Before You Buy A Customer Data Platform, Listen To This - with Seth Hirsch - Episode 271
INTERVIEW WITH SETH HIRSCH
DESCRIPTION
In today’s podcast, we are continuing our conversation about CDPs with Seth Hirsch, Head of Analytics at Acadia, where he serves as a translator between Acadia’s number-crunching analysts and the clients themselves, explaining client needs to the analysts and data-driven solutions to clients.
Make sure you tune in to find out more!
With a mind for analyzing, Seth took a number of routes in the data-driven retail universe before winding up as Acadia’s Head of Analytics. It’s a position that calls for easy explanations of complex issues.
“What I’ve changed my mind about recently is that there’s no one solution that an ecommerce brand can fit in. They’ve got to figure out all the different components. All the channels where direct consumer was king for a couple of years is having a lens to all the different ways that a brand can sell their goods is more important than ever right now.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In part two of the Seth Hirsch interview, Kiri and Seth discuss:
If companies don’t acquire their own CDP, what are the solutions?
Seth is bringing some mid-market clients onto Snowflake - a great data environment, cost-effective, and fast, but it requires a lot of humans. Data hygiene, that the tables are organized, and API integrations are flowing.
Could you define when it makes sense for a company to invest in some kind of solution here, whether company revenue, number of stores, number of channels, etc?
With the old approach (all in one), this would cost high 10’s thousands (or more) to set up and maintain
Some brands Seth’s team works with are under 10M in revenue, just with a stripped-down version with only the essential features they need
What are the common structures you see in place, and the pros/cons of these?
It's a very high-demand field with a shortage of qualified people to do this job
Now with “headless” cloud solutions, the jobs can be split out
Acadia has outlined 10 steps for building the CDP process. Some companies might have the capability to do 4 of 6 of them, for example
It can be built by a third party like Acadia and then in-sourced to the company
Seth shares a recent example of these
Large specialty retailer with a large data team in-house, B&M stores, and online
Ingested data daily from all systems into Snowflake
Started to have challenges with identifying a single view of the customer record (in-store and online), performing some analytics around demographics, and behavior, predict future behavior. Expose this back to the retailer so they can use it with their other programs/needs, such as email marketing.
You lead our analytics team and have a lot of experience hiring and managing analytics folks. What mistakes do you see companies make when staffing their analytics capabilities?
Your first instinct is to hire 1 person, a jack of all trades. This holds companies back
An entire specialization - 5 different specializations at Acadia (cloud, using data to build models and predict future outcomes, understand the business problem, and connect that to the data)
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Connect with Kiri Masters
Learn more about Bobsled Marketing, an Acadia Company
Connect with Seth Hirsch
Learn more about Acadia
