Preparing Marketing Ops for a Cookie-less Future

So you’ve been hearing about the future of cookie-less browsers.

But what does that all really mean?

In this episode we speak to Nikki Candito, VP of Demand Strategy at MeritB2B; Greg Manetti, CTO at Klearly; and, Mary Blanks, CMO at Klearly about the forthcoming “cookie-less future”. 

Tune in to hear their perspectives on what to think about, how to prepare, and some incredible thoughts around 3rd party Cookies. 

Hi, I’m Michael Hartmann, I’m Naomi Lou, and I’m Mike Rizzo. And this is ops cast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MO Pros. The number one community for marketing operations. As professionals tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of ops cast brought to you by the MO Pros. I’m Michael Hartmann. Today I’m joined with my cohost Mike Rizzo. Hey everybody. We are excited today. Today, we are going to be talking with three guests, not just one but three about an impending feature that we probably all should be thinking about and are going to have to deal with.

At some point as, as marketing ops professionals, the one where we don’t have access to third party cookies. So joining us today for this conversation are, uh, first Nicki Candido. She’s the VP of demand strategy at Marriott B2B. She’s a results-driven strategic marketers specializes in marketing technology, driving demand and digital inbound campaigns.

She has 19 years of experience under her belt. She excels in driving digital transformation, demand, gen and analyzing results. Next, we have Greg Manetti, chief technology officer. Clearly who has spent 20 years at the intersection of marketing sales, it legal and data. I just have to say, I like the legal part.

Nobody talks about that. Um, he knows firsthand how intentional on patient revenue leadership has to be to build teams that stitch together MarTech and sales tech data to operationalize it most effectively. Dan, last but not least. Mary blanks, chief marketing officer. She has held various roles in B2B marketing strategy and operations teams over the last 20 years, her blended marketing technology experience along with execution allows her to bridge both the technical know-how with the fundamentals of great go to market strategies.

She’s held global positions at red hat eco lab and ran her own marketing consulting room, a consulting firm for five years. Almost made it through that without Scott Nicky, Greg Mary, thanks for joining us today.

We’re looking forward to learning from you all. Okay. So I, we, we talked about this a little bit before, like, I’m going to guess that if our listeners are anything like me, even though I know I should be preparing and probably getting ready for what’s coming down the road with, uh, I guess mostly Google, who’s got still to remove third-party cookies.

Uh, Yeah, I, you know, how’s that going to affect our go to market strategy and what do we need to be doing now? What should we be planning for? How should we think about technology? So I’m going to guess that most of them are probably in the same boat, uh, or they’re just all better than me. And so just selfishly, I’m looking forward to learning and trying to catch up on what I need to know.

So maybe, uh, why don’t we start with, uh, Let’s clarify, like let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about what actually is already done. I think I’ve, I’ve done enough research now that other there’s some stuff has already changed, but what other changes are coming? When is that expected to happen? And what are the potential impacts?

Greg? We want to start us off with that. Uh, sure. Thanks, Michael. You know, it’s funny for a time, right? You know, in my past, I, if people would ask me what I do for a living. Know, I’d say, well, I’ll make the internet a little bit creepier. And I stopped saying that at some point, just because it became less funny and people’s faces started looking a little bit more grim, right.

When I would drink it up. So the changes here. So what we’re talking about, really, we’re talking about personal privacy, right? About what we’re seeing on the, uh, w what, what, we’re, what we’re doing. It really in our, in terms of our internet browsing, um, and principle, we’re talking about a transition between targeting individuals.

Right. Based on those individual interests and looking really more at groups of, of, of people with shared interests. So that’s really the change we’re talking about. Um, you know, uh, it’s an important change, uh, but really simply speaking, this has been happening for several years. My goal, like know, starting with the ad blockers that we had to install on our browsers.

And then of course, apple and Microsoft that we Mozilla going ahead and moving faster. The reason we’re still talking about this, as you said, uh, you know, Google and Chrome, it holds 65% of the market share globally. Uh, so you know, when they make a, when they make a change like this, it’s still newsworthy, right?

When they make a decision that says, we’re going to do this in two, uh, in 2020, And then push it to 2023, so the world can, can catch up. Right. And they can be ready as well. That’s kind of a big deal. Um, so you asked a little bit about the, uh, the impacts, uh, you know, a couple of the, the primary impacts are going to be MO Pros get together.

And we started swapping stories about being chased around the internet for, uh, you know, uh, for a pair of shoes that we looked at last. Right. That’s going to that’s more than likely the best. And, uh, of course, and then for me, I get a morbid, uh, a morbid chuckle when I go onto a website and I see, you know, go reports, 53rd party cookies being dropped on my computer.

Right. Uh, and it just, I find them funny just because I like to see how it, what people still have on there and what they’re, what they’re running, but, uh, you know, jokes aside. Uh, then the last people that the last article I looked at, you know, HubSpot had a couple of survey results about what people think, the change that these changes are gonna impact.

Um, and you know, about 40% of marketers think it’s gonna cost them more right. To target the audiences that they want to target. Um, and, uh, The other side of it is they think you’re going to a hope spot. It says that they’re going to, you know, people are going to turn to email marketing. That’s a completely different conversation about, uh, whether or not that strategy itself will, will pay off.

