1: Marketing meets public policy at Neara: Insights from Mary Cleary, VP of Marketing, Communications & Public Policy

you Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing? I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that spark change and share ideas that challenge the status quo. Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential. Today on the show, we've got Mary Cleary. She's the VP of Marketing, Communications, and Public Policy at Nira.

Nira is an AI-powered infrastructure modeling platform that helps utilities prevent outages and increase transmission capacity. The company was recognized as one of this year's times 100 companies for their work helping utility companies across the globe prevent power outages. Under Mary's leadership, Nira has expanded beyond its headquarters in Australia and has established major presences in Europe and the U S on the show today.

We talk about what marketing looks like at Nira as well as this combination of marketing and public policy and how that works in her role as the VP. look at the differences and complexities of marketing in a regulated industry, as well as the complexities around international scope of marketing activities. We also have a really interesting conversation about AI and their both using AI as well as marketing the AI in their solution. And you don't want to miss this episode with Mary Cleary.

Mary, welcome to the show. Thanks, Alan. Pleasure to be here and thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about what you're up to and the company, cetera. But before we get there, I love dogs. I have two rescues myself and I hear you love dogs and dog rescues and love to hear your story. Yeah, absolutely. You are in great company. I am a massive dog lover and turns out I also have a massive dog. have a, he's a 150 pound Bernice Mountain dog. So he's a gentle giant and a total goofball.

He's also a bit of a neighborhood celebrity, which is fun. I was actually out for a walk recently by myself. It's a super, super stubborn, lazy breed. So he had refused to join me that day. And someone I've literally never seen before pulled over and demanded to know where Chief was. Exactly, where's Chief? Yeah, speaking of dog rescues and dog wellbeing, No Dogs Left Behind is an organization I also really love and one I will talk about any chance I get.

It's this incredible organization that rescues dogs from the meat trade. So it's actually founded by a guy who is a former David Yeoman exec and he literally pulls dogs off of slaughter trucks. He rehabilitates them, nurses them back to health, rebuilds their trust in humans, flies them here to the U.S. and then connects them with loving forever homes. That's amazing. It's amazing. I've got to check them out. I had never heard of them. So thank you for putting them on my radar. Of course.

I don't even know how we transitioned from dogs to marketing, but we'll get there.

What has been your, like, where'd you get your career start and what's been your path to Nero? So in a nutshell, it is quite nonlinear and non-traditional. So I technically started my career as a banker who was trying to get into venture. And as I was building my operating chops, I realized that I really love being an operator and specifically a marketer.

So going back to sophomore year of college, I was studying history and also spending spare time as a PR intern for Zach Posen before he was creative director. He was the cool new designer on the block at the time. He dressed all the celebrities for the award shows and things. I signed up for this elective class that was only two credits. And I thought, this will be a fun little detour for my major. And little did I know that I would work harder there than in any other class.

It was taught by Lawrence Lennahan, who is one of the most impressive humans I know and a really big early career influence for me. He's also the founder of the now massive venture fund called FirstMarket. And actually the following year, he changed the class to juniors and above, but I like to think that wasn't because of me. But the assignment was to start a quote unquote Web 2.0 startup, which makes me feel 10,000 years old. But alas, that's what me and my class product team did.

And we actually had some modest success and won some customers. And I think that's when I developed a masochistic love of building new things. And the problem was I didn't know anything about growing a business or finance or raising money. So despite a little bit of success there when it was time for graduation, my parents were essentially like, wow, we're so proud of you. That's so cute. Get a real job. So then I went off to banking and subsequently Cork Dev or basically In-House &A.

That looked like Lots of hundred-hour weeks, lots of pacing logos on slides, but I also met a ton of incredible people. And in all seriousness, I learned all about company valuation, the dynamics that move markets. And so here I am regularly digging around data rooms and acquisition and funding processes, and I'm getting this direct exposure to the kinds of questions that investors want to answer to before they write a big check.

