Mar 23, 2022
Today, on CMA Connect, we bring you highlights from last year’s CMAb2b panel. This roundtable was held one year into the pandemic. Almost exactly a year ago. Listen in on how businesses shifted their focus.
The panel includes our moderator and guest host for the day, Jeff Lancaster from LinkedIn. He is joined by Linda Hazzan, Director of Communications and CMO of the Toronto Public Library, and Andrew Au, President of Intercept Group, a digital marketing agency.
Here’s some of what they dig into:
Constantly changing challenges offer massive disruption and non-traditional partnership opportunities (5:31)
“The Toronto Public Library is the biggest and busiest library in North America, with 100 branches that 75% of our staff work out of. One thing that’s been an impact for us from a marketing and communications perspective is a narrowing of communication channels. We’ve shifted to completely digital and a lot of our customers aren't comfortable on digital channels. We did not have sufficient tools and mechanisms or even practices to be communicating with each other that way. The other is the development of several non traditional partnerships. We partnered with food banks and turned our closed branches into community food banks, with our staff providing support. We also developed partnerships to distribute internet connectivity kits.” - Linda Hazzan
The rise of consumer-centric, marketing-led business (9:43)
“Intercept is a b2b agency. We focus on the global tech industry. One thing we observed is that improving customer experiences has been key. If you want to be customer centric, you've got to be marketing-led, and I think for the first time we saw marketing step up and really take charge.” - Andrew Au
Finding standard organizational definitions for ‘digitization’ (15:07)
What does it mean for a whole organization to understand going fully ‘digital’? Everybody has their own interpretation of what that means. Clear definitions and understanding are key for public organizations in particular, says Linda Hazzan.
A greater understanding of advanced technologies within mainstream operations (21:21)
Jeff Lancaster talks about developments at LinkedIn, “We're building some products - like conversation ads, in which we're starting to introduce AI and chatbot technology to offer a better experience.”
For the full conversation, listen to the episode.