Fireside Chat: Strategic Opportunities in Marketing Data and Analytics:

Featuring: Jonah Goodhart, Co-Founder & former CEO of MOAT

Amy Buckner Chowdhry, Founder & CEO of AnswerLab

Alex Langshur, Founder & Co-CEO of Cardinal Path

May 20th 2020 1pm EDT

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Introduction

Madison Alley Global Ventures virtually hosted an exclusive Fireside Chat with the following distinguished guests in the industry providing their perspectives and experience in their successful businesses:

Jonah Goodhart, Co-Founder and former CEO of MOAT, Amy Buckner Chowdhry, Founder and CEO of AnswerLab & Alex Langshur, Founder and Co-CEO of Cardinal Path.

Featured companies for discussion:

MOAT:

Acquired by Oracle for $850M

Real-time multi-platform, and actional marketing analytics

Across Desktop, Mobile, Video, Content

Measures: View ability, Non-Human Traffic Detection, Audience, Attention

Full- service Reporting Platform

AnswerLab:

UX Research insights that help the most innovative brands launch products

Clients: Facebook (FB), Google (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), FedEx (FDX), Walmart (WMT),

American Express (AXP)

Cardinal Path:

Acquired by Dentsu International (formerly Dentsu Aegis Network)

Leading markets analytics consultancy

Helps marketers win by creating business value from data

Panelists:

Jonah Goodhart:

CEO and co-founder of MOAT spent the last 10 years focused on building MOAT

Focused on understanding how human attention works in a world that is increasingly digital

MOAT’s specific focus is on building analytics and measurement around brand advertising

Acquired three years ago by Oracle where the company continues to grow and operate

Amy Buckner Chowdhry:

Founder and CEO of AnswerLab, started the company 15 years ago

AnswerLab has grown to about ~158 employees across the US and India:

It is a UX research company, partnering with brands as they go through their product design process / experience design process making sure that they bring humans into every stage they go through sot they’re making decisions along the way, resulting in the best possible delivery on their Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and goals for experience.

Alex Langshur:

Co-founder of Cardinal Path with four colleagues – current Co-CEO

Spent 10 years building his company to current level

Cardinal Path is located throughout North America and Europe, and expanding operations and beyond:

Company’s focus has been to instrument data flow between organizations and its consumers and to ensure that instrumentation is done comprehensively, robustly, and accurately to be able to surface what insights aren’t being withdrawn from that data flow and create value from them

Primary focus has been on deploying martech stacks and they are the world’s largest reseller of Google Linux 360

Highlights:

CMO Perspective

Michael Seidler (Madison Alley) asked: “First question and from a CMO’s perspective or from a marketer / executive marketers’ perspective – what is the value for data and marketing, and how can CMOs and other marketing executives take advantage of data analytics and consumer insights that are available?”

Jonah Goodhart (MOAT) : “First of all at a high level, marketing, I think like a lot of things, is storytelling quite simply I think the question that we ask is ‘how effectively did I tell my story’ and ‘how successful was I at it’ and driving some desired action analytics and insights around trends that help me focus my efforts” Jonah continues to describe in detail that you have to ask the right questions and you have to make sure that you’re using the right metrics to judge success, for example: “I think digital inventory obviously and digital usage spiked with the virus and the stay-at-home efforts and we’ve seen a lot of changes on that front, but not every company was able to take advantage of that not every company was positively impacted by that. Some companies benefited on the face of things but had to adapt to Zoom which we’re using as an example, I saw the CEO of Zoom in an interview recently, and he said he built Zoom for enterprise customers with IT departments and in the span of a couple of weeks his primary user one of them became two-year-olds doing preschool with their entire class so I don’t think he could have anticipated or they could have anticipated that use case, but identifying a trend, identifying something has changed and then adapting to that change”.

Michael Seidler: “Jonah, could you elaborate on MOAT as it was developed and as it exists today and how it provided marketers with a view of data analytics? Also, how it distinguished itself in providing data analytics in a different way than perhaps other platforms?”

