Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Kim Davis.- Editorial Director at Martech

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Welcome to this week's episode on The Radcast! Get ready for Editor, Writer, Speaker, and current Editorial Director of MarTech, Kim Davis. In this episode on The Radcast, host Ryan Alford talks with guest Kim Davis about his editorial journey, stories that are still hitting his radar and can’t be ignored. They also dissect the distinction between performance marketing and brand building... This is an amazing episode as Kim opens up about changes he has seen the most from the last 10 years in the advertising and marketing world, the huge impact it has made while also sharing great insights for exactly how to go about this. Kim also had a quick take on RAD or FAD keyword trending topics:Clubhouse and/or “Social Audio”TikTok for the Main StreamSocial CommerceCancel CultureInternal Brand Ad Agency’sTo learn more about Kim Davis, follow him on LinkedIn, or visit https://martech.org/If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, let us know by visiting our website www.theradcast.com or leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Be sure to keep up with all that's radical from @ryanalford @radical_results @the.rad.cast If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

The only thing I can't stand, though, is everyone's offended by everything. I just don't want comedy to die. I feel like comedy is dying, you know, because of cancel culture. If you try and run the same campaign across every kind of channel these days, it's not going to work. If it has swung in that direction, then that's a big mistake. And that's certainly something we've learned over the last 15, 16 months. Brand is absolutely essential. And by brand, I just don't mean a nice logo with the right colors.

Brand values, brand reputation, what the brand stands for. Because as I said, you're addressing specific audiences and you better be able to know who you're addressing. You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford. Welcome to another edition of the Radcast. It's the post-July 4th holiday for us here, and I am both a little sunburned and maybe a little tired from my own vacation, Kim. But Kim Davis, Editorial Director of MarTech. Thanks for coming on, Kim. Great to be with you, Ryan. We didn't get too much sun up in the Northeast, but I hope you had a good break.

We did. We did. Took the family down to the lake. We got a lake, lots of beautiful lakes and parks in the South Carolina area. So we did get down. But, you know, Kim, I want to get right into it. You know, let's talk a little bit. Maybe we'll just start before we get into your background about what you do. I mean, editorial director, I think people know that you write and edit, you know, stories as it relates to marketing. That's the bread and butter.

But maybe talk a little bit about, you know, that, you a little bit about that, your current position in MarTech maybe. Yeah, absolutely. So I am the, as you said, editorial director of MarTech. I commission stories from contributors. I have a staff currently of one. We may be expanding that shortly. So we produce content internally. We have a daily newsletter, one. We may be expanding that shortly. So we produce content internally. We have a daily newsletter, which has a good circulation.

We also do some webinars. And last summer, in fact, we did a very nice series of video interviews. And we're thinking of kicking that off again. So social media, the usual mix of content these days. It's not just a website, but it's kind of spreading the brand everywhere. I love it. So marketing is MarTech is short for marketing technology. Is that true or or is it is that MarCom technology? You know, like, yeah, well, let me put let me put a nuance on that, if I may.

MarTech, of course, in everyday parlance is short for marketing technology. What we are thinking of when we use the name Martech is the combination of technology and the strategies which it reflects and implies. Because I think if you put marketing technology at the heart of your marketing, which I think most people should be doing, then that does affect your entire strategy and approach. That's a key distinction. I'm glad you did that. And MarTech's been on my radar. I mean, I came up, I've been traditional side of things the first 10 years of my career, and then the last 10 have been in digital. It's more just following the trends and the realities of where the eyeballs and where everyone is.

