How MOps can Leverage the Transition to First Party Cookies with Sylvain Giuliani

In this episode,  we talk with Sylvain Giuliani about how Marketing Ops pros can take advantage of the increasing importance of first-party cookies. Sylvain is currently Head of Growth at Census, a reverse ETL provider. He is also an active member of several communities, primarily in the revenue space. He is also an investor and mentor with experience at several startups - as a founder and leader.

Tune in to hear: 
- The state of things with first-party vs third party / intent data; and, the trends/impacts on the ease of capturing and quality.
- How Sylvain approaches the challenge of the importance of identifying customers’ preferred communication channels to optimize spend/effort.
- How Marketing Ops teams can leverage this insight to strategically collaborate with other marketing teams (demand gen, ABM, etc.) - specifically as it relates to access and understanding of data. 

To contact Sylvain on LinkedIn, click this link to his profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvaingiuliani/

Episode Brought to You By MO Pros 
The #1 Community for Marketing Operations Professionals

MOps-Apalooza is back by popular demand in Anaheim, California! Register for the magical community-led conference for Marketing and Revenue Operations pros.

Join Us at MOps-Apalooza, Nov 4-6 2024!
Join us LIVE in November 2024 along with 400+ Marketing and Revenue Ops pros. Learn more here.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Michael Hartmann: 0:23

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by Marketingops.com, powered by the MO Pros. I'm your host, Michael Hartmann. Joined today by one co-host, Mike Rizzo, who has been just, he just flew in, so Mike. Yes, I just zoomed

Mike Rizzo: 0:37

right in. Thank

0:38

you.

Michael Hartmann: 0:38

I'm back. I was zoomed right in.

Mike Rizzo: 0:41

I just zoomed right in cause we're doing this on Zoom today. And uh, yeah, I was at the MOps-Apalooza venue site visit, getting ready for a big event, so that was

Michael Hartmann: 0:51

exciting. All right. MOps-Apalooza. September, October. I think I should know this. I know I should know this. There's a reason why we haven't had episodes. Okay. November. Wow. See November. I can only keep a few more dates in my head with all the projects I have going on, so, sorry. Fair. It's okay. Shame on me. All right. Well let's, let's get this, let's get this party started cause we've got our guest today. Si Giuliani, uh, We are gonna be talking to him a little bit about, um, gosh, a couple of different things, but I think it ultimately, it kind of comes down to the sort of pending, um, or, or increasing need to, to have first party cookies and how that applies to marketing operations. So, Uh, so is currently head of growth at Census, a reverse ETL provider, which I'm, I don't even know what that means, so he might have to tell us what that is. But, uh, he is also an active member of several communities, primarily in the revenue space. He's also an investor mentor and has experience with several startups, both as a founder and a leader. So, Sylvain, thanks for joining us and welcome. Thank you for having me. Yeah. What, what the hell, what the hell is reverse etl, by the way? I just like, just get, I mean,

Sylvain Giuliani: 2:02

yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, reverse CTL is the act of, uh, getting data out of your cloud data warehouse that you usually, uh, powering like your BI tools and getting the data into your operational tools such as, you know, Marketto, Salesforce, you name it. Like we have hundred plus integration nowadays. Oh, okay. And, uh, okay. So, you know, next time someone says like, Hey, I see this data and Looker. I wish I could do something about this churn problem. Who are the people who churn? Well, you can use River University to identify the people who are churning. Get them into market load so you can send them emails

Michael Hartmann: 2:35

before they got. Got it. Okay. All right. That makes a little sense. Yeah. All right. That was not, that was not intended to be a pitch. I just like, I saw that term and I was like, I don't know what that means. I kind of know what it means, but, all right. Um,

Mike Rizzo: 2:49

we need more on the topic. In fact, we were talking to Si and Si and their team about, um, helping us learn more about the topic. So I think there's probably more of that coming soon. Okay. Because there's not enough of us that know what reverse ETL is, that's for sure.

Michael Hartmann: 3:03

So we're excited about it. You know, this, this whole idea of like, Well, the, well, we're now recording. It's, it's Cinco de Mayo, 2023 as we're recording. And, um, there's been the, the, the latest MarTech landscape just came out, what, earlier this week, maybe late last week. Yeah. And what's the number? 14,000? Is that what I saw? I haven't had a chance to look at it. It's over 10,000. I know that, but yeah. Yeah, it's 11,000 something. Now this whole need to sort of stitch together data, I think is, is a big one. So yeah, definitely a topic we probably need to, we need to dig deeper into at some point. So, Just, yeah. You know, Sylvain, we'll have to, uh, we'll have to bring you back on for that. Maybe. I love it. But one of those things is probably, so first party cookies, right? So, um, you and I had a conversation quite a while ago, but um, and things maybe have changed a little bit, but, um, kinda what's like, I love your take on kinda where things are with first party versus third party. It's been a while since, I think we actually had a guest on, like over a year ago talking about. This a little bit, but more, more so from the sort of deprecation of third party data or intent data. But what are you seeing? What are the trends, impacts? Is there any equality stuff like just a general overview?

