Data Management: When the Enterprise Owns the Data + Are CMOs redundant? | 52
Episode Title: Enterprise Data Management: When the Enterprise Owns the Data + Are CMOs redundant?
Alexei Yukna, Director of Marketing Technology Research at 14West talks gamut of themes, who as a practicing professional – someone who is actually involved in the day-to-day of bringing enterprise data together and leveraging it for better business outcomes – shares some practical insights not just for his peers, but even for martech vendors!
Here are some of the key highlights:
1. Going Agile: Alexei takes us through the entire process of how 14West decided to adopt an agile approach to building technology and managing enterprise data for the over 40+ global businesses they serve. The goal is to help marketers at these companies find their audiences (inbound) and keep them (subscription) – and he shares their agile strategies, including centralizing the PMO and integrating complex, cross-functional yet dependent teams
Don’t miss: Marketing and Technology have every different perspective on what Agile means, and Alexei lets us in on it!
2. Putting Data at the core of the digital experience platform
Alexei says: “If you say the enterprise owns the data, then you really need convergence between the types of data and where its put, but also in the philosophy between the stakeholders”
How does a complex organization of this size manage first and third-party data architecture and audience management? How are they bringing agility to the way data can be accessed across different stakeholders without compromising on security, speed and scale? Once 14West decided that enterprise data is at the core of the digital experience platform, they focused on:
- How is the enterprise data constructed?
- How is the data abstracted as a layer between the enterprise ERP/CRM (or other data sources) and the CDP?
- Understanding how each stakeholder consumes and interacts with the data in different ways
The Outcomes? They saw:
- Better data going into the CDP
- More optimal utilization of the CDP and therefore more efficient and effective activation of the marketing data (they use Lytics and Blueshift)
- Better representation of the element’s marketers were looking for
- Better affinity scoring
- Better ability for Marketing to work closely with the data enterprise team for smooth data flow
3. Rationalizing the stack, integrating the elements, and making build versus buy decisions for technology:
Of course, key considerations include use-case, speed, scale, real-time, data flow, minimal latency, safety and compliance, cloud-first, etc. Plus, Alexei shares more on 14West’s best practices such as ‘release with parity’, ‘safe agile’ and ‘minimal disruption/ business continuity’.
Don’t miss: Alexei tells us why investing time in a PoC with the potential vendor is useful and practical, and saves you a ton of trouble later. The best part: vendors learn a lot from it too, and are able to refine their product and solution based on what they learn – even in PoCs that don’t convert into a partnership.
SEGMENT 2: NEWS OF THE WEEK
How do you hire for a CMO now? What does that look like? Can you get away with not hiring a CMO and distribute the role across multiple specialists while reimagining what this role needs to do?
In the recent past, J&J, Uber, and McDonald's have all announced that they will not be replacing outgoing CMOs. In the post-Q2 results call recently, the CEO of Unilever, while announcing increased digital marketing and marketing technology investments, shared that it was getting increasingly difficult to find the right people to manage this degree of complexity and convergence.
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