Paul Stephen: 0:00
Okay hello everybody. Welcome to episode two of season two of Shoppernomics, our ecommerce podcast. My name is Paul Stephen, I’m your host today, and today’s episode is called: from AdSales to AI e-commerce marketing strategy. Joining me today is Alberto Billato, e-commerce strategy consultant. Welcome, Alberto Billato, it’s great to have you. You’ve had some pretty interesting roles at Future Publishing Wiggle, the DeLonghi Group and now Videndum Media Solutions. Big variety, loads to talk about there, but first I’d love it if you could introduce yourself really rather than me, do it and a little bit about your sort of e-commerce journey.

Alberto Billato: 0:40
Absolutely. Thank you, Paul. Thanks actually for having me here and hello to everyone which is decided to attend and spend an hour with us today. For me, it’s a pleasure and you know just a few words about myself. As you said, I’ve been actually like 30 years I’m just counting 30 years plus experience in digital e-commerce across a number of industries, being lucky enough to actually see a number of them globally, starting with retail with the publishing world in future in both and then moving to retail with Wiggle, and then entering the fantastic world of corporate with some fantastic brands like the DeLonghi Group, Stiga Swedish actually house naming gardening products and Videndum PLC most lately. That was a fantastic experience. I’ve seen and I, you know, experienced a number of cultures and approaches to digital, with this pros and cons, which you know, made up actually most of the you know my experience up until today. On a personal side, instead, I just like to mention a couple of things about myself. I grew up in Italy, as you may actually, you know guess from my accent and I left through Czech Republic whilst I was a uni and then the UK, and that was 2010, 14 years or 13 years actually fast forward 11 housemovings in between, now settled in the north east of Italy. I have a family of three who replace basketball with cycling. Just bought new bikes, so that’s a bit more summary about me.

Paul Stephen: 2:20
That’s brilliant. So today we’re diving into transformation and change in the e-commerce marketing strategies and getting some key insights from Alberto Billato, from your journey through a number of different, really cool e-commerce roles. So, before we dive in, this is an. I would like to remind everybody this is an interactive event, which means that, as a listener, you can get involved with the conversation. So simply ask to speak and we can welcome you on to the stage. At the bottom you’ll see, there’s a, there’s a, there’s some extra buttons for for you. We will invite questions and comments at the end, so you so make sure you write your notes down and we’ll answer them after, after the chat, so you can also make comments in the LinkedIn event and, if you would like, but we would encourage you to join us on stage live if you like. That’s brilliant, so don’t forget to use those emojis throughout to let us know how you feel about the chat, as we’re going as well. That’s, it’s always great to be interactive. So, Alberto Billato, you’ve gone through a few different roles, each each with very unique skill sets, and the approach to marketing and e-commerce has changed significantly since you began with ad sales. In future publishing, for example, what would you say has remained the same, and then kind of what has changed over those years.

Alberto Billato: 3:34
Actually great question. Let me start with what has changed and, as you said, pretty much everything in. If you think that in future publishing. I used to sell advertising online for online publications and offline publication and the and that was actually the years of pre-google adverts, so you can imagine, you know the, the scenario there. It was a pre-cookie, you know the just totally, totally different. It’s very, quite hard for people actually people to join after in the world of digital to explain how it was before. So technologies changed dramatically and, of course, the other thing that’s changed a lot is being the widespread access to information that are now available to everyone. Way more competent people in digital that they don’t learn on the job, as I did, because it didn’t exist when I was a unit, and then you know, they come out of master degrees and MBAs with a respectable set of hard skills. Information are well available actually online, so everyone can really learn new skills on the go by themselves, from the comfort of their own, and that is transformational in a sense. So there is no shortage of way of learning new skills. The other thing actually that’s changed to me is the acceptance. Going back to e-commerce, of course, the customer journey you know now is being recognized. That happens as a mix of online and offline experiences. So if you, if you are a big, if you, you need to be truly omnichannel and if you don’t do as a brand, you can make a brain or you can make or break your business. Whilst you know, if you look at the similarities, I think is actually I don’t want to look sounds philosophical, but we’re still the same humans as before, as consumers, colleagues, customers. We are still motivated them, excited them, even afraid from the same very same things than before. So what I’ve seen is like in my role throughout this you know my career the importance of listening, being curious and communicating well, with clarity have not become less important. Actually the opposite. In a world that now offers so many different opportunities are almost at no cost.

