Which marketing channels to cut when budget gets slashed?

Marketing teams struggle with AI implementation despite widespread availability. David Rabin, CMO at Lenovo Solutions & Services Group, explains how enterprises can overcome organizational barriers blocking AI adoption. The conversation covers three critical implementation strategies: establishing clear ROI frameworks for AI investments, organizing data infrastructure to support AI workflows, and building internal change management processes to shift teams from manual to automated marketing operations. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is David Raven, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo's Solutions and Services Group, which helps companies build right-size AI solutions. And today, David is going to share how you can overcome organizational barriers that are blocking your AI adoption. All right, let's move on to the second question. The world's a little bit of a weird place. We've got tariffs and geopolitical stuff and earthquakes and Russia making waves around the world. I'm sure at some point it's going to affect marketing and our budget. So how do you decide which marketing channels to cut when the budgets get slashed in the back half of this year?

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  We just guess most of the time. No, look, I mean, we'd like to think we're a data-driven company. We know that this tactic works better than this tactic. So that's where we would start. We're generally going to take a bit more of a macro view, though. So then let's take your tariff example. If we're sensing a little bit of softness in a certain part of the world or with a certain category, that will steer us from a business standpoint to maybe flex up or down in that space. We'd like to be as agile as possible, though. So the world of digital marketing lets us do that. We're not sitting here ready going, hey, let's go buy that Super Bowl commercial right now. Most of the world is really reacting more on demand so that we can turn the spigot on and off. Then there's also some wild cards. Actually, I have a soccer ball here, or football, depending on which part of the world you're in. We are a FIFA and World Cup partner. I just came from a meeting on this, so it's

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  kind of top of mind to me. But we made a big investment in FIFA and the World Cup. We are one of the top seven partners, the entire organization. We're going to power most of the technology for the 26th World Cup. It's going to be very difficult for me to now go convince our leadership team. I'm going to cut our hospitality program for next summer because, you know, I want to save some money. So we also have to take into consideration, if we've already made one big bet, we don't want to probably cut that at the knees.

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  It seems like there's marketing channels that can be cut. We also have this implementation of AI. Is it a marketing channel? Is it a services issue? Is it a people issue? Can you do more with less? I think that's really the big question on everybody's mind. As budgets get cut, are marketers still going to be in the job? And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to David Raven, the Chief Marketing Officer at Lenovo Solutions and Services Group for joining us. If you'd like to contact David, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit his company's website, which is lenovo.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube, and we'll be back in your feed every week.

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  All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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