Posts by chrisohara

I am the head of global marketing for Salesforce DMP and Data Studio, products which help marketers identify, expand, and activate their digital audiences across every consumer touchpoint. I am a frequent contributor to industry journals, an also the author of 6 best-selling books about food and drink.

Watch: Talking AI at Programmatic IO NY



4 Better Ways to Sell Technology




Does your typical one-hour meeting look like this?

  • Go around the room with introductions (5 minutes)


Stop the Slides


Grab a Marker


Show, Don’t Tell


 Tell Stories



Because they will call Ron.

Why Most of Today’s DMPs are Lousy




A Little DMP History




What’s the Problem?





Why Completeness Matters





What to do?



The New CMO Lexicon: Redefining “Identity” and “Marketing”

Today’s consumers are highly demanding. They expect curated movie recommendations from Netflix, one-click restaurant reservations from OpenTable, on-demand limousine service from Uber, limitless housing options from AirBnB and the world of commerce available 24/7 from Amazon Prime. It’s a great time to be alive for a consumer, but perhaps the worst possible time for the CMO of any other company. Just think, Uber doesn’t own cars. They are a technology company built from the ground up to deliver personalized service at scale to consumers—that’s what today’s marketing is all about.


Only a few short years ago, CMOs had a difficult, but simpler, remit: build the brand and the consumers follow. Absolut vodka was about as undifferentiated a product as anything on the market, but great packaging and a clever ad campaign made it a power brand. It thrived because the world still worked on the principles of How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp’s 2010 book. Sharp posited that a marketer needed two things to succeed: availability in the consumer’s mind and availability of the product at the shelf. Brands like P&G’s Tide control lots of mindshare with mass media budgets, and P&G ensures it is widely available at every supermarket so a consumer can easily choose between it and Wisk at the “moment of truth.”

That system is dying rapidly, as mass media channels become fragmented into thousands of websites, apps, streaming media channels and experiences we don’t even understand yet. As a marketer, you can’t “buy eyeballs” today like you used to. This paradigm is largely responsible for the ever-shrinking average CMO tenure (from 44 months last year to only 42 months today). CMO’s must be prepared to insert themselves along steps of the consumer journey that move from channel to channel, and also have the ability to capture each tiny piece of digital exhaust that consumers’ gadgets and gizmos throw off, helping to inform their understanding of how they engage with a brand.

To make it clear, here’s a chart:

Rents access to people Owns people data
One-to-many marketing One-to-one engagement
Big bets on limited channels Small bets on dozens of channels
One “big tent” message for many Dozens of messages for segments
Panel-based attribution Real-time feedback
Agency defines strategy Marketer owns strategy, agency executes
Ad-focused Experience-focused

Yesterday’s CMO would “buy eyeballs” with big TV and print campaigns, and use subscriber information as a proxy for targeted reach. Today’s CMO wants to own cookies and mobile keys so they can have a one-to-one conversation. Yesterday’s CMO looked at the performance at the end of a campaign, and optimized for the next one based on results from a survey. Today’s CMOs crave access to real-time performance data so they can optimize at run time. Things couldn’t be more different.

In this new norm, what should CMOs do to ensure they stay ahead of the curve? They have to change the way they think about consumer identity and how that impacts their work as marketers–and redefine the way they think about “marketing” in general.

Identity beyond IDs

A few months ago, I wrote that “identity is the new basis of competition” in marketing. That’s still true—you can’t build meaningful cross-channel experiences if you can’t tie people together with their devices. To that end, I recently was invited to an internal town hall with marketers from a large beauty company where the CMO announced that they just now eclipsed over 500 million addressable IDs in their data management platform. Her staff started clapping. Why? Because these weren’t known buyers, just cookies and mobile IDs—but they represented the ability for marketers to connect and build experiences for anonymous people who interacted with their website, mobile app or an ad. That has real, tangible value.

But, devices don’t buy things, people do. Just because you have a good device graph with billions of cookies, e-mail addresses and mobile keys doesn’t mean you have a good view of the people behind that information. Identity data must be augmented with data from systems of engagement to formulate a true view of the consumer. Every click, download, article read, and video view throws off digital exhaust that is filled with scraps of information that machines can use to paint a truer picture of a consumer’s identity. When marketers start valuing all data as a financial asset, they are starting the process of turning IDs into people.

For those of us in the industry, we can be forgiven if we think the world revolves around display, social, mobile and video advertising. We’ve gotten really good at delivering personalized digital experiences in real time, and we have a Lumascape full of clever technologies that are moving the needle for brands that are trying to reach connected consumers. CMOs must think outside the Lumascape, and connect these important addressable touchpoints to mass channels like TV, radio and print in order to deliver personalized experiences at scale.

More than  Marketing

The problem is that our definition of marketing often misses the concept of touch points that can exist separately from marketing. These touch points can include interactions between salespeople and potential customers, what happens when a product is returned, conversations on community sites and forums where customers talk to each other about a brand, and also within the e-commerce experience when a consumer is making a purchase. These are arguably more valuable interactions with consumers than a digital banner ad or email because these are either people that are existing customers or those about to buy. They’re incredibly valuable to a brand and don’t involve the traditional notion of “marketing” whatsoever.

Let’s take a look at an example. I fly Delta because I love their app, and they reward my loyalty with special phone numbers so I can reach someone no matter how hairy things get throughout my travel experience. Every time I interact with their website, app and service representative is an opportunity for Delta to market to me—and also an opportunity for the brand to learn more about the way I fly and what matters most to me as a consumer. Getting it consistently right keeps me loyal, but getting even slightly wrong brings me one step closer to tweeting #DeltaStinks. Not fair, but that’s representative of brand relationships today.

