Becoming Customer-Centric: Powering Digital Experiences with Customer Data Infrastructure

Feb 28, 2022 12:00 PM1:00 PM EST

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Key Discussion Takeaways

As the customer experience evolves, data is more critical than ever to make sure your strategy is customer-centric. But how do you streamline the process to collect data and efficiently power the customer experience?

With digital and privacy regulations looming, changes in consumer behavior, and a limit on your team’s bandwidth, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) may be your answer to data collection. CDPs can gather first-party data quickly, enable more relevant interactions with your customers, and help you prepare for future digital changes. By collecting data, building customer profiles, applying privacy controls, and activating that data, CDPs can boost ROI and serve you well in the long term.

In this virtual event, Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson is joined by James Fang, Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle, to discuss how CDPs can help you improve the customer experience. James talks about the challenges of gathering data, why the digital world is changing and affecting data collection, and how CDPs can boost efficiency and solve these challenges.

 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

 

  • James Fang discusses how the customer journey is changing — and the challenges that come along with it
  • What is a CDP, and which CDP should you buy?
  • The McDonald’s case story: why real-time data activation is important
  • How brands have adjusted to privacy changes
  • Utilizing CDPs as more customers move back in store
  • Investing in an all-in-one solution versus a best-of-breed stack
  • How CDPs can improve efficiency within the IT marketing department
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Event Partners

mParticle

MParticle is a customer data platform for brands to accelerate growth. With MParticle, brands can unify data and simplify partner integrations with enterprise-class security and reliability. It improves marketing, advertising, and analytics by connecting data seamlessly across channels.

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Guest Speaker

James Fang

VP, Product Marketing at mParticle

James Fang is the Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle, a leading customer data platform. With over 10 years of expertise in enterprise software sales engineering and product marketing leadership, James knows how to help innovative technology companies grow. Before mParticle, James was the Director of Product Marketing at Okta, Inc., Director of Solutions Architecture at Agora, and Consulting Systems Engineer for Cisco Systems.    

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

Event Moderator

James Fang

VP, Product Marketing at mParticle

James Fang is the Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle, a leading customer data platform. With over 10 years of expertise in enterprise software sales engineering and product marketing leadership, James knows how to help innovative technology companies grow. Before mParticle, James was the Director of Product Marketing at Okta, Inc., Director of Solutions Architecture at Agora, and Consulting Systems Engineer for Cisco Systems.    

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson LinkedIn

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect

BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.

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Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson

Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect


BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.

Senior Digital Strategist Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.


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Discussion Transcription

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18

Hello, everybody. My name is Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson. I am a digital strategist here at BWG connect. And we are a network and knowledge sharing group. It's what we do, we stay on top of the newest trends, challenges, strategies, whatever it is that is shaping that ever changing digital landscape that we all know and love. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year, and 100, small format dinners as well. So if you happen to be in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email, we'd love to have you we'll send the invites, the format is typically 15 to 20 people at a round table having a discussion about a specific digital topic. And it's always a great time. It's from these conversations that we get ideas for these webinars. And it's also where we learn about the resident experts, such as mParticle who's here today. Anybody that we have speak to the community has come highly vetted from multiple brands across our network. So just reminder that if you're ever in need of any recommendations of any service providers within the digital space, please feel free to contact me we can put some time on the calendar. Again, my name is Tiffany. So it's Tiffany Tiffany@bwgconnect.com and be happy to provide you a short list of the best of the best across the industry. And we do note that a lot of people are hiring right now. So we do have a talent agency BWG Talents, so feel free to reach out to me and I can put you in contact with them. So a few housekeeping items, we're starting this about three to four minutes after the hour. So rest assured, we will wrap up at least three to four minutes before the end of the hour, give you ample time to get your next meeting. And with that, I think we can roll into the introductions and learning more about powering the digital experience with customer data infrastructures. Our friends here at mParticle have been awesome partners and supporters of the network. So we're going to kick it off to James. James, if you can give a brief introduction on yourself and mParticle. That would be great. And then we'll dive into the information. Thank you.

