Thinking beyond the old way of “bean counting” measurement

Summary

MarTech Podcast ™ Episode Summary

Title: Thinking Beyond the Old Way of “Bean Counting” Measurement
Release Date: April 14, 2025
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Guest: Christian Ashlock, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Branch

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of the MarTech Podcast™, host Benjamin Shapiro engages with Christian Ashlock, the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Branch, to delve into the evolving landscape of marketing measurement. The conversation centers around moving away from traditional "bean counting" methods towards more holistic and forward-thinking measurement strategies that align with current data privacy trends and technological advancements.

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The Evolution of Marketing Measurement

Christian Ashlock begins by reflecting on the simplicity of digital marketing's early days, where deterministic methods using device identifiers or third-party cookies allowed marketers to track user behaviors seamlessly. However, with increasing privacy regulations and platform changes, these traditional methods are becoming obsolete.

Notable Quote:

"There’s a lot of folks that have been doing this for a while in a lot of companies, they built up all their tools, their processes, their training, kind of relying on that old way of measurement." — Christian Ashlock (02:32)

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Impact of Data Deprecation and Privacy Regulations

Benjamin Shapiro highlights the impending deprecation of third-party cookies and the broader implications for data access and measurement accuracy. He emphasizes the challenge of capturing the full spectrum of marketing efforts, especially those that influence brand perception and conversions but remain invisible to traditional analytics models.

Notable Quote:

"To me, there's kind of two fundamental shifts here. It's your access to data and it's figuring out whether you're measuring the right things." — Benjamin Shapiro (04:31)

Christian agrees, indicating that the elimination of third-party cookies is not a singular event but a gradual trend influenced by user consent and privacy considerations.

Notable Quote:

"If users aren't aware and have opted in to the data you're collecting on them, you're just not going to have it. And that's increasingly going away." — Christian Ashlock (04:38)

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Strategies for Modern Measurement

Christian outlines a three-pronged approach to contemporary marketing measurement:

1. Tactical Measurement: Ensuring real-time marketing tactics are effective, such as audience targeting and bid strategies, largely managed by Martech and adtech solutions.
2. Campaign Optimization: Making day-to-day decisions on budget allocation and creative adjustments based on campaign performance.
3. Strategic Planning and Budgeting: Focusing on long-term brand building and cross-channel performance evaluation using advanced methodologies like Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM).

Notable Quote:

"There's a way that I find it helpful to break it down into three things... tactical measurement, campaign optimization, and strategic planning." — Christian Ashlock (08:00)

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Balancing Immediate Results with Long-Term Branding

Benjamin reflects on the shift from broad, memorable marketing tactics of the past to today's data-driven precision, cautioning against the overemphasis on immediate results at the expense of long-term brand building.

Notable Quote:

"It's not always about your marketing and measurement. Some part of marketing is measuring based on what you think is working and using the signals you can get as normalized as you can get them to give you a sense of what direction to head." — Benjamin Shapiro (16:20)

Christian emphasizes the importance of aligning measurement strategies with the buyer's journey and the nature of each marketing channel. For instance, upper-funnel activities like brand awareness campaigns require different measurement timelines compared to bottom-funnel tactics like search advertising.

Notable Quote:

"You have to think about both the effectiveness of the channel and the action you're trying to drive." — Christian Ashlock (10:41)

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The Future of Analytics and Measurement Tooling

The discussion transitions to the necessity for advanced analytics tools that can integrate diverse data sources into a unified framework. Christian advocates for flexible, ROI-focused tools that can handle varied data inputs and provide actionable insights without requiring marketers to manage the underlying complexity.

Notable Quote:

"The best tools that marketers are going to have to understand their marketing are going to be able to combine a couple of different data sources together and then present them in flexible ways that you can kind of poke at the data to get the insights you need." — Christian Ashlock (12:21)

Benjamin likens the challenge of integrating disparate data sources to a multilingual bus stop, underscoring the importance of a common framework for data to ensure meaningful interpretation and effective decision-making.

