In a Monk's Opinion | Changing Hearts and Minds with Data

hello and welcome to in a monk's opinion in every episode of imo we bring together experts in the field of digital marketing to discuss the challenges facing the industry today in order to deliver actionable insights that you can apply to your professional lives today i am very pleased to welcome to smart experienced and talented digital marketing smes greg hershey of otter products and greg taylor of our own media monks my name is brianna merzi i'm the associate director of data mediamonks and in today's episode changing hearts and minds with data we are going to explore the human side of technology transformation and how to build a data infrastructure that fosters collaboration and communication for those of you who don't know much about mediamonks we are a digital first marketing and advertising services company that connects content data digital media and technology services across one global team built from the bottom up inspired by the connectivity and flexibility of technology apis a single pnl model offers clients seamless access to an 8500 strong team of multi-disciplinary digital talent across 57 hubs and 33 countries media monks works with eight of the top 10 most innovative companies in the world along with many other clients that span all the major industry verticals like cpg automative retail banking and much more if you want to know more about mediamonks please head to our website at mediamonks.com and if you have any suggestions about future episodes of in a monk's opinion please reach out to us at imo o mediamonks.com we'd love to hear from you to set this stage a little let's look at how data architects and digital marketers solve problems and envision success as a data architect myself i think it's fair to say that data architects and marketers look at projects and success differently while data architecture can be complicated the goals and benchmarks are fairly straightforward we can objectively identify if we have completed a project successfully by checking that our data points are tracked if we have our form submits our clicks our revenue and our reports the role of a marketer is perhaps not as nuanced so for example the insights from the data need to be interpreted based on customer and brand knowledge and there's a large aspect of like insight and analysis and it requires them to tell a story so when you ask a data nerd like myself to visualize success after an implication for example we see all the data is flowing through their quick channels seamlessly from our users devices the platforms the apps the website then it looks something like this the data is going into the hands of the marketers with hearts for sending love so they can gauge the success of their campaigns but on the other hand this is how the like a digital marketer visualizes success data is more like a superpower that enhances the skills of the people on the team they want to empower individuals promote collaboration and instill confidence so the team members can make good smart decisions clean and organized data is a means to an end for this team not the goal itself like for the data nerds out there so without enablement teams might not embrace new technology and new ways of working this brings me to our speakers today who know a lot about bringing people and data closer together great hershey and greg taylor work together very closely to transform otter products into a unified company ready for the next big leap starting with greg hershey would you both take a moment to share a little bit about yourselves your background your current responsibilities sure and thank you for having me uh my name is greg hershey i am the performance and analytics director at otter products i've been there for about 10 years and i've been with a marketing team for about the last year prior to that i worked in supply chain and in operations on the customer service side my background is really in operations and operations analytics but my passion is in transformational leadership how can we not only solve problems but bring people together to help help them embrace the solution in a way that's sustainable and meaningful for them well everyone i'm greg taylor so typically when we're talking on internal calls we just say h t so feel free to do that in the chat box today as well um but i'm greg taylor i'm a vp of growth here at mediamonks i joined the company actually in 2016 when it was formerly mighty hive so got started in account management prior to that actually was the reason a lot of you might be following certain facebook fan pages because i was growing those about 10 years ago in my previous agency experience but today ultimately what i'm able to do is be able to help clients like auto products and stakeholders like greg to be able to connect the dots across a number of their different marketing channels combining some of that offline online data but then ultimately having the foresight for what the future um could hold as well i'm so looking forward to today's discussion great thank you both for the intros so without further ado let's jump into some questions um greg h or h let's set the stage with otter products do you want to give us a little bit of a background about how many employees you have your global scale the different products yeah absolutely so otter products many of you might be familiar with the brand we're the case company we make phone cases that protect your mobile devices we were an industry leader in creating protective cases in conjunction with the rise of kind of the iphone we have roughly about 400 skus at any given time sometimes up to 500 that we offer but we do more than just cases we're expanding product lines um we do drink wear we also do coolers and we've got a really interesting product called livery it addresses the last mile of delivery when you think about like a blue apron type business or a wine of the month club that helps with that so we do a lot of different things but our our core business is still cases in technology that supports the phone industry we have about a thousand employees direct employees worldwide but if you look at all the people that are working in our ecosystem it's probably closer to 10 to 20 000 people if you look at the suppliers that we work with and a lot of the distribution