Good human marketing: Wednesday’s Daily Brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, where do automation and creativity converge in marketing?

Hopefully everywhere, if you are working with the right marketing technology, and also have the marketing operations pros that can execute it.

I recently shared a Spotify playlist with a friend of mine who isn’t in our marketing community. We were both adding a lot of great tunes to the list, and there was one track he introduced that was perfect for the theme and came from a movie we both love. I shot him a celebratory text about the song, and he admitted that the suggestion had been generated by Spotify’s algorithm.

To my friend, I imparted the wisdom I’ve acquired over the years from covering marketing technology and digital transformation. I told him that machine learning is all about unlocking creativity (and listening enjoyment, I might add) for humans.

Below, Holistic Email Marketing CEO Kath Pay applies some of the same spirit to emails. Marketers use the technology to engage customers at scale, but it still takes good (human) marketing to make sure that the brand’s message doesn’t fall flat. Customers can tell the difference.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Email automation is never ‘set it and forget it’

Kath Pay, CEO at Holistic Email Marketing, is reminding marketers that automated emails still require careful management and attention. This was just one lesson from the last year and a half, but in 2020-2021, we learned and relearned it constantly.

Truly helpful marketing incorporates all of the technology you can call on to segment, personalize and automate your messaging. One of the best ways you can help your customers is to show them relevant messages that incorporate your customer data.

A standard email message doesn’t convey that level of personal awareness.

Automations in your message content actually help you send more personalized emails, because they use data to choose content that will personalize and enhance your messages or to choose a specific audience for your content. That’s why quick and easy access to data is essential for agile marketing in an environment where conditions change week to week or even day to day.

It allows you to update campaigns on the fly if products or services become unavailable or if you need to pause a campaign in one location or ramp it up in another.

The lesson here is to stay on top of your automations at all times, both the ones your customers see in public and the back-end automations that drive audience and content choices. And it’s not just for pandemic-related issues.

When the world seems to deliver one disruption after another – massive fires, floods or hurricanes, political and social upheaval, economic disruptions – we need to make sure our automations are updated to reflect our new messaging, customer and business needs and goals.

Read more here.

Neustar launches Fabrick Impact Assessment diagnostic tool  

Neustar, the identity resolution vendor, has added a diagnostic tool to its Fabrick identity ecosystem, the data connectivity layer which supports Neustar’s marketing and other services. Fabric Impact Assessment will diagnose and mitigate the impact of third-party cookie depreciation and device ID loss across Neustar customers’ media and measurement investments, helping to avoid deterioration in reach, measurement accuracy and ad-driven revenue.

The diagnostic tool will apply a score to customer’s measurement and media syndication partners across a range of channels and platforms. 

Why we care. Publishers and advertisers alike are looking ahead to third-party cookie deprecation with some concern. What remains unclear is the extent to which alternative IDs, relying on first-party data with some supplementation, will mitigate the effects of the loss of cookies. Expect to see a lot of activity developing tools to accurately measure just what’s going on.

Read more about Fabrick here.

Dave Gerhardt boomerangs back to Drift  

Almost as much as CEO David Cancel, Dave Gerhardt had seemed to be the face of conversational marketing platform Drift. Employee number eight, as he reveals in his LinkedIn, he was Director and then VP of Marketing during a period of rapid growth for the company. Although there’s a turnover in senior marketing roles anywhere, it still seemed strange to see him depart for a CMO role at small business sales app vendor Privy.

After one year and nine months with Privy, Gerhardt has returned to Drift, this time as Chief Brand Officer reporting to Cancel. Tricia Gellman continues as CMO. As Cancel laconically noted, “We back.”

Why we care. Gerhardt brings positive energy to the marketing technology space and has always been worth listening to. This feels like normal service resumed.

Quote of the day 

“We’re entering the age of marketing where if you don’t have a great martech/data platform, you will lose top marketing talent. Another reason to invest in great MOPs and Analytics people.” Sara McNamara, Marketing Operations, Slack