An Interview With Kieran Powell
Enhancing user-centric design and prioritizing the needs of your target audience.
In an age where marketing landscapes are rapidly evolving and consumer behaviors are constantly shifting, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a pivotal role in steering their organizations’ marketing strategies towards success. With a plethora of channels, platforms, and techniques at their disposal, the decision on where to allocate the marketing budget is more critical than ever. We’re seeking to explore questions like: What factors influence their decisions? How do they balance between digital and traditional marketing channels? What role does data play in their decision-making process? And importantly, why they choose to invest in certain areas over others? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dorian Kendal.
Dorian Kendal brings a wealth of experience building and leading high-performing global marketing and web engineering teams. He joins Netlify from Unity, where he launched the company’s subscription business and oversaw onboarding and retention. Kendal also owned a consulting business where he guided high-profile clients including Google, Twitter and Meta. At Netlify, he will focus on expanding global brand awareness and bringing to market tech stacks that solve some of the most pervasive problems digital businesses face today.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My career has not followed the “normal” path. I didn’t originally start in marketing — my career began in operations at a large consulting firm. After a few years on the road and knee-deep in major projects, I left the firm and went on to work with companies like Google, Dolby, and X in various capacities.
While I enjoyed operations and business consulting, it was never what I wanted to do long-term. I have always been fascinated by linguistics and social psychology. Understanding how people communicate, the words we use and how we use them led me to a love of marketing: the perfect intersection of the two. After getting my marketing feet wet at Trulia, I decided to make the full pivot to marketing at Unity Technologies, where I worked for over 5 years.
While at Unity, I had to learn fast. Because I built the team that owned the entire digital experience for new and existing users, while also managing the team that led the e-commerce asset store, I got the opportunity to tackle multiple challenges. Through innovative marketing and growth campaigns, we took a new business from $0 to over $38M within 2.5 years, enhancing the success and growth of Unity’s free user base. During the first 2.5 years, the global web team and website reported to me. Getting campaigns live and making changes was painful and often excruciating. This was because a monolithic web architecture shackled us. Simple things like adding a countdown clock to a landing page took weeks!
After leaving Unity, I stumbled upon Netlify as I was looking for my next chapter. I had a call with the CEO and was amazed that their solution would have saved me so much pain and anxiety just a few years prior. As I learned more, I was hooked. Netlify offered a pathway to move away from monolithic architecture, which was admittedly, the source of my pain. I was so intrigued that I didn’t just become an advocate for their new vision for web development and marketing — I joined the team as CMO in 2022.
Reflecting on my past experiences, I can confidently say that it is important to proactively seek new opportunities that align with one’s passions. My journey proves that prioritizing creativity and curiosity is the way to shape a fulfilling career path.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I moved to San Francisco from Toronto in a quest to immerse myself in the world of tech — so I was new both to the US and to Silicon Valley. My first client was a company called Excite @Home, and my first meeting with them was an important one, with the client project team and many of the company’s executives. Knowing who would be in the audience, I wore my best button-down shirt and slacks. Confidently, I walked into the meeting only to find a group of people in t-shirts and worn-out jeans. I stood out like I had never before. We had the meeting, and when it finished the partner from my firm pulled me aside and said, “Dorian, your clothes are making people here uncomfortable. Please don’t ever wear anything like this again.” I was mortified.
What did I learn from this? I learned that you should never make assumptions about what will work for a given audience, but rather be curious and ask questions. What works in some environments won’t necessarily work in others, so don’t use previous experience as an absolute answer for solving current problems.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I’ve recently found myself fascinated by generative AI and how it can fundamentally change the productivity of teams. I know there is a hype cycle around AI right now, but we at Netlify are helping it deliver on its promise to our developer community.
As a first step into AI for developers, we recently released a feature we refer to as the AI-Enabled Deploy Assist. With this, when a developer tries to deploy some code and it fails, they can click a “Why did it fail?” button, and with AI they will get a diagnosis of the cause of the failure and how to resolve it in mere seconds. This could otherwise take many hours of work identifying the problem and then even more hours researching how to fix it. This is a productivity game changer for any teams building, launching, or maintaining web experiences.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. Can you share an experience where a unique or unconventional budget allocation led to unexpected success in your marketing campaign?
As we were entering the final stages of preparing for a major conference we were hosting, a software provider of ours offered our engineering team some service credits in exchange for a sponsorship of the event. These credits released budgeted funds for those services from engineering. Given the credits were for a sponsorship of a marketing event, the budgeted funds were transferred to the event. With those surprise funds, we were able to host a VIP event for our key partners that drove a significant amount of pipeline that was otherwise not planned and was an unexpected success!
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
It is a fine balance, especially when you have pipeline targets you need to meet. Trends don’t make those targets go away, unfortunately.
That being said, I believe it is really important to experiment with new tactics, approaches, and strategies to see if they can work for your organization. Just doing what worked in the past over and over again won’t provide the step-change growth that the market now expects. My general philosophy is to start with an investment in what you know works so that you can achieve your baseline goals, then experiment with what’s new to accelerate results and exceed goals.
As an example, when the idea of growth marketing first emerged, it brought with it a focus on experimentation. This was at the core of the trend, and it pushed companies to be more creative, to try things, to fail and to learn. The permission to fail that the growth mindset brought with it gave leaders like myself the freedom to unlock ideas that we might have previously dismissed.
