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Choreograph CEO Evan Hanlon on Building Scale and the Importance of Experimenting
00:24:09
This week on Modern Marketers, Choreograph global CEO Evan Hanlon joins Joshua Spanier and Bethany Poole, global senior marketing director at Google, to discuss the human side of leveraging data in your marketing and why it’s more important than...
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- [00:02]
Joshua Espanier
Hi everyone. This is Modern Marketers by Think with Google. I'm Joshua Espanier, VP of Media Lab within Google Marketing. I lead teams around the world who plan, invent execute and measure marketing programs on behalf of Google's brands. Each episode I talk to game changing marketers and founders who are delivering modern marketing today. Today I'm here with Evan Hanlon, Global CEO of Choreograph. Also joining me today as co host is my colleague and global Senior Marketing Director at Google, Bethany Poole. Let's dive. Right, okay. Well, Evan, it's great to have you join the podcast. Really excited to have this conversation. I should introduce you, right? So Evan Hanlon, CEO of Choreograph, which is a subdivision of GroupM.
- [00:49]
Evan Hanlon
Correct, correct. You got all of those, right?
- [00:52]
Joshua Espanier
Okay, that's good. And Bethany, do you want to say what you're doing?
- [00:55]
Bethany Poole
Sure. I lead customer advocacy for YouTube and Google and am a partner in crime to Josh. And I hear you guys go way back.
- [01:04]
Evan Hanlon
We sure do.
- [01:05]
Joshua Espanier
We do go way back. And not just that we both have sort of no hair at this point, but Evan has. Has better tattoos than me. So. Do you remember when we first met Evan, Josh?
- [01:14]
Evan Hanlon
I think about the first time that we met pretty much all the time when we get ourselves into these kinds of situations, because it is one of my more memorable moments, not only in my career, but particularly in my time in Las Vegas. It's definitely made an impression on me, to say the least.
- [01:29]
Joshua Espanier
Vegas, baby.
- [01:31]
Evan Hanlon
Yeah. Unfortunately for a lot of people, it's not going to be as exciting as they would think. But we were at CES and it was not long after your agency had joined Group M via an acquisition. And I got a call from the CEO of the agency at that time asking me if I had some time to go meet with some very important clients. I walked into the room and it was Josh and one of our other favorite clients, Michael. And Michael had laryngitis. And so Josh was sort of left to do all the talking. And Josh just looks at me and the first thing he says is, what's your thing? I just go, what? He's like, well, you know, Andrew's thing is, you know, he has very natty sweaters. What's yours? And it really sort of took me back for a moment because I had to think about it for a little bit. I think I said flannel and skateboards. So that was the first time I remember sort of sitting down with you. And it was a wonderful conversation, but definitely very different than I had expected.
- [02:26]
Joshua Espanier
Yeah. So Andrew, for context, was one of the founders of Essence Media, who we work with at Google and Skateboards and Flannel. You're a bit of a creator type person, right? Like you like to build and do stuff. How much skateboarding have you done recently and what else have you been into recently?
- [02:43]
Evan Hanlon
I've done very little skateboarding recently. I think much to my wife's happiness as well. We have an 8 month old now and I think the last thing that she wants is me taking a trip to the ER on a busted knee. So not so much anymore though I still collect a little bit on that front. A lot of time right now really spent gardening. My wife's a super green thumb and we're moving to the suburbs out of Brooklyn. And so I've been really brushing up on my, not only my plant knowledge, but my plant tool knowledge because I love the sort of accoutrement of different things as well. So I'm learning the difference between a dibber and a hori hori right now when my wife is just like, you don't need any of these things, but I think they're very important.
- [03:26]
Joshua Espanier
Want to ask about those things. They sound almost dirty. But just because I'm not there. But isn't Brooklyn already the suburbs or is that deeply not what you're allowed to say?
- [03:35]
Evan Hanlon
You know, that's sort of the dirty secret. You know, it's as you start to get further out, you know, particularly in Carroll Gardens, you know, there's a reason that Gardens isn't sort of the name, but, you know, her ambition is slightly larger. So we're returning to my ancestral homeland of Long island, which my mother is sort of over the moon about, you know, particularly with a new grandson.
