Episode 1: Why Motivation AI Matters

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Alex Olesen: We are here with our first guest, Lisa Spira, the Head of Content Intelligence at Persado. Lisa, we’re very excited to have you. Why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?

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Lisa Spira: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be the first guest and talk about Motivation AI with you. I’m the Head of Content Intelligence at Persado, as you said.

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Lisa Spira: The Content Intelligence team are language experts at Persado. Content intelligence is the intersection between creativity and data. It’s data-backed content creation, and it’s identifying what is good content. So, we work really closely with the data science team to train this AI to hold its hand…

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Lisa Spira: …and interpret what it knows. And I got into this because I have always loved language, and I especially always love names. I’m an automation, which is a type of linguist with expertise in names…

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Lisa Spira: …and one of the things I always loved about names was the pattern recognition element. And so, through that interest, I stumbled into my first job at a different marketing technology company whose technology was really based around the origins of names…

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Lisa Spira: …and that’s how I got enamored with the whole field of marketing language and AI and technology and product building…

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Lisa Spira: …and that’s how I landed at Persado. So, that’s my story of getting here, and my team is made up of people with all sorts of unusual stories about how we’ve gotten into content intelligence. There’s no one particular background that makes someone good at this, except maybe just a true love of language.

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Alex Olesen: I love that, and I think it’s such a unique differentiator for the Persado experience, not only internal or other Persadoans like myself but…

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Alex Olesen: …working with our clients to understand what motivates their consumers to interact with their brands and create happy customers for life.

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Alex Olesen: So, I want to touch a little bit more on motivation AI. Can you, in your own words, define what Motivation AI means? And then, who is Motivation AI important to?

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Lisa Spira: I think, as marketers? There’s something I’m gonna start that one again.

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Lisa Spira: So, there is a difference between wants and needs, and then actually taking that next step to act. And that’s where motivation AI comes into play. We all want things. We all need things, and we all buy a lot of things. But…

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Lisa Spira: …how do you motivate someone to make that purchase and not just make that purchase, but boy, your specific product right now across this channel at this moment in time?

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Lisa Spira: It’s about action. We have to motivate action. I can want a lot of things, but I’m not necessarily going to click that ad or see that email…

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Lisa Spira: …and take the action. And so what Motivation AI is an AI that uses language to motivate consumers to take an action, to click, to purchase, to convert, to make a connection, whatever that action is, and I think that motivation AI is really the important piece in doing this, and it’s really grounded in the language.

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Alex Olesen: I love that; Motivating the next best action for consumers to take…

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Alex Olesen: …which, and I know we’ll talk about some of the challenges that marketers face; We’ll talk about that next. But one of the things that I like about the way you define Motivation AI is that you are understanding the next best action across the entire consumer journey. In fact, some of the best use cases for Motivation AI or around customer service and being able to deliver a consistent on-brand experience…

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Alex Olesen: …well beyond a first purchase or initial transaction.

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Lisa Spira: One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in the data working with this tool is how…

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Lisa Spira: …depending on what action you’re trying to motivate…

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Lisa Spira: …different languages might work better. So, we always work with our clients to choose what they’re measuring. What is important to them: Is it clicks? Is it less calls to the call center in servicing? Is it items in the cart? Is it…

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Lisa Spira: …like actual emails back?

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Lisa Spira: There are lots of different things that could be. Some are very common, some are very uncommon, but we can motivate all of them, but we won’t use the same language to motivate all of them. The language that entices people to open an email may not be the language that motivates someone to click through that email to the landing page. And it may not be the same language that would motivate someone all the way through to putting the item in their cart.

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Alex Olesen: One hundred percent. And actually, one of the most interesting projects my team has worked on with yours was understanding that what motivates consumers actually changes over time. So, we took a look at banking and credit card data as well as retail conversions, and what we found out was that it depends on how far the average consumer’s dollar goes.

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Alex Olesen: This is important, especially in a period of inflation like we’re experiencing now.

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Alex Olesen: Depending on how far the average consumer dollar goes, that influences what motivates a consumer to interact with a brand. And the language that motivates consumers. To click on an ad or interact with an email…

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Alex Olesen: …is actually completely different when consumers are spending more or when they’re saving more of their paycheck. A very unique insight that I think we uncovered, together with their team.

