Driving CDP Adoption at a Large Organization with Sangeetha Parsan and Mary Wallace

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I'm Naomi Liu.

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Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman, flying Solo today. Mike and Naomi will both be back soon, I'm sure. Today, I am joined by Sangeetha Parson and Mary Wallace from Informa to talk about the lessons learned from rolling out a CDP at a global enterprise organization. Sangeetha is Vice President Professional Services at Informa. She's been in IT leadership in various capacities at Informa for several years. Prior to Informa, she was part of IT project management technology with UBM, which was acquired by Informa. In her early career was in solution architecture for web CMS and e-commerce. Mary is Senior Director of Marketing Technology. She has held several leadership roles in marketing, marketing operations, and technology at Informa. Before Informa, Mary led marketing technology efforts at UBM. You're seeing a pattern here. Before it was acquired by Informa, she has held roles in marketing, marketing services, IT, and project management throughout her career. So Sangeetha and Mary, thank you for joining today.

Thank you for having us. Very happy to be here.

Good. So I'm looking forward to this because I was looking back because I'm obsessed with like what's going on with the podcast, but at past episodes and what's downloaded. And in our top 10 is like the one episode we've done about CDPs. So this one is going to strike a chord for me. I think hopefully it's a chord that Yeah, our listeners will be interested in again, because we, it seems like an interesting topic and people, one that people are interested in and engaged with that we haven't covered much. The other is because a lot of the guests we talk to are, you know, more from small to medium-sized businesses. And I know that both Naomi and I have a little more of a history in medium to large-sized organizations, and I don't think we get enough of that coverage here. So I think it hits 2 birds with one stone, if you will. So, yeah, I think what we're going to talk about is that you all have been rolling out a CDP for a little while now at Informa, among other things, but that's part of it. So maybe let's, if we could start with a little bit of the history behind the whole project, right? Why did Informa want to invest in both the technology, the infrastructure, the people? et cetera, et cetera, for a CDP to be a part of the organization?

Yeah, sure, Michael. So I think with any transformation of this size, the key is to understand the business drivers, the goals, and how technology can help drive these two. I think in Informa's case, it's customer engagement because we are a B2C and B2B business at the end. Data-driven decision-making was another key factor, coupled with the marketing operation efficiency, right? Especially during the pandemic, it was a very key factor to get more out of less, right? And that's those were the initial factors that started driving it. And also, you know, Informa or any company these days, you know, there are a lot of data silos that we need to address, right? And a CDP kind of addresses that base goal of bringing every everything together, helping the data take shape and tell its own stories, right? They've been driven by the power of technology, you know, whether it's compute storage, everything comes together in a CDP to drive that goal.

Mary, do you have any additional thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think Informa understood that it needed to have, like, from a strategic perspective, it needed to make a change. It wasn't— it couldn't be physical anymore. And that came back, as what Sangeetha said, with the pandemic. And so when they understood that they needed to change and move, I think they made a lot of— they made a decision that they needed a CDP, right? We had a ton of warehouses, but they weren't enough. We needed something to show, to Sangeetha's point, the full customer. 360-degree view of the audience, what their needs were, what their wants were. And so I think it was that that kind of led us to where we are today.

Yeah, you both have been bringing up the point about like the pandemic and its implication on the business. So for our audience that's not familiar, maybe I'll take a little bit of a step back and you guys can see if I get this right. So if you're not familiar with the business that Informa's in, it fits into— I always, the way I tell it is to sort of 2 parts to it. There's events, which is I think a big part of it for different silos or different industry specifics. And many of those businesses also have, I call it a media arm, right? So publishing content and things like that. But the events piece obviously is the part that I think was what you were talking about where the physical activity had to be augmented. And so, yeah, so I think that's good context for everybody. So the other part to understand is that This is a global company, right? That has, you have, I know that when I've worked with you all, that's been in, we've got people in the US and in Europe and in the Middle East and in Asia. So just, just where people are located, plus the events are global. You know, how is, like, do you think that adds another layer to this? Like the, just the global complexities of trying to roll something like this out?

