About Lynne
In this episode, we're joined by Lynne Cappozi, Acquia’s CMO. Lynne weighs in on how to maximize your investment in Acquia products, top digital marketing challenges, and how open source is changing the game for marketers.
Lynne is one of Acquia’s boomerang stories, first serving as CMO in 2009 and returning to Acquia in 2016 to lead the marketing organization into its next stage of growth. Prior to her experience at Acquia, Lynne held various marketing leadership roles in the technology space at companies such as JackBe, Systinet & Lotus Development, all of which were acquired during her tenure. Outside of her work at Acquia, Lynne is on the board of directors at the Boston Children’s Hospital Trust and runs a nonprofit through the hospital.
Project Picks
Interview
- Tell us about yourself and your role at Acquia.
- What does Acquia do?
- How has open source changed the practice of marketing for Acquia’s customers?
- What kind of organizations make up Acquia’s customer base?
- Being a marketer yourself, what do you see as the biggest challenge for enterprise marketers as we head into 2020?
- What is Acquia doing to help marketers overcome those challenges?
- Where do digital agencies like Mediacurrent fit into Acquia’s ecosystem?
- What can marketers do to get the most value out of their investment in Acquia products?
Thanks for tuning in for another episode of Open Waters! Looking for more useful tips, technical takeaways, and creative insights? Visit mediacurrent.com/podcast to subscribe and hear more episodes.
Transcript
Mark Casias: Welcome to Mediacurrent's Open Waters Podcast, navigating the intersection between open source technology and marketing. I'm Mark Casias. And with me, this episode is Bob Kepford. How are you doing today, Bob?
Bob Kepford: I'm doing good. How are you?
Mark: Things are good. This episode, we will be talking with Lynne Capozi, Acquia's CMO. Lynne is one of Acquia's boomerang stories, first serving in the CMO in 2009 and then returning again in 2016 to lead the marketing organization into its next stage of growth. Prior to her experience with Acquia, Lynne has held various marketing leadership roles in the technology space at companies like JackBe, Systinet. How, I'm sorry, I'm missing the pronunciation on that. Is it?
Lynne Capozi: That is correct.
Mark: Oh, I did it right.
Lynne: Systinet
Mark: And Lotus Development. All of which are acquired during her tenure outside of her work at Acquia. Lynne is on the Board of Directors of Bostin's children Hospital Trusts and runs a nonprofit through the hospital. And we'll definitely want a link to that nonprofit in the show notes for you. Welcome Lynne and thanks a lot for coming in.
Lynne: Well, thanks very much happy to be here.
Mark: Okay. So let's get it started. And as always, we start with the pro project pick or the project pick, we're still on the name. Lynn, what do you have for us?
Lynne: I don't know. See what you think of this. I was gonna say actually one of my favorite things and one of my favorite tools is a Cvent app, which is anytime I go to a conference, which I go to a million of them, I'd love having a Cvent app where I can just look on my phone, have really great interaction to see what the agenda is, what sessions I want. I can comment. I can do surveys. I can. So I love that. For me, I love it. We just had, we just did one for, you know, our Acquia Engage conference. But so I would say that's what it is. It's the Cvent, C V E N T app at any conference. So for instance, like we put on Acquia Engage, our own customer conference, and we used the Cvent app so that there was an Engage app that all attendees could use.
Lynne: So they go on their phone, they can find out the agenda, they can post questions to the speakers. They can find a way to get the presentations. We can communicate with them to say, "We've had a change of venue." There's so many people removing from conference room A to conference room B. Or, "Drinks are served on the patio outside in 10 minutes." I mean, it's really great just to have, you know, live interaction with an attendee. And, it's just such a nice way now, because everyone just wants something that's on their phone. No one wants to carry around a conference agenda.
Mark: Right? Yeah, yeah. Those are the first things that get recycled, you know, whenever they-
Lynne: Exactly
Bob: Like you get one it's like, "Here, you throw this away."
Lynne: Yeah, that's right, exactly.
Mark: That'd be great.
Lynne: It's my, it's my latest thing.
Mark: Yeah. That's, that'd be great for the decouple days. I'm a organizer. Bob used to be an organizer, but he is also a quitter, but he, that that'd be a great thing for, for that as well.
Bob: I see. You're still, you're still angry about this.
Mark: I'm still bitter about it. Yes I am. I am.
Lynne: I had another option, which is on the, I'll give you this one, then you guys can and choose which one you think is more cool. And so I have, I have an app that I use now that I love and it's called GoGoGrandparent. And it is a way for me to give my elderly dad access by his cell phone and a one touch button to, it's kinda like a concierge service to Uber and Lyft and he doesn't have to know anything. He doesn't have to log in.
