Data-Labor-Technology

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Sum up what it’s like being the most senior black exec where you work?

It’s tugging at me in different ways. I’m grateful for having an opportunity to influence how my company becomes more diverse and inclusive, but it sucks that it’s taken such a bad situation to create that interest. So many white people — both internally and across the industry — have reached out to me asking for advice on what they can do. That’s the really frustrating part. Black people didn’t create these systemic prejudices, so please don’t expect us to resolve them alone. It would be great if the white people I talk to come to me with their own ideas on how we all move forward after having done their own research. 

What sort of questions are you being asked by white people?

The questions vary but so far they focus on things that they should already be doing. I’ve been asked a few times about how to hire more Black people because they’re hard to find. That’s just not true. Others are asking me where to find Black execs to speak at their conferences. If those execs applied the same mindset they use to fix problems in ad tech then we wouldn’t be having these conversations. These are people building a global business on the back of data. We need to apply that same data-centric mindset to address racism as a company. Publishing diversity numbers would be a start, but not the complete answer. Those numbers, however, could create pressure that could help us to make better decisions when it comes to hiring.

Has being Black hindered career progression for you?

I can’t necessarily point to a concrete example and say I didn’t get a promotion because I’m Black. And yet, from an early point in my career, I knew I was going to have to work twice as hard as most of my colleagues and be on my game all the time if I wanted to get ahead. People tend to hire and promote people who make them feel comfortable. Go to the ‘About Us’ section on any site for an ad tech vendor and you will see a lack of diversity, particularly at the exec level.

If it’s that tough, how have you been able to get as far as you have?

There is no replacement for hard work. Regardless of your color or gender, if you want to progress in your career you have to work for it. With that said, there have been times throughout my career where I felt I definitely had to “play the game” and make sure other people felt comfortable with me in the room (because of the color of my skin) even if that meant sacrificing my own level of authenticity and comfort. This is often referred to as code-switching….which, unfortunately, is something that black people often do in a white-dominated industry. I’m happy to say though that as I’ve moved up in my career and have gotten older, I no longer feel the need to code-switch and truly bring my full self to work every day.

Do you not worry that as you become more senior, opportunities start to become fewer — have you seen this happen?

It’s definitely a concern. The higher you climb the ladder the tougher it gets because there are fewer opportunities available and more competition for those opportunities.

Do you experience unconscious bias through microaggressions within the ad-tech community on a regular basis? If so can you explain how?

Yes definitely and here are two examples:

There has been plenty of situations where I will be out with my white colleagues, and we will be joined by another white male … he will great my white colleagues with a “hi” or “how you doing?” … but when he greets me he will say “my man” with a bit of awkward slang to it.

Earlier this year I was at an industry conference that was being held at a fancy hotel. I was attending a client meeting in the lobby which included 4 white guys and me. During the meeting, a random hotel guest (older white gentlemen) came up to just me and asked “Is this the concierge desk?”

Having just raised a $47 million round — part equity, part debt — in April, FaZe Clan CEO Lee Trink said the company is in the process of fundraising for its Series B as it readies further international expansion and moves to diversify its ranks. Trink also discussed how FaZe Clan is working to root out divisive language being used by the gaming community, improving the category’s diversity and why marketers looking to associate with youth culture also need to accept its “edges.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What does your international expansion involve?

A test market we tried in December was in Thailand where we made the decision to lead with an esports team. We recruited a PUBG Mobile team [and FIFA Online players] in Thailand and content is starting to follow. We’re developing a really great social media footprint inside Thailand.

The concept is that FaZe Clan should feel as home-grown or local as possible within a global brand. You have the ability to take a brand like FaZe Clan and have it represented locally around the world so it doesn’t feel like an American import.

Last year you signed your first female FaZe Clan member. Do you plan to diversify FaZe Clan’s ranks further?

