Joy Dabeet, Chief Marketing Officer at amana: “It’s really hard to see any limits as to what AI can help us achieve”

If you work in marketing and need to modernise your tools (and perhaps your team), then listen to Joy Dabeet, Chief Marketing Officer at amana. Joy only joined the company in April 2022 and has already transformed the marketing function from a traditional approach to one that gives the company “a full view of our customer demographics and trading behaviour in real-time”.

Such data is incredibly helpful for amana, which is best described as a “neobroker”. That is a digital finance platform that makes it far easier for consumers to trade and invest. As a data-driven marketer, Joy oversees a specialised full-funnel performance team (one she helped create) that enables amana to create short- and long-term strategies tailored to target demographics.  

This isn’t the first time that Joy has driven change in companies. Prior to joining amana, she was the Regional Marketing Manager for Middle East and North Africa at Amazon, where she led the company’s efforts to raise awareness of its application-centric services. Before that, she led multiple marketing teams through innovation and brand change, including Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority, the Arabian Radio Network, Communicorp and Aramex.

It’s quite a change from someone who started her career working in a lab as a genetic engineer. But that analytical ability certainly helps explain her willingness to explore new technologies. Something, as you will read, she thinks all marketers will need to do if they’re to avoid the “AI will steal your job” fate predicted by the IMF.

Why Dust or Magic? That stems from a quote by legendary American advertising creative director, William Bernbach: “An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.” (And if you’re wondering where you’ve heard the name, Bernbach was the inspiration behind Don Draper of Mad Men fame.)

Could you please introduce yourself to our audience? What motivated you to pursue a career in marketing, and how did you embark on your journey in this field?

I am a genetic engineer by education and started my career in labs. My heart was more in research rather than diagnostics, so at some point I diverted from this path. As much as I sometimes miss my lab days, I absolutely love marketing. It combines science, research and problem-solving with creativity – particularly as relates to good copy, something I deeply love.

What are your thoughts on the escalating integration of AI in digital marketing and its potential influence on the future of marketing, Martech and social media?

The impact of AI on digital marketing cannot yet be fully measured, but one thing we can all attest to for certain is that its impact will be of huge magnitude. AI will (and is starting to) impact every aspect of marketing as a whole, from performance marketing across the full funnel, to content, copy and design.

The Martech industry will explode, with tools to address and improve marketing challenges across all these functions. AI in digital marketing has the potential to significantly improve our ability to target and segment customers and optimise our targeting on a real-time basis.

It can also help optimise our content, personalise it and help improve the quality of our copy and creative. This translates to more effective advertising, and therefore millions of dollars in savings annually. It can help better analyse influencer impact and engagement for a specific industry or even product, to therefore select influencers more effectively and also serve up better content to their audiences.

It’s really hard to see any limits as to what AI can help us achieve.

Related reading: What will the digital landscape look like in 2028?

How do you ready yourself for an AI-driven landscape as a marketing leader? What new skills do you need?

Curiosity above all. Not a skill per se, but imperative because you have to invest personal time in reading up and learning about AI. There are no shortcuts – no-one can do it for you, you simply have to do the work. It helps if you have an innate curiosity. Beyond reading and learning, you must be ready to invest time and effort in trialling and adopting some of the AI tools currently available. Like anything in life, it’s challenging and tedious at the start, but gets easier as you get more ‘AI fluent’.

Looking ahead to 2024, what AdTech trends do you expect to dominate?

1. Rise in premium content, including the use of AI in design/ audio-visual content.
2. Video marketing will continue to grow and dominate.
3. Tracking tools to help navigate third-party and first-party cookies.
4. Tools that can help improve contextual targeting.

Related reading: Harnessing data to shape the brand experience in a post-cookie world

Could you share some of your most noteworthy accomplishments that you take particular pride in?

A profound privilege in my career has been my current work with amana.

I was tasked to transform the company (in terms of the marketing function) from a traditional broker into a digital neobroker. An incredible challenge that I was lucky to take on, and it has been an incredible adventure. 

I started by completely overhauling our tech stack and employing new tools for acquisition, retention, attribution and SEO. Next, I hired a strong senior team in performance marketing (including data analytics) and brand communications. We went from a marketing function that had almost zero customer data to having a full view of our customer demographics and trading behaviour in real-time and building mechanisms to improve our acquisition and retention. 