Jonah Goodhart: “At MOAT, I think we wanted to ask a very simple question which is when you story tell us a brand in digital – if you go back to around 20 years ago or so, most of digital advertising was – at least the successful advertising – was direct response – it was driving some hard action.” Jonah continues to elaborate that “Brands had not in the mid to late 90’s figured out how do you story tell in a digital banner ad that’s tiny on the top of someone’s screen? and it took a while to figure out to story tell in this medium. We begin by asking the question alright well, if that’s the case how do you judge success?” “In one of the areas that we sort of happened upon in that process was viewability, and the even more basic question of before you can judge success of a brand, before you can judge whether someone paid attention to it, you need to know that the ad was actually there – that someone saw it or had a chance to see it and so this sort of core question became a really important part of the of the cycle strictly from an analytics perspective”

Michael Seidler: “What’s the incentive for consumers to participate in research panels and other data that they may be providing – what’s in it for them?”

Amy Buckner (AnswerLab): “There is no more important time probably in the history of marketing and in research for clients to understand what the customer needs are – people are experiencing unprecedented economic uncertainty, fear, anxiety and they’re worried about their health and now is the moment for a brand to truly understand and have empathy for what their customers experience in that, and then to be able to design an experience that supports it and helps people. So, what we’ve seen with our clients is that they’ve falling into kind of these three camps: 1. One group really gets it and they understand they need to double down on getting as many insights as possible and try to figure out how to support people 2. Another group says ‘I’m afraid, I don’t know how to do research right now so I’m just going to not do anything and hope this all blows over’, just like we just hope the economy is going to suddenly bounce back in a couple of weeks 3. A group that says, ‘I just wasn’t really using so much research before, so I’m just going to turn it off now’, but the problem is that when you start launching your digital experiences without having this insight, you’re building the wrong thing or you’re building a thing that is built incorrectly and only adds to people’s suffering, so it’s more important than ever to be able to tie this kind of research into the design of your digital experiences.”

Privacy

Question from Michael Seidler: “Could you touch upon this fear of GDPR and in CCPA and other data privacy issues – how is it that marketers can still capture and collect the right data that they want to make meaningful decisions; but yet be in compliance?

Jonah Goodhart (MOAT): “I think privacy was an ongoing discussion going into the pandemic, we were talking about the death of third-party cookies; in the New York Times you may have seen just announced that they’re removing all third-party cookie targeting on their site – they’re only going to do first party targeting which means only when they have a direct relationship with the person will they use that data and only that data to target people. We’ve seen the rise of so-called ‘consent based’ permission and that’s the GDPR and CCPA at some level and this idea of quote-unquote do not sell my data. This concept as a consumer is in fact your data and the need for tracking and tracing. Google and Apple have partnered to combine and build a tracking system together that not only are we not worried about we’re encouraging because it’s probably the right solution and will probably be really helpful, I don’t think anyone in the privacy world would have guessed that that they could pull that off a month ago or two months ago or three months ago, but it might be the right solution for what we need, historically there has been a trade imbalance if you will, with privacy meaning that the consumer gives a lot of data and it’s not always clear what they get back in return.”

Alex Langshur (Cardinal Path): “I’ve been focused on privacy for some time and counseling clients about it because there are teeth to the legislation that’s out there and they bite pretty hard if and when they bite.” “I think that what we’ve seen prior to this – is a little bit of a laissez-faire attitude towards the collection of data and the more the better, and right now, certainly in Europe, there’s a shift in that mindset amongst the population and we haven’t really seen it in the U.S. but I’m waiting for that moment, because we’ve had data breaches and people have been notified about that and even after they breach you still go on and still see incredible amounts of requests for data from organizations, but I think COVID-19 and some of this event is going to be the tipping point, where they say ‘no I’m really interested, the parameters and the guidelines dictate the direction’. Therefore, the parameters of guidelines are imperative we’re not going to get around, there is the fact that we are losing third party cookies so the easy stuff will be gone, identity resolution will be important, the collection and management of 1st party data will be mission-critical”.

Attribution & Qualitative Data

Regarding Attribution, question from Michael Seidler (Madison Alley): “Attribution- so is it possible or to what extent is it possible to measure the customer journey across all? There are so many different touch points now – social media, the web online, you know, offline retail and all those -so is it possible to map out that customer journey and how meaningful that is? Then, can marketers make decisions, or is there meaningful data that can be absorbed through the different touch points that can make decisions in terms of attribution and ROI decisions and intelligence, given that there’s so many different touch points of data that that’s coming in?”

