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How Purpose-Driven Marketing Leads to Measurable Climate Action with Ecologi CMO Adam Boita

• Stun and Awe • Episode 42

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Adam Boita is the Chief Marketing Officer at Ecologi and a seasoned marketing leader with over 17 years of experience across iconic brands like PlayStation and Pernod Ricard. In this episode, Adam shares his journey from consumer marketing to leading climate action initiatives, guiding businesses to embed sustainability into their operations.

We discussed how Ecologi helps companies fund high-impact climate action projects, tackle the complexities of carbon credits, and leverage innovative tools to integrate sustainability seamlessly. Adam shared insights into Ecologi’s transparent approach, the importance of trust in climate action, and how his team ensures businesses achieve measurable impact.

Adam also highlighted the role of creative storytelling and humor in climate messaging, showcasing how Ecologi’s campaigns inspire businesses to take their first steps toward sustainability. He provided practical advice on balancing brand-building with performance marketing, creating awareness campaigns that drive long-term results.

We covered:

  • Climate action for businesses: Ecologi’s transition from consumer subscriptions to B2B solutions, empowering companies to fund impactful sustainability projects.
  • Navigating carbon credits: Tackling controversies and ensuring transparency and quality in climate action initiatives.
  • Engaging messaging: Using humor and wit to break down barriers and inspire businesses to act.
  • Campaign planning: How Ecologi balances brand awareness and performance marketing to drive measurable results.
  • Lessons for startups: Building trust through transparency, investing in brand identity early, and aligning profit with purpose.
  • Practical insights: Strategies for integrating sustainability into operations and communicating impact effectively.

Whether you’re a startup founder, marketer, or corporate leader looking to align your business goals with meaningful climate action, this episode will give you the insights and actionable strategies to achieve the impact you're aiming for.

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Introduction to Carbon Footprint and Climate Action

[00:00:00] Adam Boita: Every business should be measuring their carbon footprint, looking to set emissions reduction targets, and then following through on those emissions reductions and reporting those on a yearly basis, alongside taking climate action and, contributing and compensating through, through climate action.

As long as they have the right intent, then how you communicate that intent is is the most important thing. 

Welcome to Growth Leap

[00:00:25] Michel: Hi everyone and welcome to Growth Leap. I'm your host, Michel Gagnon. We talked to pretty awesome business builders who are designing disruptive and meaningful companies. 

Introducing Adam Boyta and Ecologi

[00:00:34] Michel: I am joined by Adam Boyta, Chief Marketing Officer at Ecologi, a company dedicated to driving meaningful climate action. Adam brings over 17 years of experience in brand marketing, having worked with major brands like PlayStation, Pernod Ricard UK, and the National Citizen Service Trust.

He now leads the charge at Ecologi, inspiring and empowering businesses to accelerate global climate action. Adam. We'll be exploring his approach to purpose driven marketing and how he balances building a strong brand with the demands for measurable results in today's data driven world. 

Adam, welcome.

How's it going?

to be here. 

Ecologi's Unique Approach to Climate Action

[00:01:16] Michel: So let's start by talking about Ecologi, making sure people know what it is and what you guys stand for. With so many companies hopping on the sustainability bad wagon, Sudmai view it as just another marketing trend. I'd like to know how does Ecologi truly stand out in this crowded space and also what sets it apart from other climate action platforms.

[00:01:36] Adam Boita: Yeah. The kind of climate action sustainability space is still a very nascent space. It's still, very young compared to other industries. And I think Ecologi was one of the first brands in that space when it wasn't so crowded. And I think the one thing that, made us stand out was our brand. And the way just the aesthetic, the design it's very accessible as a brand. And I think the idea from the early days when it was, predominantly a consumer led brand was that it needs to be accessible and easy to fund climate action. And that's still one of the top main reasons why our customers come to us today. And then alongside that, when it comes to sustainability, And climate action. There's just so many different projects, so many different ways you can fund that you need a trusted guide making sure that you're making you're funding the highest quality and the highest integrity projects that your budget can buy.

So our trust is a huge part of why people come to us. And that's mainly due to the way that we are very transparent in terms of. the projects you're buying where they are, where your dollars are going. We have a public registry where we retire all of our credits that people can go to as of today, see all the carbon avoidance removals, et cetera.

So, 

that has, built trust in us as a brand. And then that combined with the design aesthetic, which is, it's not techie. It's which a lot of maybe our competitors are but then you also see some of our competitors borrowing some of our more accessible design cues and user and brand experience in terms of their online experiences.

