What new-age marketing looks like

The co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, David Packard once said: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” The way digital is shaping the reality for businesses now, it only reinforces what he said.

Driven from the top, an organisation needs to break down the silos to be truly customer-centric. Conversely, as the pressures of ROI and accountability increase, marketing needs to step out of its comfort zone and collaborate with other functions across the business.

While businesses understand the need to break down the silos in theory, achieving it in reality is still a herculean task. Big global brands have already taken a step in this direction. Read here about the likes of P&G and Mondelēz bringing the organisational changes required for a modern-day marketing team.

MasterCard is another example. The financial services corporation recently launched its data and analytics-driven platform called Priceless Engine. It enables the company to track trends as they happen and collaborate with merchants to tailor their offers to consumers based on those trends, all as much as possible in real time.

Read also: 1.3 billion reasons why you can’t ignore digital [Gallery]

I sat down with Sam Ahmed, senior vice-president and group head of marketing for Asia Pacific at MasterCard, to ask what went on behind the scenes to launch this platform. Not just any other launch, Priceless Engine required the company to make fundamental changes to its cross-functional workings – a change Ahmed says is irreversible.

“It is the new way of working for the marketing department.”

The discussion for Priceless Engine started sometime in November last year and what triggered it was a few things. The issuers, or MasterCard’s partner banks, were talking more and more about digital marketing, but through the lens of driving business and not just advertising.

At the same time, MasterCard conducted digital landscape research about who was doing a good job in this area from which it learnt that the best brands weren’t doing great digital advertising. They were driving business through digital and social. The conversation internally centred around how to come up with a system which helped everyone in the ecosystem: the issuer, the technology teams and the merchants.

After a discussion with Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing officer of MasterCard, it was decided APAC would take the lead. The numbers also made perfect sense. E-commerce growth in the region is growing at a staggering 30%, the internet population in Asia stands at about 1.3 billion with nearly 11.5 million being added to it on average every month.

Taking the organisation along

There were various teams that needed to be on board, Ahmed explains, beginning with the global digital and technology teams. Priceless Engine is made up of 20 different tech platforms. “There was no way we could have done that alone. The marketing team collaborated with them to get the project going.”

An important priority was to link this initiative to business and drive transactions.

A key learning for the marketing team was that the digital marketing language isn’t suited for business.

“Here is an example. Previously, we would walk into the room ecstatic with the 5% engagement rate we got from a certain campaign. To a business person, 5% of anything is not worth their time.” There was a need, therefore, to change the metrics and language.

It came up with dashboards and metrics to inspire the business people, but before that the marketing team interviewed the likes of Vicky Bindra, president of Asia Pacific and global accounts for MasterCard Worldwide, and key presidents in the region, including Eddie Grobler, division president of Australasia for MasterCard.

“And they helped us shape the key metrics they wanted us to drive and one of them was click-through transactions,” Ahmed says. The objective of the business was simple. Digital advertising should drive consumers to a purchase action and not an engagement action. “This meant we had to rewire things,” he says.

The third function involved was the market development team which liaises with the merchants. Historically, the two teams spoke for a few weeks, developed a campaign and then spoke to the issuers and the whole process would take weeks. But with Priceless Engine, the conversations need to be far more frequent and in some cases, almost instant.

“Some campaigns needed answers within 12 hours. That’s a new culture – feeding back, getting sign-offs with sometimes four to five people and legal. That has enabled us to move fast with the merchants,” Ahmed says.

And finally, the global accounts team, which leads big accounts in terms of sales and service. “Their belief in this has been incredible. They saw from their end that this was a big discussion in this area and they really backed us.

“We have now interacted with over 38 issuers across APAC and without their help, we wouldn’t have got it done.”

This, according to Ahmed, is the first time MasterCard has had to rewire cross-functional workings to this extent.

“In marketing we have found over the last few years that you cannot succeed without the cross functional teams aligning because without it, you will have a great advert, but nothing else. This rewiring is what helped us with the launch of Priceless Engine.”

Identifying the right skills

One of the learnings the team had early on was the job couldn’t have been done by itself alone. Therefore, it appointed one digital agency across the region, for the first time. This meant it now had a partner that it could scale the work with.

Together with TBWA\’s Digital Arts Network, it looked at specific resources it needed. This included digital strategists, data analytics experts, data scientists and content producers.

Internally, it also hired people from different areas. Another big learning for the company was that there was no extensive experience in this area, according to Ahmed.

It’s really hard to source for the right people in this area. So, if you are looking for someone with 10 years of experience to make you feel comfortable, it’s just not there.

So, what’s the solution to this? “You need to judge people on their runway ability; that has been my learning. Do they have the ability to take this to the next level, even though they may not be doing it currently?” he says.

Over the next three years, MasterCard has a resource plan in place to hire across these new roles, including that of a community manager to act as the link between digital and media.

“It took us a few years to start hiring digital specialists and then we started hiring media people. And now we realise it’s time to mash them and, hence, the need for community managers,” he says.

Another important learning is that such talent is typically in the age group of 25-30 and along with digital, they have had business experience as well. And if they have had regional experience, it really adds to their credentials, according to Ahmed.

The day-to-day running of the engine

The regional team meets twice a day. In the case of the ongoing campaign with Justin Timberlake, for example, the team meets at 10am. This team includes the digital strategists, content producer, analyst experts and the marketing team together with the agencies – the media agency, the digital agency and often Facebook as well.

The team distils three key things:

• Insights into current trends.
• How is the content produced doing across all the platforms.
• What the next steps are.

They then have joint calls with all markets – India, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia in this case. All four engines then get on a call again in the afternoon to share what they have learnt and raise questions or concerns.

“This helps us pick up learnings from one market and apply it to others if needed. What it also enables is giving marketers an option to raise their hands and discuss challenges they are facing in their market and not give up,” Ahmed says.

The business teams also get involved at a regular interval. “What we found that it’s best to involve business in a week or two. Too much if it can be overwhelming, but if campaigns need, we approach them almost instantly.”

Also, the way the marketing team operates internally – how often it meets and updates – has changed. As Ahmed puts it, the operating model the team has built will change six months down the line.

“We have a lot of learning yet to happen and when it does, the model will change or evolve.”

And iterative learning is crucial to the new-age marketing teams. For marketing to be able to raise their hands and say we don’t know all the answers, but we will get better, and for the business to let marketing run this way is a huge shift.

“With that mindset, 10 years ago would be to lose face as a marketer. If you said you’re trying something that won’t last,” Ahmed says laughing.

From now until the end of the year, MasterCard will roll Priceless Engine out through the Priceless Surprises platform to drive transaction velocity. This will be issuer agnostic, that is, for all of MasterCard’s partner banks. In 2015, it will start to work with specific issuers and merchants on specific campaigns using this technology depending on their business needs and priorities.