Alex Langshur (Cardinal Path): “It’s been this holy grail that everyone’s been pushing towards and the bottom line is that I think it’s kind of a fool’s errand honestly, if you want to talk about attribution within one of these walled gardens all day every day that is what’s going to happen. If you think about an entity like Google that knows when you’re on Chrome and knows your location signals and has your intent signals and has your voicing, there’s the ability if I spend across that platform I think they’re going to give us full visibility into that platform; just full disclosure – we’re very big into the Google marketing platform because we just see that garden is very robust in its ability to provide attribution, the challenge becomes when you try and go outside of those walled gardens, then you’re stitching things together.” “The idea of ‘pick an ad’ here and I’ll take an ad there’ and ‘I’ll buy these different media and channels’ and be able to pull that all together into attribution as a unified perspective – I see the technological hurdles against that, just the privacy rules against that, as being almost insurmountable but within any walled garden I think we’ll be able to do that.”

Amy Buckner (AnswerLab): “We work in a world that’s very different from this – when we think about looking at the cross-channel experience, we’re watching people in their natural environments going through a cross-channel experience and then understanding how the brand is able to connect all of those together and so that’s particularly important right now as we think about COVID-19, we’re trying to help brands understand: how do they message about their COVID-19 updates across both their home pages and their mobile site and their emails – are those stories connected together? Is that what people are looking to see? Are they, for example if they’re a major retailer, are they able to communicate well about how their shipping is going and if anything is not in alignment with what their original brand promise was, are they able to articulate that in a way that customers want to understand?”

Question from Michael Seidler: “In terms of qualitative data, Amy if you could elaborate on as you think about data and analytics, it’s mathematical and statistical but; what AnswerLab has been particularly successful is at capturing qualitative data from consumers and other constituents, so could you talk about that a bit more and how you’ve been able to provide marketers and other decision-makers with qualitative data?”

Amy Buckner (AnswerLab): “We typically engage with companies in a number of different ways: 1. One example is, that a client may be embarking on a very large initiative to redesign an entire experience – let’s say the entire bill payment platform experience is going to change over the course of the year, or a client may be launching an entire new experience that they never had before, and what we’ll do is partner with them through that process and build the insights into each stage of the process. What do we build, are we building the right thing? Now we’ve got a couple of concepts and ideas – is this the right concept in a right value proposition? and now we’re into the iterative design process – ‘are we building this in the way that people want to see it and is it meeting their experience goals?’ right before it goes live and then benchmarking it over time, that’s one way. 2. Another way is that we have clients who are constantly doing work, constantly making updates to their experiences – so you can think of Google and Facebook and we will embed a team that works with their product teams to bring the qualitative insights into every single decision they’re trying to make so it’s just ongoing research that’s happening all of the time.”

Identity Resolution

Question from Michael Seidler (Madison Alley): “If we could talk for a moment about ID identity resolution, given that customers or individuals have so many different devices and are in so many different touch points, how is it that marketers can accomplish ID identity resolution and resolve that there are consumer profiles in an increasingly complex world of multiple devices in so many different touch points?”

Jonah Goodhart (MOAT): “From an identity resolution perspective, you can attach data in a so-called anonymous way to an anonymous profile and get a pretty good sense of what someone’s doing, what they’re buying, where they’re going and the more data you attach sometimes the better idea you can get of who someone is to some degree” “I think from a marketer that sounds like a great thing and if we know, the better we have an opportunity to serve someone. I think from a consumer that’s not always the best thing and what I’ve seen in a lot of these data sets is that technology’s imperfect and we’ll get it wrong and when you get it wrong and it’s something personal; like we’ve identified someone and we believe that they’re a man and they’re actually a woman or we think they’re married and they’re not or vice versa – you end up making different decisions as a marketer about how you’re speaking to that person or with that person and if we get it wrong we end up in a in a bad place – I think identity resolution is important but I but I really think that we need to ask better questions about the permission, I know for a fact that a lot of credit card companies sell their data so you transact and they sell your data and it can be connected to a so called anonymous online profile and you can be targeted on the major platforms based on what you bought.”

Strategic M&A and Capital Transactions in marketing data and analytics

In strategic M&A opportunities in data and analytics there’s been a lot of activity from 2019 onwards; some of the most notable transactions have been Salesforce acquiring Tableau for over $15bn which further emphasizes the importance of data visualization, and Google acquiring Looker for big data analytics and particularly cloud data analytics and visualization for $2.6bn. On the service side, Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of Epsilon for data marketing services for $4.4bn.