[Music] [Pierce Ujjainwalla] Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for joining today. We've got an incredible session here. We've got Google. We've got Generative AI, scaling email creation, and later on, we're going to be releasing some brand new, never before seen features in Knak. I am super excited to be with you all today. A little bit of background about myself. I'm the cofounder of Knak and the founder of Revenue Pulse. I'm a washed up Marketo Champion. You don't want me in there anymore. But back in the day, I was doing a lot of implementations with Marketo for some of their largest customers. And one of those customers and I think they're here in the room today is Microsoft. And so I met Charles back in 2013 where he was doing that very first implementation at Azure, and they've gone on to be one of Marketo's biggest customers. And from the very beginning, I met Charles. I knew he was a visionary marketer. He really led that implementation. And now, in 2022, he called me up and he was like, hey, Pierce. I was like, Charles, what's up, man? He's like, hey, I'm at Google now. I was like, that's awesome. And he said, I've got 200 marketers, and I need to make them more efficient at email. And I want to really empower them to be able to do the best marketing possible, and they have to love doing it. So I'm so excited to have Charles with us today. Please give him a big round of applause.

[Charles Eichenbaum] All right. Thank you, Pierce, for that introduction. Set the bar really high.

Yeah. So I'm Charles Eichenbaum. I work at Google and Cloud Marketing there, and I run what we call the DOME team, Demand Operations and Marketer Enablement. And that basically is MarTech operations, data analytics, data science, and our connected marketing and sales function.

And if you haven't heard of Google Cloud...

Basically, our mission is to help every organization accelerate their ability to digitally transform its business and industry. And right now, in this AI era, which is one of the most profound, we're going to see one of the most profound shifts in our lifetimes, far bigger than we think the mobile and web shifts were. We're focused on helping organizations do this with an AI first position.

And we've got a lot of momentum. So these are a bunch of our customers. You may see some that you are familiar with. We operate in over 200 countries and territories, and we're really, really focused on helping these customers and many others succeed.

So let's go back to 2022, like Pierce said. Google Cloud had been growing since 2018, and we were at a point where we started to realize that what got us here won't really get us to where we want to go. And we needed to change some things.

So the first thing we wanted to-- The first thing that we realized that we needed to change is our speed of execution and cost efficiency. We needed to do things a lot more efficiently and scale with our revenues. We couldn't keep investing and investing in people to do the work, and we needed to make our teams much more efficient. And then we also needed to make them faster. And like Pierce mentioned, we needed to make marketers, we needed to give marketers a platform that they enjoyed using, that they loved using, to do things faster.

So let's jump into how we build campaigns. It's five easy steps, right? Marketer submits a form. Operations builds it.

We review and iterate. There's final approval, and then we launch. I think all of us here know it's actually much more complicated than this. And what we did is we really looked at this and said, hey, where in this work stream can we simplify things? Can we make things easier? And can we improve things for our marketers? And really, the area that we identified was bullet three, the review and iterate phase.

So I'm not sure if you all are familiar with this, but I call it the change request death loop.

And what happens is, at a lot of companies, is we'll build an email as an ops team. We'll send it to the market or landing page. We'll send it to the marketer. We'll say, hey, what do you think? And they go, hey, we need to change this image. We have a new speaker. Let's do a change, and then it goes back to the ops team, and then hours or even a day later, the change happens.

The ops team takes it, puts it in the tool, sends another preview. - How does this look? - Looks great. Five days later, we forgot a comma, or we need to change this. Okay, great. Go through that loop again. We are measuring this. On average, that loop happened five times, which meant things were much slower than they needed to be. It made marketers frustrated. I just, I just want to add this comma, like, how hard is that? Just let me in the tool. And they're like, I can't really let you into Marketo.

When we're running at a global scale like this, it's very difficult because you have to train people on it in a very deep way, and there's a lot of governance that goes into it. So we just didn't enable that. But we said there must be a better way to doing this. And so that's when I remembered, Knak started this business in 20-- Pierce started this business in 2015, to help marketers do that in a better way. So let me give them a call, and that's when I called them in 2022. And so what Knak is really is it's a video of a marketer using Knak. It's a no code email landing page platform that makes it really easy for marketers to build beautiful emails and landing pages. So you see here, drag and drop...

