Talks
I talk about personalization, experimentation, and how to craft experiences for humans that also achieve business goals. Usually, I speak to retail and consumer goods audiences, and it's often a mixed room: marketers who want the outcome, engineers who have to build it, and someone at the back quietly working out whether it was worth the money.
I'm best in a practitioner conversation. Let's talk about what worked, what didn't, and the journey that got us there. Dialog and questions are way better than scripts and slides.
What I talk about
Personalization
Everyone agrees it matters and almost nobody agrees what it is. The useful kind is behavioural: not who somebody is on paper, but what they have already done on your site, and whether your content is shaped to respond to any of it. Usually it is not, and that is a modelling problem rather than a software one.
Experimentation and optimization
Personalization without measurement is guessing with extra steps. What a program looks like when fewer experiences, better instrumented, beat a wall of variants nobody reads the results of.
AI and AI Actions
AI made content cheap to produce and expensive to trust. What breaks when a team can generate more in a week than it used to ship in a quarter, and nobody has settled who signs it off.
Bio & headshot
If you need these for a programme or a show page, take whichever fits. No need to ask.
Short bio
Gabriel Dillon is GTM Lead for Personalization at Contentful, now part of Salesforce, based in Oakland, California. He joined in 2020, left to run partnerships at Ninetailed, and returned when Contentful acquired it. Earlier he was Algolia’s first North America sales hire and co-founded ReadMe (Y Combinator W15).
Longer bio
I sell personalization software, which mostly means I spend the day talking about how personalization has let us down, why it's still definitely worth the squeeze, and why success must include user context, realtime signals, amazing content, and measurement of impact.
Most teams hear the word personalization and picture mail merge style {firstname}s scattered throughout some generic text. But it can be so much better: more obvious, easier to implement, and more useful. What do you offer a visitor on their third visit, or one who came in from a partner's site, or has been circling the same pricing page for a week? These are better questions than: how do we sync our data warehouse, can we model the audience accurately, or how do we publish a variant in the first place. Though those questions are pretty good, too...
I'm the GTM Lead for Personalization at Contentful, now part of Salesforce. I've worked here twice — once in partnerships, then again by way of an acquisition, and I've now been through one from both directions. Before that, I spent 4.5 years at Algolia, where for a while I was the only person selling in North America. Before that, ReadMe, which I co-founded and took through Y Combinator. Twelve years of selling technical products to people who are, quite reasonably, suspicious of salespeople.
I say I'm vaguely technical, or just a salesperson. Take your pick.
For forms
- Title
- GTM Lead, Personalization
- Company
- Contentful
- Location
- Oakland, California
Headshot
Download, 1200×1200 JPG
Enough for print at 300 dpi. Credit: Big Event Media.
Elsewhere