Sylvain Giuliani: 4:22

Yeah, no, I mean, you know, the cookie apocalypse happened. I, I feel like in, in our space, I think, uh, you know, if you think back a couple of years back, like as a marketer, you were using one of those 10,000 tools out there and to get data in, you know, your hotspot, Marketo. It was very simple. You just slap some JavaScript code in your app, like on your website or some code SDK in your mobile app, right? And it will do all the tracking for you. Facebook will do all the attribution for you, will tell you like the conversion rate of all of your campaigns, things like that. So didn't require you any kind of like data, uh, skillsets or data transformation, skillset. Then create happen and all that data basically. Went away or you are very low confidence about it because it's getting blocked and a lot and you know, it's just not possible to track it basically. Right. And so what we are seeing, you know, as census as someone who like took to a lot of like data team and marketing team who are using data is like a huge if to first party data, right? And so what is first party data really? I mean, it's kind of like the same thing, but you are the one generating it and not a third party vendor. So it's like, you know, if you go on census website today, we are gonna track your click, right? But it's like, Our own library is tracking your click. So nobody's blocking it at, doesn't block it. Right? So, or it's event that might be happening in your, on the server side. Right. So you know, when you create a document in Figma, like that event is generated on the server side, so nothing can block it. Right. So we can know, oh, si create a document in Figma and you shared it with Michael. Right? So that's again, like that's an event. That is first party data. And then you want to again, As a marketer, you wanna consume that data because you wanna build like audiences segmentation. Maybe you wanna do some transactional email or push notification based on like, uh, a trigger that they achieved. Like, hey, you said like 10, uh, 10. 10 documents in Figma, something like that, right? And so you, that data goes through the warehouse, that's first party data goes through the W and then you wanna sync it again to a tool like Marketo. That's how way Senten tool like sensors comes in handy, right? There's other ways to do it. You can just write custom script, get you type the data team to write code for you. But most, most importantly, it's like how do we, what we see is like a lot of marketing people wanting to have. Self-serve, access, the mythical, like, you know, I don't wanna talk to your data team to self serve the data. Like, kinda like what you used to have with like the third party data. Uh, that's what we've seen. That's kinda like the shift that is happening. Uh, you know, we can talk a little about, also about like CDPs, you know, the rise and demise of CDPs. It's also powered by this kind, like trend I would say. But, uh, I will stop that to see if that's, Answer your question.

Michael Hartmann: 6:48

The rise and demise of CDPs. That's, it was a quick one if it's demise already, but, um, so there's two things that are going on. I think two things that strike me about this. One is this sort of move away from third party data. It reliance on that. Feels, feels like it's like a down, like a down negative thing, but there's a potential upside to first party data, but it also comes with extra. You need different additional skill sets maybe, and tools to capture even more data than you're already capturing in, in. I don't know about you, but most marketing ops teams I know are already swimming in data but not able to do much with it. So how do we over like, yeah. Feels like two sort of challenges at the same time.

Sylvain Giuliani: 7:32

Yeah, and I think that's like the, I think there's. Like next to the cookie agra, uh, I would say of third party data. Acas, right? Like there was a big trend, uh, in the back, which was like the rise of the warehouse, like, you know, so the past few years, you know, storing data, transforming data has never been that easy. Like, you know, it's like you UK it's very cheap to deploy. It's very cheap to implement. And so on the other side of your business, an IT team, a data team, are probably invested tremendous amount of time and money into building a warehouse and ultimately a bi. Solution. Right. You know, like there's a executive team or board meeting that is being powered by a dashboard somewhere, right? And so all that data is being clean, transformed because big decisions are being made on that data, right? And so that's the, that's the big shift that happened in the back. And so now it's like as marketing team, that's great because we can just build on top of that work. Like we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We don't have to. That's why I say like the demise of CDP, right? Because the CDP is like you have to redo all that work from scratch again, as a marketing team, like nowadays. Solution plug into the west. I'm not even talking about sensors, but you see, like if you're a price customer, house plus customer, you will see them. They're talking about like, Hey, we can connect to the warehouse, we can send data to the west. Like, you know, they're signed, everybody's trying to make a warehouse, the first class citizen, right? And so as a marketing team, we can leverage the work that has been done by IT and data team. And then just consume data that we can trust. Right? And I think that's like also a thing that is accelerating the adoption of first party data because you don't have to start from scratch essentially. Right? So all of those event that we talked about that is happening in the background, like number of document created, who created those documents, like anything like that, all of that is already exists. Like it's powering BI report, you can just reuse it as a marketing team, right? And I think that's, uh, one of the biggest, uh, you know, accelerator of that trend. Yeah, I

10:21

think,

Mike Rizzo: 10:22

I mean, I think a lot of this layers into there's, you know, the PLG motion for us, for the SaaS companies out there where they're trying to understand, you know, you were still, you were hinting at, you know, oh, you shared, uh, 10, uh, links from Figma, right? So like that, this idea that you're collecting usage behavior from your, from your first party sort of interactions. Um, and I think it's important, like, you know, for, for the audience out there to understand that like, The death of the cookie, so to speak, isn't like around this concept of, you know, your HubSpot and munchkin codes and all that stuff, like that's not going away. Like, not like you've been doing that and it's not going anywhere. Those are first party cookies. That is your data. It is collected, it is not gonna go anywhere. People can turn off the cookie like consent banner and yes, that part will stop flowing just like any other cookie.

Michael Hartmann: 11:18

But that's already happening today.

Mike Rizzo: 11:20

Well like that. Like that's already happening today. So in large part, like I would love, and I'm gonna interject here and this is where Michael loves me cause I just jump in on things and despite the outline I'm sure we were probably getting here. Uh, I would love. For you to say, you know, to, to just share your thoughts on, you know, really like, is the B2B marketer at the end of the day, small to medium size, even the, even the enterprise. Like, are they really impacted by this idea of like the cookie being retired and like going away? Like it feels like it's more of the e-com side of things and like the consumer, the B2C consumer than anything else.

