Episode 14
Why digital advertising is B2B's emerging trust crisis - and what to do about it
In this episode of the 'Trust & Influence' in B2B podcast, host Joel Harrison speaks with Dan Shaw of Funnel Fuel about the evolving challenges of trust in B2B marketing, particularly in the realm of digital advertising. They discuss the current crisis in digital advertising, the complexities faced by B2B marketers, and the importance of data integrity and transparency. Dan shares his journey in B2B media and the mission of Funnel Fuel to address these issues. The conversation highlights the need for B2B marketers to ask critical questions about their advertising spend and the importance of data sovereignty.
Takeaways
- Trust in B2B marketing is multi-dimensional and evolving.
- B2B advertising is currently facing a crisis of integrity.
- The B2B community is lagging behind in advertising innovation.
- Complexity in advertising leads to inefficiencies and poor results.
- B2B marketers must focus on data quality over quantity.
- Funnel Fuel aims to improve transparency in B2B advertising.
- Marketers should ask suppliers about their advertising spend.
- Data sovereignty is crucial for maintaining control over first-party data.
- The future of B2B advertising lies in omni-channel strategies.
- Asking questions is essential for understanding advertising effectiveness.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Trust and Influence in B2B podcast.
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:I'm your host Joel Harrison and welcome.
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:Very good that you could join us today.
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:In this podcast we talk about all matters relating to, as the title suggests, trust in B2B
marketing.
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:And it's a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted challenge which is evolving all the time and
my understanding is evolving all the time.
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:And today we're going to explore a slightly different topic or theme that we've done
potentially recently which is on the issues relating to trust in digital advertising.
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:which has come to something of a crisis in recent times.
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:And my guest today is Dan Shure of Funnel Fuel, who's got an unrivaled experience in the
digital media world, having spent many years at IDG and then running agency on core
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:digital media and consequently being involved, integrally involved in the seismic shift
which have reverberated across the sector in that time.
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:Dan has worked with some of the world's biggest B2B publishers, brands and agencies, and
he is uniquely positioned to be instrumental in defining a transformational moment.
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:Dan, welcome.
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:Thank you Joel, quite the intro, looking forward to this.
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:uh No pressure at all.
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:Okay, so let's start by talking about Funnel Fuel.
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:So Funnel Fuel was established to address a very specific problem, which I've kind of
teased out there in intro, and that's around the efficiency and more importantly, perhaps
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:the integrity of B2B digital advertising.
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:Tell us a little bit more about the problem, what's going wrong, how it's affecting
brands, agencies and buyers.
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:So I think this is a really interesting question.
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:think B2B advertising in particular is under the spotlight at the moment.
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:There's been a few examples of B2B advertising campaigns not doing what they should be
doing.
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:lot conversation around brand safety, inappropriate positioning of B2B ads against content
that...
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:doesn't even fall into the category of dubious, it's just outright inappropriate.
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:We've all read those kind of articles and if people haven't, I'm sure you'll be able to
point them in the right direction.
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:I think where we've ended up in the overall advertising sector is it's just been driven by
lot of opacity and it's not improving.
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:So if we look at what's happened in the consumer world...
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:Google's announcement recently, Meta, Mr.
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:Zuckerberg was very explicit around moving forward you don't get to see anything.
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:You give us budget, you give us creatives and you walk away and we do the rest for you.
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:It's becoming more opaque.
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:In addition to that, you've got a B2B advertising community that traditionally hasn't been
able to use the tools that do the best job for B2C marketers.
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:So you've got huge innovation happening in B2B advertising, or rather, sorry, huge
innovation happening in advertising.
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:What's really happening is it's huge innovation in B2C advertising.
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:The B2B advertising community continues to get left behind because there isn't enough
innovation focused on this niche market, which is a pretty big niche market when you're at
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:just under 10 % of the total advertising spent globally.
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:But again, there hasn't been investment in both developing the right products or having
the right conversation with B2B advertisers.
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:So the position we end up in is one where people are using consumer built tech, trying to
strong arm a B2B objective into that.
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:doesn't work.
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:So it's a big problem there.
