David Siciliano: And this is Call Us Disruptors. We have Mike Rizzo on today.

Jess Siciliano: Yes. He is from MarketingOps.com.

David Siciliano: Yep, he's the founder and CEO. He's a marketing ops guru. He hosts MOps-Apalooza in the fall. They're a great platform and an amazing community of marketing operators, in a relatively new field with all the technology out there today. And we had a great conversation about how data is a crucial part of informing your creative.

Jess Siciliano: Most companies don't have a creative problem, they have a source-of-truth problem. Everyone is working from a different understanding of the customer, which leads to disconnected campaigns, messaging, creative, and measurement. The fix isn't better creative first. The fix is aligning on who you're trying to reach.

David Siciliano: Cool. Enjoy the conversation. Hey, Mike. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Mike Rizzo: Thank you. I'm stoked. I'm glad to be here. I just wish my setup was as awesome as yours is with the cool cushy chairs, so I could not be in my office chair right now.

David Siciliano: Designed by Jess herself. I wanted to start with who you are, but more so: what is marketing ops for people who don't know, and why should they care about it?

Mike Rizzo: That's a great question. So I'm Mike Rizzo, CEO and founder of MarketingOps.com. Marketing ops is a profession where individuals help integrate technology into a modern marketing and sales motion. Today, fundamentally, sales and marketing does not happen without technology for the most part. And if you want those technologies to work to the best of their abilities in service of your specific hypothesis — every business is a little different — you're going to want somebody to manage that technology in a way that's aligned to those business goals and KPIs, and knows how these tools connect together. That's a marketing operations professional. And MarketingOps.com is a space for all of those professionals to come together.

David Siciliano: I would imagine this space has changed over the years, or maybe didn't even exist a number of years ago. How have you seen it change?

Mike Rizzo: It has changed a lot. Marketing ops as a category definitely did not exist probably 15 years ago. People were doing the act of marketing operations, but they weren't calling themselves that. It really evolved out of the B2B sector. You'll see it in B2C as "lifecycle marketer" or "marketing automation specialist," but they're largely the same thing. In B2B, we ended up calling it marketing operations, and that was perpetuated by an organization known as Marketo, acquired by Adobe many years ago. They advocated for the importance of having a very technical individual on the marketing side to use a technology that was frankly kind of hard to use. You could do a lot, it was really powerful, but it needed some technical chops.

David Siciliano: Okay, I want to get into what's broken. When you walk into an organization, what do you try to understand first, to know if their marketing foundation's healthy before getting into any creative campaigns?

Mike Rizzo: There's quite a bit you need to look at underneath the hood. First and foremost, what systems are in place? If you're at an enterprise, you'd expect a series of tools already in place — everything from a CRM where you manage contacts and relationships, to deal-desk technology for sales and territory planning, to marketing automation. So at first glance it's a bunch of interviews with stakeholders. You're trying to say, "How do you do your job today? What tools are you using, in what ways?" And then as you get into that ecosystem of what we refer to as go-to-market technology, you start to uncover: how are they being used? What tools are talking to each other, or aren't? And underneath that, what data is driving the decisions? Before you get into any campaign structures, it really comes down to a foundational data layer: are we aligned on the most important things for us to keep an eye on? And if that's true, how is that matriculated through the rest of the go-to-market ecosystem to enable the rest of the teams? It's like — I imagine if there were psychologists, they're trying to dig down deeper into the root cause of the thing that makes you the way you are. That's probably the closest I can get to it. You need to dig in really deep to figure out, well, why is this thing doing this, and why do people think this is the right way for an organization?

David Siciliano: Why does that matter? Because I hear you saying this didn't exist before all these tools came around that could measure things and give you data. It sounds like not every company has all that data in one place, or it's not organized. You told me a really fun story about aligning on a story internally before you start working on anything. Is that where you're getting to?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. The reason it matters to have a really solid understanding of the foundational data that drives business decisions is, to put it simply, so the right hand knows what the left is doing. Historically there's a lack of alignment between the goals for marketing versus the goals for sales. A lot of that is driven by a complete miss on: "I think this is a high-quality account for you to talk to, and I represent the marketing team." And then the sales team is like, "That's bananas. We've tried to talk to accounts just like that for the last seven months and it's not gonna fly." That shared definition of what success looks like, what our ultimate objectives are as an organization, and then down to the team level, really boils down to how do we measure that. For a marketing operations professional it used to just be that you managed a couple of common marketing tools — email platforms, landing page builders, webinar tools. But what's evolved today is that you get to be a steward of aligning teams on those core definitions that define what success looks like. You get to act like Switzerland — you're an impartial party that says, "Hang on a second. This is what marketing says, this is what sales is saying, and this is the data I have visibility into. Which point do you both want to pay attention to? Because I don't want to surface 50 of these in a report, especially when you're both saying something different." You need to be the steward of that alignment discussion.

