YouSaid · the spoken record

Austin Hay

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-08-13
most recent: 2023-08-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, I have a marketing technology course coming out with ReForge in the fall. If you're a practitioner of Mortech or you're interested in Martech would totally love you to take the course, would love your feedback in particular. I love to stand on this podcast and act like I know a lot about Martech, but I'm still learning. And so I think it would be awesome to just get feedback from the community about what was interesting and helpful, what wasn't there, and we can improve upon. And then the other thing is if you're ever looking for Martech help and you want to reach out, that's great.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, find me online LinkedIn threads. I actually have threads. I don't have Twitter, like Hot Take. I think Twitter ruins people's careers. I've already seen multiple careers ruined by Twitter. Some people just don't know how to shut their mouth. So, like, I just, I'm not on Twitter. But I am on threads and I'm trying to figure it out. So if you want to talk to me on threads, you can. I'm on LinkedIn. And then I have my email address on LinkedIn too. And I'm always willing to talk to people.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I did all that and I got to the point where I was going to get babysat and I called our local police department and I was like, yeah, so I talked to the office. I didn't need an officer to come out and meet at this time. And they just like laughed me off the phone. They're like, we're not going to send a police officer to watch you fly a drone. And I just thought the thing was really funny because, yeah, it like makes sense. Like, why would they waste taxpayer dollars to like have me fly a drone? But it was a requirement. So I ended up not being able to fly this drone in DC. But if anybody's listening and they know how to fly a drone and they want to fly, I would be totally down. I have two drones. I have a Mavic Air 2 and a SkyDio Enterprise, which Skydio is a really cool company as well if people are looking for drones.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live in Virginia, but like maybe a mile outside of Washington, D.C. And around DC, there's a restricted air zone. And so after I did my FA drone pilot license and I became a certified drone pilot, I really went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to fly a drone in DC because I've seen them around, but obviously it's like a national security. You know, I'm probably like dramatically mutilating the exact experience, but like as I went to do this, it was very complicated, archaic, but also like funny because it was all online. Like you have to like go file to form. You get a letter from a local representative who says you're in a good standing. So it found like a councilman that I just knew. And then you have to like fill out all this stuff, this paperwork. The site looks like it's from 1994. There's an office literally in DC where the person approves you. Then you have to like go and get a police office.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this actually gets back to our intellectual curiosity thing. Maybe I just search for weird people when I hire because I just love when people do interesting things that are like unrelated to work. And the story is during COVID, I didn't really want to just better myself online through a bunch of educational platforms. It just felt like it would be a little bit soul-crushing to sit in front of my computer screen and learn how to do statistics or whatever. So I was like trying to look for things that were interesting, niche outside of my domain, knew nothing about. And the three that I came up with were I learned to fly a drone. I became a CFP, certified financial planner, and I became a notary. And it's just because they seemed like really useful things that had nothing to do with my work and would learn about something completely interesting and different. And so those are the three that I chose. The drone stuff, it actually was funny. I started flying here in DC.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hopefully, at some point in time, somebody builds a better Salesforce. That will be for our next podcast, though, Lenny. Can't cover that today. And then reverse ETL's high touch. So very similar, except the only difference is what do you do for an email tool? A lot of people use HubSpot. I would try to go to a customer IO as long as I could, and then I'd move to Braze afterwards. So big difference is just Braze versus customer IO for B2B.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so Golden Stack. If I was a B2C business, I'd buy amplitude for my CDP, I'd buy customer I.O., and maybe I'd upgrade to Braze in the future. I'd put everything in Snowflake. I'd buy high touch reverse ETL that data out to my ad networks. For attribution, probably AppSlyer from a mobile app, if not branch, but it'd probably be AppSlyer first. So that gets you. You've got AppSlyer, amplitude as your CDP, and product analytics, customer IO for email, Snowflake for your data warehouse, high touch for streaming all the data tools. That's like Goldman Stack today if I were implementing it for B2C business. For B2B, roughly the same amplitude, if you need an attribution tool, if it's a B2B, actually if it's a web-only business, probably use branch because branch is better for web. So you have branch amplitude, connect all the data to Salesforce.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that the way that it ties to appreciation is like if you can understand what people are going through and you start to view them a little bit more as a human and understand like what's beneath the surface of work, who are they, what do they care about, what are the things that are driving their life word, it just makes you so much more appreciative for what you have and the good moments when they're actually there. And this doesn't just apply to life. It's also like business too, you know. It makes winning a lot more fun when you know the hell that people have gone through. So that's just like something I like to talk a lot about with people, especially folks who are younger in their careers who maybe have only seen wins, like describing what the losses look like so they can kind of picture in their mind and then have some experience when they go through it. It's a big part of my shtick.