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ALISON WAGONFELD: Hi, everyone.
I'm Alison Wagonfeld, and I head up marketing for Google Cloud.
And welcome to this virtual fireside chat.
I am really excited to be speaking with Di
Mayze from our customer WPP.
So many of our customers are doing amazing things
with Google Cloud, and I'm really
excited to hear more about what Di and her team are up to.
Welcome, Di.
DI MAYZE: Hey Alison.
Thanks for having me.
ALISON WAGONFELD: So to start at the beginning,
tell us a little bit about what WPP does.
DI MAYZE: WPP is a creative transformation company.
And it's made up of many brands that you probably
have heard of, so AKQA, Ogilvy, Wunderman Thompson, VML, Y&R,
BCW.
And we creatively transform marketing for our clients.
So the creative bit talks about innovation and new ways
of engaging customers, and the transformation
means we look at the future of marketing
and we don't do things just because that's always
the way it's been done.
ALISON WAGONFELD: That's wonderful.
And how about your role at WPP?
DI MAYZE: If I think too much about my role,
it gets a bit scary.
But I'm the global head of data and AI for WPP.
So I look after every agency, every brand, and every market
and we cover data and AI.
And because there's 100,000 people in WPP,
we're a small, but perfectly-formed team
who just make sure that we create something for everyone
and we inspire everybody on the opportunities of data and AI.
ALISON WAGONFELD: I love your passion about data.
In fact, I saw a picture of you online with a big shirt
that says Data.
Tell me a little bit about what got you so excited about data
and how you see it as being so powerful.
DI MAYZE: It's a really weird journey, Alison,
because I'm not a data scientist.
So that's my confession up front.
I don't sit still long enough to be a data scientist.
We have brilliant data scientists.
But I got the bug in 2007 when I did a project for Dunnhumby
and subsequently went to work there.
And the way they defined loyalty and the way
they treated their best customers
and the culture at Dunnhumby totally inspired me
that everybody could get behind data.
It can be really used for great, great experiences,
really getting to know customers and building relationships
between brands and customers.
ALISON WAGONFELD: That's wonderful.
So some people find data intimidating.
How do you make it more accessible?
DI MAYZE: I try and make sure that we don't use the word data
as much as I maybe want to.
Data isn't about maths.
There's so many different facets.
And when we talk about AI, we say
it's a fusion of psychology and economics.
And maths, and stats, and modeling, and tech,
of course, a part of it.
But there's something for everyone.
But if we don't make it just about modeling and scary
language, that people maybe know the buzzwords
but don't necessarily know what it means,
then part of our challenge in the creative transformation
process is to bring that to life and to get
everybody excited about the opportunities of data.
ALISON WAGONFELD: So I was super excited
when we announced that WPP had selected
Google Cloud as its key cloud partner
for driving transformation back in 2019.
Can you tell us a little bit about what
that journey has been like and how
you've been using Google Cloud?
DI MAYZE: So Google Cloud has appeared in such a breadth
of exciting projects.
So from a massive replatforming--
I'm sure there'll be people in Group M and at Google
with scars of massive replatforming of our audience
planning platform from on-prem to Google Cloud.
It's already delivered great efficiencies for us
because of the agility and the flexibility,
so we've absolutely been thrilled
with the results of that.
But we're also doing some really innovative machine learning
capability with Google.
I'm obsessed at the moment with unstructured data.
And our relationship with Google Cloud
allows us to really use your APIs,
to use your Vision API, your language API,
to really, really get some great insights out
of unstructured data.
ALISON WAGONFELD: So what do you think
have been some of the most impressive benefits,
either for you or more specifically for your clients?
DI MAYZE: I asked some of my colleagues
when I knew I was going to talk to you,
and they just summed this up beautifully.
And you'll like this in your role.
They just said, Google Cloud is the future of tech.
And yeah, that's it.
I knew you'd like that.
So it's the first place we go to when we're looking at tech.
It enables us to collaborate across agencies.
I'm really excited about the analytics possibilities.
I think we're just starting on our journey with you
on BigQuery, and Data Studio, and Looker,
and what the possibilities are.
So I think we've just started our journey,
but we're already noticing how we can work with it.
ALISON WAGONFELD: That's excellent.
And as a client of Essence at Google Cloud,
we're thrilled that you're using Google Cloud to help
make the experience better for all of your clients.
So it definitely works full circle.
So what's next on the horizon for you with AI,
and data, and Google Cloud?
What can we look forward to?
DI MAYZE: So we will continue the unstructured data projects
that we're looking at.
So we're building an unstructured data capability
using Google Cloud for our data catalog, where we are curating
and inventorying all our data so that we can share it
with every market, every agency.
So we're up to 400 data sets.
Once we can unlock the unstructured data tagger
that we're building with you, the number of data
sets that we can glean insights from will be enormous.
And we're also doing a project on preproduction videos,
knowing that videos, in terms of marketing,
work really, really well.
But you can only yield the value once you've finished them,
and then that can be quite high risk.
So we're working with the Google Cloud capability
to look at sentiment analysis and building mood boards.
And I'm really looking forward to working more
on ML innovation projects with you this year.
ALISON WAGONFELD: That's great.
I've seen a lot of our customers using our AI APIs
and it's been great that you're getting value out of those.
So one of the things that I like to always understand,
particularly when I talk with other women,
is understanding how you're advocating for women
in technology, because I know that something that's
so important to just add more diversity into the tech world
right now.
Anything in particular that you're
doing with respect to women at WPP,
or more specifically with AI and data?
DI MAYZE: So we have a data and AI community
that we launched last year.
It has nearly 3,000 members.
It gives everybody a chance to have a platform, a stage.
I can't say we're yet at gender parity,
but we do make sure that females in the team
get as much air time, a chance to present.
We launched an AI Academy last year
and we targeted ourselves with 50% females
running through that pilot.
We make sure that if we have female events-- in fact,
I'll be honest.
Sometimes, I debate, should we have female-only events?
Is that the inclusivity that we're looking for?
But we did run one last year and the feedback
from the females who attended was really positive
and they really enjoyed it.
So I think we will be doing more.
And I mentor many, many women, and they're
all brilliant and so smart.
And I'm not sure what I can add to their lives,
except give them a boost and be their biggest cheerleader.
But there are so many fantastic women in tech at the moment.
ALISON WAGONFELD: That's wonderful.
I love how you're making data and AI accessible to everyone.
It just creates such a more powerful platform
for, sure, everybody at WPP, but also all of your customers.
So phenomenal.
Thank you for collaborating there.
So I want to thank you also for all of your time today.
It's been wonderful to hear from you,
to hear what you're building, to hear about the data community
that you're creating, to hear about how you're
using all of the most modern technology at Google Cloud
to really inspire your organization
and do so much more.
So thank you very much for your time.
DI MAYZE: Thanks Alison.
Been great to talk to you.
ALISON WAGONFELD: Great to talk to you, as well.