Right. But I think those are some of the, the generalized impact that most marketers are thinking about everyday. How much is it going to cost me to advertise? How much is, how well am I going to be able to target based on this change, these changes. Uh, and then of course, you know, what am I, what are my alternate.

Yeah, it’s interesting like you, I, I didn’t start in sort of the digital world of the privacy, but I, I started out in marketing doing database marketing and that was 20, 25 years ago. And back then, that was, I was blown away about how much people already know about us. Right. It was, and it’s only grown and gotten faster.

And the turnaround, Mary and Nikki, any other kind of things that we should know about the changes that either, either already happened or. For me. I think the thing that I’m trying to ground myself and to Greg’s point. Where I’ve been thinking about cookies over the years and cookies equaling an audience.

Now I just need to be more intentional about thinking about it more in that cohort, where I’m not necessarily going to see the ad pop-up for the shoes for my third-party site for myself. But if, you know, as a group of people, We’re now going to make up an audience that could be re-targeted for something like that.

So it’s, you know, cookie equals audience today and in the future it’s cohort equals audience. And trying to keep that in my mind, as I think about evolving the strategy. Right? I like that a lot, Mary, I think Greg, the way you put it in the very beginning made it less. Right. So going from targeting an individual to a group of individuals, it’s kind of like, what is old is new again?

Right. 10 years ago, that’s how we were marketing. And we were targeting and spending our dollars and the addition of the cookie and all the little tiny pieces of data that we could get on people. It’s like, wow, look at all this data I can use. I can target whoever I want whenever I want wherever they are.

But in a way it’s also created a place of people get frozen because they have too much data to act on and they don’t know which pieces to use. So if you kind of flip it and look at it in a positive way, you’re going to be getting more useful data at a group of individuals and your costs actually might go down.

That’s really interesting. So you use that, you’ve all used the term cohort and. As a general definition. I think I have a pretty good idea what it means, but like, what will that, like, what would that, what would a typical cohort look like in this world then? Do we have, do we know what that’s going to look like?

Is it up to each different vendor? Like, how’s that, how’s that going to work? That’s an interesting question, Michael, I don’t know that I have a specific answer to that. I think that either we think about just how much, uh, granularity, uh, the, the search engines, um, uh, are able to get to us, uh, in terms of what, what are our interests categories?

And they can do it a relatively, uh, you know, minute in a micro-targeting basis. Right? We, we we’ve heard about that throughout the news in terms of what, what we can do from a targeting perspective. So I think that you’re going to see. Um, uh, other than the protected, uh, the now protected, uh, you know, statues around, uh, around, uh, ethnicity and, and religious preferences, political affiliations and things like that.

You won’t see that, but you’re going to see things that are, that are more aligned, uh, to, to, to topics that’d be guide the sole one that would be like this person’s into cars. Right. And they may be more specific this person’s in the sport cars. Right. So they’ll, there’ll be, there’ll be, um, audiences that, that, that, uh, we’re interested.

Right. Uh, but it, but we won’t necessarily be able to say, give me people that, uh, that like sports cars and have been on these four different websites, right. That’s not going to be an option. The other thing that I would add to that as well is the part that I’m trying to keep in mind from an execution perspective.

This really impacts top of funnel the most. And we have to be really intentional about creating great conversion points, potentially a little bit higher in the funnel. Then maybe we’re, we’ve been used to thinking about when we’ve been targeting individuals, but making sure that top of funnel we’re creating really great content that brings people in so we can get to know.

Not just sports cars, but then our exact sports card we’re selling and trying to market a little bit earlier as well. So I think content strategy and to Nikki’s point kind of a back to the basics approach all the way, you know, maybe even up funnel a little bit more is going to be important as well.

Yeah. That’s a great point, Mary. That’s a great point. I think, um, Uh, to go back on what you were saying earlier, Greg, um, describing yourself as like making the internet a little creepy, a little creepy, or maybe, um, I’m glad, I’m glad things aren’t necessarily as creepy as they, as they, uh, could, could have certainly continued to go.

Um, I too actually got my start in ad tech. I worked for our company at the time it was called specific media. They bought MySpace. I don’t know if you guys remember that transaction. It was quite a few years back now. Uh, it was an interesting time and I was able to try to like explain to folks what that creepiness factor was all about.

Uh, working for a big, a big ad tech company like that. And, and over time they’ve rebranded. And, um, now they’re Viant technology. Uh, they went public, I think, not too long ago. And now they’re talking about this, like when you kind of get into this concept of. Cohorting and things like that. They’re actually talking about household targeting.

It’s a technology that they had built many, many moons ago, uh, that they feel really confident in now. Right. I was just like looking it up as cause as you were all talking about this idea of cohorts, I was like, oh yeah, there was that thing that they were working on like forever ago. And I was like, I wonder if that’s still a thing and it sounds like it is.

And to me that seems like kind of the direction that we’re going now for all of the listeners out there, like, it sounds a little creepy household targeting, right. And they’re not going to come into your house. Uh, but they are going to look at. Your IP address. Right? And so we all have that. That’s like standard.

That’s the thing though. I think Nikki made a point, right? What’s old is newer. Maybe it was this. That is exactly. I mean, when I got to Davis marketing, my first job was to build a 50 million household database for our company to go target. And we had a, you know, appended data and all that at the household.