James Fang  2:26

Sure. Thanks, Tiffany. So good morning, again, everyone. Thanks for joining us bright and early. It's still nine o'clock here on the west coast. So my name is James Fang, I lead the product marketing team at mParticle. For those of you who are not familiar with us, mParticle is one of the leading customer data platform, data platform providers, and we power brands such as McDonald's, Airbnb, Spotify, NBC Universal and PayPal Venmo, in order to help them deliver the best customer experiences using first party data. And that's near and dear to the topic at hand today, which is how customer experiences essentially are evolving, especially with the acceleration, we've seen that due to you know, COVID and are certain circumstances, the acceleration to digitalization and how your data is becoming more and more critical in that strategy. Also, I'll be talking a little bit today about what exactly is customer data infrastructure or specifically a CDP. And if you're, you know, in the market, kind of not sure whether it'd be valuable for you how to potentially even evaluate one to see whether it's a good fit for your business. So with that said, let me jump right in.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  3:44

And definitely no, we want it to be interactive. So again, keep sending in the questions throughout, and we'll be sure to get them answered. There'll be a lot of really great information. So we are excited. Thank you, James.

James Fang  3:58

Great. Alright, so I think it's fairly obvious to all of us here, you know, took a look at the roster. And we're all very seasoned marketers, that today's customer experience are indeed, powered by data. Yeah, there's still companies out there that will still attempt to spam every inbox, or do a wide glass social media campaign. And, you know, there's still more, you know, traditional channels, right? We saw a couple of good Superbowl ads this year. Okay, maybe they were just okay this year. But you know, more and more companies are becoming more intelligent on how they target their customers, right? And the key to delivering that right message at the right time. The right channel, of course, is data. But at the same time, the customer journey is becoming more and more complicated, recording, oftentimes multiple touchpoints across multiple channels to get to a conversion. And, you know, as a response to that, marketers have responded by adding more and more tools. For example, whether you know, it's adding an additional email service provider, a mobile messaging platform to send an SMS or in app push, adding additional social channels, or adding an analytics or attribution platform to do measurements and iteration, right. And this is good, because it gives you more data, more information and more means to target your customers. But as a result, we have we as marketers have really created this mess of data. And as I said before, in this modern age, where each tool needs that data to operate, that means that each tool needs to be integrated with the other tools in the stack. For example, if you want to run a suppression campaign, because you know, a customer just closed out a customer support ticket, and they were there, they weren't very happy. And you might not want to target them for the time being, you need that data from Zendesk, potentially flowing into, you know, your ESP. And likewise, if if you know you got a low click through rate on your email campaign, you may then want to tie that into your other channels, right. So as more and more tools are added, this becomes an exponentially unmanageable problem. Another challenge to this model is data quality starts becoming a challenge right there, There ended up being duplicate user records, user profiles, data fields, such as you know, the date of birth, or the last purchase made is inconsistent across the tools. And all of that leads to just marketing inefficiency, your dollars are spent, but it's not necessarily translating to the ROI that you're exactly looking for. And of course, at the same time, we're dealing with, you know, these data integration challenges. We're also dealing with evolving data privacy regulations, that restrict our ability to collect data and use it. For example, the GDPR in Europe, protects EU residents. And then the upcoming California Privacy Rights Act of CPRA, which is going to be enforced in July 2023, is going to now require brands to force an opt out option for selling or sharing data. At the same time, these regulatory kind of data privacy laws are coming into place. The large platforms such as Apple and Google are also getting involved. iOS 14.5 now requires an explicit opt in, in order to capture IDFA, to track users across apps and websites. And Google has said they will eventually fall suit, they'll eventually deprecate the Google advertising ID, which is their mobile identifier. And eventually, you know, I think we've been all hearing it, but the third party cookies is going to be eventually deprecated as well. So how are we going to, you know, deal with all these challenges, right. And this is where the customer data platforms and the value they bring come into play. The goal is to kind of bring order to the chaos and CDPs like mParticle, essentially streamline the process of collecting first party data. So that instead of collecting data in each of those tools, and having to integrate with each other, that data is collected once a single time directly from the source, whether it's from your mobile apps, web apps, you know, historical apps from or third party platforms. And then it's stitched together into a unified holistic view centered around the customer's profile. This profile includes what their known identifiers are, such as their email address, a credit card number, you may collect from the store from an in store purchase, whether they have submitted like a signup form, right, and includes the consent, as well as all of their behavioral event data, such as their product views, checkouts, and purchases, right. And then in direct kind of response to all the privacy regulations, a CDP then applies privacy controls. So based on how that user has consented, and the data processing purposes, they've allowed, for example, if they consented to opt in to marketing, or they've consented, opt in to analytics, only then data decisions are made. And finally, we can activate that data, right CDP's will be able to send that data, whether it's just the raw events, the things that their users are doing, or being able to segment users and build audience