Don't Fear The Data, with the Experts from The Data Driven Marketer

For today's episode, we shoot the shizzle with Adam Kerpelman and Mark Richardson of The Data Driven Marketer Podcast. Usually they record in their "data basement", but today host Taylor Shanklin invites them on to enlighten-izzle us on about their work in marketing. They discuss their experience in the industry, their methods for success, and their advice for other entrepreneurs.

The Data Team discuss their backgrounds in video production and content creation, and how they got into the world of marketing and data. They discuss their current project, which is a platform that helps marketers target their campaigns more effectively. They also talk about how they see the future of marketing, and how their platform can help marketers reach the right people on all the different channels that are available today.

It was Halloween not too long ago, and we jump in for the creepiness factor of targeted ads and how they work. Targeted ads to specific people? Are we there yet? Spooky to think! This plus more topics are sizzled up such as;

• The Benefits and Risks of Personalized Advertising
• The Importance of Advertising in Branding and Storytelling
• Creating Content: A Case Study
• Creating Content that Serves Multiple Purposes

🎃👻 🎃👻Happy Halloween Everyone from the whole team here at Creative Shizzle!

If you want to learn more about Adam & Mark and the 'Data is Dope' Team you can connect with them here;
@thekerp
@thadamage
@datadrivenpod

Or on LinkedIn:

And also make sure to visit their site for some dope data:

https://www.netwisedata.com/data-driven/

Transcript

Taylor Shanklin  0:01  
Hey Hey you lovely people out there. You've got a lot going on in your day with big dreams and big goals for your world. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from leading entrepreneurs, changemakers coaches, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up. I'm your host Taylor Shankland, CEO and founder of creative shizzle and I am stoked to bring you a fresh episode of talking shizzle today, this show is all about helping you think differently so that you can grow. Talking shizzle is brought to you by our team at Creative shizzle where we help businesses, entrepreneurs, and social good innovators make amazing marketing shizzle happen. Check us out on the web at Creative shizzle.com Now, let's talk some shizzle All right, welcome. Welcome back, folks, we are here with another episode of talking shizzle we're gonna get into all sorts of shizzle. Today entrepreneur stories, some fancy, personalized identity based advertising. So I'm excited to introduce our guests today we've got Adam Kerpelman and Mark Richardson on the line, you guys are with net WISE data. Give us a quick intro on who you are, what you're about. And what you love to do in this crazy world of marketing.

Mark Richardson  1:37  
I can dive in my name is Mark Richardson. I'm one of the CO hosts of the data driven Marketer Podcast, which is sponsored by net WISE data. Our employer, I'm the Digital Marketing Director, as well as one of the podcast hosts. And my background is primarily SEO based, but I'm currently owning all things demand gen. And I just enjoy helping brands succeed and better tracking their marketing efforts from a full funnel approach and optimize their conversions wherever they're looking to do that. So that's that's what's brought me here today.

Adam Kerpelman  2:10  
And I'm here because Mark, Mark said, Hey, you want to do a podcast? I said, Yeah, I mean, you know, that's probably the thing I've practiced the most at in life, other than swimming, but that's another story. I'm Head of Marketing at nowise. So I'm way a level above everything mark just talked about strategically using those tools, as well as content creation and all that kind of stuff. My background that I largely share with Mark is in video production and content creation and kind of we got we got early to the, hey, you should have an explainer video on YouTube party, and managed to build a whole sort of career on the back of that basically, which has included podcasts, like the second I saw Kevin Smith doing podcasts, I was like, that's the future of something, and I'm gonna start practicing. Talking just for an hour about any topic, someone loves me, so I never have to be prepared. Don't take that casually. But that's sort of the core skill set. So the current project that we're working on, we provide targeting data for marketing campaigns. It's always hard to describe without it sounding a little bit creepy. We're only b2b. So we have lanes, we can plan there. They're not as maybe creepy as people feel when you talk about that stuff these days because of Facebook and the other things. But yeah, the reality is, we're in a really interesting spot because we're marketers selling to marketers, a tool that can help them do the stuff that we get to kind of just do all day which is right at the edge of you know, the how do you make sure the right people are getting your message at the right time on all of the channels in a kind of modern, you know, everyone is familiar with the modern media ecosystem. Now, it's not just go get ads on cable, right? It's Instagram, tik, Tok, LinkedIn, Twitter, it's all everyone has all of them. And so our whole platform is about pulling together the audience data, you need to go to those platforms and upload a file and know that you're really strategically hitting the right people for your 

Taylor Shanklin  4:08  
Well, I've got a question for y'all. Would you like to sponsor this episode? And get us in front of some people with your data?