Prebuilt modules.

Brand is inside of the tool. Brand governance is inside of the platform, and so just makes it really, really easy and streamlined for folks to do that. And we're like, okay, hey, this has got, this might add legs. So we had this idea. Let's have marketers work directly inside of Knak, make all the changes that they want up until the last minute, and then click Done when they're ready and send it over. And the results that we were expecting, anticipated results increased speed of execution because the marketer could move as fast as they wanted or as slow as they wanted, and a lot more cost efficient. Remember, part of that change request process is somebody picking up the change and putting it in the tools and QAing it and sending the review again. And that, when you do it at the scale that we were doing, that adds up tremendously in terms of cost.

So our roll-out plan.

2022, we ran through an incredibly quick deal cycle with Pierce and bought it in December of 2022. And then we started to figure out, okay, how do we roll this thing out? We invested in building training materials. We invested in frequently asked questions. We invested in playbooks.

And then we piloted it with a small group in February of 2023. So we moved very, very quickly, too, also thanks to Pierce and the services that he helped provide and us be successful at Knak.

And then we launched our first cohort in May, our second cohort in July, and third in August. And when we launched this cohort and through the small pilot groups, we understood, hey, marketers are going to need some support because they're not really used to working inside of platforms like this. And so there is going to be a transition period.

And so we set up, basically so we operate globally. We set up time zone coverage across the world.

We set up email. We set up office hours. People could call and get support on Knak, and we called it the Knak Concierge. And it was a pretty big key to our success. And then all is well, right? Well, no. We started to get some feedback. Marketers liked some things, and they didn't like some things. And so that's when September 23, we went into annual planning, and we're like, we can't just, we've got to change the way that we've implemented this.

And so here's some of the things that marketers loved, or they didn't love. So some of the things that they loved, fast changes. That part, they absolutely loved it. They can go in, they can add the comma, they can change the speaker, they can change the time. They can get hands on and be creative inside of the email and see the email or the landing page exactly what it's, how it's going to show up for the customer. They can handcraft those surfaces. They really like that real view of the assets, and they really liked the Knak Concierge.

What they didn't like and this first one was a little bit surprising to us, they didn't like collaborating outside of Google Workspace. So a lot of work went into the email. And Workspace has a lot of rich, collaborative features, and everybody at Google uses it, and so it was difficult when there weren't people that had access to Knak or weren't used to Knak. So they wanted that back.

When we implemented Knak, we also basically if you saw the prior email, all of those modules that that were being pulled over, we had over 100 of those modules. And we basically had very bare bones templates, and so marketers every time had to start basically from the ground up. And so what we did there is we invested in building a lot better templates. We kept the building blocks. We simplified the building blocks, but we kept the-- We added the templates so that they didn't have a blank canvas every single time. And then the last thing and this one was a little, this was pretty controversial, I think, for us was from the Workspace doc, they still wanted our team to do the initial population. A good chunk of them still wanted our team to do the initial population of the Knak assets. And so what we ended up doing is we reintroduced the marketing ops team, my team, building that first version for those that that wanted that. And then we still got the benefit of marketers being able to make changes. If you remember back, on average, marketers were making five changes after it was built. So that value was still there for them to use it.

And...

Some of the results. So we saw 90% reduction in change requests when we launched it. We were able to avoid over $2 million in incremental costs to continue to scale and grow at the pace that we needed to, and we've rolled it out to over 200 users. I think it's roughly 250 now. Here's some quotes. "I was able to build three emails today and a landing page in less than an hour." It's one of the marketers, thanks for providing a tool that directly addresses our challenges and helps to make the workflow easier and less time consuming. So those are some, just a couple of many, many, things that we heard from marketers in terms of using the using the platform.

So some things that we learned.

One, small changes can be powerful. If you go back to when we were looking at that easy five step process, there's a lot behind that. Figuring out that area where you have the most leverage in the process and creates the most churn.

It could be a very small, seems like a very small change, but actually have an outsized impact, especially because that's a particular big pain point of the marketers.

