SPEAKERS

Christopher Brown, Christian Klepp, Ren Agarwal

Christopher Brown  

One of our large Fortune 500 customers, we saw a 55 sorry, 57% increase of overall marketing deployed year on year. So, within one year they increased, just because they made easy for their frontline users to deploy.

Christian Klepp  

In this increasingly complex and highly technological business environment, managing marketing initiatives across multiple geographies can be a challenge. Overwhelmed central teams, inconsistent local execution, and missed market opportunities are costing you growth, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Today, we’re looking at a tool that claims to fix these challenges and help marketers to scale their impact. Welcome to the Marketing Demo Lab series, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, my co-host, Ren Agarwal, and I are diving into Marvia with the Director of North America, Christopher Brown. Let’s go. All right, and off we go. Welcome to Marketing Demo Lab, folks. I’m your host Christian Klepp. I’m here with my co-host, Ren Agarwal. How you doing, Ren?

Ren Agarwal  

Good, good, good to be here.

Christian Klepp 

And today, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to dive into a platform, and I’m just going to set this up for you a little bit here, right, because, and I’m sure you’ve had the experiences like this, Ren, I certainly have back in my days when I was in marketing, and I was working for a Fortune 500 company, and they did a global rollout because they decided to rebrand, and so we had to make sure that the brand was consistent across different markets.

Ren Agarwal 

Oh, fun.

Christian Klepp

Well, yeah, it was kind of fun until it, until it wasn’t. It sounds very contradictory, but that was, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it was all analog, but it was a lot of like emailing things back and forth and putting brand assets on servers that nobody could find, right, and the result of that was that the people in market in those different geographies got too impatient because they didn’t receive the brand assets on time, so they started. They were kind of left to their own devices, and that’s where it all started to go. Well, I wouldn’t say all right, but it was just enforcement became indeed a very difficult exercise. So we are talking today to a gentleman by the name of Christopher Brown, who’s going to talk, show run us through a platform that solves all of these problems.

Ren Agarwal  

Wow,

Christian Klepp  

and I hope, I hope I gave, I hope I gave you, you know, I did your platform justice with that. But Christopher, welcome to the show.

Christopher Brown  

Thank you very much, Christian and Ren. I appreciate being here.

Christian Klepp  

All right, fantastic. So, let’s, let’s dive in. Right, so I, your platform is called Marvia, so I’m going to say it’s.. it can be described as a platform that simplifies localized marketing for central teams and their non-marketing partners, and I think that’s the reason why it was so important for me to, like, set that tone and you know, share a little bit of my own story there. But who exactly are these non-marketing partners that you guys are also working with? Are we referring to franchise owners here? Are they local branch managers, sales reps, all of the above?

Christopher Brown  

All of the above. We’re essentially a distributed marketing platform, so anywhere that you have a central brand that you want to keep consistent across regions, markets globally, but you have a lot of people touching the marketing materials or sales enablement materials, right, and they’re creating their own. Any, any, any large brand that does a brand survey is always shocked and surprised at what they find being put out at the local level, and being able to facilitate making sure that everything that goes out from the organization is on brand and on design is a big challenge. There’s really two approaches to this, right? You can either hire, keep hiring designers to be making address and detail changes for every little location, but that gets cost prohibitive, you know, that you can’t just keep hiring, you know, 20 designers to be focusing on tactical changes, but you also can push out your PDF brand guidelines to the locales and have them create it, but you know,

Christian Klepp 

I’ve done that, yeah,

Christopher Brown  04:08

you know, you know, not, you know, not everybody understands the brand voice, that you know, sticking a logo on something does not make it on brand, and, and you know, locations tend to get creative, you know, they, you know, I was on a call the other day where someone was customizing a campaign with, with Super Bowl imagery and stuff, and the central brand was panicking, so you know what you want to do is, you want to put the guard rails, you want to ensure that they make it easy for them to do a lot of the localized marketing, but you want to make sure that your brand is consistent across all markets. Now, that can be distribution channels, that can be franchisees, that can be employees. If you’re dealing with a global market, it can just be your own teams within a global company. So, it really, any, the way, good way to think of it is, anywhere there’s a hub and a spoke, you’ve got a hub, which is a central brand, but you have a lot of branches, locations, regions, a bank with a lot of locations, or franchisees, or your franchises anywhere, you have a lot of locations, but, but a central brand you want to ensure is accurate.

