Hello and welcome to our CMO panel hosted by the CIM Greater London Region. My name is Chris Daly and I am the Chief Executive of the Charter Institute of Marketing and today we will be discussing with our panel of leading CMOs why it is crucial to invest in technology and skills to succeed in a post-COVID world. If one thing is for certain, the pace of change and the need for lifelong development has never been more prominent. The catalyst for today's event is CIM's CMO 50 report which explores the views of 50 of the UK's leading marketers from business, the third sector and the agency world. It uncovers our confident CMOs and marketing directors feel about the future together with the big issues about keeping them awake at night. In particular, we will discuss three key issues highlighted in the report first being how COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation, the second being what marketers must do to keep up with technology and innovation and thirdly how marketers are bridging the digital skills gap to succeed in a post-COVID world. It is my great pleasure to introduce our host of the day, Mocky Kahn, who is chair of the CIM Greater London Region. Mocky, over to you. Thank you Chris and thank you to everyone for joining today's panel discussion. It's great to see so many of you have tuned in. We have a lot to fit in before two o'clock. Just to remind everyone, this session is being recorded and will be available on CIM YouTube channel. Just to give everybody a background and context, over the last past couple of years, the pandemic has taken, has shaken all industries in an unprecedented way. Digital transformation has accelerated beyond expectations and inspiring CMOs were at the helm at many companies as they innovated to keep abreast of these changes. Today we have brought together leading and high-profile CMOs to discuss some of the key trends they have seen and the technology and the digital skills that they are investing to stay competitive. I really want to encourage you to submit questions, which I will be submitting to the panelists towards the end of the session. You can do this by using the question mark icon on your screen. If you're watching it on a laptop, you find it's on the right-hand side of your screen or on the top or bottom if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. I really want this session to be interactive, so please be sending your questions and our panelists are waiting for them. I have great privilege in introducing our exit panel and I'm delighted to welcome Christoph Wollman, CMO with Dr. Bank. Hello, Christoph. Ruth Wollman, CMO of Avernard. Hi, Ruth. Hi. Paul Bolt, CMO of Microsoft UK. Hi, Paul. Hey, good afternoon, everyone. And Rika Wickerman-Brun of Managing Director of MRM who are part of McCanns. So welcome, everyone. It's really great to see you and thank you for taking your time out of your busy schedule and joining us today. So let's start. What we're going to do, we're going to spend 10 to 15 minutes on each topic and my role is obviously to moderate but also be timekeeper. So the first topic we'll discuss is digital trends. And the first question we have is what digital trends have emerged in the industry over the last couple of years? So Christoph, would you like to kick start on this one? Thank you very much, Mocky. And yes, just by way of explanation, I'm the CMO of Deutsche Bank's corporate bank who deals with business to business clients or corporate and institutional clients, not retail clients. But it's interesting that we observe, and I'm sure many of the listeners of yours do the same, that there is a merging trend between B2B marketing and B2C marketing in terms of what audiences are expecting. And that's exactly what we've seen over the last years and particularly amplified by the pandemic, where in the past, very often a corporate website was basically sort of just a showcase of product capabilities. And it wasn't really actively using or used as a marketing funnel workhorse, so to say. That has completely changed in line with also an emphasis on email marketing and an emergence of the whole social media channels. So when we're also looking at trends that Gartner has observed, where the channel allocation has been moving, 72% of the marketing channel allocations really gone into that digital channel route website, email, mobile, and then compounded by digital ads and search ads and social NSEO. And that's actually what we see, that kind of engaging with your audiences compared to in the past purely sending and positioning is much more important than ever before. Thank you, Christof. What other panelists' views on this? I want to add, I think, absolutely right, Christof, and obviously we see that a lot in the agency as well. I think it's also, I think, it's not only channels, but I feel the audiences have broadened as well. It's that you're not just one person. Yeah, so a grandmum can be a gamer. We're using information, we're using gaming to provide information in Brazil. They use gaming to really get push on the vaccines. 40-year-old mother of a 16-year-old is also a TikTok user, and a B2B marketing manager is also an Instagramer. So I think the audiences in conjunction with what you just said have broadened as well, which I think is a really interesting thing that's come out of the pandemic as well, that we need to accelerate and move towards as well. Thank you, Rika. Ruth, what are your views on this? Yeah, I think I build on what Rika just said. The pandemic has meant that everybody's had to digitize faster than they were before. And I think whether it was age groups that were more operating online, more than others, if I take an example of my mother's in her 70s, she'd never done online banking until the banks weren't open. And so she was forced to be able to do more things online than she'd ever done before. But also, we're in the B2B space and only operating B2B. We've seen so many of our clients that perhaps have been in more traditional industries that weren't born in the digital age, digitized because of the pandemic. So whether that's education, healthcare, parts of financial services that perhaps were slower in terms of adopting digital have been forced to digitize. And I'm actually now rethinking how they operate differently because of this forced digitization. And that's both their organization as a whole, but also roles within that organization. So I think that's just created a whole level of digital literacy that we've not seen before. And that's both a good thing and a bad thing in terms of just some of the risks that that presents from a cybersecurity perspective across the board. So we're definitely seeing that as well from both an individual level, but also an industry level. I'd also like to quickly jump in. Sorry to jump in because we should make this a live debate. I think it's important at this point in time, also to think about what Ruth and Ricky just said. When you are classical markets here and your idea springs into your head straight away, you know, persona models, I think you all have seen on social media this funny comparison of two pictures. That person that is born in 1940 lives in a castle and is a very famous person. And two persons like that, one was Prince Charles and one was Ozzy Osborne. So forget about that persona-based marketing. Ricky just said a grandma can be a gamer. So we have to also, next to observing the channel explanation, we have to leave our mind prison of bankers like me always wear ties. No, they don't. And that's exactly what we need to observe in marketing next to the whole technology and budget challenge. So it requires a completely different set of skills, experience and mixture in the team. But we are definitely elaborating on that later. Thank you, Christophe. And I just want to say to the rest of the panelists, if there's anything that you want to come in or you want to challenge what someone else said, please do step in. As Christophe said, we want this to be a discussion. So Paul, obviously, you know, CMO of Microsoft and obviously technology led. What have you seen in the last couple of years? Yeah, I think, I mean, firstly, I think the world has indelibly changed. And I think a lot of what the panelists are saying is like the rules, the rules have shifted. The world is different. I think the biggest trends that I've seen are the level of expectation about customers. So I'm talking through the B2B lens at Microsoft. So thank you to the B2C marketeers who have created incredibly high standards over the years. That's no bled fully through into B2B. And so the expectations in terms of how our customers engage with us, those expectations are higher than ever. And I think probably our first earnings call after the pandemic, I think I see, I've probably said something along the lines of we've seen two years worth of digital transformation in the last two months. I think the other really interesting trend to come out of it is, you know, some businesses were prepared and ready and fit and good to go into this environment. Others weren't and still aren't. And so I think you see there's a lot of opportunity at the moment as well for market disruption and business model disruption. You know, I mean, who, you know, for example, a year or two years ago, I think a lot of people would have thought, you know, twice about buying a car online through an organized, you know, they've never seen before.  I think about sourcing in buying cars. There's a lot of disruption in the market. And I think some organizations are reimagining and rethinking their operating models and will pivot themselves beautifully for the opportunity that's ahead. And by the way, I'm very optimistic about the future. I think post vaccine, you know, post Brexit, we have to be optimistic. Because I think all the corporations and maybe public sector and academic institutes on, you know, on this call, I think we've got to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as the economy, you know, rebuild, as we look at building a fairer, more equitable economy. And everything we're talking about now, the skills, the technology, the disruption, really enable us to kind of reimagine what the UK could look like. And I think that's probably one of the most exciting parts. Not so much that everything I agree with what's been said. I just think there's a much bigger opportunity for us to reimagine and reinvent what the UK looks like. And I think technology and skills, and I will continue talking about those, are absolutely central to us being competitive as an economy, investable as an economy, and to rightfully underplace all the global stages in the economy. So there's this ginormous movement underneath these kind of marketing trends we're talking to, which is a market here as well. I'm really excited about how we think about embracing them and how the organizations we work for, as I say, are part of the solution, not part of the problem, as we adjust to an indelibly changed United Kingdom. And I think you speak to many people who would say the biggest driver of digital transformation in their business has been COVID, not their CMO, not their CDO. And so it's been huge. And I think there's a lot of dust still to settle, but there's an amazing opportunity for us, CMOs and as business leaders, to really think about how we become part of the solution, how we embrace the opportunity that's been presented in the global and the UK economy because that bit's vast. I'm less interested in the tactics. I'm kind of more interested right now around how we step into a position where we're seen as part of the solution, as somebody who's invested in the UK as a trusted organization. I think that's really interesting in there. It's not about how do we go to market. It's about there's a chance for the right organizations to step forward, step in, be held accountable and be trusted within the UK. I think that's probably the most exciting trend that's emerged from