Building the AI-native insights function of the future

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Nataly Kelly: Welcome to Inside Insight, where marketing strategy meets consumer truth with your host, Nataly Kelly.

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Nataly Kelly: For years, the biggest brands in the world have had every advantage. More data, more people, bigger budgets. And yet they're often the slowest to act on it. Because the challenge isn't having data, it's turning it into decisions. That's where things are starting to change.

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Nataly Kelly: Companies using AI and marketing are seeing up to a 20% improvement in customer engagement, not by collecting more data, but by changing how decisions get made. The gap isn't technology, it's structure, how teams are built, how decisions get approved, and how work actually gets done. And that's what AI is starting to expose. In some organizations, it's still just a tool. In others, it's becoming the starting point.

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Nataly Kelly: So what actually changes when you build marketing that way? Natalie I'm Natalie Kelly and today I'm joined by Patrick O'Toole, Chief Marketing Officer at Unleash Brands, a platform reaching over 20 million families across brands like Urban Air, Sylvan Learning and the Little Gym—brands I've personally used as a parent and love. After leading billion dollar brands like Mountain Dew and Burger King, Patrick is now doing something very different, rebuilding a marketing organization from the ground up. With AI at the center, today we'll explore why big brands struggle to change and what happens when you start fresh. Welcome to the podcast, Patrick.

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Patrick O'Toole: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

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Nataly Kelly: Thank you. It's so wonderful to have you. I'm really excited for this conversation.

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Patrick O'Toole: Me too. I think it's, you know, I love the topic and as you said, I love what we're doing here and how we're able to adopt AI into everything we're doing and how it differs from where I spent most of my marketing career. So excited to dig into it today.

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Nataly Kelly: And what a marketing career you've had, Patrick. Love, love your experience, and I can't wait for our listeners to learn more from you. So I'm going to go ahead and get started with my very first question.

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Nataly Kelly: I know you've worked inside some of the biggest marketing organizations in the world and have a very impressive career. Why do you think that the companies with the most data often struggle to act on it?

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, it's really interesting. You look at the companies that I grew up in. So I spent 15 years at PepsiCo. I had the opportunity to work in their snacks division, at Frito Lay, internationally in their international beverages division, and also in the US division. So I got exposure within the company of everything that they did and how they looked at all marketing decisions in different parts of industries and then different parts of the world.

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Patrick O'Toole: And, you know, the biggest thing for me is a lot of this is how they were set up, right? And they built that organization with insights and analytics at the core of what they did. And there was—there was always something that we shared. And I don't, I don't know if it was true, but I think it probably is. As we said, we spent more money on research every year than Harvard does at PepsiCo.

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Patrick O'Toole: And so when you have that established way of doing things, you very much default to it, right? You have a formula of how you unlock and unearth great insights and how you deploy them within the organization. And there's also spend on resources, whether it's agency partners, whether it's internal staffing, on how do you actually integrate that into every decision that you make. And when something disruptive like AI comes along, it's hard to know how to integrate it, right? So I think they struggle a little bit with, hey, we've got this great new tool that's evolving so fast. How do we integrate it into our decisions?

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Patrick O'Toole: And some of it is legacy ways of doing things, but some of it's also safety, right? And some of it's reliability. And they've set up very established protocols and processes. And so I think in a lot of large companies, they look at it and say, hey, how do we integrate this into what we do? There's a natural skepticism and reluctance that comes along with it that is responsible on one side, but also slows them down on another side.

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Patrick O'Toole: And so I definitely saw that at PepsiCo, and then also at Restaurant Brands, where I spent two years as the CMO of Burger King, was just this established way of doing things. How do you integrate it? And how do you integrate it in a way that allows you the continuity of your business, the continuity of your teams, and I think it slows them down a bit.

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Patrick O'Toole: And what we've done here at Unleash Brands, and one of the reasons it was so compelling to me, was the ability to build it from the ground up with AI at the center. And I was always the biggest advocate of, in my other organizations, to my leadership of, hey, how do we adopt these new ways of thinking? Now it's kind of reversed. As I have leadership, I have a board and a boss who's pushing me harder every day to use all the tools and help it unlock a differentiated strategy for us that allows us to beat our competition.

