Erica Perng is the Senior Director of Corporate Communications at Jmac client Integrate, an industry leader in precision demand marketing. She’s provided excellent PR and communication services across a variety of industries, including real estate tech, biotech, and brain training. We spoke with Erica on her background, her relationship with Jmac, and the rapidly changing world of B2B marketing.
Talk A Bit About Yourself And Your Background
I’ve been in PR for a little over 20 years. I started out interning at this agency called Middleberg in New York, worked in New York in PR for four years, then moved to San Francisco. I was working on a lot of biotech pharma PR, and after that I went in-house to Blue Shield of California, then worked at a bunch of different startups in health tech. I worked at Lumosity, which is a brain training company, for several years, and then moved over to B2B marketing and spent some time at Demandbase, a real estate tech company called Qualia, and now I’m at Integrate. I’ve been at Integrate for about two and a half years and it’s been really great.
How Have You Worked With Jmac?
I met John at Middleberg, and it was a really special group of people. Everyone was friends and it was super fun; it was the perfect agency to be at in your 20s or even early 30s. And that’s where I learned what PR was. Back then we were faxing press releases and doing a lot of phone pitches, which no one really does anymore. There was no social media. It was a different PR landscape, but it was a great place to learn the foundational elements. And John was great. We worked on a lot of fun consumer consumer websites. I started working with Jmac at Integrate about two and a half years ago. He’s a great partner—he definitely gets PR and has a whole wealth of experience at agencies and in-house. I always felt we were on the same page when we talked through strategy. Outside of business, he moved from New York to San Francisco 10 years ago and we’ve kept in touch. I still see John here and there for coffee or lunch.
What Career Accomplishment Are You Most Proud Of?
I don’t know if there’s one accomplishment I can pinpoint. Lumosity, my first tech PR job that sort of straddled health and tech, made me realize data can tell a really powerful story, and how many different avenues there are when it comes to corporate communications in tech. At Lumosity we pioneered “Smartest Cities”: we aggregated our data and figured out where people had the highest Lumosity gameplay statistics. So that was kind of a light bulb moment.
To this day I work with a fair amount of surveys. At Integrate, we just did a B2B marketing budget survey to better understand the landscape. I was a sociology major in college, so things like that are always really interesting to me. But apart from that, it’s been great to meet new people and connect at every organization I’ve worked at. And I think, especially in today’s remote world, it’s a little different. But I’ve met so many amazing people throughout my career. That’s one of the things I value most.
What Are Some Of The Most Notable Trends You’re Seeing In B2B Marketing?
As we found in our survey, there are so many economic headwinds and it’s a difficult time to be in B2B marketing. But B2B marketers are increasingly told to do more with less, and it’s kind of this impossible target. One of the biggest challenges B2B marketers face is the ability to use data to inform decisions and to measure performance. Still, 84% of marketers in our survey actually had a positive or neutral outlook about 2023. So there’s a lot of optimism despite all the challenges. In terms of trends, I think there’s really a need for clean, compliant data, especially in today’s world where privacy restrictions are changing all the time. We’re going to be in a cookieless world at some point in the next year or so. Ultimately, B2B marketers need better insights and better data, and they need to defend their spend.
Looking Ahead, Do You Have Any Predictions For The B2B Marketing Industry In 2023?
ABM and demand are increasingly converging. They have different technologies, but there’s some overlap, and increasingly ABM and demand teams sit in the same group. Forrester analysts have said that ABM is just good B2B marketing and in five years, ABM is not even going to be a category—it’s just going to be B2B marketing.
Also, everyone’s keeping an eye on ChatGPT and AI, and I think it’ll be really interesting to see how that shakes out. You can see the nefarious side of it, but you can also see how helpful it is. I had a friend who was going to Joshua Tree and she just asked ChatGPT to plan her itinerary for her. And I’ve used it personally as a way to kickstart ideas and get going. There’s a huge possibility for ChatGPT to change how we learn. Think about Wikipedia: you can go down a rabbit hole and learn a bunch of things just by clicking on the next link. And if you think back even 20 years ago, you weren’t able to do that; you had to use an encyclopedia. So I think in B2B marketing and in general, ChatGPT is going to change things immensely. There’s always some amount of skepticism with any new technology, but there’s optimism, too, of course, and so we just have to figure it out as we move forward.