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- [00:07]
Orna Sear
Hey, this is NOORNA sear for AdTech Unfiltered. Today we're diving into the evolution of the agency pitch in a world shaped by data, AI and rising pressure for real business outcomes. Joining us is Mallory Benjamin, Chief Transformation Officer at upstate New York based agency Dixon Schwabel and company, who sits at the intersection of marketing, tech and data. We unpack the shift from last click obsession to predictive modeling, why transparency only works if clients understand it, and how to simplify complex tech without losing impact. If you want to know what actually wins pitches today, this episode's for you. Let's dive into this episode with Mallory.
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Interviewer
Now, Mallory, how long have you been with Dixon Schwabel?
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Mallory Benjamin
Six years now.
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Interviewer
And how long have you been in this particular position?
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Mallory Benjamin
So Chief Transformation Officer, the role is pretty new to me. We actually, my official rollout into that title was about a year and a half ago.
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Interviewer
So we're gonna talk about something that everybody who is at an agency cares about, which is how to pitch new business, especially in today's modern era. So I wanna hear about your position to kick things off. How does being a Chief Transformation Officer coincide with pitching new business?
- [01:15]
Mallory Benjamin
Yeah. So before we jump into that, I'll give you a little background on what a Chief Transformation Officer does at a mid size agency. Our size. So the role was brought into the agency to sort of serve two main purposes. One is to help support our technology and innovation strategy. So how are we supporting our clients in that specific endeavor, but also our own internal efforts around this, and then secondarily is to help our C suite and our CEO specifically identify sort of what the top challenges are that we're looking to solve as an organization. Whether it's a client challenge or something a client internally may be facing, or our own internal challenges, we work so to help kind of call down that list of maybe 50 things we talk about in any given meeting and bring it down to three and start to operationalize it. So my role is about bringing in the right people to the conversation, actually putting action against it. A lot of times people will ask me, so what do you do all day? Is it just pontificating? Definitely not. There's a lot of solving problems and identifying what those look like specifically to a pitch process where my role is really strategically positioned around helping the clients to solve their internal challenges. So when I come into a pitch conversation, I'm using uniquely, sort of speaking the marketing language of our data and the IT teams to understand how might we take a technology problem or technology opportunity and pivot that so that we can use the data and get the information that we might need to really build out that personalized marketing efforts that the client might have as a particular goal. So maybe it's not personalization, but maybe it's how do we start to actually understand what data we have or what the data infrastructure looks like? And I'll be involved in that conversation to say, here's a few options of how we might solve this. One might be a technology solution. One might be pivoting to use technology they have already a little bit better than they are right now. So they may have solutions in house that they don't even know. The tools could talk to each other. And they don't because the marketing and the data people and the IT teams typically don't sit in the same reporting structure. So there's sometimes some disconnect between that and I'm typically brought in to kind of help merge that gap.
- [03:19]
Interviewer
It's clear that in a role like yours, especially as you defined it, because I know Chief Transformation Officer is going to mean different things at different organizations, but from an agency perspective, you're central to the pitch process. So I know that this isn't your first year doing pitches. You've been doing them for a minute. What have you observed about the evolution of the pitch process, especially this year?
- [03:40]
Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, this year a lot of the conversation has changed. I think for the last probably five years, we've been having a lot of really deep conversations about data, how data infrastructure can help support the work that we're doing doing how to use that data better. And then this past year, a lot of it's pivoted, obviously around AI, which is the buzz word of the minute, and understanding how AI is a solution for them. I think what we hear most often from CMOs is that their CEO wants them using AI, and they maybe don't know exactly what the applications are or how we can best solve that particular challenge that they're having internally. They just know it's something they need to be using.
- [04:14]
Interviewer
What role does data play in shaping the story you tell during a new business pitch?