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Lisa Spira: Oh, one hundred percent. That was one of my favorite things that we worked on because context is really just so important to language resonating.

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Alex Olesen: Absolutely. And I know we’re answering my next question without explicitly getting to it. But what issues or challenges that marketers face can Motivation AI help solve?

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Lisa Spira: One of the challenges that marketers face today is a wealth of data, more data than they know what to do with, and data can be scary, and mountains of data typically leave you with no direction.

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Lisa Spira: You have all the pieces there in front of you, but you don’t know what to do with them, or you don’t have the talent or the direction; so I think that data is a huge challenge, and I think Motivation AI really helps solve this because it is a platform that is grounded in data…

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Lisa Spira: …within our platform. We do testing through experimental design, which is like A/B testing. But essentially, it’s A through Q testing with an exponent. It’s really hard to understand. It’s really complicated, but it’s a lot, and what it does is measure the minute elements within the language, and how they work, and how they motivate what works best, and…

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Lisa Spira: …um and how. And then we we use all of this data to continually train our AI so that it learns. And so, I think it’s really exciting, because what we’ve done is, we’ve harnessed so much data into knowledge that can really drive consumer behavior. So, I think Motivation AI is really great at solving a data challenge

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Alex Olesen: Absolutely. And I think the type of data challenge that Motivation AI solves is a very interesting…

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Alex Olesen: …way to address something that is going to challenge marketers in the future with the appreciation of pixels and cookies. So, I talked to you, and I know that your team talks to marketers (a lot of our clients), and one of the things that they are focused on is understanding what motivates their consumer base without necessarily needing to collect…

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Alex Olesen: ….personally identifiable information, or PII. And one of the most interesting case studies that I’ve worked on at Persado with our clients is a cash-back or miles redemption case study with a co-branded credit card…

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Alex Olesen:… and what’s interesting is for the same card holders, whether a consumer prefers cash back in their pocket or miles redeemed for experiences, the language that motivates them to interact with the points redemption platform is completely different.

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Alex Olesen: So that’s a great example…

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Alex Olesen: …of taking demographic data and not relying on a pixel or a cookie to garner the same understanding of what motivates a consumer and create an authentic experience between the consumer and the brand.

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Lisa Spira: Absolutely, I think, as we move into a world where cookies are less reliable and less the future of…

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Lisa Spira: …data and marketing efforts and personalization efforts moving into the world of Motivation AI. Where we build segments differently, and we look for language segments that’s going to be just so important.

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Alex Olesen: Absolutely.

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Alex Olesen: So, I think we’ve done a great job for the listeners of shaping what the market looks like talking about Motivation AI as a category. I want to shift a little bit to give the listeners some background on…

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Alex Olesen: …I know both you and I work there, But for the listeners, let’s start from square one. What is Persado?

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Lisa Spira: Persado Is the company that created Motivation AI. Persado has a platform that motivates consumers to take action, and it does this through language. 

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Lisa Spira: It generates messages by leveraging the world’s most advanced language, knowledge, base of more than one million tags, and scored words and phrases.

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Lisa Spira: But to me, Persado is a playground for language innovation.

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Lisa Spira: At first we’re focused on language that motivates action, but that’s a small scope, and it’s a huge opportunity. So, we’re continuously training our AI to write in new ways to look for different types of patterns to become…

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Lisa Spira: …something it’s not yet doing, um, to me, it’s a playground, and from my vantage point, Persado blends the best of humans and machines to drive results for our clients, and those results are actions.

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Alex Olesen: I love that it is a playground for language innovation. I do want to touch on something you mentioned earlier about experimental design. You know, one of the unique things that we get to work on with clients is not so much understanding the optimum message to send. That’s important. But I think ruling out messages that to the…

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Alex Olesen: …tribal knowledge, to the creative teams that our clients might seem like a good fit…

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Alex Olesen: …but um, backed up by the linguistics and the natural language process you’ve been talking about. Persado can actually help eliminate years of sub-optimal decision-making and creativity. In fact, our clients have reported that they learn things about their audience. Fifty times faster than if they had done traditional A/B testing. So, talk about a great playground…

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…innovating language and understanding what motivates your customers.

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Lisa Spira: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the Persado knowledge base has something like the equivalent of six hundred and forty-five years worth of testing inside of it.

