0:16Lisa Spira: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be the first guest and talk about motivation. Ai. With you. I’m. The head of Content Intelligence at Prisato, as you said,
0:28Lisa Spira: and Content intelligence that team my team is the language experts at Versato content. Intelligence is the intersection between creativity and data. It’s data backed content, creation and it’s identifying what is good content. So we work really closely with the data science team to train this Ai to hold its hand really,
0:51Lisa Spira: and interpret what it knows. And I got into this because I have always loved language, and I especially always love names. I’m an automatician which is a type of linguist with an expertise in names,
1:07Lisa Spira: and one of the things I always loved about names was the pattern recognition element. And so through that interest I stumbled into my first job at a different marketing technology company whose technology was really based around the origins of names.
1:23Lisa Spira: And that’s how I got enamored with the whole field of marketing language and Ai and technology and product building.
1:33Lisa Spira: And that’s how I landed at Crosado. So that’s my story of of getting here, and my team is made up of people with all sorts of unusual stories about how we’ve gotten into content intelligence. There’s no one particular background that makes someone good at this, except maybe just a true love of language.
2:32Lisa Spira: I think, as marketers? There’s something i’m gonna start that one again.
2:37Lisa Spira: So there is a difference between wants and needs, and then actually taking that next step to act. And that’s where motivation Ai comes into play. We all want things. We all need things, and we all buy a lot of things. But
2:57Lisa Spira: how do you motivate someone to make that purchase and not just make that purchase, but by your specific product right now across this channel at this moment, in time
3:10Lisa Spira: it’s about action. We have to motivate action. I can want a lot of things, but i’m not necessarily going to click that ad or see that email
3:19Lisa Spira: and take the action. And so what motivation Ai is is an Ai that uses language to motivate consumers, to take an action, to click, to purchase, to convert, to make a connection, whatever that action is, and I think that motivation Ai is is really the important piece in doing this, and it’s really grounded in the language.
4:28Lisa Spira: One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in the data working with this tool is how
4:35Lisa Spira: depending on what action you’re trying to motivate
4:39Lisa Spira: different language might work better. So we always work with our clients to choose what they’re measuring. What is important to them Is it clicks? Is it less calls to the call center in servicing, Is it items in the cart? Is it
4:59Lisa Spira: like actual emails back?
5:01Lisa Spira: There are lots of different things that could be. Some are very common, some are very uncommon, but we can motivate all of them, but we won’t. Use the same language to motivate all of them. The language that entices people to open an email may not be the language that motivates someone to click through that email to the landing page. And it may not be the same language that would motivate someone all the way through to putting the item in their heart
6:31Lisa Spira: Oh, one hundred percent. That was one of my favorite things that we worked on, because context is really just so important to language, resonating
6:56Lisa Spira: one of the challenges that marketers face today is a wealth of data more data than they know what to do with, and data can be scary and mountains of data typically leave you with no direction.
7:13Lisa Spira: You have all the pieces there in front of you, but you don’t know what to do with them, or you don’t have the talent or the direction, So I think that data is a huge challenge, and I think motivation Ai really helps solve this because it is a platform that is grounded in data
7:34Lisa Spira: within our platform. We do it, testing through experimental design, which is like a B testing. But essentially it’s A. Through Q. Testing with an exponent. It’s really hard to understand. It’s really complicated, but it’s a lot, and what it does is measure the minute elements within the language, and how they work, and how how they motivate what works best, and
8:02Lisa Spira: um and how. And then we we use all of this data to continually train our Ai so that it learns. And so I think it’s really exciting, because what we’ve done is we’ve harnessed so much data into knowledge that can really drive consumer behavior. So I think it’s motivation. Ai is really great at solving a data challenge
10:03Lisa Spira: Absolutely, I think, as we move into a world where cookies are less reliable and less the future of
10:13Lisa Spira: data and marketing efforts and personalization efforts moving into the world of motivation. Ai. Where we build segments differently, and we look for language segments that’s going to be just so important.
10:51Lisa Spira: Cursado? Is the company that created motivation? Ai Versato has a platform that motivates consumers to take action, and it does this through language. It generates messages by levering.
11:06Lisa Spira: It generates messages by leveraging the world’s most advanced language, knowledge, base of more than one million tag, and scored words and phrases.