Lynne: They know exactly where he lives. In most cases, they know where he is going. Cause I give at common addresses for him. The bill comes to me and all he has to do is make one call and say, "I'm ready now to be picked up wherever I am". And they can, he doesn't even have to know where he is. They can just, they can pick him up and basically like front end to Uber and Lyft and it's called GoGoGrandparent. And it's terrific. And it gives, I get updates. I get text messages. He's been picked up. He's been dropped off so I don't have to worry.
Mark: That's great actually. Wow.
Lynne: Quite fabulous.
Bob: Man. There's so many ideas like this. It's like, oh, that's a great idea.
Lynne: I know. It's like, why didn't I think of that? Right. It's not. It's probably not that hard. But it's yeah, it's great. And they just charge a fee on top of the Uber/Lyft ride. But it's great. Peace of mind for me. And it was a nice kind of trading negotiation tool when I took his license away.
Mark: It's like DoorDash for your parents.
Lynne: What's that?
Mark: It's like DoorDash for your parents.
Lynne: Exactly. So there you go. There's my, there are my two picks so you can choose which one is, which one you think is better.
Mark: Nice. I think I'm gonna use both of them
Lynne: Really?
Mark: Yeah. Why not? They're, they're both really good. They're great, great services out there that, that are, that are neat. So yeah.
Lynne: Yeah, exactly.
Mark: Yeah. Thanks a lot for those. All right, Bob, let's start with the interview.
Bob: Yeah Lynne, we want to just thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your role at Acquia?
Lynne: Sure. So I'm the Chief Marketing Officer here at Acquia. And basically my job I feel is to tell the world, tell the entire about Acquia. And so I'm responsible for all of the marketing functions globally for Acquia. So demand gen and our advertising and our field marketing efforts and working very closely with our sales organization. So it's all about spreading the good word about Acquia and Drupal.
Mark: Excellent. So spread the good word. What does Acquia do?
Lynne: So basically what we do is Acquia helps companies of all sizes be successful with the open source product Drupal. And Drupal basically what it does is it powers and builds websites. And so we provide products and tools and support that helps organizations be successful with Drupal in trying to reach their digital transformation goals. So we create great customer experiences. We support some of the largest websites on the planet.
Lynne: So some that have very large one-time events, the Grammy's, the Emmy's, the Olympics, many, many large events that have a one time occurrence where you can't have your site go down. During those particular cases. We also support many large organizations that have multiple multiple brands. So maybe a company like Nestle or Pfizer, well that have thousands, thousands of websites. So we help support those organizations. We help keep them up and running on their sites and we really help them with their digital transformation so they can provide the best customer experience possible.
Bob: How, how has open source changed your practices and marketing to Acquia's, or for Acquia's customers, but also to them? You know, we talk a lot about open source on this podcast. I'm just curious. What, what, from your perspective, how has that changed to marketing for your customers?
Lynne: I think it's, I think the whole world of open source has changed the world for marketers because well, first it provides a way for products to really work together. And so, you know, unlocking the silos of data, right? So marketers can get access to the, a great customer view. They can have more access to their data to be able to swap back and forth between their applications that they're running. So really to be able to provide better decision making for marketers and really getting a better view of a, their customers. So being able to run their websites efficiently and quickly, maybe executing on marketing campaigns, really it's all about, you know, open being open and sharing data.
Lynne: And also the other thing that it provides to marketers is the whole Drupal community itself, the whole open source Drupal community. You know, there are over a million and a half, the number grows every day, people around the world that use Drupal and are contributors to Drupal. And that just provides for great quality product. Continuously adding to the product, adding features, people that are knowledge about the product, a marketer knows that they could hire a Drupal developer at any time because there's so many of them around the world. So it, it really provides all kinds of flexibility for marketers, not only from just a product standpoint, but really kind of thinking of as like unlocking data, to be able to be a more effective marketer.
Bob: Yeah. It really contrasts the, the close source model where you kind of are at the mercy of the product owner and you can't really see what's going on, but when it's open, not only can you get your data in and out, but you also can have a better insight on where the product's going and what's possible and you can even extend it. And that's something Acquia has done. And Mediacurrent does everyday.
Lynne: Exactly, exactly.
Mark: So Mediacurrent and Acquia, we partner up a lot. What other organizations make up Acquia's customer base?
