You all know I love to learn, and learn I did talking to Dino!
Have you ever wondered what St. Louis is like to someone who has never been? How can a game you might have played as a teenager be turned into a marketing tool? Does brand perception really mean that much?
Today we are talking about that, and more, with Dino Delic!
About Dino:
Most comms teams are stuck reporting activities instead of proving impact. I help them change that. As the creator of the Data-Driven Communications (DDC) Framework, I work with Fortune 1000 comms leaders to build three capabilities most teams never learn:
→ Strategic Alignment — connect comms work to business priorities
→ Actionable Intel — create intelligence, not just dashboards
→ Demonstrate Impact — show outcomes, not just outputs
The proof:
→ 500+ communicators across 300+ have taken the DDC Maturity Assessment
→ $2.1M in pipeline influenced by DDC-trained teams
→ 7-point higher retention among DDC customers
I host “Earning Your Seat” — a podcast featuring comms leaders who’ve made the leap from order-taker to trusted advisor.
I run workshops worldwide (London, NYC, Tokyo, Sydney, and more).
Contact Dino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinodelic/
Dino’s plug: https://www.linkedin.com/smart-links/AQEscxgQOwIDNA
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:08)
Well, welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. I’m Sean in St. Louis and today we have a special guest for you and this guest is awesome because he is not from St. Louis and he’s going to tell us what he thinks of St. Louis as we’re going through our conversation here. His name is Dino Delich and he is from a company called Meltwater, which is an online media, social and consumer intelligence company that helps companies and brands to ⁓ take information that they have and to find insights from it.
Dino himself is actually the head of the Data-Driven Communications Research Lab there. And as you’re going to hear, he’s an outstanding communicator, and he’s also someone who really understands the power of using data to help make decisions. But part of why he is so good is because he is also a podcast host himself, and he has a show called the Earning Your Seat Podcast. And you’ll see as we talk just how naturally he fits into this conversation and how much fun we had talking. I also want to encourage you
pay attention at the end of the episode because he’s going to give you some resources that are free, that are provided by Meltwater that can help you with marketing. And they’re not intended to sell you anything. They’re just intended to be good resources for you. And he talks a lot about the 8 % of companies that really manage to take insights and information and use them to tie to business outcomes in a meaningful way. And wouldn’t you like to be part of that 8 %? I know I sure would. And any kind of resources that can help us.
to get to that point I’m definitely paying attention to. So with all that said, here’s the interview.
Sean Jordan (01:44)
Well, welcome to the Marketing Gateway and I’ve got with me today Dino Delich from Meltwater. Dino, I’m so excited to talk with you and I know you have so many awesome perspectives on so many things. But one of the first questions I ask every guest that comes on the show is to tell me something surprising, something I don’t know and it could be about anything that you’d want to share. So what can you surprise me with?
Dino Delic (02:05)
I’m going to surprise you with you. You surprised me. We’ve just met. to help me get a flavor, why don’t you tell me something surprising about you and I’ll see if I can raise it.
Sean Jordan (02:16)
Awesome. Well, I think one thing that not a lot of people know about me is that I am an amateur photographer and I like to go when I am having a bad day at work over to the St. Louis Zoo, which is about 15 minutes from here and just start snapping pictures of animals. So I don’t post them. They just take them for me. But that’s something that I do.
Dino Delic (02:32)
Nice. That’s awesome. Okay. All right. I’ll try to raise it then. ⁓ because I have an Australian accent, everyone always assumes that, you know, I surf cause I live in LA. Terrible surfer. Hardly ever go. ⁓ the funny name comes from Bosnia. So yes, I’m into Bosnian things, ⁓ such as, ⁓ food and soccer. but ever since I moved here, I’m, I got really into mountain biking. So.
I don’t know if that surprises people, but the one thing that everybody always wonders is like, hang on, he’s not blonde haired, blue eyed and he doesn’t surf. Is he really Australian? So it’s a little bit surprising to hear that I actually grew up there.
Sean Jordan (03:11)
That is interesting and here in the Midwest where I live, we don’t have lot of mountains to go mountain biking on, it’s not as common of an activity around here.
Dino Delic (03:20)
I know.
I know. I used to live in Chicago and, ⁓ I had no idea what mountain biking was until I moved here and I broke my ankle playing soccer. And the doctor said, you can go ahead and, ⁓ ride a bike. And he was talking about a stationary bike at the gym. And I was thinking I’ll ride my father-in-law’s mountain bike on the hills behind my house. Got addicted ever since. And here I am.
