127 | Five-steps for leveraging first-party data

Jon Busby: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing Podcast. This is a bit of a different one today. We've actually recently had an event here at Together on the benefits of first party data, and we thought it would be worth us just getting in a room, or virtually getting in a room here in our virtual studio and talking about what we've learned from the day, because it was incredibly insightful.

And I'm not just talking about the wonderful talks that all of us did on today's podcast, but I'm talking about the questions and interactions we have from our audience. So I'm very pleased to be joined by two previous tech marketing podcast veterans Michele, our executive media director and Michele.

Welcome back to the podcast. Firstly.

Michele Reale: Thanks, John, for having me.

Jon Busby: And Mr. Serger, Mr. Jonathan Serger himself, our Director of Innovation and Head of AI together. Jonathan, welcome back to the podcast as well. I think it's been a couple of months since we've had both of you, or either of you on. So very excited.

How do we feel the event what's everyone's memory of the event? Because it was a couple of weeks ago now by the time we're recording this. Who wants to go first? Jonathan, what was your memory of the event?

Jonathan Sedger: I would say we had a room full of marketers who are really engaged in this subject.

Everyone's been talking for day about data for a long time. I think now it's an imperative and that's the sense that I got in the room that everyone's really taking this seriously now.

Jon Busby: Yeah. And Michaela, you were the one that originally put this topic of first party data out there. I'd like what was your feeling coming away from September's event?

Michele Reale: Yeah. Being honest, John, obviously as we all know Google through a little bit, yeah, exactly. Decided to give us a bit of a problem there. Because originally we planned for this event to happen coincidentally with Google's announcements around, obviously the application of third party data, third party cookie data.

We, and I'm glad we did. We decided to keep the event and I think the vibe in the room was absolutely. Fantastic. I think everybody in the room agrees to the fact that obviously data is potentially a game changer within the marketing teams, but it's it's not an easy, it's not an easy area to crack essentially.

Jon Busby: it really isn't, but there was a lot of nodding. Firstly, I was very pleased the room was full where we all know how difficult it is putting on events, but so we did have a full room. That's not a, that's not a pitch for anyone listening to this to come to the next event, but you probably should do.

But there was a lot of nodding and agreement as we went through some of those elements. And then there was some incredibly insightful and quite deep questions. Some of which I still want to get to the bottom of. So I think we're going to use today's podcast really just to dive into some of our thinking behind some of that and see what we learn ourselves.

So the first point, and we did, Michele, we did a recording just before the event talking around how this first party data and AI and everything feels like a modern day gold rush. And I took that analogy and blew it up as part of the event, actually and we built this, we ended up building this five step journey that I think many of our clients are going on.

When it comes to first party data. And so I want to take a little bit of time just sharing that with our listeners, but also as we go through each step just talking about what's important. So it's five steps. They all begin with a just cause I do love a good bit of alliteration. We have acceptance, which is all around consent.

We have analytics, which is all around building analytical dashboards and de siloing your data. Activation, which is all about how you use that first party data. Then we have automation, which is. Building some of the integrations between systems and of course, Jonathan, you wouldn't be here if we weren't talking about this AI.

I some of those topics are really sexy, like AI, some of them are less we're talking about acceptance or rather consent. But that, if I was to start somewhere, that's why I feel like many of our clients are really going wrong. They're not even thinking about getting the right access and getting the compliance and legal frameworks in place to ensure they're using it correctly.

I'm going to throw it out to you guys. What are your thoughts on that framework? Where do you think many of our clients are going wrong today?

Michele Reale: Yeah, I might start with on that question, John. I think there are two kind of key trends highlighting some of the challenges that I would say marketeers, face.

And maybe this has been the case even in the past when new technologies. Become available, but obviously the speed at which, marketing technology is changing. It's, it's really super fast. And I think when it comes to making the most of the opportunity that this technology unlock, and obviously first by collecting data, being one of them kind of highlights the fact that, clients have a lot of legacy.

Ways of doing things, legacy systems, or, sometimes quite a fragmented ecosystem within the organization, which kind of do not necessarily align with how these new technologies, work and potentially, the value that come out of that. So there is one trend. The other trend is of course, from a user experience point of view, which is even more important, everybody is.

pushing to give back control to the users as much as possible. So when you put these two things together, clients are faced with two challenges. One is how do we make the user experience, continuously better and better. So pushing, that creativity content, UX. On the other side is how do you collect all of the information off the back of that in a kind of new, New era where you don't have, five teams collecting all different, data sets in different ways that they cannot be utilized.