- [04:20]
Mallory Benjamin
Data is absolutely central to what we're working with, any marketing problem that we might be trying to solve. But I think it's essential because marketing's really solving a business problem, and in order to solve the business problem, we have to have the data. I think one of the things that's very interesting about Dixon Schwabel and companies specifically, we really focus on this clarity as our central positioning segment when we talk to Our clients. We're a creative and media agency that focuses on bringing clarity to all of the problems that our clients are facing. And it's interesting because what we often find is that the problem the client comes to us with is not really the problem we end up solving in so many cases. So data, if we don't dig into the data and we don't understand their target audience, and we don't understand maybe what information they have about the particular customers that they have right now, we can't help to bridge that gap. So that's always an essential piece of that conversation. I think the second part to that is on the reporting side, obviously attribution, it's sort of a four letter word to me. I struggle in this space because we've done a lot of work with many different verticals and there's always a lot of pressure to prove one to one attribution. And a lot of marketers still focusing on last click attribution. And all of those systems are not structured to really drive the best ROI for our clients. And so we've been pivoting a lot to predictive modeling for our clients as a way to demonstrate the successes from a marketing standpoint. And I think that's one of the places where we like to talk to clients to say the more you can give us from a business data perspective, the more we can bring into that model and help drive really strong understanding of what we can get you, what the medium mix should look like and what the outputs of that specific campaign can really be for you based on your spend.
- [06:04]
Interviewer
Thinking about this next question I want to ask, and I think you kind of hinted at it right now, mentioning that clients have continued to be obsessed with last click attribution and that you've needed to make some pivots there. So my question to you is, what are some of those evaluation criteria that clients are really looking at when you are pitching new business and what have you really prioritized?
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, I think it really depends on the client, which is a terrible answer. That's the right answer. Right. I think some clients are still in a very click through kind of media metric world, right? At the end of the day, they think that's how they can best prove value or they believe, truly believe that there's some direct tie to the business outcomes that are happening from those media metrics or those vanity metrics that we focused on for so long. And so I think there's a bit of hesitancy to relinquish that and give that up or in lieu of other metrics that they feel satisfy the needs of their leadership teams, they kind of lean on that as a way to solve for the challenges or the gaps in information that they do have. And so I think the more we can provide real, true, hard evidence and the more we can educate along the way. Especially when you're dealing with something that feels so abstract, like a predictive model, it's really challenging to have them understand. Here's all the inputs that went into it, and then here's how math, science, AI helped us understand what that really could look like. And it's just a very fluid process. But I think there's absolutely more and more an emphasis on what the business outcomes are and how we're going to understand what those look like.
- [07:34]
Interviewer
There's this mixed bag of emotion around business outcomes. And should we be talking about business outcomes or should we be talking about classic KPIs? Where in that conversation are you sitting right now? I know you just mentioned that business outcomes have to be the priority, but if you were to provide a little bit more clarification on what that actually needs to be when you are including it in a pitch, what does that look like for you?
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, so great question. I think in order for us to measure it, we have to have access to it. And I think that's a challenge for anybody working in the marketing space is that if our marketers, right, if our CMOs or any of the marketing contacts we're working with don't easily and accessibly have access to that information, then we can only measure as far down that funnel or the path to conversion as is reasonable based on the information, the data they have. Because if they don't have it, we don't have it. And if we don't collectively have it, we can't optimize to it. So I think as far down the funnel as we can get, we absolutely want to measure. But I think we also have to work with informed teams that can help us to understand what does the path to purchase look like, what is the lifecycle of the product purchase so that we can understand how long does it take for us to make the sale. Because not everything is an instantaneous purchase we work with. One of our clients has been really great about doing some research and studies of their own to say here's what we understand. When we start marketing to a new provider, they're in a health care adjacent category. When we start marketing to a new provider, it's about 4.2 months before we see them write A prescription for this product. So understanding that we know there's a life cycle to how long we need to be in market and what information we need to start supplying those that target audience before they're going to actually write the script on their behalf. So what does that help us do? Right, that helps inform the cycle. But I think at the end of the day we can only be responsible so far down the funnel as far as we get the information back because our models can't take that information into account. I do think there's absolutely value in the vanity metrics, as we will call them, but I also am a very, very big proponent of quality over quantity when it comes to inventory, when it comes to channel strategy, anything that we're working on for our clients, I absolutely pay attention to the metrics that we're looking at. But I would take quality inventory over a quantity inventory and at a high click through rate any day of the week.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. There's so many different arguments happening right now about these, about the business outcome space. So it's good illustration. There's. I want to shift our conversation and talk a little bit about ad tech and Martech and the role that those things play in relation to your business pitches. So there's just an ever growing number of Martech and ad tech solutions out there. How do you decide which ones are going to be embedded into your pitch? How do you make sure that they're adding value when you are offering something to a client?
