← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
What It Means For Companies To Be "Data-Rich" But "Insights-Poor"
00:16:54
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- [00:00]
Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the iHear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, iHear 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.
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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.
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Ryan Berry
Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Typical life span 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.
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Ryan Berry
A matter of timing.
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Benjamin Shapiro
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 use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
- [01:15]
Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro and today we're going to discuss overcoming Data Accessibility challenges. Joining us are both Steve Phillips, the co founder and CEO, and Ryan Berry, the president of Zappi, which brings pre launch consumer insights into every phase of the creation process. Working with over 350 global enterprises and more than a thousand companies, Zappy is a wonderful example of not only a beautiful brand, but also a tool that can help you understand your customers before you even have your product ready. And today, Steve Ryan and I are going to talk about what it means to be data rich and insights poor. But before we get to today's interview, I want to tell you about what I'm listening to. Ever wanted to sit down to a candid conversation with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands? The current podcast is your chance. On the current podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with the experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to the current@www.thecurrent.com or anywhere you get your podcasts today. All right, here's the first part of my conversation with Steve Phillips, the co founder and CEO and Ryan Berry, the president of Zappi. Steve Ryan hey guys. Welcome to the Martech Podcast.
- [02:38]
Steve Phillips
Thank you Ben.
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Ryan Berry
Thank you Ben. Thanks for having us.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you both here and thrilled to learn a little bit about Zappi, a company that I really have a lot of respect for from a marketing perspective. I know I was a little Bit of a fanboy before we pressed the big red button to record, but I love your brand. I think your marketing team is smart and sharp and I'm really excited to hear a little bit more about how you're helping marketers understand who their customers are. So let's talk a little bit. First and foremost, I would say raise your hands, but give me your elevator pitch. We're going to start off with a little get to know you section. Talk to me about Zappi and what you do and who you're helping.
- [03:15]
Steve Phillips
Basically, we are here to help enterprises make better advertising, make better brands, develop better brands. And we do that by collecting consumer insight data for them, but amalgamating that data said that they can not only answer individual business questions today, but can think about and learn from their consumers over time. So we're really here to make sure that consumer centricity isn't just something that CEO says in their shareholder letter at the end of the year, but it's something that is genuinely available, democratized throughout the organization. Anyone can access and understand what their consumer is thinking. So as many decisions, ideally every decision they make, they've got the consumer at their heart and they're thinking about them and the impact on them when they make these business decisions.
- [03:58]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's a tool that helps you understand who your consumers are and specifically what they are thinking. So let's talk a little bit about how that manifests itself. Today's episode is what it means to be data rich and insights poor. Ryan, why don't you take this one, Tell me a little bit about what it means to be data rich.
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Ryan Berry
So if you think about it, for the last 10 plus years, most companies are on some journey for digital transformation. They're trying to get all their data in one place. And there's been a lot of advances of the technological adoption of things like media spend, operational data, sales data, and there's a lot of data around what happens, but there's very, very little data around why things happen and why people do what they do and why they choose one brand over another. And what Steve and I observed, you know, we were starting our business, is a large part of the problem with that is the marketing research industry is littered with great thinking, great perspective and great techniques. But it's by nature a managed service industry. And so each of these learnings that brands are collecting is living and dying in someone's head or in some PowerPoint. And the opportunity we've always saw is if we can give brands technology solutions to give them credible answers as they're creating and make it accessible to put why people do what they do next to what they do. They'll be able to connect the dots around why and what, be more predictive downstream when they're making decisions, more precise when they go to market and sort of move away from the age old. I know half my advertising sucks, but I don't know which half. Because you can understand why a millennial resonates with one person or another if you ask them and you understand their behaviors, their motivations, their attitudes, and how that relates to new product campaigns, new advertisements, et cetera. So we're really trying to digitize the why people do what they do because it's already happening elsewhere. And I think moving that forward has been quite hard for businesses because of the way, just for context, our customers are very large Fortune Hundred enterprises. And so there's a lot of siloed thinking, a lot of decentralized budget management that it really disables the organization from ultimately knowing what it knows.
