Now that AI can generate endless content, what is the true strategic value of a human-led content strategy?
Agility requires more than just adopting the latest tools; it demands a foundational strategy that allows you to integrate new capabilities without disrupting the core customer experience. This means being able to distinguish between a promising innovation and a distraction.
Today, we’re going to talk about moving beyond the hype cycle to build a marketing technology ecosystem that actually delivers. We’ll explore how to treat content orchestration not as a task but as a core strategic discipline, how to make AI a practical asset rather than a science project, and why so many CMOs are re-evaluating what they truly need from their platforms and partners.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jennifer Griffin Smith, CMO at Acquia back to the show.
About Jennifer Griffin Smith
A well-respected international marketing executive, Jennifer Griffin Smith has more than 20 years of experience managing go-to-market strategies and corporate communications for public and private technology companies. She focuses on the needs of customers and partners in the ever-changing digital world, ensuring that Acquia solutions deliver exceptional value today and in the future, and that all programs and communications are addressing the unique needs of customers.
Jennifer leads the global marketing organization, including product marketing, GTM programs for customers and new business, brand, and marketing communications. With her extensive experience as a B2B marketing practitioner, Jennifer is passionate about new ways to grow awareness, improve marketing ROI, and create high-performing, award-winning teams. Before joining Acquia, Jennifer held CMO positions at Brightcove, Alfresco Software (acquired by Hyland), Software AG, Workhuman (formerly Globoforce), Avid Technology, and Progress Software. She has also held senior European marketing roles at Microsoft, PeopleSoft, and Information Builders.
Jennifer Griffin Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifergriffinsmith/
Resources
Acquia: https://www.acquia.com
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. Now that AI can generate endless content, what’s the true strategic value of a human-led content strategy? Agility requires more than just adopting the latest tools. It demands a foundational strategy that allows you to integrate new capabilities without disrupting the core customer experience. This means being able to distinguish between a promising innovation and a distraction. Today we’re going to talk about moving beyond the hype cycle to build a marketing technology ecosystem that actually delivers. We’re going to explore how to treat content orchestration not as a task, but as a core strategic discipline. How to make AI a practical asset rather than a science project, and why so many CMOs are re-evaluating what they truly need from their platforms and their partners.
[00:01:28] Greg Kihlstrtöm: To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Jennifer Griffin Smith, CMO at Acquia, back to the show. Jennifer, welcome back.
[00:01:36] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Thank you, Greg. It’s nice to be back. I think last time I was here, neither of us really knew what we’d be talking about in 18 months’ time, right?
[00:01:44] Greg Kihlstrtöm: I know, right? It’s a, yeah, crazy world we live in, right?
[00:01:49] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Crazy world. I was, I was actually thinking about that and I went back and looked at it and I thought, wow, if only we’d known, we’d have been a little bit ahead. But I’m excited to be back. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:57] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, absolutely. And and for those that didn’t catch our last conversation, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Acquia?
[00:02:04] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Sure, sure. I’m the Chief Market Officer here at Acquia. I’ve been at Acquia for about three years. We are a um, a technology platform that allows marketers, IT teams, digital marketers to create the most amazing digital experiences using content so that they can connect with their audiences uh more powerfully. That’s everything from content management solutions, digital asset management solutions, optimization tools for your website. All the things that I have worked with for years and my team get to uh use every day. So it’s uh, it’s very exciting. I love it. And I think last time we spoke, we were talking about accessibility and um, and the need for building accessible sites and content. And we talked about making it accessible for everyone around the world in regardless of needs and it got me thinking that we didn’t talk about agents. And now we have to make our content accessible for agents. They’re like another audience as part of that. So it kind of all connects, although we might not have known about it 18 months ago. So, excited to be here. My title is Chief Market Officer, which I am thoroughly proud of because I actually think this new age of AI takes away the “ing” of marketing and actually has us focus on markets because our AI agents can do the “ing”. And um, and I think that’s a really exciting time to be in marketing.
[00:03:21] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Oh, I love that. That’s great. Yeah, nice. So yeah, let’s, let’s dive in here and definitely, you’re, you’re totally right, the, the accessibility that takes on a whole new, a whole new uh approach with, with agents and I, I know we’ll get into some of that as well. I want to start with the looking at content orchestration really as that strategic discipline. So starting from that, that strategic mindset here, how do you see the most successful brands shifting that mindset from this idea of simple content creation to a more holistic content orchestration across that increasingly complex customer journey. You know, what does that operational shift look like?