- [03:56]
Joshua Espanier
Okay, well, congratulations on the you baby. Congratulations on these big life changes.
- [04:00]
Evan Hanlon
Thank you.
- [04:01]
Joshua Espanier
Before we go any further, maybe you should tell Beth and I what is Choreograph and what do you do there? I know you're the CEO, but what does that actually mean?
- [04:10]
Evan Hanlon
Sure. So Choreograph is part of Group M, like you said. And Group M is a collection of media agencies and media agencies. Their job is to work with advertisers to figure out where and what advertising space to really buy. Right. On tv, on radio, online, across all the digital platforms that have proliferated and that have a tremendous amount of sort of paid opportunity to reach customers. As a part of that, there is a lot of data, there's not a lot of technology, there's a lot of automation that exists within there. And so increasingly the Process of media buying in a media agency requires software and requires the use of data and technology to make those things move quickly and to connect to customers and platforms. Choreograph is really where all of the data and all the technology that Group M holds sits. And what we really focus on is software that helps our teams and our clients do four big things. The first is create insights about people using data to create media plans about where to reach those people. Right. So to decide where we want to put ads on TV, on digital, etc. To then actually activate that. So you plan a campaign. Now you have to run one. And then finally, to measure the effectiveness, we build the sort of technology and integrate that with the data sets that we own, that our clients own, that exist within the sort of world beyond that to make that process easy and simple.
- [05:38]
Joshua Espanier
It doesn't sound easy and simple.
- [05:40]
Evan Hanlon
It does not.
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Joshua Espanier
I know it's not, but it's certainly pretty fascinating.
- [05:44]
Evan Hanlon
We're working at the tip of the spear with our clients to help them think about the strategies and the ideas to connect with people. And if you're taking a sort of technology first approach, you're going to miss the importance of how culture intersects with that, how people behave and operate, and really what our clients are thinking about in terms of driving a business. What we really focus on is, you know, how do we bridge the gaps between those different technologies and platforms? And one way to think about it is like, how do we bridge the gap between how people experience television and, and how people experience, you know, algorithmically driven platforms online and make a brand experience feel cohesive across the board. We really focus on sort of building the sort of technology that can bridge those, those gaps and help deliver there. So that's where we try to sort of spend our time. And why I think it's important that we're much more marketer first.
- [06:36]
Joshua Espanier
Your world and that work you just described is complex and nuanced and sophisticated. How do you talk to CMOs and non technical experts about the work that you're doing? It seems like being able to speak the language of technology and data and systems and tools is a, you know, absolute thing that every CMO needs to be able to sort of at least hear and listen and understand. But what do they get right or what do you get right in order to make that communication possible?
- [07:06]
Evan Hanlon
Well, we do it very carefully because it's a hard one. And I think where I spend a lot of time with my teams is trying to keep them out of the weeds and keep a focus on why we do what we do. And I think keeping people focused on that is really important. I think that there's two things that I am super passionate about having Right. As a foundation for those conversations. I think the first is that the technology interface has to be intuitive and reliable because I think where you lose CMOs and where you lose CMOS teams is when it's not intuitive or reliable, then you have to start asking about the zeros and the ones and the how does this work and what happens when this goes wrong or right and you get lost in the details which distract you from driving towards business goals, driving towards marketing goals. Right. And driving towards an output. So I think that, like, foundationally, if you don't have technology that people can interact with, with, can see that is real and that can build trust around sort of what's going on below it, you're sort of already lost then. Right. Because you have to sort of spend that time. I think the second is this is, you know, ironically, you know, the sort of data space is something that requires and I think lacks humanity and humanism to a degree in which if you just hand it over to the zeros and ones, a lot of times what you, what you see is that you just are reinventing the wheel, you know, And a lot of people have actually probably thought about these things before in the decades before this from a marketing perspective. It's just the tools that we have that are ultimately changing. And so where I think I'm very focused on as well is looking to bring people in who are what we're talking about earlier, you know, obviously technologically savvy, but that do have a marketer first brain. So I think, you know, that's the big thing that we really look for is sort of clear communicators who are able to make sure that you can make the connection between the zeros and the ones and the human interface, which I think is something that we probably don't spend enough time talking about the importance of making technology work really well.