Two, show the marketer their benefit. One of the mistakes that we made when we went in is we talked to the marketers about efficiency and cost savings.

You know what they told us? They don't care.

They don't care how much it costs us to do this. They don't care how efficient. They care is it easy for them to use? Does it give them a benefit? So talk to them about, hey, that change that takes a day, the comma you want to add? You can do that now for yourself in this really easy to use platform. You can see the assets as they're going to render for the customer in the emails and the landing pages. So really talk to them in their language and not what's in it for you.

Have marketers who are advisors. The small pilot group is an example of that, where we had champions in the different regions that we worked with very, very closely.

I think one mistake that people make when doing this is they just get the folks who are really excited about it. We actually focused on getting a mix, so we got people who are really not excited about it and very resistant, and we got people who are excited about it. And we ended up converting one of the people who were very resistant but also very influential in the organization. And, at the end, she was like, yeah, this is going to be better. This is going to be easier, and we've got to go do it. And that voice was very powerful because everybody knew that going in, she didn't, she wasn't a fan. And being able to flip her was...

Was super helpful.

Marketer experience versus savings. I touched a little bit on this when we re-added that step where we are actually building the initial asset in Knak.

It added back probably 10% of the cost, but it was 70%, 80% of the pain for the marketer. And so really being able to balance the marketer experience and the savings that we had was important, was important for the success of this. It's not savings at all costs. It's savings balanced with marketer experience.

One of the things that really went well was that strong ongoing enablement, The office hours, the time zone coverage, the chat, being able to get support very, very quickly was important. And then the last one, and this might be controversial in some organizations, but don't make it optional. We didn't make it optional. We just said, this is the way it's going to work. This is the future. We had a very smooth on ramp, so we allowed people to do it the old way for a little bit, but eventually we deprecated that.

It's much easier to run a clear, simple, single process versus multiple ways. And I realize that might not be tenable at every single company, but I would encourage you, if it is, to go down that route.

And so since we've gotten folks hands on a Knak, the ones that have really embraced it report more success. And I talked about them being able to make changes very, very quickly, but they also say that they feel more creative because they're actually getting hands on with the surfaces that their customers see.

They start to understand more the art of the possible.

It's a lot more tangible work for them and better outcomes. And I also see this more broadly when marketers have a technology background or a MarTech background. They are able to really understand and do more than other marketers aren't. So there is a lot of benefit for marketers to get hands on inside of marketing technology, but most marketers don't because MarTech is super complex. I'm sure you all have seen the ever-growing landscape of Scott Brinker, here on the right. And just our little space is zoomed in there. And so there's so many different tools, there's so many different ways of doing things.

All of these tools sort of interconnect together, and there's so many dials amongst all of the tools, and they have to work perfectly. If they don't, it's going to break. And so we tend to have marketers outside of these platforms and interact with forms or market or our marketing operations teams.

But I think that AI, GenAI couldn't have a presentation here without GenAI, ain't it right? GenAI is going to be a catalyst for change and connecting marketers to the power of technology. So even today, we're seeing examples where marketers are ideating or creating. They're doing blog posts. There's tools like Jasper out there that folks can use that are designed for marketers to be able to create, email copy and or just any kind of copy. There's tools like Gemini out there that marketers can ideate with.

I was actually talking to one of our writers internally today, and she was talking to me about how she uses Gemini to basically ideate and see area like with a, like a creative writing buddy is what she called it, and see areas that, that she wouldn't see and be able to create more, incorporate more perspectives in her writing. Audience targeting is another example where we're seeing things. Recommendations of audiences, people using natural language to be able to build audiences. So today, we have a form. People select some criteria, and they send it over, and then they have an analyst, and they go back and forth, and they refine the audience. It's one of those areas that takes a long time.

But I think we're going to see this change, and I'll show you an example of a company that's doing really cool stuff in that area in a minute.

GenAI campaign creation, so being able to take that core asset and have it create the landing pages, the emails, the thank you pages, all the paid media, all of those things that take a really long time for us to build out is another example, and you're going to see that also today. Market research, being able to ask tools like Gemini, how are my competitors talking about security? Or how are my competitors talking about, what is their messaging framework? And being able to get quick, synthesize massive amounts of information, so you can do your, marketers can do their job better. Performance optimizations, being able to look at the data, come up with insights and recommendations.

