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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a Conversation Intelligence Hero!
Invoca’s Conversation Intelligence Heroes program gives our customers a platform to highlight the successes they’ve achieved with conversation intelligence technology. It also has perks like personal branding opportunities, VIP invites to regional events, access to private beta programs, and more.
As part of the program, we’re shining a spotlight on our inspiring heroes. Today’s featured hero is Mark Loovis, Director of Marketing Technology at DIRECTV. DIRECTV has continually evolved its product, best-in-class content, service, and user experience to create an industry-leading video offering that streams from virtually anywhere.
Check out our Q&A with Mark below, where he shares how he got started in marketing, the future trends he sees on the horizon, and how his partnership with Invoca helped him grow.
I fell in love with Marketing in college. In my final years at Texas State, I joined the National Student Advertising Competition team. Unknown to me was that Texas State is a powerhouse in this competition with several district and national championships under their belts. The team also treated it differently than most of the competitors by combining the powers of the communications and marketing departments instead of siloing ownership inside one organization. As a result, it was a perfect little keyhole into what an advertising agency would feel like. I was fully sold at that point and have been around the space ever since.
I was drawn to the technical aspect of marketing. I simply wanted to understand how things worked while maintaining a skeptical attitude about if they were, in fact, working. As a result, my account/project management role eventually included becoming the agency SME on advertising technology. That, in turn, led to me being ‘stolen’ by the client. I garnered marketing technology experience and now I own the entire architecture and platform strategy at DIRECTV.
In that time, I got some nice wins under my belt. I designed and implemented AT&T’s first foray into dynamic email design, stood up the first tag manager at AT&T, redesigned the last touch attribution model at AT&T, migrated AT&T’s AdTech infrastructure on multiple occasions, installed Invoca across three different organizations, and completely redesigned the DIRECTV marketing and advertising tech stacks.
I’m a technology nerd, so I love installing tech in my home. I’m super excited about the smart home industry and I expect huge improvement in that space over the next couple of years. Outside of that, my family recently became big FC Dallas supporters — we love going to games and talking soccer together.
Thankfully, I was introduced to Invoca very early in my career. When I introduced Invoca to DIRECTV, it was well received and there was an immediate need to invest. My ability to install it quickly was also a plus. Once Invoca was onboarded, the marketing technology team looked like they were performing miracles by tracking omnichannel experiences, informing the call center, optimizing media spend, and enhancing experimentation without the need for a bunch of IT dollars.
Fun story — a consultant told me this project was going to require several million dollars in investment and 6 months at least. Needless to say, they didn’t know what they were talking about.
Those “eureka” moments are the best! We simply improved our back-end data connection from a once-daily load to a near real-time load. That generated massive improvement that our media partners were able to quantify. For DIRECTV, we got huge wins from an acquisition perspective and, lo and behold, the service team wanted a piece of that action too. The concepts didn’t change, but the end user did.
Too many to count? Invoca was brought into DIRECTV for two primary reasons: tracking calls derived from the website and media optimization. That morphed into call routing efforts to ensure we sent customers, and non-customers, to the right experience every time. That morphed into direct media tracking exercises. That morphed into data sharing straight to the contact centers, which helped us increase our close rates by 110%. We would never think of Invoca as a one-use platform.
Want to read more of Mark and the team’s incredible story? Check out the full DIRECTV case study here.
I think marketers have already seen this, but tools are changing product names to try to cash in on the AI trend. AI, and the application of that label, have started to seem more trite. Outside of that, I think marketers are interested in advocating for the use of AI but struggling to find the right area to start.
For me, the biggest risk isn’t in selecting some massive AI platform but in not allowing your people to use AI organically. I hear a ton of stories about how leadership wants to find “AI use cases” but things like Bard and ChatGPT are blocked on their VPNs. This two-faced approach to AI adoption will only hurt organizations as it hinders employees from exploring all the tech at their disposal. If you haven’t used a LLM to make an email sound more professional or tried to break the prompt writer I don’t trust you as a technologist.
Not thinking as an enterprise. Acquisition groups need to be aware of retention efforts and vice versa. At times, these teams are in conflict and that makes both experiences suffer. Stop assuming that current customers don’t go to a page or that acquisition would never call a wrong number.
There is always more juice to squeeze! As a technologist, you don’t need to seek out new tools all the time. Sometimes it’s about convincing teams that existing tools are set up incorrectly or aren’t leveraging certain capabilities. Take advantage of people looking at the shiny object and get to work polishing up under-appreciated platforms. Leadership doesn’t forget when you accomplish goals without increasing the complexity of the architecture or adding another line item to the budget.
Are you interested in becoming a hero? Turns out you don’t need to get bit by a radioactive spider. You just need to be an active Invoca customer and participate with the community in some of the following ways:
What do you get out of it? Below are some of the perks that Conversation Intelligence heroes enjoy:
You can register to become a Conversation Intelligence Hero here or scan the QR code below. Just remember: with great power comes great responsibility.