Notable Quote:

"It's like being at a public bus stop in Switzerland where someone might be talking German, Swiss, German, Italian, Spanish, French, English... you all have to be able to communicate into some sort of common language to operate." — Benjamin Shapiro (13:49)

Christian concurs, highlighting the need for tools that abstract complexity and focus on business outcomes, enabling marketers to drive towards their goals without getting bogged down by technical intricacies.

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Balancing Art and Science in Marketing

As the conversation wraps up, Benjamin and Christian reflect on the dual nature of marketing—as both an art and a science. They acknowledge the indispensable role of creativity and intuition alongside data-driven strategies, advocating for a balanced approach that leverages both precise measurements and human insight.

Notable Quote:

"It is not always about your marketing and measurement. Some part of marketing is measuring based on what you think is working and using the signals you can get as normalized as you can get them to give you a sense of what direction to head." — Benjamin Shapiro (16:20)

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Conclusion and Teasers for Future Episodes

The episode concludes with Benjamin thanking Christian for his valuable insights and teasing the next episode, which will continue the discussion on optimizing organic marketing channels. Listeners are encouraged to visit the podcast’s website for episode summaries, guest information, and to subscribe for daily updates on marketing and technology trends.

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Key Takeaways

• Adaptation to Privacy Changes: Marketers must move beyond traditional measurement tools reliant on third-party cookies, embracing strategies that prioritize user consent and privacy.
• Holistic Measurement Approach: Combining tactical, optimization, and strategic planning measurements ensures both immediate and long-term marketing success.
• Advanced Tooling Needs: The future of marketing measurement lies in sophisticated analytics tools capable of integrating diverse data sources into a unified, actionable framework.
• Balancing Creativity and Data: Effective marketing requires a synergy of data-driven precision and creative intuition, ensuring strategies are both measurable and resonant.

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Further Information

• Guest Profile: Christian Ashlock on LinkedIn
• Branch Website: branch.io
• Podcast Resources: Visit martechpod.com for episode summaries and contact information.
• Subscribe: Follow MarTech Podcast™ on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for updates and more.

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This summary provides a comprehensive overview of the discussed topics, capturing the essence of the conversation and key insights shared by both Benjamin Shapiro and Christian Ashlock. For a deeper dive, listening to the full episode is recommended.

Transcript

[Benjamin Shapiro]

The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.

From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs.

[Christian Ashlock]

Better than TV advertising.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours. If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that used technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss measurement and optimizing your marketing strategies. Joining us is Christian Ashlock, who is the senior director of Product Marketing at Branch, which is a trusted linking and measurement partner for growth focused teams. Branch maximizes the value of evolving digital strategies for world class brands like instacart, Western Union, NBCUniversal, Zocdoc and Sephora. And today, Christian and I are going to discuss thinking beyond the old way of bean counting. All right, here's the first part of my conversation with Christian Ashlock, the senior director of Product marketing at Branch. Christian, welcome to the Martech podcast.

[Christian Ashlock]

Thank you, Benjamin. Excited to be here and chat with you today.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Excited to have you on the show. Love to hear a little bit about Branch. You're a company that focuses on marketing measurement, obviously something that we all care very much about. And honestly, the world of data and measurement is evolving so quickly. I think it's time for us to all sort of hit the brakes. Hopefully we made the transition to GA4 and we all have our own toolkits and measurements. Let's talk a little bit about the traditional way of measurement and why we need to get away from the old way of bean counting.

