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Video is the most powerful tool in your marketing stack, and most of it is being wasted. Not because the footage is bad, but because no one’s thinking about the business outcome it needs to achieve. Everyone’s still stuck in the "fast, good, cheap: pick two" triangle. We say f*** the triangle.
We're David and Jess Siciliano, co-founders of Savvy Studios. We started in the traditional agency world and left it behind because, guess what? The model is broken.
Whether you're an agency or a brand, each episode you'll walk away knowing exactly what to ask for, what to push back on, and how to make video work harder for you.
We believe you can create great ads and brand videos with any budget. People just don’t know how to make it work. After listening, you will.
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[00:00:00] Mike Rizzo: Set aside ego. That is one thing every single organization can do, is just like set aside ego, recognize that an organization, truly a company exists to serve its customers. And if you're operating under the premise of does the thing that we're doing deliver on the promise or the value to our customers or would-be customers?
[00:00:25] David Siciliano: This is Call Us Disruptors
[00:00:28] Jess Siciliano: A show for the agencies, the marketers, the brand side leaders who are done pretending that pretty video equals performing video
[00:00:35] David Siciliano: Hi, I'm David
[00:00:36] Jess Siciliano: And I'm Jess
[00:00:37] David Siciliano: And this is Call Us Disruptors We have Mike Rizzo on today.
[00:00:41] Jess Siciliano: Yes. He is from marketingops.com.
[00:00:44] David Siciliano: Yep, he's the founder and CEO.
[00:00:46] He is a Marketing Ops guru. He hosts Mopsapalooza in the fall. They're a great platform and an amazing community of marketing operational operators?
[00:00:54] Jess Siciliano: Operators
[00:00:55] David Siciliano: Sure
[00:00:55] Jess Siciliano: Marketing operators is what
[00:00:56] David Siciliano: people call- Yeah, which is in a, a relatively new field with all the technology out there today. And we had a great conversation about how data is a crucial part of informing your creative
[00:01:07] Jess Siciliano: Most companies don't have a creative problem, they have a source-of-truth problem.
[00:01:11] Everyone is working from a different understanding of the customer, which leads to disconnected campaigns, messaging, creative, and measurement. The fix isn't better creative first. The fix is aligning on who you're trying to reach
[00:01:25] David Siciliano: Cool. Enjoy the conversation. Hey, Mike. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:28] Mike Rizzo: Thank you.
[00:01:29] I'm stoked. I'm glad to be here. I just wish my setup was as awesome as yours is with the cool cushy chairs so that I could not be in my office chair right now
[00:01:39] David Siciliano: Well, designed by Jess herself
[00:01:42] Mike Rizzo: I know
[00:01:42] David Siciliano: Um, I wanted to start with who you are, but more so what is Marketing Ops for people who don't know, and why should they care about it?
[00:01:49] Mike Rizzo: That's a great question. So I'm Mike Rizzo. I'm the CEO and founder of an organization known as marketingops.com. And what is marketing ops and what is marketingops.com? So marketing ops, we'll start there, is a profession where individuals help integrate technology into a sort of modern marketing and sales motion, right?
[00:02:12] So today, fundamentally, sales and marketing does not happen without technology for the most part . And if you want those technologies to work to the best of their abilities in service of your specific kind of hypothesis, right, every business is a little different, you're gonna want somebody to manage that technology in a way that is aligned to those business goals and KPIs and knows how these tools can connect together, and that is a marketing operations professional.
[00:02:39] And so- I guess I- ... marketingops.com is a professional for all our... a space for all of those professionals to come together
[00:02:45] David Siciliano: I would imagine this space has changed over the years or maybe didn't even exist a number of years ago. H- I guess how have you seen it change?
[00:02:51] Mike Rizzo: Yes, it has changed a lot over the years.
[00:02:54] Marketing Ops as a category definitely did not exist, um, probably 15 years ago . Um, I'm, like, dating myself a little bit now trying to remember when it all sorta came to fruition, but it was not a thing before. Arguably, it was a, it was a function. People were doing the act of sort of marketing operations, but they weren't calling themselves that Really, it evolved out of the B2B sector more specifically.
[00:03:22] You'll see it in B2C as like lifecycle marketer or, you know, marketing automation specialist or something like that. But they're largely like very much the same thing. In B2B, we ended up calling that Marketing Operations, and that was perpetuated by an organization that is known as Marketo, and they were acquired by Adobe many years ago now.
[00:03:43] And so they really, um, almost like advocated for the importance of having a very technical individual on the marketing side of things to use. Well, frankly, a technology that was kind of hard to use. You could do a lot, was really powerful, still is today, but needed some technical chops. So
[00:04:01] David Siciliano: yeah. Okay, I want to get into the problem.
[00:04:04] So I guess... Well, I'm trying to get into what's broken, but I'll frame it this way. When you walk into an organization, what do you try to understand first or try to look for to know if their marketing foundation's healthy before getting into any creative campaigns?
[00:04:18] Mike Rizzo: I would say there, there's quite a bit that you need to take a look at underneath the hood.