Christian Klepp  

Okay. Okay. Fantastic. And you know, thank you for walking us through that, I think that was a great introduction, right?

Christopher Brown  

Thank you.

Christian Klepp  

Yeah,

Ren Agarwal  

let’s get into the platform, shall we?

Christian Klepp  

 Yes, yes, please.

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, sure. And I’d love this to be interactive, so feel free to jump in and chat. So, oh,

Christian Klepp  

don’t, don’t worry, we will.

Christopher Brown  

That’s great. So I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen, and the first thing to note about our platform, and why I think we’re a little bit different, is we are a, we are very a highly customizable platform, so the platform itself, you know, when you talk to a lot of SaaS platforms, the conversation is like this is how we do things, so you, you know, your, your people have to learn how operations happen in our platform. We’re a little bit different. Every business is different. How you communicate with your, with your networks, how you want to access information, all of that differs by company. So our platform is very customizable. How you set it up, how you organize materials again. It’s not just putting a branded, a branded, you know, entry page on, but it’s also the access, the workflows, all that can be customized. So this is just a demonstration portal that I’m going to use to sort of show the platform. First thing to note is that we have an open API (Application Programming Interface), so single sign on integrations are very common. We can integrate with other other marketing stack tools. We also have things like within the modules in the platform, things like open upload. So, if you have people not on the platform, but they take, you know, pictures at a local event, and you want to maybe access those for marketing purposes, they don’t have to be on the platform, they can load them into the platform, they’ll go into a holding file, and then your marketing team can determine what to do with them.

Christian Klepp 

That’s important to know, but, like, for example, How does one start using this platform if they’re, like, for example, looking for a specific asset without having to dig through multiple files? Like, how do they do that?

 

Christopher Brown  07:19

Yeah, so, depending on how you communicate as a company, you can set that a number of set that up a number of different ways, so access to information, the kinds of information now assets that plain dam images, I’ll jump into that, plain damage images themselves, we see a lot of use cases of, for example, jump through pages, so you know we are designed for the non-technical, non-marketing user, so it’s important to understand that, so you know these are these are users that maybe don’t have the experience or the market capabilities, so a big part of what we do is understanding simplicity equals adoption, so we want to make it easy for someone with no technical skills to get into the platform, find what they need, execute on the on the on the plan, and then get out of the platform. It may sound strange, we don’t want people to spend a lot of time in our platform, we want them to get in, get out in five minutes. So, for imagery assets like that, we see a lot of jump through pages, so say you want to jump through to product product shots, and then you can jump into that subset. All this can be customized according to, you know, according to assets. This is just the dam component. We obviously have a number of different kinds of tagging, customized tags, AI tagging. Also, we’re seeing a lot more use of metadata as a tagging mechanism. What campaign is this? What’s the target audience? So that kind of customization is very important for being able to access the kind of information.

Ren Agarwal  

Christopher, who sets this up, this level of filtering and tagging of those assets that, as you just walked through, is that the client does that. Do you guys assist the client with doing that?

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, so we’re very hands on. The onboarding process, depending on complexity and integrations and things like that, can usually take about six to eight weeks, and it’s a collaborative effort. So, for example, we’d have our onboarding team sets up a weekly meeting. There’s homework for each side every week, you know. We’ll be building out the portal, the customer will be loading assets in, there’ll be training for admin, and that process we have pretty dialed in. So it’s a very much a collaborative effort, and then when we go to go live, we also have a strategy to be able to roll it out effectively across all our customers. We’ve learned what works, what doesn’t work. So, for example, you go into a test group and they’ll exercise the platform first before you do a full rollout, and they’ll, they’ll, they’ll play with it, and you’ll, they’ll give you great. Feedback that doesn’t make sense, that workflow isn’t quite right, and then you can tweak it, and then go to a full live, right?

Ren Agarwal 

So that previous example you were just showing us, and this is obviously, you know, a made-up brand that you know is hypothetically using your product, you had all those, you know, assets listed in your dam, and they were tagged, that obviously is a prerequisite for using the portal, and what you’re saying is that the brand would probably do that level of tagging, right?

Christopher Brown  

It’s again collaborative, so we would work with them, understanding, and we really work with marketing teams that have all levels of capabilities, so you know, some of our customers are saying, you know, we’re using Google, Google’s right now for storage, and we need to really up the game. Some are coming from other dam platforms that wanted a more integrated solution. So it depends on where they’re starting from, and then it’s just a plan to get them where they need to be correct.

