Mostafa:
Welcome aboard. Hello, and welcome to the Digital Disruption Podcast! First, thank you all for checking in and listening to the Digital Disruption Podcast. We appreciate you being here. I guess we should also start by introducing ourselves. So, go ahead, Patrick. You’re leading this.
Patrick:
Thanks, Daoud. I’m Patrick Sock, Senior Director of Digital Transformation at e-CENS. I’ve been a digital marketer and data analyst for about 23 years now. I’ve worked in a variety of capacities in the industry—from being an in-house marketer when online travel first emerged, to being an account director at a digital agency, and a lot of things in between, including freelance consulting and leading a technology team at a major holding company. Back over to you, Mostafa.
Mostafa:
Alright. Thank you so much. Well, I am Mostafa Daoud, Head of Content here at e-CENS. I have successfully hosted this podcast. It’s doing great now, and we’re trying to onboard people onto the transformation train. I enlisted the help of Patrick, who will be answering all of your questions and my questions, to be honest.
Mostafa:
So, we want to start from the basics—the first 101s. We’re going to start with, what is digital transformation?
Patrick:
Sure. It’s a great question. I would say if you ask five or six different people, you would probably get seven opinions. So, digital transformation can mean a lot of things depending on the industry and who you talk to. Let’s start with, at e-CENS, we are a data-centric company. We help companies utilize their data to engage with their customers, optimize their digital experiences, optimize their media investments, do conversion rate optimization, etc. So, we tend to approach digital transformation from the perspective of delivering better experiences and better results through your digital assets. We take a measured approach.
Patrick:
The way we define digital transformation is intentional organizational change designed to increase your organization’s digital maturity, which probably prompts a follow-up question—what is digital maturity? Digital maturity represents your organization’s set of capabilities at a given time—a snapshot in time—of your organization’s capability to accomplish its marketing, sales, and customer experience objectives through the integrated use of technology.
Mostafa:
That sounds good. You said that digital transformation is the enablement of using different technologies and staying ahead of the curve. But I want to ask, does digital transformation integrate all of the systems and functions like sales, marketing, and product? How does digital transformation help you mash all these together in a measurable way that delivers ROI to your organization? How do you measure it?
Patrick:
Absolutely. I mean, truly, digital transformation can affect the entire organization, including supply chain and business operations. It can really impact the way technology is used and integrated across the entire organization, so I appreciate you bringing in some additional examples. The reason why it can be so impactful is because it is holistic, right? It is meant to impact not just the investment in technologies but the way technology is used across the organization.
Patrick:
So when we’re doing digital transformation assessments, when we’re trying to help establish a baseline of where a company’s digital maturity is, we’re not just looking at a technology stack. The rubric we use is kind of four main pillars. We look at technology infrastructure, data infrastructure, your roles and skills (so your people), and then your processes or your ways of working. All four of those pillars holistically contribute to your overall digital maturity. Right?
Patrick:
So one thing that I like to evangelize is that investing in additional technology—buying more pieces of technology—is not digital maturity. It’s not transformative. It’s how you invest in technology and use that technology that’s transformative. It’s got to be tied to your business objectives. It’s got to be tied to actual use cases that support what your business is trying to achieve in order for it to be transformational in any way.
Mostafa:
I mean, we definitely need one more tech tool to achieve our goals. We won’t be able to achieve it without one more tool—just one more tool. This is…
Patrick:
This is the trap, right? There’s undoubtedly some truth to it in the sense that new technologies, new functionality, and new ways of doing things do unlock new opportunities. The proliferation of cloud-based technologies has made a huge difference in how we utilize data, deploy applications, and automate processes. But that said, when I led a team that supported advertising technology licenses, I cannot tell you how many times organizations invested in tools, and their teams didn’t use those tools.
Patrick:
And so, four, five, or six months down the road, you find out that—I’ll give you an example, like an enterprise search management platform. Search Ads 360, for example, is a Google product. So you sync all of your search engine accounts to that tool, but if six months down the road, all of your account managers are still managing paid search through the Google Ads interface and not through Search Ads 360, now you’re paying for technology, but you’re not getting the benefit of that technology. So, this sort of illustrates that point of the four pillars precisely. With a tool like Search Ads 360, not only do you have to invest in and buy the tool, but you also have to have people on your team who have the skills and knowledge to use it. You have to have the data integration to have proper measurement of results, conversion, attribution, etc., bringing in offline conversion data if you have it available. You need all of those things happening together to have technology be transformative.
Mostafa:
So now that we have… I mean, can you elaborate more on the four pillars? You mentioned four pillars before I move on to my next question. What are they?
Patrick:
Sure, yeah. So this would be your technology infrastructure, your data infrastructure, which are closely related. In fact, you might even say digital maturity and data maturity at this point in time go hand in hand. So you’ve got your technology infrastructure, data infrastructure, your roles and skills—so these would be your people, your talent—and then processes, and that would be your ways of working. Are your teams properly collaborative? Do you have centralized measurement frameworks? Are you all looking at the same KPIs and metrics? Do you have data dictionaries that define the core data that matters? Are all of your marketing teams across different channels utilizing the appropriate data collection methodologies, naming conventions? All of those things are integral to being able to bring everything together holistically.
