Episode 252 / Emre Acikel / Bayer / Global Head Data Driven Marketing
Connecting the Dots Between Media & Creative
For Emre Acikel, connecting media and creative reporting is a no brainer to ensure data driven marketing success. All marketing campaigns are driven in almost 50/50 proportion by these two forces, but his experience in multiple organisations taught Emre that companies tend to keep media and creative separate. However, his Shiny New Object is joint reporting, which is already yielding great results at Bayer.
Bonus:
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The Importance of Being Highly Skilled
One of the best investments Emre has made in his career is taking the time to study new skills consistently every year. That’s because in a differentiated domain, the more knowledge you have, the more indispensable you become to your business. But the key is to find those skills that not everyone is focusing on, in order to set yourself apart. That’s why he’s now studying philosophy.
“While everyone is learning how to use ChatGPT I’m studying philosophy because, in a world where all the answers are out there, asking the right questions will make all the difference.”
Staying in the Trenches
A good marketing leader doesn’t lose touch with hands-on keyboard experience. Emre’s top data driven marketing tip is to never find yourself “far from the trenches” and taking information only from others.
Instead, having a side project where you experience your work first-hand gives you unbeatable insights into what your consumers are going through themselves. Whether growing an Instagram account from scratch, improving traffic to a personal website, or any other digital marketing activity, they all benefit your overall skills set and performance.
Why Creative & Media Reporting Needs to be Joint
There is no point in reporting on creative and media separately when campaigns are driven almost 50/50 by both. Instead, Emre’s been experimenting with finding insights across data sets and understanding what creative works best in which channel, for different audiences, and in which permutations. This not only improves campaign ROI by c.15% (based on his findings at Bayer), but also unlocks efficiencies in internal processes and the creative supply chain.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Emre Acikel 0:00
Become in a position where you hear the developments and you hear people from your team coming to you with recommendations. Being far from the trenches is not a good position.
Tom Ollerton 0:18
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Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I had the pleasure, the absolute privilege of interviewing our industry's leaders about what is going to happen next in data driven marketing. And I am on a call with me Emre Acikel. Sorry, that didn't do a good job of that. But you your global head of data driven marketing at Bayer, thank you so much for coming on the show. Could you give the audience a bit of background on you, if they don't already know what you do?
Emre Acikel 2:03
Hi, Tom. Thanks for the invite. Indeed, as you say I'm the Global Head of data driven marketing in Bayer consumer health for the last four years. I'm located in Switzerland, before that I was almost 15 years in Procter and Gamble, having IT roles, ecommerce channels and digital marketing roles. And right now I am in charge of basically leveraging data to drive marketing effectiveness and efficiency, and eventually, business growth, in Bayer consumer health.
Tom Ollerton 2:39
So in that career, what has been the best investment of your own time, energy and money in your career?
Emre Acikel 2:45
For me, if I look back, spending time to learn skills to differentiate myself has been the best investment. I mean, I realized that when I was assigned the E comm role in Istanbul, maybe 14-15 years ago in P&G. But I realized at that time, I was a sales guy. And I was assigned to ecom role, which was a new role. They gave me that role because I had computer science background, I knew some technical things. But what I realized, in a differentiated domain, when you do well, you have much more autonomy, much more freedom, you get promoted faster. And, and I liked my job a lot. And what I realized, I took the lesson I need to spend some time every year to learn skills that will differentiate me from the herd, differentiate me from the others make me a bit more indispensable in my domain. And throughout my career, I did that a lot. So I moved to digital marketing because I realized ecommerce sales guys, there are so many of them. So but somebody knowing ecomm, and digital marketing is rare. So I learned that then I learned retail media specifically then I have trainings in assignments on Disruptive Innovation Development in big corporations like working with startups. And right now it's AI. And while everybody or most people are learning how to use chat GPT I try to differentiate and I'm studying philosophy right now because what I realized is thinking two steps ahead in a world in a data rich world, where all answers are out there. Asking the right questions will make the difference. So and philosophy is a very good domain to teach you how to ask the right questions and how to frame good answers. So I recommend everybody to spend time learning skills to differentiate themselves.
Tom Ollerton 5:07
And philosophy is quite broad. So where have you started? Or where is your area of focus within the field?
