AI Elevates Marketing Speed, Experimentation, and Trust at Marriott Vacations Worldwide

Jeff Mosier:

Hi, I'm Jeff Mosier. I'm the marketing content lead for the Infosys Knowledge Institute. I'm here with Will Clayton, the privacy director of Marriott Vacations Worldwide. Will, thanks for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Will Clayton:

Thank you, Jeff. It's my pleasure.

Jeff Mosier:

So tell us a little bit about how AI is changing your marketing organization, how it's making things a little bit different than what it has been.

Will Clayton:

Yeah. I mean, AI is changing every organization. If they're not, then they really have their head stuck in the sand. And ours, of course, is no different. Some of the things that we've seen is this idea of things happening faster than they used to, of things happening differently than they used to, because we have tools like generative AI. Sometimes even just figuring out where's the line, what's AI and what's just old school machine learning and some of the more legacy stuff that we did. But at the end of the day, we want to bring all of those tools in and we want to see those marketing programs happening faster. We want to see them happening more successfully, and we want to see them happening more efficiently. And that's what we're seeing.

Jeff Mosier:

How do you adjust to the speed?

Will Clayton:

That's a good question. And I think it's important to underline that. Hospitality in general is a very people centered business. And in technology, we often have the mantra of fail early, fail often. But if that's how you're failing and it ends up with things like class action lawsuits or six and seven and eight figure penalties from legal things, or even just in the court of public opinion, people saying you're really not doing right by your customers, then we don't want to do that. We want to fail early and fail often and fail gently because at the end of the day, those are people at the other end of that. And we can afford to mess up with how we do things, but we can't afford to mess up the relationship with an owner, with a customer, with a prospect. So that's really more how we need to approach that.

Jeff Mosier:

Are you concerned at all that that caution that you have to proceed with hinders innovation?

Will Clayton:

Yeah, absolutely. Everybody maintains a risk portfolio. And if you say, "Hey, I think I can change the whole world in the next three quarters, but only if I risk it all," that's a legitimate portfolio. But to say, "You know what? We really cherish these relationships, and so everything that we do is about preserving that, is about building that, is about respecting that," then you have to dial that risk back and you really can't afford to say, "Hey, let's take these people that are everything we do and put them in this unproven technology and shake them up and hope money comes out." But at the same time, we're here to serve and we do that using the tools and the technology that become available to us.

Jeff Mosier:

Sure. And you're still in a process, you haven't reached the AI endpoint, whatever that might be. So what are some of the decisions or some of the actions you have to take now to prepare yourself for whatever comes next with AI and how y'all evolve to take advantage of it?

Will Clayton:

Yeah. And when you said the AI endpoint, Skynet, we haven't reached Skynet yet where the AI controls our lives and hopefully we never will. Joking of course, but it does get to the question of do we understand what's going to be coming out of these programs? And I like to think of it as, if you say, "I'd love to have more eyes so that I could see what's happening around." And you say, "Oh, I'd love to have more ears." And AI does a great job of assessing what's out there. What do we see, summarizing things that are happening in the industry, but when you start saying, "I'd like to have more mouth. I'd like to have the ability to speak to more people, more personalized and better." Okay, do I really trust this machine to be my mouth? And I'd like to have more hands that help me to apply the programs and the policies that I'm putting together.

And those, you have to be really careful when you start to say, "Hey, machine, act on my behalf. I trust you with everything that I am as a person, as a team, and as a company." And so I'll just say, no, we're not quite at the Skynet level of here, take this because we've just absolutely got to preserve and cherish those relationships as we go.

Jeff Mosier:

It sounds like you differentiate between the AI you use internally for gathering information, analyzing information, all of that. In AI, you might use external facing or customer interactions, things like that. Those feel like two separate sorts of things that you have to take into consideration.