this. Thank you, Paul. A couple of you already used the term expectation. So I think the next question for me to ask you is, you're all from different sectors, which is great. So do you think within marketing has metered expectations certainly in your sector? What has pandemic actually done to accelerate the transformation and technology? So who would like to take that? Well, I can start if you like, because whenever I have the opportunity to speak to very valuable audiences like today's audience, I try to find that corner that we marketeers do not have to spend half of our life justifying our existence and succumbing to KPIs and whether we are needed in the board or not. To be honest, marketeers are more needed than ever before. And the pandemic has showed this very clearly. Give you an example. In my industry, I started a couple of years ago with what is now a solid trend of content marketing. I insourced journalists and started creating content myself as opposed to having sponsored content statements written by some people who don't understand our industry. And that helped me that when the pandemic hit, the very next day, clients were expecting us to educate them on how is treasury changing? What are the priorities? How do you manage your supply chains? I give you another example. When the unfortunate invasion of Russia and Ukraine happened, that was on a Friday night. On a Sunday night, we had a complete website up and running that advised clients on what is the nature of sanctions? What do you have to do with your payments? What happens when you have outstanding business with counterparts in Ukraine? This was even before any German official or other country official website published this. And this responsiveness is enabled by a technology but also by a team that has the capability and the content creation capability. So to answer the question about marketing's relevance, if not now, whenever, can we better show that we are not push vehicles of corporate brand messages and getting products out of the door? That's the job of sales. You have to get rid of what you have. Marketing is the one that shows the competence that gives the gift of giving information and context so that a client can decide where they go. Because it's ultimately where there's B2C or B2B. It's a people's business. And human marketing is what will drive the future. And we as marketers, therefore, shouldn't spend our time in justifying which KPIs are relevant or not. Of course, you have to have material KPIs in terms of showing whether re-engagement hits any or strikes any cause or not. But that for me is like, yeah, I mean, a car has four wheels. Why do I still question this? Just move on and get into a different stage of discussion. Thank you, Christoph. Rika, I'd like to bring you in here because you're from the agency world. So what Christoph was saying, you know, they were very ready, very quick and could set up the website and information there. What's it been like on the agency side? Well, there are two things I really want to pull out from what you said, Christoph, that I think are super relevant. I think one is, I think you're right, marketing should be seen as a service to human beings. Yeah, not only as things to go through, it was a funnel. It is now a very complex, you know, map of customer experience touch points. But if we start looking at it, and this is definitely, you know, from an agency point of view where we get the best work out this way, if we start looking at it, marketing is a real service to humans, yeah? To human beings, to different kinds of people that has different needs, even more so today because they are more like, we talked about more than one person. I love that. I always think one thing that I fear is coming out, not just, you know, not just a pandemic, but definitely accelerated by the pandemic, but you mentioned the war and the situation in Ukraine as well, is, oh my God, it's really taught us to be much more responsive, much faster. From an agency side, we have probably sat and kind of gone through a kind of, do things faster, do it better, you know, accelerate your digital transformation, etc. I think that Paul's laughing. I think, you know, I think it's given us a push, which is great. It's given us as an agency as well to be taught us that we can, and given confidence in us, that we can be responsive. It works. Yeah, we can be agile. Don't be too worried about the silos and everything. So, I think it's done that. And in that, it's definitely made us more robust to deal with change. Think, we have tried to plan for change. We always talk about, you know, changes coming, changes here. We've experienced, we're quite fortunate in many ways that we have actually experienced very rapid changes, and we have dealt with them. And they've taught us robustness and resilience and speed. And I think that's one of the two things, one of the things that have come beautifully out of the past two years. Thank you for that. I'm obviously going to move on to the next part, which is technology. But just before I do, one of the things that people are asking is, what digital trends are, do you predict what will happen in the future? So, what are the trends that you see coming forwards? Paul, over to you on that one.  I think before we do, I just, you know, say to everyone, just don't forget the basics. You know, modernize your data estate, get it in a central data lake, and then you can apply all the amazing cool tools and technology like AI and cognitive services and machine learning on top of it. But so don't, you know, if we're going to talk future, there's still a lot of work to do today in most organizations that I go to speak to where, you know, unless you've got great data, it's very, very hard to leverage cognitive services, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and a lot of the tools that we use here went through a very, very painful modernization of our data estate. So, I'll talk about the future, but everyone, great data strategy, understanding data strategy, and then you can really exercise the value of some of the tools that I'm referring to. Because I think the one that probably is top of mind for a lot of people is the metaverse. And the role the metaverse has to play. And, you know, it's very interesting when you think about it through a B2C or a B2B perspective, the context in which metaverse, you know, can and I believe will, you know, shape the way we kind of, the way we socialize, the way we play and the way we work. Clearly, you know, from my perspective, we've demoed a lot of our metaverse technology through Microsoft Teams. And I see a very clear use case for, you know, metaverse as a collaboration platform, as a platform to get teams together, as a platform to, you know, extract more from one another. Because it's good to digitalize, by the way, you know, and I was with Rika in the other week, there's a lot that digital also doesn't do well. There are certain topics and scenarios where you just need to be in the room. It's much easier. You can get through much more work as human beings. But I think metaverse is a really good bridge between the two.  It's a very blocky metaverse. Everyone's made of squares, but you've got to create your own identity and your own character to go in and build and participate in there as well. So I can genuinely see a really good use case for it in terms of business context. I think there's an existing great use case in the world of gaming in the shape of Minecraft. I won't be going to the pub to meet my friends in the metaverse. I think I'll still do that as a human being. I think that's going to be a much more enjoyable experience. But I think defining the use cases for metaverse and how we think about metaverse is like fascinating stuff. Thank you, Paul. Metaverse is an interesting area. And so, Christophe and Ruth, what are your thoughts on the metaverse? Is that something that you would think that other brands and companies should be thinking about now? I'll let Ruth respond, because I'd like to be a bit controversial here. So maybe Ruth would do that, Annie. Anything to say? Ruth is to you first. Yeah, I feel like we're very much on the cusp of the next generation of how we interact in the digital space. If you think we had the web 20 years ago, then we have social media 10 years ago, and it feels like this next decade, the thing that's coming for all of us as marketers to get our heads around is the metaverse. And at the moment, I've spent some time in the metaverse. It does feel a little bit clunky. It does feel like it's very much the realm of the early adopters in terms of that adoption curve. But that pace of transformation that Paul talked about is speeding up. We know that as marketers. So we've got to figure it out, haven't we? Otherwise, we're going to miss that curve. And I think like anything, it's figuring out what's relevant today for us. And everything we talked about, granny's on TikTok. You know, there are going to be some early adopters that are the early adopters of these new channels. And if we're not there and we're not relevant, we're going to miss those customers. So thinking about how do we pilot, trial, show up, experiment with our customers. You know, we've all become much more digitally native through the pandemic. So how do we co-create and co-innovate with our customers that are in that space as well? But then what is that mainstream proposition for all of us? And how do we use that to do things differently? You know, I think, I love that last discussion around, you know, what does this new world mean for us as a marketing community? And I think marketers are optimistic. We are the voice of the client. We are creative and we are one of the functions in our business that get to think about the future beyond this quarter and this financial year. And I think we have to embrace these new technologies and particularly these new engagement channels like the Metaverse to take our organizations into that future. Now I'm in my late 40s. And so generally I am not the right age group to take our organization in the right way into the Metaverse. So certainly in Avanade we've put a whole bunch of people that are naturally experimenting in new channels to figure out how should we occupy the Metaverse and what do we do first? So we've got a kind of, and it's terrible, it's definitely not inclusive of me, but younger group or people that are really interested naturally in the Metaverse actually doing some pilots for us in that space because it's their passion in you. And that is just one thing I know, Paul, you brought up the Metaverse but there's also some really cool stuff happening in terms of marketing tech at the moment around artificial intelligence, just making it all smarter, faster, you know, using data. Ruth, we will come on to that in terms of technology in certain sectors. So Christoph, let me hear your thoughts on this. Yeah, the reason why I want to be controversial a bit is, you know, everyone agrees and I do agree with Paul and Ruth that as a marketer you need to step into new frontiers and you need to be explorative and stuff. And I compare the Metaverse a little bit like what the whole E trend was at the end of the 90s. You put an E in front of any product because it was Internet or cool and you got investors and then suddenly the bubble burst and then we had a sort of real use case testing of the Internet and this is where we are today. So yes, it's here to stay for collaborative purposes as well but I have an absolute experience to share straight away because when the pandemic hit, of course we said every big conference of this world had to move into the digital space. So you either do a big Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting or webinar and whatnot. So we tried to push the boundaries and we teamed up with a Metaverse company and on the occasion of one big industry conference we had a festival of finance and we invited them to the Metaverse and