Interview with Muriel Glatin - Data Marketing: "We have nothing to be ashamed of in France

published on 02/11/2015,

updated on 17/08/2021

Like every year, the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) organizes its big annual show. This year was a bit special in that the show was renamed to become "&THEN". A few days after the show, I had the opportunity to speak with Muriel GlatinCamp de Bases' Director of Consulting, who had the chance to accompany the French delegation to the show. She tells us how she perceived the show and the major marketing trends in the United States.Jonathan Loriaux This year the show, which was previously called DMA, has changed its name to &THEN. Is there really a difference compared to the previous editions? Has the formula really been renewed?Muriel Glatin The formula has indeed been renewed. This year, there was a particular focus on creating interactivity between the different participants at the show, with presentation formats that were much more open, allowing the "speaker" to speak and interact with the audience. The aim is to make the event a networking space, not just a place where "people come to get information". In this conference model, the speaker is not a speaker, he's a facilitator - he's going to push the questions towards the room. Sometimes he or she tries to stage them, as in the case of one speaker who presented a board with questions for a jeopardy game, and then gradually opened the floor to questions. With a bit of luck, the room would react, and sometimes... it wouldn't react at all.JL : So, it's a bit of a mixed bag depending on the profile of the speaker.MG That's it. Exactly... the speaker, the space, the subject... Nevertheless, this will to create interactivity, to create a link between the participants is probably a request from the visitors of the show. There is a second message that was carried in this edition, pushed, almost like an injunction, in particular by Mel Robins to the marketers to tell them: "you have to move". You have to get out of your office. You have to get out of your charts, your numbers. You have to look at what's going on around you, you have to go out and meet people even if you don't know them, even if you don't understand what they're saying. This is his "theory" of the five seconds. For five seconds, you must let yourself be carried away by your impulse and your initial ideas. After that, it's always time to censor yourself and slow down. We also had all this talk that was brought to us.JL Beyond this discourse on openness and spontaneity, are there any particular technologies that have marked you that most of the speakers have returned to, perhaps a little more strongly than in previous years?MG In the techno topics, we have indeed noted the subject of data quality which is very present especially in the aisles of the show. This is probably reinforced by the fact that today, we are in environments where we have many data sources with more or less good quality. The imperative of data quality is very present in the United States.JL What makes this a topic that would come back to the forefront today?MG There are two reasons. Because your database is fed by a lot of data sources that are more or less clean. Hosting them in a single platform means that you have to be very robust in terms of data quality protocol within these unified databases. The quality treatments are all the more important because today we have 10 or 20 data sources, and sometimes more. This was not the case before.JL The return of data quality is being driven by other technologies that are themselves changing the way data is managed in the enterprise.MG : Exactly, it's the dematerialization that means there are so many points of contact. And each point of contact brings with it its own data quality issues. And when you aggregate all that, it's even more multiplied. A second point that may explain this focus is the fact that, in an economy that has until now been very much driven by digital in the broadest sense of the term, with a lot of cookies, more display, the issue of quality is less of a priority than when we're in a more CRM world, with nominative databases. What's also new, especially for France, is the programmatic aspect and onboarding data. All these technologies will enable us to reconcile cookie databases with nominative databases. Bringing together first party and third party, advertising and marketing, display and CRM... These terms used to refer to very different, very watertight, very compartmentalized worlds. Today, you can push targeted, ultra-personalized advertising banners, addressed specifically to a customer or prospect based on the data you have on them. This makes it much easier to optimize my advertising budgets, because once I'm able to identify my contacts for my advertising campaigns, I can also consider that certain customer targets don't need to be exposed.JL You mentioned the term "onboarding data", for the readers of Badsender who are not familiar with the subject, could you redefine what it means?MG Onboarding data is the technology that will allow us to deduplicate cookies and an email address for example. From the email address xxx@campdebase.comI will therefore be able to hang up all my web browsing. This onboarding data will make it possible to link the personal databases with the entire database of information on cookies. As a result, display and banner ads will become a kind of new channel for relationship marketing. Today, with relationship marketing, we mainly activate the SMS, mailing or emailing channel. Today, in my relationship program, I can also include CRM display because I can reach my customers by name.JL To come back to &THEN, is the event open to the international market and does it properly welcome foreign delegations? And what is your feeling on the opening of the show to the international.MG : Historically, the show has been 100% American, but it's now open to foreign delegations. This is clearly one of the objectives of the DMA organizers, to make it a truly international show. A little anecdote: this year, the French delegation was the largest. And there's a clear emphasis on welcoming foreign delegations. We get real VIP treatment. We're the first to enter the showrooms, and we have pre-show and post-show workshops with the organizers to brief us, etc.JL Seen from France, we often have the impression that Americans are far ahead in marketing practices. After participating in the event, are there any subjects on which you feel that France is not lagging behind the United States in terms of certain techniques? Are there any subjects on which we finally defend ourselves very well, even better than certain American practices?MG : It's always refreshing to go and see what's going on in the United States. At the same time, we've come to the conclusion that we have nothing to be ashamed of in terms of what we're doing in France. We're way ahead of the game when it comes to DMP, first-party and third-party cookies. All you have to do is go to a trade show in France, and you'll see all the representatives proposing this kind of system. We're also very advanced when it comes to predictive analytics: perhaps twenty years ago, in the United States, we talked more about modeling and predictive analytics. Now, I don't see any difference. On the contrary, in France, we have high-performance solutions and high-performance players in data science, so whether in terms of tools or methods, France is defending itself very well. Once again, the point on which we've perhaps made less progress is what I was saying earlier about media convergence and data onboarding, which in France is still underdeveloped. There's a lot of talk about programmatic, but it's still driven by the big players and is still not widely used in companies. In France, we still have a lot of evangelizing and acculturation to do. Whereas in the United States, I have the feeling that the data culture is much more widespread within marketing teams.JL On the other hand, were there any topics during the event that were not addressed and that you think should have been?MG We didn't hear much about regulations and legislation, consumer protection and the Internet user. On the contrary, I was a little surprised by some of the comments made by speakers who explained that, in any case, the intensity of prospecting and the way of addressing the customer is more a question of managing commercial pressure. You push, you push, you push and then when it starts to react rather badly, you adjust your commercial pressure. The subject is not addressed as it can be in Europe.

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Jonathan Loriaux

I've been involved in email marketing for over ten years, and my career path began on the technical side (email campaign integration) before moving on to sales (as an eCRM expert) and finally marketing consultancy. For the past 9 years, I've been the author of the Badsender.com blog. Emailing isn't just an expertise, it's truly become my passion, which is why Badsender is now my main activity, with the creation of an emailing consulting business linked to the site.

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Interview with Muriel Glatin - Data Marketing: "We have nothing to be ashamed of in France

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