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:Like you say, 10 % is a big facet of that.
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:And it's a very important set of communities that you're driving.
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:I guess one of questions I'm to ask Ness is what's gotten to this point.
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:And one of the things I suppose is that the people building that technology haven't been
motivated or incentivized.
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:They haven't just been focused on that B2B audience because they're looking for the mass
market consumer audience.
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:Is that right?
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:I mean Joel, I'll be honest, I think the whole advertising community hasn't actually been
engaged with a lot of the development that's been happening to enhance the product that
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:they are buying.
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:So you speak to consumer marketers and I remember...
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:Crikey, I think it must have been almost a decade ago.
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:Viewability suddenly became a subject.
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:People were being charged for ads that were appearing on websites but never even got seen
by a human.
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:There was uproar, there was the release of new tech to address this issue.
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:I personally felt that was quite an exciting moment.
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:It was addressing a problem I'd witnessed firsthand from being on the publisher side.
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:The incentive to create more more ad slots, which you could monetize those ad slots, where
advertisers were blissfully unaware there was zero impact on the ad because it never been
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:seen.
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:And do know what ended up happening Joel?
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:The viewability standard was defined without real input from advertisers and it was
defined as half an ad being in view for one second.
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:So we kind of recognise a problem.
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:We don't speak to the advertising community, because I can guarantee you there's nobody
who would define that as being good viewable.
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:And then we set a metric which again doesn't do justice to the requirements of any
marketer, let alone a B2B marketer.
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:So I think that's a problem across the whole sector.
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:And I think the advertising community is neglected.
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:I think the ad tech world has built itself without engaging that community at all.
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:Then you recognise that we operate in this niche, this sub 10%.
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:Nobody's speaking to us about what's happening and there's a limit to what we can do but
the positive thing is we can make changes.
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:This isn't kind of a lost cause.
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:I'm not issuing a rallying cry for a B2B equivalent of Google or another dominant platform
because I think LinkedIn has already kind of stolen a march on the B2B kind of marketing
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:world and you look at some of the spend flowing through that one platform and already
we're starting to see a dominance which worries me because I think the ecosystem will work
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:better when it collaborates.
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:power in the hands of one or two as we seem to do time and time again.
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:There's a lot going on here and thank you.
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:I mean, it's a very complex problem to explain.
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:So thank you, but you've done a great job of simplifying it there.
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:You know, it feels like some of the, there's a problem that we've got people perhaps
consuming these services, whether that's the ultimate buyer or the intermediary, the
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:advertiser.
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:too, sometimes it's, just, is complexity part of it?
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:Is just, too complex to understand?
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:So people just, or is that a legitimate excuse that you could?
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:that you could use in this situation should people have got over that.
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:I do think people tend to, we don't defer to ignorance is bliss.
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:Do people really want to know about this?
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:And to be honest Joel, we're still a...
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:sector of people who are kind of like, kind of works enough, I don't want to ask the
awkward questions.
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:I think the truth is, and where we see the changes happening in B2B are, I don't think
anybody needs to reinvent this ecosystem.
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:I'm not suggesting we need to kind of rip out the plumbing and completely build from
scratch.
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:And I think that's kind of where I view companies like Funnel Fuel as being able to add
real good value into this B2B community because we're not trying to rebuild the core
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:plumbing.
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:That plumbing does a great job of being able to push relevant
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:advertising message from a relevant audience at scale in real time.
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:That's really exciting.
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:We can use that plumbing.
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:We just need to build specific bits on top of that consumer plumbing to make B2B
advertising work better.
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:One of the things that excites me about your current message is around this whole idea of
integrity, transparency.
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:Part of the problem is nobody actually asks the ultimate questions.
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:And I think it's not difficult.
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:How are you actually targeting this audience?
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:Where is my ad being served?
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:And what will it do for me as a marketer?
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:in terms of supporting my marketing objectives.
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:We should be able to answer those three questions very easily.
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:Yeah, because the kind of ultimate implication of this is that it's inefficiency, right?
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:You're not getting advertising budgets, marketing budgets are under pressure as never
before.
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:And if you're doing, if your advertising isn't being served efficiently to the right
people, then you're not getting anything like the right results from it.