our guests and remember, you know, not young 18 year old but middle mid-year individuals on the client side suddenly found themselves jumping as an avatar into a 3D conference space where they saw the conference stand that we usually had at the big exhibitions in 3D and I fully can say the excitement was amazing, the fact that you could talk to somebody, you could change your avatar but there's a difference between the excitement of doing something for the first time and technology works and it's okay and it's super and then move from that novelty factor into a BAU factor. Okay, shall we do this now every conference with avatars and I would hasten to say let's first of all fix things in the 3D world and make it very well happen and then replicate and learn in the meantime what the Metaverse will mean for you what specific business needed has so that you do not fall into this place like I've got a creative market here who actually doesn't really know what we are sweating in front of our clients and what we need and he comes with ideas. Yes, it's good to inspire but then to find out what's the relevance for collaboration, as Paul said, big tick, absolutely big tick, you can really see people hand over documents in the virtual space anyone who would like to see this we have a channel called Expedition Finance where we just had a four five minutes clip that is going to be aired soon and it's not a Deutsche Bank product push it's exactly that industry engagement where we have someone who's just exploring these things so it's absolutely important but let me come back to the question of one of the audience in terms of the digital trends I think when we are using technology better and better then we can come to contextual marketing so that I know so much about our clients where they're in the journey and in my case we've got very complex buying journeys that sometimes last up to 18 months with so many different people involved so you cannot just say here's a hot lead, hello sales, please take it and close it it's the engagement and knowing contextually where someone is backed by the data that you have and the access that you have that's important and we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking all the big firms have sussed it out and if you're sitting in a small mid-cap firm got you poor market here you are at the end of your tether not at all because if you're in a smaller company you can make changes far quicker and test things far quicker that's when you're in a big organization and in a regulated organization like mine where technology progress has to jump through so many hurdles so see this as an incremental journey of where do you want to be how relevant do you want to be contextual before you then add other stuff to your tech and marketing delivery stack Thank you Chris, we've sort of wandered into technology which is great and Ruth you sort of touched upon AI and I just want to the concise thoughts from each of the panelists just in terms of in your particular industry what new technologies do you think are going to be prominent in your field so if I go to Ruth first Artificial Intelligence certainly for us it's just making marketing faster and better without the need for us to dramatically increase headcount and skills to be honest with you there's some really cool marketing technologies now that underpin each of our marketing tech stacks but it's interesting I just think there's so much now in the marketing space that you can become too it's just it can become too cluttered that you lose sight of actually what's important which is your customer and how you help your customer and I think them as much as we as marketers stay connected to what's the problem that we're trying to solve with our customer and how are we staying deeply relevant to that that we are front of mind for our customers so that they know why we're here and how we can help and that when they're ready to engage that we're really easy to engage with so those kind of fundamentals of marketing I think have stayed the same irrespective of channel divergence I think one of the things I see is there's so much technology now to enable us to do that it can sometimes lose sight of actually that objective the one thing that I see really helping us is artificial intelligence in joining the dots between the various platforms that we use not just in marketing but actually in how all of our businesses operate so sales delivery service thank you Ruth just before I go to Rika there's obviously a lot of questions coming in and just on that AI one of the questions that I've seen is will AI replace marketers? I think it will replace some roles or some parts of roles some of the tasks that we do and generally it's the tasks that you know should be automated frankly bringing us up to do some of the more emotive or strategic elements of our job someone said no was that you Kristoff? yeah because in agreement with Ruth I don't see the value of marketers that you're preparing campaigns where you lead people through the funnel and you're writing every email individually so of course AI and machine learning is something for masses or for big campaigns that you've got programmatic ways of leading through some steps but the reason why I'm violently disagreeing is also in terms of our profession as marketers good marketers can never be replaced by automation process automation or AI never be assisted and creativity in terms of the engagement is that you need as a marketer to sufficiently know your industry and your business of course that in the way you respond is as I said is an engagement of an ongoing dialogue an ongoing conversation I mentioned in a couple of minutes ago you know our response to the war that there's no script say oh what happens when you know one country invades the other this is what you have to do you have the technology at your fingertips but then you have to very quickly ask yourself what keeps our clients awake at night what do we have to do first and how do we update how do we communicate do we actually you know swamp people with information or do we do this like you season a good dish you know in the right proportion because that was also one of the observations through the pandemic yeah of course opening rates and clicks with rates and emails went first up then down why did they went down because you know more people were fighting for the same pie i.e attention pie of the audiences so that kind of experience how you use technology to make a meaningful engagement that's the clue what a good marketer has to do so i'm very happy also later on to talk about you know what kind of marketer do we need thank you so much i'm conscious of time so i'll go to rica then i'll go to then i'll go to paul rica your thoughts in terms of technology in your in your sector i think it's interesting because i obviously work in the creative space as well right you know so obviously lots of lots of what we do results in the creative output of some kind and i think when we talk about AI i think you know think for us as a creative industry and the creative agency as well not only that but you know i think it can enable it can help speed it can complement i don't think i hope it will never replace the critical thinking we have as humans the obligation we have to be critical thinkers and question things hope we won't do that i will compliment us i also think from a creative point of view we have to be emotive still creatively and be humanly oriented and i hope that AI is not going to take that away from us you know i think that we will still have to have the human and emotive element in ideation and creation i think humans respond to motion and i think that's our obligation so i hope it will compliment us from speed fast game is a good game and all of that and take all of the boring stuff away from us but i will not lose the critical thinking and the emotive creative output that also drives us as marketeers and as human beings thank you Paul your thoughts yeah i'll keep it short if it was a bit tight on time i think you know the technology augmenting human capability is where i see the best outcomes in my team every time and i think that that's always going to be the way with regards to you know AI and automation replacing roles it will replace roles all across every business over the next five ten years but you know it's kind of it's no different to you know what happened to all the horse and car drivers when mechanization of taxis arrived in London they retrained as we'll talk about skills again later on there is a sizable skills gap and we've seen it before as technologies like mechanization replace horse and car we've seen huge waves of skill sets displaced in in the past there are many examples over the over the over the centuries and you know post-industrial revolution many many examples but these people reskill these people retrain and we've got a similar piece of work to do with marketeers i think we've got a similar piece of work to do you know broadly across our organization so i think it all meant humans that's the very best outcomes i see and will people be displaced yes will they need to learn new skills to be relevant to the economy yes thank you paul a lot of people asking about investment and and and the return so how do you ensure return on your market investment so paul would you go answer this one or get your insight on this yeah i mean you know if you said to me hey show me your marketing scorecard and you know and kpi's there's a thousand leading and leading and lagging indicators that we we track as a business but fundamentally one of the things i would encourage you all to do is really think about how you simplify your impact so there are three numbers i speak to my business about three top line numbers one is in relation to brand and reputation but there's a hundred numbers underneath that leading and lagging one is in relation to my ability to drive demand and revenue in our unmanaged customers that long tail of smb customers and the other one is how we're having a positive impact on you know on on cross-selling up-selling and accelerating pipeline into our managed accounts and enabling our sellers so i wouldn't bore you with all the metrics and you know um you know microsoft has its own internal acronym dictionary that's many acronyms we have which is called mad the microsoft acronym acronym dictionary so someone with a good sense of humor who named it there are hundreds of leading lagging but there are you know what i say to my team i want you to think about success through this brand and reputation metric this ability for us to scale cost effectively and drive acquisition of customers in revenue in the smb space and our ability to complement the sellers in our managed account and there's a you know a metric similar to what christoph described you know earlier in there which is a very sophisticated machine learning driven engagement metric which highlights the propensity for a set of behaviors account-wide 360 across a customer that identifies the propensity of that set of behaviors the likelihood to drive a revenue outcome based on other organizations who have behaved that way with us and that's really fine-tuned and incredibly sophisticated now to the extent that my business are happy to accept that score as ROI because the tangible link to revenue and customer ads is so statistically significant it's beyond any any conversation right now in terms of justifying ROI and the tech investment there are so many lenses you can look at this through one is obviously revenue one is obviously acquisition of customers one is lifetime value and all those other other great things but I think the one that's often most underestimated is the customer experience i.e. if you build a custom for one database track there or do a contract and you're from one database build them from another database have a separate marketing database and then some kind of CRM instance your sellers are working