Liberating Your First-Party Data Ft. Cory Munchbach

Adam Kerpelman:
Hey, it’s The Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Cory Munchbach:
And I’m Cory.

Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us, and special thanks to our guest today, Cory Munchbach, who is president and COO at BlueConic. I’ll just do what we customarily do here and throw to you for a quick intro on BlueConic and how you got to be there.

Cory Munchbach:
Awesome. Yeah, I’m Cory Munchbach. Exactly as you say, I have been with BlueConic for about seven years. We’re a customer data platform, so we are a category of marketing technology. Our focus is on getting data to the marketers and digital experience and product folks that are interacting with customers and driving growth for their companies. We work with super cool brands across the globe, VF Corp and UEFA for my soccer fans out there, Michelin, about 300 customers around the world that we get the privilege of working with every single day. Before I was at BlueConic, I was an analyst at Forester. I covered marketing technology, marketing strategy there for a number of years. I wrote the first wave on the marketing clouds. I’ve been sort of living, breathing this marketing tech, data space now for quite some time and excited to be here to talk about it more.

Adam Kerpelman:
Before I jump into that, I got to call out one thing that I noticed on your LinkedIn profile. You’re also a Prof G certified strategist!

Cory Munchbach:
I totally am. I can’t believe I didn’t lead with that, honestly.

Adam Kerpelman:
You’re in good company here in terms of Prof G fans.

Cory Munchbach:
I’m a big Prof G fan. Yeah, I love his stuff and No Mercy, No Malice is one of my favorite newsletters every week, for sure.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Anyone who doesn’t know it, highly recommends it.

Cory Munchbach:
Highly recommend it.

Adam Kerpelman:
He finally gave me the data-driven freedom to just go ahead and shave my head-

Cory Munchbach:
Yes!

Adam Kerpelman:
As my hair has been falling out for 10 years. The stat that he always drops about companies raising more money if their founder is bald. I was finally like, “Okay, now I got some data in favor of, “Just get rid of it.”

Cory Munchbach:
The opposite of, “If you’ve got it, rock it,” right? If you don’t got it, just get rid of it, so I’m right there with you. Good call.

Adam Kerpelman:
It’s the only hairstyle choice left. Once you’re over the hump past the point, it’s kind of like … Take some control of your destiny. I kind wanted to start from just your top line on BlueConic’s website. Liberate your data.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
What do you mean by that? As a marketer, I was sort of like, “Ooh!” You’ve caused me to want to go to the next subheading.

Cory Munchbach:
I love that. So it works!

Adam Kerpelman:
So what’s up? Yeah.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, that word was really specifically chosen in that just in talking to marketers and folks that are working on, as they say, sort of growth initiatives with customers. If you’re a publisher, digital product experience. If you’re working in commerce, it could be just your general commerce experience. But oftentimes, the business users who are responsible for driving the growth through personalization, through new initiatives and diversification, don’t have the data to do that well. It’s locked up in an ERP or in some other system. It’s held hostage by an agency that you’ve been working with for years and they own the data. Maybe just internally it’s kind of a blockade. You can’t get what you need from it. The queue’s too long, whatever the case might be, and it’s a real shame because the data that could be helping really drive the business is just not available to the people who are actually kind of on the front lines thinking about that, running the campaigns, designing these initiatives and programs, et cetera.

