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, Teresa Fusaro, Senior Director Marketing Activation, Tech & Digital at the multinational consumer goods company Reckitt, discusses common challenges to innovation and shares her predictions on the future of “creative data”…
Tell me about your current role.
In my current role, I’m responsible for marketing and advertising technologies and capabilities on a global basis, across the three business units of Reckitt: health, hygiene and nutrition. I lead the global digital products strategy for three main marketing areas: Consumer data, Media activation and Creative Technologies. My team collaborates with the global marketing function to drive the data driven marketing transformation across the organisation.
Can you give an example of a time when you personally helped to drive innovation?
An example, which is very close to my heart is from my time at Nestlé. A few years ago, I was leading marketing technologies globally for Nestlé, and the media function came to me with a challenge relating to digital media measurement. We had a very robust set of tools and ‘best practices’ for digital media activation, but we did not have any way to monitor the adoption of these best practices across markets and brands. We lacked a common framework to benchmark the markets and agencies and to monitor the compliance to our digital media best practices.
After analysing which were the available options in the industry, my team and I, realised that there was no solution out of the box that could answer our challenge. We had to build something literally from scratch. We found a technology partner and we built what we called a media governance tool, which was a great success, both internally and externally. The capability was rolled out in 20+ markets in 1 year and the project was presented at a WFA forum as a success case in the space of media best practices monitoring. Nowadays, this is a new technology category with various vendors and agencies coming up with their own media governance and campaign set-up solutions.
What are the most common challenges to innovation?
I’ve had the opportunity to work for three companies that were going through digital transformation, firstly, Nestlé, then Adidas and now Reckitt, and I’ve seen some common challenges to innovation. The first one for me is around the operating model, because bringing innovation means changing the way of working and that has implications for different teams and for your relationships with media agencies and partners. You need to understand who will be impacted by any new capability we introduce and consider what those impacts will be at the beginning of the innovation process.
Another challenge is dealing with changes around measurement. We are very used in the digital media industry to think about media KPIs. Innovation, though, is usually more focused on business KPIs. What will be the return on investment as a result of your innovation? That requires a shift in mindset for most marketers.
What tips can you offer others hoping to drive innovation?
In my experience, driving innovation requires resilience and persistence, because it’s not always an easy journey and you might not be right at the first attempt. My first tip is be ready to embrace failure and educate the team to normalise mistakes. Working in what we call the agile framework helps, because it is about iteration and not seeking perfection. I think it helps a lot to think about your Minimum Viable Product. Don’t expect your idea or your process to be perfect before moving forward, go step-by–step and progress by bringing people along with you on the journey.
How do you think digital marketing might evolve over the next few years?
One of the big drivers of transformation in digital marketing is definitely in the space of creativity, related to the Generative AI Creative Technologies. About 15 years ago, we had a big transformation in the media activation space with programmatic media, which redesigned the relationship with media agencies. These days, we are seeing a similar trend when it comes to ways of working with creative agencies; through the power of Generative AI technologies, brands have the opportunity to achieve better control and transparency for creative production and automation. The expectation is that the new tech will increase efficiencies within creative teams and improve the performance of our creative resources, while at the same time requiring new competencies and new professional skills.
Do you think ‘data collaboration’ will become more important to marketers?
Data collaboration has always been important. Our brands collect a lot of data, but it’s not always easy to get the insights we need from the data or to make the data useful and usable in terms of data collaboration. Linked to my previous point, I think that the intersection between media data and creative data will be very important in the future, due to the explosion of Gen AI led creativity and the increasing number of creative assets. Creative data will allow brands to have better insights into media performance and how to deliver an improved consumer experience.