But MarTech has always been kind of one of those pillar content places for me and somewhere I think of either by all of your great SEO. But then once I get there, I've always kind of been a trusted source for where as an agency owner now and as someone that's been in the business, someone I think that really admires the work that you guys have done. You know, and I want to come back to marketing. You know, we keep everything kind of centered in that space, you know, being the thread of everything. But I do want to give, you know, our listeners, Kim, you know, some of your editorial background and, you know, a little

bit more about your, you know, achievements and journey and all that stuff. So let's talk a little about that. Okay, I'm going to as much or little detail as you wish. It certainly hasn't been a straightforward trajectory. I actually got my first journalism job straight out of high school as a teenager, working as a music journalist back in the days when music journalism was printed on inky paper, pre-digital, of course. And then I went to college and at the opposite end of the spectrum, I co-founded a philosophy journal. Then it was a whole bunch of different things. I'll bring us up to date. I arrived in the States 25 years ago. I've been a New Yorker for 25 years. I arrived in the States 25 years ago.

I've been a New Yorker for 25 years. And the first journalism job I had there was working on a joint project between the New York Times and New York University, which was hyperlocal journalism, where I got to help run a newsroom of excited journalism students. And that was a lot of fun. And then to cut a long story short, it was really by chance, I was looking around for something a little more permanent. And I thought tech journalism. Why? You know nothing about technology, you can scarcely change a light bulb. But I filled out an application form and they interviewed me, I liked the people. And I became a cyber security editor. I had to read like six books on cyber security before my first day on the job.

And then I gradually moved to other kinds of enterprise software, including marketing technology, ended up on a little website called The Hub, which was exclusively MarTech. And then that got subsumed into what was then direct marketing news that got rebranded as DMN. I became editorial director of DMN. DMN closed down last year and after a short pandemic influenced pause, I was very happy to join MarTech as editorial director. I'm not sure it's the best I can do. Well, how would you categorize so many different, as you said, kind of a winding journey, your editorial journey and all of that. Do you have a style or an approach like that weaves through all of that, or has it been as evolving and as changing as the categories themselves?

I think I probably do. Obviously, there are going to be differences depending on your audience, but I do like to tell stories, in a sense, embed myself in the story. I'm not quite talking gonzo journalism, but to actually bring the audience there. I was here, I saw this, I spoke to these people, which is kind of traditional journalism. I do like to try and carry the audience on a journey, not just through the one story, but from week to week as they see how the story's interweaved and how one links to the other. I mean, call out any highlights to call out, you know, like whether it was before, we'll come back to marketing here eventually. But, you know, throughout that, I mean, I think there's got to be maybe be a few bright spots or a few or even low spots, know like as as people i'm sure the we do have a lot of

editors and and writers out there that listen to the podcast i'm sure any uh words of inspiration or or highlights from from those journeys well i got some highlights from back in my music journalism career where i met people like debbie debbieondie. But yeah, in terms of writing more recent stuff, I did a piece a few months ago on the data challenge which companies are facing. And that could be a very dry kind of piece. I mean, everyone knows it's important. How do you make it interesting? I was able to speak to a series of people with very different points of view, some things in common, and weave together a kind of, again, journey out of it to take the reader from point A, we've got this big problem,

right through not to a resolution, but to seeing what possible options there are out there. How has, you know, maybe talk about it through a different lens, how have you watched and seen how media has changed and the consumption of media? I grew up on this dual line. I remember in my industry, you get the ad age, you get the magazine. I had probably six or seven different subscriptions 15 years ago.

The magazine, the printed piece. I know some of that's actually that tactile started to come back a little bit. Everything comes full circle, I guess. I mean, I know some of that's actually that tactile starting to come back a little bit. Everything comes full circle, I guess. But, you know, but from you, the writer's standpoint, how has the media evolution and changes drastically changed the way you which over the last 10, 15 years, media has fragmented, and lots of other, the culture basically has fragmented. It's partly because of this wonderful world we live in, where everything is available at your fingertips, and you can't consume everything, so people pick and choose their niches,

their special interests, and the channels and devices they want to receive them on. I remember going back to my early days in New York, I can't tell you which year it was, but if Seinfeld was on TV, everyone stopped to watch Seinfeld. And you talk about magazines, if anyone was interested in, I guess, music, everyone would read Rolling Stone or whatever. But now everyone's off in different directions. How it affects me as a writer is something I alluded to earlier. I'm not just churning out a series of features is something I alluded to earlier. I'm not just churning out a series of features for the same publication or website. I'm having to hop from channel to channel