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just think a lot about the power of appreciation and one thing that I've just been thinking a lot about recently is the challenge that people might be facing in their daily lives. I actually was recently listening to another podcast by Adam Fishman and he had Brian Balfour on. And Adam's basically just interviewing a bunch of dads, which is cool. But the nice thing about being a little bit older in your life, being a dad is that you maybe have seen hardship before. this podcast is created just exploring the stories of people I really admire and have and go through their hardship and in that it's been a very profound experience understanding the type of challenges that people have gone through in their lives you know people who have lost mothers and fathers early in life people who have lost children I myself you know my wife and I lost her dad last year we lost two grandparents to COVID we lost our dog”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sound super dumb. It's called cal.com, and I'll tell you the story first. I've been a big Calendly user for a long time, but Calendly is pretty expensive. If any of Calendly is listening, you want to give me a promo? Cool. But it's very expensive. And then I also just found that it is not always graceful at syncing multiple calendars from both businesses and consulting gigs and personal. And I had trouble remembering my calendar link. There's like, I don't know, the interface is like circa 2016. So like really looking for something a little bit more notion-like with like a command K interface and just like integrations that work. And Cal.com has not failed me. It has been awesome. So if people are looking for new Calendly tools, strongly recommend.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I talked about what you did to prepare, but the other one that I think is really good because it forces people to get vulnerable is tell me about the most difficult or challenging thing you've overcome in the last year in your life. Doesn't have to be work related, it could be personal. And I think it's like a great way to just reset the atmosphere, make people dig a little bit deeper”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you need to go watch it. It's about Blackbeard and gay pirate captain. So strongly recommend that. And then for just really dumb comedy, what we do in the shadows is hilarious.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm currently watching for the first time suits, which I'd never seen before, which I think is pretty good because the story arc of every suits episode is that there's a problem and they solve the problem and then the problem is solved at the end. So it's like very gratifying for anybody out there who's like a high anxiety person who just like wants to have the story arc resolved at the end of the episode. But if that's not your jam and you like excitement also watching silo, which are for comic relief, there's our flag means death, which is hilarious. Have you seen that show?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first book I already mentioned, but say it again, it's the contrarian's guide to leadership, awesome book. Second book that would be really good is The Art and Adventure of Leadership by a guy named Warren Bennis. And these are more like philosophically leadership books. They're less about technical specs on how to run a business. So you have to be into that.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often is not that it's do you have to even make a decision right now? And by leaving yourself to have space to decide, you actually open up the possibility that in the future you'll make a better decision. So I think that's like a really good lesson for systems. And it's obviously like a lesson that you can apply to the rest of your life too.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we have to make a decision because our boss is telling us because there's an OKR because we feel the pain because somebody's complaining to me. But actually in reality, you don't have to make decision at all. You can just let it sit for a while. And this also applies to, I think, how you move through the world and view people. Like a lot of times we will meet somebody in a company setting or in a business setting and we are quick to make decisions about them. You even ask me questions about how I hire people very quickly. We're looking for shortcuts to make decisions about evaluating people. One of the best pieces of advice though about thinking gray is it gives you the grace to not decide about people until you have to decide. So obviously for an interview decision, you have to decide, you have to decide yes or no. But so often you'll come across people and you'll meet them once or twice. And, you know, like I feel like there's this tendency in the back of everybody's brain to be like, do I like this person? Do I want to work with them?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so Stephen B. sample is a professor at USC. He wrote a book called The Contrarians Guide to Leadership, really great book. It's one of his principles. There's actually a lot of great principles in the book, but this is the one that I think has stuck with me the most in my career. And the concept of thinking gray is like, you know, so often in life and in our jobs, we are forced to make decisions very quickly. We have to think black or white about a problem set or a solution and then decide. And one of his tactics is this concept of thinking gray, which is actually to not decide for as long as you possibly can before you have to decide. And it's really challenging because it involves this little thing called patience, which I do not have a lot of most of the time. And I know most people don't as well. But it's particularly really relevant in systems thinking and product because so often we believe”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I had wanted to fit in, which I feel like is maybe a framework or maybe just a really good decision making philosophy is this concept of thinking gray. Have you heard of it before?”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework that I talk a lot about in my research course is about building a stack. Everybody asks, hey, how do I build my stack? What should I do? What tool should I use? Even you earlier were like, What's the golden stack, right? Tell me what five tools should I get.