Chris Bryce: Welcome to episode 30 of what is now called Beyond the CMS, where we get industry leaders in the content and content platform space chatting about current trends and what the future might be. For folks who are listening in, we welcome you to ask questions, frankly, ask us anything.

Chris Bryce: We got the original idea for the show from the Car Guys, a couple of car experts that would take folks on a call-in kind of style and do their best to help answer questions about how to make their cars work better. But over here, we're really curious and interested in the world of content and how to deliver content, and the systems and people behind that.

Chris Bryce: Thanks to everyone who's made some time to join us on the various channels here. We're live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. We're super stoked to have special guest Mark Demeny join us today, who is a consultant and industry expert in the area of content and content platforms. Just really great to have you join us and looking forward to a great conversation.

Chris Bryce: Folks that are listening in, really just ask us anything. This is a great opportunity to have a great mind to share information with. So, Mark, welcome, and maybe you want to introduce yourself.

Mark Demeny: Sure. So, yeah, as you said, I've been in content management for nearly 20 years now, working for a lot of different vendors.

Mark Demeny: I started in Ottawa working for companies doing content quality and analysis, ended up working in Vancouver managing a very large CMS installation, and then now working for a few vendors doing some advising and consulting, and then also working for the MACH Alliance on a lot of their special initiatives as well.

Chris Bryce: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining, and great segue. A lot of folks don't necessarily know what the MACH Alliance is. Our customers and the folks who tune into this show, now and in the artifacts afterwards, are often CTOs and CMOs that are tasked with a modernization or a replatforming, and this work comes up. Maybe just to start us off, do you want to talk a little bit about MACH?

Mark Demeny: Yeah, the MACH Alliance has been around for a few years, and at the time they founded it, they really had to do a lot of marketing to sort of educate the market on a lot of architectural principles that we consider very commonplace today.

Mark Demeny: So things like headless and accessing content through APIs, things like microservices, things like cloud and SaaS. Those were very new when the MACH Alliance was formed, and that's really where the acronym MACH came from: microservices, API-first, cloud, headless.

Mark Demeny: In the last few years, we've really shifted the organization to be much more around the business thinking and mindset of those things, because in order to take advantage of that from a technology perspective, you really have to do a lot of organizational transformation in how you buy software, procure, implement, think within an organization. And a lot of these are really well aligned with agile principles as well.

Mark Demeny: But in order to do that, we've been doing a lot more work around education. We now have an LMS, people can sign up for courses and get that information as well. We're doing a lot more work around standards and resources to help organizations really understand when they're going through a composable approach: why should you go through a composable approach, how to do it, how you should structure your organization, how you should think about all of these things from an implementation perspective as well. So that's really what we've been focusing on the last few years.

Chris Bryce: And how many organizations are there now in MACH? Are you around a hundred and ten?

Mark Demeny: We've got a few more in the pipeline, so that changes on a regular basis, but that's the last number I have.

Chris Bryce: Okay, pretty awesome. So that's a nice suite of composable vendors that by default have the ability to kind of connect together and have all of those services come together. Cool. And I think you were mentioning, sorry, I think we might be onto the same idea, but please go ahead.

Mark Demeny: Yeah, no, I was gonna say, some of those are vendors on the software side, the ISV side, and a lot of others are on the system implementation side as well. So it's really a mix of both. And then we also have a number of ambassadors in the community that are on the client and buyer side as well. And so we really try to balance those three groups in pretty much everything that we do.

Chris Bryce: Very cool. You were mentioning earlier before the show started some of the work that you're doing on the Open Data Model initiative. And I think that's where, when we're on this kind of MACH stream of thought, do you want to talk a little bit about that? I thought that was interesting.

Mark Demeny: Yeah, so we should be releasing around July 7th, assuming everything goes according to plan, but essentially it's to help architects in organizations doing implementations, or SIs, really understand what the moving pieces are in a composable approach.

Mark Demeny: So, you know what I mean by that? To give a really quick example: if you have a product catalog in your commerce system and you have a product catalog in your product information management system, what's kind of the contract between those two things, and how does data move within those? And if you think about a product being displayed on a product display page in an e-commerce site, there's a lot of information coming from different sources.

Mark Demeny: So you may have some of the underlying specifications coming from a PIM. You may have marketing copy coming from a CMS that may be personalized. You may have the inventory coming from an ERP, you may have delivery coming from warehouse management and order management.

