Reflections: Dreamforce 2022

Reflections: Dreamforce 2022

Kristin Wozniak, SVP Analytics, Insight + Strategy (Cossette Media)

My first reaction: where am I?

After spending the majority of my time in sweatpants in front of a screen in my bedroom for the past 2.5 years, walking out of my hotel into the unexpectedly warm and humid San Francisco air and into a conference centre full of thousands of unmasked people felt somewhat surreal but also a little scary, definitely inspiring, and massively overwhelming.?

When I think about how I feel about the whole experience now that I’m home, those really are the three feelings that dominate my reflections: inspired, scared, and overwhelmed. Let’s start with the positive…

Inspired: Sustainability

The buzz in the room(s) was enough to drum up feelings of excitement and inspiration, with thousands of people curious and ready to learn. From product launches and developments, from detailed technical demonstrations, to motivating keynotes and workshops, there was a lot to feel inspired about. Like a kid in a candy shop, I turned to my colleague (the incredible Carrie Bisnath) and asked, “Where do we start!?”

But the theme that inspired me more than anything else was the overall focus on sustainability.?

A few months ago I was working through a “sustainability brief” for a client. Through the process, I went back and forth on how to respond to a brief about sustainability when it can encompass so many things. Sustainability, at its core, means not making decisions or acting in a way that creates negative impacts on the future. I love this definition because it opens up thinking around sustainability to include more than environmental sustainability. I definitely felt that sense of an expanded definition reflected at Dreamforce, with conversations dedicated to sustainability as it relates to:

• building and championing consumer (human) trust,?
• leadership (a deeper focus on the leadership + employee experience vs. just the consumer experience),?
• innovation in product and service development (let’s focus on longer term solutions vs. bandaid solutions and the conference also saw the launch of Net Zero Cloud),?
• business (how can we effectively manage ebbs and flows in the market while truly respecting customers, employees, the product, and the bottom line?)

This theme carried through to talks from Jane Goodall (swoon!), Al Gore, Simone Biles, and Alex Honnold. For each one of them, it was clear that sustainability (through whatever lens you choose) really was their motivation to do and be better.?

While I was excited about the focus on sustainability, I couldn’t help but be struck by the abundance of contradictions. For example, the conscious effort by Salesforce to not serve pork or beef given their carbon intensive footprint felt quickly offset by overflowing garbage bins of single use plastic containers and utensils. Never mind the fact that it is easy to forget that digital marketing and data mining both have an incredible carbon footprint through their reliance on data centres [estimates vary, but there seems to be an overall agreement that data centres account for about 2% of all global carbon emissions, about on par with air travel (Forbes)].?

This reflection is not meant to be a criticism. There is no question that “being sustainable” is hard, and as Jane Goodall pointed out in her talk, we often make the mistake of isolating our sustainable efforts into single focused initiatives and forgetting to see how a win in one area can easily create losses in another.

Her suggestion? Collaboration and commitment. So clear in its simplicity. So hard in its execution.?

But I’m still inspired. I’m inspired to commit to championing sustainability as a person and as part of an incredibly influential industry. I am inspired to ask the hard questions, collaborate with others, build the best solutions we can, and work toward not just implementing “carbon offset” solutions but to actually changing our approach so we do better from the very beginning. (And a massive thank you here to Brian Cuddy for always making sustainability part of the conversation and holding us all accountable. His BS detector is always on, and I love him for it.)

Scared: Privacy

By far and away, my favourite talk of the conference (I mean, with the exception of Jane Goodall of course…) was about how Salesforce thinks through privacy and ethics in marketing. That may seem odd, I know. But let me explain…

One day, I walked out of a session to be greeted by a group of Dreamforce protestors wearing t-shirts and holding signs advocating for privacy in data and to “take the force out of sales.” Of course, me being me, I stopped to talk to them, wanting to understand their point of view.?

I was horrified to learn that the group of protestors was actually a hired flash mob who knew nothing about Salesforce, Dreamforce, or data (and definitely not data privacy). They had been hired to “protest” outside Dreamforce in order to promote a small CRM company trying to break into the market.?

