Rethinking B2B Marketing: The Power of Programmatic | Brandon Lutz

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Brandon Lutz, Head of Offline and New Media at Miro. Brandon has spent close to 10 years in the B2B marketing world helping brands like Indeed, Amazon, and Miro develop measurement methodologies and strategies globally to grow media investment outside of traditional B2B tactics like search and social media. He's a big believer in the power of programmatic and offline media, and helping B2B brands move into this space, from audio, CTV, and more. Brandon, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Brandon Lutz: Hey, David. It's good to be here. I'm excited to have our conversation today. David McBee: As am I. We did a lot of emailing before this interview, and I'm super excited about all the programmatic knowledge that you have. I was telling you, I feel like you are a gem, and I can't wait to show you off to all of our viewers. Brandon Lutz: All right. Well, the pressure's on, so hopefully I deliver. David McBee: It's an old Dale Carnegie trick, "Give them a reputation to live up to." So now you have to be amazing. Brandon Lutz: Perfect. David McBee: A lot of B2B marketers rely heavily on traditional digital strategies like search, and SEO, and social. Do you really feel like there's a place for programmatic media in that mix? Brandon Lutz: Absolutely, yes. One of the things, having worked in B2B for a very long time, is that you see a lot of consistencies around media mix, and where brands tend to typically stay towards. I think there's a lot of bias towards staying in the channels, like search, and paid social, and SEO because there's high intent, so people are searching for the services they need. They're highly trackable, so you can measure performance. But the truth is, and I think there's a lot of conversations around this in the B2B space, B2B buyers are still people, and we're not all sitting on paid search all the time. Maybe not me or you, but people are out in the world living their lives, consuming media in different places. So for that reason, there's opportunity for your business to be in front of people at different parts of their day. I think if you're just going to stay in high intent places, like paid search and SEO, it's going to limit your ability to reach new buyers and prospective buyers. David McBee: Absolutely. Tell me more about some of the strategies in the programmatic that are valuable to B2B. Brandon Lutz: When it comes to B2B, in my experience where it can cross different brands, what you don't have with maybe a more traditional CPG or more established brands is... I don't know if suspicion is the right word, but maybe a more conservative investment environment. So if you're going to invest in offline or new media, the question is, how do we know that this is going to be the most effective use of our media dollars? I think programmatic fits in here for a couple of different reasons, versus maybe more traditional offline tactics. One would be targeting. Regardless of what the actual tactic is in programmatic, depending on the channel or the platform, you can reach wider swaths of individuals, and you can go beyond just adults 25 to 54, maybe what you see more in terrestrial or linear TV. If there's a specific niche of buyer, there's probably tons of third-party audiences out there that you can use. If there's a specific geography, so maybe you only care about particular buyers in one city or one part of the country, you can select that there. Also, just behavior. So maybe you want to target someone that's walked into a Home Depot or a Target, for whatever reason, there's just more flexibility in who you're reaching. That goes into my second part, which is the flexibility of programmatic. When you have a traditional media tactic, take out-of-home, once you are locked in, there is diminishing returns if you have to pull out, and it's not just about the cost associated, but production costs, the ability to cancel media if you need to, and programmatic just gives you the ability to be way more flexible with your spend. So if you see in multiple regions one is working better than the other, you can pivot your budget quite quickly, and there's very little penalization versus a traditional tactic. That makes it also easier for you to plan tests and experiments. I think the last thing that I would say about programmatic that I really like is that multi-stage, so it can support any stage of the traditional marketing funnel. I'm a huge believer in this. It can be for awareness and consideration at the top, but with the right test design, you can use programmatic media to measure bottom of funnel performance like you would a channel like paid search or SEO. The manner is just a bit different. David McBee: I'm glad you brought up measurement, because I think that's one of the things that keeps advertisers from investing in programmatic, because they don't get that last click attribution. So how do you overcome that objection and prove the effectiveness of programmatic campaigns to your clients? Brandon Lutz: I think the most important thing is, when you are at the stage where you're proposing programmatic or anything that's below or above your traditional B2B tactics that we've discussed earlier, I think the first place you need to start is, as a marketer or marketing leader, you have to be a salesperson for why you're selling this to your leadership or to your clients. That always starts with understanding what is suspicion, if