Juliette Aiken brings a product-led, customer-centric approach to her new role to help ITG, powered by Storyteq, sharpen its marketing proposition, connect its creative and technology capabilities, and demonstrate the value of smarter content operations to brands operating at scale.
When Juliette Aiken was growing up, she wanted to be an archaeologist. Whilst life took her down a different path, the instinct to dig deep never left her. Recently appointed chief marketing officer at Storyteq, ITG‘s marketing technology platform, Juliette is driven by a desire to uncover customer pain points, excavating the “problems and needs that need to be met”.
Juliette has built her career across a number of fast-moving businesses and, most recently, spent several years as CMO at Dotdigital, after joining as a product marketeer. By the time she left, the company’s revenue had doubled with Juliette’s tenure contributing significantly to the growth trajectory.
Connecting people’s pain with solutions
The B2B marketing space is dominated by acronyms like MQLs, SQL, SQOs, to name just a few, and “can end up feeling abstract, when at the end of the day we’re connecting people’s pain with solutions that can help solve them”.
In any marketing role, Juliette reflects, a “deep understanding of the product and its capabilities” should also come with an understanding of the customer, retaining customer-centricity. “The rest is almost connecting the dots, which is putting it very simply. But I think if you’re able to focus on those two things, it makes marketing really meaningful work.”
Why ITG and Storyteq
After eight years at Dotdigital, Juliette felt “it was time to move on and try my hand at a slightly different flavour of martech”, leading her to ITG. “The core customer is still marketers, so that was very appealing to me,” she says.
ITG’s roster of global brands likewise proved highly appealing. “That really got me to look up and think, Wow, how are they working with all these incredible global brands? Having access to this amazing customer base who are getting value from our products and services, that’s marketing gold.”
Last but not least, says Juliette, the people she met along the way signalled that this was the right next career step for her. “Our CEO, Andrew Swinand, our Storyteq MD, Joaquim Lecha, and Steve Shaw, chief product and technology officer, all have a similar passion for the problems that ITG and Storyteq solve.”
Bringing heritage and technology together
Juliette notes ITG’s “strong heritage” of giving marketers the right tools to ensure the effectiveness of their campaigns from every angle, maximising impact and reducing waste. “Being able to do that well,” she adds, “and also being able to work with businesses on the transformation and offer a consultative voice on how you best go about it” is where ITG shines.
Paired with Storyteq’s content marketing platform that spans content automation, digital asset management and workflow management, “you get this amazing platform from which you can scale the speed of your content operations without losing in-market efficacy”.
“I look forward to drawing ITG and Storyteq even closer together in our go-to-market efforts. Combining the expertise of ITG and our AI-powered tech is why some of the world’s biggest brands are already working with us. With ITG, powered by Storyteq, they get a partner and the proprietary tech to deliver global campaigns that scale in a way that is brand-safe.”
Scaling content with governance
While it’s often said that the content landscape of today is complex and vast, it bears repeating, especially in the wake of new regulations and legislation. “Content automation is amazing at allowing you to scale your campaigns and making sure that they’re localised to different languages, currencies, and distribution channels available to local marketing teams,” Juliette says. “You quickly get into conversations around how effectively your assets are organized, and how reliably they’re stored for repurpose and reuse. It becomes a question of content governance, which is pertinent when you consider new legislation like the EU AI Act.”
Pursuing scale without operational oversight can result in mistakes or best-practice going out the window altogether. Yet this can be avoided if “you’re able to scale your content operations, while also ensuring that the scale and adaptations feed back into your digital asset management platform, which should ultimately be a single source of truth for any campaign marketer or anyone working in a local or country-level marketing capacity,” Juliette explains. It helps avoid legal risk and also reduces duplication, both issues that plague marketers and their budgets.
She sees how marketing and brand teams are thinking about content operations, whilst needing to maintain scale, speed, quality, and governance. “Combine all of the above and you need to be looking at solutions that can be truly transformative to your business.”
Meeting rising expectations
“We talk a lot about how the expectations for marketers are greater than ever before,” she continues. “After all, organisations expect more content, better content, faster content. That isn’t going to change, particularly in an AI world. But we’ve done amazing work to help major businesses transform their content operations, empower their teams, and meet and exceed those expectations through our technology and people.
“We’ve shown our clients what’s possible, and we’ve made it happen. Now, it’s about showing everyone else.”
This article was originally published by Little Black Book. The original article can be read here.
