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Q&A with Randy Frisch, CMO at Uberflip

Q&A with Randy Frisch
Randy Frisch, CMO and Co-Founder at Uberflip has led the content experience movement, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and focus on the experience. 

Randy also co-hosts the Conex Show, a weekly podcast featuring top marketers and their strategies and secrets to success. His talks empower marketers with the strategies they need to capture their audiences, prove their worth, and align their vision.

MEDIA 7: If I were to say to a bunch of people who know you, ‘Give me three adjectives that best describe you’, what would I hear?
RANDY FRISCH: Determined, passionate, caring.

M7: From Flipbooks to the world’s first content experience platform in just 6 years. What are some of the top reasons that helped drive Uberflip to where it is now?
RF:  We started as a solution that would allow marketers to share content to readers whenever they wanted and on whichever devices. People still want to consume content whenever they want. Think of the way in which we consume video content on Netflix or music content on Spotify. We’ve been successful in large part because we’ve been able to create a product that marketers need, that make it easier for their buyers to become customers. But that hasn’t been enough.
The differentiator for us is culture—the values we strive for as an organization (not just the work environment). I’ll share my 3 favourites here:

● H.U.S.T.L.E.: this one stands for Heart, Unique, Skill, Tech, Lean, Entrepreneurial. My co-founder, Yoav Schwartz, and I actually screen new hires for these traits.
● Valuable, Relevant & Consistent: this one comes from the initial definition of Content Marketing (“creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content”) by Robert Rose and Joe Pullizzi at the Content Marketing Institute. It only makes sense that our teams and employees should expect to be valuable, relevant, and consistent.
● Give Back: It’s important for us to give back to our communities and while we do this in numerous ways led by people across our team, one of my favourites is an annual charity ping pong tournament we host called Startupong which brought together startups in Toronto to raise $50,000 for Sick Kids hospital this year.
We’ve been successful mostly because we’ve been able to create a brand around engaging our team, our customers, and even our partners around these values.


"As marketers, we need to take our buyers on a journey using content. We need to be able to get a buyer from one piece of content to the next—think of a nice hiking trail through the woods."

M7: How can modern marketers leverage the personalized content recommendations given by Uberflip AI?
RF: It all comes down to the journey we take our buyers through. We recently produced a report with Heinz Marketing in which we found that only “1 in 3 B2B marketing leaders [of 283 interviewed] believe their current website encourages people to engage with their content at a high volume”. Essentially, we are leading buyers to a piece of content and leaving them to fend for themselves among your content. A visual I like to use is that of walking someone into a dark forest with no pathway and leaving them there. Not a good experience at all. As marketers, we need to take our buyers on a journey using content. We need to be able to get a buyer from one piece of content to the next—think of a nice hiking trail through the woods.

Uberflip AI serves up recommendations on our platform personalized to our buyers after they’ve consumed a piece of content. This allows them to stay and engage with more content while they’re in a content experience. Uberflip AI gives marketers the ability to predict what topic or piece of content their buyer might be interested in based on their behavior on a website, benchmark them against other users, and deliver content that they might be interested in, in order to extend their journey.


"Buyers want personalized content and they want it when they’re ready to buy. And it has to be a great experience."

M7: How does user-generated content help in scaling ABM campaigns at Uberflip?
RF: I believe the best UGC for ABM (acronym overload!) is the reviews from customers. The best way to learn is from our peers. We often copy our competitors or look for best practices. There are many ways we can relate to a target account by showing them what their peers are saying. It could be finding a tweet from someone they respect speaking about the value of your platform. Think of it this way. If Roger Federer tweeted that a certain shoe was key to his play you'd likely win over other aspiring tennis players. In the world of B2B marketing, we can sometimes find more professional review sites like G2 or TrustRadius where highlighting a review from someone in a related industry can help win over the next target account.

M7: There is a lot of buzz around your book “F#ck Content Marketing”. What inspired you to preach this influential gospel?
RF: I was off to Dreamforce in 2017 and I came across a SiriusDecisions stat that 60-70% of all marketing content goes unused. It brought to light that even I contributed to this problem by driving my team to create more and more content. I had a revelation.

Thanks to Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi at the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing was supposed to be about creating and distributing content “with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” But somewhere along the line, it became too much about creation and not enough about distribution and driving customer action (converting). And when marketers were distributing content, we weren’t distributing it in ways that led to profitable customer action—think of all those generic emails we sent people, loaded with links to videos and blog posts spread across the internet. We were sending people into dark scary forests full of content (sometimes that of our competitors). And we never got them back.