And I think that kind of was one of the points where the room agreed on, which is the problem sometimes is not the data probably exists, but making sense of the data, accessing the data, analyzing the data is one of the biggest barriers. So these are the two dynamics that I think strategically clients have to adjust around.

Jon Busby: Yeah, it's de siloing it really, isn't it? But I'm going to dive, you mentioned the user choice piece. I think this is the great balancing act, as I'm calling it, of first party data is, we do want to give users more choice. We want them to trust what we're, how we're going to use their data is going to be responsible.

But also, many users don't. Don't really want to give us their data. Like you've got to, you've got to give them the value. There's like the value of the personalization on one side and there's the trust element on the other side. You've got to make sure that the two are in sync. Cause at the moment, they're not, they're very much not,

Michele Reale: yeah and actually coincidentally and might need to dig the the reference for later when we published this podcast, but was reading an article today from A piece of research around how many touchpoints it takes, to drive people from first touchpoints all the way to SQLs and even a step before SQL, which is typical at MQL may require a few hundreds touchpoints.

Now, if you take that, if you just think about that, you have to touch an account potential prospects a few hundred times. You need to really work super, super hard on that user experience because it takes a lot of convincing. So completely agree with you. I think that is a game changer, especially after Covid with the buying journey, moving more and more on the digital on the digital ecosystem.

Jon Busby: Jonathan, I'm gonna bring you in here as well. What stood out for you with the process? The framework that we. Reapply the journey, I'm going to come in, there's lots of different ways, journey, framework, process, whatever we want to call it.

Jonathan Sedger: I think, what stood out to me is, what's driving this kind of real acceleration in terms of people really taking data seriously now within marketing organizations.

I think there's a few things, Mike mentioned the depreciation of cookies, which has been kicked, the can's been kicked down the road again. On that, but it's obviously. Got a lot of people focused on it. I also think that AI has been a real driver of this focus on data as well, because, those two subjects, AI and data are completely interlinked.

If you're utilizing AI with bad data, then you're going to get bad results. So I think it has been another factor that's got people focused on it. But I think, there's a lot of these things that have been Yeah, existed for a long time, AI, a lot of the things that we describe as AI are things that have been around for a long while.

And actually that's something that came up. People were talking about machine learning, a lot of these technologies have existed for a long time. It's just, they haven't had enough focus. And I think people are really starting to drill in and take these things seriously. And we saw from some of the marketers that we were speaking to there that actually by taking these things seriously.

That's driving some really transformational results in marketing. We are seeing examples where it's moving past the talk and actually market is starting to deliver real value, which is really pleasing to see.

Jon Busby: I'm going to bring it back to an old topic that you used to, we talked about a lot a few years ago, right?

Which is, it's the same, essentially AI is done to machine learning and all that group of technologies. What VR and the metaverse were, right? Nobody was really, it all existed before, but then all of a sudden you put a name to it. And everyone's Oh, I get it. Don't get me wrong. Some of the technology has come leaps and bounds on in AI.

I think we also need to recognize that, but you're right. Some of this stuff has hung around for a long time. And people have only just really woken up to how they could use it.

Jonathan Sedger: I think with all of these things though, that, you get these waves of hype in the media and yeah, everyone's talking about this thing and then the next thing, but there are companies that are continuously making progress, innovating, moving the ball forward on all of these different technologies.

And actually it's only when. These big waves break the, those things get that level of attention. But I think, there's, there are so many opportunities that I think have been missed for a long time, in regards to data or machine learning the, it's just good to see that people are now taking these things seriously and looking at how they can utilize it and not just for the sake of it either, just actually looking at it through a really strategic lens and going, where should we be looking to.

Utilize these technologies and what are we trying to achieve with it?

Jon Busby: Yep. Yep. A similar kind of approach to what you've just mentioned there, Jonathan, and aligning it with what you were saying, Mikaela, as well. Like one thing that I always really like to highlight whenever we talk about first party data is, To remind ourselves that a lot of that first party data already exists.