So I'm starting to see how powerful brands aren't just memorable, but that they're actually much more valuable in dollar terms. And at this point, I'm starting to fall in love with marketing from afar. then next chapter is I make my transition to operating roles. I had started to interview with some different VC funds, but I was disheartened that they weren't going to be partner track. So I really didn't have enough experience to be considered at the principal or above level.

So I basically would have been going back to the venture version of an &A analyst and then have to ground trip. So I said, all right, I'll go try on some operating roles. And in retrospect, which actually isn't that surprising given my early startup double, I absolutely loved it.

And that's when I really fell in love with marketing and practice and when it officially became part of my rebit in some way, or form, starting with product marketing initially, morphing out to more of a generalist approach. and then building marketing functions for the first time. And I really love marketing because it's a perfect mix of left and right brain for me. I think of myself as very analytical.

I like to say, I think in tables, which is helpful for structuring and kind of planning programs and bringing rigor to how you measure things. But I'm also a positioning nerd and I get so much satisfaction of getting that. I love it. I love it. And I've never heard of somebody say, think in tables, but. I think maybe that's from all the pasting stuff on slides as well. Everything needs to be lined up just right in my mind.

Yes. Yes. I think anybody that has spent that much time in PowerPoint, whether you're a consultant, a banker, whatever it is, everyone knows what I'm talking about. Awesome. That's quite the journey. you've actually been, I don't know how, I should probably go back and count at some point, but there's been a number of folks that I've talked to that have gone from banking to marketing. At least the ones I talked to, you included, they make great marketers.

I would love to talk a little bit more about your company, Nira, and what is the company's scope? What are you guys focused on? All that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Fast forwarding all the way ahead to Nira today. Nira is a predictive infrastructure modeling software that helps electric utilities be more proactive about all the things they need to do to keep the lights on. So even as demand for electricity exceeds what existing infrastructure was actually built for and as severe weather continues to cause more outages. So every day, most of us see distribution poles, transmission towers that actually enable that electricity we all take for granted.

And utilities who own that equipment are responsible for that across massive areas, like I'm talking several thousands of miles. And as evidenced by the many news headlines suggesting as such, there is so much that can and does go wrong. So sadly, that equipment can cause catastrophic wildfires and power outages that are inconvenient at best. But when they leave people exposed to, for example, extreme temperatures, they can cause really tragic loss of life.

So that equipment's really old and too many utilities rely on manual processes to maintain it. Then there's also the fact that they're subject to these kind of Byzantine rules and regulations that actually limit how fast they can move. to correct major issues. So it's like trying to clean a skyscraper with a toothbrush. yeah, so there are the fact that electricity demand is also going through the roof. There's more data centers coming online, more EV adoption, more severe weather.

These are really expensive and thorny problems. So it's no surprise that people see their electricity bills go up at the same time, maybe they're experiencing more outages. People love to hate their electricity provider, but very few people, myself included, before I entered the space, really appreciate the complexity of the challenges that they're up against.

So you have this perfect storm, no pun intended, where Nira helps them get ahead of all that by making it really simple to identify risks faster, define the scope of potential problems, and then communicate that to policymakers so they can move faster. love it. You're filling a... pretty vital service and electricity. You're right.

Like the demand and with new computing, I felt like we were already at a max and then AI comes along and it's, hear this big sucking sound of energy needs and it is to your point running all on the same pretty old infrastructure, if you will. feels like a really vital space. Yeah, for sure. Several areas of the country are expecting an entire New York state's worth of additional demand, which is pretty wild. That's crazy. It's crazy to think about. What does marketing at Nira look like?

So marketing at Nira has three main pillars to it. There's policy engagement, comms and PR, and then of course the more traditional kind of paid and owned marketing channels. And they're all intertwined and intended to really force multiply each other.

So we are really lucky to have a number of incredible customer case studies. So we use comms and PR channels to amplify those in the media, which then help us build credibility with policymakers and regulators who need to understand how our technology actually helps solve the energy issues that their constituents care about. So product marketing is a huge focus for us.

