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[00:02] Myrna Gönnemann: Hello and a warm welcome to a new podcast episode of Business Insights. In this podcast, the TYPO3 team talks with exciting guests from the community, agencies, partner companies, and projects about topics that move us as an open-source system and as a community. I am Myrna Gönnemann, and I work in Success Management at TYPO3 GmbH. In this episode, we are addressing the question of how marketing departments can keep track and achieve measurable success in times of enormous complexity and constantly new channels. To discuss this, I have a special guest with me today who has been shaping the digital transformation of the agency world for over thirty years: Hans Piechatzek from our partner agency move:elevator. Hans is the founder and managing director of move:elevator and, together with his team, developed the Wave Principle, a strategic framework for modern and efficient marketing. I spoke with him about why we urgently need to say goodbye to pure gut feeling and why projects often fail because important stakeholders are integrated too late. We look at how to systematically minimize risks, how data provides real clarity, and why artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the role of agencies and marketing teams. Join Hans and me as we discuss the Wave Principle, bringing more clarity to marketing chaos, and the role of AI for the future. Enjoy listening! Hans, it's great to have you with us today. Thank you for being here.

[01:39] Hans Piechatzek: Thank you for the invitation.

[01:41] Myrna Gönnemann: You're very welcome. I'd say let's dive right into the topic. You are quite proud of the fact that you work with the Wave Principle. That sounds great, but to put it differently: What problem are you actually trying to solve with it? And why should our listeners pay close attention right now?

[01:59] Hans Piechatzek: That's a relatively quick story. I think almost all marketing departments are familiar with the problem we solve. Over the past few years, we've noticed a fundamental shift in marketing. For a long time, marketing was just the department for "pretty pictures." People made annual plans, two- or three-year plans, had their media mix, and just pushed things through. In the last five years, maybe a bit longer, that has changed. Marketing today has become much more complex. We have more channels, constantly new formats, and new platforms. Marketing departments all face the same issues: they have an explosion of tasks to take care of, but no explosion in budget and certainly not in staff. So people ask themselves: How are we supposed to manage all this? How can we master these countless tasks? We said a solution was needed. Above all, we want to operate as partners on equal footing. We wanted to find a way to do structured marketing together with our clients, move forward, and achieve measurable results. That's how we developed the Wave Principle.

[03:19] Myrna Gönnemann: Could you explain to me exactly what the Wave Principle means, what it is, and what its core content is?

[03:27] Hans Piechatzek: Sure. This Wave Principle is actually a package that we retroactively wrapped around the way we work. As I just hinted, over the last five years, we realized that things were changing and that we, as an agency, needed a different operating system for collaborating with our clients. So we developed methods for ourselves, which we ultimately summarized in the Wave Principle. In short, WAVE is an acronym:

• W stands for "Weg mit den Annahmen" (Away with assumptions)

• A stands for "Alle an einem Tisch" (Everyone at one table)

• V stands for "Verständnis durch Daten" (Understanding through data)

• E stands for "Entfesseln mit KI" (Unleashing with AI)

If you'd like, I can dive into the individual points.

[04:19] Myrna Gönnemann: I'd love that. Let's start right away with the W.

[04:21] Hans Piechatzek: Knowledge over assumptions. What's behind that? We noticed that when working with companies, many campaigns, websites, and concepts are built on anecdotal experiences. Someone asks, "What do the customers like?" and a hand goes up: "Well, five years ago we had a customer who wanted this," or "We once did that, and then the following happened." Entire strategies are often built on these kinds of assumptions. The funny thing is: we have a very strong team that exclusively does performance marketing. In performance marketing, as the name suggests, everything is measured. This performance marketing team was the first to realize that the assumptions entire campaigns were built on were often wrong. You'd launch the campaigns and see that they weren't being clicked at all. Meanwhile, other things we tried out resonated much more strongly with the target audience. That's when we realized that these assumptions just aren't good. So, we decided to build a whole toolkit of research methods—whether it's interviews, observing users doing various things, or market research—to move away from anecdotal experiences and assumptions, toward real insights from the target group. We found that we achieve much better results this way. That's why we advocate to clients that, even if you think you know everything, you should still validate all ideas and concepts with real people to see if they actually work. And that's really my first tip: don't base things on assumptions; verify everything with real people before you fully implement it.

[06:22] Myrna Gönnemann: Hearing that, when you mention things like market research, my immediate thought is naturally: oh god, so many resources have to flow into that to actually implement it strategically. But on the other hand, if you make the wrong assumptions, that also burns a massive amount of resources in the long run.