To be successful, CMOs must expand their definition of identity. “Identity” is more than just an ID. It’s what is formed after capturing every possible insight from every interaction. And “marketing” is not just about cross-channel messaging, it’s about creating great consumer experiences with every touchpoint that happens including sales, service, commerce and more.

It’s a great time to be a data-driven marketer.

[This article originally appeared in AdExchanger on 10.16.2017]

Data’s New Paradigm

there_will_be_blood_master__detail_carouselThe Rules of Data-Driven Marketing are Changing as Data Rights Management Takes Center Stage

Unless you’ve been living off the grid, you’ve seen the promise of “data as the new oil” slowly come to fruition over the last five years. Connected devices are producing data at a Moore’s Law-like rate, and companies are building the artificial intelligence systems to mine that data into fuel that will power our ascension into a new paradigm we can’t yet understand.  Whether you are in the Stephen Hawking camp (“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”) or the Larry Page camp (“artificial intelligence [is] the ultimate version of Google”), we can all agree that data is the currency in the AI future.

In our world, we are witnessing an incredible synthesis of fast-moving, data-driven advertising technology coming rapidly together with the slower (yet still data-driven) world of marketing technology. Gartner’s Marty Kihn thinks the only way these two worlds tie the knot for the long term is centered around data management platforms. I think he’s right, but I also think what we know as a DMP today will evolve quickly as the data it manages grows and its applications evolve alongside it.

I think the most immediate changes we will bear witness to in this ongoing evolution are the changes in how data—the lifeblood of modern marketing—will be piped among data owners and those who want to use it. Why? Because the way we have been doing it for the past 20 years in incredibly flawed, and second- and third-party data owners are getting the short end of the stick..

Unless you are Google, Facebook, Amazon or the United States government, you will never have enough data as a marketer. Big CPG companies have been collecting data for years (think of rewards programs and the like), but the tens or even hundreds of millions of addressable IDs they have managed to gather often pales in comparison to the billions of people who interact with their brands every day across the globe. To fill the gaps, they turn to second- and third-party sources of data for segmentation, targeting and analytics.

In the wild and wooly early days, where most digital consumers were targeted on desktop devices using cookies, this meant buying pre-packaged segments of audience data. Website owners were happy to have some javascript placed on their pages, and let data companies gather cookies in return for a monthly rent check—as long as it didn’t interfere with the revenue from their direct sales efforts. Part of that deal included offering their data as a mechanism of insights and discovery for marketers and agencies. Adtech companies would showcase their data in various ways, or use it as an input to lookalike modeling. In the end, data owner would infrequently be rewarded if the data found its way into a delivered advertising impression.

The real usage of the data was sometimes unknown. Many cookies got hijacked for use into other—even competitive—systems, and there was little transparency into what was happening with the underlying data asset. But, the checks still came every single month. The approach worked when the best data owners (quality publishers) had a thriving direct sales channel.

Fast-forward to today, the game has changed considerably. More than half of enterprise marketers own a DMP, and even smaller mid-market advertisers are starting to license data technology. Data is being valued as a true financial asset and differentiator. On the publisher’s side, manual sales continue to plummet as programmatic evolves and header bidding supercharges the direct model with big data technology. In short, marketers need more and more quality data to feed the machines they are building to compete, and publishers are getting better and more granular control over their data.

More importantly, data owners are beginning to organize around a core principle: Any system that uses my data for insights that doesn’t result in a purchase of that data is theft.

Theft is a strong word but, if we truly value data and agree that it’s a big differentiator, it’s hard to argue with. For years, data owners have accepted a system that allowed wide access to their data for modeling and analytics in return for the occasional check. For every cookie targeted in programmatic that was activated to create revenue, a million more were churned to power analytics in another system. Put simply from the data owner’s perspective, if you are going to use my data for analytics and activation, but only pay me for activation, that’s going to be a problem.

In order to fix this, the systems of the future have to offer the ability for data owners to provision their data in more granular ways. Data owners need complete control of the following:

How is the data being used? Is it for activation, lookalike modeling, analytics in a data warehouse, user matching, cross-device purposes or another use case? Data owners need to be able to approve the exact modalities in which the data are leveraged by their partners.

What is the business model? Is this a trade deal, paid usage, fixed-price or CPM? How long is the term—a single campaign, or a year’s worth of modeling? Data owners should be able to set their own price—directly with the buyer—with full transparency into all fees associating with piping the data to a partner,.

What is being shared? What attributes or traits are being shared? Is it just user IDs, or IDs loaded with valuable attributes, such as a device graph that links an individual to all the devices they use? Data owners need powerful tools that offer a granular level of control for controlling data at the attribute level, and deciding how much of their data they are willing to share–and at what price.

Outside of big data and blockchain conversations, the phrase “data provisioning” is rarely heard, but it’s about to be a big part of our advertising ecosystem. However, it is those very security concerns that have kept data sharing at scale from becoming a reality. The answer is an ecosystem that offers complete control and transparency–and a smart layer of software-enabled governance tools that can stay ahead of nuances in law, such as the new GDPR requirements require. As adtech and marketing tech continue to come together, and systems evolve in parallel with their ability to make the best use of data, the systems of the future must first ensure data security before data innovation can truly happen.

Data may be the new oil, but will it be run by adtech wildcatters, or will the rules be governed by the data owners themselves?

[This was originally published in AdExchanger on 9/26/17]