So I think, brand has always been mentioned in conversations that you've got a great brand. That's what attracted to me, your content, et cetera. So that's what we really try and hold sacred. And I think probably getting into this later, but. Now we're a B2B brand having come from a kind of consumer led proposition which where brand, is always, I think, considered more important taking that into a B2B spaces has enabled us to continue that strong brand.

Ecologi's Products and Services

[00:03:24] Michel: If um, we want to explain a little bit, what is it that Ecologi offers, or if, if, you know, somebody would like to partner with you, can you maybe share some of the products or opportunities that, people can discover on Ecologi?

[00:03:37] Adam Boita: Yeah. So overall we help businesses fund high quality, high integrity, climate action as part of their net zero journey in a nutshell. I'll buy a personas range from. Senior decision makers within marketing obviously CEOs and MDs uh, 

heads of sustainability and sustain the chief sustainability offices. And then from a kind of regulation policy compliance, we see operations. And then from a people engagement with CHR. So our original product, which was a consumer subscription product which helped you take climate action as an individual for yourself or for your family and pets depending on whether or not you were, frequent flyer or you're a heavy traveler, you could increase or decrease your levels of contribution that was then flipped into a climate action workforce for employees. If you're an HR, Persona and you want to start building your employer brand. And we know a lot of the workforce, Gen Z, Gen Y, millennials, whoever is coming to the workforce, want to work for more purpose driven organizations that take DE& I, ESG a lot more seriously, this was a way to enable them to talk about, join our company and we instantly fund climate action on your behalf, because it means a lot to us in addition to maybe other climate action initiatives that we're doing, measuring our footprint, decarbonization, that kind of thing. And then we have an API product. So for e commerce owners or people who have product and services online, which allows you to find a climb action that could be planting a tree it could be offsetting carbon with every order that allows that to kind of 

seamlessly work. So we have a Shopify plugin as well as like Zapier and then a custom API, depending on how advanced you are in terms of integrating climate action within your. Online offering. We also have a pay as you go impact shop which allows you to select the projects, if you're a bit more of an expert and you know exactly what you want, and the carbon price you need, then you can go to our impact shop and purchase impact there. Anything from carbon avoidance, carbon removals, nature based restoration. And then we've 

recently launched impact funds, which are carefully curated. funds that bring together multiple projects into one fund. So you don't need to worry about selecting multiple projects. We've done the hard work for you. And what it allows you to do is first off fund multiple projects in one go. Secondly, allows you to spread your risk. no project is without risk, but it lowers the risk of those projects delivering the benefits that they need to. And it also maximizes your impact. So we have A forest and reef forestation, a landscape reforestation restoration fund.

We have a UK Climate Nature fund and we'll have other funds coming online. So Ocean, for example, carbon removals in the future. And then obviously if you're like a slightly bigger organization, enterprise, FTEA hundred plus to a thousand, then you know, A lot of those businesses will speak to our commercial and impact and sales teams to make sure that they get the kind of custom climate action, depending on where they are in their climate journey, what they want to do.

They want to compensate for their emissions that they want to contribute to global climate action. So that's a whole myriad of kind of scenarios there. 

Challenges and Trends in Climate Action

[00:06:24] Michel: I want to get into your specific marketing expertise and experience, but just before I'd like to discuss about what you've seen over the past two, three years, I think you've been with Ecologi for almost three years now. And from my standpoint, from Germany, I've seen quite a bit happening, the good, the bad and the ugly we've heard a lot, especially with carbon credits a bit of a scandal maybe two years ago around companies who were maybe double counting things like I'd like to get your view, know, how do you see things moving? Because initially you said of, 

it's still a nascent. Space, let's call it like that. But a lot of things have happened over the past couple of years. So what's your take on this?

Like what have you observed, but also how do you see things progressing in terms of, I don't know maybe regulations, but also what from people and companies approaching you.

[00:07:14] Adam Boita: Yep, sure. Yeah, it's been nearly three years that the Ecologi, no, nearly four years, actually, the Ecologi has been around. And, since that time, we've accumulated 24, 000 businesses, 40, 000 members, planted over 80 million trees, avoided 3 million tons of carbon. So we're proud of that track record.

And I think that track record wouldn't be possible without like I said, one of the key tenets is The due diligence that we do around our projects we use the industry standards like gold standard, Vera, Puro but only as a starting point. And then we have a whole other layer of due diligence that are impact team, climate experts.