So I think Informa's vision is to be the best at, not only the biggest, but the best at events, right? And so I think that, Michael, laddered into what you were saying, and I just want to call that out, right? Like, Informa is growing rapidly, but to be the best, we needed that CDP. So just I know that's not answering your question, but I just want to add that in. As far as rolling it out, we took it business by business, right? So, we didn't try to do all businesses at one time. We looked at a sub-business within Informa, worked through that, understood their requirements, understood their business needs, rolled them out. Then we went to the next one. We understood their requirements, their business needs, and then we saw a pattern, Michael. between the multiple businesses. And we realized with that pattern that instead of doing all of them bespoke and separate, different, we realized that we could do them all the same with nuances. And so that's kind of how we approached it. The last thing I'll say is I think, Sangeetha, you and I are looking at it like it's Starbucks, right? So all Starbucks are the same. But not all the chocolate chip cookies in Starbucks are the same.

Yeah, to add to what Mary said, Michael, I think, you know, the regional differences are actually— they do factor in here, right? There are some products during the pandemic, product offerings that were doing very well in certain regions. You know, I do remember there was a show in Florida that actually ran during the pandemic, right? But it was not the case in some other regions, uh, such as, uh, you know, Asia and other regions. But there were other product offerings which were doing extremely well in those areas. I think the whole concept of the CDP is to bring, uh, this insight together so you can look at it as a revenue stream, right? Which is performing well under what conditions? That kind of prepares you for the future too. Not saying that it's going to be another event like this. But it helps you to be hyper-focused on your product offerings and revenue streams, you know, to adjust to the market conditions.

So, from a strategic point of view, it sounds like, you know, CDP is like an enabler of an overall strategy to try to get deeper and closer to understanding your customers and prospects across all those lines of business. Including things like knowing, like, we've got a customer in this one business. Is they also involved with this other business in some way? Is that kind of a fair way of saying it?

Yep, totally. So some of our customers are attendees in one, at one event, and in another event, they are a sponsor or an exhibitor, right? And so to understand that and to see how that see those relationships has allowed the marketing teams to better segment, right, and to better communicate with their audience. It has also allowed us to say, okay, well, we didn't understand before that, or could see before, that somebody, believe it or not, who is in aviation was also in fashion, right? And so—

That's interesting. Isn't it?

Right.

And so that changes how you communicate, that changes how you personalize, that changes how you understand your audience.

Love that. Yeah, I'm sure that it's uncovered all kinds of unexpected things like that. So you also mentioned, I think, Sangeetha, you were the one who said there's— you've got some businesses that are more B2C and some that are more B2B. Like, how, again, like, how does that— because I think most people who might— most companies are doing a CDP would be sort of primarily B2B or primarily B2C. And so they don't have to deal with some of the complexities that have you— like, how have you dealt with— because you talked about sort of bringing all this data together, and I'll use my own word, normalizing it across these businesses. So how do you accomplish that for Both B2B and B2C then?

I think it's about— it all boils down to the data points, right, Michael? What data points are critical to decision-making, right? Whether it is the first-party data that we are collecting from our customers directly through event registration systems, behavioral data, you know, that comes out of the various web properties and assets, to Salesforce data that we get on our event progress of the event, etc. Right? But when you bring all these data points together, like as Mary mentioned, it can go both ways. Right? You're able to understand, okay, who are your customers? Who are your customers' customers? Right? And who are interfacing with us day in and day out? Who are only interfacing us through these events? I think it's just about Identifying the data points, bringing them together, and then the picture actually starts to emerge by itself. All right, when I was working on an initial pre-CDP analysis, right, it was very interesting to see the bundles, right? How we do the digital and, you know, product offerings, how we bundle different product offerings. At one point, that granularity was not there, right? It was going in as a bundle. So how do you know which product inside that bundle is performing well. You know, that's how it was going into Salesforce as a bundle. But as you start to understand the data and make it more granular and granular, now that could go as 3 different opportunity line items versus 1 opportunity line item. Then you start to see, right, which combination is doing well. So I think, yeah, the data points, there could be some variances, but at the end of the day, I think they all are very, very similar behavior, demographic, product, you know, they fall into those major buckets.

