Latest news with #TheMarketingSociety
Scotsman
12-08-2025
- Business
- Scotsman
Marketing festival that cuts through the noise
Creative challenge vote at last year's marketing festival | Supplied Chris Marsh previews The Amplify Marketing Festival, a day of insight, debate and creative inspiration for the sector Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Amplify Marketing Festival 2025, hosted by The Marketing Society, returns on 21 August 2025 at the University of Edinburgh Business School, bringing together Scotland's marketing community for a day of insight, debate and creative inspiration. Chris Marsh | Supplied For more than a decade, The Marketing Society has championed events during the Edinburgh Festival, celebrating marketing's power to shape business growth and cultural change. Amplify has become the flagship event, uniting agencies, clients and creatives in an engaging, informal and stimulating forum designed to spark big ideas and build a vibrant marketing community. Carat are proud to be the headline partner of Amplify for a sixth year. This year's Amplify opens with The Ogilvy Lecture, an annual highlight honouring the legacy of David Ogilvy - one of Scotland's most influential advertising pioneers. The 2025 lecture will be delivered by Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer at System1 and a leading voice in creative effectiveness. Sponsored by Ogilvy, Orlando's lecture will explore the powerful relationship between emotion in advertising and long-term success in brand building as well as championing showmanship in advertising. The programme also features The Amplify Debate, where industry leaders will tackle the provocative motion: 'This house believes to improve company culture and performance, marketing should lead the way back to the office.' The session promises sharp, evidence-based arguments and lively discussion, reinforcing Amplify's reputation for fearless, future-focused thinking. Attendees can also select from six breakout sessions covering topics such as Nation Branding with Brand Scotland, Employer Brand of the Year, The Cannes Lions Review, The Best Beer Ads in the World, Client vs Agencies Creative Challenge and Celebrating Craft: a masterclass in copywriting with Honorary Fellow Gerry Farrell - all offering practical insights and fresh perspectives. The festival concludes with the legendary After Party, sponsored by sister agency Dentsu Creative, at the Assembly Club Bar, giving attendees the chance to connect, share ideas and celebrate our community. Amplify is a must-attend event for marketers who mean business. Limited tickets are available - head online and secure your place now and be part of the conversation shaping the future of marketing in Scotland. Find out more here
Campaign ME
26-06-2025
- Business
- Campaign ME
Marketing Society GCC Awards 2025 winners announced
The Marketing Society announced the winners of its 2025 GCC Awards on Tuesday, 24 June, with the regional marketing community gathering at Atlantis, The Palm to recognise work that delivered impact, effectiveness and innovation. Now in its third year, the GCC edition of the Marketing Society's global awards programme has become a regular fixture in the region's industry calendar. Originally launched in the UK in 1985, the awards continue to highlight standout work from across the marketing spectrum. This year's ceremony introduced three new categories – Best Use of Media, Best B2B Campaign and Best Team – reflecting the continued diversification of marketing roles and approaches across the region. Entries were assessed by a judging panel of senior client-side marketers. Alasdair Hall-Jones, Global Director of The Marketing Society, said: 'The GCC continues to impress us with its bold and innovative marketing landscape. Our Awards are not just about recognising great campaigns, they're about celebrating the people, teams, and ideas shaping the future of our industry. Award-winning work inspires others to raise their game and help build the stories that showcase marketing's positive impact on business. Each year, the calibre of entries reminds us why this region is one of the most dynamic hubs for marketers in the world and growing in importance globally.' Procter & Gamble, Union Coop and Havas Middle East were awarded in Brand Communication for Pampers – Joy Has Come Early, while Mashreq took the Brand Evolution category for its Climb2Change initiative. Miral Destinations won in Customer Experience and Engagement for its Yas Annual Pass campaign, and The Regeneration Journey – Red Sea Development, by Red Sea Global and Bloomberg Media Studios, earned the Sustainability title. The Madagascar National Tourism Board and Whereisthis were double winners, taking both Best Use of Media and Successful and Effective Partnerships for Madagascar Uncharted | Beyond the Baobabs. In the B2B category, IBM and Weber Shandwick MENAT were recognised for The CEO's Guide to Generative AI. Al Masaood Group, MSL Group and Publicis were named Best Team for Al Masaood Marketeers – The Makers of Results. The 2025 Marketing Society GCC Awards aim to recognise marketing work that delivers both creative strength and measurable business outcomes, offering a regional platform for industry benchmarking and peer recognition.
Martechvibe
25-06-2025
- Business
- Martechvibe
How CMOs are Redefining Marketing through Innovation
The report also reveals a shared belief among CMOs that while the core purpose - or 'why' - of marketing remains unchanged, the 'how' is evolving rapidly. Marketing is undergoing a powerful shift. CMOs are no longer confined to crafting campaigns; they're shaping business strategy, driving innovation, and using technology to unlock deeper customer connections. With data fluency and AI now part of the marketing DNA, the role has evolved into a blend of art, science, and leadership. This is how modern CMOs are redefining what marketing truly means. That transformation is the focus of a new report from The Marketing Society, developed in partnership with The Trade Desk. Titled 'Leading the Innovation Conversation: How to be a Pioneering Changemaker,' the report brings together the voices of leading CMOs to explore how the role is being redefined through innovation, insight, and intent. The report reveals how leading Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in the Middle East balance their day-to-day demands with strategic brand building and innovation. Moreover, the report highlights a fundamental shift in how marketing is defined, with the role of the CMO no longer limited to creativity alone. Marketing leaders recognise that emerging technologies and data fluency are critical to driving innovation and achieving measurable business outcomes. The report also reveals a shared belief among CMOs that while the core purpose – or 'why' – of marketing remains unchanged, the 'how' is evolving rapidly. With digital acceleration and rising customer expectations, innovation is no longer a luxury but a necessity. ALSO READ: Day 1 VMF KSA: The Changing Role Of The CMO AI is at the forefront of this evolution. All CMOs featured in the report are already using AI in various ways – from content creation to process automation and data optimisation, though most acknowledge they're still in early stages of adoption. The marketing leaders are united in their view that AI's greatest potential lies in its ability to deliver the right message at the right time to deepen customer engagement and brand loyalty. Terry Kane, Managing Director MENA at The Trade Desk, said: 'This report underscores that the future of marketing innovation lies at the intersection of data, technology and creativity.' 