This week we're talking about a topic from a blog post Brian wrote last week about the NetWise Audience Platform and why we decided to build it with the goal of "democratizing" access to our data. This podcast is a convo more about why that kind of access really matters.
Sure, it's about building a great product and making money for NetWise, but it's also about something bigger, which we hit in this episode. As the business world is increasingly complex, and business marketing is increasingly data-driven, access to data isn't only about success in business, it's about fair competition. Better access to data means better and more efficient capitalism.
Want to know more? Give the episode a listen. Want us to keep them coming? Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!
Why NetWise decided to democratize access to our data.
Podcast: What is the Data in Data-Driven Marketing
Adam Kerpelman:
I was reading a post and it was presenting this idea that contextual advertising is going to be the new hotness after cookies go away. And I kept thinking...they were literally putting it in quotes like it was a new thing. They just mean bad data. We're assuming that because you're reading The Wall Street Journal that you are x, y, and z.
Brian Jones:
Totally, back to what advertising was 10 years ago, right?
Adam Kerpelman:
Exactly.
Brian Jones:
That was hot, it was hot stuff a decade ago. That's the funniest and also simultaneously most annoying thing about being in the marketing industry is that everyone's a marketer.
Adam Kerpelman:
Everyone wants to rebrand everything always.
Hey, it's The Data Driven Marketer brought to you by NetWise, I'm Adam.
Brian Jones:
I'm Brian.
Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Data lab?
Brian Jones:
Data basement. No, you nailed it.
Adam Kerpelman:
We agreed to try it last week, but I feel like if I don't get the pause in there just right, then it's just data basement and people might miss the...I don't know.
Brian Jones:
Data basement.
Adam Kerpelman:
Pertinent to this week's episode everyone should probably get it regarding the database reference.
Brian Jones:
Data basement.
Adam Kerpelman:
Data basement. That just sounds creepy if you don't understand what a database is.
Brian Jones:
I think that's how you feel if you hung out with a bunch of data analysts.
Adam Kerpelman:
Hang out in the basement. Yeah, that's true or have a land party down there where we qualify leads and work on marketing campaigns.
Brian Jones:
A land party where we qualify leads, sign me up.
Adam Kerpelman:
So, this week we are actually here to talk about a post that went up on NetWise's blog last week, last Friday, that we will link to in the show notes that Brian wrote about democratizing data. It's in part about our platform, which get used to it, that's what we care about here our products and what matters. But I think today we kind of want to have a broader conversation about why we think that's important. But I think maybe the place to start though is Brian, what do you mean when you say democratize access to data?
Brian Jones:
Well, it's used a little bit as a catchy headline, but the idea is make available. In a broad sense of the word, bring the capabilities of, in our case, we're talking business data. But I think in a more general sense business intelligence information. The ability to analyze data and to use it to make data-driven decisions, data-driven marketing. But we're seeing more and more information across businesses in general, every single person is talking about data. Every single department is talking about data. How do we optimize things? How do we analyze things? How do we track things and report things? They've never heard the term KPI more frequently than right now in 2021.
So what a side effect of this is, is that we just have millions of people in the workforce right now who are incredibly data savvy and they want to use it. They want the capability to get in there and get their hands dirty with information. So we're finally evolving past just Excel, and not everybody. It's probably only fair to say most people, but there are a lot of people, especially marketing, who are just incredibly data savvy. They can do everything in Excel that people make jokes about, pivot tables, macros, fancy formulas. And then they also have started to dabble in databases, which is the big daddy of Excel. Now you're starting to cross over into technologist space.
Adam Kerpelman:
Infinite Excel.
Brian Jones:
Right, it's infinite Excel. So all of a sudden what you can do, the power, you can have the amount of data you can do things with, the information, the sharing of information between company departments and between businesses, and information that's available for sale and for trade, and just all this stuff that informs us as a people doing our jobs, make our businesses better and make more money ultimately, is exploding. So we want the data to be available to people.
