Transcript
Speaker: Hi, and welcome to the inaugural episode of On Target with Christina Kagner. Today, I'm joined by Dan Kropsey. We have a really exciting conversation to talk about AdTech, Martech, and all the great changes that he's seen over the years. I'll let Dan introduce himself in a second, but I think it's a huge privilege to be able to talk to someone with so many years of experience and so many different perspectives that he's seen over those years.
Speaker: So thanks for joining me today, Dan. It's really a great privilege to have someone with your backgrounds on our first episode of On Target. I am extremely honored. Do you just want to take a minute and introduce yourself to our listeners? Yeah, I mean, it's been around the industry for a long time. I can kind of walk through kind of where I've been here. So I started my career in Nielsen.
Speaker: working retail measurement, trade promotion, consumer insights, and that sort of thing. You know, later, executives from Nielsen and I were kind of broke off and wanted to focus more on retail in -store execution and consumer demand forecasting. So I did that for a while, it was a lot of fun. Then Nielsen asked me to come back and there I went into kind of brand and retail product innovation. And that eventually led me into
Speaker: Being a part of the team that created a joint venture with Carolina, which many people may know is NCS Solutions. They're still rocking it today. Did that, you know, basically the premise there is to, you know, take advertising from demographic proxies into people who actually buy the product or don't buy the product. So that was really pioneering for our industry. Then I left for the crazy unstructured world of social media. I got to meet this smart lady here.
Speaker: Um, that was, you know, really incredible experience for me. He was just, uh, learned a ton of new things. Eventually I've, uh, found myself back with, um, with Catalina and, you know, purchase based targeting and really the intent there is to help them transform from, you know, printed coupons in the checkout lane to really on the immediate targeting, um, and services. So.
Speaker: Now I'm learning, leveraging all of that stuff I've done over my career to help, you know, my clients with their own marketing technology strategy. So, incredibly blessed. I got to touch most forms of marketing. I got to play with every kind of data you can imagine. And probably best, I got to learn from really some of the industry's best. So it was, you know, fabulous career.
Speaker: Awesome. You're a bit of a unicorn in the fact that you have over 30 years of experience. And we can see that when you talk about going from printed coupons all the way to omni -channel audiences. Can you share a little bit about what that's been like, just getting to work on all these really exciting products over the years? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, I think the fascinating thing for me is, is that as much as it seems really crazy different,
Speaker: In the end, if you kind of break it down, it's still, you got to product to sell, you have a customer to sell to and understanding kind of your product and what it's intended to deliver to the category buyer in your audience and what drives their needs and desires, what have you. All that kind of comes back down to that. And it's really after that point.
Speaker: To me, it's the easier part from there. It's just like what does technology allow you to do and where can you talk to them? How do you do it most efficiently? So to me, you know, that's what kind of the older but wiser, but still geeky and inquisitive kind of, you know, life I've lived helps me see. That's awesome. And do you want to tell me a little bit about your latest venture, Harmony Marketing Technology? What makes you different than other MarTech companies out there? What are you really innovating on now?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, in short, you know, I'm a consultant, I'm a MarTech strategy consultant, so that's what I do. My emphasis is on data insights and analytics as a part of that. And, you know, really, and I kind of hinted at that a second ago, my purpose for my clients is to effectively help them more effectively understand and influence behavior will stop, right? What data analytics, whatever, and that can, you know, span from
Speaker: helping an advertiser with their data strategy and their capabilities to improving their likelihood of success with AI by making their data more AI -ready and business -ready. Vendor selection, adapting to ID signal loss, privacy, product strategy changes, really kind of the gamut and whether you're an advertiser or in the service industry. As far as what makes me different, I think the biggest thing for me is, and I sort of touched on the breath thing in its
Speaker: And to me, it's not just been there seeing this kind of breath. It's really, like I said, if you see a lot and you do it with hundreds of clients, invariably you find the patterns and the commonalities and then that allows you to surface opportunities that they didn't think of, right? It allows you to connect, let's say, I did assortment work. So I know choice drivers, why people pick what they pick
Speaker: 20 set foot shelf set. Well, why wouldn't those same choice drivers be audiences to talk to on their mobile phone and make the creatives the reason why that practice existed rather than just doing a general ad, which was candidly what most people still do today. I think the differentiations for me is that you don't
Speaker: It's hard, lots of companies have these artificial or hidden barriers to new ideas and synergies. And it's reasonable, right? Because if you haven't seen a situation, it's really hard for you to kind of connect dots. You can't connect dots you've never seen before, right? So I think that kind of, it just happens more naturally. And it's really what makes it fun for me because you're, again, breaking it down to the most basic components and then building it up from there.
