Data Dominance Through Software Subservience Ft. Alex Southworth

Adam Kerpelman:
This is the Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

March Richardson:
I’m Mark.

Alex Southworth:
And I am Alex.

Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back. Another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us. And special thanks to our guest this week, Alex Southworth. I think you might be our first mothership guest.

March Richardson:
Indeed.

Adam Kerpelman:
Our first D&B guest. So you have that.

March Richardson:
We’ve arrived at the mothership.

Alex Southworth:
Finally, finally.

March Richardson:
Beamed up like Scotty.

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. Beam me up.

Adam Kerpelman:
I’ll throw to you for an intro quickly, in terms of what you do.

Alex Southworth:
Yeah, no. Excellent. Well, it’s funny that you say that I’m from the mothership. I often feel like I’m not. Yeah. My role at the moment is I head up a digital marketing practice. So I’m kind of the segment leader for that, and I own that business unit. But before that, I actually came into DNB through an acquisition. I was with a company called Orb Intelligence. And I guess the other way of describing me is, that I’m also a recovering consultant. Spent about 20 years in B2B sales and marketing consulting. And now kind of moving over to the data side.

Adam Kerpelman:
So in the context of sales and marketing consulting, that’s it. So coming in and telling people what’s wrong with their marketing, or just the processes on that side of the house?

Alex Southworth:
Kind of a combination of everything. Usually, you phrase it as, you can improve your marketing by doing ABC, and the same with sales as well. But it’s really anything from, how you drive more demand, to how you do account-based marketing, to how do you integrate your marketing organization with your sales organization. All of the above, ultimately with the view of just how do you drive more leads.

Adam Kerpelman:
And we are in your department so we have crossed paths. Before we jump into the data stuff and I introduce the topic that caused me to be excited about this. You studied chemical engineering before all this happened. How did you make the shift from chemical engineering into this?

Alex Southworth:
Just to be clear, chemical engineering with French.

Adam Kerpelman:
With French.

March Richardson:
With French.

Adam Kerpelman:
Right.

Alex Southworth:
I can explain the French bit. The French bit was just an excuse for me to study for one year in France, which just sounded good on paper. So went and did that. I think it’s interesting. In the UK, there’s a very different attitude towards university degrees. They tend to be a bit more generic in terms of the jobs that you can get afterwards. So irrespective of what you study, the aim is that university is just a place of learning. At least that’s how I think about it. And you can jump into any job. Afterwards, I’ve always had a passion for business and ended up going into business consulting. So that’s the beginning of the path that led me to data.

Adam Kerpelman:
I hear you. I got a philosophy degree, undergraduate. What do you [inaudible 00:03:51].

March Richardson:
I might actually be the closest. I was an English major.

Adam Kerpelman:
There you go.

March Richardson:
Of all three of us, I might be the… It’s weird, because you’d think it’s like all marketers are econ and…

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. But we met through drama.

March Richardson:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
It all intersects at that creative side.

March Richardson:
Yeah, I think. And that gets to a great question. I think we’re going to explore down the road.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yes. But first, I want to start from the topic that I teased already, which is the one that, Alex, you served up when you signed up to pick the time for recording and everything. It says data domination through software subservience. I think I know exactly what you mean. But I’ll start by asking, what do you mean by that?

Alex Southworth:
I’m actually just curious as to what you mean by that. Because I think I kind of just made that up, thinking we could kind of figure out what that means.

March Richardson:
I think coinage is best in underutilized tools in all of marketing.

Adam Kerpelman:
Absolutely.

March Richardson:
We’re serving that up.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. I think it means… How to say it? Say it in a way that segues to the other topic with the creative stuff. We use data for marketing and things like that, so it bumps into that creative side, and it’s easy to think of that side of it as marketing but it’s more science. And the way that you effectively manipulate massive sets of data is with software. This is what math major study now. My last CTO is a math major. And so his story of how he learned to code stuff was originally starting with Mathematica. And it’s just coding math into stuff. And then you talk to data science and they say, “It’s the same thing. I write queries.” They do this, they do that. We’re deep in the extent to which all of that stuff is already so software facilitated that it makes sense that the next evolution is so complex, we already can’t think about it without machine support. So figuring out the next thing that software should eat is always the right place to go especially if you want to win where it’s data and science see.