Mark Demeny: And so people implementing these systems, especially if you're relatively new to it, it's really hard to understand the moving pieces. And so what we're trying to do with the Open Data Model is essentially say, okay, these are, both in sort of plain English but also in things like a JSON definition, here are the common threads between these things. And then here's, you know, a capability like say personalization, which would be an extension on that. Really laying out the landscape so that people understand where those things fit together, but then also through what we're calling recipes, documenting the best practices for these things.

Mark Demeny: So, and in a lot of ways providing different options, because there's no one right way to do anything in a composable approach, but at least to be able to say, here's the information, here's how these things fit together, and here are some recipe examples that may make sense for your use case contextually.

Mark Demeny: Because even something like saying, hey, you're updating inventory. In some cases, updating inventory may make sense to do in real time. In some cases it may not make sense to do in real time. So there's never a right answer there, but if at least we're saying, here's the cases where doing that in real time makes sense and here's how to do it, and then here's the cases where it might not make sense, maybe you're doing daily sync and maybe it's some legacy system, at least to sort of explain a little bit of the nuance in all of those different cases and variations.

Mark Demeny: And then long term, ideally we get to a point where an architect building these things might be able to talk to an LLM that has access to all of this data that we've collated and be able to say, right, I'm building this, and I'm building a B2B e-commerce, with the configure-price-quote, and these capabilities for managing organizational structures within that, and here's the vendors that I'm using, go off and tell me how to build my integration layer and connect these things. And hopefully we can get to that point to do that in time.

Chris Bryce: Interesting. The title of the show, How to Choose a CMS, and that is a question that we get asked often. MACH represents kind of a concept that may be part of that choice. But maybe just from your experience, can you share a little bit about what's going on today? What are CMOs and CTOs thinking about as they look at, in particular, the suite of headless CMSs, and there's a very similar feature set on the surface. Yeah, maybe just share a little bit about what you're seeing out there and what your approach would be to thinking through the best steps in choosing a modern CMS.

Mark Demeny: Yeah, I'll jump really quickly to sum up the choices in the past and then where we are today, because it's always an evolution.

Mark Demeny: A couple generations ago, a lot of that choice was dictated off of programming language, right? Like, hey, we've got .NET as a skillset, or PHP or Java, and that sort of made your shortlist, and then you'd work within vendors that were architecturally aligned. And then there was this big shift to headless, and a lot of MACH Alliance members, where the big benefit was you don't have to be tied to a vendor programming language, and you can start to take advantage of SaaS services and build whatever front end, whatever way you want.

Mark Demeny: And now we're kind of at this point where both of those worlds, the value proposition for one approach versus the other has changed a fair bit, right? Every other vendor now has headless ways of delivering content to a front end, so that's no longer a really differentiating criteria the way it was.

Mark Demeny: And I think what's happening now is, at the same time, a lot of the headless vendors, they started just doing content management, and a number of them have acquired other things and built other capabilities. Contentful is now doing page management, so is Contentstack. Contentstack acquired a CDP.

Mark Demeny: And so really the question now is much more along the lines of, okay, you sort of flip the question a little bit to say, okay, as an organization, where do I want my roadmap for CMS to look like, and who do I want to be in charge of that roadmap? And I think this is a pretty fundamental question, because if you're an organization, you can say, right, I want to be in charge of my roadmap because I care about a differentiated customer experience.

Mark Demeny: Then what that means is I now have an additional set of responsibilities, because I'm picking different vendors, I'm picking different technologies, I may be building things that vendors may not have. A pretty typical example that I've seen is large organizations who are creating a ton of content.

Mark Demeny: They may not like the UX for content creation that a headless CMS vendor has. Maybe they build their own for various different reasons, but they take on that responsibility. The flip side of that is you may not want to have that extra responsibility. It is a lot more work. And so then you're going back to the vendor saying, okay, I'm happy to buy what a vendor has and work with their capabilities.

Mark Demeny: But then also it's worth understanding where that vendor wants to be going, because there's a lot of different examples out there. If you think about Automattic, the last few years they've been working on Gutenberg, and that was a big chunk of their product investment, to build out that capability.

Mark Demeny: Sitecore, last few years, their roadmap has been focusing on shifting to SaaS with XM Cloud. Optimizely has been purchasing things around content marketing, made an acquisition there, and doing a lot of integration there, fitting that into how you manage personalization and content strategy.

