Author: Glenn Schmelzle

Episode 180

 ‘1 to 1 Marketing,’  sounds wonderful. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers wrote a series of books in the 1990s called this. We have thrown all kinds of technology, content, and persona construction at it over the last 25 years. But it still eludes us. Architecting communications that converses with each person, at their own point in a conversation with our brand is hard.  Is it marketing’s job to actually have 1:1 conversations? And with  what’s at stake if we  screw up personalization, can we implement or maintain it without losing our jobs?  

Today’s guest is here to help answer that. 

Since getting his M.A. in Information Studies from Aarhus University, our guest has lived at the intersection of data and communications.

Since 2020 he has been the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic, an omnichannel marketing software, where he works primarily with large companies involved in omnichannel marketing, customer experience management, and customer lifecycle projects. 

He’s on a mission to ensure that the end user gets consistent, timely and relevant communications across channels – be it web, email, app, text, social – or even in-store. He often presents keynotes on Omnichannel Personalization and sits on the jury for that at the Danish eCommerce Awards.

His first book, written  together with Colin Shearer, was a bestseller on Omnichannel Marketing. We’re talking with him about his book “Hello $Firstname,” which came out in 2023. Joining me from Copenhagen, let’s welcome Rasmus Houlind.

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

2:30 – Book’s Main Theme 

37:48 – Public Service Announcement

38:41 – Quantifying the value of Personalization

1:00:25 – Rasmus Contact details

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Rasmus on LinkedIn

Rasmus works at Agillic

Book has versions available for North America & Nordics

Plato’s theory of forms (here is a YouTube video on it)

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Example in book used the Financial Times

Episode Reboot

Download a free abstract of the book

Episode 178

If you go to Wikipedia and type Zero-sum game, it’ll describe it as “a situation that involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero”

Many think that’s how privacy regulations are affecting marketing. Anytime client privacy is upheld it’s at our expense. We’re losing; they’re winning. Zero-sum game.

Siobhan Solberg disagrees.  She says you can effectively market to your client in a way that does right by them and is privacy-compliant. 

She calls herself a protector of privacy, while also being a marketing consultant, the founder of a marketing agency. She has over a decade in the measurement space, having created CXL’s course on personalization. She’s also been a speaker at conferences like Superweek and The Copywriter Club. She also writes on privacy and marketing on her blog and is host of a podcast whose name is spelled out in the shownotes but which I’ll call Marketing Unf*d.

She is currently enrolled in the Master of Laws program for Privacy, Cybersecurity, and Data Management at Maastricht University. 

When she’s not not pushing these boundaries, Siobhan loves to get outside and test her physical limits

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Siobhan’s agency is Raze

Siobhan’s podcast, Marketing Unfucked

She writes on privacy and marketing on her blog, siobhansolberg.com

Chapters & Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

0:46 – About Siobhan 

2:11 – What marketers should know about Privacy

20:56 – PSA

21:53 – Privacy across the organization

39:59 – Siobhan’s contact details

Episode 177

Today’s talk is with a technology vendor, as a Disclaimer, please note that there’s no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. They’re simply on the show to give their perspective on our topic.

Today we’re going to talk about leveling up beyond KPIs to data that visualizes our full-funnel.

Comedian George Carlin knew how complicated things get with marketing technology. Or, you can imagine that when you hear him talk about stuff. This is the feeling we can get watching our Marketing technology evolve before our eyes. As our  software tools grow, so does the complexity. We’re beyond the point of logging into each of them to see individual KPIs. They have just become too specialized, and now we need meta-tools, crafted solely to connect with the specialized marketing systems, to extract and roll up streamlined data that we can analyze or see on a dashboard.

It’s against this backdrop that I invited today’s guest. 

Jacob Varghese hails from India, having graduated with a BA from University of Mumbai. Since moving to Canada in the 1990s, he’s focused on building marketing machines and crafting go-to-market strategies that yield repeatable, predictable, and scalable revenue. 

Following experiences as a senior executive at numerous  B2B SaaS outfits, he’s now the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AgencyAnalytics.  His passion for augmenting marketing and sales through data and automation comes through in the insights he shares on his blog.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Jacob on Twitter

Jacob is with AgencyAnalytics

Scott Brinker

Timestamps

0:00 – Intro

03:09 – Background on Jacob

09:33 – Getting to useful dashboards

26:14 – PSA

27:08 – Presenting data as a story

46:46 – Get in touch with Jacob

Episode 176

If your job involves numbers, you likely spend time graphically plotting it.  Whether it’s for analyzing or presenting, we usually toss our datasets into our visualization tool (mainly because it takes one button click) and start visualizing it. The problem here is that we’re making content before knowing our intent, we’re making the software master over us instead of being its master. 

Today’s guest says the visualizations that come from this won’t be intelligible, won’t make them motivated to act and won’t yield good decisions. However, he does passionately believe that when people who know how to read numbers, see it presented the right way, it’ll motivate them to make the right decisions. 

Lee Feinberg graduated from Cornell University with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. In 2012 founded a consultancy to help data leaders create armies of trustworthy decision makers.  He has worked in the analytics and data visualization fields for 20 years.