and from platform to platform, from video to audio to the written word, trying to engage with the audience where they want to be found. We run up against that same challenge with brands that we work with because depending on the size of them, when we work with me, I'd say medium sized companies at this stage, and even the medium

sized people, you know, they have the resources that they have. And, you know, it's how, where to find the audiences and how diverse, you know, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or Facebook or, like you said, printed piece of blog. You know, the content opportunities are endless. But, you know, having to, you know, refix the message appropriately to each channel can be overwhelming. That's got to be the case. can be overwhelming. That's got to be the case. I mean, there was the time when you could run one TV ad campaign per quarter and see how it performed and do the next TV ad campaign.

If you try and run the same campaign across every kind of channel these days, it's not going to work. At the same time, you want some brand consistency. You don't want to appear to be a completely different brand in every channel. That must be a headache for your agency, guys. It is every day. It's the journey that we live. What to you, whether it's pre-marketing writing and technology writing or even today,

is there a common thread when you're either evaluating a story that's brought to you or other things? Is there some commonalities to what truly makes a great story for your readers or listeners or watchers, depending on the channel? Yeah, I think our North Star is that our audience is marketers. And these days, marketers, in the very broadest sense, will include the marketing operations people actually running the systems. So what we always ask ourselves is, will this story help them do their jobs will it tell them what's coming down you know coming down the road for them help them look at the future a little bit and that means we tend to shy away from it will be easy to write a story every day about what what some tech vendor

is doing their latest innovation the latest thing they're launching. We get pitched those all the time, as you can imagine. And a lot of them are interesting and some aren't. But we're always asking ourselves, what does our audience, our audience of marketers need to know? And a great way to inform them on that, I think, is always if we can speak to brands who are using the technologies, using the solutions, what's been their experience with them? Yep. That's, I think, smart in everything we do. I think sometimes, and even as brands, there's so many, I think, correlations here with what you're talking about in marketing as a whole, but, you know, keeping your audience front and center and not think about them and not yourself, you know, because sometimes we think about what we're interested in or what's good for us or what

we're doing, you know, the speeds and feeds of our product versus, okay, what problem am I, what does the audience need from this? What am I, what's the solution that you're bringing? So I think that's maybe part of the success of Bartek over the years. How have you seen, you know, obviously being on the forefront, you're pitching these stories, you're seeing the technology change. Is there a few things that you would talk about, you know, the last 10 years or so, which I know things change so fast, like day to day now almost. But I guess period specific doesn't matter as much as, you know, do things as a whole just stand out to you for how you've seen marketing and advertising change? Yeah, and I think it's something we really just touched on. You're not addressing a

mass audience anymore. You just can't. Now, that raises the question, okay, so what are you addressing? And if you listen to the cutting-edge technology suppliers, they'll talk about literally one-to-one individual personalization. That, they say, is the key to success. Me addressing Kim, the relevant message at the right time of day, just at the right moment. That's great for some enterprises, maybe. There's a lot of brands just don't have the digital maturity to do that. They don't have the control on their data. So maybe you take a step back and you think you're addressing audience segments. You know, and the better you can segment your audiences, the better you can be sure of delivering something relevant.

But I think that's the main change. And as you say, it's accelerating enormously, is away from getting as many eyeballs, whoever they belong to, on your message. That just doesn't pay off anymore. We're all deluged with advertising. If you're showing me a message that's not for me and it's not something I want to hear about, it's just going to go right over my head. So true. And I think that's where I'm really interested in your opinion on this.

