The DDC Group’s CMO on Breaking the BPO Mold, the Emotional Intelligence of AI

In this edition of Beyond the Brief, we sit down with Madison Conway, Chief Marketing Officer at The DDC Group. Born into a family of graphic designers and raised on the science and art of brand storytelling, Madison has built a career that spans agency work, state-level global commerce, 5G brand strategy in telecom, and e-commerce partnerships at eBay. Now leading global marketing for a company in the midst of a sweeping transformation, she is tasked with one of the most nuanced challenges in B2B: repositioning a legacy outsourcing brand as a forward-thinking, AI-first operations powerhouse, without saying “AI” so much that nobody listens.

We discuss how The DDC Group unified a network of independently operating companies under a single global brand, why “benefit first, feature second” is more than a tagline, and how their agentic AI platform, DDC Evora™, is built with emotional quotient at its core. Madison also shares her philosophy on internal communications as a marketing function, the danger of the “me too game,” and what it really means to be global yet nimble.

Q: Madison, your path to CMO is not a straight line. You grew up in a family of artists, considered being an English major, and have worked across agencies, state government, telecom, and e-commerce. Help us understand your journey and how it led to your current marketing leadership role.

Madison: It would be easy for me to say I was born into it, and honestly, there is some truth to that. Both of my parents were in graphic design. My father’s career took off in creative and art direction at marketing agencies, and I grew up going with him to do competitive research. I remember taking a Kodak disposable camera to Walmart to photograph point-of-purchase displays because Target was his client. So from an early age, I was obsessed with the science and art of aesthetics, matching copy to imagery, leveraging color, and telling a story. As a middle schooler, I collected Coca-Cola advertisements. I just loved it.

When it came time for college, I entertained English, journalism, and social sciences. I was exploring everything except what I was probably always going to do. An advisor finally said, ‘Why don’t you take this writing for business communication class?’ I took it and immediately knew: the detour was over. I pursued communications, marketing, and media studies and eventually earned a master’s in integrated global communications, covering everything from multinational organizational communications and international public relations to cross-cultural marketing and storytelling.

The throughline is curiosity. Agency work taught me which industries and asset types I gravitated toward. Working in global commerce for the State of Georgia, where I actually introduced social media to the state for site selection and foreign direct investment, showed me the scale of what marketing can accomplish. Telecom taught me how to brand a movement, not just a product; we were selling 5G as a shift in how the world operates, not just the carrier behind it. And eBay showed me the ecosystem thinking behind partnerships and affiliate marketing. Every stop added a layer. By the time The DDC Group called me back in 2019, I had a toolkit I didn’t fully appreciate until I needed it.

Q: The DDC Group just completed a significant transformation, unifying what was previously a network of separate DDC companies into a single global brand. What did that look like from the marketing chair?

Madison: To be honest, I was thrilled. When our CEO came on board in April 2024 and announced the merger of all the DDC companies into a single entity, I knew we had a genuine opportunity to rebrand and become stronger together. Previously, you had DDC FPO, DDC OS, and a series of other DDC entities that were really a network, not one company. Now we are one company, one brand, with the global reach to back it up.

The internal structure now runs through distinct business units, each focused on a vertical: shipping, logistics, and travel; energy and utilities; retail, automotive, and diversified; BFSI; healthcare. Each unit has specialized leadership with deep domain expertise in that industry. For marketing, that means we serve almost as an internal agency. Each vertical has a head of marketing whose primary internal client is the Chief Business Officer for that vertical. Then at the global brand level, we work closely with the CEO, the EVP of Technology, and our Chief Capability Officer to make sure the brand is positioned consistently and powerfully, and that messaging cascades into the tactics each vertical activates.

What I love about it is that we go into conversations with trucking companies, energy providers, or retail brands and can genuinely say: we know your business processes, we know your pain points, and we are invested in your industry. That domain credibility is something larger competitors often can’t replicate. They offer a boxed solution. We roll up our sleeves.

Q: The DDC Group describes itself as an AI-first operations partner. But you have been deliberate about the framing as “benefit first, feature second.” Can you unpack that philosophy?

Madison: We are a services company that builds technology to deliver those services; that distinction matters. We are not selling AI for the sake of AI. When a client comes to us, we want to get to the bottom of their actual goal and then determine which combination of people, processes, and technology will achieve it. Sometimes AI plays a central role. Sometimes it comes into play in a way you would not expect. And sometimes the most impactful recommendation is not what you would lead with in a pre-packed pitch deck.