[00:04:22] First and foremost, like what systems are in place in general, right? If you're at an enterprise, you would expect that there's probably a series of tools that are already in place. Everything from, you know, a CRM where you manage your contacts and the relationships there to deal desk technology to enable sort of like sales and territory planning to marketing automation.
[00:04:44] There's a whole series of things, and so really at first glance, it's a bunch of like, I would call them interviews with stakeholders in an organization. And you're trying to say, "Hey, how do you do your job today? What tools are you using? In what ways?" And then as you get into that ecosystem of what I, what we refer to as go-to-market technology, you start to uncover, well, how are they being used?
[00:05:11] What tools are talking to each other or aren't? And underneath that, what data is driving the decisions when those tools are talking to each other? And really, like before you get into any campaign structures and anything like that, it really comes down to a foundational data layer of are we aligned on these things are the most important things for us to be keeping an eye on?
[00:05:35] And if that is true, then how is that being sort of matriculated through the rest of the go-to-market ecosystem to enable the rest of the teams? Yeah, it's like- I don't know. I don't even know what other profession to compare it to 'cause I'm not an expert in any other fields. But like I, I imagine like if there were psychologists or something, right?
[00:05:58] They're like trying to dig down deeper into like what is the root cause of like the thing that makes you the way that you are. I would say that that's probably the closest as I can get to it. It's like you need to like dig in really deep to figure out, well, why is this thing doing this and why do people think that this is the right way or the only way or whatever, right, for an organization?
[00:06:19] Yeah.
[00:06:20] David Siciliano: Why does that matter or why are you looking for that? 'Cause I hear you saying like this, this didn't exist before all these tools came around that could measure things and give you data. It sounds like not every company maybe has all that data in one place or it's not organized or I don't know.
[00:06:35] You told me a really fun story kind of about, about aligning on a story internally before you start working on anything, right? Is that where you're kind of getting to?
[00:06:43] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. Ultimately, like the reason why it matters to have a really solid understanding of the foundational data that drives business decisions is that, I mean, to put it really simply, it's like the right hand knows what the left is doing.
[00:06:57] If there's a lack of alignment historically between what are the goals for marketing versus what are the goals for sales, and a lot of that is driven on a complete miss on, well, I think that this is a high-quality account for you to be talking to and I represent the marketing team. And then the sales team is like, "That's bananas.
[00:07:18] We've tried to talk to accounts just like that for the last seven months and that's just not gonna fly. Why are you telling me that?" Right? You know, hopefully that isn't happening as much as it, as it used to. But really it matters because that shared definition of what does success look like for us, what are our ultimate objectives as an organization, and then down to the team level really boils down to, well, how do we measure that, right?
[00:07:42] And for a Marketing Operations professional, it's been this evolution sort of tying it back to this like change of like what we've seen over the years. It used to just be that you kind of managed marketing technology, probably specifically a couple of marketing tools that are really common, like marketing emails platforms, landing page builders, and webinar tools, and maybe event tech and stuff like that.
[00:08:04] But really what's evolved today is that you get to be a steward of aligning teams on- Mm-hmm ... those core definitions that define what success looks like, right? And, and you kind of get to act like, to use like the, uh, the country territory, you know, Switzerland, like you're, you're an impartial party at the end of the day that is meant to say, "Well, hang on a second."
[00:08:27] This is what marketing says, and this is what sales is saying, and this is the data I have visibility into, so which point do you both want to pay attention to? Mm. 'Cause I don't wanna surface 50 of these in a report, especially because you're both saying something different, right? And so you need to be sort of the steward of that alignment discussion.
[00:08:46] David Siciliano: Yeah. We see that all the time. I mean, when, when we get pulled into projects and there's a brief, like sometimes the brief is made by revenue or the marketing person or whoever, and then the CEO comes in or the CMO comes in or some other department comes in and they go, "Well, actually, it's really this," and, and it becomes really confusing for us.
[00:09:04] We're like, "Wait, so what are we making?" Yeah. I'm confused. Yeah, I guess like what's, what's something everyone can do? What is something that they sh- that they can be doing or that they're not doing to align the team?
[00:09:15] Mike Rizzo: Set aside ego.
[00:09:18] David Siciliano: Mm-hmm. Right, right, right,
[00:09:19] Mike Rizzo: right. I mean, I, I mean, really, that is one thing every single organization can do, is just like set aside ego, recognize that an organization, truly a company exists to serve its customers And if you're operating under the premise of does the thing that we're doing deliver on the promise or the value to our customers or would-be customers, like in the case of Savvy, right, you're, you're often, like, sharing messages that would resonate with would-be customers.
[00:09:52] Sometimes you're also sharing messages with current customers, but ultimately it needs to, like, pull through that message that says, like, "This is the promise that we make to you," or, "This is the value that we deliver to the market." And if you're all thinking of it in that way, you can kind of set aside the, like, yeah, I know that you're comped on the fact that you hit a million dollars of pipeline and whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
[00:10:15] Like, cool. Like, that's how you make money. But if you do it in a way that doesn't align to the, the reason this company exists and the value we're trying to deliver to our end customer, then you're probably not a very good fit for the team. And so if you could just set aside your ego for a little while, and I don't mean to pick on salespeople.