lists to send to downstream email, mobile marketing tools or paid media or analytics and attribution tools. So one last thing to clear up is that CDP's are dealing with first party data, and it's likely you guys already familiar with the difference? But, you know, when I think about third party data, oftentimes I picture this more unclear, you know, hazy, nebulous cloud of information. It's often based off of, you know, surveys or swarms that have been submitted in the past, and therefore, it's frequently out of date. And generally, I wouldn't say it's completely trustworthy. Right. And since it was collected likely, a long time ago, it's also unlikely with the new privacy regulations coming into place, you, you can simply just say you're going to use that data without violating potentially some privacy laws, right, because that could have been collected, for example, before the user had any sort of consent to that data. Now, you know, compare that to first party data. first party data is information that we're getting straight from our end users. And this is usually done as shown in the previous slide. In partnering with your IT teams with your even app development teams, to properly track every single click every single button press, again, every single sign up. And while this may seem like a initially a heavy lift, trust me, it's worth it. Because once you have this infrastructure in place, you're going to get a forever stream of clean first party data. And you're gonna know exactly who your users are, what actions they've taken with your products. And you can use that data to enable more relevant and contextualize interactions. And plus, let's be honest, third party data is eventually going away, right? I've talked about privacy changes earlier. So you know, what is going to happen? When cookies and mobile advertising identifiers essentially go away, right, you can't just follow the same existing model, where you're simply sending sending a cookie or an IDFA to social platform. And that's, you know, that you're banking, your marketing strategy on that, because that is, you know, eventually going to go away. Alright, so, another frequent question I get is, okay, you know, I kind of get this idea of a CDP. Now, it's not so confusing of a term, how do I actually decide, you know, what type of CDP to buy? I'll provide a couple of factors. And I'm definitely looking forward to the kind of open q&a Time to address more specific questions. But the first important thing to consider is, you know, what, again, use cases you intend to solve with a CDP. Oftentimes, we see the mistake of people buying something like this simply to kind of reorganize their data simply to get a 360 degree of the customer, which is kind of a, you know, a snake oil term, it's a it's a forever endeavor that never ends, when instead, you should be thinking something more practical such as, you know, I want to unify all of my audience creation in a central tool that has visibility across all of my channels, right? So instead of creating a separate, you know, audience in my mobile messaging tool, in my email service provider, I have one central place that has visibility into all the interactions, and I'm creating all my audiences there and sending it out. That's it, that's more of a viable use case. Second, you want to ask, is it capable of ingesting data from all my sources, right? A lot of CDP's are web only. And, again, a lot of modern companies are moving beyond that to more omni channel experiences, does it pick up in store, point of sale transaction is able to merge all of that together into a unified view of the customer. And other potentially other sources? For example, TDPs need to pick up engagement rates from your, from your activation platforms, because again, I gave the use case earlier around things like suppression campaigns based on a previous activity. Number three, does it offer pre built integrations with your stack, it doesn't matter if the CTP has 1000 logos, what matters is your logos are covered. And be wary of the good old trick where they show a logo of an integration. But that integration is literally export into a CSV or XML file, and then you have to import it on the other tool. That's not a real integration. That is a marketing ploy. Right? So I really dig in, is there an automated workflow where the audience is, you know, you set it up and you forget about it, you don't have to do those manual integrations. So this is CDP offers pre built integrations with your tech stack. And then another really important one is the actual data delivery of that integration, is it real time? Or is it scheduled to simply sync on a recurring basis? Right. And what this really entails is, if you don't have that real time activation, you're you're limiting your use cases, right? So if your use cases simply, you know, fire an email on a regular basis, and that's fine, you don't need that real time nature. But if if you're, you know, moving towards more in moment, contextualized interactions, such as, you know, based on a location alert of when your customer maybe is near a physical location, or based on a cart abandonment and some other activity, you want to immediately, you know, get that customer and drive, you know, that contextualize offer. Not having that real time nature is going to limit your use cases. And then one that's frequently forgotten is, you know, I alluded to earlier is the privacy regulations. You know, we actually live through GDPR, and a lot of marketers made the mistake of, oh, my compliance team is going to handle it, only to find out, you know, come today of enforcement, those compliance teams would come down and say, We need to potentially shut down this tool, we need to ask you to, you know, stop using this tool, because, you know, we have no way to govern the flow of data that wouldn't put us at risk of, you know, violating, you know, compliance. And so CDP should be designed to help you with that it should have valve knobs to be able to say, again, based on that user's consent, I'm able to turn on data to this destination or shut it off, in order to comply. At and then the final factor I want to mention here, also one that potentially is often overlooked is again, I talked about the challenge of data quality, duplicate records, mismatching kind of records. And you have to ask what features are available to proactively ensure data quality, so that you don't have to deal with that mass of being have to clean it up afterwards, which is kind of a very hairy and nasty job, and again, impacts your ROI.

