2024 is not even a month old and we already see a continuation of what started in 2023. Companies of all shapes and sizes across many industries are cutting budgets and letting people go. Whenever I’m talking to our customers, I can see a noticeably clear push across data and marketing teams to focus their efforts and cut costs where possible.

While we’re still seeing the effects of the ongoing Covid pandemic, it seems like we’ve entered a new stage of maturity in the industry. Given how young and dynamic the market is, I see a common thread among companies and decision makers: They commonly think in the Amazon-way of managing initiatives.

Amazon famously gives ideas somewhere between five and seven years for an initiative to become successful. This way, ideas and new practices get the time they need to mature while the market matures. And CMOs and CDOs love this idea! When justifying their spendings and decisions to the CFO, they had an easy time in the past pointing to Amazon and simply ask for more time and money to develop their ideas.

Riding the wave of trust and delayed accountability, decision makers could grow teams, build tech stacks, and worry about the return of investment later. While there has always been some surface-level need to justify spendings (commonly in the form of business cases and some controlling efforts) we are now starting to see more and more CFOs running out of patience. When demanding not just justification but accountability, their counterparts from the business come up empty-handed. What follows is usually not pretty at all.

Now, how did this happen? To explain, let me literally start with...

A short story of Adam and Eve

Let’s imagine an industry-leading, global company, called Awesome Corp. At Awesome Corp., Adam is working as the head of marketing. He has been in the company for about six years and has been hired to make the marketing organization more successful and allow Awesome Corp to conquer new markets and lead the conversation with Awesome’s digital products.

Forward thinking as Adam is, he quickly identified the crude and, admittedly, not very awesome data practices at his then new company as a major obstacle on the way to conquer the digital world. Driven by the trust the company has already put in him, the decision has been made to form a new CDO position at Awesome and hire Eve, with a strong background in data science, to help Adam and the company to be more successful through data.

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What followed were investments that may sound familiar to many readers. Of course, the company now had to hire a slew of data scientists, data engineers, visualization artists, report baristas, and being-right-by-default analysts. Literally every imaginable piece of data was quickly thrown into the new data lake, then pumped through the usual sewage data pipelines into many reporting and visualization tools.

Of course, Adam and Eve know very well that data alone is worth nothing. Someone needs to use it! And naturally, Eve's analysts take it onto themselves to teach Adam’s business what to do. Following the ancient teachings of an analyst’s job being to “find insights and give recommendations” they don’t miss an opportunity to educate Adam’s team on how they think they should do their job.

Fast-forward a couple of years. Both Adam and Eve have since received massive funds from Awesome’s CFO to build their teams, in-house technology, and build process involving both. However, they have finally run out of the CFO’s patience. While they were allowed to delay accountability for many years on the promise that one day, eventually, the stars will align, and all the dots are going to magically connect themselves to reveal the answers to marketing, sales, product, the universe, and everything, the seasons have changed.

It never happened. Instead, Eve’s analysts find themselves chasing Adam’s team and other stakeholders, desperately trying to understand their challenges and give recommendations based on the “insights” they gather. However, Adam’s team never managed to connect with the army of analysts. The analysts don’t understand their business and all their recommendations are either trivial or unrealistic. In the end, marketing is still running free with enormous budgets and analysts are turning to other companies, hoping to finally be heard. Workshops on data literacy and data-driven culture were unable to change anything and countless hours of data storytelling did not have an impact.

Besides not delivering on the initial promise, it became clear that neither Adam nor Eve were able to truly connect with the CFO. While marketing kept talking about reach and engagement, analytics was bragging about the impressive size of their tech stack and the capabilities they loved to build for themselves. Meanwhile, all the CFO wished for was for them to think about company value and cashflow to justify the investment to shareholders.

What should we do instead?

Now, this story might ring familiar to you. Your own company might already be cutting costs in previously well-funded areas or still investing with the first signs of low returns. Having talked to some of the largest and most successful companies in the world, there are some common threads that I want to share with you on how they manage to stay successful:

• Their data culture is based on a strong pull-culture instead of push-principles. This is the most important shift in mindset. Rather than expecting analysts to tell well-experienced business stakeholders how to do their job, the data team is providing capabilities to the business but trusts them to both analyze their own business and make the right decisions. They have built the right support culture to support data exploration and experimentation in daily operations, leading to an actual return on invest through embedded insights.
• In terms of data, they have long recognized that not all available solutions are built equally. Analytics vendors work tirelessly to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market but often struggle to tell a holistic story of how their solutions are going to be integrated into businesses, leading many to the false assumption that they must build their own ecosystem. Mature companies know what they need and how to use it well.
• They resist the shiny-new-object fallacy of always jumping on the newest trends in favor of building a solid foundation that enables democratized best practices at scale. There is a strong understanding that insights rely on the most basic data being collected in the right way and that it’s everyone’s responsibility to work towards it. Some have tried to build the required systems themselves, but soon realized that there are better ways to enable the business to follow the absolute best of practices.
• Recognizing that mistakes will happen, they have systems in place that automatically look for errors and proactively alert the team when things break. Maturing and evolving a practice includes gaining a realistic understanding of how people work with technology and trying to soften the impact of unavoidable mistakes.
• Based on the right mindset of democratization and verified, trusted data, they can adopt mature practices, like cross-channel dashboards, media mix modelling, and holistic insights across channels and campaigns. With the right data of the highest quality being available in the right systems, there is no more guesswork on how initiatives influence each other and where side-effects are introduced.
• Even if they are not currently affected by the global recession, they know that the best time to mature your practice is when you have the time for it. It is much easier to make your company more resilient when there is no urgent fire to fight. While crisis can bring opportunity, it is better to avoid it wherever possible.

As you may have guessed, the reason I was able to listen in to the discussion at those successful companies was because of my job at Accutics. As a company, we have long realized the need for the practices I’ve outlined above and have built a unique platform to help companies all the way along their maturity evolution.

‍Accutics Standardize allows you to fix your basics, bring order to your cross-channel marketing chaos, and even enable new capabilities like branded short URLs and guaranteed-to-work marketing links at enterprise scale. Once the business starts adopting a mature tagging practice, Accutics Validate helps them to monitor that best practices are followed across all media platforms to avoid wasted spend. It’s easy-to-understand quality score gives you a single number every CFO understands and that proves the quality of your work, regardless of if you work in marketing, analytics, or at an agency. Once all of the data is of the guaranteed highest quality, Accutics Connect finally paints the full picture by bringing your KPIs into the same platform and shedding a light on your holistic performance drivers.

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Naturally, we don’t expect you to take our word for it. If you are ready to take your own or your client’s insights to the next level, don’t hesitate to reach out. With our joined efforts, you can turn the year (or maybe even age?) of accountability into a win for your personally, your team, and your company.