[Christian Ashlock]

Yeah, sounds good. So I definitely grew up as a digital marketer in probably when it was simple, right? Everybody either had a device identifier or a third party cookie. You could be real deterministic. You could say this person saw my ad, this person went to my site, this person purchased something or maybe they didn't purchase something and I want to show them another ad. And I think a lot of folks that have been doing this for a while in a lot of companies, they built up all their tools, their processes, their training, kind of relying on that old way of measurement. And I don't have to belabor the point too much. I think everybody that does digital marketing has been thinking about privacy and regulation of platforms changes for the past few years. So everyone knows that this is shifting and this is breaking. And what I think is really interesting is what are the approaches that forward thinking marketers are taking to say, like what do I do now, how do I prepare for the future and how do I come up with ways to do measurement that aren't just trying to recapture the past or kind of replace the things that are going away, but think about the new things they can build that are really going to help their brand and their business.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

When we talk about what's going away, obviously the deprecation of third party cookies should Judgment Day ever come. According to Google, we're all concerned about our data sources and for now it's kind of like normal operating procedure, but in theory it's going to be harder to get access to follow the people that you're targeting wherever they may roam. To me, there's kind of two fundamental shifts here. It's your access to data and it's figuring out whether you're measuring the right things. And often this podcast, mostly for me, selfishly, I think about what's been coined dark social all of the things that you're doing in marketing that are not getting captured by your last touch attribution or your MMM models that have an effect on your brand drive conversions, know like and trust, but just don't show up in your digital analytics, how do you think about those two factors or deprecation of data and also measuring the things that actually matter?

[Christian Ashlock]

Those are two huge ones. I'm glad we booked like what, eight hours to go through, I think everything for the rest of the podcast to cover off on those.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

We're going to cram it into about 10, 15 minutes, but talk fast.

[Christian Ashlock]

So I think in terms of the data sources, the biggest thing is we talked about will third party deprecation of Chrome ever happen? I like to think about my favorite William Gibson, the Sci Fi author quote of the future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed. You're Safari users. We already don't have cookies. If you're have a lot of users in Europe where there's already consent required to do Tracking and things like that, you already have those holes in your data. So I think of it less like there's a single date that everything goes away. And kind of what's most important is the trend line, right of if users aren't aware and have opted in to the data you're collecting on them, you're just not going to have it. And that's increasingly going away. So I think about that as really what are you investing in today that's going to set you up for the future? And I think that there's some Martech companies or some folks that want to promote or promise right like a silver bullet that's just going to replace that. But I think as long as the long term trend is you really have to have users consent, people have to understand what's going on. You have to have opt in to doing tracking. It's going to be hard to scale up things like alternative IDs where you can maybe just do a hashed email address and totally replace cookies. And then you mentioned there's already a lot of things that don't show up. So I think that's really going to force marketers to think about their all in approach to measurement like what their goals are. And you mentioned mmms and things like that, understanding a little bit more about the different tools that are available to them. And yeah, if you're promoting a podcast and you rely a lot on word of mouth and social sharing and things like that, how do you think about and pick tools and partners that help with that specific challenge versus being able to do everything a lot more deterministically like the past.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

It's funny, we've gone into marketing and because digital marketing has become such a focus, rightly so, of everyone's marketing practice, we've kind of lost sense of marketing measurement in the pre digital age. Like we think of marketing starting with the launch of Google. And in reality people have been marketing products or services basically since the dawn of people. Maybe not that far back, but I'm sure somebody after they invented the wheel, made two wheels and tried to sell the second one.

[Christian Ashlock]

Yeah, I remember touring Pompeii and there are signs and etchings still up that are pointing to different stalls and things like that. So yeah, I agree with you. Having stuff and needing to tell people about it is just a core thing that businesses and people have to do.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I go back to the Mad Men era where we think about slogans and television and radio and billboards and marketing was about being memorable, creating a message that resonated with people. So when they are in market, they remember your product, go to the one place they can go get it and buy it. And there was no, well, which billboard specifically did the person see? It was blanket coverage and measuring results on the back end. And now that we've gone through this wave where everything is so down to the minute, detail, trackable and tangible, we just default to what gives us the fastest results, not the most accurate results. So as we're moving away from being able to have this precision data at our fingertips, immediate response, type of tracking. What advice do you have for marketers to think about measurement in a way that not only gives them the precision, but also the sort of accuracy across what really makes a difference in their marketing efforts?