Emre Acikel 5:13
I'm actually taking an undergrad degree in an online university. So taking all the four years of classes, history of philosophy, all types of philosophical domains. And yes, there's, as you say, it's a big domain. But combining my work life, I think this is the biggest benefit. If you take a book of Immanuel Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, yes, there are great ideas, maybe many of them are not applicable. But throughout the books, you realize, oh, people asked so many great questions, to untangle very complex topics. And I think, to me, this will be a key differentiator in the coming years for people working in data AI, where technology will do many, many things, will have many answers, asking the right questions will be key to finish.
Tom Ollerton 6:14
Could you give me an example of a better question that you ask now that you wouldn't have asked before the course?
Emre Acikel 6:21
I mean, for example, first party consumer data. And I mean, it helps. If you look at mainstream discussions, it's how we can better collect or there's this data privacy regulations, we will lose access to many types of data, etc. But it helps you to ask why we are doing this at the end of the day? And are we using that data effectively. In a long time in my career, I was asked to collect more data. And recently, what I realized, actually, the reasons we're using that data are creating more efficient marketing, more effective marketing, and we can do those things. Without that data so... It helps me asking the right questions and challenges that score within the company and deliver a better impact also with much, much less data.
Tom Ollerton 7:25
So I think we might come back to this later, I hope we do, you raise a very provocative point there. But what I would like to know is what advice do you find yourself giving to people when it comes to data driven marketing? What is that one bit of advice you find yourself coming back to most often?
Emre Acikel 7:41
To me, it's hands on keyboard experience, especially for people like me, who spend most of their time in big corporations. In the early stages of the careers, you do a lot of hands on stuff. But as you go up the ladder, there are a lot of good agents, partners who do the work for you. And you lose that hands on keyboard experience. And you become in a position where you hear the developments. And you hear people from your team or your agencies coming to you with recommendations, you can trust them you can decide. But being far from the trenches, I think, is not a good position, at least for me. So I recommend people to have continued to have hands on keyboard touches, and be on the trenches. And it's quite easy to do it. For example, you can have a simple blog website, you can have an Instagram account from zero, where you just put effort to grow it or you put effort to drive traffic website, or you set up a DTC business small one, not much of your time, or try to sell a product in Amazon, and do all those little things like SEO, Google ads, YouTube marketing, Instagram reels marketing yourself for your small sidekick, if you don't have have hands on, work at the work. So as a result, I highly recommend people to keep that site throughout their career because it grounds you really well into the reality.
Tom Ollerton 9:29
I've only heard that a few times on this podcast two or three times in the last few years. And it always strikes me as a very intelligent thing to do, just a small side hustle just to understand the basics of the things that you mentioned and give you real power in conversations. Because if you're talking to someone about a website or digital marketing campaign, or whatever it is, if you've done it yourself even at a small level, then that tiny bit of experience puts you in a completely different realm to somebody who's never touched it so I back that completely. You become one of them as opposed to on the other side of a fence with no actual experience.
Emre Acikel 10:03
Exactly, also, like, while working with agencies, it's kind of you are hiring someone to do part of the job. And I mean, although they're good partners, you need to have a very good brief to tell them what to do. But if you know the details yourself, it increases the quality of the discussions a lot. And you can go into details and, and become much better at one team with agents.
Tom Ollerton 10:33
And also when, I don't work for an agency anymore. And things might have changed in the last six years. But there was a lot of people in agencies who'd spent the weekend learning about something and then presenting it to the client, like they're an expert. In reality, they'd only spent five hours or 10 hours or maybe a week longer than the person that they were having the conversation with. So I think that if you spend those five or 10 hours, then quite often you could be on a par with the people who are supplying to you that's not always the case. But I've definitely seen that over the years. But anyway, I'm sure it's a lot better now. And that doesn't happen.
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We're gonna move on to your shiny new object, your shiny object is reporting creative and media analytics together. That sounds obvious what that is. So can you help us understand why that's your shiny new object? And why you're passionate about that being the future of data driven marketing?
