SL-6 Why Data-Driven Marketing is a Must

In this episode we have Vidyarth Eluppai Srivatsan, Director of Marketing Technology at The Coca-Cola Company and Pavel Bulowski, Chief Marketing Officer at Meiro and Co-Founder of She Loves Data. Vidyarth describes the Director of Marketing Technology position as a bridge between the roles of Chief Data Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Information Officer. It’s about going across the marketing, digital or technology to bridge the knowledge gaps and come up with both the strategy and execution. Data’s importance in marketing has soared. Currently, there are over 8000 AI and automation platforms available for marketers to take advantage of, so it can be tricky to know which ones are worth our attention and money. Pavel emphasizes the importance of thinking of them as strategic purchases and looking for the ones that offer capabilities that will help differentiate ourselves from the competition. Quotes: "Often when I work with people on my team who have that one very linear trajectory in their career, they are good at what they do but they don’t see a bigger picture. That’s what I can bring to the table, synthesize across the board a little bit more." "This role is a bridge between all those roles, CDO, CMO, CIO, that deal with marketing. There is a definite knowledge gap. We can’t expect all of these functions to know everything about how the fundamental layer that connects each of these buckets to really come through, and that to me is the central role of anyone who heads up the domain of marketing technology. So regardless of where this role sits, this particular person has to think about going across the marketing, digital or technology to bridge the gaps and really come up with both the strategy and the execution of the angles. That in essence is what the role entails, the definition of the structure will vary across companies but the purpose is to bridge the knowledge gap between these departments." "It’s a bit of a blindside because you can’t drive businesses by data, I think that’s a bit of a misconception. Business has to be driven by business, you need to have business objectives.In my mind it’s business driven and informed by data, but not data-driven on its own. When people put it out, a bit out of context and into the open it often feels like there are a bunch of data scientists who are able to find these whole new insights and directions for a company, and it is not necessarily so straight forward. Often, data analysts don’t have the business context. I think over the next couple of years it’s going to go back and we are going to hear more of business reasoning in marketing again, supported by data, of course." Thanks to our sponsors: Shine Solutions Group Talent Insights SAS Women in Analytics (WIA) Network Growing Data Read the full episode summary here: #SheLeads Ep 6 Enjoy the sixth episode of our #SheLeads Series!