Yeah. Yeah. And so like now it’s just exactly, what’s old is new again. And so household targeting is going to be the thing. And they’re going to be able to try to understand a household’s preferences, uh, across the board. Right. I’ve got two small children I’m into tech, my wife’s into baking and these other things.

And so we’re going to see ads for all of each other’s things, uh, for baking tech. Is that. That that too. Yeah, new there’s I’m sure there’s a new thing that I have to get some time here soon. Um, to be honest, I’m so happy that she’s a baker food is something like, Ugh. If I could send all of you, her cookies, you see what I did there.

I’ll see what I did there.

We’re talking about a cookie list world and I want to set everybody could be a dad joke statutes. So anyway, I think, I think all of this is really interesting. Um, and, and going back to this idea of like, sort of broadly targeting households and, and, and speaking to the point of like, Just creating good, valuable content for, for conversion.

And just trying to understand an audience. I feel like a lot of this though, you know, correct me or throw out your opinions on it. Um, it’s really, it sort of just matters for that B to C transaction. Like I don’t, I don’t feel as strongly concerned about it from the B2B side of things. Like there. I don’t believe there was a sophisticated B2B brand out there in the world that said, I know Mike Rizzo is really specifically interested in this, uh, this SAS products feature a feature within a SAS product.

Um, not the SAS product as a whole. But like one of the components of it, like it just never got to that kind of detail. Right. They just knew that I was like into SAS tools and I’m a marketer. And so they want to sell me marketing tools. Um, and like nothing’s changed. That’s still true. And they’re still gonna be able to see all that information.

So I sort of feel like it’s more on the B2C side of things than anything else. I don’t know where I need to worry about it on the B2B side of things. So would love anyone’s thoughts on that? Yeah. One of the places I, yeah, I was wondering about it both in terms of the benefit right. Of, of, of sort of this cohort idea, uh, in general, is it, it doesn’t matter whether or not we’re doing it through, um, uh, through a display ad or paid search, right?

The whole point of advertisements that get them accounts, get them to come to us. Right. Hmm. A lot of focus was on that retargeting. Right? How big can I make my retargeting list? How many people can I get to come to my site and then advertise to them to get them to come back. And I wonder to some extent, right?

To your point around the cohorting around B2B is that sometimes we actually don’t, even if, even if we do a great job of earning it through SEO, right. Or earning it through social. We’re still only getting viewed they’re tuned into our channel. Right. They know who we are. And I do wonder whether or not more of a cohort approach.

May elderly net us, uh, potentially more people that we didn’t even know would be a particular shared interest. So it’s kind of an, you know, you, you asked a very good question, right. You know, we hear a lot about the, you know, the accountant tend to things like this, which is really that same sort of co co co cohort idea.

But I, I do wonder whether or not just from a strategy perspective, right. You know, we’ve, we’ve spent the last several years. You know, trying to bring people back to our site based on re retargeting. And that’s not really an option, but is there a benefit for that? Like when you think about, um, this idea of, well, you know, we’re no longer trying to bring that individual back, but we’re trying to bring people that are similar to that and hope again, that the net catches a few people.

What do you think about that?

Yeah. I, I, I, I liked that, um, line of thinking. I, I tend to agree. Um, I think there might be a chance where you’re, you are going to be able to maybe find an audience that you previously didn’t didn’t have an opportunity to do so. Um, and, and what, all of what you were sharing with me, my head went to this place and forgive my ignorance here, but like on the third-party cookie side of things, Are the walled gardens going to somehow not let us retarget an individual or, and by walled gardens, we’re talking Facebook, LinkedIn, and that kind of stuff, because, because, uh, Google doesn’t want to drop their cookie anymore.

Is that a thing like Facebook still has their cookies, some version of their cookie out there. So like don’t we still technically have the ability to retarget them individually in some way in the walled gardens. I think, I think the answer is yes. Right? The question is going to be, if we’re all going after the same people in that wall guard, right.

What does that impact in terms of costs in terms of the inventory that’s there, right? It’ll be interesting, but I think it’s a logical leap, right? Where are you? Where are you going to go? Where are you going to go? Where they have the most. Right. And most data is in the walled gardens, Facebook, LinkedIn, even Google itself because of the, you know, if you’re using Chrome and you’re logged in Google, still built, you know, you’re using Gmail.

Google is still accumulating a tremendous amount of information about who you are and what your. Yeah. So it sort of feels like we’re going to continue to have the ability to, to do retargeting, frankly. I’ve never seen retargeting work terribly well in a B2B world anyway. So like I didn’t as a part of a growth marketing demand gen strategy.

I don’t even like half the time, the budgets that I’ve seen that were given to the line item for retargeting were like, you know, a fraction of what you were doing for the, for the new spend anyway. So it’s like, yeah, if I, and then if I’m thinking about spending on retargeting, it’s probably just going to go to like a LinkedIn or the place where that audience, I think.

Lives anyway, like I’d rather hit them the place where I, where they’re thinking about work or whatever, or something, or maybe if I’m a, B to C company, maybe Facebook’s the right place. Although I’ve heard a lot of success for B2B brands on Facebook. So I can’t, I can’t, uh, can’t make any claims or anything.