Sylvain Giuliani: 12:03

I think for sure like the small companies reverse resource or econs, like things like that. Like they're getting destroyed because again, it was so easy to just inject the Facebook like you know, tracker, right? Like that's the thing's like, yeah, you don't have to be an A genius. You copy paste this thing. Or even worse, sometimes you have a direct integration. You don't even know what's happening, but you's saying to track, right? Yeah. They're getting impacted. I think like that. Because that's going away. It makes it harder for even like larger company to do quickly deployment. Like, you know. Now if I, like, I mean, let's take an example. We, the three of us, we work at a normal size, like B2B company, 300 people, right? And we're like, Hey, you know what? We are gonna start doing advertising on TikTok, right? Like, so. Now we can't just put the, the tracker, right? Like now it's like, okay, we need to sync our audience somehow. Like, you know, so, because we wanna retarget, so how do we do that? Okay, we can do a CSV upload once in a while. Okay, that sucks, but I can come like do it, but it sucks, right? And then it's like, but really I need to send like conversion event to, to, to feed the machine, the algorithm technology. Hey, this is good audience. Like keep, keep showing the ads to the right people to train their algorithm, right? And then to do that, you need to send event again. You can do the Monday morning CSV upload, right? Like it's okay, but like you don't have that ease ness of like just, yeah, just plug the system together and you just work. And then you're like, oh, where is my conversion even coming from? Right? Like, okay, some of them are coming from spo, like you said, those trackers are not going away. If you're like, Hey, a demo form request, like, you know, SPO. Credit tracking them form, like for the mission, like nobody's gonna tell you to take that away. But again, if you wanna say, Hey, I'll give you some example of our customers, right? It's like, hey, they, they show awareness ads. So B2B plg company, right? They show awareness ads or like feature that you are not using. So they're like, Hey Mike, we know that you are notion. User, right? Where you're our user audience and, but you're not haven tried like our new AI feature, right? For example. And so they're gonna retarget you aggressively everywhere until you stop, uh, you start using the ai, right? And so that's kinda like the, those dynamic audience, this is where it's get more complicated. And before it was still relatively easy to do with the third party tracker. Now it's just impossible without like, Some infrastructure or help from data and engineering, right? So that's, that's, I think that's how they get impacted. It's not like it's impossible, but it's just like an extra hoop that they're to jump for that they didn't

Michael Hartmann: 14:22

have to do it before. And I, and I don't, I actually, since I've, I actually am the one here who's works at, has worked at larger companies currently working at a large company. Like I don't think there's really much differentiating their, you, you were heading where I expected you to go. So, which was when Mike asked that question, I suspected the issue was actually how do you push that? First party data to those advertising platforms now to do the targeting in different ways. And it sounds like that's really, that's gonna be the new challenge because we're, they're gonna be dependent on general stuff that they will probably still try to package and keep to the, you know, but it's gonna be relatively, if I remember right, right, it's gonna be chunks of a few thousand people as opposed to, you know, hundreds or dozens or, or, you know, whatever is the right appropriate amount for your, your business. Mm-hmm.

Sylvain Giuliani: 15:11

Yeah. And, and to me there's like this kind of like duality, right? It's like as marketer, like, you know, you go to any marketer in the world and you say, Hey, we're gonna build like agencies. Like, nobody's gonna be like, oh my God, this is a novel concept, right? It's more like, how do we build. Better audiences. Like, you know, I already have a hundred, but like I need to go even further. I need to press more. And so it's like, I want, I know I wanna do it. What's stopping me is like access to that data. Right. And so you took some of some of the things away from me by having like this kind of third party coming away or like, Like that, kinda like third party side of the house. And so this is also why you see a lot more first party data being used, right? Because like, oh, I want to, I wanna do a, no, I wanna do a, a targeting that is like, you know, location based, usage base, like pre, like a like called purchase base, like yada yada. And so it's like you, you stopped talking to people. I mean, I, I was talking to like, uh, a large gaming company, right? And. For them. It's like we have audiences in the order of magnitude of like hundred thousands of audiences, right? And it's just like everything is like programmatically done and it's all powered by first party data, right? Like, and that's the, and you know, and I asked them, yeah, I mean that sounds like a lot of work. Is it even worth it? Like to go that big? Right. Uh, like in terms of like, for them it's worth it because they have large user base and it's not about. Reaching to people, they can reach anyone, but it's like reaching to people to right place with the right message. Right. And that's the only thing, like, that's the power of first party data is like, they know that seal plays on, uh, Xbox and like School of Duty, right. And Mike, you more like a PlayStation person or a PC person. And so, and you like in like, you know, AARD game or something like that of them, and they'll show you the right ad in the right place at the right time instead of like spending the ad dollars showing ads to everybody. It was like, I keep seeing it. A for wall of white, I'm a call person. Right? Like that. So that's the

Michael Hartmann: 16:58

how, how, how like, so my understanding, cause I haven't had the opportunity to really work with them a whole lot. But these intent data platforms, right? Are they assumed they're pretty. Relying on third party cookies. Is, is that true or is it like, are they gonna be like, affected by this as well? So, so in other words then our, the marketers who are relying on intent data for, you know, whether, whether they're using for lead scoring or whatever they're using it for, to. Prioritize targets or whatever you think they're gonna be affected. I think it depends

Mike Rizzo: 17:28

on where your intent data is coming from. Total. Like it's a total like reverse IP lookup play. And for people from working from home, that's a challenge. Um, but people going back to the office, that's helping. And then I think it's also like, like G2 for example, you know, the review platform. They've got a crap ton of intent data that they can signal out back to people, but that's their first party intent data, right? So like there's value in that data.

Sylvain Giuliani: 17:54

Um, yeah, there's not too much issue there, like intern data. I mean, we can go into the pages like, is it even worth investing in this? But like, uh, maybe it's a big fan of a day.

Mike Rizzo: 18:06

Forget the same subject, throw like ro, like, you know. Yeah. Uh, on those folks, but maybe I could get some intent people to come on and tell me about why it works.