And I know you aren't an ad agency person. You're a writer writing about marketing technology. But you're certainly seeing so many of these stories and the technologies you know as an agency owner and someone that you know we pride ourselves on being great storytellers as well and really being and and coaching our clients not to fit up forget about branding like you said you know I feel like we've reached this pendulum you know where it's all about the technology and targeting and data and it's like uh you know it's like i'm data and confused and uh it's like so but is the pendulum swung too far it's like all this tech

all this stuff oh yeah we've got our brand and we've got to tell people why they should care about us and all those things. Has it swung too far? If it has swung in that direction, then that's a big mistake. And that's certainly something we've learned over the last 15, 16 months. Brand is absolutely essential. And by brand, I just don't mean a nice logo with the right colors. I mean brand values, brand reputation, what the brand stands for. Because as I said, you're addressing specific audiences and you better be able to know who

you're addressing. And those audiences today, especially now, are going to care about things much more deeply than the product or service they're researching. And oh boy, your brand had better be on message for the consumers you want to reach. And obviously, I would hope sincerely on message because insincerity is going to be ferreted out by the audience, if I can use that expression. Do you guys talk about brand at MarTech, you know, specific to the MarTech brand? You know, like you guys have had some evolution, obviously, even the time that you've been there. I mean, like you guys have had some evolution, obviously, even the time that you've been there. I mean, do you guys have that kind of conversation?

And how do you guys think about Martek as a brand? Yeah, we've actually been having those conversations recently because as some of the viewers probably know, Martek is a relatively new creation coming out of bringing together Martech today and marketing land into one entity. So yeah, a good deal of thought about branding, how we present it, and we're presenting it as Martech is marketing, which as I said earlier, doesn't mean it's the wires and plugs on the floor of marketing, but it's the whole mindset and strategy and approach, which evolves out of putting technology at the center of what you're doing. Yeah. I love it is what are the,

are there any kind of stories? I mean, we'll get real topical now, like today, you know, is it, are there stories that we should call out maybe to our listeners and watchers that are just, you can't ignore them anymore. Like this, and you've hit on a few things already with targeting and all that, which is really smart. And, but I think I'd love to know if there's, whether it's, and this could be anything, a technology, a capability, or it could be more functional or broad than that. But I'd love to know if there's stuff that's just, you know, we should be putting on the forefront because you can't ignore it anymore. Yeah, I'll call out three things for you.

The first is the data challenge. And let me explain what I mean there. I look back over the last few years and it's as if marketing technology was built backwards. It started off with really good execution systems, delivery systems, systems to take the message that last mile on the journey to the customer. And then you realize that needs to be data driven. And people started trying to pull their data together and discovered that was really hard because organizations and especially big ones, they have data in so many places, and they have data about the same consumer in so many places,

you know, from the call center to sales to marketing and so on. And bringing that all together in a way that you can actually execute on it in a reasonable amount of time, not like having a team of data scientists pulling reports about what I did last, you know, six months ago. It's a real challenge. And that's why there's a lot of talk these days about customer data platforms, CDPs, may or may not be the solution. That's something we're covering very closely. That's number one. The second thing which you really can't ignore now is Google's deprecation of third-party cookies. Even though it's been pushed back to, I was about to say 1923, 2023, it's a real challenge to advertising, especially programmatic advertising. And there's a lot of competition now to provide alternative IDs.

But these IDs generally rely on some piece of first-party data, like an email address. And guess what? I mean, even if a publisher like the New York Times has me as a subscriber and I have a login, I'm often going to be looking at it without logging in. They don't know I'm there. You just lose a huge percentage of the audience without third-party cookies. Whether Google's flock alternative will solve the problem is yet to be seen. It looks like a way to create a walled garden for Google, a bit like Facebook, but that's the other story which I'm thinking about every day. One more quickly, one I think cannot be ignored today is diversity and inclusion in marketing organizations, marketing teams, agencies, of course, and publishers like ourselves.