'Marketers have a unique opportunity to embrace this shift and become even smarter leaders, especially in a region like MENA, where digital transformation is moving at pace and the appetite for innovation is high.' Five key takeaways from the report: Innovation with Intent – Without a clear understanding of customer needs, innovation risks becoming noise, not impact. Communicate to Activate – Internal alignment within an organisation is key to adopting new ideas and approaches. Respect Fuels Collaboration – Meaningful, transformative partnerships are built on shared values and mutual respect. Strategic Presence over Ubiquity – Be deliberate and data-driven about how and where you show up for your customers. Reach your audience where it matters. Marketing Demands a Blended Skillset – Marketing is part art, part science and all business. An equal mix of data, technology and creativity is essential to success. Alasdair Hall-Jones, Global Director at The Marketing Society, said, 'The Marketing Society is about creating the space for marketers to discuss all these issues and more. We hope this report inspires marketers to drive meaningful change in their business. More than that, we hope it's the start of a continuing conversation.' Read the full report here: ALSO READ: Martechvibe Celebrates Personalisation Week The Martechvibe team works with a staff of in-house writers and industry experts. View More Locala's omnichannel advertising platform leverages granular insights and cutting-edge AI to help marketers plan, activate, and measure campaigns that are personalised to the local consumer. It specialises in transforming complex mobility and consumer data into actionable audience insights, fueling advanced media strategies. VISIT WEBSITE Blue Prism is a global software provider, offering ROM 2, an intelligent automation implementation methodology that empowers teams to scale their digital workflow. One of its use cases is sales and marketing solutions, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms. VISIT WEBSITE Pega is a combined business process management and robotic process automation (RPA) platform that comes with workforce analytics features. It offers a wide variety of tools such as Pega Email Bot to automate repetitive tasks with personalised customer replies at scale. VISIT WEBSITE EdgeVerve, a subsidiary of India-based IT company Infosys Technologies, offers RPA software for major enterprise companies. Its AssistEdge Robotic Process Automation provides machine learning and AI tools called Infosys Nia. Its AssistEdge RPA enables global marketing and distribution companies to automate 970+ manual tasks at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Clevertap is a comprehensive platform that allows global marketers to get unified customer data analytics and omnichannel engagement in one place. VISIT WEBSITE UseResponse is a fully customisable customer support and feedback software, helping companies to better understand the needs of their customers. It provides the capabilities of multichannel ticketing, live chat with messengers aggregator, chatbot, feedback community portal, and knowledge base. VISIT WEBSITE Survicate is a drag-and-drop, multichannel survey builder, helping brands effortlessly collect and analyse customer feedback. It offers 23+ one-click, native integrations, enabling advertisers and marketers to create follow-up campaigns based on real-time customer feedback. VISIT WEBSITE SAP Sales Cloud comes with end-to-end solutions and offers AI-fueled insights for understanding customers' preferences. It helps build customer profiles at scale. It also empowers users to automatically manage contact information, which streamlines clients' journeys. VISIT WEBSITE Freshsales by Freshworks is an AI-powered software that streamlines the sales cycle by automating mundane tasks and personalising customer engagement. It generates quality leads and nurtures relationships by understanding visitor intent in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Developed for midsize enterprises and large organisations, Creatio offers end-to-end CRM software solutions, allowing users to manage sales, marketing, and services all in one place. For marketing professionals, it provides Marketing Creatio, an omnichannel marketing platform to orchestrate customer journeys and accelerate lead-to-revenue. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a global technology provider, offering low code/no-code, AI-powered capabilities. Marketers and advertisers can harness its technologies for multiple use cases like B2B strategies, cross-channel personalisation, real-time analytics, and more. VISIT WEBSITE SAS offers embedded CDP capabilities, letting marketers unify customer data, understand digital activity and enable analytically driven, real-time activation. It comes with data activation facility that enables marketers to pull only the data they want, further reducing data migration costs. VISIT WEBSITE Blueshift is a scalable CDP platform that offers AI-driven capabilities for clubbing real-time events with related data from various sources. It streamlines these insights into unified customer profiles, enabling marketers to automatically personalise their targeting goals. VISIT WEBSITE Wotnot is a genAI-powered , no-code chatbot platform, helping the sales and marketing team to engage with visitors on their website via personalised conversations, catering to their lead-generation goals. It offers platform-based solutions, such as AI Studio, a GPT chatbot builder, and an analytics dashboard. VISIT WEBSITE Aisera is a generative AI platform provider that offers AI Copilot, AiseraGPT, and AiseraLLM for various domains. With Aisera, enterprises can accelerate the development of their LLMs or purchase ready-to-use generative AI solutions with pre-trained LLMs using customer data to reduce hallucinations. VISIT WEBSITE Deliotte offers Ncyte, an all-in-one analytics solution. Utilising patented algorithms, proprietary data models and predictive analytics, Ncyte delivers actionable insights for various marketing functions. With Nycte, data and marketing teams can pre-define events such as attributed campaign performance to evaluate their efforts with live notifications. VISIT WEBSITE CleverTap is a customer engagement and retention platform that offers the functionality to integrate app analytics and marketing. Powered by TesseractDB, a purpose-built database for engagement & retention, it combines the features of audience analytics, omnichannel engagement, and product A/B testing for marketing functions. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX), lets advertisers personalise their campaigns. Its flagship product, Oracle Moat, a comprehensive analytics and measurement platform, provides a suite of solutions across marketing and ad intelligence. Moat helps reach prospective customers, capture consumer attention, and measure the outcomes to unlock business potential. VISIT WEBSITE Meta Ads is a social media advertising platform leveraging the user base from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp to deliver personalised ads at scale. It offers Meta Business Suite and Meta Business Manager for managing and tracking ad performance. Utilising its AI-powered tools, advertisers can partially or fully automate with complete control over their ads. VISIT WEBSITE WebEngage is an end-to-end customer data platform, helping brands to strategise their customer engagement and retention functions. It supports third-party integration for use cases including customer segmentation, omnichannel engagement, and survey & feedback. VISIT WEBSITE ServiceNow features Robotic Process Automation Hub (RPA Hub), a scalable genAI-powered platform for orchestrating and managing a robotic workforce to execute various business processes. Its workflow automation enables tasks like lead management and campaign execution and supports integration with popular marketing tools to streamline processes. VISIT WEBSITE Tealium is a comprehesive customer data platform helping brands orchestrate and manage their data activation from a marketing standpoint. Its AudienceStream CDP functionality enables marketers to create custom campaigns via 1300+ integration options for several use cases. VISIT WEBSITE Qualaroo is a saas-based online survey creator offering Qualaroo Nudge, a proprietary technology for uploading custom properties for airtight targeting. It enables marketers to 'nudge' when user clicks on a page element, helping them to target visitors on their real-time activity. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk is a Danish-American company that offers software-as-a-service products with the capabilities of omnichannel integrations. Its omnichannel messaging platform enables sales and marketing teams to easily track and consolidate customer tickets from various sources, ensuring enhanced customer experiences. VISIT WEBSITE WebEngage is an all-in-one marketing platform that integrates omnichannel engagement with live analytics features. It offers AI/ML-driven product recommendations engine that enables marketers to boost conversion for all channels, including the web and mobile apps. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company offering omnichannel support capabilities for all customer-focused marketing functions. It provides no-code, easy-to-build API integrations to access real-time customer data from multiple sources — such as CRM, CDP and ecommerce platforms. VISIT WEBSITE SAP provides omnichannel marketing capabilities through its flagship product: SAP Emarsys. By accessing its purpose-built reports, teams can determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, segments, and channels in achieving sales goals. Its B2B account engagement features let brands deliver predictable and personalised marketing-led B2B insights at scale. VISIT WEBSITE MoEngage is a global AI-driven marketing platform that enables brands to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns from a single intuitive interface. Utilising MoEngage's User Path Analysis capabilities, marketing teams can target customers across 10+ channels, depending on their purchase behaviour. VISIT WEBSITE Intuit Mailchimp is an AI-powered omnichannel platform that offers email and marketing automation functions. With its customised pre-built audience segments, marketers can scale their campaigns based on individual contacts' demographic information and shopping behaviour. VISIT WEBSITE Hubspot is a cloud-based, scalable customer platform that offers various marketing automation solutions with omnichannel support capabilities. It enables marketers to create omnichannel campaigns to connect and interact with customers across multiple channels in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Bloomreach is an all-inclusive marketing automation platform that comes with omnichannel orchestration supports for various use cases, such as marketing campaign personalisation, and headless CMS commerce platform experience. VISIT WEBSITE Agillic specialises in offering global brands a comprehensive Omnichannel Marketing Automation Platform that enables them to create personalised marketing campaigns. Its multichannel marketing capabilities support multiple integrations, such as Playable and Sleeknote for lead generation, Zapier for automating routine processes, among others. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud features Adobe Campaign, enabling marketers to synchronise their customer data from various channels for omnichannel marketing. By leveraging its omnichannel integration with Adobe Journey Optimiser, brands can build multi-step journeys, campaigns, and personalised real-time moments that follow their customers across channels. VISIT WEBSITE ActiveCampaign is an intelligent multichannel marketing automation platform that enables marketers to seamlessly connect campaigns across the channels that matter most to them. It helps enterprises streamline personalised marketing, transactional emails, and one-to-one CRM interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE UiPath offers a comprehensive AI-powered robotic automation platform, enabling marketers to streamline recurring functions, such as lead automation and customer engagement. Utilising its capabilities, marketers can personalise and automate customer interactions, depending on their needs and preferences. VISIT WEBSITE SAP is a composable marketing automation technology provider, offering SAP Intelligent RPA solutions to automate repetitive, rules-based business processes, including marketing and sales. Using its tech stack, marketers can automatically extract product data from manufacturers' websites, update online inventory and import website and email sales. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft offers Power Automate, a low-code and AI-powered RPA software that helps marketers streamline tasks like lead management, email campaigns, social media management, data analysis, content publishing, and customer feedback. Leveraging its capabilities, businesses can automate repetitive tasks, such as lead capture and email marketing workflows. VISIT WEBSITE IBM offers AI-powered Robotic Process Automation capabilities for CRM and marketing functions. It enables users to automate workflows with integrated OCR and intelligent chatbots, distribute work across multiple bots without human interventions and manage emails via low-code authoring tools. VISIT WEBSITE Hyland offers an AI-powered comprehensive robotic automation software suite, enabling marketers' teams to automate their campaigns. Its Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology allows businesses to automate repetitive marketing functions, such as execution of targeted and personalised strategies in near real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Datamatics is an intelligent automation platform, offering TruBot RPA designer, a low-code bot design tool for marketing teams to create customised bots quickly. It provides 500 pre-built components, enabling low-code design and rapid deployment capabilities with drag-and-drop options. VISIT WEBSITE Automation Anywhere offers Automation Success Platform powered by Vertex AI, enabling enterprises to develop a cloud-based digital workforce at scale. Leveraging its bots, ML, and AI technologies, marketers can automate their marketing and sales processes. One of its popular offerings is Automation Co-Pilot, a genAI-powered assistant that empowers businesses to create and summarise content. VISIT WEBSITE Appian is a global technology provider, delivering end-to-end process automation with RPA, AI, IDP and API integrations. Utilising the readily available APIs of this low-code platform, teams can create a series of connected digital business applications including customer management and marketing. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by Zoho Corporation, Zoho Analytics enables marketers to track all critical metrics in a single platform to enhance marketing outcomes. The company offers 75 pre-built data visualisation reports and dashboards on marketing performance for collaborative analysis. With its AI-powered assistant, marketers can generate automated insights, predict future trends, and configure smart alerts. VISIT WEBSITE Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform, offering marketing analytics tools to global businesses. Its open-source analytical tools include Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics for understanding market trends and website traffic respectively. VISIT WEBSITE Nielsen is a global audience insights, data and analytics solution provider, helping marketers measure what people listen to and watch. It offers a comprehensive, AI-powered Nielsen Marketing Cloud platform with sub-products such as Audience Segments, Scarborough, and Advanced Audiences to understand audiences for different targeting initiatives. VISIT WEBSITE MoEngage is a full-stack marketing automation platform, offering consumer insights and analytics solutions for marketers to understand customer LTV. With MoEngage Analytics, they can measure user engagement, spot behavioural patterns, and act on retention to prevent app uninstalls. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft Clarity is a behavioural analysis tool that helps marketers understand user interaction with their website. It supports features like Session recordings, Heatmaps, and ML insights in real time. Processing more than a petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month, Clarity accommodates limitless traffic for various marketing measurements at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by AI-led insights, Merkle offers scalable marketing analytics and CX technology solutions, helping brands to optimise their campaigns. Some of its flagship solutions are Measurement & Media analytics, Consumer & Experience insights, and Product & Market intelligence. VISIT WEBSITE Hubspot offers marketing analytics and dashboard software, enabling businesses to make data-backed decisions for use cases, such as revenue generation, site analytics and detailed reporting. Leveraging the capabilities of its multi-touch revenue attribution model, marketers can monitor real-time website traffic via unique tracking codes. VISIT WEBSITE Google Analytics is an open-source analytics tool by Google, enabling marketing teams within organisations to better understand their customers via valuable insights. Consequently, businesses can use those insights to take action, such as website improvement and tailored audience list creation. VISIT WEBSITE Adverity is an integrated data analytics platform, enabling marketers to automate their customer's data integration and visualisation functions. It offers 600+ pre-built data connectors to popular marketing platforms, social media networks, SEO tools, and marketing automation solutions. The platform also provides pre-build dashboards to generate tailored reports. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target within its analytics tools solutions, enabling marketers to execute in-depth analysis of their customer data. Adobe Analytics allows the sales and marketing teams to mix, match, and analyse data from any digital point in the customer journey. VISIT WEBSITE Ahrefs features a suite of analytics tools under its Ahref Enterprise offering. It offers API and Looker Studio connectors, enabling marketing teams to elevate their SEO strategy with enterprise-grade and insights. Some of the criteria for its API endpoints include Backlinks, Organic & Paid Traffic, SERPs, Website health score and more. VISIT WEBSITE StackAdapt is a multi-channel programmatic advertising platform, enabling digital marketers to customise their strategy. It offers open and flexible DSP (Digital Signal Processing) capabilities for executing tailored ad campaigns. Furthermore, its ad previewer lets marketing teams preview video, display and native ads on desktop or mobile across 500+ publishers, covering 23 verticals. VISIT WEBSITE Rakuten is a global affiliate ad technology company, enabling advertisers to optimise their marketing strategies with data-driven insights. It offers AI-powered forecasting and benchmarking capabilities and dynamic multi-touch commissioning tools, allowing advertisers to customise their campaigns. It also supports first-party data collection integrations for both B2B and B2C marketers. VISIT WEBSITE Nielsen offers Nielsen Ad Intel, a cross-platform advertising intelligence platform with actionable insights to identify prospects, analyse brand strategies and learn from past advertising campaigns. It offers various advertising intelligence features such as ad spend monitoring, competitive benchmarking, global competitive insights and expert data harmonisation. VISIT WEBSITE Magnite is an independent sell-side advertising technology provider, enabling publishers to monetise their content across all screens and formats. It offers Magnite Streaming, a singular supply-side platform that merges technology from the Magnite CTV and SpotX platforms. Utilising this functionality, marketers can identify their potential audiences to restructure their targeting strategies. VISIT WEBSITE IBM offers a comprehensive suite of Watson Advertising to agencies and marketers. With Watson Advertising's AI-powered assistant, advertisers can customise their advertisements, based on real-time ad results. It also supports functionalities of cookieless advertising, ad fraud management and brand safety measurements. VISIT WEBSITE Google features a comprehensive list of AI-powered Ad tools under its Google Ads offering. Some of its popular tools include Keywords Planner, Ads Editor, Reach Planner, Ads Mobile App, Insights Finder, Ads API, and Recommendations Page. Additionally, it offers Google AdMob to help businesses plan their in-app revenue generation strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Criteo is an all-in-one connected commerce media platform, enabling marketers and agencies to scale their digital and physical assets. Leveraging the capabilities of its AI-powered technology, brands can develop strategies for intent-based product recommendations, multi-prolonged accessibility, contextual advertising, and more. VISIT WEBSITE Basis Tecnologies (formerly known as Centro), is a programmatic advertising platform, offering ad management tools for search, social and site direct via a single interface. Its flagship products are Basis Assistant and Basis Automate+. Basis Assistant is a Chrome extension, connecting 20+ platforms and tools, and Basis Automate+ is a digital advertising automation tool for simplifying campaign process. VISIT WEBSITE AppsFlyer is a mobile attribution company, helping mobile advertisers to identify their ad network. It offers a measurement suite, giving app marketers full visibility into their customer journeys while preserving their privacy. Utilising its AI-powered Creative Optimisation platform, marketers can formulate their creative strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Adtriba is a cross-channel digital marketing management platform based on data-driven attribution modelling. Its solutions include Adtriba Triangulation, enabling advertisers to witness the integration of diverse measurement methods, such as Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Incrementality Testing. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers connected advertising solutions with its natively integrated Adobe Advertising platform. Its consultancy-based reporting options come with AI-powered optimisation features, helping advertisers analyse their ad performance via 200+ measurement metrics. Utilising its connected TV (CTV) and search, social, and commerce tools, marketers can optimise their customer acquisition strategy. VISIT WEBSITE specialises in Conversational AI, generating autonomous conversations that appear human-like. These conversations form the foundation of brand engagement. Their AI-powered, no-code Dynamic Automation Platform manages around two billion conversations from a multitude of channels in numerous languages. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr offers a comprehensive suite of 250+ AI-intent bot templates for various industry verticals to accelerate bot development. Its specialised AI and compliant rule engine enables marketers to modify and automate their promotional campaigns for better engagement via suggestion-based personalised bots. VISIT WEBSITE Meta's new class of generative AI features and creative tools allow users to create and share custom stickers or update the visual style of their photos with a simple text prompt. They can also chat with 28 different AIs and get unique perspectives on topics like travel, games and food. VISIT WEBSITE is a UI-based platform that allows marketers to create a chatbot quickly and deploy it easily on multiple channels. Leveraging the capabilities of its conversational builder, enterprises can build the Dialogflow using dialogue messages. Some of its popular offerings include XO: Experience Optimisation and GALE(Beta). VISIT WEBSITE IBM watsonx Assistant is an interactive virtual agent that utilises natural language and AI, enabling users to set it up on their app and website. It offers fast and accurate responses to customers, enhancing their overall experience and satisfaction with its adaptive learning capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE Haptik helps enterprises manage their customer lifecycle with generative AI-powered conversational solutions to boost marketing and sales. It offers Contakt and Interakt to enhance overall CX, where Interakt enables marketers to send hyper-targeted and personalised campaigns to drive customers to take action on WhatsApp. VISIT WEBSITE Dialogflow is an all-in-one platform for developing chatbots, voice bots, and virtual agents using natural language understanding and Google AI. It helps marketing teams create conversational agents that can handle common customer requests and issues, such as FAQs, and order status at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Dialpad is a fully integrated unified conversation intelligence platform that utilises ongoing ML(Machine Learning) algorithms and does not require coding to configure a chatbot. It offers real-time insights and tips, helping marketing teams customise their approach for every customer. VISIT WEBSITE is a low code-no code, enterprise-grade generative AI platform offering readily available LLMs for CX transformations. Its omnichannel reporting and analytics suite for marketing enables organisations to streamline their customer journeys. VISIT WEBSITE is a global conversational AI technology provider optimised for operational efficiency at scale. It offers self-learning AI capabilities that emphasise Natural Language Understanding (NLU) along with intent suggestions. VISIT WEBSITE Avaamo is an all-in-one conversational AI platform for enterprises offering a suite of industry-specific skills developed to automate and resolve common use cases. It offers Outreach, which enables marketers to educate and engage with customers across existing touchpoints through proactive and personalised communication. VISIT WEBSITE Amazon Lex offers fully managed conversational AI interfaces with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. It enables sales and marketing teams to automate user tasks in their applications like the CRM and across any digital channel. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk is an AI-powered customer feedback software provider, offering customer satisfaction (CSAT) software to businesses across multiple industries. Its marketplace offers 1600+ apps and integrations, enabling marketers to create a complete customer feedback system. VISIT WEBSITE UserVoice provides product feedback management software for SaaS businesses. Its UserVoice Validation tool delivers actionable user insights to inform roadmap strategy. From testing ideas to ensuring satisfaction with released features, it helps research and marketing teams gather quick user feedback throughout the entire product lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE Twilio provides integrated Mindful Feedback functionality within its Flex offering, enabling marketers to automatically take action based on real-time customer feedback. It automatically collects customer feedback after Flex interactions by capturing feedback over post-call voice IVR, outbound voice IVR, conversational SMS, Web SMS, email, and web surveys. VISIT WEBSITE Trustpilot offers ML and AI-powered feedback management tools, helping marketers build trust and loyalty through customer reviews. Its AI-driven Review Insights tool enables marketers to identify growth areas from negative feedback, whereas its Image Generator tool lets them enhance social media engagement. VISIT WEBSITE Survey Monkey is a global online survey and forms tech stack provider, offering AI-fueled market research solutions to businesses. Its enterprise feedback management program provides 250+ templates with the capabilities of customisation, allowing organisations to build tailored survey forms. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr is a unified customer experience platform (CXM), offering AI-powered feedback management capabilities with its flagship product: Sprinklr Surveys. It integrates solicited customer feedback with unified-CXM data, enabling brands to derive meaningful, actionable insights. Utilising its genAI-powered survey builder, marketers can create conversational surveys to streamline their NPS strategies. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a comprehensive customer-oriented technology provider offering a feedback management suite. Salesforce's survey responses help marketers create personalised surveys based on their existing customers' data. Some of the supported applications of its feedback management platform are genAI-powered survey form development and sentiment-insights-based survey collections. VISIT WEBSITE QuestionPro is an online feedback software provider, offering ready-made survey templates to businesses across 40+ countries. Leveraging the capabilities of its customer satisfaction templates, advertisers and marketers can create and gather tailored questions. VISIT WEBSITE Qualtrics is an all-in-one customer experience solution provider, offering website & app feedback tools for organisations to collect customer feedback efficiently. Its digital experience analytics capabilities combined with DXA integrations, bring together verbal and behavioural data for in-depth analysis of user feedback. VISIT WEBSITE HubSpot is a one-stop marketing platform, providing customer feedback software under its Service Hub offerings. Its pre-built APIs include net promote score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, allowing marketers to strengthen their customer loyalty strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Medallia is a comprehensive platform, enabling marketers to capture feedback from all customer touch points. Some of its popular feedback management software capabilities include Sense360 for analysing consumer spending, Medallia Video to automatically extract meaningful insights from customer's feedbacks and Agile Research for creating branded surveys in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Zeotap lets brands integrate, unify, segment and orchestrate customer data, fostering a cookieless future. It offers a 'Non-Customer Entity Data' feature that helps marketers to integrate both customer and non-customer entity data. VISIT WEBSITE Twilio provides, Twilio Segment, an AI-powered CDP, enabling marketers to streamline their personalised customer engagement journeys. It brings together clean, consented customer data for real-time insights with 450+ pre-built connectors. VISIT WEBSITE Syntasa provides data-ready CDP capabilities, equipping marketers with essential tools to prepare their customer data. It offers real-time sentiment analytics capabilities, helping enterprises derive behavioural insights from unified user profiles to foster hyper-personalised experiences. VISIT WEBSITE SAP is a company-wide customer data management platform, helping marketers improve engagement, conversion, and retention. It offers a genAI-powered data model, enabling enterprises to unify their B2B and B2C customers' profiles to reach their personalisation goals. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle is a global database management company, providing CDP solutions, under its flagship product: Oracle Unity. Its AI-powered models enable marketers to create hyper-personsalised campaigns with predictive insights by streamlining real-time customer data from heterogeneous sources. VISIT WEBSITE Growthloop is a composable CDP platform, allowing marketing and sales team to action their data at scale. It offers GrowthLoop Audience Builder, enabling marketers to initiate their lead generation functions. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers a real-time CDP, letting users create high-value audience segments for B2C and B2B use cases across their marketing funnel. It follows a cookieless marketing approach to automatically unify customer data across various online and offline channels in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE ActionIQ is a composable CDP platform that offers audience segmentation, acquisition marketing, and Customer 360 capabilities. It integrates analytical tools, enabling marketers to collect and analyse their first-party customer data at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Zoho CRM leverages automation and comprehensive analytics to empower any sales team, fostering stronger customer loyalty. Ideal for both small businesses and enterprises, this software enables enhanced productivity and tailored solutions through predictive intelligence. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk offers Zendesk Sell, an easy-to-deploy CRM platform that is simple to deploy and navigate, catering to businesses of any scale. Its mobile-friendly Sell app has the functionalities of geolocation, helping sales and marketing teams. Offering an all-in-one CRM platform, organisations can implement use cases like prospecting, engagement, lead generation and communication capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE SugarCRM is a global CRM software provider, helping marketing, sales, and service teams improve efficiency through automation, data, and intelligence in near real-time. It offers Sugar Market, an all-in-one marketing automation platform that helps marketers to automate their campaign with higher ROI. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a one-stop sales and support CRM software that regularly updates customer records, tracks emails and calls, and creates organised support processes for quicker customer responses. Its simple and scalable infrastructure is ideal for businesses of all sizes. VISIT WEBSITE Pipedrive stands out with its emphasis on automation, tailorability, and seamless integration. Purposefully built to enhance the efficiency and productivity of sales professionals, this CRM solution has an intuitive setup and robust capabilities. It facilitates lead generation, comprehensive sales analytics, and seamless business expansion. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle NetSuite CRM, a component of Oracle's business software suite, is for all midsize and booming businesses that want a comprehensive, integrated CRM solution with ERP capabilities. Using it, customers and partners can directly interact with the platform, freeing the additional work load for their sales team. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution brimming with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring and sentiment analysis. VISIT WEBSITE Less Annoying is a CRM software that utilises a straightforward search feature within its contact management system, making it easy to track contacts. It is ideal for small-sized businesses and offers a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface. VISIT WEBSITE Insightly offers CRM software solutions for enterprises looking to understand their audience data across various marketing functions. It integrates seamlessly with third-party apps, streamlining workflow automation, including bulk emailing and report generation. VISIT WEBSITE HubSpot's sleek dashboard with consolidated CRM tools simplify complex customer data, further transforming it into meaningful insights. Complementing typical CRM functionalities, HubSpot provides tailored options, including conversation intelligence and email monitoring. VISIT WEBSITE Apptivo delivers adaptable and web-based CRM solutions, enabling marketing and sales teams to streamline all customer service requirements across various devices and browsers. Despite its focused feature set, it encompasses over 65 interconnected applications alongside a robust sales pipeline management tool, ensuring efficient tracking of potential leads without any downtime. VISIT WEBSITE Sitecore offers composable cloud solutions with its flagship products, Sitecore Experience Platform(XP) and Sitecore Experience Manager (XM). They help marketers to overcome scalability challenges. Some of its features include intuitive visual editing, headless delivery, marketing automation, scalable personalisation, data and machine learning capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform that helps enterprises link clients, partners, and employees to securely exchange information and documents. Built on its Customer 360 platform, Salesforce's DXP ensures seamless integration with any solution in the Salesforce ecosystem. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of platform-based marketing automation solutions for personalised B2B and B2C automation campaigns. Some of its featured products are Eloqua Marketing Automation, CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement, and Unity Customer Data Platform. VISIT WEBSITE Optimizely is a digital experience platform (DXP) provider that offers Optimizely One, an easy-to-use and fully integrated suite. It provides a single, unified workflow with thoughtfully embedded AI and machine-learning algorithms, accelerating work across the entire marketing lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE OpenText offers a cloud-native, scalable platform for enterprises to streamline their marketing functions. It provides fully composable content management, digital asset management, creative workflows, personalisation, targeting and customer data technologies in one place, ensuring a holistic approach to B2B, B2E and B2C experiences. VISIT WEBSITE Neptune DXP is a PaaS(Platform-as-a-Service) provider, helping marketing teams build custom apps based on modular, reusable application building blocks. The company offers flexible environments to businesses across different verticals, further providing personalised digital solutions at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Magnolia is a composable DXP that comes with no-code connector packs and low-code micro-frameworks for third-party integrations. It also offers an open-source version alongside its commercial plans enabling enterprises to build tailored use cases. VISIT WEBSITE Liferay DXP helps marketers deliver personalised and connected digital experiences across a broad range of channels, including customer portals, websites, intranets, mobile apps, and connected devices. It offers intuitive CMS, user analytics, and site management tools that businesses need to launch, test and optimise digital experiences for faster go-to-market. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by IBM Consulting, IBM iX offers a composable DXP, providing a comprehensive solution to make enterprises' systems future-ready. Utilising its data-driven insights and intelligent workflows, marketers can design and deliver human-centred experiences across the customer lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE HCL Digital Experience (DX), forms part of a wider HCL Customer Experience (CX) product portfolio, offering core capabilities such as content management, DAM, CDP called Signals, and low-code application development. It provides services in government, life sciences, insurance, financial services, and other verticals. VISIT WEBSITE Contentstack is a headless CMS and Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solution provider that helps marketers gain a competitive edge. It recently launched into Google Cloud Marketplace, and is also available on Microsoft Azure and AWS. It seamlessly enables mid-market brands to adopt its omnichannel campaign engine to drive higher conversions and sales. VISIT WEBSITE Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud provides businesses an edge with its modular capabilities: Content Management System (CMS), Discovery features for search and merchandising optimisation, and Engagement tools such as Customer Data Platforms (CDP) for personalisation and analytics. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of services specifically designed to address the day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experience at scale. Its platform helps manage different digital content and assets to improve customer satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage. VISIT WEBSITE Acquia offers DXP solutions, comprising of two main elements: Acquia Drupal Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. It can be accessed in both platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) with additional components such as Site Factory for multisite management, digital asset management (DAM), CDP, personalisation, and Campaign Studio. VISIT WEBSITE
Broadcast Pro
25-06-2025
- Business
- Broadcast Pro
Middle East CMOs embrace innovation and AI in new report
The report highlights a fundamental shift in how marketing is defined, with the role of the CMO is no longer limited to creativity alone. The Marketing Society, in collaboration with global advertising technology leader The Trade Desk, has released a new report examining how marketing innovation is being redefined by top Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) across the Middle East. Titled Leading the Innovation Conversation: How to Be a Pioneering Changemaker, the report captures the perspectives of leading brand executives navigating the challenges of modern marketing while striving for innovation and long-term brand value. The findings point to a major shift in the role of marketing leaders. Once focused predominantly on creativity, the position of the CMO now requires fluency in data, emerging technologies, and business strategy. With digital transformation accelerating and consumer expectations rising, the report finds that innovation is no longer optional—it's essential. CMOs across the region agree that while the core purpose of marketing remains intact, the methods and tools used are evolving quickly. Artificial Intelligence plays a central role in this transformation. Every CMO featured in the report is already exploring AI in areas such as content generation, workflow automation, and data-driven decision-making. While most leaders admit that their organisations are still in the early stages of adoption, they recognise AI's potential to deliver highly personalised messaging that enhances customer engagement and strengthens brand loyalty. Commenting on the findings, Terry Kane, Managing Director MENA at The Trade Desk, said: 'This report underscores that the future of marketing innovation lies at the intersection of data, technology and creativity. Marketers have a unique opportunity to embrace this shift and become even smarter leaders, especially in a region like MENA – where digital transformation is moving at pace and the appetite for innovation is high.' The report also distills key themes shaping the future of marketing in the region. It stresses the importance of intentional innovation rooted in customer insight, internal alignment to enable new strategies, partnerships built on mutual respect, and data-informed decisions about brand presence. Ultimately, it argues for a hybrid approach to marketing—equal parts analytical and creative—with a clear understanding that modern marketing must deliver business outcomes. Alasdair Hall-Jones, Global Director at The Marketing Society, added: 'The Marketing Society is about creating the space for marketers to discuss all these issues and more. We hope this report inspires marketers to drive meaningful change in their business. More than that, we hope it's the start of a continuing conversation.' Contributors to the report include prominent regional marketing leaders such as Her Excellency Nouf Mohamed Al-Boushelaibi, former Executive Director of Strategic Marketing at Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism; Charles Awad, Chief Brand Officer at Majid Al Futtaim – Holding; Steve Chantry, Chief Growth Officer for West and East Emerging Markets at Kraft Heinz; George Paige, Global Head of Brand at Etihad Airways; and Aimee Peters, Regional Head of Brand, Partnerships and B2B Marketing at HSBC MENAT. Their collective insights provide a snapshot of a marketing industry in transition—embracing the possibilities of AI and technology, while remaining anchored in the enduring power of purposeful storytelling and strategic leadership.
