CTRL/SHIFT - 14 06 2026 PARTHENOPE STAGE - DIANA ROSSI - HOW AI IS REDEFINING MARKETING

on to Diana Rossi from HL Software. How AI is redefining marketing from companies to intelligent growth. Diana, let's give an applause. It's going to be in English or Italian.

Uh, how are you preferred? Do you prefer it in English or in Italian?

English.

English. Okay.

English. Amazing. Let's give it applause to Diana.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. I didn't prepared actually any presentation in uh uh of myself of my career. Uh I can just tell you that I basically started my career now 15 years no not 15 but a little bit less uh years ago and I started in digital marketing. So when digital marketing was just for nerds it was just for people who were very boring to be honest. uh I was one of those and it was considered really useless compared to other types of marketing in this case.

So now situation is has completely changed. So that's the the the richness that we have right now. Uh just to tell you I'm not in HCL software anymore. I just started actually a new job last Monday. So and I'm in Naples uh right after a few years in uh in US and other uh places in the in in the world.

So now let's talk about and I don't want to teach you anything because this is not I think the scope of this uh of this conference. I just want to discuss with you of course very interesting topics like for example the growth whenever it comes to either um social media or e-commerce or any other types of marketing we're talking about growth right now right so let's start by saying if I'm going okay that aentic AI is of course growing is growing a lot and compared to many years ago go when we started actually which was not a gentic AI it was not even considered uh machine learning. So I I was studying I I was extremely lucky in my career and I did um an MBA master with Scott Galloway. I think he's the king of marketing. He's the king of a lot of I I do feel you should really uh listen to his podcast.

He's gonna teach you so many things which I cannot of course. But he told he told us he actually asked us what was the first time you actually started using AI. Can you tell

more or less a year when you started using it? Whether it was Chad GPT or anything else.

Yeah, it was like few years ago right? Actually when we started thinking about it. It was not even like two or three years ago. It was uh my first time using AI it was when I was in um a small uh marketing specialist or analyst I don't know what at Amazon in Luxembourg talking about it was like creating them. we were actually creating HTML uh for uh I don't know Amazon devices or something and they were autob buildinging themselves.

So the templates were built automatically based on the person they were sent to the the emails were sent to which is if you think about it it's actually AI it's machine learning but it's AI so this is what we are currently seeing right now and what we is really redefining the the also the future of all the marketing phases that you will see. So what what we are seeing right now is that that AI is accelerating. In this slide, I I actually asked I I wrote a small easy prompt to CLA and I was like, okay, how can I tell a bunch of people that AI is actually accelerating but is not new new from scratch for anyone? And Claude told me, okay, you can say that every disruptive technology that attracts aggressive marketing, etc., etc.

, etc., We are actually um aggressively growing a lot in terms of attracting people to with the ads with the advertisement on our brands. What we are seeing right now is just that marketing that we knew is completely over. So the difference the main difference from what we have seen in the past and what we're seeing right now is that you receive a bunch of advertisement in uh during your day during your uh and we're going to see which touch point uh we are our brands because I'm uh right now I started working for MSC. So whether you're going to ever receive an advertisement for a cruise is going to be me.

I'm sorry for you uh because I'm I'm pretty aggressive in my marketing strategies. But before the campaign was completely campaign centric. It was about the content. It was about a cool picture. It was about something a message that we wanted to um aggressively talk about.

We wanted to aggressively enhance to the right person right right now it's not like that and what's really interesting and we are seeing right now is that is that uh basically marketing with AI with AI is about time so anytime you're scrolling on your iPhone or your whatever phone you use now I'm a little bit biased on the iPhone whatever you're doing in your A whatever you're going to be always targeted by an AI marketing strategy and it's going to be extremely customized on what you you saw during your daytime, what you seen or what you've done in the past days. I have a fun story about that. I was um I've lived in New York for a couple of years and I was walking in the street. I visited basically the the the weekend before a Nike store. Okay.

I was looking for some shoes. I didn't do anything. I didn't leave any contact to the shop. I didn't leave anything. I I don't think I'm even like subscri I didn't even um subscribed on the on the on the website on Nike website but I received while working in the street while passing by a Nike store I received on my phone a notification from Nike not even owning on not even having the app on my phone and this is just why I entered the store.

So you're so retargeted every single time in your day, every single time you do anything in your life, in whatever you do, uh whatever brand you're looking for, you're just retargeted. So brands knows exactly whatever you like, whatever you do in your daytime. And that's actually luxury because of course I think it's luxury. Of course, because every time you do see an ad is so customized on whatever you want to see. No, not anymore like I don't know advertisement or not anymore newsletters from Amazon trying to sell you a pool or something that you don't need because it's so customized that you're going to always need anything that we are trying to sell you.

