Evolving Your Audience Center of Excellence

Transcript

It’s so nice to have you all with us here today. This is another Tech Talk where we host guests of all areas of media, ad tech, and martech. I’m Nancy Tefera-Santos, Senior Vice President in Marketer Insider Intelligence. Thank you for joining us. Today we’re going to hear about the Audience Center of Excellence. This is one of my favorite subjects because we get to talk about people. This is your opportunity to learn. We want you to submit questions during the presentation. I’ll get to as many as I can during the Q&A. So please keep them coming. Now I’d like to introduce my very special guest, Nina Caruso. Nina is Product Marketing Manager at Adobe. Nina, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Nancy. I’m excited to be here. Nina, it’s so nice to have you here. I know you have years of experience at Adobe. I got a little sneak peek to your presentation yesterday, and it’s really fantastic. So let’s turn it on over to you and get started. Amazing. Thank you, Nancy. Thanks for that warm welcome. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. So let me jump right into this content and start with a little anecdote. I’ve found in some research actually provided by eMarketer that 43% of marketers this year are placing their big bet on real-time marketing as the tactic that’s going to have the most impact to their business in 2021. Really that same number of marketers say that segmentation in the skills to do personalized messaging at scale are a big gap or deficiency within their organization. So that’s interesting, right? In order to do real-time marketing and be successful at it, you need to be able to have the skills in your organization to do segmentation and personalized messaging. I think this conflict is really summed up quite nicely by this recent headline from a recent Inc. magazine article by Greg Bartel. Successful digital transformation isn’t about technology, it’s about people. And that’s really what I want to cover today. What we’re seeing at Adobe and across the larger MarTech ecosystem is that more and more marketers are interested in adopting and starting to evolve to use customer data platforms for audience activation and to help with real-time marketing at scale. What we want to be able to make sure marketers do though is ensure that they have the people and processes and organizational frameworks in place to support that new technology investment and be successful. So that’s really what I’m covering today. I’m going to share with you a little bit of backstory and history on audience centers of excellence. Share with you some details about what centers of excellence is do or supposed to do. Some of the market forces that are at play today and how the COE needs to evolve alongside of that. A guide for the evolution and then some tips to get started today. So the backstory on audience centers of excellence. Let me flash us back to 2013, which probably feels like eons ago in ad tech time, but this is sort of what things looked like. Fragmented customer data is the big headline here. So think about channel teams, content teams, analytics teams, CRM teams. Each of them had a different view of who their customer is or was, had different ownership of different customer data sets. So the CRM team had customer data that looked completely different from the social teams, customer data from the paid media team. And unfortunately what this resulted in was a really poor customer experience. If you were to visit a brand’s website and then returned on your phone to that same page, you probably had completely separate experiences being served up, probably different advertising and different offers as well. So maybe a few years down the road from that, a lot of companies started to adopt DMPs or data management platforms to help with this problem of fragmented data and customer experiences. And what DMPs offered was a technology solution that allowed customers to combine different sources of synonymous data. So customers could combine things like analytics or behavioral data with offline data and second and third party data, form those into integrated audiences and then use consistent audiences across channels to provide a more cohesive customer experience. So definitely improvement by leaps and bounds on that original disjointed customer experience. And with customers buying into DMPs and using them as their audience technology of choice, a lot of customers thought they were getting to this kind of Nirvana state where teams were all using the same data set, sharing a budget with integrated use cases, laddering up to shared KPIs with a consistent audience view, producing really successful campaigns and maxing out that return on investment from the DMP purchase. But here’s what things looked like in actuality. Each different team still had different data sets. They still had different budget. They had sometimes competing use cases and definitely very different KPIs and different definitions of what success and what good looked like. And each of these different use cases and data sets repeated across these different teams ensured that conflict and organizational silos, even with technology to help solve for it, those conflicts still existed. And this is where the center of excellence, that audience center of excellence really started to come into play where successful organizations who were using a DMP started to adopt this framework really to help manage that data management platform investment. They were using a COE to help use and track data that was coming in to measure campaigns, test different initiatives, actually govern the data and help to communicate out through the rest of the organization about team successes and processes and really using the center of excellence to drive the operations of the DMP. So let me share with you a little bit more about what COEs do before we talk about how they’re evolving today. So some of the key responsibilities that many customers, audience centers of excellence are working on. One of course is implementation. So responsible for actually setting up that technology. Audience ownership with all what this means is responsible for defining the process of how audiences are formed, what data is used. Integrations, this is huge when you’re thinking about