out and all four of those mechanisms have the ability to communicate with your customer it's a horrible experience and so you know there's a lot of obvious ROI like the revenue and some operational efficiencies but I think you've got to bring it back to two things the customer experience and the commercial outcomes you're trying to drive and if you can keep your eyes on on those two it doesn't allow you to get through the clutter of the maltech that I think that we mentioned earlier on it's a very complex you know space at the moment everyone's got cool tech there's tons of cool tech out there and I think one of the great learnings for us over the last three four years is keep ourselves anchored on the commercial outcome we're going to drive then work back and find the tech rather than get really excited about some snazzy tech and figure out how to how to embed it in so that's been one of our big lessons in the last in the last few years and the final point I would say and my team will laugh if they heard me say that all the time marketing metrics for marketeers commercial metrics for the commercial business there are things we need to look at as marketeers that are really important to us we stand in front of a sales leader and talk about bounce rates or dwell time or views or likes they're going to say have you seen my number go away and so you know we have a very clear view on what's marketing speak and what's commercial speak so ensuring you're gluing a commercial data set back into the commercial part of your business and your marketeers are holding themselves accountable to a marketing data set it's something else that we're also kind of you know really we keep ourselves true to Thank you Paul anyone got any other views or differing views from what Paul said I think I just echo that but maybe add to it which is I think you asked the question around how do you prove the ROI of marketing technology and I don't think that's I don't think that's maybe the right question to ask because marketing technology I think is always an enabler of what we do should be making it easier for us to execute easier and better for us to engage with with our customers as Paul said if it ultimately were measured on how good is the client experience that we're delivering joining up particularly in big organisations what is often a very siloed fractional execution that we need to make better across the board and actually making our business more more successful if they're the two kind of things that ultimately we're trying to do marketing technology should be enabling that rather than saying what is the ROI on an investment in a site called websites or an adobe digital asset management platform that's probably the wrong question to be asking we should be asking what is the return on investment of the marketing program in entirety of which our job is to figure out the enablers of doing that whether that's people and skills that we need or technologies that make our people's lives easier to execute those commercial and client experience objectives so I probably ask the question a different way Mocchi okay thank you Ruth what I want to do is now go on to digital skills because I know I do want to have some time for further questions from the people who've signed in so I'm going to ask each of you a question and if you can you know respond so first one is to you Ruth what digital skill gaps has the pandemic created in your industry and how have you breached that a digital skills gap in your organization I'm going to maybe be a slightly more controversial in terms of I'm not seeing digital skill gaps what I'm seeing is the ability to join siloed digital skills from a client perspective and a client experience perspective so I think we're all investing in developing the skills that we need and those you know great skill sets coming into the market that have got deep domain expertise in certain platforms and areas where I'm seeing there's a gap is actually what I call core marketing skill so that ability to see things from a client's perspective you know ability to join the dots in terms of what is you know what is the end-to-end experience across all the different touch points and bring that lens because it's like we've got so much data now we're drowning in the data and we're failing to ask the right questions with the data to get the answers that we need so I think it's some of those business skills and quite traditional marketing skills that I think we're beginning to see a shortage of thank you Paul what features digital skills are you predicting is a must have for for marketers and in marketing yeah I think there was a couple things one is there was a really nice piece of work that Microsoft did probably we launched it about nine months ago with a commitment to train one and a half million people in the UK with digital skills for a couple of reasons one is we did a lot of work alongside I can't even link in to understand where the skills shortage are so fundamentally looking at the dates what are the roles being posted what are the roles being filled you know what are the roles most in demand and you know probably most people wouldn't be surprised to learn that software developer is is right up there that's that's that's a pretty hot market at the moment but it's a great piece of work I'm encouraging you to take a look at it where you know we work with Goldsmith University and it's around creating a blueprint for UK competitiveness and in there it talks about the skills gap the program's called get on 2021 because that was the year we launched it in but if you if you search for that you will find how we think about that all up from a UK perspective but also taking some accountability from our side because we're creating some of the technologies we'll be displacing roles that we discuss that are on and we're not kind of wearing roast tinted glasses and pretending that that isn't the case and so a large part of that commitment is ensuring you know that we as an organization are recognizing not only the gap and the skills gap but also recognizing the fact that technology is is displacing some of those skills if I'm looking from my perspective I would say you know the the biggest challenge and maybe I'll step back and think about it through a kind of maybe a modern marketing lens if that's even a thing is to you know data science data science capability codewriting capability people who are operationally brilliant it's unfortunate I work for Microsoft I could I get lots of very talented creative marketers and brand people you know kind of gravitate towards towards the work we're doing that's not been my problem my problem has been operations processes and data so how do you get the I guess the the the backbone of the work we're doing in place and that's been that's been trickier for us so software developer you know data scientists and people who view marketing options as a discipline and it is by the way and it's an amazing job those have been the three areas we've probably you know struggled most with from a from a kind of hiring capacity Thank you Paul Rika this is this for you as a CMO one of the world's largest advertising agencies I'd love to know what your clients top digital skills priorities are Well they're mine as well as my clients this is just straight and I think two things I I do not I don't want us to distinguish between digital and analog that's the first thing even when you talk skill set yeah the generations that we are looking at even ourselves do you not have that distinction anymore and I think we segment unintentionally by doing it and I you know that really I think so one thing being truly customer focus and really understanding the customer experience is is is something that that I do think we should focus on and I do think that we should hire against or sort of look at what we need in terms you sort of make the most of that and for me that really means about breaking silos more than anything it meets breaking silos in how we operate and how we think and it's very much about adding people to the mix who have broader skill set who have done more and more and not just have done sort of vertical training in one subject I love to look at people that have you know experience different areas of a customer experience go how can you add to that so that that's one thing because that will allow us to create high-performance teams and I think that it is not individual skill sets but it is should be about high-performing teams as well that can you know be truly diverse cross-functional I think cross-functionality in organizations are really important so and that's why the broader sort of skill set comes into play so that we're more agile what is really the apparent is prioritise your data I'm agreeing with Paul prioritise your data not only the series and the ones but prioritise your insights your how you analyse that data how you talk about you know how you use that data usefully so data is definitely a priority that I both from an agency and the people that I have will promote and prioritise and I would also advise my clients to do the same Thank you Rika and to you Christoph because obviously you know you're looking at the skills gap and looking at hiring so how would you ensure diversity in your hiring to gain those necessary skills that you need in your team Yeah that's a good question Moki because I'd like to start the answer with a psychology principle which is when you create rapport to someone the underlying principle of mirroring are placed an important part you love they love and you know you build bondage well how does it mean how does it relate to the whole marketing and hiring process you have to first of all see what's your client universe like what are their skills that's what's their expectation level you need to mirror the diversity of your clients not only geographically when you're a global organisation like like we are because you need to cater for cultural differences in the way people process information but also in your own team it's you can compare this with a Michelin star chef kitchen where you have somebody who you know peels the onion and cleans you know all the ingredients a sous chef who will make everything happen and then you've got the ultimate chef who's then basically saying oh here a little bit there a little bit and out of doors and you know on that conveyor belt so you need to have age diversity in terms of what kind of skills do you want to internalise I spoke about content marketing I've internalised journalists and it's not just an easy thing to say oh well let's a journalist start in marketing function because they are journalists they are not marketeers but you need to bring them on the journey and that's why when you hire again think about that mind prison it's important to have a robust and very well trained marketeer that's why the CIM is such an amazing organisation fostering the knowledge fostering the skill set next to that you need to see what kind of industry knowledge do you need in your team what kind of technology knowledge so Paul if I would do an next hire I would actually sort of link up with you and say Paul what is the you know what's the person that I would need in my team so ask the question and get lateral hires from places you wouldn't expect and lastly you know think about what's needed for which for which function for instance when we are talking about content marketing there's a lot of experience needed I've recently hired a person who's over 60 who you know has the benefit of ample time no kids to look after no career ambitions that you get them out of the door in two years time so think about for which purpose do you need which capabilities and that's the right diversity you have and that's why I am more excited and positive than ever before given the fact that in the past I was my hiring was basically I'm sitting in London but I you know London was my hometown now I can hire from India from everywhere