It's an extremely technical product and Product marketing plays a key role in simplifying the value proposition for our typically very large buying medium. So early on, a really big takeaway for me in joining Mira was that once prospects see the demo, they're beyond impressed. But given we were new to both the US and European markets, it wasn't exactly easy to actually get people to the demo.

So we made it a priority to really capture and bottle what I call demo magic and push it all the way up to top of funnel, making it really visible early on in the buyer journey. And that's the role that product marketing plays. We also have an advantage in that it's such a visual product. So because we're modeling whole networks, I would even go as far to say that even just watching footage from the platform can really instill a sense of common control.

We also have an amazing designer who really brings that again, demo magic to life in short GIFs and even static images and in paid channels, for example, when you have one second or less to capture people's attention. Then thought leadership is also a really big piece here. It won't surprise you, but the energy industry is extremely dynamic. And because we are a product designed to help solve these existential challenges that impact policy and consumers.

in a time when there so many unanswered questions, we have a really strong point of view on how that should all shake out. Then zooming out to the DemandGen engine, I often describe it as a wrapper that we put around all the product marketing and thought leadership to make sure we package it appropriately.

And LinkedIn has been a really successful channel for us in DemandGen across Web A current focus there is we've been building some good muscle on how we aggressively test different variables and encouraging prospects to convert. And then as you can imagine, because our ICP is so targeted and we know exactly who we want to work with, ABM makes a lot of sense for us. And that's a really important part of our go-to-market motion.

Ops too is very much embedded in the fabric of our overall go-to-market, not just in marketing, but from pre-sales all the way through to customer success. And that really helps us tightly align marketing and sales especially. So for example, in our ABM funnel, we're looking at the stages we've identified from identified target to someone who's actively engaged. And we share accountability across sales and marketing for interrogating who's moving from one stage to the next.

And obviously at Nira, we talk quite a bit about infrastructure. and I view ops as essential infrastructure for the market team. So when you have lots of people running hard at opportunities in both sales and marketing, you got lots of deals in flight initiatives, professional campaigns, it is really easy for things to fall off the rails and end up in a situation where you look behind you and you're like, I think that went well. So I often think of ops as keeping the wheels on the bus.

And I'm really grateful that we were able to invest in that function early in our expansion journey. And then just culturally, I would say giving each other feedback is really important on the marketing team. So we all work hard and when you look at something long enough, it's really easy to convince yourself that it's the whatever you're working on is the greatest thing in the world. And that being true, least in my experience, there's nothing like a fresh set of eyes.

So sometimes bringing in a third party. And actually, a quick shout out I'd like to give to a community for marketers called Exit 5. They do these roasts, and they're these amazing live sessions where you can share a landing page or an ad or whatever the theme of the session is. And they'll give you some pretty hardcore live feedback with an audience. Sometimes it's lots of third parties at once giving you live feedback with no context.

And sometimes that's a really powerful way to adjust your own perspective. That's awesome. I haven't heard of that either. you're like a source of all kinds of little nuggets today. So I'm going to have to check out exit five as well. One of the things you mentioned in terms of what marketing includes is you've got also public policy and you might be the first marketer I've talked to that has public policy in your remit. Do you feel like that fits naturally together with marketing?

I do. do. Obviously, there's a very different set of tactics and goals in the public policy remit in that we aren't selling to policymakers. The common thread is that success in both arenas, marketing and policy, really depends on that same fluency that's required in marketing comms in the persona and what's at stake for them. And in that case, regulators and policymakers in regulated industries are really just another stakeholder. and an extremely important one at that.

So our, we're selling to utilities, our primary goal is to educate policymakers on how we provide value, not just to utilities, but ultimately to the consumers that they exist to protect and advocate for, which then makes it easier for utilities to adopt our technology. That makes sense if it is about education and marketing is great communications function. It makes purchase sense in that regard. And I do think about it. You may be the only one on the podcast I've talked to.

