**MOOPs** Episode 6 - A 2-million record DB mistake w/ Prasad Sawant, VP, Director of Marketing Technology at FCB Health

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune in to each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career. Hey everyone, thanks for joining us for another episode of Moops TV. I've got Prasad here with me. Thanks, Prasad, for joining us. I'm super excited to hear your answers because I don't know what they're going to be yet. So I'm going to get started with some introductions. Obviously, you know, you guys know me at this point. I'm Jessica, one of the co-hosts. And I'm going to kick it over to Prasad to introduce himself. I'd love for you to start with who you are and where you currently work.

Thanks, Jessica. Yeah, definitely excited to be here. I'm Prasad Sawant. I'm currently a VP Director of Marketing technology at FCB Health, a healthcare communications agency.

Awesome. Prasad, how many years have you been practicing marketing/revenue operations?

I've been in it about 9 to 10 years now and loving every minute of it.

I feel like people who hit the like 8+ years are basically like veterans at this point.

Yeah, you've probably like seen it all at this stage.

Yeah. Without telling me the specific mistake yet, because I'll get there. The mistake we're going to chat about today, when did it happen in your career?

So, I mean, I've made mistakes all throughout my career, including like last week. But this particular story happened in the middle of my career when I was marketing manager. And it's kind of probably one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made. I'm excited.

I'm excited. Sounds juicy. Okay. So again, without telling me specifically, what were you trying to do when you made the mistake?

So I was trying to update a tracking tag in a dynamic campaign. So the campaign was set up to like 12 or 13 different languages. And at the time we weren't able to track like Opens and clicks for each dynamic template going out on a single send. And we were doing a big product launch and new implementation of a website, and it was super important to track it. And I was trying to update that tag for a product launch that was going out.

And sounds like there were probably a couple systems at play, but what were the main ones involved in What happened?

It was only one. It was Oracle responses.

And so what actually happened? What broke, et cetera?

So what had happened, I updated the tag and it tested OK, but I didn't use a real real data, just like some dummy data. So it didn't really show what could happen realistically with this tag, which I didn't know at the time. And the tag appeared at the very top of the email as like a piece of code coming in there. It looked really, really bad. And about 50% of the product launch audience received the Their email with that at the top of their email.

So like nothing else, just the tag code?

Yeah, just the tag code. So that's like the first, the first area of the email that they saw.

How big of an audience was it?

2 million people. Yes, it was a good amount.

Is 2 million the full audience or the half that Got the code tag?

The full audience, about a little under a million, ended up getting it before I paused it.

So I'm going to ask who noticed it, but it probably sounds like pretty much everyone. Who called you specifically?

Yeah, it was, it was only one colleague who emailed me about it, and nobody else in the company had received it at that point. Which I don't know how. I guess maybe they were at the end of the list to get it, which I don't know. It's all like random sense. I have no idea. Yeah, just what it was, just one person who pointed out. I was like, holy crap. I just— this is the biggest thing I've ever done. Mistake I've ever done. So I just, I paused it immediately and then Then from there, I told my boss, we talked to the marketing team, and it was just like— the tag was just like one line out of place from where it was supposed to be. That's fixed. I did a test run on another email before, and then just like that, it started working again.

Nice. Cool. So it sounds like you caught it, openly told everyone, and we're Able to relatively easily kind of remedy the situation.

Yeah, I'm sure it didn't feel like it at the time. No, I was like sweating. I was like, I didn't wear enough deodorant today. This is terrible. But I was like, I gotta just— I have to own up to this right now because it's gonna look bad if I don't tell anybody about it. I did debate it though. But ultimately, I was like, yeah, I just gotta tell somebody about this.

It's always easier to tell someone than try and not tell anyone and fix it yourself. At least that's my opinion. So beyond that, what else did you learn kind of in that remediation process from cleaning that up?

I think the biggest thing, and I feel like I did it maybe before also, was to try to own up to some mistakes when it happened. You know, take, take credit for your failures, but I think it also helped me try to put some more processes in places. I've worked at a variety of— with different clients, different companies, and everyone's QA workflow process is a little bit different, and we didn't really have a strong one at this company, so that mistake Maybe build a process to prevent any mistakes like that happening in the future.

So what does that process look like now? And what did it look like then?

So before then, it was me doing campaign development, QA testing, nobody else checking it. It just was just me doing everything. So instead, now after that, I put in like 2 checks between my manager at the time and then another marketing manager who was doing a similar thing internationally with like a thorough checklist. So one person goes through it and then a second person checks off to make sure they're seeing the same values, same links, tracking tags, or working appropriately.

Has that QA process evolved over the years, and is there anything on it now that wasn't on it then?

Well, I'm no longer at that company, but I think my whole— my vision— or not vision, my idea of QA has become more inclusive over the years to make sure that we do everything, you know, try to get more stakeholders involved, more editorial people who are involved on the creative side, data people involved when it's large sets of personalization that's going out. So it's expanded to just include not a lot of people, but the right people, and just more of a checklist to make sure that we're doing the right thing.

Yeah, I definitely think my personal QA checklist has expanded over the years.

Cool.

Well, kind of a couple of final thoughts to round things out. I don't know a single person in MOPS that doesn't have some sort of email deployment horror story of— maybe not to the extent of an email with just containing code, but what would you say to somebody else who made a similar mistake?

I would definitely say don't hold on to that mistake for too long. Don't let it impact the way you work and like you get anxiety about it, just try— I would just try to laugh about it and learn what you can from the experience. And maybe that'll help you limit any mistakes in the future.

Nice. And then what other advice or what advice do you have for any fellow marketing or RevOps professionals kind of in general?

Yeah, in general. I mean, I think again, on the line of mistakes are going to happen. So I think, you know, just make sure you're always having fun, But in general, I think the space can be tedious and technical. So I always just try to have as much fun as I can with it. And also just sharing knowledge is a huge part of the space. So if you feel like you have something to share, I think a lot of people do it really well, but I think anybody can share and people are so responsive in the community too. Your ideas or new findings you might have, new techniques you might've found.

Yeah, I love that. I definitely have learned so much from stuff other people have shared. The community around this whole space is awesome.

Yeah. Like, I don't know what I would have done without the Salesforce documentation that's out there from individuals, not from Salesforce. They really like saved my ass sometimes.

Yeah, definitely feel that way about the community documentation around the marketing automation platforms I've worked in. They know how to do the hard stuff that isn't in the official documentation, for sure.

Definitely.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me and share your mistake. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate you sharing your learnings.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. Oops.