AI Reinvents Marketing Governance at FM Global

Bruno Soeiro:

Hi, my name is Bruno Soeiro. I'm from Infosys Aster. Hi,

Kaydee Marcinek:

Hi, I'm Kaydee Marcinek. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of FM.

Bruno Soeiro:

Today we'll be discussing how AI is being integrated into marketing. Thank you so much for giving us your time. I know this week at Marketing Masters, it's quite a busy week. We've had an amazing set of two days, especially with the six working groups. Could you tell us what the working group that you represent and what insights did you find interesting of this week?

Kaydee Marcinek:

Sure. So, I am in the data technology and measurement working group, which as you can imagine, there's a lot of conversation around AI. And so, I'd say the conversation was, we had a lot of conversation about tactical things. So, everything from training LLMs to GEO to agents to governance to training up talent and upskilling around AI. But I think the overarching kind of theme around that was around governance and trust. Because at the end of the day, if you don't have that, none of the other things matter. And we are at that point where everything is moving so quickly and all of these things are growing so fast that if you don't have governance and trust around it, that none of the other things really matter. So, it's important to get the foundation right as everything else moves up and scales.

Bruno Soeiro:

Could you tell us, how are you evolving your governance structures internally, especially with the role of AI now playing through LLMs, SLMs and all this wonderful great stuff that promises lots of value. How are you bringing it back and making sure you're doing it responsibly and safely?

Kaydee Marcinek:

One of the things I do first is I talk to some of my peers, because I think that the interesting thing about AI is it is a bit of the wild west. And so every company, be it B2C, B2B, as well as agencies out there, everyone has gone off and decided what is most important to them right now. And so, some are further ahead in one area or another. And so through talking to peers and learning, you can gather all those learnings and figure out what is the best way to organize around AI. So I think first it's, you're not necessarily going to be the one to figure it out best on your own. So talking to others I think is very important, so that's the first thing I do. And I think the ANA is a really great organization to help bring all of those ideas together.

And then, really through my own team, understanding what is most important to us. I think first and foremost, it's protecting our brand. So, making sure that we have some governance around how our brand shows up in AI, so we can get excited about building agents or starting to push out communications or social media through the usage of AI, but we need to also make sure that the way we do so represents our brand in the right way. So, I think just figuring out some of those fundamentals first, and then also looking internally. So, making sure we're talking to some of the experts within our company. So that's within our data and analytics and AI organization, which we're lucky enough to have some really amazing experts within FM who do that, as well as within our legal department, CIO department. And so, speaking with them about some of the best practices there, so it's not just a marketing thing but we're talking with others within our company.

Bruno Soeiro:

No, that's really great. I wanted to expand on a point you brought up on how you're unlocking your talents to build some great AI, in generative or agentic. How are you adopting this to your talent strategy and marketing so that you're driving proficiency in the usage of this new technology?

Kaydee Marcinek:

So, I would love to have one person dedicated to AI, but I don't have that headcount unfortunately. So, I think there's so many people excited about it, so I've just asked the folks on my team who are interested in it to raise their hand and it's become a side hustle for some of them. And because we have this AI group within FM, they have a great set of tools that they're allowing kind of a smaller cohort of folks within our company to leverage. And so, things like Copilot 365 and other tools that aren't available to every employee at the company but are to some, they're allowing some employees to experiment with, and there's a smaller kind of working group. So, I do have some folks on my team who are involved in that. And so, they're able to start experimenting and putting together some use cases of what we can do within marketing. So, it has become a bit of a side project for some of them to leverage.

The other thing that we've been doing is our creative agency has hosted a kind of deep dive immersive session on AI for us. So, agencies luckily do have folks who are just dedicated to AI, so we've been able to leverage that and have some sessions with them. So we can explore, okay, where should really we invest our time? Should it be with synthetic audiences? Should it be with GEO? Where should be the next place that we spend our next dollar or next bit of our time? And so, that's been really helpful and just seeing where the opportunities lie.

