How to Approach a MarTech Build Out in Today’s Evolving Landscape
By: Kevin Cuxil
As we prepared for the split from Disney in 2019, we had an opportunity to take a step back and re-imagine Fox’s Marketing Technology (MarTech) strategy. At a high level, the strategy was pretty simple and probably sounds familiar to you if you’re reading this if not a bit cliche:
Build an omni-channel communication platform capable of delivering the right message to the right user at the right time.
At that time, I was given the amazing opportunity to build out my ideal stack from scratch. I didn’t realize how much I learned along the way until I looked back on my experience while preparing to speak on the Lev Digital Podcast “In The Clouds”. In doing so, I thought to myself, “What advice would I give to those looking to build out a new platform or those looking to migrate/re-platform?” Let me break my learnings down for you.
We are at a really exciting time in the MarTech and AdTech world right now. Things are evolving and changing at a rate that we have never seen before. But, it can also feel scary with things like new legislation, third party cookie deprecation and changes to the walled gardens like Meta. To add more to the confusion, we’re now seeing the proliferation of platform acronyms while simultaneously seeing the convergence functionality. So, where do you start?
When looking at the MarTech landscape, there is no shortage of vendors or solutions. Many platforms offer capabilities that are somewhat indistinguishable on the surface: email, push notifications, in-app, paid media, etc. This is where long-term experience– and sometimes painful memories– help guide the way.
Get Used To Redundancy
In order to build a state of the art MarTech stack, you first need to get used to redundancy…or, at least perceived redundancy. For example, at Fox we have three vendors who call themselves Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). They’re all great at doing specific things but just because they may put themselves in the same category doesn’t mean we have redundancy since they each solve distinctly different strengths.
Most of the MarTech players started with one or two core competencies and then expanded out to other functionality. If a platform started out as email and then added features like push, it will behave fundamentally differently than a platform that started with push and added email. This is because the core KPIs and metrics are different. Therefore, the audience creation, analytics and insights can look very different by platform. If you think about it, getting your Data Management Platform (DMP) to talk to your email Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sounds great. But looking at DMP data through a CRM lens, or vice versa, doesn’t make sense. Your CRM is often targeted and specific in its messaging, while your DMP is more about harnessing large scale audiences within the Ad Tech ecosystem. Things like open rate and bounce rate mean nothing in the DMP world, while impressions and ad types are of little use within an email CRM platform without the right approach. If you are working with a vendor who completed a recent acquisition, I recommend asking when they are planning on re-platforming because there is only so much tape and bubble gum that can be used. To truly harness disparate data, the platform should contemplate all the key metrics and KPIs from the start.
Standardize Your Data
So, let’s get started…before you churn out an RFP or enlist the help of a consulting firm to help guide you through a MarTech build or overhaul, it’s important that you establish the core pillars to underpin your success. First and foremost, you need to standardize your data. That means spending time to ensure that the data is consistent and usable at all points, across all platforms. This is neither easy nor sexy. You can do this in phases but there is no running or hiding from it. If you cut this short, you will feel the consequences for years to come. It can be tempting to try and solve this with a product. There are CDP platforms that will have solutions for data transformation and you may think that will solve all your problems. Not so fast. While their ability to do some data transformation and mapping is very useful and this functionality can even accelerate your timeline temporarily while you fix the data, it’s not a long term solution. This is like painting over mold in a house. It may look good but, eventually, you will have to fix the source of the problem.
Build In-House Expertise
Secondly, you need to build in-house expertise. You need in-house engineers with domain knowledge if you really want to scale. If you simply want to send emails and are not looking for advanced capabilities like hyper-personalized messaging or sophisticated message sequencing then you’re ok to rely on a vendor. But, if you have an ambitious roadmap, building the internal team is key. At Fox, we did this by partnering with a trusted consulting firm and embedding our engineers within the squad so that when the consultants rolled off, we retained all the knowledge and skills.