It all hit me. So I said “f#ck content marketing”, or rather, f#ck what it had become. My mission over the last two years has become to teach marketers how to create great personalized online experiences that we can send our buyers to, that actually take them on a journey leading to a conversion.


"Marketing is now becoming creating and distributing content to drive profitable customer action."

M7: What is the idea behind ‘The Conex’ (podcast show) hosted by you every week, which is already a big hit among the viewers?
RF: After 3 years and 227 episodes, we’ve decided to end the Content Experience Show and start fresh with a new show, The Marketer’s Journey, launching October. We had a great base of listeners and guests, but we wanted to spend more time focusing on the concept of the journey—both, the journey that our buyers go through, and the journey we go through as marketers. I’ll be speaking in-depth with marketing leaders about what their journey has looked like as marketers and what they strive for in creating great experiences for their buyers and customers.

M7: How do you see content marketing evolving over time?
RF: We’re not just seeing the evolution of content marketing, we’re seeing the evolution of marketing as a whole. Marketing is now becoming creating and distributing content to drive profitable customer action.
Let’s take a look for a moment at the way in which we consume video and music media. We went from syndicated TV shows and weekly programming on set channels (cable) to having bingeable content ready for us on demand (Netflix, Hulu, etc). We went from listening for our favourite song to be played on the radio, to downloading songs on iTunes, to now getting recommended curated playlists and artists based on my listening history on Spotify. We can search for content we want on demand and binge it for as long as we want. And we can do it whenever we want on multiple different devices around us.

Our buyers want personalized content and they want it when they’re ready to buy. And it has to be a great experience. Marketers are starting to catch on. We’re starting to spend time and money on analyzing the data, having great salespeople, and even on distribution. The difference-maker is that marketers are spending more time and money on personalized content experiences and using a content experience platform like Uberflip to accelerate the buyer journey.

ABOUT UBERFLIP

Uberflip is the world’s #1 Content Experience Platform (CEP). With tools to aggregate all your marketing content, they empower B2B marketing and sales teams to create personalized content experiences to engage accounts, nurture prospects, and convert leads, without the help of IT. It’s their mission to put control back in the hands of marketing teams to deliver high-converting experiences, that put the customer front and center.

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Zenfold Leverages Ginkgo Enzyme Services to Enable Veterinary Active Ingredient Development with Sustainable Biology

PR Newswire | October 17, 2023

Ginkgo Bioworks which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, and Zenfold Sustainable Technologies, a company focused on developing and manufacturing specialty ingredients using sustainable technologies and precision fermentation, today announced a collaboration to leverage Ginkgo Enzyme Services in its effort to discover an enzyme critical to the manufacturing of veterinary products. This partnership aims to replace traditional chemical processes in veterinary active ingredient production with a sustainable biological method. "This collaboration marks a significant step forward in Zenfold's mission to bring sustainable manufacturing technology to the veterinary medicine industry," said Dr. BSV Prasad, CEO and Managing Director of Zenfold Sustainable Technologies. "By utilizing Ginkgo's expertise and innovation, we are well-positioned to develop a sustainable solution that will have a lasting impact on the Indian market and beyond." "We are excited to partner with Zenfold, which brings a powerful vision of sustainable biotechnology to veterinary active ingredient development. This collaboration will enable us to apply our state-of-the-art enzyme discovery module to enable more innovation in the veterinary medicine space," said Jennifer Wipf, SVP, Head of Commercial, Cell Engineering at Ginkgo. "The project involves creating a broad library of cDNA candidates from a metagenomic collection of billions of enzyme sequences. That's the kind of scale visionary projects like this need, and Ginkgo is committed to scaling up this solution for the betterment of animal health and the environment." About Ginkgo Bioworks Ginkgo Bioworks is the leading horizontal platform for cell programming, providing flexible, end-to-end services that solve challenges for organizations across diverse markets, from food and agriculture to pharmaceuticals to industrial and specialty chemicals. Ginkgo's biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, is building global infrastructure for biosecurity to empower governments, communities, and public health leaders to prevent, detect and respond to a wide variety of biological threats. About Zenfold Zenfold Sustainable Technologies is a pioneer in the field of sustainable biology, with a focus on veterinary actives and enzyme supply. This collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks marks Zenfold's expansion into the global veterinary market and further emphasizes their commitment to environmental responsibility and innovative biological solutions.