We were actually brainstorming with Knak yesterday on some things that possibilities. And one of the things, like, hey, can't we just have like, look at all the emails that are in our system, and can't the GenAI say, this is a-- I don't know, security company targeting these personas, and seems to be like there's some missing middle of the funnel content there.

Or you could tweak your top of the funnel content there. So just giving it these massive amounts of data and asking it to say evaluate how my nurture streams look.

So and so many more. That's the exciting thing about this area is five years from now, there'll be things that we hadn't even imagined.

So with that, I'm going to show you a quick demo of a company called GrowthLoop. And GrowthLoop has a composable CDP. So basically, it can sit on top of your data if it's in BigQuery. You can build audiences, and you can orchestrate across a bunch of different channels. And in this video, you're going to see a demo of how they're using AI to make this easier for marketers to build audiences and campaigns.

Do you have the audio? There's really cool music, I promise.

There we go.

You see here they're asking about the customers and recommending audiences based on that.

It's going to ask about what sort of goals do you want to attain with this campaign.

Where are people most likely to engage with? So that's GrowthLoop. I think they're doing some really fascinating stuff. Like, you saw how they were just engaging with the platform using natural language to build those audiences, refine those audience, and ideate. So that's one cool platform. Another, so now we're going to jump into Knak, and we're going to see a little bit of the future of how campaigns can be created.

Hey, everyone. I'm excited to be here at Adobe Summit this year showing off some of the work we've been doing leveraging Knak AI in partnership with Google. We've been looking at the landscape of digital marketing and looking at some of the big blockers that we see marketing teams facing when it comes to campaign creation. And really what we're looking to do is leverage AI to move from the current stage of creation into campaign generation. So what we're going to be looking at today is a vision of what that could be and how we could incorporate that into the Knak experience. So you can see here this is a very familiar experience. We're starting in the inspiration center. And for those that don't know, the inspiration center is really a curation of some of the best brands in the world. Example, emails and landing pages that you can use and start incorporating into your own campaigns. But really what we're going to do here is leverage AI and ask it to generate an entirely new campaign from scratch using just a prompt, and some documents that I've been working on. So I actually have a campaign brief that I've been working on the side, which I'll use to actually bring in here to generate the content. We can see here from the prompt alone, I told it that I want to have a product launch webinar, and I want it to be on April 22nd, and at a certain time. And I actually knew where I was in my organization, what my brand was, and recommended the best template available to me. And when I pick that template, now it's going to say, ask me for an actual document. So this is where I can bring my campaign brief in, drop that in, and it's immediately going to scan and extract all the campaign details. And then Knak AI will then use that to populate the campaign details, so you don't have to do anything. So you don't have to enter in any event dates or times. Simply look it over, make sure everything looks good, and click continue.

Now you'll notice, what happens when you pick a template is that it's going to actually have a set of emails and landing pages to pick from as a starting point to build your campaign. It's going to recommend them out of the box. So you can see here, it's recommended these six, and I can choose some optional ones if I want. But in this case, I'm going to stick with the recommendations.

Before I submit, I get a nice little preview with some live snapshots of what the assets will be once they're generated. This gives you a full confidence that what you're actually going to create is exactly what you want. Creating the campaign generates the emails and generates all the landing pages.

And then launches into a new campaign view that visualizes the emails and landing pages in a much more rich way showing the content and all the tokens resolved, so you don't have to preview it in a downstream system. So you can see here, when I click into any asset, it's going to render exactly as the end user would see it when they look on their browser or in their email client. So this is what we really want to leverage AI to do is streamline the entire workflow so you can focus on the things that really matter to you and your teams. Thank you for listening. I look forward to learning more from you of how you might use this in the future and helping us shape it as well.

So these are some examples of how AI is being the catalyst for improving marketer workflow. You can't just throw AI in, or you can. You end up with a chatbot, basically. But if you really infuse it in a purpose-built AI first workflow, you can save a bunch of time, be a lot more efficient, and marketers can really focus on the work that they want to do versus things that used to be very tedious.