We also have an independent climate committee that helps us. We have a. impact regionalization strategy. And we've also just developing internally a kind of quantitative formula that we put all of our projects through to make sure they're not only delivering what they set out to deliver, but also making sure that they have, co benefits they hit the UN SDGs. So I think, yes, there has been controversy within the markets, most notably, the guardian, calling out, worthless carbon credits and phantom credits and double counting all that kind of stuff you talk about and I think you know The industry does need to improve does need to you know evolve as you say, it's a nascent industry versus other more highly regulated industries like the finance industry, for example but the kind of carbon credit market is no different. And there are, many different initiatives that are going on in order to improve, prove that. And we, we fully support that, but as a player within the sphere it's not just obviously carbon credits is not non carbon based projects, which don't necessarily fall that issue.

But. From our point of view, yeah, we're very confident in our due diligence and assessments of projects. And out of all the projects we've ever funded, I think only one has ever failed and in that instance, we replaced all of the credits for that particular customer. Yeah we're proud of that, that track record.

Ecologi's New Campaign

[00:08:59] Michel: As of today as we're recording this, you've launched a brand new campaign. That is pretty cool. I just saw so we'll make sure people have the access to the link so they can see it. What I've seen from that campaign is a short video and you basically have this, I don't know, management meeting happening, and I think the CEO potentially is asking what's going on with our net zero strategy.

Can you tell us a little bit about the idea also what's happening and how you came up with this specific um campaigN., 

[00:09:28] Adam Boita: Yeah. I think, 

[00:09:29] adam--he-him-_1_09-25-2024_130639: um, you know, 

[00:09:30] Adam Boita: communicating climate change is. And I think it's, 

[00:09:33] adam--he-him-_1_09-25-2024_130639: um, 

[00:09:34] Adam Boita: Sir David Attenborough said communicating climate change is. now like the biggest challenge and it's such a challenge for communicators that, that kind of work within this space, you can do fear based advertising, you can do emotional advertising. 

Um, 

But I think with this particular campaign, and it's something that we've seen work, we did last year at COP 29 we did a collaboration with Cassette Boy, where we started to lean into the wittiness and trying to expose the. Bye. Double standards that were happening, politicians saying one thing and then not delivering the other.

And I think humor and wit particularly when there's a lot of doom scrolling around the climate fear based advertising doesn't work. And, one of our tenants in terms of tone of voices. Being real positive and inspiring. And so with this campaign, we wanted to be real positive and starring, but also witty and also just shine light on our buyer personas effectively, and our audience, they're not doing anything wrong. They want to do good. They may have some excuses, but they don't know, how to. overcome the barriers of time, resource, knowledge access to the right resources to make that happen. Fear of greenwashing, taking climate action, but they're not communicating in the right way and then having a backlash. But we know that all of the benefits of taking climate action for businesses are there, Increased brand reputation competitive advantage attracting new customers attracting and retaining existing staff and employees in terms of that kind of engagement. And then also most recently we're seeing a lot of times, being compliant with RFPs or tenders or even kind of government procurement frameworks that this is now a requirement either via social value or through a carbon reduction plan. We wanted to shine a light on the type of conversations that we know are probably going on in all businesses, but in a light hearted and witty way to kind of 

break down those barriers and actually say, look, companies like Ecologi can help you on that journey. It's all about taking that first step and the kind of rest will follow. And it sits obviously very much in terms of, If we're talking like a brand versus performance, this is clearly an awareness campaign, top of funnel, creating intrigue around just the name Ecologi. And then obviously, we're always underpinned by we have a set of four values.

One of the first value is planet first, where we're science led and impact driven. Uh, 

And so all of the content that then sits underneath. This brand campaign is all about, explaining people the difference between compensation or contribution or climate adaptation versus climate mitigation, or how you need to go beyond carbon neutral, how to go beyond carbon offsetting the powers of trees and what trees can deliver.

So all of that kind of educational piece sits underneath that. But this for us was just, yeah, the kind of North star of where we can help and take businesses.

Planning and Executing Marketing Campaigns

[00:12:04] Michel: And how do you plan a campaign like this? If we if you want to break it I know you've been doing this for you for years, especially for B2C brands who usually have a lot more budget than a B2B company. If you just want to. Give us a simple overview of, when you're planning a campaign, what are the key deliverables that you're thinking about the objectives?

Maybe budget and also how do you measure, let's say, the effectiveness of that campaign.