Adam Kerpelman  4:18  
We can definitely help you with how to use the platform. In spite of our Yeah, well, in spite of the recent acquisition by Dun and Bradstreet, the budget, I might but the problem is the we still have the startup budget until we kind of roll over into the mothership of Dun and Bradstreet really taken us over so

Mark Richardson  4:39  
I love it though. I like to tell my friends like once they their eyes kind of glaze over I start talking about, you know, matching b2b data points and b2c data points and creating a unified customer profile their eyes, you know, sort of get this like recessed look in their eye and I'm like, Oh, we're big brother. You know, we're like incepting people then it kind of brings The back of like, oh inception, you were like the spinning top, in your mind that you don't realize is actually influencing you as you navigate the Internet. But were there subconsciously infiltrating your psychology? Or were giving you or giving other teams the tools to do that.

Adam Kerpelman  5:16  
It's all legal because it's anonymous, right? So this is the thing I don't think people understand when they talk about that tracking stuff. Like a lot of that infrastructure is we look around in the platform, and I can't see anything I'm not allowed to see legally. And it's a lot of like, take one data file that you can't read. And you align it with another data file that you can't read. And then it exports another data file that you can't read. And then you take that to Instagram, and you know, that you compliantly put together and then you need it for your target audiences and stuff

Mark Richardson  5:45  
like and all publicly available information. Oh, it should probably give that caveat

Adam Kerpelman  5:49  
out of that, too. Yeah. Especially in the b2b space, because it's it's a lot of businesses with government filings and stuff like that. 

Taylor Shanklin  5:56  
No, I mean, it is a thing. It's, it's funny, it's like you can go in this direction, where people are either really, really creeped out by it. Or you can go in the direction. And this is a question that we get from our clients. So what can we send someone? Like Jamie? Exactly, Janie. I mean, when I say Janie, a specific Facebook ad, I'm like, we can't quite do that. Because there's privacy, you know? And so it's like, yeah, we can go around, you can get pretty good around interest and things like that. But I'm like, No, I can't like actually ensure that person, just see it.

Adam Kerpelman  6:34  
I'll say from inside the tech, like, where we are on the tech side, we are ever increasingly closer to doing that. But I think it doesn't play out the way that they imagine. You can start to thread it together. But it's more of this dynamic thing where it's not like the company necessarily has that data. It's just, they're building their site to be able to respond to it. And I do think we're increased, like we're getting closer to it being Oh, hello, Adam. And me not being creeped out by it. Because I understand that, you know, the standards are in place to make that sort of compliant from the standpoint of like, it's not creepy. It's just how the internet works. Like, sure I'm not a name to the website, if I haven't logged in, but I am an IP address. I have to be they can't send the files to my my browser to show me the things. So

Mark Richardson  7:21  
whether it's your mobile ID, you know, tied to a name. I mean, I think we're I think we're we're probably we're, if we're talking about like a dynamic ad insertion type of universe. That's interesting. You know, I don't think we're far off from that. I mean, it is it's, it's both scary to the consumer, but maybe exciting to to brands, I think the place this is something we talk about a lot of where brands are really succeeding is in the metaverse, you know, things like like the Windies playground in VR, you know, this is what one thing we've kind of bandied about and brainstormed, you know, possibilities for, for making digital experiences that connect to, you know, a discount in, you go through the drive thru and you get, you know, your, your meal for $1. Because you you want the Game Shooting hamburgers into a basket in the in the VR, Wendy's playgym you know what I mean? So there's, I think there's, there's opportunities for differentiation, and, you know, and personalization, like you're talking about that aren't necessarily, you know, the creepy banner ads following you around all your platforms. Although we could get we could be in that. I think we could be in that realm very soon as well.

Taylor Shanklin  8:27  
Two things. First off, I'm curious. So, Mark, you're kind of like the science. It's interesting. You're kind of the science guy around this. And then Adam or as Acharya curp, you're kind of the creative, you know, so it's like, Y'all are kind of like this dynamic duo of science and art coming together. Would you say that? 

