Marketing today is about being data-driven and understanding who your customers are. Developing a holistic view of the customer is about to get harder, though, thanks to a new world we’re all about to enter: a world without cookies.

“If you are really heavy on third-party data, then you are going to be impacted the most. If you have built a good first-party data strategy and have enough data, you can survive longer. Based on my experience, third-party data wasn’t always working or effective. The best way to navigate this is to start building up your first-party. This may be complex for some, but if they start small and slow they can still catch up.”

Meet Mazen Mroueh, Head of Global Digital Factory for Frieslandcampina, one of the world’s largest dairy factories. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Mazen tackles the tough question of how marketers can best prepare themselves for a future without cookies and what it will take to build up their first-party data.. Plus, Mazen shares his outlook for what marketers can expect in a post-COVID world and why there is no view quite like a 360-degree look of your customers.

Main Takeaways

• But Where Have all the Cookies Gone?: Companies that have been reliant on third-party data are going to have a hard time with the transition to a cookieless world. To help ease that transition to a cookieless world, marketers must start thinking about their strategies to build up their first-party data.
• Developing A 360-Degree View: The objective for every marketer is to continuously be collecting data, but marketers must make sure that whatever data they gather lives under one unified roof rather than being diverted to different silos. When your data lives in multiple places, it becomes harder to connect all your digital touchpoints. Having a single source of data not only eliminates that friction, but allows your team to gather insights at a quicker pace.
• The Next Big Shift: The skills a marketer needs to be successful are continuing to shift. While marketers must continue to be data literate, they must also be able to most quickly and effectively. The next wave of marketers will be less about possessing a specific knowledge or skill set, and more about being flexible.

Key Quotes:

“Data is the key. It’s the most important thing, and our objective is to keep collecting data. The challenge that we have is mainly from a marketing perspective, some data is still in silos.”

“If you are really heavy on third-party data, then you are going to be impacted the most. If you have built a good first-party data strategy and have enough data, you can survive longer. Based on my experience, the third-party data wasn’t always working or effective. The best way to navigate this is to start building up your first-party. This may be complex for some, but if they start small and slow they can still catch up.”

“When we come to the data itself, we work with Salesforce and we have built a global dashboard with Datarama, and that will help us to visualize all the data from different platforms. You can just look in and see all the campaigns, all the performances in one place in real time. And that’s the beauty of data where you can visualize it, analyze it, understand it. You don’t need to fill hundreds of Excel sheets anymore, or wait for someone to generate the report for you. You can just have it there in real time.”

“[Marketers] don’t need to collect every single data source, but at least if you can collect one or two at the beginning and start using those and try to test, learn and fail, and then test, learn and succeed, it will make a big impact. And then you can move more agilely and faster.”

“I’m not saying that machines or AI will overtake humans, but I think a combination of good human skills and machine learning will definitely have an impact and change a lot.”

“The bigger shift in marketing and for marketeers, it’s the skills they need. That’s something that really excites me is the new skills that the marketer needs to be able to adapt and work. We are going to notice post pandemic, it is more about being flexible. It’s being agile and less about having a specific knowledge or skill set about data. And that’s a big transition.”

Bio:

Mazen Mroureh is a Global Digital manager for one of the world’s largest dairy co-operatives, Friesland Campina. Mroueh got his start at Starcom and caught the marketing bug while working on its account for BlackBerry in the Middle East – a turning point he says led to him becoming passionate about the sector. After a couple of years at Publicis Groupe-owned ad tech firm VivaKi, Mroueh made a brand-side jump in 2016, initially as global digital performance and programmatic manager and later as head of its global digital factory, moving from Campina’s base in the Netherlands to Singapore. There, he leads its team working on specialized nutrition products such as baby formula and athletic supplements. In the last year, Mroueh has been at the forefront of Campina’s pandemic strategy, which he says forced the team to remain focused, responsible and alert.

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