Sean Jordan (03:42)
That’s fantastic. Well, in this series on the Marketing Gateway, we’re really focused on the St. Louis area, and you’re one of my first guests that’s not from St. Louis. ⁓ And I know in talking with you before, you’ve never actually even been to St. Louis, which is kind of cool. So tell me a little bit about your impressions of St. Louis just from what you know.
Dino Delic (04:01)
Well, I have a good friend from St. Louis, mutual friend of ours, Marissa on our marketing team here. ⁓ I also have the Midwest has a very special place in my heart. I, I, lived in Chicago. Both my kids were, ⁓ born there and, ⁓ St. Louis, funnily enough, when my parents came to visit, my parents do this Bosnian thing, which is where they, know someone in every city around the world. And there’s a huge Bosnian community in St. Louis. My dad got on a
truck with a Bosnian truck driver who drove him from Chicago to St. Louis for five hours just so he can go check it out. So all I know about St. Louis is that it’s a great place in the Midwest that I haven’t been to, but I really, really need to go to. And it is on my list for 2026.
Sean Jordan (04:48)
You just piqued my interest so much about what a professional truck driver would have to say in five hours going down the boring farmlands of Illinois to St. Louis.
Dino Delic (04:54)
Ha
Well, you know, I’m sure he hardly got a word in with my dad, my dad’s a talker as well. So you’ll you’ll get a sense this is where I get it from.
Sean Jordan (05:05)
Well, like you said, you’ve got an affinity for folks from the Midwest. I haven’t lived in Chicago. So what’s something about the Midwest that you like to share with people who think of this as being kind of what they call flyover country?
Dino Delic (05:17)
I don’t know why it’s cool. mean, I get it geographically, you know, places like Kansas, I consider fly over country. I’ve never been fly over, fly over it all the time. Chicago is different. ⁓ St. Louis is obviously a big city with a lot of, ⁓ I think it has a couple of fortune 500s. I meet people that live and work in St. Louis all the time. I was one of those people though, you know, as, as an Australian living in New York, ⁓ when I said it was time for me to go back to Australia.
I told my boss, you know, I’m going to go back to Australia. And he said, no, I need you to give me just three months in Chicago. I was like, Chicago, why would I want to go to the Midwest? Like when we Aussies travel, we don’t even think to go to the Midwest. You know, we go to New York, LA, maybe Miami, Texas, something like that. And, uh, wasn’t even on my radar, but I moved to Chicago February 1, uh, 2011, which was the blizzard.
And shut down Chicago and March one. remember I bought a bike. love biking and, ⁓ April ish. met my now wife. So immediately I fell in love with and in Chicago. So this fly over country, I get it, but I consider the Midwest America’s best-kept secret. It’s like.
But as soon as anybody goes there, they probably feel what I felt, which is the people are much nicer. Everything’s much cleaner. It’s everything I loved about New York, but just better. So that’s the way I feel about it.
Sean Jordan (06:56)
Well, I’ll just mention to you, since you love cycling, ⁓ Missouri ⁓ has this trail that goes across the entire state. It’s called the Katy Trail. It starts just outside of St. Louis and St. Charles, and you can go all the way to the other side of the state. And one reason that some people come from all over to Missouri is actually to ride across that trail. There’s multiple days. You can stop at hotels on the way. And so worth checking out if you ever come to our area. So there’s something to surprise you a little bit.
Dino Delic (07:20)
I,
I, I’m a sucker for exploring on a bike. prefer mountain biking. ⁓ I don’t like being on the road. don’t want, think that’s actually more dangerous, but, ⁓ I have this ambition to like go across the country on a bike, but who knows when I’ll get the time to do that. And I’m sure that Missouri will be on that list when I get there.
Sean Jordan (07:42)
Definitely, definitely. Well, so good to get to meet you. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this show is because you do, as you mentioned, work with one of my local colleagues, Marissa Lather, who’s the co-president of our local AMA chapter. And she’s a really strong marketing resource for our local community. So she’s somebody I really respect and admire. And I know you’ve had good experiences working with her too. But ⁓ by the way, I’m hoping to get her on as a guest soon. And she recommended you. She said you’re really passionate about doing marketing, right? And so that’s why we’re here today.
So tell me a little bit about how marketing’s being done wrong by a lot of the big brands out there and what you’d recommend as best practices for how they could be thinking differently now that we’re here in 2026.
