Making Sense of Martech

Martech and data strategy promise control, personalization, and scale, but in practice, they often deliver technical debt, fragile systems, and operational chaos. In this episode, Ian Reisman brings a hard-earned perspective from 17 years inside Paramount, where he managed billions of emails across in-house platforms, enterprise tools, and high-stakes moments like March Madness war rooms that stretched well past midnight.

From 3 AM warehouse refreshes to a Salesforce Marketing Cloud migration, this conversation breaks down the build vs. buy dilemma from both sides. Ian explains why no vendor demo survives real data, how DIY martech quietly accumulates risk, and why most organizations underestimate the operational burden of scaling personalization.

The discussion goes deeper into platform trade-offs: why Braze raises the floor but lowers the ceiling, how Adobe CDP failed to scale in practice, and why Salesforce’s most powerful features are often the least marketed. Along the way, Ian calls out the hidden costs of consulting agencies, the compounding impact of layoffs on martech operations, and why AI in marketing is still just predictive intelligence — not magic.

Timestamps
05:20 — Ian's very first Martech platform and early in-house systems
13:40 — The DIY mindset: great in theory, brutal in practice 
20:40 — March Madness war rooms and real-world stress testing
24:14 — Braze vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud: raising the floor, lowering the ceiling 
27:07 — Three years of Adobe CDP and nothing to show for it
31:03 — The consulting agency trap and how to keep them on rails 
37:47 — Martech fragility and leadership blind spots
41:33 — When institutional knowledge disappears overnight
42:04 — AI in Martech: predictive intelligence, not magic

Sponsor
Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.

Connect & Subscribe
Subscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.

Creators and Guests

Host
Jacqueline Freedman
Founder of Monarch + Making Sense of Martech

What is Making Sense of Martech?

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

00;00;06;08 - 00;00;26;23
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Making Sense of MarTech podcast, where we interview leaders and put them in the hotseat. I'm Jaclyn Friedman, founder of monarch and global head of advisory for the MarTech weekly. Today's episode is all about the build versus bite dilemma, and what happens when companies bet big on building in-house tools for control, customization and cost only to find themselves deep in technical debt and operational chaos.

00;00;26;23 - 00;00;52;17
Speaker 1
And Riesman joins us with a cautionary tale from the inside of legacy systems. 3 a.m. warehouse refreshes and what it really takes to scale martech across a global media enterprise. A little bit about Ian First. Up until recently, Ian spent 17 years at Paramount, formerly CBS interactive, and he led marketing automation across multiple business units, managing billions of emails and using both legacy in-house systems and enterprise platforms, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Bryce.

00;00;52;17 - 00;00;58;08
Speaker 1
He's someone who's lived the complexity of large scale martech and survived the tail. Welcome. Thank you for being here again.

00;00;58;11 - 00;01;00;15
Speaker 2
Thank you for having me, Jaclyn. It's a pleasure to be here.

00;01;00;18 - 00;01;12;26
Speaker 1
I'm so glad to have you here. And I'm excited to dive in. And one get to know you better and preach the story of the cautionary tale that an in-house build can be. But to get us started, what was your very first martech platform?

00;01;12;29 - 00;01;45;19
Speaker 2
So our very first martech platform was our in-house legacy built email marketing platform. Internally, it was referred to as outbound. There are two components to app boundaries EMT, which is where the template management and things were done out of. And then were CMT, which handled a lot of our campaign segmentation. So that's where a lot of our data warehouse requests regarding, you know, personalized information about the user, their fantasy leagues or March Madness bracket pools, what your favorite team was would get sent in matched with their opt in status.

00;01;45;22 - 00;01;48;13
Speaker 1
How nice was that your first martech platform as well?

00;01;48;14 - 00;02;08;02
Speaker 2
That was my very first martech platform before my official swearing to MarTech 13 years ago. I was doing, content site management as well as social media management and back in the dark ages of message boards versus Reddit. We had our own in-house message board as well.

00;02;08;04 - 00;02;12;15
Speaker 1
It's all coming back around that Reddit still going strong.

00;02;12;18 - 00;02;43;12
Speaker 2
A little bit. I think people will definitely enjoy their more private spaces again. But, you know, I, was doing that and I was sort of, both content moderation slash quasi product management in terms of accepting feedback and requests from our users, were using the platform and advocating for changes to the service. I was starting to see, you know, brick wall starting to be built in terms of the future of what private message boards were becoming and more kind of just comment sections, quick hitting stuff.

00;02;43;13 - 00;03;01;22
Speaker 2
So leaning towards social as opposed to in-house message boards. So I had actually accepted a job with another company, a local, insurance company doing some sort of database management support for them. I was working 80 hours a week for about two weeks, and at the 11th hour I got pulled aside. They said, hey, we don't want to lose you.

00;03;01;22 - 00;03;19;16
Speaker 2
You obviously you have a ton of institutional knowledge regarding site and the platforms. We'd love to have you. There's this email stuff that's coming down the pipeline that's really future looking and growing at a pace that we need to support. And we understand, you know, the and your information technology major, everything. You'd be a good fit for it.

00;03;19;18 - 00;03;29;06
Speaker 2
I had no idea what email marketing was at the time. I come from a very web 1.0 background as building websites and GeoCities and Angel fire. Back in the 90s, teaching myself.

00;03;29;06 - 00;03;31;13
Speaker 1
How many of us learned.

00;03;31;15 - 00;03;40;07
Speaker 2
And I didn't know what that meant, but I was, eager for the opportunity to kind of continue this journey at CBS interactive at the time.

00;03;40;08 - 00;03;45;21
Speaker 1
That's awesome. And I guess this is a good lead into to prefer hand coding inch HTML emails or whizzy wigs.

00;03;45;25 - 00;04;09;03
Speaker 2
Me personally, I prefer hand coding. I understand that YouTube internal resources are what they are. If you're a small business that doesn't have the technical in-house resources and your marketer has to wear multiple hats, you know Wysiwyg implementing options are a necessary evil. However, if you have the ability to invest in those resources, I would highly recommend it.

00;04;09;05 - 00;04;21;21
Speaker 2
First and foremost, I feel like a lot of wizzy wig builders do not look great on mobile, and obviously mobile first is paramount, no pun intended. In today's ecosystem.

00;04;21;23 - 00;04;22;28
Speaker 1
Well played.

