Lessons from Condé Nast: 5 Tips to Unite Teams Around a CDP

Ian Phillips, Condé Nast: “We start by explaining the purpose of a CDP, how it is different, and what it would enable you to do that is different. And take them on that journey as to why it benefits them, what it can do for them, and what it can enable them to do. A huge part of it is building up that culture.

The success of CDP requires developing knowledge of data-driven marketing with our stakeholders in the commercial teams. It’s also taking what they’re already used to – setting up paid media campaigns on Meta, Google ads, or email campaigns – and showing them how the CDP replaces the function of creating lists and designing audiences.

For example, if you’re doing a campaign to renew someone’s subscription, incorporating whether they’ve been attending our events, or purchased in the shop, or if they’ve recently bought a subscription to another brand.”

Phillips: “About 30-40% of my role is engaging with the team and building up their capabilities and confidence in using the CDP, and helping them understand the possibilities it could give them.

Over time, data-driven strategy and data capability is becoming more and more important within the marketer’s role. Also, anyone working on the technology side of CDP tools needs to have a strong, clear understanding of the motivations, needs, and objectives of a marketing team. It’s much more of a collaborative process. The people who really win are the ones who can take both attitudes on board.

It’s a learning experience for everyone in the room, and there might be some people who are technically more adept at designing audiences and the logic rules you have to put in. Others may have an incredibly strong innate sense of what experience we should give the customer but might not necessarily be able to articulate it.

Tools like Treasure Data’s Marketing Copilot are enormously helpful because you don’t need technical or logical affinity with the CDP. An awful lot of the people who use our CDP tools are not technical people. That’s not their job and it’s not even meant to be their job. And that’s one of the cultural issues that we come across a lot is people take a little bit of time to be drawn to the water.”

Phillips: “The CDP is informing business and cultural change and making it more strategic, which is the most exciting thing. People aren’t just grabbing the usual email list that they send for a particular brand. They’re actually taking a step back and thinking:

• How can I contact my engaged customers?
• Where can I see what they’re up to? Can I find out whether they’ve been lapsed for a while?
• Is there anything that we can do? Is there anything that’s indicated they might be warming up as a prospect again?

We can take bookmarks for that. We keep about six months’ worth of data from web activities, and it’s really exciting to watch their engagement through the site, what sorts of things they’re looking at. We’re able to target by types of page, what the article titles are, what the tags are. So it’s really interesting to find out what they’re lingering on and then communicate to them in a relevant way.”

Phillips: “First and foremost, it’s a people conversation with your stakeholders. It’s identifying exactly what they want to achieve, regardless of which tools they’re using, and then you can define the CDP experience to suit that. 

The second thing is to take time on the foundation and make sure it’s very flexible. To that point, we’ve barely changed our foundational data model since we started with the first market in the UK, and it’s been replicated across other markets. It’s solid and it’s flexible. 

Also, when we have a new feature request or feedback, Treasure Data is very good at coming back with something that will facilitate that, which is really, really helpful. It’s very much a partnership.

In terms of getting people motivated and enthused about what the CDP can deliver, it’s very much a case of constantly littering small success stories: How it has benefited campaigns, how it has engaged the audience, etc. When marketers find a tool that enables and complements what they want to achieve, they naturally become more enthusiastic. They want to find out more.”

Phillips: “The business strategy informed the communication strategy. The business historically was pretty much each brand within each market was run almost as an independent business, and they very rarely had much to do with each other. 

The thrust over the past few years is to consolidate that and centralize various functions. And with that, we wanted to centralize our customer data as well, because in as much as all our businesses and our brands were siloed, so was their data, and hardly any of it spoke to each other. The business wanted to harness the value of understanding how customers were interacting with us generally across all our brands and across all our markets.

We’ve been rolling out market by market. We kicked off with the UK, our largest revenue generator outside of the US. We then went out to Taiwan about the summer of 2021 and India around the same time. The past year has very much been a story about getting a minimum viable product set up across our main owned and operated territories. We’ve recently gone live in Spain and Germany, Italy and France are on the way, and it will be Mexico next and Japan.

We did spend a while getting the UK set up to make sure that we understood and ironed out any bugs that we had, how we operated, and how we set up the data models so that we could easily transfer and roll out to the other markets with minimal change.”