Mostafa:
Welcome to another episode of the digital transformation disruption podcast. Or, we need, like, we need a shortcut. Like, we need—we need definitely a shortcut for the introductions—Digital Disruption Podcast.
Patrick:
Welcome to Disrupt, a digital transformation podcast.
Mostafa:
Now, something like that would be amazing. How are you, Maciek?
Patrick:
I’m doing well. How are you, Daoud?
Mostafa:
I’m all good. Alright. Let’s jump right into it. In our last episode, for people who are following up with us, we talked about what is digital transformation and, you know, what is not and what’s beyond COVID, and the holistic approach of digital transformation. We did leave—I wouldn’t say a cliffhanger—but we did leave on, like, a question. And we’re gonna—this episode is all about answering these questions and following up on things that we didn’t answer in the last episode, which will lead with what is digital maturity and what is Google’s framework for that. And we’ll follow up with a note or, like, an observation that you made, which was that Amazon and Netflix set the bar for personalization so high, and everyone is now feeling the heat, especially with digital transformation and how it brings, as we said in the last episode, sales, marketing, product, and all the company together to achieve its result. And then we’ll lead to more enterprise, you know, questions that help people like the CMOs, the busy CMOs, the directors, the VPs, to help them implement digital transformation and move on with, you know, moving on and being ready for regulations and hits that come one after another in an extremely fast-paced digital world. So, welcome aboard, and let’s—let me just start with a simple question that is never simple: What is digital maturity?
Patrick:
Sure. Thanks, Daoud. Digital maturity—there’s a few different ways that we could think about it, but, ultimately, it comes down to this ability to deliver on the promise, or—let me start over—let me put it this way: Digital maturity reflects your ability to utilize your digital assets to deliver kind of connected, multi-moment, seamless experiences. So, and, you know, in a sort of ideal world, that would be from the moment your brand starts interacting with a potential customer, right? So, whether that’s through, you know, if they saw you through an organic search, through a paid search, or if you delivered, you know, prospecting and awareness campaigns through programmatic media, where—however you first reach that, you know, potential customer—ideally, you would start to have a connected set of experiences, messaging, and contact points with that user.
Patrick:
Right? So, digital maturity reflects your capability to do that. You know, one framework that we like to use is Google’s digital maturity framework. It is very measurement and digital marketing-focused, and digital experience-focused, so it can be useful for our purposes. And they use kind of a four-step framework from Nascent to Multi-moment. So Nascent being at the least mature end of the spectrum and Multi-moment being sort of the ideal state, the fully mature digital organization. And we’ll kind of—I can kind of walk through the details of the four stages. So the four stages are Nascent, Emerging, Connected, and that Multi-moment ideal, right? And, you know, Nascent organizations are characterized by a kind of a, you know, a media-centric kind of approach.
Patrick:
So they’re leveraging data in their external tools, they’re, you know, oftentimes buying through siloed platforms, utilizing the data available to them through the platforms, not leveraging their owned first-party and zero-party data. So, a relatively high level of fragmentation and siloing across their marketing efforts, sales, commerce, lead generation, and delivery, right? So you would say, you know, kind of fragmentation—if I had to boil Nascent down to a single word, it would be fragmentation or silos. In terms of the second step of Emerging, so these are organizations who have started to, you know, connect their own data with automated type buying solutions. So leveraging more—potentially more sophisticated algorithms in their media buying platforms, still kind of, you know, single-channel optimization focused rather than kind of holistic, you know, impact of media-focused—or impact of digital experiences if you wanted to, you know, include more than just marketing. But Emerging would say you would have more connection between systems, but certainly not connection across your ecosystem. Then, data-centric organizations—they fall into that Connected phase, so the third phase.
Patrick:
Connected organizations—you have more integrated use of data and, you know, audience activation across media channels. So, let’s say you do segmentation of your key audience segments within, let’s say, your web analytics platform, and then you share those audiences with multiple media platforms in order to have a coordinated, you know, connected, you know, targeting and suppression of specific audiences. Or you utilize your CDP to do segmentation and then distribute those audiences from a single source of, you know, kind of audience truth or, you know, addressability. So, this would characterize more data-centric, you know, Connected organizations. And then, of course, at the—you know, most data-driven end of the spectrum, you know, these—the Multi-moment in Google’s framework, right? These are where you really have dynamic execution across multiple channels. You’re optimizing around—you’re, you know, you’re both optimizing and measuring and delivering experiences around the idea of the individual, you know, customer and business outcomes, right? So you’re—you really do—are trying, to the extent possible, and to the extent that you’re successful, you have a really—this kind of connected multi-moment view of a customer or prospective customer.
Patrick:
And you’re delivering and tailoring messaging, you know—the kind of ideal is, right? The right person at the right time with the right message, right? And that kind of Multi-moment organization is able to do that most successfully.
