Mapp Innovate was held at RSA House in London, welcoming a host of thought leaders for an event filled with compelling discussions, including:
The topic was all things AI, and kicking off Innovate 2024 enthusiastically was Ricardas Montvila from Mapp! Read on for a captivating summary of all presentations below.
Roadmap(p) and AI Innovation: Ricardas Montvila, SVP, Mapp
First to take the stage, Ricardas dove into innovation, AI, and the art of possible in marketing. He shed light on the power of creativity in recognizing market opportunities beyond the confines of technology. When it comes to business, consumer, and maturity KPIs, he explained it was a bigger job than you’d think. Ricardas emphasized that orchestrating these KPIs, when fine-tuned, can reveal new revenue opportunities, a task AI is cut out for.
Next, he explained Mapp Marketing Cloud’s AI Assistant features that could help identify opportunities, anomalies, custom-process monitoring, segment detection, predictions, and content generation. Ricardas signed off his talk with exciting news to watch out for: Mapp’s upcoming new AI release to help marketers easily extract insights, thereby enhancing decision-making and improving business results.
Painting the Path to Success: Katherine Jones, Farrow & Ball
Passing the mic to Katherine from Farrow & Ball, she painted a picture of the brand’s rich heritage and commitment to artisanal quality. The importance of a personalized digital experience was emphasized when highlighting 2.2 million global website visitors.
Katherine spoke on the transformative power of customer insights and how leveraging Mapp Marketing Cloud enabled personalized communication on an impressive scale. By tailoring their email communications to the unique tastes of each region, Farrow & Ball ensures their newsletters—rich with product launches, project inspiration, and expert advice—strike a chord with their audience. This regional customization strategy pays dividends, boasting higher open rates and generating clicks to their website from email campaigns alone.
Finetuning automated journeys helped Farrow & Ball to react responsively to customer interactions. She explained how crafting intelligent pop-ups and targeted emails captivated and nudged customers through carefully mapped-out journeys. From a warm welcome to follow-up communications triggered by specific actions, this orchestrated a blend of art and analysis. With an uptake in their subscriber base, Katherine’s message was clear: personalization and automation helped Farrow & Ball succeed in connecting with their customers.
From Print to Pixels: Stefano Motta, Class Editori & Andrea Esengrini, Softlab
Next on stage was Stefano Motta from Class Editori, joined by their partner Andrea Esengrini from Softlab. Stefano painted a picture of Class Editori, a distinguished Italian publishing house navigating the currents of financial information, lifestyle, and luxury goods through newspapers and magazines. Softlab, trusted as consulting architects of digital transformation, stood alongside to emphasize the impact of data analytics in marketing. Together, they shared a riveting story of how they wielded Mapp Marketing Cloud’s data analytics to identify and truly understand their readers, engage with pinpoint precision, and sculpt future strategies amplified by AI.
Stefano dove into the substantial challenges facing news and media today, emphasizing the critical need to grow subscriptions. “Monetize and increase revenue,” he said, while also emphasizing learning who your customers are and creating experiences that keep them returning. To do this, they needed first to identify their users. Andrea explained the transformative impact of implementing analytics to understand customer behaviors via Mapp, which began a new era of customer enlightenment for Class Editori.
He explained how Class Editori would establish freemium models by transitioning from simply counting users to identifying, segmenting, and categorizing them. This is paving the way for targeted newsletters and content, while helping to reduce churn. The final stride is now around AI, promising an even more personalized future through better data analysis, recommendation capabilities, and triggered/automated journeys. To close, Stefano and Andrea spoke about Class Editori’s aim to use AI to transform articles into “categorized goods,” much like an eCommerce operation, and propel themselves towards an even more engaging, subscriber-centric future.
Unwrapping Innovation: Connor Gould, Cadburys
Taking the stage with a clear vision, Connor from Mondelez International unwrapped the essence of personalization innovation, linking it to the purposeful use of AI within their brand universe, which boasts beloved confections like Cadbury, Oreo, and Toblerone. His message was potent: AI and technology can be exciting, but it’s also easy to get carried away with both. He explained that his presentation aims to ground us and remind us of the importance of brand purpose in fundamentally making technology and activation work, while also sharing this quote: “AI is a tool but the choice about how it gets deployed is ours.”