[00:10:34] Like, they have a really hard job, so, like, it sounds like I'm picking on salespeople, but I'm not.
[00:10:38] Jess Siciliano: There's ego in different roles too.
[00:10:40] Mike Rizzo: Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've worked with some incredible brand designers, and anyway, I'll set aside all the stories. But, like, there's, there's lots of folks where you can find ego.
[00:10:50] Ego definitely lives in marketing too. And at the end of the day, like, it's just set that stuff aside and say, "Hey, what is the core objective that we're trying to deliver on here for this particular effort?" Or ultimately, how does that roll up to the promise that we make to all of our customers, right, as a brand, as an organization?
[00:11:07] It's really hard. Truth- truthfully, it's really hard to drive alignment in organizations, and it's, it's hard to be objective when your comp depends on, you know, you hitting a number, right?
[00:11:18] David Siciliano: Yeah. Well, and one thing that, I mean, you live and breathe marketing ops, so one thing I feel like you're not saying, because to you it's a given, is that there's data pointing to answers.
[00:11:27] So you can actually-
[00:11:28] Mike Rizzo: It is a guess. That's true.
[00:11:30] David Siciliano: And as someone who talks to lots of companies, that's something we see often, is there's a lot of ideas of what's performing well or things they want to try because they want to, but it's really hard to get actual, like, well, yeah, but how is it performing?
[00:11:43] Like, w- what does your data say? I know. Can you speak on that a little bit about that problem?
[00:11:47] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it, it's a big problem. It's sort of a given, like we're constantly, as a marketing operations professional, you're constantly trying to look at the underpinning sort of naming conventions and systems that you're building to create a more scalable go-to-market motion.
[00:12:02] So just, like, concretely what that might mean is, like, every email that is ever sent related to this type of campaign is gonna have, like, a very specific naming convention, and that is gonna trickle through all the way to something like a performance ad that needs to have very specific naming conventions related to the overarching campaign, but also the UTMs that we use to track the analytics all the way through, right?
[00:12:27] Should be tied back to this stuff. When you're not trying to align systems in that way, the signals become mixed and, and like lost in the noise of like, well, you know, we got a bunch of deals, so, like, I think it probably came from the ads, right? And it's like, well, maybe. Experience tells us a lot of things, not just about, like, in this role specifically, but just, like, professional experience in general.
[00:12:51] More often than not, doing things in conjunction with each other, it's like one plus one equals three kind of a thing. In a lot of, like, studies that have been done, if you spend the time to go kind of look through these assets that are out, out on the web these days, we found that things like running ads alongside doing outbound sales, right, emails and calls, your, your funnel is impacted positively as a result of doing those two things together.
[00:13:21] It's just like a kind of a rudimentary example, but if you do just one and not the other You don't see the same results. And so someone being able to, like, understand that the ability for a company to go to market is, like, wholly dependent on, like, two things. Like, one is that there's an immeasurable thing happening, right?
[00:13:43] Like, you need the brand to be out into the world. You need people to have exposure to what it is that's the value and the promise that you're trying to make to the market. And you also need other th- activities to help drive that message home and reinforce the fact that, yes, I saw a video ad, or yes, I saw a clickable ad or a social post or whatever.
[00:14:03] And now there's somebody in my inbox that's kind of reminding me of the fact that, yeah, I saw that thing happen. But if you do just one of those things, it may not work quite as well, and you may dismiss this idea that, well, I can't do ads, I can't do video content, I can't do X because it doesn't pay off.
[00:14:22] Well, you're not really bolstering it in the best way that you could to leverage the asset and, like, squeeze the juice from, from the overall effort. And then, like, that's what it boils down to, right? Is just like, get the systems in place to track the outcome, and the hypothesis needs to be accepting of the fact that by doing these two or three things with this shared message structure, the overall thing that we're tracking is that this is the message we're putting into the market And does this message drive pipeline results?
[00:14:55] Not does this one video drive the best outcome. Not that you can't, like, measure the success of one video versus in a creative motion, right? There's AB testing for a reason. It could say the same thing in just a slightly different, like, orientation. There's value in that. But ultimately, the real test is, did this message land with the market or not, right?
[00:15:17] And not this one creative versus this one other type, and this ad campaign versus the email campaign. Like, they're very different mediums. It's not worth measuring. But you do need to have a system in place to be able to track that overarching hypothesis. As the steward of that alignment, right, between that go-to-market hypothesis, it's like, sure, I can track if that email does well, whatever that means to an organization.
[00:15:43] Yes, I can track whether or not someone converted from an ad into our pipeline. But that's probably not really what you're looking for. Really what you're looking for as an organization is, did we successfully enter a new market? Or were we really good at selling this product with this message versus this message?
[00:16:03] David Siciliano: Yeah.
[00:16:03] Mike Rizzo: Right?
[00:16:04] David Siciliano: Totally. We, uh, we actually have a great example of this. We were working with a supplement company made by a, a vein doctor, essentially. And they have one for, like, healthy veins to get rid of varicose veins, and then they have one for hemorrhoids, which you're not allowed to say on TV. We made ads for three of these products.