David Siciliano: We see that all the time. When we get pulled into projects and there's a brief, sometimes the brief is made by revenue or the marketing person, and then the CEO or CMO or some other department comes in and goes, "Well, actually, it's really this," and it becomes really confusing for us. We're like, "Wait, so what are we making?" What's something everyone can do to align the team?

Mike Rizzo: Set aside ego. That is the one thing every single organization can do. Recognize that a company truly exists to serve its customers. If you're operating under the premise of "does the thing we're doing deliver on the promise or the value to our customers or would-be customers" — like in the case of Savvy, you're often sharing messages that would resonate with would-be customers, sometimes with current customers — ultimately it needs to pull through that message that says, "This is the promise we make to you," or "This is the value we deliver to the market." If you're all thinking of it that way, you can set aside the "I'm comped on the fact that I hit a million dollars of pipeline" thing. Cool, that's how you make money. But if you do it in a way that doesn't align to the reason this company exists and the value we're trying to deliver to our end customer, then you're probably not a very good fit for the team. It's really hard to drive alignment in organizations, and it's hard to be objective when your comp depends on hitting a number.

David Siciliano: One thing you're not saying, because to you it's a given, is that there's data pointing to answers. As someone who talks to lots of companies, that's something we see often — there are a lot of ideas of what's performing well, or things they want to try because they want to, but it's really hard to get actual "well, how is it performing? What does your data say?" Can you speak on that?

Mike Rizzo: It's a big problem. As a marketing operations professional, you're constantly trying to look at the underlying naming conventions and systems you're building to create a more scalable go-to-market motion. Concretely: every email sent related to this type of campaign is going to have a very specific naming convention, and that trickles all the way to a performance ad that needs specific naming conventions related to the overarching campaign, plus the UTMs we use to track analytics all the way through. When you're not aligning systems that way, the signals become mixed and lost in the noise of "well, we got a bunch of deals, so I think it probably came from the ads, right?" And it's like, well, maybe. More often than not, doing things in conjunction with each other is a one-plus-one-equals-three kind of thing. In a lot of studies, running ads alongside outbound sales — emails and calls — your funnel is impacted positively as a result of doing those two things together. If you do just one and not the other, you don't see the same results. A company's ability to go to market is wholly dependent on two things. One is that there's an immeasurable thing happening — you need the brand out in the world, you need people to have exposure to the value and the promise you're trying to make. And you also need other activities to drive that message home and reinforce it: "yes, I saw a video ad, and now there's somebody in my inbox reminding me I saw that thing." If you do just one of those things, it may not work as well, and you may dismiss the idea that "I can't do video content because it doesn't pay off." Well, you're not bolstering it in the best way to squeeze the juice from the overall effort. Get the systems in place to track the outcome, and the hypothesis needs to accept that by doing these two or three things with a shared message structure, the thing we're tracking is: this is the message we're putting into the market, and does this message drive pipeline results? Not "does this one video drive the best outcome." There's A/B testing for a reason — you can measure one creative versus another. But ultimately the real test is: did this message land with the market or not? Not this one ad campaign versus the email campaign — they're very different mediums, it's not worth measuring against each other. Really what you're looking for is: did we successfully enter a new market? Were we good at selling this product with this message versus that message?

David Siciliano: Totally. We actually have a great example. We were working with a supplement company made by a vein doctor. They have one for healthy veins, to get rid of varicose veins, and one for hemorrhoids, which you're not allowed to say on TV. We made ads for three of these products. And they said, "Well, the vein formula is our best-selling one, so let's make that." We always make three concepts now, for exactly this reason. Great, but what else are you trying to sell? "Well, we really like our hemorrhoids product." Okay, well, we can't say it, so we made the ads. The vein formula one performed fine — it has doctors talking about it, mailings, newsletters, all these other motions, so people already know about it. But the hemorrhoids one they weren't doing anything for. What was interesting: people were going to the website, lots of visits, lots of add-to-carts, more consideration needed — because the data was saying, "They've never heard of this, but they're really intrigued. You should actually put your spend here on this specific channel, because you haven't touched it anywhere else." That was a whole different conversation, whereas the initial discovery call was "well, we'll see with sales monthly if it's working." It's a little more complex than that.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, and that's the reason I'm really stressed about this idea you see all over the web that "marketing is dead," that there's a one-person army with agents that can do all these things. If the deterministic value of success — whether it's a human or an AI — is just "did we get sales or not," the underpinning message of what you just shared is: no, there's a ton of signal and market demand. If you're not measuring that, and your data isn't structured to capture it, an AI would say "nope, didn't work." Unless you go out of your way to train that AI to be super specific about measuring all these things. It's the same as training a human. But humans naturally look for relationships between endpoints that are not yet determined. To your hemorrhoid example — maybe you pair it with a few doctors who now have conversations about "no, this is a really trusted supplement, you should use it," and now the customer feels validated. That's data that's really rich and valuable, but it takes more than one effort to bring it home. I'm stressed by the concept that people think AI can somehow solve for these very disconnected concepts. It takes a lot of training to get it there.