Got it. Yeah. And I think a lot of the challenge people have is getting access to the behavioral data. So yeah, I know you have a ton of that that is obviously from events, but also just from people's digital activity with the media properties and things like that that you now have access to. So technology is obviously a big technology project and big lift for that. And that is not to discount it, but in my experience, right, implementing the technology is one of the easier parts, even when it's complicated technology and it's like just getting the change to kind of make its way through the organization, people to adopt it. How did you approach that? And You know, what have you learned from that process?

I think both Sangeeth and I came at this with a background of application development, understanding that there are some keys no matter what when you're doing an application development project in order to have a win for the— with the business. One of those was understanding the requirements upfront. Working with the business, getting them to define their requirements, and then coming back to them and saying, is this exactly what you want? Right? I think the next piece is that you need to take the business with you on the development effort, right? You can't talk to them one day and say, okay, this is what we're going to build, and then 6 months later come back and say, okay, well, this is what we built. They have no idea. It's kind of like building a house, right? If you're building a house, you want to see the construction as it's happening because you want to weigh in and say, I want the wall to be blue, I want the doorknob to be silver, whatever. So we've done that. We've taken A, overtly defined requirements with the business and got them to commit to them. And B, we took the business on the journey, on the construction project, on the development effort. And then C, we've We've done a lot in terms of building out documentation, explaining how things work. We've built out training, massive training where we go in for 2.5 days, we work with the business, we train them on the tool, we train them on slightly new ways of working, better ways of working. And then last but not least, we're now starting to ladder in change management. So, what are your expectations? What are you expecting to accomplish? And what are your current processes and how you're going to turn slightly on those processes to better use this technology?

Mary went with her ABCs. I'm going to go with 3 Ts. All right. One is transparency. As she mentioned, they need to know what the processes, what the problems are. If the data is not perfect, it's not perfect. You know, present it as it is. Right. The second T, I call it, is the trust, right? Get them to use the data before they come onto the platform. Get them to test the data, right? So that way the trust in the data builds from day one. And I think the third and final T is what Mary mentioned— train, train, and train, right? So that your confidence also builds up along with, you know, the trust.

ABCs and the 3 Ts. I like that. So, yeah, I think that's all been good. What have been the biggest challenges with that adoption, right? Have you— because it sounds like you've got a pretty strong sort of approach in place, but I suspect, yeah, anything like this, right? People are used to what they're doing. And so anything change— someone mentioned it, said this in a recent other episode, said like, Change is hard, right? And it's like, it's a simple thing, but it's true still. So how did you— have you like, what have you kind of challenges and how have you addressed those?

I think to me, the biggest challenge, you know, if I were an end user, right, I've seen my data in a certain way. I've seen it in green bucket and pink bucket and purple bucket, you know, going with Mary's analogy. but I've never seen the blocks coming together to, to, you know, build a house, uh, per se, right? I think that is a change in perspective, right? It's still the same data, it's just that now it is interlinked and, you know, you're getting a new view of it. So I think getting them to think that through, you know, what is unification? And the next challenge is— I mean, unification is a very key concept in a CDP, right? Now the next challenge is to agree that it's Informa's data, right? Yes, the brands generate it, the brands maintain it, the brands own it, but at the end of the day, it's Informa's data. So as Mary mentioned, if a person is in aviation and they are in fashion, our first thought process is something is wrong with the data, right? But it is a different, wider picture that we have to see here. Well, nothing's wrong with the data. We are just getting an enhanced view of the data, right? You know, understanding that your world has expanded a little bit. I believe those are 2 initial challenges people have to overcome even before you get to the tool. I'll defer to Mary because she does a ton of training and she has seen the struggles that they face on the field.