Sylvain Giuliani: 18:17

Yeah, yeah. I think it works well for a very thin slice of the market. Yeah. And it works extremely well for them, but everybody else, it's kind of like us. A money pit that doesn't bring you anything. Uh, that, that's my, that's my hot take on it. Uh, but I think from an identification point of view, there's no issue cause you just need an identity key, right? Like if you use G2 as an example, Here's, like G is gonna be like, Hey, this company called uh, accent.com is looking to buy like a warehouse, right? Like, and so the only thing that you need is like this identity, like the account, website or domain, sorry, campaign. Like that's the thing. And it'll be the same for people. It'd be like, Hey, this silk is doing something right. And so as long as you can match those two identity, you know, that's, that's okay. That's okay. And that doesn't really require third party data. I mean, you could like, you know, using like, Cookies. Like CrossFit cookie, but like, that's going away. But like I think nobody really relies on that anymore. I mean, as far as as

Mike Rizzo: 19:17

I am. Yeah. Oh, I think what's interesting too, and I know we've got some other things we want to dive into here, but around this, like the innovation that's gonna take place on, on the platform side, right? Like not, not the marketing automation, technology side and the 11,000 vendors there, but more on the ad tech side. Right. So like you see there's like LinkedIn lead forms, right? Like yeah, they're going to use that as your conversion signal now. And they may even, like, there's a very, I could see a business case where platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook and all those other providers are gonna optimize for you to have, uh, potentially lower cost per conversion to go use those ad platforms that hook up to their own lead conversion metrics. Versus trying to send you off platform to go track a conversion and do the whole back and forth thing, they're gonna be like, no, you know what, just. Just get your lead form here, right? Yeah. And then they're probably gonna be like, you know what, just upload your list. In fact, take your data, upload your list over here, and run your email campaign out of our platform. And it's like, so like I, I feel like there's gonna be this big shift in MarTech around the outbound marketing capabilities on the platform side.

Sylvain Giuliani: 20:26

I mean, like you're a hundred percent right? I mean, if you look at LinkedIn, Add performance, right? Like, I mean, you run exactly the same ads. Sames one is a leading lead gen form, right? So form on LinkedIn, you never leave the website. The other one is the same thing, but you click, you have to go to an earning page. Like the leading legend, like obliterates, like the conversion rate of the, of site conversion. Right. And, and you know, like LinkedIn tell you straight up, like you should do it like the, the ui, like they make it on purpose that the non formm converse less. The buttons are smaller, the click zones are smaller. Right. Like it's, it's made through for you to direct you to. No, just keep people on. It's fine. Yeah. It's gonna be totally, you know, like of course. And

Mike Rizzo: 21:07

then forward tracking is there, right? Like Yeah. It's already happening. And, and all the conversion tracking is happening on their platform, which means it's like there's this like, uh, false sense of security that like, oh, cool, like I've got all the things that I need. But to your point earlier, when you want to start to layer in the deeper segments of like, well, I really need to target somebody that hasn't used X, Y, Z feature. And as in a particular region mm-hmm. There's no way to be able to do that connection anymore, which is why, you know, marketers need to be paying attention. Right.

Michael Hartmann: 21:38

So, okay. So how, how will, how will the, and this, this may be, I know, so, so you and I were talking before we started about like Aiche P t and how that, I think there may be a tie in here, but like one of the things we all want to get to with our marketing teams and marketing ops teams is to. Better understand like what's the preferred channel that people want to be communicated through, right? Uh, or that performs best in terms of whatever it is we're trying to optimize. How, how, how is this? I guess two parts of it. How is the, the cookie situation gonna affect that, do you think? And then second, is there, like, you're describing all this sort of intelligence, but it's built into the, to the, uh, the platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, or the, you know, us having data and then trying to deploy it in the right way back out to them. Like how, like is there a play for AI in this somehow? I don't, like, I don't know what that looks

Sylvain Giuliani: 22:30

like. I think there's, I think you decomposed like the problems in like free, in free bucket, right? It's like one is like, How do I collect as much data as possible, which is first party data. Like, so even like, you know, identifying prefer channel, like it's, you need to know which channel works well for each individual, right? So again, if you think in term of first party data, it's like, well, I know SI is a human. Okay. He does his email address. Is this Id. On different platforms. So I've, I've sold identity resolution across as many channel as possible. And now I correct. Data was like, oh, he consume email, he opens email, he replies to email, he click on email, right? So a lot of first party data stream coming from that, and it's like, well, I know email's the cheapest channel I have, so I'm gonna use that first party data to actually exclude sale from all of the profe, like over channel. So I'm not gonna show you ads on LinkedIn because, I can get to him for free Via emails. Right. Or via app messaging. Right. Or or whatever platform you have. Right. Uh, then if you think about like, Uh, third party platform, ad platform or even like social platform, right? Like lot of committee, like lot of things happen in Slack committee now. Like, you know, I think like there's something called marketing ops mobs, PLA committee, something like that out there, right? Uh, and it's like how do you track the, the engagement where it's like you have to do. Deep link, like UTM trackers, things like that. So again, like you can collect, oh, this link is unique to seal because he has like his own like, like, uh, anonymized ID and he clicked on TikTok, right? For example, on the dm on TikTok or WhatsApp, message on TikTok, right? So it's like I can get that data back and be like, oh, looks like seals a lot on WhatsApp or whatever platform you took about, right? And so, so I think that's one, like it's collecting that data. Second point is like, how do we make sense of that data, right? Like, so I think this is where historically the best

Michael Hartmann: 24:08

companies that, that, that is the big question in my mind.

Sylvain Giuliani: 24:11

Yeah, historically it was gotta go hire a bunch of data scientist people, essentially. Right? Or like, you know, during the koolaid of one of the many, mark, mark tech, advi, uh, you know, like, uh, marketing message. It's like, no, just give us your data. We put in the black box, insight comes out. You don't know how it works, but trust us. That's how it works. Like, you know, that's basically, but again, it costs you money. I think right now what's interesting is like, you know, GPT is trying to be very good. I mean, as a technology, something that is very good at like pattern matching. Uh, identify things like I'm running like myself right now. Just experiment like using G P T to do identity resolution, for example. And that works extremely well. Like, you know, like it can, like, it can detect that these two humans like are almost the same as like, Hey, we should do something with it. We should match them with a high level of confidence. Right? And so I think again, like there's, there's gonna be a way to repackage this kind of like G P T technology to kind of like make it like, As, as a feature of a product. I'm not saying like you're gonna go and charge PT and be like, Hey, what's the difference between these two mics? Kind of thing. But like, it's gonna be very easy to build this feature, uh, to make marketing life easier, right? And then the third, the third bucket, right, is like, cool, I got my data, I got my insights. What do I do with it, right? Because, uh, like how do I deploy, how do I activate my data in marketing speak, right? Uh, and I think that's the, that's the next thing. And so, again, like these free buckets, like you need to be exceptional at these three things to be best of written marketers nowadays, like, you know, you like if you can be good at one. And that gets you ahead of the pack. But like the best in class marketing team I've, I've met are, you know, they are world class at these things. Yeah. All of the data. Super accessible, high confidence. They generate tons of this side of it and they know what to do with the data and they deploy it in like super tactical advertising campaign, email nurture campaign, like, you know, empowering your sales team with insight to be like, Hey, this account is, you know, this account is at risk, this account is ready to up sell. Things like that. Like that's, that's what the best marketing team team do, team do nowadays. Sorry. Um, but that's my take. But that's how AI could fit into it.