[00:16:18] Really? Yeah. You're not allowed to say hemorrhoids. It's, like, a thing. Mm-hmm. And, uh, so we made, we made three ads, and they're like, "Well, Vein Formula is our best-selling one. Um, so let's make that." And, and we always make three concepts now for this reason, for this story. Great, cool, but what's, what else are you trying to sell?
[00:16:31] "Well, we really like our hemorrhoids product." Okay, well, we can't say it, so we made, you know, two ads. The Vein Formula one performed fine. The hemorrhoids one went off and in all new markets because the Vein Formula one has doctors talking about it. They have mailings. They do newsletters. They have all these other motions they're doing.
[00:16:49] So people already know about it, and so it performed well, great. But the hemorrhoids one, they weren't doing anything for. What was interesting was people were going to the website, and there was a lot of visits and a lot of add to carts, and there was, like, more consideration needed because the data was saying, "Oh, they've never heard of this, but they're really intrigued.
[00:17:06] And so if you- Mm-hmm ... you should actually put your spend here on this specific channel because you're do- you're, you know, you haven't touched it anywhere else, and maybe you should probably touch it somewhere else, too." And there was a whole different conversation, whereas the initial discovery call was like, "Well, we'll see with sales monthly if it's working."
[00:17:21] And it's like, well- Right ... it's a little bit more complex.
[00:17:23] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, and that's the reason why I am really stressed about this idea that like you, you see a ton of messages out on the, uh, out on the web about like marketing is dead. Like there's this like, you know, one-person army that can just have these agents that can do all these things and, and, and all this, all this kind of stuff.
[00:17:46] And if the deterministic value of success in any, whether it's a human or an AI is like, did we get sales or not? The underpinning message of what you just shared is like, no, there's a ton of signal and market demand, and if you're not measuring that and data- like your data isn't structured in a way to try to capture that, if all you said was success is sales, an AI would be like, "Nope, didn't work."
[00:18:12] Right? Unless you go out of your way to go train that AI to be like super specific about measuring all these things. And like, yeah, you could do that stuff. It's the same thing as training a human to look for those things. But humans naturally look for relationships between endpoints that are not yet determined, right?
[00:18:27] That have not yet been like brought to fruition. And so it's something you can see. And like to your point in that one like hemorrhoid example maybe they pair it up with a few doctors that have like now conversations about, no, this is a really trusted subs- substance and you should use it or like supplement and you should use it, right?
[00:18:46] And like, oh, now I feel validated. I was adding it to my cart, but I didn't see that a doctor ve- like put their name behind it, so I wasn't ready yet. Well, now you can't, right? And so like that's data that is really rich and valuable, but it takes more than just the one effort to bring that thing home. And I'm just like, I'm s- I'm stressed by this concept that people think that like AI can somehow solve for these like t- very disconnected concepts, right?
[00:19:14] Like it takes a lot of training to get it there. I'm not saying you can't, but it'd be
[00:19:20] David Siciliano: hard. You still need the engineer, you still need the knowledge, you still need the training, you still need to ask the right questions. That's what this whole show is about, is like what questions should marketers be going into these campaign meetings asking.
[00:19:32] And like the reason why I wanted to bring you on was, well, who's your target audience is always the first thing we ask for any project. But I don't always trust the answer 'cause where are they getting the answer from? And that's one of the things-
[00:19:43] Jess Siciliano: Sometimes they will think it's a different type of person.
[00:19:45] Totally.
[00:19:46] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Or
[00:19:46] David Siciliano: we're making one ad, but for four different types of people. And so of course the creative just gets really diluted and it doesn't perform well. And then we didn't do a good job, I guess. But I don't know. And then, then we work with a brand who's, okay, here's what's working on Meta. This is the data we're seeing.
[00:20:00] This is our messaging right now. This is what we're trying. It's like, oh, this is gonna be fun. Like now we can come up with different ideas. They can be small. It's solid. We can test them. Yeah.
[00:20:08] Mike Rizzo: And that stuff matters. Like, I think, you know, I don't mean to toot your horn for you, but you know I love you guys.
[00:20:13] I think that's the value in, um, your ability to like not only just like have a podcast that explores these topics deeper and sh- sort of showcases the way that you're talking to your customers and, and, and the market in general. But I think that was like one of the unique learnings for me on my journey of building brand, building business, building community, is that you really do have to like Try to understand your audience and get to the core of, like, what message you're trying to put out into the market.
[00:20:41] And, and when you're, when you're asking questions as a creative agency, right, about, well, what's your TAM? What's your SAM? What's your SOM? Who's your overarching market that you can go after? And, like, who are you specifically homing in on? And then from there, like, who are the personas that you're trying to talk to and what do they care about?
[00:20:58] Everything down to, like, do they drive a van? Like, I made the argument, it was probably 15 years ago, I was like, "Hey, when we go build out our personas in our..." what was then HubSpot, 'cause it's got a persona building tool, which is kind of cool. I was, like, pushing our team. I was like, "Hey, do you think they drive, like, a minivan?"