So with that said, one final slide before kind of getting back into the q&a section is I do want to re-emphasize that real time data activation matters. And this is actually one of the core differentiators of mParticle itself that we're happy if so again, like one of our kind of crown jewel use cases is we powered the Whopper detour campaign, which was a really creative marketing ploy by Restaurant Brands International, where as soon as a customer drove up to a McDonald's store, they would receive SMS text, instructing them that they could get a whopper for a penny. And then they would deed for then, and you know, order that Whopper and what really drove, it wasn't necessarily to deter the, you know, McDonald's traffic. But what it really drove was adoption of their mobile app, they got 6 million app downloads from it. And it kind of, you know, instructed them for the first time, here's how mobile ordering works. And, you know, the mobile ordering channel was all of a sudden lit up for them. And they made that transition through COVID. From you know, again, more traditional brick and mortar to a digital experience, kind of marketing lead motion. Contrast that to most other CDP's, which again, is operating more of the kind of batch job, our leasing kind of model. Alright, with that I've already spoken enough. I'm hoping to now transition the time of discussion.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:55

Yeah, awesome presentation, this is a great way to really dissect a really big topic that can go a lot of different ways. And so definitely, everybody started chiming in with any questions you have. I do want to recap, because there was so much that we just unpacked here is is the why, you know, and what to think about. So, first, I put, you know, more solutions, more problems in the fact of you have all of these awesome solutions, but they're fragmented siloed. They're not talking to each other. You need that data. And how do you bring it all together, and CDP is the solution. Then, on top of all your more solutions, more problems, you have regulation looming. So I wanted to touch upon that, because that's something that a lot of people bring up. They're very confused about, you know, the timing and whatnot. So first, I guess I'll go to the Apple side of it. So do you have any experience of seeing of like how brands have adjusted to the Apples privacy changes.

James Fang  20:03

Yeah. Great, great question. So first of all, when Apple first announced App Tracking transparency, and you guys all saw a screenshot of that, a lot of people were afraid, they said it was the death of IDFA, like opt in rates would be 10%, or something lower. And we've actually seen a little bit more positive news there, brands are starting to adjust. They have been prompting, and I think companies like app spire attracting more encouraging rates, like 30% to 40%, opt in. And they're doing it a couple ways, right? First of all, it's not just a vanilla, hey, we want to track your data, but they're offering some sort of value. In exchange, the most basic value is, hey, let us track you, so we can provide you more relevant ads, but a lot of them are, like, hey, we want to keep just experienced free for you or, you know, you know, we want to prevent, present, you, you know, targeted offers, and really promotional discounts, or somehow even gone to like launch, you know, loyalty platforms, which, which, again, would incentivize that type of behavior. So, second, you know, I have seen kind of extremes, there are some companies who, you know, saw that policy and said, I'm gonna stop collecting data altogether for now and see kind of see what happens, whereas others are taking a little bit more call it looser interpretation of that policy. And saying that track and share means I have to explicitly share, it doesn't doesn't mean that I can just track it for myself and use that first party data for myself. So they're not even prompting, it's just first party data for their own purposes. I'm not a legal compliance expert. So please don't you know, quote me, or sue me, for your policy decisions, consult with your own legal teams, but I'm just kind of laying out the spectrum of what I'm seeing up there.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  21:57