Dino Delic (08:25)
Well, yeah, I’m very grateful that I met Marissa. actually met her on a meltwater webinar. I was moderating. She was one of the experts on the panel. I could tell she, she was just great. And we kept in touch. And then when I started rolling out this program, this data driven communications research lab that we stood up, I kept reaching out to her just for like personal advice. What about this? What about that? Cause I was running into some major issues. ⁓ and she was just the best therapist that, ⁓
that I could get. And then when the program started taking off, I said, all right, you have to come work with me. So now she’s a member of the team. And that story is a little bit of an example of what big brands get wrong. not what is now becoming a big brand, you know, we’re, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and so many silos get created that somebody like me who’s, you know, got experience in sales.
Who has a pretty good sense of what the customer is looking for. Cause I hear it and see it every day when I’m creating a program and trying to get marketing buy-in marketing is so well established already that it’s like turning a ship. And so that’s why me and Marissa sort of built a speedboat. So what a lot of brands get wrong is that they, once they get big, they forget what it’s like to be agile. And I just think that’s the way it is. Like you can’t really change that. So that’s not the best advice, but I would say,
So many teams that I’ve seen, cause I work with marketers and communicators as part of the program. That’s what I do. I coach people to make better decisions. What I see that they get wrong is that they operate on hunches on the creative side. And then they don’t think about data until afterwards. And you feel this, right? You’re, you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum. You’re a researcher. So you get hired to give people answers to questions so that they can make better decisions with it. Unfortunately, there’s not enough research being done.
on the communication side, definitely. think marketing is a little bit more research oriented, ⁓ but still it could be done a little bit more, but definitely there isn’t this rigor to think about data before you actually design the campaign because one of the pros, know how your greatest strength becomes your greatest weakness? Well, for comms, their greatest strength and weakness is they’re so agile. You could talk to a PR person and tell them what your issue is.
And they can start working on a campaign and start pitching journalists and start designing messaging for you right away. And that’s actually a detriment. think taking the time to slow down and do some research is the correct way to do it. And I’m not just making that up. That’s what our reach research has found. We have studied over 500 communications professionals around the world across 300 different companies. And we found that 49 % of people operate in this sort of reactive use of data way.
Or they think they’re being proactive, but what they’re really doing is just collecting data about their activity. But 8 % are using data on the front end. And people think that the 8%, the top level, uh, using APIs and crazy dashboards and have a huge tech stack. Not true. It’s, it’s just that they’re using data on the front end. So what a lot of big brands get wrong is that they think they’re going to buy the tool, use the data after they’ve designed campaigns and the insight and the impact is going to be there.
You got to think about data on the front end.
Sean Jordan (11:50)
You’re describing a reality I’ve seen a lot in the corporate world. And I have a lot of clients, for example, that have bought into tools like Qualtrics. And Qualtrics is a big survey platform. I used to use it myself. ⁓ And they hope that they can just collect all this data, and they’re going to be able to get all these insights. And they’re not really using it. What they wind up doing is using it on the back end after they’ve already made decisions to try to understand why their decisions didn’t work, rather than to inform the decisions at the beginning.
Dino Delic (12:13)
Yes.
Yeah, there’s a bit of a misnome. think, and that’s why I’m doing this ⁓ job is, is I actually feel very passionate about this because I kind of feel like communications gets a bad rap. ⁓ I’ve seen communicators who are just brilliant business people, but they all get caught in the, in the same trap. And let’s face it us software companies, we, we tend to exacerbate the problem sometimes because we tell them that the tool is going to do everything that they want it to do just because we want to get the contract signed.
And then, yeah, they, they, people believe that what it means to be data-driven is to collect as much data as possible. And nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve seen so many people that are data-driven that don’t collect a lot of data. What they do is they use a wide variety of data. It’s about getting it from different sources just to help you triangulate your, your field of view. So that’s, that’s what’s sort of driving.
My, my passion behind this is that I’ve seen people get caught in these traps. And I think it’s, there is an easy way out, but no one’s really documented it and said, Hey, these are the best practices. Everybody’s busy saying, Hey, these are the best tools you should buy because they’re the ones selling the tools.