Bruno Soeiro:

Absolutely. And I think over the last two days, we've also heard a lot about people adopting AI and marketing for either the efficiency play. Look, how do I unlock value from resource and cost and extracting that value and then embedding it into the effectiveness. Where would you say you are on that journey? Are you still doing efficiency plays, or is your AI strategy looking at, how do I drive bottom line growth?

Kaydee Marcinek:

We're definitely still looking at efficiency plays. I'd say that we're kind of parallel path-ing right now. So we're looking at, where can we find those quick wins? So the low effort, high gains for efficiency, so where do those lie? And then the parallel path is building that foundational infrastructure of, where do we want to leverage AI day to day?

So, an example of a quick win for us is building agents around sales enablement. So right now, I have a sales enablement team who are pulling manually data from many different places and building out packets for our sales team. Why can't an agent do that? Right? So, and it allows that team to be able to take what's manual work and scale it and be able to do a lot more work in a lot less time, and then focus their efforts on more strategic work. So, that's just an example, but I think that that's given them a lot of efficiency gains because there's a little less work to do for them. There's plenty of other things that they can be focusing on that can be a bit more strategic, and agents can really help them do that.

Bruno Soeiro:

That's a really great example, because we've been hearing a lot of the last two days that there's a slight misconception that AI will change jobs. In your example, it's how AI is changing tasks and driving accelerators. So that's a really, really great example.

When we think about measurement, there's been a number of measurement discussions this week of marketing efficiency to marketing effectiveness. How are you measuring? What KPIs do you really focus on in terms of efficiency? I'll start off with that, and then we can move on to the effectiveness.

Kaydee Marcinek:

Sure. I think when it comes to efficiency, I'll look for instance, and it depends on what you're going after. I'm really interested in content and our content performance. So for instance, I look at engagement and I want to make sure that the engagement is with our target audiences and they're spending the right amount of time. So, efficiency for me is going to be about reaching the right audiences and having them spend the right amount of time with us. It would be inefficient if we're just spending a lot of money in places where we're not reaching them and it's wasteful. So, I think that I'm looking to make sure that there is that deeper engagement happening.

I think AI is only going to accelerate that, because you're going to have much more real time optimization. I've in previous lives have done much more manual optimization and you might have a two day lag time potentially for when you're getting the data and being able to crunch it all. And then, oh, I just wasted two days of inefficient spend. Right? And so I think that having that much more real time optimization with AI.

In addition to that, you have the opportunity potentially with agents to be able to have more real time creative turnover. Right? So, you can build out the ability to have new creative, if you've built the right parameters that's deployed. And so, not only can you have much more efficient media spend, but a much more efficient optimization of the creative that you're pushing out there.

Bruno Soeiro:

I mean, that's pretty impressive. It sounds like you've explored and deployed generative AI, you've got agentic already at play. In terms of measuring the effectiveness, I think the effectiveness conversations you heard this week is, how do we start to take marketing KPIs and embedding them across the workflow so we can drive collaboration across the CFO organization, the CEO, and start to look at how you're feeding top, middle, bottom part of the funnel and how the different roles start to play across. Have you started that journey, in terms of cascading your KPIs across the organization to drive collaboration?

Kaydee Marcinek:

Absolutely. When I talk with our CEO and CFO and COO, they always want to know how marketing is helping with getting that next client and driving profitable growth for our company. And I think it's got to be a blend because our company at least, we're B2B, we have a very long sales cycles, very high touch. So, unfortunately, it's not an e-commerce business where we can track it all online and have that much more clear attribution. But I have an ABM team, and so I think that at least you have something a bit more tangible there where you can say that marketing played a role with the revenue that was generated, and so we can attribute, we have some attribution there. Both in terms of something we can quantitatively measure, but also there's always the kind of anecdotal feedback we get, which sometimes that holds a lot more weight, depending on the client. So, there's that piece of things.

But then I think there's also, you got to focus on the top of funnel too, and so I will also look at just our brand awareness with key target audiences that we're going after. And so, and then measuring that over time versus our competitors and seeing if that is increasing at a higher delta over time than the rate at which they're increasing, so, and that's something I've done a lot in the past. And so I think it's got to be a blend, it's not never going to be necessarily just like one core metric, at least in the case of us.