00;04;23;01 - 00;04;47;05
Speaker 2
Additionally, you know, I think you're always going to want to ab test. And I think the more control you have over your templates and all the, you know, if you're doing it right, if you're with a modular approach, the modules within them, the more you can, you know, build additional modules to test against your existing modules as well as brand changes are always coming.

00;04;47;05 - 00;05;13;15
Speaker 2
It's, you know, cyclical. Every year or two. You know, it's much easier to do find and replace on an HTML for a hex color to replace, you know, font color or a finer replace on a font style to, to replace the font itself versus having to go individually into every single content block, into every single kind of front end service, manually make all those changes, and then test them across all the different platforms, whether it's on.

00;05;13;18 - 00;05;20;11
Speaker 1
Agreed. Shifting gears slightly, what's one tool you think is completely overrated in martech?

00;05;20;13 - 00;05;24;07
Speaker 2
I know that a lot of people like, I know a lot of people, like, really.

00;05;24;08 - 00;05;25;29
Speaker 1
Inspired.

00;05;26;02 - 00;05;56;00
Speaker 2
A lot of people like praise. I understand that it's easier to get into. However, I do feel that from a data perspective, it locks you into doing things a very specific way that may not be in line with your own data, and then may make you more dependent on, you know, product resources and API engineering resources that you know, may limit your ability to build things and scale and build things on short notice, outside of other teams, you know, sprints and scrums and all that stuff.

00;05;56;03 - 00;06;19;20
Speaker 2
I think the flattening I'm, I'm firmly against the sort of flattening of a data model. I data is historically relational for a reason. An empty column in a, in a data structure and uses a, the same amount of data as, you know, pair data that does exist. And the bulkier that table gets, the more difficult that is going to be, especially as you grow your customer base.

00;06;19;22 - 00;06;26;02
Speaker 1
I love a spicy take all right, last rapid fire question who is someone you admire, whether it's professional or personal?

00;06;26;07 - 00;06;47;15
Speaker 2
I got two answers for this. The first, I think, is the easiest one. A little bit of a layup and a little bit of cop out. So I apologize personally. My girlfriend, she's actually somebody who works in marketing. We met through marketing. You know, we'll probably get into this a little bit, but I don't believe that you need to be a technology expert to get into a digital marketing role.

00;06;47;22 - 00;07;06;16
Speaker 2
But I do think you need to be able to kind of listen and understand and, you know, at a high level, be able to, you know, comprehend best practices and why something does or doesn't work. She is the epitome of that. You know, I think when you get into the trenches with people, you understand very quickly who gets in, who doesn't.

00;07;06;16 - 00;07;26;12
Speaker 2
And she is very much someone who gets it. On top of that, yeah. She has been my rock over the past for, for years. And, you know, working together the past two years of just complete uncertainty. You know, she has just always been there for me and has always advocated for me and put me on a pedestal in a way that nobody else has before.

00;07;26;15 - 00;07;51;26
Speaker 2
In a way that sometimes make you feel uncomfortable. But I really do appreciate professionally. I would not be here where I am today, without the help of two people in particular at CBS Sports.com Donna Ashland, who oversees kind of registration. And then, frankly, Zach, who oversees our fantasy and Games data. These are people who, you know, as much as my career jumps out to a lot of people.

00;07;51;28 - 00;07;56;21
Speaker 2
17 years at Paramount. These are people who are pushing 30 years in the company. You know.

00;07;56;24 - 00;07;59;11
Speaker 1
A real OGs. I'm just kidding. Yeah.

00;07;59;14 - 00;08;09;22
Speaker 2
If you look at their profile pictures on our, like, our backstage, like, internet portals, like, they look like they were taken with Polaroids and it's scanned. It's how long they've been with the company.

00;08;09;24 - 00;08;11;08
Speaker 1
That's awesome. Yeah.

00;08;11;10 - 00;08;31;06
Speaker 2
They were instrumental to our migration on to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. I learned so much about data and governance and how it works. And, you know, all the you know, I think you can understand data at a high level, but where you become a master of data is all the outliers that can exist in data and how to how to manage those.

00;08;31;08 - 00;08;56;10
Speaker 2
And I learned so much from those two. They were, you know, mentors to me, despite the fact that I never officially reported to them, nor did they, you know, intentionally offer themselves up as mentors, but their ability to kind of, their compassion and ability to teach and let me learn and listen in on things and answer pointed questions I have, I had along the way, made me who I am as a marketing technologist today.

00;08;56;12 - 00;09;22;29
Speaker 1
That's amazing. Let's set the stage. So we're going to talk about the build versus buy potentially horror stories. So Paramount is a legacy brand. It's over 100 years old and it's accredited with one of the first feature length films originating back in 1912, which is kind of wild. What was it like building martech inside of that kind of heritage company and working within that space?

00;09;23;02 - 00;09;56;01
Speaker 2
So the interesting thing about working in Paramount is that, you know, there is a outside, you know, impression of Paramount as being a singular company that is largely the culmination of a hundred different brands, at the very least. And it used to be more, I came from the legacy CBS side. So CBS interactive, you know, before it was Paramount, CBS and Viacom had many on again, off again relationships with one another for the the final merger and then shift to Paramount.

00;09;56;04 - 00;10;28;19
Speaker 2
So I came in between one of those two and, you know, was there during the most recent one, The legacy. CBS interactive was actually a surprisingly fun and good place to build martech. I will give a lot of credit to now CEO of Yahoo! Jim Land Zone for building a really good culture. You know, I think every big company has aspirations of being a startup or having the mindset and, you know, hunger of a startup company, and it's largely unrealistic in a fantasy.

00;10;28;26 - 00;10;55;09
Speaker 2
However, I think that Jim is only as good of a job with a very mature, high profile brand of building as close to that sort of mindset and workflow as you could. It became a, I think, much easier and messier during the various mergers. As I said, each of Paramount is not less of a singular company and more of a multitude of of individual brands and sub brands.

00;10;55;11 - 00;11;19;06
Speaker 2
There has not been a singular, you know, CMO for all of those brands. Every brand has their own distinct stakeholders brand guidelines. You know, you would not even know that some of these brands are a part of the CBS and or Paramount sort of ecosystem. Like when I first started, we had, you know, seen as a part of the CBS interacting suite of brands.