audience technology, thinking about what data is actually being brought in and also what points of activation you’re setting up where you’re actually going to syndicate those audiences to. Project execution, exactly what it sounds like, making sure that the prioritized use cases and initiatives actually get done. The COE is also responsible for internal roadmap, meaning what use cases and initiatives will be adopted next and deciding how they are prioritized according to organizational objectives. Vendor management, so liaising with the technology vendor of choice, making sure you’re on the same wavelength when it comes to what new features are coming out and how they’ll support you in your value realization. Experience and usage, another key responsibility of the audience COE is managing how different teams and users are able to leverage the data and making sure that there are appropriate controls in place in terms of how data is used and for what purpose. Communication, being able to communicate out to the rest of the organization about the state of the investment, where you’re finding success as an organization, what changes have occurred in terms of technology or people or process. Measurement, of course, tracking, putting measure controls in place to track where organizations are finding success. And then also making sure that you’re tracking to understand where you need to make adjustments over time in terms of use cases and execution of campaigns. And then education and adoption, right? Making sure that the consumers of the audience technology actually know how to use it, that they’re embedding the technology and the people and processes of the COE in their everyday use as consumers of the tool. And here’s a quick view of how COE teams are oftentimes organized when it comes to people. So typically there’s a cross-functional project team, sort of like boots on the ground in doing the work every day, really responsible for driving key tactics and responsibilities for the COE. And then this cross-functional project team is supported by stakeholders and then also a steering committee. So let me drop down another layer to share with you a bit more about who these people are and what they do, right? So the core project team is typically made up of a product manager or product owner, you may call them, and they really act as an administrator. And they might even be a subject matter expert from an area like media or CRM or analytics. It may depend on the institutional knowledge that exists or where some of the priorities of the organization lie. So again, this team or this individual responsibilities include owning the roadmap and really executing on the project plan and also helping to drive communication across the organization. The core project team, like I mentioned, is supported by the stakeholder committee, and it might include additional representation from teams like legal or marketing insights teams and those folks might be owners of other related technology applications. These folks, again, not in the everyday, but they’re probably participating in some level of like monthly readout and helping to both define use cases and drive cross-functional decisions. And then you have the steering committee. And I like to think of these folks as executive sponsors and probably who they are and where they’re coming from, most likely depends on where the budget came from that actually procure the technology, right? Who’s holding the purse, if you will. So these folks, they may be participating in the monthly steering committee, perhaps they’re getting some type of quarterly readout. These individuals are really helping to break down any internal roadblocks or silos that you’re trying to bust through. And they’re helping to sign off on decisions as well in partnership with that stakeholder committee and hopefully helping with any continued budget needs as well. All right, so let me now get into what’s changing and why are we evolving the center of excellence models that supports audience technology. So there’s a lot changing in the space of ad tech and martech. And it’s particularly impacting how customers are thinking about data management and audience activation over the long term. You can see there’s a lot of headlines, a lot of anxiety in the space, a lot of this driven of course, by Google announcing that they intend to block third party cookies in Chrome at the beginning of 2022. And these changes are forcing marketers to rethink what’s the right audience technology that I’m going to use over the long term to activate my customer data. And many customers are thinking about how to evolve to use customer data platforms to really double down on their first party audience, first party data audience strategy. The sort of best in class customer data platforms are ones that allow marketers to ingest all of their data across the customer lifecycle, right, using a single system that really solves for complete data management. So in this view of the world, a lot of focus in the DMP has been focused on pseudonymous data of how to find and also acquire new customers. With a customer data platform, you should be able to continue to do that, but also store known customer data and execute on use cases that need to leverage known customer data, things like how to grow and retain existing customers. And a customer data platform, again, one that is best in class, can help you continue to market to customers using one tool throughout this customer lifecycle. So all the way from awareness to loyalty and growth. So moving from the top of the funnel to the bottom and going through that lifecycle over and over again as you cross sell and upsell customers. But what’s critical here is how to think about evolving the people and process to support this new technology investment. Some of the reasons why it’s important to think about evolving the people and process side of things with this new investment, a couple of reasons. One is new data, right? So we talked about many marketers are focused through perhaps a DMP today, ingesting anonymized data. But with the with CDPs, this opportunity to now ingest known customer data. So making sure that you have the right access to individuals that will help you with that new data ingestion. So that brings us to new resources, right? So thinking about