Alex Southworth:
Exactly. No, and I think you kind of hit on it. I’ve got kind of a short answer. I’ve been kind of thinking through while you were giving me time to think, and I’ve got a longer answer. But the short answer for me is, yeah, basically data is the fuel that I think just drives a lot of software, especially in the realms of kind of B2B sales and marketing, and enterprise software. Even if you look at things like cybersecurity, for example, even that is kind of driven by B2B data. The longer answer I’ve got is, if you think of software, I often kind of think of it as kind of three components. There’s the user interface, there’s the kind of the pipes inside, and the processing, and it could be AI, machine learning, all of that kind of stuff. And then there’s the data underneath.

Alex Southworth:
If I kind of break those three components up, I look at the user interface, ultimately that’s really, really subjective. Some people like one solution or one piece of software, some people like the other piece of software, it really depends. The second piece down is kind of all of the processing. And even if you think about things that are cool and hip to talk about at the moment like artificial intelligence, machine learning, all of that sort of stuff, that’s actually really commoditized. How to process data is really commoditized. It’s easy to literally look it up and figure out what to do. The real gold in terms of the software is actually the data that sits inside a platform. And going back to my days at Orb Intelligence, that’s really how we sold.

Alex Southworth:
That’s what we positioned. It was kind of, we can give you the fuel to drive your software. And we sold to all of different ABM platforms, to cybersecurity platforms and even analytics vendors as well, who did everything from predictive lead scoring, all the way through to account based marketing. And just tying in with the segue, the other key thing, I think, is that data also frees up, I believe, marketers, to do creative stuff. Yeah. And, I think, that’s where you get the real multiplier when you start looking at a lot of these digital marketing systems, it’s all about what’s the data? The system that sits on top of it is all about making it easy to manipulate the data. And the goal of that is really to free up time for marketers to do what I believe a lot of them want to do, which is just be creative, move the needle, and kind of swim upstream a bit in terms of doing something that’s not the norm.

March Richardson:
I think that provides an awesome segue into how I was wanting to answer your question. I don’t know if we want to-

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Do it.

March Richardson:
… tease out more of this software subservience. I was really pleasantly triggered by that question around, does marketing start with the creative or with data? And just thinking about my own processes, I think that in order to get data, you need to push something out, right? Something has to be in market. So I think my answer would be probably we start with the creative, but we start with assumptions based on our experiences. And those are experiences with testing and with data. So, try not to evade the question. So, I think starting with the creative, it’s like with baseball, baseball players produce tons and tons of statistics, right? So that’s your trend, that’s your data set. And in order to affect those trends or affect that data set moving forward, you employ tests, right?

March Richardson:
The hitter employs an adjustment, the pitcher changes how he throws the ball. And from that point forward, you can annotate and see from when that change was implemented, did success occur? Right? So I like to think about marketing campaigns in a similar way. That’s sort of the testing cadence, you have a control group, you have the data for that. And you look at the metrics you want to affect, and then employ a V2 2.0 version of that test to singularly affect that one metric. And then in order to do that, you have to employ a creative team, a storytelling process, a design team, et cetera. And so I think that’s how I would answer that question. I think they’re very closely interwoven together, but storytelling is the start for me.

Adam Kerpelman:
When you start talking about baseball, I immediately imagine the scene for Moneyball, with the grumpy scouts, and they’re going like, “Yeah. But what about the gut feeling? What about the sound it makes when he hits the ball?” It’s like, Okay. A little, but also data.”

March Richardson:
Yeah. also-

Adam Kerpelman:
Also lots of data cast off by this particular sport.

March Richardson:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, you never discount the eye test. I mean, the sound the ball makes off the bat is important, right? And it tells you the guy’s hitting the ball really hard. But I want to know how many times he can do that. I want to know he can do that against all the best pitchers.

Adam Kerpelman:
My take on it, that what you’re saying that listeners have heard at this point, so I’ll make it quick. I’m excited. I was already the right kind of nerd to go down the data. I mean, Mark and I, working together, our first company, were doing weird SEO things before there was really a name for it. It was just sort of like, “Hey, if you put a bunch of keywords at the bottom, in the same color as the background, it gets indexed.” But the part about it that I love is the hardest part of the creative process for me. The best example I can give is in, we did a bunch of narrative kind of work. And so there’s the casting process. And you got to go through this process of people coming through and just delivering the lines in front of you, and you try to give them some adjustments, and then you all huddle up and feel like jerks because you have to pick out of this crop of young, hungry people, the three or four people that get to work. I hate it so much.

Adam Kerpelman:
I feel the same way about ideas. Like when you get to the point of working at ad agencies and stuff, which I did, where you have a pitch room, you do your best to get a bunch of smart people in a room and then come up with the 12 best ideas. But you only have the money for three, if you’re lucky, maybe just one. In the world that I think data sets up for creatives, you can just put all 15 cheaply enough in market in some way or another and I don’t have to worry about that sound off the bat part as much anymore. I don’t have to.