Adam Kerpelman  8:50  
Yeah, for sure. It's the reason I tap Mark whenever I can to pull them on to a team is so that that split can exist? Because when I don't have the right team, for the type of marketing that I think we're talking about at the edge of this stuff, then I have to do all of it. And it's still rare to find people that understand that the technical side in the way that that Mark does for sure. And it's really, it's like, it's a funny thing to talk about in that way. Because it doesn't feel like expertise, when you just kind of made all the shit up as you went along. Which is the experience of anyone, like our age right now. There was no there wasn't an SEO class in college. Like it was just sort of like, oh, okay, well, this is the stuff you can do to rank better in Google. And that's what clients care about. So keep chasing, it will keep learning about it, whatever. But here we are, like 20 years later, you know,

Mark Richardson  9:40  
it's the scientific method, you know, it's like, it's like, come up with an idea. Test it gather data set, look at what you were trying to prove, or did you prove your hypothesis? Did you did it fail? Did it succeed? And then take, you know, take those learnings and look at that as your control group and then we isolate a variable to test for the next round is kind of my That's kind of the system that I've that I've built and tried to employ with any, you know, freelance clients or when I'm employed full time at a place like like net wise Dun and Bradstreet, it's kind of the approach, I will apply to any channel, whether that's, you know, Google or Facebook or Tik Tok, it's like, start with an assumption, challenge that assumption with content, and let the audience signals kind of inform your future decisions. I always say, your audience will tell you what's, what's working and what isn't working. That's the beautiful thing about being being data driven.

Adam Kerpelman  10:31  
The way I say it often on the other podcasts, and it's kind of the essence of what we, what we'd like to explore over there is, yeah, historically, on the creative side, although, like I said, there's a lot of client work, because there's sort of that thing of like, okay, the stuff I've write isn't quite good enough, but I'm really good at facilitating the process of making it happen. But there's still, you know, if you end up executive producer of a web series, you're still involved in this process that like, there are parts of it, that just always made me feel achy. And data makes a lot of them better. And I'll give you the the example that what I hated the most was casting, because it's just like, for Joker sitting in a room, and then a parade of people come through. And you kind of you try to make a value judgment based on what you're trying to align with, or like who whatever. And it's like, there's also no way that just the people in that room aren't putting their own bias on top of like, well, this person is more attractive than that person, or I don't like short people, like whatever, you know, thing inside of that. And I was just, I could never, I was never not aware of it during that process and hated it so much. And there's extrapolations of that, right? Like when you're in a creative meeting, and you're trying to decide like, what you think will resonate, unless you have the bandwidth, which we never generally do, to actually do, like user testing around branding and stuff. Yeah, you're just kind of it's just fanfiction. past a point, like, you're just going, Okay, I think I know the consumer well enough, now, I'm gonna guess that they'll like the pink horse. And then and then like, after that meeting, I'd be sitting there going, ha, I just I don't I think I just liked the Band Chorus, let's try it out. The new answer is just do all 10, which kind of gets to your product, I think, which is a lot of creative stuff. It's, it's exciting to me, because we get to try more stuff. Instead of having to have this sort of internal fight among creatives about like, which one works better or not, it's just got an idea for five color schemes, run them all, at the top of the funnel, and see which one gets clicked on more and by the right day by the people that you want. And now you don't really have to have the uncomfortable fight about casting, it's still a weird thing. It's why I don't work at videos anymore. But, but where we are in ad creative for a marketing department. And what we hope to facilitate for other marketers is that, you know, that universe that like, to me starts filling Utopia on both ends. On the creative side, you don't have to fuss as much about perfect targeting. And you can just kind of try tests and let the user tell you what they want. And because you have that feedback signal, you can make better stuff for the user. And so when we talk about like creepy tracking, advertising has to exist, people don't mind advertising, they mind advertising that isn't relevant to them, or that's intrusive in its injection point into your sort of attention, you know, stream, I guess, but like, I love it when I see an ad for a thing that I actually wanted. So yeah, both ends, you know, and so we're kind of right in the middle of going, Hey, I think we can help with both.

Taylor Shanklin  13:30  
Yeah, I sometimes laugh about how, you know, like, I'll tell my friends I'm like, it's some Instagram ads, like really work on me. Like, they really figure it out. And like, I've actually discovered a lot of products and like software platforms and things like that, that I use now even ones that I use for my business that targeted me on Instagram, and then I'm like, Oh, well, let me see what that is. And then I go on, I do the research and so it works. What I don't like is Robo callers and email spammers and that sort of thing. But I'm like I'm cool with seeing a targeted ad on a social media channel. You know, like that's that's acceptable to me now in this day and age.