Adam Kerpelman:
And I think there are multiple...you immediately ended up talking about Excel and about databases and really what those are are interfaces or tools for sort of manipulating the data. There's another aspect of this as well, which comes down to how you access the data and making that more accessible and easy to use. And then there's also just access, just getting the data. We did a whole episode about what is the data in data-driven marketing and a whole chunk of that, where it gets interesting that we talked about in the episode, which I'll link to in the show notes in case you haven't listened. Actually I probably won't by the time I get to the end of the show and forgotten I said I would do that.
Brian Jones:
That's a good confession.
Adam Kerpelman:
Anyway, subscribe it's in the backlog. But we talk about the data you have from your own campaigns. We talk about the data that comes out of those campaigns and the first party data that you have, but then there's that whole ecosystem of accessible data outside of it. And, and by accessible, I just mean literally one can access it. But the current reality, short of the problem we're trying to solve here, is it's not really accessible because I don't have a million dollars a year as a marketer for a small mid-sized company or whatever, just even working at an agency. I can't say, okay, well here's what we need and I'm going to need a million dollar budget. It's the thing that creates the gap between the giant huge brands that can afford this stuff, and then the people that are trying to compete with them.
Part of it is about...part of what we're talking about when we say democratize is about creating tools where they can get access and do the tests and do all the cool stuff. Part of it is also just acknowledging that what we have now is a SAS business and not a commodity business, if that's the right way to say it, right? We're not selling you lumber, we're selling you a SAS product that ultimately gets you access to the lumber, but it's not like you're paying for the ramen. The way that market treats the data right now is like going for lumber buys. You buy it, you use it, you have to go back and buy it again. And that is not sustainable, especially for somebody with a mid-market budget. It's just not. I know because I've been there my whole life and I've been at companies competing against the people that have the unlimited budget for the data. And it's like, well, we can never beat them even if we have superior shoes, because I can't pay for the eyeballs.
Brian Jones:
To continue the wood analogy, everyone's selling eight foot two by fours and that's also kind of been all that's available for a long time, but everyone's a sophisticated woodworker now, so they want all these custom cuts of wood. They want panels, they want laminates, they want different types of wood cut into different shapes. So there's an aspect of the data itself needs to be available to people and then the tools to access it and manipulate it need to be available. And then, like you said, with cost, there's an interesting component to cost. There's the cost of purchasing information in an ecosystem where you can buy business information. There's the cost of buying tools and platforms to access it. But then, in reality, when you're really starting to talk about the data, the level of data driven decisions that companies are trying to make these days, the real cost is the investment in getting this stuff set up and having teams to manage it.
We've spent the last decade helping really big companies set up data systems. And it's really, really challenging. What happens is you end up building tools that service a couple needs, a couple of departments, and then all these other groups start to want to use it and it doesn't work right. You're missing things you needed, they need other information brought in, and so we're trying to do heavy lifting for people here. We're trying to do...we present, here's the wood, here's the saw mill, and here we've made it really easy to use the saws without cutting your fingers off.
Adam Kerpelman:
It's more like here's the wood and that CNC machine.
Brian Jones:
There you go.
Adam Kerpelman:
If anyone knows what that is. Yeah, I think it brings up a funny aspect of the idea of democratization and kind of democracy and this idea of you want to give access to the people. And I think that then creates a conversation of saying, okay, what's the important part to have be actually open access, and then what's the part where the system needs to control the interface with that material, so that it isn't messy. And I think a lot of platforms tend to, and this is one of the things I particularly like about the decisions that you made with NetWise before I even got here, you say often the thing that matters at the middle is data.
And for us it starts with good data, but then past that saying, oh, we have an integration with that, we have an integration with this, we have an integration with that, immediately turns into integration request Hell. And so now you're having the problem of, if you want to chase the democracy analogy, it's saying, okay, but I want the voting system to work this way. I want the voting system to work this way. I want the voting system to work this way. And if you all try to do your different...eventually you've created a mess where nobody can vote necessarily without learning the specific system. There's a reason that balloting systems are generally pretty simple, press the button for the thing that you want, nevermind fights about balloting machines and stuff like that. But the idea of pick a or b, okay, you finished here, you can go, it could certainly be way more complex, but someone there has to decide, okay, here's where it cuts off, and that's the thing that...