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Nataly Kelly: Wow, that's really fascinating. I love that you talked about how integrating that into something that's kind of already in fighting may be different from building with that from the start and that mentality from the start. I wanted to ask you if there are any structural things that you think play in there and actually slow teams down. Where do you see things breaking in practice?

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, look, I think what slows people down is the trust factor that goes into a new technology, any new technology, but AI is by far the most disruptive that I've seen over the course of my career. In that there's the piece around...

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Patrick O'Toole: Okay. We know through our traditional ways of how we've always done things that we're going to get a certain level of reliability from, whether it's doing quantitative or qualitative research... We know that this formula works. And they also have some restrictions in it. Right. Of, hey, like, we know that we get a lot of insights or data coming in, whether it's through our sales data or, you know, something I'll talk about. What we do here at Unleash Brands is we get consumer surveys through Net Promoter Score, but the amount of data that came in, it was very hard to reliably mine through all of it using traditional methodology.

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Patrick O'Toole: And so, you know, what we've done here at Unleash Brands is we take that Net Promoter Score data that comes to us nearly on a daily basis and we feed it through AI and we have different validation methods to know that it's giving us good, actionable results. And I can get into more details of the how, but I look at where it breaks down is in large organizations, somebody's job or somebody's role, whether it be an agency partner or an internal resource, to go mine through that data, look for patterns, look for getting to reliability, whether statistical significance, things like that, to act on it. And now we can move so much faster and actually detect change much earlier because of the resources we put forth.

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Patrick O'Toole: And some of it's security, some of it's really just inertia. And some of it just, in all honesty, is there's some job protection that goes on, of like, hey, I was the person who interpreted this. Now there's tools that can do it for me, and sometimes there's a reluctance. And what we talk about, you know, I talk about with my team is this is something to enable you to have superpowers, right, to charge you, to make you five times more effective. Our department actually has more people in it than we did when I got here.

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Patrick O'Toole: But our adoption of AI is making those people much more powerful than they were a year or two ago. And the amount of things that we're able to produce on the production side, the amount of insights we're able to glean and get through is just so much more so. And I think a lot of organizations struggled with that comfort level of getting there for a lot of reasons.

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Nataly Kelly: Yeah, I think it's a great point because a lot of people are talking now about AI for productivity and efficiency gains. But what you're talking about is actually leveraging AI for unlocking growth potential. And that is really a smart way to approach it, in my opinion. So I'd love to hear you share more about some of these details. So I know you mentioned kind of the incentives and the layers and the human change. You know, it's a change transformation exercise to kind of get people to think about leveraging some of this technology in a different way. I was wondering if you could shed some light on how you think that shapes what actually gets done versus what should get done.

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, look, I think I'll give an example of how we use it, and it's a really... It's something that we launched into the world on Monday and we're recording this on a Thursday. Um, but so three days ago we were. So we used AI, AI to develop a proprietary insights tool based on all of our consumer research. So we put all of our consumer research into a proprietary LLM that we worked with a behavioral economist on to help understand, hey, when consumers were giving us feedback at...

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Patrick O'Toole: In this case, it's a Sylvan Learning center example. What are the motivators behind what they're saying? What are they really looking for? And they may not tell you directly. And you know, great insights professionals know this and can mine through it.

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Patrick O'Toole: But we looked through all the comments, all the verbatims, and we figured out like, hey, there was—there was something broken with our pricing model and our engagement model at Sylvan. In that Sylvan, you know, to put your child through tutoring, it can be pretty pricey when you look at it holistically. And we were selling, you know, we talk about we were selling the car versus the car payment and how we engaged consumers. And consumers, especially in today's economy, more so want to understand, hey, how much is it going to be to help my child and how long do I have to commit for? And a lot of our pricing programs wasn't set up that way.

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Patrick O'Toole: So the AI helped us mine through our insights and get to, hey, here's how we should think about our pricing. Here's how we should think about communicating consumers. And we looked at and said that's actually a business model unlock for us that we want to go out and test. And so we have about 500 plus centers at Sylvan. We've taken 100 participating centers,

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Patrick O'Toole: We use the insights that we got to quickly and in three weeks we developed an entire consumer flow that's different than how we do it. Where consumers are now able to sign up for a price for every tutoring session. No commitment. They can book online, which we didn't have before. Right.

