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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:01.809)
Okay hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm going to get straight into it and introduce this week's guest which is Lisa Vecchio. So, well before we get into who you are Lisa, hello, welcome. Thank you for joining us, thank you for joining us on a pretty miserable, miserable Friday afternoon. We have the graveyard slots for everyone listening. If we don't sound that sensible it's because we're not feeling that sensible.
Lisa Vecchio (00:11.906)
Hello, great to be here.
Tom Rudnai (00:24.14)
But thank you for joining me on a Friday afternoon. I guess before we get going, do want to maybe just give me a little bit of a quick background into you? know looking at your kind of CVs, some very interesting companies on there, Hootsuite, Aircall. So tell us a bit about you.
Lisa Vecchio (00:37.666)
Yeah, sure. Believe it or not, 20 years in marketing and B2B and speaking to different marketers, not everyone ends up in this lovely profession that we're in on purpose, but I am one of those ones who actually built my career out of passion and purpose. So from a young age was very culturally curious about how I can help.
Spread the good love of businesses through marketing and do what I enjoy which is like networking, influencing, bringing people together. so nine years, one company in EdTech in the US and then moved out to Australia. Always knew I wanted to work in international markets. Came to the UK 10 years ago. Started working for some really early startups getting to like their first million. Then I went the opposite direction and went to Expedia for their B2B enterprise business. And probably for the last five years or so have been in that kind of like mid-
scale so you mentioned Hootsuite, Aircall, French Unicorn and now I'm in a company called Veed we're an AI video creation and editing platform I've been there for about a year and being in the AI space marketing to marketers again I feel like my icky guy has come back come back together
Tom Rudnai (01:50.449)
I that, I was listening to a podcast about Ikea guy very recently but let's not go down that rabbit hole. There's a lot of geographical switching around there which sounds like a, quite a fun way to live your life but I guess from a marketing perspective, how different is it working in the US versus Australia versus the UK?
Lisa Vecchio (01:54.082)
Yeah.
Lisa Vecchio (01:57.976)
Yeah.
Lisa Vecchio (02:08.878)
I think with anything, few similarities, quite a few differences. I mean, we can slice and dice this so many different ways. We can talk about how they do business. We can talk about the fact that, you know, from a, I guess, like funding perspective, there's different markets and how they operate. But also I think like how you go to market and like...
I think the message here is like, it's not a one size fits all kind of game. When you kind of work in international markets, you need to think about not just localization, but cultural relevancy, market maturity, different set of competitors, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Tom Rudnai (02:45.519)
Yeah, that makes sense. And then one question that I always like to ask that I always think is really interesting is like, is there a step along that career that you would say has been the most formative for you in terms of, I guess, your own thinking and progression? Because I think often people can point to one.
Lisa Vecchio (03:02.498)
Yeah, I would say, like when I was at Wiley, like in the start of my career, like because I was just genuinely so curious about like traveling and cultures, I really put myself in a position to work, like in an international company with the other markets. And that meant that like I was putting my hand up to do like the late night phone calls or like when we'd all come together for like global sales meetings, like I'd be leading those sessions with them. And so when I was like, you know what, I want change, I want to move abroad. It was really natural for them to say, I'll take someone from the
US HQ and move them out to Australia. And saying yes and being brave and like, you know, starting my life over like in my late twenties was like deliberate, but also like put me on this path for all of my future roles to be like the international person, right? To be like a really attractive candidate for global companies, but then also being able to bring a lot of value from having been working for US based companies or smaller subsidiaries of a US company. So I think the deliberate centering your
and like your goal but then also like following through with what you set out to do is kind of like what shaped a big part of like my brand as a marketer.
Tom Rudnai (04:11.993)
Yeah, well, and what's interesting in that, think, to dig into a bit is what you said about the time that preceded it, where it sounds like there was a lot of, it's not as simple as you're either given the opportunity or it's not. It's something you went and swapped out by going out of your way to do the tough late night calls and all of the stuff that, because I've done it before and walking across time zones is hard.
Like what would your advice be to, cause that's a difficult thing to do if you're a marketer out there that maybe wants to go and experience that. Like, yeah, what would your advice be?
Lisa Vecchio (04:42.082)
Yeah, and I think it doesn't have to just be working in international market. It's anything. Like, you're an SEO and you want to become a social media manager or something. It's like making space in your time to...
outside of your current job scope or whatever those lanes are to go build the relationships with the people who are already in those roles or key stakeholders for you getting space in those roles, volunteering for extra projects. Maybe you don't work for an international company yet, so that opportunity just isn't realistic. So thinking about how you leverage your network to maybe have conversations with people who are in your same position to learn what skills are needed, et cetera.
Tom Rudnai (05:20.273)
and not waiting for it to fall in your lap, which I think is why it's important.
Lisa Vecchio (05:22.366)
No one can wait. We don't have privilege anymore. The pace of innovation and all these companies and the death of growth at all costs. It's like you want something, you've to go out and make it happen.
Tom Rudnai (05:35.312)
I think that's very true though and actually more true, it's not just for big changes, but it's more of a survival skill set now than ever. I was down at Brighton SEO the other week and it was really good and there's a lot of great stuff happening there. But one tone that really frustrates me actually is there's a lot of SEO folks who are very protective and wary at the moment. And there's this little atmosphere of AI is this mean thing that's coming to get us and how do we stop it? And it's really frustrating because it's like, hey, there's no point, it's here.
to work out how to carve out your role. But it's the same skill set that you just described that would make you very well suited to do that.
Lisa Vecchio (06:13.166)
I mean, what's happening with AI at the moment? mean, as you just said, like, if the sentiment is like, we'll just ignore it and pretend like it's going to go away. I mean, you're not future proofing your career. And I was thinking about this last night when I was flying, flying back from actually SEMrush, their big conference in the SEO space, but also branching out into like influencer and like all these other other areas was like,
I constantly feel like I either have FOMO, like I'm not quick enough, or imposter syndrome, like I don't know if I can do it. And I think the reality is that's a healthy way to be thinking about. Like we're going through a huge industrial kind of revolution equivalent at the moment, and if you're just gonna put your blinders on, I'd be really wary, even for young people who are earlier in their career, to not kind of take advantage of becoming an AI native at the start of this journey would just be really disadvantaged for them.
think in the long term.
