DAM Deep Dive: Aprimo

Kevin Souers: 00:00

Probably like most people that are in our industry, I started out as a chemist in a pharmaceutical plant. The best way to help user and customer is that you build functionality that will be used consistently at scale. And to have functionality used consistently at scale, it better be straightforward.

Nick Tomassetti: 00:19

There's three things that really matter to a C-suite executive. Increase revenue, I can decrease cost, or I can reduce risk. You have to be able to tie into one.

Erik Huddleston: 00:28

Yeah, anytime that I think about the value proposition of a product. I really want to talk less about the features and functions of the category or the code and more about the business process inside of an organization that I support.

Nick Tomassetti: 00:45

It's a three-legged stool. Technology, people, and process. If you say, oh, we've got this great new technology, but you never address the other two, you'll continue to have the same problem over and over again, no matter what technology you pick.

Chris Lacinak: 00:57

Welcome back to the DAM Right Podcast. In another episode in our DAM Deep Dive series. I'm Chris Lacinak, your host and CEO of the best DAM consulting company in the business, AVP. In this episode, we turn our attention to Aprimo, another long-established platform in the DAM space that you should be keeping an eye on. You'll hear my conversations with Erik Huddleston, CEO, Kevin Souers, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Nick Tomassetti, Senior Vice President of Sales. Together, these three leaders at Aprimo offer insights and perspectives on Aprimo's evolution, how organizations are approaching DAM at scale today, the role of AI as a foundational capability, and the factors that continue to shape adoption, governance, and the realization of value. Before we jump in, hit subscribe, follow, like on your platform of choice. And remember, DAM right, because it's too important to get wrong. Entrance to the DAMosphere Erik Huddleston, Chief Executive Officer.

Erik Huddleston: 01:58

I joined APRIMO about four years ago.after taking a public SaaS company called Cision private. Cision was in the earned media space, social, press releases, PR, et cetera. And my career goes all the way back to the very early nineties at kind of the dawn of digital where the the first technology company I was a part of was one of the very first players in the personalization and e-commerce space. It was a really exciting time. And so I've been in, you know, content operations has been central to my entire career. So Getting to step in to the role of CEO, the market leader in the DAM space, which is kind of the beating heart of content operations, was really a delight.

Chris Lacinak: 02:56

Kevin Souers, Chief Product Owner and Chief Technical Officer.

Kevin Souers: 03:00

Probably like most people that are in our industry. I started out as a chemist in a pharmaceutical plant. Somewhere along the line, after being a chemist, did get an MBA. I ended up in management consulting too long ago to even admit. And what was great about management consulting at that time, we're talking about twenty five years ago, tech was everything. Everything you did, all the transformations you did, tech was front and center, and we were kind of making it up as we went sometimes. Did that for a long time, kind of grew to a nice spot in the industry. But, you know, this SaaS thing kept bugging me that maybe that was going to be a thing. So my wife being very understanding. And by the way, ironically, my wife recruited me into the management consulting company as I was. So that worked out in many ways. She foolishly allowed me in the middle of a recession in 2010 to quit my job and do a startup. And that startup was focused on localization of content for through channel marketing automation. Left, right, zigzag. That startup was acquired by private equity in 2016 and combined with the entity that was formed to make Aprimo, and here I am.

Chris Lacinak: 04:23

Nick Tomassetti, Senior Vice President of Sales.

Nick Tomassetti: 04:26

Actually, I started my career at Aprimo out of college, believe it or not. And I was doing campaign management and data segmentation and database marketing, and then got into email marketing. Then decided it was best that I go try something new and went to Marceto. And so I've spent my career in Martech companies. And then, by way of acquisition, found my way back into Aprimo.

Chris Lacinak: 05:01

Company history and Overview Might be a little unfair to ask you this question since you've been with the company for just four years, but I'd love for you if you could. Tell our listeners a little bit about the origin story of Aprimo and your history with the company, the history of the company.

Erik Huddleston: 05:15

It was born out of the complexity. that organizations were feeling from the the digital transformations that were taking place. You know, all of the increase both in velocity and volume of content, campaigns, experiences that are having to put be put in market. And the cycle time compression that was having to take place there. It was a high flyer, filed their S1, got an offer that they couldn't refuse to not go public and were acquired. And then quickly spun back out to you know really to to to take advantage of you know what I kind of see as the second big wave of content operations innovation. And that's really everything that's taken place in the AI space. And You know, so we took on a little a little bit of a broader mandate on either side of DAM to help, you know. Work through, you know, I call it the complexities, not just with being the system of record for all of that content, but also, you know, the planning processes upstream, governing the content creation processes to get the data into the DAM, and then the review and approval processes. downstream from content creation.

Kevin Souers: 06:52

Aprimo was founded essentially to be operational system or record ERP, if you will, for marketing. The management of all the activities, all the resources, all the content was obviously part of it. But it was much more work management focused when it was founded than necessarily content focused. Because I think back then content was a little more finite. You had print, you had, you know, some email emerging. Where a lot of email emerging, but you didn't necessarily have all the social channels and whatnot that we've got now. Because So it was really manage the people, manage the activities, manage the budgets, and it still is. But it was pretty clear when we came board, and that they were remarkably successful at it. They were, you know, grew fast. They were one of the, you know shiny, cool acquisitions that occurred in rapid unison, now about what, 15, 16 years ago. And they were acquired by a service company called Teradata. And just like I got out of services and into technology, because SaaS was the future, you know, services and technology management don't always go hand in hand. So they went through some tough times, I think, at times under the ownership of that company. I wasn't there. But the first day that they were out from that ownership was the first day I was in. So I as I mentioned, came in with that. And it became immediately apparent to us that we needed content. That content was the future. That content was what made the world go round. That content is king. And so. Silly me thought we could just build a DAM. How hard can it be? It's a picture box. So it's embarrassing now to even say. Luckily, there were smarter people than me involved and pointed out that maybe I couldn't just build a DAM. And we were able to merge, acquire, whatever you want to call it, a company out of Belgium called ADAM. And it's ancient history. We took both the Aprimo and ADAM together, which were largely single-tenant hosted or single-tenant on-prem systems, both of them, and we took them to SaaS all at once. Uh integrated those platforms, built brand new cloud native, and then took to SaaS. And it was a gamble. That's for sure. There was a lot of people that were wondering what the heck we were doing. But it worked out well.

Chris Lacinak: 09:23

So, what year was that about? Was that how far after?

Kevin Souers: 09:26

That was 16 and 17.

Chris Lacinak: 09:27

Okay.

Kevin Souers: 09:28

And then bringing all our customers 18, 19. You make a decision like that, you make a redesign like that, you make a build like that, and it has a tail.

Chris Lacinak: 09:37

So that was really kind of the more modern DAM era, uh, for kind of reinvention of DAM there was a lot of reinvention at the time.

Kevin Souers: 09:44

Yeah, I like to, there's a couple of SaaS DAMs out there, but you definitely true multi-tenant SaaS, which I'm passionate about. You know, that was part of the discussion when I came aboard is it had to be. Why I left a great job years before, SaaS was the future.

Chris Lacinak: 10:04

I'm curious. I mean, it's interesting because I remember back then there was a lot of pushback on kind of SaaS platforms. Was that a challenge back in 2016, or do you find people ready to adopt that and run with it?