Christian Klepp 

Okay, you were talking earlier about AI tagging, and I wonder if we could go back to that for a second, because, like, how does, like, say again, like a local manager, somebody who’s in a non-marketing role, how do they, how do they use that to help them find assets that they’re looking for? Like, if we’re, if we’re on the topic of coffee, which is not B2B (Business-to-Business), I know, but we all drink it, right? So, if they’re looking for a seasonal image for their city, like, how would they be able to do that with AI tagging?

Christopher Brown  

So, AI tagging is is one method of tagging assets for being able to search, so like as you said, if I search for coffee and I go to coffee, then you know I am pulling up based on the tags that are associated with that asset, that can be an AI tag or custom tagging schema that the company has for their own things. AI is a great resource for automating some process, but it’s still a little bit blunt. So, you know, AI tagging is often not as refined as our customers want to be. That’s why they’re implementing meta tagging and other kind of tagging to really bore in on some things, and we see that across AI usage across platforms like ours, so we have a number of different kinds of AI, and really, where AI is right now is it is great for facilitating prompt navigation around systems, platforms, workflows, it’s great for that. At this point, for actual creative development, if your through line is brand consistency across the organization, AI is not quite there yet for brand, for asset creation for actual image creation and things, because it does have a tendency to warp some of the brand consistency. So, where we’re very cautious with how we implement it, it’s super useful for, like, how do I do something, or how do I, you know, how do I find something that is the use case that we’re seeing most commonly now, and not actually the asset image or marketing piece creation.

Ren Agarwal  

Well, since Christian opened up the AI can of worms, and we do want to go more to the platform. Just walk us through a little bit about, like, how is AI, if at all, implemented at Marvia in this platform, like, what are the elements of it? What’s give us an AI tour, if you will, just to the extent that it’s applicable to your platform.

Christopher Brown  

Sure, we have a few different levels that we’ve implemented, and we also have a number of others that are road mapped out over the next year, so again, right now we’re focused on utilizing AI for efficiency and to enhance business workflows, and not necessarily what we’ve seen in our space is a lot of companies are coming out with with with AI products that you know, hey, we’ll build all your creative for you, and you know we’ll, we’ll automatically build and deploy marketing materials, but we’re seeing a pullback from that now, primarily because, again, if your through line is brand consistency, it’s not quite there to keep those rigid, those rigid, you know, guidelines in place, and so where we’re implementing, and I don’t have it turned on in this particular demo, but for example, maybe prompt to assets, prompt to workflows, or I have an objective, I’m getting into the platform, I want to roll out a social media campaign, what do I need, and then taking you directly to the assets, the kit of assets, or the workflows that can execute on that.

Ren Agarwal  

Got it, got it. Okay, so that’s a great segue, Christian. Maybe let’s just talk. Let’s just go through a workflow or two.

Christian Klepp 

Yeah, I mean, I see I’m seeing like your screen here, and I’m seeing templates. Could you walk us through how somebody. Like you know, work, work on one of those templates, like if I were a local branch manager, how do I customize a flyer or a social post without breaking the brand’s layout or colors?

Christopher Brown  

So a template, the template module is really one of our core functions, and it’s really key to most of our customers’ use of our platform. We have a number of different ways to create templates, templates can be anything you want. They can be digital assets, they can be, you know, they can be print assets. And if I jump into just a template, in this case, I’m a multi-location manager, so I’m managing for different locations. So it enables you to set that up, so you know, not every marketers are one location marketer, you may be managing multiple things like that, and then the template itself, one of the things we call it DNA, one of the things that is the theory of our marketing is we want to remove steps from every process, we want to automate as much as possible, automation is very important again, because you want people to get in, get done when they get done. So I’m not, since I’m moderating change, making changes for the Portland location. You see, automatically things are applied to this template: Portland, Oregon, image address, phone number, anything can be brought into a template based on me as a user and what what location I am customizing for, so if I’m in Atlanta and I open this exact same template, it may look very different, it may have Atlanta imagery, Atlanta, that automation is really key, because again, you’re not asking them to make a lot of those changes that are such repetitive tactical changes, you don’t want to have to, you know, do that every time, so you’re just automating those processes.

Christian Klepp  

Sorry, I had a question there, because, and I know this is probably something I asked you in our previous conversation, but because obviously you’re, you know, you’re serving customers all over the world, so I would imagine in different geographies. I think the last one we spoke about was Japan, so obviously they would have to prepare assets in Japanese, right? So, do marketers have that ability to do that on your platform?

