The Daily: Future-proofing marketing through the secret weapon of standardization

On today's podcast episode, we discuss the main challenges around extracting more value from first-party data, what happens when you create standardization, and the importance of measurement as we head into 2025. Tune in to the discussion with Senior Director of Podcasts and host Marcus Johnson, Senior Analyst Max Willens, and Vice President of Product at LiveRamp Matthew Karasick.

Subscribe to the “Behind the Numbers” podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, YouTube, Podbean or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Instagram.

Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson (00:00):

Data collaboration enables innovative companies to uncover powerful new insights that transform customer experiences and fuel business growth. With LiveRamp, marketers get the industry's only interoperable platform for data collaboration across every cloud, walled garden and media platform. Learn more at liveramp.com.

Matthew Karasick (00:19):

No longer will any one party be able to just get all of the data, put it in one single database and do whatever they want with it. Data will stay in silos because it's supposed to. That doesn't mean all parties can't opt their data in to be part of a use case that everyone has agreement on.

Marcus Johnson (00:40):

Hey gang. It's Thursday, December 19th. Max, Matt and listeners, welcome to the Behind the Numbers Daily, an eMarketer podcast made possible by LiveRamp. I'm Marcus. Today, I'm joined by two folks. Let's meet them. We start with our Senior Analyst who covers everything digital advertising and media. He's based in Philly. It's Max Willens.

Max Willens (01:00):

How's it going, Marcus?

Marcus Johnson (01:01):

Hello. And also joining us is LiveRamp's Vice President of product. He's based in the Seattle area. It's Matt Karasick.

Matthew Karasick (01:10):

Hey Marcus. Happy to be here.

Marcus Johnson (01:12):

Hey fella, I'm glad you're here with me and Max for today's episode. First, before we get to the content, we start with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better. So let's do it. One minute on the clock that comes from Victoria who edits the show. Let's do it gents. So Matt, start with you. You just told me that you're based in the Seattle area, but where are you from?

Matthew Karasick (01:38):

I grew up outside of the Philadelphia area in New Jersey.

Marcus Johnson (01:41):

Oh, okay. Very nice. What took you over?

Matthew Karasick (01:44):

I met my wife in Bermuda and she is from the area and here we are.

Marcus Johnson (01:49):

Very nice, very nice. Not a bad place to be. Max, you are based in Philly, so where Matt started, but you're originally from?

Max Willens (01:57):

New York City.

Marcus Johnson (01:59):

Yes indeed. Matt, what do you do, in a sentence?

Matthew Karasick (02:04):

I lead products for our insights pillar here at LiveRamp. So that includes all things using data to extract insights and to better understand where and how to best use your marketing dollars.

Marcus Johnson (02:19):

Very good. And Max?

Max Willens (02:21):

I help brands and publishers understand where the money is going in the media landscape.

Marcus Johnson (02:28):

Very nice. Matt, back to you. What is your morning drink?

Matthew Karasick (02:33):

Coffee.

Marcus Johnson (02:34):

How you take it?

Matthew Karasick (02:35):

Black.

Marcus Johnson (02:36):

Oh no sir, no breakfast either, we just learned.

Matthew Karasick (02:40):

No breakfast. I make my French press. I recently upgraded my lifestyle significantly. I went from hand grinding my beans to an electric grinder. I have easily shaved off 12 minutes per morning. It's glorious.

Marcus Johnson (02:55):

Welcome to the future, sir. And Max, how about you?

Max Willens (02:59):

Black coffee is the correct answer, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson (02:59):

No it's not.

Max Willens (03:02):

For those of you keeping score. I also drink as much of it as I can carry upstairs to my office. I should swap grinder notes with Matt offline because I had one a couple of years ago and it died on me and I'm trying to get back into it. Because I currently use a spice grinder and I know that that's not really what you're supposed to do for French press, but I have a crude hacked together system that I use, but I should also enter the future too.

Matthew Karasick (03:34):

I got you, Max. I'm a week and a half into my new toy and I couldn't more highly recommend it, so I'll pass it on.

Max Willens (03:40):

The golden age. Awesome. We'll talk more offline.

Marcus Johnson (03:43):

The correct answer was instant coffee with too much cream and an unsocially acceptable amount of sugar. Matt, if you had to move, if somehow for some reason, I'm not going to ask why, but you were kicked out of the Seattle area, where would you go?

Matthew Karasick (03:57):

At the moment, ski season just started. So I'm going to say interior British Columbia.

Marcus Johnson (04:01):

There you go. Well played. Max, how about you?

Max Willens (04:05):

That guy knows his skiing. I'd move to London. I love London.