Kevin Souers: 10:14

Oh, gosh. They were not ready at all. I mean, we've got a great partner in Microsoft. We were just, we had to go across. I was doing over 100,000 miles a year, for years. You know, we have a blue chip customer base and a lot of compliant, like life sciences is huge for us, and financial services is huge for us. And they tend to be compliant and hesitant. And it's funny, a lot of the battles and the progression and the discussion, not battles, but the discussion and the education that occurred back then, I feel is happening all over again with gen AI.

Chris Lacinak: 10:49

From the perspective of Chief Product Owner and Chief Technology Officer, could you just put Aprimo into the landscape of DAM systems or the larger ecosystem, if you like. Just help us get our heads around where does Aprimo fit into the landscape?

Kevin Souers: 11:05

I mean, Aprimo historically is considered, I would say, An upscale, at scale, DAM for blue chip customers. We have remarkable configuration, we deal with scale that that most can't. And we are very focused on content not just sitting static, but being a content engine, like using that content to drive activity. Go back to that original Aprimo story I talked about. We were all about the work management orchestration of processes. That DNA has not gone away. It's just the content's front and center. And so, in that regard, of not just being system of record, but system of engagement, system of collaboration, system where you go to do work. Rather than just go to get stuff or check on stuff or load stuff. I mean, we want our people in there doing their jobs more than ever. And in that regard, we think a lot about collaboration and balancing that with process. And we handle super compliant processes like medical legal review and pharmaceutical. At the same time, from that platform, we want to deliver to mid-market companies and just allow 10-person organizations to work together. They're not trying to do audit ready, compliant processes that end up with filings for the FDA. They just want to work with their colleagues to make cool stuff. So we handle the planning, we handle the orchestration, we handle the approvals and the life cycle management pretty thoroughly compared to most DAMs.

Chris Lacinak: 12:47

I'm wondering if you could just tell us about the team at your company. What is the culture? You know, I'd love to hear just a little bit about the organization you've built and cultivated.

Erik Huddleston: 12:54

Yeah. It's really five things. We talked just a little bit about it. It's a relentless focus on operational excellence. So keep the bar high. It's a learning culture. So be data driven. Don't have a fear of failure. Have a thirst for learning. So let's run experiments. And let's be intellectually honest about whether things are working or not. So separate the people from the problem. So people aren't afraid that if you know, their bright idea ends up not panning out that they're going to get you know fired or put in the penalty box or yelled at or or whatever. And Then have a focus on cycle time. So let's move fast to bias for action, sense of urgency, so that we can move through those experiments quickly. So, that the things that we are executing on, that small number of things, are the right ones. They're going to have the best outcome. And then do it in a one-team culture so that you, you know, everybody at Aprimo knows the things that they do that create value for our customers and for the company and for themselves. They know how to measure them. Like they can, you know, they can all tell you, like, oh, yeah, you know, this was, I'm a BDR, and this is how many calls that I did, and this is how many demos that I set up, so that's how much of the pie I created, and that's going to make this sales rep be able to hit their quota because now then they have enough pipeline. And you go through everybody in the organization and they understand that you know, that idea. And that really helps with the camaraderie of the organization and the alignment of the organization to you know to keep everybody you know lifting each other up uh instead of you know like oh like i did my thing they didn't do their thing oh that that stinks gonna be you know, you know, that product's going to fail or that launch is going to fail or you know, we're going to miss some, you know, some financial target this quarter or whatever.

Chris Lacinak: 14:58

I know that In 2016, Aprimo I think was acquired as opposed to got an investment, but from a private equity firm, Marlin Equity Partners. And I know that you joined in twenty twenty, so four years later. But as someone who has had as much experience as you have, I wonder if you could paint a picture for us, what does it mean? How does a company that's PE backed operate any differently, if at all, from a company that's not, to give us an inside look to a PE backed dam platform these days.

Erik Huddleston: 15:30

Yes, there's an entire spectrum of what that means. I'll talk about the Aprimo context, and there's several of the DAMs that are PE backed. I think it's the best model for the scale of companies in the DAM space, at least today. And first, you're a private company and not a public company, which means that you can take on more risk and you can move faster because you don't have the regulatory risk and you don't have the institutional investor risk that you have in a public company. And that that those things can slow you down more than anything else. So, being private is the first characteristic that really gives you an advantage. But then you don't have to manage a diverse set of stakeholders. Like in most PE backed companies, you're really talking to one person or two people, you know, I say people, you know, firms, institutions. And they have a crystal clear vision of what the strategy is. And so you don't have to corral a bunch of people that aren't really aligned. Uh and it so it gives you focus uh uh and you don't have to worry about you know getting second guessed or or any of that. And then the third thing that it allows you is because, depending on who your backers are, we're currently backed by Marlin Equity Partners, massive PE firm. Just recently, this week, I believe, I saw them announce a pair of billion-dollar 10-figure funds that they just launched. They have a whole bunch of them. So having radically deep pockets behind you does two things. One, it lets you be aggressive in the market. If there's some opportunity, you know, particularly in a such a converging space that's evolving so rapidly. Like last year, they opened their checkbook and bought us a really innovative piece of IP that we needed in order to fill out part of our innovation roadmap. And that was a luxury. You don't normally get that.

Chris Lacinak: 17:57

Customer Overview

Nick Tomassetti: 17:59

For us, there's, I'd say five kind of core components. We really look at consumer, CPG, and retail as our certainly our fastest growing segment and our largest segment. You tend to see a broad spectrum of customer sizes in there as well, from very large multi brand firms down to like $20, $30 million CPG companies. If you look at from those top five, though, you get into banking and financial services, which also includes insurance. life sciences and healthcare, and then a few other spaces that we see. And of course, there's like publishing, media entertainment, agencies. So I'd say like the there's a lot of things that we do that may work really well for like B2B tech as an example. And so if you think about the growth of segments, I actually did this analysis a few years ago, where like three years ago, we didn't have much of a footprint in technology companies. Today, if you looked at our new name customer acquisition, it's one of the highest sectors that we have. And so I think like a lot to do with our investment in AI and leading technology has led a lot of technology companies to us because they want to be on the leading edge of technology.

Chris Lacinak: 19:33

Is there any area where you your team or Aprimo had deliberately chosen not to compete?

Nick Tomassetti: 19:39

There's market segments that we know. There are niche providers that have built out functionality that serve those market segments better. But that doesn't mean that there's going to be a use case that isn't a fit for us. And so to give you an example, like if somebody's got really heavy MAM requirements is really looking for a MAM, like I know that's not a fair for us, right? But you can certainly find a media and production company that is looking for a DAM to power their website, which is what we do every day. So it just I'd say the one area where we really have is like we don't really have a desire to go into SMB. And so I think if you look at DAM software holistically in the market segment. You have vendors that serve the SMB market and serve smaller organizations pretty well. And do so in a pretty cost effective way. And they scale differently. And we really decided to focus on the mid market and enterprise. So the one area where Chris, we wouldn't say it's less of a from a market segmentation point of view that we just don't today see a direct fit with like what how we want to go to market is the really small organizations or small needs, mostly because they're looking for tools that can do a lot less. And tend fit it to that market better than us.