Tom Rudnai (07:05.595)
think that you've just described something I feel every day, which is that you have this spectrum of FOMO to imposter syndrome. And I always get it. There's so much noise. it's something you get a lot as a founder, but also a marketer because you have to be on social media as part of your job. There's so many people telling you how you should be doing, how quickly you should be going as a founder. If you're not, you know, code is a commodity now. You should be able to churn out features every day. But then, you know, your experience day in, day out, that well, that produces really shit products. And so you're always trying to balance your experiences. Well, everyone's telling
Lisa Vecchio (07:09.73)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (07:35.599)
you in it. It's so noisy, it's really tough.
Lisa Vecchio (07:38.433)
It's so noisy and I think because like being in the AI space working like in AI video for example like you're on social you're trying to like it's probably not helping to say take a break so go on social because actually that's just like another distraction but like and all you're seeing is other people's content and you're like that's a great idea or how do I... marketers selling to marketers you're always thinking about like what's the next brand thing you can do or like you know a way to kind of present your content on social and I've been talking about it more and more just how exhausting like you have to give yourself the brain space.
you also have to give yourself time for yourself, like whether that's meditation, yoga, walks, sports, like and I think the way how fast things are moving like it just would be unhealthy for people to not prioritize themselves right now. So I hope you do as a founder and as someone who's overwhelmed by all the kind of keeping up.
Tom Rudnai (08:30.681)
I mean that varies week on week. always say being a founder is like an absolute roller coaster. A joke that one day you feel like an entrepreneur, the next you feel unemployed and you just kind of oscillate in a very unhealthy way between those two things. Let's think, so we've already gone way off track here, but I find it interesting.
Let's say I was kind of someone, young marketer in Lisa's team, who maybe is struggling with this and wants to understand like how do I carve out my space in this world? Like from a mentor, in a mentoring type conversation, what advice would you give them in terms of how they should adapt to the kind of AI native requirement and where to look so that there's not an overwhelming amount of noise, but they can actually act on the insights that they get.
Lisa Vecchio (09:16.718)
Yeah, I think it's an interesting question because there's some accountability needed for the individual. There's some accountability needed on.
myself as let's say a mentor or a leader for that person and then the organization as a whole. So, you we talked about you don't ask, you don't get, you're going out and creating opportunities for yourself. Like there is a responsibility for the individual to be curious, ask questions and just start experimenting. So whether they're spending time in communities with like other marketers like themselves or scrolling through LinkedIn, they're taking advantage of like the millions of free courses that are out there. Like they just need to get started. I think that as a leader, I'm already thinking about
How are we going to using AI to improve like, you know, efficiency and productivity? And then how can I actually foster an environment for the team to experiment in a safe space so that it can kind of free up their thinking? You know, I mean, agents, right? Or like the name of the game at the moment. And so like, how can we create safe spaces to get people hands on with some of these tools? We're hosting a marketing hackathon in a few weeks, right? Because I feel like that's my responsibility. Like as someone who just wants to foster better marketing across
the marketing industry to bring marketers together to play and have fun and learn about OpenAI or N8N or lovable and vibe coding but for the role of you know whatever they're trying to accomplish in this case like content for social.
Tom Rudnai (10:42.395)
Yeah, and I'm looking forward to coming to that hackathon. think before we get into the actual meat of what I want to talk to you about here, and for people listening, this kind of relationship and this idea started when I listened to Lisa do a great talk at a very swanky LinkedIn office in central London on using the office and having your own like theatre in your office is just so cool. But I want to build a
Lisa Vecchio (11:00.462)
It's good office.
Lisa Vecchio (11:06.274)
All
Tom Rudnai (11:09.233)
this episode around AI video creation and how people can use that. But I think it's also interesting to talk a little bit about marketing at Veed as well as just the content in that area. give us a little bit of context on that because I know that's changed a little bit and you've been making big, big investments in brand recently, right? I guess help us understand why that shift and just what the shift has been.
Lisa Vecchio (11:16.536)
Mmm, yeah, absolutely.
Lisa Vecchio (11:32.855)
Yeah, so I think first of all, as a business, the game's changed with the way that SEO searches on, traditional searches on decline, LLMs are there disrupting things, and we grew our business on organic demand. What a privilege to be able to have one of these ultimate case studies of what good SEO looks like. actually built our product around.
Existing demand people were searching for I need a video compressor tool. I need automatic subtitles I need all these kind of video components and we built them and they came But I think the world that we're living in now is we can't just expect that demand to come knocking on our door We actually have to create new demand and through that is creating more top of funnel awareness opportunities and so, you know, we've done a few experiments this year and I think you know
Most marketers can probably appreciate the frustration of trying to convince a CEO to invest in brand or not over, over kind of emphasize the attribution model that we all know is flawed. And so I think, you you start with data and you start with your typical kind of like, hey, 95.5 rule or these are the reasons we're not growing so fast to kind of get buying and engagement on brand. The first thing that we did,
really started with diversifying channel mix and trying to get into the enterprise space was our first trade show. And it sounds pretty basic and the marketer on the team was like...
You know, I don't want to do a big investment. Let's just kind of book the bare bones stand and just test this out at this channel. And actually went like, that's not true to our brand identity. We're a bold brand. We take risks as part of who we are in our DNA. So go big or go home. And we had this bright green booth. We thought about how to activate customers with a digital avatar booth. And the lesson there was we got the CEO involved. He was there experiencing people being like, my god, that's so cool.
