Sensible Martech Choices, Latest Marketing Surveys, and Identity Resolution News | S3 EP 02

Chitra Iyer [00:00:02] On the talking stack today, we discuss how to assemble a sensible and practical Martech stack. The challenges with integration across clouds, platforms and so-called Franken stacks. Highlights from three of the latest marketer surveys that have just hit the headlines. And David Raab's expert commentary on three new news announcements in The identity resolution space. All that and more on the Talking Stack Today.

Chitra Iyer [00:00:37] Today, we're excited to welcome our first guest on of Season 3, who is in line with our stated goal last week a practicing martech professional with over two decades of experience in various marketing and intel and Analytics Roles including his previous one as a CRM and paid media analytics lead for PlayStation. He's currently the senior manager marketing strategy and Operations at Williams-Sonoma Inc. One of the largest e-commerce retailers in the U.S. Welcome to the show Pat

Pat Maigler [00:01:07] Thank you very much. And I'm sure the lawyers from Williams-Sonoma would appreciate if they just say all of the opinions shared today are simply my opinions and not the opinions of Williams-Sonoma inc

Chitra Iyer [00:01:19] Thank you. That's exactly what we wanted. In fact, your opinion, your experiences as a marketing technology professional, in fact, that is what a lot of our listeners want to hear about. You know, how does one become or grow into the role of  Martech professional? So why don't we start with your Journey? What has got you to where you are in your career today?

Pat Maigler [00:01:40] Thank you very much for having me. This is a great honor to talk to you. And I'm happy to share my story.

Pat Maigler [00:01:46] So I always like to tell people that I'm really motivated by progress. So I just like to see things change. And I tend to follow changes. And that means that my career has taken a very circuitous route. And I started out early supporting marketers and really found that one of the challenges was in the data. And in particular, we were doing a large data migration project, though, and seeing some of the bottlenecks there. I started to get more involved in the data and in the data migration and then starting to analyze the data, troubleshoot the problems, investigate what was happening for the marketers. And I just think began to get fascinated by this world of ever-changing software, technology, and data needs and the data exploding. But at the same time, at the highest levels of any organization, the throughput into the CEO's eyes doesn't increase. So it just becomes this challenge of how to do you filter, aggregate and turn more and more data every year into the same amount of actionable insights or into all automated so that you can really trust through black boxes that maybe people don't fully understand. And whether you build those black boxes in the house or you trust a partner, it's pretty much the same paradigm. You can spend a lot of time analyzing data and, you know, making it pretty, making awesome dashboards. But if no one's taking action on it, it really doesn't matter. So there's a lot of smart people working in business intelligence and data platform engineering and making Martek products. And we want to tap them, but we want to tap them in. As much as marketers have the capabilities to pull those levers, understand the changes, execute on them through partners and realize the results in a way that the board and executives can understand. And so to me, that's just like a never-ending problem and a constantly moving target. So hopefully it keeps me employed for a while.

Chitra Iyer [00:03:57] Personally speaking, as a practitioner, what are some of the key milestones you've seen along the last two decades or so when it comes to using intelligence to make. Marketing decisions.

Pat Maigler [00:04:10] I think the biggest change and I can't say exactly what had happened, but probably around like 2008 was a shift in marketers' mindsets that. They need to trust the data and listen to the data a little more than their own instinct. I think they always knew they needed the data to justify what they had already decided they were going to do in a kind of like cherry-picking to tell the story. To get your next budget. But you know that about 10 years ago, a little more people really like, you know, I think I can be more efficient. I think I can be more competitive. I think that maybe other people are going to eat my lunch if I don't start listening to this data. Start building my models. Start hiring these people who maybe aren't creative, maybe they aren't from my world. But I might have to start trusting some analytical people. And I'd say, you know, on the other milestones, as far as just pure technology is the data processing and visualization has come a long way in not requiring a team of developers to do each stage. I mean, who worked a lot with MicroStrategy and Cognos and, you know, other homegrown proprietary tools. And it's just like, yeah, they're great when you build them and then they're fairly static or oh, you want a new attribute that'll be a month or get in the backlog, you know? So when I saw Click You, that was exciting. But when you try to scale these technologies to a hundred or a thousand users or you try to implement a security model or ECL on top of it, you end up instead with one hundred Python scripts or you know, I mean, you just create a different level of complexity and you could say the same thing about moving to do or the cloud or whatever. It's like you're trading out problems, right? So you have to decide what is your organization's appetite for this new type of problem? And do you really have the right people on staff or the right partners to guide you through that journey? Also, the in-house vs. partner thing has changed a lot. You know, instead of it just being agencies where you kind of farm out a lot of the work, try to hold them accountable. They kind of try to hide how much margin they're taking from you. It has to be much more transparent. Like every Martek vendor, I talk to, whether we're an upfront cost expert, even before they sign an NDA, often telling them about our whole stack. And I think people are shocked by that. But it's like you could look at my LinkedIn profile or other people in WSI or you could scrape our Web site, you can figure out what we're doing. So like anybody's super motivated can get to this information. So it's not really nonpublic. It's more just like how much do you want to confuse your vendors and have them pitch you on the wrong things? Or how much do you want to get to the point that you're doing co-development? They really understand your business and you're able to leverage resources across a variety of companies to get to this point where you're building value together and you're optimizing which resources, which algorithms, which servers are actually used.