Paul Stephen: 5:57
Yeah, I mean that’s the point is that there are some things like the process of buying a product, getting a customer excited about a product. Marketing is meant to be the process of moving someone closer to the position to buy, I think is one of the phrases. So yeah, so for me, the kind of the technology is, like you say, the channel and the tools etc that we use is the bit that’s changed too. I mean, you know, we’ve gone on quite a journey now where lots of brands have had to go from sort of zero to being fully e-commerce, and that was your experience at DeLonghi. You managed to sort of create a whole, you know direct to consumer global e-commerce strategy which sort of you know became a sort of 12 million sort of euro kind of business from nothing. What were your biggest learnings from doing that as a kind of project?

Alberto Billato: 6:53
Actually, Delonghi Group was a very was a fun one and my first corporate role. I think it was an interesting one because, compared to other situations I found myself in the market was already there. You know, Delonghi at the time was a two billion company where we’re, you know, made up by three brands, the biggest one being DeLonghi for coffee machines, kitchen machines, for the brand Kenwood and Brown House. Of the, the brands were, you know, all over the place, you know these well distributed for sure in Europe. So actually attracting demand, the generating new demand, that was not the issue, were not short of traffic in a sense, but there was no digital ecosystem or a digital, let’s say, way to the product. There was somehow aligned with the consumer expectations about from the brands. It was kind of matching the same quality of the products. I guess is the. You know, if you think about the different, the different experience there, the biggest learning for me was the fact that the, even though I joined as a project highly sponsored by the CEO, Mr DeLonghi itself, the blessing and sponsorship of the CEO is not enough to make things happen and the, you know it was a very large corporation and he really told me how to engage with senior leaders, sales leaders, and develop a sales strategy that they were comfortable with. That was like 2014. And still, if you were talking about e-commerce, it was regarded as the future but not the present. So everyone was expecting coming. But actually, you know, leave me alone. You know, don’t actually disturb my business. My products are already well distributed in my market. I don’t really need to be to see with this drop in conversation with the retailer. So that was the kind of info, the pushbacks and the barriers that was getting at the beginning. So, plus, if you think I was actually coming from Wiggle, you know, a kind of scale up business, fully digital, 100% pure player retail selling abroad, where everything was very much that the driven opinions were important but only supported by data. For me it was actually a cultural shock and I had to really adapt very quickly to this kind of new environment. So you know what I did actually to make it a thing’s happened, because the you know, on one end we had to scale this business fast was actually listen, listen first. The listening, the amount to travel had to take to really speak to the sales leaders in the different subsidiaries truly understand that business model. Their expectations, align my communication and language to theirs. So we were actually 100% understanding each other and working as a team, coming out with the right solution. That was actually what really made the difference and made this story. My tenure at the DeLonghi was just over three years and it took less than a year to be up and running and driving to the 12 million. You know, it was actually less than a couple of years per annum. So I think is the once that was actually secured in terms of aligning the digital strategy, the go to market strategy, in a truly omnichannel way, and that was different by subs from subsidiary subsidiary, despite the same technology stack and operation integration that we had them. The next step was actually going through the same kind of process, but we did more operational teams involved, such as administration, customer service, marketing and, of course, sales. Explaining that the benefits, the implication and how the company could benefit from that even though the DeLonghi was already a multimillion business right away and clearly explaining to an operational person that’s selling one extra coffee machine and it’s not going to change the P&L dramatically in, particularly considering the amount of effort that you need to go through, because shipping a single coffee machine has kind of the same effort as shipping a pallet of them, but clearly the benefit, the sales benefit, is different. That was actually the conversation the convincing how to do actually the time and expressing how that was important in terms of matching the consumer expectations for a fast forward, modern brand that was just wanted to innovate, not just on products, but also on the way on the go to market experience. So you know, nett-nett, what I learned is you need to bring people on board, take time to listen, explain and then resistance really fade away naturally. And this was the, you know, this single lesson was really invaluable and lead my digital transformation efforts in Stiga and with Videndum later on.

