Brand transparency, authenticity, & scaling relationships w/ Justin Shriber & Reid Blackman

Can a brand experience feel like an authentic experience? How can brands improve trust? What are ways that a brand can showcase their values? In this special episode of IBM thinkLeaders, recorded live at Cannes Lions, we are joined by Justin Shriber (Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions) & Reid Blackman (Founder & CEO of Virtue). We talk to Justin and Reid about navigating the customer experience, building authentic relationships, and whether platforms can empower one-to-one relationships. We also dive into the merits of the Dunbar Number and scaling relationship online, brand safety, data as currency, and when it might be appropriate to automate our communication.

“We talk a lot about authenticity and I think that that conversation is going to evolve. Authenticity to me is simply being transparent with what your motives and your aspirations are. And the reality is that as marketers, as sales professionals, we can be authentic and that may not necessarily align with what customers are interested in. If as a marketer, what I really care about is moving more merchandise, moving more products and services, I'm being authentic, but that isn't necessarily the answer. So I think that there's going to be an evolution not just of being authentic, but also making sure that the things that you're being authentic about aligning to the audience that you're trying to reach.” -Justin Shriber, Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions

“Those kinds of things are really important and they're good, but they could also be misleading in the following sense. It's easy to be the hero in one way by doing some grand gesture. It's difficult to be good day in and day out. And so one thing that companies really need to do is not just think about what are the big gestures we can make that would be a useful way of communicating our values. But what can we do day in and day out? What can we build into operations and workflow to make it the case that we really do take our values seriously?” -Reid Blackman, Founder & CEO of Virtue

BIOS

Justin Shriber is the Head of marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions. For two decades Shriber has helped companies accelerate growth and profitability by building strategies that align marketing, sales and service with customer needs. At Oracle, he headed Oracle’s CRM OnDemand organization, and at Siebel he was one of the early pioneers of the cloud, leading product teams responsible for delivering the first generation of SaaS applications. He was also vice president of products at C9, where he led product management, product marketing and strategy. @jshriber

Reid Blackman is the founder & CEO of Virtue, an ethical tech consultancy.Reid was gripped by ethical problems the first semester of his first year in college over 20 years ago. Countless hours later, after reading, arguing, and teaching about ethics, he’s still hungry for more. While his early research concerned issues largely contained within the ivory tower, his research has become increasingly action-orientated, particularly as it concerns the ethics of institutions like governments and corporations, and also the ethics of emerging technologies.

He has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Texas in Austin, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Colgate University. He currently sits on the committee for “Methods to Guide Ethical Research and Design” for the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and is a member of the European Union Artificial Intelligence Alliance. When he isn’t doing ethics you can find him with his wife and children, unless there’s rock climbing to be done.