Meet Étienne, Senior Director of Marketing, Conversational AI at Hootsuite
We spoke with Étienne Mérineau, Co-Founder and CMO of Heyday, and now our Senior Director of Marketing, Conversational AI to talk about his journey so far that has brought him to Hootsuite:
What nest are you in?
Heyday was born and built out of Montreal, the city that many now dub the world’s AI capital. With Hootsuite’s acquisition of Heyday, there is a real commitment to continue building a center of excellence in AI in Montreal and accelerate our leadership in R&D. We were 70-people strong when we joined the nest in August 2021. 90 days later, we passed the 100-people mark and we are hiring AI developers in droves.
Montreal was the perfect launchpad for us as the city is a natural bridge between the North American and European markets. As a result, France has been a very welcoming market for us, with iconic brands like Lacoste, LVMH & Decathlon now trusting us globally. And that’s in part due to the fact that our AI was bilingual by design, thanks to the specificity of the Canadian market but more specifically of Montreal as a bilingual city at its core. Multilingual capabilities are key for brands that strive to be culturally relevant by localizing their customer experience. We’re proud of our cosmopolitan and diverse roots.
What is your favourite social channel?
Argh, can I pick two?
Instagram is an awesome medium for storytellers. It’s the perfect hybrid between video (stories and reels), photography, and copywriting (the art of the caption!). So it gives brands, influencers and people in general the perfect trifecta to tell a compelling story.
TikTok is definitely up there too. It’s the more rebellious, authentic, scrappy and creative sibling — the new rockstar of the social media family. As a result, it’s definitely a favorite amongst Gen Zers who crave authenticity and spontaneity over the more polished and picture perfect visuals of IG. It is definitely changing the game when it comes to brand building and social shopping — all brands should keep a close eye on this disruptive channel in 2022 and beyond.
What did you see as synergies between Heyday and Hootsuite?
Social is becoming the new interface for search and e-commerce. Especially for younger shoppers for whom social is the front door of the Internet. Their digital experience increasingly starts and ends on social, directly on their mobile phone. And as a conversational commerce platform, messaging — the private side of social — has always been at the core of our product strategy.
With Heyday and Hootsuite joining forces, we are now building the operating system for brands to navigate this new social-first era.
On one hand, Hootsuite is the leader in social media management, enabling brands to manage all their public conversations with their customers under one roof, from social publishing to social listening to social selling. On the other hand, you’ve got Heyday’s customer messaging solution that helps brands manage all their private conversations with their customers (i.e. direct messaging) and to do it at scale thanks to conversational AI.
So together, we are really the two sides of the modern-day customer experience coin.
We’ve uncovered and outlined an amazingly synergistic vision of delivering a 360 social and conversational platform that will unify all the key touchpoints of the customer journey in one place, which is critical to unlocking a single view of the customer and, in turn, unprecedented personalization capabilities. And with our AI/ML capabilities, we’ll be able to deliver these powerful capabilities to the masses, effectively “giving Fortune 500 capabilities to the Fortune 500,000”. We’ve very excited about that vision.
What do you want your Hootsuite and overarching career legacies to be?
One of my favorite quotes is from a French writer named Charles Du Boo: “The most important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become”.
It helped me muster the courage to pivot my career and take the leap despite early success in an industry that I had stopped believing in: advertising.
Before founding Heyday in 2016, I spent a decade in ad agencies as a copywriter and creative director. My day-to-day goal was essentially to find new creative ways to disrupt people’s digital journeys with brand messages. Fun from a creative standpoint but fundamentally flawed when it comes to creating positive customer experiences.
Advertising, by design, is a “push model” and a one-way street as opposed to a “pull model” and two-way interaction with customers. In other words, it’s a monologue, not a dialogue.
With messaging becoming mainstream, I saw a real opportunity to fix things and help brands and marketers create a 1:1 relationship with customers, instead of the traditional “one-to-many” and “one-size-fits-all” model of mass advertising.
Turning an “interruption” model to a “conversation” model, that’s really the eureka moment that led to the genesis of Heyday, and what’s still driving me today.
And when I take a step back, it’s also the golden thread of my personal career journey: going from advertising copywriter to AI entrepreneur. What connects these two seemingly different worlds and paths is a passion for creating engaging customer experiences. A passion for innovation and communication.
At the end of the day, I’m a storyteller who helps brands get closer to their customers, and messaging is the most ubiquitous and personalized channel of all times. It creates new opportunities for engagement — engagement that is not just surface-level (a click) but rather meaningful (a conversation).
So as we move away from a world of cookie-based advertising to a more conversational type of marketing, I definitely hope to be remembered as a pioneer of that space.
I also think there’s a widespread preconception that you have to be an engineer to start a tech company. It definitely helps (my three co-founders are engineers) but my personal journey is a prime example that you can still be a founder and innovator even if you don’t know how to code. Selling a product is just as important as building it, if not more. At the end of the day, the single necessary and sufficient condition for a business to survive is a paying customer. And that’s marketing, that’s storytelling, that’s selling a vision of the future and excite prospects that if they do not take the leap now they are missing out.
