Spredfast CMO Jim Rudden: Marketers Must Connect with People, Not Pixels

This is part of an ongoing Q&A series from Eastwick’s Ad Tech practice. Every month we will be profiling advertising and digital media influencers to get an unfiltered glimpse of their professional and personal lives. If there is someone you’d like to see us profile, please email adtech@eastwick.com

Describe your background and how you ended up where you are today.

I am a software person. I have been in software since 1991 — back when we shipped our products on floppy disks. The last 12 years have been in marketing, but I worked in just about every other function before that. I wrote documentation, trained people to use software, wrote code as a consultant in the US and Europe, worked as a product manager defining enterprise products, and I also worked in sales targeting the biggest companies in the world. After all of that, I came to marketing.

I am not sure that is the most traditional path to CMO, but I think my journey has given me a lot of empathy for the different ways that people experience products.

The marketing tech space has become increasingly more congested. How do you see this playing out?

I mentioned that I’m a software person, but I’m also a marketer, so naturally I love the proliferation of marketing tech. Well, good marketing tech.

Marketers have to get smarter with their marketing in order to break away from the noise. We have to shift our mindset to the moment when you reach the consumer, and then say “What’s the most important thing for them to hear? Not what’s the most important thing for me to say?” This empathetic mindset forces us to think more critically about the conversations we want to have, instead of the taglines we need to tell you.

As a consumer, that reads plain and simple, but as marketers, we have to remember we’re connecting with people, not pixels. People want to feel like they’re being heard — promoted posts won’t work, automated responses are aggravating, so businesses have to up their game.

What innovative companies do you feel the industry should be watching right now? Why?

Spredfast. Amazing company. Oh, you are asking for a company besides Spredfast? People should check out Mevo. They make something called an “event camera” for live streaming. But it is not just a camera — Mevo is also providing software that allows you to run a really sophisticated live production. I think that is what is exciting — the production capabilities, not just the camera. Video dominates social these days. That is not stopping any time soon — and companies of all sizes are going to start adding live streaming to their video mix. Most live streaming is pretty poor from a production quality perspective. Products like Mevo are going to give brands the ability to produce really great live video at a really low price point. Anyone using social for business is going to need to be great at live streaming.

Consumer-brand relationships have evolved over the last few years due to emerging technologies opening up new ways to connect. What has been the most disruptive change for marketers and what can marketers do to stay ahead of the game?

Consumers can now shut out brand interruptions. They filter our email, block our display ads, fast forward through our commercials, subscribe to ad-free radio and hide our social newsfeed ads. They are shifting to platforms where they are in control — most notably social networks.

As brands, our only options for gaining attention these days are entertain or serve. I think this is incredibly healthy for brands — it forces us to be creative and relevant to our consumers. We have to earn their attention with entertaining content. It also forces us to be focused on service — when that consumer does come around and ask for our insight or our help, we better be ready with an amazing experience. That is our moment — are we ready to serve? That is how you stay in the game with today’s consumer — you win their trust because you cannot interrupt them with your brand anymore.

What is something people may not know about you?

I now play guitar. Picked it up just a couple years ago simply because it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do, but never made time to learn. I had the luck to find an amazing teacher. Learning new things from scratch is humbling, but incredibly satisfying if you take the long view. I have come a long way in three years, but when you live in Austin where we see live music all the time — I am constantly reminded that I have a really long way to go.