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Ep. 122 Smarter Media for Mid-Market Brands with Marilois Snowman from Mediastruction
00:19:50
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Market Live Announcer
Market Live is coming up March 10th and 11th in New York City. With us some, just some of the brands and agencies that have registered thus far. And don't worry, we'll be doing several of these announcements with us. Bayer, BMO, Farmers Insurance, Electronic Arts, the Hershey Company, HP, Huntington Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Kenview, L', Oreal, MasterCard, NFL, PayPal, PepsiCo, Redfin, Synchrony, T Mobile, Verizon, Workday Ah, agencies. Want to hear which agencies are going to be joining us? Assembly, Butler, Till, Canvas Worldwide, Kara Choreograph, Kridera, Dentsu, Digitas, ipg, IPG Media Brands, Magnet, omd, PMG Publisher, Sapien, Razorfish, Wavemaker, WPP Media and more. Can't wait to see you there. Go register now. Marketecturelive.com 3-10-11
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Host - Tech God
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Host - Tech God Introduction/Outro
Welcome to the AdTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God.
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Host - Tech God
Welcome to the AdTech God Pod where we speak to the female founders of our industry. Today's guest is Mary Lois Snowman, the founder and CEO of mediaestruction. For those who don't know, mediaestruction helps mid market brands plan and buy media. She's heavily focused on helping quantify the true impact of marketing and forecast the future sales with confidence. I've heard a lot about Mary Lois. She is a friend of a mutual friend and so I'm happy to have her with me today. Thanks for joining the pod.
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Mary Lois Snowman
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
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Host - Tech God
Thank you. And I love referrals. I think it's one of the things that I enjoy the most because usually there's some sort of connection to the guest. I value it a lot. So thank you for being on the show and thanks for taking some time out of your day.
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Mary Lois Snowman
It's great to be here.
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Host - Tech God
Okay, so I want to hear it. 19 years media struction. You've been in this industry for quite some time. You've been working with these mid market brands for a while. I would love to hear why you started Mediastruction and what's kept you going for 19 years.
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Mary Lois Snowman
Yeah, so I, I didn't set out to start media structure and actually I was really recruited by what was at that time the largest independent media agency to run a new venture that they had. And I had a lot of ideas not coming from enterprise level organizations or whole cos about how I wanted to service mid market. So it was kind of a fun and innovative way for me to rethink breaking down silos and departments and kind of building an agency geared for mid market from the ground up, which we did. And then years later that that independent agency didn't make it and we continued to grow. So that was the genesis of media structure.
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Host - Tech God
It's kind of incredible sometimes how I hear about people, I guess getting into the industry overall. Your love for storytelling has a lot to do with marketing and advertising and what you need to do for your clients to make them happy. But you as a core, as a company, you guys are really focused on driving outcomes for your clients. But most or a lot of these mid tier or these mid market brands don't really get what they need. What have you experienced over the last 19 years of working with these mid market clients? What are they missing from I guess the hold cos and how are you guys trying to address it and help them out to drive better outcomes?
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Mary Lois Snowman
I had this idea of media mix modeling for a long time but I didn't have the language and most of our clients don't have the language. They don't know what media mix modeling is. Over the last 19 years there was this evolution, you know, where the majority of the ad spend was with what you might think of as traditional media. And then of course digital media comes along and digital media has so much measurement attached to it. So everyone became very interested in being able to show some sort of return to executive leadership at their mid market brands. Whether that executive leadership is the owner, founder or whether it was a chief marketing officer. So a disproportionate focus, you know, was, was spent on digital media. And I just had this thought where, you know, there's got to be a better way for mid market brands to understand the impact of offline media and also the impact of media on off sales. If you think regional auto dealers, regional banks, those merit events happen in a brick and mortar location. So in the last couple of years with the sort of accessibility of Machine learning, modeling. With cloud computing becoming much more affordable, there are a lot of pretty sophisticated advanced attribution solutions that we can build for mid sized brands. And that's, that's super exciting. Of course, that's accelerating very quickly in the last year or two.
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Host - Tech God
Mary Lois do you guys work with them more hand holding kind of managed service? Is this like an all in one, all inclusive service that you guys provide to these brands? Because some of them don't necessarily have the resources in house to do it. Do you advise them on media buying, creative messaging, et cetera, or do you focus on one particular piece of the business?