Paul Stephen: 12:11
I mean this was a director-consumer sort of task for you, but one assumes at that point that Longhe had a sort of very established B2B kind of relationship and lots of the people were used to that sort of B2B relationship. So I assume that was the challenge really was to shift them from that sort of position of the importance or the bulk, like you say, of shipping B2B to B2C. But had you already had to tackle the challenge of, even though you weren’t transacting with consumers, you still have to sort of start behaving like a consumer brand? We see some manufacturers particularly they kind of, even though they’re not directly transacting, because they do that through retailers or distributors is that their sort of their website still has to behave like a consumer brand, even if people can’t transact from it? Had Longhe already gone through that or were you starting from scratch?

Alberto Billato: 13:11
We were kind of starting from I mean not completely from scratch, but you know, just to give you also organizationally, I was actually the first person employed as leading the commerce B2C business in a newly born digital center of excellence. So that was actually the year. I mean, in those say same months, the company started to recognize the importance of this kind of shift. We had a website, which was a classic catalog website with some information about the products. But this, you know, starting to trade towards the consumer, kind of forced the business to really think 360 in terms of what it means to deal with the consumer when something goes wrong with delivery is one, of course, is an easy one for the commerce, but also it was for the company to understand the importance of people searching online for the products, so starting their information journey early on and not at the point of sale, the physical point of sale. And that was transformation also for the marketing teams the way they had to, let’s say, create the content, the timing they had to create the content. So we were a kind of I mean we had already an established business behind the corporate that was eager to, you know, help, but they didn’t know how to help and we had to say to really spend time with them and craft this kind of machine that later on, you know, and it’s still growing as an e-commerce channel. From chats with my ex-colleagues, it’s an ever learning experience.

Paul Stephen: 14:54
So, firstly, you’re now sort of talking about you’ve got. You’ve still got your old B2B business, you’ve got your B2C business, but of course you had a number of different sort of brands there and I think a number of companies you’ve worked with you. You’ve kind of you’ve had multiple brands under sort of one other group, so to speak. So how did you deal with it? How did you ensure that you know the right proposition was reaching the right target audience, rather than a kind of whole one fits all sort of thing? You’ve got the, you’ve got the, like you say, the different systems set behind you. You’ve got the people, but from a sort of outward marketing point of view, how did you deal with that sort of challenge?