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, that's a super great question and I know every partner in the space wants to know the answer because for, you know, the last almost 16 years I've been doing this, people have always offered like we can join you in the pitch. I think the value of that conversation really has to focus on does it bring a direct value to the client and do they understand what that would mean for the relationship and is it really a unique selling proposition? So I would say we would bring a partner directly in or we would reference the use of certain technologies when it pertains to like a category specificity, you have really specific data or you have really specific ability to target one category or vertical or industry that they're going after and we can demonstrate that. But I think it has to be truly unique and there has to be a clear application for understanding going into that RFP that we're going to absolutely leverage that tool or tech in that particular instance. I think more often than not we go in as ad tech, neutral or agnostic as far as what our solutions might be because as I said before, when we talk about that clarity, you go into the RFP conversation thinking that you're solving problem X very often as problem Y, and that same solution might not be the right fit. And so I don't typically like to lock ourselves into what that solution is until we're further in the process. But I do think there are unique opportunities. But more and more clients don't know or necessarily care. They're hiring us because they don't want to be involved in that process and they want to understand that we know the space, that we work with partners that are trusted and that we're going to provide them the best solutions for their needs.
- [12:06]
Interviewer
So I'll drive us down, I think, to a transparency question that really is something that you can speak to in detail. Do you believe that transparency and programmatic and digital buying has become a differentiator when you are pitching new business?
- [12:20]
Mallory Benjamin
I love this question so much. I am a highly transparent person. So I think when it comes to differentiators in the market, I think truthfully it lives in the eye of the beholder, which is troubling for me. Right. I've been selling transparency as a differentiator for probably the last 16 years. I think there's huge value in transparency, but I think it's only valuable to the client if they understand what non transparent solutions really are doing. And that requires so much education. And sometimes it may not paint you in the best light if you're trying to kind of pull the smoke and mirrors away from what's been offered in the industry for so long and what's become staples. We had a conversation recently, I was talking with someone and we were discussing the non transparent margins on the back end. And I just think these are things that clients aren't necessarily aware are happening and agencies aren't publicizing them. But there's just such a huge value in knowing where your dollars are going, how they're being spent, what portion or percentage truly is being spent, what partners and where, and then having the line of sight into offering clear impact understanding of each of those channels. So if we're willing to provide that clarity to you and also offer you an understanding of why those things are happening, or maybe they're okay, maybe they're here for a reason. And we know this partner X over here is doing this, but it's not driving the numbers that we maybe thought that it should. But here's what it is providing us and here's what it looks like in our propensity Model, model. And here's why we want to keep it. I think that there just has to be an established level of trust for that transparency to really be valuable for clients. But oftentimes they maybe don't know what exists on the other side.
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Interviewer
I was looking at the survey on LinkedIn, like some, you know, big consultant put out one of those, you know, polls and they had a couple of different choices in terms of, like, what's the biggest issue in advertising? And so they had four choices. I can't remember all of them, but a couple of them included addressability, inventory. And then of course, one of them was transparency. And then a lot of people had picked transparency. And then in the comments section, what a lot of folks said is if you address transparency, everything else will be solved. It really boils down to the fact that transparency is such a big issue, it's affecting everything in such a massive way. So I love that you made it such a big priority for you.
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah. And I think partners that we work with, we ask a lot in the transparency question and we want to know how much is going, going where? What does this look like? Are we going to be able to see the results if we ever engage in anything that's managed service and isn't directly run? I know we have annoyed partners in the past because my team has a thousand questions and they want to see all the nitty gritty details because they're being good stewards of our clients dollars and they want to make sure that they understand the story that's being written by the data, that they can tell that as part of the overall narrative of our channel strategy and how it's improving or detracting and why we're going to move those dollars away. And if you don't have that understanding, or we don't have that understanding, we can't provide it to our clients. And that's something that we do hang our hats on. So it's important.
