You’ve spent a lot of time in your career advising CMOs, and now you are a CMO. Talk me through some of the advice that you have given that you’re going to employ for Epsilon.
As a consultant, there were broad-based challenges that I would hear from marketers very consistently when it came to marketing technology, advertising technology, identity resolution and their tech stack in total.
One, the tech stack is not doing what it needs to do—cost-effectively delivering sales in the near term while at the same time building the brand relationships that ensure sales continue in the long term. If you spend enough money on either branding or performance, you can drive the needle up. But the point is, you’ve got to do that cost-effectively and in a way that makes sense.
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Why do marketers think their tech stacks aren’t doing what they need to do? What is missing?
The ability to pull the different pieces together.
Marketers have to engage through channels in order to engage at scale, and channels materially limit their ability to engage in those natural types of conversations that help them build a strong relationship with the consumer. They have the ability to build consumer profiles. They have the ability to engage with consumers in different channels. They have all the pieces, but they can’t pull that all together so that the brand is speaking to the consumer with a single, harmonized voice across all those channels.
The second challenge is that the tech stack is overly complex. Marketers want to invest their energy working with a limited number of vendors who don’t just bring point solutions to the table but bring everything they need to accomplish that goal of building a brand while driving sales.
That may lead you to think, ‘Oh, okay, you’re saying everyone should be using a marketing cloud or wants to use a marketing cloud.’ But the issue there, is that it usually precludes marketers from being able to do something else they want to do, which is work with cutting-edge new technologies that greatly improve their ability to hit objectives.
So, they’re caught in this ‘in-between’ space, thinking, ‘I’ve got to go all-in with the marketing cloud; I’ve got to stitch together a bunch of point solutions—ID resolution; DSP; CDP; cleanroom, etc…—to make this work.
Three is, this is all changing ahead of cookie deprecation. Marketers have already got tech stacks they don’t think are working ideally. The tech stacks are about to start working a lot less ideally.