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I feel Yeah, because they're afraid. There are mutual benefits is a better way of saying it. If you build a tool custom to yourself when you've bought a tool, because the vendor at that point is committed to you and they want you to be successful. So you often can get like, Of accelerated outcomes if you build on top of a third party than if you just build it yourself. A great example is like, you know, say you buy one of these A-B testing tools and you build around it and you're a large customer of them, but you've invested a lot of your own engineering resources to make this solution your own, if they know that and they care about you, they're going to be willing to actually like make you happy in the moments where you need a change from them. Say some SDK change or a new feature or something like that.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consulting for was thinking about building their own A-B testing tool. And actually, we had the same problem at RAMP recently. And they're like, well, we just think we should build ourselves. This is corridor, our technology. We have the engineering resources to do it. And they were evaluating it to build the entire system themselves or buy a third party. I think it was split.io or something like that. The entire engagement was basically designing a financial model to show them that they could make a lot more money, save money, move faster if they just bought the third party tool at the lowest possible cost and spent all their resources that they were going to spend building it, building around it and making it their own. And there's lots of, I hate the word synergy because it's just like so yucky.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I've already mentioned to you is B and B as opposed to BVB. So build and by Build versus buy is a very narrow constricting decision tree, right? If it's only build versus buy, then you've already made the decision that you can only do one or the other, which means you're already fighting somebody at your organization. Build and buy means that both of you can win and you can actually create a solution that is not only unique, but saves the company time and resources and makes everybody happy. It's more of a consensus-driven approach. So I just, whenever I hear in a meeting or a call or some discussion about how we have a tool and it's really expensive and we want to build it ourselves, I try to just use the build and buy framework to tee people up and say, what about the problem can we buy? What about the problem can we build? And where does it make sense to invest our resources and our people accordingly to get the optimal outcome? A great example is company that was”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, there's this problem. I just need to solve it with the tool. Hey, I'm trying to do X, Y, and Z. Can you just give me admin permission straight to the system? So if you back up, though, first you understand the problem, like, hey, what is this person trying to solve? What is their discrete issue? A great example is like, I'm a sales manager and I want to make it so that every time I hire somebody, I don't have to go through this really tough process of like onboarding my staff. All right, so that's the problem. Who are the people that involves? Does the sales manager need permission from the CRO? Did the sellers need to be trained? Is there some other confounding factor that we're not aware of why we don't want to just automate this thing? Once you have an understanding of the people and the problems that you're trying to solve, then it's really, really easy to design the system to solve that. And so that's like my number one framework for technologists in particular is like, don't just jump to the system. Think backwards. Start with the people and the problem and then move to the system solution. And then another.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit of a tendency for people to think that people who manage the set of tools are just interested in managing and setting up tools. But really at the end of the day, we're trying to help people actually do stuff. Then there's this PPS framework that I talk about a lot, which is problem people and system. So whenever there's a challenge that comes up, like at RAMP or in a consulting gig, I like to first say, what's the problem? Who are the people involved and what system does it impact? Usually because people just jump straight to the system. They're like,”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I've already said this, and this is that you've promised to put this at the top of the list, so I'm really excited. It's just tools are not meant to solve. Tools are meant to solve problems. And I tell that to every person I hire, I repeat it consistently at RAMP and all of my consulting gigs. And it's not just the words, it's the spirit of it. Tools are really just meant to solve problems. You don't have to buy a tool to solve a problem. You also don't have to buy a specific tool to solve the problem. And I think it embodies so much of like what marketing technology is trying to do. It's trying to help people understand their problems and then actually take action on them using tools and technology that are both first party and third party. So most people just like focus on the tool part and focus on the buying and integration part. And so I think like if you consistently remind yourself that tools are just meant to solve problems, then you really get into a space where you as a systems person can be an advocate for your marketer or your product people. I think sometimes there is a little”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that I want to build, so if I ever build this, maybe it'll be a newsletter for you, is just a one-page doc of the most useful life frameworks. And they're just the words. And so you obviously have to know them. But I feel like I come across really good frameworks all the time and then I forget them.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question, but I don't have a good way of like looking for red flags, but I do tend to spend a lot of time on netting out of false flags.