[00:04:04] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Hmm. It’s a great question. The word orchestration. It sounds kind of jargon-y, doesn’t it? Um but what does it, what does it really mean in practice? So when I think about it, it’s it’s like content production is humans doing the work with AI helping them around the edges. So we, I we always talk about like there’s an AI writing assistant here and there’s an image tool creation here and it helps, but it’s not incremental like your org still stays the same, your marketing organization stays the same, and the bottlenecks stay the same. And it, and in fact, most of what we hear about in marketing organizations is the burnout, right? And actually Forrester talked about that in their pulse survey last year that 25% of marketing leaders were citing burnout as a major team concern and that’s because I think we’re not using these tools as strategically as we can. So for me, content orchestration shifts us to a totally different realm, right? It means that humans set the direction, they define standards, they make judgment calls, but AI can handle the mechanical volume. So teams are creating, but they’re thinking more strategically, they’re having more points of view, while everything else, the formatting, the versioning, the multi-channel assembly, all that “ing” that we talk about, that is taken over by AI. And that’s what I see. You know, I’m lucky because we have a very large global customer base and one of the things I love about my job is that I get to talk to CMOs every day. CMOs that are doing this and we’re sharing experiences and some of the most successful brands that we talk to and that we look at are really restructuring roles around that idea where mid-level managers are becoming workflow architects. Their job isn’t to review. It’s to really build these automated pipelines so they can assure quality and consistency. And senior people, I refer to it in my team as kind of the delta, right? How do we focus on the delta? And that’s those bold insights, that creativity, that point of view that AI generally doesn’t do as well as we do. Um and so that’s, I think that’s really exciting and important. And so it so that’s how I see this difference now moving from kind of just efficiency into orchestration.
[01:06:31] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah. And and so in in addition to some of the data and and the systems that orchestration certainly includes, it also implies connecting maybe disparate teams. So content with data with channel owners with IT. What are some of the common organizational hurdles that you know, now, now that the the marketers are able to focus on on some of these things and and not just kind of focused on on just getting the “ing” done to your to your point, what are some of the organizational hurdles that maybe prevent true content orchestration from being as successful as it could? And and how can a CMO help break down those silos?
[01:07:14] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah. Marketing has always been a cross-functional um role. I, I’ve always said to marketing teams, if you want to be in marketing because you want to own one thing and just get praised for one thing, you’re in the wrong team, right? Because what we do stretches everything. It goes across product and customer success and customer service and and and sales and so it’s always been at the center of all of those things. What has stopped us being successful in the entire time I’ve been in marketing is not the people. It’s not that you have people that don’t know how to work across those. It’s the systems that have created and we have spent years recruiting people, whether they be in marketing and marketing operations, in revenue operations, in customer success. We’ve recruited people to fix the underlying problem of the systems and I’m not even going to name them, but we all use a lot of systems that you have to buy systems on top of the systems because the systems actually don’t work properly and it kind of drives me crazy. So the first thing that I think we have to think about is how we connect all or use AI that actually take over those systems and do we even need them anymore? And so I think about a couple of things. I think about teams needing to or like audit time, that’s where I say, don’t. You’ve got to think about output, but if you ask a team, where do you spend your time? If I think about what I did last week, what my team did last week, what is stopping us being more efficient? It’s generally not the people, it generally comes down to the amount of time they’re spending on these disconnected systems, tagging, integrating, informing other team members. And so when you understand that, you can think about how to connect them. And then you start thinking more about the outcome and I think our systems need to be much more outcome-based. So not it is just a repository for holding things but why am I thinking about, oh, I’m going to build a webpage and and I’m building a webpage because I’m running an event. Why wouldn’t you have a teammate, a digital teammate that you would say build me the marketing tactics I need to get 300 people at an event, which would include, oh, now I know you need a landing page and you need some social media and you need some at, you know, that’s that’s output-based systems and there’s there’s very few of them right now. And then the biggest, the third challenge, I would say, which which is probably the biggest one that I’m seeing more and more. You know, every day there’s all these things in the news about AI and security and governance and I think governance is the one thing that is not given enough attention right now, is AI agents are drafting and publishing and optimizing, who’s responsible for ensuring the brand is still safe, coherent and is there are many examples of bots that have done things and said things for brands. Um compliance is really, really important and I would encourage everybody when thinking about AI, we all get a little bit wrapped up in all of the greatness, but governance of these not just connecting these systems, but governing them and governing what the output is even when your team are able to do more is really important.