Without a doubt it’s something we’ve been having not only more and more conversations [about] but some action behind bringing more females in. Frankly, it’s a challenge at times. But I think as leaders in the space, we need to lead in terms of bringing in more women and bringing in more diversity.

There’s recently been a reckoning on social media about bad behavior within the gaming community. What are you doing to encourage better behavior?

It is important for us to take a leadership role in that. 

Gaming is a little bit late to the party. Gaming has been siloed away in a corner where a lot of traditional players just left it alone and didn’t see the value. If you look at  a lot of the things we’ve done — building bridges to the traditional entertainment space and also starting to bring in significant sponsors — a couple of years ago that really didn’t exist. What that meant was this was a large, bustling community but really left on its own in a corner with not a lot of sophisticated operators on the business side that were tending to it.

Now we’ve been able to build those bridges, we can fix that, but then the other part of it: We have to grow up. We have to be good citizens within the business community. It maybe painful at times for some people but it’s a positive and necessary process to go through for us to take a rightful place alongside all these other businesses who went through it a few years ago. 

Can you give specific examples?

A big thing we are leading the charge on is the …  language that’s been used in gaming that has been tolerated.

We have stated to our fans that we are not going to tolerate any type of divisive language. We have started to employ AI tools to help with that. We are discussing whether it will be “a one strike and you’re out,” or a suspension and kick someone off from being one of our subscribers and followers. We are engaging conversations with some of the other parts of the gaming community to help do the same. 

We have started a diversity council within FaZe Clan that is a volunteer group that is working on actionable items in this area.

You announced a partnership with Quibi for a reality show. How’s that been going?

It looks like that’s not going to go to fruition. That announcement was a little premature before the deal was papered and, at the moment, it’s not going forward. Might that change? Perhaps. I don’t think so. 

There were two parties involved in that deal. One deal was executed, the other deal wasn’t and we just weren’t able to come to agreement on terms with the other party.

Was it Quibi you couldn’t come to an agreement with?

No.

Marketers sometimes have an uneasy relationship with influencers. What do you say to reassure them?

A lot of the power we have is social influence power because it’s connected to the brand of FaZe Clan and there’s IP there, there’s identity there and there’s something other than the ups and downs of individual talent. 

We are not just a sports team. We are a sports team and a lifestyle brand that pushes culture. If you’re breathing that rarified air of being able to drive culture then that’s typically done — especially if you’re talking about youth culture — by people who have edges. It’s about authenticity. It doesn’t mean unbridled, you can’t use that word ‘authenticity’ to cover up everything. But if you want to participate in something as powerful and as compelling as FaZe Clan it’s going to have some edges to it. 

We work very hard to make sure there’s brand safety. Even with the ups and downs of individual talent, it’s always about how the company reacts more so than what happens with individual talent. If we try to sandpaper every rough edge off, we’re not going to be as compelling as we are.

That segment can be targeted on the publisher’s site to show offers or different creative to Telegraph readers who are already customers of the brand. Or to suppress a certain group so the brand can target lapsed or unknown customers. Over the last few weeks, The Telegraph has had dozens of conversations with brands, although it was too soon for them to name them, about running these types of campaigns.

“[This is] changing the conversation, now it’s about deeper, richer partnerships with advertisers and how we can work together to support the power of their audience,” said Karen Eccles, senior director, commercial innovation at The Telegraph. “It’s about moving from third-party to first-party and from anonymous to known audiences. It’s an opportunity that sits squarely under our reader-first, subscriber-first strategy.”

The Telegraph has been moving towards subscriptions-first over the last two years. In May, it had nearly 500,000 subscriptions across print and digital, with an average revenue per subscription of £198.63 ($248.75). It also has 6.6 million registered users who have entered details like name and email address. Now, subscriptions are the company’s dominant revenue stream, overtaking advertising. Last week, the publisher cut its branded content team, Spark, in order to focus on bigger ticket ad partnerships that dovetail with its subscription strategy. 