So I'll say, I'll come back and say there's 3 challenges. I will do circles Square and triangle. Okay, since we did the ABCs and the three T's, now we have circle, square, and triangle. So I think the first one is we struggled with a lack of ability to show success, right? We knew there was a success because more people were using it, people were going to it, people were choosing that the CDP platform, but we struggled with. metrics of success. I did it the old way and this was my conversion ratio. I did it the new way and it was +0.5% or +1.7% or whatever. So, we struggled to show that using the CDP actually produced better results. I think we struggled with respect at some point, right? So, it was, well, what do you know and why do you know it? And all that other stuff. I think we had to win over the business and win over that this technology solution was producing a business solution. It wasn't all about technology. We understood the business. Trust us, we understand the business. And then last but not least, I think there's In marketing today, I think there's a lot of change fatigue, right? If you look at the metrics, the adoption of technology within marketing, marketing ops, it's not what it was a couple years ago, right? And so we had to struggle. That's the world in general, and that's also Informa in particular. And so I think that change fatigue we had to struggle through.

Yeah, it's interesting because I think there's no— is there change fatigue? It's like, I think there's just fatigue in general, right? I think these teams are all moving so fast that anything that, even if they believe that it's going to be helpful, right, that the process of the change feels like it's going to be painful and make things take longer, and it may not be, quote, in quotes, right? Right. I hear that a lot about data in particular. And I've like, I, my, my view is that, yeah, especially in the B2B world, marketing and sales data, if you think it's quote right, you've missed the boat. Like it's not right. Like it's just not going to be like financial data in general. It doesn't, we don't have the controls, got a lot of humans involved and it's just, so it's going to be rife with stuff that doesn't make sense. So you're already, I think you're fighting an uphill battle when you start pulling it together for multiple businesses where they, They think they know what's right in their business data, but maybe not in the other ones. So have you experienced, like, is that part of the challenge too? Are you just seeing that kind of thing? Or is it more of the resistance because it's just different and you don't know my business?

I think it's a bit of both, Michael, right? It's human nature, right? When something is different, your immediate reaction is, is it right? Is it wrong?

Yeah.

Right. But I think the more tender loving care you give, right, the more connection you have, then it is getting better, which is what we are seeing in the results.

Gotcha. So, Mary, you mentioned about, I don't want to, like, how to measure the impact, right? So how, like, what are some of the, what are some of the results that you all have seen from rolling out the CDP? And I know it's still a work in progress. How, and have you evolved how you're measuring it in terms of the overall program?

I think, Michael, we are still, it's still a work in progress to your point, right? I think we have seen successes. We have shouted those successes, right? So, The other day somebody said unique open rates was up by 20-some percent, conversion rates was astronomical in terms of improvements. It was an isolated case that we could show a win. And so we took that isolated case and we are shouting it from the rooftops, right? This is what somebody did. This is what is achievable.

Yeah, it's what's possible, right?

Yeah, 100%. We had one where we were able to, because we're pulling in all this data now and unifying all this data, we were able to see based on IP address, like location where somebody was at, right? And we were able to take that data that they never had before and we were able to convert people. And so that was again a win because that was something that had never been achievable before. And all of a sudden, understanding where somebody is based on their location and converting them, that was a win. So that's, I think, where we're doing it is kind of these isolated cases, but then shouting really loud, look what we did, look what we did. Kind of like Super Bowl champs, right? They shout for a long time. Oh, I was the, you know, XXX Super Bowl champ. So using that methodology.

Yeah. It's storytelling, right? Which resonates with everybody.

Storytelling. We're marketing to the marketers.

I'm going to talk about the other side of the coin, right? I think the processing power and the functionality and features that a CDP will bring, has brought to us, It's opened, you know, a whole new set of avenues, right? Data that we thought we couldn't process before, connections that we thought we couldn't do before, right? And those are all happening. We can see that coming right now. It's about also, you know, putting on a new pair of lenses and seeing, okay, how can we utilize these connections? What else can we do with it? I think that is where AI comes in because this is not something a human can process, right? So our job is to collect the data, bring the data in a meaningful way, give it to the CDP, and then the power comes with the AI and ML capabilities, you know, that can be built on top of the data that is unified and cleaned up and standardized in the CDP.

Yeah. So are you— when you tell those stories about The wins, are you— is that helping when you're talking to additional other teams that are kind of maybe just getting started or have been, you know, slower to really adopt the technology? Has it been helpful with that?