Got it. Awesome information. So the third party cookies and the deprecation of that. And the phase out of the Google advertising ID. Can you give also a overview of that? Are there specific dates that we should be putting on the calendar like this? Is the date, the day deprecation date phased out? And how how to start preparing for that internally with your teams?

James Fang  22:25

Yeah, good question, as well. So Google has been a little bit vague on the phase out of the advertisement ID, except they have explicitly just said that. We're going to offer you a solution marketers versus just saying, you know, versus taking the apple purchasing too bad. But but they haven't been very explicit on a date, other than they said, upcoming. With the phase of phase out of cookies, I think, I think I think they've been saying like, you know, 2023 2024, that date also sounds a little bit flexible. And they've been experimenting with various solutions. I think FLOK failed. Right. So now they're, they're introducing Google topics. So So I began, I think they're, they're finding they're trying to find a way that it, it works. But But fundamentally, I think, you know, marketers should take this into their own destiny, they shouldn't rely on some sort of like topics or solution that the provider does to kind of magically solve the problem. If if you haven't already, again, start thinking about the transition to a first party data strategy. And, you know, collecting more valuable behavior intent data than even just topic tags, right, that can can serve you well, in the long term.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  23:47

So talking about those two major companies, and then also looking at it from a state standpoint, is the California privacy policy. And so that is truly set July 2023. Correct?

James Fang  24:00

Right. Yeah. And so California already passed CCPA. But there's kind of two major changes between CCPA and CPRA. So one is the actual ability to enforce it. Right. So kind of it was a weak law, because, you know, the state couldn't really impose fines, but we've seen for example, the EU aggressively start to impose fines on GDPR and we we anticipate with CPRA, the same kind of regulatory action is going to happen. The second thing is, it extends the rights from simply do not sell to now do not share write and do not share is more I think, a very applicable to all our all the marketers here because that potentially means not distributing that data, not just selling it to other parties.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  24:53

Then moving on from the regulatory challenge to is challenge three The Post pandemic world as consumers go more in store, how does that customer experience look? And EDP?

James Fang  25:12

Yeah, so first of all, you know, I'm very curious. And this is why I also I'm on the call here, I want to hear from all of you what your plans are, as, as this thing kind of definitely goes away, right? You know, we've been, you know, I know, as a consumer myself, I crave, you know, a little bit of variety, right, getting back into the stores. But I do anticipate that, just like we're seeing in the workplace, where employers are saying COVID has already changed the world forever, we're not going back to like, nine to five, five days a week. I imagine as marketers, we're thinking, you know, COVID has already changed the world. And it's already digital first. But now, like, I want to re insert the in store experience. But I want to complement the in store experience with the digital first kind of experience I've built. Again, I want to hear from you guys to validate if that assumption is true. But I see like things like curbside pickup, and, you know, order in advance those conveniences that consumers have come to appreciate. Those are gonna stick around. And I see mobile ordering, you know, still sticking around. So, again, looking looking to hear what you guys have to say.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  26:34

Yeah, definitely a lot of change happening. And it can mean those three topics we just covered, is a lot to digest. So looking at a team that's studying to contemplate, okay, we definitely get it. We want to pursue a CDP. We understand like, what to look for what not to, but who needs to be in the room? On that start, you know, and what does that roadmap look like? And how do they prepare for that? Making sure the key stakeholders are involved off the bat to be successful?