Marcus Johnson (04:09):

Yes. Yes. Sorry Matt, he beat you on that one.

Max Willens (04:12):

Although, that's based on a pre-Brexit perception of the place.

Marcus Johnson (04:17):

That's also fair.

Max Willens (04:18):

I'd get there and go, you know what, just kidding. I'm going back. I will stay in the airport until I figure something out. Who knows? Happy to be wrong. Sorry, it's everyone I know that lives in England right now.

Marcus Johnson (04:32):

Yeah, no, it's fair. How close we are to other countries is a huge point of coming to the UK, so that's a fair answer. All right gents, very nice. These are the two guests we have for today's episode. Thank you gents for being here. Let's go to the fact of the day quickly before we move to the main episode.

(04:51):

Today's facts, how long did Notre Dame take to build? So Notre Dame is the French Gothic Cathedral in the heart of Paris. Any guesses? Matt, how long do you think that took to put together?

Matthew Karasick (05:05):

10 years.

Max Willens (05:06):

I would say 200.

Marcus Johnson (05:06):

Did you build it? How do you know this? That's insane.

Max Willens (05:09):

I remembered from when I was a kid, we did European history and I remember finding out that some of those cathedrals took literally hundreds of years to build and it stuck with me to this day.

Marcus Johnson (05:21):

I just said seven Matt, so you're not too far off what I think most people who didn't remember this from school would've guessed. 1163 to 1260, so that was the first build, but then further work was undertaken, which wasn't completed until around 1345. So about 200 years what we told. Bishop Maurice de Sully initiated the colossal project under the reign of King Louis VII. Notre Dame, French for our lady, referring to the Virgin Mary. I was curious about this because I was recently in Paris and they just reopened it because there was a fire in 2019. Closed the church for repair until it just reopened a couple of weeks ago, but there's still a lot of construction going on. The cathedral won't be 100% restored until 2026. It's as beautiful as ever.

(06:09):

All right gents, let's move to today's real topic, future-proofing marketing. Max, when we were discussing how to start this conversation, you had mentioned that you'd seen some recent research that really kind of hammered home the importance of measurement. As we head into 2025, a lot of people thinking about different things as we head into the new year, measurement just as important as ever. Tell us about this piece of research which you think set the table quite nicely for our conversation.

Max Willens (06:41):

The thing that my mind flashed through instantly was this piece of research that InMarket put together where they asked marketers about their top investment areas for 2025, anticipated areas investment and measurement and attribution came in first by a huge margin, but if you looked at the things that rounded out the top of the list, what leapt out to me about them were they were investment areas where insight, measurement and attribution are both absolutely crucial and also not very easy. And it just painted a picture of a marketing community that is really needing to and trying to make sense of what they're doing and how they're spending the money, which felt like a good kind of starting point for this conversation.

(07:30):

And I guess to me it's really, really interesting that we have gotten to this place because these are our concerns that marketers have had for a really long time. But I'd love to just sort of hear from Matt about why the notion of things like standardization has really come to a head recently. Is it just because there's been enough investment on the buy side and first-party data that's gone on long enough that the people making decisions want to use it better, to get better at leveraging it in broader context? What is it that you think is leading to this heightened interest in being able to measure and extract value from the data that everyone is sitting on top of?

Matthew Karasick (08:21):

Not surprising. The importance of the area to be able to measure and be able to do attribution, that's not new. All these marketing departments, their CFO is going to take their budget away if they can't point to what did we get for this? What was the value that we got for it? And so the rough news is that the following has not changed, which is it is an art and a science. It is not a button that you can just go push and so unsurprising that the industry will always continue, be finding the best way to do it easily and accurately in a sort of privacy and governance-sake way. And so there's a ton of changes going on in the industry, in privacy, in regulation, in the way cloud computing works and the way people's data infrastructure is out there. That enough has changed that just throwing JavaScript tags on web pages and producing huge amounts of copies of data and running your methodology is no longer a viable path to doing this.

(09:36):

And so as the industry is both getting a little bit of a cold shower of, hey, some of the old practices we did are no longer going to be prudent and comes the sunshine that comes along with that, which is, but there is a future-proofed way of doing this, which has a number of advantages. It is better data when you're connecting to data at source in this way. It has both privacy and governance tools so that you can honor your commitments to your consumers, to your partners, to your own company.