channels that we work with so we've got a fairly complicated business with lots of relationships lots of selling channels and also um a piece of that that's direct to consumer so that's kind of our products in a nutshell that's great thank you for the overview i'm sure everyone will call knows otter products are great um what was the culture like at other products three years ago so if we look further back um before your you know your journey to to transform and become more data driven do you can you talk about the state of the analytics were people using them yeah so we're kind of right in the midst of this cultural transformation we're seeing really positive science as we work with you guys a couple of years ago what we have at auto products which is a really good thing and also has its challenges we have a lot of empowered people who are ready to go solve problems and that's kind of our entrepreneurial dna we grew from a you know roughly about 100 million dollar business to close to a billion in about two or three years and when that happens the technology and the infrastructure and the sustainability of the systems that help support that lag behind they can't stay caught up and so several years ago we had a really reactive approach to data and we still have that in some regards but we're transitioning to a much more proactive state but when we're talking about reactive what we mean is that we're just swimming in a sea of data there's so many systems there's so much information that people have access to that often times when we were making decisions we were bringing different data to the table or bringing different sources of the same data that didn't reconcile and it causes a lot of confusion and it causes a lot of frustration we also saw a lot of mismatches where we would take production level data to answer executive type questions and that's frustrating for the person bringing the data it's also frustrating for the executive who wants a summary and wants to understand what things look like in aggregate so a lot of mismatches around the use of data and driving value-added business decisions and a lot of frustration from all parties is kind of what we were seeing and experiencing yeah that makes sense so greg taylor t do you remember the early meetings and the things otterbox was looking to accomplish when you guys embarked on your journey like over you know quite a few months ago can you share anything from that time yeah yeah it was a number of different conversations so it actually started right before the pandemic began so they were the last client that i got to meet in person and it was a really good conversation understanding that they had a number of disparate data sources um they understood that you know they weren't taking necessarily an integrated approach to their media planning and operations um so what they wanted to be able to do is to bring together those teams whether that's creative whether that's their in-house marketing teams their outside agency partners and other specific teams that are very important to driving the business forward but i think at the same time it was also a very good uh discussion really around what does the future of data even look like a lot of it was very focused on marketing and while that's nice and while we can continue to push out specific products we needed a more integrated approach to understand is there potential overlap across these specific uh business units that auto products has as uh hershey alluded to earlier they have a number of different uh products that really do have similar customers so how can we ensure that we're not bidding on the same customer multiple times showing them products that aren't relevant or at the same time how can we re-engage folks that might have lapsed from previous months or even years so very early on it was more of a discussion around how do we take an integrated approach to not just marketing but also data holistically to be able to solve a lot of the problems that they had was there anything you saw or you wanted to accomplish that you thought might not be possible that was in your sort of back pocket that you were hoping for but weren't sure who i think it was definitely the analytics portion of it i think it was something that i knew that they had a very good understanding of um you know they're very reliant on their distribution partners but at the same time you know you think about ownership of data you continue to push these themes and understand that you know as we go further into privacy um especially with ccpa out of california and other states following suit what does that mean for auto products in terms of first party data sets what does that mean for user consent so analytics was always the thing in the back of my mind where i thought that um we could really start to push this needle forward and really bridge that gap between marketing and ultimately uh data warehousing as well yeah fair point so to you both let's quickly run through the technological changes did you need new hardware software cloud integrations third-party vendors what did it look like so i can i can answer first and then greg is much better at this than i am so he can correct anything i miss so back me up t i like to think about it in really simple buckets um the first piece is just the executional tools and the the google ecosystem has a really good set of executional tools when you talk about campaign manager sa360 db360 those are important to have and i think our strategy is such that we want to have ownership over that source data even though we've got agencies executing in them we want to make sure that we maintain continuity all the way from the beginning of the execution and then you've got kind of your middleware which would be your ga360 and your big data query where you can take that data you can consolidate it gives you a consolidation point and a way to transform it and then it gets into our ecosystem that we own and run our data warehouse where you can push it to there then the last piece would be taking outputs from various levels of that data technology infrastructure and using those to answer value-added questions from the users so we've got the front-end execution piece kind of that middleware piece of big data query pushing into our data warehouse and then you've got kind of a component