Cory Munchbach:
The idea of liberate was literally that to sort of get the data away from where it is and into the hands of the people in the business who can use it to greatest effect overall. What that sort of means day-to-day is, again, data that’s locked in a CRM, an e-commerce system, whatever the case might be. Sort of structural silo or system silo, downstreams that you can use it for segmentation, for thinking about how you need to interact and do personalization. Getting just sort of downstream data science into people’s hands, right? It’s not necessarily a total reinventing of the wheel here, but rather taking a look at, “How do we make data a more operationally efficient asset for the business?” That’s what we’re focused on doing at BlueConic.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, I think it’s interesting. People think of data. They imagine how easy it is to send an email and how easy digital communications are and stuff, and they have no idea that once you get behind the wall of a company that it’s actually files don’t match and things don’t sit in the right place. And then, the thing we’ve been dealing with in the course of an acquisition is even just cultural and social aspects of even if you can link up the machinery, getting the departments to communicate about what they need the data for and get the feedback to the right places. It’s certainly a marathon and not a sprint.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, I’m so glad you mentioned that because I think there’s a whole component about this. I’ve been, now, in this sort of general area and in different perspectives for a while. The most underestimated piece is the change management. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the implementation goes or the technology syncs up, but it is, and it should be by the way, right? You shouldn’t be adding a technology that doesn’t have kind of an operational impact, but that does mean that you need to develop new muscle. You need to rewrite processes. There’s things that you need to think about that are going to change, and I’ve never seen anyone really fully grasp that unless they’ve sort of been burned before, so they’re sort of bringing some past experience.

Cory Munchbach:
But with CDP, we’re still a fairly new category, and so there isn’t a lot of expertise out there, outside of maybe the vendor side of things where it’s like, “Yes, I know exactly how this is going to disrupt day-to-day operations for a while, and here’s how we’re going to account for that.” But yeah, the people process of people, process, technology is where the dollars get made, but also where these projects go very, very sideways for sure.

Adam Kerpelman:
And that’s for sure. I mean, this is perfect for this podcast. In terms of any data driven operation, I think it’s really easy to forget about that human side and that expectation management side around it, too. I think a lot of the things that come with data attached to them, people present as these silver bullets and they kind of go, “Hey, we got a CDP up. Why isn’t this fixed?” and the people in the marketing department that were arguing in favor of the data tool are going, “Oh, because it’s still so wildly complicated.”

Cory Munchbach:
Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:
Like saying, “Well, we bought a car.” It’s a very complicated machine.

Cory Munchbach:
Yep. Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:
“I bought a car. Why do I still need a mechanic?”

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, that’s also it, right? The focus on, and rightly, what are going to be the positive outcomes of adding this technology to the mix? We’re going to talk about how we can do things five times faster. We can make what task that took two weeks, we can make it take two minutes or automate it. That’s all great, and you should be clearly defining those outcomes when you’re looking at technology. If they’re not going to meet that requirement, then probably it’s not a great solution. But the path to getting there, I use this example a lot.

Cory Munchbach:
We’ve had a couple customers where they’ve cut down a process that used to take a week and a half and literally just made it an automated thing that happens every night, but no one thought about, “Well, what does that mean then for the amount of creative that we need to sort of run campaigns against it? We don’t just do a once a week batch type of campaign. We’re doing much more nuanced emails.” There’s all of this kind of considerations that come into play that get sort of subverted by the idea of, “Oh my God, it’s going to be so awesome to be able to do this,” but the aperture on where the impact is going to be, good, bad, and otherwise, doesn’t come up to play until sometimes either too late, or tending to pump the brakes and go back to the drawing board to figure out the other pieces that fit around it.

Adam Kerpelman:
Well, and like you said, then there’s the new emergent problem. I don’t want to call them problems, but they’re challenges that come from the new thing also, right? You just mentioned creative, which is a thing that I’m very familiar with for sure in the marketing department, where, occasionally, leadership will say, “Well, can we take a look at the creative in market?” And it’s sort of like, “Well, I can show you the pieces. But because of how modern digital marketing works, they’re being programmatically assembled into 500 different iterations of copy of creative in market, so do you want all 500?”

Cory Munchbach:
Right.

Adam Kerpelman:
“Or do you want to work on understanding the thing I’m trying to explain to you about this programmatic machine that’s different from just, ‘Here’s the ad we’re going to run in Time Magazine, and that’s it for this month. We’re done here.'”

Cory Munchbach:
And one thing that I think is so underestimated, honestly, and this is, I think, just a bugaboo of mine related to the change management piece, but that it’s so easy to get kind of caught up on the perfect, or an idealized, end state that might be years in the future, to be honest. But when you confront that, it creates kind of an inertia against doing it at all, where it’s like, “Well, if we can’t have exactly what we wanted and it’s perfect within 12 months, then let’s not bother. Let’s just sort of skip it.” It’s very all or nothing, and what I see in the organizations that are doing some of this work best is that it’s much more about creating that operational kind of muscle and discipline within the organization, which is for the long haul, right?