Chitra Iyer [00:07:20] Tell us a little bit about your experience with assembling these tags and what's a rational, insane way to go about it? And how do you also work with I.T. productively and not as adversities when you're trying to gage what Stack will work for you?

Pat Maigler [00:07:37] There's a great tool. I came across recently called CabinetM. CabinetM allowed us to visualize our marketing technology stack. It also helps to identify duplication, track the integrations and the contracts. And just within a few weeks in a pilot, I was able to use it in meetings with executives to explain things that to a non-technical or non-analytical person, you need a diagram with icons and that's very easy to explain or to pivot. They have dynamic stacks tools. So I found that's a helpful starting place. If you're new to an organization, they already have, you know, a bunch of tools in your life. Who's using what? Who's responsible for what? How do we even begin these conversations? If you're in two-year contracts with some folks, you know you're not going to put it out for RFP or if others you know, the data flows are embedded two ways through eight partners. You're like, it might be a while to unwind. So I think you really have to ask yourself, what is the current state of affairs? How did we get here? And then my approach is you have to consolidate decision making into a steering committee so that you can layout a strategic roadmap for what can change when. Right. You can't turn off the lights. You have to keep all the trains running. But you have to have an idea of which ones can be changed out and which timeframe. So, again, I would go quarter by quarter and just say, okay, what are we ready to commit to? We know this is a core strategic partner. They're adding value. We understand how they're adding value. And we have clear relationship ownership on both the business and technology side. Then we just kind of check the box. We're not going to consider replacing them this quarter. OK. Which ones are really expensive where we may have duplication or we're not getting full utilization or we're not happy with the relationship? Those might be ones to consider changing. Now, the ones that are more commodity or low price probably not worth your effort until you've addressed the bigger strategic ones. So I tend to be a fan. If you're not a technology company, go with a few big strategic partners. Buy into one of the clouds until you know that you can do better or you can truly build one of these strengthen stocks. I am skeptical. And so I say if you're a big company, you have deep pockets, go with a few big partners, get the most out of them, try to transfer knowledge in-house. And then when you're down the road and everything's humming, you can figure out if there's any partner. There are two of us in certain aspects, but for the most part, you're just going to create more tech overhead and integration. So you're either going to have to do that in-house or pay somebody else to do it, whereas if you just keep building within the capabilities of one of this large tech stack. Partners. You're like a salesforce at Microsoft. Even an Oracle. You can get a lot of your marketing goals achieved and maybe not all of them exactly as you would imagine. But I definitely would caution people against customization versus configuration. I think using the tools as they're intended to be used. Participate in alphas and betas, but for the most part, go with what your vendors do really well and what they know really well. Leverage their experts to make sure you're totally dialed in there. And if that's, you know, 80 percent of your Stender, your focus. I think the other 20 percent you can get to when you have time. But if you're a smaller company and you're very cost-conscious, I think you have to be very clear with your vendors on what your key goals are. And then really when you're RFP and make sure that you're going to go through a pilot, if they're willing to, you're going to hold them accountable to one metric of success so that you can actually inclusion. You're going to execute with them and you're going to just have a close relationship. And I think for smaller companies, a lot of times a smaller Martek vendor is going to serve them better because they're going to be more hands on and you'll be a bigger customer to them. Whereas if they have, you know, Fortune 100 customers, you're gonna get sent to a small and medium-sized business group that may treat you like a commodity.