teams like IT that will help with that data ingestion, thinking about additional marketing teams that maybe weren’t involved in the audience center of excellence before. And these new data sets and new resources will hopefully help you to unlock new use cases, right? With more access to additional customer data, you now should be able to unlock things like more integrated and more personalized marketing and experience messaging. So now as we sort of get into more detail about how this evolution occurs, there’s a couple of considerations I’d offer before you fully kick off this project. So one is considering who is the project driver, right, making sure that either there is an individual or a team who is clearly tasked with owning this evolution. A lot of times this team might reflect where the budget for that CDP purchase is coming from. But in short, if no one is driving this project, it’s probably going to drive itself off the road, making sure you have someone who’s owning the onboarding of the technology, but at the same time owning the people and process side of things. The other consideration I’d offer is if you have an audience center of excellence today, think about what’s working for you today and what you might want to leave behind, right? Have you been meeting on a monthly cadence with a group, a small group of individuals? Do you actually need to meet more regularly? Have you learned that through the process that you have in place? Take that knowledge with you as you move on to this new technology. And then three, think about basically what can you clean up before you move on to the next thing. I moved about a year and a half ago, as I’m sure many of you did as part of COVID. This is that opportunity to go through your closet and get rid of things and don’t sort of collect junk in your new house, if you will, right? You want to think about when it comes to audience technology, what data sets are you no longer using that you’ve been holding on to for a while that maybe are stale or they’re just no longer relevant to your organization? Think about what you can get rid of as you again are evolving to that new technology. All right, so here are the five steps that I’m offering to you today to jumpstart this evolution of your audience COE. I’m going to talk through how to assemble the right individuals, reassess the model that you’re using to support the COE today, how to evolve the COE objectives and roadmap, a suggestion to double down on governance strategy, and I’ll share how to do that. And then my tip to communicate or over communicate and educate your organization. So one, assembling the right individuals. We talked through this concept of core team, stakeholder team and steering committee already. And when you’re thinking about new data and particularly when you’re just thinking about onboarding this new audience technology, IT and data engineering teams or data architecture teams as you may call them within your organization are folks who you’re going to want to bring into that core team as you’re setting up this new CDP. Those are folks who are going to help with those new data sources, helping with the ingestion and set up. They’ll be critical partners to you at least during that implementation phase. Additionally, there might be other marketing teams that you want to bring into the fold. Perhaps a focus has been on programmatic marketing teams and you want to be able to extend that perhaps to additional marketing teams who will have relevant use cases in the CDP. And then on the stakeholder side, if they’re not already involved, legal and privacy in particular are going to be critical partners, particularly with a CDP providing access to more known customer data or directly identifiable data, what we used to call in the industry PII, right? Those teams are definitely going to want to have a say in terms of how that data is used and by whom for what use cases. So step two, now that you have the people in place is thinking about the model that you use. So there’s two center of excellence models that we see primarily used at Adobe. So the first is that centralized model. This is where there is one center of excellence for the organization and then multiple different teams who really act as consumers of the audience technology. And then you see that decentralized model. This is one that’s typically used by multinational organizations or multi-brand conglomerates. This is where you would have multiple center of excellence teams that each support a brand or a geographic region. And this is going to be appropriate when there are very different use cases and different data sets for each brand or geography. But the point here is now is the time as you’re adopting a CDP and reviewing the center of excellence model, now’s the time to reassess, do you have the right model in place to help your organization utilize the new technology effectively? And three, now with the right people and model in place, it’s time to think about objectives and roadmap. Now the center of excellence team should really be driving the execution right and helping to prioritize the different projects that the organization is going to help execute through the CDP. And the audience center of excellence team should really be acting as gatekeepers at times saying no to certain projects, helping to prioritize effectively to meet goals. And what this really comes down to once the priority projects are in place is breaking down the work into individual pieces to execute and get to that end goal. So for example, many of our customers today, many of the folks probably on this call are so focused on how do you get to more valuable first party data? How do you capture things like authentication? So that can be broken down into pretty simple steps that the center of excellence team can help strategize on and ultimately help deliver. So you’ll want to think about how do you identify a high value audience? How do you think about the type of audience or individuals who you’re trying to collect information or get to authentication? Once you’ve identified that, do you have the right data ingestion, data integrations in place to actually collect and store those authentication signals? Then you want to be able hopefully over time to scale that maybe using AI and ML to do modeling. You want to make