Funnel Reboot

You could say that the marketing field is going through exciting times right now. But you shouldn't say that everything's rosy. Here are examples of issues we're grappling with:

The use of SaaS by Marketing may have freed us from being chained to the IT department, but after 25 years of binge buying all these point solutions, we're saddled with loads of Technical debt, and the order to repatriate customer data from all these servers.

CMOs are tasked so much with explaining technology out there, much of their time is used up by the C-Suite's questions, leaving little time for them to manage marketing.

There's the question of whether the agency-client relationship will survive with AI. Some say brands won't need an agency as they will generate their own creative. Agencies like Publicis, who've poured huge sums into their media-platform CoreAI that monitors billions of consumer signals and can inform what ads should be made, when & where.

Because our field doesn't have standardized accreditation, our terminology isn't uniform, and we make dialects for our company or industry. How's that working for us? About as well as it did for those building the Tower of Babel.

My guest is Myles Younger, Head of Innovation and Insights at U of Digital. Since graduating from Northeasters 20 years ago, he's been up and down the marketing industry block. He was a client-side marketer in the tech and financial services sectors, He founded and led an adtech company, Canned Banners, that was acquired. He worked as a VP at data consultancy MightyHive which became Media.Monks.

He is in a new role now at U of Digital, spearheading this education thought leadership to expand the company's educational offerings across different formats, learners, and markets

To me, he's something of a modern-day David Ogilvy, who wrote his thoughts on his industry back in the day, in a book called "Confessions of an Ad Man". Myles is just as outspoken on digital media and advertising topics, and the opinions he voices in trade publications and podcasts can come across as prophecies about this industry and sometimes pleas for how it could be better.

I caught up with him in Portland, OR, where he lives with his wife and three kids.

Timestamp/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

0:03:25 Welcome Myles

0:04:55 Continuum of approaches to privacy

0:07:58 Our reliance on ad tech; its future

0:20:56 We can only go as fast as our people can

0:24:53 Tech debt we've brought on ourselves

0:31:50 PSA

0:32:37 Changes impacting platforms & ad agencies

0:42:44 Platforms exploiting advertisers in the name of Al

0:48:27 The good & bad of using their Cloud offerings

0:52:32 Best reaction is educating ourselves

1:00:00 How to reach out to Myles

Links to all People/Products/Concepts mentioned in the show appear within the Funnel Reboot site on Ep 184's shownotes page.

Episode 183

As a Disclaimer, note that there's no sponsor or affiliate relationship with the vendor interviewed here. They're simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.

As trite as it sounds, the way that we look at the world affects our understanding of it. Let me tell you about a time I noticed this. When I was a kid, I would go to school, walk into my classroom, and see my teacher there. She was such a constant there, I imagined that she never left the classroom, she was a fixture of the room, part of the furniture. It's like the teacher didn't persist as a person who had a life outside of the classroom. So when I was out at the grocery store with my parents and I saw my teacher, not dressed in their teacher clothes, not ensconced in their teacher setting, my brain just melted.

While this might be laughable, those of us using marketing analytics tools could be guilty of falling into the same trap. Credit for making this concept clear in not 1 but 2 great books must go to Avinash Kaushik. Think about it. According to Classic web analytics, visitors who hit our website had started an imaginary timer that we called a web session. We imagined in this race against the clock, they were viewing a sequence of pages which ferried them to forms we used as gates. We told ourselves that the gate-crossers had completed a successful session, converting from visitors into leads or customers.

Stepping back, there are a few things wrong with this picture. Users don't only exist inside of a session, just like the teacher didn't only exist in the classroom—they roam about as they please.

Today's users aren't confined to marketing content. The experience they have straddles our marketing sites, to sites and apps where their identity persists through being logged-in, where the interactions even span multiple devices - as we see on Slack and Discord for messages we've already read.

The user's state changes - sometimes they complete a purchase, or become a paid subscriber, but at other times they may opt for a free plan or abandon their cart.

We need analytics for all of these actions. We need to step back and view the entire experience that people have with us over time. This is something that classic web analytics just can't measure.

This is why the new generation of tools allows us to analyze complex trends and behavior of our users. They are collectively known as event-based analytics tools, and they excel in portraying the way that users experience a product. The foremost product-oriented analytics tool out there is called Amplitude, and today, we are speaking with its product evangelist.

Since 2021, Adam Greco has been Amplitude's Product Evangelist, guiding clients in understanding their tool through workshops, blogs, and videos.

He got into this field in 2005 when he joined analytics platform Omniture where he was a customer advocate for four years until Adobe acquired them and rechristened them Adobe Analytics. He then worked at consultancies for 15 years, showing people how to get the most out of Adobe's tool, authoring over 200 blog posts along the way.

Lately Adam's speaking and advising on analytics has had him splitting his time between Chicago and Amsterdam (where he was when this was recorded). When he's in the states and not working, he enjoys restoring and going for drives in his 62 convertible corvette.