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went through all the stages, and we didn't hire them not because of them, but because the job got removed. And this person took two years to get a philosophy degree, or maybe it was a poacher degree, and then also taught himself to program. So it was like a really enriching two years. And there were lots of ways that I could see them bring their past experience and the way that they took time off together to be a really well-rounded candidate. And so I would say I look less for red flags and more for false identifiers on the resume application that may shortcut me towards the decision. Another one is just like school, you know, like people just look at your school where you went to undergrad or grad and they kind of make a decision one way or the other. And I feel like that's also can be a really bad shortcut because there's some like amazing founders, for example, who went to school as you maybe never heard of. So I know that's not a good way to answer.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Answered that question on two spectrums. One is if I'm hiring as an IC or as somebody who's hiring an IC versus I'm getting hired. So like one of the red flags whenever I'm approaching a company to work for them is I'll ask for their company financials. And like a company that's not willing to divulge their financials to like a director level or above person, I don't want to do business with because that means like they're hiding something or they have a culture where like they don't trust the most senior leaders of the organization. Like either is a bad choice in my perspective. So that's one of the questions I always ask when I'm going up for a job. When I'm hiring somebody red flags, I feel like one of the false flags, not a red flag, is more like when there's a gap in somebody's job resume. Like it already gravitates towards that and it's often like really explainable. A good example is I was hiring somebody once who had like a two-year gap in their resume. We didn't end up hiring the person, but they”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much signals out people who are biased versus not. People who have tooling biases will immediately just implement this tool because I used it before. And I really like to hire people who are not tool specific, who are more tool agnostic, and they think about tools as being things to solve problems as opposed to tools being things that you just solve because you've already solved it one way. This isn't a gripe and certainly not intended to slice at PMs, but one of my observations of a lot of PMs is they just like pick the tools they've already used before because it's easy. It's a shortcut for them, which I understand. But problems are not always the same, so tools shouldn't always be the same. So I like to pick people who kind of like think about the problem set and the solution space more and they ask questions about what problems you're trying to solve, which I think is much more of an actual PM mindset of like trying to work backward from the problem as opposed to just taking the problem and regurgitating stuff that you already know.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gave me this idea and I loved it. I think it was an A16Z partner. But I love the question because when you ask, hey, how did you prepare? You're really asking how does the person think? How do they plan? How do they take things seriously or not? What did they read? What did they do? And if you have to prompt them to tell you all the things they did, then like they're just not a systems thinker. But if they're like, hey, actually, I read these things. I did this. I woke up. I went for a run. The more interesting complex the answer, the more interesting complex the candidate. And so I love the question because it just gives you a really good understanding of the person on a whole like right out the gate. And then the other question I like to ask is I like to ask, so you're coming in tomorrow to our marketing tech system and by Friday you have to like write up a report on all the things we should change. Like what do you do? And I like to ask that question because it pretty...”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit of a utility function. So, you know, look for your talks with curiosity. I look for basic engineering scrappiness. And as a side note, I would say lots of people out there, the advice that I give them is you don't have to go get a software engineering degree. You can teach yourself, I am self-taught, you can take a coding academy online. I think you get enough knowledge through being able to do web programming or some type of back-end programming. So I would say it's not more than a six-month investment for anybody to really get this skill set that's needed. Obviously, like once you get the skill set, you can build upon it with years of experience afterwards. But if you're new to the space and you're like in marketing ops and you want to get more technical or if like you're a user acquisition manager who did”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who have intellectual curiosity is they're scrapping in engineering, they might not be the best engineer possible, but they know how to get around. They know JavaScript, they know Python, it can read API documentation and make an API request. They have enough base knowledge to basically understand how to solve a problem that an engineer might do, even if they themselves are not an engineer. Now, obviously, like you can get lucky sometimes and you'll find the engineer who never wants to be an engineer again and decides to move into something less technical and in those cases they're super powerful, right? But I haven't met a lot of those people in my life. And also there's just some like business dynamics to it. You know, like you could probably make more as a back end engineer than a Martech guy. So you probably just pursue the pathway that makes more money.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first thing that I always gravitate towards is just like intellectual curiosity. And I know that's very, maybe a little bit overrated, but I think you can tell pretty quickly if somebody's just interested in the world and learning things. And the thing about third-party tools is you are constantly learning. You'll never be an expert in everything because there's way too many tools to be an expert on. I forgot what publication. I think it's Martech Editor-in-Chief or something. There's a publication that I subscribe to and like everything is classified as Martech. And the diagram is like huge. You like cover a wall. Now I don't believe everything like that is Martech, but even if a fraction is, there are way too many tools and technology to ever be an expert. So you have to be both very interested in learning and very willing to quickly learn if you want to be in the space. And so I just generally look for intellectual curiosity as the first sign. The second thing that I think helps people a lot.