[00:21:19] Right? I'm a B2B software serv- like, software marketing, right? Like, we're selling B2B software. Mavenlink was the company at the time. And they're like, "Why does that matter?" I'm like, "'Cause I'm a classically trained marketer that went to school and learned about marketing and, like, that's the way my brain works.
[00:21:37] I don't know. Because I wanna know that if we were to host an event alongside, I don't know, maybe we did, like, a, a minivan, like, drag race competition, and it would just speak volumes to the people that happen to wanna buy our software. Maybe that would work." Like, I don't... You know? Like-
[00:21:53] David Siciliano: I mean, that's a great concept for a software company, by the way, have, like, people racing and someone shows up with a minivan, but it's got, like...
[00:21:59] But it's so functional. Maybe it's not sexy, but it's so functional. You know what I mean? It's
[00:22:03] Mike Rizzo: so functional. Yeah,
[00:22:05] Jess Siciliano: exactly. Yeah. There's a certain type of person, too.
[00:22:06] David Siciliano: Yeah, there's a certain... I, as a minivan, ex-minivan owner, uh, it was great. I could do anything with it. I could put all of my equipment in it.
[00:22:12] Yeah. All my kids in it. Everyone I know, my, my in-laws, everything. It was great.
[00:22:17] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And you can- I am not
[00:22:19] Jess Siciliano: that target audience.
[00:22:22] Mike Rizzo: My wife either. Yeah, but we've got friends that love their minivan, right? And, like, and that, that again illustrates the point of, like, if you can drive down from your total addressable market all the way into personas, into some nitty-gritty details around what they might care about, you can also come up with, like, interesting campaign ideas where, like, yeah, a minivan is a highly util- like, a high-utility vehicle that works really well for somebody who's got a whole bunch of equipment, who's got kids, and all this other stuff.
[00:22:52] But guess what? You're also a business owner. And if I was Mavenlink running a SaaS, like, or running a services company, I'm herding a lot of cats. I've got a whole bunch of designers and developers and project managers and all these different things. And guess what? A minivan, it kind of encompasses the same sort of vibe, right?
[00:23:09] Like, I can get a lot done with this thing. You can get a lot done with Movember. Like you can make a tie happen, right? And if they happen to care about minivans, it works. Like, by the way, they didn't care about minivans. I'm positive. But
[00:23:20] David Siciliano: yeah.
[00:23:20] Mike Rizzo: You know.
[00:23:21] David Siciliano: Um, yeah. We, we talk about this all the time, because I also have traditional agency background and, and the world was like, "Okay, well, what are..."
[00:23:27] I was on the, like, Budweiser account. Like, "Well, okay, what are the other beers doing? Let's try to do something similar or competitive." And it's like, well, no, actually, well, who's the person drinking Budweiser? What other things are they doing? What kind of house do they live in? What
[00:23:38] Jess Siciliano: kind of holiday- Because they're not the same person as Stella Artois.
[00:23:40] David Siciliano: No, they're not. And then- Mm-hmm ... w- and then what are, what are those g- So, like, what's their, like, favorite, like, drink brand doing? Well, maybe we should, like, emulate one of their commercials for f- instead. I like Snug example, 'cause it's, Budweiser's also a drink. But if they're drink- if we're s- marketing Budweiser, what's their favorite shoe brand doing, right?
[00:23:57] Okay, well maybe we should do something like Nike and make, but it's Budweiser. Like, not have the horses in the bar, and have it be more like the reward after performing well or something. Like, it's a whole different type of campaign that gets a really specific audience, which now, because even TV is measurable and targetable to the IP address, right?
[00:24:16] You can really target specific audiences through the creative itself, not just on the back end with how, when you're setting up your campaign. I mean, that's a huge change.
[00:24:26] Mike Rizzo: It's a really big change. For anybody who is watching this as a learner and didn't know that you could understand the performance of TV ads, uh, to the IP level, that means like, yeah, at the IP- like where you live, we know the performance of that stuff.
[00:24:39] Sorry. It's it's like, don't be freaked out. No, they don't necessarily, you know, know anything else, but they do know whether or not you saw an ad, you know?
[00:24:48] David Siciliano: Right.
[00:24:50] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. It's like the first time I learned about this stuff when I was in marketing, I was like, "Oh Interesting.
[00:24:56] David Siciliano: So okay, let's talk more about this reframe.
[00:24:58] So what are ... give me the bullet points. Like, what's something that these companies can be doing as a checklist before going into a creative call, right? Since things like a single source of truth, some of these things I know you've talked about to me before.
[00:25:08] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Things companies can do to try to, like, drive a better outcome for any campaign is drilling down on, yeah, like, single source of truth is, is super valuable.
[00:25:18] I would argue that people are conflicted on what that is. More often than not, it's historically been like a CRM where you're, like, logging all of your customers and prospects and your deal records and all that stuff. In B2C land, you tend to have, like, a data lake, data warehouse, a CDP, customer data platform end up becoming, like, a single source of truth.
[00:25:40] What's fascinating today is that's sort of shifting into B2B a bit more. We're seeing more of that take off, which is nice. And ultimately what that does is it allows you to align on, like, the core data points that, that make up your market, right? And I think with AI today, you get to play in that sandbox a lot more efficiently than you used to.