There’s a wealth of data showing that targeted ads are more effective than non-targeted. In tests from October 2019 to March 2020, before coronavirus, The Telegraph used its own first-party data segments to target audiences on its site. Targeted versus non-targeted ads led to an increase of 43% on average in engagement rate, measured by time in view and time spent.  

Previously, publishers and brands have been rightly nervous about sharing their unique selling point — their first-party data. The Telegraph tested the match rate of two of its own data sets through Infosum and scored a 99.9% match rate. The 0.01% arose from the tech provider’s added statistical error.   

Over the last three weeks, the use case that’s generated the most interest from ad buyers has been the insights of existing advertiser customers who are also readers of The Telegraph. Since coronavirus upended consumer behavior — people’s life, hobbies, what they care about, who they are with, is all in flux — advertisers are groping for information on new and existing audiences. 

“More questions, more richness and more definition of who the customer is we’re going after allows us to get closer to an efficient way of spending and investing the funds,” said Isabelle Baas, managing director, digital, data and technology, Starcom Publicis, which completed its acquisition of Epsilon last July indicating its first-party data ambitions.

Aside from the pending cookie collapse, mingling data sets has not gained pace because many advertisers don’t have large enough first-party data pools, especially post-GDPR, which has put a crimp on information collection. The Telegraph is taking each campaign on a case-by-case basis in terms of data-set size: Some segments need to be broad to be effective. Others, like targeting only CEOs, are smaller and richer. For scale reasons, it’s offering Unity only to campaigns costing more than  £15,000, ($18,788).

“I’d be lying if I said every single client had well-structured databases,” said Baas. Indeed, brands that are not direct-to-consumer have a long road ahead of them to build up data point reserves across all channels, like connected TV.

Moreover, agencies are keen for an alternative solution to spending in the walled gardens of Google, Facebook and Amazon, where one-to-one audience matching at scale has always been available. Another benefit is Infosum’s tech lets agencies carry out custom audience planning, compared to working with managed services, which limit buyers by defining audiences by taxonomy.

“This will make audience planning grow up,” said  Dan Chaman, managing partner, products and solutions at Havas Media Group. “Agencies have to bring in good strategy and hypotheses that you can test, that’s the essence of what we used to do. If it’s just the programmatic team doing this, you won’t get to the point you should, it needs to involve the strategy and planning community.”

Like all publisher-specific tools or partnerships, it will live or die by its scale with publisher and advertiser partners. The sell-side has been quicker to adopt alternatives to third-party cookies: Channel 4 and Immediate Media are also working with Infosum and agency Infectious Media and live campaigns are imminent. There’s an opening for agencies to show their worth and collate other data sets, said Chaman. Otherwise, and as The Telegraph found, brands can easily, and are willing, to work with the publisher directly. 

Whether IDs will connect across properties and within walled gardens in a compliant way is the next hurdle in trying to re-architect a digital ecosystem without third-party cookies.

“I’m hoping there won’t be any scale issues, but that depends on how each publisher ultimately monetizes its audience and is happy to share information that is associated with that ID,” said Baas. “That allows a new stream of revenue coming into publishers’ business and gives power back to those players in the market.”

While this is a step in the right direction for gaining intelligence on how target audiences engage on Facebook, Google, Amazon and other potential companies, there’s a lot more that brands can be doing to build and own a comprehensive understanding of their consumers. 

Clean rooms can offer a start for brands in establishing how they can collaborate with data partners as they assess all touchpoints of the customer journey. 

Clean room rules of engagement

In general, clean rooms are managed by premium publishers that take on sourcing, organizing and processing data. Therefore, the publishers set the rules of engagement as to which types of data they want to offer to brands, and brands determine how much of their precious first-party data they are comfortable sharing. 

By analyzing various data streams that would not have been brought together under other circumstances, a clean room’s analytics team can provide insights to advertisers on how to build more precise segments with specific product or performance characteristics. In essence, clean rooms have enabled the big tech companies to become channel-specific agencies for their advertisers.