We're not talking about creating huge lakes of new first party data. Don't get me wrong. That needs to be part of it on with the value exchange, which I'm sure we'll come on to shortly. But it's also recognizing that as marketeers, we're probably the ones that have sight of most of this data today.

And it's our job to bring that together. My favorite example is you may be looking at your marketing automation platform. Because let's be honest, that's what we spend most of our time in marketing looking at. And you may be looking at your email platform if that's something different.

And maybe your social networks and potentially your your CMS or your website that's also based on a similar technology like HubSpot or AM. You might, if you're a bit more mature, be looking at your CRM, but I guarantee you're not thinking about your help desk. I guarantee you're not thinking about all those other tools that your customers touch.

And in fact, I had a customer tell me the other day that they go and. proactively find our help desk and go and create tickets on it to see how quickly we respond. It's not today. A lot of, we don't have access to that data. It's probably sits with a separate team. We may not have the right compliance and legal framework to access it, but I just think it's up to our job.

It's our job in marketing to go and discover it and try and bring it into the fold. So very similar to What both of you were saying there around both privacy and hey, some of this stuff already exists. Um, let's move on to the value exchange piece though, right? Because we talked about, we had a fantastic panel with Sage and Workday and the FT.

So just a big shout out personally, firstly for Kirstie and Laura and Amy that joined us as part of as part of that panel. Cause it was a really, um, run panel and really quite interesting some of the points that came out of it, Michele, what stood out for you from some of the answers that that our panelists gave.

Michele Reale: Yeah, the value exchange is one concept that is becoming more and more strategic for a lot of. B2B brands, traditionally a lot of the marketing initiatives, we're always based on a fairly simple exchange in terms of, someone looking to buy a service or product, funding information, in the form of a probably white paper, technical, technical sheet.

And there was some sort of exchange of data. And I would say up until maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that was the primary way, of how that value exchange was happening. Obviously that is no longer the case anymore. And the reason why we had, for example Laura we're very happy to have Laura from DFT is because there is an analogy here around what the journey that, premium publishers have been on for a while now, especially in the world of digital to essentially ask Readers to pay for online content, where that news potentially in some way is also available, for free across the entire web.

So if you are running an organization like dt, the question is why should readers, pay to read an article? And that immediately puts, the focus on, okay, the quality of the content and the value for the reader needs to be the best. Possible that obviously the editorial team can put in place and in the same way, technology brands need to ask themselves the same questions because buyers do not just buy off the back of a tech, tech sheet anymore.

There's many different factors that come into play trust, credibility. Obviously softer elements like, sustainability impact on society. So the way companies buy from other companies is a lot more complex. And all of that needs to be essentially a content journey that they need to come across, when they're engaging with brand X Y, or Z and it's a very different way to organize your content team around and, from a brand standpoint and, Brands like Sage and Workday have been leading the way for a while.

So it was really great to hear, some of their experiences around, for example, podcasts in the case of Sage, Workday also, has been pushing the boundaries for a while in terms of their content experience on their digital platforms. And there's many other good examples, the opportunity is really big.

It's just a mindset, moving away from a more information based model to more of a value based. Content approach, which will drive more data to, to use.

Jon Busby: Jonathan, how about you? What stood out for you there?

Jonathan Sedger: As you said, we had some really brilliant minds on that panel. And some really interesting insights that came out of that.

Yeah.

Jon Busby: Of course, the one I'm going to get most excited about is the podcast example. Partly because that was the question I wrote for Claire that was leading the panel from our side. But it's a great example where the FT of course launched a podcast, but also one of the few publishers that went with a true, like proper paid gate.

So the podcast was this element where they were releasing something out to the world that was free. Like, how do you align those two? And that's basically the same battle most brands are going to like, how do, where do we put the gate? And I'd love it if there was just a best practice answer where you're like, you put the gate here.

But the truth is, I think you need to do and test and learn based on your audience. One thing that Michele mentioned that I want to make sure we dive into Jonathan, because I'm really intrigued to know where your head's at here. And this kind of comes into some of the AI conversations we had with Beth Redpath later in the day, is this whole piece of buying committees.

Like just for our audience, let's remind everyone what we say we mean when we say buying committee. I think most B2B marketers should be familiar with it, but let's level set what we mean just so we're all on the same page.

Jonathan Sedger: Yeah, I think it's quite intuitive, right? It's this idea that, in the majority of B2B sales, you're not selling to one individual, you're probably selling to six, seven, eight, nine, ten individuals.