Alberto Billato: 15:29
It’s actually a fantastic challenge and the because the since I joined Corporate, I started to experience, to be experienced actually with Corporate Corporate having multiple brands under the same umbrella, like in the DeLonghi group, as mentioned. We are like free brands mainly. Then in Stiga we had five brands, in Videndum, four brands and more coming. So you know, the challenge is really. I mean it comes to prioritization on one end, because clearly not all brands are equally, may not be equally important, but at the same time, I think it comes also with some constraints. Clearly, you know these companies. As you mentioned, the majority of the business actually happens to be to be, so the level of investments that they can dedicate to B2C is proportional and the tech stack is something that you kind of need to make it work across all brands. The digital team as well, is most of the time stretched across a number of brands. So, aside from the brand manager, the communication manager, that most of the time is different, but the digital team really changes that every time they need to send a newsletter or upload a new promotion or a new product on the website. So you really need to make work with the same tech stack and the same people with all the time constraints and actually that brings along. So in this case, what you need to do is the at least what I’ve done, and the first step is actually that I’ve done. I was actually looking back at the brand strategy, really starting who the consumers were and what their needs and blocking in the customer journey, and also really starting the existing distribution model that were already in place, not just online but also offline. Because once you actually crystallize these elements and these are really the building blocks that will lead then to your approach, your strategy, your plan on how you activate this brand digitally and once I’ve done it, you will start to see actually that there are differences. Luckily, there started to be differences among these brands. Just to actually have a concrete example, thinking about the DeLonghi Group, we used to have Kenwood Kitchen Machines, which fantastic British brand where the websites actually existed to inspire existing customers and aspiring chefs with recipes from lower world written by internal chefs the company had some of them and also by engaged consumers. If you think about the Kenwood Machines, they are actually machines that normally last 15 to 20 years. Often it’s also passed for generations, and so owners are always on a hunt for new recipes, new ways of using the machine and also to finally say the right level of accessories that they needed to perform different actions in the kitchen. Think about each kitchen machine comes with over 50 accessories each, the pasta maker, the I mean a lost count. There are really many and really how to actually find a retailer. So when we started it, we really understood that all of the websites were more to inspire and be the sort of companion for even long forgotten machines at the exit from production but still people using it and they’re still interested in buying accessories. So that was actually what we come up with and actually worked really nicely, considering that the that study also helped us crafting a business model which started to sell accessories which were not sold that much, if not sold by the retail partners. So that actually started to bring additional businesses, additional revenue and highly profitable items actually to the DeLonghi Group, which makes fantastic sense and it was very much welcomed across the sales team and in the group and by consumers. Delonghi instead was more a premium experience Consumers were looking at and also an educational piece, because the back in the days Espresso was very much an Italian way of drinking coffee and I was in UK and it was very hard to. You had to go to the niche bars in London to get the Espresso coffee. Otherwise you would normally go for an Americano or for a Starbucks Costa kind of thing, and so the website used to be part of the educational journey. That came really to life also with the not just with the website but also with product apps that were helping setting the machine in the right way, and also the coffee club, the blog, where we used to partner with coffee producers actually to educate consumers and really make them understand the right kind of coffee for their taste. So it kind of started as an e-commerce journey. But, as you can see, e-commerce it cannot be unlinked from the brand experience you want to portray to the consumer, because otherwise it just becomes another way. It’s just a sort of a plan B of Amazon. Of course, we probably know the same speed of delivery and quality of operations. So you really need to find the kind of niche and make it unique and make it a destination for people to come regularly. And these three examples we’re providing totally different experiences but, as I mentioned, they were based on the same tech stack and managed by the very same team.

Paul Stephen: 21:45
Yeah, I think that’s the sort of the clear thing there. You’ve got different brands, different propositions, but you need to have consistency, otherwise you just end up in a kind of crazy place. I think there’s some interesting things that come out of that as well is that, like you said, the journey started to go from B to B to B to C, but then along the way, you then end up engaging with customers in a different way and it almost opens up completely different models. We’ve seen that with some of the clients we work with as well, where you because they’re the manufacturers you say they can, they stock all the spares, they stock all of the accessories, if you like, but maybe your retail channels it’s not so efficient or appropriate to do so. So I think that’s great. The way it’s effectively creates different business models by going direct to consumer and, as you say, the common technology is what really is required to hold it together. But you need a consistent approach to things, lots of different skills required. So, in terms of that digital team and then moving on to maybe what’s different now with AI, et cetera, what are the skills you saw along the way that needed to be created or new people that needed to be boarded into the team to support that cross-brand digital team.

Alberto Billato: 23:14
I think the kind of skills acquired by the team is the. I guess what I actually found out is that it’s very difficult to become, in particular when you work in corporate, being very vertical in what you’re doing. You need to somehow stretch the to brand, you need to stretch the marketing, you need to have very much business development and brand building mentality kind of mentality to really make it work. And if you are kind of a, you stay confined in your level of expertise. That is not really helpful in corporate where most of the time the team is small and they grow as the business grows and develops.

Paul Stephen: 24:06
Yeah, but it’s difficult to be brilliant at everything, isn’t it? You know, for a very successful e-commerce practice, there’s so much involved from the content, the technical wiring, shall we say, of that platform into third-party systems, the SEO, the paid search that’s going on, the marketing, the creative, the content. It’s not one person. It’s very difficult to do that.

Alberto Billato: 24:35
Absolutely, and of course there are agencies that are definitely there to help and help scaling. I think you need that to have a strong core in-house that truly understand the dynamics of the business and what is needed there. But then you know the role of agencies is clearly there to help and to scale.

Paul Stephen: 24:58
Yeah, I mean AI is definitely changing some of this because certainly from a content point of view, it’s making some life easier. So what do you think AI is going to do to the way we work and the way these teams can succeed?