- [05:57]
Benjamin Shapiro
Most of the conversations that I have are a fear of lack of data, right? We've gone through this year with the tsunami that never was, of the deprecation of third party cookies and how all the privacy concerns and we're never going to be able to have enough data. And we're all these just digital marketing calculator machines. And marketing isn't about understanding consumers. It's about aggregating data and finding signals and feeding it to the right computer and making that computer go and get you money. It's refreshing to hear that this conversation is essentially the opposite. In reality, we all have these gigantic, vast pools of data that we really don't know what to do with. So I'll turn this back to you, Steve. I consider most brands to be more data rich than they give themselves credit for. But I also think that marketers have gotten incredibly lazy. We have lost our dog fighting skills to use a line from Top Gun. We are too reliant on data and not enough about understanding and insights of our customers. So talk to me about that sort of juxtaposition of data rich and insights poor. How do we think that we don't have enough data when we're drowning in it and then can't figure out what to do with it in the end?
- [07:17]
Steve Phillips
So companies and people know they have a lot of data, but they don't have the data that they need at the right time in the right place to make a decision. So when they say they don't have data, what they Mean is I don't have the data that's necessary right now. And part of the problem is they spend a lot of time capturing data and not enough time thinking about inside. And if you can capture data in a much more sophisticated way, if it can be interoperable with other forms of data. So if you can have a connected data system that you think less about the collection of the data and more about the utilization of the data, and that's really where the marketing industry has got to go. So we've got to say, okay, great, we've got the data, but let's stop it being siloed. Let's stop spending our time and effort on thinking all about the collection. Let's look at the data holistically, and then let's piece that data together and democratize access to it. Because what insight is, is an aha above the data. It's like, okay, now I understand these five characteristics of my consumer, and I think, oh, brilliant, Now I know what I can do in the future to work with them, to make money out of them, to get them to be interested in my brand. And you've got to enable that thinking. That thinking should be based on data, but you have to spend your time thinking about the insight and the application of the insight and not your time thinking about the collection of data. And that's where we spent too much time.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah.
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Ryan Berry
Like the insights providers that are in these companies are largely seen as data providers because that was the operation. Validate this decision. Tell me the ads. Good. Make sure it's going to work. And you probably see this in your own life. I certainly see it within our own business. Very little of the data we actually get is insightful. You're oftentimes wondering why. And you harness why from talking to your customers and understanding their worldview. And, you know, and I think a lot of our customers think of a toothpaste customer as only buying toothpaste. But as I always joke about this, they buy beer, they buy whiskey, they ski, they like sports, they go on diets, and they eat junk food. And so understanding all those things in, as Steve said, a harness way, particularly in a world where language models are being built inside of companies, allows the customer to be there for a cfo, for a coo, for a brand manager, for an R and D manager in a way that has never really been there for them without having to go down to the fifth floor and ask the marketing research department to sort of stamp their decision for them.
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Benjamin Shapiro
So let's play a little game here. I want to play the game of double down or diversify. What I'm hearing from you is there's this juxtaposition of we've got this data and there's a huge challenge of making sure that you have the right data at the right place at the right time with the right application. And then there is this sense of diversification, which is your actual data. You know, the bits of information you're getting from your consumers can tell you some insights, but you can also go talk to them. Should you double down on understanding the data that you're collecting from all your systems of record and making sense of that data, or should you diversify if you're not getting good conclusions and go spend more time talking to your customers and getting the feedback to understand what's happening with a smaller sample size in real time?
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Ryan Berry
I could take this one first. You have to diversify. So we just did a survey with the AMA of 700 marketers and 70% of them are saying the consumer data that they buy isn't being harnessed. So there is no diversification. And as I said to you, Ben, like a lot of the operational data was already amassed and democratized. But again, because Consumer Insights was analog, it doesn't actually exist in the data ecosystem. And so I think there's a really important need for diversification. I mean, Steve's leading a lot of our work with how our data and AI plays, and it's almost like a sourdough starter. If you don't feed fresh consumer perspective, you're going to start getting the same answers over and over again. And I think that puts brands at a massive competitive disadvantage if they're not harnessing their own data asset and diversifying it to include the voice of the customer.
- [11:10]
Steve Phillips
Yeah, I think it's remarkable that companies and CEOs, as I said, always talk about being customer centric. But if you look at a CMO tech stack, it probably does not include consumer insight data. It doesn't include conversations that consumers have had about new brands, new products, new ideas. And that's crazy. And it's because it lives in the wrong part of the organization. So you have to take that data and you have to utilize technology to make sure it's available, to apply AI on top of it, to ensure that it's democratized in the same way that other data is, but is also talking to that data.