Campaign ME
07-04-2025
- Business
- Campaign ME
CMO Barometer: Marketers delve into AI, EQ and ‘the dichotomy of marketing'
Marketers have stated that artificial intelligence (AI), emotional intelligence within leadership, as well as marketing craft: finding the balance between short-term performance metrics and long-term brand-building remain their top areas of focus, according to the latest CMO Barometer research released in March 2025. The CMO Barometer is an annual study that surveys top marketers and is conducted by Serviceplan Group Middle East and The Marketing Society in partnership with The Institute of Marketing and Customer Insight at the University of St. Gallen (HSG). In 2025, this survey took into consideration the opinions of thousands of respondents across the EMEA region, but the CMO Barometer is still building up its responses in the Middle East by engaging with senior marketers across the region. As part of this exercise, The Marketing Society and Serviceplan Group Middle East hosted an hour-long session titled Leading the Conversation moderated by Alasdair Hall-Jones, Global Director of The Marketing Society, and attended by five senior marketers, including: Amina Taher , CMO, Wio Bank George Yaryura , SVP Marketing, Mashreq Sidhanth Gopishetty , General Manager, Fung Group Megan French-Ritsch , Executive Director Marketing, PIF Confidential , and Natalie Shardan , Managing Partner, Serviceplan Middle East 1. Effectiveness of AI-first strategies Marketers delve into speed-to-market, automation and efficiencies Mashreq's George Yaryura got the conversation going by sharing his thoughts on the proliferation of AI and its impact on the industry. George Yaryura said, 'AI helps with campaigns: to help generate creative assets and enhance productivity. With the rise of social media, and the rapid acceleration in speed to market, we need to look at two things: firstly, we need to make sure that we still differentiate our brand with these AI-based creative assets, so it doesn't become too generic. Secondly, we need to upskill all our teams on how to prompt AI better to generate true value.' Wio Bank's Amina Taher shared, 'At Wio, we use AI throughout our digital banking platform to make banking better for everyone. Beyond creating our images and keeping our communications consistent, we've put smart AI systems to work behind the scenes. These systems automatically watch over our digital infrastructure, boost our security, cut costs, and keep everything running smoothly.' The leaders also discussed how within the business-to-business (B2B) banking sector, marketers are leveraging AI for data modelling and data analysis. Heading Marketing for Mashreq's Corporate and Investment Banking, George Yaryura explained, 'Within B2B marketing – specifically, within financial services and wholesale banking – it is all about account-based marketing, which calls for hyper-personalisation and very targeted campaigns. Interestingly, there's a lot of transactional data that had not been used historically. But now, we're seeing a rapid – and radical – transformation because we're now tapping into that data modelling and propensity modelling using AI. From that data, we're able to draw insights and implement hyper-targeted and hyper-personalised campaigns.' That said, Yaryura added that marketers are barely scratching the surface. 'I don't think we've seen the full extent of AI's impact yet,' he said. Personalisation at scale and deep customer insights Building on the conversation, other marketers at the round table discussion also shared their viewpoints on how AI is enabling hyper-targeted campaigns that deliver highly personalised experiences. Sharing the first-hand benefits that Serviceplan Middle East's clients and agency staff have experienced from its very own generative AI (Gen AI) tool, Natalie Shardan said, 'One of the key aspects that AI is helping with is personalisation at scale. This is what will drive better engagement and better return on investment. This means that, regardless of the AI tool that we use to generate assets, storytelling will be key to success.' She added, 'AI-powered automation, driven by tools such as agentic AI, have helped us streamline our work, and deliver creative and customer service functions faster and more efficiently. It's also helped our clients gain deeper insights into the customer behaviours, enabling far more accurate forecasting and real-time decision making. The tools that we have developed internally have helped us dive into richer customer data and enable seamless customer experiences, which lead to smarter and more effective strategies.' Beyond the impact of AI on personalisation, marketers also discussed its effectiveness in terms of segmentation, customer relationship management (CRM) and targeted communication. Sidhanth Gopishetty used the example of 'play patterns' to describe how Toys'R'Us Asia (Part of the Fung Group) has leveraged AI within the toys industry. He said, 'A play pattern refers to how a child plays with a toy. For instance, if you give a child two blocks or two cars, what are they likely to do with it? Traditional play patterns would tell us that they're likely to stack them on top of each other or drag them along any available surface. But in today's world, kids are not playing with only physical toys anymore. It's all digital or, at least, all the toys have some digital component. Hence, we started using AI to explore how we can predict these new 'play patterns.' We've had some success with this, and we've shared these findings with leading toy brands across the world' Marketers at the round table also discussed ways to leverage generative AI tools for co-creation, to streamline briefs and communication with agencies, and to upskill and learn at pace – especially given that the more technical and financial aspects of joint ventures, M&As etc. are increasingly becoming a part of a CMOs role. Marketers discuss co-creating 'a conscious destination' During the discussion, the industry leaders also agreed that the impact of AI goes far beyond automation and efficiency to also encompass how Middle East destinations are marketed and operated. They said that AI will require marketers – and the agencies supporting them – to relearn a lot about marketing and consumer behaviour, especially given the paradigm shift caused by its inputs and insights. Heading Marketing & Brand for one of PIF's Confidential Projects, Megan French-Ritsch explained, 'AI's impact in tourism isn't just about automation or efficiency—it's about fundamentally reshaping how we create, market, and operate destinations before a single traveller arrives. One of the most groundbreaking applications of AI and tourism is what we refer to as pre-experiences – where you've got AI-generated digital environments and immersive environments that allow travellers to explore, customise and, even, co-create their travel itineraries before setting foot in a destination. French-Ritsch added, 'This fundamentally changes how destinations compete—it's not just about what's on offer, but about who offers the most compelling AI-powered pre-travel journey.' She also went on to discuss the concept of a 'conscious destination'. 