Alberto Billato: 25:20
I think the generative AI is actually truly transforming the way people are approaching digital innovation, and what I’ve actually noticed most recently I mean generative AI has been there for a while, but actually has really come to the news recently in the last 12 months, I guess is the generative AI offers clearly an opportunity to scale faster repetitive tasks and, in a sense, it empowers the team to do much more, much faster and much more efficiently in digital and e-commerce. Not just those teams, though and this is actually something I’ve seen across organizations. You see more people from departments which would normally be quite passive in terms of technology adoption, such as customer service, consumer care, administration, finance and so on and so forth. So they’re really trying to get, to get quantitative with these tools and really experiment and see how they can actually bring value to the business, and this is a massive difference, because it really brings a kind of spread across the organization, an element of innovation and kind of forces people to rethink what they truly need to do and what they should be focusing on.

Paul Stephen: 26:55
And have you found, you know, some people are more open minded to it, shall we say, than others. Have you seen any sort of patterns with that, or have you come up against any challenges with embracing that sort of change?

Alberto Billato: 27:11
I mean talking about generative AI. No, I think it’s been very much sort of a self-experimental activity run by people. But I think it’s the. You know. Clearly newest generations are the ones which, for them, is not even weird to try. It’s kind of normal in the way they are. They are so much exposed since the beginning actually on through technology. But I’ve also seen an interesting pattern of people in their 50s and 60s actually be more prone to test out the new things and rethink the way that they’re actually running the day-to-day operations.

Paul Stephen: 27:53
Yeah, yeah, no, we’ve seen that too. I mean, it’s one of those things. I think AI has probably, for some of us, been around a lot longer. We’ve kind of been using it in, you know, making our Google AdWords campaign or whatever more efficient, using the sort of built-in stuff that’s been in Google for some time. I mean, strictly speaking, I think Spellcheck counts as AI. I’ve found some description. We’ve been using it for a while, and certainly when I speak to some of the younger members of our team, is that they, you kind of say, are you? using AI and they’re like well, yeah, of course we use it here and it’s built into that. It’s not a big thing. So, yeah, I think it’s embraced by some without even realizing or embracing it. I mean the sort of the amount of tools and things that are now available. I think at the end of 2023, there were about I don’t know over 11,000 MarTech tools that, in theory, we could use to create a website, do a marketing campaign or whatever it was. So, in terms of the experiences you have, what are the tools that you prefer? If you were going to set up from scratch and you needed to build an amazing e-commerce practice and amazing team, what are the sort of tools, as well as people, that you would want in your team?

Alberto Billato: 29:14
Fantastic question actually, and if you ask anyone they will probably reply in a different way. I guess what I’ve seen is the, of course is very personal in a way and based on what you need and everything. So what I actually found out recently and used recently and really actually appreciated it, was a tool called Xgen. ai as an American business, and they were born as a sort of an internal size search product recommendation tool which kind of caught my attention because these tools, compared to others which are more legacy, that I’ve been in the business for in the market for quite some time, kind of fixed the challenge that I had, which was most of the legacy systems do require a constant control and update and rules and customizing those rules and adapt, which kind of requires a full-time equivalent person, you know, deployed entirely to that. And internal size search and product recommendation is such a powerful tool to increase your AOV and your conversion rate. So it’s a pity that most of the times you can’t really do it properly Whilst the digital actually kind of connects. What I’ve seen with Maya is the CDPs, ERPs, PIM, all of that, and you just simply set your target being AOV, increase of expert center or particularly focus on a specific category and it really learns by itself, as you will expect from an AI tool, and I’ve seen that actually some really cool results are coming out of it, which is one to watch and is developing as we speak. Another one or another tool actually that I use instead to improve my productivity. One is called Wimcicle and W-H-I-M-S-I-C-A-L I hope I pronounced it correctly and this actually is an AI powered version of Miroboards and it creates flowcharts and stuff simply from a text printer, which for me, where I didn’t really have time to learn how to use Miro properly and I always rely to the team or to other people to actually make you work for me, doing this kind of stuff and starting from a canvas and simply from a text printer has been transformational. And the last one, and I’m sure most people can relate to, I’ve been back to meetings for many, many weeks and months of my life and I was always lazy enough not to actually send minutes out immediately. Now I’m using Fireflies. AI actually, and they record minutes in a structured way after each meeting and it sends out automatically, and that really simplified my life enormously.