[Christian Ashlock]

This is something I really like to talk to marketers about and there's a way that I find it helpful to break it down into three things. Like I think that there's the measurement you have to do to make sure that on a tactical second by second basis, your marketing is actually working. I think of this as measurement that's like building the right audience or deciding when to show an ad or how much to bid. That's a lot of stuff that the machines and the algorithms are consuming that are getting broken. And I think that that is really going to fall mostly honestly on Martech and ad tech providers to figure out new ways to build things. So hopefully that's something that marketers can just understand how to use like automated tools that are coming from meta or Facebook or how to get their DSP to work. I'm hoping that problem is off of individual marketers. I'm hoping is like a Martech and adtech industry can solve it in terms of using aggregate data and things like that. I think the other two are harder. The second one I think of is really like the day to day campaign optimization decisions you have to make as a marketer, like do I increase my budget to this search campaign or do I swap out these creatives or do something different with my video? I think that's something where individual marketers and industry have to work a lot together. And then the last area I think is going to be hardest for marketers is the planning and the budgeting and that's where all the stuff comes in. You two were talking about, about how am I building up my brand, how am I have the right mix of activities across channels that's going to drive long term success, just not short term gain. And I think that that's one where old but new again approaches like mmms and things like that are going to become important for marketers to kind of verify the results they're getting from all the partners they're working with and somehow pulling them together so they can make decisions across channels versus everything kind of being apples and oranges and being hard to compare. So happy to dive into any of those three areas, but that's kind of how I break up the problem in my head.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

I think of it as, and maybe this is just me biasing towards my generation, which tends to be a digital marketing centric generation. But there's been this wave of we know how to market better because we can do it faster, quicker, more efficiently than the gray hairs that marketed before us. And now all of a sudden we're seeing that everything that we're doing that is immediate doesn't always tell the truth. It's not always that responses and marketing efforts are converted in real time. Sometimes marketing channels require patience and require you to look not at a minute to minute, second to second, but an hour, day, week, month and year timeframe, specifically organic marketing and content. I'm like, look, it's a six month to a 12 month strategy before you understand if it worked. What advice do you have for marketers when they're thinking not only about the measurement and tools, but also the timeframe it takes to analyze your channels?

[Christian Ashlock]

I think about that a lot by what are you asking that channel to do in the buyer journey? Right? Like if you're trying to reach with people on social just to get them to know your brand, you're probably going to have to talk to them a couple of times. You're going to either have to get them to follow you or engage. That's going to take some time, that's probably going to take months to build up. Unless you just happen to have something very viral or very buzz. And then if you think about like your sales cycle, if you're in B2B and it's a six month sales cycle, then you've got to give yourself enough time to add to the beginning of the sales cycle, how much time it even takes them to engage with the channel. Maybe if you're in B2C or have a quicker sales cycle, maybe that doesn't take as long. So I think you have to think about both the effectiveness of the channel and the action you're trying to drive. Because obviously if you're doing bottom of the funnel stuff like search and somebody already knows your brand, they already are aware of the solutions you're trying to offer. You're going to see that pay off a lot quicker. Content marketing, right. Is going to be even longer. Maybe you're producing like a white paper or research or some sort of interesting info for somebody. They may start researching that months before they're doing a renewal for their software or things like that. So yeah, I think you have to really understand the user behavior you're trying to drive, how long it's going to take that to actually come across. And the more upper funnel it is and the longer your sales cycles are, it's just going to take a lot longer time before you can measure the impact there back on your brand versus the stuff that's at the end of the line before a conversion.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Tell me now that we have a sense of how to evaluate the time you're expecting a channel to take to mature or understand if it works. About tooling, it seems like this is something sort of in branches wheelhouse. How do you think about the evolution of analytics and measurement tooling?

