Roland, thank you for putting me last. This is a really cool event. I had really nothing... I had no idea what to expect. Roland contacted me and he was like, yeah, we are trying this new thing. We did it in I think, and gonna do it in the Bay Area. Maybe we'll have 50 people there. And I walk in today and I'm like, oh my God. Very cool. The topics have been really interesting. I come to this space from similar to Scott earlier from the agency side. I've been on the agency side of marketing for basically my whole career, 25 years or so, and have worked quite a bit in B2B, in tech, but in consumer advertising and marketing as well. And I think it's apropos in a lot of ways to end today's session with talking about emotion and emotional impact. And it's really interesting that the conversations today have touched on in a number of different ways the sort of, whether it's a B2B is going to B2P or imagination and creativity are really important. There's sort of a humanity. There's a new sense of humanity, I think, that's entering into the B2B technology and marketing space, which wasn't there several years ago. When I started at Gyro about four years ago, we talk about something called humanly relevant. And I would, we would have these conversations with clients or prospective clients and we'd have the strangest reaction, a very heretical like, what are you talking about? How could emotion play a role in B2B decisions? How could emotion play a role in technology? It's the ultimate of all rational things. And we're past those days, I think. We find that the conversations we're having now with clients who are large and small, it's much more part of the conversation. It's less about does emotion play a role and it's more about how do we do it? How do we go about infusing what we do with emotion? And I'd just be curious, I'll show a hands maybe, to what extent the role of emotion is being discussed or has been discussed in your day to day, if at all? People, I guess, if you could raise your hands to say that yes, we do, it has been a topic of conversation within your organization. Okay, so like maybe 50%, which is pretty cool. So hopefully we'll have some fun with this topic today. It's a light topic. It's a good way to end the day. You can't really go wrong with emotion. I'm not going to get too complicated with it. So we're very familiar with emotion in consumer marketing. We all, like whether we watch TV or we have killed our TVs and we just are totally on the internet content, you can't escape consumer marketing. You can't escape all the emotion that's been part of that for so long. And it's taken for granted. It seems very alien in a B2B context, but we're very accustomed to it in the consumer world. And so I just wanted to sort of set the tone to a certain extent and get us into a more kind of emotional, not like a sad, but emotional mode. And so I just want to play a few spots that sort of speak to different types of emotions from, these are consumer spots mostly. So I'm going to work with Julio and we're going to try to sync this up. If you can play this one. It's time for daddy to make some funny. Yeah, we got all of this at Walmart, the decorations, the tablecloths, all of the food. And we even saved enough money for the clown outfit. Unbeatable prices backed by our price of $10,000. And we're pretty much guaranteed. Save money, live better. I don't know if you've seen that before. This is actually a few years old. It was created by an agency here that's local, so I figured it would be fun to show. And it's just, I mean, this is what we see, right? This is what we're used to in the world of consumer marketing. Think about doing something like this for the work you're doing and how alien that might be. So we're going to now play another one, which is a totally different category, totally different product, and a different kind of emotional approach. It's like I'm almost a tearjerker. Yeah, I'm the father of an 8 and 10 year old, and I was putting this presentation together, and I'm like, God, I'm such a lame dad. But besides that, so that's obviously a totally different category. We're all familiar with Google. We're all familiar with Chrome, I'm sure. Many of you have probably seen that before, but this is almost like a use case told with storytelling. Really effective, really powerful. The emotional, could you imagine comparing this type of approach to a more sort of here's how, a how-to video or a demo, right? Just completely different. I've got one more for you, and let's see, this one, it's actually B2B, so we're now in the B2B space. We're out of the consumer space. You may have seen this. It's gotten a lot of coverage and pick up for Volvo trucks, and I believe that's Claude Van Damme, although I'm not like a movie buff. So let's take a quick look at this. A pair of legs engineered to defy the laws of physics, and a mindset to master the most epic of splits. Thanks. That is awesome. Thank you. There's a lot of, I don't know if it's real or not. I don't know if anyone here does. I've heard it is real. Okay, I've heard it wasn't real, but pretty awesome storytelling, although probably most of us in here are not selling trucks. So again, how do you take something that's abstract, it's technology, and make it tangible, make it emotional, and go beyond just sort of speeds and feeds, features, benefits, and all the things that we spend so much time defining for the products we're selling? So how do we essentially go about applying this in the B2B technology world? And how do we, if we're convinced that emotion plays an important role, how do we convince others in the organization? And really, there's no better way, obviously, I'm sure most of you would agree, to convince analytical, maybe engineering-minded people about something than with data. And there's a lot of data that speaks to the power of emotion in decision-making, certainly from a consumer's perspective, also from a B2B perspective. And I love, there's some data in here that we use quite a bit, and you may have seen this before, but it's from Google and CEB. I know there's at least one or two folks from CEB here, and we work with them a bit. And this is just, it's sort of a dated study, but it is so powerful and so spot on to the fact that the emotional relationship that folks have with B2B brands versus B2C brands is just so much more powerful. That connection, from an emotional perspective, is just a heck of a lot stronger, which is really initially very