Paul Stephen: 32:31
Some great stuff there. Like you said, simplifying your life and making it more efficient sounds good to me. You mentioned there CDP, ERP, piPIMm. I mean there’s all these sort of legacy systems that obviously when you come into a big corporate they’re kind of there already and joining them and getting things to talk to each other is kind of a really big challenge, a considerable challenge, particularly if you’ve got multiple brands. In terms of e-commerce platforms, have you seen any sort of e-commerce or it doesn’t matter if it’s ERP or e-commerce platforms or CRM are there any that you would choose to go for now if you had the choice? You may have been handed one and not had the choice in the past.

Alberto Billato: 33:20
Very tough question actually. It really depends on the kind of business. The type of business you’re after, I think, from a CMS, any commerce platform, my personal preference goes on more on the Shopify. I like things simple and with not much. They don’t require a huge amount of IT involvement to make developments, make things happen fast. I think it’s like speed to market is probably more important than having the perfect execution, so I kind of like that kind of platforms over others. I’ve experienced working with Adobe, Salesforce and others and they all have their own pros and cons. It Shopify itself is not perfect for all the it doesn’t fit all the kind of businesses out there.

Paul Stephen: 34:12
So I think that would work like your multi-brand sort of thing at DLG, exactly.

Alberto Billato: 34:20
I mean that one actually was an interesting one because it was a platform I never used before. It’s called a Swedish platform. I’m not sure I haven’t actually heard news of it most recently, but we used the Epi Server, which was a Swedish platform, and we make it work.

Paul Stephen: 34:37
Yeah, that became Optimizley.

Alberto Billato: 34:39
Yeah, fantastic, changed it.

Paul Stephen: 34:43
Yeah, all the good ones get acquired.

Alberto Billato: 34:46
Exactly.

Paul Stephen: 34:51
So I’m conscious of our time now and I’m going to remind we’re going to take some questions at the end. We’ve got a few more questions to ask. But just to give you the heads up, please put your questions in on LinkedIn there and we will try and bring you in, or please flag if you’d like to ask the question directly yourself. So back to that sort of conversation about change, cultural change. Some of the brands you’ve worked with you might have considered they were sort of more traditional businesses. So what sort of things did you have to do to try and make them digital-first organisations, shall we say?

Alberto Billato: 35:28
I mean, no matter which business I joined, I’ve always found resistance because e-commerce digital which to me, my translation of e-commerce digital means consumers first and then the driven. But e-commerce digital was always seen as a big change with a number of knock-on effects on how the company was operating, and successfully so over the past decades. So what really helped me actually was creating positive relationships that helped those businesses transform, and that was actually taking more time, in particular, the beginning to truly understand the business from different angles, and so my colleagues at the time could actually see I was on the same page. I was trying to make the effort to speak the same language, to really explain what I was expecting, and they were able to explain to me what they were doing and what they were expecting and what their expectations were in regards to e-commerce and their fierce work. So by doing this, I was actually understanding what they were saying and then went later on, had to challenge some of the processes and their way of operating their decisions. Resistance was almost gone.

Paul Stephen: 36:49
What was that sort of main blocker or barrier? What was their resistance?

Alberto Billato: 36:54
I mean, it really depends on the kind of department and everything, but really doing things differently, naturally as human beings, is, you know. Think about this new guy coming on from a different industry, doesn’t know what I’m doing and he’s there to teach me how I should do things better. It really doesn’t work. It creates obstacles, barriers and it doesn’t really move things. What I actually found is that in most of the businesses actually all businesses have been into most people are really passionate about what they’re doing and they really care about the success of the business they’re spending most of their day working for. So you just need to find the right key to enter this kind of and bypass these resistance.

Paul Stephen: 37:51
Thank you for that I think it’s brilliant One of the other things that we haven’t got to discuss yet you actually sit on a council around governance of AI, which is obviously the buzzword of 2023 and still very much significant relevance into 2024, so, from your side, in terms of governance, what are some of the key challenges around marketing with AI and how teams and maybe how governments maybe deal with that? What do you have used around governance of AI?