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Mary Lois Snowman
The focus is on paid media. We sort of tangentially will talk about messaging or positioning if we're testing it through paid ads. That can be a really great kind of precursor experiment to, you know, a creative relaunch. We do like a lot of hand holding in terms of mmm. Because first we have to educate brands about what these algorithms do. It feels a little bit magical if you're talking about historical data and algorithms and there's not like a cookie or a piece of code that they can understand the journey, right? You're talking about large scale probabilistic data, that there's education that happens, then there's gathering it and cleaning it and wrangling it. And that's probably the most painful part. And I don't think you can do that with an off the shelf solution easily. So there needs to be sort of an evangelist within their organization who's a point person along with our data team to get past that phase. We do customization of these algorithms. I would say it's a little bit more of a curation than it is actually building it from scratch. But there's so many available today and having the right person who understands the industry that you're modeling the media mix, the historical media mix and which, which model to apply is a real skill so we can get to that faster because we don't have to build it from scratch, but we do, we do still curate it. It's not a black box solution. And then the speed with which you can now optimize, you know, you can change your media mix quarterly or, you know, monthly, depending on the brand and where, you know, the volume and what you're spending, which is new because just a couple of years ago you would build a model, you would socialize it in a PowerPoint. It would take you 12 months, sometimes 18 months, and by then everything would have changed. So this really allows for a speedy.
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McDonald's Ad Voice
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Mary Lois Snowman
Insights and speedy optimization and channel planning
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Host - Tech God
Working with this mid market clients. What Is there a particular segment that you focus on overall? I'm curious to hear, is it, I looked at your website. I noticed you work with some banks. I noticed that you work with Ocean State and a few others. Do you focus on any particular type of client or is it just all mid market and it's all customized based off of their needs?
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Mary Lois Snowman
It's primarily B2C.
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Host - Tech God
Okay.
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Mary Lois Snowman
It's primarily brands spending somewhere between one and $30 million a year, sometimes $50 million a year. But the brands come to us because they have number one big growth goals. So they, they need advice. How, how do we grow? And they have a lot of questions around what their media investments will deliver for them and they're, they're challenged with that and those brands come to us.
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Host - Tech God
Okay, so question for you because historically a lot of these mid market clients use search, social display. Now, now other mediums like connected television have become easily accessible. While historically maybe the budgets didn't make sense for them to do so. Even the targeting may have not made sense. But now with so much addressable TV hyperlocal targeting and just the ease of accessing it, are you seeing that there's a lot of interest there with clients and do you, do you feel like they've understood the true value of either CTV as a branding player or as a performance play overall?
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Mary Lois Snowman
Yeah, we, we've seen, I'm going to call them performance brands. Just talked about brands with big growth goals that kind of grew their business around search and social just as you described. And then they've kind of reached this plateau and they're trying to figure out well, what's, what's next, what's the right next investment and how, how do I measure it? Think CTV as a medium kind of provides a good interim solution because it is, it gives you all the sort of benefits of that large TV screen in the living room, the branding and awareness driving benefits of that. But it is a digital medium so it does have some measurability in that way. We're still pretty bullish especially for regional brands on, you know, linear tv, terrestrial radio. We definitely see a positive outcome not only as a channel all on its own, but the synergistic impact to all of the digital media as well. We see that through. Mmm. So, yeah, that's, that's part of what our mission is. And as much as we're very concerned about driving their business, you know, how do we, how do we grow, grow that beyond, you know, what they cut their teeth on?
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Host - Tech God
I think you touch up on something that a lot of people don't bring up on this podcast because everybody works in digital is just like the true power of linear. There is still a very sizable market that still watches TV or linear tv and it continues to be a particular demographic that is still very much so still connected to the cord and they haven't cord cut yet. And it's usually a high income, comfortable segment of our population. And so seeing how that helps the overall performance across digital and linear combined is actually really interesting to me.
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Mary Lois Snowman
Yeah. And I think if you are a brand for which on any given day a consumer could be in market for your product, you know, this might be really hard if you're, I don't know, you've developed a new type of dog collar or something, you know, it's, it's not it. You might not have the volume and scale to go linear. You might still want to rely on connected TV because you want to reach pet owners. But if you're a bank, a furniture store, a discount retailer, an auto group, you really get the benefit of your local content and the affiliation with your local content, local news, local sports. That's really valuable for those brands. We see it, we see it in the synergistic impact of their digital performance. We see it in the brand lift studies. There's still a really good place for that.
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Host - Tech God
So, Mary Lois, AI is a topic that comes up all the time. We talk about operational efficiencies, we talk about creative capabilities. I'd love to hear from your perspective, especially with how bullish you are on MMM and how you utilize that. How are you using the data and AI to improve performance for your clients and are you utilizing it at all or is this still a process that you haven't implemented?