- [09:20]
Joshua Espanier
It feels like the fundamentals of marketing have been the same for the last 70, 100 years and they're going to continue to be the same. Understanding the audiences, storytelling, creating emotional connections.
- [09:33]
Evan Hanlon
I. Look, I couldn't agree more with you. One of the things I think a lot about, you know, in a media agency world is like the idea of scale, right? Why is scale important? How do you reach people at scale? You know, what is the benefit that it ultimately provides for you? And that word is still important for us. But the definition and the delivery of that has changed, you know, over the decades. Once upon a time, the primary media vehicle, you know, that was the lion's share of what we did was, was broadcast television. And, you know, it's in the name broadcast, right? It's one signal reaching everybody. And if that is the sort of medium that you're delivering through, then that's going to have a certain set of definitions. And what scale then means is as many people as possible for as cheap as possible. Right. And that makes a lot of sense through that world today. Scale is still really important, but it's. It's flipped upside down. Right. It's not one broadcast. It's everybody getting their own individual cast across lots of different places. And now you need to think about scale in terms of, you know, building up from the individual as opposed to down from the population. The principles are kind of the same, right. You know, you need to reach enough people in the right way, in the right places. It's just the levers that you pull to your point, Josh, are changing slightly and we need to adapt with that.
- [10:56]
Joshua Espanier
The name of this podcast is Modern Marketers, Modern Marketing. We are constantly debating this internally at Google. I'd love to get your thoughts, Evan. What do you see as modern marketing today and modern marketing best practices?
- [11:09]
Evan Hanlon
So it's a pretty wide range of things. And I think in talking with your team, not to be boring, but I think you guys have a pretty good handle on where a lot of that is going. I'll take two places to really focus on. One is, I think a much greater focus on the short term. And what I mean by that is there's always in mind, right? What is the big marketing goal and the big business goal that we're trying to drive towards? We're trying to grow X percent and share, you know, with an audience and X percent in the business. And I think that that's important for us to always keep in mind. But there's lots of different contributing factors to a big giant, complex number and problem that modern marketing, I think is very suited to addressing. And so I think to a large degree, modern marketing is about being a bit of a game of inches and sort of building again sort of from the ground up. And I'll give you a really good example. When we have clients who come to us and have a very tangible sort of easily bracketed goal, one of our sort of large consumer goods clients, their big thing, which for a lot of people kind of sounds small, is like, what if we sold every. Everybody who buys one thing from us, one more every week. And that's a really, I think, interesting and digestible challenge that you can do a lot with. And that again aggregates up to something that can be really, really big. So the second thing that I think is really important is experimentation. You can plan until you're blue in the face. You're not going to know what it's going to do until it actually hits the market. And I think the other piece of that then that is most important is that any signal that is consequential and decisionable is a valuable signal. And what I mean by that is like something that doesn't work and that we get a sort of very clear signal that it doesn't work is just as valuable as a signal that it does work. It's the stuff that is gray and in the middle that is bad. Right? And it means that there wasn't enough of a point of view. There wasn't a well structured enough hypothesis, There wasn't good enough measurement around it. If you're left at the end of the day sort of wondering what something means, like, I think that that's the only negative outcome that you can really have from modern marketing. If you get a clear signal that something worked or you get a clear signal that something didn't work, like I think that those, both of those can be ultimately as valuable as each other. So I'd say that those are the two places that I try to focus on the most in the sort of kind of bringing our clients along on the kind of modern marketing journey.
- [13:45]
Bethany Poole
Evan, can I ask you a follow up on that? One of the things we've heard from talking to customers and CMOs and I think we've experienced ourselves too, is the experimentation is great, but people get nervous about failing. They get nervous about that. Like if it doesn't work, how have you created a culture in your organization to just encourage that? I mean, you want to serve your clients really well, so you don't want people screwing up at the same time. You need that growth mindset to move forward.