Um, Mary, I think are Nikki. I wasn’t sure who un-muted. Um, I just wanted to go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago about the difference between B2C and B2B and how it’s going to affect kind of both sides. I think from a B2B perspective for a long time, marketers have been focused on individual leads and how many leads are being converted and how many leads their salespeople are pushing over.

And this gives them an opportunity to look at the buying group. So maybe in B2B the cohort. Buying group of individuals at an organization or a set of organizations that all have to rally around that decision and, you know, the larger the deal and the more expensive it is, the more people you’re going to have in that.

But that might be a different way to look at, you know, what the cookies future looks like.

I was, uh, you know, Mary talked about how I think the important. Really good content, especially for top of funnel is even became more important. And I started thinking about. Yeah, I think there’s been a general move, at least in some spaces to move away from gating content. And I think part of that’s because there’s been technologies that look for AI can help with intent or can, uh, but I, if I understand it, right, they’re based primarily on third-party cookies, which I could probably use a primer on first party, third party.

I don’t like, did we just skip second base? Um, you know, but it’s. Are you thinking Mary, that, you know, that’s, that’s really why that the content has to be good going to, we’re probably going to have to go back to gating. Is that part of the thought, because we can capture them and start to track them with our first party cookies.

Like I’m trying to think kind of think through that scenario. I feel like that is the ultimate challenge as marketers. And a lot of ways, personally, I am not a huge fan of gating content. I like to be helpful. And I think a great content strategy that gives people information without a lot of friction is important, but I think that’s going to be the balancing act that we have to.

Go through. And even when I start to think about the cleanliness of our data and whether or not we collect business, email addresses or let any email address in, right, like it gets into a ton of ops issues and, and huge, um, huge things that we talk about. I do think content will be critical. I don’t know that we have to get everything right, but you have to think about the value exchange in a way that.

I do feel like we got away from a little bit in the last few years, and we have to make sure that we’re providing. Maybe content that isn’t as generic as it would have been at something top of funnel for third-party intent where you don’t have great line of sight into why that person’s researching, you know, a general topic or whatever.

I think you’ll have an opportunity to be able to potentially provide, you know, more helpful, more relevant content earlier in that cycle to get someone willing, to engage with you and, and share a little bit more of their own information and exchange for the value in the content that you provide. Yeah, I think it’s going to be releasing that we had, um, Chris Walker on as a guest a couple of weeks ago.

And I think it’s really interesting. I not going to claim that I can paraphrase exactly what his view of this whole world is. But I think in, in sh one of the short versions is like, he really kind of thinks it, the only thing that really matters from a lead gen is like people who come in and say, I want to talk to somebody.

Right. And. That also can, I think that’s sort of coming at it from a different direction where you’re kind of going, okay, well, if we’re not going to it, should we gate or not? Well at the end of the day, whether you get it or not, it needs to be content. That’s going to help people figure out what is it you do and what do you offer?

And what’s the value of it. So that then they can be the hand raiser, right? Because ultimately that’s probably the best way you’re going to close. Exactly. I think it’s about that contribution to the business and to Nikki’s point, right? Like where we were so focused on leads in the past, right? It’s it’s not about that credit that you can assign.

It’s more about contribution to the business. And if you can bring those hand raisers in and get them to the demo or to the conversation quickly, it takes a lot of the other things off the two.

I think, um, you know, I, I love the idea of not getting content, uh, as well as much as possible. Um, you know, I think with the. It’s funny, like there’s this, there was a shift awhile ago about like no more gated content and then like chatbots were a thing. And then it was like, chatbots can deliver content.

And then like, you know, there’s been these kind of like digital marketing shifts that have sort of like, yeah, like we’re just going to make it really easy for someone to like, get what they need. Cause there’s a bot now, uh, or whatever. And then like, You know, kind of go hands off and, but like, how do we measure all that stuff?

And like, those questions were sort of just like left up in the air and then now we’re going cookie lists. Right. And so like, here we are, we’re all like, you know, this day and age right now in this moment, we’re saying like, yeah, like we, we still want to avoid gating content and we don’t really have the ability to measure things as accurately because cookies, some version of cookies are going away.

Um, and so. I feel like there’s this like wave of pressure, excuse me. That is going to come down on, on marketing. To, to prove value. Right. And it’s like, okay, I’m not, I’m not allowed to get content. Cause none of my buyers want gated content and I don’t have any cookies to, to do anything with, but I got to go put some stuff out in the world and then everybody’s going to be like, Hey, it’s, it’s like a PR strategy.

How do you know. Sometimes you don’t know, right. You do a press release, you do a whole bunch of brand and media interviews and all of a sudden leads spike. And at the same time you pumped a bunch of money into your demand gen pipeline, like for ad spend. And you’re like, well, what brought in the business?

Like, I dunno, it’s a little, oh yeah. And we started a podcast, right? Like, I don’t know what, but we got a bunch of your business. And so is there going to be. Because of this, like now there’s this shift on the digital advertising cookie front, that’s sort of taking the same approach of the like, go, hands-off make it easy to consume stuff.