Will Clayton:

Yes, and that's a really astute question because it does get back to the heart of the matter. It says, if somebody on my team screws up, that's between me and them. And that's cool. And if we say we're going to do things where error is possible and mistakes will be made, we totally get that. When we start saying we're going to do things that could alienate consumers and could potentially steer us on the wrong side of the law or of industry standards, absolutely brick wall and it has to be a brick wall until we get tools that we say we trust them because we've used them in limited amounts or in internal roles that we can let them out, off the leash a little bit because now we trust them. That's absolutely the approach. I love that analogy.

Jeff Mosier:

So tell me, you kind of touched on this a little bit previously, but what is some of the greatest value you've seen from AI so far and where do you think the next wave of value is going to come from? Is it going to be different type of value?

Will Clayton:

The way I see it is AI and depending on how you deploy it, but AI gives a person the tools to act like a team to say, "Hey, explore this for me. Hey, how would I do this because you're the expert in this?" Where I might have had interns or people on a team who bring that together and AI can bring a lot of those skills. And when you have a team of people who now each expand, well, it's a force multiplier. But again, you have to make sure that the person whose brain is governing all of those eyes and ears and hands and mouths, if you go that route, is following the strategy and understands what the brand means and what are the values that it's there to serve.

Jeff Mosier:

How do you go about training people or upskilling people to be that team of one and understanding taking all that input and actually executing it, or at least getting it in the position where it goes to the next person up?

Will Clayton:

Some people miss this. Start with, "How do I not screw this up?" And if that means don't do it, if you're in something so sensitive that not screwing it up means just don't do it, that's the right answer. And I don't think we are, but when you start by saying, there are tool sets out there that are run by AI that we have no control over, let's not take data that's meaningful and relevant and sensitive and potentially regulated by laws or by industry best practice. Let's not take that and put this in a tool set even if promising interesting fun answers come out the other end, because we don't know what's happening inside of that tool. So a lot of it comes to sandboxing the tool set and having people whose role is to understand what they mean and let people learn how to use these tools with, I won't say training wheels on, but I will say in a, what was it, closed course with professional driver, this is how you keep from really screwing it up.

And that's a great way to kill an AI program is start by losing sensitive data, by allowing an agent to act on your behalf in ways that are insensitive to people. I'm a doctor here, first do no harm. And that's a great way to do that. So we try to be very, very careful about the tools that are made available and don't just let everybody try stuff and see what sticks because some of those tools are really broken and some of those are really insecure and a lot of it we just don't know.

Jeff Mosier:

Are you finding much difference in the types of people who are taking to AI most eagerly and the ones who are maybe a little bit standoffish? Is the type of employees you have in marketing going to change because of AI and the tools that they have now?

Will Clayton:

I hope not because what makes a marketer great, what's always made a great marketer is someone who can latch onto the technology and understand. And whether that was 25 years ago, if it was an Excel sheet that they were using to keep track of my click-through rates and my conversion rates, that was someone who knew the technology, but used it creatively. And that's, I think, what makes a successful marketer. And I think that's what will continue to make a successful marketer. And if you see someone who says... And of course, we're at an analytics conference, so I get that there's creative types and there's quants and there's the... I'm going to say the rare few, but there's some really awesome people who bridge those gaps. But I don't think the marketer will change. I think the tools and the technology that they're using underneath their experience and intuition and skill as a marketer will change, but their role will always be to serve the customer, to serve the mission, and to use whatever tools they can use responsibly to do that.

Jeff Mosier:

That seems true, especially if you approach AI as a way to serve your business needs rather than... It'll be transformative, but it still has to be something that you use for business purposes. If you're just using AI to use AI, you're not going to get much value. You have to know what your purpose is with AI, right?

Will Clayton:

Yeah, absolutely. And if you don't bring a purpose to the table, AI's not going to make up the difference. And that's... I don't worry about the younger generation. They're awesome and they're smart, but I know that there are people right now who are trying to get through life with AI doing all the decision making for them and they're going to really struggle because again, what makes someone successful as a marketer or anywhere else is to say, "I know how to use the tools. I use them to do the heavy lifting so that I can think strategically and so that I can think on behalf of my stakeholders." And when you lose sight of that, that's when you really get in trouble and you let a machine drive you into metaphorical walls and problems.