March Richardson:
Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:
And it starts to tear down the importance of the gurus that tend to be at the head of these successful ad agencies. I’ve worked at Chiat for a little while. And it’s like there’s some worship of the creative class around that place. That’s sort of like, “Okay, think different was a great campaign.” And so, I do feel more free, but it’s mainly because I don’t have to, in my capacity as a manager of a marketing team, I don’t have to be sitting around going, “No, no, the horse should be pink.” Like, “Try all the colors, see which one gets clicked on.” It’s just fan fiction past a point. I’m just making up what I think our target customer would like. I heard a product designer describe it that way, like, “Past a point, it’s just an exercise in fan fiction and you have to go get feedback from your users.”

Alex Southworth:
Yeah, no, it is. And it’s interesting. So we work in the world of kind of selling data for digital marketing solutions. And you kind of have this weird kind of inherent paradox where, as we are going to market with our data and our solutions, the people who are coming up with the kind of the messaging, the positioning, the creative, the campaigns, they’re also the target audience that you’re targeting.

March Richardson:
Yeah, yeah.

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. And it’s kind of like, “Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing?” I don’t know.

March Richardson:
It’s a uniquely 21st century challenge. Is it not?

Adam Kerpelman:
That’s for sure you.

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. Very meta.

March Richardson:
Marketers didn’t have this problem. Don Draper, and McCann, and Sterling Cooper, didn’t have the problem of you’re worried about cyclical marketing. Yeah. We can always kind of joke about it say, “We’re the team that’s eating the dog food, drinking our own champagne, marketing to people who are like ourselves.” So a lot of it is there’s that, I guess, that sound off the bat quality is in how does someone receive an ad? How does someone feel enchanted or persuaded? And that’s a really weird thing because we don’t like to take stock of that when we’re a consumer going, “I feel really persuaded by this brand right now.” I mean. They did a good job of convincing me to buy those shoes.

Adam Kerpelman:
If you feel too persuaded, it feels invasive, like those Sarah McLaughlin, ASPCA ads.

March Richardson:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
It hurts too much in the arms of the angels.

March Richardson:
Everybody changes the channel when that comes on. We don’t…

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah.

Alex Southworth:
The other side of that is kind of, are we just in an echo chamber?

March Richardson:
Right.

Alex Southworth:
Just sharing with each other, the words, and the phrases, and the standard kind of cliche statements that everyone’s been saying for ages, and ages, and ages, to the extent that we now believe them ourselves. Are we missing something? Are we not going through the creative process that we would if we were selling something that we wouldn’t be using? I think that’s an interesting philosophical going back to your education there, Adam.

Adam Kerpelman:
Right.

Alex Southworth:
But it’s an interesting philosophical question, which is actually do marketers who are selling and positioning digital marketing solutions actually need to extract themselves somehow and think about it from a different perspective? And is it harder to do that? Is it harder to go through that process?

March Richardson:
I would say absolutely. I mean, you’re speaking to my existential crisis when I get out of bed in the morning, it’s like, “I don’t want to just continue regurgitating the same things we’ve said in the last 10 ads.” But it’s also, thinking about, “Okay, what’s that thing that would make me think differently about a product?” To steal your agency example. You really are kind of trying to get people… It’s like rewiring your synapses, your neural pathways to see, “Yeah, this is what I need, right? I’m excited about this.”

Alex Southworth:
Absolutely. And it’s not differentiated either. If you kind of carry on down that path. If everyone’s saying the same thing, you just have a sea of sameness. How can you extract yourself out of that?

March Richardson:
Yeah. It’s almost like you need certain jargon to prove that you’re in the industry. We were interviewing a writer earlier today and we were talking about SEO. He asked about, “Well, do I need to do a bunch of SEO research and stuff?” And I was basically telling him, “We kind of apply that at the end.” But if you’re talking about Facebook audience targeting, then the phrase lookalikes is probably going to come up there organically somewhere within a thousand words. But if you want me to tell you to write a section about lookalike strategy, because that’s what serves SEO, and there’s search traffic behind it, by golly, I’ll tell you to do it.