00;11;19;07 - 00;11;41;07
Speaker 2
You know, one of the OGs in the kind of like digital information age, for sure. And you just wouldn't think of that as being associated with the same brand that makes you know, how I Met Your Mother or in the whatever CBS show, right? I think seeing all these different brands and how each of them had different teams and operated independently of each other was very interesting.

00;11;41;07 - 00;12;13;15
Speaker 2
And, you know, we were still trying to make sense of that. During my most recent departure, in terms of trying to consolidate tech stacks. They want everything to be very singular, but I think with very different platforms and products and services and KPIs. I think that's going to always be difficult because I guess the description of streaming service like Paramount Plus is going to be very different than there are legacy things in sports like, say like CBS sports or something that needs to be, you know, quick and heavy hitting like CBS news.

00;12;13;15 - 00;12;18;18
Speaker 2
Breaking latest news. The needs are also very different from one another.

00;12;18;20 - 00;12;34;18
Speaker 1
For sure. Related to specifically the teams in which you worked on, where it was kind of like, do it yourself in that there was an in-house solution. What was that in-house solution trying to solve for that? Maybe other third party vendors, could it or was it more of a philosophical oversight?

00;12;34;20 - 00;12;47;19
Speaker 2
I think I think it was. It comes down to it. Financially, you know, I think it's it was sort of the martech stack that I inherited at the time. I didn't know any better. I made the best with what I had.

00;12;47;20 - 00;12;52;06
Speaker 1
Whenever we inherit it, it's always a little trickier, especially in-house.

00;12;52;07 - 00;13;12;17
Speaker 2
It most certainly is. And so there just, you know, wasn't a lot of incentive, especially, you know, me being young, inexperienced to make things better. It was just do the best with what you have. I definitely think there's a mindset of do it yourself in terms of like remove dependencies as much as you can wherever you can.

00;13;12;20 - 00;13;14;22
Speaker 1
How does a great thing but.

00;13;14;27 - 00;13;40;20
Speaker 2
100% a great thing. But you have to make sure that you have the best tools to be self dependent and independent and, you know, have dedicated resources who can help you out in a pinch and are spread too thin between a bunch of other products. And I think that's where, the do it yourself mindset has evolved over time to just do it yourself, but with better tools that enable you to do it yourself better.

00;13;40;27 - 00;14;01;23
Speaker 1
I agree that it's it really sounds like that dream of full control. No vendor strings attached, no contracts. But when you're, for example, six years in duct tape, paying your way through data chaos and waking up at 3 a.m. for a warehouse refresh, when did maybe the parts kind of crumble? When did things start realizing it's not worth it anymore?

00;14;01;25 - 00;14;03;28
Speaker 2
I mean, for me, it was day zero.

00;14;04;01 - 00;14;05;05
Speaker 1
I think there.

00;14;05;08 - 00;14;12;27
Speaker 2
Was I think it required a shift in marketing leadership to really make that happen and draw attention to it.

00;14;13;00 - 00;14;15;03
Speaker 1
Yeah. To maximize that opportunity, for sure.

00;14;15;08 - 00;14;40;08
Speaker 2
I think that like, our previous leadership just didn't have a ton of care. And in our time in investment and then, we got a new senior director of marketing for CBS sports who could very clearly see that, you know, what we were doing, how we were doing. It was broken and not scalable. Building it yourself. One of the key things about project management and product management is you want to eliminate feature creep.

00;14;40;11 - 00;15;03;05
Speaker 2
Unfortunately, when you're building a product yourself, it's going to take 3 to 5 years. The needs are going to change over 3 to 5 years as the technology and the channels that you're trying to market to change over these 3 to 5 years. It's inevitable. So whatever you end up launching with is going to already be behind. And, you know, we were our in-house tool was built for batch and blast non segmented campaigns.

00;15;03;12 - 00;15;28;22
Speaker 2
When it came down to, you know, the automation segmentation, personalization era, ultimate arts, you know, it quickly fell apart and could not meet our demands. And, you know, she advocated very heavily for at the time at target based on her previous experiences. And I think she singlehandedly pretty much got the ball rolling on, changing a lot of aspects of marketing technology to how we do things.

00;15;28;26 - 00;15;42;00
Speaker 1
That make sense. It reminds me a lot of really like road infrastructure. I feel like by the time road work is done, it's already three years out of date in terms of all of the city planning and components that, at least in the states, mapping it out in other countries, when.

00;15;42;02 - 00;15;44;19
Speaker 2
Everything is always under construction somewhere, it doesn't matter.

00;15;44;19 - 00;16;01;15
Speaker 1
Yeah. It's true. So speaking of under construction, like what were the actual costs of maintaining this in-house tool? Not just technically, but operationally? Like me personally, because I can just think of the the late nights and the heart attacks personally.

00;16;01;17 - 00;16;14;24
Speaker 2
They were a nightmare. March madness, as I alluded to earlier, was our busiest time of year at the time. CVS was the exclusive home of March Madness and the NCAA tournament and all these games whatsoever.

00;16;14;25 - 00;16;15;13
Speaker 1
You're right.

00;16;15;16 - 00;16;38;15
Speaker 2
What this is before more recent, kind of like, joint ventures with Turner Broadcasting and the talent show. We have the CBS as we can now. We would support. Yeah, individual sound would go out to, you know, 10 or 15 million users. You know, it had to be, you know, very personalized. We had to send them directly to their pool, directly to their league in their name, to make it personalized their, their pool names.

00;16;38;22 - 00;16;55;28
Speaker 2
One person could be in one pool, one person could be in three pools. So we had to, you know, make sure that logic can loop through and dynamic and all that stuff. So it came actually more than the 10 to 15 million users we had to receive, because that's a one to many relationship. As you alluded to, our data warehouse would refresh at 3 a.m..

00;16;55;29 - 00;17;17;04
Speaker 2
I would have to be awake at 3 a.m. to, process a data warehouse request in CMT. And, you know, during probably like the last year or two, they were prone to failure, didn't have any users we had. And I had to just roll with what I had and with that data or have data data. But, you know, you got to just, you know, can't let perfect be the enemy of good in that situation.

00;17;17;04 - 00;17;22;25
Speaker 2
You just get an email at the door that was, not fun for me personally.

00;17;22;28 - 00;17;25;23
Speaker 1
Give me the cold sweats just thinking about it.

