A New Era Of Marketing: AI & Change Management For Growth

Tessa Burg: Hello and welcome to another episode of “Leader Generation,” brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host Tessa Burg. Today I am joined by really an old friend but someone who I met initially in the professional world, Patty Parobek. She is Mod Op’s VP of AI transformation. Patty, thanks so much for joining us today on the show.

Patty Parobek: Yes, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Tessa Burg: And just before the call, we realized this is your first time on the podcast, which is crazy because we’ve worked together in the past. You are, for me, a social media influencer and an icon now in AI and you’ve always been an amazing strategic thinker. So I cannot believe it’s taken this long to have you as a guest.

Patty Parobek: Well, I’m glad to be here now.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, so let’s jump into it. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, what has brought you here to Mod Op?

Patty Parobek: Yes. So I have been in marketing strategy probably for over 17 years now. You know that ’cause you hired me 17 years ago at American Greetings. So that was my first area where I started really loving strategy development and also got my first at bats with change management because as you know in a large organization the things that you wanna move forward to goal growth of any kind, especially in marketing goal growth, you have to get organizational buy-in for many things and helping the organization learn and adapt to SEO best practices was kind of my first trial with that, which I loved. So since then, right, I’ve been at different marketing organizations and agencies always in strategy development and always finding myself back in change leadership, which I have a real passion for now.

Tessa Burg: It’s funny because I could have told you, and I probably did tell you at some point that I always knew your career would be in change leadership. And I remember the moment I realized that and we were at American Greetings, the department we were in, the digital side of the business, we were specifically in the acquisition marketing and American Greetings management program at that time really focused on the retail side of the business, which was much larger; way more people. I learned a lot about merchandising and end caps and this was part of like general management training. But I also learned that American Greetings doesn’t like spend a lot in marketing like they poo-poo on it as a traditional company. So we’re in this department spending millions of dollars and there was a lot of scrutiny, there was a lot of overlap, lack of definition, not understanding these new technologies, not understanding the role of the website. E-commerce at the time was still fairly new. And I personally was not doing the most amazing job bringing people along. I would say my style was more steamroll, like, I know what’s right. I think I’m just gonna like put my head down and just go as fast and hard as possible to meet my goals. And we took, as a department, personality tests and your personality came back at Woo. And I remember reading the description of Woo and what Woo meant and I was like, this is exactly what we need right now. We need someone who can meet people where they’re at, align on the benefits of what we’re trying to do ’cause we all want the same thing. It’s not like, ’cause they didn’t want to meet their goals too. And you know, that was really the start. And I think that was the second year you were at American Greetings, that we became much more intentional about our internal communication plan. And so whole planning across divisions as opposed as individuals. And yeah, I carried that with me and I always thought like whenever I need Woo, I need Patty.

Patty Parobek: So I am happy to report that after taking many personality tests over the course of my career, Woo has fallen down the scale. ‘Cause very early, young, 20-year-old Patty was very complimentary, almost over complimentary towards everyone. And since then it’s been replaced by the steady secondary set, which has always been adaptability, collaboration, positivity. And those three elements have never changed. And I think in a change leader role now in today’s world and in every organization, those are the things that are going to make any kind of transformation successful. Collaboration across all the voices of the organization from top to bottom, as well as empathy and understanding of what everyone’s going through and what everyone will need to hear as far as what is in it for them.

Tessa Burg: I agree, and I think if you are a manager, a director, even a C-level person listening to this right now, think about those qualities. Are you seeing those aspects in your team today? Because it is our strong belief that change management is going to become the number one necessity for marketers, for their personal career and for true transformational change at the business this year. If you haven’t already started, and if you haven’t already started, you’re definitely not late, but I do think by this year the need will be apparent because as marketers, and we’ve talked about this on past podcasts, we’ve all started testing and playing with AI, we’re all now starting to experience the benefits. I feel like there’s a new study that comes out every day with positive results of how much time you can save, the increase in quality. But you as a marketing leader are probably struggling to measure the true impact to margin, to revenue, to true efficiency. And you’re probably getting asked: Can we downsize, can we increase margin here? What is the purpose of all these apps? Why are we spending so much on licensing and tech? How does it all connect? And that is where AI adoption, specifically change management AI adoption will play a role. And we’re lucky because this is not Patty’s first rodeo. Not only has she been in change management for the majority of her career in the marketing space, but you just were coming off of a position in AI adoption. What have you learned, like what were observations you made as you stood up your first AI-adoption process? And I’m just curious because like, you know, we’re just starting it, but this is sort of, like, your second tour of duty.