David Siciliano: You still need the engineer, the knowledge, the training, you still need to ask the right questions. That's what this whole show is about — what questions should marketers be asking going into these campaign meetings. The reason I wanted to bring you on: "who's your target audience" is always the first thing we ask for any project. But I don't always trust the answer, because where are they getting the answer from?

Jess Siciliano: Sometimes they think it's a different type of person.

David Siciliano: We're making one ad, but for four different types of people. So of course the creative gets really diluted and it doesn't perform well, and then "we didn't do a good job." But then we work with a brand who's like, "Okay, here's what's working on Meta, this is the data we're seeing, this is our messaging right now, this is what we're trying." And it's like, oh, this is going to be fun. Now we can come up with different ideas, they can be small, we can test them.

Mike Rizzo: And that stuff matters. I don't mean to toot your horn, but one of the unique learnings on my journey of building brand, building business, building community, is that you really do have to try to understand your audience and get to the core of what message you're trying to put into the market. When you're asking questions as a creative agency — what's your TAM, your SAM, your SOM, who's your overarching market, who are you specifically homing in on, who are the personas and what do they care about — everything down to "do they drive a van." I made the argument probably 15 years ago: "Hey, when we build out our personas in HubSpot" — it had a persona-building tool — I was pushing our team, "do you think they drive a minivan?" I'm a B2B software marketer. Mavenlink was the company at the time. And they're like, "Why does that matter?" And I'm like, "Because I'm a classically trained marketer and that's the way my brain works. Because I want to know that if we were to host an event alongside a minivan drag-race competition, it would speak volumes to the people that happen to want to buy our software. Maybe that would work."

David Siciliano: That's a great concept for a software company, by the way. People racing, and someone shows up with a minivan, but it's so functional. Maybe it's not sexy, but it's so functional.

Mike Rizzo: So functional. And that again illustrates the point — if you can drive down from your total addressable market into personas, into nitty-gritty details around what they might care about, you can come up with interesting campaign ideas. A minivan is a high-utility vehicle that works really well for somebody with a lot of equipment and kids. But guess what, you're also a business owner. If I was running a SaaS or services company, I'm herding a lot of cats — designers, developers, project managers. A minivan encompasses the same vibe: I can get a lot done with this thing. And if they happen to care about minivans, it works. By the way, they didn't care about minivans, I'm positive. But you know.

David Siciliano: We talk about this all the time, because I also have a traditional agency background, and the world was like, "Okay, what are the other beers doing? Let's do something similar or competitive." And it's like, no — who's the person drinking this? What other things are they doing? What kind of house do they live in?

Jess Siciliano: Because they're not the same person as another brand.

David Siciliano: No, they're not. What's their favorite drink brand doing — maybe we emulate one of their commercials instead. What's their favorite shoe brand doing? Okay, maybe we should do something like Nike, but for a beverage — not have the horses in the bar, and have it be more like the reward after performing well. It's a whole different type of campaign that gets a really specific audience. And now, because even TV is measurable and targetable to the IP address, you can really target specific audiences through the creative itself, not just on the back end when you're setting up your campaign. That's a huge change.

Mike Rizzo: It's a really big change. For anybody watching this as a learner who didn't know you could understand the performance of TV ads to the IP level — that means, yeah, where you live, we know the performance of that stuff. Don't be freaked out. They don't necessarily know anything else, but they do know whether or not you saw an ad.

David Siciliano: So let's talk more about this reframe. Give me the bullet points. What's something these companies can be doing as a checklist before going into a creative call — things like a single source of truth?

