Balancing Personalization with Brand Consistency. AI Marketing w/ Tameka Vasquez & Oliver Christie

Does personalization truly scale? If so, how can we balance one-to-one personalization with brand consistency? In this episode of thinkPod, we are joined by Tameka Vasquez (marketing strategist and professor) and Oliver Christie (futurist and founder of Foxy Machine). We talk to Tameka and Oliver about creating customer experiences that resonate, the beauty of simplicity and being jargon-free, and whether or not AI will replace human creativity with marketing. We also tackle whether marketers have been tone deaf and the difficulties of hyper personalization.

Some of the questions we tackle include:
- is there a place for artificial intelligence in marketing?
-How can we balance the customer experience with automation tools?
-Does personalization truly scale?
-Have marketers become tone deaf?
-How much will AI replace creativity?

Some quotes from our discussion:

“Let's just start asking better questions. Let's just start challenging the status quo. Let's start looking at what we're doing across the various functions at an organization and figure out what we can do better, how we can optimize, how we can grow, how we can design a future.”-Tameka Vasquez

“I always think of AI as simply a set of tools. Some are more sophisticated than others, but really it's what do you do with that tool? How are you going to use it? And I think we're still quite early on in the conversation as to what we should be doing.” -Oliver Christie

“And at the end of the day, we're really just talking about reaching customers where they want to be reached and making sure that we're creating experiences that resonate.” -Host Amanda Thurston

“I'm a big believer in simplicity and I think the reason I'm super excited about the possibilities of data and of artificial intelligence and all of these tools and technologies is because hopefully it just gets us to a place of simplicity.” -Tameka Vasquez

“The data we've got and the tools, we've got are more sophisticated, but the questions we're asking are not.” -Oliver Christie

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Connect with us & the guests:
thinkLeaders @IBMthinkLeaders
Tameka Vasquez @tameka_vasquez
Oliver Christie @OliverChristie

Tameka Vasquez is a marketing and business development strategist with nearly a decade of experience managing various growth and demand generation programs for global technology companies. Her background includes bringing products to market in industries such as banking, media, and research. She is currently the associate director of marketing at a multi-national machine learning and data science company. Tameka is also currently an assistant professor of marketing management at St. John’s University. And she serves as a strategic advisor to Opus AI, an automation platform with a proven method of increasing diversity hiring.

Oliver Christie is the founder of Foxy Machine. Oliver helps companies envision their future and leverage this technology to stay ahead of the competition. He looks at how AI can impact key aspects of the business such as acquiring and retaining customers, customizing products and services, and achieving profitability. Oliver then works with companies to develop the right solution which, at times, can fundamentally reshape how the business operates.

Oliver’s experience includes working in the Financial, Media and Transportation sectors, and using technologies such as IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, Google Tensorflow, H2O.ai and Intel.