The results have been outstanding. We launched our amana app in the UAE within five months of my joining the company, and we now have over 125,000 registered customers, have already expanded to two more geographies and have plans to further expand across MENA [Middle East and North Africa] in 2024.

Prior to joining amana, I spent four years at Amazon as part of the marketing and communications teams that launched Amazon in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It was a massive team effort across corporate, retail and operations teams in multiple geographies across the globe, but it was a huge learning opportunity and one of the biggest privileges of my career. 

What major hurdles have you encountered as a marketing leader, and how did you surmount them?

Data validation. Collecting data from different sources, including our data warehouse as well as our attribution tools, and validating data across these multiple dashboards. This can be challenging at times and is very critical as this is the data we use to build dashboards, measure the growth of the business, identify gaps and challenges and make most of our strategic and tactical business decisions. Surmounting this challenge is a continuous and monumental effort carried out on a frequent basis by my performance and data analytics team in conjunction with the tech, development and product teams. It is truly a team effort to make sure we are collecting, measuring and analysing valid data to inform our business decisions.

Regulatory frameworks as well as rising global competition also pose challenges. For example, there is a lot of regulation around crypto, one of our most popular asset classes across the region. It is important for us to let customers know we offer a robust catalogue of this asset class on our app, but we face some challenges in marketing this to our customers as crypto-related content can get blocked on various ad platforms. And with global companies eyeing the MENA region and looking to participate in the growth of this region, we are focused on scaling and growing our presence in the region while ensuring we provide a state-of-the-art product and exceptional service to our customers.

Another challenge is the rise of user-generated content as one of the main formats people consume content. This poses a challenge to marketers to find ways to produce content that is engaging and attractive to customers, while still relevant to brands, and doing so in quality, in volume and with cost-effectiveness.

In the foreseeable future, marketing leaders will need to quickly learn to adjust to a world of AI and how to leverage it for various marketing functions to improve quality and efficiency. This will include identifying which new tools to use (sifting through hundreds of options), learning how to use them and effecting this change within existing and new marketing hires. The speed and quality of work (and therefore competition as well) will change rapidly, and marketers will have to keep up.

What piece of advice would you offer to fellow marketing leaders that has been particularly beneficial to you personally? 

A big one comes to mind from my days at Amazon: focus on your inputs.  What this means, in a nutshell, is that you cannot always control the outcome of a campaign, especially in today’s complex world of marketing and customer segmentation, but you can control your inputs.  And the better and clearer your inputs are, the better the likelihood of a positive campaign output. 

In practice, make sure you review and analyse your data, ask the right questions, do you’re A/B testing, loop in other teams and departments (especially customer service) for inputs – do the groundwork. It may seem tedious and take you more time, but it will significantly improve your chances of success.

Are there any startups in the Martech industry that have piqued your interest lately?

We are looking at Fuse.cx, a startup fresh out of the UK. Founders have very solid experience in mid-funnel/customer engagement, and we think they can help us drive value out of this complex part of the funnel.

Another one is Kore.ai for further down the funnel – a great tool for AI-driven chat box experiences (think customer service centres). At amana that could help conversion on some of our more high-touch customers.

Some other startups we are keeping an eye on are Grin for managing creators, MessageBird for better communication with customers and RAD AI for effective campaign concepts. Lots of interesting tools popping up, particularly AI-related. Naturally, we have to be selective to keep our tech stack tight, but we will slowly start to explore and trial some of these options for amana if we believe they can bring meaningful value.

What Martech technology has your company recently embraced and what difference has it made to your business?

We use Martech tools for attribution and retention, as well as SEO. We use tools to view customer sessions and validate the quality of our product and the experience of our customers. We use a powerful business analytics tool to consolidate data and build real-time dashboards. More recently, we have started incorporating AI tools within our content and design functions, and we are in the process of adding Martech tools to support our social media function, particularly as relates to influencers.

The impact has been profound, particularly in the world of data and dashboards. The ability to monitor and track our data in real-time has been instrumental in truly understanding the growth of the business. From customer demographics data and trading activity on the platform, to real-time acquisition costs (down to campaign level), as well as engagement metrics, we can track meaningful KPIs and help inform strategic decisions at a marketing level as well as an overall organisational level.