Kim Davis.- Editorial Director at Martech

 The only thing I can't stand though is everyone's offended by everything.
 I just don't want comedy to die.
 I feel like comedy is dying, you know, because of cancer culture.
 If you try and run the same campaign across every kind of channel these days,
 it's not going to work.
 If you're just swung in that direction, then that's a big mistake,
 and that's certainly something we've learned over the last 15, 16 months.
 Brand is absolutely essential, and by brand I just don't mean a nice logo with the right colors.
 Brand values, brand reputation, what the brand stands for,
 because, as I said, you're addressing specific audiences,
 and you better be able to know who you're addressing.
 You're listening to the Radcast.
 If it's radical, we cover it.
 Here's your host, Ryan Alford.
 Hey guys, what's up?
 It's Ryan Alford.
 Welcome to another edition of the Radcast.
 It's the post July 4th holiday for us here, and I am both a little sunburned,
 and maybe a little tired for my own vacation, Kim.
 But Kim Davis, Editorial Director of MarTech.
 Thanks for coming on, Kim.
 Great to be with you, Ryan.
 We didn't get too much sun up in the northeast,
 but I hope you had a good break.
 We did. We did.
 Took the family down to the lake.
 We had a lake.
 Lots of beautiful lakes and parks in the South Carolina area.
 We did get down.
 But, you know, Kim, I want to get right into it.
 Let's talk a little bit.
 Maybe we'll just start before we get into your background about what you do.
 Editorial Director, I think people know that you write and edit stories,
 as it relates to marketing.
 That's the bread and butter, but maybe talk a little bit about that,
 your current position in MarTech, maybe.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 So I am the, as you said, Editorial Director of MarTech.
 My commission store is from contributors.
 I have a staff currently of one.
 We may be expanding that shortly.
 So we produce content internally.
 We have a daily newsletter, which has a good circulation.
 We also do some webinars.
 And last summer, in fact, we did a very nice series of video interviews.
 And we're thinking of kicking that off again.
 So social media, the usual mix of content these days.
 It's not just a website, but it's kind of spreading the brand everywhere.
 I love it.
 So marketing is,
 MarTech is short for marketing technology.
 Is that true or is it, is that Marcom technology?
 You know, like, yeah.
 Well, let me put, let me put a nuance on that, if I may.
 MarTech, of course, in everyday parlance is short for marketing technology.
 What we are thinking of when we use the name MarTech is the combination of technology
 and the strategies which it reflects and implies.
 Because I think if you put marketing technology at the heart of your marketing,
 which I think most people should be doing,
 then that does affect your entire strategy and approach.
 That's a key distinction.
 I'm glad you did that.
 And more tech's been on my radar.
 I mean, I came up, I've been traditional, you know,
 side of things the first 10 years of my career and then the last 10 have been in digital.
 It's more just following the trends and the realities of where the eyeballs and where everyone is.
 But MarTech has always been kind of one of those pillar
 content places for me and somewhere I think of either by all of your great SEO in the mountain.
 But then once I get there, I've always kind of been, you know,
 trusted source for where, you know, as an agency owner now and as someone that's been in the
 business, someone I think that really admires the work that you guys have done.
 You know, and I want to come back to marketing, you know, we keep everything kind of centered
 in that space, you know, being the thread of everything.
 But I do want to give, you know, our listeners, Kim, you know,
 some of your editorial background and, you know, a little bit more about your, you know,
 achievements and journey and all that stuff.
 So let's talk a little bit about that.
 Okay. I'm going to as much on little detail as you wish.
 It certainly hasn't been a straightforward trajectory.
 I actually got my first journalist and job straight out of high school as a teenager.
 Working as a music journalist back in the days when music journalism was printed on
 inky paper, pre-digital of course. And then I went to college and at the opposite end of the
 spectrum, I co-founded a philosophy journal. Then it was a whole bunch of different things.
 I'm bringing us up to date. I arrived in the States 25 years ago. I've been in New York for 25
 years. And the first journalism job I had there was working on the joint project between the
 New York Times and New York University, which was hyperlocal journalism. I got to help run a
 news drama of excited journalism students. And that was a lot of fun.
 And then to cut a long story short, it was really by chance. I was looking around for something
 a little more permanent. I thought tech journalism. Why? You know nothing about technology. You can
 scarcity change a light bulb. But I filled out an application form and they interviewed me. I like
 the people. And I became a cyber security editor. I had to read like six books on cyber security
 before my first day on the job. And then I gradually moved through other kinds of enterprise
 software, including marketing technology, ended up on a little website called The Hub,
 which was exclusively MarTech. And then that got subsumed into what was then
 direct marketing news. That got rebranded as DMN. I became editorial director of DMN.
 DMN closed down last year and after a short pandemic influenced pause. I was very happy to
 join MarTech as editor director. Well, how would you categorize so many different, as you said,
 kind of a winding journey, your editorial journey and all of that. Do you have a style or an
 approach like that weaves through all of that? Or has it been as evolving and is changing as
 the categories themselves? I think I probably do. Obviously there are going to be differences
 depending on your audience. But I do like to tell stories. In a sense embed myself in the story.
 I'm quite talking guns or journalism. But to actually bring the audience there, I was here,
 I saw this. I spoke to these people, which is kind of traditional journalism. I do like to try
 and carry the audience on the journey, not just through the one story, but from week to week,
 as they see how the story is into we even how one looks to the other.