 

Christopher Brown  17:15

Absolutely. And based on who I am as a user, if I’m a Japanese user, and I’m in the Japanese market. I log into the platform. My permission structure is set up. I’m only seeing the Japanese assets. I’m only seeing what I need. The platform itself is in Japanese, so I.. so.. so my user experience is also very localized. So I’m a Japanese user working in the Japanese market, I don’t see everybody else’s, I only see what’s important for me in my market.

Ren Agarwal

Okay. Good. Yeah. My follow, Christopher, is you were talking about automation, so tell us about the automation at play when you opened up this document versus a document for another region. What’s going on in the system?

Christopher Brown  

So in the, in the background, me as a user, there is a whole bunch of metadata associated with me, right? So, so what location I’m at, what, what is my contact information, what imagery goes with my location, what you know, like, if there’s a template that says grand opening in Portland, that’s automated, so and then the template itself, when it opens, it’s pulling within the template, there’s fields that are pulling in DNA, and so whatever DNA is being pulled into that template for me is is different when it’s being pulled in for someone in New York or Atlanta or in Austin.

Ren Agarwal

Okay, terrific. So you’ve opened up this template, it says, you know, lock this is original. Don’t edit. What’s the next step? What is what does user do next?

Christopher Brown  

Sure, a couple of other things. Obviously, within templates you can set up, you know, anything can they can be as locked down or as open as you want, and again, it’s a question of, you know, optionality is important. Thing, choose one of three headlines, choose one of three images. We see that a lot. This is a question of setting up the text, so you see I’m typing in lowercase, but it is in uppercase, you know. So, so you’re basically, you can set parameters around that. This can be one line long, it can go to switch to two lines, you can block it at the end of one line, saying this is all the space you get. So, for open text, you can set those parameters around. We also have things like, you know, a pattern recognition, so if there’s a phone number, an open phone number space, it will always be in the correct format, locked in. So now that I’ve sort of made some changes to this particular template based on what I’m allowed to do. We often see if it’s a very open template, you’re giving them a lot of creative freedom to add their own imagery, add their own, you might want to have an approval workflow associated with this, and so basically, before anything can go leave the system, you know, you can have a last check on it, whether it’s a regional marketing team or national, however you want to organize that, you can even have a two-tiered approval process, and then once it’s approved, it can be, it can leave the system. Now, where does it go from there? We’re a pure play SAS platform, so for example, if it’s a Facebook post to the local Facebook page, again, my DNA knows what my local Facebook page is. It can be posted, scheduled for posting, and run an ad unit to my local Facebook page. If this is a print, like, like this particular document, we can tie into your.. if you’re, if you’re using one printer nationally, we can tie into that. So this order gets sent out to that printer if it’s just download for print, it can be download in in print ready format.

Ren Agarwal  

So nice,

Christopher Brown  

Really. Again, every business is different with how they operate and how they want to do it, and that flexibility is really what sets us apart.

Ren Agarwal 

Is it possible to see some of those downstream actions from this screen, like getting to that approval stage or getting to print,

Christian Klepp 

just to see how it works, right?

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, sure. If you have a well, I can show you. Let me show you sort of the back end, and this is the back end. I will, we’ll jump around a little bit, but a couple of things that I do want to mention. So, for example, one of the, one of the advantages of a platform like ours is for digital, for print, the analytics is super important, because now, now you can see across the whole organization what’s happening with all of your marketing assets, so this isn’t really deep business intelligence, but it’s deep marketing asset intelligence, and it can start to be predictive. So, now you can start to set KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) around your marketing assets for reporting to senior management. You can now start to see, hey, these assets people don’t really use, they don’t really like. Okay, we’ll get rid of those assets, or if you see a campaign or some assets that people love using, make more of that type of campaign, so that’s just a note that we definitely see a lot of these, these things start to be informative over time. We have, let’s see, just jumping into approval workflows and requests, creative requests, which I haven’t gotten into yet, so if I jump into, let me just jump into an approval workflow. This is a purchasing approval workflow and a deployment, so you can see that that it’s on the back end, you can see that, and then on the request side, you can see this is a creative request, which I’ll show you, so this comes in, you know, in four, and then again, it’s about efficiency, so we’ve taken away the email back and forth, and we really have an internal chat log where you’re talking to the requester and a general chat log talking to the requester and an internal talking to maybe your designer, Matt. Can you pick this up? So again, we’re taking away those kind of things.