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Patrick O'Toole: Straight booking sessions online to go build it. And what was kind of funny is we probably could have gotten it done in a week and a half like we were, we were going so fast and the tools allowed our team to move with such high quality and speed to be able to launch and deploy it that we had to slow it down and quality check it. And I was saying to my boss, this should have taken six months to get to the insights to be able to go deploy. And I think we almost look at it like, wow, we can move so fast and really unlock what's going on with the consumer right now. And the ability to get to mass personalization, which we've been talking about for a decade, but now we can actually do.

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Patrick O'Toole: I think some of those layers are getting broken down and some of those things, like where you would traditionally go to an agency and it would take you a month, we can do overnight, is pretty incredible. So it allows us to speed up the process, allows us to get to really personalized offerings that the consumer is looking for, allows us to understand what consumers are looking for at a much tighter and much faster level and really move at the speed of the consumer.

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Nataly Kelly: Wow. You know what I hear is the speed benefit. And I hear, you know, you obviously would have had to pay an agency to do a lot of that stuff in the world. So it's a cost savings benefit. But what I really hear is the speed to delivering a better customer experience at the end of the day, because that's what those tools are ultimately enabling if you're able to stay in lockstep with how the consumer needs are changing. And that's really a great unlock. So that's so exciting. Patrick, thank you for sharing that.

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Nataly Kelly: You mentioned that AI is now step one for you. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more in practice, what does that actually mean about how decisions get made? And maybe you have an example you could share or help our listeners understand it more in practice, what it looks like.

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, and so what we mean by step one is, and you know, I'll go all the way back to like when we hire someone, the first thing we have to do is talk about why AI can't do this role or how AI is going to complement this role. And as I said, it has not resulted in us having a smaller department now it changes up some of kind of our agency roster and what we in house versus what we have out of house.

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Patrick O'Toole: And you know that web development example that I used, we can get things done in a matter of hours that would have taken us weeks before. And it's just more efficient to have that manpower sitting here versus sitting with our agency partners. But we still have a big agency roster that are a key part of our team. But step one is really like, how do we staff it in house versus out of house? How can we use AI to help complement it?

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Patrick O'Toole: And then we look at things through a lens that I learned back at PepsiCo, which is kind of the 70, 20, 10 lens of 70% of what we do and work on is tried and true methodology that we know is going to work. So things that are validated by MMMs, things that we know are going to move the needle and drive the business. 20% is that validated new space around, it's emerging and you know, some of it might be media partners or emerging ways of engagement through our CRM. And that 20% and then 10% is really just true experimentation and testing and ultimately everything. You know, the 10% should flow into the 20 and the 20 should flow into the 70.

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Patrick O'Toole: Eventually we're able to really get smarter and more efficient on our 70% with the use of AI, of faster validation through some of the tools that we have. Is it working? Is it driving the business? And then we can spend more time on what's next. And again, in today's consumer environment, right, where you've had consumer sentiment hovering in an all time low for a year and a half, we need to make sure that all of our businesses are able to engage with consumers in the way that's most relevant for them right now.

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Patrick O'Toole: And, and you know, as I was talking before about, like mass personalization, you know, it was kind of funny like, and this is something that may or may not even be AI, but you know, I got, I got a really personalized push notification from McDonald's yesterday. And I eat McDonald's twice a year. You know, I don't want to tell my Burger King friends that. But, you know, it's, it was just mass. It said my name, it knew like what I ordered most frequently.

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Patrick O'Toole: I'm like, wow, what a smart way to engage. It knows what I like, it knows who I am. And AI is unlocking a lot of that. And I put that in kind of a 10% bucket of I looked at it and say, hey, how do we, how do we use that?

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Patrick O'Toole: And say, hey, your daughter just did a cartwheel at the Little Gym yesterday. You know, it's summertime and you know, maybe it's time to move her into swim lessons at our water wing school. And like, these are great compliments and here are great incentives based on, you know, your zip code. I know how many kids you have, I know their ages. Let me put together a personalized messaging or personalized offer for you.

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Patrick O'Toole: So we're, we're doing that to really get better at that 10%. And a lot of that is just unlocked by having AI flow all the way through the chain on how do we build and set up our teams, how do we choose our agency partners, and then how do we engage with consumers.

