Episode 278 / Chris Love / Virgin Media O2 / Head of Marketing Performance & Econometrics
The Power of Relationships in a World of Data
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Regardless of our job titles, ultimately what we do is sales, says Chris Love, Head of Marketing Performance & Econometrics at Virgin Media O2. If we don’t sell things in the right way (which can simply mean speaking to people in a certain manner), “we’re failing at the first hurdle.” That’s why his shiny new object is relationships in a world of data.
Marketers today have an abundance of data, but knowing how to use that to support other teams, and seek other teams’ input into their work, is what makes the magic. For Chris, “people buy from people” and the first step is forging good relationships internally and being able to communicate well within your organisation, before you even consider reaching out to customers.
Yes, do good work first. But secondly, see how your work can help the rest of your organisation, and how they can help you in return.
Additionally, communication and the way we present things is so crucial. One of Chris’ top marketing tips is that “people don’t like to hear: “Here’s the answer.” People like to hear; “Here’s what we think the answer is, and here’s a way we could go and prove it, or try and test it.” This approach is safer and more collaborative, building a two-way relationship and making stakeholders feel engaged. Something to think about in board meetings, as well as when talking to clients.
Get more data driven insights from Chris in the full episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Chris Love 0:00
Ultimately, we're selling something even internally. You're selling your marketing strategy, your vision, your creative strategy. If we don't sell that in the right way and speak to people in the right way and come to them where they are even internally, which we know so much about doing externally, then we're sort of failing at the first hurdle.
Speaker 0:21
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Tom Ollerton 0:54
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 weekly podcast about the future of data driven marketing. And it's always my pleasure, always my privilege, to interview one of our industry's leaders. And today is no different, but I'm doing it in person. Don't do this in person enough, but Chris insisted. I'm here with Chris Love, who is head of marketing performance and econometrics at Virgin Media O2. So Chris, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a bit of background?
Chris Love 1:28
Thank you and thank you for having me. I'm quite excited to be here. I Yeah. So I started, started my life at University of Nottingham. I did a degree in economics with French. I went to, I went up to live in Manchester and worked for various media agencies up there as part of the Dentsu Aegis group, and did econometric modeling, mostly for retail clients. Then I moved down to London, worked at the7stars media agency, again, different range of clients, supermarkets, bookies, the whole kind of lot. And then shortly after that, I worked at a company called AKA, which is another media agency, but it's more travel, tourism and and that kind of thing. And then I joined Virgin Media back in in 2020 so I like to consider myself a COVID baby, because when I joined, when you couldn't go into the office, and, you know, I had one hour with IT in my first week, and then didn't see anybody else in person for like, four months or something like that. And then, yeah, we merged with o2 in 2021 and that's when my role broadened out to cover Virgin Media and o2 and what I do is cover pretty much the effectiveness program, so all of our measurement outside of digital attribution and insight and research. So everything from experiments to econometrics to our reporting program, TV, attribution, all that kind of stuff sits within my remit.
Tom Ollerton 2:49
Right. That is serious cred, Chris. So what I'm curious to know is to get to that point, you must have made some mistakes, but what is that massive screw up that you were really red faced about at the time, but actually you're glad it happened in retrospect.
Chris Love 3:07
I yeah, I think, I think every analyst has an example of this in their in their time, if we're all truthful with ourselves. But back when I was I was working up in Manchester, and I really hope my bosses from that time, or maybe they will like it. But yeah, I was working on a project for a client. We were about two days out from a debrief, quite a big debrief. We only did them once a year, and I realized that I had mixed up two columns or fields, depending on what term you like in some of the data that I had input into these models that we had built. And I told my boss at the time, and we corrected it, and it completely changed the whole narrative. So whole deck needed rewriting not even 48 hours before the debrief with the like CEO COO, C everything O. Really, really, big deal. So we were there super late for the next two days, sorting it all out between us. And then on the morning, before we went to the to the debrief, I was flicking through some stuff because my boss had asked me some questions, and I realized I had done it somewhere else. I had made the same mistake, and I was absolutely mortified. And naturally, I buried that and didn't tell anyone until probably right now. So if he's listening, then he's going to get a surprise. But yeah, it was, it was quite a big lesson in in terms of attention to detail and and that's was quite an important element to that one.