and not just for my regional role because you know future of work is those people and those roles who can work from home all the time be my guest so let's really think about that creatively too and use technology that's a great start I was just going to add that of course you can partner you know I you know you the best I don't think the best creative brains in the world sit working on one brand for their entire career I think they're going to work in large agencies where they get to work on the world's the world's greatest brand so I also think there's a really important thing here you know I've got 35 full-time employees and everything else I partner on and some of those are five person agencies some of those are global agencies but I hired the 35 people that I believe give me competitive differentiation into roles that I think are sustainable and meaningful and everything else I utilize you know agencies and external experts and contractors for so that's the other thing you don't have to have all the skills you need you can't afford all the skills and by the way some of the greatest skills don't want to sit in one company they want to go and experience multiple projects so you need to think as well around the kind of you know you're partnering you know methodology to augment your your full-time employees or your enhanced team whatever phrase you'd use thank you Paul thank you everyone just before we go on to the questions from the people who've logged in I just want a brief quick sentences from each of you Justin because obviously we are marketers and you know this technology is scientific but how do we balance that science and that creativity within the team and within organization so very very briefly so Paul I've got you on screen first you want to go first on that one yeah but happy to listen it makes life really hard and you know modern marketing is now part part science you know that that that means building in leading in managing these teams are a trickier you know than it's ever been but I truly believe that you know when you think about you know diversity of team and I'm thinking more through a neurodiversity lens right now that you know the best marketing teams I interact with now are part art part science and are very comfortable with how they interact and interact with one another you know and the role they play so I think increasingly great leadership makes it feel very complimentary and natural you know and you know and I think that you know a lot of what Christophe said that you know that we are marketers but we are increasingly commercial animals and I increasingly have people in my team from you know sales operations backgrounds and different backgrounds to really bring the commercial reality of what we do for our business into into that group and if you can get that blend right where the data can validate you know the creative or otherwise and teams are willing to you know you have an open you know kind of you know you know kind of supportive environment where those conversations flow that that's the art of today's marketing leader and it is part art part science and there's more commerciality on the CMO panel than I think there would have been on any CMO panel 20 years ago when you when when you did this so it's changing and you know my advice is embrace it you know find the right ingredients for your for your organization it's really exciting time to be a marketer thank you Christophe well I would say provide people with the opportunity for training that's why again I reference CIM and I would always say teach the creatives some science so with science and like you know data management my editors need to know how to to compose a a newsletter in the technology so they need to learn that and so teach the creative science and teach those people who come in from a sort of more data analytics because give them the ability to be creative so that they can use their skills as well so you don't suddenly have two factions in your marketing team the one that just on the left hand side of the brain of the other on the other just teach both skills and make sure that you provide opportunities for lateral movements to create job satisfaction so that when the handshake with you and your team member loses then or pigeon hold to just be the social media analyst they are full blown marketeers and as Paul said good managers of external relationships with a specific speciality so that's what be my my biggest advice thank Christoph Ruth I think I just say three things really that is really important for us now with skills the first is we have to be the voice of the customer in our business and we've heard talked a lot about there's been this seismic shift because of COVID in terms of how customer behavior has changed Uber digital now you know embracing change second I think it's really important that we are really we stay very connected to our business and and the need for our businesses to be sustainable in the future whether that's profitable responsible and again that's changing but we can't lose sight of what our business does the third thing and I think this is what we've talked a lot about today is we have to be digitally literate and how we each invest in ourselves but also our teams in terms of that digital literacy some countries are doing a really good job of making sure their whole population is digitally literate Singapore's a great example to go look at they've fundamentally put digital literacy in the same category into schooling as maths and and core education UK is not there yet and I think Chris and the team at the CIM have got a role to do in influencing that but they're the three things I think it's really important that we stay focused on in terms of skills Rika your thoughts yep really quickly because there's three minutes left I don't think it's about balancing I think it's about merging skills you know I don't think it's the weight scale of balance and who I think it's about merging skills you know it's really again I talk about breaking down silos and that's where that merger lies as well so at MRM for example we will never start a piece of work without having both science and creativity from together from the get go they might go and divert routes in the process from ideation to creation but I think the starting points of merging the skills rather than balancing them is important because that allows us for dynamic optimizations within the process not after not before but in the process of creation so merging merging skills rather than balance is what I would what I'll end that with yeah no I agree with you and I've been asking you questions from people who've send them in as we've been going along but there's there's a couple of questions that have really come through and we touched upon the metaverse but I don't know who wants to take this question on is can you trust an avatar who would like to take that one can you refresh that refresh that can you trust an avatar yes because obviously we talk about metaverse and it's coming through it's like how do we create that profile and personality and trust of course I mean the avatar is your digital personality and you trust a 3D person when you meet them and you trust them when you meet them 2D we are you know I don't want to ask the question whether people trust me just because I'm talking to you now on a 2D level it's just another way of interacting that gives us more opportunities because we are interacting in the metaverse in a 3D digital world while it's currently at this point in time it's a 2D world that enhances all the interactions but it's not a question of trust the question of trust is a fundamental question of what we do and I would add there will be metaverses with different rules and potentially legislation you know around the technology as it emerges so I would just encourage you to think about the environment that you're in if it's a private metaverse it's been built by your organisation and it's sat behind your files and your Active Directory it's going to be just fine if you just randomly wander into a room and someone else's metaverse and give them your credit card details I'd encourage you not to very good advice and we've clearly got enough content and questions for for another session but just one more question that's sort of coming through quite a lot is what should an SME focus on because no we've got some great brands here and sectors but what should an SME focus on and at that level who would like to answer that question yeah but we do sorry go on I was going to say you know I've spent most of my career working in smaller businesses I would say keep it simple double down on platforms don't try and build best of breed point of solution stuff get your data cleaned determine which roles you want in house and determine where you need support from a partner and pick your partners wisely you know in today's sprawling business models you know you could be funding a competitor as well so pick pick your partners wisely it's a it's a more of a strategic decision than probably ever has been before if you look at the the kind of business models of some of the large tech firms they touch a lot of industries now so pick your partners wisely to make sure they're not competing with you the day after you've paid them the PO and I think just to that I totally agree but play to your competitive advantage of being flexible and agile I would do that I would add that to your your points Pauls and that play to your competitive advantage in agility and flexibility yeah and I don't want one other thing which is just really focus on your customer you know just if you're clear who your customers are love them grow your business with them that's the easiest thing to do and then try and find other organizations that look like those customers you've got you know don't worry too much about the other stuff just really focus on being deeply relevant for your customer thank you and building on what who'd said use your customer for advocacy there's no time better than nowadays in the SME business our customers have an active role in being your your second market tier team because if you build the customer advocacy they're talking about you nowadays everybody whether you buy on a big platform you check what are the reviews what do things you know and not the reviews that all of us hate because they're not relevant but if you have a smaller customer base use them to your advantage because that is your big advantage I love the SME business I come from a country that is known for having an amazing SME business propping up our economy I wish this would be everywhere and in the same way and us marketeers play a big big role on customer advocacy and thank you sadly that's all we got time for today we have slightly overrun but it's clear that we could quite easily have done another hour and time has clearly flown so I just want to special thanks to all our panelists once again so Christoph Ruth Paul and Ricard you know thank you very much it's great to hear your perspective and get your expert insights and thank you for joining us and and I'd say to everybody else hope you enjoyed the discussion and found the insights helpful and enjoy the rest of your day thank you


Visit the Tutoring Center's website. If you notice we're offline, go ahead and check the hours above. If the button says Chat with the TC, then we're open. Enter your information in the window that opens. Then select Start Chat. The Tutoring Center will let you know if someone's available. Follow the link provided. Choose your audio settings. And once in the Zoom room, the host will match you with the tutor. You and your tutor will be assigned your own room. Enable your camera and mic if you want to, or open the chat window and use that. You or the tutor can share a whiteboard and request control to write on each other's whiteboards. You can also share other open windows. And just ask your tutor for help if you need it. Thank you.