of visualization and trying to figure out how you can make sense of everything and we had to replace the execution piece and the middleware piece we already had some of the data warehouse piece and some of the visualization tools on our end so that was kind of the approach that we took and what we had to replace yeah and i think he covered it well in terms of the specific platforms i think the key call out here also was just ensuring that we can integrate um with the different data sources that they already had so not necessarily ripping or replacing everything but how can we complement what they're already doing in social how can we complement where they're already storing data outside of even bigquery and then ultimately um with on-prem systems you know what data do we need to pull out of there to get a full view of the customer journey as well one other point there for those who are struggling with this because this is probably key to our journey our erp system is a big deal for that so it the erp system that we run and the data we get from our third-party vendors helps us to answer those non-direct to consumer data questions and that can be complicated and frustrating but it's key to make sure that that's integrated to answer these advanced questions good tip and then once you guys had your sort of your martech stack decided you found the missing integrations you have that laid out did you anticipate which teams would be affected or impacted when you when you got started or when you dived in yeah that's one of the things i think is critical for understanding how to make these big changes is understanding that the landscape or the org chart and for us at otter products we have a pretty complicated landscape because we're a consumer products good company so we're not just doing the marketing but we're building designing manufacturing and distributing all of that as well so we've got a lot of different people that care about what's happening in the marketing so we were very intentional about understanding who those stakeholders are within the marketing function and outside of the marketing function and then breaking those stakeholders into different levels or buckets who are the executive level that we need to influence who are the middle management the directors the managers that need to be influenced and who are the contributors that this impacts directly or incidentally and how can we reach out to speak with them to help build consensus on the need for this change and then bring them along as it's happening so it was pretty intentional speaking of people and the teams can you talk about like the different personality types that you were introducing change to and maybe how they reacted except that's a it's a really good question i would say that we're probably no different than any other company like you've got a bell curve of personalities got some people that react well and want to jump in and have it happen yesterday and you've got other people that are a little bit more cautious and hesitant their adoption curve lags quite a bit so balancing those in those different levels is pretty key and understanding who your early adopters are at your executive function who are your early adopters in your middle management function your contributor function and what are the critical paths to making these changes so they can start to see results i think the key is you look at the crossing the chasm theory is finding those early adopters and finding those wins and helping empower them to get to your early majority it's a big deal and managing that is not easy to do when you've got different personality types did you find there were early adopters in all different teams or was there like one maybe the data team or one team in particular that had more or less that's a really good question also i think it's a combination of finding people that are passionate so like working where the passion is is really important if somebody is passionate about the change and they can see the value proposition they're always kind of on that core team and then the the other thread that i try to work through is looking for key areas or functions where there can be a big impact in trying to challenge myself and trying to challenge the team to tie themselves to that vision so we've got you know for us like our digital media team is key they do so much of this work and it impacts their day-to-day job partnering with them early on was really apparent that we needed to work with them and partner with them and we luckily we've got people that are that can see the vision that we're really engaged but that doesn't mean that it wasn't disruptive or that it wasn't challenging to start to make some of these changes so we had to figure out how to work with them in a way that minimized the disruption and how to empower them to be a part of this decision-making team so that we're not just behind the curtain making all the decisions and then kind of pop out and say hey we fixed all your problems i hope you like the way we fixed it it's pretty important to make sure that they're empowered that they have a chance to be a part of that team and then other key stakeholders like our rit team our data warehouse team you look at with us the way we're structured we have parts of consumer marketing that roll up into sales into channel marketing and they're also key stakeholders so working all of those threads and trying to stay focused on the critical stakeholders and also giving input continuously to understand where some of the secondary stakeholders are can be a difficult proposition it's always a moving target but it's a combination of finding where the passion is and then helping maybe people to find the passion or find what inspires people that are in key positions so it sounds like there was potentially a cultural change like this passion was almost the cultural change that maybe shifted the team into a different way of looking at the project is that sort of what needed to happen yeah i think in some regards parts of it had already taken place when i took this role there were people that understood the change or understood the need but maybe didn't see how it was going to happen and so a lot of it was trying to lay some framework to help them see this is potentially how it could happen and then giving them a chance to