Sean Jordan (13:28)
Well, you mentioned the word triangulate, which is a word I love and use in my classroom a lot when I’m teaching. I’m going to come back to data in just a moment because I wanted to ask you about something else. that’s one of the areas where you have a lot of expertise is in optimizing social media marketing efforts. So that’s a big part of communication as well. And this is one of those topics where everybody seems to have a lot of opinions, but not necessarily a lot of data to back up what they recommend. tell me a little bit about how you advise brands to think about social media marketing.
Dino Delic (13:55)
Hmm. Well, without asking for a very particular question, I’ll tell you my own personal experience. Cause you know, running a thought leadership program and the research lab that we have set up here at Meltwater, really, it relies on good social media marketing. Again, that’s why we hired Marissa. I think where I’ve seen people get it wrong is that they use AI for the wrong reasons. And I feel really strongly about this. ⁓ AI has reduced the
barrier to entry for a lot of people. You can now create content and I’m the beneficiary of this. Like basically without Marissa, I’d be a one man show with the two of us. Now I use AI, I think more than any other person in our company in on the sales and customer facing side, but I don’t use it to generate content.
Because everybody else could too. The first prompt and someone says, it’s like, give me a 30 day social media calendar or write a LinkedIn post about X, Y, or Z. And I know there’s a million people saying like, well, you got to train it and do all this sort of stuff. I use it as a thought partner for sure. But I see too many brands getting themselves in trouble where they’re using AI to speed up that process of just getting a message out. Again, they’re only exacerbating this problem of not using data on the front end. Where.
AI is most helpful with social media marketing is to help you with the laborious tasks after the fact, like analyzing, for example, analyzing the data after you’ve executed a campaign. We pulled off a couple of weeks ago, a really big lift for us, which was these virtual workshops that we stood up. And within an hour, I had a full report to my executives connected to our business goals.
And that was mostly driven by AI. That’s what I like using AI for. It’s not sexy because I didn’t use AI to generate the slides or the content or the idea. had a hunch that communicators were starving for educational content. And I poured my heart and soul into creating the educational content. But then when I needed to demonstrate to our executives, the impact of this, I collected all the data from zoom and all these other data sources. And then.
And in under an hour, had a report on everybody’s Slack that was interactive. looked beautiful and it had a bunch of great numbers. That’s where we should be using more AI and less on generating the content. And that’s why our feeds are flooded with slop is because everyone’s using AI to do the easy things. think they’re hard, but they’re actually easy. Everyone’s doing it. So if we shifted our focus to leveraging our creativity on creating the campaigns and then using AI to
automate the laborious process of measuring, collecting, gathering the data and analyzing the data. I kind of think the world would be a better place because I’m personally sick of seeing all the crappy posts on LinkedIn that are clearly not written by a human.
Sean Jordan (17:02)
they’re so similar to one another that you start not standing out because you just look like everybody else because everybody’s using the same prompts and the same ideas. And I think I’ve seen the same with lot of brand marketing where they’re using AI. ⁓ It doesn’t make them stand out once the novelty wears off. It just makes them look like everybody else. And in an era where we need authenticity, and we know that from so many different research reports out there, ⁓ that inauthentic approach really makes communication with
customers with clients, with partners, stakeholders, everybody difficult because they don’t feel like anybody’s listening. They’re just out there churning out content. And I love your idea of using it on the backend because I think that’s one of the strengths of this kind of software is thinking about it kind of like, how can we supercharge Excel? The most boring part of anything that we do, how can we supercharge putting things into a document where people can read it? That’s the part that we actually need some help with not evangelizing about our brand, which is something we ought to look forward to doing.
Dino Delic (18:02)
Yeah. Yeah. I think people struggle with the definition of authenticity, don’t they? And yet again, it’s another one of those, ⁓ catch phrases and buzzwords that everyone’s happy to talk about, create content about. And, you know, I, I’m a, I love paying attention to the advice that people give that just seems so ubiquitous. It’s kind of like, I don’t know what the word for it is, but
You know, when people say to you, like, everybody knows you should brush your teeth twice a day and wash your hands after you go to the bathroom. And so I laugh when you go to the bathroom, you see employees must wash their hands. And you’re like, who needs to be told this advice in social media marketing? feel like authenticity is the same placard. You know, it’s like next to a social media platform, there’s a sign saying employees must be authentic. It’s like, if you have to keep reminding people of this, then what’s going on? feel like the definition of the word is not coming through. think people wonder like,
What does it really mean to be authentic? And you just said it there. And for me, the practical advice is what can you passionately talk about for 15 minutes without a prompter? You know, everybody, whether you’re fresh out of school at the age of like 21, 22, 23, or if you’re 41 years old, like myself, and you’ve been doing, you know, this field of work for 20 years, you’ve developed a POV and an opinion. Start there. That to me is authenticity. what?