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Interviewer
I know you already brought up AI, but I'll ask you a question about it. How do you frame automation, AI and data driven targeting in a way that reassures clients rather than intimidates them?
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Mallory Benjamin
Well, so that's the whole reason that my role was brought into the agency, ironically. But I think my role is about simplifying it. I want to make it as easy for them to understand as possible. I don't come from a technology background. I came from a paid media background, sort of taught myself a lot in the ad tech space and was fortunate enough to find a space that or an agency that found a role for me based on skills that I had in ways I could be most beneficial to our clients. And I think that this is something that I'm very passionate. It's not about overwhelming and telling them the technical know how, but it's about simplifying the process and saying, here is what you have in place right now, here's what it could look like, and these are the things that it could enable for you. And if you can explain the outcomes clearly and make that transition process as simple as possible, possible and really take the weight off of them to bring the right teams together. So a lot of times we'll be connecting, you know, CMO sitting in the conversation, but we'll be bringing their IT team together with our data scientist or our data analyst or potentially even our database team that's building out what the framework of that data looks like in the architecture. But we try to, even in those conversations, make sure the first one's appropriate and that it's at a level that everybody in the room understands. Here's what the goal is, here's how we need to think about this. These are the things we need to be considering so that marketing can do X with the data. And then we let the tech guys come together and have those discussions and make it possible for them.
- [16:59]
Interviewer
I have a question about something that I think has to be your responsibility and it's that as the Chief Transformation Officer, how do you make sure that you're pushing everybody along, that you're a good chefer, to make sure that people are evolving and bringing new technology and just innovation to the table in the pitch process.
- [17:16]
Mallory Benjamin
So in the pitch process specifically, I think we always have this philosophy that we always talk at Dickson Schwabel about progress over perfection. And I think there's no place better for that than in a pitch scenario. So when we're talking to a new client, we want to make sure that we're bringing them something new, even if we aren't quite sure it fits the objectives or fits the challenges that they have that they've brought forward in the rfp. We start to bring in that thinking and give them a sense of what it could look like. Right. Painting the art of the possible is still something that's very valuable to a client and then making that seem very clear to them. But I think it's also living it out in our day to day interactions. I have high expectations and my team will tell you that, but I'm also very encouraging and supportive and I believe wholeheartedly in servant leadership. And so when we have a problem or we want to solve something, we're always looking for a better way to do it, but we're looking at it from a perspective of, I have a problem that we need to solve, and it's all hands on deck and everybody's in it together. So I think when you have that mindset, there's never a space where people are kind of competing for any resources or solutions. Anything is game and any idea is a good idea. Let's try it. Let's fail fast and see what happens as a result. So I think when you adopt that as the internal mantra for how we work and the expectations we set for all of our team members, that carries through to the pitch process, and they see that resonating from the team that
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Interviewer
we're working with at this juncture. How often do you find that clients are looking for you to be masters of existing technologies or platforms that they're leveraging versus having you highlight emerging technologies that they don't have experience with?
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, I would say both. I think that that's something that I wish it was one or the other. It's certainly not the space that we live in. I think when it comes to. To being masters of current technologies, that's a given, that's an expectation. So if you don't know the current tech, you're not even in a consideration set for them. But I do think the emerging tech, and especially as we start talking about AI, there's pressure for everybody to adopt it and understand it and bring it in right now. And a lot of times it's about helping them understand where the applications are within the work that they do. One of the things that we've been recently providing our clients with is sort of like one cheaters or overviews on all the places we use AI for them proactively. Right. Like, they'll say to us, do you guys even use AI? Like, we hear about all these things. Is this even. I'm like, yeah, it's all over the work that you're doing, and here are the places that it exists already. We, I would say more often than not, our clients really want us to be in that space of testing and learning, but they want us to bring them along with it so that they can start to use those technologies and ingrain them into their own work processes. In that way, we are able to help support them and have them realize that it's being demonstrated throughout all these different steps of the work that we do. And also demonstrating that AI is much larger than just LLMs and it's part of marketing workflow for the last 50 years. So it's important, you know, as you're
- [20:17]
Interviewer
explaining these LLMs to clients, how do you communicate to them how it is going to impact their campaigns? Because there's something really nebulous about a lot of these technologies, especially in the AI space. So what does that look like? Because every I think about the last 10 years that we've spent talking to clients about, well, you know, there's algorithmic learning that's taking place and it's optimizing and it's super ambiguous. And now I think our expectations have shifted where they're seeking clarification and they need you to the one who's doing the clarifying.