- [14:13]
Evan Hanlon
For me it comes back to that, like, are you taking a good enough and a rigorous enough focus on the short term? Because if you fail fast, you know, not to, you know, use a cliche, it lets you get to the next decision point where you can course correct, you know. And so I think the challenge is a lot of folks have thought about marketing and media and a lot of these things on the biggest and the longest term scale, right? A year or two, a three year long sort of you know, experiment and process, which if at the end of it you get there and you find out that it didn't work, like you wasted a lot of time. But if you're doing things and you're finding out after a day, a week, a month, three months, you know what's going on and you're able to use that to inform what you're doing the next day, week, month, three months, you can course correct quickly and you can iterate and improve and optimize, I think in a very sort of quick way. So, you know, I think that obviously like, you know, things can look spiky, but when you, you know, on a sort of very, very short term perspective, and we should be okay with that spikiness as long as when you zoom out, it's showing a clear sort of path up and to the right. So that's, I think, you know, it's a balanc. But again, I think that that's where like, if you're able to, you know, create, make lots of very small decisions, I think that's really good. I mean, it kind of brings me back when I was in, I played soccer all the way football, sorry for you, Josh. You know, from when I was in kindergarten all the way up through college. And I remember one of like the really counterintuitive things when I was, you know, sort of like kind of getting really serious about it. I remember having, you know, some British coaches talking about taking lots of really choppy, short steps, you know, when you had the ball, I was like, well, don't you want to take these like long loping strides, you know, to like carry you down the field, you know, and you know, they sort of demonstrated the control, like the maneuverability, the speed that you ultimately have when you're sort of shortening that up because it gives you more control. And I think that that's sort of a big piece of it. You know, it didn't help me in my cross country career, but you know, I think, you know, on the, you know, in the, in the midfield, it was very helpful and I think that there's a, a useful analog to there in terms of thinking about, you know, that sort of stride length.
- [16:22]
Joshua Espanier
One of the things that we've seen with our teams, and if you just focus on the sort of single experiment, whether it passed or failed or worked, you know, it's, that's challenging because then it comes binary. But when you can lay things out with. And we. One of our tricks is we kind of use almost like scorecards, like red amber Green, but we show 15 of them at once. You know, if two thirds of the green and a third are red, which is always the case because the experiments, they're all informed experiments, some will work, some will don't work, but you show them over time, it gives some reassurance. Oh, we're working two thirds of the time. And here's what we've learned from these other ones. And so not getting caught up on any individual one. I love your point both about the soccer, the stuttering steps, that, that makes perfect sense. I'm going to steal that one. And the notion of, you know, we're on a continuum, we're on a journey, always. There is no perfection. We will Never get to 1 to 1 absolute next sales guaranteed. So we just keep testing and learning and iterating and making smart bets along the way. One of the things that I'm starting to see and think is that while I may mean fewer adverts, fewer ads, because we're just going to be more effective and efficient with the ones we do run, the start of the process is actually a real opportunity for creativity, both with generative AI and just the number of assets we get to produce. Where it used to be, you'd have a creative team and they produce, you know, your five or six standard assets for the channels that you were thinking about. And now we're going to produce a thousand assets for sort of almost every channel, if you so want to go there. And then using AI, both before launch and then soon after launch, you're going to start optimizing and seeing what's working and it's going to lead to really interesting creative places and spaces which we never would have considered before. So we may get a sort of Cambrian explosion of creativity when a lot of people are pushing back and saying that everything's going to look and feel the same because the AI is building it. And I'm not sure that's quite the case. I think they may actually get all sorts of fascinating new experiments and then we'll actually have the data thanks to Choreograph and other companies to help analyze that and sort of pick the winners and go from there. So I'm, I'm really excited about the possibilities of where this is all going.