So I think what you're expressing there is this interesting conundrum where within an organization you frequently have, the sales department wants to use the data a certain way, the marketing department wants to use it a certain way, customer success might even want to use it a certain way. And if you start immediately trying build a thing that makes all of them happy, then you end up with this thing that's this tool does 30 things, I only need two of them, and they all kind of get in the way of one another.
Brian Jones:
Yeah, I mean you're hitting on one of the hardest challenges in software right now, I think. As data becomes...as everyone recognizes that it's the information that they're really after and the ability to analyze it and manipulate it and extract intelligence from it, the software systems that we build for people, the interfaces have to get more complex. They have to get more adaptable, more customizable, and we don't quite, I don't know if we'll ever be at this point, but at least right now, we don't want to jump to everyone just saying, Hey, you're either using Excel or you have to write software, you have to write your own code to do things. But what we've experienced with our platform, which I think is parallel to what we're going to start seeing with all kinds of information and BI tools in general, is you want to enable the user to go as deeply as they are able to.
So you need to build an interface that enables them to do a lot of complex things, fairly easily through a gooey interface where you still have to know the concepts behind how databases work and how data links together and how you explore it and extract it, but you don't have to write software for it. And then you kind of want to start to expose some of the software pieces, because I've been surprised how many marketers have asked us if they can write custom SQL to access our data. And you can, it's something we put into our platform for ourselves, not thinking other people would want to use it, but it's half our customers actually are excited when we show them that they can write custom SQL, which is really surprising to me.
And so what was interesting for us is that we, in the process of helping hundreds of big companies do all the complex things that all their departments wanted to do with business information, right there, their finance teams, their marketing teams, their data science teams, their platform teams, we saw so many of the ways that they need to access business information. And we were able to synthesize that into a tool that we built for ourselves, for our own operations team to not have to write software. So some really simple stuff that you can do through a data platform like ours would be days, maybe months of writing your own custom software to do that one little thing and it seems trivial when you do it and you'll just click a button and be like, oh, that's a nice feature, but it's something wildly complex behind the scenes.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, and I think it sort of, it gets to the back half of the podcast where I like to try to spin off the sort of philosophical map and stuff. But what you're talking about is a process that we went through for our platform, but that we also just believe in, in the sense of every other platform should do it so we're just going to talk about it here on a podcast. There are aspects that you want to put behind the UI. You want to say, look, all these people who are not necessarily technical want to do these things, let's build the widgets to help them do it, and then at the same time, realize the place where we are dealing with data savvy marketers who, if they advance to a certain point, want to be able to do the more complex things.
But also, it doesn't work to not have an on-ramp. You can't just say, okay, here you go. If we follow the democracy analogy, you need an in-between where, and this is the thing that I think has been hard for democracies in the modern media ecosystem; you have to have an educated populace of people to use the system. And so you can't just go, oh, well, if it's a thing that we don't have in the UI, here is unlimited, you need a CS degree in a data's team to understand it, and now you're now you're boxed out of this situation because you don't have that qualification level. There needs to be, and I think this is what, again, it's in our platform, but it's the thing that we think everyone should be mindful of, there needs to be that part where there are the power user tools, there's the sort of power user tools, there's the it's all still gooey, but it's sort of scripting tools because if you understand if then statements and Zapier, then you can still do some pretty powerful things.
And then you also need a knowledge base and a podcast to educate people about how to do those things, which is in part what we're here for, because we want ultimately to get everyone to using the more complex things. When this really gets to the democratization thing, we want everyone to get to be able to use those things, to do the truly powerful stuff that you can do with access to the data; building everything you've talked about as part of that on-ramp right. You need to be able to see I can do this, I can do this thing, but it doesn't quite work, but if I do these two little modifiers, now that works. And then you need to be able to go from that to go, okay, I've got to figure out how to write a script for this in SQL; there are some articles I can look up ideally through the platform to be able to age up essentially (age isn't a fair way to say it) level up to that platform.