I have actually talked to somebody else that has policy in their remit as well, but I don't hear it a lot. So I wanted to make sure we talked about it a little bit. You deal, it's related, but you deal with a lot of regulated industries. How, like how is marketing different in that context? That's a great question. I think the biggest difference. is that it becomes extremely important to make sure that there's empathy built into your message.

So in many industries, if you make a mistake, you might look silly in front of your peers or maybe you can get fired. But in our industry, the consequences of making a mistake look more like ending up in court and becoming the target of public ire. often despite your very best and most earnest efforts. And often it's not even a mistake necessarily. It's just that the macro challenge is so big and so complex and utilities don't have the resources to tackle what's at hand. makes sense.

I was just going to say the stakes are higher. Really high in that regard. Yeah, for sure. And then there's the change management piece too. I think change management is difficult. Like empathy exists and it's important in every industry, but in a regulated space, it's a whole other beast. Because you're not only trying to change how your end customer views keep processes, but you're also trying to change how their regulators see those processes. So there's a ton of market education required.

And even once your market and policymakers and direct customers are bought into your approach. You need to work really hard to make sure all stakeholders are actually comfortable with the approach and how it gets operationalized, they validate it, et cetera. I'm taking back your role within the company as head of marketing, public policy comms. You've got a very technical product you mentioned, and that's at the core of product marketing. then you add the public policy component.

You've now got multiple personas. You've got really large buying committees.

Now you're also international in scope. And so that feels like it's just like an accelerator of complexity to me. But like how does that come to life? How does that come to life? Yeah. So first year you're preaching to the choir. It is. And so this might sound obvious, but I think it's so important to understand your persona and their challenges inside and out. And while the problems we're solving really are the same globally, the approach to solving them is not.

So we can't just copy paste our messaging across borders. you know, a very simple, perhaps oversimplified example of this is in the UK, they call transmission towers pylons, but it's really so much more than tailoring specific phrases and then even things like units. There's actually quite a bit of tailoring we need to do to prove we actually understand the different regulations in different jurisdictions and also the different geopolitical situations that have a large impact on energy.

Yeah, I'm envisioning you with a secret decoder ring every time you go to a new market. Make sure you're the right language. And the regulations have to be quite a challenge just because no one does everything exactly the same anywhere in the world. Yeah, totally. It's interesting. I was actually just at a conference in Milan. It's our first time going to this particular conference, but it's very much the analog of a big show that we go to every year in the US.

And they're talking about the same things, but it's wrapped up in a completely different package. So it is, it's also just a fun and interesting intellectual exercise to observe how the same problems are unfolding in very different contexts. That's amazing. That's amazing. And I'm a little jealous you were in Milan, by the way, great place for a global conference. Well, AI is everywhere in marketing. It's. everywhere in the world these days.

And you, my understanding is you have both products that leverage AI and that you're using some AI in your marketing. How do you think about getting AI, whether it's messaging or how you talk about it?

I would love to know your perspective. Yeah, it's definitely a, definitely an evolving topic in a lot of ways. I think there was definitely a window of time in which AI was a box to check. People looked expressly for AI solutions and many big companies inside and outside of the industry I'm currently in have mandates to use AI. But there wasn't much, there's not been much guidance beyond that. What does it actually look like?

And now that AI has permeated so many aspects of our lives, but personally and professionally, you're buying a home. There's a good chance AI is going to help determine your mortgage rate, your insurance premium, et cetera. If you go to the doctor, there's a good chance AI is going to play some role in a diagnosis. Many of us look to things like chat GPT to help plan trips or write emails. And I think that ubiquity is doing two things.

It's number one, it's raising the bar on expectations, but also making people really aware of the potential shortcomings. And as a marketer of a product that, that, or AI plays a big role, it makes it extremely important to be very clear about how it actually works. And in our case, that makes it important for us to demonstrate that there's still very much a human in control of how decisions get made. It's not like AI is making the decisions for utilities.