00;17;25;25 - 00;17;49;08
Speaker 2
I'm sure that it costs the company, significantly less. But, you know, when things would start to break in, we would have to loop in, internal central resourcing. As I said, they would often times be split between all the various products and central teams that they would have to support. And it was difficult for them to, you know, build the support infrastructure that we needed to get during those tough times.

00;17;49;11 - 00;18;01;05
Speaker 2
So, you know, if you you're saying this thing's a priority over and over again, I guess eventually something has to fall, dominoes to fall somewhere that, you know, makes it an operational priority for sure.

00;18;01;05 - 00;18;15;00
Speaker 1
And while, of course, we're going through, you know, the nightmare fuel component, if you could go back, would you do it again via an in-house platform? And are there any conditions that you would add versus buying something more modern?

00;18;15;02 - 00;18;26;01
Speaker 2
Probably not. At least not with the use cases that I had to deal with. You know, if I could advocate for more simple use cases. Everybody gets everything and there's no personalization, there's no segmentation.

00;18;26;04 - 00;18;28;01
Speaker 1
That's sad.

00;18;28;04 - 00;18;28;24
Speaker 2
I'm sure the.

00;18;28;26 - 00;18;29;16
Speaker 1
Cheap, but it's all.

00;18;29;16 - 00;19;00;08
Speaker 2
On that. Yeah. But a lot poorer of a user experience and probably, you know, would have hurt conversions by not having kind of optimized and personalized kind of user funnels and user flows, then users into other than that, probably not. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Especially, you know, during our migration, having to work on an IP warming and Salesforce Marketing Cloud while also supporting, March Madness and, hopping back and forth between two different tools at the same time during our business period of the year.

00;19;00;09 - 00;19;02;28
Speaker 2
I hope to never go back there again.

00;19;03;00 - 00;19;04;28
Speaker 1
What's that on your worst enemy?

00;19;05;01 - 00;19;05;19
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;19;05;21 - 00;19;10;27
Speaker 1
Yeah. Curiosity. How long did that migration take? Because it's not exactly a lift and shift 1 to 1.

00;19;11;01 - 00;19;12;16
Speaker 2
It took about six months, I would say.

00;19;12;16 - 00;19;13;28
Speaker 1
And fast.

00;19;13;29 - 00;19;41;01
Speaker 2
Not that bad. In hindsight, you know, I think there was a lot things move very slowly in those first 2 to 3 months. Yeah. And there was a lot of breaking things. There was a lot of expectations that were second demos that maybe didn't meet our use cases live in production as the title. But, you know, I think once we got a handle on things and honestly, again, like, you know, Donna and Frank and Steph and I really did a lot of the heavy lifting.

00;19;41;02 - 00;19;58;04
Speaker 2
You know, at a certain point in time, they had to take a lot of the reins away from me. You know, consulting agency that was, you know, we paid to help us out because I think they only had so much knowledge of how we wanted to do things and how our data lives. And we were only getting so far with their understanding of it.

00;19;58;04 - 00;20;10;11
Speaker 2
I think once they really understood the platform and took the reins, we were able to move very quickly and let's hustle, you know, six months to be fully off. But, you know, I would also say that, like, there are a lot of out solutions, right?

00;20;10;13 - 00;20;16;04
Speaker 1
It wasn't a full time migration. It was a jumping ship and getting started.

00;20;16;07 - 00;20;25;14
Speaker 2
Technically speaking, we were no longer using the old platform. Not not reflective of the final state. We we left, you know, ten years later.

00;20;25;17 - 00;20;40;00
Speaker 1
Understood. Last but at least, are there any personal horror stories where there is a campaign moment, a system meltdown that you just want to get off of your chest? It's kind of like or gathered around the campfire telling ghost stories.

00;20;40;03 - 00;21;05;02
Speaker 2
Yeah. I'll keep harping back on March Madness and all the horror stories I had around that. You know, March Madness is. Yeah, is an interesting marketing period, because there's nothing for a user to do until the brackets are officially launched on Selection Sunday. You know, we don't know. And if we did, you know, we couldn't advertise who was going to be in the tournament to let users make their picks.

00;21;05;04 - 00;21;24;04
Speaker 2
So, you know, there was always a war room started around 5 p.m. every Sunday that, you know, were last for hours. Most years. It was pretty good, I believe 2 or 3 years ago, it was the first year we had moved our game onto a new back end slash front end platform for the game itself and user experience.

00;21;24;04 - 00;21;47;17
Speaker 2
We were probably online on Sunday evening until around like 11 p.m. site was completely broken. Getting killed on social. You're not allowed to go to market with stuff. Doing our best to stabilize the game as best as we can, you know, constantly asking for updates from people who are very tired of being asked for updates from every single stakeholder.

00;21;47;17 - 00;22;03;23
Speaker 2
People going to market before they were supposed to and, you know, realizing it after the fact. So I've been catching it live. Yeah, that's something going on social that wasn't supposed to. It's always a nightmare. There's always issues, when you can't really stress test, until it's time to go.

00;22;03;23 - 00;22;05;11
Speaker 1
Okay.

00;22;05;14 - 00;22;24;11
Speaker 2
Yeah. That was easily the worst March Madness we had. Yeah. You think you're going to be able to log off by 9 p.m. and then it's, you know, approaching midnight and you're still like, wondering if you're going to be allowed to send this thing. How is this going to impact our numbers? Yeah, everyone's already kind of game planning kind of stuff.

00;22;24;12 - 00;22;26;15
Speaker 2
Yeah, it was fun.

00;22;26;17 - 00;22;48;13
Speaker 1
Fun? I feel like I said sarcastically. There's only so many things you can prepare for when you don't know what you're going to be working with. Brought to you by our sponsors. If there's one thing that's followed me at every stop in my martech career, it's trying to get good data into the hands of marketers. That's why I'm so excited to tell you about our sponsor, High Touch, the leading composable, keep an eye decisioning platform.

00;22;48;15 - 00;23;08;20
Speaker 1
Companies like Domino's, chime, Aritzia, and PetSmart trust high touch to power their data. And here's the kicker 90% of customers have a real use case live in production. Within that first week. That means you can implement a world class CDP in months rather than the usual years long headache. That's why top brands choose high touch to personalize every customer interaction at scale.

00;23;08;20 - 00;23;28;17
Speaker 1
See what high touch can do for you at high touch.com/mso. And now back to the hotseat okay, so switching gears to talk a little bit more about tech. We've alluded to some of these APIs, but I really want to dive into the scale the sprawl, all the things related to it. So I'm curious because you're very pro a certain platform versus others.