Lisa Vecchio (13:29.828)
happening in there, like all these meaningful conversations that he was like, we should do this again and what else can we do that can kind of compound this. So we did a brand campaign in New York this year, which was like a combination of like out of home and social where we leverage real creators. It was really clever. I can't take credit for it, but the idea was like their faces were on the billboard. There were then like we brought them to NYC and they were like hunting the subway system to find their billboard. And then naturally they shared that out on social and people who knew
them shared it out on social and it was like an important moment for us to actually kind of...
gained some visibility in a market we didn't have loads of. Where this is leading to is like all of this compounded to the fact that like we've realized that actually if we can increase branded search as a leading indicator for growth and we can correlate that to revenue growth, we're at the point where I feel so lucky that our CEO is saying like, let's strip out the attribution model and let's just focus on reach and frequency. And so the change that you're referring to is like, look, we're in the AI game, we're shipping a
feature now like every week if not every day and so we don't have the luxury to take three months or six months to build a campaign plan and then everyone does their little bit. I think part of like upskilling with AI and other things is we're all becoming a bit more full stack marketers and we're thinking about speed to market is probably like one of our core core KPIs and so the marketing team at Bead is no longer like a silo of this person's doing demand over here in PR and then social it's we're all orchestrated around a moment in market.
which is social first, and the goal there is reach and frequency. So it's a really exciting time. We're still learning from the data and learning what works. But as we're repositioning ourselves as not just a video editor but an AI video creation tool, it's important that we are in the moment with the movement that's happening out there, where conversations are happening, where our customers are. Does that make sense?
Tom Rudnai (15:29.777)
It makes a load of sense. I've written about five questions down as were talking. So this is going to go for a while. There's one thing that I want to go back to, which is you said that the CEO said that let's strip out the attribution model. And there's two really interesting things in that. One is the CEO said, is coming from top down and you have buy-in from executives, which is normally the exact opposite of how this stuff works.
Lisa Vecchio (15:31.884)
Right.
Lisa Vecchio (15:49.612)
Yep, that's why I said I'm really lucky.
Tom Rudnai (15:52.388)
Yeah, exactly. Well, you've been lucky twice, right? A load of organic demand to drive the initial growth and then you've got this. You're making a lot of marks with jealous right now. But also you said strip out the attribution model. Was that necessary? Was it necessary to?
Lisa Vecchio (16:04.078)
Yeah, and I probably said that a bit too like, laissez faire. mean, the attribution model 100 % still exists. Like we're in the middle of 2026 planning and like, what are we looking at? Like all the data points, right? So I think what...
You know, when you're organic search and you're in the game of like not dropping links anymore, right? Because that's going to limit your content reach. When we're leveraging creators and influencers to like create on our behalf and again, kind of in a linkless world where, you know, we're focusing more on impressions and engagements, that's not showing up in the traditional sense that it would if we were putting, or when we were putting 99 % of our budget towards performance and, you know, paid search.
A lot of that paid search budget is now being moved to these other channels. Saying all of that, we do use an MMM model. So that MMM model is what's directionally telling us that your organic channels and your influencer channels are more cost effective than what you were doing with traditional paid search. So let's look at testing the shift here.
So I'd say it's a blended approach, but what we are looking at at the moment is that correlation, and there's some regression modeling stuff happening around the impressions that we're seeing on search, the influencers that we're partnering with, the branded search lift, and then revenue coming in.
Tom Rudnai (17:25.103)
Yeah, well, because that's what I'm always interested. I'm always of the belief that like measure everything, but don't ever treat anything other than revenue as your kind of North Star, right? That's where attribution can go wrong because people start optimizing for the attribution model, the thing it's meant to attribute to. But is it? Yeah, I think it must be quite a tough thing as you switch towards a more brand approach to
have that kind of quite sophisticated attribution in place, but avoid people becoming a slave to it. Like how do you create the right behaviors internally whereby people stay focused on the right stuff and not just the things that they can prove via that route.
Lisa Vecchio (18:03.79)
To be honest, think we're like living, like, I listened to Elena from Lovable speak the other day and she was saying something that was really interesting. She was like, you know, we're launching so quickly, marketing still figuring out how to keep up and how to rewire themselves. And I was chatting to her afterwards because,
Tom Rudnai (18:18.427)
Yeah.
Lisa Vecchio (18:22.304)
It wasn't a dig at marketing. It's just that like how we've always done things doesn't apply in the world where new AI models and new AI features are launching on a daily basis. So I think that to answer your question, it's less around like, we don't have an option not to be moving in this direction because it's so fast. It's more about how do we free up time and space and bandwidth and mental capacity to be looking at the analysis. Like, because we're just like, we've become this machine now that we need to pull ourselves
out and keep sense checking, we still don't know, right? This is only like a couple months of like a shift, you know, of like, are these the right signals? Should we be looking at other signals? Should we be trying other tests? Is there a different combination of this formula? So I think maybe six months ago, the team was like a bit resistant to moving this way to like a bit hesitant to think of like this, way that we've taken this social first approach, especially we've like also looked
it like changed our channel mix like we're leveraging X in a way that like you know wasn't even part of our our channel strategy a year ago and so now though like when we're looking at the landscape looking at competitors look at what's working for other people who are moving just as quickly as we are it's kind of like we're all in on this and let's make sure that we like give people more the space to to reflect because it's like
It's chaos. In the most positive way I can say it, it's chaos.
Tom Rudnai (19:54.886)
Yeah, well, and it sounds like, so we say you have patience and you have buy-in from leadership to go down this slightly more long term route. A lot of people probably don't have that. And even if they manage to go down this route, it's really important that in those first few months, they can show clear signals that it's working. So you said branded search is the kind of headline KPI that you're shooting towards. Talk us through what the different leading KPIs are that you've seen.
Lisa Vecchio (20:01.422)
Mmm.
Tom Rudnai (20:21.379)
in the meantime that give you confidence this is working and like yeah what are the checkpoints along the way to seeing brand in search improve?