Mckayley's probably got a stat on Yeah. What the latest number of people in a buying group, is it 13, is it 17, is it five?

Jon Busby: We just don't know. It just keeps changing. Every month

Jonathan Sedger: it gets, it increases and increases. And obviously it depends on what you're selling. If you're selling to enterprises versus mid market or SMBs.

But it's this idea that you're not selling to an individual. And that buying group is that sort of committee of people that make a decision on a purchase. Yeah. And the conversation that we're having with Beth is, that ultimately You know, the way that we've treated leads, is ultimately as individuals.

What is that individual doing on your website? If you're getting intent data from third party sources, what is that person doing out in the world? And then we give that person a score based on how engaged they are with our content and, potentially with information that they're looking at out, out on the wider web.

But, this idea that is an indication of whether a company is ready to buy, I think it's quite accepted that is quite a flawed methodology. And actually, if we look at it as the buying group, all of those different people that are part of that. That discussion I think it's, it's becoming accepted that having more of a view on how all of those individuals that are part of that bombing process engaging and yeah, what kind of intent is that whole group showing is a much more valuable way to identify whether a company is actually in market and ready to buy.

But there's a lot of complexity and challenges around that, and traditional CRM systems are not set up to to to group those buyers together into an activated buying groups that you can see that. And the conversation we had with Beth was how she's already tackled that in one role that she's been at and also is now.

Going through that process in our new role as well. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah,

Jon Busby: I definitely want to come back to that because it's something that stood out for me, especially when we start talking about AI, because I think that's a big gap when we start applying it to the B2B context. Everyone thinks magically you can just apply it to B2B and something will come out of it.

But the, I think actually that's one of the missing pieces is understanding what an activated buying group looks like and creating a model around it properly.

Michele Reale: By the way, John if you were looking for stats around buying committees, you should reference our research published together with the Financial Times, which our listeners can find on our website on on decision making and how that has changed, especially since COVID.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I see. I'm going to see that's exactly what I'm, what's going through my head, right? So we've been on a journey with that research and I took some of it and started turning it into synthetic personas. So Jonathan, me and you were working on that. We've talked about the podcast before, and then when you piece that together with what Beth said around these buying groups, and I know a few people made comments to me afterwards around it.

You have got to realize that actually it's not about having a synthetic persona of one of these people. It's about how you model them having conversations with each other in order to then see what the impact that is on their decision. Hopefully that makes some sense. And I have seen some AI startups starting to do this, but I just think it's, that's the bit that's missing in B2B at the moment is no one is modeling.

People are modeling what a buyer looks like, but they aren't modeling what a buying committee looks like. That's a whole other level.

Jonathan Sedger: There's so much you can do with AI and buying committees, but I think if we take it sort of way, way back to, just that, that kind of principle of organizing your sales and marketing around, Buying committees, that's a huge fundamental change, right?

And it's, I think it's something that's starting to gather pace, but I think because it is such a big structural change into the way that companies do sales and marketing, and there's so many different stakeholders involved in making a transition like that, that it's, I think most companies are not there yet.

I think there's a few kind of trailblazers who are. Going down that route. But as soon as you start talking about removing MQLs a completely different way of measuring your success as a marketing organization, that's something that raises a lot of eyebrows, and definitely when Beth was talking about the journey that they've been on to do that, and obviously Beth was a previous podcast guest.

Guess where she talked through that. So our listeners can go back and listen to Beth talking about that. But it, yeah, it's a massive shift, and it really did generate a lot of conversation with the markets in the room.

Jon Busby: Did you know it did let's just keep diving into the AI elements.

So we, we covered off some of the early parts of the process, but let's jump straight to the AI piece at the end, like what stood out for you, Jonathan, from your conversation with Beth.

Jonathan Sedger: I think the actually, it's not one thing when we talk about AI, people tend to have an idea of what it is and what it can do for them, it is quite a diverse technology with, as we were talking about earlier, many different facets to it from machine learning to, the new kid on the blog, which is gen AI and all of these technologies can Be applied in lots of different ways.

I think the fascinating thing for me in that conversation with Beth is that, they've been using it in lots of different ways. We talked about how challenging it can be to orchestrate all of that data so that you can actually identify those activated buying groups. They use machine learning to help them with that, dealing with a legacy version of Salesforce where they just couldn't do that orchestration.