Michael Hartmann: 26:12

Um, wow. So I, I bet there's a lot of people out there listening like me, where, where we know we have gaps or challenges with our, our data. Either it's not complete, not normalized, right. On key things that we typically would use. Could, could something like that help with data cleansing kind of stuff as well?

Sylvain Giuliani: 26:36

Yeah. Well I think that like, this is where it depends what type of company you have. Like, you know, I think historically humans are still like, you know, like if you took your data engineer or data analyst, like they're gonna tell you 60% of their job is like data transformation is a nice way to say it. Right? Cleaning, right? Yeah. Yep. And, uh, I think that's not gonna go away anytime soon. I think, you know, like AI, things like, that's gonna make that life a lot easier. Like, I mean, I mean, go to J G B T right now, past like 24 numbers with completely different format and you say, put all of that into like intentional formats, you know, ease, o standard, whatever the ZO standard. It just does it right? Like, you know, same thing past like the company name of like one with ink, one with Ltd, one with.com and say, just put them into normal company name, human readable. It just does it right? Like, so I think that's going to help you tremendously, like cleaning your data. Uh, I don't think it's, it is still ready to like, transform your data and make sense of it.

Michael Hartmann: 27:33

It's not gonna, it's not gonna do it in an automated way. You still have to prompt it and, Give it the clue. No, you can,

Sylvain Giuliani: 27:38

you No, you can, you can prompt it. Like, I mean, you can, you can just be like, this is my role, you know, company name. And then, you know, the other one is like, you know, use G B T to clean it by making like human ridable and it just kind like, just keep doing it over and over. Getting your data set, like that's like, like these tools already does it. It's, and more like, this is just gonna be a new normal, like for most of the tools. Sure. Because it's so cheap and approachable to

Michael Hartmann: 28:02

build things in this Yeah. And the other, like the other thing that, so I bet. The, the, the first thing that came to mind when you talked about like matching two identities from different places that look like they're a match was, um, one of the challenges I think everybody runs into is you've got a really good client at your, at your company. They move to a similar role or a, you know, to another company. Like how do you follow them so you can go pursue them as a new, new cli a client at that company? Uh, that may actually be possible, if I'm understanding what you're describing.

Sylvain Giuliani: 28:32

Yeah, I mean it's, it's possible today, right? Like, I mean, there's a bunch of tools out there, gem, you know, APU does it like, I mean, you know, it is at the end of the day, it's like you are gonna be late when I think there's two things, like knowing that person join, right? So it's like, You know, it goes into product building. But like, you know, LinkedIn is a good place you can spare, plug in, you know, you can, uh, I wait for an email to bounce like, you know, I send an email to Mike user, right? And like, oh, bounce, I guess it's not there so I can at least understand it's not at this company anymore. Right? Uh, so I think that's gonna be, that's a different set of product. Like I think this is not where AI gonna be able to help you, like magically, cause it needs a data set. I mean, if you wanna check something, it's called people GBT io. It's got announced yesterday and it's like, A chat G P T interface that you can create a lot of people and can be like, Hey, show me all the marketing p of people. That looks like Mike Riso. And I also have like thousands of followers on Twitter. And it's like, or like change job. Recently I just give you over list. Right? It's like, it's like, oh, human readable or like NLP to, uh, query a database of people and prospects.

Mike Rizzo: 29:39

Wow. Crazy.

Michael Hartmann: 29:41

That's amazing. Like I'm, I am actually sort of speechless right now. I, I, I can't, I can't decide if I'm, I'm amazed or I'm, or if I'm frightened. So

Mike Rizzo: 29:54

I don't know. I mean, having come from the world of, like, I started my career in ad tech, um, and like once I figured out how all this stuff worked, and of course we're like, we're literally in the midst of a conversation about how that whole world is changing right now. But like, I don't know. When you go from, from that to where we're headed now, I'm like, should we really be that surprised? Like people

Michael Hartmann: 30:15

pretty, pretty,

Mike Rizzo: 30:17

you know, in, um, I don't know. They're engineering new outcomes now to try to solve for these problems that, you know, they're like, well, I want it to be the way it used to be, so I'm gonna try to find. I'm trying to find my work around

Michael Hartmann: 30:33

on all that stuff. Yeah, well, no, I, I'm not, I'm not surprised either cause I started my career in marketing. I went from doing financial systems and warehouses to building a consumer database. And this was a long time ago, 30 years ago to call it. And even then, right there was a, like, when I saw what was available to almost the household level, I was just stunned. And then it's only gotten. More robust and more data points, more, more activity and all that.

Mike Rizzo: 31:07

Yeah, I

Sylvain Giuliani: 31:07

mean, I mean, yeah, I take like Google, Facebook, the more first party data you feed them, the more they learn and the more they better target. It's like you, it's kind of like, uh, uh, an ai, but the buzz was not made around it. And for good reason. You know, they want to say like, oh, you know, we have this AI that allows you to target everybody. It's like, that sounds sketchy. Uh, but now the cat, the cat, the cat is out of the bag. It's like, So this G P T thing is kind of like what we were doing with ass, like, kind of, I guess you can say that, you know,

Mike Rizzo: 31:41

what was doing

Michael Hartmann: 31:42

hy hyper targeting at the individual level. Right. It's just, that's yeah. It's, and it's and good. Yeah. And like really good at it.