James Fang  27:11

Yeah, I definitely think for the most part, it does still start with marketing. Although I have seen other works, where sometimes, for example, if if there's a mature call it like, data product, organization, or sometimes they're called, like, you know, marketing operations, or mar tech operations, and they'll kind of lead the evaluation effort. But the first thing, again, is to really discuss what are the use cases that I'm looking at the value of them initially looking to derive from this decision. Data is not new. So a lot of companies typically have some sort of data collection in place, whether it's, you know, you know, tag management systems, something simple like Google Analytics, or even something more sophisticated, right, they may have a data lake or data warehouse where they stashed a tonne of data, but marketers can't get access to that data. So it starts with a marketer. But then, as you know, as you're flushing out, kind of what you want to do with that, you do want to tie in your IT counterparts fairly quickly. Because then you'll start, you know, right away talking about integrations, right. What do I need to connect to? What? For what purpose? Again, how does? How does privacy come into play? How do I then govern that data? Once I have stuff flowing between various systems and tools. And typically, what we see also is, once kind of those requirements has been gathered, use cases mapped out integrated integration, then there is typically a very thorough kind of like, call it data inventory exercise. So then you're literally like tracking, what points am I collecting? am I collecting all the buttons? But why do I need to collect all those button clicks? Right? What are the more important kinds of events and different data stakeholders will come to have different needs? Right? So for example, again, the marketer may say, I really need, you know, the commerce events. But then, you know, the product analytics team may say, Well, I really care about you know, how people are converting through the funnel on our eCommerce site. So I need to know the drop off points, and such, right. So once you kind of get a unified list of, hey, this is my comprehensive view of all the data points that we need to track and you're aligned with it, then kind of comes the next step, then you're kind of ready to evaluate a CDP and say okay, now we understand the value now understand what exactly we're collecting on Winston kind of, you know, who are the primary stakeholders are going to use that data and what tools then then you know, you can you can make some sensible decisions on what CDP best fits.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  30:10

Awesome. So one question here is, should you invest in a best of breed stack, or look to consolidate your investment into an all in one solution? Promise by a marketing suite?

James Fang  30:27

Yeah, I'm definitely going to be a little bit more biased, in my, in my response, you can probably guess which one I'm leaning towards. But, you know, that one is really a choice of, you know, vendor lock in, versus, you know, having freedom and flexibility. I think we're all for some sort of consolidation. And we're all in agreement that I think the latest numbers like there's like 9000 More Mar tech tools. That's, that's way too many. Most companies probably have, you know, it depends on the size and scope, but most companies have, you know, up to 30 to 40, Mark tech tools, and that's still too many. So, you know, there are definitely areas to consolidate down. But I think there are significant risks to saying, you know, my, you know, analytics tool, my mobile measurement platform, my ESP, my mobile orchestration platform, you know, my CDP, all of that is going to go under one umbrella, because now you're betting on that company, to maintain that that level of innovation across the board. And that company typically is not motivated at all, to build any, you know, best of breed integrations, other than maybe like the Big Five, you know, the handful that they necessarily have to integrate with. Whereas most independent CDP's like in particle, they still integrate with the big guys. Like we have integrations with Adobe campaign manager, Adobe tech target, you know, Salesforce, right, so we'll still integrate with the big guys. But we will leave the space to say, if you want to move off the big guys, you're more than welcome to your own timing.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  32:10

And when you move forward with the CDP, and you have the idea of what you want, is it safe to say that as you get into it, that pivots, and it's easy to pivot the KPIs the needs the scaling? is simple? Or is that something that you should really have vetted on the want on the front side before you really dive in? Because there's going to be more expenses as you grow and realize, oh, that's actually not what I wanted. This now is proving I want this, you know, how do you balance that?

James Fang  32:47

Yeah, you know, earlier in my presentation I did talk about, it's important to have a couple of use cases in mind, because I think one of the worst things that can happen is you buy the CDP you sell this vision to your executive, upper management team. And again, all it's doing is it's cleaning up your data. And it's not producing any ROI, that puts you in a very bad spot. So you know, having those quick ROI wins is is valuable. Now, as you do that, naturally, additional use cases may crop up. Like for example, you may not be thinking about privacy right now. But come 2023 You may be like, Okay, this is the most important thing for me right now. And then you can look back on your seed investment and say, Okay, I actually realize this can handle this requirement. So I think it's a balanced, there's room for pivot, but it is critical to have some early kind of business value drivers that you're very clear about, and that you're tracking against in your CDP implementation.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  33:55

So then those wins, you have validation to keep your funding going to keep the project moving. Would you say also analyzing the Lean management around it, the process flows the team freeing up more of their time, just the efficiency internally, on top of any KPIs that you may create? Yes, there's a lot of efficiency that can be gained here.