Alberto Billato: 38:20
Probably take our attitude to, you know, is a very complex one. Trying to be short on this one, I mean, as a matter of fact, ai literally exploded in the news and we’ve seen an unprecedented adoption by non-techy people, which is fantastic. But at the same time, most people don’t know what they’re really using and the implication of AI, in particular regarding data privacy, ip rich assets and, in general, the bias that these algorithms have in education, for me is absolutely of paramount importance. If you think about it, you know you’re using a tool which is so powerful and in seconds can actually help you take decisions, but if you don’t know how it really truly works behind the scenes, you are more exposed to mistakes.

Paul Stephen: 39:18
Yeah, it’s innocence really. I kind of you know people copy and paste or ask questions or whatever into any sort of AI tool. They don’t realize it’s actually kind of not exactly data going into the public domain, but it kind of is.

Alberto Billato: 39:36
Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know the fact that the European Union actually, with the AI Act, as you know, sets and clarity and boundaries on how the technology should be used, but more has to be done, of course, and has not become a regulation yet. It should supposed to be in April or so. In regard to marketing, instead, on top of the education piece I was mentioning earlier, I think AI is both an opportunity for brands and retailers, because clearly it helps accelerate productivity and can generate new business models, but I also see that as potentially as a threat, as a you know, competitive advantages built in years of investments by brands and retailers in innovation, for example, can be wiped out very quickly. And that’s one thing, of course, where you know AI is not something you can escape. You need to monitor constantly the competitive landscape.

Paul Stephen: 40:32
Yeah, I think. I think that’s what’s scary about what AI can help you understand, like you say, understanding segments or understanding market data. It’s so powerful if used in the right way. Like you say, the things that an established brand might consider its IP can be very quickly replaced. So I’m going to ask one more question and then, hopefully, we’ll take some questions from the floor maybe. So we love to find out what the good and the bad experiences have been for people who join us on this podcast, so I’ll be interested to find out if you have any advice or stories from experience which you would definitely do differently in the future.

Alberto Billato: 41:17
You know I try as a person, I try actually. You know good advice I go. It was always like don’t look back too much, you know, don’t think too much about the past. The past has gone and focused on the present. But I think my advice is the and I’ll probably be repeating myself that is actually its importance and particularly when you’re face and you need to bring along people with you is actually aligning expectations and create a common language for digital or whatever it may be. That is crystal clear within the organization. That is immensely powerful. It may sounds like you’re wasting a good couple of months at the beginning or weeks, but in reality you’re saving so much time and you’re making the project so much more successful and you really instill that kind of mentality in the organization for years to come because you’re creating ambassadors within the organization and that is really helpful and powerful. So my advice would be you know, if I had to look back myself, particularly when I was actually in the Longi group, you know, spend more time on it and because that is really really important. But of course, sometimes it is not enough and that’s fun fact when, particularly under extreme circumstances and I can actually think about COVID time where I was a stick at the time and in multinational company producing garden equipment for consumers and where we had to, you know I was actually pushing for digital, setting up the DTC for you know a good number of months. We know much of success because there were other priorities and that we had to face and challenge. And you know COVID exploded, shops would close down, amazon stopped selling anything that was not vital for people and so we had to really set the organization ready for trading on marketplaces in less than a month. That was putting the whole organization under enormous stress and no matter how much alignment I’ve done before, you know that was really stressful time. So, particularly when you do it fully remote, then you start really from zero. So I guess you know COVID of course we do hope is not happening again or we learn from it. But let’s say the I guess you know the importance of spending, you know the right amount of time with people and aligning communication is actually very important.