So with that, I'm going to invite Pierce back up, and he's going to talk a little bit more about Knak and where they're headed.

Great, Don.

Nice man. Great job.

Great job. Thanks so much, Charles. It's awesome to see what you've done in such a short period of time. And I love how you talked about the now, what you're doing right now with your marketers, and the future. I think Generative AI, there's so many opportunities in front of us. You all just saw a bit of a prototype of where we're going as a company, and it's amazing to get the opportunity to work with Google, with the Gemini team to build this out. And I was out at our customer advisory board yesterday, and this is how we've always done things at Knak. We really work with our customers to build out things that are truly valuable to them.

And just so everyone knows, like, our mission at Knak is to make it simple for marketers to build emails and landing pages. And I mentioned back in 2013 doing that initial Microsoft implementation. And we talked to, so much has changed, but it's still hard, especially in big companies to build these emails. It's a challenge. And so really at Knak, we're trying to make your lives easier. We're trying to speed that up. And I'm really excited to show you some things that are available today. So that last prototype is in the future. Here are a few things that are available today in the Knak platform using Generative AI. So three things up front that I'd love to show you all. I think accessibility is really important. We know that a lot of our customers, they have to have accessible emails. And it's a little thing but making sure you go through all of your images, add the alt text like it adds time to that process. So I'm going to show you how we do that automatically.

I don't know about all of you, but there's lots of times where I go to write a subject line and I just have like writer's block, and I sit there for like an hour trying to figure out the best one. But we're going to show a subject line assistant where it looks at your email and automatically suggests the best subject line.

And then lastly, we work with a lot of big customers who are operating at a global scale. And so translations is another thing in that workflow that can really add a lot of cycles to getting a campaign out the door. Some of you might use agencies right now to do this, and it could take, a week or two to get the translation back. I'm going to show you how you can do this in seconds with AI.

So let me play this first video that's going to show. So here, again, we're in Knak, and what we're about to show you is how, when you add an image in, where that automatic alt text generator is going to come in. So here we're dragging and dropping an image. You can go into our image library. If you're using AEM assets, we also integrate with that. And so now we're clicking on AI suggestions. It's going to give us a few. We'll click that one. We can modify it if we want. And we also have an Optimize tab. This is really to help you make better emails. It's noticing that there is no subject line, no preview text.

So again, we're using the AI assistant to suggest those subject lines and preview text. And the nice thing here is we're actually going to tell it, you know what? We wanted emoji, and we want it to be shorter. And so Knak AI is going to automatically give you some other options that, again, you can click and use with one click.

Lastly, translation. So I've got my email. It's all ready to go, but I need to translate it. Well, with Knak AI, you just click which languages you want to translate that into. And it's not going to take weeks to get this done. It's going to take seconds. This is how long it actually takes. And you'll see we've actually just translated it into like six languages.

I'm from Canada, so I speak French, and I can confirm that is French.

And so, yeah, you see a subject line, preview text. Even if I look at the alt text, we also translate all of that. So really excited to be announcing this. A lot of our customers, what they've told us is, like, they're using all of this as a first cut and then sending it to their localization teams, and it's speeding it up incredibly. So really proud of the team on that one.

All right. This next one I'm going to play with audio, because Andrea, our product manager, talks really fast, and I can't do that. So here's dynamic content. But before we do, just some setup on this.

Like I mentioned, I'm a longtime Marketo user, and you probably all know there's kind of two types of dynamic content in Marketo. You've got kind of that out of the box version, which is really simple, easy to use drag and drop. And then you have velocity scripting, which is super powerful but requires the technical resource to do it. So my goal to the team was, what if we combine those two things? What if we make the power of velocity scripting available in a drag and drop interface? And so that's what Andrea is going to show now.

[Andrea] At Knak, we've made dynamic content no code, meaning you can use it on any email without needing special developers or code to pull it off. What you're seeing here is an email where I've customized the articles based off of industry as well as city. Not only did I build this without code, but another massive plus compared to Marketo or Salesforce is you could easily preview what the end content looks like.