[06:40] Hans Piechatzek: Absolutely, but you shouldn't overestimate the effort required. Our research methods start with very small packages. For example, if we are building an app or a website, we start with small packages where we say, once the concepts are ready, let's have them tested by five users. There are statistical methods in usability research which show that if you run it by five people, you've already identified potentially 80 percent of all problems. In that respect, we start with very small packages, and in our offers and calculations, these are not large line items. We aren't talking about 50,000, 60,000, or 100,000 euros, which people used to spend on market research. So I can take that worry away. Starting small still brings a whole lot.

[07:39] Myrna Gönnemann: I can easily imagine that. Especially, as I said, when you think about building entire campaigns on false assumptions, they might end up being worthless in the worst-case scenario. Sure, you always get some learnings out of the process itself, even if the assumptions were wrong. But it's still a massive drain on resources, financially and especially in terms of working hours, that just goes down the drain for wrong assumptions. And that is definitely something you have to prevent somehow.

[08:06] Hans Piechatzek: Exactly.

[08:07] Myrna Gönnemann: To move right along before we get stuck on the W, would you explain the A to me?

[08:13] Hans Piechatzek: Sure, so this A stands for "Everyone at one table," and it's meant metaphorically. The problem we solve with this is quite different or not as obvious. In the past, it was often the case that you did projects where you might get a briefing from the marketing department, you create concepts, present them, they get approved, the whole thing gets rolling, and at some point, someone in the company raises their hand and says, "No, we can't do it that way," or "We've already tried that three times. Absolutely not," or "You forgot something important." In any case, someone suddenly throws a wrench in the gears. Funnily enough, I had an onboarding session today with a new employee, and I presented our Wave Principle. She said, without naming names, "Funny, you should definitely present that to my old employer," because exactly these things always happened—where the management or the level below, just before everything was ready, said, "No, not like that, please." So, what do we do about it? We bring all stakeholders to the table. For concepts, kick-offs, and also for our strategy meetings—we regularly hold so-called "Move-forward meetings" with clients, where we follow a specific process to bring everyone together and do a review, a retro, and also look ahead. At these meetings, we bring all relevant stakeholders to the table, and then we clarify three things with them.

The first question is: Why are we actually sitting here? What problem are we actually trying to solve? This question sounds so mundane, and you would think anyone could answer it. But the truth is, you suddenly have sales, marketing, the CEO, the product manager, and everyone has a completely different understanding of why we are sitting here today. Clarifying this point can take one or two hours, but it's simply vital that everyone is in agreement on what problem we want to solve. Then we ask the next question: Okay, what is the target state we want? Where do we want to go? And it's the same story there. In rare cases, it goes quickly. Often, these are real battles. Once we know where we stand, why we are sitting here, and where we want to go, we co-create the path forward in the third step. We define a common path. When you manage that, you get such clarity in the project, and we also generate a sense of optimism, where clients often tell us it's rare in their company that everyone actually wants the same thing. In our experience, speed in implementation doesn't come from pushing harder; speed comes from clearing barriers out of the way and ensuring that everyone is pulling in the same direction. That's why we say bring everyone to the table, clarify these things together, and then projects move faster, easier, and are simply more fun.

[11:22] Myrna Gönnemann: I can definitely see that. Right now, I know many people don't like the term "vision," but when everyone collectively knows why they are doing what they are doing and where they are headed, it's always a good foundation, a good baseline to build upon. That's actually something we frequently notice in our collaborations: there are just so many different departments you work with, and everyone has their own goals that they set, their own strategies. Granted, they are linked to the company's overall success. But sitting down and consciously making it clear that this is where we want to go together is incredibly important.

[12:02] Hans Piechatzek: Exactly. With the whole vision thing, Helmut Schmidt really left his mark with his old line: "Anyone who has visions should go to the doctor." I think the quote is incredibly funny, and that's why I cited it for a very long time, but I actually think it's quite harmful because I see it exactly the way you do. It's so crucial to have a common goal, and whatever word you give that thing doesn't matter. But if you have a direction that everyone is running toward, then it works.

[12:29] Myrna Gönnemann: Then I'd say let's move right along to the V.