Patty Parobek: Yeah, so there are many learnings and I think probably two of the most important to talk about here in this forum really coincide with a lot of mistakes that I see businesses making at this phase of the game, right? So probably have some really important mandate for efficiency plays, bringing in a lot of investment and they are looking at solely what is our efficiency gain right now? And it puts a lot of pressure on the organization to try to create efficiencies and processes that might not even be the correct processes, right? So you don’t wanna layer efficiency on top of things that are essentially broken. And so in the organization that I came from, a really intelligent, fast-moving marketing agency, we didn’t start with efficiency. And this is a thing that a lot of organizations I think are not necessarily getting right at this point. We started with the greater vision, what is the North Star we’re actually hoping to achieve for our business, for this organization? And then how can we use AI to enable that. Efficiency will be a part of it. Because any new investment that you wanna make towards growth of the company towards a new vision, a more ambitious North Star will need some time saving somewhere to be able to reinvest in making progress towards that goal. But one of the biggest learnings that I had in the organization was just seeing the power of the vision really motivate and mobilize an entire organization and then everyone embraced, kind of, just figuring out how we were going to get efficiency to happen together.

Tessa Burg: It reminds me of that phrase: “Sometimes you need to slow down to go fast” or “Slow down to speed up.”

Patty Parobek: Yes.

Tessa Burg: And I think especially with what some of the biggest voices right now in AI have been saying, it is all about predictions of replacing knowledge work, predictions of offsetting remedial tasks. And so it is easy to hear all of that and be like, “We have to get way more efficient” or “We just shouldn’t, “we’re spending this much time.” But again, by the end of this year, marketing leaders, you’re probably seeing you’re not getting that and it might be time to slow down, think about the vision, create that energy, and Patty has been here one month, only a few weeks, today is the first day of August and we’ve already felt it, like the impact of when you energize people around the vision and for us, you know, really giving our clients an unfair advantage through marrying creative and tech and reimagining what the agency of the future will look like. And it’s so validating and so inspiring to me how many people are excited about doing that, excited about being part of what’s new and what’s next, you know, at Mod Op. So it’s been great to have you pull that out and start on our journey. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Like, that’s a big opportunity for us as a business, but also it’s person by person. Like what are some of the opportunities in general for all marketers right now.

Patty Parobek: As far as adopting and transforming with AI?

Tessa Burg: Yes.

Patty Parobek: So I do believe the predictions are true. I do believe our work as marketers is transforming right now. We are feeling it. I think there’s probably not one person in marketing not using some LLM and AI tools today. I think it was two years ago, the Marketing AI Institute put out a survey that said 98% of marketers were already using AI tools and that was two years ago. So the transformation will enable us to do things that we didn’t think were possible before. And we talk about the things that we’ve always wanted to do in our marketing departments, our organizations like, “Oh, if we just had this message “not have to be a mass message “because we know the power of personalization.” Well, now the power of hyper-personalization is right at our fingertips. And, right, any kind of content that we wanna create in a hyper-personalized way to be able to be impactful as possible is there in every format. So I think embracing the future of what we can gain in all of the most amazing and brilliant strategies that we could ever think of and opening the door to all of the things that we wish we could have been doing in a more substantial way. One of the best examples I have of this is when in my last organization through AI transformation, we were talking with each team about what is the vision of your role in two years time? Let’s pretend all of the things that you don’t necessarily like doing in your role are gone. What would you replace that with? And some of the best things were because we were a marketing agency, right? “Man, I would just love to have more time with my clients.” “I would love to have events. “I would love to take them on retreats. I would love to really get an in-depth understanding “of what it means to be a client of ours “and have that relationship again “instead of creating PowerPoints every 40 minutes “or creating notes in four different ways. “If I could just release “that mundane part of my marketing operations “for brilliance and human connection, “I would do that.” And I think that’s where marketing is going to head. How can we bring humanity and new types of creativity in new ways because of the technology that we have?

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s reimagining what those relationships could look like, especially coming off the pandemic. You know, we’ve lost so much personal touch and AI gives us the freedom to think bigger, to dream bigger, but also elevates us and how we use our time and I think for a lot of people it’s moving away from thinking of your value as like every hour I spend is the value I get out of it. And instead thinking of the value of my time is my thinking, is my skills, my humanness.

Patty Parobek: Yes.