[00:12:30] Adam Boita: Yeah, so I think we start off with our kind of yearly top down and bottom up build revenue perspective, I help run the kind of growth, the growth team. So that's made up of sales, marketing, and partnerships. And so we're all targeted on revenue ultimately. But revenue also equals impact that we can have on the planet. So it's really nice to be able to tie, commercial gains for planetary gains effectively. And so we'll look on that. We'll work backwards in terms of, the amount of leads over particular FTE size. So we target leads over 50 within a certain quality score, within a certain industry. We then look at conversion to SQL conversion to close one deal, work backwards on that for, general cost per lead and the ceiling that we want to hit and then. Ultimately, we that delivers the kind of, performance marketing budget overall, but we need deploy. And then within that, we then look at it and say, what's the split between performance budget and brand budget. And we followed best practice, B2B LinkedIn Institute, it's very well known, obviously depends on the industry, but broadly it's a 45 percent split between brand and 55 percent split between the generation. And then, 

we work with our media agency to determine the best channels for both those. So, 

Typically for lead gen, it will be LinkedIn some meta Yeah, that's it. From a lead generation perspective and linked in, obviously and then from a brand awareness point of view we look at programmatic video YouTube pre rolls linked in again. Actually experimenting with TikTok for business as well. We've got a very small line in there. Cause it seems to be quite impressive compared to meta at the moment. And then we're also going on sky ad smart with the campaign. They've got a really great VOD targeting around sustainability, key decision makers within businesses.

Ideally you want to be on three, ideally four plus channels in order to create oscillation between brand and performance and, ultimately. All of the research shows that if you're driving brand, it makes your performance work harder. Because otherwise you'll just reach a bit of a glass ceiling on performance.

And I think a lot of B2B companies maybe realized that too late and they, Max out their performance and then realize that leads are slowing down and cost per leader going up. And actually then they're like we need to invest in brand. When actually if you invest in brand upfront, we know the payback is a lot longer, three, six months, but ultimately it should make that performance work harder.

So in terms of the metrics that we would measure for brand awareness, it would be reaching impressions video views and then engagement be that likes, shares, reposts, comments. And then obviously for lead generation we still have, engagement parts of the funnel traffic retargeting, and ultimately it's resulting in, form fills and conversions and clicks.

Transitioning from B2C to B2B Marketing

[00:15:04] Michel: You've mentioned that or I've mentioned that, you used to work on the B2C side. That's something I'd like to build on a little bit 

 or dig deeper, let's say you, your initial. Roles were really focused on the big B2C world. What have you noticed, when you transitioned to a B2B marketing role?

What were the big differences, let's say and potentially things that you had to adapt a little bit in your approach?

[00:15:30] Adam Boita: Yeah. First and foremost, I actually really, I think I'd like me to be more, more now I'm in it

[00:15:35] Michel: Good answer. 

[00:15:36] Adam Boita: I think it's because there's a lot more accountability and a lot more trackability in terms of the performance of your campaigns. For brands I work with where, PlayStation was setting, Boxes wasn't really even online, you could buy them online, obviously, through websites, but a lot of the volume went through retail outlets.

So there's a lot of trade marketing. And you couldn't get that kind of like 1 to 1 relationship by I put this in the marketing funnel here and I get X out. It was very much about becoming culturally relevant. Becoming a cool lifestyle brand that people wanted to buy into. And then people would purchase the games off the back of that, PlayStation was the first gaming consoles, but consoles in the ministry of sound and be kind of 

aligned with the kind of music generation, aligned with the festival generation, aligned with the fashion generation.

And it became more than just a gaming. It became a kind of lifestyle badge versus Xbox, which was still very Microsoft, very techie, very kind of computer kind of nerd style things. And the same thing with Absolute really, again, we were selling bottles of alcohol primarily through, the on trade, which is biz which is not, pubs and bars, the impulse channel, which was convenience channel like a corner stores and then through the off trade, which is like groceries, like Tesco, Asda, all that kind of stuff. And so again, the kind of relationship between marketing input here and output there, wasn't always there. And again, a lot of trade marketing time and time again, people always came back to, we buy into the absolute brand because I saw the great collaboration you did for that limited edition with Jamie Hewlett from the gorillas or a great piece of marketing you did with that particular music artist in the concert that you put on remaining culturally relevant for all of those brands was super important. For the sales guys to have a differentiator effectively when it came to negotiations and the power of the brand was the one thing, ultimately, yes, some bookers are better than others and there are reasons for that, but ultimately differentiation, the consumer's mind comes from differentiation and brand and what it stands for and what I guess tribe they're aligning themselves to but then when we got into NCS which was both, targeting 16 and 17 year olds, but also their parents.