That left me feeling… gross. I wanted to wash the overwhelming sense of dishonesty off of my skin. The right to privacy and ethical uses of data are critically important, and I was devastated that a group would use this cause in protest form as cover to promote a CRM product.?

I raise this experience here, because it felt like an exclamation point on a feeling I had already been having. As technology and artificial intelligence become more advanced, and we are able to collect, aggregate, and integrate more and more data to “improve the consumer experience” with the goal to improve personalization, the question for me is: “do we really need to?”

As an industry, we throw around a lot of “statistics”: 66% of people expect brands to understand their needs and expectations, 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience, 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging… (note that I am not sourcing these numbers because they were said verbally in presentations during the conference and were not sourced in the talk track – another challenge for another day). We use these pieces of information to justify the deeper use of data (e.g. we need personalization or we will die!).?

This raises a few questions for me:

• How do we think these stats might change if we added a cost to these exchanges? For example, what information are you willing to share to get this tailored / personalized experience? Would you hand over your age and gender? Your search history? Your postal code? Your credit score? Access to your chat history? Your child’s name and age? My hypothesis is that the overall interest in tailored experiences would start to decline if people were forced to actively make those trades.
• Do consumers really know what data of theirs is being collected and used? Sure, we have updated terms and conditions and we integrated “opt outs” into our products and we now need to accept cookies when we visit sites… but I ask again, do we, as industry professionals, really think that Canadians know what they might be agreeing to? And are we okay using their data if the answer to that question is “no” (as it probably is most of the time)?
• Just because the numbers say people want tailored experiences, does that mean we should give it to them knowing the data and privacy implications? What responsibility do we have as marketing leaders to make sustainable decisions for the informational and democratic health of our communities? (e.g. I know my kids would be more likely to clean their plates if I gave them ice-cream for dinner every night, but I know I have a responsibility as their parent to set them up for a healthy future… which means they get vegetables too. Just because they ask for it, doesn’t mean it’s my duty to give it to them.)
• Just because we can do something, does it mean we should? I ask myself every day what ethics and values I want to stand for in my job and impart in the industry. There are some things I just don’t feel okay doing.?

Okay okay… I know this sounds preachy. I know I work in media and advertising, so let’s not go crazy here. My asking of these questions is not to suggest that I “get it right” all the time. I absolutely do not. But I do know what if we don’t start asking ourselves these questions and really thinking about the long term impacts of our obsession with personalization and the quest to own ALL the data, the future could look bleak.

This is why when there was an opportunity to attend a session titled “Embedding Privacy and Ethics in Marketing”, I jumped at it.?

Lead by Salesforce’s legal and ethics representatives, this presentation was a look at how much work goes on behind the scenes to ensure ethical practices are built into their products, and how many variables you really need to consider (e.g. collecting a piece of data you don’t really need can have consequences that range from violating privacy rules to building accidental biases into your machine learning algorithms).?

Hearing from this team was authentic and inspirational, but it also unfortunately felt very disconnected from the product conversations happening in other rooms. The session was tucked away in a 20 minute slot in the afternoon of the third day of a three day conference. (Given the high level of data integration and personalization talked about in the primary product launch (Salesforce Genie), I wish this session had kicked off the conference!) It was a reminder for me that there is real value in integrating this conversation far more often, in everything from pitches and plans to products and services. Ethics and privacy need to be top of mind as we navigate next steps for the industry, which means it needs to be visible in all we do.?

A huge thank you to Rob Katz and Matthew Tonner for representing such an important issue, and a big welcome to the Plus Co. family, Michael Cohen! We’re excited to champion these important issues with you to create a more sustainable and safe future.?

Overwhelmed: Opportunity

Predictably, I don’t know where to start as I explore why I felt overwhelmed by my Dreamforce experience. Opportunity was everywhere. From new products to new ways of thinking to new people and new ideas… as I said at the beginning, “where do we start!?”?

I don’t really know the answer. But I say this to my team often, so I will share it here: our goal is to be at least a little better tomorrow than we were today. And if we keep that in mind, there are a million “right” places to start.?

So let’s get going.?