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Courtney Tierney spent years on the agency side telling brands what their CRM strategy should be. Now she's the one whose name is on the result. As director of CRM and customer engagement at Papa John's, she owns how the brand communicates with 42 million loyalty members across email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app channels. The gap between advising and owning is real, and this conversation gets into exactly where it shows.
Before Papa John's, Courtney was the senior director of account planning and research at Digital Additive, a Salesforce Marketing Cloud agency, where she worked with brands such as Grammarly and WeWork. She also spent time in-house at IHG. She's crossed the agency-to-client line more than once, which makes her perspective on what each side gets wrong about the other harder to dismiss than most.
This episode covers QSR category assumptions that fall apart in a pitch room, why deliverability is insurance, not overhead, how franchise models create competing contact strategies in the same inbox, and why the conventional wisdom to stay in your lane, agency or client side, is worth ignoring entirely.
Timestamps
03:55 — Agency energy vs. in-house ownership
05:10 — QSR pizza is not QSR
09:10 — Certifications, genuine expertise or the game
12:53 — Launch before your reporting is ready, and you're guessing
17:50 — Generalist agencies vs. CRM specialists
25:37 — Deliverability jail, a real story
30:17 — Cross-channel frequency and the national versus local fight
38:35 — Geo-targeting competitors at the zip code level
Sponsor
Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.
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What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
Welcome to the making sense of martech, where the rabbit hole goes deeper than the headlines. This
is a show that pressure tests ideas, not just platforms on the hot seat. Today we have Courtney
Tierney. She built a career on the agency side, telling brands what their CRM strategy should be.
Then she went in-house and had to actually build it. One system, one budget cycle, and one skeptical
stakeholder at a time. And today, what agency experience really prepares you to do and what it
doesn't prepare for you at all? So a little bit about her first one. Before we even get into the
introduction. I've known Courtney for a decade. She's been my account director not once, but twice.
And she is the best. Um, but Courtney is the director of CRM and customer engagement at Papa
John's, where she now owns the vision for how the brand communicates with 42 million loyalty
members across email, push, SMS and in-app. Before going in-house, she worked on the agency side for
years, most recently as the senior director of account planning and research at Digital Additive,
a Salesforce marketing cloud agency where her clients included Grammarly and WeWork, and prior
to that, she worked agency side at Great Worldwide as well as IHG inhouse. Welcome, Courtney.
Thank you for being here. I'm so excited for this conversation because there are few this qualified
to talk about it. And having gone from in-house to agency back and forth multiple times, moving from
advising to owning means the accountability changes shape often. And now that you're no longer
the smart outside voice, you're in the room. You're the person whose name is on the result, and that's
a pivot that not everyone can handle. Or handle multiple times, which I've done. So
that is true. All right. So to dive in we'll start off with some quick rapid fire. What was your
first martech tool? I actually had to look it up. So my first martech tool was at IHG when I was in
house running our life cycle marketing team, and we were on strong mail. Way back in the day, right?
I don't know that one. So it eventually became Epsilon or we moved to Epsilon, one of the two.
But yeah, we started on a strong mail. Probably really dates me. It's
a deep cut. It is a deep cut, but I really sunk my teeth in and learned with
Salesforce Marketing Cloud when I was a digital additive with you. Yes. Okay. Agency life
versus in-house. What's the one thing you genuinely miss and don't say? Just the variety of
clients. I will just say, really, the agency energy and the pitch of it all. When you're getting
a new client or onboarding a new client. At my last agency job before Papa John's, we
did a lot of implementation. So for us it was really exciting, like building something and
migrating over what they had and making a lot of improvements. So, you know, it's just the buzz
around that. I think you get an agency that you really don't get in house because nobody really
cares but you. So I get excited, but nobody else around me cares. It's not like when we're like,
launching a big brand campaign where everybody's excited or a big social takeover. Everybody's
excited about that. Nobody's excited about a new CRM platform. Yeah, the behind the scenes doesn't
get the same level of praise in. No. No. And last year I had an agency. And that's all you do. Then
you do get the buzz and I missed that. Yeah, that makes sense. So in a pitch meeting, what is the
fastest tell that an agency actually understands your business versus is pattern matching from
their last three clients. For me it is. Just because you've worked on a type of business
doesn't mean it's the same. And I'll give an example like QSR can be very different when
you're in pizza versus if you're bulls or the landscape is very different. So
I think agencies make a lot of assumptions like, yeah, we've done that type of brand so we
know what's best. And oftentimes they are very surprised. Yeah, I think many agencies could
do well learning that specific company's business model first by asking questions. Exactly. And I
think the other thing too is understanding the platforms and the technologies that there are
that they're on. And a lot of assumptions are made as well in the pitch that what works for one,
again, will work for another. And that's not always true. Without a doubt. Do you know that? Yes.