What would you be willing to debate someone on? What do you think is wrong with the way things are being done right now? You can then use AI to help create a content waterfall and all of that other stuff, but using AI to develop your POV. mean, anybody could do that. That’s what I think. If you’re doing something that anybody could do, then you’re to look like everybody else. But if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to do something that only you could do, or that other people will give up on, if you’re willing to climb a steeper hill than most other people.
the view from the top is much, better.
Sean Jordan (20:04)
I agree 100%. Well, I want to go back to data for a minute. one of the things that we struggle with at any level, whether you’re in a smaller business and consulting like I’m in, or if you’re at a Fortune 500 company, is getting all this data in the right place so that it can actually help you with improving decision making. And one of the problems with ⁓ data is knowing what to use and what to trust. So you’ve got organizations that have these big troves of ⁓ big data.
you know, and they don’t know how to organize it and use it effectively. Even after, you know, years and years of thinking about it, a lot of them are still struggling with what to do with it, right? But you also have times where you have what your internal messages from your data and your external messages from like marketing research or other, other tools like that, that are telling you two completely different stories that are at odds with each other. And I certainly see that all the time. I’m sure you have too. So tell me a little bit about how you advise companies to think about data when it comes to marketing and communications and
What types of data you feel really yield the best insights?
Dino Delic (21:04)
People always ask this question though. What’s the best practice? What’s the best metric? What’s the best data? I’ll tell you something. Do you let people swear on your show? I left out the search for a single source of truth is bullshit. An executive taught me once. ⁓ I was talking about, you know, where they get their data.
Sean Jordan (21:16)
Feel free.
Mm-hmm.
Dino Delic (21:32)
This, this person is a C-suite executive for a massive company. ⁓ and not your typical, not a CMO, not a, not a CCO. won’t give it away, but somebody outside of that typical function. And I thought, okay, as such an important individual to this business, where do you get your information from? And I was leading towards single source of truth. Cause I thought that’s what they want to see. Like all executives just want clarity. That executive told me that is not true at all.
Said if I’m getting a single source of truth, if, all of my partners, if all of my vendors, if all of my, ⁓ sources of information are telling me the same thing, something’s wrong. Like you’re to get blindsided. That’s whole point of research is to explore a curiosity is to learn what you don’t know so that you have a clearer picture. Because if you’re getting the same information, then you’re asking the wrong question and you’re asking the wrong people. And so I kind of feel like everyone’s searching for like, what’s the single source of truth? Where’s the one place I can put everything and see a clear view.
I think the higher you get up in a company, what I’ve seen is that you need to become more strategic and to be strategic, you need to be comfortable with ambiguity and figure out how to connect the dots. So the framework that we’ve developed, the data-driven communications framework, teaches people how to manage that complexity, but in a structured way. the complexity that I would be, ⁓ that I guide clients to look for is three types of data, three layers. And it’s based on the principle of.
Brand is what you say about you, right? How you show up, how you speak, how you decide to put yourself out there. That’s your brand.
Perception reputation is how people then receive that message and everything else about you in context. And so then it’s what they say about you when you’re not in the room. And then business outcomes are all about behavior. If you say that you’re the best podcaster in the Midwest and I show up here today and I feel that and I, my perception is that yes, you’re better than anybody else that I’ve met in the Midwest in this game, then
My behavior will change and align with that and say, next time somebody asks me for who’s the best podcaster in the Midwest or who should I speak with? I’ll recommend Sean Jordan. But if it’s not aligned, if you’re saying that you’re the best, but you don’t show up as the best in my perception, am I going to recommend you? No. And it’s the same principle in marketing and communications that if you’re not getting the business behavior that you’re looking for, if your sales of your product are not where you need it to be, then you first need to look at your brand data and your perception or reputation data.