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:And that's a massive issue,
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:You've hit the nail on the head there Joel.
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:And I think again if we think about, hate to keep referencing the B2C world, but we should
learn from that world because the B2B advertising marketing world is very very different.
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:The reason you've been doing this for decades Joel, there's a specific need for specific
information support and help.
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:So I think the two bits there and scale is a really interesting one and efficiency because
the B2C world sacrifices efficiency, accuracy in the interest of scale.
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:Almost everything could be in
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:market for a lot of these FMCG goods.
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:wastage, inefficiency, slightly less of an issue.
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:You're operating in such a large playing field that 10-20 % wastage is perfectly
acceptable.
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:Well, that 10-20 % becomes 50-60 % for B2B marketers, especially if they're trying to do
the things that are not designed by the B2C ad tech world.
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:So account-based marketing is just a really simple example.
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:You're just trying to find a small subset of 500 organizations that are a key part of your
middle funnel
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:activity.
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:You cannot accept wastage that means you're actually targeting six, seven, eight, nine
thousand companies.
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:You've got to make sure the advertising is hitting those five hundred.
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:Prove it and then prove the impact of it.
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:If we can do that then everybody wins and it's snake oil and it's not magic, it's just
proving that you're doing the job that you're being painted in.
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:The interesting thing about this for me, Dan, is that I spent the last 20 years defending
B2B marketing, aspiring to better for B2B marketing, but also defending it from its
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:denigrators, saying, it's behind B2C, it's, you know, they understand it's not
sophisticated.
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:This is an example where it really is behind, it really is not sophisticated, it really
isn't as efficient, and there really needs to be change.
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:this is a topic I'm really kind of happy to get behind.
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:Good, good.
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:also I think, Joel, I do agree with you, but I think there's another part which is we are
lucky.
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:We don't as a community have to continue to do the thing that we are told to do by Mr.
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:Zuckerberg or by the guys at Google.
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:Because actually a lot of our B2B audiences, Spindable, is more engaged outside of those
environments.
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:So we don't need to throw money at Meta and just hope and pray it does something because
it will not do the job for a B2B marketer.
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:So Dan, let's take a bit of a step back and talk about your story.
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:I know you've been involved with the world of B2B data for a long time.
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:Tell us a bit about what you were doing before Funnel Fuel.
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:Well, before Funnel Fuel was my first business venture encore.
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:Before that was my 15, 16 years in B2B media.
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:So I kind come from a world more similar to yours, in the sense that I spent a lot of time
working directly with B2B technology brands in the commercial team for a US publisher
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:called IDG.
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:That was my first exposure to this world of data.
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:I was given a great opportunity to launch an ad network.
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:And that was kind of the first version of the world we now live in, that data.
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:world.
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:So that gave me the opportunity to understand what could be done and what could be done
better.
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:And again I'm hugely aware of the pressures of B2B media owners, publishers.
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:It's impossible to do all things.
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:You can't be an events company, media company and a data-driven company and be great at
all of them.
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:And data was where my passion was.
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:So I left IDG, now Foundry, to launch Encore.
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:And Encore was a brilliant journey.
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:We were the first in the market to truly talk about how data could help B2B marketers.
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:We had some brilliant agency partners who recognized we could really add value to what
they were doing.
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:We were positioned in that brilliant moment where the programmatic world was growing.
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:but B2B hadn't quite figured out where it fit.
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:So we had a moment where we were using some brilliant partners to deliver great campaigns.
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:We focused on trying to build bridges across the supply chain, but the frustration kept
being that idea that at some stage, one of the partners that we were relying on would
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:fail, it would break, or they would deprioritize our work because again, it's back to this
niche.
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:You're the small guys just delivering the 10 % of the revenue in a world that's driven by
FMCG.
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:So when I stepped away from Encore in 2020, if you'd have said to me I was going to be
back in this sector, I'd have probably laughed at you and said that's the one thing I
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:definitely won't do.
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:But then we had a series of kind of interesting macro events.
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:The C-word happened, obviously, globally, and that enforced me to take a slightly longer
break than I'd imagined.