Mostafa:
Oops. That was on it. Which leads us to the next point that we said we’re gonna talk to: organizations and big organizations like Amazon for eCommerce and Netflix for entertainment—they are, you know, staying in the Multi-moment and, like, they’re their crown—the Multi-moment B, and they are not easy to dethrone from their throne. So how do you think that, you know, organization leaders and people who are higher-ups need to think about delivering the seamless experience using personalization within, you know, within the digital marketing sphere using digital transformation, as we said? You know? It’s a negative thing. So how do you approach this?
Patrick:
Yeah. I mean, a part of it is understanding that the world really has changed in terms of what’s possible, and because what’s possible has changed, you know, and because some companies are delivering on what’s possible, that sets the bar higher for everyone. And so, you know, there’s lots of organizations that are delivering those same kinds of seamless experiences, and more and more are joining the ranks every day. But, I mean, even take a company—you know, a pet product and a pet food company like Chewy, right? I mean, talk about a company that delivers a really seamless, multi-moment, end-to-end experience. You know, extraordinarily fast fulfillment and delivery exceeding, like, excellent customer service, right? But they have a whole—what you as a customer, you don’t see the amount of infrastructure and process that sits behind those experiences they deliver. They have full—you know, they probably have 16 or 20 different fulfillment centers across the United States. They’re able to deliver, you know, pet food oftentimes within less than 24 hours and—and usually in well under 3 days.
Patrick:
Right? Their service is exceptional. Their frontline customer service agents are empowered to fix problems. They don’t have to go ask for a manager’s approval. They just fix things, right? If your pet dies, they send you flowers. You know? It’s like, it’s just amazing, right? So there’s—there are, you know, lots of companies that are delivering on this—on this promise.
Patrick:
You know, one of the things that Netflix and Amazon share in common is just a massive percentage of their users who are in a logged-in state, right? So the—you know, most people remain authenticated on Amazon and Netflix, like, at all times and across multiple devices. What could be a better—you know, as long as they’re being good stewards of your personal information, you know, what could be a better source of data for customization and personalization than the fact that, you know, they know who you are across, you know, multiple sessions and multiple screens throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, over time, right? So—so they have this amazing graph of your engagement or lack of engagement and your behaviors that fuels those experiences. So it’s a good lesson for other brands and companies, you know, to the extent that you can leverage the trust that you build with your customers, you know, to have them be in a logged-in state and to, you know—for them to understand that you are trying to deliver better and better experiences to them, a better product to them, a better service to them, and that you are going to be a good steward of their information. You are gonna respect their privacy, but that you do, you know, in sincerity, want to provide them with better experiences and—and products and services. I think, to me, that’s at the crux of it.
Mostafa:
I mean, I—I wouldn’t say that—I wouldn’t say that Amazon are the best when it comes to handling data. They collect a lot of data, and they’re at the forefront of regulations and, you know, privacy concerns and regulations, and organizations like the EU and the US and California and such. So I wanna—well, I wanna ask a question that is two parts. The first part is how does digital transformation help you stay ahead but stay in line with the new things—the new transformations that have happened on, like, for—on the digital scene? How does digital transformation help you address that? And then how do you continue delivering a personalized and seamless transac—like, not transaction, but experience with the new regulations that focus heavily on consent and, like, privacy and stuff like that? So, you know, I wanna keep bringing that back and work how organizations should approach it.
Patrick:
No. That’s a great question. I mean, I might not put all my cards on the table, but I’m a huge fan of all of the privacy and consent regulations. And, I—I think consent-based data collection is—is key to just digital dignity. So, like, for me, I would like to see our entire industry sort of get on board with putting privacy and consent forward, you know, rather than—rather than trying to minimally comply with the letter of the law, I would like to see organizations put privacy and consent at the forefront and kind of lead with that. I do think it would help, you know, cement a higher level of trust, and I also think it would reinforce the—you know, the future of kind of personalization and—and addressability for that matter in terms of, like, media, is for—is really in zero and first-party data, right? So that, you know, data that you own, but, you know, not only that—not only is it important that that data be first-party data, it’s important that that data is consented data, that people know you’re collecting it and have allowed you to collect it, that it is handled in a privacy-friendly, privacy-safe way, appropriate safeguards for data security, and that you do—you know, you really should utilize that data for the purposes that you said you were gonna collect it for.
Patrick:
So, I think—so I think that in terms of digital transformation, right, a challenge is always an opportunity, right? It’s kind of how we—you know, how do we respond to the changing landscape, right? We know third-party data collection is going to be impaired even more than it is currently. So we need to find, on the sort of media end of the spectrum, we need to find networks where we can actually find addressable audiences, right? How do we find addressable audiences? Well, retail media networks, where we can leverage retailers’ own, you know, consented first-party data, they can curate audiences on our behalf, identity solutions that are privacy-friendly, like LiveRamp, where you can onboard your own zero and first-party data and then sync up with other, you know, publisher audiences in a directly one-to-one addressable manner, where you can both target those audiences and measure the results, right? So, they’re really—first-party data—this is why I said earlier, in an earlier podcast, digital maturity and data maturity go hand in hand.