Mike Rizzo: Things companies can do to drive a better outcome for any campaign: single source of truth is super valuable. I'd argue people are conflicted on what that is. Historically it's been a CRM where you log all your customers, prospects, and deal records. In B2C land you tend to have a data lake, data warehouse, or CDP — customer data platform — become the single source of truth. What's fascinating today is that's shifting into B2B more, which is nice. Ultimately it allows you to align on the core data points that make up your market. With AI today you get to play in that sandbox a lot more efficiently. Get to a place where you've truly defined who are we, why do we exist, who do we exist for, and then how do we categorize that information into a system of record — a CDP, data lake, or CRM, please not a spreadsheet. That'll help drive a lot of the conversations forward. And then from there it's, well, who are we talking to this time? About what?

David Siciliano: Based off the measurements, right?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. If you're an early-stage startup, obviously you're testing a lot of things. But for those that have been in market for a while, by establishing the right foundational systems of record — those core data points. By way of example, let's pretend there are seven core data points that really matter to you: company size, revenue, the industry they're in, the specific product they're interested in. And "what product are they interested in" doesn't come pre-built in a CRM — you have to have a hypothesis that says, "We need to track which products and services they're interested in, and reliably get that information so I can make more informed decisions later to go target more people that look like this." And then their job title for the individual who first came into the pipeline, and the person who ended up signing. There's probably only a handful of really valuable data points that give you clear signal and let you start making decisions. You can go deeper, but if you just get those first few things lined up, you're going to be in a much better place than 99% of your competition.

David Siciliano: And your creative team will love you, because those become all of the details for the story structure. Who are we, what's the conflict, what are the obstacles, where are we — the location. What you just listed, the answers are all those things.

Jess Siciliano: This is literally how we come up with concepts.

David Siciliano: Right. "It's got to look like a medium business, so we're in a corporate office. They have a nice car, nice clothes." It's literally doing all the creative direction for us.

Mike Rizzo: It's fun to see the overlap between what feels like such a nerdy subject — understanding business health and performance — get tied back to something perceived in the eyes of the market as this very brand, top-of-funnel thing. They're so far apart. But this creative go-to-market motion functions first as a hypothesis if you have no data yet, and it's really good to do that. But once you get data, everything else fuels that thing, and it gets better over time. When someone says "you're data-informed," or "you're a data-forward company," I'd be like, "Really? Show me the last creative campaign you built based on the real data you saw." I would be shocked.

Jess Siciliano: I was just thinking, a lot of these companies — I wonder if that's sometimes where ego comes from with some people we work with. They wish their target audience wasn't their target audience. They wish they shopped at better shops, they wish they had a better car.

David Siciliano: Aspirations.

Jess Siciliano: Yeah. And then we make this video, and it's not at all where they're at. It's not aligned at all. I wonder if that's sometimes where that comes from.

David Siciliano: We sometimes get, "Hey, by the way, we can't have any palm trees in the location we pick, because everyone who buys this is in Kentucky." That's a true story.

Mike Rizzo: That's a great point. How would you know that outside of looking at some level of data? And if you're trying to work through your go-to-market hypothesis and you think you can manifest a customer — that's a problem.

Jess Siciliano: We have that. Clients want to manifest a different type of customer.

David Siciliano: "We're really about this," and it's like, cool, I love that — what are your top-performing ads? Or they want to grow into that, that's fine.

Jess Siciliano: There's a difference between that being your goal and that being where you're at.

David Siciliano: The reason I was excited to talk to you about this: it's hard on our end, because how are we measuring success? We can make something amazing — it could be cheap, it could be expensive, it doesn't really matter. If we can't measure success, we won't know anyway. So it becomes a much harder process. But if we can come into the conversation before we're concepting anything with, "Hey, we all agree and we're data-supported on who we're talking to, this is our messaging, it's going to all these different places," now we can actually do something. And it can be something we build on over time.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. When someone who's really good at creative work can think like the data-informed marketer — or at least ask the questions to get you to think that way — it should be a clear signal you're working with a highly skilled creative team. It's rare to find people who are marketers and creative folks at the same time. The level of fun we get to have with our brand at Marketing Ops with you is turned up a notch, partially because we've gotten to know each other, but also because we know who our persona is. We know our audience really, really well, and we're as data-informed as we can be — I've done five years of research with them, I know where their pain points are and where they're growing. There's a message we want to put into the market, but it needs to meet them where they're at in their career journey. And we want to do that through our brand tone of voice. That's where the creative aspect comes in: how do we make this fun but still accessible? Those are conversations you can't have unless your creative team is really thinking about the marketing side of it.