Chris Lacinak: 21:21

Aprimo has both the enterprise offering and the mid-market offering. Have you seen are there any things that you can pick out between those? Those are very different buyers. At that mid market level, have you seen any changes? Or do you feel like they're pretty much a similar buyer that they were three or five years ago?

Nick Tomassetti: 21:38

You certainly see a level of complexity and sophistication in the enterprise buyer that you don't see as much in mid market. But they have the same problems. Yeah, it is it's a factor of scale. Like you'll see more resources dedicated to this problem in enterprise. Because they can. Oftentimes, the needs of the mid market are like I can't dedicate a full time librarian to DAM on the lower end of the market. I don't have a developer to go build integrations or leverage APIs. So I need simple package connectors that integrate with these systems. I need a better way to hook into Dropbox or Box.com to pull content in. You just have to we have to we think through it as, you know, I've got to be as simple and easy to use for somebody who's like that in both segments, but I've also got to be able to do the things that are required of the Mars or Home Depots or Wells Fargo's of the world. Because they're the most complicated and sophisticated companies on the market, too.

Chris Lacinak: 23:00

You talk a lot about content operations. And I think in other interviews I've seen with you, you use the term content orchestration. I wonder if you could just, w hen you use those terms, can you put some color on that for us and tell us a little bit about how you think about those sorts of operations and what they look like?

Erik Huddleston: 23:18

Yeah. Any time that I think about the value proposition of a product. I really want to talk less about the features and functions of the category or the code and more about the business process inside of an organization that I support. And I find that if I talk in terms of the business process It helps in articulating the value that we're creating, and it helps create a better north star for us internally as a team as well. And so that content operations, content orchestration, content supply chain, like any word that you use for it, I think is a good representation of the business process. And it really starts with the marketing, budgeting processes, like and the planning processes. What experiences do we want to put in market? Like what campaigns do we want to run? What content do we want to create? Like, you know, what are the outcomes that we're trying to support with all the stuff that lives in the DAM? And then it goes into, well, we have some of that, and content reuse and all those value propositions are great. Like, let's pull that forward out of the DAM. Some of it we don't have. So now then there's a piece of that process that we have to go through of managing our agencies or our in-house creatives or our AI to create or customize Create new content or customize the existing content for the channels or the segments or the new campaigns, the content holes, all of that. And then there's a review and approval process behind that, because we have to do everything from brand safety to quality to you know, brand guideline checking to risk and compliance, you know, licensing, checking, all of those things to make sure that that we can actually use the existing or new piece of content for the purposes that we want. And then it's the system of record with all of the metadata and all the rich governance and security rights and all of that to wrap around the content that goes in into the DAM. And then it's the it's downstream from that in pushing that content into the channels, whether it's web or email, the ads we're creating, the print content. All of the places, and then serving that content directly from the DAM through CDN for the online digital channels.

Chris Lacinak: 26:01

Customer Success What's one or two or three things that you find that's a theme around like that your most successful customers have in common?

Nick Tomassetti: 26:11

It's a three-legged stool. Technology, people and process. And so if you say, oh, we've got this great new technology, but you never address the other two, you'll continue to have the same problem over and over again, no matter what technology you pick. You can pick any platform you like, be the simplest thing to use or the most complicated, it doesn't matter. You don't have the other two, right, then that's where it becomes a challenge. That's always important. And either the customer is going to invest in that themselves and have a well structured team and well structured people and process It understands that's part of solving the problem, or they've decided to that they have a problem and invest in people to help them who are experts in that. So that's kind of one factor. Second would be executive sponsorship that this is prioritized. You often see like maybe there's a desire or need with admins and people who are in the day-to-day see the value of what could be achieved. But they need to have the resources and the support of the organization. And so it usually takes some sponsorship at the executive level. You might see a somebody who just wants to do something for one team over here or one component, and they don't have buy-in above them or beyond them across other teams. And so that can be a huge factor in success.

Chris Lacinak: 27:42

What do you wish more people understood about what it takes to be successful in launching and running a DAM operation?

Erik Huddleston: 27:50

There's all these mind-blowing things that AI is doing. Around assets, asset creation. But at the same time, you know, some of the most innovative features that we have are the features that knock down those those very barriers that that people are fearing uh are are keeping them from leaning in. It's like I don't have the the you know the the the people like you think about When I'm ingesting new assets and all the metadata that you have to craft, that can all be automated with AI with a higher degree of accuracy than than than people, because people just don't have enough time for the average enterprise, Gartner says, has over a million assets. And the average asset has dozens of pieces of metadata on it. You do the math on that and you think about a person typing in or clicking on like it's not happening.

Chris Lacinak: 28:55

Are there other philosophies or approaches that you use as you think about the holistic nature of DAM and what really makes it fly for organizations? You know, is there something that you special philosophies or approaches that you use to just make sure it's going to stick at an organization that's not just great technology, but something more than that.

Kevin Souers: 29:16

We obviously talked about the consistently execute at scale, don't enable one user, enable groups of users. But the other factor that comes in is trust. Right. Whether it's trust the agents in the most modern sense of what we're building now, I gotta trust. It's why we talk about quality management systems around these agents. Trust has always been required you know, at compliance customers life sciences need to trust that immutable audit trail or else they get fined a lot of money and potentially even in some industries like financial services go to jail. And so trust really has to be trust by design. And especially in this day and age where there's so many new technologies coming out and everyone can do a demo and hook a couple of things up and make it look like it can make your coffee in the morning. Make your bed after you wake up, right? The art of the possible in terms of what we can do in Aprimo labs, in our innovation lab is ridiculous, right? But when it goes into production and people are using it to do their jobs, do very serious things like life sciences companies evaluating content that will be read by people who are consuming drugs into their body in order to save their lives. But if misused could be horrible, these are important things, and you got to trust that system. So, governance, security, scale, that system has to run, right? We go down, we're putting, if we're slow, I mean we never go down, but if you have a performance issue, you could be affecting thousands of people. So that trust at every step of the way is important. I think DAM has a unique capability to be that most trusted system.

Chris Lacinak: 31:02

Can you give us one of your speaking of customers, like one of your favorite customer success stories, and if you need to anonymize it, that's fine. But or feel free to share names, whichever makes sense. But I'd love to hear a success story.

Nick Tomassetti: 31:15

We had our customer Domo, they're a software company out in LA and talking about how they leverage Aprimo and success rates. And what I thought was cool is rhere are a few quotes in there. A couple from their CMO, like people saying, I love Aprimo. How easy it is, I love how you guys organize this stuff? But also they have about last time I checked with that team, they were at this was in February, March, sixty five percent, seventy percent adoption across the entire company. So when you talk about product marketing and HR, logging in and using your DAM, like that's a really cool story. I love that about their story. We had the Mars team presenting at Gartner London six to eight weeks ago. And they really talked about their success and how they're driving efficiency into their process. And for Mars, we really are focusing on content operations holistically. And so it's not just about digital asset management, it's also about content review, automation, et cetera. And so Sid, one of the guys up on stage, really talked about they're driving about 65, 70% of like creative brief production they've automated with AI, with AI. So a few examples there that they shared. Here we had British Petroleum and Wells Fargo were on stage at Gartner Denver. And talk through like some of their success. And so, you know, beyond that, you know, it's a myriad of CPG and retail customers, but I'm just kind of like just generally thinking through a few that have recently publicly presented on their success with us and where they've been, and particularly with AI. Because again, a lot of people were talking about it, but not a lot showing it. And so there's some of those examples.