be a part of that framework so not telling them what the answer was but inviting them to review the draft of milestones here's how we think this can work what do you think about this and what i find effective in helping stakeholders work through changes um asking them what their concerns are or asking them openly here's the plan how do you think this is going to fail tell me what you think will make this not work what is going to make you most nervous about this plan when you can find their passion whether it's a positive emotion or a negative emotion you can either uncover engagement that drives a project forward they're going to line up and push it forward or they're going to tell you here are the emotions that will hold me back from giving you my engagement and when you can find those emotions that hold them back it's what i found to be most helpful in kind of removing those roadblocks those emotional roadblocks that help them decide how they want to engage so we've gone through that process with a lot of these stakeholders to figure out what does that look like for an executive what does that look like for a director what's that like for a manager what does that look like for a contributor and it's a lot of stakeholders to think through that's a lot of meetings to have but it does help kind of grease the wheels for a sustainable systemic strategic change yeah i think that's very good advice to those facing similar situations like the engagement and breaking down the stakeholder groups and addressing those concerns for each of those groups and really inviting participation and not like a top-down you this is the way it must be to get them on board so it makes sense um greg taylor from your perspective and your point of view as the point person uh digital agency how did you feel your role was to assist great hershey in this big project and cultural change for them yeah so i think historically when people think of sellers they're just all right they're gonna push a contract to me we're gonna sign in then they're gonna leave me high and dry um that couldn't be further from the truth um of my approach so you know with my background being in um fulfillment understanding these platforms in and out understanding where there might be stop gaps or challenges um it's my my really job to make sure that the clients understand what they're really getting into um during the pre-sales process you know me me and her she had a number of different conversations of where we would imagine hey this will probably be a slower role than another platform or this initiative can supersede those accordingly um i know as we start to talk about econometrics modeling very big idea but it takes a long time to actually get to the goal because there are systems that need to be in place um there are floodlights or pixels that need to be updated there are teams that need to be brought up to speed on what exactly we're trying to do here and everyone needs to be aligned on what attribution and measurement truly means um so throughout the entire process as questions have come up as we have our ongoing sinks i think it's been very critical for me to provide any additional insight or best practice expertise as i have seen fit of course as we experience new challenges i'm going to loop in additional smes across our various teams but being really connected at the hip to what hershey's doing to what other key stakeholders that he's identified as being owners of a specific initiative need to accomplish has been very key to the success that we have already had um but in general i would say just being able to plug and play where necessary um is what has led to the success thus far awesome greg hershey did you guys have to internally create any new positions for some of the teams some of the work streams that you didn't anticipate yeah so my position was new for this specific reason so i moved within otterbox to help with this work for this purpose so that was probably the first position and a lot of that was driven because of the need to better connect to those executive leaders i think there was a an acknowledgement of us being able to better meet the financial impact of what was going on in marketing so we had we had data that we could bring but tying it back to the p l from a leading and lagging indicator standpoint was difficult and our executive team really wants our marketing team to focus on the numbers that's the verbatim phrase that they've given us we want you to focus on the numbers and be data driven and what that means for them and they've given us specific use cases is that they need to be able to ask us you know if we have a revenue gap that we're trying to cover on our demand plan this came up in a meeting last week our ceo said specifically i want to be able to turn to the cmo and i want to be able to say we've got a five million dollar gap because of timing or world circumstances or whatever it is how much marketing investment do i need to be able to cover that gap and he wants to be able to get an answer that is meaningful that we have confidence in that will drive an outcome that he's looking for in our data circumstances that we have the ones that we're moving away from we can't answer that question there's no confidence in that so we've we've got to be able to have the structure to support that that is my role it's also a head count that we've got to prove to help with data science work so that we can continually answer these questions at the strategic level and then we've also got an analyst that reports to me that's helping with data literacy so tying out that tactical level of question answering to the strategic level of question answering so we've got kind of a strategic bucket and a tactical bucket and we're trying to work on improving that data literacy with the tools that we're building out and implementing so a lot of different structure changes needed to help with this so let's talk about results now that the project's underway and going strongly like how are you guys measuring success that's a really good question there's a couple of ways that i measure it and when it's in i'm going to give you the in-flight way that i measure success and then i can talk to how we're going to measure success as things continue to roll out and we start to see results let me talk about that first the results