I think it's luxury, but probably people uh might find it a little bit creepy or something. I I I do I do think there is a um a bit of truth in the middle. So, I've always worked with a with a specific eye on AI governance and right now AI um EU AI act is going to help us a lot to try to give um the right rules and the right legislations behind it of course. But don't think about that. It's not that creepy actually because we are in Europe and I I heard some of the people at this stage like 20 minutes ago talking about Europe that is um is completely basically up uh because Europe European Union doesn't have any like I don't know AI tool or AI agent.

That's true. That's actually true. But we do have legislations and we do have our data within our basically the the the union. So that's our richness and that's is um that is going to be what we are going to keep. Oh, this is actually in Italian.

Sorry, because I uh I took it from the er AI impact. I don't know what um white paper which I I tried to to translate in in Italian of course um from my old uh old company HCL software. So what we are seeing right now is that what what I was telling you is that the ROAS so the return on the advertising spend is much higher. So three times higher compared to what was before. Um I used to have a four per four times ROS in my previous time previous life in marketing.

Now it's around seven or eight%. Seven or eight% on a single rod on a single advertising. This is huge because of course the uh personalization the customization on single advertising is so high that of course right now you cannot even make any mistake. It's not that you can just say okay no it's not like that I made a mistake on that person. It's not the target I wanted.

No, AI is going to uh is going to tell you exactly what's the right target for you, what's the right focus for you for that time of the day, for that specific target or that specific customer. Another thing that I um that I learned back in um in US and which is now finally coming up in Europe because we are in the pilot phase for Google AI which is great to be honest uh as a marketing as a marketeer here in uh in Italy is the CRM and customer journeys which are now so predictive. So I remember I had with my marketing agency uh in my previous life actually um a weekly call out a weekly like I don't know looking at the report. So we every single week we had to uh review the report see the rows see the main KPIs that we were tracking at that time. So for example it was a CT CTR or anything else.

Right now I can see and I can manage my car my campaigns all around the world and I currently manage more than 40 countries. How how can you do that? It's impossible, right? How can you manage 40 campaigns in 40 countries in the world? It's impossible.

You can do that just because of Google AI to be honest. And you can do that really. And every time that the the the advertising is not reaching you or not reaching you or not reaching you, it's just like something that is going to be changed in the upcoming like two or three minutes. I cannot say like milliseconds right now uh as it's like this as it's written there or in the white paper but it can be changed very very fast and very quickly. One last thing is the decision intelligence.

I I've worked on a a robot um for a campaign on a robot. It was for um for a pharmaceutical company last year and the decision intelligence decision automation was changed in milliseconds really and he was taking decisions on how to move the surgery timings etc in milliseconds. This is huge. This is a such a change for us that is going to change the entire like day of your media diet. So I just give you um I just give you like an idea of how your my day I I actually took my uh boyfriend's usual day uh daytime and just to give you an idea of how many touch points you can see in your in your daytime which is crazy to be honest.

It's like from 8:00 a.m. you listen to audio ads. Then you just scroll on your Instagram posts and everything. Then you uh look at the DSP video ads.

Now there is CTV. There's s such a bunch of advertisement that you can just change and customize however you want and whatever you want. I think it's a it's this is richness. This is really richness in terms of data and in terms of luxury that we have from our customers. I think it's uh it's really explic explicative of how things are going to change in the marketing landscape.

But of course, if you want to see more there uh there's a there's a person in the room I worked with uh for when I was at Alibaba. Alibaba was an incredible company where rules were not existing to be honest. uh and I was in charge of marketing for a huge company where Chinese ads and AI was all around the to be honest that was something that made me escape like made me around to New York to US right now I'm very happy to be in Italy with a lot of rules but at that time I think this is what we could see every single time every single device was connected it now even more now we can see the real change even more and more. So last just my last uh slide I I just prepared like four slides but I keep talking about marketing the the uh what I just wanted to tell you is that the competitive advantage is not data. I think I think now for marketing and for digital marketing however you want to call it is more capability.

So there are three pillars which are the main one and which are going to keep like are going to be always going forward especially with AI which are data creativity and automation and of course you know better than me how to uh talk about them how do you want to uh use them in your career in your daily job uh if you want to talk about it a little bit deeper I'm always I can uh you can reach me out on LinkedIn or however you prefer. I didn't leave your contacts my contacts sorry on the slides but um however you wanna whenever you want to talk about it I'm here and what last but not least creativity is the one that I prefer is about human ideas that's something that as you saw in the first slide which I prepared which was prepared by code human creativity will never be replaced not even AI can replace so thank you for for having me today.