It's AI is helping collect and collate the information that they need to make their decisions. the make it being really clear about how the logic is auditable and editable with humans in the loop. And also that it's not. about replacing humans, it's about making humans better. So I actually saw a really good ad recently from Fiverr. It featured, it was like a picture of a bunch of smiling humans and the text overlay was really big letters that said, I took my job.

And then there was an ellipsis and at the bottom it said to the next level. I love it. Love it. Yeah. And Fiverr actually, Shiri, who's one of the VPs of marketing there, was just on the show. like it's, you've pulled it full circle. And they are doing some really cool stuff. There was an ad recently or a video I saw just a day or two ago, and it was a musical themed episode where you've seen people use AI features to create things. And the whole theme was, nobody cares.

The notion was like, look at this great picture. Oh, but I used AI and somebody sings out, nobody cares. So I thought that was pretty interesting. But I do love what you're talking about. And I do love what you're talking about. The whole idea of AI to help make humans better, to enhance what we can do on our own abilities, I think is right. And I do think it is got to be the combination like you talked about, which is like humans and AI, one or the other. For sure.

One of the things we love to do, we know you like dogs. We know you've got a big guy named Chief at home, but we'd to get to know you a little bit better. My favorite question to ask everybody on the show is, has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up who you are today?

That's a really good question. I would have to say, so growing up, I ran with my dad a lot in the morning. So. My dad traveled a lot when I was growing up and one of the ways that he was really intentional about spending time together was running. So he's always been a runner and with his influence, I became one too. So from pretty much middle school, I would often get up early with him before he had to leave for work and before I had to get ready for school and we'd go for a run together.

And we'd talk about things, we'd mentally prepare for our days ahead. And for me, running is less about physical exercise, although that is convenient way to multitask. But it's really more about the discipline to get up early in the morning and essentially comes down to staring down the day with confidence and a clear head. So it's been a really powerful way for me to build grit and resilience personally.

And I think it's actually why I'm a morning person and why I tackle challenges the way that I do. I found physical endurance is a really good way to get uncomfortable, sorry, get comfortable being uncomfortable. And it's nice because while running is still very much a personal routine, I definitely don't run together every day, but we do when we can. And here I am in my thirties and just earlier this year we ran a half marathon together. Awesome. That's awesome.

I'm jealous a little bit because I'm not a runner. I shouldn't say that, but I don't like running, let's put it that way. But it's so much easier to do when you travel because you just need sneakers and whatever outfit you need, right? You literally walk out the door and you can go wherever you need to go. So I need to figure that out personally. Maybe there's no way I would ever run with somebody like you who's been running your entire life. Maybe I'll figure that one out.

What advice would you give your younger self if you were starting all over again? do one thing at a time. So this is something my mom always says to me when I succumb to that like chronic type A personality overwhelm and so does. And I definitely haven't always done the greatest job of putting that into practice, but I would definitely say that to my younger self and hopefully I would listen.

I need to take that advice myself. thank you. Good advice, always easier to give advice than to do it yourself. That's true. That's very true. Is there topic either you're trying to learn more about or you think marketers need to be learning more about? This is an easy one for me to answer because it's something I think about all the time. And that's how you measure the impact of activities like brand investments that are not exactly straightforward to measure.

So I would argue that everyone, including folks like investors and engineers who typically who might look at brand with some degree of skepticism. They all want the company to represent that they represent to have a strong brand. But then when marketing spends money to that end, too often they end up facing a barrage of questions about what the impact was. I think too many marketers get caught in the middle there and I've definitely been there myself.

So in general, I think there's so many different attribution frameworks out there and I, there's no one perfect model. They've all got strengths and weaknesses, but I will say that I think short-sighted attribution is a massive threat to marketers and measuring things like brand is something I know I want to get better at. No, I 100 % agree with you. And it is very hard. I think it's even extremely harder even in B2B industries like yours.