For Cadbury, this isn’t just about confectionery—it’s about encapsulating generosity in every bite, a principle magnified during their groundbreaking Diwali campaign. The Diwali initiative wasn’t merely an advertisement; it was a lifeline to local Indian businesses struggling post-pandemic. Cadbury’s AI system didn’t just create ads—it forged connections with thousands of localized versions of a single advertisement, each one championing a neighborhood store. This wasn’t just about selling chocolate; it was Cadbury using their brand to kindle the spirit of community support, showing that technology, when wielded with purpose, can bring about real, positive change.
Connor then played the Cadbury Worldwide Hide ad for the audience. This Easter campaign transformed the traditional egg hunt into an expansive, digital experience that connected loved ones across the globe. Here, AI was the magic behind the scenes, making Easter an event not bound by geography, and Cadbury the conduit for shared moments and memories. In Greece, Lacta’s ‘AI Love You’ campaign tackled the brand’s relevance among younger demographics. Through AI, Lacta translated feelings into words, revitalizing the brand’s association with love and Valentine’s Day, reinforcing its place in the hearts of a new generation. To close, Connor emphasized these campaigns showcase AI’s role not as the protagonist but as the enabler, the storyteller’s pen that writes new chapters in a brand’s ongoing saga with its consumers.
Unlocking Customer Insights: Khan White, PBSL
Khan White of PBSL Group stepped onto the stage to introduce the nationwide network of nine specialized brands under the PBSL banner. Khan explained how their collaboration with Mapp has reshaped their understanding of customers through centralized data in Mapp Marketing Cloud. He animatedly described their journey, from integrating Mapp with Magento to optimizing their lead magnets, all to understand what captures their customers’ attention and to improve the all-important AOV.
He shared PBSL’s strategy for piecing together a unified customer profile, leveraging Mapp Marketing Cloud to layer business data over web analytics for enriched insights. He also shed light on custom-built dashboards to see trends and forecasts with AI to optimize their personalization and targeted communications strategy. Khan’s account was a masterclass in strategic data utilization. Paired with AI as their secret for detailed product insights and precise customer journey positioning, this ensured they could better allocate resources efficiently and understand their customers intimately.
As Khan wrapped up his presentation, he spoke of executing personalized campaigns across PBSL’s array of brands via website, email, and SMS. Using Mapp Marketing Cloud, they could steer segments, activate real-time automation flows, trigger pop-ups, and personalize recommendations. Finally, he gave the audience a glimpse into the future: PBSL will continue its partnership with Mapp to enhance customer loyalty, drive AOV, and increase purchase frequency. All of this will be accomplished while maintaining the human touch that PBSL’s diverse customer base has come to trust, solidifying its reputation as growing experts in the industry
AI and the Paradox of Personalization: Katie King
Our final guest speaker was Katie King, AI expert, and author of Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing. When defining what AI is, she framed AI not as a wave of futuristic robots, but as a 70-year-old technology now blossoming into an indispensable tool for business insights. “It’s big data transformed into a fine-tuned instrument for deepening our understanding of customers and operational efficiency,” Katie explained, advocating for a new term: augmented intelligence. Katie urged us to adopt a mindset where AI serves as a beacon, guiding businesses away from guesswork and towards data-enriched strategies.
Throughout her presentation, Katie emphasized AI’s transformative role in marketing—how it refines personalization, turning generic outreach into tailored dialogues. She illustrated this with compelling cases, like Delta Airlines’ personalized flight information and Heinz’s creative use of AI in product promotion. Katie balanced the excitement around AI with a word of caution on ethics, advocating for a human-centered approach that leverages AI as a powerful assistant rather than a replacement. Her practical scorecard for success provided the audience with a clear strategy to gamify AI integration within their teams. This approach ensures that as the world evolves, their organizations will adapt accordingly, all while maintaining the human touch that is central to their brand purpose.
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