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Mary Lois Snowman
Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. When it comes to the modeling work, anything having to do with analysis of data, we're still using machine learning and human powered oversight of that machine learning. What we've seen recently, and we haven't experienced this, but we've been observing it, is AI can hallucinate. There was a Reddit thread going around this weekend where a brand realized that, that they had been using AI to make some pretty big decisions.
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Host - Tech God
I saw that.
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Mary Lois Snowman
Q4. Did you see That I did and it had hallucinated and it had conflated product data with sales data and they were having to unravel that. And we've seen that too in testing LLMs, you know, using Excel. So there's this really great guy, Nico Newman, who's a scientist, a marketing scientist and he had a good post on LinkedIn this weekend about it and he was saying, you know, there's a couple of key questions that you should probably ask. You know, can I see the SQL or the machine learning model that was attached to this? Can I, can I test the guardrails of it? And that's kind of where we are. That said, we are working on a feature that would use an LLM to query your own data and your own Futuresite, that's our platform's branded name in future sites. Mmm output. Because right now what you need to do is you need to kind of create these static visualizations of the data and of course the numbers change as the data is fed into the model. Every night, you know, every night it's refreshed. But to be able to kind of query what ifs and a variety of what ifs analysis would be really cool. So we will, we will test into that. So I think probably like every other guest you've had, a judicious use of AI is going to make things a little easier. But we're cautious.
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Host - Tech God
Mary Lewis, I spoke to you before we recorded about the conference that we have coming up in March. And we're focused a lot around consumers having control and what that means, their ability to change, how they research, how they discover. And that's really kind of flipped the industry upside down. Like, not that we don't know what to do, but we know that behavior has shifted quite a bit from search engines to website to really just asking a question and getting your answer. Where do you see things heading in terms of consumer behavior with web traffic declining and moving towards other mediums? Are you seeing that impacting clients or are they just not as in the weeds as we are and so hyper focused?
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Mary Lois Snowman
No, we, we are, we are seeing it even with smaller mid market. We're seeing referral sources from chat GPT. We're realizing we're seeing fall offs in web traffic attributed to a change in the consumer journey. And we're also seeing a change in SEO as I'm sure everyone else is, and how we're advising even mid market to think about their content, how they change their content on their website, how they find, how they make themselves discoverable. In places like Reddit and LinkedIn, it's, it's definitely changing. I think, you know, I think I read OpenAI is charging like a million dollars for testing in, into, I'm going to call it product placement. So our brands are not, don't have those budgets but what we're doing on the back end for them is changing
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Host - Tech God
already because of the way these search engines work. A lot of the copy needs to change on these websites. From more of a, here's a, you know, multiple paragraphs about what we do into more of a qa. That way when people type in that type of question, the answer comes up and they reference your page. I think they call it G O instead of SEO or aeo. And so it's interesting to hear how that's changing and impacting even mid market accounts that you know, they've realized that traffic is declining towards their, you know, their organic traffic is declining and how they need to improve that. Where do you see things going in the next 12 to 18 months from where you sit? Are your clients excited? Not excited? Is there one particular thing that they really look forward to or is it business as usual? They just want outcomes and they want growth.
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Mary Lois Snowman
They want outcomes and they want growth. That's business as usual. How they get there is different. I think I said a few minutes ago that there's education around MMM and it kind of feels like mysterious. The interesting thing about AI being in everyone's pocket today is that that feels like magic. And now they're kind of coming back to this. Well, tell me more about how this MMM works. And to them it doesn't seem, it seems more tangible than it did previously. So, so that, that's changing a little bit.
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Host - Tech God
If you had a potential brand listening right now to this podcast, like what. What advice would you give them in terms of exploring how the media buy solutions in market? What do you think they should be looking into to improve their overall performance?
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Mary Lois Snowman
What I don't see very often is what I want to call a chief data evangelist. It almost needs to be someone who just knows what questions to ask and has a curiosity across marketing as a whole. Very often they'll have a data person who's very much in charge of building things, building models, building reporting, dashboards, that sort of thing. But there's so many ways that data impacts branding, messaging, attribution, sales, and there's so many different methods for capturing that that it would be I, if I were, if I were a brand, that would be one of my first hires. And I think I think enterprise organizations are kind of, I think I have seen that with enterprise organizations. I mean but they usually have a CMO plus this other person. I think it would be my first hire at a mid market brand.
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Host - Tech God
Well Mayor Lewis, I wanted to thank you for joining me today. Loved it. Thank you for, for the introduction, Julie, for making that intro and thank you again for joining me. Looking forward to releasing this episode.
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Mary Lois Snowman
Thank you.
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Host - Tech God
Thank you.
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Host - Tech God Introduction/Outro
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Ad Tech godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of ad tech innovation.