[Christian Ashlock]

I think this goes back to kind of the hook for this is the move away from bean counting and having just one single source of truth. I think in general, the best tools that marketers are going to have to understand their marketing are going to be able to combine a couple of different data sources together and then present them in flexible ways that you can kind of poke at the data to get the insights you need. So to make that really practical, if you're thinking about I'm running a campaign to try to get people to download my app, I'm going to be running ads, I'll probably run banners on my website. If I have stores, I may put up QR codes. Like if you're waiting for a piece of coffee and you want to order ahead, maybe you scan that and download that. Instead of having like a common currency across all that, marketers are going to get those datas in lots of different bits. Right? If a user downloads the app on their iPhone, they're going to get aggregate data from Apple. If Android users are going to get different data set in. If you're running a campaign with Meta, you're going to get meta's data back. And I think that if you're a very sophisticated large brand, you might have a data science team that can parse all that for you, that can do correlation, that can put things together. But most marketers are going to need to find partners that help you abstract some of that complexity. Right. Of like how do you put the those data sets together and really show it in a way that's focused on your roi? Like, what were my investments? Can I map that back to my objectives? And are the tools flexible, both in the data they combine, but also flexible in I'm going to need to tune the reporting specifically to my company because I'm going to have different objectives and it's not just going to be a simple click and convert kind of thing.

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Fundamentally, I think of the combination of data that you're talking about, getting all of your different sources. It's like being at a public bus stop in Switzerland where someone might be talking German, Swiss, German, Italian, Spanish, French, English, who knows what language people are using. But you all have to be able to communicate into some sort of probably hand signals, common language to be able to operate. And to me, that is one of the biggest challenges today when it comes to making the most is we get all of these different signals and we can be so overwhelmed by the quantity of data, the variables, the different nuances from how our data is actually reported from different channels that if you don't have that unified version of what your data is, if you can't make everyone speak a common language, even if the data is accurate, it doesn't mean anything. So it's not just about collecting and aggregating, cleaning. There is something to be said of having a common theme across all of your data, of what conversions are, what is actually driving your marketing performance so you can understand which channel is actually the most effective and where you should be spending your time.

[Christian Ashlock]

Exactly. And I love the bus stop analogy. All you really care about is getting to where you're trying to go. All those details of like the syntax of every different language and how people learned it and communicating it. Or as a traveler, you probably don't need to know all that. You want to go on your trip. And I think as a marketer, we're in a stage where we're asking people to learn a lot of stuff. Like how do I set up the amount of bits that I have for scan reporting from Apple exactly the right way, which are not the things that you probably want to be spending your time on as a marketer. So it's like, yeah, how do you find? I always think about like people, processes and platforms. So not just the right tools, but how do you set your team up to get that stuff together, but making sure your reporting is really focused on the business outcomes that you're driving there. And the only thing that's really going to unify it is can you take it back to if you're trying to drive sales do we think these things are driving sales? And if you're trying to save costs by maybe getting people to do customer service in your app, how do you drive that? And I think what's hard for marketers right now is that tension between a black box solution versus something you can understand. Right. There's a lot of promises of we'll automate all this. We'll use machine learning, we'll do matching to put all this data together for you. But you don't have to think about it. Which is maybe fine if you can prove that it works, if you get to where you're trying to go on your bus, but is maybe a challenge if you're having to make decisions on it and it's hard for you to trust what's going on there?

[Benjamin Shapiro]

Yeah, it's a confusing time. As a marketer, we're seeing our access to data going away, which is forcing this fundamental shift in how we view not only what the purpose of marketing is, but also how we evaluate it. And as we start to get more advanced in our technology, I think it's worth taking a pause, taking a step back and thinking about what marketing is. It's both an art and a science. Right there is all of the data and precision in the world. But fundamentally part of marketing is creative and intuition and just having a gut instinct about what is working. It is not always about your marketing and measurement. Some part of marketing is measuring based on what you think is working and using the signals you can get as normalized as you can get them to give you a sense of what direction to head. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Christian Ashlock, the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Branch. Join us again tomorrow when Christian and I continue our conversation talking about optimizing organic marketing channels. If you can't wait till our next episode and you'd like to learn more about Christian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Branch IO. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, where you can even apply to be the next guest speaker on the MarTech podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod M A R T E C H P O D on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can contact me directly on LinkedIn. My handle is Benjschap. B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feedback, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Foreign.

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