James Kotecki - Behind The Marketing

Speaker: James Kotecki, Director of Marketing & Communications, Infinia ML

James Kotecki: My name is James Kotecki, and I am the Director of Marketing at Infinia ML. The biggest ah-ha moment of my marketing career came when I realized that I don't have to know everything. I can actually just interview people who know things and turn that into great content and turn those conversations into great ideas. So a large chunk of my business, and a large chunk of my marketing expertise, and career has been built not around knowing all these great insights about technology or the businesses that I'm representing or marketing on behalf of, but in my ability to ask questions of people who do actually know those things. Something that is said in the voice of the customer, literally the voice of the customer, is far more powerful than something that I, as a marketer, can say. Something that is a really powerful piece of content, a really powerful insight, is probably living in the heads of my colleagues, my technical colleagues, at work right now, and it's my job to use my expertise to draw that out of that. It's not my job to kind of create that out of nothing. So I think once I realized that all the great content and all the great ideas and all the great stuff that marketing is pumping out could come from interviews and conversations, or at least a large chunk of those things, could come from interviews and conversations - that was really a game changer for me because it allowed me to focus on what I'm good at, asking questions and then allowing other people to do what they're good at, which is sharing their insights and expertise. Now, I once heard Terry Gross interviewed, the host of NPR's Fresh Air, (the interview show) and she said that actually, she had some kind of similar revelation at one point when she was hosting a radio show. In her early days of doing that, she was like, 'Oh, I can I can actually just do interviews on the on the air - full time do that.' So I want to just be clear. I'm not at all comparing myself to the great Terry Gross, but we did have a similar idea.

James Kotecki: I was working in marketing at a tech company called Automated Insights, and it was going fine. But I just had this entrepreneurial itch to go and start my own thing. So I left. I took a risk, and I started my own company, a solo marketing business that I figured out eventually was going to focus on customer storytelling, and testimonial creation on behalf of mostly tech clients. I didn't realize that exact focus at first. I kind of had inklings of it, but I was scattered in a number of different directions. It took me maybe 12, 18 months to actually figure out exactly how to focus the business precisely and what exactly I was selling. And at the end of that time, the person who had been the CEO of the company that I had left had himself left that company and had gone to do something else and was now coming in to be the CEO of a new company called Infinia ML. He asked me to join that company as its director of marketing, and I did. The reason that the risk paid off was because in that 12,18,24 month span, of doing my own business. I had really been able to level up my own marketing abilities, my own confidence, my own kind of self, leadership and managerial abilities, to the point where I was able to come in at a much higher level for this new company and be a better contributor.

James Kotecki: Okay, so somebody comes to me and says, Hey, I'm a marketer and I want to take my career to the next level. What do I do?' I would first turn the question around and say, 'What do you mean by next level? Is it just going from, a manager title to a director title? Isn't that kind of linear promotion?' That's just one definition of what next level could be. It could be doing something, deepening your expertise within the title that you have now. And the fact that you don't get a promotion and therefore increased managerial responsibilities is what actually allows you to deepen your expertise because you have fewer managerial responsibilities and you can actually go deeper. That's just an example. Another example would be you could go and start your own thing. That's what I did. That's how I took my career to the next level. But I'm not seeing anyone necessarily has to do that. I'm just suggesting that before you think about how to advance and climb the ladder of life, just think about whether the next rung is really in a straight linear fashion. Because the ladder of life doesn't look like any kind of ladder that you buy in a hardware store - the rungs are flung all over God's creation. This metaphor is breaking down. But what did not break down is your resolve as a marketer to figure out what the next step should actually mean for you at this time. Not what other people would define it as, not what might impress people at your family reunion, but what the next level should actually mean for you right now. I would spend a lot more time thinking about that question that I would even necessarily thinking about. 'Okay, how do I get there?'

James Kotecki: Recent team's success. I'm going to give you a very simple and in some ways for a marketer, very beautiful example of this. Our challenge as company, we're a company of machine learning experts, data scientists, engineers. We have a set of tools and machine learning that we can kind of direct at any number of industries and executives. And so one marketing challenge for us has simply been to figure out okay, what's the best fit with our message in the market and what specific segments of the market are we trying to go after? So we've recently begun to narrow our focus strategically, and as part of that, we've been sending out email campaigns to people that we've never met before. Classic marketing cold email campaign. You get a bunch of emails to people that you have a pretty good sense will be interested in what you're offering. You know, we're not trying to bamboozle anybody or anything. We think they could really get use out of who we are and what we have to offer. But they've never heard of us before. So this was one of our first major kind of straight up cold email outreach campaigns, and there was a lot of uncertainty. I gotta tell you, on the biz dev and on the marketing side around how and if this would actually work. And so I'm happy to reveal that once we did this campaign, we started to get some feedback that it was working. We started to get some positive responses, and I felt like Doc Brown and back to the future, you know, like jumping up and down and saying 'It works! I invented something that works and really, it was a team effort, obviously, to put together these emails and narrow the focus and write the copy and get the list. And put together all of the machinery that allows email marketing to happen. I'm sure all the marketers listening to this know that whole process very well. But there's a simple joy and beauty of just connecting with an audience and knowing that, yes, I have put together a message that is compelling because we, as a company, can offer something that is actually gonna help somebody else. And ultimately, I think that's what we're all here to do.

James Kotecki: I'm gonna give two answers to this question. One is think about any science fiction, movie or TV show. Are there more videos in the world of the future or fewer videos in the world of the future than the world that we live in right now? On average, I would say there's way more videos in the futures that we collectively have imagined for ourselves. So if you are wondering if video is the future, you can kind of look to our collective psyche on that as we reflect it back through our own storytelling. And the second answer is personal, because I actually started a video blog on YouTube in 2007 talking about politics. In fact, I actually interviewed several presidential candidates at the time, in my college dorm room at Georgetown University. I was one of the first people kind of talking about how presidential candidates were using YouTube in their campaigns. So personally, I'm extremely biased. I love video. It is really at the heart of who I am. I absolutely do not think that every single marketing campaign or marketing initiative needs to have video attached to it. In fact, in the work that I'm currently doing at Infinia ML. There's probably a little bit less just because we're trying to still figure out our marketing and our messaging to know exactly what kind of videos to make. So I don't want to say that it's right for everybody and every moment, but I will say that video, as I see it, kind of brings us back to an earlier era of communication. If you think about the earliest forms of communication between human beings, it's a person standing in front of me making noises or making motions, and they're communicating something to me, right? And then, through things like pictures and writing and paintings and all those things as beautiful and as wonderful as all those are, those actually get away from that kind of very basic, very instinctive garbled communication in a 1 to 1 kind of way and video actually brings it right back to, 'There is a person standing in front of me, albeit on a screen who is making motions and saying things with their with their mouth, and those sounds were coming out, and I'm hearing that I'm being communicated with. It's very, very personal and hopefully the way that if you're watching this video, you feel like I'm personally connecting with you right now. So I don't think anything can really match or surpass that for video. Until they get to some kind of Holodeck, of course. And I certainly hope Vocal Video will work on that, but until then, video is where it's at. So keep making videos and, videos are the best kind of wishing I had an edit button at this point to kind of figure out a way to end this video, but I figure at this point, you know what I'm saying.