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:from there, it just became an opportunity as I embarked on a couple of consultancy
projects to recognize actually we could do something really different here.
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:So yeah, Funnel Fuel was born out of my love of data, but my frustration that there still
wasn't the tech innovation development happening in the B2B world to make that data
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:promise a reality.
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:Because Tunnel Fuel is a relatively new company, You're still the scale up, is that
correct?
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:Yeah, three years.
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:Three years is kind of how we talk about ourselves.
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:did quite a lot of work behind the scenes, though.
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:We came out of stealth mode with some pretty impressive momentum behind us.
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:But that was part of validating that what I thought was possible was possible.
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:And I've simply referred to what Funnel Fuel is the other day as a very unusual marriage.
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:And I can kind of see what they mean.
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:I kind of took Cambridge at it at first.
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:But it is a strange marriage because...
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:We've kind of got the ad tech heritage in Funnel Fuel.
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:So the launch of Funnel Fuel was very largely driven by me using tech as a key part of a
consultancy project and recognising just how well this tech could be used for a specific
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:B2B challenge.
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:It gave me the opportunity to play with that technology in a far more real world
environment than I ever had done before.
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:And when you can see something work, after years of being promised things would work,
Joel, we've all had the PowerPoint, we've all been promised it can do everything.
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:This was my first experience of using a tech that truly delivered against that B2B niche
need.
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:So that was really the kind of acorn that grew Funnel Fuel.
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:So we didn't come from a standing start.
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:We had 11 years of tech, engineering, build behind that first part of our
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:product.
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:What I recognised was a lot of the challenges, we touched on this a bit earlier, that
people go away and build Adtech without speaking to the community that they're building it
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:for.
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:And I think I was almost on the verge of doing that for I reigned myself in and recognized
despite the amount of time I've spent in this market, I've never worked client side.
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:So me deciding what client side marketers agencies wanted felt a little bit strange.
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:So I did something very different.
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:I decided to do a lot of the work in stealth.
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:I decided to engage with a lot of very senior, very smart client side professionals to
gauge if...
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:what I was doing was actually going to interest them enough to potentially part with some
of those very hard-fought marketing advertising dollars.
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:And actually one of the biggest kind of...
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:pieces of advice I got was from somebody who now works with us.
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:So Paul Collier, who's our CMO, has spent his entire career client side.
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:And he was in a not too dissimilar position from me during that kind of enforced COVID
era.
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:So we spent a bit of time talking in beer gardens, the appropriate distance apart for a
maximum of two hours or whatever the relevant rules at the time.
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:And I was continually testing and challenging him and asking him whether he felt if what I
was doing made sense.
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:A lot of that job was really, really deep thinking.
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:So Paul really wanted
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:understand I need to understand this market from start to end I want you to really go into
exactly how it works who the players are and what's actually happening behind the scenes
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:I'll be honest he had a bit of a moment and then he had a why don't people know about this
moment and then he had a
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:Could you really deliver on this?
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:If all the problems that you're saying Dan do exist around opacity, lack of being able to
show accountability both at a delivery and an impact level, if you can do that Dan, then
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:you're talking a language that I think will resonate.
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:Little did I know Joel, that he then went away and spent probably two months talking to
you about bigger industry challenges and come on Joel, what do you think is going to
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:happen next?
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:Because I was talking about this whole issue of efficiency.
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:How do we make things more transparent?
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:How do we make ourselves more accountable?
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:You'd been talking about that at very macro level across the whole marketing sector.
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:So without knowing it, you kind of did a bit of a job for me and aligned Paul to
recognising that this was relevant.
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:People did want to talk about it.
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:And the advertising piece is not everything in marketing.
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:But if we can get it right, we can make our B2B marketing client's life so much easier and
give them everything they need to prove success.
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:I've always thought that advertising was opaque and I always thought it was kind of
willfully so.
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:So it's great seeing this really being addressed and with a sense of mission behind it.
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:So I think it's a great project and I'm applauding what you guys are doing.
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:So, Funnelfield started in 2023 and the Grumcombs have been growing since then.
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:How has your...