side i think the result side is really important when you talk about data and analytics and numbers if you can't show improvement and you can't show it in the right areas concisely for the right audiences then it's you know it's the tree that falls in the forest when nobody's around so what we're trying to do is match the right people with the right information at the right times and that means that we've got specific plans in place to be able to measure performance by level by function and when i say specific it doesn't mean i have a spreadsheet with everything we're tracking we do have a spreadsheet that has some of the things that we've got that we need to work on but at a higher level we've got some concepts that we believe are going to meet our end user needs and that's based on conversations with those users here is what you're asking here is the pain that you're seeing and the value proposition that you're looking for and then we've got a milestone that we think will meet that need and we're collaborating with those end users we're showing them here is the working model of what we think we're going to deliver does this meet your needs and that's it's three basic projects for us one is data science to answer strategic questions the other one is campaign management with a portfolio contribution twist but we're not just looking at a campaign and the standard that we're trying to hit or the success standard that we're trying to hit but how can we take a cut across all evergreen campaigns all actively managed campaigns compare them by funnel type and then calculate a weighted contribution to empower those users to really make decisions based on the data they're getting and not just comparing digital media to digital media how can we compare digital and email in pr and all the other places that we're serving media how can we compare them and their contributions against each other to provide a more holistic view and that can be a scary proposition when you're talking with stakeholders and they see comparisons they get really really nervous about losing resources and that's not the name of the game so you've got to manage that concern and we can talk more about that if people are interested but the last one is what i call audience performance management but that end consumer data that first party data we have access to a lot of first party data and we want to stitch that together and there are pockets where it's not stitched together as well as it could be but if we can stitch that together we can really drive and influence our customer lifetime value not just for our direct consumer business but for our holistic business there's assumptions we can make and inferences that we're comfortable making that will help us see how our greater consumer is being impacted by the processes of our digital marketing team or our email team or our customer service team and we know it's having an impact we know that the customers that don't buy from us are coming and interacting with us either before they buy or after they buy so unlocking that value proposition bringing the numbers to the table helps us drive results and all of the plans that we have in place are to bring those numbers to the table and measure the results against a standard of excellence the in-flight measurement is much more emotionally based the way i gauge success right now is meeting with each one of those stakeholders who has a vested interest in one of those milestones and looking at the productive disequilibrium that's in place that's a fancy way of saying are they engaged and are they working collaboratively for the vision that we have and what do we need to do to manage that productive disequilibrium so it means they're uncomfortable enough that they're growing but not so uncomfortable that they give up and that's what i'm looking to do is manage their engagement and if their engagement is healthy then it it's just a matter of time before we can produce and measure results in real time but i just want to know a bit more about the collaboration like how are you able to get those teams maybe the more the ones that were more disengaged to collaborate and like enhance the workflows between them yeah that's a really good question when we look at our functional teams within marketing we had several functions we had one function that was kind of already leading out in taking ownership over reporting we had another function that was doing the same and a third that was less engaged and i think the key was starting to understand where the pain points are and where the where the the misses were in our previous state of of operations what what was happening was that when we went and started to ask them questions and started to see the pain points that that they were explaining the previous solutions that that were being offered to them weren't meeting their needs so you know like it was uh we were taking in some regards that if you build it they will come mentality they were being served solutions and not listened to so a lot of the shift has been i'm trying to understand what is it that makes your role successful how can we help empower you to be better at your work and then coming back and saying well what if we gave you something like this would that help meet your need and many times the solution it's something that's already known it's out there in the industry or it's a way it's a best practice but it's got to be seen as a best practice through their eyes that's the key so until they believe it's a best practice you don't have their engagement if you te you can tell them all day long this is a best practice and if they don't believe you it doesn't matter so the key is is finding a way for them to realize it's a best practice and then tying it together to that strategic solution and one of the things i like to focus on is sustainability so when you talk about big technology changes and data driven marketing most of the disengagement that i see is because solutions are not sustainable what that means is that somebody has to go pull a report off a production system and then they have to manipulate it somehow they put it in excel and they either have to use it the way that it's presented or they have to spend a lot of time and effort cleaning up the data and we're asking marketers who are usually not analysts they don't