Jeff Mosier:

So on measuring actually how AI is working, how effective it is, do you see that changing? Are the measurements and KPIs and all of that changing with AI?

Will Clayton:

One of the things that we do see is how long does it take me, how difficult is it to really understand some of those numbers? And so we've used things like algorithms in the past where I can just take some of the numbers I get and plug them in and instantly get out a meaningful answer that I can then act on as a marketer. And I think we'll see that with AI as well. I think we are seeing that with AI, is this idea that the tools are there to help me act quicker. And again, it goes to, I move from experiment to operationalizing that. And how can I bring AI tools to bear to say, instead of having to sit and work up a whole new model for this, it's going to be the same class of problem that we solve. Let's let AI address that and come up with a model or with an analysis for us.

So what might have taken days or weeks or longer for a really smart analyst, if we can have that smart person translate some of those smarts into how do we apply these AI tools, then again, now we've freed up that person to go start thinking about what's the next challenge and how do we incrementally build on that success?

Jeff Mosier:

How well do you feel like you can understand the benefits or measure the benefits of AI so far? I know you mentioned speed is one thing. We've talked to some people that have said, "We know it is making us more productive, but it's really hard in some cases to quantify that benefit." How well can you quantify it, do you think?

Will Clayton:

Yeah, I think we all, and I'll lump myself in there for sure. I think we all are at the point where we got our ROI and I think we can look at the I and say, "Hey, AI is helping me to reduce my investment, to reduce the cost of this." One of the examples I see is when years ago, if you looked at someone's segmentation plan, they might have two or three and you say, "Well, why just so few?" It's really hard to work these up. And now you see routinely much larger numbers of even segments, personas, or however you address your audience of bidding segments. And all of that goes to the technology. And I think what we'll see to maybe answer your question is, I think we'll see the cost and the speed of doing that, costs go down, speed go up, and we will start to behave, again, like much smarter marketers or like much larger teams because we've got machines doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but we keep an eye on what they're doing.

Jeff Mosier:

What do you see as some of the long-term implications for marketing with the use of AI? Kind of big picture, you mentioned the individual being a team of one, what are some other areas where you think marketing will be transformed because of AI?

Will Clayton:

I think, and a lot of this goes way outside of what I do, but... So I started my journey way, way long ago doing typography, layout, desktop stuff. And I figured out really, really fast that I was really good with the technical aspects of it and really, really bad with the artistic side of it, which of course is the success. That's how you win. So that's not what I do for a living, but I think we'll see people like me who may have a vision that's stuck in their head and can't get that out of their hands. AI is really, really powerful for even things like a pitch or a presentation. And so I think we'll see people become more powerful communicators if they learn how to use the tools, how do I deliver a prompt that encapsulates what's going on in my brain or what my team has come together.

And I think we'll see people like me who are not an artistic genius who will now have tools that will allow me to be more powerful in that regard. So I think it will help to blur the lines and it will help to allow more of us to think outside of our silos and our areas of specialty and really be holistic marketers.

Jeff Mosier:

Are there some areas where you think that AI has not lived up to the hype or disappointed for you so far? Any particular areas?

Will Clayton:

The other thing I really enjoy doing with the ANA is I co-chair the ethics policy committee. We actually review complaints that people submit, and I think we're going to continue to see issues both in the press, both in individuals impacted. AI does not always do a great job of representing the populations that it talks to. And so we see situations where when you say to AI, "Show me a person," is that person going to be representative of who you want to talk to? And not only that, but then if you say, "Okay, well make this person more representative of who I want to talk to," where's the line between that and pandering and saying, "Oh, you're using this tool instead of going and hiring models or talent with a variety of backgrounds, you just use AI to crank out generic representations of people."

I think we have to be careful to still come across as authentic, to still understand that our values in terms of having diverse representation, AI is not going to consider that unless we teach it how. So part of that's just being more effective as marketers and part of that is understanding the tools and how they work and how can we use them most effectively.

Jeff Mosier:

Fantastic. Thanks for the insights. Thanks for the conversation, Will. This has been great.

Will Clayton:

Thank you. It's my pleasure.