Speaker: I love what you said about getting the data AI ready because I think that's something that so many people miss out on is that you can't just use AI for the sake of using AI. Do you have any watch outs or tips or tricks you can give marketers that are just looking to start their journey into AI? Yeah.
Speaker: A lot of what you're reading is, oh my gosh, we won't trust the AI to spit out something. Someone's got to check it, fact check it. Someone's got to make sure we don't make a horrible mistake. And I think that topic's been covered. I think though, my approach and advice to people doing this is, and my prior teams have done some amazing things with machine learning in an early stage of AI, but I've been fascinated about, it's a pattern recognition capability at its core. And so it only sees patterns you feed it.
Speaker: Right. And a lot of the best patterns are never teed up. I was amazed that like, well, how could that, you know, how could, you know, gluten avoiders not be highly correlated to Udi's bread? That cannot possibly be. And the fact of the matter is all the little signals that would have told you that were too small. Right. But instead, to make AI ready, you kind of say, well, let's tag data. Let's say, hey,
Speaker: you know, coca mocha chocolate fudge is chocolate. Okay, so let's say they're the same for the sake of the AI. And voila, it may find that oh, chocolates a great correlation to this. And conversely, there's a lot of bad things out there. And in our social media days, you remember, you know, example, I use their all time. Jaguar. Is it a car? Is it an animal? Right? Is it a football team in Florida? If you don't
Speaker: tell AI that those are different things under different contexts is AI isn't gonna, it maybe eventually figures some stuff out, but why leave doubt? It's really easy for a human to put their knowledge and their topical expertise in the data to leave no doubt. And then AI gives you confidence, you can let it roll on its own more often, your fact checking is minimized. And really to me, that's like one of the biggest
Speaker: And it, it should resonate great with your teams too, because you're saying, you know, what you know as a human, what you know through practice does in fact matter. We mean, I need five of you, but we need the best of you to teach the data. Right. So the AI can find it. So that's kind of what I'm talking to clients about. And I do think in the end, um, that's going to be the different AI itself. Most people can't afford to have a bunch of PhDs. So.
Speaker: If the AI tech itself is going to be a commodity for most people, what's going to matter and what's going to differentiate you is the data you feed it. And that's everyone's responsibility. Yeah, I love that. I think thanks for sharing that. I think that's an amazing perspective and a great way for
Speaker: marketers to think about how they can do things differently. We've definitely seen over the years, there's been a lot of things that have come and gone, a lot of buzzwords like AI. I thought we could spend a little bit of time today just talking about the trends that you've seen and some of the things that you're most excited to see in the industry. So what are some of those past predictions that you've seen marketers make that were just never really realized the way it would be? We'll think trends first. And it's a perfect question for the old guy, right?
Speaker: Uh, but actually I kind of, I love the question and I, you know, like I said earlier, I take pride in the older but wiser kind of, kind of, um, angle here, but, but I would say seriously in most industries. You know, there's a gradual steady incremental improvement, right? In, in granularity, sophistication, automation, almost every industry kind of has that, but then, but there's always a boom, you know, there's a game changer. So if you kind of go back in my trend in, you know, you know, which goes back to 30 years, right?
Speaker: is the big game changes for me, the internet, yeah, right? That changed everything. iPhone, Amazon, and now consumer privacy. I mean, to me, those are the, in my 30 year span, those are the big game changers because, you know, I'll give you some examples of what that meant to solutions I was a part of. When I went from market level targeting, when I first came out of college,
Speaker: Then we get to store level. We change, you know, the price is going to be different in different stores, right? And then boom, right? The digital ecosystem hit. Now we can target, you know, to individuals and to households and stuff. And creatives went from one size fits all in the early days that were like literally physically delivered to your house by the post office or the newspaper kit, right? And then boom, now we can deliver, you know, customized creatives, you know, directly to your eyeballs.