Erik Huddleston: 33:23

One of the world's largest energy companies, and they ran this, like this, I'll call it a pilot, but they launched a product, which for them means launch a company. And instead of like the army of agencies, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that would normally be like brought in to launch something new. It was like this skeleton crew. I mean, that you could count them on your fingers, the number of people, and AI. And so they leveraged our platform and a couple of other companies' products. And this infinitely small team, and they launched a company with it, like a whole new brand, like everything. And it was wildly successful. They did it in some ridiculous percentage of the time. I don't want to misquote it, but it was like. You know, it was less than 50% of the time. And I don't know what the cost difference is, but it's got to be mind-blowing given how many just the people. Another one is a a large CPG company, and they're in 150 markets. And this is where you talk about getting a little bit upstream and a little bit downstream from the DAM. Like one of the big problems that is now unlocked by generative AI, like all of a sudden, you can create all the content that you need for these big, you know, personalized campaigns, but you don't have the labor to do the planning for these big campaigns. So they they uh they leveraged uh they actually, they were a lighthouse customer that helped us build a product that we just launched earlier in the quarter called Intelligent Content Brief. So, you know, like you think about a lot of times you'll see it as like the ingestion form for content that's coming in to the workflows that then put the content in the DAM. This like takes the brief document, and it's like a collaborative canvas where the AI who's trained on your brand and your products collaborates with the marketer to create the campaign brief and then localize it for all of the markets. And this was like, you know, this would take dozens of people, and it would take a few months. And they shrunk it down to, you know, like a couple of people and a couple of weeks. And then pushing it down into the markets was like massive compression. And the CMO said that the quality level, it was the highest quality level that they had seen in a content or campaign brief. And it was the ones that were collaboratively generated with AI. So that's another one. And then, like, the most, you know, the most boring one is just the review and approval process. Something drops in the DAM. And then you have these agents that just like crawl all over it. And they're basically the people. They're the people that are inside the organization, but they're AI coworkers. So one of them will go and look and they'll say, maybe it's a little risk agent, and he'll say, like, hey, was this an AI-influenced piece of content? Because that has an elevated risk profile and has to go through a special approval process. It's like Oh, you know, it's a librarian agent. Let me go do my best at putting all the metadata on it. Like, oh, I'm looking at it. Oh, I recognize that product. Let me stamp it with the product. Or, you know, oh, I see my brand in there. Let me say, let me say it's got a brand reference. Oh, there's one of our spokespeople. You know, let's go make sure that we still have rights to use them. Like, and it just does all the things that the person would do before they allowed the asset to be generally available. And then another one that knows all about the brand and it's like, oh, is the quality bar high enough on this piece of content? And is it on brand? Does it have any brand safety issues? Any of those things are wrong, send it back to the agency and have them try again. It's like the DAM just rejects the bad content. It only lets good content in. And so that's one that and it goes on like, you know, that like life sciences is it We have one that's using our they're not using it for the final checks because that's still still scary, but they're doing pre-checks with our product. You know, the all of the pharma processes. Like, does this piece of content, like, is it compliant with the regulatory framework for the country that we're saying in the metadata is going to be used for.

Chris Lacinak: 38:23

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Erik Huddleston: 39:24

Aprimo has a you know a great heritage. You know, it's been the leader for years and years and years. And I hope that it's not a secret, but it's really the innovation of the organization. It's a super high IP product. And the rate at which we're doing things that nobody else has ever done before in the DAM space is just astounding. It has an innovation rate of a Silicon Valley startup in a mature market leader body, which I think is i t's very unique. You just never see it.

Nick Tomassetti: 40:08

The difference for us was the investment in AI into our teams and how we operate. And so, to give you an example. Our finance team uses AI. Our HR team uses AI. Our go-to-market teams use AI. One example I love, and this was something we did years ago was if you send us an RFP, for DAM, an AI agent is going to go answer those questions. And that process took you know, six, seven hours sometimes for people to sit down and go through every question and match up the answers. And even if you had a, we had used our own DAM right to build that. And so just building in the skill sets of the people, go back to people development. That even one of my now, you know, we have a process of quarterly OKRs. Objectives and key results. So one of them this quarter was what's AI going to look like in sales in go-to-market three years from now? And the output of that was: here's what we want to do later this year. What can we automate into how we operate so we can be more efficient? We're not going to remove the human element of building trust with Chris or with somebody who wants to buy our software.

Chris Lacinak: 41:32

For someone that's not steeped in AI, which it sounds like you're very steeped in AI, so let's back out to the person, maybe the average person who, you know, when you when they hear you say that maybe thinks, all right, so you know, maybe Aprimo will do some speech to text for me and some facial recognition. Can you give us an example of like, you know, when how your users, the ones that are really using it and benefiting from it most, or how they're using it and how it's working for them.

Nick Tomassetti: 41:55

Let me give you a good example. This one comes up all the time. You have a customer, a digital rights manager, right? We're all used to, you know, somebody had a model in a photo shoot, and you had a rights agreement with that model. So it isn't can can we read the you know the the agreement and know what's in it and be able to search the words in the document It's can we read the document with AI, identify that this was actually a rights agreement, and then pull out the expiration date and apply it automatically. That's the difference. And so now I can now that's where the technology is. I can go show you an example today to say, all right. Not only do I know this is a rights agreement, but I've applied the expiration date from the date in the document where it says these assets expire on this date. So that kind of level of detail that you know, you take how much more efficient can our people be if we can, you know, leverage things like that to say you don't have to read every detail, and we can get it 85% right, 75% right, 90% right, whatever it is, and get better and better over time.

Chris Lacinak: 43:10

I mean, from what I've seen, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think Aprimo is somewhat unique in that it has both enterprise solution and a mid-market solution. We see a lot of, I think, some enterprise companies that don't have that mid market level. Is that an accurate thing to say?

Kevin Souers: 43:31

It's absolutely. And that was something that was not by accident. That was something that had to be invested in, that's where the cloud native came in handy quite a bit because that solution that is delivered, you know, delivers across a hundred countries for huge pharmaceutical handles tens of millions of assets for large CPGs. It's literally the same platform that's going into that 10 person mid-market organization. And it's not a separate product. It is the same product. And what's nice about that is folks can grow with us, right? And we've made it obviously there's levers and buttons you push that turn off certain features that, quite frankly, they might not be ready for. It's overkill for them. And that's where we kind of have, at the end of the day, the user. When you develop around the user themselves, those behaviors aren't different whether you're a marketing person working in a 10-person organization or you're a marketing person working in a 2,000-person organization So that's what we got.

Chris Lacinak: 44:35

How do you do that at the same time as you try to make this really simple user interface that folks can pick up and run with? That are not going to go through some enterprise thing, but are just a 10-person team that needs to start using it tomorrow.