What's the most confidently wrong thing you believed about in-house marketing before you were
actually doing it? Or did you start in-house then when agency and no. So I started
agency and I remember thinking when I got in house and IHG, I was like, wow, it took them so long
to get back to me. And I was always frustrated. You know, there are meetings all the time. They can't
really be that busy and they can't really be in that many meetings. Well, we are, and I think that
was something I really realized when I got over to the client side, and even when I bounced back
and forth in my career, is you truly are spread really thin on the client side, whereas I think
agency, you can really have some big teams and bulk up and have everything that you need to
support the clients or on the client side, we truly are working very thin
and pulled in a million different directions. When I was younger, I didn't think that that could be
true and it really is. No, it very much is. Uh, it's like if you're not in a meeting, you're in a
meeting about a meeting to get a meeting or about the progress or lack thereof. Instead of work, you
are four times praise certified and you also are three times marketing Cloud certified. To be
honest, how much of the genuine expertise versus playing the game the platforms like, especially
the incentivized for agency side. Which one do you think is more pay to play? Do you think there is
value to it? What are your thoughts? You know, I do think that there is value to it. I think
especially if you are on the agency side saying that you're an expert, not just generalist, that
you really should have those certifications, especially if you're working, you know, hand in
hand with the with the platform. I think if they have to take it, you're an agency that's
supporting those same programs. You should have to take it as well. From the client side, I think it's
rare that so many people take those certifications. But I think for me and our team,
it's important that we at least understand what we want and what we're talking about. And I think
taking those certifications do help. I'll give you my hot take. I don't believe in certifications.
But, you know, I don't think you. Should be forced ahead of time. But I think it also depends on your
role and I think we'll talk through it. But having a team in house that is building
everything versus an agency, I do think it's important for those roles to have those
certifications. Me maybe not so much, but I just love learning and so I do make the time to do
them. Well, it's good to be educated on what your team is doing or not doing. Correct. Okay. Helps you
ask the right questions. Exactly. What is your hottest take? Hottest take? Well,
let's say data is still here and still is important now than it's ever been. And I think
definitely in that age of AI data is so important. I mean, you can start to incorporate AI
into your marketing. But if you don't have the right data, that's going to power that AI decision
engine. It's not going to give you the right strategies that you're looking for. And so I think
we are probably working together at the time when data was the buzzword. Now AI is the buzzword. But
I will say like data still is the most important thing, and you've got to have clean
data that's relevant to your customers to execute on strong strategies. That's my hot
take. So to set the stage a little bit, Courtney was paid for years to advise brands on exactly
the kind of work she's now owning, end to end. And the move from agency to in-house is not a lateral
shift in skill set. It's a shift in what you're actually accountable for, and agency work and
in-house work look really similar on a resume sometimes, but they're by no means the same job.
What's something you were confident about as an agency strategist that turned out to be wrong
once you actually own the outcome? Yeah. So on the agency side, you relied sometimes
more on your client to pipe in that. Right? Analytics. We all know that there's a
lot of challenges with the platform from a reporting standpoint. So you really do have to
rely on the accurate reporting oftentimes from your client. And that could be really frustrating.