[01:39:59] Greg Kihlstrtöm: And I want to go back to your, to your earlier point. I want to, I want to get to the governance piece as well, but uh to your earlier point about the outcomes and and outputs driven. And I, I think that’s a really powerful concept here because, you know, I think since it, it feels like forever but it’s, you know, since late 2023 or what, you know, since ChatGPT really, you know, came onto the scene, we’ve all been talking about content generation and, you know, the, the power there and but there’s certainly a lot of other use cases beyond and in addition to content generation that that AI can um can really help with. And and you mentioned several of them already. But I I do think to me one of the powerful things is for marketers to be what what you just said, which is let’s think about the outcomes that we want to achieve as opposed to kind of being freed from some of the the tactics and, you know, that that a marketer, again, the the “ing” and the marketing um thing that you mentioned earlier, you know, what what are you seeing as far as, you know, some of the some of the most valuable and and practical applications of of AI, you know, beyond, again, beyond some of those things that that we’ve certainly been talking about for a while?
[01:40:02] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Hmm. Um so I’ll go back to governance, the first one. Governance at scale. So AI can automatically audit content, right? It can audit it for accessibility. Our last conversation, brand compliance, accuracy across pages. If you use it properly and train it, then I think that is really powerful work. The other piece for me is and it’s a little underrated is content restructuring for AI discoverability. Most of the time, we have so much content and the bigger the marketing team and organization, the more content is created across all of the silos. And so how could you, how can you use AI to structure content correctly for LLM readability? Um it’s not necessarily, you don’t necessarily think, oh that’s glamorous, but it can really expedite, you know, output, right? And um, and I think we forget about that and it’s been so hard to do in the past that it’s, it’s kind of been left. Um but we have a lot of content and the structuring of that content to be found by LLMs is really important. Um and then just as we talked about, you know, content operations layer, this formatting, versioning, multi-channel assembly, the stuff that buries our strategists, AI can handle that really well. And then the other piece which I I if we if we get past some of that is also operational is thought leadership. You know, I am learning to use AI even now as a partner, not a as a thought leader partner where I am getting pretty tough with it in responding to it and asking it for ideas and asking it what is not right with what I may have given it, with what I’ve missed, with what I’ve, that is super powerful, you know, and and I encourage teams to do that when we’re, you know, you might think, oh, I can use it to run a set of data to look at campaign performance and you can, you can consolidate data like nothing I’ve ever seen. I mean, forget all the other analytic systems we’re using. It is so powerful but then say, what have I missed? And then say, what is wrong? And then say if you were a top performing 1% consultant in this space, what would you have spotted? Right? That’s all that’s where it I think it’s very, very powerful.
[01:51:35] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah, well cuz cuz to your point, I think we’re getting we’re getting beyond um, you know, simply measuring for clicks and conversions and and things like that. I mean, again, when teams are stretched thin, you kind of look at the dashboard that’s in front of you and you report on it, right? But, you know, we have the we have the ability now to dig a a bit deeper to do what you just said to ask those critical questions. I I’ve had a lot of success with that myself in in just, okay, here’s my best thoughts. Now, now be a tough critic on me and and tell me what, tell me what I did wrong. You know, and and it’s it’s it’s interesting once I think once you get past the agreeableness of the LLMs and to actually get them to be um, you know, be a tough critic, right? Um, what is this change about measurement and and, you know, and and how marketers are are uh even grading their own work, but even looking at how content and and other things are performing. Like how, how can this change things?
