Throughout our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today’s guest didn’t do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.
Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity.
That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors.
After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn’t the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So she teamed up with Alan Weiss in 2022 to write her second book. “Masterful Marketing”
I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I’m so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter.
Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.
Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several European e-commerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights.
Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing what he was learning. Seeing that the domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan to release the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star. Except for when he’s having fun playing in a punk rock cover band.
Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you’re connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today’s data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of monitoring and logging the flows almost can’t manage them. It becomes overwhelming to manually check and ensure the quality and integrity of the data. The more sophisticated the systems, the more errors creep into the data. If we rely on flawed data, the outcomes and insights we generate will be equally flawed. This is where data observability comes in.
In this episode you will hear about something called an observability platform. It identifies real-time data anomalies and pipeline errors in data warehouses. Now there’s a twist here because we’re in a cloud computing environment that charges by number of computing cycles. You don’t want an observability tool that’s another pipe accessing client data and running up the meter. The good news is there’s an easier way to detect when data has gone awry, by comparing log files – basically metadata – they are just as effective at alerting you to problems.
If you’d like what this is doing described in a completely non-technical way, think of Hans Christian Andersen’s Princess and the Pea. There is a girl who comes to a castle seeking shelter from the rain claiming to be a princess. The queen doubts whether she is truly of noble blood, and offers her a bed, but this bed has twenty mattresses and twenty down-filled comforters on it. A pea is placed underneath the bottom mattress to test if this girl detects anything. The next morning, the princess says that she endured a sleepless night; there must have been something hard in the bed. They realize then and there that she must be a princess, since no one but a real princess could be so delicate.
I spoke with Yuliia Tkachova, the co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data, a company which recently received $1.3M in a pre-seed round. Originally from Ukraine, Yuliia came to found Masthead after work that convinced her of the need for an observability solution. She had roles as a Product Manager roles at OWOX BI and Boosta, where their data solutions encountered problems. Prior to that, she did marketing for RAGT. She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Suma State University, specializing in MIS & Statistics. She also serves as an Organizer at MeasureCamp, a volunteer community where analytics professionals come together to learn.
Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment’s required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.
Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you’ll see from his backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it’s him.
After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the University of Cambridge as a Doctoral Candidate, our guest worked in the UK analytics practice of a global Management Consultancy. Due for a change after 6 years of that, he moved to Ottawa Canada and founded his own consultancy so he could offer a more independent approach. A while later started the firm he’s been leading for nearly 15 years, Bronson Analytics.
In 2018 he began a recurring event in Ottawa called Beer & Analytics, which draws hundreds from the field together for learning and socializing. In 2022, the event went outside of Ottawa for the first time, being held in Toronto.
It’s fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot’s 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that’s becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I’m talking about marketing analytics.
The winning analogy of the conference made fun of how loosely people add the term AI to everything. Kenya Gillette used soccer to characterize this. Imagine you were the person who designed the game, documented all the rules and scouted the earth for people to play it.
Then someone says they can make soccer better…by simply playing the game ON THE MOON. That is the equivalent of saying that any business activity can be made better by adding AI to it.
