← Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
The Daily: Future-Proofing Marketing Through The Secret Weapon of Standardization | Dec 19, 2024
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- [00:00]
Marcus
Data collaboration enables innovative companies to uncover powerful new insights that transform customer experiences and fuel business growth. With Liveramp, marketers get the industry's only interoperable platform for data collaboration across every cloud, walled garden and media platform.
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Matt Karasic
Learn more@liveramp.com no longer will any one party be able to just get all of the data, put it in one single database, and do whatever they want with it. Data will stay in silos because it's supposed to. That doesn't mean all parties can't opt their data in to be part of a use case that everyone has agreement on.
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Marcus
Hey, gang. It's Thursday, December 19th. Max, Matt, and listeners, welcome to the Buying Limits Daily, a new marketer podcast made possible by Live Ramp. I'm Marcus. Today I'm joined by two folks. Let's meet them. We start with our senior analyst who covers everything digital advertising and media. He is based in Philipp Philly. It's Max Willins.
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Max Willins
How's it going, Marcus?
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Marcus
Hello. And also joining us is Liveramp's vice president of product. He's based in the Seattle area. It's Matt Karasic.
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Matt Karasic
Hey, Marcus. Happy to be here.
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Marcus
Hey, fella. I'm glad you're here with me and Max for today's episodes. First, before we get to the content, we start with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better. So let's do it one minute on the clock. That comes from Victoria, who edits the show. Let's do it, gents. So, Matt, start with you. You just told me that you're based in the Seattle area, but where are you from?
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Matt Karasic
I grew up outside of the Philadelphia area in New Jersey.
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Marcus
Oh, okay. Very nice. What took you over?
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Matt Karasic
I met my wife in Bermuda and she is from the area. And here we are.
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Marcus
Very nice. Very nice. Not a bad place to be. Max, you are based in Philly, so where mat that you're originally from?
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Max Willins
New York City.
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Marcus
Yes, indeed. Matt, what do you do? In a sentence?
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Matt Karasic
I lead products for our insights pillar here at Liveramp. And so that includes all things using data to extract insights and to better understand where and how to best use your marketing dollars.
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Marcus
Very good.
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Max Willins
And Max, I help brands and publishers understand where the money is going in the media landscape.
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Marcus
Very nice. Matt, back to you. What is your morning drink?
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Matt Karasic
Coffee.
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Marcus
How'd you take it?
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Matt Karasic
Black?
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Marcus
Oh, no, sir. No breakfast either. We just learned.
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Matt Karasic
No, no breakfast. I make my French press. I. I recently upgraded my lifestyle significantly. I went from hand grinding my beans to an electric grinder. I have easily shaved off 12 minutes per morning. It's glorious.
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Marcus
Welcome to the future, sir. And Max, how about you?
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Max Willins
Black coffee is the correct answer, Marcus. For those of you keeping score, I also drink as much of it as I can carry upstairs to my office. I should swap grinder notes with Matt Offline because I had one a couple of years ago and it died on me and trying to get back into it because I currently use a spice grinder and I know that that's not really what you're supposed to do for French press, but I have a crude hacked together system that I use. But I should also enter the future.
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Matt Karasic
Too, so I got you Max. I'm a week and a half into my new toy and I couldn't, couldn't more highly recommend it. It's all possible.
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Max Willins
The golden age. Awesome. Offline.
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Marcus
The correct answer was instant coffee with too much cream and an unsocially acceptable amount of sugar. Matt, if you had to move, if somehow, for some reason, I'm not going to ask why, but you were kicked out of the Seattle area, where would.
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Matt Karasic
You go at the moment? Ski season just started, so I'm going to say interior, British Columbia.
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Marcus
There you go. Well played, Max. How about you?
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Max Willins
That guy knows his skiing. I moved to London. I love London.
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Marcus
Yes, yes.
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Max Willins
Although that's based on a pre Brexit perception of the place.
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Marcus
That's also fair.
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Max Willins
I'd get there and go, you know what? Just kidding.
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Matt Karasic
I'm going back.
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Max Willins
I will stay in the airport until I figure something out. Yeah, who knows? Happy to be wrong. Sorry to everyone I know that lives in England right now.
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Marcus
Yeah, it's. No, it's fair. How close we are to other countries is a huge selling point of coming to the uk. So that's a fair answer. All right, gents, very nice. These are the two guests we have for today's episodes. Thank you, gents for being here. Let's go to the fact of the day quickly before we move to the main episode. Today's facts. How long did Notre Dame take to build? So Notre Dame is the French gothic cathedral in heart of Paris. Any guesses? Matt, how long do you think that took to put together?