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:the offer and the kind of mission you set out to, how has the growth and what you've
experienced since that growth aligned with expectations or any plan that you had?
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:I think it's really hard to plan any kind of start-up scale.
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:You aim for the moon and you accept you're going to miss it by a country mile, but let's
just see what we can do.
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:Where I've seen the business really is clients have engaged with us.
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:This isn't a conversation.
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:It's very difficult job because part of what we're doing is going in and essentially
saying that...
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:current way B2B advertising is broken, that we can do better.
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:It can be quite a negative start of a conversation with somebody that, you know, the money
you've been spending for the last seven, eight, nine, ten years, you could have spent that
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:better.
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:We're trying to get this message right, which is, it's getting better.
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:And we still don't talk about ourselves in terms of being the answer, the silver bullet.
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:What we're trying to do is just make everything slightly better.
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:We're trying to make the accountability better, the performance better, the reporting
better, the insight better.
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:And I think where we've seen most success is around clients actually opening the door and
saying, I would like to understand a bit more about this.
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:I'm not going to just accept the fact that it's an awkward conversation for me.
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:I'd rather have that awkward conversation now and go in proactive and say, however, this
is what I've done.
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:Because again, the reports and you I've got certain views around some of these reports
that are coming out and naming and shaming brands for appearing next to content.
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:So I'm not sure it's really doing the advertising world much good that type of public.
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:shaming but I do think it's leading a lot more marketers to kind of open the doors and say
I'd just like to learn a little bit more and I'd like to understand a little bit more and
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:when people understand that despite the fact that a lot of our messaging a lot of our talk
is around being more transparent being less opaque the end result of everything we do is
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:it delivers better outcomes so it's kind of a I know it's a negative conversation around
things that may have happened but the byproduct of that is if we do it well it will work
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:better and we can prove it.
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:I mean, I absolutely right and I was at a conference yesterday from a major global martech
vendor and they were there pitching their services in the current environment around
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:actually we're all under pressure right now what we need to make sure everything we're
doing is as efficient as possible and this is how our platform is doing that and there's
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:no reason why your digital advertising shouldn't go through the same process of scrutiny
now perhaps it hasn't in the past but when's the best time to start it's probably now
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:right
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:Yes, or yesterday.
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:Yes, exactly.
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:But in the absence of yesterday, today is probably better.
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:So, so you've also we touched on this earlier on, right?
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:So you obviously you're building a company, you're also building technology.
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:know, and are you are you describe yourself as an ad tech business?
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:Are you a technology business or are you not a technology business?
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:How do you yourself?
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:Joel, we are not an ad tech business.
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:I'm really fierce about this one because I think there's so many companies that actually
claim to be ad tech that aren't that true ad tech is fairly scarce, to be honest.
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:So there is actually a metric by which we could be defined as an ad tech business.
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:We've got more engineering talent than we've got commercial.
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:So we've got more engineers building than we have got people out there selling it.
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:But that's just, it's much harder to build something than to sell it.
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:And I firmly believe that having done that for the last three years now in City.
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:So I don't like to think of this as an ad tech business because that implies we're
building specific bits of ad tech that we're going to monetise in isolation.
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:We are building a X, Y and Z.
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:That's not our model.
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:Our model is we're building capabilities that enable us to do a better job, enable our
clients to see that we're doing a better job and to improve the efficiency and the
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:transparency across that whole piece.
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:So examples of products that we built, for example, are transparent account building
lists.
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:So we think about ABM, I've always had this frustration with ABM.
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:We receive a lot of ABM lists, and I'm certainly not going to name and shame, they're not
ABM lists.
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:They're exports from some CRM that isn't really appropriate.
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:And again, if there's an agency intermediary involved, it's simply because the time it
takes to get a really clean ABM list, the campaign is...
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:finished.
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:So we are doing more and more work with clients around these kind of dynamic ABM lists
where we can take seed data from them, build a bigger account list and also start to pull
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:on providers that they may already have contracts with to pull intent data in so we can
activate.
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:So again, we're not siloed, we're just trying to build tech that maybe connects one, two
or three different platforms that a client may have already signed up for, but is
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:struggling to activate against or is struggling to find really good outcome based
advertising against them.