Within that CRM, they yeah they took the data outside of that and were able to then augment it with information from other 3rd party sources. Once they'd actually act identify that activated buying group. They were then able to use AI in, in lots of other ways as well.

So they were able to take human creative content and personalize it for those buying groups. They were able to look at those buying groups and go, what are they interested in? Okay let's automate them being part of a campaign that's relevant for them. So there's different levels where they were using it for the orchestration.

But also then for hyper personalization at kind of the end of the process as well. Yeah, I think, the takeaway for me is, yeah, that before you even start thinking about using AI for activated buying groups, like you need to get back to the kind of basics of the. Yeah, the strategic part of going, what do we need to do to go on this journey?

Is it the right journey for us right now? What stakeholders need to be involved in that? And how can I get something moving forward? Like that. But I think once you've tackled those kind of big meaty questions, then looking at AI is certainly something that can help you on that journey.

Jon Busby: But I think you've hit the nail on the head, looking at my talking points here of what we need to go into next, which is a lot of this technology change isn't about technology, it's about people and stakeholders and relationships and all that kind of stuff. It may sound strange coming from a technologist, like I use that chart during the day of this is the investment in and how much your budget has been going to more and more tech recently yet are Marketing effectiveness, which is a really difficult figure to define, by the way, hasn't jumped up by anywhere near as much, our budgets in MarTech and the amount of solutions that we're running has jumped up significantly yet effectiveness has only gone up, went down at one point, actually before it went back up again.

Michele Reale: Oh, on that point, John, there was one of the, one person in the room saying that actually they've taken out some of some technology tools recently and gone back to a more traditional brand approach to, to drive trust. So it's almost like brands suffering from a little bit of tech or tech

Jon Busby: overflow.

It was the case study we used in part of the room as well, which was the, essentially what Nike had done which has moved to a performance approach away from a brand approach and lo and behold, it impacts you. Like what were they saying they did? They removed a load of technology.

Michele Reale: This touches on something I've come across many times. And sometimes having to explain to clients that there is a little bit of an effect that if you just follow that kind of performance model, uh, from a tactical perspective, it could be a media platform, like they say, Google AdWords, or, any other type of more performance channel, there's always going to be something introduced in the market that everybody wants to jump on.

To have a bit of a incremental gain, but the reality is that these tactics, they only give you, if they give you, if big, if, but if they give you an advantage is only going to be short lived, maybe for, let's say a few weeks or maybe a quarter, because in essence, then everybody adopts the same methodology and then every, you create a new baseline essentially very quickly, whereas Stuff like, which might be considered a little bit more old school, but more traditional around, building your brand, building equity, building that trust, it's something that then, for your competitors is very difficult to replicate.

So going back to that storytelling and why buyers should trust you as a brand to implement very complex technology solutions, obviously requires a big investment, in that. Long, long term by it's a barrier that your competitors are going to find incredibly difficult to overcome rather than just a, small kind of, gimmick that, that is going to be released by platform X Y, or Z.

The Nike. Case study was absolutely, great, a great fit. And actually it's been picked up by quite a lot of quite a lot of marketing marketing information sources recently, because obviously we all know Nike hasn't had the best of times in the in, in the last couple of years.

So going back to that kind of storytelling is absolutely key. And I think B2B technology brands have got a lot to learn. Yeah,

Jon Busby: I think it's it's really, what's the right way of putting it like poignant. We're always looking for that silver bullet that is going to give us the edge.

And actually, in a lot of cases, you've hit the nail on the head that a brand builds a moat around your marketing and your effectiveness. I, there was a stats that I'm going to have to go and look up because I can't quite, it's on my head, but I, it's part of the reason why we've seen such a big, change in some of the Google search results recently is because brand is now such a big factor.

And you have to spend time investing and building it and building the trust. Before, before you can gain the rest of that success I'm going to come on to take a slightly different take us on a slight different angle there, which is, I, and I, as part of that night case study, like I was raising the.

That one of the bigger challenges we have is literacy, specifically literacy around data because Jonathan, as you just mentioned as well AI is fed by data, like the two intertwined, the two sides of the same coin. If you will, you can't really get the most out of your artificial intelligence unless you've got the right foundation of data behind it, and you can't really get the right foundation of data if you don't know what to collect and how to use it and your teams aren't literate enough.