[01:52:16] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah, a great question. For anybody like me that’s been in marketing for a long time. It’s like dare we mention the word funnel, right? Because everybody, you know, I just it we, we talk about this so much. If we think about how we engage, you know, if I want to go and search for I would like a blue office chair. I would have put into Google and I would have put blue office chair, right? And I would have as a marketer been dying for those blue links and stuffing words in for those blue links. And as a consumer, I would have got back a bunch of links, right? And I would have, and now what I will probably put in is actually I am looking for a blue office chair that is rated at least four stars, that is under $400. I want it in this location. I want assembly. I don’t want to have to assemble it myself. And I’m not getting, I’m not getting clicks back, right? I might get some images that I decide to click through but I’ve got all the information. And so just the way, and that’s just one example. You could put that across students searching for courses. You can put that across e-commerce. You can put that across B2B buying. And so the way the journey is very different. And therefore the measurement has to be very different. And so I think we as marketing have to get the rest of the organization feeling okay with that measurement because if one more person asks me for how many more leads we can generate, you know, you think about it. Do you fill in a form? No, like that’s not how it’s working. So I think we have to measure different things. So things like AI citation rates, right? Are we looking at whether content is being serviced and trusted by LLMs? I think I mentioned, we spent 20 years optimizing for search ranks and the next five years are going to be about winning the answer battle. That’s what I think. I think that that will be very different. And we, we did some research um end of last year with um teen voice because like you, you have to think that when you’re measuring these outputs, demographic and generations are a big impact. We, marketing has always been focused on segmentation, audience segmentation, but now so more than ever. When we looked at, we commissioned a survey with over 500 teens between 13 and 19 and actually some of the responses we got on what they trust of companies and their websites and their content was really eye-opening because you’d think that age group would happily give over their data for anything valuable they get back. Not the case at all. 44% said that keeping their information private was a non-negotiable and was most important for them. So that gets me thinking about, okay, so you’re measuring your LLN visibility, but you’ve also got to really make sure that data is being protected. And then you’ve got to measure the transactions or the engagement of people of different types of people and your segmentation along the buyer’s journey and think about engagement. And at what point engagement becomes whatever the new term for conversion is. You know, I heard something this week that was your website isn’t an educational place anymore because they’ve already done the education before they get there. Your website has to be a transaction, not, doesn’t matter what industry you’re in because all of the pre-work has already been done. So if you get them there, it’s because they’re going to transact in some way, even if that’s just the engagement or download of content. It’s not education anymore.
[01:53:32] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s that’s definitely lots of shifts there, right? You know, everything from the, you know, the, the SEO, you know, such a focus being put on SEO over the last few decades at this point, um to, you know, so that’s that’s a that’s a big change. Um from-
[02:04:19] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Big change, Greg. But I do want to say one thing on that because I’ve been pointed out on this too. We also need to remember that the hard job of marketing right now is you’ve got to run parallel because the biggest amount of traffic still to my site is through SEO. The LLM percentage is still small, although it’s growing. But right now, our challenge is we have to manage both, right? So you can’t, it’s not one or the other, it’s really both.
[02:04:59] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah. So, I, I also want to talk about, um, well, you know, the the MarTech landscape is uh, you know, famously crowded. So, you know, there’s the the infographic with all the, I don’t I don’t know if they there’s like 10,000 plus platforms on the, on that one super graphic or whatever. But, um, you know, from from your perspective, what’s the fundamental disconnect between the all-in-one platform kind of dream that’s often sold and the practical day-to-day needs of an enterprise marketing organization?
[02:05:35] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Hmm. The all-in-one dream is just overselling simplicity and underselling complexity and expense. Every time. Every time. I don’t really care who the vendor is or what the solution is. There is no one, one stop shop for this. Um, and I think it’s the same in with AI tools and agents too. So what I would tell any CMO evaluating platforms right now is to think about three, especially AI, three specific things to look for. And I’ve I’ve learned this and you know, I’m lucky, I deal with it every day, but one, it has to be LLM agnostic, right? So you it the you just you just has to be. Second, open source, open collaboration, as we’ve said, one size, one tool cannot do everything. We have to be able to integrate and collaborate tool by tool, agent to agent, and that has to be done in a way that you don’t need to have a computer science degree in order to do it, right? So the, you know, user-friendly, open and intuitive. And then I think right now, composable and orchestration friendly because things are changing so quickly. And we see now, you know, I mean, we can buy tools on a six-month contract. You know, I could tell you about three different systems, writing tools that my team looked at that a year ago, you know, number one was king and then six months ago the other one and then last week it was like, hey, we’ve all found something different. So I think if we can be flexible, have open, composable, orchestration, um friendly platforms that are LLM agnostic, that will be beneficial. The newest vendors aren’t necessarily the best, um because we have to make sure back to that governance that there’s human oversight and that we can feel safe with the data that is being put into these um, these tools. It’s also tricky for a lot of organizations. I talk to a lot of companies whose marketing teams are struggling because they can’t even get the first step forward because they’re in a regulated industry or a head-quartered company that is so concerned about security that they can’t even get access to use AI tools. We have to figure that out for those companies because they will be left behind.