sure that you’re building in a plan to activate off of that data once it’s stored to be able to message to those subscribers, those authenticated users. And then definitely critical is having a measurement plan in place. Can you track how successful you were in this project so that you can iterate and hopefully improve over time? Now I mentioned before that we see governance strategy as just so critical as you’re going through this evolution process. And a big part of that is because of the now more sensitive data that is going to exist in the CDP. And I think there’s a couple of key considerations here or key steps to take. So the first would be to define roles. And really what this is about is thinking about who needs access and what will they be responsible for. So thinking about this at an individual level or at a team level. And then thinking about how that access is going to be designed. So how do these teams or individuals, how will they use that data? Are they going to need to just read data, write data, edit data? And when I say data, thinking about creating audiences or deciding what audiences get activated or inserted into campaigns. And then once those roles are defined and the access design is finished, you want to be able to implement. And the best CDPs will have a productized way for you to implement very specific and stringent controls so that you can dictate for your organization who has access to what and for what purpose and make sure that you can monitor those and also change them over time as conditions change, as team members change, et cetera. Okay. And then this last piece of jump-starting the evolution is over-communicating and educating. And this is so critical, I think, as part of a digital transformation to think about how you share with the rest of your organization as you’re going through this evolution, share with them about how it’s going, how things have changed, how the people and process side of things, how your audience center of excellence is evolving and how they need to be interacting perhaps with you differently. Also a great opportunity to use this as a platform for evangelism and opportunity to market yourselves throughout your organization as you’re working on this process. So the way I think about this in terms of communication, perhaps something some of you are already doing today, but I think about how I consume news and something I’ve seen organizations be really successful with is using newsletters and podcasts, right? Using a newsletter, perhaps on a monthly cadence to share where are you in this evolution journey? What new data sources does your company have access to? How have processes changed when it comes to audience creation and audience activation? And then I learned this recently from a customer. They’re using podcasts in such a creative way. They’re actually using a podcast series as part of their audience center of excellence and transformation to interview stakeholders that they have who are part of their committee of the center of excellence team, interviewing them and sharing with them how they need the technology choices, what their vision is over the long term. And it’s getting a lot of traction at their organization. Now, when it comes to education, a lot of the CDP vendors in the space are doing more and more when it comes to offering on-demand learning and are even starting to do some credentialing or badging. And this is a great thing to take advantage of to make sure that folks within the organization who have adopted a CDP are actually learning how to use it effectively and learning about all of the amazing features and use cases that that CDP can offer. So taking advantage of those is critical. And then last but not least, we know when you’re going through a new technology, onboarding and evolving people in process, there’s going to be questions along the way. Right. Office hours are a great way to help address some of those in one place. And then, of course, Slack channels. Right. So you can just easily ask questions, provide yourselves as accessible a center of excellence members to the rest of your organization and have some of those Q&A documented as well. So just some final final tips to get started today. So one is know your priorities as an organization, know where you’re trying to get to, where the North Star is, and really let that guide the technology or onboarding and the evolution of the Audience Center of Excellence. Identify the right people. Make sure that you have a program owner, that that person or team is very clearly defined. So they’re keeping you on track. Use this time of evolution to evaluate the model. Think about do you have the right framework in place in order to be successful? Track success along the way. So think about this of building in checkpoints to make sure that you’re hitting those priority goals as an organization when it comes to hitting the bottom line. But also think about softer KPIs like is the Audience Center of Excellence helping to foster more collaboration, maybe break down some organizational silos? And then last but not least, communication is king. Make sure that you’re bringing your organization along for the ride as part of this evolution journey and clearly sharing how processes are changing, how access levels are changing, and also consider education as part of that communication plan. I think there’s going to we’ll share this as part of the session today, but a couple of additional resources. One is we just had Adobe Summit a few weeks ago and there was a great session on leading your customer data management practice led by our consulting services team, along with IBM and IBM shared their own journey and how they’re evolving their own center of excellence model. And then we also have a white paper, which I think we’re able to offer today as well on this very same topic. So it goes into some of what I’ve shared in more detail. So, Nancy, that’s that’s it for me. I will turn it back to you. Nina, thank you so much. This was fantastic presentation. I know our audience loved it. Not only did we have a lot of questions, but we had folks asking for the slides. So just a reminder, we will send the slides out with the recording afterwards. So everyone look forward to that. Nina, a couple of questions that came in. Emma in Phoenix would like to know