Indeed, the efficiencies and opportunities that AI enables can radically uplevel brand experience and output, though unlocking their true potential relies on understanding how to uplevel teams to use the technology effectively. Those who can fully leverage the power of AI and infuse it within every aspect of their business will dominate the market. But for those lagging behind, this is a Kodak moment: there will be no loyalty for businesses that are slow to deliver AI-powered experiences that make consumers’ lives easier.

Throughout this guide, we’ll showcase AI’s potential to transform marketing today and tomorrow, as well as the actions you can take right now to reap those rewards and lead in the new era.

Together with Workato—a platform we leverage to provide automation solutions to our entire enterprise—we organized a hybrid hackathon and invited parts of the company to join virtually or in-person from our Buenos Aires, San Francisco and New York City offices. The event took place in Gather.town, a 2D metaverse. The aim of the game? To use Workato and Slack to automate anything they thought would be useful for everyday Monks. The challenge was to think beyond the simple notification bot. Been there, done that. There was no limit to the technologies teams could use. The tools they built were required to be completed within eight hours. In the end, every idea was judged based on its level of creativity, visual representation, tool use, execution and overall relevance. 

Besides the many innovative solutions that came out of this event (and absolutely blew my mind by the way), I also learned another important lesson: hackathons are a fantastic way to connect people from all different corners of your organization and the world, and bring them closer together. The formula is simple: just give a group of talented people a challenging task in a tight time frame, create the right environment, and they will not only come up with incredible ideas, but also have lots of fun and build lasting friendships in the process.

Bridging together our global hub of talent.  

Each person on our rocketship diversifies our skill sets and deepens our experience—to the benefit of everyone, not just one team. Because of our integrated business model, we can stimulate people to venture outside their lane from time to time and seamlessly cross-pollinate their skills and experiences. While pitches often spur unexpected collaborations—and still result in great success, thereby confirming the power of integration—I was happily surprised to see this hackathon also highlight how easily and quickly we can connect our global hub of talent. Josh McClauss, our VP of Marketing and one of the hackathon’s judges, says that the event truly reflected the beauty of our integrated universe of talent.

Safe to say, such great talent comes with great ideas and solutions. The creativity, innovation and collaboration amongst the people that participated was outstanding, which most likely has to do with the nature of the event that brought these teams together. According to McClauss, an interactive event such as a hackathon is very well-suited to exactly the types of people that Media.Monks attracts. Why? Because of the way in which this company was built.

We may be a 9,000+ strong company, but all of our cornerstone pieces still very much carry their startup spirit. “We may have new stakeholders and constituents to build this business around, but the power in what we’re doing is still and will always be about being nimble, flexible and creative and getting together in these moments to move beyond the competition—not only because we think about things differently, but because we do them differently,” he says. It’s experiences like these that capitalize on our talent and get them excited to be here long-term as we continue to realize what the next era of a marketing services partner looks like to the world.

Fostering light bulb moments.  

Judging from all the ideas the teams came up with, I can already tell this era is looking bright. It was very exciting to see each of them bring in their unique perspective and build something that’s going to be useful to the company and our clients—both now and in the future. 

One team, for example, developed a bot that searches Slack for previously asked questions to direct users to the right answers, whereas another team leveraged Slack as an interface to interact with Open AI and create AI-driven images for ad creative prototypes. “These are tons of options that can be applied to our business immediately,” says our SVP Global Media Melissa Wisehart, who also served as a judge. Such ideas can be implemented right now to not only increase efficiencies and build better processes internally, but also deliver stronger results for clients. 

As it turns out, the way to foster out-of-the-box and solution-based thinking is by setting clear boundaries, which stimulates people to not just think, but also realize their ideas by actually building the tools that solve their everyday challenges. “This entails both the boundary of what the end vehicle is and the boundary of the time frame that you have, that’s also very important,” says our Executive Operations Manager Nicole Chanlatte, who co-organized the hackathon. “Telling people to take this time, set it aside, and dedicate it to working on a specific problem or project—that in itself should unlock new paths.” From there on, it’s a matter of building on these ideas and solutions, while seeking ways to implement them across the business right away. “I believe that if we follow through on some of these projects, the impact could be huge to both efficiency and revenue,” McClauss adds.