And like, don’t be so gated and personal and creepy. Is there now, is it going to put more pressure on marketing again? Sort of seems like that’s going to happen, right? Yeah. That seems like a natural system. Correct. Um, I don’t necessarily have a great answer for how it’s gonna fall out, but I think you’re predicting, you know, probably the next two or three years worth of us figuring this out.

Um, uh, uh, you know, you, you outlined a couple of the, the, the optimal conversion points, right. You know, forms. Um, now the chat bot. Yeah, we’ve told, we’ve also talked about, you know, from a history perspective, right? We’ve all talked about creating our own walled gardens ourselves, right. For our own websites.

Right. Trying to, to entice people, to create the create accounts on that. And then of course, there’s the, you know, the, the age old technology of queerness rings, right. And be able to see the people coming through, um, and being able to at least give some level of understanding at a, at a page view perspective that did this advertisement work, or we may not be able to do as easily.

Um, trust and verify, right. Or our advertisement, or anyway, I remember the one place that, you know, that I really looked to the query strings for people to be able to, to match out what they’re saying. The click-through rate was on the ad with what I’m seeing on my website outsides, or just certain to be some kind of discrepancy there.

Right. Um, and so, yeah, I think it will be, will be harder. It’ll be interesting to see where the pendulum goes. Right. Does it go back towards world Gordon oriented? Sites for, for, for B, if we’re B2B where he can get the content, but you do have to give something great very little bit to, to create an account, or does it, uh, go back to query strings or something along these lines, to be able to stitch that together, there’s still going to be a gap and some Hocus Pocus that goes there, emerging data tables from different groups to try to make it all make sense.

And I take a bunch of. Bunch of Felix. Right. Uh, and I think if I get through it, one more thing out there, and it’s not anything that any of us have the ability to answer, but more of just like a, a call out into the wild, which is, you know, for all the financial. Kind of CRO CFOs and venture back groups that are out there.

You know, you need to be thinking about how this impacts the investments that you’ve make, right. Like into startups because. They aren’t going to be able to answer the questions as easily necessarily, you know, this type of shift along with the other shifts that the marketplace is demanding are going to force you as investors and your CFOs and your financial folks to be trying to figure out new and more creative ways, you know?

Yes, you can pass that back down to, to the sales and marketing teams to try to figure some of it out. But at the end of the day, it is going to come down to. Uh, you, as inst, as financial institutions need to understand that it’s not easy and you’d probably have to go try to figure out how to get educated on how to ask the right questions to be able to get into getting to the right data.

So it’s a little bit of a. Me on my knees begging ahead of time for all of the marketers that are out there in the world who are going to get pressure from the VCs and the CEOs are getting pressures from the VCs to say, Hey, this is going to be hard to figure out, like, don’t put too much pressure on us.

Yeah. We’ve got a small version of that now with the changes that apple made with apple mail and not, you know, so. We still have, I don’t know that we really know if it’s hasn’t materially impact or not. We really just, it’s sort of a guess. I was just talking about that with a colleague, as we were starting this episode as like, Hey, how’d the have the performance of that email go?

And she’s like, well, the clicks, I don’t look at it opens anymore. She’s like, oh, anyway, before everybody started. Okay. I want to try to take this down on another level, maybe to like, almost to a tactical level. So we’ve talked about, I know on this, we’ve talked about cohorts. We talked about first party cookies.

We’ve talked about third party cookies. Um, I think in particular, like, I think I understand how, how and where these come into play. Like I think the first party cookies is where we get the, the walled garden kind of thing. And third-party cookies is maybe when you go outside of the walled garden. But so, but if I remember if I understand it, right, like today, like probably everyone listening has some form of marketing automation platform that they’re using and it’s probably using.

Unless you paid extra or did something different implementation, probably using a third party cookie, right. For the tracking you’re getting out of that just right off the top. Right. So I guess it would help them, like, what do you like, how do we know? Like, what’s the difference between those. Is there something we should be doing now, if we’re using third, if like, if we’re using third party cookies, whether we know it or not, like, so maybe one step is just go figure out.

If we are like, then do we need to change first party cookies? Is, are you options? Like, what are the things we need to do from that? Like really tactical standpoint and start working towards that. And I don’t like I’ll open up the floor. I don’t know which of you is probably best suited to start this up.

That part of the conversation. Okay. I saw Nicki nodding her head a lot. So I’ll take a shot. Um, so it’s cookies plus, right? Like looking at your first party data set. So all the data that you have collected that you own is proprietary to your organization. You’ve probably collected consent along the way, make sure that your first party data collection strategy.

Makes sense. You’re collecting the things that you’re actually going to use. I can’t tell you the amount of data I’ve seen organizations collect, and then it just sits in your database and no one ever uses it. So be really purposeful about the data. In addition to the cookie that you’re collecting, um, third party data, right?

That’s where other organizations go out and they have all this information that you can either. Bye borrow, you know, be part of, um, and you don’t have consent to that, but you, you basically pay to target those people. One thing that, um, actually, Mary, Greg and I were talking about a couple of weeks ago was the idea of second party data.

And I hadn’t really thought about it before, but for organizations that have other business entities, um, like under their corporate umbrella or even partners that they work with, you can actually share your databases. Right. And you’re going to end up finding these matches that make a lot of sense for who you’re selling to and who your prospects are.