Lisa Vecchio (20:31.17)
Yeah, and like I say, it's still early doors, but I mean, just the switch in channel strategy from shifting the budget, looking at what channels we're going to be targeting social first, leveraging influencers as a core growth channel. mean...
even the content that we're creating has completely changed. And so what we're seeing is, you know, when I look at something like X or even LinkedIn, and I compare previous posts that we've done to the posts that we've been creating the last couple of weeks and months, I mean, we went from like, maybe a couple hundred, you know, impressions, maybe a thousand or two to like,
100,000, 200,000. And so what we're seeing is like, we've got this formula right and we're getting the reach, the traffic to our website is just exponentially like, you know, increasing. And when we compare, split that out between brand and non-brand, you know, the non-brand stuff is still primarily being driven by, by search and, know, trying to get rankings in the LLMs where all of this brand lift that we're seeing is coming from that social first and influencer approach. So that's kind of probably the starting point. Then we've also
looked at layering on paid social on top of that, right? And so we're getting much more cost effective CAC experimenting with different ad formats. And then all of sudden, we're able to have better targeting. And when we look at layering that on top, we see another kind of spike, right? So as you isolate and then add and then kind of just keep experimenting with the different mix, that's what we're learning from basically.
Tom Rudnai (22:10.479)
Yeah, well, I'm always a big proponent of much more organic strategies, I suppose. But I think one thing people often overlook is the halo effect that you see on literally every metric across going to market starts to improve. So even if you are quite heavily reliant on pay, that doesn't mean that brand shouldn't be a priority, right?
Lisa Vecchio (22:27.66)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Tom Rudnai (22:29.425)
The other thing, before we get onto another topic, you mentioned one thing in there which is that you've been leveraging influencers very heavily and a lot of your strategy has always been quite social dependent because it's just natural for what you do, right? You're showing off your video capabilities. How do you think about kind of, I guess, do you worry about reliance on social and other people's algorithms and do you ever think about a need to kind of build up an owned audience, so to speak?
Lisa Vecchio (22:57.016)
So I think that's actually what we're doing in this recent shift. So up until this point, Influencer was probably one of our most cost-effective acquisition channels, other than YouTube, realistically. And a lot of that was Influencer's own created...
you know, content, we'd give them a brief, they'd go out and create their stuff and amplify it and we'd see amazing results from it. But actually, it's becoming more of blended approach where it's not just their own content, but their interaction with our branded content and on our own brand channels, where we're actually seeing, you know, increased reach and more kind of...
I guess the collaborative approach is not just keeping it to like create your stuff. And then this depends on what channel it is. So on X it's more like commenting and resharing rather than creating like own content. Where on Instagram and TikTok, of course, that's like where they shine, right? So we want to give them that creative freedom. In terms of own channels as well, like CRM is a top performing channel for us as well. And I think as we kind of mature our own database and first party data, like that's still something like I'm not overlooking or dismissing in any sense of mean.
Tom Rudnai (24:07.885)
When you say CRM as a channel, you mean kind of email?
Lisa Vecchio (24:10.358)
Yeah, I'm sorry, it's just probably our internal terminology. I'm just talking about email and lifecycle.
Tom Rudnai (24:15.173)
Got you. Okay. Makes sense. Super interesting. I'm conscious we've gone about half an hour and still not even talked about what we were meant to talk about. Let's get onto that a bit. Cause I think one thing, and this is what I found so interesting about the talk that you did the other week, cause I was trying to apply it to our context and we talk about FOMO and one of the big places we've always felt it on FOMO is like AI video creation. Can we be doing an awful lot more than we are? But I've struggled to apply it.
Lisa Vecchio (24:18.976)
Okay.
Tom Rudnai (24:38.649)
to my own context. I guess what I really want to understand, I know from speaking to people, there's a lot of people out there that feel the same. So I want to get into like how, how, how we can practically, being marketers as a whole, incorporate AI video into, into our, our strategy beyond isolated experiments. And I don't quite know where to start, but I guess maybe a good place is, there, what are the best examples you've seen of companies that do this really well?
Lisa Vecchio (25:08.972)
Yeah, well, I maybe before I go into those examples, think there's...
two ways AI is think like impacting video and one is AI creation meaning like you're generating like any AI generated content and then also there's like AI editing and I think what's interesting about both of those is like it doesn't have to necessarily be in isolation you may already be producing content for your social and it's how you can like equip your team or people who are maybe like non-social editors or video people to go ahead and just like create content even if it's not AI generated it's just your talking head you're creating a video
for LinkedIn about, I don't know, the event you did the other day or a thought leadership piece and you can actually like unlock so much more.
potential within your own organization to arm your team with some basic tools that they probably never had the confidence, going back to like imposter syndrome, like, I'm not a video editor, this isn't for me. And I just think it's important to start there because for me, I'm a marketing generalist. I make the worst likes, like I am not, I am not a designer, right? You do not want to see my PowerPoint slides, let alone if I tried to like...
I think, like, create a video. I'm like pushing more video out than I ever have before, and it may be if you're like a deep video expert and you're a motion designer, gonna go, well, that's pretty crap, Lisa. But you know what, if you're a marketer who just wants to like level up and create more content, I don't think it's that bad, because I did it in 20 minutes in my living room and I didn't need help from my team. And I'm talking about some basic things like, you know, automatically adding subtitles to your video, having your brand kit locked in so that you can add your logo or do stuff in your colors.
Lisa Vecchio (26:45.488)
using something like edit with script where like it literally takes your transcript and it'll delete all your ums and ahs and you know like word silences and all the sudden like you went from having a pretty like video to like something that's polished and shareable so I just wanted to start there but when we talk about AI generation
I think it's interesting because there's a lot of tools out there at the moment. There's a lot of noise out there. a lot of people are probably asking the same question that you've just asked me or are asking each other. It's like, when are we going to start seeing this in our day to day? And I think we're still kind of at the early point of that hump of before it just becomes the norm. people are...
cautious of AI slop and just pushing stuff out and we still have to balance the human and the AI. So to answer your question,
I think video ads is a great way that people are using AI generated content to test and experiment. So maybe they're creating different variations of an AI generated ad and then they're changing the color or the character or the headline and they're able to get quick feedback on is this the right message or is this the right content before they go ahead and scale it. And maybe then they'll go hire an agency to go do full production.
on it but it's a great way to get I think market feedback before your ad spend. People are using it like avatars. know avatars have been around for the last couple of years. They've been used more in let's say like training and development like internal comms. We launched our own model called Fabric a couple months ago but you you've seen probably like you know Sora come out from... Sorry I'm just...