Cory Munchbach:
I kind of liken it sometimes to you can run a marathon without training and not being a runner, but that’s probably not very sustainable for you, versus, “I’m just going to become someone who exercises daily,” or sort of takes that into account. And if you’re playing the long game, which you should be if you’re thinking about lifetime value and engaging your customers and sort of building a sustainable relationship with your customers, it can’t be just something that there’s an end state in mind. The way that is sort of difficult for a lot of organizations to grasp really gets in the way of, what I would say, would be actually the most impactful types of business transformation, where you go from not being able to do these things at all to being able to do them at scale sustainably over a long period of time, but that’s not always the preferred approach.

Adam Kerpelman:
So the question that that brings up for me that’s maybe just very specific to the marketer’s use case here, but I’m curious what you have to say about it. In a marketing versus sales departmental dynamic, marketing, in my experience, is traditionally more predisposed to be ready for the marathon, right? The way I always say it is I’m trying to grow trees so that the ducks that sales wants to hunt will come. And I guess it’s not a tree, it should be a pond, but-

Cory Munchbach:
It should be a pond, you’re right.

Adam Kerpelman:
The metaphor is agriculture versus hunting, and sales wants to know “What’s the ROI?” right? And we talk about, “Well, we’re going to come in with this new model, this new data tool,” anything like that. They immediately say, “Well, what’s the uplift going to be? What’s the ROI going to be?” And the answer is, often, in a couple of years, in 12 to 16 months, the ROI, we think, will be X, but it’s 12 to 16 months. So immediately, the data scientist part of my brain is going, “Okay, so there’s going to be this margin of error,” and then doing all those calculations, I find that there ends up being a conflict around this stuff that’s always there between sales and marketing, but heightened when you’re talking about, “Should we use a tool like this?” or, “Here’s the discipline that we need each department to introduce in order to make it all work,” and then it turns into this kind of tension there.

Adam Kerpelman:
I guess the question at the end of it is it that just me or is this a common struggle of trying to go and say, “Look, it’s this really cool, new tool. It’s a new paradigm. We can do really interesting stuff with it,” but like you said, you’ve got to sell to sales the idea that the benefit’s not going to show up for a while so you have to have a counter answer to “What’s the ROI?” Well, the ROI is all kinds of intangible stuff, but also, it’s going to take a while to emerge.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, look, that question is specific in a B2B, B2C context as well, right? Sort of different lift kind of conversation, but part of this, also, is that it’s sort of exactly what I’m saying, is setting the expectations. What I find difficult is that there’s just a lot of different expectations set throughout the organization, and part of change management is figuring out those pieces and then saying, as an organization, “This is worth the investment, even though we won’t see the impact for some amount of time.” And what I see a lot in organizations, though, is what is the cultural appetite for that kind of delay, and maybe you need to take a different approach. So I’ve seen customers who, in our case, for example, they load in quite a bit less data initially in the platform, but just so they can show the type of impact it will have in a smaller scale quicker, so two months in, as opposed to two quarters in. And then deliberately use that to build kind of the initial business case to build beyond that.

Cory Munchbach:
And so for me, it’s more about there’s not a one size fits all to answer that question. I really do think it is a lot to do with the organizational dynamics, how senior the leader is that’s making the argument for this. We also see, for instance, in an organization where perhaps we’re being selected by a VP in a particular department, and they really need to make a case to the rest of the executive team, or to their CMO or whatever. That’s fine. Then we give them the data that they need or the outcomes that they need, recognizing that they’re not going to be as big and transformative if we were to do this over 12 months period of time.

