Episode Transcript
Will Fraser: Hi Rory, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing?
Rory Copern: I'm doing great, Will. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Will: No, it's our pleasure entirely. Now, those listening have just heard a brief intro about you, but your career really requires some explanation to make sure we didn't miss any nuances. Could you share a bit about your background before we jump in?
Rory: Sure. I'm a 20+ year Canadian tech and media guy. Caught the Internet bug back when it was relatively new and have been riding that wave ever since, very focused on making an impact here in Canada. For about a decade I played the role of Captain Canada for large technology companies that operate intergalactically - Microsoft, Google, Twitter and the like.
Really enjoyed those experiences and learned a ton about scaling companies quickly inside big organizations. I've been incredibly interested in exporting that knowledge to Canadian business. Left Twitter as MD of Twitter Canada to work with an old Google colleague who took over the Weather Network and Palmer X Corporation because we wanted to run a Canadian headquartered company. Now I'm in a phase of my career where I'm advising smaller Canadian scaling tech companies and having an absolute blast.
Will: That's a pretty rapid career with some big companies. I know you've been involved a lot with marketing and advertising technology. Along that journey, where do you think you've learned the most? What key lessons have you taken away?
Rory: My real global technology company roots are in adtech, which isn't the normal way in. I was driving more of the science and engineering behind marketing and advertising on the web, which gave me that mix of quant and qual that intrigued me - art and science, if you will.
I learned a trainload at Google, and I'd point to that experience as being foundational because it was very early days of programmatic advertising in the Canadian digital landscape. My job was to work with Canadian publishers and the advertising ecosystem to get programmatic trading off the ground. We became very early adopters of the technology.
That role had me focused on understanding the performance aspects of marketing, getting specific on ROI, audience reach, really understanding objectives and measuring them carefully, getting into the dollars and cents of acquisition. But the other side was the art of marketing. It's easy to get lost in the sinkhole of tech and formulas, but a huge chunk of performance comes down to the story you're telling and the canvas you're telling it on.
Will: Performance marketing and acquisition marketing is really where technology got its foothold. As we're coming up on 2022, what do you see as the next trends in marketing technology?
Rory: When we talk about trends, I'm usually asked about the very latest. What I'd give as a meta theme is that the concept of digital marketing is going away - it's just marketing now. The notion that digital is usually the lead horse in the marketing mix for most brands is becoming not just a trend but the wise way of running marketing strategy if you've got significant budgets and goals.
The other piece that's going to be incredibly important over the next five years is that the currency of digital marketing is changing seriously. As the third-party cookie wipes out for Chrome, we now watch the remaining 60% of users becoming relatively invisible to retargeting and many technological use cases we had before. As that changes, there's a major jump ball coming in where budgets will go, how measurement will translate, and how auction-based marketplaces are working.
Will: Let's dig into those two points. Starting with organizations where walls between marketing departments need to come down - while this has been happening for some time, I'm sure there are organizations where they've yet to fall. Do you have experience in how someone could encourage their organization to lower those walls and think of it just as marketing rather than digital versus broadcast?
Rory: The conversations I'm typically having with buyers are that they should ask their partners, whether agencies or vendors, to approach them as they've organized their own teams. Most CMOs today aren't thinking about a digital marketing team versus a non-digital marketing team - they're just marketers. The ability for an agency to come to the table with a full suite of perspectives and talented people who understand how all pieces fit together before they even get in the room and can address a marketing problem, not a technology problem, is stop number one.
We've got to stop talking about the tool we're selling and start talking about the outcome we're driving. When we can do that well, we as an ecosystem of vendors and partners can service CMO needs much better. Companies doing really well today are figuring out ways to collapse walls on their own side to approach problems the way they're being cast by their customer, less focused on the silos that naturally form inside companies dealing with different technologies.
Will: That's a good point about pulling away that technology layer. Any time new technology comes to market, technologists are keen to play with it. But as it leaves being experimental and becomes just a tool we must use, it becomes less about the tool and more about the outcome.
Rory: I think we're really bad at this as an industry. We create our own jargon, define our terms, talk about our stuff in ways that make sense to us and less about the outcome we're trying to drive. It's consistent now that companies doing really well at simplifying messages and articulating potential in simple terms that make sense to people trying to get their jobs done - that's the winning formula for the next 10-20 years.
