William Tyree: Welcome to the Brand Intelligence Podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands.

William Tyree: We’ll dig into how great content marketing is the flywheel for growth and how to manage your brand compliance and governance while growing a business. I’m your co host, William Tyree, and today we’re taking a dive into the world of gambling and gaming. Joining me to discuss all things marketing automation and compliance will be Chris Yates, Head of Marketing Operations for Tabcorp.

William Tyree: All right, Chris. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s just a pleasure to have you. 

William Tyree: We like to ask our guests to tell us about their theme song. So imagine that you’re going out to give a keynote speech or something like that. What’s that song that you would have rolling? 

Chris Yates: Yeah. So maybe a song that would describe me or the way I like to work, or maybe a motto would be Paul Kelly’s song From Little Things, Big Things Grow. I’ve probably been in operations management most of my career, either as a manager leading teams or as a consultant. I’ve seen so many examples where significant operational improvements have been seen.

Chris Yates: And in nearly all of those cases, they’ve started very small, and they’ve built slowly over a period of time and grown into something really significant. We often look for big fixes or, immediate success, but I think big things can happen in business or in the process when you start small and you try to focus on being better than you were yesterday and for a prolonged period of time, and before you know it, you look back and marvel What’s been achieved.

Chris Yates: So yeah, I guess what motivates me every day when I come to work is to try to make the place where I work better and then it was yesterday and hopefully after a period of time, the results are significant.

William Tyree: That’s awesome. I love it. It’s a great pick and reminds me of, just a little improvements. Have you read atomic habits

Chris Yates: I haven’t.

William Tyree: That might be? That might be a great book. I love it personally. A bunch of people on our team have actually read it and it’s about it’s exactly what you’re talking about in terms of it’s about just 1 percent improvement every day on little things.

William Tyree: Yeah.

Chris Yates: It works a lot of times. Sometimes you do need to buy a piece of software or make a big change, but often, the big significant improvements can be made by 1 percent it is every day for a long time.

William Tyree: Yeah, 100%. Awesome. Good. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what TabCorp does for those unfamiliar? And then I’d love to hear more about your role.

Chris Yates: Yeah Tabcorp’s a wagering company, sports betting company so my role as head of marketing operations is pretty varied, but part of it is managing the end to end approvals process for all our marketing activity so the marketing team is pretty big at Tabcorp. We’ve got well over 60 people with various teams and various functions, so I liaise with all the various marketing teams as well as our regulatory teams as well as the legal team.

Chris Yates: To show everyone knows what we can and we can’t do. Everyone’s trained, we’ve got good processes in place, to show we’re, to ensure we’re compliant with what we need to do in our regulatory requirements. So yeah, that’s a big part of what I do.

William Tyree: Awesome. And within marketing operations that can mean a lot of different things, a lot of different people, are you basically, helping the marketing team and the brand team? Be more efficient through like the martech stack and things like that. What’s the scope of that at Tabcorp?

Chris Yates: Yeah, so I yeah, I call it herding the cat. Sometimes there’s lots of different teams doing different things and we’re all in different silos. So I try to get people to connect, try to work in a streamlined process. So we’re all working in a unified manner with the same priorities and the same, working together.

Chris Yates: Yeah, so a bit of the Martech stack a bit of working in ways of working and operational excellence type of things. But yeah, quite a varied role.

William Tyree: Awesome I love marketing operations as a field Personally, I love rev ops as a field as well I think it’s fascinating to hear how people get into it. I’ve seen everything from, I’ve seen a lot of entry level sales reps, actually, they get into it, they start working with Salesforce before you know it, they’re start, they start like figuring out how to integration between Salesforce and other things works.

William Tyree: And then the next thing, they’re in marketing ops or they’re in a rev ops or things like that. I’ve also had a bunch of people that started with me On my various marketing teams as say in a content role, or maybe they were content manager or writer or something. And then, maybe the ops person goes on vacation.

William Tyree: They’re like, oh, gosh, I got to figure out like this integration between Salesforce and HubSpot or whatever. Before you know it, they’re like, Hey, I think this is where I need to live. How, what’s your story? How did you actually get into marketing ops?

Chris Yates: Yeah, my background is operations management, ran lots of big teams over the years doing different things. I was a management consultant. I’m focusing on operations for 7 or 8 years. Yeah, so I started with TabCorp 5 years ago. No marketing background, no wagering necessarily background.

Chris Yates: But I guess my how I influence the team is my operations trying to get everyone organized. I guess you’ve got a lot of people in marketing, they’re creative, they’re might necessarily be process driven all the time. Yeah, there’s lots of different ways you can contribute into a team. And yeah, I’d try to do my part.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between Chris Yates and William Tyree…