Kevin Souers: 44:47

I think the key for us is to say, if you're going to serve the customer best, and this is especially relevant in the age of AI. If you're going to serve a customer best, it's because you're getting tens or hundreds or thousands of people to act consistently. And the only way to get them so that not, hey, we came up with a new Gen AI feature, so now my brand manager can get their job done two hours faster. Because if that's a one-off, the brand manager has to be really sophisticated and know how to use that functionality or create something one-off. They're going to take that two hours and I'm going to put it in their pocket. God bless, we love our users. We like to build things, to give them those two hours back. But it doesn't help our customers, remember I said the customer is a close second. The best way to help user and customer is so is that you build functionality that will be used consistently at scale. And to have functionality used consistently at scale, it better be straightforward.

Chris Lacinak: 45:48

What would you say is an essential trait of Aprimo that is critical to its character today that you think goes back to you know day one, something that it carries with it today that's really defines Aprimo.

Erik Huddleston: 46:01

If you look at the culture of the company, the way that the teams operate First and foremost, there's a a level of operational excellence reflected in the execution of the work. That I think is unusual in how high the organization sets the bar. It has some side effects, obviously. Like if your quality bar is super high, you have to do less things. And so we do fewer things, but we do them at a super high level of quality. And that has downstream consequences. It means that we've gotten really good at having a learning culture. So being very data driven. Very quickly figuring out what's not working because if you're only going to do a small number of things, it better better be the right ones. And if they're the wrong ones, you need to know really, really quick. And so that also means the team is, you know, very acutely aware of cycle time, like being sure that we're not wasting any time. And all of that gets wrapped in I think a pretty cool innovation culture. You look at our roadmap and the kind of content that we create and the customer stories that we talk about. You know there's some some pretty cool and innovative stuff uh going on it's definitely not the the same old kind of blue collar uh you know back office of the front office infrastructure space that I think DAM has has historically had a reputation of being.

Chris Lacinak: 47:33

How do you think that Aprimo approaches DAM as a technology and practice that's different from your competitors.

Kevin Souers: 47:42

I think of my product people. Who just surprise me constantly. They're brilliant. And much like I was just saying, they'll sit. And they'll understand the business needs of our customers. They'll never let our customers necessarily dictate what we should build. We don't really think of features, we think of system, design thinking. A platform is a collection of capabilities and quite frankly, integration and the foundation of an entire stack. It's not just a set of features, right? And, you know, a lot of there is a reality in our industry of RFP checkbox, right? I can't tell you how many times because, you know, there's certain competitors do certain things better than us, we do certain things better than our competitors. Our competitors will always try to make a point about whatever single feature they know we don't do necessarily well. Of course, we do everything well. And to me, it's never to us, it's not that. It's, you know, DAM exists to solve a set of business problems, but the business problems really haven't evolved much over the years. How you solve them, hugely. At the end of the day, you want to increase content discoverability. You want to improve life cycle management. You want to ensure brand safety. You want there to be governance. You want to automate the asset management. You want to raise the ROI of the entire ecosystem so that you're that foundational of the composable stack. And ultimately, now, and especially in the last five years, you want to directly power diverse digital experiences, ideally as personalized as possible. Could have given the same six things six years ago. Seven years ago, right? Same speech, probably nine years ago for the most part. Power digital experiences, a little newer. And that's how we wake up every day. That's what we think about. What is the business problem we're solving in the broader context? Rather than what feature do we need to build next.

Chris Lacinak: 49:40

In 2025, you all were named as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. What are your thoughts on, and of course, folks can go read the report on why. Aprimo ended up there. But if you could just give us some thoughts on, you know, what was it that Aprimo is doing that put you there?

Erik Huddleston: 49:55

The things that if you and I would have everybody just read the report, it's really good, or you can read The Forrester Wave, or you can read the IDC Marketscape. They all have the same similar themes for for Aprimo's success in all of those. The big one is it's IP and innovation. We're the IP forward DAM. We have the most features, the most sophistication, like the most innovation. So, you know, that that shows well when you're trying to to stack rank people up. So that's one. Two, because we're also the the enterprise leader who has come down in the market. It means that we cover the most use cases. and can adapt to our customers' requirements the easiest. And that's a double-edged sword that I'll fully acknowledge. But it allows for a lot of successes where you might not get success otherwise. So you have a kind of a breadth of coverage thing that I think that's super innovative. And then its breadth of capability. So, you know, if this is the core, you know, kind of DAM feature set. You know, we have a bunch of capabilities on this side and a bunch of capabilities on this side. And so they act as, you know, our customers look look at their look at their DAM and they say, oh, it's awesome because it has this stuff, it has this stuff. Whereas maybe a competitor might say, oh, those aren't really DAM features. But for us, because it's all one integrated platform, it is. And so you just have you just cover off on some value props that you just wouldn't get from the other folks in the Magic Quadrant.

Chris Lacinak: 52:00

Roadmap and Technical Foundations What's something about your product? And here we can think at whatever level makes sense, that you think your product that Aprimo really excels at that might not be apparent to someone that you know isn't working under the hood or may not have the technical chops uh to really fully appreciate. Ss there something one or two things you could share with us on that front.

Kevin Souers: 52:23

For us, first of all Aprimo has, there's a couple of other DAMs that have it as well. We have something called content typing, which allows you to have parallel taxonomies. Because you know what? A product shot is different than a lifestyle shot. An instructional video is different than a promotional video. The taxonomy should be different. And we've always had that, and that's cool. But in the world of Gen AI, that becomes really, really powerful. Because you know what? Now, what we do is on ingestion, you can ingest a thousand different assets. You can identify with our Librarian agent, what content type that is, each asset is. You can apply the proper taxonomy. Then we have that same librarian agent predicts the metadata. And not just, ooh, this is a PowerPoint file or any metadata you can grab off the file type, but truly contextually understand. Using Gen AI and predict those structured fields that are unique to that customer's taxonomy, not base fields. Customer specific fields. Why is that important? Well, the secret little thing that Aprimo has sitting behind that is a completely configurable by the business native roles engine. Why does that matter? Well, when that content comes in, it has certain metadata fields or a certain content type, and that rules engine figures here's what it is, it can start pushing it down different paths. At that point, our orchestration engine kicks in. So you can literally ingest a thousand different assets, have it completely categorized, completely populated with metadata, and path to 200 different spots. Please don't build something that complex, but hypothetically. Before a human ever gets involved.

Chris Lacinak: 54:00

How do you think about autonomous DAM? Is it the same as Agentic? Is it basically just the fruition of Agentic AI or is it something else? How do you think about that?

