Marketing may just be the most complex profession in the world right now. There’s new tech, new media platforms, new consumer habits and constantly changing attitudes, needs and behaviours. And all of it is evolving, faster than ever. Now throw AI into the mix. It’s like marketers are running on a treadmill that’s moving faster and faster. But it’s not just speeding forward (and up and down). The treadmill marketers are on is also spinning both left and right (sometimes simultaneously). And making giant leaps forward faster than any runner could respond to. Welcome to the data-driven marketing world in 2021. I hope you have good shoes on and lots of water!
To make sense of this seemingly chaotic situation, In Partnership With explores the latest in AI machine learning and data-driven decision making with Reagan Zuzarte. Reagan is the Founder and President of Triangles, an ROI-centric marketing optimization firm. Over the last 12 years, Triangles has worked with innovative customers in the real estate, financial, retail, spirits, hospitality and events spaces and more. Their AI-enabled process uses structured learning to establish baselines for paid media. From there, they test which additional media spend drives impact; adjusting and efficiently scaling parameters that are reliably adding incremental value. It’s a proven approach that yields an optimized result for customers.
Data-Driven Marketing Today
Reagan’s team has a primary focus to bring a data science aspect to media performance. Key questions they consider include: How do you measure the incremental impact of a brand’s media on their performance, whether their target is consumers or businesses? How do you measure the impact of media across your consumer journey? The Triangles thesis relies on being as agile as possible with your media mix. That way, you can let the data decide for your campaigns.
Triangles strives to ‘tell the story’ with data-driven marketing to understand how to actually optimize marketing efforts. This includes things like spend, creative messaging and geographies a brand is active in. It’s about taking the signals that come back from consumer behaviour. Once successful – which takes some testing phases to gain – you’re eliminating the guesswork from the equation. This foundation of a strong experiment design allows his team to make more reliable predictions. When a customer sees the data transparently, in a normalized way, making decisions become easier and efficient.
With the latest marketing tech, the guesswork is being removed and now brands are optimizing targeted messaging at an incredible pace. It’s the opposite of trying to be all things to all people.
Instead of ad saturation, Triangles’ campaigns allow brands to speak with those who really are most engaged and who are converting to revenue for your business.
Changes in the Marketing Ecosystem
Reagan acknowledges that there is part art and part science to the marketing industry. So when asked what the secret is behind his team’s data-driven marketing formula, he admits there is no one set of answers to any customer question. But there are some common forces at play.
Brand teams that are data and digitally savvy, while being broadly knowledgeable about marketing strategy are performing at an all time high.
Five or 10 years ago, performance marketing – whether by outsource or internal – was the first domino to fall in the data-driven marketing landscape. Reagan observes that has now led to more and more tech with the tech stack helping to do things like optimization and attribution. But, even with advanced tech, it’s still complex. Sure, there’s more tech for evaluation, but it hasn’t really made things easier. It’s still quite murky in terms of what ‘good’ looks like. Often, Reagan notes, there’s different and often conflicting methodologies on measurement. For instance, what you would measure internally on your own analytics versus what you might see in an external data management platform. Plus, layer in the data a brand will receive on a publisher exchange or programmatic exchange like Facebook or Google. Aligning all that disparate data is still a challenge.
Privacy Becoming a Major Factor
Take all that context and then add in the last few years, starting with GDPR, the big force of consumer privacy. Reagan believes those laws are now making data-driven marketing a lot more challenging – and rightfully so.
It is becoming a lot more challenging to connect the dots and to really prove ad effectiveness while protecting the consumer. Consumer data, as we know, is often being sold and resold without their informed consent.
Reagan firmly believes there is a balance to be struck between advertiser effectiveness and consumer protection. Triangles does help find middle ground for customers by aligning with their data policies. Targeting can still be quite precise without being invasive.
Part Art, Part Science
The challenge with trying to do great work that is data-driven marketing is that you want to you try to turn it over to the algorithms. Their ability to evaluate the statistical probabilities and science-side of marketing is incredibly powerful. However, as any marketer will tell you, algorithms, no matter how advanced, often ignore nuance in every business or with consumers. Artificial intelligence is just not there yet. AI cannot solve to think like a human. In fact, since humans designed AI, there are potentially problematic biases built in. The incredibly complex human ability to lateralize thinking remains unique. So that is where the art comes in, as powered by humans.