- [18:29]
Evan Hanlon
I honestly, I couldn't agree more with you. And I think you speak to like a really fundamental challenge that we have of where we see creativity get bottlenecked and reduced when you get to the point of activation because of exactly what you've described, which is the inability to scale the types of execution and the type of creative that you ultimately need. And to give you an example, right, I work with and have seen strategists. They come up with some brilliant insights which lead to a thousand permutations, right, of creative channel and sort of creative execution. And we're all super excited about what this means and how we're going to be able to look at it. And, you know, we structure a plan and, you know, we are going to measure it and we've got all this brilliance to it and we all go, isn't that amazing? Unfortunately, we have 10 pieces of creative to be able to do this with, right? And so you've lost, you know, 900%, 990% of the possibility, you know, with that because you've sort of been reduced down to these, like, 10 permutations, right? And all of this amazing work, all this creativity sort of is. Is. Is for naught to some degree. What if there is a world in which, you know, there's a button that you get to press that fills in the gap of, you know, those 990 creative opportunities that you had before? And let's take a pretty, like, conservative viewpoint and say that's 25% or 50% as good as what you could have if you had an artisanal sort of individual going through and able to produce each of those thousand things to a point of perfection that's still 400% more creative opportunity that you're unleashing, you know, by being able to put those things into market very quickly. So I think that idea of that Cambrian Explosion, Josh, is a really, I think, powerful idea and one that, you know, we should ultimately be leaning into. And we obviously have to have a critical eye and we have to have a, you know, a creative eye on it. And again, I think, if anything, it sort of highlights the importance of creativity even more, especially because when you marry it to the idea that you had before, it's like we have more creative opportunity than before, but we might have less opportunity to actually serve it up, right? That person that we want to reach and we want to deliver a great message to. Maybe two years ago, we would have 10 bytes at the apple. What if you only have two bytes at the Apple in the future, right? Like, then you really got to make it count. And that's where I think, again, being able to deliver that creative experience that's going to matter to them, that's going to take advantage of it, becomes a lot more important. So, yeah, I think you're right. And that Sort of. I'm stealing the sort of Cambrian Explosion idea because I think it's a perfect encapsulation of the sort of precipice that we're on right now.
- [21:09]
Joshua Espanier
I wish we were having this over wine and a meal. It's a fun conversation.
- [21:16]
Evan Hanlon
There's always part two, Josh.
- [21:18]
Joshua Espanier
There's always part two.
- [21:19]
Bethany Poole
Evan, you've talked a lot about the vision you see for the AI future and the AI world. What's the thing that customers and brands are missing as we race towards it? What would you give us advice on?
- [21:30]
Evan Hanlon
I think there's two things that's important to focus on and remember. The first is that AI is not an easy button and it's not an answer. It's a tool to get us to the answer. And it's a tool that has existed for a long time. Right. Machine learning, algorithms, these are really important things. I think we're seeing a next step up in terms of power and usage, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we are shifting to something that is wholly unknown to us or that is going to be the sort of solve for all of our woes. The second is I think it's also really important to continue to be pragmatic and questioning and pushing and not get distracted by some of the marketing speak, which we're very good at sort of creating. And I think the past few years we saw incredible bubbles around technologies, whether it was blockchain or NFT or the metaverse, et cetera, all of which who have very clear use cases in today's culture and world, but didn't necessarily live up to the hype and the promise of completely upending how marketing ultimately works. And so we should be, I think, skeptical, right, about anything that says that we're going to throw away decades of what have been sort of resilient and constant principles that have been underneath, and make sure that we're thinking about these as tools and not saviors.
- [23:00]
Joshua Espanier
Long live marketing, huh?
- [23:02]
Evan Hanlon
Long live marketing.
- [23:03]
Joshua Espanier
Evan, it's been a pleasure having you here today. Thank you so much for joining Modern Marketers and look forward to further conversations.
- [23:10]
Evan Hanlon
Josh, couldn't be happier to join you. It's always a pleasure talking with you about modern marketing and just in general. So I really appreciate it.
- [23:19]
Joshua Espanier
A huge thank you to my guest this week, Evan Hanlon, Global CEO of Choreograph. If you like this episode, please subscribe to get the latest updates and the next recording as soon as it's ready. We'll see you next time. For Modern Marketers by Think With Google.
- [23:34]
Frankie Guadagnino
Thank you for listening to Modern Marketers by Think With Google. Our host is Joshua Spanier. Modern Marketers is brought to you by Google and Attention. The podcast is produced by the Google Ads Marketing team and Frankie Guadagnino, Nagina Niazmatova and Emily Behrens for Attention. Our technical producer is Kevin Fisher. Modern Marketers is edited by Sean Colello and this podcast is mixed and mastered by Andy Inglot. Our theme music is by Jerry Matei. Thanks for listening.