In what ways has data-driven decision-making influenced your approach to allocating marketing budgets, and can you provide an example of this in action?
I have always been a huge proponent of making decisions based on data, not hunches and assumptions. Otherwise, I feel like there is a risk of falling into the “random acts of marketing” trap. So, for every campaign we run, my team determines success criteria in advance, and we use this as our guide as we make decisions around resource allocations.
One of the most common examples of this in action is how I allocate budgets across social media channels. When we devise a campaign, we set a return on ad spend (ROAS) goal. Usually, this is around 3:1. As we go live on channels like X, Meta and Google, we establish firmographics and then track ad and/ or paid search performance. We adapt our approach and budget very quickly if a given channel is not performing in line with our ROAS goal.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
When it comes to investing in different marketing channels, marketers need to plan proactively and make informed decisions on resource allocation based on the needs of the business and overarching marketing goals. A marketing plan also must identify clear KPIs, as this will allow you to analyze your progress quantitatively and communicate your successes and failures to both the CMO and the C-Suite.
However, this is not a one-and-done process. Outcomes fluctuate with the seasons, campaigns and macroeconomic conditions. Therefore, marketers need to continuously calculate ROI across marketing channels, including specific metrics related to conversions based on differing touchpoints, throughout the year. Marketers can then use insights gained from this to highlight high-performing and low-performing touchpoints and channels to understand better where to cut back on spending and optimize their resources. Overall, taking a data-centric approach to evaluating the ROI of different marketing channels ensures an accurate and effective allocation of resources.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget, and Why?”
- Allocating funds to unlock unprecedented marketing productivity and effectiveness.
In this macroeconomic environment, resources feel like they are more constrained than they have been in over a decade. Marketers are being asked to do more with less, and all spending is under the finance microscope. We as marketers need to be super thoughtful about where we spend money and why. Enter AI. We have made a concerted effort to incorporate AI into nearly all of our processes to increase our productivity. For example, before a piece of content is published, we run it through AI to optimize it for search. Previously, we would have needed an individual to spend hours to complete a task that AI can now do for us in a matter of seconds.
2. Building a tech stack to support rising standards for campaign personalization and dynamic web experiences.
The old days of “one-size-fits-all” monolithic tech stacks are over. They are restricted in what they can serve to consumers that is truly unique, and personalization is most often at a group, versus individual, level. At Netlify, we use a more modern stack of tools that allows us to unlock truly unique digital experiences. We recently found great success by adopting our visual editing solution, which now allows any marketer or content editor to make changes immediately (subject to governance rules, of course), without having to wait for a developer’s help.
3. Incorporating evolving technologies, such as AI and composable web architecture.
Companies that do not want to be disrupted need to adopt evolving technologies like AI and composable web architecture. AI provides powerful opportunities to personalize experiences for consumers, while composable web architecture provides the infrastructure, orchestration and interoperability needed to extract the best from an ever-increasing ecosystem of tools and services. At Netlify our stack is fully composable, giving us the ability to easily swap out solutions when we find a service or tool that better meets our needs. We can move fast as a result of the flexibility composable provides.
4. Shifting from traditional web platforms to emphasizing flexible web architecture.
As a marketer myself, I lived with the pain of an inflexible monolithic tech stack for many years. Any changes were painful and took what felt like an eternity. We could only push changes to our site weekly, which was a major challenge when we had time-sensitive changes to make. Skip forward to where I am today and our flexible web architecture, and we are pushing changes, on average, 27 times a day! It is incredible to see what this change has unlocked not just for our site, but for our team, which can now work more independently.
5. Enhancing user-centric design and prioritizing the needs of your target audience.
With the introduction of generative AI, we are seeing a rapid acceleration in the production of code, the introduction of devices and the expectations of consumers — what I would call “UI 2.0”. These ever-evolving and increasing expectations require us to continuously evaluate whether what we are delivering is putting our users first.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on your overall marketing strategy?
As my current company has moved up the market, targeting enterprise-size companies, we decided that a company-branded conference would be a key ingredient in our overall marketing strategy. The challenge was that we had not allocated a budget for this event when we went through the financial exercise months previously. So, while we had the idea and knew it was a priority, we didn’t have the funds and needed to make a tough decision. We turned over every rock, and the only area where there was money we could move was paid search. We did a deep dive into our paid search performance, identified the tradeoffs of reallocating the budget to this event, and then made the decision to move the money. In the end it paid off, big time. Our return from the event far exceeded what we forecast from our paid search initiative. It was risky and a challenging choice to make, but the bold move worked for us and our overall marketing strategy.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
If I could start a movement, it would focus on leveraging the storytelling powers of marketing to promote a culture of empowerment and compassion. Environments that cultivate empathy and openness are guaranteed to translate to success in professional and personal experiences.
To put such a movement into action, there should be an emphasis on angling stories around the success of those with diverse backgrounds and experiences. Additionally, executive teams can share personal narratives about growth to serve as sources of inspiration. Lastly, brand messaging should creatively incorporate values of empowerment to motivate their audience.
My proposed movement is reflective of my own career path that led me from operations to marketing — I’ve been lucky to be in really collaborative, open environments that can be harnessed for social impact. I believe my career has been successful due to empathetic leadership and mentorship, as well as working with teams that bring together a diverse set of experiences, skills, and backgrounds.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me on LinkedIn as well as Netlify’s social media (Linkedin, X).
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
CMO Perspectives: Dorian Kendal Of Netlify On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget and Why was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.