It 100% has. We now have a— in our toolkit, we have 20, 30 different examples of this is what this team did, this is what this team did, this is what this team did. And we're not shy. We tout them out. We tout them out in training. We tout them out when we start, you know, an onboarding process. I will say, and Sangeeta, I think they're coming to us now. I think it started where we were going to them saying, look, you got to do this, you got to do this, you got to do this. And I think now they're coming to us.

So yeah, and Mary's team has done an amazing job with taking it to the customers, right? The marketing forum, every interaction we have is showcasing those wins, bringing awareness, and building a community together, right? I think it makes people, oh, you know what, I could try that, that situation applies to me, right? Those ideas are bouncing. back and forth, which is interesting to see. At some point, I don't think we don't even have to be in the middle. The community has gotten that powerful that they are starting off themselves on experimenting things.

That's interesting, the idea of a community that is there. Like, now there's these people who it's like proof points because, you know, this podcast is part of a, you know, more of a public community. But I see the power every day of people helping each other. From that standpoint. So internally, it's, it's, it almost sounds like one of the byproducts of doing this now has been the sort of building of that community of marketers across all these businesses who now have a place. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but right, but it's a place now where they can all communicate and share ideas that they may or may not have had before. I mean, I'm sure there were internal relationships one-on-one in small groups, but not in a broader sense like this. Is that Has that been a surprise that you've been able to do that with this?

I think we intentionally did it, Michael.

Ah, okay.

Right? I think we fostered the community. No, no, but I think we fostered the community, right? And we knew that we needed that, like, groundswell. And we knew that we needed— if one marketer is saying it's good to another marketer who's afraid, it's far more powerful than me saying that you need to do it. So, we did it with intention.

I think it's the IT 101, Michael: people, process, and technology, in that order, right? That's the winning formula.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny because when I've struggled with getting people to adopt or go through a change process, One of the things I've learned is to find the people who are the most, the ones who are least interested in it. And I always know if I can get them convinced that it's going to be useful and beneficial, my job is basically mostly done because then they'll be the ones who convince everybody else. I'm sneaky like that.

Yeah.

So, all right.

Well, that—

so more to come on that. So you mentioned, you know, additional things that you get to do. What are some of the big next steps that are coming up? I know it's like, it sounds like, like how far into the whole rollout process are you of, you know, all the different businesses? And then beyond that, what do you see in the long run?

So I think in terms of coverage, we are making really, really good progress like as Mary mentioned, it's a slow and steady progress, right? Bringing people along with us. For some of the divisions in Informa, again, there are multiple for people who don't know Informa, but for some of the divisions, we covered more than 60% ground. You know, some are between 40 to 50%, right? I think the major shift is coming in 2025 because our people and our processes are now very aligned and, you know, we are free to move with the technology change, right? So as to what is exciting that is coming next, like I mentioned, all right, so far it's been about data collection, data transformation, right? Now we are going to see the power of AI because, you know, we are going to the CDP World soon. And in the previous CDP World we attended, I think one of the things that caught our eyes was LLM-based segmentation, all right? You don't have to say, okay, pull in the country, pull in the consent. You just have to say, give me all the people with the country with this consent, you know, write a one-liner, and the tool is able to build that for you. I think that is really, really exciting, right, as a marketer. That opens up the arena for experimentation, and it's, it's going to be a cool technology to see. Mary, anything else on your radar that you want to Bring on for the next steps?

Yeah, so I'm going to go back to— you mentioned AI, and I think we had to take this step and get the data organized, get good quality data. And I think with that good quality data, then the AI agents will sit on top of it. I think if we hadn't done this, I think the AI thing would have been like all over the place. So I think that's one piece in terms of next steps. And I think the other thing, Michael, is to continue to roll out data maturity and how the business and marketers use maturity, right? Or excuse me, mature in their use of data. I think that's a next step that we need to take.

When you say that, what do you mean by that data maturity? Is it understanding data? Is it identifying issues with data that can go be addressed through upstream processes and technology, or is it, am I, is it something completely different?