[00:25:59] And so getting to a place where you, you truly have defined, like, who are we? Like, why do we exist? Who do we exist for? And then how do we kinda categorize that information into whether it's a CDP, data lake or, or CRM, please not a spreadsheet, but like something that is like a system of record, that'll help drive a lot of the, the conversations forward, uh, for sure.
[00:26:25] So- Yeah ... uh, and then from there it's like, well, who are we talking to this time, right? Yeah. About what?
[00:26:30] David Siciliano: Yeah. Based off the measurements, right?
[00:26:32] Mike Rizzo: Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, if you're an early stage startup, obviously you're gonna be testing a lot of things. Um, but for those that, uh, have been in market for a little while, or, you know, you've had a few customers, I would say, like, by establishing the right foundational, um, systems of record, right?
[00:26:48] Those, those core data points of ... Just by way of example, like, let's pretend that there's maybe like I don't know. I'm not gonna name all seven, but let's pretend there's probably like seven core data points that really matter to you. And it's gonna be like the company size, the number, uh, like in, in terms of revenue, the types of company, like the, the industry that they're in, the specific like product that they're interested in.
[00:27:12] And like that ... It's not like, "Oh, what product are they interested in?" That just doesn't come pre-built in a CRM, right? Like, you have to have a hypothesis that says like, "Hey, we need to be able to track which products and services they're interested in, and, and I need to be able to reliably get that information so I can make more informed decisions later to go target more people that look like this."
[00:27:31] And then like, I don't know, their job title for the individual who ended up, you know, first coming into the pipeline, and then the person who ended up signing, right? A whole bunch of things, right? There's probably only a handful of like really valuable data points that give you clear signal and allow you to start making decision.
[00:27:47] You can certainly go deeper and establish more that allow you to be more informed. But if you just get those first few things like lined up, you're gonna be in a much better place than 99% of your competition out there to go create, you know, more go-to-market motions.
[00:28:04] David Siciliano: Yeah. And your creative team will love you because those become all of the details for like the story structure.
[00:28:08] Like who are we? What's the conflict? Mm-hmm. What, what are the obstacles? Where are we? The location, right? Like what you just listed, the answers are kind of all those things.
[00:28:17] Jess Siciliano: This is literally how we come
[00:28:19] David Siciliano: up with
[00:28:19] Jess Siciliano: concepts- Yeah. This in- information.
[00:28:20] David Siciliano: Right. It's gotta look like a medium business. So we're in like a, a corporate office probably.
[00:28:23] Okay. Got it. They have
[00:28:24] Jess Siciliano: location.
[00:28:24] David Siciliano: They have a nice car. They have nice clothes. Mm-hmm. Like it's literally- Props, wardrobe ... it's doing all the creative direction for us. Yeah.
[00:28:29] Mike Rizzo: It's fun to see the overlap between like what feels like such a nerdy subject around like understanding business health and performance get tied back to something that is foreseeably i- in the
[00:28:40] or perceived in the eyes of the market as like this very brand top-of-funnel thing. Like they're so far apart from each other. But this like- functions in two ways. This creative go-to-market motion functions first as a hypothesis if you have no data yet, and it's really good to do that. But once you get it, it's like everything else actually fuels that, that thing, and it gets better over time, right?
[00:29:05] And it's just fun to see, like, how those, those worlds collide in, in ways that, like, most businesses don't ever realize how... Like, when you say you're data-informed or, like, you're a, you're a data-forward, like, data company, I'd be like, "Really?"
[00:29:21] David Siciliano: Yeah. "
[00:29:21] Mike Rizzo: Show me the last, like, creative campaign that you, you built based on the f- the, the real data, like, that you saw."
[00:29:28] I would be shocked.
[00:29:29] Jess Siciliano: I was just thinking in my mind of, like, a lot of these companies, I wonder if that's sometimes where ego comes from with some people that we, we work with, that they wish their target audience wasn't their target audience, and they wish, you know, like- That's true ... they wish they shopped at better shops.
[00:29:46] They wish they had, like, a better car. They wish that they ha- You know what I mean?
[00:29:51] David Siciliano: Aspirations. Yes.
[00:29:52] Jess Siciliano: Yeah. Totally. And, and then they make a l- you know, we make this video, and it's not at all where they're at. It's not aligned at all. I wonder if that's sometimes where that-
[00:30:03] David Siciliano: Oh, yeah. I mean, we get sometimes, they're like, "Hey, by the way, we can't have any palm trees in the location that we pick because everyone who buys this is in Kentucky."
[00:30:09] Like, that's a true story.
[00:30:10] Jess Siciliano: Yeah.
[00:30:10] David Siciliano: We're like, "Okay, no palm trees. Got it."
[00:30:12] Mike Rizzo: That's a great point. And, and it's those little nuances that, like, how would you know that, un- uh, outside of looking at some level of data? And to your point, like, if you're trying to work through your go-to-market hypothesis and you think you can, like, manifest a customer, like, that's a problem.
[00:30:31] Mm.
[00:30:33] Jess Siciliano: We have that.
[00:30:34] Mike Rizzo: I, I believe it.
