Posted on by Vishnu Devarajan
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Lucio Ribeiro in starring role at Malaysian Marketing Conference & Festival 2024
02 Apr
He is one of the leading lights in AI in the global marketing space.
Lucio (pronounced luchio) is a marketing and strategic business consultant, lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Marketing at RMIT and Deakin University, public speaker and former founder and MD of digital agency theonlinecircle.com. He is also an adventurer, having gone from Buddhist temples in China to the heart of a humanitarian crisis in a refugee camp as a volunteer.
Lucio worked for McCann-Erickson, Lowe Lintas, MRM and Ogilvy. In 2011, he co-founded Online Circle Digital which he sold in 2019. Lucio has worked with clients like Mercedes-Benz APAC, P&G, MINI, Renault, Chevrolet, Vicinity Centres Retail, Target Australia, Unilever, MasterCard, Mondelez, Parmalat, Kraft Foods, Schweppes, Purina/Nestle, Cadbury, AGL Energy, and Cadbury NZ and The Warehouse Group NZ.
He graduated in Law, with an MBA and Certificate in Psychology, Game Theory (Stanford) and Artificial Intelligence (MIT). He is a lifelong alumni of The Marketing Academy. During his career, Lucio was elected by public vote as one of the top 100 most influential Online Marketers in the world by Marketing Today and has judged international awards like AME, MB Awards and the NY Festival.
Lucio is Advertising Week’s Australian ambassador, having gone as a speaker on a world tour with the largest advertising and marketing event in the world.
Lucio is also a top billed personality at the SXSW (South by Southwest) Festival in October. The iconic SXSW event is a tool for creative people to develop their careers by bringing together people from around the globe to meet, learn and share ideas. It champions innovation, creativity, tech and collaboration. The 2023 event drew more 100,000 attendees.
Last year, Seven tapped one of Australia’s most respected digital marketing innovators to overhaul the way the broadcaster engages with and retains viewers across its linear and digital ecosystem. Lucio is now Director of Digital Marketing & Innovation at Seven Network, and is also a Forbes Tech Columnist.
How do you classify AI in the marketing domain?
When comes to artificial intelligence, I like to categorise it in three big pillars. The first, I categorise into AdTech and MarTech. The second pillar is experience as a function of artificial intelligence. And the third pillar one is around data and insights.
What’s your main remit at Seven Network?
I explore generative AI around large language models that already exist in the business. I think there’s an immense opportunity to facilitate the viewer journey and discovery. If you think about what Netflix does, it is simple experiences around thumbnails with different emails that are matched to different users.
The technology is there and Seven has a huge amount of really great programs available. We just need to better facilitate the exploratory journey, the UX side of it.
On bouncing back…
There was a time I got clinically depressed and got very close to suicide. It was a dark time in life. And then again, as I guess, as you go through the darkness, as you go through the hell, you better keep going. It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
I’m a Buddhist and I love my spirituality. I am also someone who is still learning and still scared of the things I don’t know. But I observe my own darkness for someone else, and how I can bring light to the darkness foofr someone else and in the process get illuminated myself.
What advice would you give marketers who might not have made this level of peace that you’ve made at this stage of their careers?
I think we need to define things, to at least know what we don’t need to do. I decided to start defining things. We will fail here and there. But as we understand what actually really matters we will begin to do better. I personally feel we need to have a consistent moral compass, instead of presenting different versions of oneself in different environments.
I encourage younger professionals to find their own path and not be afraid to face challenges, while also acknowledging that the work is never truly done.
Talk to us about AI.
I recently found a new paper in which authors surveyed three thousand published AI researchers. Their conclusion is the estimated date for when AI could beat humans at every possible task shifted from 2060 to 2047. If 2023 was the year of AI Landing, 2024 is the year of AI Expanding.
AI is no longer a buzzword; it’s at the core of revolutionary changes across industries and its tendrils are reshaping the future, led by a cohort of global innovators, from healthcare to media to finance.
Tell us about some of your life experiences….
I lived with some war refugees in Greece to find out what it felt to have nothing. Then I went to Cuba, as part of my research, to understand scarcity, isolation and resilience. It helped with my understanding of community, as most communities are now in decay.
I read somewhere that in America 30% of people don’t have one person they can call to share news. Can you imagine not having someone you can call to share news about yourself?