Cory Munchbach:
I talk a lot about this. In all things in technology, you’re kidding yourself if you’re not realizing that there are trade offs between time and scale of outcomes. Those are directly linked. And also, that what the business requires and the technical feasibility has a level of trade off to it. Just because the business wants it, doesn’t necessarily mean that the level of technical investment, or debt or solution or whatever, actually ends up being worth it. Is the juice worth to squeeze here? And this isn’t a zero sum, but that level of understanding, particular to the organization and the appetite for this and the situation, goes a long way to accurately setting expectations and providing the right kind of wins and updates over whatever the course of that journey is to trade that off, I think.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, that’s maybe a good segue into sort of some of the other topics that we’ve talked about, but I think maybe a place to go first is just to talk. As much as I live in the data, because of the nature of NetWise as a business, I think a lot of people who would even consider themselves data-driven marketers are still flailing to get their head around some of the definitions in the space and stuff. So maybe it’d be helpful to do a quick rundown from your perspective of just sort of the definition of first party data, second party data, third party data, all that kind of stuff. And then, I think we can jump off into the conversation about future of all this junk.

Cory Munchbach:
Love it, love it. Yeah, so I’ll take each one. First party data is data that the brand or publisher has on their direct consumer or customer. They’ve collected it in, ideally, a consented, thoughtful, intentional privacy-compliant way, being transparent with the individual from whom they’re collecting that data. Second party is exchanged directly between two first parties, so a publisher and a brand, brand and a publisher. I think this is where you start to get into a lot more talk these days about clean rooms, sort of technology that facilitates those kind of interactions. And then third party data is data that’s collected by a single provider and then farmed back out, sold to anyone who’s willing to pay for it. The relationship is not directly with the customer or the consumer. It’s just sort of a data farm, and then you can buy it back.

Cory Munchbach:
There’s a number of, obviously, ways that those data types kind of relate to one another and some certainly blurry edges, depending on how the data is collected and treated. There’s also a lot more talk nowadays of zero party data, right? Sort of the expressly provided, very explicitly given, data. To be honest, I think that sort of fits into first party, but they’re the closest relationship between the two. But yeah, that’s how I would sort of, at a very high level, define the differences between those types.

Adam Kerpelman:
It gets quickly into an interesting conversation that NetWise deals with a bunch in that we have a subset of data that we deal with that we sometimes don’t know how to classify in that space, which is why we sometimes say we’re a data provider. Other times you say we’re a data originator because we’re also doing a lot of work to clean up the data that we deal with. If you cruise around our website, the ID graph, all that kind of stuff, we are actually interlinking data and that link itself is a data point that is a thing that we’ve sort of originated by doing the aggregate analysis of all the stuff in the middle. Which I bring up mostly just as an illustration of how this almost instantly gets impossible to understand as soon as you’re like, “But first, and then it connects to second and then third, and then it’s all the same, but they’re all people and-“

Cory Munchbach:
Totally.

Adam Kerpelman:
“Connect to one another.” So to anyone listening who still doesn’t understand it, believe me, we barely do as well. One of the things that we talked about before we started recording was the future of this stuff in the context of, I want to say, potentially coming. There will be regulation. It’s coming in some form. We know because the White House is talking about it now. The executive branch is asking the other branches to figure stuff out. We end up intimately familiar with this because we want to remain compliant, which means we have a whole department that’s reading these laws and trying to figure them out. Well, what does this mean for that ecosystem and how marketers in the space should respond?

Cory Munchbach:
I mean, it’s a very, very, very big question, and I imagine Lina Khan at the FCC and all sorts of others have different, and maybe better, opinions on this in terms of where I think it’s going, just because it is arguably an existential question. I think the thing that I struggle with in the current debate about data collection and digital is kind of one of my earlier point. There are always choices and consequences, and the difficulty, I think, of the discussion right now is that there isn’t a lot of nuance to it, I find. It’s very either super abstract, sort of extrapolated out to such a level that anything is true at a certain level of abstraction, so you can kind of get very high level directionally in agreement on some broad based topics. But then, even as you just said, you get into the level of detail so fast where it is pure gray, and that’s not part of today’s discussion.