Emre Acikel 11:59
Yes. So when I started my role in Bayer, we had a lot of external benchmarking to help company to modernize overall marketing efforts, and few different sources of data showed the same thing, which is for any marketing, campaign effectiveness, creatives makes around 50 to 60% of the impact. And the rest is the media by the term. And we internally asked this question, okay, let's see, media part is 50% of the impact. Creative itself is the 50% of the impact, to make it simple. But when you look at organizations, they're two separate organizations. And it's the handoff between the two organizations, no immediate team buys and says, Send me the creatives and creative teams, give me the brief, I'll give you the best creative, but there was no complete review of a campaign having media and creative together in the same room. So we started with that problem. And I simply asked, you know, we have simple media reports, you know, by platform by brand, by campaign, which audience what are the impressions and performance KPIs by campaigns? Most of us see them? And I said, Can we add creatives to so what I meant was in a, for example, YouTube campaign or multiple lines, but I'd like to see which creative visual to which audience. And I'd like to see the creative level details of the performance. And then a lot of people said, Yes, but you need a huge creative taxonomy, you need to match everything. And yes, it seemed like a mammoth task. But our partners 55 helped us to connect all the dots and, and simply magic happens, because what we realized, at an aggregate level, you can easily say, this marketing campaign performed well, or this marketing campaign doesn't perform well. With the creative details, then we have start to see the other 50% of the equation. We start to see within a campaign, certain creatives actually worked well, but certain ones didn't. So that encrypted data doesn't show you that. And similarly, on the other side, we were saying this creative is not working. But we realized for maybe for audiences, it didn't work. But for one audience, it was working really well. So it's it was an eye opener for us and we started to rollout this tool for all our markets, and, and we have more than 20,000 creatives analyzed. And, and with the help of the latest AI technologies, we start to generate several links. And one of the key thing we realized, and again, it's, you can't see that without the joint reporting is in a campaign, if you have multiple audiences, with tailored creatives, you have a much better performance, almost 15%, higher performance, ROI performance, then a campaign with just one creative to a mass audience. So this was, for us a key pivotal moment to start what we call internally Precision Marketing Program, to roll it out, and start to increase our Precision Marketing like campaigns in our digital space. So I stop here to hear your questions. Because I can talk for hours.
Tom Ollerton 16:14
As can I, but it's a short podcast. So let's, let's try and keep it on track. So I'm curious to know, you worked with the supplier and you connected the dots? Can we sort of drill into that a little bit? How did you connect the dots? Were you tagging, you're running multiple ads, and then tagging each ads? Or you tagging creatives within the ad? We tagging visuals and messaging format? Like can you help without giving too much away? Can you help me understand how you produce statistically and structured reliable data?
Emre Acikel 16:43
Yeah. So what we realized is, at first, we were thinking, we have, let's say, 20,000 creatives, and we have hundreds of campaigns every month sounds and those creatives are being used in them. So somehow there needs to be, we need to have an ID to match everything. But it was very complex. What 55 team helped us to discover was, we were actually able to pull all the creatives from that accounts. So they have the technical knowledge, I remember there was one of them was called Oculus create, I guess, it helps you to retrieve all the creatives from that account. So we didn't need to do any mixing, matching or IT taxonomy work, we just run the ads. And from the ad accounts, we were able to pull back all the videos, display ads, and all the creatives be use matched with the line of that campaign. So it might be a bit technical, but in short, this was a huge shortcut for us. Without any taxonomy or tagging effort, we were able to pull back all the creatives matched with campaign lights. So imagine, YouTube, TV 360 campaign, which has multiple lines, and each line has a corresponding creatives that is pulled from the system. And as a result, you can easily see this creative was shown in that platform to that audience that time. And this is the amount of impressions this specific creative had, and this is the result.
Tom Ollerton 18:34
And how did you work out whether it was the visual or written element that was the driver of the outcome that you want?