Adam Kerpelman:
Here’s a lens through which I’ve been thinking about that though lately, having recently been… Netwise is a 20 person company. And we’ve been consumed by DNB. It’s a fresh indoctrination into a new type of corporate everything. And what comes with that is a certain lexicon. And so every time I say the word align, I hate myself a little, but it’s the right word to use to get the point across so we can keep this effing project moving forward. So I’ll use it. And that’s the thing I learned in law school. Terms of art exist for a reason, even though people look at them and go, “That’s legalese.” Doesn’t matter. It means something to the other lawyers, it means something to the judges, and that’s what matters, and so it works, right?

Adam Kerpelman:
Here’s a good example from philosophy. One of my favorite classes I took was aesthetics. And it was like, “We’re going to explore what constitutes art.” And I thought it was going to be a completely different conversation. But the whole class ended up being fighting over just a baseline definition of art and artistic without going into the merits of any existing art. That was the whole thing. And God was an easier class to take because you can just kind of go, “Hey, do you believe in a Supreme something that’s over us? Cool. We’re all on the same page. Let’s have theoretical conversations about whether or not it exists.” A failure of common language causes that class to be a completely different thing.

Alex Southworth:
It’s a really fascinating topic kind of this topic of lexicon and language. And your perspective, coming from a 20 person company into a 5,000 person company, and all of the challenges that go with it. I did a very similar thing. Orb was a 10 person company and kind of going up into the mothership. But prior to that, I worked in consulting, which is probably the most jargon intensive career you could possibly do. So I’m actually just really sensitive to the jargon that people use in different organizations and almost have a switch in the back of my head that I’ve developed over time, which just switches off this jargon and goes to this jargon.

Alex Southworth:
Little things like, what do people mean by the word sales? What do people mean by the word revenue? What do people mean by target? What do people mean by forecast? Really foundational business terms have subtly different meanings in every single company. And it’s really important to understand it. And then you start getting into the lexicon around all of the soft things around how to motivate people, how to communicate ideas with people, and all of those sort of things. And I think one of the biggest challenges… So, the other thing I do is I do a lot of work with our M&A strategy and working with our folks to determine which companies we’re going to by, and then afterwards integrating them, Netwise being one example of that. One, thing that I’ve really become acutely aware of is, you kind of goes through a few different phases in the integration.

Alex Southworth:
The first phase is where you kind of do the forming. Yeah. Where you kind of bring the teams together. But then you go through this storming phase. And that storming phase, a large part of that is just everyone aligning on the language that we’re using. Like I said, everything from targets, all the way through to, when we talk about, even something that’s maybe an industry term such as a cookie. What do we mean when we say the word cookie? Something like that. And so aligning on language and terms that you use, I think is such an important piece, and just foundational. And you talk about data, you talk about language, and then on top of that, once you’ve got all of those things kind of nailed, then you can start thinking about creativity. You can start thinking about coming up with ideas and executing on all of them. That’s why I love working with you guys, because I feel like we are kind of exploring that.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Okay. This is a very different conversation from talking about data marketing, but that’s data for marketing purposes, data driven marketing. But I don’t care. That’s what we’re here to talk about, whatever we want. Yeah. My last job before Netwise was freelancing for a couple of years with crypto projects. And a couple of really interesting ones are just obsessed with human coordination via tokenized incentive mechanisms. One of the things I used to say all the time is, “The thing you can’t solve with tokenized means as effectively as you can just getting people paid or whatever, is information asymmetry.” If you don’t have the right definitions, if people haven’t been read into certain aspects of how stuff works inside of this dow or whatever, where there’s weird token mechanics and stuff, then coordination fails.

Alex Southworth:
We’re getting onto a crazy topic because the way you’re kind of going with this, I feel like you could open up the hole. If you think of, let’s say, a B2B organization, you’ve got incentives, you’ve got commissions, you’ve got bonus structures and everything, the whole idea of how you layer does on top of that incentive structure, I think is a topic for maybe our second podcast.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Second podcast, for sure.

March Richardson:
Oh man.

Adam Kerpelman:
But I can do an hour on that one alone. So, we’ll be fine.

March Richardson:
That’s a gold mine in there.

Adam Kerpelman:
So to pull it back to marketing a little bit, the thing for me at least, that sort of as, I guess, a methodology maybe, is a way to say it, that helps break that barrier of, am I just shouting into the echo chamber? Is new media. I have, if only on a personal level, an obsession with… The easiest way to say it these days is whatever the kids are doing for entertainment. And I make a point of continuing to. And my wife is making fun of me for being on TikTok. And I’m like, “Sincerely, it’s a little bit for work.”

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. Yeah. I love it.

March Richardson:
Totally.