too many customers of meltwater by us to measure just the brand, just what’s happening. How are we showing up? What’s our share of voice? Who else is talking about this? And then they don’t measure the perception. That’s why I love research is because asking people a question, have you heard of us? Do you like us? Would you buy from us? Do you trust us? Would you work for us? Do you think that we’re a good company that doesn’t just organically show up in news and social, unless it’s a planted message. So
Organic social media is fantastic. Surveys are fantastic. LLMs are fantastic. ⁓ I love search data because you can see what people are typing, but you need to be able to separate what’s happening at the brand level, what the actors are saying on the stage from what the audience is perceiving because there could be a company that’s got a fantastic social media campaign. But if the audience doesn’t see it because Trump did something crazy that day or because there was
you know, an earthquake somewhere, then it doesn’t matter what your reach or your impressions were. So going back to your question to try to tie a bow on this, it’s a close connection of the three layers. Inputs, outputs, outcomes. Inputs are you show up in a particular way. That’s your brand. Outputs are the audience then perceives or ⁓ engages or receives that message in a particular way in context with everything else. And then the outcomes.
That’s their behavior. That’s the data that says, are they going to your website? Are they recommending you? Are they buying more stuff? Are they changing what they say when they’re interacting with you and their behavior is ultimately what the business is looking for. Nobody cares about the brand or the reputation. If the business behavior is great for everything’s working fine, then nobody cares about the first two.
Sean Jordan (25:54)
It’s so interesting because what you’re describing is so strategic. And it seems like a lot of times when you talk about marketing, communication, PR, any of these related fields, there’s this perception on people that don’t do it that it’s all creative. That, if we just got our brand to be a little bit cooler looking, or we just had this better messaging, or whatever else, then everybody would love us. And it’s rarely that, right? Most of the time,
Those are things that are icing on the cake behind a really, really well-defined strategy. And yet, it seems like a lot of times in the non-marketing sectors of the business world, people just look at the frosting on the cake, but they don’t look at the cake itself.
Dino Delic (26:35)
Yeah, you know, it’s easy to be an armchair expert in marketing because everyone’s marketed to everyone’s communicated with it. We all read the news. We all have social media. We all, you know, turn on the TV or whatever billboards. Like you cannot be a human world, human being in this world without being subjected to marketing. And so then that gives people a sense of, I know what I like. And so then a CEO might tell their team, well, this is what I want you to do to, know,
That’s when they start treating marketing and comms like an order taker. But how do you change that? If that’s how your executives treat you, that’s the biggest question that we try to answer is the whole point of this data-driven communications framework is to help our clients not be order takers as much as they hate to admit it. But that that’s really how most people get treated. The research has found in order to do that, you have to educate people about what you can do. And so the engineering team doesn’t get treated like order takers.
Or the finance team doesn’t get treated like water takers as much. I’m sure they do, but like when somebody wants something done from the engineering department, they defer to them because they have expertise that these people don’t have because you don’t think about, or you’re not, not subjected to what engineering is all about or what finance is all about. So the hard part with, with, ⁓ trying to be strategic, like what you’re saying is you really have to start at the same.
starting point every time. If you’re to be strategic, then you need to start at the end, that business outcome. It’s that resisting that temptation as a marketer or communicator to just dive in and create a campaign and do the creative, do the creative after you figured out how you engineer the connection between inputs, outputs, outcomes.
Sean Jordan (28:24)
I think that’s such insightful advice. Thanks for sharing that. Well, one of the things I like to ask everybody because we’re talking about marketing, especially right now as we’re thinking about the new year is what are some emerging trends or challenges in marketing or comms or PR or anything else that you’re touching that you’re most excited about right now and how do you see them shaping the future of the industry?
Dino Delic (28:48)
There’s, there are two, I love when trends collide and there’s, there are two that I, ⁓ am thinking about. And that’s, that’s sort of the impetus for, for what we do over here. There’s the rise of LLMs. Sorry. So cheesy and generic, but it is changing everything. And I know that because my mother-in-law is now relying on LLMs over Google. And when my mother-in-law adopts the technology, then you know, it’s firmly arrived.
You know, this is the lady who refused for years to get a Tesla, even though her husband wanted to get one because she didn’t like where, you know, she didn’t like not having the, air ventilators switch right there. She touching buttons and all that sort of stuff. So if she is relying on chat GPT, for example, to do her research, she’s also not the only one we’ve seen stats. ⁓ I was looking at something from e-marketer and Salesforce where they were saying that May last year.