Speaker: right, in milliseconds, right. And then data change, of course, as well, you know, went from mailing lists in, in publicly gathered information, and you inferred, you know, media consumption by the magazines you subscribe to, right, or shopping by the catalogs you had delivered. And now, you know, I built multiple attendee graphs with virtually everyone in America. And I was able to connect, you know, skew level purchase data to those households and
Speaker: in article -specific media consumption and play -specific visiting data. And then I had digital IDs that could talk to them on their phone or on their TV or what have you. So a lot of change in the years. And I would think the one thing that I would say I thought would happen more that didn't has been personalization.
Speaker: And it made a surprise. He was like, well, personalization, we do a lot of that. But I think it's way underdeveloped. And I'm clarifying. I'm not talking like minority report level creepy personalization. If the kids need to Google that, it's minority report ads, Tom Cruise movies.
Speaker: And you'll see it, but that's on creepy stuff like that. I'm just talking about just simply putting a message that will be relevant in front of someone. And my go -to examples is probably one of my favorite categories, ice cream. This is a category that's not the best for overpaying for CPMs. It's very high penetration. Everyone likes ice cream. You certainly don't want to overpay. It seems like on the surface to be a great mass marketing.
Speaker: type type product, right? Because you got to hit an ice cream lover without looking, right? But in reality, personalization is perfect for ice cream. Like in my last company, we could identify a chocolate lover based on purchasing they made across the entire store in categories beyond ice cream, cookies and baking and candy, right? We could do the same thing with fruit lovers and protein seekers and lactose sensitive people, premium buyers, value conscious,
Speaker: You know, and these are basically, if you look at the ice cream freezer section, products remain specifically for these people, very specifically for them. Yet, you know, it's not done. It's not, it's done, but it's, it's relatively rare and you'd think it would be done. And I, the argument I used to get all the time was, well, Dan, you know what, you know, you know, you have a lot of data requirements here. Aren't you going to harm your scale? And the response was all right. Right. Everybody else gets the vanilla literally.
Speaker: Right. You know, you don't know what they're purchasing, so you're going to get vanilla. Right. And, uh, you know, so I think that's an example of how we've under done it. And I do think that that's going to change. I think as retail media matures and as retail media penetrates the rest of the ad tech, I think the realization is retailers know why a price on a shelf is serving a particular sub segment, right? They know that that matters.
Speaker: And I think retailers and the data they bring to the party is going to make that much more prevalent. Whereas today I think we've been a bit lazy because oh my gosh, that's too complex. Or there's too much cost because I got to pay five people for that personalization. I think that's going to change as retail media becomes much more pervasive. Yeah. And I love that ice cream example because I spent about a year of my career working on ice cream brands.
Speaker: And I think the thing that always shocked me is that you have two different types of ice cream consumers. You have your impulse consumer that's going to the corner store and picking up a single ice cream bar just because they want it right there right now. And then you have your occasion buyers that are literally planning for birthday parties for family get togethers and they're stocking up. And so it's not just, it's the same product, but it's not just different messaging. It's completely different mentality, right?
Speaker: It's almost that instant gratification versus the delayed gratification, the fun, the moments, the family, the experience. I think there's so much that brands can take advantage of that. I love what you're saying around personalization because you can even create a really nice strategy around brand differentiation that I think a lot of marketers miss the opportunity to do. I agree. It's a perfect example. Eating a pint of ice cream and you're really sad or you're
Speaker: Your girlfriend breaks up with you. You know, it's a classic case. So there's, yeah, 100 % agree. And yeah, I think the other thing that I love you said is that retail media and the penetration of retail media, because obviously we've been seeing that pendulum swing in a lot of different directions over the last few years, onsite, offsite, then COVID hit. Literally retail media became the biggest boom ever. And now that everyone is kind of back into their more permanent shopping behaviors,
Speaker: we're starting to see retail media evolve to include that in -store experience that I think for so many years we neglected. Like how do we message the consumer at point of purchase? So I also love that you're bringing that to the forefront of the conversation. Yeah, it's, you know, the, you know, one of the other, I guess, untapped potential disappointments is that the,
Speaker: Even with an advertiser talking with a retailer, there's so many touch points. And whether it be just being on the shelf price point of a circular ad to, you know, the equivalent on the ecom site and out of home and is there's still very much separate in practice. And again, back to the reality is that there's, you know, there's a reason someone picks that product on 12 foot set.