Will: Now, about that jump ball you mentioned - this sounds like it will have huge impacts on corporate budgets and people's ability to fulfill KPIs or objectives. Is that true, and if so, how do you think that will play out?
Rory: Yes, I think so. Looking at the top line - if you look at most digital advertisers, or just advertisers now as we should say, depending on who you talk to, most everyone is spending 70-80% of their budget between Google and Facebook. There's a cadre of maybe five other players - Twitter, Snap, TikTok, LinkedIn, some folks like that fighting for another 10-15%, and then another 10-15% for everybody else, all other publishers and programmatic exchanges.
I think what's going to happen is that if a publisher or advertising source doesn't have first-party logged-in data and serious scale, they're going to lose a lot of budget. The international gigantic scale first-party login platforms who have 70-80% of the budget are probably going to be the winners. Google and Facebook do better in a world where data goes away for players that don't have first-party data.
What that's going to do though is juice the auctions. Both Facebook and Google ride on auction platforms that exist entirely of buyers bidding up impression values. When you point more demand towards what is likely to be supply growth lower than demand growth, you're going to see inflation in cost, and frankly, we're already seeing that today.
Will: And you know, I've been a big believer that companies are acquisition addicted. I don't truly mean just acquiring customers - I mean what you called acquisition marketing addicted. It's been a channel where people can pour dollars into the ad tank and acquire customers. But with budgets rising and companies looking to be profitable, it looks like a train wreck for marketing departments trying to deliver objectives if they don't have unlimited ad dollars.
Rory: Yes, it's definitely a scale game. The ability to get very sophisticated talent working on sophisticated strategies with large budgets definitely produces outsized outcomes in auction environments. To me, this idea of getting more creative, understanding other avenues of acquisition and using them as a bigger part of the mix will become much more important.
I think there will always be a very large and profitable market for Google and Facebook - that's not going to stop. But it's what else brands do - how do they engage users in ways that aren't banners and aren't interruptive and aren't the ad context we've known for a long time?
Will: I think you said something interesting around the word "user." When we look at paid acquisition marketing, even if they're cookied, they're not really a user of mine. You're mentioning that idea of user and how to use other channels. What are you seeing? Are there opportunities for people to be more intelligent with who a person is in that paid space, or opportunities to find other channels because they're thinking about you as a user and not just a cookie profile?
Rory: So I'd say yes to both actually. At Google and Twitter, both auction-based digital marketing companies, anyone who's been selling those solutions long enough will tell you the key is having a customer who understands their customer's lifetime value. The smarter the advertiser is about understanding the full spectrum of customer value, the better they'll do in an auction environment.
What's interesting is that same idea of understanding full lifetime value quickly points sophisticated advertisers towards activities and strategies to further the conversation with a customer after acquisition. Rather than constantly getting new customers, the balance seems to be shifting towards how do I speak to people I already have - cross-sell, upsell, improve and deepen the relationship, provide opportunities to get to know each other better and increase customer value through that activity.
Will: And you mentioned Covid there. One interesting thing I saw during COVID was businesses big and small realizing how important online digital transactions were. Hard to believe that was a 2020 realization, but it seems it was. What I've seen is the tech industry, for all its advancements, was really focused on that first part of the funnel, on acquisition. As more traditional players triple down into digital space, they seem to be bringing that belief that it's easier to resell, upsell, cross-sell into the market.
Rory: Part of how I've perceived that change - what I noticed most starkly in Covid was that for a long time, most major digital marketers who were retail-focused would treat the web "as a store." They would analyze digital performance through the same lens as evaluating one store in their network versus another - same store sales, traffic costs, inventory turnover. That was always super weird to me, not exploiting the full opportunity in a digital context.
Rory: Then through Covid, when foot traffic stalled and there was an exodus to the web, those players started talking more about the web as a channel, which makes perfect sense to many of us who've been here. When you see the majority of dollars transition into that new mode, you start to think about customers differently. That notion of smash and grab, get money through the door and keep going - evaluating the web versus a store changes when the web becomes equal to physical retail, digital retail, all aspects of retail operations.
With that came a refreshed view of the full value of a user in that channel. Now they're looking at opportunities to run the business with a digital-first strategy where physical retail environment is a support stool to the front end of the business, which is now digital. A huge and profound shift, and frankly one I've been trying to drive for these behemoth companies for decades.
Will: I think in my experience, people have been talking about how in digital we can track everything, we have so many more touch points. But would it be fair to say that a lot of these large organizations were maybe just doing lip service to that until this transformation happened?