So I hope to inspire more writers, marketers and storytellers to build businesses. To apply their skillset at bringing cool products to life and building technology that has soul.
What are you proud of?
I’m proud I didn’t quit and followed my gut. People don’t always realize it but the journey of an entrepreneur is made of dozens of inflection points that can make or break you. The major deal with a global brand that falls apart. The term sheet from investors that ends up in the gutter. That one critical hire that finally decides to accept Google’s offer. And the list goes on. Every entrepreneur at some point feels like he or she’s hitting rock bottom and then the question is: “Should I quit and just move on?” Especially in the drought of disillusionment phase where the industry is still early and nobody believes in your project. Innovation can sound dumb at first before it becomes obvious.
As a result, success in tech is less glamorous than it seems. It’s actually the result of patience and resilience, and relentless work, a relentless belief that things will turn out and that you will finally build momentum.
I joined the chatbot space back in 2016 when it was still made of hobbyists and a few seed-stage startups (most of which have died a few years later because they were too early). The number of times I got rejected pitching it to brands and agencies before it finally got mainstream is probably in the 1000s. So I’m proud I didn’t quit.
The fact that we stuck it out and kept pushing kept us alive. We kept our feet moving. You need to survive first before you can thrive. That’s what we did and we ultimately found traction and product-market fit. And then the rocketship just kept firing all cylinders and it was as if magic happened.
TL;DR: survival always precedes success.
What advice would you give someone just getting started in their career?
There are so many learnings in the journey that I’d love to unpack but let’s go with these 3 critical ones:
Expect and embrace change. Change can create discomfort and even sometimes lead to chaos. But change also brings about a wealth of opportunities for growth. Your level of agility and your capacity to adapt will be your greatest asset in a VUCA world (Volatile-Uncertain-Complex-Ambiguous). You will likely have to go through 5–7 personal reinventions throughout your career, so continuous learning and intellectual curiosity will help you stay relevant but also have the necessary vision and agility to capture opportunities as they come instead of simply reacting to them.
With Moore’s Law making technological evolution more exponential every decade, change is inevitable. The line between relevance and obsolescence will be finer than ever. Plus, you are starting your career in an era of seismic shifts that will forever change the face of commerce and the workplace. As Naval recently mused on Twitter: “What free trade did to blue collar jobs, remote work will do to white collar jobs.” Digital Darwinism is real and only the most agile and adaptive workers will prevail. Which brings me to my second point…
Strive to be a T-Shaped person. The concept of T-Shaped skills describes the breadth of abilities of people in the workforce. The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field — i.e. you are a specialist in a specific domain that you mastered as an individual contributor (e.g. software development, copywriting, etc.) — whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own — i.e. you are a generalist and lateral thinker you can connect dots.
Generalists are more immune to change because they can transfer their skills to other domains and fields to create value. On the other hand, hyper-specialization can be rewarded in the market in the short term (if it’s a scarce skill for example) but specialized skills are easier to automate with AI so it puts a greater risk on your career in the long run. You also want to strike the right balance between hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are easier to automate versus soft skills that are much harder to learn and replace.
In the end, the future belongs to generalized specialists. To go deeper into this concept and rabbit hole, I highly recommend this post from Farnam Street. Great blog and great read!
Outwork your competition. The secret of the Caramilk is both simple and extremely hard. There is no shortcut: you have to put in the work. A lot of it. Remember Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule? It states that it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills. So the only way to go faster than your competitors or peers is to outwork them. It’s simple math and it compounds over time.
Say you work an additional hour per day vs. your peers. That means 5 additional hours per week. Times 52, it means an additional 260 hours per year. Now do that for 5 years. If you started to work at 22 years old, you have already outworked your competition by 1,300 hours by the time you are 27. Now imagine that at the scale of a 40-year career: every year you will widen the gap. After a decade or two, the gap will become unclosable. Talent alone doesn’t matter, hard work is the engine of your career. Talent is only an accelerant.
P.S. I’m personally the extreme type: I worked 80-hour weeks for a decade. If you take my napkin math, that means I worked approximately 21,000 additional hours in the last decade versus the average white-collar worker. For me, it’s been an absolute game-changer. I’m now in a place some 40-year olds would envy. But I definitely sacrificed a lot along the way to accelerate myself. Again, there is no shortcut. Only trade offs, commitments and investments. At the end of the day, investing in yourself never fails. Make the magic of compounding work for you — whether it’s investing in your craft/skills or in your retirement account, time will do the heavy lifting for you.
Bonus: Read (to emulate the greats). Action is good: you will learn by doing and failing. But if you are lazy like me: it’s much easier and faster to learn from the greats who have paved the way before you. It will save you time and suffering: learning from their mistakes and wins instead of failing on your own will leapfrog your career. That’s the only shortcut, the rest is just hard work and moving your feet. That’s how opportunities and luck will magically find you.