It's something we need to keep doing because to your point, brands don't grow without brand investment. Exactly. And for people who like Nice big valuations too. Brand plays a big part in that. Very true. Very true. Are there any trends or subcultures that you follow you think other people should take notice of? Love that question. I love going down a good rabbit hole, but I'd say my favorite is probably that I'm a bit of a food and nutrition science nerd.

And I'll actually credit both my mom and my husband with that. So quick backstory is that much to both of their chagrin, I was an extremely picky eater and had a pretty limited palette until my early to mid 20s. My husband will actually say that I ate no fruits or vegetables until we started dating, which is not entirely true, but he's been a really big influence in getting me to appreciate pretty much every type of food.

And in so doing, I realized that learning about food and what was good for me would actually encourage me to eat better. So as much as I would love to talk your ear off about the different types of tumeric or relative nutritional merit of different brains, I will resist that temptation, but I will recommend a book. Years ago, my mom gave me a J. Kenji Ault's food lab, which is absolutely fascinating.

There's literally an entire chapter about how to cook eggs and the like the down to the... different time intervals that make sense for salting and how that affects the texture and the color of the yolk and things like that. And fast forward to today, that book is covered in cooking splatter, like gross cooking splatter, scribbles and post-it notes and things. And maybe just because she's my mom, but she now calls me her favorite food friend. And I consider that a great honor.

literally early in our relationship, my mom and my husband would actually text each other about the things they'd gotten me to eat. His mission in life is to get me to cross the tomato frontier and I'm not there yet. But actually one more thing I'll say about this is coming back to eggs for a second. I recently had a shaved cured egg on a pasta and it was absolutely life-changing and I've been meaning to try that for a while and maybe I'll do this again. And I highly recommend. I love that.

I love that. And what it sounds like you picked the the best partner for yourself you could ever pick. To have your mom and him texting each other, celebrating when they get you to eat something new. Just a hilarious image in my head. yeah, it's literally be like, she's eating blueberries. Blueberries. I've got to this book. My daughter actually is a little bit like you. Like she's a little bit maybe more adventurous than you are. But still, like, vegetables are hard to come by.

Fruits easy, but vegetables are little harder to come by. she does... That's interesting. I had the worst experience. Oh, interesting. Interesting. I went vegetables first. Okay. She loves research. So like this notion of maybe putting this food lab book in the kitchen, I think might actually be the unlock I needed. So, I'll try. I'll try that and see. Yeah, keep me posted. Yeah. Last question for you. What do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?

Something else I think about all the time. So I'll go with an opportunity. And I think one of the biggest opportunities is to build a strategy around proprietary data-driven storytelling.

So to give you an example, I am a massive admirer of what companies like Gong have done with Gong Labs. Are you familiar with Gong? I'm not actually, no. So they started out basically by recording sales calls. They call themselves a revenue intelligence platform, but in collecting all that data and it is used for coaching sales teams and such. So they'll say things like in 60 % of sales conversations across deals that close reps said XYZ kind of thing.

So they have this, they have all this data and so much of their marketing is about their own data. So they're pulling, they're making these observations across all the calls they record and are able to pull out these extremely insightful observations that only they can make because of the data they're collecting. So I think to the extent you can actually harness your own data and tell stories about it that only you can tell, I think that is a massive opportunity to stand out. that.

And the concept of, I'm going to get this wrong, but you said proprietary data-driven storytelling, right? Yeah, it's a mouthful. It is, but it's perfect for an acronym. Yeah, exactly. Because we all need more acronyms. Exactly. DDS. Yeah, or you could hyphenate the data and it just be PDS. But I don't know if that makes any Yeah, I like that. Simple. That's my gift to you. PDS is your unique. Mary, it's been fantastic getting to know you and learn more about what you're doing at Nira.

So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your ideas. Thanks so much, Alan. Pleasure speaking with you. This was super fun. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and does not imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service. Hi, it's Alan again.

Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast. It's created and produced by me with post-production support from Sam Robertson. If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe on your favorite listening platform. I also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloittedigital.com slash us slash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues. I love hearing from listeners.

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