11:16Lisa Spira: But to me persado is a playground for language innovation.
11:21Lisa Spira: At first we’re focused on language that motivates action, but that’s a small scope, and it’s a huge opportunity. So we’re continuously training our Ai to write in new ways to look for different types of patterns to become
11:40Lisa Spira: something it’s not yet doing um to me it’s a playground, and from my vantage point pers auto blends the best of human and machine to drive results for our clients, and those results are actions.
12:53innovating language and understanding what motivates your customers.
12:57Lisa Spira: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the personato knowledge base has something like the equivalent of six hundred and forty five years worth of testing inside of it.
13:09Lisa Spira: It’s some large number like that, but it’s Ah, it’s really a mind-boggling stat. But that is how our customers learn so much faster, and one of the other things that they can do is they can test hypotheses with us. We can, of course,
13:27Lisa Spira: you know, let motivation Ai suggest how we’re going to test, based on all of the data. But humans can have a hand in that and say, This is what I think works. This is what I’ve learned from other testing. Or this is what the creative team is really excited about,
13:44Lisa Spira: and then we can test, and we can put math behind it, and then we can know which is always really cool,
14:40Lisa Spira: The companies that benefit the most are the companies who are willing to experiment.
14:46Lisa Spira: You have to have a testing mindset to truly take advantage of everything that motivation Ai has to offer.
14:55Lisa Spira: I think a great fit is a company who wants creative language in marketing? Who wants data behind that, who is tired of chasing the whims of human copywriting
15:08Lisa Spira: and tired of the risk of intuition and the hunches. So a company that is excited about testing and excited about data is really a great fit, and a company that wants to learn and is willing to change.
16:50Lisa Spira: The formatting step is really cool, because the platform can test into all of those things, although we primarily optimize language, and that’s usually where most of the power is, and also not every channel has a visual, although more and more they do. But we can also tap into those visual elements, and those can be big things like you’re talking about like the card art,
17:14Lisa Spira: but they can even be smaller things like whether you use bold or you use capital letters or what the spacing is, how big or small the button is, what color. And you can test into all of those things through the platform, which is really powerful.
18:22Lisa Spira: I think that they’re investing in Ai today, I think now is a turning point where we’re all seeing that Ai doesn’t have to be scary, and that it can have powerful results.
18:37Lisa Spira: But more than that, that, it can augment your humans. It won’t necessarily, or I mean it won’t. I firmly believe
18:45Lisa Spira: that Ai Isn’t going to take away our job. It’s going to change our jobs. It’s going to create new jobs that work with Ai in new ways. It will eliminate some jobs and create a whole host of others. So I think that today
19:02Lisa Spira: ah, leaders across brands are really embracing that Ai can be a powerful source of good in their company, and it can be transformational for their business.
19:15Lisa Spira: You know. I think, that
19:17Lisa Spira: um recently, with the with Dolly to the
19:22Lisa Spira: people all over have been able to see Ai generating content, and that’s quite a bit different from what versatile does. But I think it has been eye-opening to so many people that when you can see it, what it is an Ai working
19:41Lisa Spira: that you know, you can be more willing to embrace language Ai, as a different sorts or a motivation. Ai
20:58Lisa Spira: We do a little bit of everything. We sort of sit in the middle of data, science, product and operations.
21:08Lisa Spira: And so we’re at the nucleus of creation of content at Versato. So what do we do? We write words, we teach an Ai to write words, we train it, We give it a thumbs up, comes down on how it’s doing.
21:24Lisa Spira: We We analyze a lot of data coming out of different Ai systems that are trained to do very specific things. We create insights, We really just because an Ai is learning.
21:39Lisa Spira: Well, the humans want to learn, too. What is it? No. So we create ways of interpreting and understanding the language data that we have visualizing that and tagging content. It’s a lot. We also hold its hands. Sometimes we have
21:57Lisa Spira: maybe a use case or a channel that the Ai has never seen before, so we’ll help it along. Step in if it hasn’t seen enough data to do something yet where it’s partner. And yeah, so
22:15Lisa Spira: content. Intelligence is really just at the nucleus of all things, language, creation at this, at the central point of our product.