00;23;28;20 - 00;23;48;25
Speaker 1
I would love to hear you contrast not just in-house, which sounds like there's very few redeemable qualities, but with more enterprise stacks, which are include marketing Cloud, Bray's data warehouses here, EMS, you name it, like what is working and what isn't working when it comes to legacy and potentially next gen, because you were using both at the same time.

00;23;48;27 - 00;24;14;10
Speaker 2
Yeah, as much as I called out brains, there obviously some positive to using brains. I think there's a reason why marketers like using braze. I think it's maybe easier point of entry. You know, there are cons to flattening data. It does make it easier for someone who is not super data savvy to understand that this is this data table is just a spreadsheet, and every user has a value for every column.

00;24;14;10 - 00;24;23;28
Speaker 2
You know, a little bit more Wysiwyg. It's a little bit easier to build, but I do believe that you may raise the floor, but you lower the ceiling and reason for.

00;24;24;00 - 00;24;25;26
Speaker 1
Ooh, interesting. Tell us more.

00;24;25;27 - 00;24;50;02
Speaker 2
General market is very difficult to get into. I will say that like our migration was not easy as much as six months is. You know, that's not a good there is a lot to to unpack. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is less of a Zyrtec tool and more of an empty sandbox for you to shell out if you do not have the correct data structure.

00;24;50;02 - 00;25;19;19
Speaker 2
Engineering governance do not have a proper understanding of the flows. It will work against you. So it is more technical, but you know, in having a more robust and flexible data set, you know, there's more than one way to get data into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So you're not stuck with a single methodology or single workflow. You can have separate work streams and separate data flows that work for certain teams and certain products that can then be matched together through the in-house platform.

00;25;19;19 - 00;25;40;04
Speaker 2
And that enables tools like Journey Builder and the content manager. I will say that one of the downfalls that I think Salesforce Marketing Cloud has in terms of its demos is that they focus everything very much on their journey builder platform. Journey builder can do a lot, but not every email that you send is going to be part of your journey.

00;25;40;07 - 00;26;04;01
Speaker 2
As well as understanding that how journeys work, what's a journey is live. You cannot make edits to it and you need to be able to make sure that you had everything accounted for before you set up a journey. As a part of our migration for CBS sports, one of the things we were sold on Journey Builder for was, you know, different offer periods and offer flows for fantasy football leagues.

00;26;04;06 - 00;26;25;15
Speaker 2
And you're sending users down appropriate flows based on whether or not they paid or not to different aspects of, you know, what their league setup looks like. The problem with that is a returning league can have new users join it after the league has already launched, and Journey Builder works on a user by user basis and not any kind of like subscription by subscription basis.

00;26;25;18 - 00;26;44;27
Speaker 2
So you can have some sort of subscription that, can have multiple subscribers tied to it. If you try and set that up in Journey Builder, you're going to have the same account in two different states, potentially getting two different offers in two different times. And or one of those two people not getting the offer at all. And maybe that would have been the person who could have kept the scale on your conversion.

00;26;44;27 - 00;27;07;25
Speaker 2
So that's where it doesn't necessarily, work out as well. I probably should have mentioned them, when you asked me which which one fell the sliders. But, we for a couple of years attempted to use the Adobe CDP platform for CDP needs. You know, we were using them for maybe that three years. We were not able to build anything to scale with that CDP.

00;27;07;27 - 00;27;29;06
Speaker 2
Yeah, I have the mindset as well as other, data technologists and marketing technologists within the company. You know, I think people get too hung up on certain use cases. Oh, this is ecom. This is fintech. This is, you know, IPO requirements. You know, for my mind and data is data SQL or SQL. You know, it relates to each other or it doesn't.

00;27;29;08 - 00;27;56;08
Speaker 2
Regardless of what it is, there's a reason why, you know, business schools teaching widgets and don't get into different, you know, aspects of the business because ultimately, you know, the goals may be different, but, you know, data and math don't change. Unfortunately, Adobe did not work that way. Everything was very user base. And, you know, just because we were able to set up, you know, an NFL campaign didn't mean that we can scale that to an onboarding journey for new subscribers.

00;27;56;10 - 00;28;01;06
Speaker 2
We struggled mightily with that till kind of our, our contract ran out with them.

00;28;01;11 - 00;28;25;13
Speaker 1
Yeah. That that tracks so to that point, most vendors, no matter who they are, are always going to pitch seamless orchestration like it's a Pixar movie where everything magically connects. It works. It's scalable for every use case, but under the hood it's often duct tape and records. And this things are not not doing what you want. So in your experience, how much of the dream survives that reality with.

00;28;25;19 - 00;28;33;00
Speaker 1
Granted, you've shared a few examples, but is there a platform that you think has lived up to the hype?

00;28;33;02 - 00;29;02;09
Speaker 2
So I think any platform can get you 80% of the way there. Most platforms, despite slight differences between them, can, at the end of the day, ultimately do the same, if not similar things. From a ultimately delivery and user experience perspective, I think where martech vendors set themselves up and trick you up as a customer is SharePoint making it seem like it's easy that it and it's never easy.

00;29;02;11 - 00;29;03;06
Speaker 2
You know you can.

00;29;03;08 - 00;29;05;01
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's a complex beast.

00;29;05;07 - 00;29;33;27
Speaker 2
Set something up very easy, very bare minimum. Very barebones, very easily. Most companies do not want to or have a desire to simply just be barebones. Do the bare minimum. Everyone wants to innovate. Everyone wants to, you know, be at the cutting edge of their respective industry. And I think that's where by overselling how easy it is to get there, companies do themselves a disservice if they were to be more.

00;29;33;27 - 00;29;52;00
Speaker 2
I think, upfront and not sell you on a single solution based on something they saw that worked for another company that they think is very similar to you, but maybe has a lot of smaller differences that make a huge difference in the long run. I think if they were to just say, like, hey, it's going to be a journey, there's more than one way to do this.

00;29;52;02 - 00;30;14;04
Speaker 2
You know what we're telling you now is it may work for you, but honestly, it may not. But at the end of the day, we can help you get there. I think that you can get there. But yeah, the fantasy vision of it's just it's just X, Y, and Z. We've got a predetermined, fully fleshed out, built demo environment where everything works great.