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:But yeah, we're not an ad tech business.
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:We will not be releasing the foreseeable future, a funnel fuel product that is going to be
in any way, shape or form described as SAS.
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:Even our analytics product, Joe, we give that to clients as a kind of zero cost part of
working with this.
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:If we want to prove that what we do works, we've got a tool that shows them that.
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:We're not going to charge them to prove that what we do works.
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:That's part of our mantra, really.
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:Is there a simplistic way of describing yourself or a categorization that you do align
with or you not really think there's an area that quite ticks every box?
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:There aren't many pure play B2B advertising companies out there that are genuinely
building tech in the way that we do.
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:There are obviously repping businesses and there companies that sit on top of other parts
of the ecosystem.
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:I don't really, I mean, when people talk about our competitive set, I see most of the
spend that clients are allocating to us coming from places like LinkedIn, because it kind
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:of feels more like that type of approach that we bring.
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:But I don't see any kind of direct direct competitors.
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:There are genuine ad tech companies out there that are building great ad tech in the B2B
space.
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:There is finally some innovation in this space, but it tends to address just one very
focused area rather than this whole bigger issue of B2B advertising.
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:Okay, all right.
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:Thank you for that.
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:I appreciate it, Sid.
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:So it's often hard to fit a square peg into a round hole and all that kind of stuff.
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:So the digital advertising world is one that evolves fast and Google's kept us on
tenterhooks for a long time about the future of cookies.
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:So what's the status of this problem you're trying to address right now?
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:Is there any chance the industry will kind of self-correct and deal with it by itself?
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:I doubt it.
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:Based on my experience, haven't seen any genuine industry attempt to make ourselves better
as an entire collective.
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:There are loads of great companies in this sector, so I'm mindful I don't want to call out
the sector.
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:But everything that seems to be happening is actually going in the opposite direction.
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:And again, I'm going to reference the B2C world, but I find these kind of approaches by
the big platforms of give us your money, give your objectives, go away, and we're not
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:going to tell you anything is particularly frightening.
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:And I don't believe B2B marketers will go down that particular path.
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:I think we're in an era now, and the Google hokey-cokey around cookies.
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:frustrated everybody.
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:And I've got lots of sympathy for every single person who operates in this sector because
everybody invested time, resource, energy in trying to figure out what to do.
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:We all played the game, understanding how big Google is in this ecosystem, it's their
playground, we've got to kind of understand what rules they're putting in place.
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:But the impact of those decisions on smaller businesses is actually quite material.
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:And if we didn't have such an agile organisation, we could have spent a significant amount
of time exploring opportunities that Google then simply pulled the
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:So I think, I view that as part of our job in this ecosystem is to stop the
over-dependency on anybody else.
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:The more we can, we can't move away from Google, we can't.
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:You look at how it's lots of data about Google's search dominance is on the wane, but
Google is a dominant player in this ecosystem, even the B2B advertising space, because a
313
:lot of traffic is generated via the Google platforms, a lot of eyeballs are generated
because Google have put them there.
314
:We can't ignore them, but let's at least try and not give them all the control.
315
:And that's why when we talk about analytics and things like that, we are a million miles
away from relying on a Google cookie or anything else to deliver insight for clients
316
:because that whole 18-month, two-year window that's just passed has shown you can't trust
them to be consistent in what they're going to do.
317
:I mean, you could argue it's a case in point about why they're without assuming no malice,
right?
318
:There's just not enough vested interests and to sort it out.
319
:It's too complicated to sort it out.
320
:And they'd rather main, they don't want to destroy the status quo.
321
:So, or kill the, you could say kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but that's maybe a
bit too cynical.
322
:It's just not worth them trying to address it.
323
:So hence they've just fudged it.
324
:They have budget and again we talk about how the advertising community, the people are
actually paying the dollars for these.
325
:ad placement and never involved in the conversation because I don't believe there's any
marketer out there who said to Meta or to Google, please can you be more opaque?
326
:Tell me less please, that would be good.
327
:There is, I just don't believe that.