Both human insights and technological support are needed to keep our marketing ecosystem alive and thriving to create the most effective marketing possible.
The analogy Reagan often brings up are pilots in the cockpit of an airplane. The technological systems to fly a plane have come a long way in the last five decades but Reagan isn’t getting into a plane without a pilot. Sure, a plane could likely fly itself – and autopilot during long, routine flights across oceans is standard – but would you want a machine landing a plane in icy conditions with a cross-breeze? In these conditions, most of us would demand a seasoned human pilot at the helm, navigating with both their experience and the latest technology.
Common Mistakes with Data-Driven Marketing
After a decade and a half, Reagan has seen a lot. Tech continues to evolve, but at its core, it’s about employing the best research methodologies. The biggest mistake Reagan sees in some well-intentioned efforts are usually related to the experiment design phase. Challenges abound. When you’re comparing, for example, sets of results that aren’t in market at the same time. That will impact the legitimacy of your data, results and subsequent decision-making. Perhaps there are seasonal shifts at play (for your consumer or with pricing on ad platforms).
Setting up the experiment design the right way each time ensures that you’re truly empirical and learning from comparable data.
That is a challenge, admits Reagan. He continues that usually experience is the best teacher as to how to properly lean into the insights. And then it’s about leveraging the talents of people who are stats savvy.
Know Your Level of Comfort
The other thing to note is that there is a margin of error involved. And depending on the customer and their requirements, you can work with confidence intervals that aren’t as close to 100%. For instance, 90% is often strong enough to draw conclusions from. As the saying goes, “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Aiming for absolute perfection isn’t viable and will likely slow down data-driven progress.
Knowing what’s right for your brand and campaigns is critical.
A major factor in research quality is the challenge that comes along with cross channel measurement. This is understandably a very difficult topic. To attribute an online video view, for example, which may drive a customer’s offline visit to a store, is a difficult connect-the-dots challenge. Reagan sees a lot of platforms that claim to solve attribution perfectly. But there isn’t a silver bullet. Choosing and testing models which map to a brand’s business objectives is most important. From there, running controlled tests to refine the model is key, while also allowing that there might be blindspots which need some leeway.
Looking Forward to the Future
It’s always interesting to examine what’s next. For any marketer today – or an aspiring marketer the future – Reagan thinks, undoubtedly, one of the most important foundational blocks is being conversant in data. From managing conversion to being comfortable with spreadsheets, this know-how adds value to any marketing ecosystem. Even if a digital designer, whose first passion might naturally be the artwork involved, understanding the consumer response to their creative via measurement can help sharpen their insight and make their output better.
The more advanced practitioner will lean into code and insight generation from data-driven marketing, suggests Reagan.
The best will understand confidence intervals and propensity models. Demanding signal from noise and understanding what is statistically significant will be one of the foundational tenets of effective marketing leadership in the future. For many, Reagan believes it begins with the quest to figure out which KPIs are truly relevant for their brands. Being measurable doesn’t automatically make it important. But most critically, Reagan knows that marketers must stay active learning about tech, measurement and privacy trends, tapping into the right talent to leverage opportunities.
Clearly, there’s a lot of complexity to navigate through. Fortunately, creative and data-centric marketers are making the most of these new opportunities to better connect, engage and win together. And that is going to get them to the finish line (on their treadmill) or in the boardroom even faster.
In Partnership With
Reagan Zuzarte is the Founder and President of Triangles, an ROI-centric marketing optimization firm. Triangles focuses on data-driven growth to maximize digital ROI and over the last 12 years, Triangles has worked with leading companies in many verticals. Select customers include SAP, Campari Group, Woodbine Entertainment, Biosteel, Informa, Minto Communities, Movember, Tia Health, CentreCourt Developments and Rexall.
Tim Bishop, CM is a multi-disciplined executive with a proven record of optimizing strategic efforts to expand the influence of leading organizations, such as the Canadian Marketing Association, Cineplex Entertainment, Lavalife.com, IMI International and Northstar Research Partners. In Partnership With is his latest focus to curate Canadian marketing experts to celebrate the power of strategic partnerships in a perspective-based content series.