[00:30:36] Jess Siciliano: That, that clients wanna manifest, like, a different type of customer.
[00:30:40] David Siciliano: Yeah. No, we're really about, like, this Y or whatever. Like, oh, really cool. Like, I love that. What are your top performing ads or whatever? Well... Or they wanna grow into that. That's fine
[00:30:48] Jess Siciliano: There's a difference between that being your goal and that being where you're at, you know?
[00:30:52] David Siciliano: I think it's, I think it's hard on our end why, like, why I was excited to talk to you about this and, and have it shared is it- it's harder, it's hard on our end because I think how are we measuring success? So we can make something amazing. It could be really cheap, it could be really expensive. It doesn't really matter.
[00:31:05] If we can't measure success, then we won't know anyway.
[00:31:07] Mike Rizzo: Mm-hmm.
[00:31:07] David Siciliano: And so it becomes a much harder process. It's like I don't really know what success is gonna look like for you, so I don't know, I don't know how to help you, but we'll do our best we can. And if, if we can come into the conversation before we're concepting anything with, "Hey, we all agree on and we're data supported on this is who we're talking to.
[00:31:24] This is our messaging. It's going to all these different places," I mean, now, now we can actually do something. And it can- Mm ... be something we can build on over time as well. Mm-hmm. Which is
[00:31:32] Mike Rizzo: great. Yeah. I don't know that I tooted your horn all the way through on that last comment that I was making, but, like, it was abundantly clear that when someone who's, like, really good at doing creative work can think like th- the data-informed marketer, or at least ask the questions to get you to think that way, it should be a really clear signal that you're, like, working with a highly, uh, skilled creative team.
[00:31:56] It's rare to find people who are, like, marketers and creative folks at the same time. The level of fun that, like, we get to have with our brand at Marketing Ops with you is, like, I think turned up a notch partially because, like, yes, we've gotten to know each other and you know how, like, the vibe of our, our brand works, but also partially because, like, we know who our- Yeah
[00:32:19] persona is. We know our audience really, really well, and we're as data-informed as we can be to the degree that, like, I know, you know, how many years of experience they have. I've done five years of research with them. I know where their pain points are and where they're growing. And yeah, there's a message we wanna put into the market, but it needs to meet them where they're at in their career journey and the pain points that they have.
[00:32:40] And we wanna do that through our brand tone of voice. And that's where the creative aspect comes in, right? It's like, well, how do you, how do we make this fun but still accessible, right? And those are conversations you can't have unless, like, your creative team is really thinking about the marketing side of it or, like, the data side of it really.
[00:32:56] David Siciliano: Okay. You ready for a quick fire round? I'm gonna say some sentences, give me your hot take. It could be a true false, it could be, it can be whatever you want. You ready?
[00:33:03] Mike Rizzo: Mm-hmm. Uh, as ready as I'll ever be.
[00:33:07] David Siciliano: Okay. Personas are dead.
[00:33:09] Mike Rizzo: False.
[00:33:11] David Siciliano: Most companies already have enough customer data.
[00:33:13] Mike Rizzo: Yes
[00:33:15] David Siciliano: It's a very reserved yes.
[00:33:16] Mike Rizzo: It's a reserved yes because, like, that would need a qualifier. I'm a data, I'm a data nerd. It needs a qualifier. Most companies who have been around for five years have enough customer data, yes. But if you're just getting started, no, you don't have enough customer
[00:33:31] Jess Siciliano: data. I got one.
[00:33:32] Mike Rizzo: Yeah.
[00:33:32] Jess Siciliano: Uh, the problem isn't missing data, it's disconnected data.
[00:33:36] Mike Rizzo: Oh, yeah. Yeah, like hard yes on that.
[00:33:39] Jess Siciliano: A hard yes.
[00:33:40] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. More often than not, it's just that it's not talking to the right systems.
[00:33:44] David Siciliano: Every campaign should start with an audience definition.
[00:33:47] Mike Rizzo: Ooh, every campaign should start with an audience definition, I think. But the, like, your ICP can adapt over time. It probably doesn't need to change every single week.
[00:34:02] So, so yes, but, like, you should have some established sort of, like, rules, uh, for audience definitions that shouldn't change for too, too long. Like, like, run a hypothesis, right, for longer than one effort.
[00:34:16] Jess Siciliano: The best performing asset is rarely the, uh, most expensive one.
[00:34:20] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. For sure agree with that. Like, I have countless examples of that in my life.
[00:34:27] It's
[00:34:27] David Siciliano: really a thing for you.
[00:34:30] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. I've got countless ... I mean, we, we ... Yeah, yeah. I've got social posts that have just, like, done super well because it was one sentence, and it cost me no money.
[00:34:40] David Siciliano: Okay. Marketing Ops should have a seat in the creative discussion.
[00:34:44] Mike Rizzo: I would say it depends. I would love for Marketing Ops to be able
[00:34:51] For those that have the appetite to wanna, like, be involved in that level of marketing, like, yes. I think just this speaks to, like, the varying degree of personas that we have in marketing ops. But at times you'll feel compelled to, like, almost feel, like, pressure, like you're supposed to contribute. And you shouldn't feel that pressure, right?