That applies not just to dynamic elements, but also in collaboration. If I leave a comment on a dynamic part of an email, it's tied to the email dynamically. Notice it shows up in purple, not the regular blue. That means it'll clearly show anyone on my team which version of the email I'm referring to in the feedback I leave. Let's add another segment focused on the health care industry in Canada. I want to show you what the no code dynamic builder looks like. To build a segment, you can leverage any existing data point from in Marketo or Salesforce, segments, data points, custom objects. Notice as I'm building, I'm building combined segments using multiple data sources. This normally is impossible without code. We're building these from scratch right now, but if you have segments, you're going to reuse often. You can do this once and reuse them whenever you need.

Yeah. So again, if you're using developers right now to write velocity scripting, you can empower just like Charles has on the creative side, now on the segmentation side as well.

All right. Let's keep going.

Big announcement today at the Adobe Summit. They announced AJO for B2B, which sounds really cool. You can kind of use it to market to buyers' groups. And we know that Adobe is putting a lot of resources into AJO. We've got a lot of customers piloting it now. Knak is all about building a decentralized platform, so we just want to be where the marketers want to be. And we feel like marketers are seeming to go towards AJO, and we want to get ahead of that. So we are proud to announce that we do have an integration with AJO. If you build emails or landing pages in Knak with one click, you can sync them over into AJO. So I'm going to show that now. And this also I learned I went actually to the Adobe booth after they made that announcement about the B2B one, and they said that it's the same APIs and this will work on the B2B version.

So, yeah, we're back in Knak again.

And so this time, I'm going to show you how to build an email. If I have any Silicon Valley fans in the audience, I think you guys will appreciate this one. But right now, we are building a webinar email for Pied Piper.

And, you can see here, we're just kind of dragging and dropping some of the modules from the left. So these are kind of like prebuilt modules that an administrator would build.

And so, yeah, we're looking at the email and desktop now. We can check it in mobile, obviously, make sure it looks good everywhere. And when we're ready, we're going to go over and actually sync this email into AJO. So this works like any of the marketing automation platforms. So you sync. You pick your integration. You click a button. It goes right over there. And so let's take a look at what this looks like in AJO. So we're in AJO now. We are going to open this email. We can kind of review it. It's got the merge tag, obviously, for personalization. We can check over here as well, how's it looking on desktop? How's it looking on mobile? Of course, but double check, make sure it looks good. Now what we've realized is, hey, we actually want to make a change to this header. So we can go back into Knak and change this header into a different color. You can make whatever changes you want. But once we've done this, you have kind of two options. You could sync it as a new email, or you could just update that email in AJO. It's up to you. So in this case, we'll just update the email, go back to AJO, and I'll show you that it got updated in AGO once we hit the refresh here.

So another thing, there can also be, like, last minute changes. Maybe you don't want to go back into Knak. One of the great parts about this integration is that everything is still fully editable in AJO. So if you want to change text, images, links, you can do this here. So in this case, Richard has got demoted from speaking at this webinar, and his investor is going to take over. That's I've learned this, you got to make the investors happy.

So, yeah, so Laurie is going to take over here, and we can check it again. But this is it. It's, super easy to use. This operates a lot. If you haven't seen our other integrations with Marketo or Campaign, it works pretty much the same way.

So, just kind of one final thing. I started my career kind of on the Marketo side. We definitely built the business around Marketo. We do integrate with others, but we've got the deepest connection with Adobe. So we integrate with all of their maps. If you're on AEM assets, you can bring all of those images right into Knak.

Full integration there. And then as well, this is brand new for us, but we have an integration with Workfront. So if anybody uses Workfront, you can kind of see exactly where your assets are. Are they have they been started yet? Are they in draft? Are they out for review? Do they need changes? All of that is kind of visible. And then we also integrate with ProofHQ. So if there, if you want to use ProofHQ to continue to do your approvals, you can do that. And all of the comments come right back into Knak. So if you want to just make those quick changes, avoid that death loop that Charles talked about, we make that easy.

So yeah, it was amazing hearing from Charles. We've got work with a lot of Adobe's biggest customers, and we'd love to work with you. So thank you so much, everybody, for your time.

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