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Nataly Kelly: Wow. You know, my brain is just spinning as a marketer on all the potential. You know, I'm thinking about my own kids and thinking about, I just literally yesterday I had to manually copy and paste every item from their school calendar and every day off and every start and end date, which I think every parent does.

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Patrick O'Toole: Yes.

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Nataly Kelly: But you with their zip codes know when the school cycle will start, when they're going back to school, when you can have camps, when you can have all those, you know, activities and things planned around the district level, you know, school calendars. And you never—like, I think as a CMO before I would have been like, well, that's just going to be like a two year effort to get that data. But now with AI, you can do it in a day, probably, you know.

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, well, it's, and that's, that's what the, the coolest thing for me about this opportunity was the amount of families that we engage and that are within our CRM.

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Patrick O'Toole: Right. So we, we engage with about 20 million families a year. So one in every four kids comes through one of our brands. And we are, we're going to be launching some more engagement tools. I can't talk about them just yet because they're on the horizon, but some more engagement tools will allow us to get closer to families.

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Patrick O'Toole: And really we want to be an aid for families. Right. We want to be a parenting companion of like, you might not know when your kids' days off are, but we know and we can help you understand. Hey, this is coming up and, um, a lot of times we're not even going to send you information that's, that's relevant to one of our brands. We just want to gain your trust.

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Patrick O'Toole: Right. We want to be like, hey, like Unleash Brands knows what I'm going through as a parent and here are some things they've done that have really helped me out. And when it comes to the time where you're thinking about tutoring for your kids, hopefully you'll think about Sylvan. Right. And that's, that's how we're building it, is we want to be a companion first and, and a helpful aid for every parent that's out there that's got mom brain and everything going on that's, you know, in the craziness of our modern lives.

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Patrick O'Toole: We're a company that gets and understands you and can help deliver solutions. And in return we hope that you, you, you'll think about our brands when the time comes for you to get swim lessons or tutoring or want to take your kids out for a fun Saturday at, at one of our Urban Airs.

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Nataly Kelly: Wow. It's exciting to think about the potential there as a parent. I can't wait to see what you're going to be launching soon. There's so much potential now with all that AI has given us in terms of speed and capability and capacity. So I'm curious, Pat, can you talk a little bit about how that changes the traditional flow of marketing and insights as you've seen it in some of these very large organizations and what you think the impact will be on research, testing, decision making? I mean, you're already seeing it unfold and what you're rolling out at Unleash Brands, but maybe you can share more about that.

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I talked a little bit earlier about, you know, our work with a leading behavioral economist in building out LLMs and, you know, I look at it from an insights standpoint. And when I look at areas that were light when I arrived, that we've invested heavily in insights, consumer based insights...

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Patrick O'Toole: Like we did some stuff on an ad hoc basis but really didn't have a team 100% focused against it. Analytics is another one where we had business analytics but we weren't doing growth science. And so we've stood up a growth science team that is AI first and then CRM. As I said, we're having 20 million people within our CRM. How do we really use AI and our teams to unlock giving you something that's so personalized again, down to your zip code, down to your kid's age, like knowing where they go to school, knowing like the key events that are coming up in your life, in their lives.

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Patrick O'Toole: How do we best serve you as, as a consumer? I look at that, that's really going to change massively. And something that we're doing with, you know, on the, on the consumer insight side is we built consumer persona based on millions of pieces of data on all of our brands. So again, any brand that you go into from Unleash Brands, there's really two sources that we're getting insights from outside of traditional collection methods. The first is when you go and leave Google reviews on our locations, we can glean insights from that.

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Patrick O'Toole: And I'll use Urban Air for example. And one of the things that we built out by looking at our Google reviews and then our Net Promoter verbatims that we get is moms aren't telling us this directly through qualitative research, but behind what they're giving in these reviews is like, safety is really a concern of mine. When I go to Urban Air, I see you hooking my kid up to a zip line that's 20ft in the air. Or they're, they're on these 10 foot, we call it Stairway to Heaven. There are these pillars that kids climb and they're harnessed in. Like, they're thinking about safety.

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Patrick O'Toole: Right? Like, is my child safe? And Urban Air is incredibly safe. Right. We test, we go through great lengths to make sure that safety is at the top of everything we do.

