An Interview With Kieran Powell
Don’t trust the data.
Most digital data is corrupted with bots, fraud, and imprecise targeting. In one Twitter campaign, my target was American veterinarians who skewed towards middle-aged women. When I looked deeply at the data, many of the ads served to teenage males in India! I mentioned the research earlier where 99% of the traffic from TikTok ads came from bots.
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 Dekker Fraser.
Dekker Fraser was the Vice President of Marketing for a Google accelerator startup and a Global Brand Manager for Sony PlayStation. He has over one million enrollments in his Udemy marketing courses and graduated from the Kellogg School of Management. Dekker.page
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?
I started my career as a graphic designer. I quickly pivoted to marketing when I realized that lead generation was what kept the business from going bankrupt.
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 thought I had found the perfect target customer for a new brand that I was launching at PlayStation. No other segment would value the product as much as they would. There was just one problem: that segment was tiny and would be nothing more than a blip on Sony’s financials. That realization fundamentally changed my approach to marketing strategy. I realized that perfect targeting and positioning is not as important as catering to areas of large demand.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I just reached a major milestone of one million enrollments in my marketing courses and will be featured soon in TechCrunch. Next, I’m planning to build a course on advanced B2B positioning. I’ll address the two major mistakes in B2B positioning: (1) trying too hard to differentiate your offering when buyers are not looking for anything unique and (2) not calculating value propositions to identify which factors are creating or destroying the most value.
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?
Conventional marketing wisdom is that you should spread your budget evenly throughout the year with a variety of media. With the help of my colleagues, I concluded that there are special cases where the exact opposite is true. Sometimes it’s better to spend most of your budget in an unbelievably short amount of time to break through the noise. I did this successfully with video advertising in one instance and influencer marketing in another.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
I see marketing as I see investment portfolio management. Often it’s best to make a few big, bold bets knowing that the majority of them will not payoff. A couple of exceptional performers will make up for lackluster performance elsewhere. The famous investor Peter Lynch calls these “tenbaggers.” In the entertainment industry, they’re known as blockbusters.
I once hired an agency to develop this super creative interactive chatbot game that was a total flop. I also invested in an over-the-top advertisement with an energetic actor that was a big success. You have to get comfortable with failure if you really want to break through the noise.
The most important consideration is whether the new concept can reach a lot of people. Don’t expect anything to magically go viral without a clear distribution plan.
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?
Lately, I’ve relied a lot on the research of the MIT PhD Dr. Augustine Fou. His data show that about 99% of the traffic from TikTok ads are bots and almost half of the traffic from programmatic ads. After looking at my own data, I’ve completely stopped Google Display Ads and gotten really strict about placements on YouTube and Facebook.
With performance marketing or demand generation, it’s easy to differentiate a good channel from a bad one. With long-term brand marketing, however, you have to be very vigilant. Consider, for example, Google recently getting sued for inflating video ad metrics.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
It’s very difficult to compare channels due to bots, inflated metrics, lack of standardization, and flawed attribution models. If you launch a direct mail campaign to generate meetings and your pipeline suddenly surges, it’s pretty obvious that the channel warrants further investment. With brand marketing and integrated campaigns, however, you cannot accurately break down performance.
The biggest consideration for me is how confident I am that I’m reaching the right target buyers. YouTube ads, for example, are often viewed by children in foreign countries who don’t speak English. That’s true even when you set the targeting as English-speaking adult Americans. You have to really dig deep with your audits to identify which channels are reaching the right people.
The right audience also varies considerably by what stage of the funnel you are focused on. You might begin a B2B campaign by targeting just a handful of CEOs with expensive thought leadership direct mail. As more departments get involved in the purchase decision, you can expand to cheaper LinkedIn ads.
If I’m confident in the targeting then the next relevant question is reach. Can I reach my TAM at a reasonable cost based on factors like CPM? Channels that scale well are worth more investment.
I place a premium on context-specific placements. For example, a Reddit ad targeting someone researching a specific problem is more valuable than a Facebook ad when someone’s randomly scrolling. An interview on a veterinarian podcast that reaches 1,000 veterinarians is more valuable than sending 1,000 cold emails.
I also place a premium on widely trusted channels such as CNN, TechCrunch, or well-known YouTube channels.