[02:05:59] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely a I mean, there’s so much interest and a lot of a lot of companies I talk with this same thing is they’re they’re worst case scenario, there’s people doing workarounds which are not that would not be advisable either, especially in in highly regulated industries and stuff. But yeah, the, the the marketers and and others want so much to be able to use these tools. They see they know the benefits or potential benefits of them. But yeah, the, the internal governance on on, you know, allowing access to those tools definitely is is a barrier and it’s a, it’s a competitive disadvantage, right? If they if they can’t solve it for themselves.
[02:07:57] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[02:07:59] Greg Kihlstrtöm: One last thing I want to talk about here is just this, you know, you talk with a lot of marketing leaders, um, and as well and just this idea of, uh moving away from being a, you know, quote-unquote customer of a MarTech vendor towards being more of a a partnership. And, you know, some of this goes back to, you know, a lot of things we we touched on briefly here as well. But, you know, what is a healthy productive partnership between a brand and a and a technology provider actually look like in practice?
[02:08:08] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yeah, I, I don’t know that this has changed much. Um, we’ve all had, you know, partners, vendors that we’ve worked with in the past that have done really good job and we’ve had those that haven’t hit the mark. I think right now, truth and open and honesty, you know, they’re, we’re getting into a world where we where there are tools that will be able to analyze the technology that you are providing. So you can write whatever you want on your marketing ad, right? But it will get found out very easily. So I think being open about roadmap. I think looking for best practices because the world is changing so much that what we’ve done in the past is definitely not going to be what we do in the future, but we all haven’t been through it either. So, you know, I think people are looking for those vendors that can say and tell me what others are doing and show me what has worked and what has not worked. So I think that’s really important. Um, and I think it’s very important to walk the talk. And it’s why I actually love my job every day here at Acquia because I am marketing and selling something that I use and we are customer zero. And let me tell you, we give our product team a hard time because our expectations are up here and I also hear from customers what they want. And I think you have to be living and breathing it. You have to understand what your buyer is going through. And if I were, and that’s what I ask, you know, I like nothing more than talking to the marketing team of somebody that I might be acquiring tech from about how they’ve been using it, about what they’ve seen and then other customers. And I, I think that’s really important and I pride myself that I would say 80% of my team could talk to a customer and talk about our solutions and how we use them because they use them every day.
[02:11:59] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Love that. Well, Jennifer, always great talking with you. I got a couple couple questions for you as we wrap up here. Uh first, uh in a couple days, Acquia Engage Denver is is coming up. So, um what are you uh most looking forward to about that?
[02:12:00] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Yes. Uh, the event cycle hasn’t changed in the world of AI. We have uh, actually we have uh, three events coming up. We do Denver, London and Paris. I’m really excited because I get to be in the field talking to customers. We are going to be launching a significant update to what is Acquia Source, which is our next generation content management digital experience platform. The key is kind of um, one pane of glass for all things, which is Acquia AI, which provides insights and recommendations. So you don’t have to run those reports. It’s telling you what actions you need to take on your content, on your website, on your campaign, which I’m I’m we are just loving and and very excited about. So, I’m, I’m so looking forward to showing people that and talking to customers.
[02:13:58] Greg Kihlstrtöm: Nice, nice, love it. And uh last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[02:14:00] Jennifer Griffin Smith: Oh, consistently, I’m not sure. Is there anything consistent anymore? Um, I force myself, I actually don’t even have to force myself, now I think about it. Every week I find myself asking people in our organization, my own team across our product and and R&D team, what I don’t know about AI. Just like teach me something, something basic. Get on, you know, screen share and teach me what I could be doing differently because I learn every day something new, which I love. Every time I dread doing a piece of my work because I know it’s time-consuming and it’s evening and I want to go spend time with my children, I think how can I do it differently and I use AI to do it. And I will say it’s been a little life-changing. But I think every day it’s just asking something new. It’s listening to podcasts like this and um, and just being open and hearing what people are doing. Um, I can’t say that I’m a great book reader because I don’t have a lot of time. So anything that can come to me fast and furiously, especially if I can listen or it’s a quick, you know, uh, three-minute video, then I love that. That keeps me informed.