So who are the kind of. Decision makers ultimately as to whether or not they could go on. So for those of NCS was a and still is one of the UK's leading youth programs. runs a summer camp effectively for anywhere between two to three weeks, where people young adults learn skills that they don't necessarily learn in school, resilience just those kinds of life skills. And that was where I had my first taste of, proper performance marketing, where we were trying to get expressions of interest and then pushing through the funnel. We had a sales force, we had emails, you're targeting both decision makers and the team. So again, from that perspective, you're trying to make that brand culturally relevant. Understand the mindset of teens when they're in that really important transition into adulthood. And, you know, 

we had econometrics, we had a very, extensive econometrics looking at, power of TV versus social online versus at home, how those metrics work in order to deliver those expressions of interest and ultimately signups to the camp at the end of the campaign season.

Building a Strong Brand in B2B

[00:18:29] Michel: I, I want to keep going on this because you've mentioned a couple of times, you want to build a brand, you want to make it culturally relevant when you get into B2B. I think a lot of our audience or a lot entrepreneurs in general tend to focus. they fall into a trap of explaining the features or how they do something or how the product is helping you get there.

The storytelling very frequently is missing. And I think when you look at, big enterprise software, obviously these things are not as sexy as a, an absolute vodka or a PlayStation, so I'm interested in your experience and maybe how you've, taken that storytelling.

Into the B to B world, but also, any advice that you have for our audience on how they can potentially think about the brand messaging a bit differently.

[00:19:19] Adam Boita: Yeah, I think there's a lot of there's a lot you can borrow from the B2C playbook, and I think, that's one of the, quite often the themes I see in lots of B2B either events or podcasts, borrowing from the B2C and I think that one of my mentors, Mark Choecki, who wrote the book From Boring to Brave, it's all about taking those brave choices and becoming, trying to think a bit left field and do something that, that is iconic, that is unexpected within your category. We see this in consumer marketing all the time, Who thought that Lu Roll could be an exciting category, but it took who gives a crap to suddenly come up with a brand and then suddenly alongside sustainability and purpose driven That disrupts the category. So I think there's so much opportunity in what you would term quite boring enterprise software solution markets But there's always an opportunity to swim against the tide and be a little bit different and get noticed and that I guess that's what brand can help do help that differentiation help become that top of mind brand that you would choose when you're in your Kind of discovery phase and then into your buying phase and then to when you're actually in market to buy, you know We often talk about the 95 percent of the five percent You know that brand is nurturing that 95 percent so that when they are in that five percent buying mode then they're more likely to buy from you than someone else. You still obviously absolutely need to think about the pain points and how you're solving those and how your product overcomes those barriers for that particular persona for sure. But I think that sits more in the kind of consideration piece. Once you've dazzled them, entertain them with maybe some kind of brand marketing.

[00:20:44] Michel: But do you have some sort of a process or it's more like Mad Man style where have your cigar and you just. Come up with that next big idea or, since you've done that, quite a few times before I don't know, there are a couple of things or you have maybe a framework with a couple of buckets that help you think about those things.

[00:21:04] Adam Boita: Yeah, I've always tried to distill brand essence into what I call a brand compass. And at the heart of that the first thing is around consumer or buyer insights. What is your audience thinking and phrasing it in terms of what they are, what are they thinking? So if it's an HR person, it's like, how do I build my employee brand and attract and attain great talent? If it's a salesperson, it's, how is this going to help me sell more and hit my monthly sales targets? If it's a marketeers, how is this going to let me align this with our brand story and build our brand and build our brand reputation in this space? So we start with those kind of pain points or what the particular persona is thinking. And then I look at what I call the brand platform. So this is the platform that is like a universal truth. It's like the Nike just do it or. The kind of three word phrase Ecologi's one is both centered in the original brand story, which is, the original three, four co founders that were doing it for their children for the planet. And then from a business perspective, yes, they want to be able to take climate action and grow their business at the same time, but they know In their heart of hearts that they're doing this for our planet. So the kind of the brand platform Ecologi is always laddering up to for our planet It's the kind of universal truth as to why we're doing this Alongside all the amazing business benefits alongside all of the pain points that we help solve But it's that kind of like higher purpose that we all buy into so once you've got that strong brand platform That allows you to then hook other campaigns on.

So for example, for us, it's a very modular platform because we can say take climate action, build your business for our planet or no more excuses for our planet so for us, it's been a very. Flexible brand platform where we can talk about things, but still tie it back to our universal truth. And then obviously layering onto that, we have a tone of voice, real, real positive, inspiring. We have a kind of brand experience. How do we want our experience online and our experience with our sales teams to be, human, empathetic, kinds of things. And so you can build up this picture and have it on a kind of like a one pager that kind of guides all communications moving forward.