[12:31] Hans Piechatzek: Alright, so V stands for "Understanding through real numbers." And there again, what's behind it? It's relatively simple. A few years ago, we noticed that marketing directors were increasingly asking, "What's the return on investment?" At first, we were like, "What?" and then they said, "Well, we need to know what we are spending the money on," and so on. Then we asked back, "Okay, what have you done so far? What return on investment have you seen up until now?" And they said, "Well, we don't know yet. We want to find out somehow." We realized that on one hand, there is a great longing for measurability—everyone wants to know which measure brings what results and, above all, whether their money is well invested. But on the other hand, there is very little there. There is very little data, people rarely work with data, and there's very little interpretation or derivation, even though life could be so beautiful. If I run five or ten different measures and can say in hindsight which one is truly effective and which one brings nothing at all, I could shift my budgets. I could do only what yields results and just drop the other things. But the data for that is often missing. We said years ago that we wanted to change that. We committed to becoming a KPI-driven organization, meaning we really try to measure everything possible.

We did that with Excel at first. We always tried to scrape data together, dump it into spreadsheets, and so on. We quickly realized that evaluating the effectiveness of measures brings immense value, but we also found that it's a very tedious business. So, we started using online tools like Looker Studio, Power BI, and so on, connecting other data sources with connectors so that, ideally, the data flows automatically into them, or at least the important parts. That's how we started building dashboards—Business Intelligence dashboards, as they say today—where our clients and our teams can always look in and see, okay, we just ran a flight of a performance campaign or a social media campaign, and we can immediately see: did it bring traffic to the website? Did it generate leads? Nowadays, we try to motivate clients to run all of this through HubSpot or similar systems, rather than just having emails sent somewhere, so we can run reports there and track all the sales stages. That way, we can truly say: which channels did the customers come through? Where are we converting? Which target groups do we need to address? I think what becomes clear, and why we say "understanding through real numbers," is that we are eliminating this gut feeling. My colleague Christoph always says we replace "gut-opedia" with real numbers. We look at what is actually happening and manage to do more of the things where money is well spent, and the things where you see nothing is coming out—you can still say it's good for humanity or good for the image, but if you can't find good justifications for it, you should simply stop doing it.

[16:01] Myrna Gönnemann: That's definitely true. When you mention Return on Investment, I immediately think of the focus on customer acquisition. But what about the whole topic of customer relationship management and Customer Lifetime Value? How do you handle that?

[16:17] Hans Piechatzek: Relationship management is a very important topic for us too, and it is inherently embedded in this Wave Principle. As I said earlier, we do these "Move Forwards" with clients, trying to do them four times a year. Not all clients participate—some only do two a year, and we even have clients who say they only do one Move Forward a year. But what we do there is take a whole day, and on that day, we leave the daily business behind. We don't talk about headlines, we don't talk about images, we don't talk about anything operational. What we do is a review. That means we look at how we performed over the last period (three months, six months) and what results we achieved. We look at the quality of our results, look at everything we produced, and give each other honest feedback.

The second part is a retro: how did the collaboration actually work? This part was actually the hardest—going into a retro with clients. We all like to talk about being on equal footing, but the truth is, we are the service provider and someone else is the funder. When we had criticisms, our team sometimes needed a lot of courage to say, "For us, it's a problem that you never keep your deadlines," or "You just don't show up to meetings," or "You don't approve things." You have to build up the nerve to say that first. But we learned to do it. The interesting thing is, while you always think the client is on top and the agency has to bow down a bit, we noticed that many clients find it just as hard to achieve complete clarity and address where the shoe pinches. Our clients had to learn that too. So we created a safe space where we can talk completely openly about the collaboration several times a year. Then the Move Forward continues—we look at what current problems the client has, and then we sharpen the strategy. So it's a strategic meeting. Then we plan the next period, the next three to six months, look at what measures to take, prioritize them, and so on. But why am I telling you all this? You asked about customer retention. These Move Forwards, where we create this clarity and then a commitment to common goals—I believe that is the most important tool for customer retention we have. The exciting thing about it is that I think we only lost one or two clients last year. Our agency has been around for 25 years, and our very first client from 25 years ago—the IKK, a large health insurance fund—has stayed loyal to us for 25 years. I think that says a lot about how we see customer retention and how we live it.

[19:28] Myrna Gönnemann: I find that super, super fascinating. And finally, the E.

[19:33] Hans Piechatzek: Yes, that is "Unleashing with AI" or empowerment, whatever you want to call it. You have to say, for me, this is the massive topic because our industry is changing right now like never before. Look, I've been in the profession for thirty years—I'm an old man, right? And in those thirty years, for twenty-five years, relatively little happened. The biggest thing I experienced was the switch from QuarkXPress in design to InDesign. That was really the thing. Or when Adobe came around. But otherwise, not much really happened. Everything was relatively slow, relatively leisurely, and now the elephant in the room is simply AI.