Alex Southworth:
No, no, I love the stuff that you guys are experimenting with on TikTok, because it’s a completely new format. It requires a different way of kind of creating content. And when you have to create content in a different way, it makes you question what the core essence is of what you’re communicating. And I totally see what you’re saying.

March Richardson:
Yeah. I think that TikTok and even any new media, I think, just providing a canvas for brain hacking, essentially, it’s doing what you’re saying, communicating that the core essence of an idea, of a story, of a product and positioning it. Just by a virtue of existing in a medium that’s never existed before, you’re going to treat people’s synapses in a way that they haven’t been triggered before, or inspired before, or entertained before. And I think that’s a thing that a lot of brands kind of miss, especially in marketing, is the value of sheer entertainment. Because we want to tie everything back to a conversion, we want to tie everything back to a sale, everything goes back to a deal, or revenue, and we lose just this general sense of enchantment and a sense of fun.

March Richardson:
And I think certainly with awareness marketing, where you get further down the funnel, obviously you want to describe your product, and why that’s the best product and why this and that. But initially it’s, “Just get my attention, just entertain me, just tell me a good story. And then I’ll buy your track shoes later.”

Alex Southworth:
Here’s another philosophical question. In a B2B buying process, what percentages is logical decision making versus subjective kind of feeling or emotive decision making? A whole another area, is there?

March Richardson:
Okay. I got to write down answer. Kerp wants it.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. My answer would be regardless of what you dear listener think right now, you’re way off. It’s just a straight up human cognitive bias. We think we’re better at processing the influence of marketing campaigns and things like that than we are. We’re not, it’s way higher than you think. The fact that you just see McDonald’s ads all the time, and you think you came up with the, “Free will doesn’t exist.” That’s the end of this rabbit hole.

March Richardson:
I would attack it from a place of… This kind of goes to a conversation, Alex, we had out in Austin. It kind of goes to who can be the coolest. I think a lot of it really has to do with positioning somebody on a team telling their boss, “Hey, I got this cool new tool, super cool, and it’s going to solve that problem you were talking about, that we’ve been bringing our hands over for months.” I think it’s part function, but a lot of it is form. I would say it’s maybe 50/50, but for me, I’ll be on the coolness and then I’ll worry about what it actually does.

Adam Kerpelman:
Interesting.

March Richardson:
I think the desire to be impressive, I think is kind of what we’re trying to hack in these quote unquote decision committees. It’s the person who can get promoted because they made a great decision for the company and save the company millions or made the company millions based off this decision.

Adam Kerpelman:
Back to software subservient. And I think I have an interesting way to bring this back around, and then we can-

March Richardson:
Did we just go full circle here?

Adam Kerpelman:
We can wrap up on that. So here’s the thing with TikTok that causes everything to sort of mesh in this conversation, I think. The phenomenon of TikTok is the most visceral I’ve seen so far of a different form of software subservience that I think people are just not thinking of. Elon Musk would call it limbic system hacking. But TikTok is really good at surfacing stuff I want to watch. It’s good entertainment when I sit down with TikTok for an hour. And it’s completely different from my wife’s, it’s completely different from my friends. Mine is all woodworking videos, and thirst traps, and odd British humor, like reenacted Monty Python skits and stuff. And it figured that out in about six weeks and it’s still what it feeds me, and it does its thing, and I’m okay, and I enjoy the hour that I spend on TikTok. And in that sense, a subservient to their algorithm. Of course, they’re monetizing that by selling ads, right? So it all ends up being this sort of symbiotic software subservience.

March Richardson:
So the big question now, of course, becomes, which I think it’s, which platform has the greatest ad rejection rate? Which population is the most likely to reject the ads we serve them? I think we found Facebook is increasingly diminishing returns. There’s a lot of ad fatigue amongst that community. YouTube seems to still be pretty strong. TikTok, I think, we’re in a wait and see mode. They don’t go out of their way to make the ads, obviously an ad. It feels like an organic experience. Whereas on Google, you’ve got the little ad sticker, Facebook and LinkedIn, they make it pretty obvious that this is a sponsored content.

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
But the reality is also if the targeting works, nobody cares. And then ultimately the thing about making media for those new platforms and busts through the stuff that we were talking about before is that you have to be aware of whatever user side software subservience is happening in order to align your messaging. And the only way to really figure it out, because they don’t tell us, they just say, “Be a creator, make money.” Is to just go make stuff. And then the kickback is, if you do that well enough, you just look cool because you’re the ones on TikTok while everybody else is still not where the kids are. And as much as every subsequent generation wants to grumble about whatever the kids are up to now, kids discovered the Beatles. I don’t know what to…

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. You nailed it.