Speaker: and there's efficiencies and brands are not eager to just hand retailers more money without reason. Now the beauty of this, you know, privacy which we'll talk about is they're getting a good reason now because they're going to have the most precious data around and it may, you know, at the absence of other people having that data. So they have a right to ask for more money in those cases, but still,
Speaker: synergy and efficiency and coordination between all of those different ports of retail has to happen. And right now they're in different departments, sometimes with different agencies, right? And how do you coordinate well when you got three departments and two agencies, right? And it's something that, again, comes down to same shopper, same product and same money bag, right? Somehow that has to get record. And I think it will. I think the industry is going to get,
Speaker: shaken in the coming years. And I think retail media will force a lot of hands. Awesome. So now that we've covered one of the biggest innovations in the space today, retail media, what are some of the other innovations that you're seeing that get you really excited? I think I'm going to go back to the consumer privacy
Speaker: thing again and for a reason that may not be obvious is consumers have always been the target of your marketing. That's their sole purpose. Consumers are now the enabler. They're becoming the active enabler of the marketing because they're the ones that hold the ticket now to your data. They're going to have much more say
Speaker: and whether or not you get their data, whether you can talk to them than ever before. Before it just kind of happened. And people either didn't understand or they just kind of rolled with it. That's kind of changing. And I think the interesting thing is that consumers should play into marketers' hands. Consumers now are saying, I expect something. I'm OK maybe with my data and opting in and my time. And you're seeing that with TV streaming now, with the shift back to, all right, I'll take ads.
Speaker: for a much lower price, right? Retail's always had, it was giving me discounts for my loyalty card programming, right? But they're gonna expect something in trade for their time and their data, whether it be free content, discounts, convenience, more relevance. So I think the thing that makes it fascinating for me, it's gonna put us as marketers to the test. Because our old profession is predicated on selling something to someone using features.
Speaker: Well, now you got to keep doing that, but you now also have to sell. Hey, you know, I like your data. I'd like to talk to you so I can sell you some things. And that's going to be the ultimate test, I think, because you're going to have to sell both things somewhat in tandem. Because the alternative is back to spring and prey, back to mass marketing, right? Back to pretty coarse level contextual targeting and things of that sort, which, you know, which I think is a lose -lose.
Speaker: I think there's an opportunity for a win -win here, right? But we have to be very cognizant of the fact that you're going to sell the right to sell to them, if that makes sense. It may be kind of weird for me to say that's one of the more exciting things, but I think that is the ticket. First party data and things like that is the ticket to winning, and that doesn't come without selling your proposition for their data. So I think that's fascinating in how it's going to fit in with everything.
Speaker: I've never heard that parallel drawn between ads enabled streaming and loyalty card data, but it's so brilliant. That's all it is, isn't it? It's, I'm going to pay a premium because I don't want to be tracked or I will take this discount in exchange for you knowing all these things about me. I think it is a breakthrough note, whether people realize it or consumers realize it or not. I mean, my kids are young 20 lower twenties, right?
Speaker: It's more innate to them, right? It's okay. Yeah. I, I don't want to pay that anymore. I'll watch a few ads or I don't, that's not, that's my, you know, my, my jam. I don't want to be interrupted by ads and they'll make a conscious choice to pay $6 a month, $10 a month. But have you? And you know, and that's, you know, that's a situation that has to be managed as a product as well, because when you take the biggest player out there, right? They're saying limited ads cheaper.
Speaker: I don't think they define limited, right? So at what point does limited become excessive and you give your data back, right? All those things are going to have to be thought through much more like a product than ever before. And it's going to be between you and the customer. So yeah, that's what fascinates me. I mean, maybe a huge human type of interaction type of guy.
Speaker: Yeah, I know. I think it's a brilliant chat, especially thinking about my own behavior and the fact that I have two streaming platforms that I use all the time. One, I'm totally willing to pay ads on because I binge the programs and I sit there and I watch. And another one, I would never want to see an ad on because I go when I have very limited time. It's going to be like a 20 minute catch up and then I have to move on. I love the idea of selling to the consumer and selling that value proposition.