[00:23:05] Michel: And maybe if we look back what kind of mistakes that, you may have made or that you've observed or witnessed, over your career where, or maybe you see, You just launched your campaign and others doing it as well. What are the, the top three mistakes that you always see where you say, why are they trying this?

We know it's not performing or it's not going to work.

[00:23:27] Adam Boita: It's a good question. I think focus is probably one of the things that's the hardest to do, and not spreading yourself too thinly. When I first came into Ecologi, we were driving, we had so many different features and products. We have, Ecologi zero, which is a carbon accounting software that plugged into your zero that gives you, capital footprint and then looks at how you can then reduce those emissions and produce a report. We have the climate action workforce for employee engagement with the pay as you go impact shop with the API e commerce plugin. We have the new impact funds. We have obviously even a consumer proposition, so climate positive individual climate action individual. And so we were spreading our budget across all of those different products.

And actually, when we looked at it, we were thinking about what's the biggest growth lever and actually was, assisting the sales team because that's where the biggest value was to be derived. And so we then really focused around The kind of broader brand strategy of Ecologi, the broader part of, wherever you are in your climate journey will help meet you there and take you on the next step. And so just that kind of sometimes I see not enough focus and where you're going to spend your money and get the greatest return on investment. And that takes time. That takes testing and learning, seeing what isn't working. But slowly narrowing that down, I think, is my biggest lesson I've seen.

[00:24:37] Michel: If we go back to sustainability there's a lot of discussions around greenwashing or greenhushing and you're in the middle of it, and I think your campaign is super interesting because I've been in that room where, you want to make a difference, you try to find the best path to have that impact, but it's, there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of, priorities.

What are you seeing at the moment? Maybe the customers that you have have different needs today or different asks than, two, three years ago. What's the trend.

[00:25:08] Adam Boita: I think that the main thing is how you communicate what you are doing. If you are say funding climate action for every sale, that's great, but that doesn't necessarily suddenly turn you into a super sustainable organization, depending on what product you're selling. So is about how you communicate and why you're doing it and what it represents. Every business should be measuring their carbon footprint, looking to set emissions reduction targets, and then following through on those emissions reductions and reporting that those on a yearly basis, alongside taking climate action and, contributing and compensating through, through climate action.

As long as they are doing something else or they have the right intent, then how you communicate that intent is is the most important thing. And not to over egg what you're doing. If you're not really following what following through with your decarbonization efforts. We have a business toolkit which provides guidelines and assets that our businesses can use. We follow the green claims code and the advertising standards authority, we also have links to those particular guidances within our toolkit. And then if people, have a question they can obviously reach out to our customer success team and we can help them there as well.

[00:26:17] Michel: One thing that you and I talked about in our first chat was technology and AI. And blockchain and everything else. I'd like to understand a bit, over the years, how you've approached these new technologies, and also how it has changed or not changed, like the work that you do as a CMO.

[00:26:36] Adam Boita: I've always said that technology an enabler, not necessarily the thing that's going to solve everyone's problems. And I think you've got to start out with what problem and pain do I have? And could this piece of technology or something else actually solve that problem with me? I have a friend who's got a great podcast called Shiny New Toy, and it's all about, marketeers chasing the latest shiny new toy, shiny new platform, without asking themselves is the audience there? They care about is actually solving the pain point and the challenge and the problem that I have so you know when it comes to ai I think that or any new platform is really is just test and learn at a very small scale and see if it's see if it's worth we've been evaluating a number of different ai tools dojo, ai copy ai, Adzact, which is a great kind of matching platform with using machine learning.

But we're only ever going to test and learn and then see if it has potential and then incorporate it into our tech stack or within our campaigns.

Adam Boyta's Career Journey

[00:27:31] Michel: I'd like to learn more about your career, if you could tell us the story of, how you've, you are the short version before we print it of how you've navigated like PlayStation to, landing at Ecologi where you are, like what has been a bit, you know, your guiding principle or, how you've navigated these different roles.

[00:27:49] Adam Boita: I think the spark was when I was 15 and I saw a a TV program which was featuring, I think it was JWT. So J. Walter Thompson, which was one of the ad agencies, being out of the industry still going, I think today at the time. And it was an account manager or account planner on the set of the latest kind of like car advert.