I assess each channel based on objectives such as raising category awareness or triggering an immediate sale.
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?”
1 . Allocate your budget based on six objectives:
Top-of-funnel: (1) brand awareness & (2) problem awareness
Middle-of-funnel: (3) category awareness & (4) product awareness
Bottom-of-funnel: (5) free offer awareness & (6) paid offer awareness
The big question to ask yourself is: how much am I willing to invest in long-term growth vs generating sales this quarter?
One company I worked for did an excellent job at the bottom-of-funnel, promoting free giveaways through Google ads and converting leads into paying customers. When they applied those same skills to TV advertising, however, they weren’t very successful. TV doesn’t generally do a good job of capturing people who are in market and likely to convert quickly. It does, however, do an excellent job at raising awareness for brands.
Start with the objective first and then find the appropriate channels.
2 . Don’t trust the platform.
Most advertising platforms aren’t looking out for your best interest. They just want you to spend more money. When LinkedIn tells you the normal range for bidding, go even lower. When Google tells you to raise your budget, ignore it. When Facebook wants to expand your reach, assume they’ll target the wrong people. As a general rule, disable default settings.
YouTube, for example, automatically tells me to increase my budget even in cases where that couldn’t possibly solve a problem such as a targeting issue.
3 . Don’t trust the data.
Most digital data is corrupted with bots, fraud, and imprecise targeting. In one Twitter campaign, my target was American veterinarians who skewed towards middle-aged women. When I looked deeply at the data, many of the ads served to teenage males in India! I mentioned the research earlier where 99% of the traffic from TikTok ads came from bots.
The data you can trust the most are your own. Look at Salesforce, HubSpot, or whatever CRM are you using. Look at the results of surveys and focus groups you managed.
4 . Concentrate on activities that can produce disproportionate returns.
The big challenge with marketing today is the overwhelming amount of noise. You really have to fight just to get noticed and then fight even harder to be remembered. To break through the clutter, focus on investments that have the potential for huge payoffs. As Mr. Beast says, “A 10% better video is not 10% more views, but 4x more views” and “It’s much easier to get 5,000,000 views on one video, than 100,000 views on 50 videos.”
A great example of this is the moldy burger campaign from Burger King. Not only does the ad grab attention, but it also generates a ripple effect through word-of-mouth and memorability. The best investments are those that generate waves.
Some ways I emulate this philosophy is by concentrating on the best influencers and the best publications, based on Sparktoro’s data. I also focus on bold creative — such as YouTube ads — with over-the-top messages.
5 . Leave money for labor.
A lot of money gets gobbled up by marketing technology, but often you’re better off investing in labor. A partnership manager, for example, could grow your customer base by 25% with a single contract. A PR manager could get you featured in major publications that produce more awareness than any advertising could. Technology is great for scaling, but so too are relationships with gatekeepers like journalists, association presidents, and executives at companies that influence your target customers.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on your overall marketing strategy?
I loved YouTube ads because they seemed like the easiest way to elevate awareness. Unlike with social media, an ad on YouTube is a 30-second commercial rather than a 3-second blip. Moreover, YouTube has tremendous reach and powerful in-market targeting. It seemed to be the perfect substitute for the TV brand advertising that had worked for me in the past.
After about a year of running my campaign, I met with a Silicon Valley analytics team who showed me how seriously deceptive YouTube’s targeting is.
Despite the sunk cost and attachment to what YouTube promised, I had to allocate my budget elsewhere. Reddit has shown the most promise so far, with an 80% drop in CPM and a 33% drop in CPC. Without panel data, however, it’s hard to assess the metric that matters most for this campaign: brand memorability.
While YouTube was by far the better option in terms of media, poor targeting trumped any creative advantage.
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. 🙂
A lot of atrocities stem from people thinking they need to release their anger. I’d like to see people learn how to release that tension internally through practices like meditation.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Search “Dekker” on Udemy.com or check out dekker.page.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thank you 😊
About The Interviewer: Kieran is the EVP of Channel V Media, a Public Relations agency based in New York City with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised over 150 companies in the technology, B2B, retail and financial sectors. Previously Kieran worked at Merrill Lynch, PwC, and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can help achieve your company’s business goals.
CMO Perspectives: Dekker Fraser Of Udemy 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.