Episode 7 –
Seeking Out Partners Who Align With Your Business with Kelly Barrett, SVP of Product Management at Comscore

RESOURCES   ❯   The Marketing Rapport Podcast 3-17-23

Episode Summary

The tech industry is constantly changing, and it’s vital to always stay curious and ask the right questions. But above all, you need to seek out the right partners because you can’t have all the answers.

In this episode of The Marketing Rapport podcast, our host Tim Finnigan welcomes Kelly Barrett, the SVP of Product Management at Comscore, Inc. They talk about the ever-evolving tech space, keeping up with customers, and why measurement is a team sport.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Key Insights

• The tech industry is constantly changing. The tech space is growing exponentially, so keeping up with it is critical. Kelly says, “Change is a constant, the fragmentation of platforms, of where consumers can spend their time. Measurement is sort of always, like certain areas of our ecosystem within AdTech, MarTech can tackle individual areas. Measurement is always this overarching player where we’ve got to look across all of that as digital and all these other things that need to be part of the puzzle. As gaming, as VR, as things like that start to have advertising in it, have content in it, we need to play catch up with that. So that’s the role that we always play is sort of always changing under us while we’re playing catch up.”
• Seek out partners who align with your business. You can’t find all the answers by yourself, so make sure you surround yourself with the right partners. Kelly says, “You may raise your hands and say, ‘I’m not the smartest person in the room.’ Invite more people into that room, and seek out your partners. We’ve been doing a lot of that here, especially within the data clean room space as it’s maturing in front of us and understanding — not only for ourselves and our partners but also for our clients — what types of skillsets are needed and what types of budgets and what are the best ways to go about that. So there are things like that, that we’re starting to enter into that journey.”
• Measurement is a team sport. Measurement is all about collaboration and knowledge sharing. Kelly explains, “I’m a staunch believer that no one in this industry is going to have all the answers by themselves. I think Kelly Abcarian has said it most often that it’s a team sport, especially measurement. While Comscore sits on massive quantities of data, we also rely on partners to make sure that data can be actionable, can be in the right place — things along those lines. So having that skill to identify what you don’t have and what you can go out and partner with others on and not recreate the wheel over and over again, I think that’s a big piece in this industry.”

Episode Highlights

Keep up with your customers

“One of the big things that Comscore brings to our clientele is the ability to understand the consumer at a deeper level. So if you’re trying to acquire new customers or keep your customers or not lose them, your true customers, you’re going to want to understand where they’re trending and where they’re going.”

Privacy is one of the biggest trends in the marketplace

“Looking at sensitive data information around health and race and ethnicity and things like that in data and what can be collected, and if there is no given consent, that’s a no; you just cannot have it. And how does that trickle down? And then how does that actually also juxtapose against wanting to make sure that for measurement, we have the representation that we need so that we’re not underreporting or underserving certain populations? So there’s this balance between the regulatory side and then how that shows up in data and measurement and making sure that it doesn’t impact in a different, negative way. So that’s certainly one of the big trends.”

Data privacy is more vital than ever

“It’s where our two worlds intersect between marketing and product, and we’re working on this whole new persona that we have to deal with with the chief privacy officer, the data science team, who is like, ‘What are you doing with my data behind the scenes? I want to make sure that the privacy differential is appropriately applied, that the compute you’re doing in there doesn’t all of a sudden get below a certain threshold so that all of a sudden you export the data and you’ve got one person.’ […] I’m sensing a lot of our clients are starting to go immediately to, ‘Hey, can we have this conversation with our chief privacy officer?’ The second data is mentioned, whether it’s clean rooms or not, these are the new personas that I think the measurement, and really the data world, is dealing with left and right at greater scrutiny, and it’s less passive.”

Top Quotes

[05:54] “The world is moving ahead of us as we’re still solving for the current moment.”

[12:35] “A big skill in this industry to get ahead is to really start to be a student of data, of consumers, and really, of your partnerships.”

[25:02] “It’s a lot of: bring your data, bring my data, do a match, and create a Venn diagram. But now we’re going to have to get more and more sophisticated, and I think that’s a big trend.”