'AI has enabled us to create tourism destinations that learn and evolve—a concept I call the 'conscious destination.' Unlike traditional tourism, where destinations respond to visitor needs, AI-infused tourism offerings anticipate, adapt, and self-optimize based on real-time visitor flows, behavior, and even sentiment analysis,' French-Ritsch said. 2. Emotional intelligence and leadership The conversation then pivoted to how industry leaders are honing their emotional intelligence skills and how much of this exercise is driven by the changing attitudes of younger generations within the workforce. Wio Bank's Taher said, 'Emotional intelligence – including managing people, upwards, downwards and sideways – is 50 percent of what we do, while the technical skills, our knowledge and everything else, accounts for the remaining 50 percent.' Taher also alluded to the importance of emotional intelligence in a male-dominated industry, sharing from experience how it has guided her communication strategies, relationships with her co-workers, and her learning curve stating that 'it helps you get better at getting better.' Marketers also shared deeply honest insights on the say-do gap within the industry. On one hand, there are conversations ad nauseum in the industry about communicating effectively, empathising with teams, and reflecting on how situations ought to be handled. On the other hand, there's the reality of getting things done, working hard and fast, and ensuring productivity and efficiencies, without getting overly caught up in the emotions or the stressors of daily life. Adding her thoughts to this discourse, Shardan said, 'In the advertising industry, we are in the business of managing emotions more than managing people. We deal with a lot of passionate individuals, who tend to be a little more sensitive. It's critical to learn how to navigate through these emotions while staying focused and centred on our vision. How we lead the team is just as crucial as the outcomes that the teams generate.' She added, 'The younger generation have a huge part to play in this. They demand transparency and genuine engagement rather than automated responses and emotionless ways of working. When it comes to recruitment and talent retention, it's becoming increasingly clear that the younger generation prioritizes work culture over salary. There's no doubt about it: higher emotional quotient (EQ) within leadership keeps employees motivated, engaged and, most importantly, loyal – which is very important in our line of business.' Marketers also discussed extending emotional intelligence beyond leadership to everyone in the organisation as a core capability rather than a 'nice-to-have' soft skill. French-Ritsch said, 'Right from the recruitment stage, it's important to go beyond technical ability to also employ people based on EQ. Within the travel and tourism space, we're not just selling destinations, we're also crafting experiences and evoking a deep emotional connection with people. To deliver this, we need to fine-tune our ability to sense the collective sentiment – whether that's from within our teams or from customers, investors, policymakers and other stakeholders who are part of the larger ecosystem.' She added, 'The younger generation has taken this a step further by calling for emotionally intelligent ecosystems where every employee, at every level, feels seen and heard. This generation also holds its leadership accountable to how it leads in a way that's more profound, more actionable. They demand a more human form of leadership, which I think is positive.' The industry leaders concluded that those who are not prioritising emotional intelligence run the risk of wasting potential within their teams, losing talent and failing to run sustainable brands and businesses that last the test of time. George Yaryura summed it up saying, 'Marketing is a mix of art and science and requires rounded individuals. It not only requires the science of understanding data analytics and crafting insights and strategies from it, but also the art of emotional storytelling and sensing intuitively the anxiousness or the raw emotions of consumers.' 3. Marketing craft: Brand vs. performance In the final phase of the CMO round table discussion, marketers discussed the need to balance the long-term growth of an organisation with an eye on brand, while hitting short-term targets with an eye on performance metrics. They shared the harsh truth that, quite often, it boils down to the sales performance of a company and, if that's good, then they get to focus on brand. Quite often, it can seem like it's only the marketing team that's focused on brand-building, while the rest of the company couldn't care much about it. To address this, Gopishetty said, 'We need to continue doing two things. Firstly, we need to work closer with the entire organisation, including HR, internal communications, sales, and especially finance, to emphasize the potential fallout of throwing 'brand-marketing' out of the window. Secondly, we need to find a way to set aside a small percent of marketing budget, at all times, to focus exclusively on brand marketing to remain relevant and top of mind – even if that means confidently pushing back on directives to spend a 100 per cent of the budget on performance.' French-Ritsch added, 'The decision to focus on brand while simultaneously focusing on performance is not just a tactical decision, it's also a philosophical stance on value creation. The challenge isn't necessarily whether to prioritise brand or performance; it's about recognising that, in today's landscape, brand is performance. If we only focus on short-term ROI, we will erode the emotional capital that makes a brand sustainable. Conversely, if we invest only in long-term brand-building without immediate business impact, we lose agility. So, it's a fine balance; it's a dance between the two.' Discussing 'one of the most outdated dichotomies of marketing', marketers reiterated that there's a need to balance the art and science of marketing and engineer ways for the two to amplify each other. Referring to marketing as a 'marathon run in sprints', Sherdan said, 'The brand-building exercise is the marathon, but we need the sprints of short-term performance metrics to keep us in the running within the marathon. It's never an either-or situation; it's both in constant combination.' Summing up the conversation, Yaryura said, 'Ultimately, it's about always keeping that long-term vision and that big-picture strategy in mind. Whether it's a conversation with the board, senior stakeholders or with the consumers, it boils down to how we're contributing to the long-term vision through incremental wins. It's about delivering this at pace, with agility and immediacy, while still constantly creating lifetime value. Whether it's leaning into AI strategies, strengthening leadership, leveraging emotional intelligence that help us in our day-to-day jobs, we do all of this while constantly reminding ourselves of the long-term effect of each of our decisions on the organisation and the brand.'