So you know on the client side you're like, oh great. We have all this data and we'll have all
these great reports and dashboards. But you have to work hard to get that. And I think it's really
partnering with your data sciences team and your reporting teams to get the right reporting and
right dashboards, because if not your spending or your team spending a lot of time pulling down
reports from, you know, three different platforms and then your in-house platform and merging it
all together. So I think it's really important to take the time to set up the right reporting
before you launch something. And I've actually been told, like, you know, you're taking too long. Go
ahead and launch it. And I've held off until we had all the right solid data integrations that we
needed to have the right reporting. A belated apologies, because we definitely didn't have those
ready for you. The two companies I worked at. You can look at those engagement metrics. But being on
the client side, I know right now for us a Papa John's, what's really important is sales and
margin. And so if you don't have that information, it is hard from an agency to say whether or not
you can say that campaigns working from an engagement opens, clicks, sessions, conversions. But
whether or not that's truly driving sales conversion without negatively impacting margin,
it's hard to tell that story without that data. And you often do have to rely on your clients for
it. At the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Agency or at Digital Additive, you advised clients like me as
well as many other well-known brands. Off the top of my head, from just knowing Home Depot, Carters,
Revlon, Estée Lauder, you name it, and they were all on Marketing Cloud, which makes sense considering
the agency. Meanwhile, Papa John's is on praise. Did your marketing cloud expertise turn out to be
irrelevant on day one, or actually, did it mean being platform agnostic? Underneath? All those
certifications matter more than the specific tool? Yeah, I mean, I think it truly is platform agnostic.
You need to understand how to maximize the tool. And I don't think that changes from one platform
to another. There are certainly nuances of the platform, but that's why you have your support
teams at that platform, whether it be Salesforce or Braze or Iterable or whatever it may be. And I
think it's really understanding how you need to lean into those teams to help you execute and
scale. I think being able to ask the right questions, you'll know the questions to ask
regardless of the platform once you're in it. Once you've implemented and since you know the seven
years I was at that agency, you know, we implemented many clients. Yeah, I think it's a
misnomer, especially even like in job descriptions, like you need to only have this one tool
experience. Sometimes, like marketing cloud, it can be very helpful to have that explicit experience.
But at the same time there are translatable skills across different platforms.
100% agree. Yeah, because now you're in-house. Are you more empathetic or harder on
your agency teams? I think both, and I think it depends on the
team and the expertise. I would say the hardest agencies I think sometimes to work with
are when they're more generalized than those who are more specialized in CRM
loyalty in the platforms, because you really do have that subject matter expert. So I think I do
have high expectations from agencies. Definitely. I've been told I am tough on my agencies, but, you
know, I'm always making sure that I'm top with kindness and mistakes happen across the board.
I've been there when I was on the agency side, and so I think I also had that perspective where, you
know, I could be sympathetic to issues happening or maybe misalignments on
strategies. But I think for me, it's making sure that they've learned the lesson and
not like repeating it. I think that's where I probably get harder is if we keep seeing that
mistake and I treat my my team the same way. You know, everybody, nobody is perfect and we're
all learning something new and some mistakes will happen. But it's what you learn from that mistake
and and how you improve it, improve it, and own up to it. Exactly. There's nothing worse I can think
of like one painful example, but you can never quite predict the things you don't know to do.
And that was something on top of the mind of all We Work employees was like, oh no. Every time
there's a crisis or a natural weather event that Mother Nature takes over, you immediately. Like,
what do we do about our members or our future members? And those are just some of the instincts
that you shouldn't have to take on as an agency. But at the same time, you have to pay for it. It's
a tricky like, that's not a mistake. That's just a oh, I didn't think of it. Yeah. And I think what's
important to lesson learned there is, you know, that they're always going to happen. So it's like
outlining what that procedure and process should be making sure everybody is on the same page and
if something's coming, just suppress them because you can always add them to the next end. I think
that was a good example of client side was not prepared to inform agency side. Yeah.
So we set up an automated process to help with that because there are too many late nights in a
row to suppress people. So now let's get specific about the stack and the craft,
because the systems you build in-house are a very different animal than the ones you recommend from
outside. So right now, to my knowledge, you have ran Bray's Punch and
Salesforce Marketing Cloud in coordination with the stack, and an agency might pitch one elegant
recommendation on a slide of all in one solution. What do agencies continually
fundamentally misunderstand about the operational cost of actually running multiple enterprise
platforms together day to day, versus a really pretty slide that recommends something else. Seen
that many times in my career, I think it's really understanding again, data. The data that goes
into all these various platforms. And while it may seem to flow really nicely on the slide,
it doesn't always flow really nicely. So I think what's really important is to ask the right
questions of your clients and not just talk to marketing. I mean, you should also talk to it and
to the data science team and the reporting team to understand how those stacks all go together.