Adam Kerpelman:
You should listen to ’em.

Alex Southworth:
Exactly. No, I’m actually kind of like curious, because I know you guys have been playing with TikTok and kind of leveraging TikTok from a… I won’t say an advertising, but a marketing perspective. And so, I remember when social media marketing came out in… I don’t know, it was mid 2000, 2005, 2006, and it started becoming a thing, no one quite figured out how to do it. You walked into this marketing department and there was always this team on the side, about two or three desks of people who did it, it was like, “They’re doing social media stuff.” Yeah. Or they’re even doing, I don’t know, SEO even, and stuff like that. And no one quite knew what it was that they were doing, but it was kind of cool.

Alex Southworth:
What’s interesting for me about TikTok is, I see it very much in a consumer lens. So more of a kind of a B2C. I can see from a B2C perspective, how McDonald’s will sell more burgers by advertising through that, or any other consumer company can leverage TikTok, I get it. Doing it from a B2B lens is kind of interesting. I’m curious to hear what some of your initial findings are, or your experiments are that you’re doing with TikTok at the moment. I’m just curious to hear.

Adam Kerpelman:
No, I wouldn’t say we have any findings to speak of yet, we’re just sort of booting up the machine. But what I would boil it down to though more so is, TikTok is just a way of delivering short form video. So what we’ve been focused on more so is, any vertical, or any story sized 30 to 45 second video kind of thing that we can put together, so we can get those tests in market on a bunch of different platforms just by putting that on all of the different places, also TikTok. We don’t know yet in that regard. What I do think, for sure, the awareness layer of the marketing funnel will do just fine there, because this is kind of the essence of modern multichannel B2B marketing, “Just treat them like consumers.” That’s what frees us up to go the data is dope direction and act more like a street team and less like field marketing quote unquote, right?

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:
Because the point again is just to be the coolest in the room and have that associated with your brand. And if you have to do the things that are usually sterile and technical, the B2B is like, “Oh, that’s enterprise, you do it differently.” Not anymore, not in a modern ecosystem. To some extent, you need to reach them on all those platforms because that’s the awareness layer. TikTok is just another channel like ESPN or whatever, right? We know we can do a thing there, it’ll reach people. So for sure at that layer. Further down, not sure yet. But the thing that I’m sort of personally obsessed with, which is why we do things like the podcast, is more just the idea that every company should be a media company, and along with that, you can create fans.

Adam Kerpelman:
And it’s like, “If we can get a thousand true fans for the data driven marketer, we could even detach from the mothership.” But ideally the mothership wouldn’t want us to, because maintaining that media property is how you stay the coolest in the room while people age into eventually being able to afford your products or whatever. But that’s no different a play than me shelling you with a stupid crypto token. It’s just, “Hey, what’s the value prop for you personally, hang around here, we’ll deliver. And maybe later try to sell you data.”

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. No. What about you, Larry?

March Richardson:
I was glad that Kerp hit on the brands as media companies, I actually had that written down. Yeah. I would say in response to the testing, I mean, I think just to give a bit of a glimpse into some of the ideas that we’re putting in market, it’s really kind of trying to introduce the idea of Netwise as kind of an ethos, more than a product, just saying, with certain videos that we’re testing is kind of image and text based, but then we’re also developing scripts that are host based. So using sales people as the talent, if you will, and giving a glimpse in. It’s almost like the inside look or behind the scenes, I think is one of the cool options you have with TikTok, is to give this is to give this sort of mind hack or office hack, this behind the scenes feel, people tend to respond well to looking behind the curtain.

March Richardson:
So one of the things that we’re going to be testing is this is sort of sales mentality, sales tips, and just kind of trolling the marketing community. It’s a little snarky, but a little actionable-

Adam Kerpelman:
Trolling the sales community in order to feed the marketing community.

March Richardson:
Yes. Sorry. I misspoke. I misspoke.

Alex Southworth:
Whatever you do, do not troll the mothership.

Adam Kerpelman:
No, we won’t. We’ll do our best.

Alex Southworth:
We’ll see.

March Richardson:
Yeah. But hope that answers your question. I had a couple other points down here, but man, we are running.

Adam Kerpelman:
For sure.

March Richardson:
Aren’t we?