Lots of people gathering around just to go to one of the camps. Some are reporting like 15,000, some are reporting like 8 to 10,000. So we don't have like a courier figure. So we can sell around like 8 to 10,000. I don't think they were like well prepared or as such. They just carried whatever they could carry and then they just leave their place for reason. You can see this side. This side is in Bangladesh side and this point. That point is Numan's land in Bangladesh side. And after the Numan's land, there is the border. There is a river called Nafniv, Raft Naf river. And after that, there is the Myanmar side. So basically all those people are living in this side is from these are living on the Numan's land on Bangladesh side. All these people, we can say like child, we can say like sick people. Those in the vulnerable groups, they are here. I think they need like immediate assistance at this moment of time. So I think for now, this is the most crucial challenge for all the actors who are like responding to this crisis. Dojdin, like it. Dojdin, like it.


Hello, hello, hello and welcome. I'm Meryl Kilili and this is DMTV and today I'm speaking to Miriam Mayer who's an activist with the environmental group in Germany called Letz der Generation or Last Generation and over this week they've been gluing themselves to roads to block traffic in order to protest drilling in the North Sea and to get their chance for Olaf Scholz to listen on climate action. So welcome Miriam. Good to have you with us. Hi. Let's just set the scene a little bit. Who are you and what do you do? I'm Miriam. I was 30 years old and since the beginning of this year I am part of the Last Generation in Germany. We are a climate group that is blocking roads mostly, German highways and getting arrested a lot so I'm at the moment full time doing that. Gosh, full time getting arrested. That sounds crazy. Okay, can you explain a little bit the climate picture? I mean if I just woke up from a long cryogenic sleep what would you tell me about the current situation that you're responding to now with your activism? Yeah the current situation is pretty bad. Like I remember when I learned it in school in primary school I learned about climate change and the greenhouse effect and I was like oh that sounds like a problem but surely you'll handle that and surely I'll be there long before these consequences will actually happen and now we are seeing oh shit we didn't act. We didn't act accordingly at all and it's not changing and I'm just what is happening around me it feels insane that we are not taking the serious and that we are not acting accordingly so we have one German climate scientist who says it's like we are putting all our children into a global school bus that will crash with a likelihood of 98%. So that's the situation we are in that's where I am completely panicking and weirdly I see people around me and I see politics not panicking even though science is telling us to. I see people dying all over the planet we had people die in Germany last year we had a slash 180 people died here in Germany and I thought that will be the point where we in Germany wake up and see oh we have to act this is actually hitting us now and not just people far away but we're still not doing that we are still looking for new fossil fuel infrastructure we are still considering to drill for new oil in the North Sea this is just crazy there's so many crazy things going on and I yeah I can't sit at home anymore and just watch that it's just yeah it's really it's a really desperate situation.  In Germany we had a one climate package we had the Fridays for Future movement that was very big in Germany so we had like 1.4 million people on the streets and on one single day and after that we had a climate package from the government that was actually against our constitution so we actually had our constitutional court say that's against the German constitution that's not doing enough so that's what we got with peaceful demonstrations we are still peaceful but we have to heighten the pressure somehow because apparently just marching the streets wasn't enough then we have the Paris agreement which said okay we should reach 1.5 degrees or two degrees at most and we just see that we're not doing that I agree at 1.2 degrees now we will reach 1.5 degrees in 2026 or 2030 and our German government is saying we will be carbon neutral in 2045 so it just it does work out our politics do not correspond with physics at the moment so your group lets the generation well the group that you're a part of what are they asking of the German government we have an international network but the campaigns are in each country they're a little different and it always depends on what that country is doing so for us at the moment our demand is that our chancellor who wanted to become a climate chancellor before he got elected should stop even considering getting new oil out of the North Sea because we think that's like crazy this idea ever and instead we have to do things to save oil to not use as much oil and we want them to do like the easiest things to have public transportation free that's like an easy step of course it costs some money but it's an easy step to take and it will save oil and to have a speed limit all over Germany because at the moment we are burning loads of fossil fuels with our cars and a speed limit will just help to make it much less so these are easy steps that we can take instead of drilling for new oil a speed limit I mean presumably that would depend on which roads so I mean have you have you done the the thinking around that proposal I mean are you asking for a reduction in I don't know take take 10 kilometers an hour off all the speed limit signs or what what are you asking for it would it would be more general so it would be a certain speed limit for highways one for like big roads between cities and one for within cities and villages so would be like three different speed limits that we would have all over the country and then of course there would be some areas where you already have to go slower than that so so would actually be a much easier system than at the moment tell me a little bit about the tactics that you're putting into play in order to get these demands met they're a little controversial and a little risky but what we've seen so far is in a relatively short space of time quite effective in terms of getting getting attention our basic idea is we cannot be ignored we just don't have the time we have two to three years to get this climate situation under control so we can't be ignorable we have to disturb ordinary people that's what people really don't like about us because we are blocking highways so we are not blocking politicians we're just blocking random people but what that does is it gives us so much attention because all of these people have to either be angry at us or support us but we don't have like new to buy standards that just doesn't happen when you sit on the highway so um yeah we've been very successful in getting a lot of press getting politics discussing about us of course a lot about how we do it but also about what we ask them to do but it takes high risk from all the people involved so but take me literally what you're doing i mean you sit in front of cars super doing your hands to the asphalt so you can't be removed explain a bit about the playbook around that yeah okay so the playbook is we have small groups of people who get a certain coordinates for a place we kind of try to coordinate all our actions so that we can be most effective and then usually we do it in the morning so when all the people want to go to work and we take highway exits in Berlin we have a highway right through the city so there are a lot of highway exits all throughout Berlin and they're usually just traffic lights at the end of that so we wait for the cars to have red and they have to wait and then we go on we put on our orange breasts and we take out our banners we stand in front of the cars and that it depends on how the rest of the cars are so as soon as people we see that a car is like coming too close or someone is getting out of the car and coming close we will all sit down to de-escalate the situation and then we'll just sit there try to de-escalate as much as we can sometimes you'll sit down in front of the car that's trying to move forward to de-escalate yes it sounds weird but it works so if i if i'm standing in front of a car i've tested this basically so if i'm standing in front of a car the car thinks well she can go out of the way she can move so it will drive slowly towards me and try to get me to move out of the way but as soon as i sit down the car is like yeah she's not gonna move running people over is still not like pulling us off the streets is one thing but running us over is another thing so fortunately that hasn't happened too much we had one one girl pushed by a car she was still standing and couldn't really get out of the way but she's fine so as soon as i sit down i noticed that the cars are like getting really frustrated but they're stopping that's that's just it works and then also if people try to attack you it's really de-escalating if you sit down they they are less likely to like hit you or anything because you're suddenly out of their direct reach and uh they can see that you're not fighting back you're not not aggressive towards them so it really helps but where does the superglue come in because you you just say you you sit down immediately in front of the cars as soon as there's a red light how do you have time to superglue yourself to the asphalt or is that in it is that a different tactic so that's what we do when the police arrives so we have to be really quick with that because the police also of course kind of know when we will do that so they will try to get us before we can glue ourselves yeah we just for safety reasons usually we wait for the police to come because they won't pull us off if we agree well they sometimes do but because because it will rip your skin it won't rip your skin off it's just your hand will really burn for hours so yeah if they rip you off you'll just have a completely red hand and it will just burn yeah so we do that as soon as the police arrive so you will just see it all of us except for some people who are leaving an emergency passage so some people will just sit there and not glue themselves so if there's an emergency those people can get up when the rest will glue themselves just put superglue on their hand put it on the street at the moment the streets are really hot so that's a challenge and then as soon as we are glued we're basically set like that's then the police takes over this tactic of blocking roads it's been a few months explain the timeline a bit yeah yeah so we started blocking roads actually with a different demand at the end of January that was our first campaign where we blocked roads before that we had a hunger strike so we had some people who were in hunger strike before the elections and they that demand was to get a conversation public conversation with the candidates and there are elections in Germany for the for the chancellor and Olaf Schultz ended up winning it go yeah and after his election he had to talk with them for an hour and it's yeah it's a public recording with livestreamed and everything right and those people then went all over Germany and gave talks and that's how I joined the campaign and then in the end of January we started with locking highways so that those two people who were hunger striking he spoke with them for an hour it was a public meeting livestreamed what was the conclusion from that for me personally the conclusion was that Olaf Schultz is not gonna save us like it was so clear that he either he hasn't realized the situation we are in or he just doesn't want to deal with it I don't know it's it's really hard for me to grasp because I feel like also for him as a chancellor just for his personal benefit it would be nice to not have a climate catastrophe happen like I don't really get why he's not ready to deal with it but it was just so clear that he thinks that we are just fanatics and yes and and he certainly doesn't approve of