Christian Klepp

What do you see under when you click on approvers? I guess those are the people like internally that like from the brand side that need to review the artwork or

Christopher Brown  

correct, and so you can, you can set up who’s the approval for this or who’s the two stage approval, and from from a front end access it really just reads

Ren Agarwal 

Christopher. Let me just interrupt you there for a second. Help me understand the front end and the back end. Help, help our audience understand what, what does that mean in Marvia?

Christopher Brown  

Sure, the front end is really what the your users see, and the back end is what your sort of management, your core marketing team, your brand team is utilizing to manage the platform, deploy things, all of that.

Ren Agarwal 

Got it. So, you were showing us a template here before.

Christopher Brown  

Yeah,

Ren Agarwal  

so if the user went in, you know, there was a Portland template, grand opening is the expectation the user then sends that for approval after they make changes. Do they just download it. What’s the next step in the workflow?

Christopher Brown  

Sure, so let me just make a couple of changes to one. I believe there’s a workflow attached to this one, and then let me just change out the image again. You can see how all of these pieces interact together to. Give you a, you know, a the ability to do that, and then, depending on the document, as you create it, let’s see if this has a workflow attached to it, and then, and then you would just once, once a document is created, and if it has the workflow, going back to the workflows, if it has the approval workflow, there will be an email prompt to the approval of, hey, this has been requested, each of the purchase, or it’s a, you know, it is a, and then they can make a comment on it, they can approve it or decline it, so they can make a comment, just make some change, or they can actually go in as the user and make a tweak themselves, and then approve it, so like they can just jump into it and say, “You just missed something here, I don’t want to, we don’t have to discuss this, I’ll just go make the change and then approve it.

Christian Klepp 

Sorry, when they click on decline, that basically means that the artworks not approved, right? But does that require them to actually put feedback, because you can’t just decline it without explaining why, right?

Christopher Brown  

Again, it depends on how you’re, how it works. We can even set up workflows for pre-approval, so for example, if you have, you know, I want to do a campaign with these assets for these dates, and you can have a pre-approval workflow where it’s like, yep, you’re good to do that, you know, there’s budget allocation associated with that, etc.

Christian Klepp 

Right, right, okay,

Christopher Brown  

so, so, yeah, workflows can be, can be really creative, depending on how your business runs

Ren Agarwal 

and is workflow that’s created in the back end of the system,

Christopher Brown  

correct.

Ren Agarwal  

Okay, so the and seems like you create a workflow and then you attach it to an asset or campaign or campaign. Okay, so I think we were just looking at an asset where it was a brochure you were editing. Tell us about the concept of a campaign. What is that? How does it work in the platform?

Christopher Brown  

Sure, absolutely. And that’s a big part of what we do. And if I can just jump to a couple of things that will will help make that a little bit more sense. Some of the other modules that we have that we’re seeing utilize to execute is sort of a calendar. This is a great way for you to be able to organize all of your campaigns, initiatives, etc. so that everybody can see, and again, this can be customized by user, so I may only be seeing what’s relevant to my, if you have an East Coast, West Coast campaign, things like that. I’m only seeing what’s relevant to me. Then this is a brief of what is this campaign about, and then the asset kit of assets or campaigns that are associated with executing this, so then you can link directly to that campaign or that asset. Now, not everything is a print and digital asset. Some things are, you know, you know, merch, for example. If I jump to the web shop, some things are, you know, things like T-shirts, squeezy balls, you know, event products, so all of these can be tied into the platform. Again, we can tie into whoever your, your merch supplier is. So, so that manages now. When you bring all those things together, that’s where a kit and a campaign really works. So, for example, if I jump into campaigns first, let’s start with sort of kits, so anything to achieve a business objective. This is a new store opening, but it could be an event kit, is something we see quite frequently. Now you can kit up all the things to achieve that business objective in one place. What do you need if you’re doing an event or a new opening? I need 10 of those. I need you can apply templates to this that can be automatically customized. I need 10 of these templates, so that’s going to customize for my location and my image. I can check order, and now all those orders go out to the suppliers that are applying for them again, that is making it super easy for your users to be able to execute on the business objective. Now you know it can get, it can get, you know, pretty elaborate as far as campaign execution. So now imagine you’re doing a national to local campaign, so you’re running a Mother’s Day campaign nationally for the brand, but you want all of the assets to localize to really engage the local local community, so you can set up these campaigns in a very easy step by step, so and you can put any of your marketing channels into these camp. Campaigns, and again, this is a non-technical user. You want them to be able to roll this out as easy as possible. So I’m going to say, I want, yep, elect, I want email campaign part of this. I want step two is this is the autumn season campaign. These are the dates, you can adjustable dates, these are all the assets needed for that campaign. Again, templates, customized templates. Now you can have any channel in this, so you know we have a.. we’re going to run social ads. Okay, great. On Meta, we’re going to run social ads. We’ve set up three packages for this. What dates do you want those to run? They’re going to be complimentary to the national ad buy as well. You know, often you’ll see sort of a Google ad spend. This can also,