Mike Rizzo: 31:50

Yeah, it's very good. It's, yeah, it's really scary. Good at it. Um, I, I have a question for you still on just sort of your thoughts on like, Yeah, I, I've been, I've been tussling a bit with, um, you know, I think, okay, so the underlying message, or maybe the direct message if it was said, uh, very plainly is, look, you, you need to know what to do with the data. Right? We just said, we just got done sort of talking about it. Um, the, my challenge though is like, is that, do you, do you feel that there's a role today? Like that actually tries to take that responsibility on. No, like you actually said, the best of breed marketers figure this out, but like, is that just a new marketer that we're talking about, like a new future kind of marketer? Or is it the data team? Like are they gonna become quasi marketers? Like, I don't know who's responsible for this.

Sylvain Giuliani: 32:51

I think, I mean, that's a great question. Like, you know, it's like who's going to eat wood? Like, you know, there's always that debate is like, is data team just gonna become like marketing team or is marketing team gonna absorb data team? Right? Or like ops teams or whatever, right? It's like there's always this, I think it's just a new skillset. I think if you just today the problem is that I see in most organization is like, It's so marginalized, right? It's like, Hey, I'm a dimension person. My job is to build campaign messaging and like the, you know, promote offers, right? Where it's an ebook, an event or webinar, whatever. And so it's like my, I, I focus on such a spin slice and I, and then simply, you know, marketing apps is like, well, I'm just operationalized what the dimension person wants. Like, you know, they wanna do a webinar, they wanna put a nurture before and after, so I'm just gonna do the thing that they told me to do, kind of like as a system, system level, right? And. And I think because of this kind of like ultra ization, like nobody's kind of like thinking about the overarching, like what is the, what is the customer journey and what the data fits into this whole thing, right? Like I think that's like, uh, I think there's no role for that. And I think this is kind of like, so because of that, It's the new skills that everybody should have, right? It's like, uh, you know, I was talking to, I would not name this company, right? But like they, by design this ultra data savvy and automation, they do data and automation, everything, right? But they by design, never hire marketing people in marketing, right? It's like if you have done marketing before, you are corrupt, right? And so therefore, oh yeah. Therefore you can't work for us because you don't have this kinda like data automation mindset that we need, right? Like, and they're like, We can, we can teach you marketing and messaging and things like that, but we can't teach you being like data curious and like this kind of computer science engineering mindset. Right. And anyway, I'm not saying it's bad or right or wrong, but like Right. It's a different approach. Right. It's like you need that skill set, right. Like this, a new, new type of people. I agree.

Michael Hartmann: 34:44

Yeah. I, I, I mean, I could argue about whether or not they sh they could also teach some of the. Data analysis stuff too as well, but like that, but the point, I guess

Mike Rizzo: 34:53

there's, yeah, but like there's a difference between, I, I do think you can teach somebody like the, the what and the how goes into to what SI's talking about from that team. But like, um, there's, there's a difference between like systems thinking, And like data orchestration and, and data architecture and then like therefore architecture that like goes into that and like object orientation and how those things all sort of work together. Like there's a difference between that. Like, oh, I need to make sure we have access to this data in this structured way. Like I. Because it can get concatenated and then we're gonna be able to turn it into a string and the j s o response, we're gonna be able to do da, da, da, da da. There's a difference between that level of thinking and someone who is like, who's trying to activate on that data. And then somebody who's like, okay, like if I showed you this j s o response, do you know what you're looking at? And they'd be like, I have no idea. And it's like, could you figure out if we, if we told you that we could do such and such with the data, what would you do next? Um, there's like, yeah. Cause there's a, there's a very big difference between those types of it's

Sylvain Giuliani: 36:00

systems thinkers. Yeah. Someone told me it's like, you know, it's like knowing impossible is, is not, is, you know, it's nothing as you think tagline. Right? It's like there's a lot, like there's sort of marketing people are there that just don't know what they could do. Right? Like it's just, It's just because it's part of the show them. It's like, yeah, exactly. It's like, that's cool, but I don't know what I can do. Again, I'm not saying it's everywhere, but like, it's the, the school of thought, the way we were, are trained is to just focus on certain things and like this kind of like, Way of data that that is coming is like, if you're not forced to use it, you can kind of coastline and just be good enough. Like, you know, and, and it's, it's nothing

Mike Rizzo: 36:40

bad about

Michael Hartmann: 36:41

ok, so, oh, so you're hit, you're hitting on where I, where I was gonna take a little bit issue. Like, I, I get what you're both saying. I, I still think there, I'm not gonna say everybody, right, but there are gonna be people and someone, this comes from my own experience like, When I got outta college, I actually just told the story recently. Somebody else, uh, we worked at Pricewaterhouse. They sent you off to for three months to get trained in their way of doing at that time, cobalt programming, right? Mostly right. But how you did nice consulting work for them and they had cohorts of people all the time going through this training center in my cohort were, was with this one lady who had just graduated from Duke with a religion major and. Teaching her how to code was easy, right? cause she knew how to learn. So I, I think there's like a, I think there's two things you need sort of baseline, right? You need a certain level of, uh, aptitude, right? And knowledge and ability to learn and the desire to learn. Yes. And then you need, then you need attitude, right? You need, you need to be like, you have to have the desire, you have to be coachable. You be willing to try stuff and fail and learn. And I think that's, that would be the missing piece to me. Like if somebody was in that more traditional marketing and wanted to move it to the kind of role you're talking about. That, that's, that's why I was like resisting that because I think in a lot of cases we underestimate how much people could actually learn, even if it's outside of their, the domain they think of as their expertise.

