Organizational Change Success: Cutting Data Costs 52% and Achieving 86% Adoption Rate
It took about a year, but after our company’s strategy shift, we succeeded in cutting 52% of third-party data costs and achieved an 86% adoption rate through our custom ART audiences, across all clients.
Rewind to the conversation:
CEO: “Andrew, we need you to help the company reduce our 3rd party audience data costs by 50% - they have been expensive. Teams should adopt to using our audience data instead because with the cookie on the way out, we now have a cookieless audience solution with ART that is privacy friendly.”
I was up for the test. This was a timely challenge that rode the ad industry wave of privacy and cookies and it was an opportunity to drive change in the company.
There was a lot to do.
Change as Strategy
Driving organizational change is no small task. For sweeping changes to occur, leaders need to adopt new mindsets, processes, practices, and behaviors. They should create a strategy that takes everyone to a better future state.
They should have an insight into how to win.
Just like a business case and benefits plan is needed for why a project should be initiated, organizations need to be able to adopt change in their strategy to ensure long-term success.
The organizational change I needed to drive was a part of a larger company strategy. By leveraging the internal technology, we wanted to give teams known and trusted audience data (from the likes of the Census and Data.Gov) to target their campaigns while increasing efficiency.
Change is constant in daily life. It tests people’s need for control and ability to handle ambiguity. The funny thing is, the simplest blocker to swiftness of the shift are the very people needing the change – they may either dislike or resist it. Change can be threatening and being led to change your ways, which have worked in the past (more-or-less), is uncomfortable.
Lucky for project managers and marketers, we live in a world of change. With many technological and socioeconomic factors affecting our projects, change is the norm and our clients embrased the opportunity to try something new.
Consider Culture
Company culture needs to be considered when implementing a change in how things are done. Culture is developed over time and if a company’s beliefs and current behaviors have never been adaptive to changes, there will be road blocks. But, if the organization is known to be agile, new expectations can successfully lead to implementation changes.
We drove the adoption of change by tapping into the trust and relationships we built with our clients. We pride ourselves on being programmatic experts, and our clients trusted that we would deliver results based on what they needed to see.
A Framework to Use
Project managers and strategists love frameworks. There are bunch of guidelines for processes but overall, we went about implementing change like this:
Identify the need for change and scope – initiate the project and readiness for change:
CEO and leadership identified data privacy technical changes with the cookie years ago (now Google is putting this in the hands of users) by building Pontiac’s DSP, Bidder, and ART, the Audience Research Tool.
From a business sense, our data costs were high from Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). Will all of the audience data options available within DSPs, they make it easy for media buyers to be ‘sloppy’ when selecting audience fluff. That eats into margins if you’re not careful.
Plan the change:
CEO presented the strategic business case case to the company and goaled me with implementing change and driving adoption of our audience tool.
I identified stakeholders and how each team needed to be involved – sales, product, engineering, account leaders, traders, etc.
Implement the change:
I initiated a discovery process by talking with leadership for context about the business insights.
I audited DSPs we were using to map historical data and trends for a baseline. I audited the market for competition and kept track of their product messaging to find value props and differentiators for our messaging.
Identified quick wins. I spun up my own dashboard in excel and began working with teams to set-up AB tests for a few clients to start a slow testing rollout. The idea was to ensure our solution worked and we could use data for evaluation of the product.
Reviewed with stakeholders. I created and delivered presentations to entire company, meet with product to share feedback and implement incremental changes to the product.
Implemented training sessions to ensure understanding across teams.
Manage the change transition:
Targeting our ART segments became the new ‘business as usual’ for clients that had campaign success from the initial AB tests. This helped keep adoption rates up.
Reported on those successes and tracked KPIs with a dashboard that was shared across teams.
Some teams did adjust activation feasibility due to client needs. We were very flexible about this.
Sustain the change:
Keep the good times moving! Kept communication lanes open and enabled people to understand success and that it wasn’t too scary.
Measured success and its impact on company costs: surveyed teams to ensure the changes continued to have a positive impact on clients. I also presented main business KPIs to leadership on a regular cadence.
Lessons Learned From This Process
You Can’t Please Everyone
Some teams initially pushed back because clients needed audiences with data ours didn’t offer. This was fine, but it was important to keep reiterating the case for ART audiences so they could continue educating their clients about cookieless solutions.
Calling back the Culture section, there were long held believes that were considered “this is how we do it”. Whenever I ran into this blocker of current and future state goals, if I reminded the team of the vision for the initiatives, with data, and they were eventually able to use our audiences.
It Takes Time
Making change takes effort. I repeated myself often in company meetings and in smaller groups so people could wrap their heads around things like the data methodology and early wins with clients. With the industry shifting out of cookies, we needed training and sometimes 1:1s to understand the product with confidence so everyone could talk about it.
I often iterated on the messaging and template presentations and checked in with sales about updates to collateral and how they were talking to clients about the product.
What ate up most of the time were slow AB tests of these audiences against similar 3rd party audiences. Once there were a handful of clients that showed positive results after a month or so, it was easier to go to the next team with data in my back pocket as proof.
Visibility is Critical
I needed to show the company we were on the right path with success metrics like being transparent with our company’s data costs, activation rates, as well as regular media metrics like CTR, CPC, and CPMs from tests. Proactively sharing our thought process and ideas gave others confidence to make changes for their clients too.
At first, I wanted everyone to make the change for their clients over a few weeks. But I learned if there were 2-3 teams that I could get onboard it was easier to keep things moving. From there, I had data to make case studies, which I presented to the company. I also wrote blog posts about ART here, here, and here, that we shared internally.
It Takes a Team
Multiple people gearing for the change is more effective than one person going against the grain. Perform change ‘with’ vs. ‘to’ people.
You must get other people to care and execute ‘the thing’. Effective change can’t happen from one person, even if CEO directed.
We had buy-in from other leaders at the company who could help educate others if I wasn’t in the room.
Overall, driving organizational change requires a strategic agile approach that leverages an insight into how to win. Having a culture already primed for change, leadership that is open and vulnerable about the company’s current position, and vision for the future, sets a strong foundation for a successful outcome.
Of course, change needs to stick too. Ongoing communication through reviews/audits/post-mortems should continue to happen before, during, and after the benefits are realized for us and our clients.