Rory: I think so. Really, that measurement story on the LTV side for sure. There was this notional understanding of how much somebody was worth - they weren't really doing all the work to measure it. And then those who were measuring it started to win at an alarming rate.
The joke for a long time among my colleagues was that measurement online was a double-edged sword. Yes, we could measure all these things, but then we were held to those metrics and to a standard way higher than any other channel. We started getting into very sophisticated conversations on acquisition campaign ROI, and more than half the time the question we really wanted to ask around the deal table was "Yeah, how are your print ads performing?"
Will: And I think that holistic view is what's really interesting around marketing right now - that ability to say it's not just for the marketing team to bring someone to the website or store, and it's not just the marketing team to get them to sign up for a trial. It seems like the marketing teams and growth teams are all merging together and into the product teams. What's your visibility on that transformation? Any advice for companies on how to help collapse that?
Rory: A few thoughts. First, on the relationship between product and marketing - this is a debate as old as the hills. Is your company product-led, revenue/marketing/sales-led, or engineering-led? More and more, the winning formula I'm seeing is product-led, where a product team can develop insights about a market that sit between engineering and business to create strategy and drive resources from all aspects to deliver this vision of who the user is.
Product teams are getting far more sophisticated about who their customers actually are. The data they're using to paint that picture is far more sophisticated than even five years ago. The ability to collapse lines between marketing and product teams becomes really important - are they using the same data set? Do they have the same world view? Because while the work done by those teams is very different, it uses the same insights.
The other side is there's been literature lately about the CIO and CRO/CMO being the new power couple of technology. We didn't really talk much about the information or data tech side of businesses to fuel these insights for product and revenue. Now that case is closed. Understanding how the lines blur between those organizations - everybody's got their job, but the information being surfaced is typically common across all groups.
Will: Absolutely. And I think accessing and understanding that data is really important. It's an indication of how these teams work together. In a product-led organization, it's not without marketers and sales reps and engineers. Having that alignment around data can be valuable - the last thing you need is three people talking about the same thing under different names and unable to figure out they're working on the same problem.
Rory: Yeah, exactly. One of my idioms I probably use most from my Google experience is "your opinion is interesting but your data is fascinating." Coming to the table with a thesis not rooted in data that's common to everybody making a decision is pointless now. Creating a culture that's data-first but also insights and action-centric becomes part of the DNA of the next cohort of good companies.
Will: And do you think, we started talking about the jump ball in paid acquisition - do you think this data people are now collecting and this holistic view of the customer becomes a company's superpower to combat that inflation? Or do you think that's just going to be table stakes they need to survive and the inflation will still occur?
Rory: That's a really good question. In pure academic economic terms, if budgets are being put towards non-auction based things, that might bring that market back into equilibrium to some degree. Same time, I know a lot of really amazingly smart people at Google who will keep pushing that auction dynamic as much as they can.
I actually think it's more the customer's relationship with a brand that matters. The key question is always going to be who is the user looking for when they search for your thing on Google. The opportunity to buy the first, second or third ad slot is always going to be there, and you can always bid more. But if there's an opportunity to develop a deeper relationship, the need for that placement goes down.
In my mind, a lot of people at Google would disagree with me, but particularly in the context of a customer who's already part of a brand - for as long as I've been around in the retargeting world, the worst problem was always "I just bought your thing, I clicked on your box, bought the shoes, and now you're marketing the same shoes I just bought. How much could you possibly know me?"
Will: Yes, that brand protection and LTV development starts to create a pretty powerful moat around the business where I'm going to this brand as my source. That brand is driving up their LTV so they can actually increase their paid acquisition spend if needed and justify it. But without that brand and LTV moat being powered by data across teams, it's just going to be a never-ending footrace to who can spend more to be number one on Google Ads.
Rory: I agree. I would also say the tooling and technology for cross-sell and upsell today is generally so ham-fisted that we can't really have a full view of what a customer's potential LTV would look like. The very best brands right now might send me an email once a week and might get me back, and there are a few I'm personally loyal to that have done an exceptional job driving value and relationship depth. But for the most part it's super starchy, fake communication that feels salesy and isn't authentic.
The better we can facilitate that relationship from a marketing strategy perspective, the better the tools, measurement, and strategy. The thought that goes into post-sale relationship development that doesn't feel salesy, just helpful - I think that's the change.