David Siciliano: Okay, you ready for a quick-fire round? I'm going to say some sentences, give me your hot take — true, false, whatever you want.

Mike Rizzo: As ready as I'll ever be.

David Siciliano: Personas are dead.

Mike Rizzo: False.

David Siciliano: Most companies already have enough customer data.

Mike Rizzo: Yes. It's a reserved yes, because it needs a qualifier — I'm a data nerd. Most companies who've been around for five years have enough customer data, yes. But if you're just getting started, no.

Jess Siciliano: The problem isn't missing data, it's disconnected data.

Mike Rizzo: Hard yes on that. More often than not, it's just not talking to the right systems.

David Siciliano: Every campaign should start with an audience definition.

Mike Rizzo: Every campaign should start with an audience definition, I think — but your ICP can adapt over time. It probably doesn't need to change every single week. So yes, but you should have some established rules for audience definitions that shouldn't change for too long. Run a hypothesis for longer than one effort.

Jess Siciliano: The best-performing asset is rarely the most expensive one.

Mike Rizzo: For sure agree. I've got countless examples in my life — social posts that did super well because it was one sentence, and it cost me no money.

David Siciliano: Marketing ops should have a seat in the creative discussion.

Mike Rizzo: I'd say it depends. I'd love for marketing ops to be able to, for those who have the appetite to be involved at that level. But at times you'll feel pressure like you're supposed to contribute, and you shouldn't feel that pressure — you should just be informed by what they're trying to do and help enable it. For some it might not be the best room to be in. But for others they're like, "Heck yeah, I want to be part of that conversation, because I want to come up with a minivan idea."

Jess Siciliano: If someone only remembers one thing from today's conversation, what should it be?

Mike Rizzo: Creative is made better when backed by data. That is the one thing someone needs to take away from this entire conversation.

David Siciliano: I loved it.

Jess Siciliano: I loved it too.

David Siciliano: Thanks. Anything you want to plug?

Mike Rizzo: Just work with your marketing technologist, whoever that might be. If you don't have one, find somebody and help them enable you to have more impactful go-to-market motions across the board. The health of your business is wholly dependent on the data you have access to, and there are people there to help you do that. And I'll plug a book: Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen. One of the coolest examples in it makes your brain kind of light on fire — the McDonald's McFlurry. When you think about that product, what's its competition? A lot of people, similar to the beer example from before, might think it's other slushies from 7-Eleven or Dairy Queen. But what they found by talking to and observing the market is that its biggest competitor was actually other breakfast foods and lunches. Its competitive landscape was way more than its category competitors — it was the full spectrum of "how do I feel satiated and enjoy what I'm eating while I'm stuck in traffic on my way to the office."

David Siciliano: You're so right. That's amazing, such a good example. I have a strong memory of the only time I ever had an Oreo milkshake, which is similar to the McFlurry, but from Carl's Jr. — it was when I'd get my cavities filled as a kid. And I had, wait for it, 19 cavities filled. So it's a strong memory of, I have Novocaine, I can't eat anything, my mom feels terrible for me, and she's like, "It's okay, you get to look forward to the Oreo milkshake after."

Mike Rizzo: You just had 19 cavities, so here's your Oreo milkshake.

David Siciliano: So that's my relationship to that product. Nothing else. I've never had it other than that. So it's not a competition — I'm not seeking a smoothie and going, "maybe I'll have an Oreo one."

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, it was fascinating. The book talked about how their customer is somebody about to get in the car, drive a long distance, sit in traffic, and want to enjoy something tasty while they're in miserable traffic. And oh, by the way, they feel full once they're there. Versus a donut or a banana — they'll eat the banana in a few bites and still be stuck in traffic. It was fascinating to observe: you might not realize who your competition really is until you start digging into the data itself.

David Siciliano: Where can people find you? What is Marketing Ops doing — anything you want people to check out?

Mike Rizzo: You can find me at marketingops.com. Come join our community — become a member for free in the forum, or join us in Slack and a number of other places. We host a conference called MOps-Apalooza. If you ever want to go deep on how modern businesses are going to market with technology, you can attend either online or in person. This year it's online only. And I'm mostly on LinkedIn, so you can find me there.

Jess Siciliano: Thanks so much.

Mike Rizzo: Thank you. This was fun.

Jess Siciliano: Thanks for listening to our podcast today. We explored the intersection of marketing, creativity, and production. If you enjoyed today's episode, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and share this episode with someone on your team — or someone who either needs to lower their ego at work, or who needs to up their data game. If you're looking to create better-performing content, ads, or brand storytelling, you can visit our website, savvystudios.com.