David Raab [00:12:36] The Franken  Stack discussion is one that happens a lot and obviously people feel strongly, I think, on both sides of that argument. Have you really seen that it's easier to integrate within this within the Franken Stack as you know, they're all are not different within the big clouds, which, of course, you know, as you know, built from separate products that they all acquired? And there's a lot of criticism about the degree of integration. You think that criticism is overblown? I don't know what your experience has been in the companies. Which ones you actually work with might or might not want to name names. But have you found it that they actually are a little easier to integrate than sometimes we think? Or are they just as hard as some people say? Or just what's been your actual experience with that?

Pat Maigler [00:13:23] Sure, yeah. I mean, I've used croc's, which, you know, Salesforce, DMP, ExactTarget, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Yeah, a bunch of Salesforce.com. None of them talk. Right. You know, I mean, they're clearly still acquired products on their. Old technologies. Similarly with Adobe, I mean trying to get Adobe Vista, Adobe Audiance manager and Adobe Analytics talking across companies pretty challenging. They asked to be make the same versions and you know, then they can't talk in the background. But I think what you get is much better engineering and product support from those folks. When you have challenges and they can advise you and get you to an acceptable solution, even if it may involve a third party or some of your own development. Whereas I see when you try to build the Frankin stacks, you can run into just these insurmountable challenges. If you look at I think it goes from Chief Martek or something. There is some research about why marketing projects fail and integrations was the number one reason. So while a lot of these vendors out there, prebuilt integrations, they don't all work to the same quality like demos, integrations. They work really well, pretty smooth. You can try the same integration through power be-I and it might not be as smooth, you know. So it really you have to test it out and figure out interoperable. Are these systems and then how technical are the folks I have in-house to help me?

Chitra Iyer [00:15:04] That is a great question, David. And I think I think it's maybe one of the few times I've actually got an answer from a practicing professional who has actually felt the pain, obviously. And, you know, I'm going to actually the rest of this conversation. I'm just going to do it in the context of these three reports that came out this week. And I'm just going to connect those reports. They're all pretty interesting reports and audiences can find the links to all of them. In my shownotes, the first was the State of Branding Report 2020, which came out from Binder. And it's really about the you know, it focuses a bit on the technology from the branding and marketing aspects and applications. And then the inside group released their state of marketing report 2020, which also had some thousand plus marketers talking about responding to questions largely about content and social strategies plan for 2020. And then finally, we had another company called Chief Outsiders, which does executives as a service or basically CMO was to be specific, you know, to companies that need them. Factionally CMO is, I think their they did one on CMO priorities for 2020. So all of them had some pretty interesting connected stuff. And I thought it would be great to talk about those findings in the context of all our collective experiences. The first thing that struck out and surprisingly or not surprisingly, Pattee, we're just talking about those pain points that, you know, market is feed with integration. So from all redeposit. So if I'm buying, they'll follow that skill gaps, data overload and too much choice was cited as a top obstacles to investing in tech driven marketing. OK. And the Silvie from Chief Outsiders found that eighty eight percent of CRM will see a difficulty in staying ahead of technology advancements and being able to sort of wrap around what next in their technology stack.

David Raab [00:16:58] Well, I think they're all just overwhelmed by the variety of choice. I think what Pat was saying is dead on. You just have to kind of force yourself to focus on what's important, which is what I took away because. Yeah. You know, it's a rathole. You can just you can just endlessly poke around and, you know, you're in this garden. This candy shop of all these fun things. And, you know, you could do nothing all day long but sit and look at cool marketing toys. And it's actually what I do, but it's a lot of fun. But then again, I'm not a CMO, so, you know, I don't I don't have a day job. How do you actually assess one of these things? Here's something that looks like it might solve a problem of mine.

David Raab [00:17:40] But how do I, as a marketer or a Martek person, really understand what it can do, what it can't do? Does it truly solve the problem? How much work will it be to integrate? An integration always comes up, as you know, the number one challenge with these things. And given the inherent limit on my resources, because I'm always going to have limited resources, no matter how many I have, I'll always be limited. So how do I, as a market person, effectively and efficiently assess what the options are and kind of focus on the right ones? That's the big challenge.