Tessa Burg: So we’ve talked about that is a really big opportunity. What are the challenges? Why, when people aren’t maybe seeing that vision for their personal career or their personal role as a marketer, what are some of the challenges that they’re thinking about or blockers that they’re facing?

Patty Parobek: So if you were to talk with 10% of your organization, you’ll hear the most common themes that are holding them back. And if you look at any kind of recent reports and studies out of, well, I’ll mention it again, the Marketing AI Institute or ServiceNow just did an amazing report, you’ll see some of the most common barriers are: Having the time and that means something in two different ways. Having the time to actually, in your day-to-day, think of things to do with AI, right? Or just having 10 minutes to open up a tool and kind of hypothesize what can I do with this, to making the time for new thought is a difficult thing to do. And the other side of time is time to fail and the fear around, “Will I, after 45 minutes of trying with this tool, “have a solid output at the end of it?” And that is a real fear for people, especially when they feel like their time is being monitored or again, when efficiency is the main message. In many organizations, they feel like they are on the hook for creating efficiency and showing that and measure results right now. So coming out of that level of anxiety, the best solve for it is education. If I can give you a very clear roadmap and curriculum around here’s how you can apply this new tool to three of the best use cases for your roles and your tasks right now. And all you have to do is watch this and play with this as you do it, you’ll start to see and realize the benefit immediately and it takes the pressure off of trying to figure out what I’m going to do with this tool ahead of time or in the moment. And it takes the pressure off of failing because you know that it’s a proven use case.

Tessa Burg: I think this is a big challenge for leaders to accept because since they’re feeling the pressure to show efficiency, they may already be asking their teams to do more with less to do it right now

Patty Parobek: Right.

Tessa Burg: because it feels like everyone in the world is ahead of them and the reality is they’re not. And education is so important. But another thing that you’ve observed and learned in just this last month here is we have to get highly specific in the training and it has to be

Patty Parobek: Right.

Tessa Burg: a business division role by role in order to, you know, drive the real metrics, which I think feels like a big cost to the company. It’s like, well, we can’t just do LinkedIn Learning or we can’t just take these, you know, classes at the AI Institute and AI adoption happen. I think people really want like this path of least resistance when it comes to training and upskilling the team.

Patty Parobek: Yes, it’s so true. And I also was in the camp of thinking, “Well, surely, everyone is going to be as empowered “and motivated to take this five-hour training “or 10-hour training as I was “because I’m so passionate about this, “everyone else must be.” And that’s just not the case. If you have one hour that you might give up in a week for organizational learning or training, you want that hour to have value for you and you want the return on that investment immediately or you don’t know if you’re gonna be able to do it. And that’s a real feeling of people in probably every organization. So what the beauty of AI now, and again, hyper personalization is that we’ve never had so many tools, accessible tools at our disposal to actually personalize content for a team, for a role and get that out very quickly. I don’t think that we would’ve been able to do it four or five years ago, organizationally. And now with… I mean Mod Op has an advantage because we have a really amazing technical team and creative team and the resources to be able to kind of pull this off in a more streamlined manner. But we have the ability to create hyper-personalized training platforms very quickly.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, no, I agree. I mean without the agents and the LLMs, hyper-personal training would not be possible. And at the same time though, it’s still an investment. Like we’re able to do it and that is great, but we are investing time and resources in this. So what will be the impact? Like, how are we gonna measure the success of all of this time and effort?