Kevin Souers: 54:10

Yes and no. So I use the phrase autonomous content factory, right? Which is the time is not here yet for the autonomous content factory, but it will come. Compliant agents, compliance industry will always have semi-autonomous content factories because, by definition, from FDA or FINRA, you need people in the middle. And a lot of companies can choose to still have people in the middle. But eventually you won't need them. And I'll give you an example. We invested one of our good bets that we placed two and a half years ago, is we built out, or remember I said we had agents before they were called agents. Kind of identified six capabilities that we knew were foundational, not features, but foundational pieces of the platform. That eventually you could recombine in different ways and ... And luckily, we turned out to be right. Again, that was some missteps and failures along the way. But we kept at it. And we built essentially what's an agent architecture. We called it contextual management ... the term. We built a RAG, what's now known as a RAG capability. We built the ability to use AI to predict structured metadata. We embedded a visual transformation engine. And we knew we needed content intelligence, which we didn't necessarily have, and then we went out and we acquired acquired that capability. We acquired the ability to do machine learning of user behaviors on digital properties. Remember that power digital experiences being the most recent one? And we went out and we got that, and we took that machine learning, which was used to drive personalization and still is. But ultimately, we used that to Proprietarily analyze people's behaviors on the digital categories and translate those via AI to the type of content that you either have in-house or need to create. Because we could analyze what type of content you needed on that front line. The reason we did that is a little forward thinking. I am careful which customers and how deeply I go into that because you know it's still evolving. But the reason you do that is if you have machine learning and AI analyzing what content you need, specific content you need in specific spaces at any time. The idea that it can identify and say, hey, we need lifestyle focused on segment X in digital property Y. It can kick out to the planning agents or the kick out to the librarian agents. Librarians can see do you agents, do we have that or appropriate stuff Critic agents, if the librarian agent chooses certain files to consider, critic agents can evaluate whether they think it's good or not. Compliance agents can check if it's a compliance situation, do they fit in? And if it's like, hey, it's good, but not quite as good, the visual transformation agents can then make the variant, right? We don't think visual transformation in DAM is about being Firefly and creating that golden asset, that first asset from the ground up. Creatives have that. But we believe DAM is going to have a very big role in making those localized variants. So that whole cycle I just described. We can almost do that completely right now. And not necessarily structured at scale. But that's where we think the world's going to go. Now, the nice part is that's the North Star. And you say, there's your autonomous content factory. And by the way, that would be. You could just peel things off. Like you can dial. No one's ready for that yet, right? But you can start dialing down and where do we want the humans in the middle? And you can create a whole lot of capacity, flexibility, and personalization. Ah, with the same resources you had before.

Chris Lacinak: 58:07

Maybe I missed the point here, but that sounded a lot like a bunch of agentic AI in that kind of description. So what's

Kevin Souers: 58:15

That's agentic AI, but the top just like you need people directing the agents, let's face it, the agents aren't necessarily doing the super strategic stuff. There was not a way to do true contact intelligence with a straight agent. That had to, we had to recreate machine learning. Like the agents still need to be directed to a degree. Can they act autonomously and unsupervised in very limited capacities where you're evaluating their performance after the check? Absolutely. Does it mean agents are going to run the whole thing end to end? Absolutely not.

Chris Lacinak: 58:46

To touch on another kind of buzzword that they come and go so quickly, but adaptive DAM is another one here. I think about DAM that you talked about earlier solving prob business problems. I think about adaptive DAM as something that can take many forms and solve it can be over here in this department solving these business problems, but it can also be in three other departments solving three other sets of business problems all as one system. I think that's a fairly I think that was always a pipe dream. It feels like it's really coming to fruition today. I guess I wonder is that something that is this a term you use? Do you use a different term? Is this something that how do you think about this at Aprimo?

Kevin Souers: 59:28

We don't use that term. And I think the reason we don't is we've always been that. I don't think I have two customers, maybe the entry-level customers that are just getting started in their journeys, some basic needs that we solve, but even then. You know, everyone has a unique story. Everyone has unique business drivers. Everyone has unique roles and responsibilities, even across, you know, you'd think massive global banks would have the exact same business cases and business uses. And there's definitely similarities, and we have industry blueprints for that, et cetera, but they all alter them, they all make it their own. Which makes it really hard for like canned dashboarding and reporting, by the way. But because everyone's different. So to us, that's always been, right? You know, when we made transformation SaaS almost a decade ago, we definitely said, hey, no more customization, because the customization was bad. Changes to base code is really, really bad. But at the same time, our customers who had customizations were like, yeah, dude, we ain't gonna go with you if you get rid of this. So we had to spend a lot of time thinking, how do we make it uber configurable? Right, or else we're not going to get our old customers to come with us on the journey. And so we spent, I guess, going way back, we spent a lot of time thinking, how do we make the system configurable? Well, I think we put in about a dozen massive configuration capabilities that were like kind of never thought of before that allow us to kind of morph as customers need. So to me, adaptive DAM isn't a new term per se, maybe the semantics itself, but it's how Aprimo has always operated.

Chris Lacinak: 01:01:09

Is Aprimo engaged in kind of uh C2PA or other content authenticity initiative things? Or yeah, can you talk a little bit about that?

Kevin Souers: 01:01:18

Ah, I wish I wish my content authenticity guy was on. We did it so long ago. We signed up. We support two major frameworks. I can't even remember, like, we did it two years ago. We're members of the Alliance, et cetera. You know, even when we chose our partners in AI, we chose it even when they weren't the biggest, some of the models that we use, they spoke the most two and a half years ago about IT protection and ethical training, right? And that was a huge topic in 2023, right? When I was Because that was it. By the way, it still hasn't gone away. It's just, I think most people have figured out: hey, it can't be the wild, wild west. Just like we said, you can't just hook anything up and start doing it. That doesn't cut it for enterprise processes, much less compliant processes. So we're part of it. And it's we have we came out with AI content detection back in 2023, because back then it was a fear. Like, oh my God was this generated by AI or not. And I even said at the time, like, you know, pretty soon they're going to want to know that you're using AI. Not that, you know, we want to know if AI slipped into our system. It's reversed since that, just like we thought. So, I can't unfortunately speak to those authenticity initiatives in detail, but.

Chris Lacinak: 01:02:40

But it's something you guys have been focused on. Yeah, that's good to know.

Kevin Souers: 01:02:43

Very passionate about it because you just go back to the trust. You got to do right. including by the creatives and the artists.

Chris Lacinak: 01:02:52

Industry Insights and Future of DAM What do you think, DAM the DAM landscape looks like over the next few years.

Erik Huddleston: 01:03:00

It's going to transform. You know, we've talked about a lot of the positives, right? You know, everybody is has the hood open on the process that's most critical to DAM. But there's also, going back to, we talked a little bit about AI risk, talk a little bit about risk to DAM. that's created by AI. So think about it's great that organizations are going to create wehichever stat you want to use, a hundred times more content, a thousand times more content than they did before. And you think about like the thresholds that people are at on just core discoverability, findability. And then just the performance of search and browsing in DAMs. There's some very well known deficiencies in that area with some of the biggest vendors even at today's level of content. What's going to happen when it's one thousand X that?

Chris Lacinak: 01:04:04

What are the biggest obstacles to DAM being more pervasive than it is.

Erik Huddleston: 01:04:09

I think that DAM vendors in general do a terrible job of articulating the strategic relevance of DAM to the overall enterprise marketing and content strategies. And everybody gravitates to the very real and very powerful, but very tactical value props of DAM, and they fail to connect it to the conversations that are happening in the C-suite. And so we're spending all this time talking about AI revolutionizing marketing. And you don't really hear a lot about you know, the implications of that on DAM and DAM as an enabler for that from most of us in the DAM space. And then we talk about that broader business process that I probably have talked too much about. We don't do a good job of linking the category of digital asset management to the business process of, you know, and there's two or three that you could, that you could point to that if you don't, if you disagree with me about content operations, but whatever you do believe. In general, people don't do a good job of making that linkage. And it's a critical piece of infrastructure that is very hard to be successful without. And people just don't do a good job of connecting the dots for the market.