Patrick:
If you don’t have a first-party data strategy in today’s world, you’re already behind the curve in terms of reaching the audiences you wanna reach and measuring the impact of your marketing efforts. And then, on the digital experience end of the spectrum, to deliver the kinds of seamless personalized experiences that people expect, right? Those are probably the critical areas where not having a handle on consented first-party data will—will hurt you and already is hurting you.
Mostafa:
Okay. For the people that are listening to us now, if you had to give advice to them, like the CMOs, the VPs, and the directors of digital, if you had to give them advice in, like, a minute or so about this exactly, what would it be? Like, where—where should they focus the most or—or the bulk of the force towards to keep an—to keep the machine oiled and to keep up with, you know, the changes and stuff like that?
Patrick:
Sure. So, I mean, honestly, the place to start—the ideal place to start is with a current state assessment. So, you really need to do, like, assess your organization’s capabilities. Again, in an earlier podcast, we talked about these kind of four pillars of your technology, your data infrastructure, your processes, and your people, right? You need—you need to do an honest assessment of all four of those pillars, you know, in relation to the business objectives you’re trying to achieve and to the—you know, against the changes you know are here today and are likely to come tomorrow, right? So, you know, you need to kind of take into consideration that the larger context we’re all operating in, regardless of your business objectives, and you need to find, you know, where do you—where do you stack up? You know, where are the gaps? You know, where have you kind of solidly integrated technology into your organization, right? Maybe, like, your cloud data warehouse is, like, in really good shape, like, the data quality is awesome.
Patrick:
You’ve got really, you know, solid, you know, first-party data, but maybe it’s not integrated in all the places it should be, so you’re not actually utilizing that data to deliver either on the marketing end or on the digital experience end—customer engagement end, right? So, there’s things you need to do to improve that. Or maybe you have a number of ad tech tools that are really powerful, but maybe your team is—they’re really good diligent people, but maybe you haven’t taken the steps to, like, to give them the skills and experience they need to fully utilize those tools. Like, maybe they don’t know how to properly do programmatic media buying in an enterprise DSP, but—but you’ve bought the tool, so you expect them to use it. Well, now you’re missing a key pillar there on the roles and skills side. Well, how do you fill that? So, once you do that in all of those different pillars, right? Then you know kind of how you score today, where are the gaps—every gap is an opportunity, right? And so, then you create a roadmap to address those issues. That’s the place to start so that you can really be, you know, properly kind of strategic about it.
Mostafa:
I mean, on the—on—on—when speaking about strategy, in a previous—in the last episode, we talked about, you know, the move of digital transformation from being from brick-and-mortar to digital into more sophisticated, more interconnected, more deep concepts and, you know, workings—the inner workings of—of digital information. I would ask, you know, when addressing also the—the enterprises and stuff like that, what is the—the impact that the base of the change for digital enterprises—wait. Let me phrase it much better. How do digital—like, how do enterprises keep up with the ever-changing—ever-changing scene in digital transformation and digital maturity now?
Patrick:
This is the million-dollar question. It’s a great question, and I guess I’ll—I’ll give you my—I’ll give you my cheeky answer first, which is you can’t, right? There’s no possible way that you can stay ahead of change, right, in—in a one-and-done fashion. So, you have to—yeah. So, you have to make some calculated, educated bets, right? Because you can’t do strategic organizational change every—every six months, right? Like—right? So you—what you need to do is make some calculated bets.
Patrick:
Right? You know what the current landscape is, and if you’ve done a—a really robust assessment, then you know where your gaps are, but you also need to make some calculated bets on what tomorrow is gonna look like, right? So, we know third-party cookies are going away. We know first-party data, zero-party data is gonna become much more important over time. It’s already really important. It’s gonna be more important.
Patrick:
Right? We know that certain—like, certain trends in—in digital marketing are proliferating—retail media networks, retail data for media buying, right? Addressable marketplaces, private marketplaces—there’s a number of different areas—the embedding of AI into, you know, across sort of digital tools, right? So there’s a number of things we can sort of make calculated bets on. The more we can incorporate those sort of long-term calculated bets into our strategy and execution of digital transformation, the more likely that what we put in place is going to be more robust and future-facing and durable, right? So—yeah. And some of those bets are not likely to reverse course.