James Fang  34:22

Yeah, that's a good question. The biggest gainers from efficiency actually, are IT your counterparts there because think of all those data integrations that they have to manually build and maintain? And as you you know, as you guys are exploring more and more tools, they then have to add additional to their workloads. Think of all the manual processes that potentially CDP could could could kind of resolve like data quality management I mentioned, right? Or, you know, privacy governance. You know, so, your IT counterparts, you know, if a CDP is executed properly, it should be thanking marketing afterwards of, hey, you guys can implement new tools, build your own audiences, and I don't have to get involved anymore. Right every time you do it. So I know some companies like, you know, again, McDonald's, when they were implementing with us, they factored in both sides of the house, right, the positive ROI, from being able to see incremental, more marketing efficiency driven from their campaigns, but also the ROI from, you know, their IT development teams driving more engineering efficiency. So that is something important to capture as well.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  35:37

I think that's a really important point. Because, as teams, we move fast, get a new tool, and you're so fixated on the ROI from the front end of the actual product and the customer and the profits. But there is efficiency on the back end as well between these different team members that now are freed up to work on other things, and I would expect to the marketing team would be freed up because you no longer downloading exporting Excel, CSV files, and trying to do merge mass merges and then dissect data. Now that's alleviated and the system is doing it for the team.

James Fang  36:15

Yeah, there's definitely like that. And also just faster turnaround times, like, you know, just just be able to service an audience request doesn't mean you know, you have to wait. And you can you can build your own audiences. And those can activate in real time as well.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  36:32

And be more agile with your marketing efforts, because you're getting the data faster and better understanding the customer base. Yep, there's a lot of win wins there. Awesome. So I'm going to recap here about the whys. And again, if anybody has any experience, with your own integration of a CDP any questions that you may have, if you're embarking on the journey of looking into one, feel free to drop it in the chat or email me at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. But we're going to recap here. And please feel free to interject as we roll. So the reason is, you know, fragmented systems, more solutions, more problems. We have more regulation looming, some we don't know when it's gonna happen, but it will eventually some we do know such as the California privacy law, post pandemic consumer behavior, when is that going to change how we know it will change and being able to be prepared accordingly. And then looking at your team's bandwidth, whether it be it, whether it be marketing, the compliance team, those stakeholders that are in the meeting, understanding the initiative and the why you're implementing this. And then looking at the long term of the efficiency that will be gained by the it marketing team, and perhaps even other teams that you don't even realize. Tracking that with ROI is key to be able to get more investments for the project future moving to the people that are you, obviously, authorizing the budget from above.

James Fang  38:05

Anything I missed, I would just add on to that, again, the emphasis on the ability to transform and be more creative with your marketing campaigns. Again, going beyond just one too many broad based campaign pushes to now individualized one to one contextualize based on the data that you have to be able to deliver, you know, that right message really at the right time at the through the right channel. So that that's what the CDP unlocks the data capabilities, you would then need to also obviously partner with something that can actually execute that message delivery. But that's that's something you know, in particle and most of the CDP's have a vast number of partnerships with.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  38:51

Awesome. Well, James, thank you so much. This was really dissecting a very big topic. I think there was a lot of great takeaways. Will this slide be available for those who would like to have it?

James Fang  39:03

Absolutely. I'm happy to forward that on.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  39:07

All right. Well, we definitely encourage a follow up conversation with the mParticle team. I'd also like to have a chat with you. That's how we keep on learning and gaining the Intel for future topics for these calls. So Tiffany@BWGconnect, please feel free to reach out and we can set up a time to chat, anything digital, whether it be CDP's drop shipping, international expansion, you name it, if it's digital, we are happy to talk about it. So with that, we're going to wrap it up. James, thank you so much. Great information. Thank you mParticle for being awesome partners. I hope everybody has a great week. Take care, stay safe and see you on the next event. Bye.

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