Ren Agarwal  

let me just pause you there. So, Google ad spend, what’s happening when they click on this?

Christopher Brown  

So, via API, we’re integrated with, like, Meta and Google, and Google, so it will be going to the.. it will.. it’ll be just community. Our platform is communicating directly to that platform to execute on that campaign.

Ren Agarwal  

Okay, so it actually sets up, you know, a Google ad campaign, a meta ad group, using these assets automatically

Christopher Brown  

correct,

Ren Agarwal  

and this dollar value. I’m just trying to understand, how does that get communicated? So that gets communicated to the platform as well. That dollar amount is then automatically authorized.

Christopher Brown  

So, yeah, so first of all, any channel can be in this, and they can be varied. So, we have people that are using out-of-home signage components in these campaigns. We have this, you know, direct mail, which I was just showing you, and they’re all going to different suppliers, and so there are some different mechanisms, and, and we also see a lot of variation with customers and how they manage money, right, and so maybe corporates paying for all of this, or maybe in a distribution channel there’s a split, there’s some co-op dollars associated with that, so you can apply some co-op dollars, maybe you know for Google ads or for social, the corporate is going to pay for up to $100 and anything over that is going to be paid for by the by the partner or the location or the franchisee, so those kind of customizations can all be set up on these campaigns.

Ren Agarwal  

Okay, that can get pretty complicated,

Christopher Brown  

you know. It is, you’re doing it already in each platform, so you’re just leveraging the decisions you’ve already made, setting them up relatively easily in our system, and then our system just executes it based on what you’ve already set up. So, for example, the Meta, you know, account – we’re integrated with Meta, but we’re using the brand’s Meta account, so you know those dollars are already set up in however they’ve structured, a lot of times you’ll see the two-tiered setup where the brand will have child pages for their locations or for their partners.

Ren Agarwal  

Wow, very interesting. I can see why an approval would be necessary because dollars are actually being budgeted and allocated to campaigns.

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, so that’s about that gets really complex. Mostly our larger customers are doing those kind of things, but you can also have it simple, like, hey, we have a campaign, this is what we’re trying to do, and here are the assets associated with it, and that actually goes along to playbook. So this is, you know, super helpful for our customers to say, “Hey, what.. what are you trying to do? I, you know, what I want to get more traffic in my business. Okay, great. How do I do that? Do you have a special day you’re trying to, you know, to, you know, get traffic in, or just in general? And I’m gonna go, you know, just in general, I want more traffic. Okay, great. Here’s the assets that we’re using. Here’s the campaign associated with it, and giving them execution again. What we’re trying to do for the non-technical and non, non, you know, sort of marketing professional user is just lead them very simply to accomplish whatever they want to accomplish, so that they can get in and do that, and get out.

Ren Agarwal

Yeah, so this would be like a, you know, like a strategy document. And then, if I get this right, Christopher, if I, if you scroll down, it looks like you can actually start executing directly from this strategy document once you’ve said, “Yes, I’m ready to start.

Christopher Brown  

Correct, what we do a lot of times, what we see customers really appreciating is like, gosh, we’ve got two siloed parts of our campaigns, we’ve got the strategy, the PDF brand guidelines, all that, and then we actually have all the tactical work to

Christian Klepp  

implementation.

Christopher Brown  

Right. And so what we’re doing is we’re just combining those things and. Making it super easy to deploy, and you know when we do that, you know, we see huge uptakes, you know, in one of our large, you know, Fortune 500 customers, we saw a 55 sorry, 57% increase of overall marketing deployed year on year, so within one year they increased, just because they made easy for their frontline users to use it.

Ren Agarwal  

Yeah, okay. So that’s a potential segue. Then, when we think about, you’ve got something called a social campaigns feature. Do I have that right?

Christopher Brown  

Correct.