live and breathe excel to do this and once you create excel hell they disengage they're out they don't want to do it so helping them see that if we do some of these things we can remove excel hell and we can answer your questions you can open up a power bi spreadsheet and you can hit refresh and have everything all in one spot or take the time to educate them and show them to answer this question you can go to the production system can report to answer this question you should go to ga360 to answer this question you should go to our data warehouse and the interface that we have there so lining people up with the source of information for their grain is pretty important and then helping them see the value proposition for that is also really important it's that matching principle of right people right time right data that has to be right and they have to see it and they have to believe that it's going to help them if they don't believe it doesn't really matter what you do right they won't go back to the excel help uh so is the work done um do you guys have ongoing processes that you're continually improving what does the future look like how are you guys feeling uh so this is a super timely question because we just i think there's 31 days in march if i remember right so in march we're finishing the last of our google marketing implementation so our campaign manager all of our campaigns will go live and that is a super critical inflection point for us we've got some really good report designs we've got some concepts that are in flight that we believe we've got good traction on that end users are excited about seeing once that goes live then we can finish our data warehouse integrations and we can start to build those out we can right now we can mock them up but what we want to do is build them out and show the end users these are sustainable and see what they look like and i think about it this way i want to see what the data and the analytics look like in the wild so when when they come in contact with this in their day-to-day roles when they're using this with their one-on-one conversations or with their meetings with vps or whatever their sphere of influence is i want to see is it valuable and i want to hear from them is this making your life better and that helps us manage that productive disequilibrium when they can see the results if they can see the results and they're making better business decisions and they can see that it grows their data literacy and we're right at that point or we're starting to show them those numbers and we're doing it for the data science we're doing it for the media campaign management in the next couple of months so it's it's a fun and exciting time to see the feedback in the wild yeah and working on future proofing with j42 i know you guys are rolling that out globally so that's big with all the new announcements you guys are ahead of the curve working on preparing for that um update with ga so that's great too um greg taylor do you want to add anything like in terms of your point of view assisting and supporting how are you feeling with the project and the improvements and your position on the future for otter definitely definitely so i think working very closely with their marketing teams has been been a big um initiative over the past couple of months understanding what what is the the taxonomy and the approach to data governance has been a been a key uh area of focus i think you know as a team internally at auto products they're very organized they understand what they're trying to get out of it but at the same time the the challenge historically has been that we've been relying on on a third-party agencies or outside vendors so how do we actually start to um i guess bring our team members up to speed on best practices ensure that everyone is getting the specific outputs um from whether that's campaign reporting whether that's analytics um so that way teams can come together and collaborate even more effectively in the future um you know i think for their media teams they've definitely asked the right questions they've continued to really push the needle um even with their partners i think one one uh area of growth that i've seen is um them really just taking ownership of of the partnership you know historically i think a lot of in-brands or marketers have been relying on those those agency partners to be able to dictate exactly how things should be done but for auto products they know they now know they're at an inflection point where hey you know what we're the ones with the customers we're the ones really spending the media dollars here so why can't we have a say in exactly how the data should be coming through or what data should be made available um today we're talking about obviously the google marketing platform stack but we all know that auto products uh are sold across uh big box retailers um across the nation so when we start to think about what data warehousing in the future cedar that looks like there's larger conversations to be had here and i think now that this team understands uh what they're looking for they now can be a unified front um as they do start to have these more in-depth discussions around um really access to data and then ultimately taking ownership in what the users truly want to see from the brand um three years five years even ten years down the road thank you so we have a couple questions from the audience so the first question is how did data shape not only your approach to media but also your approach to creative development okay this is a really good question i presented at our marketing all hands meeting last friday so this is three or four days ago and this exact question came up and it's something that i'm gonna go and talk with that team more about in depth there's a long answer and a short answer the short answer is that we have plans to make sure that we can do this and there's ways that it can be done and we're going to work with the team to do that we need to do that in conjunction with where we get the right value proposition for our implementation so there's specific parts of that value proposition that we've got to address before we get to this piece and i want to talk about how we're addressing them and then talk about how we what we know about how we can address this also a lot of our approach