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Patrick O'Toole: But mom still has that doubt in her mind and we can actually glean that from the things she's saying in her reviews. And so what has changed is like in our ads, we intentionally show kids being clicked in. We show harnesses being tightened. We give those safety cues that are reassuring to mom of like, hey, like we're, we're a safe place to take your kids where they can push themselves and discover bravery in a way that maybe they haven't before. Those insights, you know, would have taken some really deep consumer focus group and qualitative sessions to go unearth that.

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Patrick O'Toole: We can now get it from other collection methods that we have and help translate it into our messaging and everything we're doing and making that more prominent on our website, our language just, just backing that up. And AI has helped us get there much faster and much more efficiently than we would have been able to do in the past. And so being able to use those inputs differently and get to really actionable insights fast and how you deploy those insights and then being able to test those again.

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Patrick O'Toole: We have AI testing methodology that we're putting in. Say, is this going to resonate with our consumers? And then go. Validating it through traditional methods allows us to go so much faster and so much more efficiently than I was able to do in past stops in my career.

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Nataly Kelly: Wow, that is so interesting. And that trust and safety message, how to infuse that. And I'm just thinking, like, if you're any brand and you have a message that because of an insight, you realize is super important, the blocker, I think, as a CMO used to be, well, how do I go back to all my inventory and infuse that message in the things that we're running? But now with AI, you could, you know, have an agent go and review all of those assets and determine, well, which ones and what percentage and how do we optimize and where are the ones that will be easy to optimize versus how hard and the least costly and the most effective. And, oh, it's so cool to think through all the things that we can do now that we couldn't have done before.

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah. And as you said before, the data was always there. And all of us as CMOs are like, man, if I could just figure out how to get to it. And we would commission studies. Right. And we would try to figure it out.

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Patrick O'Toole: You'd have this moment in time study that helped you answer the question as effectively as you could. But now, too, as we talked about, with the consumer changing, with the economy changing, and you can stay on top of the pulse of the consumer in a way that you couldn't before to go deliver against. What we've always been trying to deliver is how do we give the best experience to each individual consumer? How do we communicate in the most impactful way to the different segments that we have?

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Patrick O'Toole: And like, you know, a lot of times your segments are almost going away. Right? Like, you can get to, hey, what's important to Natalie or what's important to your neighbor that's different from you? And how do we communicate and deliver an experience that works for you? And again, we've always known that that is, you know, the holy grail, but now we can actually start to get to it, which is super exciting.

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Nataly Kelly: Yeah, this is so exciting. Like you said, mass personalization or personalization at scale is finally becoming within reach for a lot of us. So that's really wonderful. So another question that comes to mind for me, knowing that you have this incredible CRM with potentially billions of data points, given the number of contacts that you mentioned, you're using all those inputs, the real reviews, the NPS scores you mentioned to generate insights and personas, what have you learned about the reliability of that information? You know, that's one thing that commonly comes up as a blocker when we're using AI is like, how much can I trust it? Can it get us 80% there, 100% there? Any thoughts on the reliability?

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, look, we always are working to use traditional methods to validate reliability. Like, AI is exciting, but still in its infancy, and we very much still hire experts A, to bring in that human perspective that we've all either innately have. If we're earlier in our career, that we've developed this gut and this feel over time of like, yeah, you know what?

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Patrick O'Toole: Like, safety. You know, I'll go back to the safety thing. In Urban Air. It's like, you know, if you just took the data as it stood, we would just be like, all of our communications are, Urban Air is safe, a safe place to bring your kid. And really, that's not what we're selling, right?

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Patrick O'Toole: We're selling adventure. We're selling your kids having, displaying courage and bravery and making connections within our park. And so it was, hey, like, safety is important, but how do we infuse that in the right way? And then how do we use our tools to go test it? And actually, some of our initial testing in the LLMs like that got back was like, you need to lean more into safety.

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Patrick O'Toole: Well, then we went and actually validated it and said, no, moms don't need to hear about it directly. They just need to see these subtle cues. And actually, we changed on how our model worked and evaluated creative. And so there is this piece around. You can't just rely on it holistically.

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Patrick O'Toole: And if not, or if you do, you're going to get some hallucinations. Everybody's work is going to look the same. And so you do need to take some perspective to it and then some validation through traditional methods and then some tweaking, optimizing of it to get it to what works best for your specific brand. And we're constantly doing that. So while we put AI at the center, we still very much want to make sure that we're validating it, that it is working as intended, and that we don't have an overreliance on it.