328
:However, they're now stuck with a platform that's enforcing rules and know they've got to
keep the spend.
329
:Sure, B2B marketers to a point are going to need to continue to invest in things like
Google, particularly on the search front, but don't rely on them for tracking or
330
:supporting your B2B objectives.
331
:They will let you down.
332
:Okay, so given your background, I know that data is something you're very passionate
about, you've got lot of experience about.
333
:To what extent is data at the core of this problem?
334
:Is this finally an opportunity for B2B marketers to get their data houses in order and
focus on quality rather than quantity?
335
:I really hope so.
336
:Again, it's, as I said, there's too much data.
337
:There is actually too much data.
338
:And that's simply because there is no real restriction on the data in this ecosystem, the
checks and balances, and there's no auditing of data.
339
:So we can claim data represents anything to a point.
340
:So it is a part of the problem.
341
:this whole data world.
342
:I think the more interesting piece is what you just said there Joel around client data.
343
:Because I think suddenly there's a realization from a client's perspective that that first
party data piece is hugely important.
344
:There's a move towards what we're talking about is kind of this data sovereignty piece,
which is do not allow your data in any way, shape or form to be taken out of your
345
:organization, either to support the advert and this has happened, the advertising
marketing goals of a competitor or to just support the
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:overall corporate goals of the supplier.
347
:Your data is sacrosanct and the fact that it would be great for any supplier to be able to
see that first party data does not mean people should be giving it away.
348
:There's a load of concern around, not just legislative concerns around this, but actually
commercial, like what's happening to my data and what is it being used for that I am
349
:unaware of.
350
:There's a couple of really interesting people on LinkedIn having a very vocal conversation
around this right now and part of the challenge is the trust piece.
351
:Part of reason trust is broken is very few of these contracts actually give clients true
control and ownership over their first party data.
352
:So if we're going to talk about trust, I would suggest every marketer looks at those
analytics contracts, those supplier contracts, and make sure that their first party data
353
:is exactly that.
354
:It's sacrosanct and it remains first party data, actionable only for you as a marketer.
355
:It's your data.
356
:You've invested heavily to make it valuable and use it accordingly.
357
:Yeah, it feels like again, back to the, it feels like it's such a fundamental asset.
358
:But at the same time, we're talking again about efficiency.
359
:You you've got to, you've got to, if give your data, the better your data is, the more
effective your marketing is going to be and pushing it under the carpet is, doesn't seem
360
:like an option very much anymore.
361
:So just, just drawing to a close, you know, clearly Funnelfield has achieved an awful lot
in terms of its mission, in terms of its, what it's trying to do and trying to, how it's,
362
:what it's building its services and products.
363
:What's next and where are you going to focus your attention, how are you going to focus
your attention to help continue to address these issues?
364
:think that what next?
365
:I always think of it in two different ways.
366
:I do geek out a little bit about this omni-channel world.
367
:Simply because I just think from a B2B marketer's perspective, that ability to lean on
channels that were not there before is exciting.
368
:Now I also get excited because we've already witnessed that if you take B2B advertising
into a channel where traditionally there hasn't been much B2B advertising, the performance
369
:standout is incredible.
370
:Now, don't know how long that will last for, but right now there's an opportunity to
create great standout, not to go out negative standout.
371
:It's still got to be aligned to the right people.
372
:It's got to be in an environment that we as B2B
373
:be more comfortable with but that really excites me it's just going to get more and more
exciting.
374
:The other one for us of course is you know we're a London based scaler we haven't done
375
:anything meaningful outside of London in terms of feet on ground.
376
:Most of our clients work with us, certainly on a regional, if not a global basis, but we
haven't explored actually going into the markets and planting a funnel fuel flag and
377
:trying to understand if we can do the same thing in other markets.
378
:We've just launched into Singapore.
379
:We're about to launch into the US.
380
:think that international peace generally is considered incredibly challenging for a London
starter.
381
:I love the fact that we've made data so complicated here though.
382
:Like we're in a great place.
383
:We came from the GDPR world, then we went through the Brexit moment, so we're now
hamstrung by European and UK legislation.