And the Villa, the validity and the cleanliness of that second party data is going to be really close to your first party data. And it’s going to be more clean than third party data as well. So it’s kind of understanding that there are three different ways you can capture data and cookies and making sure that you have a strategy for each and just do what’s right for, for your company.

Concept, you know, particularly for B2B where you’ve seen a lot of, uh, maybe, uh, a lot of acquisition happening for getting company, right. You end up with, you might end up with two, three, you know, uh, CRM to Salesforce and then. Maybe a HubSpot or, you know, something along these lines. And, you know, it’s really hard to get those, those, those technologies to, to share data and talk to each other for a lot of companies.

Right. And so, you know, one option from a visiting from a web visitor perspective are these, these, these concepts of the third parties and being able to have someone opting in effectively to be able to share those across and the intelligence you get as a result of that, um, I, I I’ve, I, you know, I’ve conceived this, I haven’t, I haven’t finished this kind of an implementation myself, but I’m very interested in it and being able to, to explore this further, right.

We’ve seen, uh, one of our, uh, uh, one of my colleagues, uh, over, uh, clearly tells us. About, um, you know, uh, you know, being on a Wikipedia and getting a message that says, Hey, you know, cause he was, he was doing a donation using his Amazon account. Right. And that notification that says, can we share data across?

Right. So these partnerships are really interesting, but I think the, the, the, from a B2B perspective, what Mick Mickey saying is really fascinating about how you can get different divisions of a co of a company, that to be able to share data and really, you know, kind of a tide raises all ships approach.

Mike and your ad tech world. Did you, did you, did you ever do partnerships like that? Like when, when, uh, um, I, I wasn’t there long enough to, to get into the inner workings of, of how all of the data exchange happened. Um, there was a mix, right? Um, they were their own ad network. They purchased inventory from other sites and so they have their own.

Inventory to show, um, advertisements on. And then of course they had, uh, strategic partnerships with other. Providers to extend the reach of their, their inventory. Right? So if you only had so many, so many, uh, square banner ads purchased on across, you know, 10,000 sites, then they needed more. Right. Um, so they certainly were doing some sort of, uh, ability and partnership to kind of tap into display ports, to go, you know, show that, that information.

And I’m sure that there was more to it than just that, but this, this idea of. We’re sort of seeing this idea of like co-selling shared data emerge really rapidly. I think I’ve been exposed to it a lot more lately, just probably because of like talking to all of you, amazing people. Um, but yeah. I think the innovation that’s going to come from this is going to be super, super interesting.

Like there’s totally a possible, you know, platform or platforms where as an organization, maybe I say, Hey, I know, um, my product, you know, SAS product, a pairs really well with all of these other SAS products. And so I’m going to sign up for the. This platform where it sort of MD five hashes, all of our data.

Right. And we sort of figure out what our, what our overlap is. And then we go to market together and we just say like, Hey, it looks like we have about a 20% overlap in terms of target customers and audience. And so how do you do enablement? And you’re seeing some of that come from folks like partners Stack.

A couple of those other partner platforms, but it’s really on the partnership side of things. And so that’s like super rapidly going to come into this idea of the marketing operations professional and managing that from the marketing side of things beyond just like the relationship building and all of the intricacies of building a partnership portfolio.

I think that’s, that’s going to be really, really, really interesting. Um, and, and one more thing that I would add to it is the players that I would keep an eye on. Our folks like, like HubSpot, like right now, I, I, we use HubSpot, right? I happen to also technically be considered a partner of HubSpot, even though we don’t resell or do anything, but I have the ability to do that.

And because I have that technology on locked inside of our environment, I see an option to co register a lead. And so like, it’s all built on one tech stack, one ecosystem, one platform. And now I can co register, uh, a record that’s shared inside of that platform’s ecosystem. And we can go sell together with another partner with another rep from HubSpot.

And all it takes is their ability to take that technology and turn it on for a completely different SAS company. And now I can, I can identify my go to market partners inside of hubs. So if I, as a, as a community, think that everybody should also be a member of pavilion because they offer something great.

Why not? Now I could say, Hey, pavilion, check this record out. They’re really interested in this education stuff. Like let’s, let’s do some stuff together. Like that kind of technology can be unlocked in an instant inside of a platform that’s like as tightly built as like a HubSpot or something. So it’s really, really fascinating.

So I actually made a note, Mike it’s like, we need to get our. Our map chairs to do a session on what they are learning about what the platforms are doing around this. Cause I think it’s going to be really important. I want to, I want to circle back real quick about the cookies. So if we’ve got, you know, like if we were to inventory our tech and we figured out, well, we’ve got third-party cookies with our marketing automation platform or Salesforce, whatever.

Should we be working with, um, uh, to somehow change them over to some sort of first party cookie? Or what should we be doing? I was like, I don’t like, I don’t know what that’s going to ask that. Yeah. Yeah, I can take a pass at that. I think you’ve already nailed it right. That we have to, the first thing I would say is inventory where you’re using those third party cookies and take a really good long look at, are those cookies serving you?

Well, when you think about the reporting and everything that you can do with them today, I feel like in this conversation alone, we’ve, we’ve kind of talked about and Mike. You know the value of some of those third party cookies from a B2B perspective in general. So I think now’s a great time to kind of pause and really spend some time evaluating their use and honestly, reach out to those vendors.

