New Digital Age (NDA), in association with LiveRamp, is spotlighting the men and women championing a data-led revolution in the marketing industry. ‘Meet the Revolutionaries’ focuses on the efforts of the industry executives helping to push digital marketing into a new era of data collaboration.
Here, Sam Taylor, Head of Performance Marketing and CRM at Direct Line Group explains why the ability to make new friends is a useful skill to have when leading any innovation project…
Tell me about your current role and how your career to date has led you here.
Within Direct Line Group, we have many insurance brands, including Direct Line, Churchill and GreenFlag. As the Head of Performance Marketing and CRM, I run the customer marketing ‘engine room’ across the group, including all our customer data and measurement activity. A key measure of our success is to drive profitability, so you could say my role is very much at the hard end of marketing.
I’ve worked in a variety of different marketing and transformation roles for the business and led teams in both brand and performance, but my current focus is on transforming our marketing activity from traditional ‘top of funnel’ brand tactics to much more of a data-driven and personalisation-at-scale approach. All brands are having to change their approach to marketing in a rapidly evolving landscape and Direct Line is no different. Whilst we are known more for our brand marketing in recent years, we have been challenging ourselves on how we leverage our first-party and zero-party data to drive better outcomes for our customers and for the business. And how we unlock new data, tools and capabilities that enable us to deliver new brand experiences across paid, owned and earned channels. This more customer first, channel second approach demands a different focus within marketing teams and forces you to think differently about how data can inform marketing right through the funnel from brand activation to acquisition and CRM initiatives.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally have helped to drive innovation?
The last two years have been about creating and driving a new the vision at DLG. I have been transforming our marketing culture and capability to become more data-driven. In that time we have updated our tech stack by moving our customer data into Snowflake, have built a new shopper Customer Data Platform that enables realtime shopper marketing and have onboarded Live Ramp as our data clean room. We have created a data literate CRM team that include coders and data scientists and we have changed our agency model to help us plan and leverage new opportunities. As a marketing leader I have had to adapt quickly. For example, the CFO was normally the person you had to influence to successfully unlock marketing investment. But today, by contrast, the CIO, CTO, or the Data Protection Officer are probably the most important stakeholders to secure as an ally. Because, to innovate in marketing and deliver customer experiences that will in turn provide competitive edge you need to plunge into a new world fuelled by data and Martech. The new age of Digital Marketing involves building and maintaining those new relationships as well as investing in new capabilities, skills and partnerships. It also requires you to think differently around creative and production in order to leverage personalisation at scale a 30 second TV ad is simply no longer fit for purpose. In fact, you have to be prepared to re-learn everything you thought you knew about marketing and then bring your business with you on your journey.
What are the most common challenges or barriers to innovation?
In a business like ours, the biggest blockages to innovation are usually legacy systems. You need to understand what the legacy systems look like, understand your current architecture, then be able to build a vision or strategy that sits on top of that. The reason why startups and scaleups often overtake big corporates in driving product and service innovation is that they don’t have expensive legacy systems to hold them back. The biggest challenge for businesses like ours is challenging the status quo; encouraging a new way. Because, the advantages we have over startups is that we have market leading brands and lots of customer data. Imagine the opportunity for businesses like ours to innovate and drive growth if they could only reduce the complexity and their organisation and their legacy systems.
If you think about the big innovations of the last five years, it’s hard to find one that is a new product. Rather, the key innovations have been seen in services that, to some extent, already existed but were reenergised to create better experiences. Amazon isn’t the first retailer; Spotify isn’t the first music service; Uber isn’t the first taxi service. But being able to use data to listen and then use the insight to deliver better customer experiences, often in real-time, is what has enabled these brands to challenge legacy products. Its why Blockbusters lost out to Netflix. I think of it as customer data being the ears and the brand and marketing being the mouth. And the more you listen the better, more relevant, timely conversation you can have with your customers. It is marketing 101 on steroids really where we can get better and better at delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time and in the right channel. It’s the data and the tech that allows you to be much more in touch with the customer and their needs. It’s fair to say it’s been a challenging 18 months but we have climbed the mountain now and the view looks great.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
There are two big things for me.
The first is that you need to be able to make new friends. Work with different stakeholders. Find and value new cheerleaders.
Let me give you an example. You can’t unlock the value of data without user consent, so when I was trying to get advice from our Data Privacy Team on how we manage consent, how we store customer data and leverage it for marketing, it became clear pretty quickly that they were very focused on what we couldn’t do. We needed someone on the privacy team who understood marketing and what we were trying to achieve before we could have the same objectives and motivations. So we found and hired someone which really helped us build momentum.
The second thing is fully understand and value the creation of ‘use cases’. What customer experience is it you want to achieve and then look to how you achieve it through use of tech or data. And, crucially, how much money is this worth if you can deliver it? The quicker you can move the conversation with leadership on to an outcome, rather than simply focusing on ‘The Tech’, the better.
How do you think digital marketing might evolve over the next few years?
Digital marketing has a lot to answer for. In the last decade its growth has created new platforms, new opportunities, new ways to trade. But in the early days this came with a price. With ad fraud in abundance and issues over excess frequency, brand safety, and a poor customer experience, trust in advertising soon became collateral damage whilst tech companies in the supply chain capitalised on it. As a marketer obsessed with the measurement of effectiveness I didn’t really invest in ads that weren’t viewed or viewable. Or on platforms that almost certainly weren’t going to deliver good outcomes.
And with the rise of addressable advertising it was often evident that the data behind the targeting wasn’t good enough to demand higher CPMs.
But in the last few years digital marketing has changed for the better. The ad platforms have raised their game, measurement has improved and studies like ISBA’s transparency study woke the advertising world up. And now we are embarking on a 3rd wave. A wave fuelled by compelling data and cookie-less targeting, by increased transparency, accessible technology, marketplaces and AI. And by media companies and platforms that are heavily investing in their digital content and data collaborations.
Not to mention that continued investment in measurement practices such as equivilisation of attention, wider adoption of closed loop methodologies and cross media measurement solutions such as ISBA’s Origin, will gravitate more and more sceptical advertisers towards data partnerships across programmatic Radio, Advanced AV and DOOH.
In lots of ways, digitally created targeted ‘experiences’ will help businesses move away from just using linear platforms to tell customers what they do in a 30 second ad to providing relevant, data informed and channel agnostic branded encounters that will help them build brand trust. That is how the most successful brands will grow.
Will data collaboration become more important to marketers?
Data collaboration is the marketing world’s new ‘secret sauce’. We’ve already seen the rise of retail media and how FMCG brands are using retailer data to fuel their campaigns. There’s an opportunity for all brands right now to leverage their own data, and the data sets of trusted partners, to amplify the relevance and reduce the wastage of their campaigns.
I would envisage that, within the next five years, most advertisers will be utilizing data cleanrooms in some way, but many will underestimate the complexity involved in getting to that stage. The evolution of digital marketing is really exciting right now and data collaboration is the thing that’s fuelling the change.