Paul Stephen: 44:06
Yeah, I mean we used to talk about that a lot. I can certainly remember pre COVID that there was a common conversation of is your, your C-suite, is your board sort of thinking ahead? Are they ready for a digital world? I don’t think that conversation kind of happens so much anymore. I mean there’s still some resistance to changing ways, but I think everybody is is quite happy to accept that the internet is here to stay and it’s not just a fad. So that’s, that’s, that’s brilliant. I’m going to, like I say, open it up now. Please raise your hand. If you would like to ask Alberto Billato a question directly, there should be a button at the bottom that you can press on. You’ve got a slightly different screen to me so I can’t tell you exactly what it is. Well, we’re waiting for that. If anybody’s brave enough to step up is in terms of where do you see yourself or maybe this business being over the next sort of four or five years? What do you think is going to change? How? How is it going to be for you, Maybe going forward in the sort of roles that you’ve had?

Alberto Billato: 45:09
Actually, the is an interesting one because the I think I’ve been seeing many different business model in e-commerce and digital. I was I wouldn’t say, you know, I was actually getting a bit bored, you know going through the same kind of process ever again, although meeting like fantastic people along the way and learning from different businesses, but the kind of basics behind that were kind of the same. It’s very difficult questions to ask now because actually, with AI is going to reshape completely the outlook in my view, and you know what I’m doing now is actually, as I said, like I’m trying to be part of, you know, this kind of cancel. I’m actually completed a specialization in AI for business. I’m really trying to get myself a kit as much as I can, although I’m not a developer, by the way, I don’t see myself developing new tools in AI in the future, but I really want to actually get up my knowledge on that one a bit and really see opportunities as they come along. Clearly, if anything, the AI is, you know, kind of instilled even more. The importance of being a digital, in a sense, is a sort of a renaissance of digital transformation in my eyes.

Paul Stephen: 46:31
Yeah okay, right, I’m just trying to see if we’ve got any more questions. Oh, I’ve got one here. Are there any key pieces of advice that you would give to e-commerce managers and directors? What should they know? What would be your sort of piece of advice for them?

Alberto Billato: 46:51
Again, I don’t want to and I’ve seen a number of businesses really depends on the stage where you know if you’re talking about a more entrepreneurial business it’s more corporate and depending on what kind of level of digital maturity they’re in. But I think if you think about yourself as an e-commerce manager or director, let’s say, coming to the business and simply taking care of your own store, I think you’re not going to move much further in the corporate ladder. It is a fantastic opportunity to really think about yourself as the trade union between the consumer and corporate decisions in terms of product development, in terms of after sales, in terms of really business development in a larger way of thinking about the term. So, because you’re really close to the customer and you can really monitor data on a day-to-day basis, you can even ask questions and get replies from consumers and test out new things. That is really the core of your role and as strong as you are in bringing that insight into the business in a way that is easy to be understood and digested, I think that’s a fantastic win for the business, more than the conversation itself.

Paul Stephen: 48:14
Yeah, I hear you say that, like you say, it feels like the connection to the consumer is so sort of live and, like you say, very powerful for the business. I think there’s a lot of data and a lot of information, a lot of understanding of the target audience that is rarely actually even sort of taken advantage of by the businesses, which is okay, one of those things that we’ll all get better at businesses will get better at. So one last chance for anybody who would like to ask Alberto Billato a question. But while I’m just giving him a last minute chance, I want to say a big thank you from me and from us at Shoppernomics for tuning in and obviously a big thank you to Alberto Billato too for sharing his story. Just loads of good stuff in there really. I’m sure hopefully there’s something there for everybody to sort of learn from. I’m sure some of it will resonate with you. We do have some more episodes of Shoppernomics coming up. The next one is actually normally we do this on a Wednesday, but our next speaker, Janis, can’t do Wednesday, so we’re doing it on Tuesday, 5th of March, so that’s coming up very soon. I’d also like to highlight that now. All of these Shoppernomics episodes are now available in your favorite podcast channel. It doesn’t matter if it’s Spotify or Apple or whatever one you want to use. You can go and check that out. So that’s really great. We’ve got a lovely back catalogue, we’ve transcribed that and all that will be on the website shoppernomics. co. uk too. So yeah, so I’ve not seen anyone else sort of hold their hand up yet, so I’m going to kind of call it there and I can only say thank you once again, Alberto Billato. I hope that’s been good for you.

Alberto Billato: 50:05
Thank you very much and to everyone attending actually for this afternoon.

Paul Stephen: 50:09
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Alberto Billato: 50:11
Bye.