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Matt Karasic
10 years?
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Max Willins
I would say 200.
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Marcus
Did you build it? How do you know this? That's insane.
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Max Willins
I remembered from when I was a kid we, you know, did European history and I remember finding out that some of those cathedrals took literally hundreds of years to build. And it stuck with me to this day.
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Marcus
I just said seven, Matt, so you're not too far off. What I think most People who didn't remember this from school would have guessed 1163 to 1260. So that was the first build. But then further work was undertaken which wasn't completed until around 1345, so about 200 years. All told. Bishop Maurice Dessolles initiated the colossal project under the reign of King Louis vii. Notre Dame, French for Our lady, referring to the Virgin Mary. I was curious about this because I was recently in Paris and they just reopened it because there was A fire in 2019 closed the church for repair until it just reopened a couple of weeks ago. But there's still a lot of construction going on. The Cathedral won't be 100% restored until 2026 is as beautiful as ever. All right, gents, let's move to today's real topic, future proofing. Marketing. Max, when we were discussing how to start this conversation, you had mentioned that you'd seen some recent research that really kind of hammered home the importance of measurements as we head into 2025, a lot of people thinking about different things as we head into the new year. Measurement, just as important as ever. Tell us about this piece of research which you think will set the table quite nicely for our conversation.
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Max Willins
The thing that my mind flashed through instantly was this piece of research that inmarket put together where they asked marketers about their sort of top investment areas for 2025, anticipated areas. Investment and measurement and attribution came in first by a huge margin. But if you looked at the things that rounded out the top of the list, what leapt out to me about them were they were investment areas where insight, measurement and attribution are both absolutely crucial and also not very easy. And it just painted a picture of a marketing community that is really needing to and trying to make sense of what they're doing and how they are spending their money. Which felt like a good kind of starting point for, for this conversation. And I guess to me it's really, really interesting that we have gotten to this place because these are our, you know, kind of concerns that marketers have had for a really long time. But I'd love to just sort of hear from from Matt about, you know, why there has the notion of things like standardization has really come to a head recently. Like is it just because there's been enough investment on the buy side and first party data that's gone on long enough that the people making decisions want to sort of use it better to get better at leveraging it in broader context? What is it that you think is leading to this heightened interest in being able to Measure and extract value from the data that everyone is sitting on top of.
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Matt Karasic
Yeah, the. Not surprising, right? The, the importance of the, of the, the area to be able to measure and, and be able to do attribution. That, that's not new. Right. Like all these marketing departments, their, their CFO is going to take their budget away if they can't point to what did we get for this? What was the value that we got for it? And so the rough news is that the following has not changed, which is it's, it is an art and a science. It is not a button that you can just go push. And so unsurprising that the industry will always continue be finding the best way to do it easily and accurately in a, in a sort of a privacy and a governance safe way. And so there's a ton of changes going on in the industry and privacy and regulation in the way cloud computing works and the way people's data infrastructure is out there that enough has changed that just throwing, you know, JavaScript tags on web pages and producing huge amounts of copies of data and running your methodology is, is no longer a viable path to doing this. And so as the industry is both getting a little bit of a cold shower of hey, some of the old practices we did are no longer going to be prudent. And comes the sunshine that comes along with that, which is. But there is a future proofed way of doing this which has a number of advantages. It is better data when you're connecting to data at source in this way. It has both privacy and governance tools so that you can honor your commitments to your consumers, to your partners, to your own company. Now that there are these future proof ways of doing this, now the industry is saying, okay, that's a theme, that's a notion. How do we take that theme and notion and turn it into practice? And that's where standards come in. What is a way that we as an industry can rally around in a way that does this, that delivers that attribution, that delivers that measurement in a future proofed way. So I look at all of this as good news. We can look backwards and say, kind of unbelievable how long we made it without doing it in this way. But industry forces sort of forced us here. And most of the leading marketers I speak to who have been early on this train say the future is bright, it's brighter than the past, that this does pro provide a path to using more and better data than ever before to get the right answers, but in a, in a way that is privacy and governance safe.