Mike Rizzo: 38:06

No, no. I, I think look, everybody can learn something. Right. Um, I think to that, to the point of, uh, what you were talking about with that team that says like, Hey, you've sort of been corrupted. Yeah. I think that's a little bit, you know, extreme potentially, but um, I think there is a difference between. Where like si you hinted at it just a second ago and interestingly, it's a comment, it's a conversation I was having with, uh, Lon Mendoza, who you've spoken to I think before Si potentially. Um, he's the, the, the founder of T M W, the MarTech Weekly. And so we were having our monthly catch up last night and um, and one of the things we were talking about was like, The, we both recently have sort of been gone out into the fray on like, Hey, we're just gonna try to figure out how to make ends meet. Right? Like, I was put into a situation now where I'm like, all right, I gotta do marketing ops.com, some consulting work to keep the lights on. And, and he went out and decided to fully commit to his role. And, and so we're, we're really entrepreneurs at this point, and so, mm-hmm. Um, we were talking about this idea of. The employee life, right? The, the employee balance of like where you're working and what you're doing. And, um, you know, I like, I personally feel so much better about like being out and trying to hustle a little bit for myself. That there's like, there, there's this very dramatic difference between. Today's payday. Cool, right? I'm, I'm getting paid today and I'm gonna go to dinner tonight and I'm gonna take the kids to a ballgame this weekend or whatever. And then there's this other side of it, which is like, I. Man, I don't know if I'm gonna get a paycheck this week cause I didn't. I didn't do enough work for clients or whatever it is. And so going back to this idea of learning and are you going to take the time to figure out the art of the possible and try to push yourself forward, your organization forward and all of those things, like, it sort of comes down to this like, Are you lazy or not? Like are you motivated or

Michael Hartmann: 40:23

not? I, I don't think, I don't think it's really, I think in some cases it's not laziness or motivation, cause I know lots of marketers who work really hard. I think one of the things that gets in the way of a lot of marketers with doing different stuff than they just like rinse and repeat kind of stuff is because there are put up. Um, sort of, uh, gates or hurdles, right, with getting stuff to market, right? So they, they're, there's a, there's a lot of effort that goes into getting something right as opposed to good enough, right? So you said that, or I think it was about what you said and quickly seeing if it works, right? So that, I think that's one of the things I've see, especially at bigger companies where you go through, yeah, so many levels of review and approval, and then it takes, people are wondering like, why can't we just update that webpage? So why does it take so many? So, A week, right? It's not because you, it's not hard to update, but people are, they're afraid of like, it's gonna be off brand, or I'm like, like I tend to lean towards like, just go right and do enough to make sure you're not gonna do something that's really egregiously wrong. And even if you do that, like learn from it. Don't do it again. Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvain Giuliani: 41:37

It, it, I'll, I'll kind of summarize what you both said. Cause everything, it's like, it's a combination of both ways. It's like you need to write the right attitude, right? But you also have to have the right context to get the right attitude. Like, you know, you can be chilling at a company and, you know, do a good job and you like, I, I'm chill. I'm doing worklife balance and going on the weekend, uh, fun, right? And then to your point, Mike, you're like, I'm an entrepreneur here. Like, you know, I, I got, I gotta make it work. Like, like that. The context forced you to have a different attitude is either you're going to. You know, do it or become creative and figure it out, or, you know, you'll just fail and then you know, you'll go try something else because you, you couldn't like have the right attitude using your word here, Michael. Right. I think that's just, that's just a cycle of life and I don't think there's, like, everybody should be, always be at full speed and things like that. It's just, oh goodness. It's like, well, not full people, but like you can just, yeah. Using the examples, like you go there, you learn a ton of things, you learn how to program, that's great. Like then, you know, you go try something new, you learn something and then, you know, maybe you don't learn something for like three years. That's okay too, right? Like and then, yeah, I think the problem is like when people stop learning and people stop adapting, like, you know, so many. You so many people, Amazon Market across the board, like you said, what was the last time you learned something to uplevel all your skills and doesn't seem like take a course or something. It's like you learn at your job working with a new peer, new colleagues, things like that. And like, actually I've been doing the same thing for five years. You know? And I feel like that's like, that's the problem. That's the real problem. And these like, that's like where you get like swept away by people who come in. It's like, I've been using G P T, it's my co-pilot. Not, not saying they replacing people. I think G P T thinks a lot like, you know, uh, I copilot an enhancer to people, right? And it's like, you just, like, what, how is this person writing so much ad copy and the A copy works better? Oh, they just brainstorm with G P T all day. Right? And, uh, they as are performing better than yous just because they can include it quicker because they have this assistant to help them iterate. Like just simple things like that, right? Like get them ahead and then it's like one fixed it to the other. It's like, oh, why is the, why sales doing better? It's like he's using intent data from blah, blah, blah. Right? And you know, like that's the. That's the mentality, uh, that's, that you don't want to sink into is like the person who's like, I haven't learned something new in five years. Yeah, yeah. What was, I mean, the colleague or,

Mike Rizzo: 43:49

or anything? Definitely not. I, I, I, and then the other point that like, so where I branched off of for a moment was like, hey, if, if, if someone understands, you know, the art of the possible when it comes to sort of data orchestration and, and what you can do with it, um, So sometimes it's like, you know, to your point, Hartman, like, uh, there might be a lot of like roadblocks in the way to be able to get something done. And so I, I could, I can argue that that's actually just a factor of laziness. Like, I just have to, I have to deal with all this stuff and I don't really want to, uh, depending on the person's response to that situation. But if you, if you were. If you were presented with a challenge and someone said, Hey, I really need to try to figure out how to do this thing, and you now know how to take data from one place and move it to another, and you're this new kind of data marketer, but then you recognize openly like that's a lot of work. That's, that that actually falls outside of the norm of the way we normally do things at this company. Yeah. Um, do I really want to try that? Is that really, is the company going to like that? Is that for me? Is it for them? So there's all this, like you become this entrepreneur. It's like, I can solve this problem. I promise you I can solve this problem, but like, no one here has done this before and so I'm gonna forge out on this path. That like feels very different. And that is where I was like, that's what branched off of. If you start learning this new skillset and you figure out how to solve these really unique problems in unique ways that don't fit into the quote unquote box of how things are normally done, you're going to run up against hurdles and then you're going, it's going to take very specific. Individuals who want to try to forge that path