It's, so it's understanding the point that data collection is where you have the most control. And the marketers are the ones that are at the data collection, collecting the data initially. So how that gets organized, how that gets structured, getting them to understand that is, is point one. Point 2 is how do you take that data you've collected, whether it's express data and somebody typed it in, or whether it's implied data and it's back to Sangeetha's website that she talked about earlier, and how you take that data and run analytics across it to be smarter and to predict what somebody wants and to be able to say, okay, what's the next best action and what is my key audience and how do I continue to excite them? All that requires a maturity in data that I think we kind of need to like usher forward.

Yeah, and to add to what Mary said previously, right, proving the ROI, proving the results has always been a problem, especially in digital marketing, right? Because you have several channels, several campaigns, several touchpoints, How do you know, you know, in a multi-touch environment like this, how do you know which one is converting better if you don't track in a certain way, right? And I think, you know, in terms of lessons learned, that is something we have to be focusing on to see how can we track, all right, every activity we do, every campaign we do, you know, we have to think about, okay, is there a mechanism to track it? Is there a mechanism to bring that data back into the CDP and feed it. I think that's an area where we really need to improve on going forward.

So the tracking of the results of things either done via the CDP and the other tools that are part of the ecosystem there, or if they're done separately, right? How do you capture those after the fact? Okay, that makes sense. It's interesting, Mary, you talked about that data maturity. My head went immediately to I hear people regularly say, oh, like, our data, everyone's data is crap, right? Everyone says their data is crap. Salesforce data is crap. Marketing data is crap. And they're hesitant to do reporting. And I'm like, just know it's crap, right? Do the reporting anyway, because that will uncover and expose where stuff is broken. And, you know, I've got a number of scenarios in my career where I've seen, like, doing reporting has identified, oh, There's a problem with the way that, you know, the marketing team is deploying assets to the market, or the sales team is recording stuff in Salesforce, or like whatever it is. And like, it feels like that could be a big part of this by itself, right? Just getting that insight. Are you also looking at, you mentioned predictive, so are you really like, are you trying to put on top of this things like predictive modeling tools to help drive other parts of the business, whether it's website interactions or I don't even know what else. So many things.

I don't think we can be competitive if we don't. I think we need that AI. I think we need that predictive, you know, the modeling and all that other stuff. If we're not, we're not going to be competitive. I can see Sangeetha wants to say something.

And yes, absolutely, Mary. You were spot on. And it also goes to a deeper understanding of what our customers are doing, right, intent and all that. The more we know, the better we can position ourselves, the better, you know, we can write content, right? It's going to have a full-on effect as we know their behaviors, not just, oh, you went to this page, but what were you actually looking for on the page? Is there a pattern as to where you went yesterday, right? I think that's where we need to go for the next step. Interesting.

And you've talked a lot about doing stuff with marketing. Are there like other teams that you see where this is going to be valuable down the road as well? And when you said marketing, I assume that's mostly been with like, I'll call it demand gen, right? People, you know, doing promotional activity mostly.

I think content sales, you know, we are trying to extend into those areas. Mary, anything you wanted to add? from the new use cases that are emerging?

I think it's content and sales, Michael. How can we better create content? How can we create content that's personalized? How can we create content that resonates better? So I think that's one. And then how can sales use this data better? I think that's the second one.

Do salespeople know how to do that? I'm kidding. I'm only half kidding, actually.

They do. Yeah, some of them are really sharp, really smart, and they understand how to use the data to sell.

So, yeah, some of the people that were so excited when looking at the insights that were coming out of the CDP data were actually the salespeople, Michael. They saw the potential that opens up, you know, for them with this kind of insights.

That's great. You may have talked about this, but others— so are you also, like, are you identifying and sharing sort of general insights about your audience as well across, like, different parts of the business, sort of separate from what I'll call the tactical, like, go-to-market activities themselves? Like, you know, this is what the profile of our typical customer looks like. They're, you know, they're engaged with multiple, these 2 businesses on average, like that kind of, that kind of stuff. Or are you really focused on more of the go-to-market activity stuff?

