To mark the first anniversary of FLYDE Talks, Paco Herranz, Founder and CEO of FLYDE, brought together for the first time in a single session the five experts who appeared on the program throughout its inaugural year. Andrés Azpilicueta (digital marketing expert), Luis Serrano (Head of Growth, Real Madrid CF), Víctor Moreno (Data Scientist, TomTom), Álvaro Pariente (Founder and CEO, BEOC9) and Enrique Miralda (digital strategy expert, FLYDE) sat down together to speak frankly about what the marketing and data sector has been debating for twelve months and has yet to resolve.
The session was structured around two thematic roundtables. The first, with Andrés, Víctor and Álvaro, focused on AI, data and measurement. The second, with Luis and Enrique, addressed customer strategy and the gap between what companies say about retention and what they actually do. The event closed with a rapid-fire question round for all five guests.
What follows is a summary of the most relevant conversations from the session.
AI AS AN AMPLIFIER, NOT A MIRACLE NOR A THREAT
The first question of the session was direct: is the current wave of AI making teams move faster, or is it generating chaos? The answer from Víctor Moreno, Data Scientist at TomTom, was equally direct: it depends on how you use it.
Víctor introduced the concept of workslop: work that generates more work than it resolves. The problem is not the tool but how it is used. Delegating to AI the tasks we do not want to do, without reviewing the output, is exactly the pattern that produces generic content, incorrect data and poorly grounded decisions.
"AI is like alcohol. It amplifies your character. If you are chaotic, AI will make you more chaotic. And at the other extreme, if you are very conservative, it will scare you. It is very important to be aware of that and use it accordingly."
Andrés Azpilicueta, digital marketing expert, added an editorial dimension: on LinkedIn there is an ever-growing volume of content that reeks of synthetic output. The democratization of AI has not democratized quality. It has multiplied the volume of generic content. The solution is not to avoid using it, but to personalize it with your own voice and judgment.
Álvaro Pariente, Founder and CEO of BEOC9, connected this argument to the data layer: AI amplifies what you already have. If what you have is disorganized, it amplifies that disorganization. The companies seeing real differentiation are those that first structured their data and then applied the technology.
“If we have the same tool as any competitor and we use it the same way, we will not differentiate ourselves. Companies that are approaching it from the data side, harmonizing that data and making it available to a good AI model, are the ones creating real competitive advantage.”
AI IS NOT PROGRAMMED FOR SILENCE
One of the most important nuances of the session came from Víctor, who put on the table a reality that many of us encounter every day: AI is not programmed for silence. If you ask it for a number, it will give you a number, even if that number is incorrect.
“Companies using AI need to put their data to work. And there needs to be a clear culture around how to use it. If you ask AI to give you a number of customers, it will give you a number, because it is biased towards giving you answers. You have to make sure you verify it and use it appropriately. It is like when politicians use statistics to say what they want: a number can always be given, but which one is correct depends on the context.”
Álvaro flagged a related operational risk playing out in many organizations: employees who, in the absence of clear policies, are using public AI tools with private company or client data, with no security framework in place. Data governance is no longer just a GDPR issue.
MEASUREMENT AND ATTRIBUTION: THE PROBLEM NOBODY CAN SOLVE
Andrés has spent years at the intersection of measurement, attribution and marketing investment decisions. His diagnosis: measurement is going to keep getting more complex as new channels emerge and as practically every consumer communication channel becomes transactional.
There is a structural problem that persists: different measurement tools do not produce the same data. Google Analytics says you generated six sales and Adobe says four. That gap is not new, but it has widened with the rollout of Google Analytics 4 and changes to Chrome’s cookie policy. Making investment decisions based on data with that level of uncertainty is equivalent to optimizing against a reality that does not exist.
“Now is a good moment to take two steps back, reinforce the mature channels, understand the gaps we sometimes have in measurement between platforms, and at the same time start experimenting with the new channels, like social commerce or traffic coming from an LLM.”
Víctor added that the way teams interact with attribution data is going to change fundamentally. The typical weekly PowerPoint report that each department presents to the management committee with its own numbers will probably disappear.
“That PowerPoint report presented weekly will no longer exist as such. Instead there will be an agent, an interface you query, and not only do you get the number, you also get information and detail, breakdown by department, by source."
HOW TO AVOID COMMON MISTAKES DURING IMPLEMENTATION
One of the most practical questions of the session was direct: of all the data and AI projects you are seeing, which one would you shut down? The three experts on the first panel agreed on the diagnosis.
The most common mistake: thinking too big
“What I encounter most is thinking too big. Trying to do many use cases at once. I want an attribution project, I want to automate manual tasks, I want personalization, and you try to put ten or fifteen things into a single tool. I would avoid doing too many at once. Start with one, measure the ROI, measure usage, measure adoption, and when you are ready, move to the next."