Chris Lacinak: 01:05:46

Let me ask you a hypothetical scenario. You're on an airplane, you sit down, you happen to sit down next to a CEO of a of a Fortune 500 company, put them in whatever vertical you like here for the purpose of answering the question. And when she finds out what you do. She says, Oh, this is interesting. I've been hearing, you know, lots of talk coming up my way, asking for budget requests around DAM. I'm not entirely convinced, you know. Help me understand why I should do this, executive to executive here. What would you say to that CEO?

Erik Huddleston: 01:06:19

I actually, this actually happened to me two weeks ago.

Chris Lacinak: 01:06:21

Oh, interesting.

Erik Huddleston: 01:06:23

So I'll tell you how that went down. It's a little bit duplicative of earlier in the conversation because that's what I had in my brain when I said it. But I basically asked him, hey, do you? You know, do you have an AI strategy? And of course, like every CEO has an AI strategy. So he started chirping off on his AI strategy. And so I said, okay, so you're saying like, that your marketing organization is going to create, I forget what he said, like 200 times the amount of output that they had. Like he was talking about the campaigns and market, how campaigns translated to revenue for them. So more campaigns in market equals more revenue is like his whole thing that AI was going to do for him. And it's like okay, so you're going to increase campaigns and market by 200x, which means you're going to have 200 times the amount of content generation throughput. Where are you going to keep all of that content? And how are you going to know that you can, you know when you can have to stop using the content from a digital rights management standpoint? How are you going to know the linkage between content and campaigns? I just started taking him through all of the you know, all of the the use cases for uh for DAM and he was like oh I I see. So this is part of my, you know, shiny, you know, 200x the the the the the the the revenue you know moonshot uh strategy.

Chris Lacinak: 01:08:07

So i in essence it sounds like you you attached on to finding out about their goals, their ambitions, their plans, and then you help them understand in a very practical, meaningful way how DAM ties into that.

Erik Huddleston: 01:08:18

That's why I said the biggest problem that DAM has as an industry is we don't do a good job of articulating strategic relevance. But here I was starting with revenue. Like what's what CEO like what's higher on their mind than revenue? And then we just worked backwards to how they were how they thought that they were gonna what their strategy was for revenue generation and then what that meant in terms of the projects and programs that they were going to launch. to the infrastructure requirements and the consequences of those. And lo and behold, what was in the center of it, a massive content problem.

Chris Lacinak: 01:08:56

When is there Aprimo launch date?

Erik Huddleston: 01:08:59

They're in my pipeline now. They're in my pipeline.

Chris Lacinak: 01:09:03

That's great. I love that you actually had that experience. What are the most common objections or reasons you hear for someone not implementing a DAM. You know, that may be considering it and decides not to, or or, you know, just flirting with the idea but never really executes on it.

Nick Tomassetti: 01:09:19

Lost funding business case, I think, is the most common thing. So even for us, like that would be more common than losing to a competitor is that someone was able to build enough of a project to lead through and see the value. And you usually might see this with like the creative team. They've got a real problem, and they know they've got a problem, but they struggle with getting the sponsorship and then the funding to move forward. And oftentimes, it comes down to the difficulty of having to build a business case for this. There's three things that really matter to a C-Suite executive. I can increase revenue, can decrease cost, or I can reduce risk. Those three things. So you have to be able to tie into one.

Chris Lacinak: 01:10:15

I'm wondering, you know, as you talk about AI in your conversations right now with potential buyers. What are those conversations like? Are they skeptical? Are they excited? Are they confused? Like, what's the vibe around those conversations these days?

Nick Tomassetti: 01:10:33

We've gone from a place where people said, you know, hey, we want to buy a new DAM. We're replacing blank, to I can't tell you how many RFPs I've looked at recently, Chris, where it is said We want a DAM that has this AI, this AI, this AI, this AI, this AI, and on down the list. And so we've built the market has adopted it. And we've been on this journey for a couple of years now. And so, because of that, you have people coming in saying, this is what I want to do.

Chris Lacinak: 01:11:06

What have you seen? Are there themes that you've seen across industries with the DAM buyers and how those have changed over the past few years? And one of those, I think, you pointed out is the change in how people talk about and now require AI. Are there other things? What's changed with the DAM Buyer?

Nick Tomassetti: 01:11:23

Certainly seeing an uptick of people looking for and approaching, I think the system integrator is on some of the solution service providers in the industry have driven part of this. But like In people thinking about holistically about content operations. And so there's been several examples recently where people are not only looking to replace their DAM because we've always seen like traditional, I'm replacing the CMS and the DAM. I just have a DAM project. Or I'm replacing PIM, CMS, and e-commerce. And you kind of see this centralization around like those core, we'll call it commerce use cases. We're seeing more now around content operations, meaning workflow or review and approval components along with DAM. And so it's if I had to think about that, like if you have this funnel of ideation all the way to delivery of content. Companies, we've always seen the historical focus over here of all the delivery pieces together, that includes DAM. And I'm seeing more of this over here more recently, where it's about the production process along with content.

Chris Lacinak: 01:12:51

For the DAM buyer, a prospective DAM buyer that's listening to this, you know, what, as someone who's gone through this process many, many, many times, What tips would you have about what makes for an effective DAM procurement process? And maybe what are some red flags that you see that you'd like to warn people about?

Nick Tomassetti: 01:13:13

Do your homework, do your research, obviously, on vendor selection and how you're going to implement. One of the things that gets missed a lot is you go into these processes with vendors, and it's, hey, let's have a discovery call. Let me make sure I understand what you want to do. And here's a demo. And then here's a contract. And people will overlook some of the most core and fundamental things to DAM being successful, like migration of assets into your new platform. So, to give you an example, I talked to somebody who said, well, we bought this platform, and then it took us 18 months to get it live. Well, this was a simple kind of I'll call it mid-market SMB offering platform in our space. And they just underestimated the effort of getting content into the system or how to do that effectively. And to see, like, folks like John Horodyski talk about metadata matters, right? It does. And while we want to talk to you about how you can use AI to create that metadata or enrich that metadata. The truth of like how you structure things is important. So I'll often see companies overlook the people in process part of that, of how are you going to make me successful? Because it can be quite easy to just go into the demo like the user interface and say we got this and then underestimate the effort involved. Or like what you think about the so planning for that, you know, talking to people who've done it if you haven't. There's lots of resources where you can reach out and understand what is a realistic timeline and what is a realistic effort to do? Should I consider migration or not? There are a lot of vendors in our space who will try and convince you that you can just, you know, be up and running on your own in two weeks. And In the S, even in the SMB world, that's unrealistic. So I always try to think because of my background. In professional services, like, hey, over a two-week period, how many of your people are going to be on vacation? Because it's spring break next week. So, first of all, let's plan on that, right? Like You know, obviously not spring break where we are now, but you get my point. So, things like that that matter to when you see an enterprise buyer that's very experienced with the procurement IT-led teams that have done this over and over again they know what to ask and how to ask those questions and how to dive into the details to make sure that they're going to have a successful project. And that's probably the biggest thing that people overlook consistently. Also, know your procurement process. You'll see people have dates and plans. Like, we're going to be live by July. And one of the things I'll always tell people is: yes, did you know that, like, companies a billion and up, the average amount of time it takes you to get a contract through your legal team, it's about 38 days.