So I think, Michael, we're starting to transition. I think it was Scott Vaughn, right, who talked about understanding the customer, understanding your audience, and creating an audience strategy. And I think that is kind of— that is where we're going, right? And so I guess I think that's the key, getting that data, understanding it, understanding the audience, and then building a strategy on top of that.

And I would like to add that, you know, there are standard dashboards that are built on this data, right? Are we doing enough to bring that to light? Yes, we are, right? There are personnel dashboards where you can build a segment and, you know, find out whatever you need about those uses. So, that level of awareness is created as part of our training sessions that Mary mentioned. But I think, you know, we can do a better job with following up on how are they using it, you know, what are they doing with this data they get, right? So, there is definitely room for improvement there. Thank you.

Got it. All right. You mentioned CDP World, which is, I think, coming up. We're recording this mid-late September 2024, and if I'm— it's about a month away, if I remember right, maybe not quite. What are you all going to be talking about there?

How we drove adoption across a global company, what the steps were, how we excited, how we shouted the wins. And how we thought, you know, a couple years ago we didn't think we were going to make it, and here we are, we're making it. So, thank you.

You didn't think you were going to make it? I don't believe that.

Well, there were times I remember, what was it, like N73 or something like that, way back when it was like one, one time we wanted to push out and, and do an activation and It was months to do that one activation. Now they're doing them many a day.

Amazing.

Right. Well, we, so I'm glad you shared it. It sounds like we got a little preview for our audience to, and, or for those who can't make it to CDP World.

So. And for whoever want to make it, I believe the registrations are still open.

They are. I checked today.

I was looking at the wrong section.

Las Vegas. That's the reason for me not to go.

Michael.

I'm not a Las Vegas fan. It's all right. It's all good. It's just not my cup of tea. But I'm sure the content is going to be great. We covered a lot of ground here already, but is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted sure our audience heard about?

Yeah, I do have one thing, right? I know CDP is a new, new toy, new technology, right? Before anybody wants to dive into it, right, just think through that, right? First thing I believe you should think about, uh, is your data ready, uh, for this, right? That's something that I'm very passionate about. Um, just because you can get a new toy, don't get a new toy, right? Be prepared. And also choose a good partner, which is very crucial. You know, some people have in-house development teams. If not, if you're looking for a partner, make sure there is a skillset match, make sure there is a business buy-in, then go into it, right? That, that could be— that would be your surefire way to get it and get success with the CDP implementation.

I think it's being in it for the long haul. You can't be in it for a short-term win. You have to be in it for the long haul. And I think you have to be in it with a win in mind, right? This is what you want to accomplish and go after that North Star versus being in it because, hey, CDP is the new cool buzzword. And everybody understands maps are— they are good, But they are not what they used to be. And so, understanding that it's not about the technology, but about a business win.

Love it. Awesome. Well, it's been fun, both of you. So, thanks for joining. I know it's a late evening for some of us. So, thank you. If folks want to keep up with what y'all are doing or, you know, reach out to you or learn more about CDPs, what's the best way for them to do that?

First off, thank you for giving us this opportunity, Michael. You know, it was very insightful, thought-provoking questions, right? I think Mary and I are both on LinkedIn. We are happy to share our profile links. That's probably the best way to ping us and reach us, and we'll be happy to share our journey in depth if needed.

Mary, anything else from you?

Thanks, Michael. This has been fun. This has been great.

Oh, good. Well, and I know, Mary, you do write occasionally on LinkedIn. So, and so I've seen those articles. You are— what do they— what does LinkedIn call them? They call them contributed articles. Is that what it is? I can't even remember what they call it now.

I don't know. I think it changed.

I'm too lazy to do those.

Once the bloggers are gone.

Yeah, that's good. All right. Well, she's your editor. Well, good. Well, thank you both. Appreciate it. Thanks to our listeners for continuing to support us. As always, if you have ideas for guests or topics that you want to share, or if you want to be a guest, reach out to Mike, Naomi, or me. And until next time, bye everyone.

Thank you. Bye.