Lisa Vecchio (28:37.078)
Open AI and VO come out from Google and then there's Kling and Minimax and there's so many of them on a daily basis. And it's funny because when we launched Fabric, which is like you can upload any image, like a talking head, that's what it's for, it's to make any image talk. A lot of people have told us they're leveraging it for their CEO to do internal comms. They're uploading a photo of their CEO with his voice clip and it can be sometimes so difficult to get the CEO to send the message for the campaign in turn. I know you're a CEO, but like,
for a campaign or like to post the thing on LinkedIn, they've actually been like experimenting with that. So like unlocking people who might be camera shy or not have like the bandwidth to actually produce content. We're using it for like themed campaigns as well, like it's Halloween this week. We produced a lot of content around it. We've got Black Friday coming up. And so we've also, you know, leveraged that to create social first content that doesn't, you know, that can be very human and real, but generated through our, through our teams.
So those are just a couple examples, but I kind of bring whether you're generating or editing everything back to like, what's the job to be done on social and like what's the right format to achieve that job. People are telling us that they want talking head video to promote their business, to educate their customers, to...
create awareness for their brand and when you kind of break things down into like the jobs to be done, you then can think about, like you would with any other piece of content, what are the right formats, what's the stuff that's gonna resonate, and then you can test and experiment.
I guess the final point I'll make here is like, why would people want to use GEN.AI video? And I think ultimately people don't know where to start sometimes. They don't have the budget. Like we talk about, you know, customer interviews where you'll spend five, 10 grand to fly someone out and go to someone's office where, you know, you could likely ask them interview questions, get them to record it, upload a picture of their head and get those sound bites potentially at a higher quality than a bad zoom recording.
Lisa Vecchio (30:39.324)
for example. So you know it's gonna save you money and help you get to market quicker. Like this is the stuff that's worth experimenting with and finding the right use case for your brand and maybe we're still in the I'm not sure yet but just have fun with it because what we're also seeing is a lot of the Gen A content like even on my own socials because it's different it's getting engagement. You know I created a Halloween video or when we launched Fabric of all the different use cases for marketing like
you can do it for podcast recordings. The example I want to give is we don't have a social creator for our Instagram at the moment. We're going, I've got the post live on LinkedIn this morning and we're actually experimenting with creating AI influencers using our tool to help us get content out quicker. It's going to be a test. It's going to look really real, but why can't we use them to do the explainer and then match that with some motion graphics to, you know, create social first content.
do know I actually can't hear you, Tom. You've gone on mute.
Tom Rudnai (31:43.43)
That's because I muted myself. Thank you. We'll cut that. I was interrupting you over and over again. When I said before we record these and they're edited to make us both sound really smart, that's what I meant. We cut out the times and I forget that I'm on mute.
Lisa Vecchio (31:47.022)
So if you weren't interrupting me, I missed it. Cause I was just like, girl.
Tom Rudnai (32:04.305)
quite a few things I want to go back to in that. The main thing was you were saying it seems like it requires a lot of experimentation and you said have fun with it and I think that's what when I looked through, was having a look through on LinkedIn, your videos you produced before this and I can see that, A, you're having a lot of fun just experimenting with stuff, creating it. But one thing I thought was, in terms of why that's hard for me to apply to my own context and what other people probably struggle with is for you, and generally just a bit more context,
Lisa Vecchio (32:16.792)
Hmm.
Tom Rudnai (32:33.465)
Generally speaking, I think we're not that creative with Topper Funnel in B2B, right? It's how tos and it's things like that. It's really for you, you're selling a video AI platform so you can create anything and your job is to show off just the fact that you created it. It's a lot more, it requires maybe more creativity to it. I find it very difficult to think what are the...
open awareness type things that I can do in our world using that technology. And that's where I guess I'm like, have you seen ways, companies that do a great job of that, or have you seen processes or ways of working that people instill that help to create those kinds of ideas and that kind of creativity?
Lisa Vecchio (33:21.644)
Yeah, like a few. And so I had a breakfast a couple weeks ago with like a bunch of, a bunch of like social leaders who work in newsrooms, right? Cause like the news is changing, everything's social first, like in terms of how they're delivering their content. Like,
it's all like short snippets on social and asking them about how they're using video. And naturally they're a bit risk averse to like using avatar, like talking head generated content, because it's like the news, right? Like they don't necessarily want to replace their journalists in that sense. And I totally get that. So it's the AI editing piece that's really important for them and how they can like equip everyone in their business to become journalists. But when it came to the generation stuff, what was important was B-roll.
Right? So for example, you're your company, you're trying to sell your service, and you may be creating a talking head video of yourself, you know, giving a thought leadership piece, for example, or how to. You need to embed context, like contextual imagery to what you're talking about, because it'd be a pretty boring video if it's just you for a couple of minutes and like nothing changes on screen. So that's where you can actually prompt or feed it a script, which will automatically prompt for you images to back
up what you're saying. Hey, just was at an event in London this week and all of a sudden your background changes, you know, and there's like the image of the London eye. And then, you know, I was working with a client and we were talking about revenue and maybe, I don't know, this sounds really corny, but like money, you know, graph shoots up the screen. Like that's a very tactical, like practical example of like in B2B marketing, like while we are talking head humans and the human part's really important.
how people can use AI-generated content. Another example is, again, in training and development, or where you're having a much longer video, where you may be going into a demo. So you're demoing your product or service.
Lisa Vecchio (35:16.622)
you can use the AI generated, and I don't like to use the word avatar or actor, but talking head that you generate, could be a cartoon or a Muppet for all you want, or it could be you or your CEO, like I said, to just do the intro for the first five or 10 seconds, which is like, hey, I'm Tom, I'm here to show you how you can use my tool.