I think 44 % of people trusted AI recommendations. And that number jumped to 86 % in November last year. So when people start trusting something, that means it’s providing value. And if people are providing value, that means that you have to be there. So all this fear mongering hype that there is around LLMs, it’s validated. People are there, people are getting value from it. And so that’s why now advertising is coming. You know, if the audience is there,
The ads will, be there very, very shortly. And these guys will start making revenue from that. So that’s one trend. The other one is an ongoing trend, which is I actually used our own voice of the customer research internally. You know, we use an AI transcription tool and now we have an AI chat bot that sits on top of it. And I could ask a question like, what is the number one challenge for communicators and marketers in 2026? And it was the same challenge from 10 years ago when I first started, which was demonstrating ROI.
And, being more strategic. So that ongoing trend combined with the fact that the LLMs are rising to me, there’s a confluence. It’s it’s that’s why I say people are thinking that AI is going to save the day. It’s actually going to complicate things and make things a little bit harder. But if we’re still trying to prove impact, demonstrate ROI and be more strategic, then it means that we haven’t actually made headway on the fundamentals. And that’s why I’m, I keep beating the drum about inputs, outputs, outcomes.
the best communicators, the 8 % that we studied, all they do differently is not spend more money on tools or use more AI. They start with the business outcomes. I work for a pharmaceutical. What’s my goal? Sell drugs. I work for a media company. What’s my goal? Subscribers. You know, what generates revenue for your business. If you, as a marketer and a communicator can’t figure out how you drive that, then you might create the most creative campaign and get the best Superbowl ad and win a bunch of awards.
But if you don’t start driving revenue or doing what your business really cares about, your days are numbered.
Sean Jordan (31:50)
I tell my students all the time when I’m talking about marketing strategy that those big glitzy Super Bowl ads, for example, ⁓ they come and they go and people usually forget them unless they’re really popular or really infamous. Those are remembered. And I think that that’s, again, pointing to what you’re saying is if the outcome is not what you’re trying to drive, if you’re just trying to drive the, we want to be a Super Bowl commercial type of company, you can get that. It’s very achievable. You can spend a lot of money to get that goal.
If it’s not tied to any kind of outcome where you’re thinking about what are you going to get after you spend all that money, the point of it is there’s not much of a point to it really.
Dino Delic (32:24)
Yes.
Yeah, we had a, ⁓ a client, longstanding client, great relationship with them. And I love working with this client, but I saw this firsthand. I was doing a workshop and I asked them what’s frustrating you like, what, what do you, what do you want to get good at? And they said, we just want to learn best practices. I hate that question. I hate when somebody wants the best practices because I always tell them the best practice. And then just like you telling me that the best way for me to lose 20 pounds by the summer.
is to do what the rock is doing. And then I’m like, all right, well, the rock is a movie star and he, you know, has nannies and all this sort of stuff. And I have kids and I have to get up at five o’clock in the morning and blah, blah, blah. Human nature is to make excuses. So I flipped the question. When somebody says to me, best practices is what I’m looking for. I asked him to tell me about the time that they wanted to throw their computer out the window. Nine times out of 10, it’s to do with data or a platform like ours. And so in this instance, a hundred and something year old financial institution that we work with.
The lady had gotten so frustrated that she wanted to throw her computer out the window because she was trying to build a report. And I said, well, tell me about the campaign and the campaign. was no thought to what goal, like, how will we know if we’re achieving our goals? It was just, we need to do this campaign because we’re old and everyone else is new. So we need to raise awareness. And they, sponsored this major sporting venue. And then they created this actually a really brilliant campaign, but
She then got frustrated trying to tell the story of did the campaign achieve anything. She relied on the old metrics of volume and impressions, but that doesn’t tell the story. You know, every campaign has a particular goal. Sometimes if you don’t think about the goal on the front end, it’s going to be really hard to measure it. But again, it’s like the, if you want to be strategic, just take five seconds to think a little bit more about the business outcomes and how you’re connected to it.
And that also allows you to not burn yourself out and save your resources and say, you know what, this campaign or this opportunity, while we could spend $20 million on, you know, getting a collaboration with some celebrity for the Superbowl and we get awareness, it doesn’t actually help us achieve the number one goal of maybe shifting the perception or promoting a particular product. So that allows you being strategic is not just what, how you’re going to do something. It’s what you’re going to say no to, you know, what moves you’re not going to make, which will then make a huge impact on your business where you’re going to save money and energy.
Sean Jordan (34:48)
Well, I mentioned students and we actually have students that are studying marketing who listen to the show. And I always love to ask seasoned professionals to talk a little bit about where things are heading or what skills are going to be valuable in the next five to 10 years. So if you were advising some marketing students on what they really should be focusing on right now, what would you tell them?