For example, Facebook’s enterprise data-sharing service (its clean room name) might share with a CPG baby food brand that it has identified additional Facebook-specific attributes that can tease-out high performers. Facebook might discover that the most desirable consumers in this audience are parents who live in major cities, follow professional athletes and check into business-class lounges at least once a month. With this intel, the brand can work on new creative to appeal to this audience of jet-setting, metropolitan parents. 

Take control of data to unlock consumer insights

This sort of channel-specific analysis offers just the tip of the iceberg. It’s only a 10-degree view of the audience when a 360-degree view is necessary for running truly customer-centric campaigns. 

The example above does not take into account the numerous other online and offline destinations parents frequent, for example, making the line from a Facebook ad to purchase dotted at best. Moreover, as the tech giants control the types of analysis they perform for an advertiser, brands cannot know anything more than what is provided to them by a team whose primary interest is making them spend more. Think of it as grading your own homework. 

In order to build a comprehensive understanding of every audience, it’s important for marketers to own their data foundation for greater internal and external collaboration. This foundation enables teams to fill in that line and uncover insights across the customer journey.

Convert cookies to persistent identifiers

One way to get started is by converting the data in a DMP to persistent identifiers. In the not too distant future, the cookies stored in DMPs will become obsolete, obliterating years of customer data typically used for retargeting, frequency capping, suppressing and more.

By working with a provider that can ingest cookies and convert them to persistent, secure identifiers, marketers can protect years of legacy knowledge. This will smooth the path to migrating away from cookie-based technologies without sacrificing what’s already known about audiences. By preserving and protecting this single view of the consumer, marketers will be able to continue engaging with them long after third-party cookies are fully deprecated. 

Standardize data across the enterprise

Securing cookie data by translating it to persistent identifiers sets marketers up nicely for applying the same identity infrastructure to all of their internal data, making it available for cross-team collaboration. A common scenario we’ve come across is when two teams have their own data lakes and tooling as they have different data permissions. Working in separate data environments solves the issue of protecting sensitive data, yet prevents teams from truly understanding what each is capable of and what they can do together. 

To promote internal collaboration, companies can work with a provider to pseudonymize sensitive data and make it available in a privacy-first, neutral environment. This process is one that savvy brands have embarked on to gain competitive advantage and autonomy over the big four technology strongholds. 

As an example, we’ve worked with a dairy brand that had its customer support logs, CRM, campaign performance metrics and other data sets locked up in internal siloes. This made it impossible for its teams to collaborate on meeting revenue growth goals by, for example, aligning marketing strategies with supply chain optimization. 

By enabling this brand’s teams to work within the same data environment, they could uncover and share new business insights with the assurance that they were all accessing the most recent, permissioned, clean data available.

Get started with data partnerships

Converting data into persistent, privacy-compliant identifiers not only promotes internal collaboration, but also enables marketers to safely and securely work with external data partners. 

For businesses in the CPG space, it would be valuable to enter into data partnerships with all of the major retailers through which they sell, in addition to adjacent brands with whom they can consider co-marketing. The organic baby food brand from the Facebook example could consider working with a hospitality group popular with families, and more accurately assess partnership potential by comparing customer databases in a privacy-first manner. 

These second-party data partnerships have been discussed for a few years, and now less access to data and an increase in data loss are accelerating the conversation. Expect data collaboration to become the norm as more brands invest in the ability to do so in a way that upholds consumer privacy and preserves data fidelity.

A lasting data foundation powers the customer journey

Clean rooms give walled gardens a way to safely lower their walls to select brands. The greater opportunity for all brands — regardless of how much they spend with the walled gardens — is bringing together all of their data to create a single source of truth that they own and can continually enrich. This self-governed, secure data foundation will prove invaluable to brands and their trusted partners, driving business growth in ways that were previously unimaginable.