Patrick:
So, I think first-party data, zero-party data are gonna be—they’re gonna remain important, right? They’re not gonna go away. Privacy and consent are gonna—they’re not going anywhere. If anything, it’s gonna become more robust, right? So, if we can put in place, as part of our digital transformation efforts, things that address, you know, things—things that we are likely to be robust long-term trends, then—then our efforts are likely to also be robust and—and future-proof, right? But—but still, that doesn’t mean—well, we’re—this podcast is about disruption, right? So we—we don’t know—we don’t know what’s around the blind corner that we don’t see coming, right? And that’s something—and if we don’t see something coming, we can’t really make a calculated bet on that.
Patrick:
And so you have to be nimble. I mean, you—you have to remain open, curious, flexible, adaptable, right, as an organization. And, obviously, the larger the organization, the more people, the more infrastructure, the harder it is to remain adaptable and flexible. But you can do things—I think, again, like, cloud infrastructure is a great example of—when designed properly and with the right middleware and, you know, development processes that can—you know, how you design your infrastructure can help you be more flexible as well. But flexibility and adaptability is crucial. Or you have to be prepared to—you do efforts today, and then five years down the road, you’re gonna have to do the effort again. If you make—if you create a rigid solution only for today, we already know what that means—change, you know, change is inevitable. And so, whether it’s four years from now, three years from now, or eight years from now, it’s going to be out of date.
Patrick:
You know? So it’s better to build a certain amount of flexibility and adaptability into your solutions.
Mostafa:
Or have someone on the inside to give you insider trading info, you know? Whenever new loads are on.
Patrick:
That’s always good. That’s always good. We have Nostradamus on our—on our payroll, so.
Mostafa:
I mean, I would—I would ask this, and we close, you know, this episode all. When it comes to digital transformation and staying ahead, you obviously can make some preparations or, like, try to read the scene, but do you make—like, do you assemble a squad that, you know, its job—its job to tell you, you know, a digital transformation squad that tells you, okay, so we need a strategic plan for this, in a year—in, you know, in a specific amount of years, we will need to be prepared for this and that, or do you adapt to, you know, changes as they come, or do you work with an external partner on these kinds of things? You know? What do you think is the approach here—short-term, long-term?
Patrick:
Yeah. I mean, I think all three could—I mean, I guess all of the above in a way, right? But I do think having some—I mean, it’s hard to—it’s hard to invest in a team of people whose only role is sort of innovation, so I think you need to—I think you—on the other hand, you can have, like, as part of people’s functional roles, like, certainly in—at certain points of leadership, right, on your technology team, your information—you know, your data teams, your marketing teams—you would expect people to be proactively surfacing short, medium, and long-range trends, right? The—you know, some of which may be sort of faddish, right? Flash in the pan and then they’re gone, but some things are—we know, you know, as we start to see things take—you know, pick up traction or are disruptive in ways that we know are likely—you know, are unlikely to go backward, right? I think you do need people in leadership roles who can point to those changes and say, no. This is—you know, this is here for the long haul, right? We need to be prepared for X, Y, and Z.
Patrick:
This is an opportunity. This is a challenge. We need to be preparing for this, right? So, you do need to have that sense—that idea of short, medium, and long-term priorities, right? These are urgent. These are necessary and urgent. These are sort of things that are on the immediate horizon but not necessarily, like, an emergency, right? And then these are longer-term trends that we know are happening and we need to be aware of.
Patrick:
And that can help you build your roadmap as well, right? As you—you know, when you do your assessment, you identify gaps and opportunities. Well, then when you create that roadmap, you can align that to the kind of time horizon to decide which ones are most critical, which ones are most impactful. And I know we are gonna cover this, maybe next time, but, you know, it does reinforce that need for—you know, kind of an alignment, you know, at the kind of, you know, CEO level in a way, right? We’re talking about, like, levels of change that require a kind of an organizational commitment. At the end of the day, just to tease that topic now, right? We’re talking about organizational change and change management, which is no easy thing. So, yeah.
Mostafa:
Dear CEO, you’re losing your seat. The next episode we’re gonna change the whole management.
Patrick:
Nice.
Mostafa:
I mean, yeah. I mean, I guess that’s it. And, yeah, definitely, this is what we’re gonna be covering alongside other things in the next episode. So, if you are interested in knowing if you keep your seat or not, just stay tuned, and, just—and in the next episode, we will be addressing any new changes that happen that organizations should be looking forward to or, you know, things that you should plan forward ahead to—down the road, be it short-term or long-term. We will definitely be addressing these kinds of things and, like, new regulations and stuff like that. So, we wanna be the source for all of the, you know, digital transformation disruptions that will happen. So stay tuned. You know, if—if you wanna know if there is something that you are not seeing, but you should definitely take care of or keep an eye on to address in the future, we will be addressing it here.
Mostafa:
So, I guess, on that note, you know, we peace out, and, we’ll see you on the next episode.
Patrick:
Thanks.