Timestamps/Chapters

0:00 - Intro

5:00 - Meet Adam; why event-based method works better than session-based method

24:00 - PSA

24:45 - how to get value out of recent analytics tools, including warehouse-native apps

56:20 - Adam's coordinates and free resources

Links to all people and products mentioned are available in Ep 183's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Today's episode looks at how pervasive voice technology is, and how marketers can make better use of it.

After spending over twenty years in marketing agencies, Susan Westwater became cofounder and CEO of Pragmatic Digital. Susan has talked and written on the role voice & conversational AI plays in marketing and business strategy.

Susan is coauthor of Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences. Recently, she co-authored the book "Voice Marketing"

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 Intro

2:30 About Voice marketing

27:15 PSA

28:00 Susan's process for enabling voice technology in your marketing

59:30 Where to find Susan and the book

All people, products and concepts are linked in episode 182's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

When a person interacts with their device or goes online, who owns their data? Today's guest says they do, and marketers should be paying them for the privilege. Right now, you might think this person wears hats made out of tinfoil. It may surprise you to learn they are the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.

John Thompson has written four books. I found out about him through his 2020 book Building Analytics Teams, which led to him being a guest on this show back in 2023. He recently released his book "Data for All" which spurred this repeat appearance - which has only happened with a handful of people.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00 - Intro 1:39 - How we came to giving our data for free 24:55 - Public Service Announcement 25:49 - Getting paid for our data 44:26 - Getting to John & his books

For links to all persons and concepts mentioned, go to Ep 181's notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it'll describe it as "a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is equivalent to player two's loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero"

Many think that's how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it's at our expense. We're losing; they're winning. Zero-sum game.

Siobhan Solberg disagrees. She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant.

She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL's course on personalization. She's also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I'll call Marketing Unf*d.

She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University.

When she's not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits.

Chapters Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

0:46 – About Siobhan

2:11 – What marketers should know about Privacy

20:56 – PSA

21:53 – Privacy across the organization

39:59 – Siobhan's contact details

'1 to 1 Marketing,' sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our brand is hard. Is it marketing's job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with what's at stake if we screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?

Today's guest is here to help answer that.

Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications.

Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects.

He's on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels - be it web, email, app, text, social - or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards.

His first book, written together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We're talking with him about his book "Hello $Firstname," which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let's welcome Rasmus Houlind.

Links for all people and products mentioned are in the episode's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

Chapters & Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro

2:30 - Book's Main Theme

37:48 - Public Service Announcement

38:41 - Quantifying the value of Personalization

1:00:25 - Rasmus Contact details

Episode 179

This is the second of two shows on doing data-driven marketing, in a way that respects user privacy. No matter how much we crave, there will be fewer ways to capture it. At time of recording, Google says Chrome will stop supporting 3rd party cookies in 2024. Our choice should not be to switch to other forms of tracking, but whether we'll go into this privacy-centric era voluntarily, or out of necessity.

Having less data on our customers may sound like it's bad for business, but a recent book argues that it's actually necessary to maximize your long-term ROI. The book, "Becoming a Privacy-Centric Marketing Organization," was a co-written by a group who work together at InfoTrust. One of those co-authors is today's guest.

Lucas holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of South Carolina and is currently at the forefront of delivering tag architecture solutions for major corporations. Specializing in sales and business development, he leads the implementation of tag governance processes through his role in managing InfoTrust's Tag Inspector product. His expertise spans sales and marketing strategy, web analytics, and tag management. With a focus on educating clients about the critical aspects of proper tagging and user behavior analysis, Lucas collaborates with some of the largest agencies and enterprises globally.

Timestamp/Chapters:

0:00 - Intro

2:26 - The Privacy Imperative

22:40 - Public Service Announcement

23:11 - How Privacy is Implemented

50:13 - Coordinates for Lucas/InfoTrust

For links to people, products and concepts mentioned, visit the show's website for Ep 179.

Today's talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there's no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They're simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.

Today we're going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel.

Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our software tools grow, so does the complexity. We're beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard.

It's against this backdrop that I invited today's guest.

Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he's focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue.

Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous B2B SaaS outfits, he's now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics. His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog.

Links to all things mentioned will be in the shownotes on Ep 177's page on the Funnel Reboot site.

If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it. Whether it's for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we're making content before knowing our intent, we're making the software master over us instead of being its master.

Today's guest says the visualizations that come from this won't be intelligible, won't make them motivated to act and won't yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it'll motivate them to make the right decisions.

Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers. He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years.

He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he's not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts - from the front row, and also hanging out with his wife and kids.

All links mentioned are in the show notes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

There were a lot of books covered on the podcast in 2023 - 44% of this year's shows were with book authors. Combined with previous years' book episodes, we have reached the 60-book mark on this podcast - you can sift through them all on our site by clicking on the "books" category on the right-hand menu.

But I've had the chance to read books outside of these, and found even more I'd like to feature. I'm not saying all all biz books that come out are good. To be honest - a decent portion of them aren't good at all. But since I set out once per year to make a special show, I felt it time to review some of the business books that shouldn't slip by unnoticed.

After you hear brief reviews of these 6 books, you'll hopefully put one or two on your To-be-read pile.

Shownotes with links to these books is available on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 175.