The strategic mistake: the "Big Bang" implementation
“This is a bad year for a Big Bang implementation. Specifying everything, writing two hundred pages of requirements, waiting for the miracle to happen in two and a half years when the platform is ready. The sprint mentality is excellent: rapid initiatives of one month, one and a half months maximum to solve one specific use case, measure the impact, then move to the next,”
The security mistake: opportunism without governance
“I am a strong believer in cobbler, stick to your last. If I have a CRM I use for client relationship management and I have my leads, it is very easy to take a cloud service, take OpenAI, connect it via API and suddenly go to my cloud, ask it questions, and have it access my data. For me that is opportunism. You are delegating security and relationship work to an LLM. It is fine to connect them, but you have to be careful about what you are compromising,”
RETENTION VS. ACQUISITION: THE IMBALANCE THAT PERSISTS
The second roundtable shifted register entirely. Luis Serrano, Head of Growth at Real Madrid CF, and Enrique Miralda, digital strategy expert at FLYDE, addressed the classic question: why does 70% of marketing investment still go to acquisition when it is five times more profitable to retain an existing customer?
For Enrique, the imbalance is not irrational but structural. Advertising platforms live off acquisition investment. Once the customer is yours, once it is your data and your responsibility, the platforms no longer have as much to gain.
“There is enormous pressure, and it seems like there is more business or a lot of momentum around acquisition. Once the customer is yours, the advertising industry obviously no longer has as much of a role.”
Luis added the dimension of internal incentives: in many companies success is measured by how many new people come in, not by how many come back.
“Getting someone to come once is marketing. Getting them to want to come back is business. Which do you want, marketing or business? That is the key."
WHO IS IN CHARGE OF CUSTOMER STRATEGY?
Paco asked Enrique about his book, in which he proposes the role of Chief Customer Strategy Officer. His central argument: if a company’s main asset is its customers, why is there nobody in the organization whose sole responsibility is to understand them and protect them throughout their entire lifecycle?
“The main asset of any company is its customers. Everything revolves around that. But in practice, marketing has one picture of the customer, CRM has another, loyalty has another. Each has its own mission and they are not always operating under the same strategy. What I have always missed, and why I wrote the book, is a role that reports to senior leadership with the sole mission of understanding the customer in depth across their entire lifecycle, and coordinating with all the departments that interact with them to ensure a coherent experience."
Luis described how Real Madrid has addressed this challenge through the Growth function, and how Enrique’s argument resonates with his own experience.
"Trying to look after the customer from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave, improving their experience, taking them where they want to go rather than where we want to push them, I find that absolutely fundamental."
HYPERPERSONALIZATION: REAL PROMISE OR A MIRAGE?
The conversation between Luis and Enrique moved towards one of the most repeated topics in marketing and one of the least executed: hyperpersonalization. Luis was honest: the goal is one-to-one, but they are still far from it.
"What we do is put that user at the center and try to reach ‘one fan, one experience'."
Enrique added the argument he has been making for years: any company, regardless of what it sells, can turn customers into fans if it genuinely cares about them.
“You have to try to turn your customers into fans. Why would I become a fan of someone who sells luggage or shoes? Because of the quality of the product, how they treat me, the prices, the service. The big challenge is having a genuine commitment from the top to deliver real value to customers, and for that to permeate downwards. That is what makes the difference."
THE FINAL ROUND OF QUESTIONS
The session closed with three rapid-fire rounds for all five guests.
What is the piece of advice or phrase you repeat to yourself most often?
“Try, iterate and share. The person who knows most about AI is the one who knows best how to use it, not the one who knows most about it.”
“The customer is always talking to us, even when they say nothing. Through their behavior, where they click, where they subscribe.”
"Value, value, value. ROI, ROI, ROI. The number of AI use cases is so vast you can easily get lost. From start to finish: what value does it bring to the company, to the employee, to the customer.”
“Apply judgment. AI is a very good employee, but I have to work harder at being a better manager. The judgment about how I want things to happen is still mine.”
“Do not stop learning how to use AI. You do not need to be an expert in all the engineering behind it. You need to be a great user of AI.”
What question are you asking yourself that you have not yet been able to answer?
"Am I providing more value thanks to AI? More than I would without it and more than any other person could provide using AI?
“Am I using AI to do more things or to do things better? I am not sure they are the same.”
“Who is going to decide what happens with artificial intelligence? Depending on whose interests prevail, it could be something very good or something not so interesting.”
“The three pillars of innovation: how much value you create, how much you destroy, and how much you capture. A difficult balance to manage, but you need to be conscious of it.”
“Will we have reached AGI when we get there? Or will another wave come along and we will move on to something else? I leave it open.”
What would be your headline for this session?
“New conversion funnel: see, compare, ask AI, decide.”
“Let’s actually put the customer at the center.”
“Let the technology work for you.”
"How far will we go with all of this?"
“Do not put off until tomorrow what you can tokenize today.”
CONCLUSIONS
The anniversary session left a conclusion that cuts across both roundtables and applies regardless of sector or company size: problems with data, measurement and the customer are rarely technological problems. They are problems of organization, incentives and mental models.
Three ideas that came up repeatedly throughout the session:
- AI amplifies what you already have.
- Retention is business. Acquisition is marketing. As long as companies keep measuring success by how many new people come in, they will keep investing where it is most expensive and least profitable.
- Nobody owns the customer. Until there is a role with that explicit responsibility, data will remain scattered and customer strategy will remain a slide in a presentation.
HOW FLYDE CAN HELP
The conversations in FLYDE Talks reflect the same challenges we see every day with our clients: scattered data, unreliable attribution, customer strategies with no clear owner. FLYDE is the layer that connects those systems, unifies the customer profile and activates data in real time, without replacing the tools that are already working.
If you want to see how to apply these ideas in your company, contact us to schedule a demo.