Lynne: Well, we have thousands and thousands of customers, many of which we've worked with Mediacurrent, and we have a lot of different examples of different kind of customers. You know, a couple of them, I mentioned the big, big ones, you know, the, the Olympics, the Australia Open, those big ones. Large organizations, like a Pfizer or Nestle. There's also some great, great customers that we've worked on jointly with Mediacurrent. I mean, one example that I absolutely love is georgia.gov, which is a government agency for the state of Georgia. And what they were facing, I'll just give you a little description of it. What they were facing was, having it, they wanted to be able to support their constituents and people that go to the government site for anything from, "How do I get a driver's license? How do I pay my parking ticket? How do I, how do I get married kind of thing? How do I get a license for that?"
Lynne: They wanted to be able to provide access to the georgia.gov site for people that were visually impaired. And so it's a great example of using voice application. Using Alexa, someone can come to the government site to the georgia.gov site. They can completely use have their whole interaction be via Alexa. They can get their parking ticket paid, they can get their marriage license or whatever it is that they require. It's a great combination between Drupal, use of Drupal running the site. And, and the combination of Alexa. And I think it's really, it's a powerful example of well be done with technology to really meet the requirements in that case, it's their constituents, but you're an, a larger enterprise organization obviously would be your customers or your consumers.
Lynne: Couple other examples are a company locally right here in Boston, headquartered called Pegasystems and Pegasystems and Mediacurrent worked with Acquia together to real do their whole migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Pegasystems is very large enterprise software company in the BPM space and customer relationship space. They integrated their own marketing platform in with Drupal 8 and now they're able to have just a great experience and a great website experience. They have everything from you'll hear them say improved translation capabilities from multi, multiple languages. They have a new UI, a better customer experience. They have improved increased conversions on their site. The marketers will tell us, and they just really have had a great experience in providing a new digital transformation for their own consumers and prospects and, and their clientele, which I think is pretty interesting. So the customers vary from government organizations to a large organization like Pegasystems to Habitat for Humanity, to The Weather Channel. So some, all different types of applications and, and website experiences.
Bob: So Lynn being a marketer yourself, going into 2020, what do you see as the biggest challenge for enterprise marketers?
Lynne: The one, the biggest challenge, I would say that I hear the most from my marketing peers is how do I meet my customer expectations? Right? The bar is being raised for a great customer experience. We, we all expect it. We've all dealt with, you know, Netflix and Amazon and we get it. We all get it. We have small attention span and really you want just a great customer experience and interacting with brands. So I would say the biggest challenge is how do you continue to meet your customer? How did brands continue to meet their customer expectations around that? And I think creating a great customer experience can be a challenge for us as marketers. And one of the biggest things about creating a great customer experience, everyone wants everything personalized. So, you know, marketers know that things and interaction with the brand needs to be customized and personalized because people are expecting that. Now it's just any interaction with the brand you expect to be personalized as much as possible. So I would say the biggest challenge I think is how do you do personalization in the right way and to create a great customer experience.
Mark: And then, so what is Acquia doing to help marketers overcome this challenge, those challenges?
Lynne: Well, I think we have, you know, we have both a method and a product and tools to help people, organizations personalize and people are in it. Marketers are in all different phases as they go to think about how am I creating a personalized experience for my consumers or my prospects. And so one way that we help them with that is through personalization tool. And, and also we have a methodology that we work with and Mediacurrent does this as well. So there's a methodology that we, you have how to do personalization.
Lynne: How do you start? Where do you go? Is it hard? Is it complicated? And so you know, we all, I always tell people do what I did. I start by, you know, it's a whole walk for all walk run. And so you could start easy, you can start small and then you can kind of expand your personalization capabilities. And so being able to have tools and, you know, support for your whole scale of personalization, if you're starting small and then growing, I think is really important. And that's where kind of Acquia comes in, both from a product perspective and tools perspective.
Bob: So Acquia, I've been aware of Acquia since I think since it's founding really, and it is grown massively and been very successful and I've been at Mediacurrent for seven years and we've worked together over the years. Just for our audience, can you kind of explain how digital agencies like Mediacurrent fit into the Acquia ecosystem?
Lynne: Sure. So well, first of all, I'd say that not all agencies are created equal. And so for us Mediacurrent is, is really critical in terms of our relationship and how we work together. So, you know, we, we've all always looked at Mediacurrent as as a great partner of ours. I think my experience with Mediacurrent goes back to I think 2009 or so when I first came to Acquia. And is that right? You were, you were around in 2009.
Mark: Yep.
Bob: Yeah, we were for sure. I, I think I started in 2007. Oh, no, sorry. I'm getting my dates wrong, but yes, we were running back.