- [11:12]
Max Willins
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I think is so interesting that speaks to what you were saying earlier about how because of the haste with which this all kind, this, this opportunity came to the fore there, there's been a lot of, I guess you would call it, like, suboptimal approaches to it. But we are now, I think now that enough people have caught up onto this as an opportunity and a way to play the game, you're starting to see people approach it in a more reasonable, more pragmatic way. I think about this a little bit. Just some other research that has been at the front of my brain that I pulled out of my colleague Evelyn Mitchell Wolf's report about privacy trends. And one of the sort of top challenges that brands and agencies cite for looking into 2025 is finding quality partners for collaborating, enriching, and modeling data. And I would imagine that when they think about that challenge, it's less identifying people that can do it and more identifying partners that can do it in a way that's efficient and doesn't take, you know, two quarters to, to get implemented or worse. And, you know, when you think also about the sort of, you know, tools and partners that facilitate that stuff, that same research cited, Clean Rooms is kind of an integral part of it. But talking just about that standardization, I mean, like, one of the things that I, I find is really important whenever I'm writing reports or doing anything is just kind of like, getting to those specifics. And so we talk about, you know, the sort of need for standardization, the, the, you know, value that it unlocks. Like, can you give us an example of, of, you know, what happens when that's in place? Like, are we talking about, you know, dramatically speeded or increased speed to insights? Are we talking about, you know, cost reductions? Like, what's the sort of, like, upside to, to embracing a, an approach to this that sort of prizes standardization and consistency?
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Matt Karasic
You hit it. It is the speed to value with and being able to achieve the value at all versus hitting a wall and not being able to get past it, right? If you think about not to go all the way to the geeky side of all of this, right? But the biggest shift is no longer will any one party be able to just get all of the data, put it in one single database, and do whatever they want with it. Because if that was the case, standards would have been good and solved a lot of other parts of the whole thing. But, like, everyone can do kind of what they want and Everything's fine. If you think about what future proof means, what we're saying is it's, that's not going to happen. Not everyone's going to just go be able to centralize all the data. It's almost by definition, data will stay in silos because it's supposed to, it's supposed to stay where it is. That doesn't mean all parties can't opt their data in to be part of a use case that everyone has agreement on with transparency and control. But if that's the case, then, and data is going to stay in siloed, and by siloed, we mean it could be in different clouds and different formats and different schemas and different technologies, then the only way to go to a marketing team is, you know, let alone in the Fortune 50, what about the Fortune 500 or 5000? And say, given that all of those things can be different, we're either going to say, then therefore you better bring an army of technologists, analysts, lawyers, you know, privacy, you know, privacy teams, or we're going to deliver them a standard so that we could say, this has already been done. There are already, you know, you won't be alone in paving a new way. This is already the way the industry is accepting to do this. And it does remove the barriers and remove the friction that takes so long. So you asked for an example. I'll give you the simplest one that I know of, which is just legal contracts and paper, right? The hey, if I am a media company and I want to let a marketer use, do measurement on using my data for their campaign, there's data rights that go along with that that most media companies would say, hey, I'm going to need this marketer to agree to some, some standard data terms. My, my privacy and legal department demands it. Well, you could imagine if every single collaboration between every given marketer and every given media company is now a new, you know, legal negotiation that just doesn't scale. So us being able to go and say, hey, all of the media side, here are the kinds of things that you all have in common. Can we get you all to chime in on a set of language that covers sort of everything and hey, marketer, when you come and come in, this here is what all the media companies are going to ask you for. And being able to take that whole process and once we get people to agree to and buy in the standards, then, you know, how far can we go? Let's remove the human element part of it. Can we make it such that okay, the way you're going to do this is by accessing analytics that are, that only run in a clean room and before you can get access to it, you're going to click to accept those standard terms and conditions that the industry is all accepted that in and of itself. I mean, it sounds so simple. I'm telling you it is. Calls, emails, red lines, removing from, from the process, which I have watched, you know, slow things down or block things for weeks, months or even quarters. And so that is one example.
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Max Willins
And that's gotta be just crazy making for everybody involved, right? I mean, one of the things that is, you know, leaps out at me when I look at the, my own coverage area is just watching the, you know, programmatic budgets migrate into, you know, walled, walled gardens. And when everybody sort of understands implicitly that you have to basically transition into what I would call like the open ish web, which is a situation where you have a coterie of partners that, you know, you can work with to either whether it's maximize the value of your audience or, you know, hunt for optimal results and driving growth. You know, being in a place where every time you try to add to that, you know, stable of partners, you have to slog through a ton of mud just seems like it would drive.