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Mallory Benjamin
Right.
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Interviewer
So how do you address that?
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, so in many cases. So like the one shaders I was talking about, these are really good examples for exactly that reason. I've been asked that question a hundred times. What is it exactly that you're doing with AI? What does AI look like? So we've actually written out use cases by department or by, you know, channel that they're maybe engaging and explain to them. So for your reporting, for instance, you have a predictive model that informs all of the media strategy. Here's how we're using it. These are the types of things that it's doing with examples and draw that out for them. But even when it comes to LLMs, like here's how we're using it for concepting or concept testing, where maybe we have a, a custom GPT that's built to mimic your audience or your target audiences that you're trying to reach. And then we're running those concepts against that to help us understand how your particular target might respond to this ad, or maybe where there's some gaps in the message or maybe how we should pivot it for those particular groups or subgroups that we're reaching out to. So I think if we're able to illustrate that and then actually pull out real examples for them, it helps tremendously. But I do think there's, there's a bit of stereotype around. You have to be a tech company to be providing these things to clients. And I think there's a lot of really great, really thoughtful, pretty advanced work that's happening with our group that maybe isn't coming through as strongly as it needs to for them to truly understand that value.
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Interviewer
Prop, today, when you are putting together a pitch, is there any type of innovation or part of the tech stack that Clients don't have an existing. Not a lot of experience with that needs to be in these pitch decks.
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Mallory Benjamin
Yes. Okay. Well, I would say this. A lot of times what I see is a need for some sort of customer data platform to exist between the systems that they have internally that they don't know that they need. Right. They, they say we have all this audience data, we have all this information about all of our clients and, and we want to do a targeted campaign to prospects or we know that if they have these two accounts with us or these two types of products with us, they're more likely their propensity is higher to buy this. But we want to target these people. But they don't understand that in order to actually use that data effectively, they have to have a way to get it, extract it from that system and bring it into any of the tech platforms that we're buying from. So there's obviously a tremendous list of partners that you can work with and a lot of different ways to make that possible. But I think that they still don't understand there's a gap sitting there that's not AI, but it's almost a technology structure that they don't have today.
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Interviewer
Is there anything that you're excited to dig into that you expect you'll be inputting in more pitches as we are not too far from moving into a new year?
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Mallory Benjamin
Yeah, attribution solutions, I think that's a big thing that I've been really focused on right now. We've been working on what those like. I talked a lot about the predictive models, but we've had some really great results in understanding what's happening from a client marketing perspective. And I also think that information can be used in the same way to better understand audiences that we're trying to target. And so I'm really excited to, to build more around that and understand how that can be strong solutions for our clients.
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Interviewer
The enthusiasm that you bring to your work as a Chief Transformation officer and just the way that you speak about the pitch process, it's really invigorating. So I appreciate the thoughts today and enjoy the conversation.
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Mallory Benjamin
Mallory, thank you for having me.
- [24:09]
Orna Sear
Thanks to Mallory Benjamin, Chief Transformation Officer at Dickson Schwabel, for giving us a clear look at how the pitch process is changing. Where data is foundational, AI needs to be practical and success is measured by real business impact. The big shift moving from selling tools and tactics to delivering clarity, connection and outcomes clients can really trust. If this sparked new thinking for you, make sure to follow the show and share it with a friend. Until next time, stay curious.
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Interviewer
Curious.
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Orna Sear
And keep questioning the way the industry works. I'm Orna Sear for Ad Tech Unfiltered. See you for another episode real soon.