I think the broader is why does that matter for the future of business or the future of the web. I think I have my own ideas around it that I've alluded to but you wrote the article.
Brian Jones:
Why does the democratization of data matter?
Adam Kerpelman:
Why is it a thing that we're willing to get on a podcast and talk about in an impassioned way? I build software to do, right? I mean, for one, I do think it's the future of the web, and so if we're completely honest, it's a way to make money, but that's why we're all here. But also why is it the direction we're just trying to go to where the puck is going. It's not necessarily, why is that? Why is that what's happening?
Brian Jones:
It's important because...were we supposed to get more philosophical or less philosophical towards the end? I couldn't understand what you said earlier. Well, I'll get more philosophical. It's because to continue forward progress of our society, in business, for businesses to continue to be more successful and more thriving. and enabled aggressive
Adam Kerpelman:
Progressive market capitalism, I would call it. And that's not to say politically progressive. I just mean evolving market capitalism.
Brian Jones:
Right, more efficient businesses, more jobs for people, but more better markets, better industries, better products, less expensive products. So to continue to do that work, we're kind of at a point where we have to get more, we have to get closer to truths in our decision-making. Businesses are very sophisticated. If you look at a large company, if you're a large company right now, you're making decisions based on a tremendous amount of information. And if you are a small business trying to move into a big market, you have to be using a lot of information to make decisions. You can't just be guessing at stuff. People love the idea of brilliant entrepreneurs who just know what's going on and they have a feeling and they wear a special t-shirt to work every day and they're such an interesting icon. Yeah, people have good gut instincts about business and about their industries and stuff, but they have it because they have so much information because they've exposed themselves enough to really understand things.
And to bring that to everyone, to bring that to businesses, make that standard, we need to move closer to truth. And there's no truth in your gut response to something. You might get lucky and have guests to the right thing, but the truth is in the information.
Adam Kerpelman:
Luck.
Brian Jones:
We need to apply science to business for that to uniformly be successful. It's okay for businesses to guess at things and people to go off inspiration. That's wonderful too, but ultimately for it to be consistent and reliable and for businesses to exist ongoing and make a stable economy, you need to use information. And we have it all at our fingertips right now. And so the more we can make that easy for people to use and accessible and affordable, the better the world's going to be.
Adam Kerpelman:
Look, and the reality is it helps everybody. You're talking about the quest for truth, but in part we're also talking about building more efficiency into the program. And if you want to chase just the idea of efficiency, you can get really literal with it. I saw a great article the other day that was a breakdown of how much power it consumes to take a Cristiano Rinaldo selfie and send it to all of his 12 million Instagram followers and it's enough electricity to power 10,000 UK homes for a year. So think about running an ad into the feed of that many people that just didn't need to be there because it's crap. Think about the pharmaceutical ads that I have to watch during a broadcast of the Olympics, because they're just guessing at my demographic. That's literally a waste of energy.
Brian Jones:
Right.
Adam Kerpelman:
Nevermind money and things like that. And that's for pharmaceutical companies who can afford it. So when you chase it down that road, it's about making everyone more efficient. But then also about if someone wants to argue at me that they believe in capitalism, then they're also supposed to believe in competition. And right now, particularly in the data marketplace, it's not really that competitive. Either you have a lot of money to throw at using data effectively, or you don't, and then you don't.
Brian Jones:
I think you mean either you're one of the few companies that dominates all the data in the world, or you don't. And fill in whatever you want the don't to be there. So it's important that information get outside those walled gardens.
Adam Kerpelman:
Right, that's not effective capitalism even because if I have a better pair of shoes then the company next door, but that has a headstart, I don't have a shot. And you see some emergent brands that pull it off, but the reality of how they pulled it off was they went and got 100 million dollars from a venture capitalist and they put 75 million of that into ad buys on a bet that in a six month period, they could beat the big guys. So they're still playing the same game. They're just, Hey if I get a little steroid from a VC firm, I could maybe get in here and occasionally see it work, and then they go, no, free market capitalism is a success. Competition is alive. And it's not.