Ren Agarwal  35:33

Tell us about what is that, because when you talk about volume, you know it’s really social media, so tell us how that feature works.

Christopher Brown 

Sure, so social social campaigns are very specific to a certain use case. That use case is, say, I am a, you know, a business, and I have a lot of distribution partners, or I’ve got a lot of local Facebook pages, a lot of you know franchises are perfect example, because they all have their own local Facebook page, but if you are setting it up where you know you are basically you want to launch that same Mother’s Day campaign and you want to launch it all at the same time in on all those Facebook pages, but you want all that creative and everything to be customized. You don’t want it to be like a generic, hey, we’re going to post to 500 Facebook pages and all the same piece of creative, because that’s just not engaging at a local level. So, what we can do is we set it up, you can have it. What are the locations you’re deploying for? You can set up opt in, opt out, those kind of things, so you know they opt into it, they opt out of it, you know, all those kind of permutations, and then you know you can set up sort of what channels they’re going to, and then set up the template itself, so for example, in this instance, if I go to editing the.. if I go to the variables, so what you see here is, you know, the asset that’s going to be posted. Now you can set up the variables within that asset. So what this does is it actually customizes and localized the creative itself, not just the headline, but the creative itself. So I can set it up so pulling in from my DNA, DNA automatically, so location description. So say this is the address location description. Every one of those 500 posts, the creative will be automatically customized. This is a, this is a game changer for this use case, because a lot of times you have creative teams that are having to customize 500 pieces of creative to localize the address. So, what they do do is they default and just say we’re going to post the same piece of creative across all those Facebook pages. That makes sense. Yeah, and so this this automates that whole process and really saves a huge amount of time.

Ren Agarwal  

Well, I was gonna say that makes sense, Christopher. Just because you know, I think you’re the company’s out of the Netherlands, right?

Christopher Brown  

We’re actually a US incorporated company. We do have.. we were born in the Netherlands.

Ren Agarwal 

Okay, terrific. And I can see kind of that customization and all the local countries in Europe making a big difference. One of the things, Christopher, I’d love to hear also is, I know you’ve been kind of in the industry for a while, and I think you were at a competitor before you came to Marvia, so why Marvia? What did you see at Marvia that made you want to jump and come over, come over to the to this company?

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, I think I think the one thing that was really important to me is they were answering a lot of questions in the market that I kept hearing, but, but most, most other places were not answering it. So, one of the things that I think is super important is understanding that having a centralized, if you’re making people go to multiple platforms, if you’re making people do a lot of steps, it just won’t get done. So, even things like this news feed I’m showing you, right? Like, how do we keep engaged with all of our local, local business partners, or local local employees, or local partners? Like, how do we keep those engaged? So they’re really answering, like, in one place, at the end of the day, we are not a dam, we’re not a template platform, we’re a marketing operations platform. We facilitate marketing operations across the organization, and that is something that I have not really seen done anywhere near as well as what Marvie is doing, so that’s really what attracted me to their product, their mindset, how they’re thinking about the problems that companies are facing, and we really are seeing it with, with the engagement we’re getting from our customers. Right, a lot of our customers are saying, well, I’ve got a dam, and I’ve got a customer request platform, and I’ve got a news platform. And I’ve got all these platforms, but nobody’s going to complex.

Christian Klepp 

Absolutely,

Ren Agarwal  40:05

maybe if I could tell us about how your pricing works for our audience.

Christopher Brown  

Sure, we’re a SaaS platform, we’re a pure play SaaS platform, so we have a dual model where sort of it is sort of by module and by user or location, so we’re not a pure user location, but it is. We deal mainly with our, the corporate, so we don’t, you know, we’re not working with individual franchisees or individual distributor partners. We really work with corporate and to roll it out, and when we really found that that is the if you really want to have an impact on marketing operations, that’s the correct approach.

Christopher Brown  

Absolutely, absolutely. I have two questions for you, Christopher, as we’re wrapping this up. So, you know, you touched on it a little bit at the beginning of this conversation, but one of the things I would say, I would imagine that when you’re having calls with prospects at one of these barriers to entry, as they look at, they look at, they look at this, and go, “Oh no, another platform that we have to learn how to use, right? So it’s the platform adoption hurdle, right, even with all these benefits that you’ve shown us today, but and getting the local partners to use them. So, how does Marvia ensure that, whether it’s a busy franchisee or the local team of a global brand, like I mentioned earlier. How do you ensure that these guys don’t go rogue and just create their own off-brand materials?