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Patrick O'Toole: And I think there is this instinct to have an overreliance on it. Like, hey, I can just get my answer right here. You know, I can be a one man band and get all of the answers through AI and just go have people create the things or have AI create the things they need. And I think, hey, that might be a future state, but we're pretty far from it right now. And so having that human intervention, having that traditional validation is still so important as you optimize the tools to set them up to be ultimately what works best for your particular brand.

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Nataly Kelly: Wow, I love that. And what really resonates for me from that, Patrick, is the role of the human expert is changing. And you even mentioned how you brought in a behavioral science expert at the start of the process, but also needed at the end of the process. That expert human expertise is like, where do we put it? It used to be maybe we were wasting human time by having them do a lot of grunt work that AI can now do for us, but now the value of those human experts even grows exponentially.

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Patrick O'Toole: It does. And it's, it's, you know, as we look at it, it's, it's very interesting. I hired, is one of the areas that I wanted to lean into was analytics and growth science. So I hired a growth scientist, brilliant, you know, Ph.D. from, from great institution, great experience. And I said, go build out your team.

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Patrick O'Toole: And I said, but I want you to be start from AI. I want you to use all the tools. And we use our AI tools and we've set up our, our environment. And you know, I sat with him, HR actually came to me and said, hey, like he's not filling these roles that we said he needs to go fill. And I sat him down, I said, hey, man, like the HR is bringing you candidates and you're talking to them? He's like, look, I actually thought I needed this when I set out.

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Patrick O'Toole: Now I'm seeing everything that we can go do and I need a different type of candidate, I need a different type of mindset. And a lot of times we're hiring for experience and mindset. Like some of our most productive AI forward people are not our 23 year old fresh out of college who are natives in this space. One of our most forward thinking AI developers is the exact opposite of the profile you think it'd be. He's older, he's very traditionally trained, but he has decided to embrace this and see how he can use his expertise married with AI.

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Patrick O'Toole: And so he's actually creating a little bit of a problem because I swear HR shares a wall with me. They're a little bit mad at me of like hey, we keep bringing you candidates and we're like well what we thought we needed even three weeks ago is different than what we need now. And our candidate profile needs to change because that human intervention is very important but different from what it was in the past. And I think some people are more adaptable to it and some profiles are more adaptable to it than what we thought we needed when we set out.

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Nataly Kelly: That's so interesting. You know the org does—it has major consequences on org design. And also, you know, the fact is you need that curiosity and adaptability at the forefront because of the fact that things are changing and what's possible is like the, the needle is moving so fast that you have to be super adaptable, hyper-adaptable in this day and age. But also because expertise is more important and lived experience and judgment are more important. Sometimes it might be people who have more years of experience behind them in some cases or, or maybe rich domain experience, you know, not making it age related but like the depth of experience seems to matter differently than it did in the past. So really fascinating findings that you're sharing with us.

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Nataly Kelly: Patrick, I love how you're thinking about this. So I have another question for you about the shift and what does this shift do to speed and team structure? You know, what changes and what stays the same. Same?

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Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, again, we're, we're kind of finding out and what, what I, what I love about Unleash Brands is the adaptability that we have and then the, the top down push for us to, to be modern.

[00:29:08]

Patrick O'Toole: Like I said I, I as the marketing team and, and somebody that, that always kind of has been tech forward, I've been the one pushing and now I'm actually getting pushed from above of like hey, let's, let's make sure we're integrating all of these things in and if the business case is there and it makes sense for us to have a different type of profile, a different team size, a different candidate size, I'm being pushed for it. And so I would say speed is, there's even sometimes where we need to slow ourselves down and say, hey, are we going to too fast and building out the team we thought we should build out because we never want to hire people into a role that is not what we thought it was going to be when we brought them in. Right. And so we're, we're actually having to slow a bit and say, hey, from an org design structure, are these the right head, amount of headcounts we need? Is this the right skill set we need?

[00:30:00]

Patrick O'Toole: Is this the type of work that we thought we needed even a few weeks ago, a few months ago? So it is you. We have gone too fast in some ways of like, hey, we thought we needed this and actually we don't. We've tried to pivot people to different places. So, you know, my, my learning from it is don't be scared to do what my growth scientist did of like, hey, like, maybe we need to push the pause button and give it a month.