Mark Richardson  14:14  
I'm glad to hear that I think I think there is a great place for advertising in you know, it's almost like the necessary evil we'll call it but but for brands it's it really is it's part of your storytelling and I you know, I came my background is also in in theater and film you know with Kevin and I - Will and I's mutual mutual friend - we connected a lot in improv acting and and comedy and stuff and so I like to think about what is the enchantment what is that in you know, kind of undefinable quality you know, it's being it's kind of being willing to to give a fun take or a different take on the theme that everybody's expecting and then and that's like, wow, okay, that brand, you know, that brand did something different that brand did something unexpected or maybe a little Big you know, and that's, if you're not in the places where the people are, no one's going to discover you, you know. So there's, there's, there's an inherent component of okay, advertising has to exist in order for for products to gain awareness and acceptance or whatever, you know. So if you can make that a more personalized, intelligent experience, I'm, I'm the same way like, you know, I love traveling, I love going to concerts. So the more you know, I don't mind seeing, you know, bands, even if they're not necessarily my favorite band, just the fact that I'm continually getting, whether it's Fleetwood Mac or king gizzard and the lizard wizard, and who is one of my favorite bands. And, you know, it's like, keeps showing me keeps showing me more more concert information, more movie releases, you know, I'm maybe a little less interested in things like fishing trips or wine expedition, you know, like, don't sell me a wine. Napa package, maybe like, that's still cool. But that's like less personalized to me. So I think my browsing behavior reflects that. So the more the more we can be accurate reflections of people's actual interest as advertisers, the more we can intuitively serve that back to them, I think we're doing I think, I think we're not doing a disservice to commerce into people's psychology, it's when you like you said, it's when you get really aggressive like, email spamming or doing things that aren't in deference to people's privacy, and saying, or like trying to sell them antidepressants, because you know, that they were they visited their therapist two days ago, you know, or weird stuff like that, I think is where it becomes too invasive. That was a long rant.

Taylor Shanklin  16:36  
No, no, I appreciate it. You said something Mark earlier about, you know, the audience will give you signals out of curiosity, either either your professional opinions and or what you do with your data platform, like what are the most important signals to look for? What is the feedback you want to be looking at?

Adam Kerpelman  16:59  
The obnoxiously broad answer that we would give on the podcast is, it depends on how you've designed your tests. Like that's the scientific method, part of it is you should design your tests toward understanding which signal you're paying attention to, and why and what you hope it'll prove. So the answer could be all of them. Anyone? It depends on what you're trying to discover.

Mark Richardson  17:22  
Most channels will have like a media, you know, yeah, it's a lot of that is kind of defy that's, I think it's kind of a nebulous, it's like, which, I mean, obviously, when you're dealing with these digital platforms, you're getting so many signals that can be kind of like, it can be overload. It's like, well, which, you know, which metric do I focus on? As a branding agency as a content marketing agency, I imagine, you know, things like, click through, you know, that's something I look for in my organic content, you know, I'm looking for socially, I'm looking at which got shared the most, you know, interestingly, like we have, and just anecdotally, our podcast, you know, we have a wide cross section of folks, come on and talk to us from like, published authors and Ted Talk keynote speakers down to people who are just in the tools working like sales, sales, execs, account execs, you know, we kind of run the gamut. And one thing we look for is, is when, you know, when we publish on LinkedIn, if we share a post, you know, how, how viral does that go? How powerful is the guest network? Are they excited to share the content that we've created. So that's one of the things that we look for simply just as an example, for from the data driven marketer is what is which conversations seem to seem to drive the most excitement are the most engagement on LinkedIn. And so then we try to look at that, more or less in in a silo and say, for our LinkedIn audience, we know that these topics do really well date, you know, maybe it's data, maybe it's digital advertising, or like programmatic, something really kind of in the weeds. Whereas if we go on to, on the tick tock, it's probably more advantageous to talk kind of broadly, you know, because we're, the goal for that is just to drive people to follow us, as opposed to get them all the way down the funnel. Whereas we know that LinkedIn, it may be more effective, we could expect some more quote unquote, conversions, you know, or contact form fills, or meeting requests, these these more highly qualified conversion events, you know, so it's kind of just defining what you want to get out of each platform. And then trying to scale that.

Adam Kerpelman  19:29  
I think another good sort of concrete example is, is even higher in the funnel, we think very with a similar mindset about the higher like, like upper funnel, more traffic, more raw traffic, you know, to your website level of things, you know, programmatic stuff like that. There. All of our campaigns essentially have 10 possible headlines, 10 possible sub heads, 10 possible images, and then we mash all of that. together into five to 600 possible combinations. And then you put it all at the top and then just kind of acts the bottom 10% Until you know which ones your performers are and then kind of double down on that. And that's, that's an example of signal coming back where you're saying, Okay, for the people that we try to catch here, this image resonates, and this image resonates. And then it's one of my favorite parts of the process, because occasionally, it's like that one word, okay? Okay, we learned something here.