00;30;14;07 - 00;30;34;01
Speaker 2
That we can show you something is not how it's going to be day zero. And it's probably not going to get to that point until, you know, year one at the very earliest. And so just having that understanding and being patient and kind of taking, not taking everything that they say at face value, is going to help you get there.

00;30;34;07 - 00;30;46;27
Speaker 1
To that end, since every vendor is going to sell that dream, how do you recommend companies ensure they're vetting the vendors in such a way so that they can trust, but verify based off of the pipe dream they were sold?

00;30;46;29 - 00;31;01;00
Speaker 2
I as much as I believe in buying and this is the crux of the podcast, I think the biggest pitfall to buying is the consulting agency. Sort of the best that you can fall into.

00;31;01;02 - 00;31;03;22
Speaker 1
Oh yes. Agreed.

00;31;03;25 - 00;31;30;11
Speaker 2
You know, the biggest benefit to buying is that, you know, you're going to have a pool of candidates who have also worked with that tool or have resources available to them to get trained on that tool, versus having something that's completely in-house at a very small, limited number of people are going to have access to have someone like that in-house to run your migration, to manage the project effectively.

00;31;30;13 - 00;32;00;06
Speaker 2
And you can use some of these consulting agencies for hands on keyboard work, but don't let them run amok. You know, I took over multiple business units like Nickelodeon and Star Trek who did not have their own in-house solution at the time, and were dependent on one of these agencies who were getting builds, I want to say ten billable hours for a 30 minute phone call or five billable hours for a 30 minute phone call that did not have ten people on them.

00;32;00;08 - 00;32;01;03
Speaker 2

00;32;01;05 - 00;32;02;08
Speaker 1
And oh my God.

00;32;02;08 - 00;32;21;21
Speaker 2
Yeah. And that was just, you know, what they thought the saddest quote was. And if you don't have somebody to rein those people in, that is what will happen to you if you leave those agencies open. Question. You tell me, what is the best practice? How should I use this tool? They will spin up all yarn as long as they can.

00;32;21;21 - 00;32;36;00
Speaker 2
And as a marketer who has KPIs, I can respect that from a business perspective. But you know they will take advantage if you want them that don't have that internal resource in-house, who can you know.

00;32;36;02 - 00;32;36;26
Speaker 1
Fly.

00;32;36;29 - 00;32;45;19
Speaker 2
Shaping. Yes. Keep keep everything on rails. Dictate to them what you want to do rather than leaving it. An open ended question.

00;32;45;21 - 00;33;09;18
Speaker 1
Yeah, I definitely, wholeheartedly agree. You almost need a singular point of contact in person managing agencies just for the fact that it is almost a full time job. Depending on the scale. And speaking of scale, what did your final stack include and was it holding up to the scale you guys were navigating? March Madness, you name it, all of the pain points you've mentioned with the in-house platform.

00;33;09;18 - 00;33;11;26
Speaker 1
I'm curious, did it work?

00;33;11;29 - 00;33;18;03
Speaker 2
I would say it had various levels of efficacy. It's based on the channel, and that was.

00;33;18;05 - 00;33;24;17
Speaker 1
Just for most martech mock ups. Answer of it depends in the best way, like.

00;33;24;17 - 00;33;49;12
Speaker 2
Speaking from a Gmail perspective, whether or not things were perfect state they were good enough state that everything could be automated. Everything was pretty straight. We are pretty independent and self dependent. As I mentioned, braze has a very specific way of getting data into the platform and that's through API. It is not having easy scalable solution for large stack fields of data.

00;33;49;15 - 00;34;11;13
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think there's a cap of 1 million records per file that can manually be imported. If you have 20 million users who watch a certain show, you know, having to break that up into 20 different files and 20 different imports and select 20 different audiences at time send is not scalable. So, you know, we were hoping to do that with Adobe as our CDP.

00;34;11;14 - 00;34;39;09
Speaker 2
As I alluded to, it did not work out. We were starting to work with a vendor by the high touch who, while small, I think were extremely friendly, extremely helpful, extremely solutions oriented and have actually, been in contact with me about, you know, opportune cities post my departure from Paramount. You know, I can't speak for how they were able to or how they may be able to scale our needs across all the different channels.

00;34;39;12 - 00;34;50;04
Speaker 2
But I can say that, like, they seem very interested and capable of doing so, and they're going to be great partners along the way. They were extremely kind, you know, people to understand risk.

00;34;50;11 - 00;34;54;01
Speaker 1
And ironically, they are sponsors of this podcast.

00;34;54;03 - 00;34;55;00
Speaker 2
Really?

00;34;55;02 - 00;35;12;29
Speaker 1
Yeah. Love, love high touch. I love how you look. I was a I was a big fan and customer as well. So this plus one. But I can't say that all of the CLI and or at least not in this forum. Before we dive into the industry at large, I'm curious, are there any Salesforce myths you'd love to bust?

00;35;12;29 - 00;35;26;02
Speaker 1
Because in our initial conversation, we. I wouldn't say, but it had to. But you are very pro marketing cloud and I am very much I want to leave the legacy in the past. And I'm curious if there's anything you'd like to bust.

00;35;26;05 - 00;35;47;22
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think I kind of already touched on this a little bit like, you know, don't become too invested in Journey Builder or exclusively invested in Journey Builder. Do not become exclusively invested in content builder. You know, I think they are tools that are helpful for certain use cases, but you have to take everything on a case by case basis.

00;35;47;25 - 00;36;03;17
Speaker 2
There's a lot of cool and interesting things you can do through Marketing Cloud, in ways that they are never going to show you in a demo environment. We had a ton of success utilizing Automation Studio for a lot of things, and that's not something that they, you know, spend a lot of time.

00;36;03;17 - 00;36;05;16
Speaker 1
On and they don't very much tout it anymore.

00;36;05;20 - 00;36;27;03
Speaker 2
And it's really it's a really powerful automation tool. You can ingest. You have data, you can, you know, refresh a list right before it's about to send to make sure your final list is up to date. You know, I just hear in general what they're pitching you in a demo environment is are things that are going to I would say this is the case with any sort of martech vendor, right.

00;36;27;05 - 00;36;50;09
Speaker 2
Think about you as a marketer and the actions you want your own users to take for them to be more invested in your own product, in your own environment and get more money out of them, make them more dependent on you. These martech vendors are also marketers. They are not necessarily always going to sell you on the solution that's best for you.