[00:30:28]

Patrick O'Toole: As, like, even like, as new models have dropped from our AI partners of saying, you know what, like, we thought we needed three people to go do A, B and C, but AI can actually do it reliably for us and we validate it. Let's actually move those three headcounts to a different place as to where we're going next. So I would say from speed in team structure, there is a, there has been a tendency in our culture to go too fast and, you know, we started the conversation about maybe other places going too slow. But with this adoption, you need to move at the right pace and set yourself up for success because the last thing you want is to bring a lot of people in whose jobs change dramatically and are different from what they thought it was going to be. Or people like—you touched on the word adaptability.

[00:31:16]

Patrick O'Toole: If you don't have the right adaptability, I think in this, in this new modern marketing world, we're all going to have to be adaptable and we're all going to have to be ready. Like, you know, we're speaking on a week where, you know, Google has changed their, their, their, their search outputs and algorithm for the first time. Like, we've, we're scrambling on how do we adapt to that and do we need to hire differently to meet that. And as, as our publishing partners change, as algorithms change, you know, we're trying to adapt along with it.

[00:31:44]

Patrick O'Toole: So I think that's going to be the biggest trait for modern marketers is how do we adapt to everything that's going on? Because as we talked about, our experience and our skill sets are still so valuable, but our ways of doing things and how we learn to do them have got to change or we're going to be left behind.

[00:32:06]

Nataly Kelly: Yeah, I think that's such a great point. And you know, the pacing that you touched on, and I think a lot of companies are struggling with that because when you can move really fast and make quick action, the importance of having the right strategy and knowing that what you're putting pointing to is higher than ever. Because it used to be that you could have a small bet and deploy, you know, and test and iterate, but those bets now become incrementally bigger and faster. And so go like going, going slow so fast. The point that you made about sometimes we need to actually slow down and think, okay, are we absolutely sure we're pointing our resources in the right direction? So, so wow, the great insights from you.

[00:32:44]

Nataly Kelly: Thank you so much, Patrick. So I have a few lightning round questions I'd like to ask you.

[00:32:51]

Patrick O'Toole: All right, let's go.

[00:32:53]

Nataly Kelly: Wonderful. So question number one. What's one thing big companies do that guarantees they move slow?

[00:32:59]

Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, I think bureaucracy, approval processes and I think some of it too is fear. Right. And you know, not, not having accountability. And when you stick your neck out on a decision and you know, a lot of places I've been were decisions by committee.

[00:33:15]

Patrick O'Toole: And you know, one thing that I really feel a lot of freedom, especially when I talk to friends at some of my, my old stops, is like they have to go through six bodies of governance to get anything done. And I think they need to start working on how do you break down those barriers? How do you extend more trust? How do you experiment thoughtfully? We talked about 70, 20, 10.

[00:33:34]

Patrick O'Toole: I think that still applies. But I think making sure that you're breaking that down and allowing your teams to thoughtfully experiment, to move at the speed where I think marketing teams need to move in this day and age.

[00:33:44]

Nataly Kelly: That's great advice. What's one signal that you trust most when trying to understand real consumer behavior?

[00:33:51]

Patrick O'Toole: Honestly, I still love digging into reviews. I read way too many reviews, like in a place that like, not our reviews, like, I feel like even if, if I send something out, people want to be nice back to us. And you know, unless they're really angry, they'll probably dial down their perspective. But when they go on Google and they go on Yelp or they go on other forms, even Reddit, and give their honest, anonymous reviews, I think that's when you get to the most useful insights of when people are, are just sharing, sharing in what they feel is a safe space. I think gives you the best advice, advice in your business.

[00:34:31]

Nataly Kelly: Listening to the customer 100%. That's always going to be true.

[00:34:35]

Patrick O'Toole: Yeah. And going straight to the customer's words, you know, straight to the horse's mouth. I love that advice.

[00:34:40]

Nataly Kelly: So Patrick, what's one insight from your Burger King or PepsiCo days that still shapes how you think today?