Pat Maigler [00:18:16] I tend to leverage third party quasi independent cause I unbiased sources like, you know, Gartner, Forrester, I look at surveys are things done by third party consultancies on upgrading different software. Once I get into the point of talking to a vendor, I'll often tell them exactly what our stack is, exactly what our problems are. And I'll say, tell me where your technology is differentiating from this technology and what proof points you have. And if you can send me a one pager on that, then maybe we can set up a next meeting. And we really try to force them to give us their best research or best evidence first. Then, you know, there's usually some degree of demos and almost always a pilot. But I think that's appropriate for your larger decisions. I think for a lot of decisions, you should use more of a satisfying criteria rather than optimizing criteria. In other words, are they good enough? Do they meet my baseline standard? Can I check the box? You don't need to consider, you know, a thousand tag management solutions, right? You know, I mean, like, if they all are commoditized dilution and you're not looking for lots of bells and whistles, just choose one and move on. You have to decide what you're in the market for and then you have to decide, you know, are you in the Gartner Magic Quadrant? Only in the upper right. And you're considering those top vendors or are you a little justs and you need to consider one of the other boxes? Or maybe you're going to talk to industry peers or people who, you know, have used some of these vendors and look for recommendations from them on how much was this or where how much were they overselling. But I think a lot of vendors will give you, you know, customer references if you ask for them. So that's that's a good way to kind of, you know, check the salesman one.

Chitra Iyer [00:20:19] One really interesting aspect of the integration and the pain that comes with it. Anand, I would love to hear your take on this is because you've been part of some, you know, mojers acquisitions, different companies coming together. You've adviced companies on that. What what aspect do you see off technology integration in the market function when these kind of acquisitions happen?

Anand Thaker [00:20:39] There's usually two factors, one is cost and then the other is the the aspiration. Right. So it still comes down to even evaluating your usual Martek vendors in a certain capacity. But a lot of people, especially during a merger or acquisition or perhaps like even in the cases Pat alluded to, arrays where there's a lot of money in being available for marketing budgets, even in those transitions, I see a lot of similarities. So in the costs situation, you're not depending on who's driving the, you know, the leadership of marketing or engagement with the customer on the cost side of things. It's. Are we seeing redundancy? Are we seeing challenges with maybe an opportunity to renegotiate with vendors? It's a perfect opportunity. Do a lot of that because both vendors are excited. And of course, the you know, the lead marketing leaders are interested to see some sort of change happen. So we see a lot of vendors, of course, knowing about mergers before they're publicly announced that somebody is doing their job. I guess the the other cost factors include, of course, staff. Right. Unfortunately, you know, you'd get some incredibly talented people across the board if you're consolidating technologies as that also impact the staff. The you know, in the leadership and has their favorites in terms of vendors. So it's very political when it comes to that. The aspirationals part is where we look at things or whether things have seen as. All right. There is a reason for this acquisition wire. What are we going after? Who are the priorities of people that we are going to focus on either in terms of acquisition or churn or retention? 'scuse me. And in that and then state you will look at the entire stack from that perspective, sort of sort of like an inside out from a customer's perspective. What is that? You know, what does that experience look like moving through, you know, the journey across these different brands or perhaps the new brand or, you know, how to the evolution of, you know, the customer's journey being experienced as the merger occurs. So there's two competing factors, of course, but a lot of times it's lots of times initially, especially, it becomes reduce redundancy. Let's see what we have. Don't interrupt people's cadences, at least for a couple of years, and then start to reevaluate where do we need to match our technology to the business cases of the business priorities that are out there.

Chitra Iyer [00:23:09] Controversial topic there. Let me pick on one more controversial topic. And you know, David, you made an observation about the binders survey. Find one of the findings in the survey. You said the scariest aspect of this survey was that this market heavy sample was evenly split down the middle. I think at 30 and 31 per cent above on whether marketing or I.T. should be responsible for tech adoption. Right. And in fact, the words were, let's be clear, putting I.T. in charge of market adoption will not end well. OK. Uncaught. So we have to ask back who's here and you know, who is who was a technical and marketing, of course. Know what is your take on this extremely controversial topic? Who should be driving the market marketing technology piece of, you know, adoption as well as optimal returns?