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, if they’re gonna jump ship and sort of create their, their, their own, you know, or have their, have their friend who’s a marketing person jump, jump in, you know, there’s there’s really a no, no way that you can stop that, but what you can do, and what we’ve seen is the reason, the motivation that people do that is because what you’re asking them to do is too difficult, and it may not seem difficult from the corporate side, but so you know that my mantra is simplicity equals adoption, so if you make it super easy for these, and I’ll show you a couple examples. This is a global customer of ours that is using us for all of their global operations, and this is for their partner network. This is also for their employee network, and you can see that they’ve set it up basically as a complete marketing tool kit, everything from their product company, so they are bringing in, you know, a lot of product flyers, a lot of event materials, social media, they’re just making it super easy for you to access and deploy what you need to do again, just getting in and getting out as quickly as possible, and another customer example would be this is a b business consulting company, and so,

Ren Agarwal  

yeah, and you’re showing us how it customizes depending upon the brand, is so that’s a nice feature of the platform,

Christopher Brown  

yeah, and some of our customers get quite creative with how they, how they are, how they are, sorry, that

Christian Klepp  

is, go to portal.

Christopher Brown  

Yep,

Christian Klepp 

yeah, yeah, there we go,

Christopher Brown  

yeah. So you know they’ve set it up a little differently, so again they’re jumping through, and again jump through pages, you know, what am I looking for, what am I doing? So it really gives you the idea of how you can organize and access information. So I think that overall you are correct, but if you make it easy, people will do it. I think that’s the, that’s the biggest. You know, you don’t want someone being an amateur designer for three hours out of their day when they should be running the business. Absolutely, absolutely. And so making it easy for them to accomplish what they want and see the results, that’s where you want to be at.

Christian Klepp  

Well, and also, most importantly, making it easy for them to find things rather than to have to go through eight or 10 layers of, like,

Christopher Brown  

sure,

Ren Agarwal

SharePoint,

Christian Klepp

SharePoint.

Christopher Brown  

So, for example, you know, we have a universal search. This is where AI also, where we’re, we’re implementing, you know, you know, user prompt. This is where kind of AI, I think, can really enhance that. That workflow is just finding what you need, accessing it, deploying it, yeah, kind of thing.

Christian Klepp

Yeah, and just, just almost as a wrap up here, because you know, you spoke about how hands on Marvia is when you’re onboarding clients and you’re getting them to training them how to use the platform, like, how much lead time are we talking about here? When you onboard the clients, and you’ll, until they, until they, like, you know, they’re up and running.

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, so we have very simple implementations that can take us as little as four weeks, you know, where we build out the portal, we customize the portal for their business and their workflows, and then you know we have some, you know, global customers that are launching in, you know, 10 different markets within Japan, in Japan, in Europe, from US and Canada, they need multiple portals in different languages. A, that’s one portal based on who I am as a login, that’s why I see the different language, and they have a lot of integrations with other marketing stack tools, or their printer, or their, you know, their single sign on. So, really, we say, you know, basically six to eight is a pretty fair number, most, you know, that is the mean most of all of our customers fall in that six or eight week window,

Ren Agarwal  

that’s not bad, not bad,

Christian Klepp  

not bad, not bad, fantastic. So we are about out of time today. I mean, like, you know, I would love to go on for another two hours and just really get into the nuts and bolts of this stuff, because you know, I used a lot of great branding, yeah, it was a lot of stuff. But thank you so much for the walk through, Christopher. How can folks out there get in touch with you, and most important of all, How could they get their own personalized demo of Marvia?

Christopher Brown  

Yeah, absolutely. You know, feel free to reach out to me at christopher@getmarvia.com that’s christopher@getmarvia.com and I’m happy to set up a time, talk to them, take them a walk through, and like I said, each customer has a different use case and problems that they’re trying to address within their marketing operations. Or you can just go to our website, get marvia.com and fill in a form, and we’re happy to get back to you and get you set up for a conversation. We’re a little bit different than a lot of SAS companies, we’re a little bit more sort of agency type engagement. We want to, we want to understand where your issues are at before we can really apply. Our portal is not one size fits all. Every customer is different, and it needs to be customized to maximize your efficiency in your marketing.

Christian Klepp  

Fantastic.

Ren Agarwal 

Thank you, Christopher. Yeah,

Christian Klepp  

once again, thanks for your time.

Christopher Brown  

Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Have a great day

Christian Klepp 

Okay, bye, bye, bye.