[00:34:48]

Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, look, I think humans are emotional, right? We're, we're emotional creatures, emotional beings. And like, you know, I look at, you know, we balance like AI creative is one that we look at and say, do we use AI creative? And we haven't really gone there. We're testing it on some of our smaller brands. But I still think like finding that insight that drives emotional resonance and it might be the personalization we're talking about, but I, I still think having an emotionally resonant brand, like we're going to make decisions based on emotion and logic, but emotion still is, is a predominant force. And I always worked on brands where there's a lot of other choices. Like, you don't have to drink a Pepsi, you don't have to eat a Dorito, you don't have to buy a Whopper. Our job is to make it emotionally resonant and help solve the problem that you're looking to solve as a consumer in that moment. I think that's always going to be true, even on the brands that I work on now.

[00:35:41]

Nataly Kelly: Excellent advice. What's one thing marketing teams should stop doing if they want to move faster?

[00:35:47]

Patrick O'Toole: Look, marketing, marketing, we always move with caution because we do the most visible work in the organization and a lot of times we are where blame is assigned when things aren't going right. And look, I would say how do you create an environment that allows you to move faster and make some mistakes? And I love fail fast in that philosophy in a lot of places. You know, marketers say that, but they actually don't get the freedom to do that. I think being in an organization where you have the trust to do that or being able to have conversations upward of like, hey, we're going to try some things and things are going to, going to go wrong. Like right now, you know, we, we work with Vayner on creative. Like we put out 10 social posts a day and I had to like tell our team and our franchisees, like, some of these are going to miss and some of them are going to look weird and like it's okay, but some are going to hit that we weren't expecting and you just need to be okay with, with a little bit of failure as long as it's laddering to learnings and long term success.

[00:36:39]

Nataly Kelly: Excellent. So what's one assumption about AI and marketing that you think is completely wrong?

[00:36:46]

Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, look, I, I think we're a proof point of it's not coming for jobs unless you're not going to be adaptable. I think human beings over time, whenever disruptive technologies have come, like we've adapted. And I think it's the same thing here. As I said, our department is bigger than when I got here and we're using way more AI, but we are cranking out way more things to help us better serve our consumers and help us beat our competition.

[00:37:10]

Patrick O'Toole: And so I think, yeah, certain, certain roles and certain jobs are going to have to adapt. And you know, certain, certain roles might not be as, as prominent as they were in the past. And as people we're just gonna have to, to pivot what we know and what we've learned into what is going to be the future role. And so I, I think, I don't think it's coming for jobs. I think the jobs are just going to move around a little bit and it's going to make us all work smarter and, and actually that human perspective is going to make us more valuable versus less valuable.

[00:37:41]

Nataly Kelly: Wonderful. So before we let you go, Patrick, we have just one last question we ask all of our guests.

[00:37:47]

Patrick O'Toole: All right.

[00:37:49]

Nataly Kelly: As AI changes how decisions get made across organizations, what's one thing marketing and insights teams need to do together over the next few years to make companies move faster without losing the human understanding behind the work?

[00:38:02]

Patrick O'Toole: Yeah, look, I think that's the piece is you always have to keep the consumer, the human at the center of everything that you do. I think once you go away from that, that's where things start to fall apart. And so we always used to, I was part of recruiting and interviewing teams at Frito Lay and Consumer. And human centricity is always what we look for in recruiting great marketers. And so I think with so many tools and so many things going on, so much data coming at you, that's the easiest thing to forget about. I think the great organizations, the great marketers, the ability to win is never lose that.

[00:38:34]

Patrick O'Toole: And how do you use the tools to better understand that versus to move past it or move faster without taking that consideration. So consumer human centricity is always going to be central as I think as long as there's humans on this planet, you know, if we, if, if we start selling to robots down the line, maybe that will change. But I think right now, as long as is humans are our consumers, that centricity is, is what's going to, going to be our unlock. And no matter what comes along, whether it's AI or the next thing down the forefront that we don't even know about yet, that's going to be super important.

[00:39:10]

Nataly Kelly: I love that answer. Putting the consumer at the center. You can never go wrong.

[00:39:14]

Patrick O'Toole: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:39:16]

Nataly Kelly: So that wraps up this episode of the Inside Insights podcast. Thanks again to my guest, Patrick O'Toole, CMO at Unleash Brands, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Patrick, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or at insideinsightspod.com or you can visit his company website at unleashbrands.com. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a regular stream of research and Insights knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. Okay, that's all for today. We'll see you on the next episode of Inside Insights.