I’ve been talking to a lot of peers myself and saying, okay, what, what are you doing? What are you hearing from your vendors? And going back to what Michael just brought up from a marketing automation platform perspective, lean on them. We’re all going through this change together. At th you know, we’re going to have to figure it out together as we move forward and learn from each other.

So ask the questions, evaluate whether or not they’re serving you in the way that you expect. And then go from there. It’s going to take some time for us to figure it out, across kind of systems and process, and a lot of change management too. I think for us as marketing operations folks, to figure out. In partnership with our content teams and our digital teams, how we’re really going to evolve kind of a fuller strategy across an organization.

Then the other piece that I would add that ties in with what we were just talking about. Uh, and Nikki brought this up really evaluating your use of first party data and making sure that you’re collecting it in a consistent and clean way across all of your incoming data sources. It is going to become even more critical in the future and kind of a back to the basics approach with, with your own data there.

The other thing I was going to add to that, I learned a lot, particularly in my last role is you’ve need a really, really great partner on the legal side. Who’s willing to dig in with you. And frankly, you know, understand marketing maybe in a way that they’re not used to understanding marketing and you’re going to have to lean in and, and understand some of the legal pieces.

I feel like every time I log in, I see some new regulation or new. You know, particularly from Europe coming in, that feels like it’s another thing to stay on top of. So I think it’s, you know, it’s a lot of education. It’s a lot of change management that you’re going to have to do across teams and helping people, not panic, but just, you know, evaluate where you’re at from a first and third party side and come up with a game plan for how you’re going to evolve over time.

Uh, we all, like, I almost want to just stop there. Yeah. Like that’s, that’s the outline right there that we needed. That’s awesome. Um, okay. So I w there was another piece that I thought of here, and this goes back to, I’ll go all the way back to the conversations about cohorts and content. And I was thinking one of the other pieces that we probably as marketers in general, Really get better at is identifying and R whether you call it ICP or persona or, you know, but I think it’s going to be really critical for us to understand what those look like.

You, you, Nikki, you mentioned buying groups, right? So I think that’s like, all those things are gonna become more important if we’re going to be, they have a chance that targeting people in this sort of new world of how we’re doing it. Agree, disagree.

I agree. I was just going to say, I fully agree and I think. Everyone kind of needs to take a step back and look at their overarching, go to market strategy, right? Like we’re starting with, oh, this action is going to be happening in 2023, but it’s going to affect so much that people have to take a step back and understand who they’re talking to and why, and the value they’re providing to them.

Um, cause right now, like I can tell you that we’re probably marketing to people that might not actually be one of our customers. Right. Cause we’re almost, we’re we’re out there too much. We’re targeting too many. Right. So go ahead, Greg. Uh, you know, I’ll add to that with it. You know, some of the piece of both you and Mary mentioned, right.

You know, with, with respect to the first party data that we have in the data with our systems, you know, there are a couple of real challenges, right. You know, Nikki, you, you said a few minutes ago, right? Just the number, the amount of data that we do have some of which we are not like. Right. Meaning that we’re not actually bringing it to, um, you know, bringing it together to, to, to enrich the story about a given deal or given a person or given a organization.

And, you know, it feel like maybe over the last say five to eight years, really what people did was they threw their hands up right at their own internal systems that it became untenable for them to kind of sort heads or tails out of it. And so rather than. You know, kind of cleaning house, right. And really focusing on, can we do something like a buying group?

Can we understand, uh, you know, intent within our data or really kind of look at just in the simple gaps of the target accounts and my ICP that I do have in my system, do I actually even have contacts on there? Right. Do I have contacts at the right level? There isn’t a lot of people will, I think will, will float back over to that side where they have to, to really look at what they have and you know, in their house and do.

Right. I think that’s why you’re seeing, you know, a lot of, you know, rebooting the CRM or, or, you know, uh, changing out, uh, in some cases the CRM, because it became, they’ve gotten to a place, you know, just like that basement, right. That just is just too cluttered. But you know, you can’t just throw everything out.

You do actually have to understand what’s in there to sort out, what’s going to go, what’s going to go and what’s going to stay and then understand in a future. What is it that we actually need to buy? What is it that we need to stay away from around that? So I’m interested to see how that, that particular evolution as people reinvest in CRM is because it’s been, I’ve heard the first time I was introduced to Salesforce, uh, you know, just clicking into, into 2000 ish, right?

The, you know, we’re talking now 21 years, right? There’s a reimagination what it means to have customer relationship management. And there’s a, there’s a mixture of data at a product level at a, uh, uh, products, uh, you know, from a product, a usage perspective, product support perspective, as well as what you’re seeing at a deal level, right.

From a marketing perspective. And then just how sales is interacting with them and bringing that together to create it, create a more holistic picture. Not, not, you know, certainly easier said than done. Right. But I think that, that, that, uh, it’s something in particular, I do expect more investment on, um, you know, there’s always a, there’s an equal opposite, right?