Adam Kerpelman:
Oh, the last bit I want to wrap up with. So how much do you think, in terms of your sort of path to where you are now in data and everything, Alex, we talk a lot about the emerging sort of, if we had to brand it, phenomenon of what we’d call the marketing engineer, someone that… This stuff is complicated enough now that you’re not going to pop out of art school prepared for digital marketing. There’s a whole other aspect to this that’s like, “If you’re going to get to the level that I’m at running teams and stuff, you got to be able to deal with the engineering side in a mental model for how all this stuff works.” Most of my day is spent trying to explain engineering concepts to people that don’t understand them and looking at me like I’m crazy because the decision I’m making is counterintuitive to their learned wisdom based on marketing practices of your…

Alex Southworth:
Can you say that again just so that I understand it? Because there was kind of two concepts in there.

Adam Kerpelman:
Sure.

Alex Southworth:
One is, I think in the role of marketing, the marketing engineer is just a concept of a role. People talk about MarTech, that there’s as much of a role of kind of the data person inside a marketing team. That’s one side of it, but also just the unique space that you’re in that also describes your target audience.

Adam Kerpelman:
Right.

Alex Southworth:
It kind of goes back to what I was saying about the inherent problem of B2B marketing solutions. It’s kind of like your audience is the person creating the messaging. Which way are you talking? Which totally [inaudible 00:38:35].

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Well, to be fair to you, I feel like I derailed down a rabbit hole of a specific example in my life and didn’t ask a question. Bad host. What I was curious about is if you think your background in an engineering topic, chemical engineering, it’s not as… Brian Jones was a CTO at Netwise was a mechanical engineer, also engineering, totally different discipline. But the mindset, right? Of how to attack problems with what is in essence scientific method, you think that puts you in a better place for the future of marketing ultimately? And then kind of what does it mean for the transition period where marketers are trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do right now while everything turns digital 10 years faster than we expected because of the pandemic. There’s so much digital marketing work right now, I feel like it’s crazy.

March Richardson:
I was just going to piggyback onto… Yeah, just saying, because you don’t always know exactly what you’re signing up for. When you take a marketing job, whether that’s CMO, VP, MarCom VP, or director of demand change, director of digital, you kind of go in with your marketing hat. You lead with your marketing experience, your data strategies, and wins, and experience. But you kind of also need to be part engineer, part data analyst, kind of part creative producer, cinematographer, all these things, are kind of sitting right below the surface available for you. They’re like tools that you’re going to have to reach in and use at some point in order to support the reason you are you’re brought onto whatever job let’s say for Adam, for example, you’re brought on to run MarCom for Netwise.

March Richardson:
Probably part of that job description is in the fine print saying, “You’ll work with the coding team or whatever.” But that’s just something I think marketers need to expect, that leaders need to expect, is to be able to project manage when you need to. To be able to talk to coders, talk to a SCRUM crew, or set up a PMO to run agile workflows and have understandings that you may not have had to manage in your last role as a marketer. And that’s what makes the field really, really interesting, kind of exciting for me is that, you are kind of wearing several different hats as you move through your day in order to achieve this larger goal of awareness and conversion.

Alex Southworth:
Yeah. It’s an interesting question because you kind of started off with, how does my background in chemical engineering kind of lead me to this place, how does that help me? Now, I think in business, in general, you are constantly in this position where no matter who you are, whether you’re the CEO, or whether you’re the intern, whether you’re in the engineering department, whether you’re in the marketing department, you’re constantly looking to make decisions. Yeah. It’s just natural. Someone asks you a question, you have to answer it, or you have to build out a marketing campaign, or you have to build out a new product, or infrastructure, or decide how you organize the company, whatever it is.

Alex Southworth:
I feel that the process of how people make decisions, and how you make decisions, is actually something that you learn continuously throughout your whole career. I’d say studying engineering was for me, it felt almost natural, making kind of logic based analysis to come up with a decision around how big your distillation column is, or how big your reactor is, or something like that. There was an established method in the process that you learn and that you key off. What I actually found most interesting in my career was actually when I started moving into consulting. And initially I started hearing these questions around, how do you size a sales organization? How do you organize your marketing organization? How do you determine how much you spend on marketing versus sales? Fairly big kind of questions.

Alex Southworth:
But what’s interesting is that with experience, you actually start learning you can apply the same methodologies that you do in science. Which is, you come up with a bunch of hypotheses. Okay. For example, in marketing, I believe this content will do well, I believe this content will do well, or this content. It’s going to be one of those three pieces of content or three campaigns as you were talking about earlier, Adam. You put them in market, but then there’s specific data that you’re looking to get back, that you’re listening to try and figure out what the right answer is. And then you tweak and you over orient on that. In consulting, you have this methodology which is really around, you come up with a series of hypotheses in terms of what the answer is. Then you go out, you collect the data, you do your analysis, and you prove or disprove any of the different hypotheses. Which is actually very similar to chemical engineering in terms of how you design a distillation plant, or a pharmaceutical reactor, or chemical plant, or something like that.