I saw a lot of agreement when we were talking about this in the room, like did either of you have conversations with any of our attendees around how Important that is and what stood out for them. Yeah,

Jonathan Sedger: It's definitely a big topic on the round table that I was part of was around, companies want to drive more data literacy within their organizations.

I've, this is a conversation I've had with other senior marketers in other forums as well. It's definitely a big thing is that, clients need to drive more data literacy within their organizations for many reasons. An AI. Is an enabler to help you scale data analysis.

But actually, if you've got people who are using AI tools for data analysis, who are not data literate themselves, then that's, that's potentially going to lead to some really bad outcomes. So that data literacy is absolutely key. It was definitely a hot topic.

Jon Busby: I don't want to be clear here what we mean by data literacy, right?

So for me, data literacy is it's not just understanding the data. It's being able to tell a compelling story with the data, being able to bring, essentially being a leader with the data, bring others on, along on that journey. If you could just analyze it and look at it you, it's very easy for you to make assumptions or make the wrong decisions on things.

So I just want to really be clear on what that means. Cause I think so many organizations think, Oh, I'm going to put a dashboard in place and then we can make data driven decisions and it's no, firstly, most people are gonna be afraid of that to begin with, they're gonna be, they're not gonna want to go and use it unless they absolutely have to.

And even when they have to we're seeing examples from our own clients where they're not going in and using that data. So you've got to make everyone not just comfortable, but to upskill them on it. I think it's the biggest gap.

Michele Reale: And I think, again, it starts from there's probably an exercise here, given the amount of speed of change to take a, not one step back, maybe three steps back and remapping that user journey understanding where the interaction is happening.

For example, John, you've mentioned, the health test data, but I can probably think about other things that we could do. Consider more of a, dark social type of effect. And by dark social, we mean interactions that are not necessarily tracked, assuming that a lot of sales teams and out there working for some of our clients, using all sorts of different communication tools, like WhatsApp and et cetera, all of these data points, the touch points, not being collected, not being tracked, which is a huge source of information, but in essence, taking a step back and really think from A to Z, how a potentially buyer is actually interacting with.

With my company, with my product, and then, auditing, whether, any of these touch points are being tracked, how, where is the data, going. And if there is someone in the company stitching all of this story together, because data literacy, understanding data is one part, but then there is a, for me, there's also the second part, which is making sense of the data journey.

Okay, someone has interacted with us 200 times in the past of six months. I'm sure that data already exists and people are looking at the data in silo in, various teams from analytics, ops, marketing managers, sales managers, but probably there's no one or very few brands will have someone to say, actually, can I build a full picture?

Of that user with our company over the last six months,

Jon Busby: we can say that because the whole role of a CDP and actually CDP technology is now becoming more affordable. We're hearing these things called like composable CDPs now. So if you're listening to this it's definitely something I want to dive into more on a future podcast, but that's essentially what the role of a CDP is, right.

Or DMP at the day is to. knit this data together and then try and make it valuable. But I think it's just, there's so many hoops that we have to jump through to even get there. Sometimes I keep using this word compliance, like I'm working with another client outside of this event where we're finding, we have to go and get them comfortable with what that looks like to get that data into one place.

But we've had to make them, if you look at the risk model here, and this is going to get very Technical for a second, is the risk there might be a risk to opening up that data to more stakeholders inside the organization. And that's where most people, most organizations focus is like, Oh, we're going to go from 5 people seeing this data to 100 like what?

There's a huge risk there. What if it gets out in the open? How are we going to manage it? But I think what most businesses don't realize is there's a huge risk. to not having that data available and making those decisions poorly. There's a massive gap if you don't make that data available.

And I think that's the mindset we, that's the change we need to start doing strategically and as leaders in organizations is to take them on that journey. Because

Michele Reale: yeah, and I would add to that also to be, to refrain from making. Decision based on short term signals, because obviously in the world, in our world, be business to business technology decisions, take some, 1 to 2 years sometimes, but also is going to impact their company for many years after that.

Making strategic decision, just based on a few signals that are happening, maybe, to, this week and then basing, strategic decision based on that, that often is a bit of a risk, which is linked again to data. Around measuring effectiveness or campaign. I think that's another shift.