Horror stories I've seen just over the last year, startups, technology, marketing technology, startups trying to raise capital. You're much more likely to raise that capital if you're a white man. If you're a woman, you do worse. If you're a black woman, you do even worse. And if you're a black woman who identifies as LGBTQ, well, you're going to have struggle. And it shouldn't be like that this year. So that's the story I can't overlook either. Interesting. All really good. And I'm glad you're there because I've got I'm going to send you a story. I got an idea. It was your number two there. Actually, all around the cookies going away. I've got some good stuff for you. So I'll send that to you after the episode. But those are great. No, all top of mind for us as an agency, especially the cookie stuff. And first party data is so important now for companies. They've got to be collecting it. You've got customers that are having a relationship with you. You know, they're you've got to learn to collect that data in a smart way and to, you know, communicate

with them appropriately and not misuse it, which is the key. Right. But the danger here, though, and I don't say this self-serving as a digital agency owner, but like the danger I see in all of this is I am all for privacy, but I don't, I also don't want, you know, me personally, I don't want fingernail polish in my Facebook feed as an ad. You know, I don't want to go back to 15 or 10, 12 years ago of irrelevant ads either. Totally. There's an experiment anyone watching this can try. If you want to see what that's like, try browsing incognito. Go to sites you usually visit and see ads which have nothing to do with you at all. I know. So we got to be careful we ask for. I'm hoping we can find the perfect balance. And we have some strategies and things that we're deploying

for our clients down that first party, as well as shared party data and things like that. But trying to find that balance of privacy and all of those and diversity and inclusion is super important. You know, I talk about it a lot. You know, we can't solve the problems of today with the solutions of yesterday. And, you know, like the perspective that you get and the what comes to the table when you have diverse people working together is really important. Not only is from a fairness standpoint, it's just crazy that in 2021, we're even having this conversation, which is a whole nother story. But but you don't realize the perspectives and the additive nature of having that diversity and how important that is.

Yeah, and how are you going to reach all those specific fragmented niche audiences if you don't understand them? Bingo. Exactly, exactly. So is there anything with COVID related? I know we try to keep it out of the episode as much as possible because we're coming out of it, hopefully. But are there any trends or stories that you've seen or things, you know, maybe absent of like Zoom calls? Those are probably sticking around some, but anything that's kind of, you know, what you think is going to hang around and what genies aren't going back in the bottles from COVID? Oh, for sure. I think this is going to be one of the most exciting stories to follow over the next 12 months is to see what sticks and what doesn't. But yeah, we're living in a digital world now.

We've all got used to that over the last 15, 16 months. And lots of the behaviors we've developed, certainly as consumers, are not going to go back to exactly what they were before. I mean, if you've had your groceries delivered for the last year and it's been effortless, developed, certainly as consumers, are not going to go back to exactly what they were before. I mean, if you've had your groceries delivered for the last year and it's been effortless, you're not necessarily going to start going around half a dozen stores, although you might go to some specialist place for some particular product. So those changes are going to stick around. The B2B side, I have to mention that as well. That's really exciting. They had to go through an astonishing digital transformation. These traditional businesses, construction, you know, hardware, used to having field marketing, meeting people, doing demos on site, having five or six events a year where they could bring all their customers together. They had to start from scratch and become pretty much completely digital.

And that's not all going away. And I'm actually next week traveling to my first in-person event since this all started. And that's the other exciting thing, because people have realized that virtual events have a huge audience reach, relatively inexpensive, don't require travel and the carbon footprint that goes with it. So I don't see virtual events going away, but we're going to see in person again. So all these changes we're going to be looking at coming up in the near future can be really fascinating. It is, it is. And, you know, just the growth of e-commerce, like you said, you talked about a little bit, the convenience factor of different things,

growth of e-commerce. Like you said, you talked about a little bit the convenience factor of different things. I think Guru, they said buy 7X as planned. In seven years, they expected the amount of growth that we had in one or something like that as the data changes. And it's certainly been recognized with our clients and certain things like that. I do think the travel thing is going to be interesting where you see these blends of virtual and in person. I still think there's some value depending on the type of event for that human touch and different things. So it'll be interesting to see what the balance of that is. Are you any other big conferences on your radar this year from a marketing perspective that you will attend? I don't think it's going to be much this year. I think, you know, when the spring

season comes around next year, as long as we stay on the same trajectory, I think we'll see some of the big conferences coming back. And 2019, I think I went to 14 conferences. So 2020 was a very strange year for me. Yeah, you're either really used to it and you're loving it or maybe you want or you're missing it. I'm not sure which one. It's never the right amount. It's always too much and not enough. I love it. Well, we've got a little segment we like to finish things off with, Kim, if you're game.