Michael Hartmann: 45:38

forward. Well, it's, it's permission. It, it, what you're describing is like swimming upstream against the, the idea that you, we should all be following best practices. Yes. Right? Yeah. Because fallacy, by, by, by by definition, that's doing what everybody else is doing. And that's like not a recipe for long-term success probably. Um, so we're, I didn't, this has been a great conversation. I want to kinda get back to the, the, not cookie per se, but I, I think. I keep coming back to, I've felt for a long time that like just within marketing ops, but let's go to broader, to marketing in general. If there's a gap in, um, skills and experience of knowing how to, um, really. Take advantage of data that's been collected and um, it feels like that's still gonna be, not only is that still a problem, that's gonna be an ongoing problem if we don't address it, especially as we continue, like, as we're developing even more and more data through first party cookies and things like that. What, like, do you see, like what, how would you suggest for our listeners that they start to address it? Is it skill up leveling? Is it looking for specific people? Like would it. I, I, yeah, I have, I don't have the answer. I just see it as a problem and I, I don't know how to solve it.

Sylvain Giuliani: 46:52

I think it's like being curious about it. Like if you know you have this pain, there's a lot way to solve it. I think, you know, I, my, the way I've learned data is like, I was friend with someone at work that was in the data team, and, you know, I had like all because I had all my questions about data and he was the person I used to go to, and so, Bit by bits I started to learn about the concepts of data. Right. And then, you know, I was like, I just don't wanna talk to him anymore. Like, I don't want him to be a bottleneck. Right. And so I started learning. And so like, cause but I, I have enough information about the world data that I could start learning by myself. Right. And you know, after that you, you take a course, you, you do some training online, like to learn SQL to start query in a new practice. And it's, it's not that complicated, right? Like I think it's, but it starts with like, Having, being curiosity and having a need. Like if, I think if today people are like, I'm just gonna go this weekend and start learning sequel, and you have no purpose for it, like it's gonna be, so it's, it's gonna be a troll to, to learn something. And you don't want learning to be a chore, right? Like, I think we, we have other things to, to worry about that. Then that's, and so that's where we approach, like I will meet up someone in your team that is more data savvy than you work with them, find interesting project to work together. Go learn how to. Query data. Don't become a data engineer or something, but understand how data Yeah. Is model, like, how to query it. Like what a big core concept. Right. And then finally, I'll, I'll do the G P T plug, but like, you know, the rate of things are going, like you can start like, I mean, I use it. Myself today, I can write pretty good sequel, but like sometimes I'm like, ah God, I just gotta know how to do this. And I good. I know enough that I can ask gps like, can you write me a windowing function that quite this data, this is my data set. And then it just quite a data, I know enough to know that what is giving me is correct, but like I. I rely on my good friend, g p t, to, to help me do the work, you know? Uh, and I think that's, you can't just start there, but I think in the future it will help you. Uh, you might be able to start there, but I think that's, again, it's a good accelerator assistant

Michael Hartmann: 48:51

that that's my, well, and, and, and I suspect that there's a number of our listeners, audience or whatever that um, don't have a colleague who's a data expert, so maybe also going into communities, right. To find others and just. Yeah, look for like, it's amazing how much people will help you learn.

Mike Rizzo: 49:09

Yes.

Sylvain Giuliani: 49:10

I mean, I use communities every days, you know? Yeah. Every time I have Salesforce problem, you know, God knows we have, uh, so many all the time. 24 7. You know what, it's, it's built like it's built. It's built that way on. That's their business model. That's where the community, that's where community come, comes in, you know, it's like, Hey, how's the. What's the best of the 20 million way I could do it in Salesforce? Tell me what's gonna go wrong if I do it. This one like you, that's what the C comes in the shell

Michael Hartmann: 49:36

experience is Eva evaluating the tradeoffs very quickly, like crowdsourcing it.

Sylvain Giuliani: 49:40

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Rizzo: 49:43

Do it all the time.

Michael Hartmann: 49:44

Yeah, it's, I I, I do too. Um, well, I, it feels like we could go on and on here, but I think we're gonna have to, to wrap up here. So, so thanks for joining us. This is, uh, so this is one of the ways that I learned still and stay current, is just like, just having these conversations. I, I think I learn something every time. But, uh, so thank you so much. If folks are interested in kind of keeping up with what you're doing, the communities, et cetera, et cetera, what's the best way for them to do that? Um,

Sylvain Giuliani: 50:12

I'm on LinkedIn under my name So easy. Uh, you know, like every good market, I mean they're replying to dm, you know, our social network. It's the hassle I'm at there. My email was Sylvain get sensors.com. I'm sure I'll put it in the show notes, that link and all that stuff. But these are kind of the two best way. If you have questions, you wanna chat about anything. Or is it down to, to each other about other people's, like tech data problem. Uh, and also you, I'm in the marketing apps community, so you can DM me there

Michael Hartmann: 50:39

too. Fantastic. Well, this has been, it's been great, Mike. Thank you. Uh, yeah, thank you. Hopefully we'll get Naomi back here soon. I know she's had, uh, Quite an adventure recently. I'll let her Yep. Share that when she'll be back when she's ready. She'll be, she'll be back, um, to all of us, you listeners and viewers, if, if we actually get this out on video. So, uh, thank you for allowing us to invade your personal space. I think I stole that from some movie or something. I don't remember. Um, good job. Anyway, until next time. Bye everyone. Bye everybody.

Mike Rizzo: 51:12

Bye.