Mark Demeny: And so I think there's kind of those two fundamental questions. The first is, as an organization, do you want to own your roadmap, or are you happy to let a vendor do it? There's no right or wrong answer to that. But then the second question is, if you're letting a vendor do it, making sure that their prioritization for their limited product management resources is in line with where you want to be going as an organization as well.

Mark Demeny: If you are a Sitecore customer and you want to be shifting to cloud, then by all means stay on Sitecore and go with them for that journey. If you're an Optimizely customer that's been focusing more on marketing and product strategy, by all means continue with them on their journey.

Mark Demeny: But the flip side is, if the vendor is developing in a direction that doesn't meet your needs, then you sort of need to take a step back and think, okay, what's my ultimate goal for what I'm trying to do with my content management platform for the next five years?

Mark Demeny: Oh, you're on mute there, Chris.

Chris Bryce: Thank you. There was a little background noise here a little bit earlier, I didn't want to interrupt you. Do you ever see a situation where the scope of the project is enough to actually impact the roadmap of the vendor itself? Like, are they open to figuring out how to adjust to customer needs? Do you have any insights around that?

Mark Demeny: That's a really good question, and the answer is, it depends. And it also kind of, not to get meta, sort of explains why there's a lot of CMS vendors in a market that you would be sort of surprised to see, because if you're a Fortune 500 company, you're probably not big enough to push Adobe around, but you might be big enough to push Sitecore around, or Optimizely.

Mark Demeny: And so this is kind of one of the questions: when people are looking at vendors, what relationship might they have with that vendor? And some of it is they're local to that vendor, they might have a beer with them on a regular basis, they may have some influence. Now, I don't think it's healthy for both sides to have too much influence on what a vendor does.

Mark Demeny: You don't wanna be dragging them around by the nose, because you may get what you want, but it may not be healthy in that if they are really prioritizing you as a client to the detriment of other things, ultimately that may not be healthy for their business. And that might not be good in the end, because if they're just relying on you for a lot of that business and a lot of that roadmap, they may not be getting other opportunities and may be less viable over time.

Mark Demeny: And so I think there is a fine line between feedback, but I think it does have to do with that dance that I talked through earlier. And a lot of vendors do have things like customer advisory boards, but you sort of wanna make sure that your goals are in alignment enough that they were already going in that direction and you are happy with that direction, as opposed to they're going in that direction and you want to go here, and you're sort of trying to drag them there. That's probably not a good relationship for either of you.

Mark Demeny: And if you're at that point, then maybe it's worth looking at either other vendors whose roadmap is more aligned that way, or back to that question that we had at the beginning, which is, do you want to own that roadmap yourself? In which case maybe a composable approach makes sense, where you say, okay, maybe I scale back the relationship I have with this vendor to just say, I just want you to manage content, or personalization, or customer data, and I might figure out the rest of those things myself and manage the ownership of that myself.

Chris Bryce: And so speaking of personalization, there's a lot of definitions of what, I guess, that actual deliverable is, everything from some basic rules to present a component versus another component, to a real kind of AI-driven assessment and delivery of the content itself. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you're seeing out there from a personalization perspective? Maybe some trends and where you think things are going?

Mark Demeny: Yeah, I mean, personalization has been out there for a while. I think systems have gotten better at delivering content and giving you recommendations. I think there's a few trends that have sort of helped with that.

Mark Demeny: Customer data platforms are becoming more ubiquitous. A lot of vendors have been buying customer data platforms, so Contentstack bought Lytics, Optimizely bought Zaius, Sitecore bought Boxever. Adobe bought Omniture years ago and used some of those capabilities for Audience Manager.

Mark Demeny: So, in general, having a customer data platform makes sense to assist with that, because then it allows you to not just do sort of that clickstream analysis and personalization, but actually have a longer term understanding of your client interactions on the website, with history, adding other channels, et cetera. So CDPs have really kind of revolutionized that a little bit.

Mark Demeny: I think one of the tricky things with personalization, and this has always been an issue, is making sure you actually have the content for those audiences. I think everybody kind of realizes that you can get a fair bit of uplift if you personalize for different segments and personas, and even different languages within that. But if you don't have the ability to create and manage all of those variations, then it makes that process quite difficult.

Mark Demeny: I think one of the things that a lot of folks discover is, and this may lead to our AI conversation later on as well, all of the fundamental, foundational things that you need to do, like structured content, in order to, and attribution, to see how those things are successful, those are a lot of work. And I think the payoff makes sense if you're doing stuff at enough scale to justify that effort. And I think this is one of the things that people sort of continually struggle with: yeah, I wanna personalize, okay, how much revenue are you doing?