We call it Rad or Fad. There's some hot trending things or even been around a little while but seem to be popping up. So I'm going to just cut through them. Maybe one word or short answer responses for rad or fad. First one on the list, clubhouse and or social audio. Rad or fad? I'm going to say fad. I've actually never been on clubhouse but i think brands can

do a better job building an identity around a podcast series or something like that i'm not sure how the social audio really will play out maybe someone will figure it out ding ding ding i agree i agree been toting that from there from the get-go uh again we we finally got into this place where we can get content on demand and now i'm gonna go when only when it's live when you do it uh that's not there's just a mismatch there with trends i think it was just something that was also people had a lot of time when covid was down so we'll see how about tiktok for the mainstream you know it's been you know the 13 to 23 year old platform for so long it's definitely

gotten more mainstream there's definitely a lot of older audiences there but uh what are we uh rad or fad with tiktok for for the masses rad um great campaign i covered was elf beauty and chipotle producing a beauty pack designed to look like a uh quesadilla was it a quesadilla burritos sorry um so that reaches an audience bigger than just the teenagers who are on there to do their dancing. So yeah, rad. Totally agree. How about social commerce, social media selling and e-commerce through social? Double rad. Why would you want to have a customer discover your product and send them somewhere else to buy

it that's got to be the future gotta remove friction in the purchase path uh kim davis man he's nailing them all right cancel culture oh yeah rad or fad i'm gonna go neutral on that because there's no way it's a one word answer. I'll just say that if consumers feel they need to withhold their custom from a brand whose values they find obnoxious, I don't think it's canceling. I think it's normal behavior. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. The only thing I can't stand, though, is everyone's offended by everything.

I just don't want comedy to die. I feel like comedy is dying because of cancel culture. That's going to be a hard job, culture no one can yeah comedian other nightmare i know right now you can't make fun of anyone comedy's parody you know everything's getting dried up anyway um the last one and i don't know how much this hits your radar but imagine it does the big brands with internal ad agencies, rad or fad? Yeah, I think that's probably rad. I'm not rad on top of it, as you say, but I do hear about it happening.

But I think it's got to be for big brands, hasn't it? I don't know that small to medium brands are going to maintain those kinds of capabilities in-house. Yep. It's one of these pendulums that started to go this way like in 2008, 2009, there was a lot of this happening. And then it's kind of seems to swing back and forth. But I think it makes sense for, like you said, the big brands that could do it because they have so much content needs. It's like hard, you know, and they have to react so quickly. So I understand. I think it's a balance. The blended formula is always what we recommend. We don't want to put ourselves out of business, Kim. No. Well, Kim, man, really appreciate

getting to know you through this and hope we can continue relationship and share stories and really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast. Where can everyone keep up with you, Martech, all of those things? Let's call out a few places where they can find you guys. Yeah, sure. Martech, the URL is martech.org. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, and I'm on Twitter as Kim Davis underscore. So you'll probably find me there. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Kim. I really enjoyed it. Hey, guys, you know where to find us. We're at theradcast.com. All of our content, we've got a search bar.

You can literally search MarTech in every episode, highlight every clip. Everything is searchable at theradcast.com. Find us on YouTube, our YouTube channel. Just search Radical Company. All right, guys, you know where to find me. I'm at Ryan Alford. I'm verified on all the channels. You know where to get me.

We'll see you next time on the Radcast.