Chris Lacinak: 01:16:34

Yeah, contracting is almost always longer than people think. Yeah.

Nick Tomassetti: 01:16:38

Hey, I've got to get off this other platform. Well, there's all this red tape that gets involved, and people don't know their own procurement process. So as you're getting excited and learning through it, there's the reality of the red tape in how companies need to operate, agree to terms, et cetera. That always gets involved, and it's often even in experienced buyers that people don't really know what that process is until they go through it. And it always tends to slow people down.

Chris Lacinak: 01:17:08

So being diligent is important, it sounds like. I think there is definitely such thing as maybe being diligent, some people will interpret as we need to have 500 questions in our RFP, right? And I think there is a such thing as too many requirements or too many questions. Any tips or tricks that you've seen where people have nailed it on the line drawing exercise that is the right number of questions or framed in the right way.

Nick Tomassetti: 01:17:36

Remember what you're ultimately trying to solve. And in so many instances, like, what is your biggest pain point? What are your top three pain points? There's a lot of similarity. This is a very mature space. You have a lot of vendors in it. Everybody's got a search bar. Right? Yeah, it's just reality. Everybody knows what facets are. So there's a lot of similarity. But remember what's most important. So if your biggest problem is I can't find content, then prioritize that. And it helps, I think, if you just tell the vendors, this is what our biggest problems are. How would you solve them? Versus, like, if you get very prescriptive on here's our use cases, you have to do it this way. What you're likely to miss is their ability to tell you, I've talked to twelve insurance companies this week and here's how eight of them are doing it best practice. You're doing it this way. Let me show you a different way. And so there's always an opportunity to learn through this process because in our world, we get to talk to all kinds of companies every single day, all kinds of marketers. That's my next meeting.

Chris Lacinak: 01:18:58

Yeah. So use it as a learning process and don't be overly prescriptive. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've seen that as well. Personal Touch What sorts of philosophy or beliefs really are a driving force for you personally, you know, as a leader in the company? That are really critical that are unique to you.

Erik Huddleston: 01:19:19

From a personality standpoint, I'm obsessed with innovation and creating customer value. So, those two things together, can I create outsized value in a way that hadn't been done before? And hopefully, that means at a higher level of whatever the value is. Than the way they were doing it. That's just intellectually stimulating to me. And then I think about how I create customer value through through innovation. And then I think about how I create enterprise value through the operations of the business. And then I think about how I create value for our employees through kind of the people process. How can I advance people's careers, get them the skill sets that they didn't have? And I think if you like, those are the three engines of a technology company. You got a go-to-market engine, you got a product engine, and you got a people engine. And your go-to-market engine creates enterprise value for the company. Your product engine creates value for your customers, and then your people engine powers both of those. But then also needs to create value for your team. And so that philosophy has been one that served me well. And then if you hook that up to all the change initiatives that you need to do to get to whatever your goal is. If it's an IPO, if it's a a new next round of investment, if it's some kind of acquisition or exit, like whatever, whatever is success for you as an organization, as shareholders, boards, et cetera. then you're able to work backwards then from that and get there quicker.

Chris Lacinak: 01:21:10

Are there philosophies or principles that guide your approach to product development and innovation? And here I really want to know about Kevin Souer's approach, but feel free to dip into the Aprimo mantras if you want to go that route too.

Kevin Souers: 01:21:24

I think my very first day at Aprimo I had a slide made by an agency I brought in that said marketing is the balance of art and science. It really is. And me as a person, I think I've always been that way. You balance out structure and left brain and right brain, right? I spend a lot of time understanding customers' exact needs and hey, this is what we need done and this is how we automate and this is how our processes work, really detailed stuff. But I spent a lot of time dreaming, and that's a big bet we made actually two and a half years ago. What does the world look like three years from now? I spent a lot of time thinking what does it look like a year from now, two years from now, three years from now? My customers are probably all nodding my head because when I go talk to them, I always say, Oh, I'm the worst guy to tell you what's releasing next week. I have no idea. Tell you what we're gonna be working on nine months from now. Um, so that kind of balance, that's me. Um, I led 6,000-person organizations. And I've scrambled in ten person startups. You know, it's both sides of the coin. Some might say Jack of all trees, master of none, but I like to think maybe.

Chris Lacinak: 01:22:40

So you feel like that's something that you've carried with you throughout your career.

Kevin Souers: 01:22:43

Constantly, yeah. Constantly. I always ask myself: am I an operator or a strategist? Right. And I think anyone has to be both, right? To some degree. It's like how you raise your family. You have day-to-day stuff that you need to get done, and you also have goals that you want to try to reach. What is the last song you added to your favorites playlist?

Erik Huddleston: 01:23:04

Yeah, that's a little bit embarrassing. You're not the first person to say that. I'm actually not in charge of my music. There's an iPad in my kitchen wall and then speakers like all over the house. And so like every last person that walks through my door goes over and parties on my playlist. So, what I could say is the last random song that ended up in my playlist that I was like, oh, that's pretty interesting. And that was this country song called Nose to the Grindstone. It was by a Tyler Childers, I want to say.

Chris Lacinak: 01:23:49

Childers, yeah.

Erik Huddleston: 01:23:50

Childers, yeah. Yeah. I'd never heard of him before, never heard the song before, but it was like this super you know, kind of gritty, like guy recounting the, the, the advice that he, that he got from, you know, his West Virginia coal miner father that, you know, just like lived his entire life, you know, in the coal mines, never really did anything. And he's like, but he's taking all of this wisdom and talking about it. And it kind of It kind of is an analogy for the DAM space because this very like hardworking, you know, blue collar like industry. But now that it's getting applied to this fascinating bigger context.

Kevin Souers: 01:24:37

Broken Man by St. Vincent.

Chris Lacinak: 01:24:39

All right.

Kevin Souers: 01:24:40

I'm not sure it's my favorite. Trying to get there. I love St. Vincent and Broken Man obviously this year was popular, but like I'm still wrapping my head around it.

Nick Tomassetti: 01:24:49

Quick, quick fact about me. My wife was in the music industry here in Nashville.

Chris Lacinak: 01:24:53

Oh, really?

Nick Tomassetti: 01:24:55

Prior to us becoming a thing. And really mom life and everything else that's caught up with our lives. But I am in a music video on YouTube somewhere. So I'll tell you that much. But I just don't, you know, I'm not a big music person myself. And so she's like all about the music, controls it. We listen to a lot of Brandon Lake stuff, I think, recently. So kids are all into that. Let me get the name right. So, I can't even answer your question because I like playing video games. I like working outside. Mostly video games because of my kids. They're into Fortnite. I'm playing Fortnite with them all the time, or I love to work in my garden and spend a lot of my time like, if I have free time, it's uh yeah, doing football practice or volunteering for stuff, to be honest.

Chris Lacinak: 01:25:51

So, you got to send a link to the YouTube video.

Nick Tomassetti: 01:25:53

I'll send it to you.

Chris Lacinak: 01:25:54

All right.

Nick Tomassetti: 01:25:54

You do what you want with it.

Chris Lacinak: 01:25:57

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