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Lisa Spira: It’s some large number like that, but it’s ah, it’s really a mind-boggling stat. But that is how our customers learn so much faster, and one of the other things that they can do is they can test hypotheses with us. We can, of course…

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Lisa Spira: …you know, let Motivation AI suggest how we’re going to test based on all of the data. But humans can have a hand in that and say, This is what I think works. This is what I’ve learned from other testing. Or this is what the creative team is really excited about…

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Lisa Spira: …and then we can test, and we can put math behind it, and then we can know, which is always really cool.

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Alex Olesen: Absolutely. And I think that’s my favorite part of the job is working with our diverse yet very experienced customer base…

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Alex Olesen: …to understand consumer behavior, not only within their industry but across industries; and Persado’s got a great list of roster of clients that sit across all parts of financial services. So, banks, credit cards, wealth, management.

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Alex Olesen: But Persado also does a lot of work within travel and hospitality within retail.

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Alex Olesen: So, those are the main verticals. But more generally, what type of company typically benefits from working with Persado?

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Lisa Spira: The companies that benefit the most are the companies who are willing to experiment.

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Lisa Spira: You have to have a testing mindset to truly take advantage of everything that Motivation AI has to offer.

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Lisa Spira: I think a great fit is a company that wants creative language in marketing. Who wants data behind that, who is tired of chasing the whims of human copywriting…

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Lisa Spira: …and tired of the risk of intuition and the hunches? So, a company that is excited about testing and data is really a great fit, as well as a company that wants to learn and is willing to change.

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Alex Olesen: I love that; avoiding the risk of intuition. It’s really interesting to me. Some of the insights that Persado’s customers uncover when they’re live on the platform. Persado actually deconstructs every message into various components to understand…is the formatting driving an increase in engagement? Are the emotions capturing the audience’s attention?

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Alex Olesen: Are the positioning or calls to action or message elements that need to be looked at creative? One of my favorite projects we worked on with clients is understanding where placement and card art…

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Alex Olesen: …should go during an acquisition campaign for a credit card, and one of Persado’s clients actually found out that eliminating a human model…

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Alex Olesen: …from the image of a credit card campaign, and only showing card art combined with the optimum language to capture consumer attention. That creative only showing the card art was twice as effective at driving clicks and ultimate conversions. So, Persado customers have a wealth of knowledge that they sit on when they work with Motivation AI.

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Lisa Spira: The formatting step is really cool because the platform can test into all of those things, although we primarily optimize language, and that’s usually where most of the power is, and also not every channel has a visual, although more and more they do. But we can also tap into those visual elements, and those can be big things like you’re talking about, like the card art…

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Lisa Spira: …but they can even be smaller things like whether you use bold or you use capital letters or what the spacing is, how big or small the button is, what color. And you can test into all of those things through the platform, which is really powerful.

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Alex Olesen: It is very powerful, and that goes back to a point we were talking about earlier about, and I love the way that you phrased it, avoiding the risk of intuition. I think, in my experience working with Persado’s customers, that eliminating…

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Alex Olesen: …messages that the human intuition might say will work, but science and natural language processing and linguistics say won’t. It’s a great way to artfully combine the human and the machine…

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Alex Olesen: …so maybe taking a step back a bit from marketing from Motivation AI. In your experience working with leaders across industries, what do you typically see leaders investing in who are getting it right with digital transformation?

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Lisa Spira: I think that they’re investing in AI today. I think now is a turning point where we’re all seeing that AI doesn’t have to be scary, and that it can have powerful results.

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Lisa Spira: But more than that, it can augment your humans. It won’t necessarily, or I mean it won’t. I firmly believe…

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Lisa Spira: …that AI Isn’t going to take away our jobs. It’s going to change our jobs. It’s going to create new jobs that work with AI in new ways. It will eliminate some jobs and create a whole host of others. So, I think that today…

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Lisa Spira: …ah, leaders across brands are really embracing that AI can be a powerful source of good in their company, and it can be transformational for their business.

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Lisa Spira: You know. I think that…

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Lisa Spira: …um, recently…

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Lisa Spira: …people all over have been able to see AI generating content, and that’s quite a bit different from what Persado does. But I think it has been eye-opening to so many people that when you can see it, what it is an AI working…

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Lisa Spira: …that you know, you can be more willing to embrace language AI, as a different sort or a Motivation AI.