these tactics about a month ago he compared climate activists to Nazis yeah that was a nice moment yeah I think that was another moment where I was like okay he is definitely not the climate chancellor that he promised us he would be like I never had much hope because yeah I know what he did before he became chancellor and it was not very promising but at the same time I feel like it at least showed us that we are really annoying him like we are at least succeeding and getting to him somehow so that was nice and and I guess that kind of energized your group when they heard that explain to me the reactions so far the roadblocks what about the institutions what about decision makers what have they said so far about these protests how they reacted that depends so in the first phase in general we had some people at the beginning from the Green Party approving of it and then they got a lot of hate for that and they took it back but now a few days ago we had the mayor of the district the district of Berlin in which our locate was come by actually and give us her solidarity and now the the mayor of all of Berlin is already against that so we already succeeded in a lot of debates yeah the police and the justice system are just kind of overwhelmed they're just not keeping up anymore I've barely received any letters from what I did back in February so it will it will take ages for them to like catch up with the paperwork and everything I've read some of the coverage there's various narratives and I'd like your reaction to it the first is that these young climate activists think that they know better than a democratically elected government and they should better be doing something else what would you respond to that well first of all we're not that young we are we have an age band from well now since yesterday um yeah 12 year old on the road and all this is 73 so we have quite an age group just something for everyone um I mean the 73 year old does it for his grandkids so um yeah yeah I forgot the rest of the question we should be leaving this to our democratically elected government who is aware of the problems of climate change and and we're giving them the the power to through our democracy to to handle this problem that affects us all yeah and I wish that will work we still want to stay within democracy with all our demands and everything so there's not any point where we are like let's just do what we say but we can just see that even though we have a democracy and we have elected our leaders they're not doing that basic job that basic job is to protect us their basic job is to make sure that we are fine that we don't have a hunger crisis that we don't have people dying from storms or floods that we don't have wars we can see them not doing their basic job and that's where I feel like okay but we have to stand up we can't just watch and we can't wait four years for the next election and hope that that will somehow um make it better it doesn't matter which party is in the government that's their basic job like the green party of course but also the other parties have to protect us that's well the the other criticism that's often leveled the climate activists and it's resurfaced again with in reaction to the protest that you're engaging in now is that these are working people that you're blocking uh from getting to work they could be pregnant women trying to get to the hospital uh and this kind of protest if it hasn't yet you've been lucky but it could really negatively affect people so how would you react to that yeah there's always a risk like we are trying to make this as safe as possible we don't want to endanger anyone so that's why we always have a way for emergencies to get through of course if the cars in the traffic jam also have to make a way for them to get through but that's what they should do anyways and if that's so dangerous then we should have a system that has makes sure that there are no traffic jams in germany because we are not the major cause of traffic jams in germany we're just adding your food so for me it's really hard to sit on the street it's really hard for me to tell people know when they want to get through if they're angry i can deal with it better if they are desperate it's really tough i feel very sorry for every person i'm blocking there i just don't see any other way and the climate crisis is not gonna choose who who it will hit it's it's like it's also going to hit all of us at random so let me just take the devil's advocate position a little bit here it's fair what you say but to the person that's trying to get through to the hospital perhaps in a car not an ambulance further back from the front where you guys are and they're just sitting there beeping the board what would you say to them if that were to happen what would your reaction be just that i'm very sorry that's we're trying everything for that not to happen and i really hope we won't ever hurt anyone with our protest i don't see any other way it's just i don't see any way where i can have the same effect the same impact without having some risk without disturbing random people i wish we had another way okay now i'm looking at a some statistics September 2021 you gov this is in britain but they were asking people their opinion on extinction rebellion the climate action group there and 49 percent were fairly negative or very negative of extinction rebellion do you believe that it's strategic to polarize people against activists like this i mean if it's one thing to say that they are they are talking about us and that's a good thing but if they're talking about you in a way which is like god i these people just just make me insane it's that really going to change hearts and minds with regard to the climate crisis from people the thing is they they are of course a lot of people are against us against our methods against what we do but what we can also see is that not many people are against our demands so what we hear a lot on the streets is yeah that's fine what you're asking for but not in this way like they they hate the way we do it but they don't hate what we want and i don't think anyone well there might be someone who will just say just because they want this and i don't like them now i'm against it but usually what we can see is that there's a lot of support for our demands even though there's not for our methods and in the end that's what matters it doesn't matter if they hate us i mean of course it's horrible like i i don't read comments anywhere but as as long as they agree with the demands as long as they discuss our demands as well well and that is something that in all the coverage i've read so far on this your demands are always there i mean they're forced to explain what it is that these people want so it certainly is a platform to to present your demands you've said that people are willing to go to prison for this that is an enormous burden on any activist an enormous risk that could affect people's futures in a very dramatic way in the short term how would you explain that feeling that you have and and that your fellow activists have that you're willing to just do anything for this i don't have much to lose of course for me personally i could try to like have a good future for now and uh like have a nice life until the climate crisis but i feel like i have the opportunity to do and try something i am in a democratic country where i can so i don't want to like wait until it really hits me personally and yeah i feel like what future am i fighting for like if the thing is if i spend my future in prison but i've tried everything for our entire planet to have a good future i'm willing to take that i'm willing to spend time in prison for that because that's just so much more important than my personal record like of course i'll have a criminal record sure i mean maybe at some time in the future that will be a good thing maybe that will be the thing that gets you the job but um yeah it's not fun like being in custody is not fun i've spent way too much time at custody and i hate that i have to do that but i just feel like yeah what future am i fighting for am i fighting for my personal trying to have as good as a life as possible under the circumstances future or am i fighting for a better future for one of us that might suck for me personally and sometimes it brings you physical harm as well this i mean the pain grips that the police sometimes use they recently carried away a 15 year old in a pain grip after taking them away from their super glue this is painful it's difficult how do you feel about that how does your family feel about that yeah it's difficult it's i really hate pain grips like that's because you usually know that they are coming and it's like it's just yeah but still i don't want to get up i just i just can't i can't just get up because they are sweating to do pain grips yeah so there's there's a lot like this is an emotional rollercoaster it's really exhausting we have been been in action at the learn again now for a week and it seems like three months at least like it's it's really a lot my family is kind of yeah mostly fine with it my parents do support what i do here but no one wants to see their daughter go to prison or their daughter be carried away in pain grips or in handcuffs or yeah it's not explain to me how let's the generation last generation has mobilized a group of such hardcore activists so quickly explain a bit about the training the legal advice the way it's organized because i see a very media savvy group here that understand communications and and i think that they're not making many of the mistakes that other groups have made in this space it's not a very preachy group it's very action oriented there are very specific demands you go onto the website they're immediately okay we've got a zoom called every thursday and every sunday join us it's it's all about getting people onto the streets it's not about here's our analysis and we've got to have this talk that's my take as an outsider but explain how it is from the inside and how they've managed to achieve that yeah i think that's just a lot of inspiration from people who are willing to risk so much so for me that were the people in the hunger strike i saw the people in the hunger strike and was like wow these people are actually risking everything they risk to die for our future and that was something that really inspired me and i also realized we can't do something because they got all the media attention they actually managed to get their demand and have our chancellor talk to them so i felt like okay we can actually do something we can actually achieve something and then uh what we do is we kind of alternate between an action phase and a mobilization phase so of course the mobilization also runs throughout the action phase but not at full speed because most of us are an action so what we do is that the people who go into action glue themselves to the streets get taken into custody they go back to their places so i will go back to norther germany and there they will do the mobilization so then we will and post those uh pass our leaflets try to get as many people as possible to come to our talks we have online talks uh to the beginning mostly because of covid and now we have both online talks and talks in various cities so sometimes you will just see on the website uh for one day there will be like 50 talks in different cities at the same time and we're trying to get as many people as possible there and then what we try to do in the talks is basically to connect emotionally to what the clamped crisis means because that's the factor that will actually get us moving get us into action and then we invite the people to training yes i have a maybe meeting like in between step where you can go to an online meeting and just ask all your questions and maybe meeting yeah that's all the people who maybe want to join the conference i like that so it's a sort of last generation curious yeah okay yeah then we try to get as many people as possible to come to trainings if once a week in every region those trainings they're online and offline right yeah and who's giving them who's involved in this is it people who have just figured