Uber's brand and marketing science teams stopped clashing by creating a tiered analytics model that gave deep support to top markets and self-serve tools to others. When they measured campaigns in high-impact regions, they found clear lift in brand perception and sign-ups, which convinced internal skeptics and won more budget.
Chapters
there was a dedicated brand marketing science team at Uber, which is interesting because you've got this team that is motivated to try to really understand what works. And sometimes that means being like, look, this brand campaign, I know you loved it, but like didn't cut it. And sometimes being like, no, no, no, this other thing really did work. How did you work with the brand marketing team? Did y'all have a close relationship? Did they hate you? They were like, oh, the marketing science team always tells us our stuff doesn't work. What was that like practically in terms of working relationship?
I absolutely loved it. I got to work with world-class marketers. They first did not love it, and I think there's a transition for most marketers where for a couple years, great marketers came in, they looked at this as a great company to do marketing for. Nobody's asking to prove ROI, and then all of a sudden this 30-year-old comes in and is like, my mandate is to try to prove this stuff. They were open to experimenting. With the working relationship itself. Then it swung the pendulum the opposite way and was like, we want to measure everything. And I'm like, nope, I don't have the resources. I don't think it's efficient for either of us to like run a measurement on everything. And so we did this tiering system where like the top, top markets got close analytical support, B and C tiers got a self-serve model, and the bottom tiers like just didn't. As much as that would suck to hear, you're not going to get analytical resources. I actually think it ends up helping them because they know They have to plan their campaigns that way. And you saw a lot of them stop advertising in these smaller markets and shift it more towards these bigger markets, like bigger impact, which again, works at first. Experimentation always is like, ah, but you're gonna prove that I'm wrong. But when you're working with really good marketers, a decent amount of time, better than the average, it actually proves that it works. And so then you get to use that to go ask for more budget and to be like, look at the impact we've got. And we would be measuring both. Brand metrics, but we'd also be measuring things like signups, lifetime value, et cetera. And so now we're able to work with them as partners to go to their quote enemies, which think marketing isn't useful. And we're like, nope, look, marketing works, brand marketing works. We develop that dynamic to have those conversations. Now it becomes cool to have that aligned view towards a new enemy instead of each other, which I think was fun.
