Team Spotlight: Lucas Piazza
Lucas is the Head of Marketing and Communications at Qloo where he supports commercial growth by building demand for the company’s AI-powered products. Lucas has worked across industries — from strategy consulting and DTC brands to ad tech and EV charging — and is recognized for his customer-first strategies, ability to simplify complex technologies, and emphasis on internal talent development. Prior to joining Qloo, Lucas played a key role in two successive acquisitions — Shell’s purchase of Volta, a dual EV charging and digital media network, and MNTN’s acquisition of QuickFrame, an AI-powered video production platform. Lucas currently lives in Brooklyn with his husband with whom he enjoys the city’s numerous culinary treasures.
Tell us how you got into marketing.
I love marketing because you get to apply theories of consumer psychology and behavioral economics day in and day out. If you’ve ever been pitched by a software company, you’ve probably seen a pricing slide that has a high tier, a middle tier, and a low tier. And there’s this theory called arbitrary coherence, which states that by putting a really high price on a slide or on a menu, the other options automatically feel so much more affordable. And customers will more naturally gravitate towards them.
What are you most excited to get to work on at Qloo?
Qloo is built on this foundation of a super-intelligent engine called Taste AI. And there are so many different ways for customers to take advantage of that. For example, it can power better personalized recommendations like Michelin Guides is using. It can power better ad targeting like JCDecaux. And it can really fuel and power more human generative AI experiences. I’m thrilled about the opportunity to tell those stories and prove Qloo’s value.
What is a lesson you’ve learned in your professional life that you’re excited to bring to Qloo?
All marketing starts with understanding the customer. But I find that in B2B marketing in particular, there’s a tendency to boil down value propositions into oversimplified, hey, we grow revenue or we cut costs. But in reality, B2B buyers are far more nuanced than that. So it’s really important to keep my ear to the ground and stay on top of what our customers’ pains and needs are. There are a number of different ways you can do this as a B2B marketer. You can devour the headlines on a daily basis. You can continue to go to conferences and trade shows and understand the topics and trends that are on our customers’ minds. You can stand up an advisory council, go on ride-alongs with the salespeople, or listen to gong recordings in your spare time.
Why do you think the intersection of culture and AI is crucial in the world today?
There are so many generative AI tools popping up, and they’re incredible, but I find that they provide really a first draft and not a personalized output for users. And a company like Qloo can really help power more individualized experiences that can create a lot more value. Let me give you an example. I’m in the midst of planning a honeymoon to Thailand, and we turned to a chatbot to develop an itinerary. And the output was incredible. It was robust, and it happened in under a second, but it felt very generic. Now… If that large language model had been trained on Qloo’s data, for example, it would have better understood me and my husband’s preferences and given us a much more detailed, nuanced itinerary that we would have enjoyed much more.
What are some of your cultural tastes that people may not suspect about you?
I grew up in a family that did 18th-century Revolutionary War reenacting, which means I have a huge love and passion for history and old homes. My favorite menswear brand is out of the UK and it’s called Percival. My green car is a green electric Mini Cooper Countryman and I love any fragrance that contains bergamot.