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discrete with the user journey, and we know that some percentage of this user base might have been lost to organic. So in light of those, how do we make spend? And then also you can be pretty smart. Like you can do, for example, geo-based testing on billboards, try to isolate that as a factor if you kind of like withhold all other confounding factors. So you can be smart coordinating these types of campaigns though is really challenging, especially if you're a really big business, let's say runs online advertising throughout the US and you're trying to do targeted billboard tests and an isolated number of cities across the states coordinating to like turn off demographics, make sure there's not isolating factors, it can be really challenging. So there's not a silver bullet right now, I don't think.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not an expert on MMM, so I'm not going to be able to comment to quite the degree that they have. But when I spoke with Michael and when I think about MMM, a lot of my conversation is like, is this actually really realistic for our business right now? Do we have the data to run an MMM model? And how is it going to change or kind of chart the course of a performance ad marketing business in light of having this information? When I think about it through those lens, Most of the time businesses are not ready for MM. They actually just need MTA and they need better probabilistic modeling. And I know that's not a super spicy take, but I just say at least at ramp and what I'm seeing at other businesses right now that are operating, it's much more of like we're going back to the days where we understand in broad strokes how much each of our campaigns is driving an advertising revenue. We're not able to tie that.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are just like gravitating towards MMM now without really understanding when MMM is useful or not. I don't know if there's a company called Recast. Maybe I think you're an investor. Am I crazy? And that's.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at that moment in time, if you come back and they see your cookie, they kind of know who you are. Now, if you're blocking cookies, that means you're basically remaining anonymous throughout the entire user journey until you log in. Not to mention, like, a lot of people have lead funnels where you need that information to actually understand what the user is doing before they convert. So if you're blocking third-party cookies before they even get a chance to convert, you have no information about like where the person came from. You just saw that they signed up. And so it might as well be organic.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They implant a little third party cookie on the site that contains an anonymous user ID and all of your attributes as you're navigating the site. And then once you log in, they convert that to a known or non-anonymous user ID. Usually that's tied to some type of entity ID or a user record.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's not the case with all channels, but it's specific for apps that have mobile apps. They're going to be impacted by it because they just aren't going to be able to discreetly identify one-to-one the person that came from a campaign. They'll know that a group of people came from a campaign, but they won't be able to make measurement with those people alongside other attributes. For website, it's not the same, but there are lots of things that are making it more challenging. One is browsers now are stripping out those URLs we talked about. So you're just seeing a bigger and bigger percentage of people being counted as organic that actually came from a paid advertisement because when they got redirected to your website, they just, the browser truncated all those URL parameters. The second thing is cookie blockers, right? We talk about all these third parties before the way that third parties often collect information is they drop a cookie in your browser that tracks you. If you've heard of segment, which is one of those well-known CDPs of the last few years,”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just because you can have embedded ads now that almost look like they can be posts that you can comment on. And I think it just speaks to kind of like the maturity of the advertising business. What's happening in the background of all this is like add attribution from apps has become a lot more difficult and mostly aggregate from 2010 to 2020 we had the golden years of deterministic matching where it was very easy to run an ad and understand with precision who installed the app maybe to know their name, but you actually would know their IDFA and you could tie that to their PII. You can't do that anymore. It's very challenging even when you can do it the results that you would get are pretty low because nobody's going to be opting into giving you their IDFA. So what that means is like these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated and interesting right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending money. And so I'm paying a lot of attention to like how”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about threads, right? Threads is super interesting. The question will be how quickly can they stand up an API for advertising and like what does that look like? Or do they just blend it in with the existing meta and Facebook architecture? One of the caveats that I'm sure a lot of performance marketers out there will agree with is Facebook has a conflict of interest in reporting, right? Like they want you to spend money. So obviously they want to report the best results. And that's the reason why attribution parties like Branch and Appsflyer exist is to somewhat curtail that conflict of interest. And so I'll be really interested just to see how attribution works, especially when you're moving from Instagram to threads, from Facebook to threads. Will it be the same architecture? Will it be the same advertising platform? Will they try to do something new? So I'm keeping my eyes on that. Reddit is also a very interesting place to convert now. They're opening up their conversions API and I'm seeing a lot more investment in Reddit.