- [11:44]
Benjamin Shapiro
It's an interesting concept of talking to the data. And to me, I think of the problems that most brands have. It's not just talking it's listening. I'm reading this book by Rick Rubin, one of the greatest music producers of all time. And basically the whole book is about how you are a filter for all of the things that are impacting you in your life. All of the different senses that you're having, you are filtering them and that helps you figure out what your output is. And from a business perspective, and specifically for us marketers, we get so much data and so much insights pushed at us all the time, it could be very hard to make accurate conclusions or come up with some sort of a hypothesis because again, we are drowning in data. We are data rich and insight poor. So the last question I have for you today is basically, what's the secret sauce? Right. If you're sitting here and you've got multiple different sources of data and you're trying to figure out what you should be doing with it, how do you turn all of that data into insights that are going to help you truly understand your customer?
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Steve Phillips
It's going back to what I said before. It's flipping the time. So at the moment, if you talk to a lot of organizations, they're spending 80% of their time collecting data and 20% of their time to analyze it and find insight from it. And we have to use technology to change that around. And if you have that genuinely deep understanding of what consumers are thinking, what they're saying, how they're feeling, then it makes innovation of product, it makes innovation in terms of communications, it makes brand positioning decisions really easy because it becomes natural because you genuinely understand these people. But if you are spending a lot of time just trying to collect data and running around going, oh yeah, but what's a demographic, what's lifestyle group and what segment are we going after? And you lose the innate understanding of them because you're spending all this time collecting data, then you're never going to sit there and pontificate about who these people are and really genuinely get to a point where you can be insightful about where they want to go.
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Ryan Berry
Yeah, in some ways, like we've talked about this, Ben, a lot, what needs to happen in consumer data. And I think we're one of the companies leading it is similar to what happened in the SaaS industry when Rev Ops became a thing. There was all this disparate technology being purchased to make sales and marketing teams more productive, more efficient, more predictive, whatever. And I think a lot of what Steve's talking about is if you're operating in a whack a mole way without intention each time you learn, you're not harnessing the collective benefit of that learning. Whereas if you adopt a tech stack for the way you learn and a consulting stack for the partners that you need to learn with, then each time you test an ad, you know there's a certain codification of variables you're going to get back. So of course you're going to learn that Jason Tatum is completely underrated. There's my Boston bias, but you're going to know that he resonates with a certain type of people. So next time you want to go and do an NBA sponsorship, you can leverage that learning beyond just the specific campaign activation that you just did. So I think a lot of what we talk to our customers about and try to help them with is just being more intentional because on a day to day basis they have to answer questions. It's just are they answering them in a way where the learnings on a Tuesday compound quarterly to give the company actual robust understanding of people?
- [14:54]
Benjamin Shapiro
Here's my big takeaway. There's all of this thought and all of this pressure on marketers to try to grab data, to try to get as much access, to try to understand, get as many signals as we possibly can. The reality is we've got plenty of data and I think of understanding what to do with that data with the five W's. And honestly, there's one of them that is a little ignored. There's your who, when, where and what. We're always spending time on figuring out who, where, when, what. And the problem is with marketers is we've gone away from figuring out why. It's understanding the customer. It's understanding not only what data we have and what signals we're getting, but what is the person that is driving that signal, that is creating that data. Why are they giving us that signal? And if you truly understand that last W, if you understand your why, you're going to be more successful as a marketer and you won't be so reliant on just gobbling up as much data as you possibly can. And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Steve Phillips and Ryan Berry from Zappi. Join us again tomorrow when Steve, Ryan and I continue our conversation and talking about what you can do when your data isn't easily accessible. If you can't wait till our next episode and you'd like to learn more about Steve and Ryan, you could find a link to their LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you could visit their company's website zappi.com@zappi.com and on zappi.com you can find the Inside Insights podcast. They also have a new book they just launched which is called Consumer Insights Revolution and also they do a weekly newsletter focusing on AI and customer insights. A special thanks to the Current Podcast for sponsoring today's Interview. If you're looking for candid conversations with marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, then give the Current Podcast a listen. On the Current Podcast you'll find exclusive interviews with experts and trendsetters who are on the front lines of digital advertising, and they always leave the ad tech jargon at the door. So subscribe to The Current at www.thecurrent or anywhere you get your podcasts today. 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 we've got summaries of all of our episodes, contact information for our guests. You could subscribe to be our next guest speaker. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter. Of course, you could always reach out on social media. We're publishing more and more content on YouTube, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. We're starting to do live streams, social shorts as well. Hit us up on social if you want to chat and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed. 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.
- [18:16]
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.