Mark Richardson  20:28  
Usually, it's the one you're less like, there's I forget who the author is. But the book, it was like, kill your darlings, kill your babies is the was the author, it's some, it's like being able to kind of detach from the thing you're most, you know, the idea you're most in love with. And like being able to kind of move on and recognize the point where that idea has, you know, doesn't really have legs or isn't working. So the beautiful thing about content creation, like I said, if we can get you can get signal from, you know, what you would consider your end user, your consumer or the the marketplace. But I think one thing that I've found in my career as a host, and a content creator has been the ability to kind of have a double edged sword or a Swiss army knife with a single piece of content. So and when I say that, I'm going to give you an example, when I worked for a vaporizer company, back almost 10 years ago, now, there's a company called vapor.com. And you know, if like E cigs and vapes, they're all very similar. So one of the things the the program that me and my producer put together was just educational videos, what makes one vape different from another one. And from there, like not only did we increase our sales and drive revenue from all of our social channels that hadn't existed before, but we're also educating our internal wholesale team, who was trying to sell these in bulk, you know, across the country to to mom and pop shops. So it not only did educate the people watching on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, you know, all the social channels that we were running Google, but it was also, it served as collateral internally, that helped to drive more lift from from the wholesale, or the sales team. So that's one thing I always kind of try to do in content production is making sure that it's not serves internal purposes, and can be educational, if even here, net wise, but I found I find like, there's immense opportunities for us to educate, you know, our own sales team on how we're using the data. As we say, We're marketers marketing to marketers, which which gets back to that like Inception, construct, I feel like we exist in you know, we're sort of we're like, we're like little like, kind of like rats in the in, in the cage, like marketing to other other rats that are testing stuff out other other little hamster wheels. The point being, I think you asked about how to know when signal was working. And so I think the feedback has to be the best content, I think it serves both the digital audience as well as your internal stakeholders are your team. And I think a lot of times we lose, you know, I've worked with clients who just don't even have that as part of their consideration set. And I always think that great content should be evergreen and shared throughout an organization as well as external effectiveness.

Taylor Shanklin  23:19  
I totally agree with you. And you're, you're speaking my language so much, because I agree, there's so many ways to and I love that example of like the Swiss Army Knife piece of content, right, where you're like, Okay, how do we use this for a lot of different ways and repurpose it and bring in the internal stakeholders to both educate them and help them with sales, marketing and all of that. So, all right, well, I've got I want to switch gears a little bit to kind of wrap it up. Last thing I want to hear from you. What is the best compliment you've ever gotten? Adam, you go,

Adam Kerpelman  23:56  
Okay, I was just gonna say mark him go. Well, I know, I know this one. Because I think about it frequently. Still, early in my production career. I worked with a guy who, I don't remember what the event was that caused it to happen. Exactly. But it he said to me, you know, I don't always like your creative decisions. But you've finished every project you ever said you were going to do. And I was like, sweet, I can live with that. If that's like my only claim to fame for the rest of my life. That I actually do. The stupid creative things I pitch.

Taylor Shanklin  24:34  
That's a great compliment. Yeah, that's and a good characteristic. So you keep finishing your projects- 

Adam Kerpelman  24:42  
even if they're stupid. Sometimes that cost some investors a lot of money, but you know, is what it is.

Mark Richardson  24:49  
There'll be a fun project. We're actually we're going to be launching one of our crazy ideas at Dreamforce up in up in San Francisco here in September. Coming up so So stay tuned for that we're gonna have a lot of

Adam Kerpelman  25:03  
Yeah, if anybody will be there, come find me and get some NFTs when some stuff.

Taylor Shanklin  25:08  
People want to find you guys online and listen to your podcast and learn more about these creepy products that you're selling at the state a company, how do they find?

Adam Kerpelman  25:22  
Yeah, data driven dot news is at the top of the rabbit hole if you want to jump in on the on the podcast and the website that will also link you to net wise ultimately, and they'll have the the CTA buttons you need to do the things if you want to actually play with our product. Personally, I'm the curb on Twitter as well and generally pretty accessible there. So pay me if any of the nonsense we talked about today was interesting.

Mark Richardson  25:47  
And I'm at the damage tha damage. And you can follow our show at data driven pod on Twitter.

Taylor Shanklin  25:56  
Alright, folks, so this has been another episode of talking shizzle where I don't know we talked about all sorts of shizzle. Today, I'm gonna have to go back and listen to this one to make the show notes. So that'll be fun. And I'll probably learn some things that I didn't pick up in the first time that we had a conversation. We will see you next time. Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don't miss a beat of the talking shizzle podcast. And if you're listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good juicy Business Growth shizzle that you would like to hear about. Get in touch with us and follow along at Creative shizzle.com or email us at podcast at Creative shizzle.com Until next time, keep making your shizzle happen