Patrick:
The age-old joke is that marketing and sales never talk, but they need to in the most successful organizations. If you’re really trying to deliver on the promise of seamless, connected, multi-modal marketing, not only do marketing and sales need to talk, but your support folks, your product folks, your web developers, your fulfillment if you’re in eCommerce or retail—all of these need to be coordinated.
Mostafa:
Alright. That would lead me to my next question. We’ve already answered a little bit of it. What is not digital transformation? It’s not definitely buying one more tool, but what else?
Patrick:
Yeah, so let’s definitely reemphasize that and cross it off the list. Buying a new tool in and of itself is not transformative. In the absence of skill—I’ll go so far as to say, in the absence of well-defined use cases, skilled people who know how to use the new tool, and a process to integrate it into your operations, it’s actually probably taking a step backward to just buy new technology.
Patrick:
Digital transformation is also not making ad hoc changes. It’s not identifying one problem and fixing it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t identify one problem and fix it, and in fact, many organizations benefit from doing foundational work first before doing full digital transformation. If you don’t have certain foundations right around data, measurement, technology integration, etc., there are a few preliminary things you should be doing first.
Patrick:
Digital transformation is not about incremental adjustment, ad hoc implementations, and projects. It’s much more holistic than that. And that’s not to say there isn’t value in those incremental adjustments or incremental investments. I’ll give you an example: maybe your company is currently not doing anything in the realm of customer engagement. Bringing on customer engagement channels like SMS, email marketing, in-app push notifications—all of these channels that drive additional engagement and value from your customers—would be a great thing to bring on board, and you may not need to do it in the context of a much larger strategic journey. I wouldn’t call that digital transformation, and yet it may still have quite a bit of value to your organization.
Patrick:
There are these incremental and ad hoc projects that we often do when we realize there’s an opportunity or something—maybe there’s a gap we’re not taking advantage of. Then there are these more organization-wide, longer-term strategic initiatives that we engage in. What kind of sets those apart is either the landscape of digital has changed so much that we’re no longer able to keep up with the pace of change—whether that’s regulatory changes, proactive industry responses to regulatory changes, or as digital becomes more sophisticated and mature as a whole, customer expectations change. You can fall behind just by standing still, right, in comparison to your competition and the industry at large. So, when you can no longer make ad hoc adjustments to keep up with the pace of change and deliver the kinds of experiences that your customers and prospective customers expect, that’s when this more transformative type of work is needed.
Mostafa:
I would follow up on this and say, before I ask my next question, as someone who handles content a lot, with the new evolution of AI and tools like ChatGPT, every company said, ‘We’re going to replace our writers with AI writers.’ And every one of them failed because, you know, not that AI isn’t good, but you definitely need a skilled person who can operate. Content is not something that you can just outsource to an AI tool and let it go wild. Content, like everything when it comes to digital, is strategic and has deep roots in every function of the business. My role as a content creator or head of content helps not just build brand awareness but also helps our sales team build more connections, push the wheel forward, and achieve more through brand recognition and people engaging with our content.
Mostafa:
Yes, there is one more question I would love to ask: how is digital transformation holistic? What do we mean from a strategic level by holistic digital transformation? I want to know more about this.
Patrick:
Yeah, it really comes down to the way we think about it and the way we consult and advise our clients. For initiatives to be truly transformative—digitally transformative—they need to impact the business as a whole and be strategically aligned with business needs, business objectives, or larger changes in the digital landscape.
Patrick:
In terms of how they’re holistic, they involve multiple teams within the organization and the entire technology stack, making the technology more embedded and integrated into operations. On one end of the spectrum, it involves the operations of the company, and on the other end, it delivers customer experiences. For example, a technology like a CDP and CRM, when properly integrated, can unify touchpoints from the moment you acquire a user to the point they need follow-up support and service. Across your organization, you know all the communications and interactions that have been had with that customer. This contrasts with the marketing team operating in a silo, understanding that they acquired new customers, drove repeat customers, etc. Sales understands they had this many qualified leads and drove this many offline sales, and support and service have their own set of metrics.
Patrick:
In a digitally transformed organization, those three touchpoints would all live within the CRM. Much of that data would also live within the CDP so that you could be orchestrating that data and optimizing the experiences you’re delivering—properly segmenting your customers, understanding different tiers of customers, understanding those who are at risk of churning, and understanding the full life cycle of that customer. That’s not possible when you don’t have sufficient integration of data and processes. CRM is another one of those great use cases where having a powerful tool that you haven’t implemented properly is as much of a hindrance as it is a help. To make it holistic, it’s really about integrating data and technology into all your ways of working and across those ways of working to paint as complete a picture as possible and deliver as seamless a set of experiences as possible.