Tom Ollerton 4:37
And so how would you make sure you don't do that now? What is your you've just got this like fear sat on your shoulder that makes your columns, right?
Chris Love 4:44
Yeah, absolutely. It's funny. Our media agency asked me to do a session with them talking about various parts of my career, not, not too dissimilar to this. And, you know, it's all very contrite, but one of the big things they asked me was, what, what lesson sort of would I give to. To everybody else, and it's linked to that story, really. And it's just about attention to detail is really important. Sweat, I like to say sweat the small stuff and the big stuff will sweat itself. Because if you don't, and you present something sloppily, or you make a sloppy mistake, like I did then, and I'm sure I've done multiple times since, everything gets called into question. So if you walk into a session and it's all the little stuff, like your fonts aren't the right color or the right size, or you haven't aligned the colors of all the different brands and your various different charts or various different series between your dashboard or whatever it is that you're showing somebody, you know you haven't sorted out your footers so that they all look sensible, and all of the all of the notes are right. Your spelling's wrong, your grammars are wrong, all those kind of basic things. But it really matters, because it's all about perception. And I always find it really ironic that we work in an industry of communication and marketing, and we forget that how people perceive the things we show them and the initial stuff that goes in front of them is absolutely critical to how they're going to view the whole remainder of your hour, or whatever. It's so important that your first perception is strong. So I just think it's absolutely critical that people sweat the small stuff and really do pay attention to it.
Speaker 1 5:35
God, you'd be a terrible boss. So Okay, all right, so I hear you, and it's odd, isn't it, that you you get the presentation, you plug the laptop in, and then you go full screen, you got this giant runner on the wall, and you're like, Oh no, put that word in twice or whatever. So what I have seen in various places that I've worked people like, let's get the deck right. Let's get the deck looking nice. But they haven't done the thinking. So I'm opposite of you. I'd rather it was a shit show, but the thinking was tangential, the thinking was creative, versus like someone who's made it all look nice. I'm like, Why do you made this look nice, but your ideas aren't good enough, or this isn't dangerous enough or daring enough. So how would you balance those two things?
Chris Love 7:00
I think that's the difference between an analyst mindset and a creative mindset to be honest. Listen, I think it's really important to have the story right. The story is absolutely critical, and maybe we'll speak to that a bit later. But particularly when you're trying to tell people stuff through data and through insight, having really clean charts which are really visual and easy to understand. Oftentimes, when you're an analyst, you get this, you think it's really beautiful visual that you've made, but you show it to somebody who doesn't spend all their time in in our Python Excel, whatever, and they're like, What is going on here? And being able to simplify it absolutely, totally on board with that, being able to have the right insight and the right narrative. And for me, the thing about attention to detail is it's a habit you form that all the time. You shouldn't really have to think about it that much. And actually, this is going to sound really lame, but in my broader team that we have internally at VM O2 and with our partners, ubiquity, who do a lot of our effectiveness work, our econometrics and auditing and so on, it's almost like a bit of a game of what you can find that somebody's missed because we want we want it to be. We strive for perfection. And I totally understand it. Perfect shouldn't get in the way of good or done. But at the same time, if you build those habits and form those that form those day in and day out, you naturally will correct those little things as you go along, or you'll create templates and macros or whatever, write some code or whatever you want that will do it for you.
Tom Ollerton 8:27
You just create a like fascist culture of perfection. But then that is that... I love, that genuinely: sweat the small stuff, you get everything right on a granular level, then the big stuff will take care of itself, which I assume is your advice.
So we'll move on to your shiny new object, which is relationships in a world of data. Sounds like a book, isn't it? But what is that? Why is that your shiny new object? What is relationships in the world of data help us understand that, and then we can get into it?