it out by themselves or people who have been out there doing this and have got results and and are sharing their stories mostly everyone just learns what needs to be done it's kind of the spirit so if someone needs to give a talk then someone to give the talk and uh we need someone to do a training someone will learn how to do this training so we have a training script that is of course oriented on other non-violent dire action trainings and deflation trainings and everything so we just had some people have a workforce and basically create our training that we want to give to people for this campaign and then we have a training script that everyone who wants to give a training connects us and there's a lot of information on how to do it of course we have done the training ourselves so kind of know what happens in there that's literally the tactical training what to do in order to block the roads how about the legal stuff like how do you understand um so the legal yeah we have we have a basic legal training within the direct action training where you will learn a little bit but we also have an extra online legal training there's also a recording of that you can watch you can't make it lie and then we have four security sessions where you can ask our legal team or someone from our legal team will answer all of your questions because sometimes we have specific cases that are not in the basic training yeah which is only about six months old right it's kind of organized itself very very quickly how many people are involved so far and in the core group and the wider membership oh yeah i'm kind of losing the overview so we had three people who started this campaign like our core team and who's still making like the most basic decisions in terms of strategy and yeah but then of course at the beginning they did mostly everything else as well so like the legal team at the beginning was one person um it was actually different person from those three but yeah they they did a lot and now what we have is like basically we already had the structure of different work groups but they were mostly just one person and now we're just adding more people to all of this group so and how many people are we talking about sorry in terms of like the actual volunteers who are really mobilizing and energizing the wider membership that's difficult question so i think in like the strategy stuff we might have like and all the legal stuff and all of these work groups we might have 30 people and then we have way more we're just like doing the mobilization everywhere and coordinating that there's an article last week about progressive groups in the US in the intercept and it explains how these groups are basically imploding because of too much internal discussion because of demands for horizontality from the wider membership but you just said that three people are making the most basic decisions how has the group managed that problem which affects so many progressive groups that everybody wants to have a say and sometimes in order to actually have a group that has action there needs to be an element of verticality as well how do you negotiate that tension yeah yeah that's that's a tricky part and that's also like probably yeah the most difficult part for some of us we have a lot of ways to give input so it's not like these people are making decisions and then ordering us to do anything like that's not happening we have a feedback process where we can always give back all all the feedback that we have from our group and there are yeah by now there are way more people involved in the strategy than just these three yeah I think we need that to be as efficient as we are because I I've done some stuff with Extinction Rebellion before and when you have a certain amount of people that want to make a decision together it will take ages and what we are doing at the moment is blocking streets every day so we have to like we have to be very efficient so yeah sometimes we will I think we had like nine or ten yeah ten blockades on one day at the same time so coordinating that is just yeah you can only do with that was some centralization and then basically our our strategy is to say okay we have a team that makes the basic decisions and you kind of you have to go along with that if you want to join you can of course quit at any time you don't have to ever do anything there's always if you're not happy with something in action there's always some people who are thinking I can do support instead because I don't want to give my idea or something do you think the fact that you you're such an action oriented group avoids a lot of those problems that plague progressive groups because there's much more action it seems than talk in your group or at least action plus preparing for action yeah yeah maybe yeah I think we are all there's all the people who are here really like they just want to start doing stuff you can really feel that energy so there's so many people are just like okay let's just do something and I feel like all of these people don't want to go into a group where you have to make plans for three weeks to do one action or do where where you feel like you're spending most of your time discussing stuff um yeah they just want to get started and I think for that this group is perfect because you can really just you can you could join in three days you're gonna go to a talk go to training we had we literally had people just just beyond the street the next week so and it's growing right I mean when people see this they get as I understand it the numbers are increasing a lot okay let me ask you some I mean personally you weren't always an activist right you studied Buddhism and you went to Kathmandu and your family have always been into ecological issues I mean explain a bit about your background and what what made you get active yeah so yeah I was I studied Buddhism in Kathmandu and Nepal and yeah I think my idea was always to do something on the lines of activism like I thought about human rights and to badge a lot I thought I would end up there some NGO fighting for that but then at some point I just realized okay if we don't get the climate crisis under control human rights are gonna go downhill globally on a catastrophic level so I just feel like this is the most important thing we have to deal with and this is the one thing where I'm really needed but I never thought that I would have this life like I never thought I would spend time at custody I never thought I would even have any issues with the police and now that's like my my day today it's like just another day on the street another day talking to the police another day being in a cell so that's kind of crazy but I also feel like it's though the one useful thing to do at the moment and I feel like for before that I was very desperate like I had this I think many of us had this failure of just crying about the climate crisis because it feels like no one is doing anything and it's so bad and it's only getting worse so now being active and at least trying everything makes me feel way better it's so much that it comes down to time doesn't it like the ability to dedicate time to those trainings and then to to be there and on blocking the roads how would you respond to someone this is look I want to get involved but I don't have the space all the time and it seems like Miriam's really fortunate to be able to do this but it doesn't work for all of us yeah and it doesn't have to like if all the people who can't do it do it that's great there are so many ways to help our campaign like you can like just donating money of course but also helping in the background like doing media work or all the support system that we have we couldn't do this without our support system like that is just managing accommodations for us or food for everyone like we have a group that cooks and brings food for everyone in the evening and they're just doing all that for free right I mean or this is based on donations that you've crowdfunded from your site it really depends on how much you need we basically have this if you say well I want to work full time for you but I can't because I have to go to work then we can say okay we can basically support you enough to still do it because we need people and we will get the money from somewhere and then we have a lot of people who just do it in every time and also you don't have to be the hardcore I will go to prison person we have we have some of those and those are for us that is basically unstoppable like sure but we also have a lot of people who just come by for two days then you're less likely to have a criminal record it won't be as expensive probably afterwards but you can some again this experience and we also see a lot of people who do something and support and then suddenly end up on the streets so that's once you are involved with the campaign a lot of people end up blocking roads at some point yeah but you can you can help us in so many ways it sounds like you enjoy what you're doing even though it's for a very serious and serious cause tell me a bit about about that about the connections between people and working together yeah I think if there's one good thing about the climate crisis it's probably that I've met these people because it's just it's such an amazing group of people people who are willing to go to jail or at least custody or like sacrifice a lot of their personal well being to help all of us so that's just an amazing group of people that's like a family feeling after now we have a lot of new people and the first time I'm like who are all of these people and the second time we are all hugging and just being in action together and being in those situations really connects you quickly yeah so it's it's very rewarding on that yeah okay if I would like to get involved with let's the generation last generation what are the points of contacts and things that you would recommend I would recommend to just go to one of our talks that's like the first step to get to know us we also have recordings of the talks given that by different people I think you have an entire playlist now yeah so just that's like the entry point of course you can also join in a different way so people just go straight to trainings or something but yeah just come to the talk to get a better idea of what we're doing and then see how you can help and maybe want to be part of it and the last question for you if there are two or three books that you could recommend for people listening like it could be in the area that we're discussing now or something totally different but two or three books that you would suggest okay that's an interesting question so I think my favorite book and then one that motivates me a lot is Buddhist books so it's by Shanti Deva the Bodhichaya Avatara that kind of talks about the Bodhisattva motivation and I don't think I'm anywhere close to that but it's definitely an inspiration to like see how you can give up everything for others yeah so that's one of my strongest motivations okay the title of it I didn't get the title is yeah Bodhichaya Avatara in English it would be introduction to the way of the Bodhisattva or something okay okay anything else that you would like to to add yeah since this is in English just to let everyone know these campaigns are everywhere there are so many countries who are building these campaigns and there is so much help that if you want to start a campaign in your country and there's no campaign already there is international exchange calls where you can hear from other countries what works what doesn't and you really only need a few dedicated people in the beginning to sign this and then you can grow quickly and yeah really have some impact we also have some people visiting here from other countries like we have a group of Czech people in action with us and some from Denmark who also want to do the same thing in their countries so don't hesitate too much like if you feel like you have no idea how to do all of this there's a lot of help like you can you can really get get a good start with this international exchange okay thank you very much Miriam Maya it's been interesting talking to you and best of luck with the protest thank you