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Matt Karasic
Everybody crazy without question. And, and listen, I, I won't, I won't scream and yell at us as an industry too much and say what took us so long. I mean, I guess I could say that in the, in if I zoom way, way out. But in terms of this, you know, listen, I came over to Liveramp by way of the Habu acquisition. We were a, a very small startup. And I remember, you know, four years ago, so much of this stuff was so new and so, you know, my first hundred calls with it with attorneys and privacy teams was education. I don't know if we as a, as an industry could have gotten to those standards, you know, much faster without that baseline understanding of what, what are we talking about? How does this work? You know, what are these tools and guardrails? And why is there a technical guarantee that X and Y and Z can't happen and we don't need that in a contract. So I don't know if we could have gotten here much faster. But the time is now to capitalize on what we have learned, on how far the technology has advanced and how we have enough examples of real companies doing this at scale in the market that we are now able to achieve these standards with contracts. Just being one example.
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Marcus
Talk to us a bit if you would, Matt, about the development of your Quick Start Insights product.
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Matt Karasic
We talked about a number of different things that are getting standardized out there, but one of them is what should the actual analytics be? What, what, what types of outputs are we trying to get out there? And it's one of those where what we're trying to do is use standards to avoid the, the infamous analysis paralysis. Like I have watched two parties come together with just absolute mutual alignment. We know what we want to do, we know we want to measure these things, we think there's something there, we think that there's optimization to be had. And I watched several all day working sessions of watching them go through the spreadsheets where very, very smart analysts had put together, you know, lists of hundreds of queries that could be run for the purposes of getting the, you know, the senior level business leaders in a room to look through this spreadsheet and to prioritize which of these queries should be the first. We should do so that all the teams could then go off on their own and then go write the code and build all these things. Which is, is probably going to happen over time in some form or another, but not because that is needs to be the starting point. And so what quickstart Insights is meant to do is, and what it does we're watching this happen is we know there's a set of sort of table stakes analytics that all marketers and need to see to be able to be productive both in planning, in optimization and measurement. And so what Quick Start Insights does is it's a set of prepackaged, pre baked sort of query and question templates that we know all marketers won't be able to need to look at an answer to be able to get a base level understanding of what the opportunity is on planning, what's working well and what's not in the middle of a campaign and what happened after a campaign so that as two or more parties do want to come together, they don't have to have those meetings of saying, you know, should we start with query number 17 or 43 to get started? They get to come in and immediately hit go on these prepackaged templates that we know have utility across the board. Now that doesn't come at the cost of either, either or both parties being able to iterate and innovate and customize and further develop new insights. But Quick Start Insights gets the basics started and it gets you to that velocity. Right? Momentum is a funny thing. It begets momentum. And so Quick Start Insights is a way to deliver that immediate time to live, time to value so that the teams can go from there.
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Marcus
Final real quick question for me is if I said to you standardization, 20, 25, what comes to mind first for you? What are you paying most attention to as we head into the new year with respect to this area?
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Matt Karasic
What comes to mind is the, the outcome that that delivers, which is we all will be able to come back and look back and giggle at this podcast in. In a few years that like what were we even talking about? It will just become the thing. It's just the way things work and that I just have so much confidence that we are not on a path of a new gimmick, a new idea. This is simply the, you know, we have, we now have a technology proof points that this is a future proofed way of doing things in terms of sort of what does it evoke in my mind of how did we get there? It was standardization of technology and architecture, standardization of data, standardization of methodology and then standardization of. Of the legal pieces of it. It's those four come together and the identity piece. It's those five together deliver what that outcome is ultimately, which is this is just the way people do things. And no one will even remember that this was a new thing at all. It will just be the thing.
- [23:31]
Marcus
Yeah, I really like that. So many. Remember when we used to moments. Remember when we used to carry a CD player around with us? Literally a CD player, you'd have to hold it flat because Discman, you couldn't do it sideways. Anyway, that's what we've got time for for today's episode. Matt, Max, thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. Thank you. First to Max.
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Max Willins
Always a pleasure. Marcus, thank you.
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Marcus
Yes, thank you to Matt.
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Matt Karasic
Thank you so much, Marcus.
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Max Willins
This was great.
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Marcus
Yes, thanks to the whole editing crew, Victoria, Lance, John and Danny. And Stuart, who runs the team. Sophie does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in. We hope to see you tomorrow for the behind the is weekly Listen Any Marketer podcast made possible by Live Ramp.