Cory Munchbach:
Even GDPR, which has done more for the discussion of privacy and consent, really, than anything else that we’ve seen in the last 10, 20 years, is starting to fall apart in the sense of the actual application, now that we’ve seen it in the wild, is really difficult to actually manage and enforce, first and foremost, just at scale. There’s too much grey area in practical application that they haven’t thought about. Also, it’s the internet, so it’s changing so fast. You have a lot of factors that go into making this an incredibly difficult kind of thing to wrap your arms around. The other point that I would make is that if you just took some of these conversations to a super level of extreme. For example, if you just said, “Turn off all third party data and all third party cookies tomorrow,” or if you went to a state where you had to pay for every website that you used, something along those lines.

Cory Munchbach:
You have an incredibly inequitable internet very, very quickly, right? The third party and the ad ecosystem funds much of the internet. So if we’re going to talk, which the White House in their statement last week, just since you mentioned that on the declaration for the future of internet, talks a lot about equity in that model. And the reality of it is that part of that is funded by ads, so we don’t have an answer for that if we go to some of the extremes that some of the privacy laws would require, and I could go on.

Cory Munchbach:
There’s dozens of examples like that, where if you start to kind of follow something down the path, you very quickly come into very difficult, hairy questions to answer. I just don’t think, right now, one of the challenges being that we just don’t have an ecosystem that is set up to have a good discussion with industry, with privacy experts, with government and regulatory bodies, that we really need to have to move this forward, though I ultimately agree with you. We’re going that way no matter what. It’s just going to be how sort of messy and incoherent it is along the process.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, it’s an interesting one to watch. Even before I was deep in data, I was deep in tech law. Part of the reason, after many years in business, I went to law school was because I had a startup that got jammed up on, in this case, it was telehealth laws that didn’t exist yet. And when that fell apart, I went, “Okay, well, what am I going to do now? Maybe I’ll learn what I need to learn to go be a lobbyist and actually try to explain some of this junk to legislators and stuff.” That is still needed. It’s still so new and so different that … And hate to say it this way because it ends up feeling ageist, but imagine trying to explain aspects of this technology to your grandparents, because that’s who we’re talking about with a lot of these legislators.

Adam Kerpelman:
I mean, and they all have brilliant staffers working for them on this stuff, but it’s incredibly complicated and weird and nuanced, like you said. And I appreciate things like GDPR where they’ve rushed to try to provide a solution, but like you said, the practical side of enforcement is a whole other mess. Everyone knows what it did to the internet, which is that the bottom third of every website is now covered by popups that you either ignore and you just experience only two thirds of the internet at all times-

Cory Munchbach:
Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:
Or the web I should say, or you accept all and then you don’t even know what you’re accepting. So it’s turned out worse in some cases, because they’re hiding extra coredge things in there that you don’t even know you’re signing up for, that maybe you wouldn’t have proactively. But now they put this gatekeeper in front of you, and it’s one way to approach the problem. I feel like in the US, it feels like they’re being a little more careful is maybe the generous argument, or have no idea what they’re doing.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
But again, we’re getting there, but the reason you have to have the nuanced piece, which is why I bring up the popups, is you could accidentally wreck the greatest communication tool that humans have ever invented. The web is built on open data to some extent, and I don’t even just mean ad ads. If a website … And actually it was the California District Court decision about the LinkedIn scraping stuff. I think that landed in the right place, as self-serving as that is working at a data company, but that stuff is public. It has to be public to work, otherwise you can’t access it. And so, like you said, either you would have to paygate it somehow, or you have to consider that the stuff you put out on a website that’s open to the world is public.

Adam Kerpelman:
The same way that I’m protected if I go to a public monument and take a picture of it. The government can’t tell me not to do that. The thing is out in public and I have constitutional rights. It’s an abstraction to apply it to websites until you understand how that works. The browser has to call the server and it has to be able to get the data back to show you the website. And if you don’t have an open protocol for that, then the web doesn’t work, and so we don’t get all the good things that come with it.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a couple threads to pull on this. One is that, just this week, very real consequences after the news leaked about the impending Roe decision, that people started looking very closely at the women’s health apps and that a number of them sell data to third party brokers. We saw John Oliver literally two weeks ago talking about third party data brokers and the implications there. So this is very real, with real world consequences, that we don’t actually have a good grasp on how this ecosystem works in a practical way, nevermind in a regulatory way. And sort of politics aside, in terms of where you might fall on some of these topics, they affect all of us, as you say, right? If we’re going to go to a paid internet, you’re creating a luxury project out of the internet.