counterintuitive, because you think about yourself as a consumer, and maybe it's Apple, or maybe it's Sony, or maybe it's Amazon, or maybe it's another brand, and how much love, or maybe it's smaller brands, sports brands, et cetera, that you have so much love for. But the context for B2B is so significant in terms of the relationships that the buyers and sellers have, the providers have, and the risk that's associated with the purchase decisions. I mean, these are large investments, right? So you start to realize it seems counterintuitive at first, and then when you start to dimensionalize it, it makes more sense. This is from 2013, so there's even some outdated logos here. I don't know if this is exactly what it would look like today, but I think the point still stands, and maybe CEB has updated data. Not to put you on the spot, but this also is incredibly interesting, and maybe folks here have seen this, but in terms of facilitating conversation within your teams, within your organizations, and saying it's not just that we want to do more emotional work, or we think emotion is important, there's data out there that says, and again, this is CEB and Google, that the personal, quote unquote, personal value benefits have twice the impact, in this study at least, for B2B decisions than the business value. This is again really counterintuitive for those of us that have grown up in a world of it's completely rational, it's completely logical, there's an RFP process, it's all about total cost of ownership and ROI and all that stuff. Those things are all true, but they're also not differentiated typically, or very differentiated. When you look at the professionals making the decisions, there's so many things that are involved within the context of those decisions and the people they're working with that are associated with their professional advancement and development, social aspects and benefits, the emotional benefits and self-image. This is, I think, incredibly powerful. There's a ton of research out there. Gyro has done research with Fortune and Forbes where we start to sort of unpack it a little bit, and again, this is 700 people. Human factors are the deciding factors. So with so many executives out there, they're basically saying the data helps you get to a point of sort of parity in a lot of cases and helps, like others have said today, rationalize what you want to do from essentially an emotional perspective. This is a new, I think brand new book and I just wanted to bring it here as well. Again, there's a lot of examples of this, but this is interesting because people are taking different perspectives on how emotion plays a role. In this case, they were looking at the impact on Net Promoter Score, which is something that many companies look at, and the overall, the total customer experience. I know there's some agencies like maybe Quarry and GLG that focus a lot on the experience, and the experience is being something that's very rational, interaction-driven in terms of what those specific interactions are, and then all the emotions that come to play within those contexts as well. And that the emotional piece is critical to overcoming declining NPS or plateauing NPS scores. So just, again, there's no lack of data out there for folks to pull together if you feel like organizationally we need to build a case for this, and we do it very often with our clients. So I have some shameless self-promotion stuff here I'm not going to go through and bore you with, but we've got processes like most agencies and companies do. But I think the important thing is, I'm a huge believer in simplicity. I've worked with companies the size of Microsoft and HP and Intel to much smaller companies, but Manav and I have done some work together at Twilio and MongoDB and others. Regardless of big or small, I think there's just too much complexity in general. So let's try to get this as simple as possible. And I thought this kind of framework might help you actualize on this. See how you are articulating or not the emotional value of the product you're about to launch, product or solution. And there's some really simple tools. You can get as complicated with this as you want to. But if you don't have all the tools at your disposal or your organization is really fractured and there's a brand team over here and then there's research doing something over there and I'm just trying to launch this product, how do I try to infuse some level of emotion that's not completely off the ranch kind of thing. So one way to think about it is just taking the brand space, the brand emotional space that you're playing in and hopefully most of the brands that you're working with have identified that. It might be the first or second page in that 100 page brand guidelines document that you read all the time. It might not exist at all. We work with startups that haven't defined this for their brand. But that's a starting point. What's the brand standing for from an emotional perspective essentially? And if it doesn't exist, make it up. But talk to your brand team when you do that or your CMO or your CEO or your founder. And then the emotional space of your audience. Obviously, it's like so many folks have talked about an audience first approach. It's obvious in so many ways in marketing. But as you get into the product stack and the specifics of the technology that often sort of starts to disappear. So let's identify that space and then between those two, where can the product fit? Where does the product pay off? When we start to bring those two and then this third thing together, then obviously it's supported by all the things that we're very familiar with, the features, benefits, unique selling proposition, all those things. They're very important and they all need to tie in together. So I thought, you know, let's take this abstract framework and make it a little bit more tangible. Let's go through a few examples. Now I might not be right about the brand emotional space for each one of these. I've worked with each of these brands over different periods of time. So someone from Microsoft or Cisco might call me out and say, no, no, that's not us anymore. And if I misspeak, I apologize. But Microsoft is, at least when I was working with them, about realizing potential. Microsoft works across businesses and consumers and massive brand, but there's a notion of realizing potential through all these amazing tools that we have. HP is about keep, their new brand for HP, Inc. is