Probably that, we will witness, moving away from short term performance metrics to something a bit more long term, which hopefully first party data can also help. Help with

Jon Busby: Yeah I'm going to move us along. Cause I, I'm like, you've you've said the metric, the M word, and I'm very conscious we could definitely spend the next hour talking about that as well.

But the, what were the most interesting questions that some of our audience asked? I'll go, and I'll go first on this one. Like I, one of the most insightful questions I had was, are you seeing personal email addresses in forms? And I'm going to actually say there was a, When we were talking about this, I think it was me and you up on stage at this point, Michele.

I'm going to say in the testing I've done, I'm seeing a lot more personal email addresses than I was expecting. And I don't think I have an answer for this. Other than maybe we just need to expect it. People are moving between roles. They don't want to, they don't, they may be worried about having access to their email account moving forward.

They may be worried about signing up to something using their company account for various other reasons. So I'm seeing almost exclusively Gmail addresses come into forms, which is frustrating. But maybe that's just a sign of the times. But yeah. And that's

Michele Reale: where maybe you mentioned John technology like CDP and I think more sophisticated.

Again, first party data capture technologies can help make, maybe it is a case where I use a profile will have to be incrementally populated with,

Yeah, exactly different data points. And then you join, you joined the dot, behind the scenes. And by the way, for my user behavior.

point of view, we know that, for example, when we look at media performance, sometimes the more senior the audience you can notice a slightly lower engagement rate compared to middle management. And that's not because that senior audience is not engaging, but sometimes the audience doesn't want to be perceived to be engaging with a particular brand publicly.

Again, that means that, behind the scenes, you need to have the technology to capture that that information because potentially a CEO is not clicking on a LinkedIn post or an ad just because it doesn't want to have that, publicly available, but it doesn't mean he's not engaging with you.

But again, probably the information is being lost.

Jon Busby: Jonathan, was there any questions that stood out for you from the attendees?

Jonathan Sedger: Yeah, we were talking about a range of different levels of change. Oh, I would say you've got some things which, yeah, acceptance that, is a massive thing, but it's something that you can it's not a huge massive thing to, to fix that.

Then there's some sort of really meaty things, like changing the way that you're measuring that, that kind of buying journey and how you'll. Attributing the different people that are involved in it. And those are big transformational kind of projects. And actually the question was, is, yeah, I can see some of these things.

I can see some of these things need to change, but actually that's not something that lives in my remit. How do I be part of taking our organization on that journey? I think. Yeah, that's something we see a lot is that people might spot things that are challenges that their organization is facing, but they're like, that's not my responsibility to, to change that.

And when you look at some of those big transformational change projects, it's lots of different departments that are involved in in changing something like that. Whose responsibility is it to make that change? I don't think we necessarily had the perfect answer in the room for that.

Jon Busby: Mike, same question to you though.

Any, was there any questions that stood out from the room that you want to highlight?

Michele Reale: Obviously one of the main question was around the value exchange. What, how you define that, and then how you organize yourself to to, to be able to improve the value exchange as much as possible.

We probably touched a little bit on that on that previously, but again, the starting point is. Around rethinking your content, marketing engine, because it's, super important, and I'm sure john these are things that obviously you, you care a lot about, which is, data governance, having consent, privacy.

So you need to make sure that whatever data you're collecting, it's actually usable and you can activate against, before you get there, You need to obviously collect the data and increase, the ways you actually go about that. So that the questions around the value exchange, which is one of the core parts of the event, super important question.

There's a few ideas as we mentioned before, and that's where I think there's a huge amount of opportunity because it's really about mapping that content against different buying committees. And creating that recognition in the market that people can come to you as a brand with trust and, recognizing your credibility on on, on the topics that are close to you as a company.

Yeah,

Jon Busby: there was some great stats on that value exchange one as well. There was like some, a thousand percent stat wasn't there? It was some crazy, the figure was ludicrous about it might have been podcast listenership and the impact it has on the brand, but it was. Yeah. Some incredible results from why you should be thinking more as a publisher.

Michele Reale: Because then basically becomes a bit a snowballing effect. Once you've established your credibility with that, buying committee or multiple buying committees, then, everything that you published that you put out there. And we see this with some clients, especially Jonathan mentioned the consultancy.