Speaker 4:
There's another place where the common human misconception of seeing outliers and thinking that's the norm comes to play. Everybody thinks marketing and growing a business is about going viral or some super creative video. What was the shaving guy who made the funny videos walking around the...
Adam Kerpelman:
Dollar Shave Club.
Speaker 4:
That's not a strategy to grow your business. He did a great job and it worked wonderfully, but behind the scenes I'm sure there was a lot of other really, really well planned out strategy. But even if it was, even if his whole success was based on viral videos, that's not a strategy that every company can use. There can't be that many viral videos. So almost every company is successful because they're methodical and they work hard and they persist and may have consistency and planning and good teams. It's boring. It's not as fun as like a funny video that everyone can share around, but that's how most of the world works. People are just grinding away.
Adam Kerpelman:
Any marketer listening to this probably has dealt with that client whose like "and then it goes viral and then we blow up."
Brian Jones:
"Let me toss an idea your way, think that could go viral?"`
Adam Kerpelman:
You're always torn between, should I take the contract for the video off of which we will make a bunch of money, but that I know will not go viral because that's a crap shoot, or do you try to explain that that successful viral videos, even if they were deliberate where it takes ten years to be an overnight success kind of thing, or they're just a fluke. You can't gun for virality. If it happens, that's nice. But the best shot is we need to make 100 videos and maybe one of them get some traction.
Brian Jones:
And then actually it is a strategy because now you just did a data-driven approach. [crosstalk 00:25:28] What is the statistical chance of this happening? So, so that it can be a strategy.
Adam Kerpelman:
Now it's not what you've just pitched, which is, "I got this idea. It's going to go viral." Nobody knows what's going to go viral. That's why we have a weird term for it, like viral. If people knew what would go viral, we would just call it creative direction.
Brian Jones:
Those are just ads. We would just call them movies.
Adam Kerpelman:
We just invented advertising. That feels like a solid place to wrap it up. Ultimately the point of your post is that we really believe in what we've built as the platform here, because the...all of the good that the Internet has done for the world ultimately is built on the back of access to certain levels of data and stuff like that.
And as we think, see things siloing off increasingly when he starts to talk about some of these antitrust actions and things like that that are going on, the answer on the other side is trying to break down the wall and give people better and cheaper and more usable access to that stuff. Even if it means competition for our platform. I think we still want to talk about that and put that out there, which is why the blog posts, which I will link to in the show notes. Any final words, any final thoughts on the democratization of data until you get an opportunity to talk about it again next week?
Brian Jones:
Like you said, we want businesses to be successful. That's the core conversation at the heart of policy and politics and economics and jobs and wealth and healthcare. It's all we need. We need companies to be successful.
Adam Kerpelman:
Prosperous.
Brian Jones:
And prosperous, right? It's not helpful for anyone to have a bunch of businesses that start up with great ideas and passionate people investing their savings and their time and risking their homes and their kids' education money to have them got a business, that sucks. That's not helpful. That's, that's bad for the world. So we exist in a place where what we do can very dramatically help businesses prosper. Right. And a lot of you can say that about anything that's being sold to businesses, I guess, but it feels very visceral for us. We're right at the front lines of, are you getting in front of your potential customers so you can sell the thing that you're passionate about? So it's a great thing to bring to everyone.
Adam Kerpelman:
So like, subscribe, stick around for more of this stuff, and it will continue to evolve from conversations like this into more stuff about helping with that on-ramp, how to do interesting things in data-driven marketing. I think right now we're just getting all the why it's so cool in our system. It is what it is. Hopefully we can keep the why it's so cool.
Brian Jones:
Keep that stoke.
Adam Kerpelman:
I think we're pretty good at that. Anyway, thanks for hanging out for another one. This has been The Data Driven Marketer, I'm Adam.
Brian Jones:
I'm Brian, stay stoked everybody.