From third-party to first-party: Building a better data foundation

What do you think of when I say “tech start-up?” Those words probably conjure up thoughts of a small team working out of the founder’s garage somewhere in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino. The reason that image springs to mind is because that is how a bunch of the biggest and most influential tech companies started out over the years. But who started this trend?

Well, it’s not a plucky start-up anymore, but the answer is Hewlett Packard. Way back in 1939, Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto, which is now adorned with a plaque reading: The Birthplace of Silicon Valley. A lot has changed since then: Far from their fledgling days when they produced audio oscillators (which Disney used to test the sound equipment for the movie ‘Fantasia’!), HP is now a multinational IT mainstay.

The original HP split into two companies in 2015: Hewlett Packard Enterprise for enterprise products and services, and HP Inc for its personal computer and printer business. The split between its B2B and B2C customers was reflected in its data architecture. Like many legacy businesses, HP found itself in a situation where it had separate platforms and data stores for commercial and consumer data managed by a plethora of different stakeholders, leading to a severely siloed data landscape.

Over the last few years, HP has overcome these challenges by bringing together its fractured data landscape into a modern, composable data architecture befitting its history as the origin of the Silicon Valley mythology. To understand how HP went about this transformation, The Martech Weekly sat down with Kumar Ram, Global Head of Marketing Data Sciences, and Luis Alonzo, Head of Customer Data Strategy and Engineering. 

Kumar and Luis’s responses have been edited for clarity and congruency.

Welcome to our very first TMW case study! Kicking off this series, we’re featuring Rappi, the Latin American super-app that connects consumers with merchants that sell a wide variety of products, and drivers that can bring those products to their doorstep. The three-sided business is not only a logistical challenge, but also a Martech challenge.

Rappi’s array of marketing campaigns and offers, driven by a sophisticated deep-linking strategy, is crucial to its success. It did, however, lead to the need for an impossibly large amount of QA to ensure the successful delivery of customer experience workflows, ensuring that would-be customers don’t fall off their buying journey at any point, from clicking on an ad through to landing in the app and making a purchase.

Leading the Martech and Adtech practice at Rappi is Satya Ramachandran, who brings over 12 years of Martech experience to the table, having previously worked as a data engineer building distributed databases. 

In this case study, we’ll walk through how Satya not only scaled the Martech QA process using computer vision and robots, but turned QA into a profit-driving initiative with champions throughout the business, rather than just a cost center.

Satya’s responses have been edited for clarity and congruency.

Listen on⁠⁠⁠ Apple⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠ Spotify⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠ Google⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠everywhere else.⁠⁠⁠

Making Sense of Martech's very own Juan Mendoza on looking ahead to the rest of 2024

A conversation with Tim Mason & Sarah Jarvis from Eagle Eye.

In this episode we’re joined by Tim Mason and Sarah Jarvis . Tim is the CEO of Eagle Eye, a leading loyalty and personalization platform and a top 10 TMW 100 global innovator. Tim has spent more than 30 years building loyalty strategies in retail, including working as the Deputy CEO and CMO of Tesco UK PLC. Sarah Jarvis is a senior marketer, also at Eagle Eye, and a regular contributor to Forbes UK. Both are the authors of the recently released 2nd edition of Omnichannel Retail: How to Build Winning Stores in a Digital World.

In this episode, we delve into the multifaceted concept of Omnichannel, exploring its definition, and we hear Tim and Sarah’s case for its importance. We also discuss the ethical considerations businesses face in the pursuit of omniscient customer knowledge, offering insights into responsible practices amid growing data privacy concerns. Additionally, we explore successful examples of companies implementing omnichannel strategies and examine the challenges organizations encounter when introducing omnichannel to their businesses, along with strategies to overcome internal hurdles.

Listen on⁠⁠ Apple⁠⁠,⁠⁠ Spotify⁠⁠,⁠⁠ Google⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠everywhere else.⁠⁠

A conversation with Rohit Maheswaran.

In this episode we’re joined by Rohit Maheswaran, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Lifesight a marketing measurement platform offering a suite of attribution, MMM (Mixed Media Modelling), and incrementality tools.

We tackle the shifting sands of attribution and how marketers are using different models and tools as the ways of last click and multi-channel attribution fade away and more marketers are embracing a back-to-the-future style of measurement using experimentation and MMM.