Area before consultancy companies have been, I would say, pretty good in this space because publishing high value content as always been an area of big investment for them. And you can see that then it becomes people recognize that as soon as you put. A piece of content out there, is super well received.

So you then create kind of a halo effect on a lot of activities that follow. So that investment in value exchange and trust and credibility can have really significant impact across a lot of the digital marketing activities.

Jon Busby: Yep, so we probably need to start giving this, bring this to a close. And so I'm going to ask the kind of typical question here, right?

What's our key learnings that we've gone away from this event with?

Jonathan Sedger: I think the takeaway for me is that a lot of the bigger. Opportunities and challenges around data and AI, they can't be solved in a silo, right? It needs collaboration. It needs collaboration within the marketing organization. It needs collaboration with sales as well.

So I think just forging those relationships within your organizations, as I said previously, the the question came up, like, how do you become part of a group that's going to help to make change? I think, speak to your colleagues, Get a group together of people who can, who also see these things that they want to fix in the organization.

Ultimately, working together is going to help you to have a sort of a stronger voice for change and to help you to make that happen and gain some momentum around it. So yeah, I think collaboration is the, takeaway for me.

Jon Busby: For me, and it's. Leading on from that, it's, it is around this data literacy and enablement piece.

And I really want to carry on with the, that stat of like marketing effectiveness versus technology spend, which probably is for my role makes it sound super weird that I want to explore it, but I just see it as such a big gap for many of our clients. And not just with our clients, even ourselves what we're trying to do.

And it's. Michaela, you were talking about using the latest trend or whatever. This is something you actually have to invest in people and resources, and it gets difficult. That's probably my main takeaway is there's a lot of people coming and speaking to me afterwards around literacy and how we, how, ways of approaching it.

And as a marketing company, I think it's our responsibility as an agency. It's our responsibility to help manage that transition. That might be right with us. It might be with some of our partners, but I think it's, I think it's a really important point that we can't just shy away from because the amount of, to how many projects can we could, I think we've all got examples of this where you've tried to implement something and it's just fallen flat on its face because the company or the organization just isn't ready for it.

And so we've got a role to play to get it ready. Michele, what's your final takeaway from the event?

Michele Reale: Yeah, my final takeaway is, I would say on the data side, actually there's two takeaways if you don't mind, John. There's one around data, which is I would probably invite a lot of our listeners to take a little pause to, to really map, their entire, tech stack and that user journey to really, to really making sure that every possible touch point has been tracked, where is the data going and then how it's being utilized because there's again, making sure that.

The basics are there to work in the best possible way. This is something that also we care about it together. You don't want to miss opportunities that are literally in front of you. And obviously, our team can support. So I would say yeah, do not feel the need to continue this race of adding tech on, on top of tech, because probably there's a lot of opportunity already.

And then the second takeaway is to really rethink your content engine. These are the two main ones.

Jon Busby: Of course, this is a tech marketing podcast from together. So I need to factor in that we can help you with any of those parts of the journey.

And just to come back to that process that I mentioned right at the beginning the acceptance, are you getting the right consent? Do you have the right legal framework? Do you have what's called a cookie management platform, a CMP? We love these three letter acronyms in tech really, don't we?

But. We've started to help many of our clients with first party data audits behind that with identifying where they might be collecting too much information and may begin maybe collecting too little. So if that's something you need help with, do reach out to us on the analytics side of making data driven decisions.

We've talked a lot today about desiloing data about enabling teams with data literacy. We've actually been going on a data literacy journey ourselves. So if you want to hear more about. That's then do reach out to us because we'd be very happy to share our journey on those items activation.

Of course, that's pretty much everything to do with media. Like we can, we're doing some great work getting our data and our clients data into these platforms in data privacy first ways. So we can certainly help with identifying those right partners all the way through to automation and I and Jonathan mentioned the great conversation we had with Beth.

That's a whole podcast in itself, really, isn't it? Jonathan, it's you can go back

Jonathan Sedger: and listen to it. And I think we're gonna have Beth back on to talk about her new role as well. So that'll be an exciting.

Jon Busby: Exactly. But we've also helped build frameworks and other elements we can share.

So if any of this is, As intrigued, you do reach out to reach out to us. Of course, as always, give us a like and subscribe and give us a review on your favorite podcasting app of choice. But this has been a great internal episode. We've not had a guest as usual. I hope you've enjoyed listening to it and we'll see you again soon.