The donut shop analogy gets at it well. If you are a brilliant donut chef who has built a franchise, running the back office, accounts payable, accounts receivable, supplier contracts, admin, finance, and accounting is not your core competency. Making the best donut is. We help you focus on the donut, and we figure everything else out. What we bring is a mix of people, process, and technology. The AI-first designation means we lead with intelligent automation, but it never trumps the benefit. The goal is always the destination we are trying to reach together.

Q: Tell us about DDC Evora™. Why build your own agentic AI platform, and what sets it apart?

Madison: DDC Evora™ was born out of what we were already achieving internally. We had been working with large energy utility clients and began leveraging agentic AI in our customer experience solutions. When we saw the kind of results we could deliver, not just for clients but in our own operations, it became a no-brainer that we needed to take this to market externally, not just keep it as an internal tool.

What makes it distinctive is the emphasis on emotional quotient, the EQ of the agents themselves. The development team is very focused on building modules that enable agents not only to execute transactions but also to leverage sentiment, maintain context, and make decisions that account for the human on the other side of the interaction. The analogy I use is that there are a million paths to a destination, but if you choose the wrong one, you might get there with a lot of bumps and bruises, or get kicked out once you arrive and not stay long. We want clients to reach the right destination in the best way possible, and then sustain those results. That is what the EQ dimension is designed to enable.

We are building DDC Evora™ as a platform with different modules on top, and we are also scaling our partnership program alongside it, because we see an enormous opportunity in marrying what we have built in-house with external partners who bring complementary capabilities. The goal is not to be a jack of all trades. It is to identify the right partnerships where the combination creates something genuinely disruptive for the client.

Q: There is a lot of talk about AI fatigue right now. How are you navigating that as a marketer for an AI-first company?

Madison: It is real, and it is something we are actively addressing in how we talk about ourselves. When you are in it, when AI is embedded in everything you do every day, you speak a different language about it than the rest of the world does. So you have to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. What does that person deal with from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.? Where does the AI narrative intersect with their actual day? That is where the messaging has to live.

The directive to my team right now is: cut the buzzwords, cut the fluff, use plain language, and focus on what it actually means for the person you are talking to. Instead of “digital transformation” and “agentic AI orchestration,” tell them how we help turn a terrible customer experience into a positive one. Tell them how we help turn someone who is asking for a refund into a customer who generates recurring revenue. That is relatable. That moves the needle. Otherwise, you are just white noise.

I also think we are at an inflection point that mirrors what happened with 5G, the dot-com era, and even video on social media. At one point, those were fads, then trends, then just… how things work. I think we are going to see AI departments disappear the way internet departments disappeared. AI will just be part of how we all work. Our job as marketers is to help people get there without adding to the noise.

Q: The DDC Group talks about a “growth mindset” as a signature part of its DNA. What does that look like in practice, and how does it show up for your team?

Madison: Growth mindset, to me, means never being the smartest person in the room, or rather, never wanting to be. It means always making sure you have the right people around you to crack open a problem from multiple angles. It means humility, continuous improvement, and being wise enough to acknowledge what everyone else can bring to the table.

For my team, that shows up in a few ways. We leverage AI ourselves. I will regularly ask the team, “Have you run that through AI? Are we working smart, not hard?” We test things internally before we push them to market, because if we wouldn’t use them ourselves, why would our clients? It also shows up in how we serve our clients. We are not handing them a boxed solution and walking away. We are continuously improving SLAs, looking at the data, asking critically what is holding us back, and what we can do better. That relentless iteration is something I hope every client feels when they work with us.

Q: In closing, is there a little-known fact about you that you’d like to share with our readers?

Madison: I am an adventure seeker, which tends to surprise people once they hear the specifics. I have been bungee jumping, skydiving, and jetpacking. I have jumped on the backs of alligators. I have even been on the back of a bull, though I will say he was constrained, so I have not technically been bull riding. Yet. I have always loved thrill-seeking sports, and I think it says something about how I approach most things: you have to be willing to leap, trust the preparation you have done, and enjoy the ride.

I will also say that my favorite music genre is live music. Nine times out of ten, I do not even care what kind it is. If it is live, I am happy.

Q: Madison, thank you for such a candid and forward-looking conversation. For readers who want to continue it, where can they find you?

Madison: Absolutely—find me on LinkedIn. I would love to connect.