Cracking the code for a successful partnership.   

Ultimately, this all goes to show that hackathons are a great way to spur collaboration and spark creativity. Besides all the fun and games—yes, I did a little virtual dance while presenting on stage—the teams came up with some incredible ideas and solutions. Needless to say, the Workato team played a pivotal role in bringing this all to life, providing a helping hand in support and assisting teams new to their tool throughout the event. 

The pleasure was theirs, too, says Gaby Moran, Workato’s Director of Customer & Partner Experience. “The hackathon event was truly phenomenal and so much fun. We have a lot of customers who do hackathons and this one had some of the most creative and impactful ideas I’ve seen in a while. So many of the automations created contributed to inclusivity and collaboration—it left me inspired!” And that's what happens when you connect a diverse team of global talent around a common goal.

“It’s so much more powerful being a part of a team that’s full of mixed backgrounds and experiences,” says Doug Hall, VP of Data Services and Technology. “Tech isn’t just for computer science graduates. If we didn’t have a rich tapestry of skills and experiences woven into the team fabric, we’d have a homogeneous glom of great skills, but we’d be more likely to do the same things this week as we did last, and in the same way.”

My move from non-tech to tech-first taught me that many things surrounding data are isolated from business needs and outcomes, even though you don’t want this to happen. When teams operate in silos and data works in isolation, so does experimentation. This inevitably leads to random acts of marketing and chaotic reporting. Rather than siloing teams, data should unify them—even if they have totally different KPIs. For instance, marketing teams look at lead generation, engagement and visibility, while product teams focus on retention and acquisition. In short, if everyone has a separate way of tracking and collecting data, this also means that everyone is looking at different things. 

Viewing the full picture is pivotal to success. 

The bottom line is that all of this information is data, and everyone should be aligned on what type of data will actually help the company move forward. Companies may invest in tools that serve one or more departments—GA4, for one, can support marketing and product teams—but the way each team or department collects data should be a company-wide decision. In turn, this means that a company’s data collection mechanism needs to be strong and reliable to be able to support every team and department in a business and help spur progress. The goal is to unite, not separate. That’s why it’s critical to align what matters in terms of data collection and measurement with the company’s business needs. 

The operative word is context—whatever we do, we must keep this in mind. Getting your company or clients to believe in the data at hand starts with analysts and measurement marketers understanding where the business is right now and where it can go. By actively participating in the inner workings of a business—with a focus on resource allocation and the processes that generate money—and analyzing relevant and purposefully collected data, you can help steer your company or clients towards profit. 

As such, I recommend every digital analyst to get familiar with a business’ internal processes. You can use this knowledge to implement tracking and analytics systems that align with the company’s procedures. A good example of this is how we helped the multinational alcoholic beverage company Diageo deploy GA4 across its 150 brand websites. As Hall explains, “Due to alcohol regulations around the world, most countries require an age verification gateway, which is a major conversion blocker that goes above and beyond consent management. This means that measurement and optimization are crucial for Diageo—and that’s how we knew that deploying consistent measurement across all brand sites was the best solution.”

In short, every digital analyst should come to understand the business context and goals to make sure the tag management and analytics tools are both implemented effectively and in line with the needs of the business. The secret sauce here is to closely collaborate with business-focused team members like marketers, consultants and account managers, who can provide guidance on what data is needed and how it will be used. Sure, we can rely on our experience and heuristics, but that doesn't mean any of our assumptions can be valued as truth. Once you’ve actually combed through a specific business context, you can start to define the right strategy for your business—and even then, it’s a matter of seeing how things play out before you can confirm or reject your hypothesis. Experiment, experiment, experiment!  

Become data mature to make your cash flow. 