Cory Munchbach:
Professor Galloway talked about this. Prof G talks a lot about Apple being a luxury product, not just because of the cost, but because Google Android phones are subsidized by tracking and all kinds of things that you don’t know about. So it’s not just that I pay a $1,000 and you pay $400, it’s that I pay for privacy that you’re subsidizing that extra $600 with. The fact that the economy of this is incredibly difficult for anyone who doesn’t live and breathe it every day to fully understand, and it’s not clear kind of where we need to go, again, beyond just getting better at it, I think this is why it needs to be tackled from a wide range of perspective. It does need to be industry involved. It needs to be privacy advocates involved. But I think, kind of going back to our data-driven marketers, marketers and agencies have a huge role to play in this.

Cory Munchbach:
Part of why we have shitty web experiences now, and sloppy banners to just accept all, is because I think a lot of companies know that they haven’t delivered a product that would get you over a hump of a higher degree of friction to engage with them. So if, again, we play out a longer term game here, “What if you had to log in to every single website just to use it?” just as a hypothetical barrier. How many companies would not get you to do that because it’s actually not worth it? The effort is just not worth it for them to do that. That’s less about the privacy, GDPR, consent, and more just about the fact that as brands and posters, we maybe haven’t given enough thought and commitment to what that value exchange between the customer and the brand needs to be. So even outside of regulation, there’s a huge amount of customer experience and long term play that companies today are just not playing that long game around would argue.

Adam Kerpelman:
And then part of it is also some of the mess that we have now has to do with what’s available for data and misuse, and sort of all the different things that might happen there. Some of it is also about just bad tooling. We’ve done episodes on this on the podcast. The third party cookie ecosystem that has emerged should go away. We are misusing that function of web browsers. We kluged together this thing that provides a service, but I’m in favor of shutting that down because then the technologists, and the nerds like me and my friends, will come up with a better solution that can be more privacy compliant, that can do better than this thing we have that was meant to just make it so that you don’t lose your shopping cart-

Cory Munchbach:
Right.

Adam Kerpelman:
On Amazon. It’s turned into this massive of 70 trackers that load every time you go to the New York Times.

Cory Munchbach:
Yep.

Adam Kerpelman:
And all the side loading and everything. The idea of misusing tools, though, ultimately gets us to the light at the end of the rabbit hole about all this stuff, which is one place where I could go Web 3 with it if I wanted, but I won’t. Instead, it’s more like how can brands and companies, and whoever at this point, start thinking about first party data differently to be ready for a world where the sort of programmatic boil the ocean thing might go away or get a lot harder in the next five years or so, right?

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
What are the tools that we can use to … I know this is the self-serving part of the conversation. It’s where NetWise and BlueConic fit, right?

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah!

Adam Kerpelman:
But more broadly though, it’s how can you think about that data differently to be able to use the tools to not have this giant performance drop once this shift happens?

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is an internal grappling of what is the value of the performance? And I think this is something where digital marketing got everyone sort of hooked on the idea of measurability and how much information you could track, and digital attribution and all of these things. But really, to what end? We don’t do a great job, as an industry, of experimentation against a different conception of what performance would look like. I remember a study that we actually did at Forrester once for a client, a banking client, who found through the research that their VIP customers were the ones who hated their emails and digital outreach the most by a wide margin, and it was actually impacting lifetime value of those VIPs because their communication strategy was so ill-aligned to what those people wanted.

Cory Munchbach:
The fact that we’re not using the data to understand what people want and what they do not want, rather than just thinking about performance marketing or the bottom line, is part of where this problem is. The thing about the deprecation of cookies, and some of these other regulations and changes, is that they become a forcing mechanism for a conversation that we’ve all been saying we wanted to have, and things that we wanted to do for a very long time, to actually put the customer at the center of how we think about this and earn their trust. All of these kind of big, buzzwordy ambitions, but we were too afraid to take the performance hit to actually go about making the kind of changes to the business that needs to happen. I think right now, what this allows us to do is invite the CFO to the table and say, “This is what the next five years could look like. Here are some of the bigger sort of experiments that we want to run to try things out. What do we need to have for a budget like that? What are the different models?”