Dino Delic (35:08)
customer journey, customer journey. Everyone’s talking about a fragmented media landscape and the people that will get ahead in the years to come are the ones that truly understand their customer. And that’s where research is so important. You really have to understand your audience, but that’s not just like, you know, what their fears and hopes and dreams are. It’s also how they make decisions and where they consume information and how, how they are driven to an action.
Because that’s what a marketer does, right? Is you’re trying to get, you’re trying to guide people through that journey. You’re trying to remove friction and you’re trying to create stickiness and differentiation. So understanding the customer journey is so important and that requires a very particular skill, which is research informed communication strategy. You can be really good by winging it, trying different things, experimentation, and that is great. ⁓ but you need to harness how you use data to do that.
I always talk to my clients about, you know, at the end of a quarter, at the end of a year, you should always go through an exercise of,
kill, right. The, the, the adaptation of that is the framework that everyone should use is double down, start and stop at the end of every year or campaign or something like that. You want to evaluate what’s working.
What’s really good. Where do we get great results? Okay. Let’s figure out why let’s double down on that. If you double down on what’s working for you, results will come. then think about what’s working for other people. Look around you a little bit and say, you know what, let’s give that a try. Let’s start something new that we’re not doing. And then that means that you can’t just keep adding things to the equation. Something has to go. Have a look at your bottom performing activities and ruthlessly cut them. And so if you go through this exercise on a regular basis,
you will improve your results. So the skills that someone needs to have is the ability to use research, the ability to be strategic and understand their customer, but then this discipline of double down, start and stop. If you do that continuously, then you’ll develop the rigor for continuous improvement versus just spaghetti at the wall.
Sean Jordan (37:19)
Fantastic. Well, I’m so glad that you’ve been on the Market Gateway. Dino, it’s been great talking with you. And one thing I always do at the end of every episode is ask every guest if there’s anything they want to plug. So you can plug anything you want. Here’s your chance. What would you like to plug today?
Dino Delic (37:33)
⁓ here’s the catch. This is, hopefully I’ve provided enough value in this conversation of people that now they want to provide me with value. I’m going to flip that. I’m going to give them something that will provide them with value. And I’m not just saying that this isn’t spin. What we have developed is a free set of resources. So Meltwater obviously has been successful and has enough money that they’ll pay for these resources to be made widely available to anyone who’s not a Meltwater customer as well. ⁓
And that is our data-driven communications maturity model, which also works for marketing, which, you know, we need a tighter collaboration between comms marketing and sales. So what I would plug is, I guess we can drop it in the show notes. I’m hoping Sean, but I’ll leave a resource, which is what I call our DDC starter pack. has the maturity assessment. It has the playbook, which you can download. We also have a link to our podcast, which Marissa helps me produce with my co-hosts.
Sean Jordan (38:18)
Yeah, we can.
Dino Delic (38:32)
⁓ the head of PR for news Corp Australia and the head of corporate communications globally for Morningstar financial. I want to plug those things. Anybody who’s looking to improve and make 2026 the year that they actually become much more strategic. Those three resources, the playbook, the podcast and the assessment, they’re all free and they’ll help you discover what your strengths and weaknesses are. So the only thing I, I would ask for to plug myself is
The more people we can get to utilize stuff like that, I think then we’ll see a lot less waste in the software industry of people buying tools that they believe don’t work just because they didn’t unleash the potential in them.
Sean Jordan (39:09)
That sounds like a pretty great goal, honestly. So I’m happy to ⁓ put that out to our audience and I hope that many of them will check that out. I certainly will check it out myself. So thank you so much for… ⁓ yeah. Thank you so much for being on our show today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you and look forward to listening to your podcast as well and learning more from you there.
Dino Delic (39:18)
I would be very, very appreciative.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. This is great. And I commend you for your preparation and your questions. ⁓ As somebody who’s recorded a bunch of podcast episodes myself. ⁓ I think you’re living up to that perception of one of the best podcasters in the Midwest, maybe beyond.
Sean Jordan (39:47)
All right, well, thank you.
Sean Jordan (39:50)
Wow, what a great conversation. And I really enjoyed having Dino on the show because he taught me some things and I always love learning new things. You know I do. So I just want to thank him for being on the show. I want to thank you for listening. And I also want to remind you to check out the show notes for those resources that he was talking about. In the meantime, I’m Sean in St. Louis. This has been the Marketing Gateway. See you next time.
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