Chris Love 9:07
Sure. So I thought really long and hard about this. I've had a few weeks to prepare, and I could have spent a long time talking about this sexy new model that we've got over here, or how well our reporting program is integrated with our experimentation program and our econometrics, and how all of those things link together with our digital attribution and our research. I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours about the four years plus it's taken to get us to that point, but actually the thing when I tend to talk to people in the industry, that people will remark upon is the fact that people tend to do what we say, or at least listen to what we say. And oftentimes, when you find yourselves in those teams, and I've certainly had it a bunch of times in my experience, you can produce this fantastic work, and clients will look at it and go, that's nice, and then do what they wanted to do anyway. And so that's. Why I wanted to kind of discuss this particular point or bring this to the table, because think the reason it works for us, and the reason we're able to really have that impact, is because we have really strong relationships with the various teams that we work with around us, and that's something that my team and I have really consciously tried to drive and tried to build over the years, and tried to make a big effort to get people on board. Otherwise, marketing departments end up, and I know this is classic buzzword, but end up quite siloed, and I see that quite a lot with our own department in various different ways. But if you reach out to your, let's say, your digital activation team or your website team, and they're coming to you and going, we've got this problem with conversion or or whatever, various types of traffic coming in. We're not sure which keywords we should be using, which ones are incremental, blah, blah. And you offer your your method that you could look at that that's really helpful to them, and they can come back with an answer. And then you start to work together on that kind of stuff. Equally, finance can come along, go, how do we figure out profitability of our various different marketing activities, similar, get to work with them and figure that out on a channel level, and support them on that and, you know, finally, the commercial department, which is the easiest one, you know, pricing, promotional elasticities, response rates, where should we put the next marginal pound of discount or or vouchering or whatever. And we do so much work in that space. And I think in general, as an industry, we do so much work that could be better used outside of marketing specifically, or at least marketing in the way we define it. And that's why, like I said, relationships to me is, is just really important, and that's the way you get it out. Because, you know, I used to live with a guy who was a salesperson. He was a recruiter, so as salesy as they come. And he always said to me, people buy from people. And ultimately, we're selling something, even internally, right? You're selling your marketing strategy, your vision, your creative strategy, you know, to your point, and so on and so on. And if we don't, if we don't sell that in the right way and speak to people in the right way and come to them where they are even internally, which we know so much about doing externally, then we're sort of failing at the first hurdle.
Tom Ollerton 12:17
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Chris, this is like absolute music to my ears, right? Because when you say to someone at a in a party, not that I come to many parties, but I just seem that I do like, oh, I work in sales, really kind of working there, working marketing. And there's this idea that sales is bad, right? Because the guy or girl on the street with the charity clipboard, you know, that lead generate, that cold lead gen, you know, door knocking, stuff like sales rightly, has a bad name. However, what you're talking about is the reality that everything is sales to a degree, right? You'd absolutely you're not. There's one thing sending a cold sales email is actually related to some ways to you speaking to the website team about their conversion rate, or whatever it is, you know. So I love that you've taken on the idea that what you do is sell, even though what you deliver is insight. That's a different department. So how did you arrive at that? And how do you, how do you sell that to your team? Because I don't know if you've got a junior arrives on your team, thinks they're going to work. I mean, you know, in analytics and marketing performance, you're, like, you're a sales girl, like, how does that work? So tell me about how you got there and how you make it work.