about reinventing, keep reinventing. So the constant innovation, constant surprise and delight. Cisco, it's never been a better time, I think, is their tagline. So the time is now. There's so much innovation happening, the Internet of Things, et cetera. Let's do this now. So there's an emotional element to all these things. Obviously, one commonality within technology brands is this notion of empowerment. So let's try to like, sort of find new space within that notion of empowerment because it's easy to fall into that. And then from a smaller, more startup brand perspective, MongoDB is for giant ideas, Metameter, which is a Hadoop big data company, Stay Curious, and Sonic Wall is your partner in cybersecurity. So you can start to like, you don't need a huge toolbox. You don't need to get complicated with this. If you think about what those brands stand for in terms of their tagline, their mission, their vision, whatever it might be, that's the emotional space you can start to define. You guys have probably seen Personas a million times. They are very helpful tools. Often what happens, and I like what Scott had presented earlier with the theme piece, because often what happens with Personas is there's a complete lack of emotion. It's like, oh, this is an ITDM, and they oversee the network and they report into the CIO, and there's a lot of facts and figures, but who the heck is this person? What do they care about? We did recently working on a project where we were trying to understand where the emotional sort of space is for the target audience. What we do a lot of times is we're scrappy, very scrappy, and we just call people. So if we want to find out within this target audience what they think, how they feel, let's find those people. And it's anecdotal. It's not scientific. It's not the type of thing you might put in front of your CEO, but it's super insightful. We were talking to recruiters recently, and the question is, for them, what does success look like? And the answer was pretty consistent and pretty clear. We want people to ask our opinions. We want to have a seat at the table for the hiring manager to actually value what we're saying. I mean, that is very emotional, rich emotional territory. So for you all out there who are practitioners, if you don't have these things, think about just setting up some calls. Talk to people in the market. I know you might have a huge research department that's off doing global research on really important things, but oftentimes the critical emotional insights are lacking. And so simple discussion and phone calls can start to reveal these things, as hypotheses even. So this is a framework that you can use on your own. You might have already defined this for yourself, for your product or solution. You might have done it on your own, and then you might want to check, like, whoa, am I off into some weird space with the emotional ground that I'm now treading? Because it doesn't really line up with these key sort of guideposts. And what I'll do is, because I'm running short of time, it's all red over here, is just an example that we did for HP. So just, again, I think tangible things are super helpful. So HP's brand space, as I mentioned, is keep reinventing. So that's what they stand for. There's a promise. There's a mission behind that. It's inspirational. It's pretty awesome. In this case, it was for technology to educators. So educators, the insight we had is they want to continually improve the learning experience, not surprisingly. So we created a platform for their technology suite of products, which are everything from HP plus Microsoft, HP plus Chromebooks, and then HP has its own technology called Sprout, which is interesting. It's like a 3D scanning machine. And we created this platform called Unstandardized Education. And it sort of cropped out right there. But there's this, like, amazing thing that I had nothing to do with in terms of writing what this kind of anthem is to get to the emotional space of these educators. Learning could stand to unlearn a thing or two, rote memorization, standardized testing, standardized anything, really. After all, there's no such thing as a standard kid. Kids aren't that simple. Learning isn't that simple. It's as complicated and individualized as kids themselves. So let's unstandardize learning. Let's unlearn the old ways. Then let's learn some new ones. And when those get outdated, let's unlearn those too. Then let's learn new ways again. Notice a pattern here? Learning is dynamic. It needs dynamic tools to match flexible devices that let education evolve with the times, collaborative technology that helps classrooms un-crystallize, ingenious things that let kids discover their own genius. HP keep reinventing. So this would be a fancy example, I would say, of like how we create an emotional platform for a product or solution. When I say fancy, I mean a lot of time and effort was put into this, but it doesn't have to be like the pretty pictures and everything. And just to give you a sense of what a creative output would be or was in this case from this, we've got a video to play that pays off this notion of unstandardized learning. If it was up to me, I'd set me free. I'd be anywhere, be where I wanna be. Well, every day that I stay, I do the things in my own way. I'd set them free. Oh, set them free. That must have been the Intel version. Sorry. So that's a concrete example of how we try to pull this together. And I just have, I think, two slides that really show as you start to formalize this. And again, some organizations have document after document after document on this. Others just don't. But when you wanna start tying the brand promise in the emotional space that lives at the top of the organization or the top of the brand to the product, you can start building it into your messaging framework. And I'm sure you guys have seen messaging frameworks all day long. This is one that was built for this specific campaign. So it really, doing the due diligence of tying everything that HP is trying to do from a vision and mission perspective to defining how HP is reinventing education or trying to, and then going down into the solution and product level. And then the takeaways we want the audience to have across each of those pillars, if you will. And again, not necessary, but as you start to build out something that's more scalable and consistent from a storytelling and emotion perspective, a really helpful way of doing that. So that's it.