is top down meaning that we believe that answering the questions at the top will have a bigger impact on the organization as a whole and all the end users and starting from the questions at the bottom up so this specific creative development question would be a bottom-up question and the reason why and this is different by company so maybe different for your company is that those top down questions are the resource specific questions they're the questions that allow us to understand how many dollars are we going to spend and which categories are they going to be spent on and when we can answer those questions and coordinate strategically at the top we we influence strategically and relieve a lot of pressure in the system there was a lot of back and forth several years ago about how much are we going to spend and is that the right number and that creates a lot of swirl and churn emotionally in the department we want to be able to answer that question so we can relieve that emotional swirl in churn and that's a category and size question when we get to this question specifically part of this will be answered in that media campaign management structure that we're talking about so we can see active campaigns in flight and we understand the creative that's attached to them we give our teams the ability to understand where specific creative is having an influence and where it's not and to start to discern specifically what's driving performance there so that's probably the piece that's on the roadmap and then i think as we get deeper into this we'll collaborate with those teams to work specifically on which collateral which asset is tracking against specific performance and try to dive into supporting them through those tools so that's definitely kind of the medium to long-term goal is to support those teams directly and then the short-term goal is to make sure they have the resources they need to do their job and then to give them some medium-range tracking to help them see directionally the trends of what they're putting out there in the marketplace and how it's influencing campaigns from a contribution standpoint so i hope that kind of answers the question yeah i think it does another question for you uh were there any surprise benefits you are not expecting oh absolutely and here's my little plug for greg and for mediamonks whenever you're doing something complicated and marketing is complicated there are many systems complex data flows and to make it sustainable and to have a competitive advantage of data-driven marketing you have to manage across all of that i think it's always key to understand what your strengths are and then have a humble confidence meaning like we can leverage the strengths that we can bring to the table and also recognize that we don't have all the answers and finding a partner that's willing to ask questions and push you has been a great surprise i think we had every indication that was going to be the case we look for that with agency partners with working with you guys with other partners that we work with that collaboration is key and seeing it come to fruition kind of always warms my heart so it's not just greg it's you brianna it's the team supporting when you're willing to engage to help raise the data literacy of our marketers to learn more about our business when it's a two-way street that gets me really excited you know there's there's inclinations that it's there we hope we make the right choice but when it comes to fruition that always makes me happy the other place that i see is with the data science team that we work with they are top notch and there's you know there's times when i bring up concerns what about this what about that and their process is really buttoned up it's been refined over time and being able to leverage their learnings across other clients and understanding what they see has made this successful other places and sustainable and to replicate that has been a pleasant surprise that it's not just a crunch the numbers and leave approach but building something that we can leverage over and over and over again and a willingness to help us build that so that we can sustain it internally and the expertise of doing that has been just an amazing surprise so usually it's around the expertise and the things that we're not as savvy at those are usually where we're pleasantly surprised well thanks for the that feedback that's always good to hear very pleased to support you guys so we have one last question um from the panel um what do you think convinced the most stubborn team members to start using the new platforms that is a good question there's two keys one is really good executive sponsorship and then the second one is leadership sponsorship so managers and directors those are your keys and let me explain just the cultural dynamics of convincing difficult to sway people when you talk about convincing a contributor you can go and have the conversation and if they're super engaged it's not a problem they'll go and work with you and that that works out great if they're not a few things will happen they'll either just disengage and won't do anything or sometimes they'll go and they'll talk with the people they feel comfortable with or they'll go and they'll complain to whoever they report to and then that goes up the chain of command you want to be looking for those things and you want to make sure that you've got a buttoned up vision that touches on each one of those levels so that when those conversations come up you've got a friend in marketing or someone who they might talk with that can help them maybe see what they're not seeing you want to make sure they've got a manager that can help them understand the vision you want to make sure you have a director that can help them do that and ultimately a cmo who is willing to go and set an overall message for the department our cmo stood up and said numbers are important for us and this is a big initiative we need to focus on the numbers this is what our executive team wants and here's how it will impact you it's going to help us get you the resources that you need having the top cover having someone proactively say that helps quite a bit before you get to the disengagement of the contributor level so you've got to have all those messages kind of out there and the expectations set