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Integrated DNA Technologies Opens New Therapeutic Manufacturing Facility to Support Growing Demand in Genomic Medicine

businesswire | October 19, 2023

Global genomics solutions provider Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT), an operating company in the Life Sciences segment of Danaher Corporation announced the completion of its new Therapeutic Oligonucleotide Manufacturing facility in Coralville, Iowa. The milestone marks a significant achievement in the company’s 35-year-history—its entrance into the therapeutics space—and enables IDT to manufacture products for research use through to current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) grade cell and gene therapy reagents to provide researchers with a single partner that can help them rapidly transition from the lab to therapeutic development. The 41,000-square-foot-site will produce cGMP cell and gene therapy reagents, including single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) and donor oligos for homology-directed repair (HDR) with additional offerings to follow. These new capabilities and offerings will be supported with comprehensive documentation and testing, a support team, and regulatory guidance to help accelerate researchers’ path to the clinic. “An increasing number of customers are seeking out IDT as a trusted partner for their CRISPR genome editing needs, and are asking us to be the provider that can help them bridge the gap from lab to clinic,” said Demaris Mills, president, IDT. “Now, with our new cGMP manufacturing facility, IDT can provide a complete CRISPR workflow—from design to analysis—that supports cell and gene therapy developers in all stages of therapeutic development, with the same support and expertise they have come to know from IDT. These new manufacturing capabilities, which have been informed by our decades of oligonucleotide synthesis manufacturing expertise, evolves IDT’s business model from Research Use Only to cGMP, and enables us to help more people.” Danaher Vice President and Group Executive Chris Riley added, “The future of genomic medicine hinges on the industrialization of biology to make life-saving therapies more accessible to people. As a pioneer in genome editing, IDT’s continued investments will enable customers to rapidly move from clinical development to commercialization. This new facility is another significant milestone in IDT’s innovation journey, one we envision will have a profound impact in genomic medicine for years to come.” The Therapeutic Oligo Manufacturing facility features ISO 8 cleanrooms, purification suites, chemical distribution and storage rooms, quality control labs, analytical lab space for product testing, ancillary and office spaces and shell space for future expansion. Manufacturing is performed in accordance with ICH Q7 cGMP standards for consistent and reliable quality. The controlled-access building features environmental controls for temperature, humidity and air pressure throughout, supported by an environmental program and continuous monitoring system. The addition of this new facility expands IDT’s global manufacturing footprint and enables the company to provide a range of manufacturing capabilities, including Research Use Only (RUO), large scale RUO, Engineering Run and cGMP (ICH Q7). A Decade of CRISPR Innovation Since 2015, IDT has continued to accelerate the pace of genomics with its complete portfolio of Alt-R™ CRISPR genome editing solutions. Its portfolio includes several first-to-market research products as well as solutions to meet researchers’ complete workflow—from design to analysis—to enable greater quality, simplicity, and cost efficiency. Last year, IDT launched the Alt-R™ HDR Donor Blocks, an improved solution for increasing homology-directed repair (HDR) rates in large fragment knock-in experiments, and expanded access to its Alt-R™ Custom CRISPR gRNA Libraries for drug discovery. In 2021, IDT also unveiled its rhAmpSeq™ CRISPR Analysis System, an end-to-end solution for characterizing and quantifying the full array of on- and off-target genome editing events in CRISPR research products. IDT’s research and development teams have also been at the forefront of CRISPR innovation, with achievements that include the development of multiple proprietary CRISPR reagents such as IDT’s Alt-R™ S.p. HiFi Cas9 Nuclease and the Alt-R L.b. and A.s. Cas12a (Cpf1) Ultra enzymes. Notably, their groundbreaking research and collaborations with scientists around the globe has been published in more than 200 scientific journals as peer-reviewed articles, and is helping to shape the future of genomics and biotechnology. IDT collaborated with M.A. Mortenson Company, a team led by OPN Architects and Barr Engineering Co. on the facility design and construction of its cGMP facility. About IDT For more than 35 years, Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc. (IDT) has been empowering genomics laboratories with an oligonucleotide manufacturing process unlike anyone else in the industry, with the most advanced synthesis, modification, purification, and quality control capabilities available. Since its founding in 1987, IDT has progressed from a leading oligo manufacturer to a genomics solutions provider supporting key application areas such as next generation sequencing, CRISPR genome editing, synthetic biology, digital PCR, and RNA interference. IDT manufactures products used by scientists researching many forms of cancer and most inherited and infectious diseases.

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