384
:We've got a very good, on the whole I think, industry regulator in the ICO who are doing
as much as they can do.
385
:They're not quite being as draconian as some of our European counterparts, but...
386
:We've been kept on our toes from a data perspective.
387
:So when we speak to American counterparts who themselves are going through a lot of
changes, they see us as almost the people who survived the war and come out with a
388
:product, solution that will work.
389
:It's kind of, you guys have already been kicked, beaten and interrogated.
390
:Are you compliant?
391
:Yes, that works in an American market.
392
:So I'm excited about that and what that could do.
393
:It feels like, as I nature of the problem isn't going away and you've got your fuel,
pardon the pun, by an opportunity but also a necessity in terms of there's an inequity
394
:going on here, right?
395
:And this is something which B2B marketers need to resolve for good of the profession and
for the good of the brands they're working for.
396
:I'd absolutely agree with that.
397
:And as I said, I do recognise at the moment a lot of the chatter in the industry is around
the problems.
398
:The good thing is we're making such great steps forwards as an industry, not just the
Funnelfield, there are other brands out there, you referenced the conference you were at
399
:yesterday.
400
:There's some really good work being done to kind of, I'd argue, not just play catch up,
but I still remain confident if we're talking again, Joel, in two, maybe three years, B2B
401
:advertising would be a better place than B2C advertising.
402
:And our counterparts in the B2C world will be looking enviously at our more transparent,
less opaque way of doing things.
403
:That's a great aspiration to have and I think it's about time that this aspect of B2B kind
of continue on the kind of development other areas have.
404
:So last question to you, there undoubtedly marketers listening to this who weren't really
aware of this problem with advertising efficiency.
405
:This is a complete curve ball for them.
406
:This is the first time they've heard any of this.
407
:and possibly they've, well possibly they were partly aware of it, they kind of buried
their heads in the sand because it was a big problem, they didn't want to address it.
408
:What should they, what one simple thing should they do right now to start on their journey
to addressing it?
409
:It's probably an answer you get a lot.
410
:Ask questions of your current suppliers and go into the market and ask questions.
411
:And I think...
412
:just to give the B2B Ignite conference a bit of a plug.
413
:But I did notice last year, and it was our first, the first event that Funnel Fuel had
ever actually attended in any real meaning.
414
:I found it really refreshing that people were asking questions.
415
:And do know that horrible moment of, I think this is a stupid question, but I really would
suggest people stop saying that because there are no stupid questions in this ecosystem.
416
:Even down to, great question I had before I walked in here, what exactly is a cookie den?
417
:And I thought it's great because sometimes we kind of default to not being prepared
418
:answer those questions or ask the questions.
419
:So ask as many questions as you can and ask one more question when you think you've
answered the final question you should ask.
420
:And the starting point is how efficient is my advertising, right?
421
:How can you prove how efficient my advertising is?
422
:It's that kind of thing, right?
423
:It's as simple as that.
424
:It's the things that I kind of worry that we're still having to ask.
425
:And again, it's the, can you tell me what my advertising dollar has been spent on, where
it has been spent, and what results it's delivered for me, please?
426
:And that's really, really simple as a, and weirdly people are not asking those questions.
427
:People do not know exactly where the ad spend is going.
428
:They certainly don't know where it's going.
429
:And I would suggest that very few people truly know the impact it's having.
430
:should be able to answer those within one phone call.
431
:Those should be fundamental questions, shouldn't they?
432
:Yeah, it is, absolutely.
433
:It speaks to the challenge that we're facing here.
434
:So Dan, it's been great talking to you.
435
:Thank you so much for your time today.
436
:Congratulations on the success you've had so far.
437
:Thanks, Jill, really appreciate that.
438
:And likewise, great to catch up.
439
:Great stuff.
440
:I hope you, thanks to Dan for his time today.
441
:I hope you've enjoyed this podcast.
442
:Please review it if enjoyed it.
443
:Remember to like and subscribe.
444
:It's a great way of letting us know that you're listening and enjoying what we're doing.
445
:There's going lots more content on this subject coming up in the future.
446
:In the meantime, today, thanks very much for listening and hope you can join us again
soon.