Lynne: I'm sorry. Yeah, we should never try to count years. That's when it, that's.
Bob: No, we didn't. I haven't been here that long that's a long ago.
Lynne: That's when it gets bad. I think the point is we have a nice long relationship between Acquia and Mediacurrent. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we work with, you know, we work with Mediacurrent and so really we provide, you know, the products Mediacurrent provides the, the expertise provides the solutions, provides the, you know, working, you are the agency that helps, helps people with their digital transformation and helps make it happen. And we work together to make that happen. And we work really closely with you folks to support our customers.
Lynne: You know, I do have to say that you are, Mediacurrent also is very well known in the Drupal space in the open source community, because you folks have been such great contributors to the community. So much so that you, Mediacurrent won an award from Acquia. One we gave last year, when we gave out our open source awards and Mediacurrent won the open source giant awards. So congratulations on that because you folks have contributed a tremendous amount to the Drupal community and are well known within the Drupal community. So I wanted to say both congratulations and a big thank you for that. Cause you helped make, Drupal and open source successful.
Mark: Awesome. Yeah, that was a nice thing to give that out.
Bob: Thank you for that. Yeah. We, we have a team, a passionate team of open source advocates here and we know Acquia is full of folks that are like-minded and it's, it's great to have that recognition. Thank you.
Lynne: Yeah. Welcome.
Mark: So what can marketers do to get the, the most, value out of their investment in Acquia products?
Lynne: I think, I think there's a lot markers could do to get kind of the most value out of Acquia products, you know, is, looking at, you know, asking people to look at what are you doing for personalization? Can we help you with that? Can Mediacurrent help you with that? Making sure that, you know, what's the latest and greatest that's going on and, you know, running your website and doing personalization, we could help marketers with things like marketing automation now, as well.
Lynne: So we have a great open source marketing automation tool that we have that works with our suite of products. So, I think that marketers should start to look at, I, am I customizing enough? Am I personalizing enough? Am I doing a great job around creating a great customer experience? And that's certainly something that, you know, Acquia and Mediacurrent in our Acquia products can, can help with right away.
Mark: I'm, I'm personally trying to get the, one of my goals for this first quarter is to get the, Acquia certification for Lift. And, do, do you have like a, a nice success story of, of something that happened with, with the customer that was using the personalization through, through Acquia's Lift program?
Lynne: Yeah, we have, we have quite a few examples of people that have been, have been using Lift and through the program that have been doing, that have been doing really well. So we have a lot of customers, that have been using Lift for personalization on their site, and it's helped them a lot with, I mean, I have customers that tell me that we have, they have examples of, of, their overall their ROI increasing because the conversions on their site have increased because they're able to feed more specific content to people coming onto this site. The experience with the site is better. The time on site actually with more specific content is more helpful. And so even, Acquia.com, I'll give you examples in my own world because I'm also a marketer and I run my site, right. And I have had, I have had, increases in conversion for all different types of areas of my site.
Lynne: And so now I can get very specific when someone comes into the site, I'm only gonna feed them content that's applicable to them. If someone's coming in from a bank, they don't wanna see a, a case that comes from a high tech company. They wanna read something that says, show me something that's like me, show me someone like me that found an advantage with your product. And so we do that. We can feed very, very specific content or someone's coming in and they're learning how to do personalization. Initially we can help feed them content to help them if they're in the crawl stage. And then if they become more the walk stage and then in the, in the run stage to really optimize around personalization. So, organizations have seen a lot of different advantages and my own self included in terms of using Lift and using Acquia Drupal. So some great advantages there and, and great, great numbers that we're happy to share, you know, at any, at any given point in time from Acquia and Mediacurrent.
Mark: Awesome. That's great that you actually, it's always funny people when talking about their service about how it improves, they always point to other people, but pointing to yourself as, yeah. It's worked great for me. So it, it's always great that you're using your own product and then it's actually, very successful. Well, Bob, do you have any other questions at this time?
Bob: I don't. This was very, very interesting to, to hear kind of, especially that last part about you using your own products and seeing the, the value they add. That's a, that's a big, big, positive.
Lynne: Yeah. I'm, I'm talking to a lot of CMOs and I do that. I talk a lot about what we specifically, what we have done and what I've done in my own house. And that really is, really resonates with people because I'm, I'm living it, as I say, I'm living the dream.
Mark: Living the dream. Alrighty. Well, that's it for today's show. Thanks for joining us. If you, if you're looking for more useful tips, technical takeaways and creative insights, visit Mediacurrent.com/podcast for more episodes and to subscribe to our newsletter.