And then I think also there's just a realistic conversation to have there that there's no real one silver bullet with marketing when it comes to those high touch B2B type companies. And it is a blend, it's not just marketing, it's marketing, it's sales, it's sponsorships, it's this whole mix of different teams who are coming together to make that happen. And so, I think there's that overall education that has to happen there to show how everything works together to get that next client.

Bruno Soeiro:

I mean, it sounds like you've got fabulous collaboration going on. In terms of the... We discussed earlier before this interview on, where are you finding your ability to be agile speed to market in terms of adoption of AI across the marketing stack? Where's your source of collaboration in the business? Is it through IT? Is it through your AI team? Where are you finding the collaboration hotspots?

Kaydee Marcinek:

Right, yeah. We're very lucky at FM. We are a company that is almost 200 years old. We are an engineering company that also happens to sell insurance. And so, the way we go about things is that our engineers visit all the facilities of our clients and they collect data points and tell them how to be more resilient as a result. And we have, as a result of that, over or almost 200 years of data.

Bruno Soeiro:

Amazing.

Kaydee Marcinek:

So with almost 200 years of data, we've done a lot of predictive modeling, but now with the advent of AI, we're able to be even more precise and accurate with those assessments and understanding the risk quality of all of the different locations of our clients. So, we can understand with incredible precision, the likelihood of a tornado or hurricane, a flood hitting into those facilities and what the outcome of that can be. As a result, we have a phenomenal team of PhDs and others who are on our AI team internally to really help our clients with all of that kind of analysis. And as a marketing team, we're able to tap into all the intellect of that team-

Bruno Soeiro:

Absolutely, [inaudible 00:14:29].

Kaydee Marcinek:

... to help us out. So they're the ones who are helping us build agents, and really with any kind of proof of concept that we need, we're able to tap into them. So, yeah, we're very lucky to have them.

Bruno Soeiro:

You are. It's a very unique situation, because you already have business signals to drive your activation. And I just wanted to end off with the last question. There's still this myth of the CMO role is changing.

We like to say it's evolving, in the sense of influence at the C-suite, as you quite rightly described. How would you summarize the core function of a CMO remains, but how are you evolving your strategy in the organization of insurance?

Kaydee Marcinek:

Sure. I started out in marketing at the advent of social media and digital marketing. And before that, you think about the Mad Man Era, and just creative and, how did you measure that? Right? How do you measure success? And you measure by, what's the conversation around it? What do people write in the papers about the ad you have the next day, right? But then with digital, with social and the measurement that came after that, all of a sudden you could really track and understand the impact of marketing. And so, there was that next phase of marketing, right? So all of a sudden, you can really start to show the impact that you're having and then bring that back to the CEO, the CFO, to show what marketing is actually doing.

And now we're at this phase with AI that I think, and obviously you look across industries and functions of where is AI going to have the most impact, and marketing and communications I think are always rated one of the top two or three functions where you see AI having the most impact. And I think that is a really positive thing for marketers out there, because I think that that means if anything, we're going to have just even more strategic marketers. I see it as, in terms of jobs changing, that that means that my team no longer has to be administrative. They're strategic now. AI is my administrative workforce, right? The rest of my team is the strategic workforce. And as a result, I'm able to have a lot more impact for the executive suite at my company. And hopefully, I'll be able to show them the impact of that because of AI.

So, I think it's going to supercharge marketing workforces everywhere and I think be a really positive impact for CMOs, and then really help us to be able to drive profitable growth. And I think obviously we're seeing just exponential growth, not just of adoption of AI, but of the impact of AI. So, my hope really is that we'll be able to use AI to find that signal from the noise and be able to predict, when is that next prospect's going to be in the market for commercial property insurance or for whatever the product is, so that we can use that to really help understand when we need to activate our ABM strategy or whatever it may be, so that marketing can have even more impact on the bottom line.

Bruno Soeiro:

Kaydee, thank you so much for spending time with us and sharing these wonderful insights. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Kaydee Marcinek:

Thank you, Bruno.