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complex. You have to think about first and last. Think about the steps in the middle. Design it so that you're putting it on the user profile and in the event. And so this goes back to the main thing that we were talking about earlier, where it's like the job of a marketing technologist is to think often one to two years down the road about what we're going to need to solve for and design systems in an elegant way not to break the bank, but to at least be the minimum viable product to actually get there. And so a lot of my job, and I think the Java marketing technologist, is trying to preserve that future state in the most minimally invasive engineering and resource way possible.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. The way to think of it is If you build your own data warehouse, your schema is unlimited. You can do whatever you want. You can design product schema. You can design user schema and event schema. But most third-party B2C tools don't allow you to control the schema. There's only one CDP I know that does that. That's Snowplow. The rest is a user object and an event object. So you can either stuff data as a user property onto the user object, or you can stuff data into the event and fire it off as an event. But that's what you're working with. So what I'm saying is most people just like don't think about the object orientation of the third-party tools they think about and they don't design their website traffic or their app traffic. We didn't talk about app, which is a whole different slew because doing attribution with iOS 14 is much more difficult. But even in the website version of the world, people will often just collect UTMs and think that their job is done. And it's like, actually, it's more.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. The taxonomy, though, I think what's interesting is it's very much guided by your third party tools. And again, that's the reason why I think companies often miss the mark here is because they're not thinking about what can my tool actually allow me to put into it in the first place.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Information from the beginning that way, when you actually want to progress your attribution model, you don't have to wait a really long time to start gathering that data.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then for all the stuff in the middle, you're firing off a page view event with first and last, where the last might deviate if there were multiple steps in the middle. So what they can do is they can just coalesce over all the last UTMs they've seen on all your events by user to get both the first one, all the ones in the middle, and the last. And so this isn't actually that complicated to set up. Most people just like don't do the work early on. And then when they want to go back later and have MTA results, they don't have the data to do it. So one of the things I tell people who are debating this is like, let's just get the infrastructure right from the beginning. Let's set up so that you have users, you have user attributes, you're collecting first and last UTM on users, you're firing events with all those. There's some other more like complex things you can do too. You can set them in first party cookies and you can also set them in your third party cookies for your tooling vendors. At the end of the day, though, what matters is like you just are collecting this.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then my UTM is only for that Google ad, right? So I have a Google Click ID and I have a UTM. So what you're going to do is you've got to store those parameters locally on the device. There's a browser or whatever. You've got to store it as UTM first campaign, UTM last campaign. And what you do is every single time that a person comes, you kind of replace the last campaign or the last value with the one that's there. So say the last one was Facebook and then I come later from a direct mailer ad, you replace the UTM last medium with the new one. Now what's happening if you're using third-party tools is that you're collecting this user information when the person's on the website. You're going to collect it both as a user attribute and as an event. That way what's going to happen on the back end for your data warehouse team is they're going to see a user profile that has both the first attribution information and the last attribution information.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decode it, but all advertisers, and for the longest time, advertising worked by putting parameters in URLs Pushing somebody through your website, collecting those parameters, and then passing it back to the ad network so they could get credit for it. And so in my mind, the best practice that everybody should stand up from day one is to basically design the system for MTA and then use whatever makes sense as you grow. And so the way that I typically recommend people is like, imagine when a user comes to your website, you collect the URL, collect the referring URL, collect all the additional marketing parameters you might want, GCLID, TikTok ID, Microsoft ID. You should just make a list of them. And if you don't have that list, I can give them to you. And then you should collect all UTMs. So in the URL, you're going to have UTM campaign, UTM Medium. Most marketers use this to note what the campaign type was. Now, the thing is, is that UTM is only going to be specific to the moment in time that the person came to your website. So like back to our example about Lenny's podcast, if I come to Lenny's podcast and I came from Google app.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And usually the evolution for businesses is they start with first touch or last touch, then they go to splitting it, literally 50-50, and then somebody gets angry because they're not getting enough credit. And they say, we're going to go to MTA. And there are both first party solutions for that and third-party solutions for MTA. But back to the main thing, the main point is if you think about what you're collecting, this is for website businesses. You're collecting the referrer, like in the URL where the person's coming from, and you need any UTMs associated with that person. And you also need any parameters from the advertising network that might give them the ability to counter conversion. For every ad network out there has little things they stuff into your URL that tell you that you came from them. Facebook has FBP, FPID. These sometimes encode it. Google has this thing called Google Click ID, which is just a really long string of characters that don't matter unless you know.”
2023-08-13 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source