Chris Love 14:09
Yeah, so I think how, how I reach this point, or how we reach this point and how we make it work are probably two slightly different, different things. But we got here slightly by accident, to be honest, over time, we started doing a whole bunch of stuff and realizing that nobody was listening. And this has happened to me time and time again over my career. And if there are any sort of measurement specialists, and you've probably got people in this building who can relate to that quite heavily, and it's quite frustrating. And you know, if you have a team of analysts, right, there's only so there's only two things you need to have a successful team of analysts, right, variety and impact. If you provide those two things to a team of data scientists, analysts, connotations, whatever you want, they'll generally be happy. So variety and impact stands to repeat it. And we were doing all of these wonderful things. We were having all the variety of work, but we weren't really having much impact, at which point you start going. Okay, well, how do we have more of an impact outside of outside of marketing in particular? And you realize that your objectives are not the same as another team's objectives. They should be at a high level, because you're all trying to drive profit, revenue, whatever volume. But they aren't, you know, commercial. They're trying to drive a higher RP, average revenue per user. Marketing are trying to drive up a level funnel work or traffic. Your go to market team are trying, just hoping that the product lands. But what it transpires is that they don't have the right data to be able to forecast that appropriately, but we do, so then you have the conversation with them and go, Well, how do we help you with your business cases? That then helps the commercial team because they can get a better off because they've got better idea of what actually lands in the market. I think one of the big things that I've learned over the years is marketing measurement is really hard. That is really critical. It's so hard and you have to pull in so much data from so many different sources, and you more or less have to be slightly finger in every pie, to be able to say, Yeah, we spent a million quid, and it did something. And people are so reluctant to believe that, like unbelievably reluctant to believe that. In a startup environment, completely different story. But when you're in an established business that's been around for 10, 20, 30 years, people very quickly forget what it was like when nobody knew who you were. And so you have this treasure trove of stuff. You know, we have so much data. Tom like you just couldn't believe it. I love it. I love spending time in it. You wouldn't believe our pricing data that we have across the mobile market. It is ridiculous. There's so much you can glean just from that, and it's really hard for people to condense it into something usable. And I find it so many times I get paralyzed by the volume of it. And if you can go in and help them and say, Actually, we've done a load of work on this, because we have to to prove to finance and to prove to everyone else that marketing does something period. Because apparently that's quite hard to believe. Here have it? Can we help you? Can we build some tools that might support you? Can you give us some hypotheses that we can go and test within the marketing structure that might help make your decision? I've got a great one at the moment with our stocking department, who said we don't know what the impact of putting three weeks till next delivery, or two weeks till next delivery, or three days, or whatever it is on site as a message we don't know what effect that has. Can you help us figure that out? Or, yeah, yeah, we can help you figure that out, because we know how to do that kind of testing, and we know how to work with that kind of data in terms of correlation analysis, regression modeling and so on. And to link it back to the original point about relationship building and how you maintain that it's that it's those little projects that fall out of it. It's that way that you can engage people in your work and show, firstly, you do good work, which is the kind of the critical thing, which I probably should have started with, like do good work first. But secondly, your work can help them, and therefore they will want to help you in return. And they'll believe in in general. They'll believe in the broader approach and the broader the broader learning. So you're kind of pulling out of it.
Tom Ollerton 18:09
So if you've got someone who isn't a people person like non neurotypical type, likes working on their own, doesn't want to be in a brainstorm, doesn't want to speak to anyone, let alone anyone that they don't know very well. And that's fine. It's just different type of person. How would you then get them to form relationships? Because you're an engaging, confident guy, so we're going to do this in person. We're going to go for a beer later. Brilliant. But I'm guessing you're atypical in my experience of people who work in your your part of the industry. So how do you, how do you get someone who's like a closed book to to come out of that shell and build a relationship when they're just not built like that?
Chris Love 18:55
I'm not gonna lie. That is difficult, and I do, yeah, I definitely resonates that there are lots of people who don't, who don't find that that easy. I didn't. I had to learn this process over time with with the team, and ultimately, it's about one to one, one to one interactions and putting putting forward. Well, the thing that I found works best is about putting forward solutions to those people in a positive environment. So if I come to you, Tom, and I say, you've got this massive problem with, I don't know traffic, it's not converting or whatever, on particular parts of your site. I know that's not what you do. But as an example, and I say, as a guy on my team who has a fantastic solution to this, let's have a chat about it. You have the discussion. He's we're like, yeah, definitely, there's something we can do here. He goes away, comes back with his solution, you can still be involved in that. You can still help them build the relationship. You know, people with anxiety or or who are particularly introvert that might be challenging for them, but if they have somebody that they know and that they're comfortable with, like, like me. Or somebody else in your department who's who they're particularly keen on or comfortable with, I should say, then that tends to help move the move the conversation along. But it is. It is difficult, and that's kind of why I think it's the shiny new thing. Because we're so focused on the data and the model that we forget that there's people making decisions over here that you still need to engage with and convince actually, you know, it's all well and good saying that Meta have this fantastic new algorithm that optimizes creatives and does all this wonderful stuff. But if you can't explain that in simple terms to somebody who's going to sign off your budget who doesn't understand what the algorithm does, it doesn't go that far.