Because you can edit the transcript to, like, you can edit the word and it'll regenerate the word for you, you can use that to, like, use the same piece of content of, like, let's say the demo, but always change the intro without having to re-record every time, right? And that can be a bit fun and experimental. I mentioned the ads thing as well, which I think is a very real use case also in B2B. And I know B2B has the stereotype of being boring and yet,
I am selling to marketers and I'm going hey, I'm not a technical person. I'm not a creative like designer, but look what I did in a couple minutes. I also would encourage more B2B marketers to have fun with their marketing and create weird stuff because it's gonna get engagement and reach and like what are your goals on social even to educate? You know you could you could do something like why couldn't you be a vampire? Setting a Halloween message out to ask people to you know next 24 hours get your free demo in your inbox.
Why not?
Tom Rudnai (36:37.265)
No it's true, we just don't have the same culture though. I think we approach advertising very differently to B2C. We think that advertising has to be about products and benefits whereas B2C they're very like no it's lifestyle and they just show a happy person using the product and everyone's like I want to be happy like this.
Lisa Vecchio (36:54.702)
So, but I think this is like, mean, I'm in B2B, I've been in B2B my whole career and you need to be a bit of a risk taker. Like I think we can all keep beating the drum that B2B is boring and it has to be about value and benefits. And I do think depending on where you work, there's just some industries that's just not gonna be able to take risks. But I think if you're...
in some industries in sales, know, for example, or selling, depending on who your audience is, is like, we're all humans. want, know, like depending on where in the funnel you are as well, right? Like depending, in terms of what content you're producing, it doesn't all have to be what living up to the stereotype.
Tom Rudnai (37:41.413)
No, and I'm not saying it's a good thing at all. guess, I think it's one of those funny things, because I talk to so many people and they're all like, yeah, B2B doesn't have to be boring. Everyone is frustrated by the same thing, yet we all fucking do it. So there's obviously something that sits between what we want to do and what we...
Lisa Vecchio (37:44.12)
Yeah.
Lisa Vecchio (37:59.095)
And this goes back to, guess, the brand building piece is like, how can you use data and examples of other B2B brands are doing well to say to your boss or whoever it is, I'm gonna just try something, trust me on this. And if it works great and if it doesn't, we won't do it again. Like, you know, no one's gonna die. So like, this is where I think, yes, we all know it doesn't have to be boring, but we also have to take more risks and try this stuff on to then prove the point. Otherwise, we're just in this.
Tom Rudnai (38:07.569)
Good.
Lisa Vecchio (38:27.754)
land of beige forever.
Tom Rudnai (38:31.377)
Yeah, I'm gonna throw a controversial opinion at you and we'll see whether you agree. I think we have to collaborate less because so we've just been rebranding a lot of demand genius and going through that and I was asking loads of people's opinion and what I realized was that all of that opinion gathering we were just rationalizing everything down to something that's really bland and doesn't offend anybody. No one loves it anymore but no one really likes it and so I was like actually I'm not being all that often I'm gonna do what I want to do. I think often creativity requires just empowering people to do it and accepting that as
Lisa Vecchio (38:35.758)
Okay.
Tom Rudnai (39:01.341)
the CMO is the CEO I might hate it I will do it anyway
Lisa Vecchio (39:06.498)
Yeah.
I mean, I, yes and no, and I think it depends on what it is. Like getting input is valuable. Talking to customers is valuable, but customers sometimes don't even know what they want because it doesn't exist yet. Right. And so you have to blend. I'd say to your controversial point, I hear you literally this morning. We're on a deadline. The team sent me an image and I was like, I don't really like the picture. Can you change it? what happened to the old font? And the one girl just got the call and she's like, Lisa, I'm just going to tell you right now.
Unless there's like something's not gonna work because of this and I like, it's a hundred percent objective and again, it also wasn't helpful feedback I'm like I just wanted to pop just make it pop a bit more
And you know what my response after that was guys I'm gonna leave you alone I trust you pick whichever one you think is gonna perform best and then we'll go because I was just being a pain in the butt and it was very subjective and if I had ten more other people in that slack message we would still be talking about it and it's literally just an image going on a landing page to invite people to an event you know not anything anyone needs to lose sleep over so I do agree with you around collaboration I think there's a time and a place I think we should Leverage data to be in insightful. We should talk to customers. We should talk
to experts like, hey, if someone's a branding expert and they're telling you it really, really should be this way instead of that way, and they've got a strong reason for telling you that, take that into consideration, but it's your brand and you do have to ultimately make a decision and it's gonna be a risk regardless. going back to the bland version you kind of got to with consensus is just as much of a risk of doing something really wild or whatever direction you had in your head for your company.
Tom Rudnai (40:43.537)
Yeah, and guess maybe one thing, one benefit of how just how noisy every channel and every market has gone is that actually we're taking less of a risk than we realise because it's so hard to stand out anyway if you do it and it doesn't work. Only 10 people are going to see it. it used to be where there was a bit more blowback, I think, because there was less noise. People notice your bad campaign, which is kind of liberating as much as it's frustrating. I've never looked at it like that.
Lisa Vecchio (40:54.264)
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Vecchio (41:02.018)
Yep.
Lisa Vecchio (41:08.77)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (41:09.617)
Anyway, the other thing that I to ask you, and again, I always try and adopt the kind of standpoint of someone who's trying to listen to this and think, how do I apply this to my content? So in terms of team construction to get the best out of a kind of video AI, AI video program and trying to incorporate that into my content, who do you find typically is using it? Is it a question of enabling everyone? Do you find you want to create like an expert within the team? How do I construct my team to get the best out of this kind of technology?
Lisa Vecchio (41:18.04)
short.
Lisa Vecchio (41:39.233)
It's a good question, but I actually think it depends on your organization and what resources you already have or don't have. You've got founders creating video content who are one man band and they need to know how to do all of it, right? Otherwise they're going to outsource it to an agency or spend loads of money.