there is one, around testing something like programmatic, or audio, or TV. There's always some reason, "It's too expensive," "I don't think it works," "We can't measure it." Whatever the reason is, it's important as a marketer to understand what the primary concern is so that you can build a story and a narrative to get you the budget, to get you the test, based around that concern. I think a very easy one to start with is, channels like paid search, they have diminishing returns. What I mean by that is, there is not an unlimited amount of people in your audience. If you are in a business where your product has a lot of new entrants or is heavily commoditized, it gets more expensive the more competitive it gets. When it comes to social, or even just talking from a CPM perspective, the more targeted you want to get with an audience, especially if you're looking at a channel like LinkedIn, the more expensive it gets, and there's diminishing returns. It's this reach curve. How many more dollars does it take to get that additional point of reach to that audience that you care about? It's not forever, and it's not that last touch. If you can't measure something with last touch, it does not mean it does not work. I think the hardest thing that you learn as a business, when you start going into more top-of-funnel channels, is letting go of the assumption that, just because it's measured in last touch attribution, that is the only thing that is measurable in marketing. There's building brand equity, there's association of the name with a category. These things are not short-term metrics, which I think a lot of businesses tend to be glued to, like the month-over-month, the quarter-over-quarter. These are just as valuable, especially when you're looking to expand your audience base, and that just takes time. That is a whole different set of measurement tactics and protocols versus, what was the click we got? What was the cost per click into that? Result in a cost per acquisition target that's above or below what we want. Measurement comes in all forms. Back to what I said previously, understanding your business's risk tolerance for investment I think is essential to knowing how to leverage a tactic like programmatic. I think a good example, a very practical example, if your organization is biased towards short-term performance marketing KPIs, and I was looking at a channel like podcasts or audio advertising, broadly speaking, maybe it's radio, maybe it's streaming, maybe it's podcasts, in a B2B context, if that's the case, I would look towards programmatic podcasting as a starting point. Because you can design an incrementality test around a geo-experiment where the metric is maybe the same as your paid search metric, and you can design it in a very data-driven way so that you're doing the new channel, but the metric is still tied to something that the business is still comfortable touching, which is that conversion aspect. You acknowledge it's different, but we're all on the same page. It's like, "I hear you about the concern, let's start here. Let me show you the bottom-of-funnel impact and the benefit," and just set yourself up so that a year later maybe you want to explore something not programmatic. Maybe you want to go into host-read sponsorships. There's no question about the value that channel brings. It's maybe something the business gets more comfortable with. David McBee: That was a great answer. I'm not even kidding. It reminded me, our CRO James Moore often says that, "Giving the last click credit for the sale is giving the last person in a relay race the gold medal," because there's so much more that leads up to that, and you really outlined that so brilliantly. Thank you. Brandon Lutz: Yeah, no worries. It's so important. Yes, obviously being at the moment where someone knows they have a problem is crucial, but a lot of times you want to be at the point of conversation when someone doesn't even know they have the problem. Just being aware that your brand exists is a much easier place to start when they then have a problem they have associated with it. It takes longer to move, but every third-party research around psychology or advertising is going to talk about the importance of brand building, and it's just a different style of measurement, but no less important. David McBee: Well put. All right, let's shift gears a little bit here. It's probably a fair assumption that most B2B businesses don't have the same leeway that your traditional consumer-packaged good clients have when it comes to that top-of-funnel advertising. So for B2B specifically, what advice do you give them? Brandon Lutz: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think the starting point of what I mentioned before is really crucial. So being that salesperson for your marketing organization, understanding the objections that are coming towards you, is I think the most important first step in that journal that I think traditional CPG clients don't have. Why I think that is, if you're looking at a Unilever, Coca-Cola, traditional retail brands, they existed in the industry before the level of advertising was so granular and so data-driven that it's almost institutional, the understanding and the importance of brand. But especially when you start moving into a B2B context, a lot of brands existed and were born out of a world when suddenly everything was measurable. You can see the short-term benefits of a sale. "Why should I not care about that more than brand building? That's like magic