Ultimately, this all feeds into a company’s data maturity, which Forbes defines as “a measure of an organization's ability to use data, along with how well the organization leverages those capabilities.” It’s not just about making data-driven decisions, but also about making sure data resources are accessible across an organization. The more data mature you become, the more you can scale—a topic that Coquet will discuss in more detail during the upcoming SUPERWEEK conference.  

With scale comes growth, which, in turn, can lead to new opportunities—and let’s be honest, this is an outcome that every business is after in their search for better tools, better consultants, and better digital marketing partners. When it comes to collecting data and tracking user behaviors (with consent, but this goes without saying), businesses do not want to miss out on any opportunity to get new customers, while staying relevant to their existing ones so that they continue to trust and purchase from them. More happy customers equals more cash flow. In the end, profit is the ultimate validation of growth (and that you’re doing a good job), both from a product and a customer experience perspective. 

Three takeaways to make your data take off. 

While it may take some time to find the most advanced tech stack or the best digital marketing partner—one that truly understands your business and all its needs—there are some changes you can make today. Trust me when I say that these actions will pay off in the end and help your cash flow grow. 

First of all, start by defining the problems you are aiming to solve and the questions you are seeking to answer with your data before you implement anything. This will help fine-tune your efforts and ensure that you are using the right tools and approaches to address the specific challenges you face. 

Second, consider (and research) the possibility of teaming up with a data consultant or specialist, who is able to provide expert advice and guidance on what tools and approaches are best for your specific problems and questions. This is particularly helpful if you are working on a complex or unique challenge that requires specialized knowledge and skills.

Third, teamwork always makes the data dream work. It’s crucial to collaborate with your team members and exchange your knowledge and experience—as Doug said, the more mixed the expertise, the better. By closely working together and sharing what you know, you can pool your collective knowledge and experience in setting up your measurement strategy. Keep in mind that within a business context, every team has its own problems and questions. As a leader, it's important to begin by having them define these, which, in turn, will reveal how aligned your team is around the company’s needs.

The main lesson that you should learn from this article is that context is key. At the end of the day, understanding human behavior, the business landscape, and how a company and its clients bring in money is what makes a successful digital analyst. I didn’t know this ten years ago, but I do now and I’m very happy to share these insights with you—find Julien, Doug, me and many other Data.Monks at SUPERWEEK 2023 and learn more about what really matters in managing your data.

The marketing and advertising industry is united by the common goal to leverage technology in new, creative ways—not only to translate data into personalized campaigns, but also to enhance internal operations. This is where automation could come in, if it wasn’t for the fact that marketing is traditionally quite limited in using such technologies. Simply put, many marketing teams haven’t been exposed to automation beyond connecting CRM to email marketing, even though there’s so much more out there.

From business to advertising, development and production operations, digital process automation can help unlock efficiencies across the entire enterprise. There are ample automation solutions for digital operations that can provide support across a company’s content, data, media and tech efforts. While the positive impact of enterprise automation reaches far and wide—from enhancing digital ad operations to improving internal people services—the biggest benefit is the ability to free employees from repetitive tasks or unnecessary complexities in the workflow, so as to enable them to direct their attention and energy towards more relevant work. Especially considering the current economic headwinds, it’s crucial to make sure that your talent can maximize their impact. 

My team of Automation.Monks is specialized in enabling the workforce to embrace automation as a new way of working and realize its full potential. We encourage people to automate as much as possible, no matter how big or small individual tasks are—if a machine can do the work, we should probably let it. This requires us to rethink how we operate within a business and how we collaborate with both tech and each other. The team not only focuses on automating our internal people, operations and processes, but also on supporting brands in automating their enterprise. So, let’s take a look at how we aim to achieve maximum efficiency, visibility and connectivity with automation solutions built by our analytics practice.

Helping brands future-proof their business with GA4.  