00;36;50;11 - 00;37;10;01
Speaker 2
They're going to sell you on the solutions that are going to get you one vested in them and more dependent on them. As long as you keep that in mind, I think you can make the most out of any but Salesforce. You know, rather than pitching you on your own, current data solutions will go right into their data cloud solution, and we'll put the cart before the horse.

00;37;10;01 - 00;37;24;10
Speaker 2
And that can sometimes, you know, hinder them and your own progress, you know, because you probably already have your own data sources in your data sets that, you know, data cloud may be useful for you down the road, but like start with what you have first.

00;37;24;12 - 00;37;47;10
Speaker 1
Without a doubt. All right. Transitioning into just the general industry at large that we're of course, dealing with just a very volatile market. And I'm curious how this will illuminate things from for martech teams and from your perspective. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, of course, Paramount pushed a one Paramount vision that never really materialized. Maybe it did, I don't know.

00;37;47;12 - 00;38;15;19
Speaker 1
But then came layoffs, restructurings, a prime time cancellation and boycott, then a reversal. Meanwhile, your team just had to stay there and stabilize the martech infrastructure. And let's be honest, when Kimmel's dragging your company on late night and your martech stacks one person away from a total outage, that's not just bad luck, that's bad planning. So did anyone at the top actually understand the tech fragility they were managing, or were they to focus on headlines?

00;38;15;20 - 00;38;37;14
Speaker 2
I wouldn't say they were to focus on headlines, per se, but I also don't think they had a strong understanding of the martech fragility, to be sure. I think as long as nothing was breaking, they were fine to leave it alone. And since everything was working for the most part, there wasn't really a ton of. I didn't see a ton of need to be involved.

00;38;37;16 - 00;39;07;25
Speaker 2
So I would say that they kind of left us alone, which was, you know, can have its positives right away. You know, sometimes no news is good news. But obviously, I think through all the uncertainty and, you know, oftentimes hearing about layoffs through, a news article on variety versus from our own leadership, you know, it made it it didn't impact the martech stack, but it certainly impacted, you know, morale in the trenches, to be sure.

00;39;07;28 - 00;39;29;06
Speaker 2
You know, I think the thing that really kept this going is that, like, I didn't enjoy the politics and uncertainty. I did enjoy the work and the challenges that came along with it. And I think that's collectively what kept me and my team going through that, that uncertainty, which is that, you know, we really prided ourselves on, you know, GSD getting it done.

00;39;29;08 - 00;39;30;24
Speaker 1
I love that.

00;39;30;27 - 00;39;39;04
Speaker 2
That was the mantra and mindset, you know, to try and keep us our minds off of, you know, uncertainty that was occurring every six months or so.

00;39;39;06 - 00;39;49;17
Speaker 1
Yeah. In a world of ongoing layoffs and shrinking teams, do you think third party vendors provide more cloud cover for candidates or actually the knowledge from in-house is just as applicable?

00;39;49;19 - 00;40;16;25
Speaker 2
They provide a lot more cloud coverage. You know, I think, yeah, having somebody on hand, they're always going to have more people on hand than you are Salesforce. And there's a huge company, for example, there's no shortage of people who, you know, your account executive can pull in in a crunch if you know, the alternative is them losing your business because you know, they couldn't, you know, execute the day to day with less resources on the ground.

00;40;16;28 - 00;40;47;27
Speaker 2
I would also say that, like, while I'm not an advocate for the consulting agency model, I do know that marketing budgets, consulting and agencies and contractors are often viewed differently than headcount. Correct? It's easier for senior leadership in marketing to say, hey, if we need something done, rather than having a dedicated resources, who could maybe do a little bit better, a little bit more quickly to have, you know, that budget in your back pocket to throw at a problem and fix it?

00;40;47;29 - 00;41;04;18
Speaker 1
Yeah. I'll never understand why that is. Separate it out. I have yet to experience an excellent reason. I have yet to be told the good, real true. Why? And I'm waiting for it. Someone please tell us. Because I don't understand that early start.

00;41;04;20 - 00;41;18;06
Speaker 2
Having seen the numbers and seen my own paychecks that I made far less than we were paying for some of these vendors, I'm not sure why, that it's easier for them to justify that than me, but, you know, again. Yeah, when you said and I said, you know, the answer to that.

00;41;18;06 - 00;41;33;26
Speaker 1
Question, it's fascinating because every company will end up losing that institutional knowledge overnight when the team shrinks unexpectedly. And I'm curious, in your experience, how did that impact the day to day operations once your team was no longer at the company?

00;41;33;29 - 00;41;57;14
Speaker 2
You know, the harsh reality is that you can't do the same amount of work with less people, right? Yeah, yeah. It's easy to, you know, think that like, are we. Yeah. An agile team. Can you make it through a tough period? But all it takes is that one branch that then creates a cascading backlog of issues that affect every upcoming campaign.

00;41;57;16 - 00;41;59;27
Speaker 2
And, you know, that compounds on itself.

00;42;00;02 - 00;42;04;11
Speaker 1
But you mean AI is not going to do it for you?

00;42;04;13 - 00;42;25;11
Speaker 2
It turns out that we're not living in, you know, iRobot, where they can create art and that AI is in fact just predictive intelligence and not actually artificial intelligence. And it's only going to be as good as you trained it up to me. But campaigns that are profitable are going to have to, you know, hit this the cutting room floor.

00;42;25;11 - 00;42;50;16
Speaker 2
And, you know, I don't think you anybody can really know how that's going to impact your business until after the fact. And, you know, I think that's just a risk. You know, companies are willing to take, you know, to kind of juice those. There's numbers for shareholder calls and, how how battle will actually long term affect, you know, how you market your products, I think remains to be sitting.

00;42;50;20 - 00;42;59;06
Speaker 1
Without a doubt. And do you think legacy brands are under investing and operational resilience? And if so, what advice do you have for them?

00;42;59;06 - 00;43;01;19
Speaker 2
I can't speak on behalf of all legacy brands.

00;43;01;20 - 00;43;10;02
Speaker 1
Yeah, there's only just a couple of companies within a conglomerate. But I have I feel like there's still a through line that everyone can kind of listen and eat. Your advice?

