increase just your effectiveness efficiency a little bit because you will save time, where you might have set longer time, it's kind of just thinking about, okay, how am I gonna structure this? How am I gonna... it gives you a starting point where I would say as you definitely and this is where the human side comes in, and where this tool will never be better than the person sitting there you have your own, you know, you need to add your own touch to it. So it shouldn't, I would not recommend to just that's what I mean. I can see it now on LinkedIn, literally people just type it into ChatGPT and copy and paste from it. And then we will have exactly as you say, we will have all this mediocre and everyone and everything will sound the same. I think it might even you know what I could imagine I used to when I had my time at Salesforce I one of my topics was also the Einstein AI solution, the process was so that that was effectively their AI offering back in the day like, five, six years ago as it started and where it helped with, you know, like it used propensity modeling, it would go through your emails that you send to the customer and based on that and provide recommendations, or you should reach out to that customer again, or help you basically prioritize right the opportunities or the leads you had. But it was very much based on what you have done before. What I could imagine with with this, GPT evolution and kind of these language models, if it would plug in more into also, you know, the things you have created before and take that into consideration if you would have that possibility, to train it based on your style of writing, and things you have done before because I'm sure you the same, right, you have to do a strategy presentation or you think of a concept and then you think back, Oh, have I done anything like that before is there some type of slide, you know, or at least a layout that I can reuse when sharing that strategy. And so I think it again, righy, whereas if yourself you then sift through your computer and try to find that deck from back in the day where you might want to use some part, it takes a lot of time. Whereas if you have a smart AI solution that can do that looking for you. And then this is where the time efficiency is. And this is also where I see, I know there is a lot of angst and a lot of anxiety around these AI solutions. But I also think it's a huge potential in all fields, right, like in medicine in with legal cases, because you're not relying on the paralegal who has to go through all the cases, you can do AI who basically has access to all of the cases globally and will be able to then find perhaps a way of addressing the specific topic and with health as well access to all of the medical data, and being able in milliseconds to sift through that and provide, you know, treatments, suggestions that have worked before things like that. It's just that sort of time saving? I am not saying that, you know, it's the answer to everything. And there's copyright issues. And hopefully, right, it's not going to go that far that it will mean that there's no content writers needed any more or no designers, because it is I mean, there's other AI tools out there who now will, you know, create images that fast and where you think, Oh, my God, what will that mean, for designers in the longer term? We don't know. But I think the you know, the creative ethic, that's exactly what you then still need to bring to that right to make sure it's not the mediocre mix of everything that's already out there. But you could argue that creativity is also always what you base it on something, it's always a mash up of something that perhaps has already existed somewhere.
Tom Ollerton 23:03
Thank you for that explanation. And thanks for giving me the very specific examples of how you use it and how we should be approaching it. Unfortunately, we've run out of time, and we're gonna have to leave it there. So Madlen, if someone wants to reach out to you, where's the best place to do that? What makes a really good outreach message to you?
Madlen Nicolaus 23:21
So I think it's what everyone says. It's LinkedIn, of course, I think but you can also reach out on Twitter as well. And yeah, maybe refer back to the podcast. So I know where to you know where to place you and the reason why you reach out but otherwise, yeah, I'm usually on top of kind of my LinkedIn, and try to answer if I can.
Tom Ollerton 23:45
Madlen, thank you so much for your time.
Madlen Nicolaus 23:58
Thank you.
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