woo-woo stuff at the top over here, but I can see the sale." I can understand that perspective. Nevertheless, the assumptions around media being too expensive, the creative, who's going to manage it, these are all objections that can be overcome. Especially in the context of programmatic being expensive, and trying to compare it to a channel like linear TV or out-of-home, your entry costs are substantially smaller, and your risk if things need to change is also much lower. You're not obligated to spend in the same way that you would if you were working with a large television network or something like this. I also would mention, if you're in a startup environment and you're a 10 person team, and you haven't even hit a million dollars in ARR, your media mix as a brand and as a company is going to look, and should look frankly speaking, very different when you get to 10 million, 100 million, 500 million. I think successful companies and marketing organizations understand that has to evolve. You'll look at the marketing mix between companies at different stages and they'll look vastly different, both in scale of specific channels but also in breadth of what they're doing. That's also just a natural evolution. So I think it comes down to, what are the objections? How are we measuring something and articulating the importance of it? And also, just understanding and making sure you're educating your leadership that what worked for us on day one is going to look very different than what we're looking at in year three, year five, based on where the business is. David McBee: I want to touch on something you've mentioned twice in your answers, and that is your reference to being a salesperson. I think a lot of campaign managers don't really think of themselves as salespeople, but you seem to really believe in that concept. Tell us more about that. Brandon Lutz: I think when I started my journey into advertising, when I was applying for jobs out of school, I was actually applying for account manager roles in agencies or in SaaS companies, and I was getting a lot of personal feedback that was like, "You know, we think you'd be great for account management, but we really think that you'd be good at sales," and I was just not into it. I was like, "I am not a salesperson, it's high stress. I want to be the account manager." I used to think of them as very separate. They are entirely different jobs and functions, nevertheless, they go hand in hand. Obviously, in a more specific context, like sales and marketing in a B2B firm should be working together to close deals, but also as I developed professionally and being a leader, it's not just about doing good work, it's about selling people on the vision that you have. That requires a developed skill set of a salesperson. So I'm a huge believer that this is important and essential to being a strong agency leader, marketing leader, whatever it is. David McBee: I really love that. All right. Well, do you have any final words of advice for our viewers? Brandon Lutz: I no longer live and work in the US, so I'm constantly exposed in Europe to the idea of typical American attitudes towards things. One of the things that I appreciate about that is this idea of being bold and taking a risk, and I really lean into that. One of the ideas that I have, or advice I have for people that I work with, clients, whatever, is do the bold thing. Make your calculated risk taking, because often than not, if you thought about a challenge or a media selection, or a marketing campaign, whatever, as long as you're thinking critically about why you want to do it and you identify the risks associated, I think you're going to be okay. Even if something is not successful the first time, doesn't mean that the channel doesn't work, doesn't mean that it's done forever, and it probably means that you learned something good in the process. Not everything I've learned in 10 years has been a win, a lot of that has come through failure. But nevertheless, being able to be a risk-taker, working on teams where my leadership was supportive of risk taking, and making big bets, and being bold made me have a lot of those experiences. Again, whether you're the individual contributor on the team, whether it's the manager in you, be bold, support boldness, take calculated risks. Again, especially tying it back to [inaudible 00:16:40] programmatic, this is an exciting space, it's constantly changing, and it's a way to get people on board with new media. I believe, especially in B2B, this is a totally blue ocean opportunity for B2B brands to be in, so get started. David McBee: Brandon, I think you lived up to the hype. Thank you very much for that. Brandon Lutz: Perfect, then I did my job. David McBee: You did. All right. What is the best way for our viewers to learn more about you? Brandon Lutz: You can find me on LinkedIn, that's where I do a lot of my activities. So if you have feedback about my thoughts, or you just want to chat, you can find me on LinkedIn.com. My LinkedIn handle is Blutz22. That's probably the best place to reach me, I'd say. David McBee: All right, great. Thank you so much for being my guest today. Brandon Lutz: Thank you. Have a good day. David McBee: Thank you guys for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, a comment, a share, or review, and be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed about new episodes. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored, of course, by Simplifi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.