Patty Parobek: So I think there’s two different measurement tracks that you need simultaneously. One is if you are really going to get to hyper-personalized learning that’s valuable for people, you have to take a baseline of what the most repeatable tasks are and how much time we’re actually spending there. If you have project management tools in your organization, you have probably slightly an advantage. But even if you have a person in each team that’s willing to give you, “Here are generally the things that my team does, “here’s how we can split it down to task, “here’s generally how long those things take us.” You have a good baseline. And then collaborating with that team on what tasks you wanna attempt AI tools to create more efficiency and more productivity for. And then measuring the before and after. It sounds like a process, but I promise it is not as complicated as it sounds. And it’s a lot of fun, the collaboration because you will see as you collaborate with different team members, the light bulbs happen and people get really passionate about getting time back and creating more productivity and output and brilliance in the things that they’re doing. But on the other side of that is if you measure efficiency that way, great, you’re going to have some cost savings for your repeatable processes. You will also have additional things you wanna add to those processes that will not make them more time efficient. So keep that in mind. But the other side is investing in growth. So measurement of cost efficiency isn’t going to be what you are banking on to show the rest of the organization that you’re making progress towards your growth and your vision. Your vision and measuring progress toward your vision is going to be the most important metric that you have, especially for mobilizing your organization. So if your vision is something really compelling like, well, the Mod Op vision, right? Taking creativity and technology to create unfair advantages for our clients, what are the things that we can put in place that can show progress towards that goal? And how can we show that we’re marking down those milestones with the efficiency that we’re getting, that’s what’s going to really drive transformation for the organization.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, and it’s been exciting. We’re building these tools for ourselves, but at the same time we’ve just started exposing them to our clients in pilot trials. And I love getting that feedback from the clients. It’s a better experience and it’s not about replacing anything we did, we’re collaborating differently. The intimacy of the back and forth is higher, it’s not as transactional because it is more strategic and the output is higher quality. So it’s more inspiring and that’s made it a lot more fun. I mean it’s made everything more fun; brainstorming sessions, strategy sessions, reviewing creative. So I hope that leaders take this step back really seriously because the benefits and what you said mobilizing your entire organization is invigorating and it’s needed right now at a time when there is so much anxiety. And I know when I sometimes go down the rabbit hole of reading way too many headlines, I do get scared and I do get like, “Oh God, this isn’t going well.” And with any new technology advancement, there’s always gonna be bad actors, there’s always gonna be misuse, there’s always gonna be some company that just, you know, fired a bunch of people and who knows if that was actually valid or you know, we don’t know. But what we can do is believe in our vision, believe in our values and put processes that align underneath that and the payoff and the benefit will be there. So I’m super excited for this next year. I think we have so many big things coming, but Patty, what most excites you about, you know, AI transformation at Mod Op or even in the bigger industry?

Patty Parobek: So, and I’ll say it again, I came back for the vision and maybe I didn’t disclose this upfront in my career journey. I was a part of one of the agencies that was acquired by Mod Op and was called to transformation at another organization and right, we were very successful at the last organization getting widespread adoption, at that time I was looking for a bigger transformation challenge because it’s my passion area now. And especially within AI, it would be too good to pass up. And then talking with you and talking with Eric, our CEO, and just the energy and emotion behind the vision was just too compelling not to come and try to do what I can to support the transformation towards that end. So just another testament for how powerful a vision can be.

Tessa Burg: Yes, I love that. And a couple of times in this episode we’ve talked about the AI Marketing Institute and we’re gonna be going to their annual trade show, and speaking it triggered the thought, like strong vision, really inspiring, really invigorating, any marketing leaders that go, I hear nothing but positive things on how they feel, they’re ready to do when they go back to their organizations. And that is coming up. I should have it-

Patty Parobek: September 10th, 11th and 12th. The workshops are on the 10th. We will certainly be there on the 11th and 12th. So if you see us, see our faces, we would love to chat with you about any of this and all things creativity and technology.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. And around the same time we’ll be releasing some of the tools that we’re using right now to help with AI adoption and transformation. So ask us, maybe we’ll have a pilot publicly available for you to try, but I feel like today is August 1st, it’s like a month away and so much is gonna change in the next 30 days just at the pace that we’re, it’s gonna be awesome. We have a promo code too for that show. It’s ModOp100. It saves you $100 off the registration. So yeah, get your tickets now. If you Google MAICON, M-A-I-C-O-N, it’s in Cleveland, the website will pop up and it is the Marketing AI Institute’s annual show. Well, Patty, this has been an amazing conversation. We are at time. Is there any closing thoughts you wanna leave the audience with before we end?

Patty Parobek: Nothing that I won’t… Well, let me think. Closing remarks. Make sure you define your North Star. Efficiency is something that can be real and tangible and measurable and is a subtitle to the movement.

Tessa Burg: I love it. And if people wanna find you or contact you, ask you questions, what’s the best way to reach you?

Patty Parobek: Reach me on LinkedIn, I’m on it constantly. We will share a link.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, we will. So you can find this episode and all of the “Leader Generation” episodes at modop.com. That’s M-O-D-O-P .com. And if you’re looking for Patty on LinkedIn, her last name is Parobek and that is P-A-R-O-B-E-K. So search Patty Parobek on LinkedIn, shoot her questions. And this won’t be the last time you’re on the podcast. It’s the first, but it won’t be the last. And, like, you were saying, you’re excited for events, we’re hoping to spin up more thought leadership and content and just make a lot of the tools that we’re using free and available to our clients and our client community. So be on the lookout for that. Until next time, thank you, Patty, so much for being a guest.

Patty Parobek: Thanks for having me. This was fun.