Mr. Kennedy:
Becoming more conversant in what all the technologies are is a big
one. CMOs have got to be some of the most highly marketed-to
positons. My phone rings off the hook. It is increasingly hard to
pick where is the best place to spend your time and stay plugged
in.
Ad Age: What are
your top marketing priorities for 2016?
Ms. Jones: One is, how do we tell our story
around our portfolio in terms of how we help companies transform
their businesses in the digital economy? The second is, how do we
drive demand, and the third is, how do we grow our people? We're
wrapping it around 'Run Simple' -- how do we run simple internally
so we can help our customers run simple as well.
Mr. Kennedy: First
is to continue evolving the Xerox brand in a way that brings the
company together around the idea of improving the flow of work and
bringing the brand to life. Second is using technology to improve
marketing's contribution to the sales pipeline. Third is to set up
standards and processes so there is a Xerox way of doing marketing
and communications.
Ms. Quintos: No. 1
is to continue to focus on our enterprise brand, particularly given
the announcement [to acquire] EMC, and make sure our customers
understand the full capabilities we have with our end-to-end
solutions portfolio. Second is how do we continue to lead in the
area of digital, big data, content and one-to-one personalized
marketing, especially in the b-to-b space. Our third big priority
is to enable our people with the right tools, training and
capabilities.
Ad Age: How will
you be allocating your marketing budget in 2016?
Mr. Kennedy: We
will be moving more of our spend towards content, marketing
automation and sales enablement. We're still going to have a layer
of paid media and traditional advertising, but we are increasingly
looking to avenues that are more targeted and are consistent with
the idea of bringing our brand story to life in very specific
industries we serve -- such as health, transportation and graphic
communications.
Ms. Quintos: We
continue to allocate significant year-over-year increases around
digital and content, and we will continue to do that next year.
2016 is the first year we will start our PGA sponsorship as title
sponsor of the World Golf Championships Match Play, which will give
us a great opportunity to reach a global audience with media spots
that will air in the U.S. and key markets around the world.
Ms. Jones:
Technology today is no longer about only CTOs and CIOs making
decisions -- it's really about decision-making across the C-suite
and across different business functions. So the way we look at
budgets is around audiences, around the customer journey, and the
markets we are in. The areas we will be investing more in are
around telling the story from our brand experience perspective and
from a content perspective.
Ad Age: Which
technologies look most promising this year?
Ms. Jones: Data analytics is very promising.
For example, how do we use analytics to help us drive a better
customer experience at events? Second is marketing automation. We
need to continue to automate lead flow, demand gen and the value
chain. Also, how do you have a real-time mobile-first
experience?
Mr. Kennedy: First and foremost is making sure
we get the most out of our marketing automation platform we've
invested in. On top of that, it's certainly social and getting
Xerox as a company to embrace social technologies. We will also be
looking at how digital content can play a much bigger role in our
marketing mix.
Ms. Quintos: Over the last couple of years we
have invested in point solutions for customer data, integration of
customer data and better analytics. Now we are trying to connect
all those things with our creative and our ad-tech stacks to link
all these things in a customer data hub and capabilities to target
these b-to-b customers.