00;43;10;02 - 00;43;37;28
Speaker 2
Here's what happens. This process is cyclical. You know, layoffs have been especially bad over the past two years at Paramount. But I wouldn't say it's the first round of layoffs that I experienced. What often happens is, you know, companies in either direction could layoffs or hiring companies oftentimes overcorrect their problems. Your to cut costs, you know, you're there often times very overeager to do so.

00;43;38;00 - 00;44;13;21
Speaker 2
And then what happens is, you know six months a year down the line. You know, when you know those holes, don't get filled, those issues start to pile up. Then they often rehire again. Unfortunately, how those retires are allocated aren't necessarily always done in the best interest of the company. And you know that where the holes are needed most are oftentimes by the people who are the quietest body, you know, or who are quick to raise their hand for help, are oftentimes the people who can just kind of want to build their team for the sake of building and, and, and safety and climbing the corporate ladder.

00;44;13;23 - 00;44;40;05
Speaker 2
But whereas like the people who like to GSD are just going to keep their heads down and plug away and aren't going to complain too much. So there's a lot of back and forth over hiring and then over firing that happens, across and legacy companies. So I think, it's a bit of a loaded question because I think, yeah, I think whether or not they I think investing enough in their operational resources, I think changes every year or two.

00;44;40;06 - 00;44;53;21
Speaker 2
They probably hover over, invest in them. One year, and then a year or two later, you know, overreact and make a knee jerk reaction and maybe and negatively impact, their resources by kind of weighing optimally, for sure.

00;44;53;25 - 00;45;20;12
Speaker 1
And if I were to kind of identify some through lines and maybe reading between the lines of some takeaways from our conversation, I would think through auditing your pipelines know where every campaign, data dependency and point of failure exist before you hit your peak season, or maybe before the the night of Sunday's election and March Madness. And prioritize documentation because your systems are only as good as what your institutional knowledge is.

00;45;20;12 - 00;45;43;00
Speaker 1
You want systems that are modular and maintainable and not dependent on any one person or consulting group. And lastly, ask the hard questions. So evaluate the vendors. Go well beyond the beautiful sandbox demo and ask about scale rate locks, backward compatibility and what happens when have them your team could disappear and how to scale it. Are there any other takeaways that you think are worth highlighting?

00;45;43;01 - 00;45;59;20
Speaker 2
I think on that last point, you know, I think you learn more about a martech tool when you break it versus when you do something successfully. And where those potholes are in the road helps kind of you create that map for future campaigns. To a point.

00;45;59;22 - 00;46;20;18
Speaker 1
I 100% agree it is one of my favorite things to do. Not because I want to break it, but I like to know the upper limitations and where in my eyes, with limits comes creativity. So you really know how to push and pull a certain tool. And with that, I have a question for you that we ask everyone who is someone we should have on the podcast.

00;46;20;23 - 00;46;43;11
Speaker 2
So I think one of the rough tunings, they're they're not necessarily directly involved in martech, but I do think that there are two people who have been instrumental on two opposite ends of the spectrum to my career in martech and kind of helping me get here versus Steph alone. She was in charge of kind of all things technical CVS, sports engineering.

00;46;43;11 - 00;46;58;29
Speaker 2
You know why we were migrating on to Salesforce Marketing Cloud? She's currently at Amazon today. Not only is she one of the smartest women I've ever worked with, she is a kind of no BBS kind of person. Yeah, she will tell me exactly like it.

00;46;58;29 - 00;47;02;29
Speaker 1
Is my kind of gal. Can't wait to meet her.

00;47;03;02 - 00;47;32;24
Speaker 2
She is very very bold, fun, personality. And as much as we were going through headaches, you know, different other sorts of aches during our migration on the marketing cloud, she kept a level head and kept things light throughout that process. I think the other person who I recommend, no more, I say on the opposite end of the spectrum, not involved in technology, but in terms of, you know, as we discussed, keeping those vendors in line, Traci Harless on our vendor management team at Paramount, she's been there a very long time.

00;47;33;00 - 00;47;41;16
Speaker 2
She, you know, one second, be the biggest advocate for Salesforce. But then as soon as something went wrong, she would be the first person to hold them accountable.

00;47;41;21 - 00;47;42;28
Speaker 1
Live a watchdog.

00;47;43;00 - 00;47;57;24
Speaker 2
And she was that perfect balance, just like sweet, caring, nurturing mother and a mother who's going to hold you accountable and make sure you can make that mistake again. She was, you know, intricate in just like, making sure we were maximizing what we are paying for at Salesforce.

00;47;57;26 - 00;48;06;20
Speaker 1
Yeah, she sounds like an integral component of the team. Well, yes. With that. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Where can folks find you?

00;48;06;25 - 00;48;16;27
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think so I'm on LinkedIn. Ian Richmond here don't have a portfolio, mostly because most of the stuff I worked on technically has not been mine. So, not really.

00;48;16;29 - 00;48;19;02
Speaker 1
We can fix that for you.

00;48;19;04 - 00;48;44;08
Speaker 2
Oh, my. To do list. In my unemployment journey, I also want to give shout outs to members of my team who are both currently select paramedic as well as those who are impacted by the most recent round of layoffs. Renne Little and Eddie Brewster. I no longer with the company. They're both magnificent human beings. They're, fascinate ING wonderful people, families who they take care of, really smart, really personable.

00;48;44;08 - 00;48;50;21
Speaker 2
If you want to have a podcast about whether or not cheeseburger is better than a hamburger, I highly recommend he.

00;48;50;23 - 00;48;51;13
Speaker 1
One.

00;48;51;16 - 00;48;54;14
Speaker 2
Strong, controversial opinions on that.

00;48;54;17 - 00;48;55;25
Speaker 1
Hey.

00;48;55;27 - 00;49;19;13
Speaker 2
I also want to shout at Rose Rogers, Dreyfus, Holly Yu, Corinne Simmons, Maria radio, who has a today's recording our show with Paramount. They are amazing rock stars. You know, if you have a team to grow and you need somebody who's really dedicated, really smart, personable, any of those people I would highly recommend? They are amazing peers to work with.

00;49;19;16 - 00;49;22;20
Speaker 1
I love that. All right. Well, thank you so much, Ian.

00;49;22;20 - 00;49;24;29
Speaker 2
Thank you very much, Jacqueline. I really appreciate it. I get thank you.

00;49;25;05 - 00;49;25;22
Speaker 1
Me too.