and then you want to continually revisit them and check that engagement at all levels if you're doing that if you're setting the expectation you're checking in on the engagement and you're you're looking for either more engagement or less when it moves up and down you've got a pretty good plan but it's got to happen you've got to be monitoring all of those continuously or when one gets out of whack the whole system starts to fall apart and the change becomes less meaningful good advice really good advice i think we have one last question that came in first kudos to the journey you've been on the success with greg at mediamonks as you separate the emotional from rational thinking and key decision making with the power of data how often will you be revisiting the measurement framework to ensure the kpis are still truly key in driving your business on a daily weekly and monthly frequency so i love this question the cadence is key if you get cadence wrong you either overburden them or you disengage them so i think our goal is to do this in the right cadence that drives the value for the end user and i can tell you what we're going to start with roughly when we talk about our data science it's going to happen at least biannually and the goal is to probably move it to quarterly and it needs to sync up with our financial budgeting and review process or annual planning and then the key points in our company where we review high-level strategic budgets we have to be able to come to the table when those conversations are happening when the iron's already in the fire and people are ready to move money around because the strategy has changed or the market has changed so we're trying to line up our data the information we can bring from a data science standpoint with that process it's an internal process that already exists and i can say the same thing for portfolio management i can say the same thing for contributor reports there's a lot of processes that already exist they're organic they're already out there living breathing part of my job is to go find them and help my team find them and figure out how to make them better we don't have to just start something new and give them something brand new we want to tie in what's already working on the cadence that's already working so for our managers when we talk about portfolio management when we talk about ecommerce performance they already meet monthly there's forums they already have where they come together and review this our goal is not just to introduce a new forum let's leverage that monthly forum and let's give them a much better tool to make decisions and to collaborate so a lot of that media campaign management performance review will probably be monthly and then when you talk about contributor information that's more of a weekly daily type ring and usually that comes off production systems so that's a lot of self-service but we don't want to leave that to chance we want to make sure that we're meeting with them that we help them with data literacy help them understand what the information looks like we've got people who are not just building aggregated reports but they're understanding data mappings and they can go in and say hey let's talk about this specific metric you're using this have you considered using this instead because this ties better to the message we're talking about at the director level and this is how we're making decisions at that level is this an easier thing for you to use so it's i think a lot of it just depends on how it's being used but for us it'll be biannually quarterly for data science it'll be monthly for most of that middle management structure for the higher middle management and then we get into weekly and daily depending on who's executing in the system yeah and to add to that their team has done a really good job of understanding where the feedback loop is also going to take place so you could be working across all these different silos as greg had just alluded to but at the end of the day there needs to be a constant there needs to be a group of individuals or stakeholders that understand you know what how does this report stack up to my other team members across the organization um so i think the feedback loop is just something always to consider um whether that's around your audience strategy your creative strategy your category planning as greg has talked about before in general because we don't want it to necessarily just stop uh with the team that's responsible for managing the day-to-day budgets it needs to go all the way up to this to the c-suite um but at the same time uh the cadence is gonna be very critical um to ensuring that you're always recalibrating what those kpis really mean let me just add one piece there this wasn't in the question but i'm gonna throw it out there is food for thought where i see a lot of marketers get confused is the is the correlation between leading and lagging indicators a lagging indicator being financial performance p l impact and a leading indicator being an operating metric that pre-indicates financial performance helping teams understand which ones they're accountable for is pretty important and helping them understand where to measure them and what grains to look at them on um kind of helps them it improves their data literacy but it gives them the decoder ring to be a more valuable player when they come to the table and talk about performance um so that's that's a lot of what we're working through it's not just when do we talk about this but making sure that they have the right leading indicator and that they understand how this leading indicator ties to financial performance is it a revenue driver is it a cost savings what does it look like and can they explain that and that has to be that's a different conversation for each person great well we've come up to the end in our time and i just wanted to thank you both very much for your insight your tips um it's great to hear about your journey and some of the obstacles you've overcome with your um with the people and the technology together and how it's working out in the long run um yeah so thanks so much again and we really appreciated having you both thank you yeah thank you very much it was a pleasure to talk with everybody

2022-05-04 14:38

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