And I thought that looks really cool. And so I initially really liked the creative side, thinking about becoming an art director or copywriter and in those days, It wasn't really an email, so you just basically had to write letters or fax or phone up the HR department and try and get work placements. So I got work placements in Abbott Mead Vickers two years in a row, J. Walter Thompson. So that kind of started me down the kind of advertising and marketing route, really. And then I decided I wanted to study that at university, so I studied that at Bournemouth. And then as part of that Bournemouth uni, there was a like a six week to eight week placement. You had to secure lucky for us, one of the students in the year above us had already gone to New York to work for gray advertising. So we applied to be on their internship program to the, myself and another friend, Jonathan tap is now I think it's Archie's and yeah, we went on that kind of six to eight week program in New York when the best times of our lives working for a great ad agency and also experiencing New York at the same time. And then when I graduated, I was just temping in the PR department at Sony, just through a temp agency. And uh, got to know some of the people. And then there was a junior product manager role going. I applied for it, got the role, and that's what started me on my career today. So I was at PlayStation for seven years.

And then I found Pernod Ricard and Absolute Vodka. So there was a marketing manager for Absolute going there. And then it was there for seven years and then yeah, was looking for other opportunities, fell into NCS. It seemed like a great purpose driven brand. I think, Absolute was the first brand that really introduced me to purpose work in the LGBT plus community, working with the artistic community.

And so therefore working for NCS was another kind of purpose for the kind of young generation. And then obviously now Ecologi. And it was the NCS. I was doing some consultancy work for Ecologi because one of the co founders was a friend of mine that I knew from PlayStation days. He said, could you come help and deliver a consultancy around the marketing plan and how we set up budgets? And then I did that for 6 months. And then I was like, I love what Ecologi is doing. I think it was the hundredth member that signed up to support them from a consumer subscription perspective, saw them grow, saw them a crowd fund, and then wanted to join that journey. So I guess my red thread has been, entertaining a generation for seven years entertaining them in a different way through, through, through booze and partying and events and music and culturally relevant events at Pernod Ricard. NCS was about, making young people more resilient and preparing them for the world that they're going to, world of work that they're going to go into. And then now it's about protecting the planet that they're going to inherit and hopefully work for many more years to come. Yeah, that was like a nice red thread.

I always say, what's your red thread? There's

Eco3Eco, 

[00:30:26] Michel: Great. Um, there, there's so much information out there these days. 

Advice for Aspiring CMOs and Entrepreneurs

[00:30:30] Michel: Like if you are a young entrepreneur, a young marketing professionals, or, an entrepreneur as a whole, a startup founders, it's really easy to get lost with the experience that you have, how would you define like a good CMO what makes a good CMO from, you know, from a bad one 

[00:30:47] Adam Boita: I think the kind of marketing of old was, campaigns do cool stuff and sometimes have no accountability. If I'm honest but I think the CMO today, has to be commercially driven, has to be numbers. Literate, Pernod Ricard. you know, my portfolio, we had whatever it was, 10 different PNLs that would add up to a spirits portfolio PNL, you can't spend it until you've earned it. You can't go and do the cool, good marketing stuff that you want to do until you've built the PNL, 

[00:31:12] adam--he-him-_1_09-25-2024_130639: you know, 

[00:31:13] Adam Boita: what your contribution is after AMP for the business. Yeah, that kind of. That commercial discipline is something that I really learned at Pernod Ricard. The performance marketing side is something that really worked, learned at NCS Salesforce very sophisticated CRM program. And obviously the econometrics to understand what worked and what could increase our numbers year on year. PlayStation is where I learned my kind of cultural relevance. I also learned that at Pernod Ricard with the likes of Absolute and working on very culturally relevant brands. So yeah, I think you need to be creative.

You need to be a great communicator, but you also need to have great commercial acumen and ultimately, marketing should be seen as a growth driver alongside sales and partnerships and a contributor to the business, not just a. You know, as my old boss would say that doing the coloring in function. In order for marketing to have a seat at the table in the future it needs to be able to produce demonstrable results whilst also building a brand, which doesn't always become demonstrably, especially, as we know, the long and short of it. Long term brownboarding versus term sales targets. Navigating that and balancing that is always going to be a difficult act. Especially if you're answering to a CEO or to the board.

[00:32:19] Michel: I don't want to take too much of your time, but I think I have a couple of other questions. One would be if we go back to what you just said, right? When you joined Ecologi two, three years ago, how do you get started? Like, how did you organize yourself? How did you Identify like the key priorities that you had to really push back then.

[00:32:40] Adam Boita: How do we plan on a quarterly basis for Ecologi, you say?