Cory Munchbach:
We need to work together. I’ve never seen a better scenario for the CMO and the CFO to be coming together, to look at, “What is the future of this business over the next five years and how do we make these changes in a sustainable lasting way?” and much less so about, “Hey, why did our CPM go up or down?” or whatever. Those are just such small indicators of a bunch of, what I would argue, much bigger change. In fact, I would say that I’m feeling like where we are right now with privacy is where we were with digital in the early 2000s. That for some companies, it’s sort of a thing they dabble with on the side and oh it’s interesting, but they don’t make it core. And then very quickly, it became clear that this is the way the world is going and we need to make this totally core.

Cory Munchbach:
The next phase was hire a chief digital officer. Again, sort of outside but cross functional, and now every business is simply digital. I think privacy is facing the same kind of opportunity where right now, we know we have to do it. We’re going to kind of dabble in it. Probably, we’re going to put some really dedicated resources and attention to it soon. And then by the end of this decade, it is core competency for the brands that make it, and as we know with digital, some brands didn’t make it to the other side of that journey. I feel the same way about the privacy discussion.

Adam Kerpelman:
And I think the way that you put it in terms of getting hooked on what we have with the digital ecosystem here is, really, a relevant way to look at it because going to have that conversation with the relevant executives is almost like an addiction intervention or something.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
It’s really nice to have the data that we have now, and the flow and the machine and all that kind of stuff. I’m sure the railroad barons also loved their monopolies, but eventually for the good of democracy, the government came in and said, “Hey guys.”

Cory Munchbach:
Totally.

Adam Kerpelman:
“You got to knock that off.” And so once that happens, it’s going to hurt, but the move is to start thinking about building that first party data strategy now so you’ve gotten through the 12 to 16 month period, maybe, a couple times before this sort of legislation … Or it might not even look like legislation, right? I mean, there’s also versions of this that, if you follow the history of mass media, there were the airwaves in broadcast television, and then there was a wave of regulation, then there was cable. All of the companies running the cable institution said, “Oh, this is going to happen the same way it happened with the airwave, so we better self-regulate.”

Adam Kerpelman:
And so part of the mess we have of cable news now is because there never were really any laws. I mean, there’s some stuff from the FCC, but it’s not as stringent as broadcast-

Cory Munchbach:
Right.

Adam Kerpelman:
Television was, and it’s because they got on top of it first. So I think you’re already seeing it with Apple and their blocking of tracking and stuff like that, and the impact that’s already had. That’s them just trying to get ahead of it and self-regulate before, ultimately, the government comes in and says, “Okay, this stuff has to change.”

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:
I guess the good thing is it’s feeling real enough now, especially with Apple’s moves, that hopefully that intervention is a little bit easier than it might have been two years ago.

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s very much going to happen, right? You just can make a decision about whether it’s going to happen to you or it’s something that you’re going to address head on. Apple, obviously, being out ahead of it. I think you’ll see others following suit sooner than later, and there will be others who refuse and miss the boat. That is where I think the enforcement mechanism is going to be important, whether it’s the fines or others, but it’s still a choice, right now, how you choose to respond, but I don’t think it will be for much longer, and then kind of all bets are off.

Adam Kerpelman:
So then I think maybe a good place to start wrapping this up is what’s your advice on how to kick off planning that new strategy around first party data and sort of that value pipeline?

Cory Munchbach:
Yeah. I mean, I mentioned a big step already is getting to the conversation with the CFO and the rest of the team, right? This is not something that only marketing is going to be able to tackle. This is a much bigger, I’ve used the word a couple times, existential sort of topic that needs to be shared across the business, and getting ahead of that and having those conversations early is a big piece of this. The conversations should have started happening 12 months ago. Better late than never, but get on the calendar of the finance team to start to talk about this. I think the other is a full audit of how you use third party data in your marketing today. Do you know everywhere that that data is coming from? What data you have on customers, how well you’ve handled it consent-wise, data lineage.