And it may take more time at the up front, but then you'll have a much better solution at the
end if you understand all those. This person is different and punch than it is in brazed. And then
you have misalignment. So I think it's really important to get get that all figured out before
you implement anything. Agreed. So last year you presented at Bray's Forge on the dollars
and cents of deliverability, and you reframe deliverability as a revenue lever, not a technical
metric. I love that because I've also phrased and framed deliverability as an insurance policy,
too, and lots of different ways of thinking about it. So is that the kind of insight that's only
earned by owning the outcome in-house or something that you just you have made that same
case with the same conviction agency side? Yeah. I mean, I think on the agency side, I just saw a lot
more because you're working with so many more clients, you can see those who really care about
it and follow your recommendations and those who don't. And at the agency, at one
point, there was a client who was not following the recommendations and got themselves into
deliverability. JL and then we had to help get them out of it. So I saw firsthand on
how it can impact revenue. Because if you're not getting into the inbox, then you truly are not
driving revenue. And email is so important across all verticals. So when I got to Papa
John's, I knew how important it was. And so, you know, I see. So one thing on the client side, you're
always faced with our budgets and it really looks like an easy one to cut, especially at that
leadership level. Like, why do you need to pay this much to have these deliverability tools? And,
uh, the good news is, as soon as somebody instructed me to start looking at cutting it, we
started to have some issues and emails were not getting into the direct inbox. And so we were
able to make some changes, but it just shed light on how important it is. And it's also one of those.
And I even have to tell my team they're like, you know, why do we have to look at these reports
every week or do readouts with our deliverability partner. and we did have an issue with. I
think a lot of people had an issue with Microsoft Office this year. There was a lot of spam traps
and just odd issues. And so, you know, our team was impacted and had to make
a lot of changes because of it and build it back up. So yeah, it's one of those that you don't think
about until you are in deliverability jail and you're trying to work your way
out, and then all of a sudden leadership is coming to you. What's happening? Why or why is the needle
not moving? Yeah, it can be a very hard business case because it is technical, right? When this past
year we really have been increasing our volumes. And I think that that's okay. As long as you have
like the right strategy for increasing those volumes with time and staggering them across,
there's a lot of strategies to do it and do it safely. Correct. And also, not to mention if your
volume is different from day to day, week to week. It can be very difficult. I know I've experienced
that firsthand where the first day of the week you're sending a lot of things, and then the
latter part of the week you're sending, but nowhere near that volume. And it can be a very
tricky thing to navigate. Yeah. And I will say for, you know, pizza specifically, there are certain
days like, say, sports and Fridays. And so that those are the days where we tend to
increase our volumes. And so you want to make sure that you're doing that in such a way that it
doesn't impact on a Friday night. Without a doubt, that would not. Or I'm Super Bowl right? Can you
imagine if we got put in deliverability Joe on Super Bowl Sunday? So that would not be a good
campaign. Yeah. And some people think, well, just don't send anything for the days leading up. And
that's not the right strategy either. So yeah, it's there is nuance and you have to know it at scale.
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at scale. See what high touch can do for you at high touch forward. And now back to the hot seat.
