William Tyree: Welcome to the brand intelligence podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands.

I’m William Tyree. We’ll speak with Alex Lamascus today about “The New Automation Mindset”, a thought leadership program, that recently won a Brandie Award for Best Brand Campaign from a SssS company.

Alex is the Director of Thought Leadership at Workato. Alex, welcome to Brand Intelligence.

Alex Lamascus: Thanks so much, William. I’m super excited to be here and can’t wait to dive into all things brand and thought leadership.

William Tyree: And before we do that, we like to ask guests to give us a theme song. So if you were walking out on stage today to give a keynote address, what song would that be and why?

Alex Lamascus: Yeah, I think I’d probably pick a specific band and then anything within that category would work for me. There’s this band you may have seen a few years ago go viral on YouTube called Too Many Zoos. They’re this group that uses traditional jazz instruments like a baritone saxiphone, trumpet and drums to play what you’d consider maybe like dance or electronic beats.

And I think that’s pretty fun, right? It’s that blend of like traditional instruments, new modern creativity. I, it, and ultimately it just captures a unique vibe that I really like. So if I had to pick something, it’d probably be something from them. They’ve got a new cover out of a Weezer song.

That’s pretty good. You should go check it out.

William Tyree: Really?, I’m a huge Weezer fan, so I’m going to have to, what’s the song?

Alex Lamascus: The Hash Pipe.

William Tyree: Oh, my God. Okay. I totally have to check that. That’s awesome. One, I love that you picked a band that, that is heavy on baritone sax, because there’s not too many of those around these days. And also, I think it’s a great pick for you, because when I think about some of the work you do, including this brand campaign, it’s truly multichannel, it’s multichannel.

It’s unusual. You’re not doing everything that other people are doing. I feel like you’re playing, other people are playing, two dimensional checkers and you’re bringing like, many more dimensions to the board . So I think it’s a really great pick.

I love it. And as a Weezer fan, I can promise you that song will be on after my board meeting tonight.

Alex Lamascus: Excellent. It’s really good. You can find it on

William Tyree: Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Listen why don’t you tell us first about Workato? Obviously there are a big brand. I think a lot of people know them, but for those who don’t, what does Workato do?

And who does Workato help?

Alex Lamascus: Yeah. So we call Workato an enterprise orchestration platform. That means that we connect all of the people, applications, data, AI together in an organization to orchestrate processes. So it’s really for anyone, right? That can apply to any department, any part of the company. We’d like to say it, brings that enterprise grade power that IT needs but it has the speed and simplicity that business users like myself or like you or you know anybody outside of IT can also make use of it now for this show’s audience.

Maybe there’s more made up of marketers and people with an interest in brand a good example would be Snowflake Hillary Carpio, who leads ABM over there, she calls it her data activation platform. So like the whole engine that powered the ABM program behind her book, busting silos is basically, snowflake capturing all the data in the data warehouse, but then Workato activating that data and making use of it, and all the other technology tools that are in the marketing stack.

Yeah, that’s basically Workato in a nutshell. Cool. And it’s a really exciting place to work, right? We’re in an environment that in the nineties we might’ve called middleware, right? It might’ve been like old and boring, but in today’s world where companies are drowning with SaaS applications everywhere, we are stitching it all together and making it all make sense.

And I think that’s incredibly fun.

William Tyree: That is incredibly fun. Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think the mission of the company is really never been more relevant, right? I think to talk about to maybe hit on something that, from a person, Scott Brinker, that I think we’ll talk about in a minute, I love something that he came out with last year, which he said, yeah, there’s consolidation happening but more and more, it’s data aggregation, right?

And it’s about aggregating all that data and driving value to the whole business. And I think we’re caught. I was a really good example of making that happen. I love it and I love the description for marketers because, we all use so many tools to get things done. I think more and more, I am running into marketers that are saying, Hey, I was able to actually consolidate these seven things and did this one thing, but that doesn’t solve our data problem, right?

Data is still all over the place. And I love the fact that Workato actually activates all that data and makes it usable. It’s really cool.

Alex Lamascus: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think it’s like there’s all kinds of data that we really want access to in marketing, right? Like it’s not just. whatever we hope lives in the CRM. Often we find ourselves reaching for like product usage data or reaching for intent data that, is somewhere else.

And so I think having that ability to reach into any part of the organization to deliver marketing in the moments that matter, deliver content, deliver whatever it is a really powerful Powerful ability that most marketers would really like to have.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between William Tyree and Alex Lamascus…