(10:14):

Now that these future-proof ways of doing this, now the industry is saying, "Okay, that's a theme, that's a notion. How do we take that theme and notion and turn it into practice?" And that's where standards come in. What is a way that we as an industry can rally around in a way that does this, that delivers that attribution, that delivers that measurement in a future-proofed way? So I look at all of this as good news. We can look backwards and say kind of unbelievable how long we made it without doing it in this way, but industry sort of forced us here. And most of the leading marketers I speak to who have been early on this train say the future is bright, it's brighter than the past, that this does provide a path to using more and better data than ever before to get the right answers, but in a way that is privacy and governance safe.

Max Willens (11:11):

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I think is so interesting that speaks to what you were saying earlier about how... Because of the haste with which this opportunity came to the fore, there's been a lot of, I guess you would call it sub-optimal approaches to it. But we are now, I think now that enough people have caught up onto this as an opportunity and a way to play the game. You're starting to see people approach it in a more reasonable, more pragmatic way. I think about this a little bit, just some other research that has been at the front of my brain that I pulled out of my colleague Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf's report about privacy trends. And one of the top challenges that brands and agencies cite for looking into 2025 is finding quality partners for collaborating, enriching and modeling data.

(12:08):

And I would imagine that when they think about that challenge, it's less identifying people that can do it and more identifying partners that can do it in a way that's efficient and doesn't take two quarters to get implemented or worse. And when you think also about the sort of tools and partners that facilitate that stuff, that same research cited clean rooms is kind of an integral part of it. But talking just about that standardization, I mean one of the things that I find is really important whenever I'm writing reports or doing anything is just kind getting to those specifics. And so we talk about the need for standardization, the value that it unlocks. Can you give us an example of what happens when that's in place? Are we talking about dramatically speeded or increased speed to insights? Are we talking about cost reductions? What's the sort of upside to embracing an approach to this that sort of prizes standardization and consistency?

Matthew Karasick (13:17):

You hit it. It is the speed to value and being able to achieve the value at all versus hitting a wall and not being able to get past it. If you think about, not to go all the way to the geeky side of all of this, but the biggest shift is no longer will any one party be able to just get all of the data, put it in one single database and do whatever they want with it. Because if that was the case, standards would've been good and solved a lot of other parts of the whole thing. But everyone can do kind of what they want and everything's fine. If you think about what future-proof means, what we're saying is that's not going to happen. Not everyone's going to just go be able to centralize all the data. It's almost by definition, data will stay in silos because it's supposed to, it's supposed to stay where it is.

(14:13):

That doesn't mean all parties can't opt their data in to be part of a use case that everyone has agreement on with transparency and control. But if that's the case and data is going to stay in siloed, and by siloed we mean it could be in different clouds and different formats and different schemas and different technologies, then the only way to go to a marketing team, let alone in the Fortune 50. What about the Fortune 500 or 5000? And say, given that all of those things can be different, we're either going to say, "Therefore you better bring an army of technologists, analysts, lawyers, privacy teams," or we're going to deliver them a standard so that we could say, "This has already been done. There are already... You won't be alone in paving a new way. This is already the way the industry is accepting to do this and it does remove the barriers and remove the friction that takes so long."

(15:17):

So you asked for an example, I'll give you the simplest one that I know of, which is just legal contracts and paper, right? Hey, if I am a media company and I want to let a marketer do measurement on using my data for their campaign, there's data rights that go along with that that most media companies would say, "Hey, I'm going to need this marketer to agree to some standard data [inaudible 00:15:49]. My privacy and legal department demands it." Well, you could imagine if every single collaboration between every given marketer and every given media company is now a new legal negotiation, that just doesn't scale. So us being able to go and say, "Hey, all of the media side, here are the kinds of things that you all have in common. Can we get you all to chime in on a set of language that covers sort of everything? And hey, marketer, when you come in this, here is what all the media companies are going to ask you for."

(16:26):

And being able to take that whole process, and once we get people to agree to and buy in the standards, then how far can we go? Let's remove the human element part of it. Can we make it such that, okay, the way you're going to do this is by accessing analytics that only run in a clean room and before you can get access to it, you're going to click to accept those standard terms and conditions that the industry is all accepted. That in and of itself, I mean it sounds so simple, I'm telling you it is calls, emails, red lines, removing from the process which I have watched slow things down or block things for weeks, months, or even quarters. And so that is one example.

Max Willens (17:12):

And that's got to be just crazy making for everybody involved, right? I mean, one of the things that leaps out at me when I look at my own coverage area is just watching the programmatic budgets migrate into walled gardens. And when everybody sort of understands implicitly that you have to basically transition into what I would call the open-ish web, which is a situation where you have a coterie of partners that you can work with to either, whether it's maximize the of your audience or hunt for optimal results and driving growth, being in a place where every time you try to add to that stable of partners, you have to slog through a ton of mud. Just seems like it would drive everybody crazy.