Your most recent Email Insider Summit panel was about aligning own channels and managing
frequency. When you were agency side was frequency someone else's problem to actually manage? Did the
clients or the agency carry that consequence? I think honestly, it just depended on the client. I
saw it both ways. I would say from my seat though, on the client side, what I think is the hardest
sometimes with agencies, especially more of the generalist agencies, is that they'll come up with
these great campaigns. And it's like Sen Sen. Sen and they have this high frequency strategy. Well,
then you don't think about the fatigue that a customer may have or deliverability issues. And
really, what's the right channel to do? It's not just email. So I think really thinking through the
frequency across all the channels and then looking at, you know, data and insights and
AI as well, like what is it, what channel is somebody interacting in? I think oftentimes we do
get caught up on frequency and volume. And if nobody's going to open a, you know,
SMS message from you, it's much more expensive than an email. So why are we doing full files? And
oftentimes that's what clients expect agencies to say to do. Or clients, maybe their leadership
team just wants you to send more and more, and it just falls on deaf ears, the consumer. And then you
get a lot of opt outs. And I think a big part of what I was talking about there is that struggle
between national and local, right. So at Papa John's and many showers and when I was in
hospitality at IHG, I mean, you they it is franchise owned. And so we have a handful of
corporate stores but most of them are franchised. So they want to send messages local to their
store. You want to send messages that are national and they oftentimes compete with one another. So
it is coming up with the right contact strategy for that customer. And people often forget if
folks aren't opening your email, that impacts your delivery abilities too. That does too. Yeah. You're
right. And so it's you don't want to over send you want to find just the right fit and mix
and channel mix for your audience base. That is individualized by customer too.
So it's not. It's coming up with the right strategy that again, cliché 1 to 1 customer
because every customer is different and we're all different. You know I'm terrible at opening emails,
but I am much better at opening up pushes and texts. We're doing a lot of competition type
strategies, right? If we know that one of our competitors is either coming into that area or
leaving that area, right. So maybe that a store is closing and so there's an opportunity to grab
some share from that competitor that's closing and then also protect. If you know that a
competitor is coming in. Versus the generic hi blank name. And it's a nice warm
welcome for sure. When you're on client side, do you have the instinct to build internal
capabilities or to outsource them? I think both, and it really just depends on the business
need. We are very reactive in the QSR industry. So if a
promotion that we're running over the weekend is not doing well on a Monday, we will pivot, right? Or
if our competitor comes up with a big Bogo like we're going to pivot. So I think for us it made
sense to bring it in-house because we really did need to be agile and move quickly. And I think
that that's a lot of pressure to put on an agency. And I've been there where it's like, oh, you want
me to turn this around in two hours? It's also very hard internally, but I do think it's easier
if you build the right team. So we had people on the East Coast and the West Coast, so we've got
support. If something comes up later in the day, a team that can help support it. And I think we can
we can move quickly when we need to. I think the challenge you'll have when you build that in the
house is everybody just assumes you'll be willing to turn something around in 24 hours. So I think
it's important as a leader to make sure you set those parameters or when and when we won't be
doing those things, so we don't burn out a team. And I think that that is maybe the bigger risk
internally when you build that team. But it's also a risk at agencies life, right? So that team can be
burnt out. I think sometimes miss when we're not working with an agency. It's just that
thinking outside the box and having those insights front that they learn from other clients.
I think inside my box. And that's why, you know, I go to conferences and I'll be at the
Braes Forge conference next week. And I think it's making sure, too, that you lean on if it's not an
agency, platform, partners or, you know, networking to make sure that you understand what new
technologies or strategies that there are. In terms of tracking competitors. How do
you go about doing this? Do you have a slack channel that tells you in this city or in this
town in the zip code, like how do you go about maintaining that in monitoring in order to
leverage that from a campaign perspective? Yeah, I mean, it's hard. We do have a field marketing team
and we work really closely with them so they know what's happening. Like boots on the ground. I think
for us it's creating automations and processes so we can easily copy and
paste or have that set up for what happens, because what happens in one region or one zip
code is going to happen at the other. So I think that's important. Um, obviously from a brand
perspective, our brand team and insights team has a lot of competitor insights into offers,
promotions, how they're positioning the brand, but they're not necessarily going that level
deeper into the actual communication. So that's really either on our team or we rely heavily if
we don't have an agency on our partners, uh, our CRM platform partners to really help
us understand what what's happening in the competitive space. And also there's a lot of
translation into, you know, what's happening in retail. I mean, if you think about QSR and
pizza in general, unless you're a brand that has an in-house sit down, I mean, you really are in app
and digital, right? Because you're not sitting down and making an order or going in and ordering at
the counter. We are very much, you know, reliant on our web and app for orders. So I think learning,
learning that process and AI is part of it now too. We have AI so people can use AI to
make orders. And so it's just adapting to the ever changing technology and
expectations of the consumers. Right. Let's zoom out a little bit for the moment, because your
journey is now very common question for people in this industry. Well, a lot of people are
bouncing between. Do I go in house? Do I go out on my own? Do I go to an agency? And there's
a lot of different varieties of folks, especially now that, you know, the working model of
business is changing. And it's changing. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of changes. So the previous
or maybe the current depends on who you ask. Industry convention is that agency work is a
generalist training ground and in-house is where you specialize. Does that actually hold up or is
it the reverse where an in-house team is, where you get to learn and generalize across different
systems, teams, and budget cycles? Or is the agency work where you specialize in narrowly
on an individual tool, platform, strategy, you name it? I think on both sides it depends on the agency
and their expertise, and it also depends on the brand and where they're focused most on.