I'm in total agreement with you from writing this, this book I'm writing at the minute about data and creativity and ads, that there's this idea that the abundant thing is the is the best thing, right? So, oh, like, we can get a we can get our hands on a ton of meta information. We get pull in website data, whether, like, as you say, there's, there's, there's tons of it. But just because it's easy to come by doesn't mean it's the most valuable. And sometimes there's data that you can't even capture that might be the biggest influence. For example, you look at your website stops converting, but you may not be aware that your competitor's got some crazy deal on. For example, actually, that's totally fine, you know. Or they maybe they've sent out a deal via email or something that you that you're not on, yeah, and, and fundamentally, actually, the relationships are hard. The relationships do take time. Relationships do take empathy. But if you do invest in them, then all the data that you have becomes a lot more useful.
100% and I think I've got one kind of story that I'd add to that, and also just kind of brought a broader narrative. I think where I started a few years ago with my team, was, here's the answer. That was the way we would present things.
Tom Ollerton 21:56
So easy to say.
Chris Love 22:06
Well, it is easy to say. And I think, you know, you're laughing, and you're right to laugh, because that's that's one of the biggest lessons about it, is people don't like, here's the answer. People like, here's what we think the answer is, and here's a way we could go and prove it, or go and try and test it. Why don't we go and figure that out together that people like and of course they do, because it's not combative, it's very engaging, it's collaborative. It makes people feel a lot safer than you're wrong, I'm right, which is basically what here's the answer implies, and that, again, just comes right back around to managing relationships and working with people. And I think it's your other point about data availability. It's just absolutely on the money. And I think Google, in particular, we're very guilty of, as a broad industry, of relying very heavily on on Google. Don't get me wrong. I love, I love the data, but there's other stuff available that you can use that's very good. And, you know, just a really simple example, one time, I was working for a client who managed a zoo of all things. And I was looking through this, these models. We run it over a few years, and I see this, this weird behavior where there's their seasonal peaks seem to vary year on year, between half term in February, May, bank holiday and Easter, and they seem to vary quite a lot. And basically what transpired was as Easter moves year to year, the other holidays that sit around it get materially impacted by that. So if Easter is earlier, fewer people go in February half term and they wait and go at Easter. More people then go in May, bank holiday and half term, same in reverse, if Easter is later, then February gets a massive peak in volume. And I thought that was really obvious. And I was just looking at the sales data. I wasn't doing anything sexy there, just eyeballing it and going, this is weird. I go into the room with their CFO, or whoever it was, C something I present this insight, thinking, are they going to tell me they already know this? And this is, this is nonsense, and they were like, That's brilliant. We've never thought about that. Literally, all we've done is look at the sales data and gone Easter moves every year. That's weird. And then, you know, small change to the media delivery and everything, but actually had a really material impact just on how they forecast their their admissions, because they hadn't really considered that Easter moving effect before. And that very simple insight doesn't require anything sexy out there. You can do a lot with not a lot.
Tom Ollerton 24:37
Well, you could do a lot with not a lot, is a lovely line to finish it on. I wish we could carry on, but unfortunately, we have to cut it off there. So if anyone wants to get in touch with you about any of the things we've talked about, where can they do that and what makes a message that you will reply to?
Chris Love 24:57
Much like everyone on the 15 or so of these episodes I've listened to, LinkedIn is the easiest way. I'm just not generic, like take time to take 30 seconds to look at what I actually do. People see head of marketing performance and misread that as performance marketing. And I'm not a performance marketer. So that's usually the big mistake that people make.
Tom Ollerton 25:20
Okay, very good. Get the job title right. Brilliant. Chris, thanks so much.
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