Pat Maigler [00:24:05] Yes, it's a great question, and I think it's something that a lot of companies are really wrestling with as the survey and David's comments imply, I firmly believe that it needs to be the marketers leading the vision. The business requirements or business objectives and having technical people ideally in the marketing or who roll up to them with the same goals and same perspective, who know enough about marketing to properly support those marketing goals. So I really believe that you will have in-house software development teams and integration developers rolling up to the CMO as a standard soon because the use cases and even the philosophy is so different from kind of the traditional I.T. cost center or even, you know, enterprise software development. It's all very different. We're not building a product and we're not maintaining desktops. Right. Or we're adding value and building an engine that makes adding value and bringing the money in the door faster and easier. So marketers have been doing that for years. They're just changing. You know, some of the channels, some of the touchpoints and the way I like to frame it as marketers should own the two way conversation with the customer. And as long as that exists and they're optimizing on the customer experience and whatever metrics on ad efficiency row, as you know, brand uplift that they need to hit, then they need the right amount of technical and analytical resources to support those goals. So that's where I think there should be centers of excellence that cross the marketing or end the tech org where analysts meet or data scientists meet or developers meet. But I definitely believe marketing needs its own analysts, its own data engineers, its own technical folks who their goal is to learn marketing better, to support marketing better, and not to write the most efficient code that runs the fastest for, you know, selling a product and bragging about your your processing capabilities to a client. You know, it's a very different use case.

Chitra Iyer [00:26:35] That one of the things in one of the findings from that Chief outisder survey of CMO's was that 53 percent of CMO's advised retailers to take a direct to consumer strategy kind of approach to thrive in this. Amazon dominant economy of 2020 and beyond. Now, what exactly does it to see focused strategy really mean? You know, is it is it focused on customer experience, on increased social media investment? What is it that is special about the way to see guys are actually winning with customer experience and punching so way above their weight?

Pat Maigler [00:27:13] I think, you know, the the new wave of sea is is really more tech. First data first you can think back to the original data, see as much more on the catalog business. Right. So Williams-Sonoma used to be the largest center of catalogs in the country. So definitely a deal to see a leader in that space. And I think ideally you're sending, you know, of course, the right message to the right person at the right time. But I don't think a lot of the data is there even in the new year to see folks. So I'd say they're largely just lowering operating costs by not having stores. They become buzz where they and they're hitting people and getting low conversion costs. So like that's kind of the model. But you see a lot of them now needing a retail presence, physical partner. So I think that kind of like a dream of how we're going to completely beat out retail and just be online is even being shifted by Amazon, you know, and their acquisition of Whole Foods, their Amazon goes stores. I just see people need a physical world presence, whether it's delivery within an hour or a convenience store down the road at some point. We're so inundated with marketing messages that only so many DTC providers can get through. So what will make DTC differentiating in the future? In my opinion, it's it's building authentic trust and having a true to a conversation with the customer so they feel listened to and respected and that you're not just pushing product at them, but you're actually offering them things that may enhance their lives at a pace that they can consume them. And then I think the other thing is highend together, surveys and panels with intelligent data modeling and look-alikes is how you will get to better insights and experiences without having to test huge amounts of media spend in a/b tests or to trust the vendors. You know, it's like listen to the customers. If your employees or customers use them as your alpha group, you know, try to figure out an employee panel that looks like a customer panel that's representative of your entire customer base and test through those and tiers, learn really fast. And then scale your investment. So that's the way I see DTC becoming really an enabler and a more personalized experience in that if it's approached that way, it gives room for smaller companies to fill more niche markets and the bigger companies to fill the more commoditized market.

Chitra Iyer [00:30:06] Thanks for that and funny you mention that whole shadow industry of of people trying to understand who their consumers was, even though they haven't really asked the consumer for their consent. So that brings me to, you know, do these three surprising. You know, surprisingly, again, three pieces of news about identity resolution. So, David, you know, let me get your input on this. Let's start with morkel launching Mercuri Identity Resolution platform. OK. What on earth are private identity graphs? And you know, what can marketers do within that they couldn't do before?