So, you know, I've worked at brands Where they really focused on digital and CRM and loyalty,
and they see the benefits of having a strong CRM and loyalty program. I also have worked at
clients where it's not as important to maybe the CMO at the time. And so I've seen that
change, even at Papa John's in the short amount of time. But, you know, we've seen a lot of transition
as to is email's still important. And then you have folks who come in and say, yeah, it is. And
they see the value. So I think it really just depends. But I've also seen on the other side when
we're hiring internally, like, oh, well, we only want to hire from within say
client side or within QSR side. And I think that that really narrows the breadth of
understanding that somebody has. I often say like some of the best marketers have both the client
and the agency side. I don't say that just because it's me, But I really do see that from the folks
that we hire, because they can see both sides and they can be sympathetic and think ahead. A couple
more steps, knowing you know how agencies work or knowing how clients work. So I always say
do both. I think when you're young, there's no better way to learn than being at like a really
fast pace and agency. But I also think that there's some hesitation because if you ultimately
want to get to the client side, sometimes it is hard transitioning from the agency to client side.
So for sure, no, I think everyone truthfully should have to do both at some point in order to be
well-rounded. Yeah, but I strongly believe everyone should have to do at least a year at an agency to
just understand what is possible. But I'm also a huge proponent for building institutional
knowledge in-house because otherwise you've outsourced all your knowledge. Yeah, I think it's
important to do both. Yes. And I guess that question. Have you seen a lot of clients
throughout the years outsourced their knowledge in general? I have, yeah. And, um, I
think that there's a risk doing that. Right. So when I started, we were completely
outsourced and using managed services. And then when we moved to platforms, that platform didn't
have a managed services team. Right. So we had to hire an agency to come in and
implement. And then we use that agency to help build. And then we ended up building our own and
rolling off. And so I think it's staying close and understanding. There's going to be times where
there's so much on your plate, you are going to have to go back to hire an agency. And it may not
be full time, but I, I think having somebody who you trust that when things get really busy and
your team can't take on anymore, you have somebody you can go back to and and rely on. And I've done
that before in my career. Agreed. I always say, don't burn any bridges because you just never
know. Many people do. So I'll say no. I feel very fortunate because every
agency that I've worked with long term ended up. We all stayed friends because it's. Industry
so small. Just be a nice person and be kind. Um, so you're going to see them again in some other
career? Exactly. All right. What is one piece of
conventional wisdom about the interchangeable move that you would tell folks to ignore?