[20:15] Myrna Gönnemann: Yes.

[20:16] Hans Piechatzek: And I always say, AI is not the future; AI is now. You probably know the quote from Kai-Fu Lee, one of the greats from Silicon Valley. Right at the launch of ChatGPT, he said: "AI will not replace humans, but humans who use AI will replace humans who do not." We at move:elevator say: AI will not replace companies, but companies that use AI will replace companies that do not. In that sense, we want to be the company that uses AI better than others. We want to be able to use AI better and achieve better results than our clients because we say that as long as we achieve better results, we have a reason to exist. That's why AI is the massive topic for us. We've been in our own AI transformation for three years now. At first, we thought it was just an internal company thing—overhauling our processes, expanding our toolkit, and so on. But we notice that AI is increasingly filtering into client projects, and we are starting to build the first tools for our clients through agents, custom GPTs, or whatever, because our clients also have a huge desire to become faster and better with AI. On one hand, and on the other hand—and this is also part of the truth—clients also pay us to make ourselves a bit obsolete, because then they don't have to give us assignments anymore. Of the two clients who left last year, one was actually a case where we built AI solutions for them, and then at some point they said, "Great, thank you! Now we can do what we used to give to you ourselves. Thanks, bye!"

[22:08] Myrna Gönnemann: On one hand difficult, but on the other hand also a huge success to see that. I mean, sure, from an economic standpoint for you it's not, but it's still a case of you managing to create real value for the end customer in the end.

[22:20] Hans Piechatzek: You know what the truth is? I'll just say it, even if this is public. It was a case where we started with the AI tools and quickly thought, "Oh la la, they really know what they're doing." And with this client, we didn't manage to achieve better results with AI than they could themselves.

[22:40] Myrna Gönnemann: Wow. Thank you so much for that context. I would love to have you summarize it once more: What is the concrete benefit for your clients when you work with the Wave Principle? What do your clients get out of working with it?

[22:56] Hans Piechatzek: Well, I think if we are all completely honest, you just have to say that marketing is becoming more and more complex, also more volatile, more uncertain—the whole VUCA world topic. And it's also becoming increasingly difficult to really know what the right things to do are. I don't want to say that we can answer all these questions off the cuff with our Wave Principle. But we definitely bring a lot of clarity to the process. We bring speed to the process. We remove risks—remember, nobody raises their hand halfway through. That was exactly what the new employee said today: "Wow, that happened all the time with us." I said, "Amazing, it hasn't happened with us in ages." With our clients, we really don't experience projects where someone suddenly raises their hand and everything gets stopped. We don't know that anymore. And then, we set the course for the future with AI, and last but not least, we bring the tools so that our clients—at least those who really work with us according to the Wave Principle and are open to it, which not everyone is, but those who do—can say exactly what impact we achieve and what the cost per lead and everything else are at the end. All these KPIs are on the table, and that just makes the work in marketing... it removes uncertainty. It creates effectiveness and that good feeling that you can prove with numbers exactly what you come to work for every day and why you earn your salary, should someone higher up ever ask.

[24:35] Myrna Gönnemann: Is there that one specific moment in the collaboration with clients that you like best?

[24:41] Hans Piechatzek: Well, there isn't just one, because two come to mind immediately.

[24:44] Myrna Gönnemann: I'll gladly take two!

[24:45] Hans Piechatzek: Yeah, okay. So, what I find crazy every single time is when we start, when we onboard during the first kick-off meetings, this topic of assumptions is incredibly prominent. "No, no, we know, we know the customers want this, the customers want that." Then we map out something based on that, create a few alternative routes, and test them on real customers. When the feedback comes in, that is an incredibly powerful moment. When we show that we have these numbers, these results, this feedback from the target group—it's always an unbelievable aha moment. And the other one is this "everyone at one table" thing. I find that really intense too, because I notice it again and again: that question, "Why are we sitting here?" The temperature in the room really rises there, you know, because: "No, that's not true at all. We have to do this. No, you have no idea. Something else is much more important." And when the clarity is there, and at the end of this meeting you walk out with a clear plan, it just feels very, very good. In the feedback round, people often say exactly that. Just recently a client said, "This sense of optimism you generate here is rare in our company." And then you simply feel like you've created something great that day.

[25:59] Myrna Gönnemann: Definitely. You mentioned just a moment ago that your industry is in total upheaval right now. And that is exactly what we are noticing across the board here as well. I would love to hear if you would venture a prediction into the future, a look into the crystal ball, because I actually just recorded a podcast episode about exactly that topic—the transformation of the digital agency landscape and what agencies will look like in three years. But now I'd love to hear it from you. What do you think the entire agency world will look like in five years?