In smaller teams, you know, it may sit within the content team, it may sit directly with the social media manager, or you might have like a video editor, you know, getting involved as well. With Veed specifically, the whole point of the platform is it's meant to be accessible for everyone. So I can't talk more broadly speaking if you're trying to use Adobe Premiere Pro and you need someone who would like really, really deep.
video editing expertise, you're gonna need a video editor in your team. The point with Veed is like, it should enable anyone to become a video editor. That's where we've seen some great use cases where, you know, maybe you did have an editor running a video team and that was getting expensive and they realized actually we can just equip the social media manager, we can just equip the sales team, we can just equip the CS team. Like think about employee advocacy from that standpoint. If AI is doing the editing, you don't need to be an editor.
expert, right? Because you press a button and you're recording a video on the street and all of sudden all the noise is removed from the background. You're not necessarily staring at the screen because you were reading from a teleprompter. You can click a button and your eyes will all of sudden go in focus. You're not sure accessibility is a must-have, so you want to add subtitles. You press a button, it automatically transcribes it for you and adds subtitles to it. So anyone can do that and I think when you're in bigger teams and organizations, that's where
like templates and like brand kits and more advanced stuff like locking that in so people can't mess it up like that's what I love to talk about like sales team a lot of times people aren't creating content because they're afraid it's not good enough they're afraid it's not going to pass quality control or not brand approved and there's a lot of imposter syndrome there's like I think there's two things happening with video creation for like non video creators one is like the cringe factor people don't like to hear themselves talk or look at themselves back and the second is they're not sure
Lisa Vecchio (43:48.353)
if it's good enough. And I think the point of AI editing stuff is like, it makes it really hard for it not to be good enough if you're using tools that are like really intuitive. So I guess the long story, long short answer to your question is, the long short answer, this is our Friday afternoon brains going, Tom, is...
depends on your organizational size and some teams are always going to have deep expertise but you don't need to have deep expertise is the short answer is anyone can do it.
Tom Rudnai (44:19.697)
Yeah, no, would be better to say something else.
Lisa Vecchio (44:22.73)
No, was gonna say, but where it's often sitting in terms of ownership is in your content team, digital team, social team, kind of in those creative pods or social first pods.
Tom Rudnai (44:34.769)
And I guess it's working back a little bit as the leader from what your goal is and what you want, what outcome you want, right? If what you need is flooding social media with kind of content from all of your employee base, then it's about creating, like overcoming the confidence thing and removing a lot of the barriers. Everything you said, I feel so much, right? It's that thing of, I'm sure everyone's had this, you think, I'm going to record a video, it'll take two minutes, it's a two minute video. And then half an hour later, you've re-recorded it 12 times, pulled your hair out and you think, fuck it, I'm going to it.
Lisa Vecchio (44:39.406)
No.
Lisa Vecchio (45:01.816)
Yeah. And that's why actually like we give the advice of like just press record and go because like
Tom Rudnai (45:06.629)
Yeah.
Lisa Vecchio (45:08.194)
If you've never been in a video editor, there's like often, it's a timeline, right? And if you don't know how to like edit with a timeline, it's like really intimidating to go like, do I've got to listen to the whole thing and then like press pause and then like find the cut thing. But now that you're editing with like a transcript and you're just like searching for the word for the thing you want to delete and you delete it and it just removes that chunk from the video, you don't need to know how to use the tools where in a way you previously needed to know. And I guess the other thing I just want to caveat is the advice that I'm giving. I'm very much speaking up.
about like talking head video for social. There will be video needs in a business organization that I'm not referring to. You know, if you're gonna go shoot a full production for your new brand video, that is not the space that, you know, I'm the subject matter expert in and I definitely would recommend, you know, to kind of speak to someone else around that advice.
Tom Rudnai (45:56.956)
Yeah, okay. Thank you for the caveat. Cool. Let's get into some quick fires because I'm conscious we've got about two minutes left. I want to actually leave enough time to get through all my quick fires this time. So first of all, and maybe this is difficult, so I'm going to caveat this with it can't be Veed or video related. What's an AI tool or use case that you really love that kind of blew you away?
Lisa Vecchio (46:02.382)
I
Lisa Vecchio (46:14.264)
Okay.
Lisa Vecchio (46:22.018)
So I'm saying N8N because I was thinking more in the context of workflows and I was thinking more in the context of like what's my job to be done as a marketing leader within the marketing team and it's to enable the team to have more productive workflows and experiment with building different agents and opportunities, whether that's to accelerate pipeline or look at intent signals and all that sort of stuff. There's a million tools to connect to connect it with. That's kind of what I was thinking about.
Tom Rudnai (46:51.633)
Yeah, okay, it's kind of, I've not actually been in there as much, but I hear about it all the time. It's one of the many tools on my long list of stuff, though.
Lisa Vecchio (46:57.198)
I mean, there's a million things you can do. And that's why like, I'm just starting to get familiar with it. like talking about the hackathon, it's like this, I'm imagining this is going to be a core tool that most people are going to want or a version like a make or, know, does Zapier is kind of like seeing a comeback with these other tools, uh, to connect A plus B plus C equals, you know, the end goal that you're trying to achieve. And I think that's fantastic because we all don't need developers now to be able to kind of achieve our goals or have to spend a lot of money on.
third-party stuff.
Tom Rudnai (47:29.487)
Yeah, I love that. noticed one thing, one of my kind of gripes about AI technology companies has been that there's, I think the art of product has been lost a little bit and that people are so focused on quickly improving their product that they forget about the end user, the kind of entirety of the use case and kind of allowing it to be stitched into workflow as well. Which I think one of the best skills that you can develop is to do that. Because I noticed without that, I spent so much time copying between one tool to another and downloading this and importing that. So I think it's something
I could work on actually.
Lisa Vecchio (48:01.347)
I think we're only scratching the surface as marketers, right? Like, because we're not used to owning this part, but now we've been given a tool that allows us to own this part. And this is like where all the up-skilling, I think, is we started the episode is probably we're gonna see it happen.
Tom Rudnai (48:14.629)
Yeah, for sure. And then another one. So this is always a bit of a fun one that's sometimes really difficult to answer. Let's say I gave you an unlimited budget and the way that I always frame it is, it's like the budget request that your CEO would never be stupid enough to sign off. What would you do? What's the big bet you'd make?