[00:35:12] Like, you should just be informed by, like, what it is they're trying to do and help enable it. And so for some it might not be the best, like, room to be in, but for others they're like, "Heck yeah, I wanna be a part of that conversation 'cause I wanna come up with a minivan idea."
[00:35:26] Jess Siciliano: If someone only remembers one thing from today's conversation, what should it be?
[00:35:31] Mike Rizzo: Creative is made better when backed by data. That is the one thing that someone needs to take away from this entire conversation.
[00:35:40] David Siciliano: I loved it. I loved it
[00:35:41] Jess Siciliano: too.
[00:35:42] David Siciliano: Hey, thanks. Anything you wanna plug?
[00:35:44] Mike Rizzo: W- Just, like, work with your marketing technologist, whoever that might be. If you don't have one, find somebody and help them enable you to, like, have more impactful go-to-market motions across the board.
[00:36:00] Your health of your business is, is, like, wholly dependent on, like, the data that you have access to. And there's people that are there to help you do that. Gonna plug a book. The book is called Competing Against Luck. Ooh. It's, it's by Clayton Christensen. It's a, like, fairly well-known author in some- circles, I guess.
[00:36:19] But one of the coolest examples that were, was given in the book, it, like, makes your brain kinda light on fire a little bit when you're listening or reading it. While I was listening, my brain was on fire, and one of the things that he talked about was, like, the McDonald's McFlurry.
[00:36:36] David Siciliano: Okay.
[00:36:36] Mike Rizzo: When you think about that product, it's like, well, what is its competition?
[00:36:41] And a lot of people, similar to your Budweiser example from before, might think, well, it's other slushies from 7-Eleven or, or, like, Dairy Queen or whatever. And the reality is, is that what they found by talking and observing the market, what they found is that its biggest competitor was actually other, like, breakfast foods and, and lunches and things like that.
[00:37:07] And so ultimately, its competitive landscape was way more than its category competitors. It was the full spectrum of how do I feel satiated and enjoy what I'm eating while I'm stuck in traffic on my way to my office.
[00:37:23] David Siciliano: You're so right. My, I've ... That is hilarious. That is amazing. Such a good example. I have a really strong memory of the only time I ever had an Oreo milkshake, which is similar to the McFlurry, but it was from Carl's Jr.,
[00:37:35] was when I'd get my cavities filled as a kid. And I had, wait for it, 19 cavities filled. So it's like a very strong memory of like, I have Novocaine, I can't eat anything. My mom feels terrible for me. As a parent, I, I can only imagine. And so she's like, "Well, it's okay. Like, you get to look forward to this , to the Oreo milkshake after."
[00:37:54] Jess Siciliano: To this sugar-filled- I've never- ... totally cavity- Yeah. ... filled. You just had
[00:37:59] Mike Rizzo: 19 cavities, so here's your Oreo milkshake.
[00:38:01] Jess Siciliano: Here's your Oreo
[00:38:02] David Siciliano: milkshake. So like, that's my relationship to that product. Susan. Nothing else. You know what I mean? Like, nothing else points me ... I've never had it other than that. So it's not a competition. I'm not like going to seeking a smoothie and I go, "Maybe I'll have an Oreo one."
[00:38:12] You know what I mean? Like ...
[00:38:14] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Yeah, it was fascinating. Like, the book talked about like, uh, the, their customer is somebody who's about to get in the car, drive a long distance, sit in traffic, and want to enjoy something tasty while they're in miserable traffic. And then, oh, by the way, they feel full once they're there.
[00:38:33] And even if they're not done with it, it's still yummy to drink while they're back at their desk, and they feel satiated for a period of time. Versus like a donut or a banana or whatever else. They're gonna eat the banana in a few bites and still be stuck in traffic. And so, like, it was fascinating to start to observe like, hey, you might not realize who your competition really is until you start digging into the data itself.
[00:39:00] David Siciliano: Nice. Yeah.
[00:39:01] Jess Siciliano: Yeah, I like that.
[00:39:01] David Siciliano: Where can people find you? What, what are, what is Marketing Ops doing? Anything you want people to go check out?
[00:39:06] Mike Rizzo: You can find me at marketingops.com. If you come join our community, you can become a member either for free in the forum, or come join us in Slack chat and a number of other places.
[00:39:16] We host a conference called MOPsapalooza. And, uh, if you ever wanna go dive deep on how modern businesses are going to market in technology, you can attend that either online or in person. This year it is online only, though. But yeah, I'm mostly on LinkedIn too, so you can find me on LinkedIn. That's the place where I spend most of my time.
[00:39:34] David Siciliano: Cool.
[00:39:35] Jess Siciliano: Thanks so much.
[00:39:36] Mike Rizzo: Yeah. Thank you. This was fun.
[00:39:38] Jess Siciliano: Thanks for listening to our podcast today. We explored the intersection of marketing, creativity, and production. If you enjoyed today's episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and share this episode with someone on your team, or someone who either needs to lower their ego at work, or who needs to up their data game.
[00:39:57] If you're looking to create better performing content, ads, or brand storytelling, you can visit our website, savvystudios.com.