Our bread and butter is helping brands automate their people, platforms and processes. The objective is to ensure that these work in ways that businesses can accelerate their digital transformation and prepare themselves for the modern era. One of our go-to tools for measurement is Google Analytics. As Google’s GA360 is scheduled to sunset in the summer of 2024, many brands are busy migrating to the new GA4 product to take advantage of the measurement platform of the future. Among many other useful updates, this tool helps brands collect website and app data to get a better sense of the customer journey by utilizing event-based rather than session-based data. It also includes privacy controls and behavioral and conversion modeling that help fill the gaps in your data caused by the cookieless future.  

GA4 adoption requires collaboration between departments across an organization, and is therefore a change management process as much as it is a technology solution. The flatter, richer insights from GA4 data can help brands deliver more value and achieve faster competitive advantages—particularly when the adoption process is planned, communicated and managed to promote knowledge-sharing and digital maturity growth. Many brands have benefited a great deal from automating their business processes. Let’s take a look at the positive impact experienced by some of our key partners.

We’re supporting a global CPG brand that strives to increase their business revenue YOY by 3%, with a media objective of 3% ROI growth—ambitious, but certainly possible. As its partner for global content production, we advised the brand to focus on the efficient use of first-party data, while also establishing the use of connected data collected from across the customer journey. We pitched GA4 as the obvious solution, keeping in mind our pillars of quality, speed and value. Using custom built in-house automation, we helped the brand rapidly deploy 169 GA4 properties in minutes—all the while managing the shift to GA4 and maintaining top quality first-party data during the adoption. The results were impressive: through our collaboration, this brand has been able to unify its marketing efforts and metrics across 37 brands in 150 countries, ultimately realizing a growth of more than 70% in global ROI since 2017.

Another major brand that we were able to help automate at scale is Diageo, the multinational alcoholic beverage company. Diageo has made the ambitious commitment to increase their market share from 3% to 6% in FY 23. In order to realize this, the brand needs accurate tools with actionable insights. Once again, we presented GA4 as the straightforward solution. Considering the planned sunsetting of GA360, we immediately started planning the GA4 adoption process. Diageo’s scope covered as many as 150 brand websites, including 39 D2C sites (and counting) where we collect transactional data, which is a large-scale task. We leveraged custom Google Tag Manager templates for the GA4 tagging as well as our in-house automation tool to automate the GA360 rollout for the GA4 deployment in minutes versus what would normally take a team weeks to accomplish.

Deploying a common data layer taxonomy, harmonized across all brand sites, allowed for true apples-to-apples data comparison. On top of that, it was pivotal to delivering high-quality, privacy-first, consented first-party data. As a result, the team was able to both save over 200 hours of work and assure quality and reliable repeatability. Moreover, any future updates to measurement are consistently applied across all brand sites using the same solution—and align with Diageo’s overall strategic goals.

Designing the future of Media.Monks with clients in mind. 

Automation is critical to driving your enterprise into its next phase of digital transformation. Though solutions are largely technology focused, it’s important to be aware of the fact that automation can only truly succeed at scale and have a significant impact on your operations if it’s spread across and woven into every facet of your company culture. By incorporating many new, exciting and innovative tools into the tech stack and empowering your people, you can lift your business to the next level of operational excellence. For example, my team is currently working on productizing cloud-based “starter kits” that can easily deploy within a company’s tech stack and seamlessly integrate with existing or modified operational processes. CMOs can leverage these tools to connect their media efforts to the rest of the organization, which allows for better visibility, data interoperability, and measurement in aligning media efforts to business objectives. This is just one of the many ways in which automation can help organizations become more efficient in reaching their marketing and advertising goals.  

No matter the size of your business or the industry that you’re in, enterprise automation enables you to both streamline your people, processes and operations and enhance the output of different teams. In other words, it allows you to do more with less. Our advice? Start building an automation-first company culture now. Recognize where the biggest pain points are in your workflows and thus where your workforce needs to level up with new skills. When it’s deployed in line with your business goals and objectives, automation will maximize your existing talent and set up your business for future success. However, since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for enterprise automation, the key is to start now.