So people will invest in this and then they’ll be like, oh, I’m going to go. I need to go. I need to go do something else for a little while. But I think the next few years will be about getting that house in order. I mean, I think I’ve heard. The other variation of that I’ve seen about trying to clean, clean up is this sort of not trying to clean up the systems, but putting whether it’s a CDP or some sort of data lake or data warehouse underneath it.

And that’s where you’re doing the cleanup, but that’s where you do some of that stuff. Uh, Yeah, I do. I do think there’s a, there’s an interesting distinction between the data lake in terms of being able to accumulate that data and being able to gather intelligence about your business. Right. I, you know, I, and I’ve, I’ve had, I’ve struggled with that as well as.

Uh, it’s, it’s only half the battle, right? To put it on to the lake. You have to be able to tell that you have to be able to understand what is the data, um, uh, sort of, uh, reading between the lines of the data, about the individuals, about the contacts across systems. And that’s a, that’s a different strategy, right?

Um, than simply just bringing it together and running. Yep. I agree. All right. So we’re kind of running short on time. So I’m going to, I’m going to let you each kind of go round Robin here. One last question. Is there anything that we’ve missed in this conversation that you think is really important for people to know about or any point you want to kind of clarify?

Um, and I’m going to go right to left on my screen for those listening, you know, following along on the field. Uh, so I’m going to start with Nikki then Mary and Greg, and then we’ll wrap it up. I think it’s really important for people to understand that overarching ramifications to their business and to start working with their teams and their leadership.

Um, because as you go up and down, the, the marketing and operations and leadership spectrum, you’re going to have a variety of, um, levels of understanding, levels of caring. Um, and I think it’s just going to be important for people to understand that like the whole team needs to get behind this and the whole machine has to work together in order to be successful and ready for when it happens in 2023.

Awesome. What I would add is, is going back to something. Greg was just talking about a little bit and thinking about it from a marketing side, I think we’re going to have to be able to really orchestrate journeys using engagement that’s happening across our, I’m gonna say our business Stack, not just our, our MarTech stack.

But frankly, across marketing, across sales and across customer success, to be able to say if from a first party perspective, this is, these are all of the engagement points that, you know, whether it’s an account or an individual’s having with you. So you can really make sure that you’re serving them up the right content based on where they are and having your first party data house in order and across all versions of the stack is going to be really.

Uh, you know, for me with most of what, what, what helps me, uh, orient in these situations? I, I, you know, I have six rules that I’ve that I sort of operate by as a person. The first rule was calmed down. I think that applies here. Right? Um, yeah, I think Mike, you talked a little to that, Michael, you get to the second one is.

Right. You can’t just ignore the realities that there is change. And that, uh, as Nikki said, we got to think about this with our leadership and how we’re going to go about it. As Mike said, what the gaps going to be in terms of us understanding what, you know, w when I put, when I, when I do, when I pull this lever over here, that I did the right things, come down and come out of that, uh, down the trap, um, is thinking more than one way.

Right. Uh, and I think that that’s critical. All right. When we’re talking about change, but I think that the change is always around us. Right. So thinking more than one way of making decisions, like it’s your money, right. I think that a lot of times with the third party data, uh, it was really easy to buy or to do that.

Um, last one and you’ve heard me say before is trust and verify. I think it’s important, particularly as we, as we evolve these, uh, our uses of these technologies to find ways to make sure that it’s worth it right. Uh, to make sure, you know, have a one-on-one out policy in terms of technology. Right. You know, just like a very popular bar, right.

One-on-one out. Right. Um, and then, uh, number six. Right, right. Which I think is very germane to the whole, my, my, my basic thesis here with respect to. Uh, the whole of privacy, right. Which is basically never forget that you’re dealing with real people with real lives and real feelings. And I think that that the combination of those rules apply to this or anything that the MO Pros or are confronted with we’ll, we’ll help them find their, find their way through it.

Hello. I met Greg six rules for life. I like, so I can see for those who are listening, you can’t see Mary and Nikki are both nodding their heads vigorously here that I think they’ve heard this before. So, um, anyway, so it’s been great. This has been, it’s been a great conversation. Um, so again, kind of round Robin, uh, you know, people want to, can I follow up with you guys about this topic or anything else, or catch up with you?

Where can they find you? You can find me on LinkedIn. I have a grand vision of putting together a little infographic and partnership with Nikki and Greg on this. So we’ll try and get that out there for everybody. Yep. So for Nikki, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I respond to almost all notes except for the lazy salespeople.

Sorry for that. Very true though.

Greg. Oh yeah. You know, for me, not to not to join the club here, but LinkedIn does help. Uh, I like the, I like being able to connect people through that. I will say though, um, and Mary knows this, I do have a general lives rule. Right? Like I, you know, I will answer. Um, at least one or two outreach emails, right.

A week, just to try to keep myself on point in terms of what’s happening out there and try to put good, you know, good energy out there into the world too. So, um, but LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me. All right, here we go. This has been fun. I, I I’ve actually been taking a bunch of notes, so I am like, I need to go back to my realization.

Getting some of this stuff going don’t wait, right. Starting out is I think that was one of the six roles. Right. So, um, thank you so much for this Nikki, Mary and Greg. Appreciate it. Um, Mike, thanks for you. And, uh, thanks to all you listening and, and, uh, we will catch you on the next episode. Bye everyone.

Thanks everybody. Bye bye.