Mark Demeny: Is it a million dollars a month? Okay, well, to personalize properly, that's one person or more at a hundred K a year or more. And so the numbers just don't work. And so typically it's really at the higher end, where you're dealing with so much volume that a 3% uplift pays for that person in that program. But it needs to do that financially, right.

Chris Bryce: Good thinking, good thinking, thanks. Just to shout out to folks who have made some time in their afternoon to join the show, thank you very much. You mentioned the AI conversation, and I know a lot of folks are wondering, a bit hesitant, excited, fearful, there's all kinds of emotions and business reactions going on around AI right now. But as it impacts content, content platforms, and decision making, how do you assess what's going on?

Mark Demeny: Yeah, there's kind of three different things going on, and all of those three have both an opportunity component and a real risk and fear component. And so I think a lot of decision making is, paralysis is too strong a word, but I think a lot of people are kind of in a wait-and-see moment right now.

Mark Demeny: And I think the first bit, where there's some opportunity from the CMS side, is thinking, okay, we can do this. Back to what we were saying earlier, it's really hard to create a lot of content variations, and I think there's this opportunity with AI to be able to say, okay, here are my audiences coming from a CDP, here are my different languages, for example. I'll use this use case that I think is appropriate for you in Toronto: it's a huge multicultural city, the top 20 languages in Toronto and Canada still have large enough cohorts that if you can do that translation programmatically at scale, then it makes sense to do that, right? Put out Tagalog content, there's a big Filipino community, enough to justify that effort, but only if AI can help you.

Mark Demeny: So, when you're doing things like calls to action and marketing, if you have that ability to say, here are my personas from my CDP, the different groups we're targeting, here are my languages, and have AI create all those content variations. In the past, if you were a human, you'd have to do 200 bits of content in 20 different languages, and that was untenable. Whereas now AI can do a decent enough job at it.

Mark Demeny: So I think there's some experimentation to say, okay, how can AI approach those new scenarios. There's also experimentation within the CMS to say, okay, how can AI assist with tasks that humans already do currently? So, make sure my grammar's good, can you rewrite it slightly bigger, can you rewrite it slightly smaller, can you do all these sort of grammar variations there? So I think a lot of people are looking at AI as potentially being able to help content creation.

Mark Demeny: There's another part of that which is a little bit more fraught with some fear, which is, okay, now that we're losing search traffic to LLMs, what does that mean?

Mark Demeny: Previously there was a bit of a contract with search engine companies, especially Google, to say, okay, Google's gonna let you know what's performing, and the reason they wanna do that is because they want you to buy AdWords. And so they would say, here's what's trending, here's the content that's getting to you, and they were very open with that. And you would get the click in the end, right? And so this was really important for a lot of people who were incentivized by the click for their company, maybe they were media, newspaper, whatever, or they were incentivized by the click because they were a marketer who was paid off that, getting their information to there, because you could justify your existence within a marketing organization.

Mark Demeny: Whereas now, LLMs, they're sucking up a whole bunch of data, and basically somebody asks for something and the LLM will give them the answer. And you don't know that the LLM has given that person the answer, and that might have been based off of your content, and you don't know whether or not they're gonna buy or are interested at all, right, because they're controlling that experience. And so that contract is very much gone.

Mark Demeny: And so I think this has led, rightfully so, to a lot of questions and panic within the industry, from anybody that's producing content, because they're sort of flying blind now, right? They're not getting the analytics that they were. And the question is, how does the brand control that experience for that content that's going to the LLMs?

Mark Demeny: Previously, and this is really interesting for brands in my mind, especially like luxury goods, previously somebody like Rolex, or BMW, or Mercedes-Benz, or whatever, you'd get that person eventually visiting your website and you could control the experience. You could show them really nice typography and nice pictures and all of those sorts of things. How do you sell something like a $10,000 watch over a chat, right?

Chris Bryce: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mark Demeny: And that brand experience, I think, is going to be really interesting to marketers as well. And so we may end up getting to this era that, it was kind of like in the radio era, before the web era, where people were advertising on billboards and radio and these other channels that didn't have attribution, and maybe we're going back to an era where that attribution is hard to get, unless of course LLMs open that up, but who knows if they have the incentive to or not.