He is associated with Data Science programs at both NYU and the University of Chicago. When he’s not talking about visualization, Lee likes experiencing concerts – from the front row,  and also hanging out with his wife and kids.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Lee’s Website : https://www.DecisionViz.com 

Lee Feinberg – DecisionViz | LinkedIn

Edward Tufte

TV Show Shark Tank

Chapters:

0:00 – Intro
02:13 – What we’re doing wrong
33:46 – Lee’s framework
58:25 – Where to find Lee and visualization resources

Episode 173

Today, we’re talking about the future of data with Google Analytics 4.

It’s been about 6 months since we all had Universal Analytics. It’s good to talk to others who use GA4 to do their jobs, to compare notes. Although GA4 is here to stay, it still has gaps that need bridging.

That’s why I spoke with Jason Hackenberry, Head of Partnerships from web development agency Arctic Leaf. Prior to Arctic Leaf, he held Digital Marketing and operations roles at Weatherby and Save Khaki United, along with roles in Merchandising.

What you’ll hear is from a virtual event he and I did in December 2023, on topics including

• How Google is migrating users of its free version differently from its 360 version
• How to capitalize on the information provided by GA4
• The data you actually need vs. what you THINK you need
• Tips on finding insights, reporting, conversion tracking and data retention
• New GA4 features that can help your lead generation or e-commerce website.

Episode 172

GA4 is now our de facto analytics tool. Regardless of how familiar we were with the previous  tool, GA4 is here to stay so we may as well get good at using it. 

I’ve got just the person to make the transition relatively painless for us. 

Our guest’s love for analytics was a happy accident after she worked in marketing at a company with a sales director. They told the executive team that marketing’s budget would be put to better use hiring new salespeople. But beyond having a warm fuzzy feeling in one’s tummy, it wasn’t clear marketing’s impact could be articulated in the way that executives talked.

Not willing to watch her department disappear, she dug in and found the data that showed marketing was having an impact. She took the evidence to the next board meeting and her department was able to continue with its work.

She chose to go out on her own so she could empower marketers to do as she’d done. She now heads up The Colouring In Department, a consultancy that has completed close to 230 GA audits now, and has trained thousands of people on how to get good at their analytics. 

Joining from London England – here is Jill Quick

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Tools – David Vallejo – Event checker

Adobe analytics

Matomo analytics

Piwik pro

Episode 171

AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications – hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them? 

Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors.

Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Yash’s company: https://www.ringersciences.com/about

Yash also founded a consultancy, here’s the Next Practices Group’s site and their social feed.

Yash on Twitter

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Boston Dynamics

Tesla

Episode 170

Whenever your marketing is being assessed by an analyst, they will use one of two approaches. 

The first is called Multi-touch attribution, which takes a customer who’s made a purchase decision, then puts weights on the touchpoints they had on various channels (Google calls their model ‘Data-driven attribution”) on the way to that point, to say which touchpoints were most influential. 

The other approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman told me about MMM, it’s a ‘tremendous undertaking.’  It involves collecting and analyzing historical data in different geographies at different times of the year: sales figures, both legacy and digital marketing channels, and external factors like economic indicators and even weather. It has its own jargon: Incrementality, ratios, betas, impact on objectives. Then there’s the math. It uses regression methods, both linear and non-linear, Frequentist vs Bayesian statistics. 

I get so overwhelmed with these modeling solutions, it’s like the old Who’s On First skit. I needed someone who would sort this out for me. 

Our guest has been a consultant in the marketing and digital analytics space for 15 years. I’m currently focusing on helping clients quantify the impact of their marketing efforts using Marketing Mix Models, experimentation, and various attribution methodologies.

He is so passionate, he started a newsletter called MMM Hub

He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a Masters degree in Information Technology, focused on Business Intelligence & Data Analytics.

Jim is great at showcasing other people in the analytics community -He truly believes that all of us are smarter than any one of us. He, along with Simon Poulton, co-host the MeasureUp podcast. 

He talked with me from his home in Pittsburgh. Let’s meet Jim Gianoglio.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Jim’s Cauzle Analytics consultancy

The MeasureUp podcast.

John Wallace

Randomized Control Trials (RCTs)

Bayesian Statistics

Media mix modeling ratio:

1. The Marketing Channels Being Used
2. The Money Being Spent on Each Marketing Channel
3. Campaign Results & Insights

Episode Reboot – articles & videos shared by Jim:

What is Marketing Mix Modeling? 3 Benefits and Limitations – this is a very high-level article, explains some of the basics (but none of the ‘how-to-do-it’ pieces)

Market Mix Modeling (MMM) 101 – This is a good intro-level article highlighting the important high-level concepts of MMM

A Complete Guide to Marketing Mix Modeling – although this article/site is littered with a bunch of ads, the content is actually pretty good. It touches on the concepts as well as providing some code snippets for R, Python and SAS.

Videos / Courses to help get started with modeling:

MASS Analytics – Marketing Mix Modeling Master Classes – (free) 14 courses (YouTube videos) – very well done, starts at a beginner introduction to MMM and goes all the way through advanced modeling techniques. It’s about 3 hours in total.

Marketing Mix Modeling 101 – (free) online course (YouTube videos). This is 2.5 hours over 5 courses that focuses on MMM using Robyn, so is good if you’re comfortable using R.

Vexpower – What’s the impact of TV ads? – (free) this is a good intro into the concepts of modeling and MMM, and should only take 1-2 hours to complete 

Vexpower – Can we try Facebok Robyn? – (free) this one walks you through a complete example of using Robyn to do MMM