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Alex Olesen: DALL·E 2 is a great example for the listeners. DALL·E 2 is actually AI that is submitting ah to competitions and is, in some cases, beating human-submitted pieces. And there’s a language example as well with GPT. Three that have submitted AI authored…

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Alex Olesen: …poems and short stories that have actually won against humans. And I agree with you. At least, I think it’s a great point.

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Alex Olesen: The vision is for machines and humans to complement each other to understand holistically what is motivating a consumer, to choose a brand and choose to stay loyal to it over time.

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Alex Olesen: Um! So, let’s focus a little bit more on the work that you do at Persado. I know that you speak to Persado’s clients regularly, and you’ve got a great perspective of the work that they’re doing, but talk to me a little bit about what content intelligence does at Persado.

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Lisa Spira: We do a little bit of everything. We sort of sit in the middle of data, science, product, and operations.

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Lisa Spira: And so we’re at the nucleus of creation of content at Persado. So, what do we do? We write words, we teach an AI to write words, we train it, We give it a thumbs up, come down on how it’s doing.

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Lisa Spira: We analyze a lot of data coming out of different AI systems that are trained to do very specific things. We create insights, We really just because an AI is learning.

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Lisa Spira: Well, the humans want to learn, too. What is it? No. So, we create ways of interpreting and understanding the language data that we have, visualizing that, and tagging content. It’s a lot. We also hold its hands. Sometimes we have…

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Lisa Spira: …maybe a use case or a channel that the AI has never seen before, so we’ll help it along. Step in if it hasn’t seen enough data to do something yet where it’s partner. And yeah, so…

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Lisa Spira: …content intelligence is really just at the nucleus of all things, language, creation at this, at the central point of our product.

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Alex Olesen: That’s awesome. And I love how you personify the AI, too, because that’s where I really do believe that brands and marketers get Motivation AI, right?

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Alex Olesen: Ah, really embrace the idea of taking. Ah! You know the creative spirit of an in-house team or an agency team where that’s the operating model…

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Alex Olesen: …and supplementing that expertise and knowledge with math experimental design, and with linguistics

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Alex Olesen: …any that you’ve left off the list that you want to talk for listeners about?

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Lisa Spira: I have two that I would love to share. I think they’re pretty interesting insights. So, the first is around the idea of reinvention. And Susan Lee from my team did this research across six years of email, Facebook, and push notification campaigns that come through Persado from two thousand and fifteen to two thousand and twenty-one. And…

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Lisa Spira: …that was a really weird way to say that I’m going to start it again….

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Lisa Spira: So, one thing that I would love to share is an insight into reinvention.

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Lisa Spira: Susan Lee, from my team, worked on this project where she was looking at six years of email Facebook, and push notification campaigns between two thousand and fifteen and two thousand and twenty-one. And she was looking at the idea of “New Year, New Me.”

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Lisa Spira: That phrase, and that idea of variations on that phrase, is really big with marketing every new year…

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Lisa Spira: …especially in retail. But not only do you see it across industries, and it was the least inspiring concept in retail when tested against other languages…

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Lisa Spira: …it just, what it proved over those years that time and time again it doesn’t work, and what we were able to do is find the alternatives that tapped into different motivations that are not reinvention, that work better..

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Lisa Spira: …at New Year’s. So, for example, individuality, permission to just do you, um or freedom. Do what you love in 2023. No resolutions, no problem…

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Lisa Spira: …hype this year will be awesome. We can sense it.

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Lisa Spira: So, there’s so many ways that you can speak to the New Year if you want to bring that into your marketing, and the one that so many people with intuition just go to immediately, and we all think about is “New Year New You,” but don’t do that.

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Alex Olesen: How interesting! I know You’ve got a second one. But What a great example of probably a campaign that many creative teams would not address year over year and assume that it would work simply because it’s a New Year. I love that example. What’s your second one?