Alex Southworth:
And actually the process you go through, I think, is the same. But you don’t realize it’s the same until you’ve gone through it and then you’ve had the chance to step back and think about what the similarities are, and you realize that naturally, without even thinking about it, you’ve borrowed lessons from prior lives and adapted them. So kind of a long-winded question, but ultimately, I think it’s all part of a journey that you’re on. Ultimately this is just the journey of how you make decisions. And I think everyone inherently is going to end up in that place, because actually, and this kind of goes back to the other thing that we talked about, which is all about lexicon and language. You ultimately have to justify the decision that you’ve made. Okay.

Alex Southworth:
And to do that, you need to have the logic. And it’s the logic that you’ve gone through based on your experience that I think brings people on board with the idea that you’re trying to sell them. And then that for me, maybe this is the perfect way to wrap is, that’s what we’re trying to do in marketing as well. So, as you’re thinking about marketing, and you’re thinking about the creative idea, it’s all about engaging. I think, personally, it’s about engaging, communicating something that resonates with someone, but then also giving them the mechanism to retrospectively justify why buying Netwise, or DNB data, or Rev.Up, for example, is a great idea.

Adam Kerpelman:
We were just talking about this this morning, or I dropped a quote somewhere that, “Bidirectional communication is necessary to surface reality.” Somebody said in a crypto meeting that I was in.

Alex Southworth:
Just like that.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah.

March Richardson:
I mean-

Adam Kerpelman:
I was like, “Yep, I’m writing that down.”

March Richardson:
Well, I mean, that goes to so much of what we’re doing. I mean, we’re analyzing our decisions based on how effective they are at influencing people to make the decision we want them to make, right? Or the decision to add Netwise to Rev.Up ABX, for example, is a referendum on how effective we are at talking about how well those two systems can work together, right?

Adam Kerpelman:
Learning to advocate for the things you believe in is never a bad skill.

Alex Southworth:
Exactly. Exactly.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. And I’ll wrap on this one. A great example of a thing that I find myself constantly explaining that makes me very aware of the paradigm difference between the engineering mindset about this, and then anything else, is when I try to explain acceptable margin of error in the analytics to people who are trying to make two ways of what I see and what Mark and I see when we look at our paid traffic coming back and stuff. And they say, “Well, it’s slipped 15%. How come you’re not worried?” And I’m like, “Well, because for that particular test, an acceptable margin of error is probably 25%.” Yeah, if we see it a few months in a row, I’ll start to pay attention to it. If it slides below 25 in any month, I’ll go, “Okay, let’s fix this immediately.” But otherwise, I’m just watching the systems go and that experiment is running fine. And they don’t get it.

Alex Southworth:
I mean, this is kind of one of the things I love about the advertising world, and the ad tech world, and kind of SEO, and all of that, it’s so numbers driven. And it’s like people talk about, “Building me audience with, I don’t know, five companies. But the reach is, I don’t know, tiny. And then the variance in the performance of the campaign is going to be huge.” Yeah. So, absolutely. Yeah.

March Richardson:
Yeah. I forget who put out the study, but there was this perception, it was, I think it was people who identify as a certain ethnicity, or religion, or political persuasion, there’s this massively outsized perception of people to a degree where I think it was, all these ethnicities added up to 175%. People think that this group makes up a certain percentage of the entire population. And you’re like, “There’s no way. Because three groups alone add up to over a hundred percent. Everybody can’t make up 30% of the population.”

Adam Kerpelman:
We’re just generally bad with statistics. That’s the problem with the human brain.

Alex Southworth:
Well, maths.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Right.

Alex Southworth:
Maths is just a language and it’s just a beautiful way of kind creating patterns of logic.

Adam Kerpelman:
Okay. Let’s land this plane. Yeah. So that feels as good a place as any to wrap this sucker up. Thanks for joining us, Alex.

Alex Southworth:
Excellent. No, no, thanks a lot guys. Awesome, awesome chatting and talking with you and working.

March Richardson:
And thanks for wearing your awesome Data is Dope t-shirt.

Adam Kerpelman:
If you’re listening, we’ll have forthcoming details on how you can get one of your own. Thanks, everybody for listening. This has been another Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

March Richardson:
I’m Mark.

Alex Southworth:
I’m Alex.

Adam Kerpelman:
Take it easy, everybody.