Lisa Vecchio (48:33.998)
I was thinking about this because you shared this question with me in advance and maybe I... So anyway, I'd like to go to Cannes Lion. Do you know the Festival of Creativity? And I was thinking about it from a V-ed perspective in the sense of like it's becoming more B2B, which I love. Like, you LinkedIn's been there for the last two years. It's also becoming even more creator-led, but...
you know, if you've never been, like, it's just, I know there's a lot of, like, mixed feelings about the awards themselves around creativity, which I'm not gonna dig into, but from an experience perspective and have your brand be part of that experience. I think in terms of, like, a big-ticket brand moment, like, I would just love to go wild there.
Tom Rudnai (49:16.337)
How much stock do you place in that kind of brand moment? The big, Super Bowl ad, the kind of, it's almost like the middle finger, we're here kind of moment. Do you think that...
Lisa Vecchio (49:24.908)
Yeah, that's what it is. like when I started here, I remember speaking to our previous CMO and she's like, when do you think we're like, Ken Ready? That's like a question to ask yourself. And I'm like, that is when you know you've made it, right? Like, not all brands can say this or that's not the North Star for all brands. But I think from a creatively led brand, like, you know, that very much values that risk taking in brand building. It feels like, like you said, a big of an F you moment. And like last couple of years talking about Super Bowl ads, we've seen some incredible B2B companies put their money where their
mouth is and that's probably the part of like being a marketer that you know when I started out in marketing I thought marketing was actually advertising and then I got into B2B and I'm like this is so not cool like I'm like embarrassed to be a B2B marketer now I'm like I love for years of course being a B2B marketer at like the space the community and then to be able to do something very B2C in the B2B world that is also the big F you to everyone who's like B2B is boring
Tom Rudnai (50:23.345)
But do you, because I kind of oscillate on this, do you think it's vanity or do you think there is legitimate reason to make that kind of statement?
Lisa Vecchio (50:30.626)
I think both. My response is very much like a, it's a cool thing that I want to do as like a personal milestone, as much as saying like, we'd have to be really, really sure it's the right investment, whether it's a Super Bowl ad or something like that, for the right audience to get what we want out of it.
Tom Rudnai (50:50.449)
Yeah, for sure. No, it's an interesting question. And then I guess for you a little bit more personally now. like in your career, is there a skill or a trait that you have that you would say has been the biggest needle mover for you?
Lisa Vecchio (51:04.224)
I would say that example at the start of the episode where I talked about kind of like
Being very deliberate that I knew I wanted this international career, being self-defined is culturally curious, and creating these moments that I wanted for myself, it's something, now that I am where I am, I look back at the younger me and I'm proud of myself that I put my hand up, put myself, was brave in these situations, and so that's something that I'm like, I wouldn't be here where I would...
where I am now, if I didn't take those, I guess like really be forceful to put my hand up and also like, I love what I do because I built a career around what I'm good at and what I enjoy doing and so I think that skill set was like setting the intention and going after it.
Tom Rudnai (51:55.578)
Yeah, and guess what I'm hearing is it's a nuance. I've not had that one before, but kind of bravery and courage to put yourself out of your comfort zone, which I think is always valuable.
Lisa Vecchio (52:05.302)
Yeah, and it's not meant to sound like self-serving. I guess it's kind of a self-serving question to ask, but thinking on it, it's just something that I encourage other people to think about. Again, we talked about this quite a bit. You are in control of your own destiny, and that's whether you're working for shit employer and not being treated well. You do have other options, as well as, hey, if you want to pivot or change careers, go and make that happen.
Tom Rudnai (52:29.839)
Yeah, and don't worry, know we lead you down a path of self-serving there, but we're going to take you back the other way now. What was the biggest fuck up in your career?
Lisa Vecchio (52:39.214)
It was very self-serving. So my biggest f-up in my career was taking the title and the money instead of what I knew in my gut was just not the right fit. it happened, the reason it's one of the biggest is it happened like the week slash month that COVID hit.
So like, like forced myself out of the job for the wrong job that wasn't for me anyway and then, you know, was out of work for that period of time. And looking back on it, it was like, I had a secure job. had it, like the things that are important to you. I had a secure job. I had a supportive boss. I felt valued. I was doing work I enjoyed and someone dangled a carrot and I was like, I chased it and never again will I kind of chase that title or money over what gives me joy.
Tom Rudnai (53:27.957)
that's a great way to end. Cool, yeah, let's leave it there. I guess before I let you go, one recommendation for everyone who's listening, whether it's like a book, a thought leader, a podcast that they should check out.
Lisa Vecchio (53:39.414)
Yeah. My friend Jane Serb has a podcast called Women in B2B Marketing. I think that's what it is, is Women in B2B Marketing. Yeah. And she's just a lovely person and I want to advocate, you know, more women like showing up on camera, joining podcasts, you know, speaking out on LinkedIn. think this is, you we don't, our voice isn't, you know, embedded in the ecosystem, I think, enough. And she does a great job of echoing, you know, women B2B leaders. So.
Jane, Sarah, I'm going to B2B, marketing.
Tom Rudnai (54:08.593)
Fantastic. Awesome. And then let's just give you a quick moment. Is there anything you'd like to plug that you're doing or that Veed's doing? give you quick chance to do that.
Lisa Vecchio (54:17.454)
Well thank you, you know just say like if you haven't tried out video, you know, you want to take that leap, my advice is honestly just start by starting. So check feed out if you want me to, if you want to.
trial or something, DM me, connect with me on LinkedIn. If you're in London, we're running a marketing hackathon on content creation. We're launching a campaign of like the ultimate guide to video marketing because of AI in two weeks time. We're going to host some events in the London office with a great panel. So if you're in the UK, follow along on LinkedIn and otherwise DM me, connect with me on LinkedIn and I'd love to meet other marketers.
Tom Rudnai (54:55.108)
Awesome, and I'm looking forward to coming to the hackathon as well. think that's a great idea to start doing that outside of just deads and technical cases. Cool, look, Lisa, thank you very much. We're back on time and it's high time that both of us got a drink on a Friday afternoon. So I'll let you go, but thank you very much for joining. Good, I'm glad, and thank you everyone for listening at home. Awesome.
Lisa Vecchio (55:01.538)
Yeah.
Lisa Vecchio (55:12.076)
I really enjoyed this. Thanks, Tom.