Mostafa:
That answers the question. A question popped into my mind that ties to two questions we’ve asked before: what is digital transformation, and what is not digital transformation? From these questions arises the next question, which is: for everyone who Googles digital transformation, they find that digital transformation is about going from brick-and-mortar to digital. So a lot of people would ask, especially on the SMB side, ‘Hasn’t everyone digitally transformed since 2020 and what happened during those times?’
Patrick:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point. COVID obviously shook up the landscape quite a bit, especially for the SMB world. Brick-and-mortar-only businesses, mom-and-pop shops, family-owned businesses—it had a huge impact on those businesses. The ones that either had a digital presence already or were able to quickly adapt to that had a much higher survival and flourishing rate during one of the most challenging economic times possible for businesses. And some businesses certainly failed during that time period without a real digital presence because so much brick-and-mortar business was shut down for a considerable amount of time. The short answer is yes—it’s hardly possible to find an example of businesses that have zero digital presence at this point.
Patrick:
Even before COVID, most businesses—at a minimum—likely had a Google My Business entity where they were potentially getting local traffic, and they also had a presence on Bing and Microsoft. You may not have been optimizing it or claiming the ownership you were entitled to of your business listing, but you were showing up in more digital places than you realized, even if you weren’t doing digital marketing, search engine optimization, or search engine marketing. At this point, everybody has some digital footprint. Most thriving businesses have more than just some digital footprint. The digital ecosystem is an embedded part of how most businesses work at this point in one way or another, whether that’s just utilizing productivity tools—many of which are SaaS-based in one way or another—whether that’s just your Gmail and all of Google or Microsoft’s productivity tools. All of that is much more integrated than it was 20 years ago.
Patrick:
Some form of digital marketing is a big component for many businesses at this point, whether that’s just very hyper-targeted local ads, social media advertising (both owned and paid), Google Merchant Center for retailers. Digital is integrated today in many ways. But your question brings up a really good point. For most organizations, digital transformation today does not mean going from horse and plow to full digital infrastructure over a 24-month period of time. We’re not talking about organizations going from zero digital to full digital—like that’s a very extreme edge case at this point in time. That means we have to rethink what digital transformation means, and it means how can we—either through a trusted partner like e-CENS or other organizations doing digital transformation work, or even if you just have the skill set and will in-house—direct change in a way that allows you to capitalize on emerging opportunities to better leverage technology in an integrated fashion across your organization to keep up with the pace of change, including regulatory changes. What do I mean by that? Privacy and consent is the big deal. It’s the elephant in the room, or it’s top of everyone’s mind. There are over 130 countries now that have some form of privacy and consent regulation in place. Privacy and consent are emerging as a global standard of basic dignity for internet users.
Patrick:
They are entitled to some measure of privacy and consent online.
Mostafa:
Yeah, and we’ve all seen it. We’ve all seen the banners that ask for permission for cookies and tracking. We’ve seen iOS 14, and we’ve seen a lot of disruptions. This is the reason why we call this the Disruption Podcast.
Patrick:
Exactly.
Mostafa:
The digital world has and still is disrupting and being disrupted. Each iteration of GDPR, CCPA, privacy laws, and even the infrastructure with the introduction of AI—everyone lost their minds, and it sparked not just business disruptions, but people went on strikes. Like the writers—they went on strike and demanded that AI not be used.
Patrick:
I know it. Yeah, it’s really interesting. Just privacy and consent alone is causing a massive amount of data loss for organizations who are complying with these regulatory schemas. Just that alone is making marketing and measurement much more challenging than it was five years ago.
Patrick:
If you layer on top of that the proactive industry responses to that—iOS ATT (App Tracking Transparency) framework, various forms of tracking prevention in browsers like ITP and ETP, the looming so-called cookie apocalypse, the deprecation of third-party cookies—all of these are having a massive impact on the ability of marketers to reach their audiences and measure the results. It’s no surprise. I just saw a variety of postings from various contacts on Adweek events, and top of mind for everybody is addressability. How do you reach a target audience in today’s world, and more importantly, in tomorrow’s world? How are you going to continue to reach the audiences that you want to reach and measure the impact of media? It’s top of mind for marketers right now. And as you know, Netflix, Amazon—these big players in the digital streaming and e-commerce world—they uncovered the secret of seamless personalization quite a long time ago compared to everybody else, and they set the bar high. Everybody strives to deliver some modicum of seamless personalization at this point. As consumers, we talk out of both sides of our mouths, which is ‘respect my privacy and consent’ and ‘also deliver me really awesome digital experiences that require you to know something about what I do online.’ This is the challenge today—how do we continue to maintain trust so that people want to share information in a secure and privacy-friendly way so that we can deliver the experiences that they’ve come to expect.
Mostafa:
Which is a question we’re going to be addressing in our next episode because that’s it for this episode. Thank you so much, Patrick, for joining me. I really liked how we’re ending the podcast—just like bang, bang, bang, bang. Definitely looking forward to our next episode, and we’ll see you guys there. Catch us next time.