Speaker: And I think we're seeing so much really cool technology come in and really trying to deliver that seamless consumer journey. I think you're right, personalization is very underutilized, but we're also seeing a lot more on the customer data space and privacy and opt -in and consent management. And that brings us to our final question for today, which is, what are your predictions for ad tech and more tech landscape? Like what should marketers actually be paying attention to today if they want to win tomorrow?
Speaker: Chaos, I think maybe mostly healthy chaos, but there is an incredible amount of uncertainty right now, an incredible amount of change hitting us or about to hit us. And again, I think this comes back again to the implications of consumer privacy, because you just think about it, right? The loss of digital ID scale, third party cookie deprecation, hitting us maybe for the last time maybe, right?
Speaker: We've already lost half the scale of mobile ad IDs. We could lose more once Google shifts to the Android. IP address masking is a very real possibility. And that will crush CTV. So you got that going on. Then you got more walled gardens with retailers entering that space. And all the media and walled garden platforms need to protect their data for the sake of the consumer, which means they're pulling it back and protecting it, which is creating now
Speaker: uncertainty about the disparity between quality of walled gardens and the quality of the open web and the cost of walled gardens versus the cost of the open web. So you have to reconcile and manage all those various tradeoffs. And then, you know, everyone now knows the power of first party data like never before. So now advertisers are trying to get their own first party data. And all of that's happening at once and it's creating, I don't even think it's fully grasped yet. It's created just an incredible amount of uncertainty.
Speaker: Right. And when these, when the, you know, what's the fan on these things, it's going to create chaos. And there's not going to be enough time to, to, to, to adapt. And no one knows when this is going to happen. You know, we've been following Google forever. Right. Now the various different governments are coming in and may or may not allow it to happen. So we don't know when it's going to happen. At the same time, our entire advertising industry is in a little bit of financial distress. Right. So they're not really keen on proactively and
Speaker: placing bets on all the different scenarios. So you're finding that people are kind of waiting and seeing a lot, kicking the can. And again, it's going to hit when it's going to hit. And there's going to be massive fragmentation, just unprecedented fragmentation. And you're going to have to move your marketing tactics to the data. And there's going to be a lot of data platforms, device platforms, media platforms, retail platforms, cleanroom platforms.
Speaker: you know, all that chaos has got to get managed, we're not prepared for. And then each of the activation platforms are now going to have to deal with dozens of ways to target. You know, you got like, you know, addressable targeting, contextual targeting, you get sandboxes, you get black boxes, you get geotargeting, you get moment targeting, deterministic, probabilistic, blah, blah, blah. You have all these different things. And so any given campaign to reach the scale you need may have to have multiple forms in the ensemble of
Speaker: of techniques to target to get to the scale and the price and the cost that you want. And all that has to be orchestrated. And we're not ready for that as an ecosystem. We're just not. So I think the other big prediction is going to be companies figuring out how to be above that and organize across. So advertisers and agencies serving them can have some hope of
Speaker: Identifying efficiencies and ensuring you are consistent with your message to the customer Right because right now if you don't if you're not prepared You're gonna let chaos rule and that means you're gonna have even more silos following each of the fragmentations Or are you gonna leave opportunities on the table because I can't deal with one more retail network Right because that means a separate team because I wasn't prepared
Speaker: to talk across these retailer networks. And I'm down to different teams and people can't sustain that. So a lot of chaos. I think in the end it'll be good for us because I think it's going to force our hand to get the data right and allow us to then kind of orchestrate a little bit better. So we'll see. It's going to be fascinating. My hope is I can help people navigate that. I'm sure you can. You've already given us a lot of great things to think about today just in these 20
Speaker: eight minutes we've had together. So thanks so much for joining me today, Dan, and for having this conversation. I think I couldn't have asked for a better first episode of On Target. I really, really loved your perspective. I love the fact that you're telling marketers to brace themselves for chaos. I love your predictions around
Speaker: what we are going to be seeing with the fragmentation and the increase, especially if we don't start thinking about the value that we deliver to consumers and really driving that home. And I think everybody listening today should go and look and see if personalization can fit into their strategy because you're right, we don't see nearly enough of that in the space. So again, thanks so much, Dan, for spending your half hour with us. And again, really, really appreciate your perspective. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Awesome.