[26:32] Hans Piechatzek: Well, first of all, please send me the link to that podcast, I'd really love to hear it.

[26:37] Myrna Gönnemann: It's actually not online yet, but soon.

[26:39] Hans Piechatzek: That's why! But definitely send me the link, I'd be very interested. So, my theory, my look into the crystal ball: I believe that things will change dramatically. I think one thing coming our way is a market consolidation. We are already noticing it now. Over the past twelve months, we've received such incredible applications, great applications from people who would never have applied with us in the past. You could say that's because of our strong brand, because we've become stronger as an agency brand. But I think it also simply has to do with the fact that the market is in motion and that people are being laid off in many large agencies, which means more talent on the market. That's good for us as an employer, but of course, it's not nice at all for the people affected. And so you can already feel that things have started to slide.

I believe that what we did for the past five years—namely writing copy, programming, designing—we will increasingly outsource to AI tools. Not completely, but to an ever larger extent. For instance, with our developers, there are differences, but some people code so incredibly fast with AI already. Our SEO concepts are almost entirely—probably 80 percent—AI work. The knowledge lies in the prompts, and we even had the copy for our own website completely generated by AI. We had about an 80 percent time savings doing that. You have to picture that. So, everything we did in the past will decrease. On the other hand, other things will become more important. At move:elevator, we have the model of the competence pyramid, and it works like this: at the bottom of this pyramid, you have all the juniors, people who haven't been in the profession that long, who might not have a high level of specialization, or who can't handle as many tools. Generally, there are quite a lot of them. Then you specialize, gather experience, learn certain tools, and become an expert. That's the top of the pyramid, because there are very few truly great experts. We believe that AI will slowly nibble away at this competence pyramid from the bottom up. For the people at the bottom, who might only know how to do one thing that the AI can learn in a few minutes and then execute ten or a hundred times faster, it will probably become difficult. That's why we say that as an agency, but also each of us individually, we want to develop upward in this pyramid. That is the reason why we at move:elevator spend a lot of time and money to lift our people, processes, and everything else to the next level.

And now for the good news: I believe we will all be managers in the future, because what will be required is giving the AI the right briefings and then evaluating the quality of the output to see if it can be used. In that respect, I believe our competence will be—and now it gets really, really exciting. How do you achieve the best possible result with AI? In my opinion, you have three components. The first is the best context. You have to give the AI context. You have to say, "You are X, the issue is Y, the problem is Z, and so on." Then you have to develop the best prompt. And then you have to evaluate the result. You can't just take everything that comes out. You really have to say, "Okay, let's try it again like this, like that, and now this is really good." It's easy to say, "In the future, we'll all use AI." But the art lies in giving the AI the context, describing the task as precisely as possible, and then evaluating the content. I believe that will be our task in the future, and we are already noticing it now. It's always about gathering knowledge broadly first, then bringing it together, compressing it, and making it the baseline of the task. We will continue to do that, but then we will likely hand over more and more to the AI. Whether we will do 40 percent, 60 percent, or 80 percent of the tasks with AI in the future, who knows. But I am absolutely certain—I recently spoke with an agency CEO who said, "When the first client calls and says they are no longer working with us because we don't use enough AI, that's when I'll start dealing with the topic." I think by then, it's too late.

[31:44] Myrna Gönnemann: Yes, because AI is simply here to stay. You can feel however you want about it, but it's here, and it's a topic that is going to stay. I find your perspective on it quite fascinating because if you view AI as a tool that is used for routine tasks like writing text, creating images, or evaluating data—outsourcing those tasks to AI—it becomes an incredibly valuable, efficient tool. And for any agency, efficiency is a massive asset. Through that, you simultaneously have much more time, much, much more capacity for the important tasks like strategy or creative work.

[32:27] Hans Piechatzek: Exactly.

[32:27] Myrna Gönnemann: That often remains undiscussed, even though that is exactly the point. Dear Hans, wow, that was truly a super wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. I gained an incredible amount of insights. Thank you so, so much for being our guest today.

[32:43] Hans Piechatzek: I really enjoyed it too. Thank you.

[32:45] Myrna Gönnemann: Hopefully until next time.

[32:46] Hans Piechatzek: Alright. You'll send me the link.

[32:47] Myrna Gönnemann: Will do.

[32:48] Hans Piechatzek: Bye.

[32:49] Myrna Gönnemann: Bye.