Cory Munchbach:
I would imagine, for most companies, that is an inordinately large project that’s going to take quite some time to do that, but you need to do that exercise. And largely, also, on the media side, working with your agencies to do that same exercise so you have a handle on how big this problem could be for you. And then once you have that sizing, you can have the conversation again on sort of bigger impact if this were to go away, but you can also start to do the work of saying, “Okay well, what is my alternative? What do I need to start doing now?” Planting seeds, as you sort of said, that maybe is going to take three years. For example, we talk about this a lot with our CPG clients who have always been behind on first party data, and heavily reliant on second party with their retail partners, and then tons of third party data.

Cory Munchbach:
There are some very large brands that are just starting to build up email lists, or direct-to-consumer type of motion. That’s not a small investment of time or resources, but you need to start figuring out, “Okay, where is this revenue going to come from?” even though right now, it’s going to be a tiny portion. We’re also seeing that out of publishers, for example. Instead of relying on pure advertising, looking at diversifying into an affiliate, an owned affiliate model, where they can host commerce as well.

Cory Munchbach:
So there are the ideas out there. The strategies are beginning to get in play, but if you don’t have a grip on the data and how that data is tied to your revenue, therefore, how you can then start to wean yourself off of it and what’s going to replace it, that’s just going to be cataclysmic when it certainly starts to happen. So conversation with the CFO, full data audit for your marketing overall, and then based on that, starting to figure out what alternatives are available at a data level and at a revenue level. And then, you just need to start chipping away at that. That’s a multi-year project, but again, you got to start now.

Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, and it’s crazy because there’s an aspect of that, that it’s almost more like risk management. The stuff you’re talking about is more like the lawyer part of my brain than the marketer part of my brain. Marketing departments haven’t, traditionally, had to worry about that too much, which is why you got to go tap the other departments. There are risk management departments that will immediately go, “Oh, we know how to do an audit.”

Cory Munchbach:
Sure.

Adam Kerpelman:
But that time has come, and we’re out of time here.

Cory Munchbach:
Perfect.

Adam Kerpelman:
Let’s wrap this sucker up! Thanks again for joining us. Where can people find you around the interwebs?

Cory Munchbach:
I am on the interwebs. I am on Twitter @corinnejames, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Cory Munchbach, and obviously on the BlueConic properties at any given time. Otherwise, I’m not much of a social medias person. I’ve sort of abandoned that ship slowly but surely, but those are my two big ones.

Adam Kerpelman:
Made a healthy choice.

Cory Munchbach:
I just know, without a doubt, it was a healthy choice. I’m not even exaggerating. Twitter’s next, I just haven’t quite [inaudible 00:40:41].

Adam Kerpelman:
I’ve steadily shed them, and then, almost two years ago now, had our first kid, and then it turned into a whole, “Maybe we got to get back on Instagram just for the grandparents.”

Cory Munchbach:
Hard. I get it.

Adam Kerpelman:
Kind of conversation.

Cory Munchbach:
I’ve stayed away. I’ve managed to make it happen. But yeah, Twitter for now @corinnejames. LinkedIn, that won’t go away. That place feels safe enough for the time being.

Adam Kerpelman:
Awesome. Well yeah, thanks everybody for listening to another one, and thanks again, Cory, for joining us.

Cory Munchbach:
Thanks for having me!

Adam Kerpelman:
This has been another Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Cory Munchbach:
I’m Cory!

Adam Kerpelman:
Take it easy everybody.

Speaker 3:
Thanks for listening to The Data-Driven Marketer. Our show is produced by Jessica Jacobson and Dan [Celsius 00:41:28]. This episode was edited by Steve [Kosh 00:41:30]. The Data-Driven Marketer is sponsored by NetWise, a Dun and Bradstreet company. Any views or opinions expressed in this episode do not represent the views or opinions of NetWise or Dun and Bradstreet.