how many resources should be involved in the Audience Center of Excellence? Great question. And the answer is I hate this answer, but it depends, right? It depends on the size of your organization. So we’ve seen really small organizations where the center of excellence might be two to three people. And then we’ve seen huge international organizations where there might be upwards of 50 people who are part of the center of excellence model. So I think about the size of your organization and also what’s realistic in terms of bandwidth and time. But make sure that there’s at the very least one person who is identified as that product owner or driver. OK, thank you. So think about size. You also talked about centralized and decentralized organizations. Trina in New York has a follow on question, wants to know, do COE models change depending also on the industry itself? So not size, but vertical industry? Yeah, that’s a great question. Yes, in some cases. So, for example, thinking about a CPG brand that has multiple different brands, they’re almost all the time the decentralized model is going to work best for them because they have very different data across those different brands that need their own management and have different use cases and resources. Attached to them. So, yes, sometimes the vertical does help determine the right model. OK, thank you. And Billy in Chicago would like to know what’s more common centralized or decentralized COE model? I’d say the centralized model is what we see as much more common at Adobe. And I think a lot of customers, even ones that are larger in size, are looking to have some type of centralized framework in place that so many organizations are trying to solve for that unified customer profile. And part of helping to solve for that is having the people and processes in place that help bring that data together. And that centralized COE model can help solve for that. Great. And Laura in Virginia Beach would like to know, from supporting a DMP to supporting a CDP, how long should the transition take? That’s a great question. You know, what we tell customers at Adobe is that go at the pace that works for your organization. For many organizations who might have had a DMP for a long time, it’s going to take time to think about how to move data and audiences over and think through thoughtfully how to evolve the people and process side of things. So for some customers, they might move things slowly, maybe over the course of six months to a year. Other customers, perhaps they’re more agile. They might be looking to to make that change much more quickly. OK, thank you. And Gerard in San Francisco wants to know, can I include partners in my COE model? But before you answer that, kind of similar, Stan in France wants to know, speaking about partners, where can media agencies sit within the structure to best leverage the CDP? Yeah, yeah. Great, great questions. You seem pretty similar. So in that in that core project team, we had I see a lot of customers have partners directly embedded there, particularly for our customers who are very focused, as many customers are, on audience activation for advertising. It may be that the agency or partner teams are very, very closely part of that process and helping to execute. And they really sit at have a seat at the table at that core project team and are in the product all the time. For many customers as well, more so on the side of things as opposed to agency side, those side partners might also be involved as part of that data architecture role or data architecture team that’s brought in to help stand up the CDP and definitely are part an integral part for many organizations of that core center of excellence team. OK, thank you. Thank you for covering all the partner partner ecosystem there. We have one more question. Henry in Denver would like to know how important is privacy adherence when it comes to COEs and what role should COEs play when it comes to privacy, especially in the move from DMP to CDPs? Love that question. Governance is a critical part, and I see the COEs as facilitators as part of that governance, as part of that governance consideration. And I think the COE can help in a couple of ways. One is they can make sure that privacy resources or legal resources have a seat at the table to help determine how data is going to be used, particularly in the CDP as customers are moving to use more and more. We call it known customer data. In addition, I’d say that the COE teams and the privacy teams not only considering how it’s going to be used, but working with the privacy team to actually implement those controls as well. So definitely a big player privacy as part of this evolution and as part of the COE as well. OK, fantastic. Thank you. That’s all the questions that we had. I know, like I said, everybody is looking forward to the slides, but we’ll also send a clean recording of today’s presentation. I apologize again for the little glitch that we had before we wrap up. Nina, I know there were five steps. I’m going to go ahead and repeat them, but I want you to help me because these are important steps for our audience to remember. You want to have the right individuals. You want to reassess your model, evolve your roadmap, bring in governance and communicate, correct? You got it. All right. It was lovely spending time with you today. And again, I know our audience enjoyed it. Before we wrap up, let me take a couple of moments to tell you all what’s happening across eMarketer’s media channels. You can always register for more upcoming events like tech talks or meet the analyst webinars at eMarketer.com forward slash webinars. Nina mentioned engaging with your audience through newsletters and podcasts. Please check out ours. Check out our newsletters. Check out our daily podcast, Behind the Numbers. Keep an eye on your email again for the link to the recording and the slides. Be sure to share it with your colleagues. This was great information. We want to get it out there. Nina also shared another presentation from Adobe Summit. Always a summit to attend in the industry. We always look forward to that one as well as a white paper. So be sure to check those out. Thank you, Nina. Thank you, the team at Adobe and everyone for tuning in and joining me today. Stay safe and please wear a mask.