Will: You just mentioned relationship development - I think that's one of the interesting advantages digital solutions have but isn't always taken advantage of. I'm sure we've all been a customer of some company that sends us three promotional emails a day.
Rory: They usually last about a week.
Will: It's just discounted promotions and seems based in this old brick-and-mortar world where the only interaction that matters is running the credit card through the till. Yet I have more touch points, more ways to develop LTV and keep contact than ever before. However, I'm still using this ham-fisted approach of smashing them with another million emails of generic offers that don't deepen the relationship or truly speak to who that individual is.
Rory: Yeah, there's also two trends I'm looking at in that direction. One is the number of subscription businesses I now have in my life is exponentially higher than 10 years ago. I had utility bills and maybe a newspaper subscription, but now when I check my credit card statements, I've got 30 or 40 different SaaS services - these are recurring revenue streams.
What I'm finding interesting is the nature of that relationship drives depth. Products I signed up for suddenly have companion products that didn't exist when I signed on. One proxy I use on a personal level is how many loyalty cards I have in my travel wallet. Now that doesn't even matter - it's the apps on my phone. I'm using Hotwire, the Air Canada app, I'm a Bonvoy guy.
The ability for them to learn more about me through activity that's not creepy weird tracking - it's like, you bought so many airplane tickets to these destinations and these are the kinds of hotel rooms you prefer. The nature of offers I'm getting is way more sophisticated than before. Instead of just a 20% discount for a flight, now it's in-depth conversations about new asset classes Bonvoy's added because they know I like to sail. These are insights-driven dialogues - they're not trying to sell me anything yet, just letting me know they have something I might find useful.
Will: And I think that's an interesting approach you're speaking about there. This idea of our data being collected, whether it's iOS now requiring apps to ask permission, it's becoming more apparent to the consumer. And the companies that can use their own data effectively to drive stronger relationships and LTVs have a tremendous advantage because it's only getting creepier that people are tracking us, and it's only getting more known.
Rory: Yeah, I've got a whole presentation on this topic. I think the mistake we made at the beginning of digital was we didn't explain to customers that this data was required to make money. If you're a publisher, we had to collect data to sell ads for more and not charge for content. It was never explained that this free service was because of data. Had it been, the web might not have been adopted as fast, but we find ourselves now where the jig is up - users know, federal governments know, and they're enacting policies to protect user data.
The important part is this notion of consent. When I sign up for a service and they say "we're going to watch what you do on our app to offer better services," my answer is okay, great. But when that conversation is "we're going to track all your movements across the web," the crazy part is users still say yes, just because they don't want to read the fine print.
That's where the feds have come in to say that's not how we're moving forward. We've got to think as brands in a way that drives actual consent for real conversations where real value is exchanged. Yes, you can have my data if you provide great content or offers in return. Once iOS started asking "do you want this app to track you outside the app?" the answer was overwhelmingly no.
Will: I mean, we're jumping from giant industry change to giant industry change here, which I've really appreciated hearing about. I want to thank you very much for your time with us today and just ask if you have any concluding thoughts listeners really need to be aware of for a successful year ahead.
Rory: If I could give one message to anybody driving a marketing budget at the end of this podcast, it would be find your authenticity and speak it. Whether it's new customer acquisition or existing customer dialogue, I believe the way to break through and deliver more efficient outcomes, but also better and more authentic, durable long-term growth, is by doing things required to establish a real relationship with customers so they can both buy more themselves and advocate for you outside of the relationship.
The example I used to talk about all the time is Wendy's Twitter account - one of the most entertaining things you're ever going to read. Why? Because they're just saying what they think in a way that's authentic to them, and it draws in hundreds of thousands or millions of users. People become loyal when you talk to them like that. That's what's missing in a lot of marketing strategy right now.
Will: Well, Rory, I would try to summarize that all up, but I don't think I'm going to do nearly as good of a job as you. Thank you very much for your time here today. Before we go, is there anywhere that listeners can find you, connect with you, follow your thoughts?
Rory: Sure, available on all channels. If you want to know what I'm thinking right now, find me on Twitter @rorycapern. If you want to know more about my resume and all that stuff, find me on LinkedIn - Rory Capern in the search. I typically use Twitter as my conversational channel and would love to engage with more folks there.
Will: Awesome. Well, thank you very much again, Rory. It's been a pleasure and I can't wait to have you back on the show.
Rory: Thanks, Will. Have a good one.