We've been telling them what they should consider and do, but what something may be like. Yeah, you
don't need to think about that. I think kind of what I just said, which is you can do both. You
know, just ignore the haters who say, like, if your agency, you got a stage and see if your client, you
got to say client, I would not take that advice. You know, I just made sure you're working for the
right agency and the right brand. And I'll just give an example. When I was at IHG. I wasn't in the
platform, strong male and Epsilon, but I worked with that team that I had so much interest. And I
went to an agency where they specialized in email and CRM, and that's
where I got really narrow. And then that really helped me put my got me to my next job, which is
where I am now, building a team. So I think it's figuring out what you really enjoy. And there's a
million agencies and a million brands out there. So if you know you're really interested in
loyalty, well, then find an agency who specializes in loyalty. There's plenty of them out there. So
for sure, it's interesting you say that because my own experience, the reason why I went agency first,
was to broaden my experience. And I was like, I, I want to learn far more and more industries to
have a perspective so that I can be more well-rounded. So everyone's got a slightly
different approach when you've done both sides. Yeah, I think for me it just has always been in
the data and insights and reporting. And so I started out my career in direct mail marketing
and it was before email is we even had email and push and SMS. So I think
to another thing I would say is don't listen to people when they say like, stick with what you
know, or that technology or platform or that channel or anything for that matter, because
technology is always changing and consumers are always changing. It depends on the agency. Right. So
I would say, for instance, at Digital Additive, we were so focused on email. But then as Salesforce
changed and the the landscape changed, we embraced mobile and
SMS and and digital. But there are other agencies that didn't. So I think it really just depends if
if you have that mindset that you're willing to learn as the industry changes, then I don't think
you become obsolete. And I think AI is going to be a great example of that in the coming years. Oh
yeah. I mean, I think we're doing a lot of great things in AI, but I think as an industry it's
we're doing a lot of bad things too, right? I mean, we all can pull out those AI generated images
really easily. So I think with everything that's just being cautious and using what works best
for your brand and who you want to be, not what you feel like you should be. So I think again, it
comes down to I don't think it's going to replace people, it's going to change how we work, but
you're still always going to need the people to input the briefs and input the
strategies. But I think AI can really help us too, with scale. I think there's a lot of opportunity
if you do it right. So I'd say with everything like, don't be afraid. Okay, Courtney, you've done
work on every side of the table and you've seen the results of both. And that's exactly the
vantage point that this show one exists for, but also to pressure test. And I'm really
grateful and honored that you came on. And before I let you go, who is someone we should have on the
podcast? I mean, I would say my fearless leader digital additive Roxane assertion. If you can get
her. I would love to have Roxana. Offline and a plug for you. But I mean, she's been my mentor and
was when I joined my first agency, which was a database agency here in
Atlanta. She was a senior account person and I wasn't there very long, but I kept in touch with
her because I knew I knew she was sharp, and she was the one who really started email marketing
with big clients like The Home Depot and Carters. And then there's a lot of shifts and agencies are
let go. She saw opportunity and, you know, like you, she went out on her own and and built an in-house
agency. And I think she has a lot of guts that I know I wouldn't have, but I, you know, she's always
pushed me to try new things. And I think one of the reasons why I did leave is I was getting
really comfortable under that umbrella of the agency, especially coming out of out of Covid and
the pandemic. And so I think for me, she actually saw it before I did. And so
I. Think of a great leader. That's the sign of a great leader. And I've I've done that with my team
as well. Sometimes it is your time to leave, not because you're not doing a great job or that you
know you weren't right for that role at the time, but I think learning what you want to do next and
where you'll thrive is important. And so I think she's a great leader and she's just seen a lot
too, and made a lot of pivots. So. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Where can folks find you and follow along? Uh, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. I am not as active as I feel
like a lot of people are these days, but I'm on there, so reach out. Before we wrap, here's what I
want you to actually walk away with on the headline. But underneath it, Courtney holding off
launching campaigns until data integrations and reporting are fully in place even when told to
launch faster means launching before your reporting is ready, and it doesn't actually save
you time. It just delays the moment you find out you can't tie the campaign back to sales or
margin. Also, deliverability is insurance. It's not overhead. Deliverability tooling can look
like an easy budget line to cut from the top, and inbox placement can break almost immediately once
you do that, which means deliverability is not the overhead you trim. When budgets tighten, the
insurance policy you're paying not to need, and the bill for skipping it lands during the biggest
several weeks. And last but not least. National and local are competing for the same inbox. National
messaging and franchisee local messaging compete the same inbox at all shares. Not to mention Papa
John's, the same tension she saw also running life cycle at IHG for hospitality, which means if you
operate in multi location franchise model, your contact strategy needs an explicit hierarchy for
national versus local sentence. Or you'll have to take the same customer twice without either side
knowing it happened or why. Thanks for tuning in to the making sense of MarTech. See you next time!
A special thank you to Christine Murtaugh, who edited this episode. In an extra special thank you
to Jenna Carter for believing in this passion project meets business. Stay curious.