David Raab [00:30:41] So a private entity graph would be my company, Sir William Snowmass own core customer data linking the different identities for those customers just using their own information. That's presumably what Merkl means when when they use that term as opposed to the public identity graph where the data is gathered by third parties and they link it all together using all those shadowy technologies that Pat was just referring to. And as privacy regs become more powerful, the public data becomes less available or at least less sharable. So private data graphs become more important as sort of the dynamic that's going on with mercury and then. What's also going on there is companies sharing a second party data with each other, their identity graph, so they can supplement Williams-Sonoma data with data that comes from American Airlines and Bank of America. Presumably not competitors, although certainly in the catalog industry there's a history of of, you know, other catalog sharing with each other as well. So now you get these sort of marketplaces or whatever you want to call them. There was this really odd or rather frightening line in the press release about mercury, about, you know, they were going to be. Selling programmatic access to identities, which sounded like set off every privacy bill, every alarm certainly in my little wall. You know, it's exactly the stuff everybody hates the idea. Is people trading identities like baseball cards won 80 by two launches, UNIFY and EAI, our customer data and identity platform for B2B marketers. Now, you know, after the recent demise, it sort of off reviews and the general understanding that Beta CS are much more sort of conducive for CDP style and CDP scale platforms. Why this launch, do you think?

David Raab [00:32:46] Well, the thing about 180 by two and I just want to comment on the side that these guys all have funny spellings with all these words must be at that entity thing. Maybe they're all like trying to establish their own identity, but so they beat a. B has always used a lot of what's really third party data. Right. A lot of compiled data. So, you know, it just makes sense. And B, to be there's only so many companies you can actually make a list, start with on a broad street and work your way down of companies who who built that. So in a way, it's much easier to do it B B than it is and B to C. So you've always had this market of data that companies want to use to enhance their internal data and that that's you know, this is more of a data than an identity platform. The way I'm reading it is like, OK, we have we're compiling all this data that we can now make available to you, Mr. B2B marketer, about your customers and about your prospects so you can have a better marketing universe. And of course, that you can only use that data if you can use it, do the identity matching to bring it together from all the different sources and get a complete profile that giving business or the people within the business. So this was not especially, I think.

David Raab [00:34:05] Different from what had been offered, but again, now we can call it a platform and we'll productize it a bit and we'll make it. Ciello So it's not so much of SCDP sort of solution, although I believe that they did have the option to bring in, you know, your own company data and match together. It was announcement from Dun and Bradstreet actually also of something similar just I think today after this this came out. And obviously there's a big i-D piece to that as well. And they did buy the lattice engines SCDP, which is no doubt underlying some of that DMB technology. So, you know, it's just something that that B2B marketers have always done and, you know, has over time the technology advances. You kind of package it up and make it more of a platform, make it more of a product than a project. So that's just the next step in that. And the third item to anticipate was something called count- with the K again. Here we have these crazy spelling things. It's a very different business. There's this whole other world of not figuring out like whichit entities are the same people, but saying is someone who they say they are. So if I go inside and open up a bank account, am I really David Robb or my someone pretending to be David Robb, which would be a really weird thing to do. But, you know, if if David Robb were rich enough to be worth, you know, pretending to be, then then it might make sense to do that because they want to get access to my vast fortune. So that's and there's an entire business, obviously, of making sure that people are who they say they are. And that's what Count does. Is it Danu Trust? So they now are just adding another version of their product that actually gives a score, which is a great thing to do that says, OK, when somebody comes on and wants to open, let's just say a bank account or credit card account or whatever is this person who's who they say they RCF send the information off to count and they come back with the score that says, yeah, they're probably who they say they are, you know. So sketch.

David Raab [00:36:04] You know, there's plenty of companies to do that their whole identity verification is a huge industry.

Chitra Iyer [00:36:10] Unfortunately, it sounds like the consumer is guilty until proven innocent. To add to all the problems of illusion of choice and illusion of consent, right. I guess it's all in the interest of better marketing. So hopefully it'll it'll show up in how wonderful our customer experiences are. What an interesting conversation. It has been to me from the evolution of data driven decision making to assembling a sensible Martek stack, to talking about integration of clouds across clouds and platforms versus stacks. And finally, or Franken's tax policy. And finally, what the two CS are doing differently all wrapped up with that brief commentary from David on what different facets of identity resolution look like. Based on those news items. So we are completely out of time today. But thank you, Pat. David and Alan, for all of that great conversation. And of course, as always, thank your listeners for joining us today and supporting the docking station.