23:11Lisa Spira: I have two that I would love to share. I think they’re pretty interesting insights. So the first is around the idea of reinvention. And Susan Lee from my team did this research across six years of email Facebook and push notification campaigns that come through versatile from two thousand and fifteen to two thousand and twenty one. And
23:37Lisa Spira: that was a really weird way to say that i’m going to start it again.
23:40Lisa Spira: So one thing, so one that I would love to share is an insight into reinvention.
23:49Lisa Spira: Susan Lee, from my team, worked on this project where she was looking at six years of email Facebook and push notification campaigns between two thousand and fifteen and two thousand and twenty one. And she was looking at the idea of New Year New Year.
24:07Lisa Spira: That phrase, and that idea of variations on that phrase is really big with marketing every New Year,
24:15Lisa Spira: especially in retail. But not only you see it across industries, and it was the least inspiring concept in retail when tested against other language,
24:29Lisa Spira: it just. We we proved over those years that time and time again it doesn’t work, and what we were able to do is find the alternatives that tapped into different motivations that are not reinvention, that work better
24:45Lisa Spira: at New Year. So, for example, individuality New Year celebrating the same, you or this year, permission to just do you um or freedom. Do what you love in twenty twenty three. No resolutions, no problem
25:01Lisa Spira: hype this year will be awesome. We can sense it.
25:06Lisa Spira: So there’s so many ways that you can speak to the New Year if you want to bring that into your marketing, and the one that so many people with intuition just go to immediately, and we all think about is New Year new. You but don’t do that.
25:41Lisa Spira: My second one is about research into the language of deadlines, and this research was done by Sheena vera on my team, and she did work sort of a case study around the language of tax season,
25:55Lisa Spira: and what we found is that it’s not it’s
26:01Lisa Spira: deadline-driven language, such as urgency, or like alert language that works the best to motivate actions when deadlines are looming
26:12Lisa Spira: as tax season approaches. For example, more gentle language that nudges the customer, think encouragement is more effective. Um. The language should ensure that the process will be painless, and encourage customers to read the message to get further information. So we don’t want to go all asap now, like, you know. Sort of
26:37Lisa Spira: um, really intense or deadline driven, and we want to go a lot more softer. So we have language like you’re still on track for filing your taxes on time. There’s still time to file for your refund. It’s easy to file. We recommend starting here,
26:54Lisa Spira: Um. And that this gentler language proved to be a lot more effective, and as the deadline approached, and, in fact, counterintuitively, as the deadline gets closer, More dental language works better.
27:39Lisa Spira: and I think your reaction right. There is one of the things that I love about motivation. Ai. Because when you stop and you think about it, you think? Oh, yeah, I totally see why that makes sense, even though it is against everyone’s initial intuition. The intuition being deadline
27:59Lisa Spira: dates. So yeah, that’s and we see that time and time again with motivation. Ai:
28:41Lisa Spira: The first thing to do is to embrace that something that seems diametrically opposed can really belong together. In the case of Chris auto. That’s math and words.
28:54Lisa Spira: Um, here. We are trying to optimize words and measuring them with math. And I think there are a lot of people who grow up saying, i’m a math person, or i’m a words person or
29:08Lisa Spira: i’m none of those, and put themselves in some other bucket, and just decide that it is opposed. And so my
29:17Lisa Spira: first piece of advice is to embrace the other one, whatever the other one is in your organization, and build connections, and figure out how those different skill sets or datasets can come together and enhance value. I think that’s one of the things that Prisado does really well, and I mean to to punctuate that
29:41Lisa Spira: I report to the Cto. Who is a data scientist, and my background is linguistics, but it works well for us to keep those ties closely together.
31:04Lisa Spira: we will continue to explore new types of motivations within language, and translating what we find into new verticals, new channels, new use cases beyond marketing
31:19Lisa Spira: um, an expansion of the machine and human understanding which will lead us to better insights if we can continue to build that relationship between humans and machines and continuing to make motivation Ai really dynamic
31:37Lisa Spira: in real time, taking its decision engine to the moment where the customer is. I think there is a really exciting future in a lot of
31:47Lisa Spira: different directions within motivating language. So i’m really excited about many of the next phases of research and testing and building that we have happening at Versato.
32:30Lisa Spira: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure,