Matthew Karasick (18:04):

Without question. And listen, I won't scream and yell at us as an industry too much and say what took us so long? I mean, I guess I could say that if I zoom way, way out. But in terms of this, listen, I came over to LiveRamp by way of the Habu acquisition. We were a very small start off, and I remember four years ago, so much of this stuff was so new. And so my first hundred calls with attorneys and privacy teams was education. I don't know if we as an industry could have gotten to those standards much faster, but at that baseline understanding of what are we talking about? How does this work? What are these tools and guardrails and why is there a technical guarantee that X and Y and Z can't happen and we don't need that in a contract?

(18:56):

So I don't know if we could have gotten here much faster, but the time is now to capitalize on what we have learned on how far the technology has advanced and how we have enough examples of real companies doing this at scale in the market, that we are now able to achieve these standards with contracts just being one example.

Marcus Johnson (19:20):

Talk to us a bit, if you would Matt, about the development of your Quick Start Insights product.

Matthew Karasick (19:26):

We talked about a number of different things that are getting standardized out there, but one of them is what should the actual analytics be? What types of outputs are we trying to get out there? And it's one of those where what we're trying to do is use standards to avoid the infamous analysis paralysis. I have watched two parties come together with just absolute mutual alignment. We know what we want to do, we know we want to measure these things. We think there's something there. We think that there's optimization to be had. And I watched several, all day working sessions of watching them go through the spreadsheets where very, very smart analysts had put together lists of hundreds of queries that could be run for the purposes of getting the senior level business leaders in a room to look through this spreadsheet and to prioritize which of these queries should be the first we should do?

(20:29):

So that all the teams could then go off on their own and then go write the code and build all these things, which is probably going to happen over time in some form or another, but not because that needs to be the starting point. And so what Quick Start Insights is meant to do is, and what it does when we're watching this happen is we know there's a set of sort of table stakes analytics that all marketers need to see to be able to be productive both in planning, in optimization and measurement. And so what Quick Start Insights does is it's a set of pre-packaged, pre-baked sort of query and question templates that we know all marketers won't be able to need to look at an answer, to be able to get a base-level understanding of what the opportunity is on planning, what's working well and what's not in the middle of a campaign and what happened after a campaign.

(21:26):

So that as two or more parties do want to come together, they don't have to have those meetings of saying, "Should we start with query number 17 or 43 to get started?" They get to come in and immediately hit go on these prepackaged templates that we know have utility across the board. Now that doesn't come at the cost of either or both parties being able to iterate and innovate and customize and further develop new insights, but Quick Start Insights gets the basics started and it gets you to that velocity, right? Momentum is a funny thing. It gets momentum and so Quick Start Insights is a way to deliver that immediate time to live, time to value so that the teams can go from there.

Marcus Johnson (22:10):

Final, real quick question from me is, if I said to you standardization 2025, what comes to mind first for you? What are you paying most attention to as we head into the new year with respect to this area?

Matthew Karasick (22:21):

What comes to mind is the outcome that delivers, which is we all will be able to come back and look [inaudible 00:22:29] and giggle at this podcast in a few years. That what were we even talking about?

Marcus Johnson (22:34):

Or what we were thinking.

Matthew Karasick (22:36):

It will just become the thing. It's just the way things work and that I just have so much confidence that we are not on a path of a new gimmick, a new idea. This is simply the... We now have a technology proof points that this is a future-proofed way of doing things, in terms of what does it evoke in my mind of how did we get there? It was a standardization of technology and architecture, standardization of data, standardization of methodology, and then standardization of the legal pieces of it. It's those four come together and the identity piece. It's those five together, deliver what that outcome is ultimately, which is this is just the way people do things and no one will even remember that this was a new thing at all. It will just be the thing.

Marcus Johnson (23:30):

Yeah, I really like that. So many remember when we used to moments. Remember when we used to carry a CD player around with us, literally a CD player? You'd have to hold it flat because the disc, man, you couldn't do it sideways. Anyway, that's what we've got time for for today's episode. Matt, Max, thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. Thank you first to Max.

Max Willens (23:50):

Always a pleasure, Marcus. Thank you.

Marcus Johnson (23:51):

Yes, sir. Thank you to Matt.

Matthew Karasick (23:52):

Thank you so much, Marcus. This is great.

Marcus Johnson (23:54):

Yes, sir. And thanks to the whole editing crew, Victoria, Lance, John, and Danny and Stuart who runs the team. Sophie does our social media. Thanks to everyone for listening in. We hope to see you tomorrow for the Behind the Numbers Weekly Listen, an eMarketer podcast made possible by LiveRamp.