Where To Start
So, you may be thinking, what do I deploy first? There are all these amazing platforms out there. Do you need an email CRM, a Customer Data Platform (CDP), a Data Management Platform (DMP)? Let’s start by defining what we’re talking about. If you do a quick search on CDP, you will find a plethora of vendors who do very different things. A CDP can be:
- Back-end data reconciliation around customer data
- A segmentation tool that marketers can use to communicate with users
- A set of out-of-the box widgets that can create custom experiences like quizzes or surveys
- And more…
Rather than try and define acronyms, let’s look at functionality and what to deploy first. At the end of the day you may select something in the CDP space that does email and push notifications really well. But, that doesn’t mean you skip the email piece and jump straight into site personalization. Some of the advanced audience segmentation and out-of-the-box data science models look great in some of these tools. But, if this is what you are swinging for out of the gate you may end up with an amazing tool that cannot fulfill your basic needs. After you have the data right, focus on the core functionality of email marketing + push (desktop & mobile), and in-app messaging. This is table stakes for any modern MarTech platform and having a system of record to house deterministic consumer identifiers like email is essential to the rest of the build out. This also gives your marketing teams tools to start using…which, in turn generate data that you can then leverage to improve the platform. After the CRM functionality is in place, I would focus on other owned channels — web, mobile, living room. This is where you start integrating experiences into the product so users have personalized experiences based on the messaging your marketers are trying to get across. Even if you buy a platform that has both the core CRM and the consumer experience capabilities in one, focus on getting really good at the core CRM stuff first. Otherwise, it can be tough to measure true lift.
Bringing It All Together
The third, and final piece I would tackle would be external or Ad Tech integration. This is my favorite part because that’s where the revenue is. But, you first need to establish the foundations of a persistent identifier and user profile before you can connect everything together.
Ok, so you ready to start looking at platforms? Maybe not quite yet. There is one more piece. Did I mention the importance of getting the data right? This means you first need a really good data pipelining tool. At Fox, we use Segment- a great tool to help standardize and centralize our data. Just as important, Segment allows us to deploy new tooling and functionality within our apps without any dev work and those new tools benefit from the same, standard, robust data set that all other apps use. Segment also feeds our data lake with the same high fidelity data that feeds the other tools. Trust me, as the platform evolves, you’re going to need that raw data. This has been foundational for us as we use the raw data to build data science models and do advanced segmentation to feed back into the MarTech stack. If you don’t do this part first, you will end up trying to do exports out of one or more platforms, which can be messy, time consuming, and frustrating.
So, now that we’ve covered the approach, I’d like to share a bit of what we’ve done at Fox. The MarTech stack is never fully complete. We’ve built a platform that is omni-channel but also flexible. When Google announced third party cookie deprecation, we were able to quickly pivot to next-generation cookieless options. As an organization, we’ve made the commitment to stay ahead of the curve. When Google announced their cookie free solution Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), we were one of the first big companies to participate in their Origin. When Google Topics was announced as the replacement for FLoC, we had plans to start testing Topics the following week. Our build has allowed us to focus on taking the next steps in terms of personalization and messaging. We are currently plugging in our next generation predictive modeling, churn prediction and customer value framework into our products and MarTech stack. Outlined below is a high-level view of the tools we’re using and have deeply integrated into our platform, Leveraging Segment as our pipeline, Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the core CRM, Lytics for engaging with our consumers on property, and 1PlusX to do next-generation Ad Tech segmentation and integration. We continue to monitor the marketplace and constantly re-evaluate solutions to ensure that what we built does not go stale.
You will notice one section in our architecture below that is notably missing a vendor. With the ever changing ecosystem, we have chosen to own our Identity Spine. This means that the Identifier that powers our MarTech, AdTech and things like mapping devices to users and households is powered by our own Fox Identity. With the current changes going on within the marketplace right now, we wanted to control our own destiny when it comes to identifiers. While our platform is designed to transact with other identifiers throughout the ecosystem, it is ultimately something we can control and maintain.
At the end of the day we are extremely proud of the stack we have built and continue to enhance. Being on the leading edge of solving third party cookie deprecation and solving problems that have never been solved before is something our teams really enjoy. If solving evolving, complex problems is something that excites you, come join the Fox team-we’re hiring!
About FOX Tech
Make Your Mark Here. At FOX, we pride ourselves in shaking things up and making things happen. We’re a community of builders, operators and innovators and each and every day we experiment, collaborate, and co-create to develop the next world of news, sports & entertainment streaming technology.
While being one of the most well-known brands in the world, we provide our employees with the culture of a start-up — fast paced, non-hierarchical, full of smart ideas & innovation and most importantly, the knowledge that each member of the team is making a difference in defining what’s next for FOX Tech. Simply put, we love to do great work, with great people.
Learn more and join our team: https://tech.fox.com