Emre Acikel 18:41
Yes, that's a good point. Because when you have all this, together, it opens up the Pandora's box, it opens up a completely exponential set of data, which you didn't look before. And it's extra work for both media people, both creative people. So we had to change two things. Number one, we hold hands, meaning we didn't let it out in everybody figuring out what to do. We actually worked with ourselves and extracted insights each month. You know what, for example, if you have this audience, these types of creatives work better. Short forms work better or long forms work better. Or for this brand, having a human in the creative works better. We started little by little. If you have more than two creatives in one campaign, it's better than having just one campaign. One creative. And we started to share those insights internally with the brand teams and they were like, wow, how did you know that? Or how did you come up with this? sight and, and then we start to help people use an experiment, we are still scratching the surface, there is there are hundreds of parameters, you can look at the creative and correlated with the campaign performance. And we are going step by step. For example, right now we can see, when we increase the creative quality, which we measured with creative acts, we can see the campaign effectiveness increase, because now we have creatives match the ad campaigns. And we have to create a quality score attached to it. And you can easily see the correlation between the creative quality and the campaign performance.
Tom Ollerton 20:48
So how do you plan a campaign? So you say you're scratching the surface? Where's your ambition? What happens next? So say you're launching some NPD for one of your brands and our key market? How would you approach that, so make sure the date of this coming back is a reliable and B drives a bit immediate?
Emre Acikel 21:05
Okay, exactly. So how we do that is, we can't do it centrally only meaning and few people driving this. So what we are doing right now, number one, organizationally, now, we combined media and creative work stream, we have one global head of media and creative. And so that is organizationally, connecting the both work streams. And secondly, with our agency partners, we have reviewed both of them together. And looking at those reports where media and creative together. And, and this is a habit we started to have at market level. What happened in the last month, let's look at it, but not a creative review. Both media and creative agencies and brands see everything together. And the results. And insights that are coming from those meetings are much more actionable, because in the past creative team, were producing it, but they didn't get the media feedback. And media team was reviewing their media plans, they were mostly looking at efficiency of all the reach of the media campaign, but they were missing the creative angle. Right now we can say, Dear creative agency, these type of creatives don't work in this platform or for this audience. So and but this, this, this audiences, and these platforms respond really, really well to this type of creative. So let's work on a more tailored, personalized, creative approach in that comment campaigns for those audiences. And similarly for media agency we can give them and based on briefs, which type of audience bias we should focus on to activate the set of creatives, we have one interesting insight also, when you have both of those things, is you see the creative utilization. Because you produce 1000s of creatives, and then you pull the actual usage, and then you realize some of them are not used at all, or used very little. So this also helps inform in the future, how much creative we should produce, and to drive much more efficiency in the creative supply chain.
Tom Ollerton 23:59
So you're preaching to the converted, really, because obviously, our business operates in a similar area. What I'm curious to know is you're right, it's proven, it's data driven. You have the media and creative analytics on a variety of different inputs to know what works, but that sometimes in my experience isn't enough to get people to stick with it to follow your advice. So what kind of barriers are you having internally with this new way of thinking and operating?
Emre Acikel 24:30
That's a good question. I, I was thinking that I think there's a quote, I will start from a theoretical lens. There's a quote, attributed to Steve Jobs. If we asked people we wouldn't have invented the iPhone he said, supposedly, but this is the same thing when we asked is the data driven marketing team and we asked guys, what type of reports are you looking for? Nobody told us to connect them against critics. So when we did that, we created those a lot of extra work for people. And or some uncomfortable insights are surfaced. And more, they had to spend much more time to extract additional insights. But this is why we did, we did and we are still doing the initial work for them, helping them understand. And when they understand eventually, maybe it's extra work. But I think it also helps them to do their job better. And we start to incorporate usage of this platform and incorporating those insights into individual people's work streams, and also our agency partners, work scopes, so that we start talking on a common data driven approach.
Tom Ollerton 26:13
I could really talk about this for the rest of the week. But unfortunately, we're at time now. So if someone wanted to get in touch with you about things you've been talking to today, where would you like them to do that, and what makes a message that you respond to?
Emre Acikel 26:26
So they can reach me out on LinkedIn. And I will be happy to respond back. So that's it from my side. And I would be happy to chat even more, especially on the philosophy part on a separate discussion, if you want.
Tom Ollerton 26:42
Well, philosophy doesn't come up very much in this podcast. But I appreciate you bringing it up. And thank you for giving us a granular insight into how you're doing data driven marketing. Thanks so much for your time.
Emre Acikel 26:53
And thank you Tom.
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