Listen on⁠ Apple⁠,⁠ Spotify⁠,⁠ Google⁠, and ⁠everywhere else.⁠

A conversation with Cory Munchbach.

In this episode we’re joined by Cory Munchbach. Cory is the CEO of BlueConic, a leading Customer Data Platform.

In this episode we talk about Cory’s recent journey to becoming the CEO of the company, what it really looks like to lead the vision and strategy of a private equity backed company, growing and scaling a product right in the middle of one of the hottest categories in the Martech industry, and her outlook for the coming year in the CDP category.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, Google, and everywhere else.

A conversation with Chris Baker.

In this episode we’re joined by Chris Baker. Chris is the founder of Totem, a brand strategy, marketing, data and innovation consultancy with a focus on the Chinese market. Totem helps global brands break into China and Asia and works with marketing leadership on digital and brand strategy.  In a recent presentation of Etail Asia, Chris gave one of the clearest views on how generative AI is impacting the marketing industry.

In this conversation, we’ll talk about his perspectives on Generative AI from looking at how it affects small and large businesses to how it's impacting content quality, and how you should build a defensible brand strategy in an environment where anyone can make content and scale it up effortlessly with Generative AI… See timestamps below.

Timestamps

(0:16) Guest intro

(05:19) Marketing data opportunities in China and Asia

(19:27  ) Role of marketers and rise of generative AI

(26:10) Adoption of Generative AI in Entreprise and SME 

(37:24) trust in the uprising technologies for say mission critical work

(50:14) Defensible brand strategy in the new era of content creation powered by generative AI

A conversation with Lauren Maffeo.

In this episode we’re joined by Lauren Maffeo. Lauren is an award-winning service designer working full-time at Steampunk where she serves the U.S. federal government. She is a founding editor of Springer’s AI and Ethics Journal and an adjunct lecturer of Interaction Design at The George Washington University. Lauren has written for Harvard Data Science Review, Financial Times, and The Guardian. She has also presented her research on bias in AI at Princeton and Columbia Universities, Google DevFest DC, and Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and is the author of Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up.

In this episode we talk about the societal impact of data governance, the link between human-centered design and managing data in a company, the anti-patterns in data management, the importance of culture in breaking down data silos, balancing transparency with security, the link between data quality and misinformation and many other topics… See timestamps below.

Timestamps
Time Topic
(0:11)  Guest intro
(10:50)  Incentives to data the practice of data governance/management
(21:47) The anti-patterns in data management
(27:27) Discussion around techno optimism
(34:20) the importance of culture in breaking down data silos
(44:06) Balancing transparency with security
(50:34) The Link between data governance and misinformation
(53:33) Importance of data quality & governance on commerciality such as generative AI

A conversation with Ari Paparo.

In this episode we’re joined by Ari Paparo the famous host of the very popular Marketecture Podcast and the CEO and founder of LaunchScience, a newly launched (pardon the pun) startup in the category of process management for GTM and product teams. Prior to these two new ventures, Ari founded and exited Adtech platform Beeswax to Comcast and worked stints at Google, Nielsen, and AppNexus.
In this conversation, we speak about the overlap between the Adtech and finance industry, antipatterns in product launches, the fool's errand of software businesses doing media, the surprising second-order effects hitting Adtech in the shift to a more private web, and how Ari feels about all the negative press directed towards the Adtech industry. See timestamps below.

Timestamps

Time Topic
(0:21)  Guest intro
(10:50)  The overlap between the Adtech and finance industries
(17:59) Launch Science and anti patterns in product launches
(38:35) The fool’s errand of software businesses doing media
(50:56) The surprising second-order of effects hitting Ad tech Industry in the shift to a more private web
(59:53) Ari’s thoughts on the negative press towards ad tech industry

A collaboration with Kerry Guard.

In this episode, we’ve got something different for you the MSOM audience with our very own Juan Mendoza being interviewed by Kerry Guard from tea time with tech marketing leaders! 

In this episode, we cover things ranging from audience capture through to building a media company. What you do with an audience and the value of it. We also talked about latest trends in marketing technology, tracking GDPR and the ever present issue of a more private web and how markets are reacting to it.