[00:32:44] Michel: I'm more interested is in when became a global managing director of a net tech company, it took me a while to promote myself, mentally and psychically, and I used to do this. I used to be really hands on now I need to see the opportunities. See where there's friction that I should remove so that my team can get the job done.

so when you move from NCS to Ecologi, when you, I know you've done some consulting, so maybe you were already you already knew where to go, but how do you do your diagnosis and say, look, these are the things that I really need to push, clarify or focus on. 

[00:33:19] Adam Boita: Yeah, that's a really good question. As part of the consultancy work, we did a deep dive across all of the different aspects of the kind of marketing chain. Worked with the CRM team, worked with the social team, worked with the commercial team, and I did like stakeholder interviews to get real, build up a real picture of what was going on in the company what each of those stakeholders wanted to get out of that. So I had a really good picture from that perspective. And then that helped me build that kind of bigger picture. I think the one thing that kind of pushed all of that to one side was within the first three months, the business made the pivot only. And so learning the B2B craft, borrowing what was great from the original plan and, Borrowing kind of from the best of the B2C playbook, but understanding the B2B guardrails and then seeing where we needed to focus.

So again, we were spreading ourselves too thinly. It took a good three to six months to really understand because, Ecologi has quite a varied different business model just because of the evolution of the brand, it's got semi subscription, it's got a potential SAS product, it's got API revenue coming in, it's got all various different kind of business models and revenue streams.

And that makes it quite complicated to unpick those all and create a cohesive view of where we need to push, we did all of that. And then we focused, like I said, more on assisted sales as a kind of growth leaver, because it meant that we could sell our entire product speed, but to one particular.

 By persona buying committee, rather than maybe the kind of self serve bringing in slightly smaller companies that would have a slightly lower average order value. And therefore with assisted sales, we could increase that and have the same kind of product set. So, yeah definitely takes time to bed in.

And then also really building the right dashboard of metrics that you can go to. I was the, one of the first things I did was, you know, had HubSpot over here. We had some reporting here. We had some subscriptions there actually bringing in, on a weekly basis. In a Google spreadsheet, how many pages he goes, what is each one of those worth?

How many subscriptions? What's in this? Totaling that up, seeing what the weekly ROAS would be, seeing where we need to make those optimizations. Lead quality, lead scoring. We started adding that all in and kind of building those foundations and that gave us like a master dashboard from which to pick where we were going to then focus.

Data is your friend and how you interpret it is, how, how yeah, make those decisions.

[00:35:25] Michel: let's just talk about lead scoring because I just heard that and that's not the next question I wanted to ask you, but since you mentioned it, can you tell me a bit about how 

[00:35:34] michel_1_09-25-2024_140639: you, 

[00:35:35] Michel: do this Ecologi?

[00:35:36] Adam Boita: Yeah, there's lead scoring actually within HubSpot. So it has a couple of fields within there. And we look at things like amount of pages that person has viewed. What industry they're from, what job title they're from, the size of company, the inferred annual revenue from I think zoom info is a plug in on, on, HubSpot. Yeah, typically we try and aim for leads with a Lead quality over, over eight or nine. And when I first came in, we were just like, any MQL over 20 is fine. And, the kind of lead score was six. And slowly over the years, we focused more on upmarket and leads over 50. Our consistent like lead quality score went from six to nine with only maybe a 10 to 20 percent drop off in like total leads. So it was all about improving quality of leads as we move forward there.

[00:36:24] Michel: Um, my last question is if you could give an advice to somebody you'd like to follow, let's say your path or somebody who'd like to build a business that looks a bit like Ecologi. What kind of advice would you have for them? From a marketing standpoint.

[00:36:38] Adam Boita: Very good question. I think thinking brand first and the type of brand that you're going to build with this particular product or service. I think quite often people overlook the value of, 

[00:36:51] adam--he-him-_1_09-25-2024_130639: you know, 

[00:36:51] Adam Boita: you can pay five pounds and have a new logo designed. But the fact is, if that's your solution to building a brand on top of the product or service you think you want to launch, then I don't think you're going to build a strong brand. And it takes, real insight of the audience. A real pain point, how that product solves that particular pain point, and then how that brand brings that to life beyond just the kind of, the rational, what emotional lens does that does that brand add to that product service that ultimately will serve you and your business for the long term.

[00:37:23] Michel: Thank you so much, Adam, for your time. Appreciate we should meet eventually wish you all the best with Ecologi will be, we'll make sure that the the audience has access to that new campaign. It's pretty funny, pretty insightful. So thanks a lot and all the best.

[00:37:39] Adam Boita: You too. Great to

be Thank you. 

[00:37:41] Simon: Thanks again for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as usual you can find the show notes at stunandawecom. 


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Michel Gagnon

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