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Lisa Spira: My second one is about research into the language of deadlines, and this research was done by Sheena Vera on my team, and she did work sort of a case study around the language of tax season…

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Lisa Spira: …and what we found is that it’s not it’s…

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Lisa Spira: …deadline-driven language, such as urgency or like alert language that works the best to motivate actions when deadlines are looming…

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Lisa Spira: …as tax season approaches. For example, more gentle language that nudges the customer to think encouragement is more effective. Um. The language should ensure that the process will be painless and encourage customers to read the message to get further information. So, we don’t want to go all ASAP now, like, you know. Sort of…

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Lisa Spira: …um, really intense or deadline driven, and we want to go a lot more softer. So we have language like you’re still on track for filing your taxes on time. There’s still time to file for your refund. It’s easy to file. We recommend starting here…

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Lisa Spira: …Um. And that this gentler language proved to be a lot more effective as the deadline approached, and, in fact, counterintuitively, as the deadline gets closer, more gentle language works better.

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Alex Olesen: That makes a lot of sense to me. I could see how, on the surface, marketers might think you need to ratchet up the urgency the closer. A non-negotiable deadline approaches. But taxpayers are aware they know they need to get their taxes in, so maybe one less…

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Alex Olesen: …um nagging force, one less annoyance, a little bit gentler language can make a big difference in whether or not consumers respond well to the marketing that they’re seeing…

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Lisa Spira: …and I think your reaction is right. There is one of the things that I love about Motivation AI. Because when you stop, and you think about it, you think? Oh, yeah, I totally see why that makes sense, even though it is against everyone’s initial intuition. The intuition being deadline…

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Lisa Spira: …dates. So, yeah, that’s true, and we see that time and time again with Motivation AI.

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Alex Olesen: Absolutely. So, in your experience, working with Persado’s customers, talking to marketers out around the industry…

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Alex Olesen: …I know we’ve talked a lot about, you know, marketing and data teams working together. There’s a lot of data that flows through, you know, Motivation AI platforms like Persado. What are two or three things that data and marketing teams can do to work closely together and get started with Motivation AI?

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Lisa Spira: The first thing to do is to embrace that something that seems dramatically opposed can really belong together. In the case of Persado, that’s math and words.

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Lisa Spira: Um, here. We are trying to optimize words and measuring them with math. And I think there are a lot of people who grow up saying, I’m a math person, or I’m a words person, or…

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Lisa Spira: …I’m none of those, and put themselves in some other bucket, and just decide that it is opposed. And so my…

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Lisa Spira: …first piece of advice is to embrace the other one, whatever the other one is in your organization, and build connections, and figure out how those different skill sets or datasets can come together and enhance value. I think that’s one of the things that Persado does really well, and I mean to punctuate that…

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Lisa Spira: …I report to the CTO, who is a Data Scientist, and my background is in linguistics, but it works well for us to keep those ties closely together.

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Alex Olesen: I think it does, And what ah, what better example of putting our money where our mouth is showing two opposed disciplines, data, science, and linguistics, working together internally at Persado, and that’s been my experience working with Persado’s customers as well. I think, many times, the best insights that Persado’s services have with our customers are…

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Alex Olesen: …moments where the customer sits back and says, You know, I had a hunch that this was a trend that we were seeing, but we couldn’t necessarily prove it with math and vice versa. The customers are sitting on a lot of data and just want to understand. How can we communicate phrases or sets of emotions…

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Alex Olesen: …that motivates our consumers to interact with us?

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Alex Olesen: Well, Lisa, thank you very much. I have one final question, but I really appreciate your time and being our first guest. We’ve talked a lot about Motivation AI. We’ve introduced Persado as a Motivation AI platform.

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Alex Olesen: What’s next for Persado? And what’s next for your team?

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Lisa Spira: We will continue to explore new types of motivations within the language and translate what we find into new verticals, new channels, new use cases beyond marketing…

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Lisa Spira: …um, an expansion of the machine and human understanding which will lead us to better insights if we can continue to build that relationship between humans and machines and continuing to make Motivation AI really dynamic…

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Lisa Spira: …in real-time, taking its decision engine to the moment where the customer is. I think there is a really exciting future in a lot of

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Lisa Spira: …different directions within motivating language. So, I’m really excited about many of the next phases of research, testing, and building that we have happening at Persado.

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Alex Olesen: Awesome. I love that. And you know I like bringing the Motivation AI engine to each moment of customer interaction, no matter if it’s attracting new customers, retaining them as loyal customers, or delivering that ever-important great customer service.

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Alex Olesen: Well, Lisa, thank you very much for being our first guest. This was Lisa Spira, the head of Content Intelligence at Persado. Ah, thank you very much, Lisa.

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Lisa Spira: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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Alex Olesen: Of course.