Mark Demeny: So, yeah, that's kind of a fascinating aspect there as well. And then the last aspect is more around using AI within content management systems for more administrative and management functions.

Mark Demeny: So, previously if you were laying out pages and building templates and building components, AI could help with that. Previously if you were building workflows, AI could help with those things as well.

Mark Demeny: So it might just be the case where you create some content and submit it through, and nowadays an AI may say, oh, this might need a legal approval because you've changed this text around the terms and conditions.

Mark Demeny: And so there's a lot of potential areas for just the optimization of a lot of the typical tasks. On the one hand, that might be really interesting and useful. On the other hand, that may mean less work for people doing CMS management functions in an organization, it may mean less work for agencies as well. And so all of these aspects, there's sort of this duality of opportunity versus potential risk or disruption, some cases more than others for sure.

Chris Bryce: Yeah, we're seeing some real benefits in our ability to use AI to model components and then just speak directly to the CMS. We're kind of trying all kinds of interesting things over here to do a job quicker but at higher quality, to allow authors to kind of get their workflows AI-managed as well. And we're getting kind of a lot of questions from customers about how can we just kind of use our own origin of content and just get it into the CMS and get it published. So lots happening for sure.

Mark Demeny: Mm-hmm.

Chris Bryce: Maybe just, time goes by a little bit on the quick side here.

Mark Demeny: Yeah, I was talking as quick as possible, but.

Chris Bryce: No, just such great, concentrated information, and really thank you. But before we go, I'd love to just hear your thoughts in general. Like, what do you think CMOs and decision makers should be aware of, or what is kind of an update on attributes of the mindset of selecting a CMS these days?

Mark Demeny: I think the big thing right now, and normally I shoehorn this into the AI conversation, is the importance of structured content.

Mark Demeny: I think, in the industry, we've been talking about structured content for a very long time, and all the benefits, content reuse, a clear function of purpose for what you're creating, et cetera. And I think it's always been a hard sell.

Mark Demeny: Headless CMS has made that a little bit easier, because that was sort of one of the core functions of headless CMS and how they built things. Whereas I think now we're getting to this point where an organization may say, okay, we wanna take advantage of AI.

Mark Demeny: And the moment they get one level deeper into the details, initially they think, okay, AI can solve a whole lot of problems, which is true, but you get one level deeper, and the detail really is, okay, you now actually do really need to think about structured content, and you do really need to think about a content strategy.

Mark Demeny: And so this is really one of the advantages, because now you can say, up to the C-level, oh, okay, I wanna do a structured content project. In the past they would say, well, what's the purpose of that? Whereas now it's like, oh, that's to enable AI. And so there's a lot more budget and attention and importance.

Mark Demeny: And so that's really, one of the nice things is that you've gotta do those things properly. And there's, I'll give you a really good example. In the previous world, you really didn't need to think about trimming your content all that much for old information, right? Because what would happen is Google, through the magic of PageRank, if people were linking to stuff and it was valid, and that outbound and inbound link was high quality, it would push that stuff up to the top. And so things that were no longer as relevant would just sort of trickle down to the bottom naturally.

Mark Demeny: Whereas to an LLM that's just sucking up everything, all of the content has the same sort of relevance to it. And so if you have stuff out there that's old and incorrect, it will take that and digest it and spit it back as if it was fact.

Mark Demeny: And so, previously you could just leave a lot of older stuff on the website, and it would just naturally, through the age of it and sort of the irrelevance of who was linking to it, things would naturally just kind of fall off. Whereas now you really have to be very cognizant of, oh, okay, this content is no longer valid, how do I retire that, how do I archive that, how do I flag that correctly?

Mark Demeny: So that overall thinking about structured content and content strategy, you have to be much better at, in order to take advantage of AI, as opposed to the opposite, where, like I said, people think, oh, AI will just solve it for me. And no, it's the opposite of that, actually.

Chris Bryce: Right, well, lots to think about. I just wanna say thanks to anyone who's taking a moment to listen into the show today. Huge thanks, Mark, for joining us and sharing all of this great information. If you don't mind, we might post a link to you, some of the ways to get ahold of you, essentially, in the comments. Also, the show becomes available on YouTube, and if anyone is interested to hear more from Mark, we'll provide, we'll make that connection. Thanks again to everyone for joining the show, and we will see you next week.

Mark Demeny: Alright, have a great day out there. Thanks.

Chris Bryce: Okay. Ciao.