 I mean call out any highlights to call out. Whether it was before we'll come back to marketing
 here eventually. But throughout that, I think there's got to be a few bright spots or even low
 spots. As people, I'm sure we do have a lot of editors and writers out there that listen to the
 podcast. I'm sure any words of inspiration or highlights from those journeys?
 Well, I got some highlights from back in my music journalism career where I met people
 like Debbie Harry from Blondie. But yeah, in terms of writing more recent stuff, I did a piece
 a few months ago on the data challenge, which companies are facing. And that could be a very dry
 kind of piece. I mean, everyone knows it's important. How do you make it interesting? I was able to
 speak to a series of people with very different points of view, some things in common. And we've
 together a kind of, again, journey out of it to take the read from point A. We've got this big
 problem right through not to a resolution, but to seeing what possible options there are out there.
 How is, you know, maybe maybe talk about it through a different lens. How have you watched and
 seen how media has changed and the consumption of media? You know, I grew up on this dual line.
 Like I remember, you know, in my industry, you know, you get the ad age, you get the magazine.
 You got, I got, you know, I'd probably six or seven different subscriptions 15 years ago,
 you know, the magazine, the printed piece. I mean, I know some of that's actually that tactile
 started to come back a little bit. Everything comes full circle, I guess. But, you know, but from you,
 the writer's standpoint, how has the media evolution and changes drastically changed the way
 you do things? I think it has. The key word for me is fragmentation, the way in which over the
 last 10, 15 years media has fragmented. And lots of the culture basically has fragmented.
 It's partly because of this wonderful world we live in where everything is available,
 but your fingertips, you can't consume everything. So people pick and choose their niches,
 their special interests and the channels and devices they want to receive them on. I remember
 going back to my early days in New York, I can't tell you which year it was. It's Seinfeld was on
 TV. Everyone stopped and watched Seinfeld. And you two at magazines, if anyone was interested in,
 I guess, music, everyone would read Roland Stone or whatever. But now everyone's off in different
 directions. How it affects me as a writer is something I alluded to earlier. I'm not just
 churning out the series of features for the same publication or website. I'm having to
 hop from channel to channel and from platform to platform, from video to audio to the written word,
 trying to engage with the audience where they want to be found. We run up against that same
 challenge with brands that we work with because depending on the size of them, when we work with
 I'd say medium size companies at this stage. And even the medium size people, they have the
 resources that they have. And it's how aware to find the audiences and how diverse whether it's
 TikTok or YouTube or Facebook or, like you said, printed piece of blog, the content opportunities
 are endless. But having to re-fix the message appropriately to each channel can be overwhelming.
 That's got to be the case. There was the time when you could run one TV ad campaign per quarter
 and see how it performed and do the next TV ad campaign. If you try and run the same campaign
 across every kind of channel these days, it's not going to work. At the same time, you want some
 brand consistency. You don't want to pay it to be a completely different brand than every channel.
 I must be ahead of you, agency guys. It is, every day. It's the journey that we live.
 What to you, whether it's pre-marketing, writing and technology writing or even today,
 is there a common thread when you're either evaluating a story that's brought to you
 or other things? Is there some commonalities to what truly makes a great story for your readers
 or listeners or watchers depending on the channel? Yeah. I think our North Star is that our audience
 is marketers. And these days marketers in a very broad sense will include marketing operations
 people actually running the systems. So what we always ask ourselves is, will this story help
 them do their jobs? Will it tell them what's coming down the road for them, help them
 look at the future a little bit? And that means we tend to shy away from it. It will be easy to
 write a story every day about what some tech vendor is doing, their latest innovation,
 the latest thing they're launching. We get pitched those all the times, you can imagine,
 and a lot of them are interesting and so on. But we're always asking ourselves, what does our
 audience, our audience and marketers need to know? And a great way to inform them on that,
 I think, is always if we can speak to brands who are using the technologies, using the solutions,
 what's in their experience with them? Yeah, that's, I think, smart in everything we do. I think
 sometimes, even as brands are so many, I think, correlations here with what you're talking about
 in marketing as a whole, but keeping your audience front and center and not think about them and
 not yourself, because sometimes we think about what we're interested in or what's good for us
 or what we're doing. The speeds and feeds of our product versus, okay, what problem
 what does the audience need from this? What's the solution that you're bringing? So I think that's
 maybe part of the success of Bartek over the years. How have you seen, you know,
 obviously being on the forefront, your pitch, these stories, your seeing the technology change?
 Is there one of a few things that you would talk about, you know, the last 10 years or so,
 which I know things change so fast like day to day now almost, but I guess the period
 specifically doesn't matter as much as, you know, do things as a whole just stand out to you for
 how you've seen marketing and advertising change? Yeah, and I think there's something we really
 just touched on. You're not addressing a massive audience anymore, you just can't.
 Now, that raises the question, okay, so what are you addressing? And if you listen to the
 cutting-edge technology suppliers, they'll talk about literally one-to-one individual
 personalization. That, they say, is the key to success. Addressing me addressing Kim,
 the relevant message at the right time of day just at the right moment. That's great for
 some enterprises maybe. There's a lot of brands just don't have the digital maturity to do that,
 they don't have the control on their data. So maybe you take a step back and you think you're
 addressing audience segments, you know, and the better you can segment your audience is,
 the better you can be sure of delivering something relevant. But I think that's the main change,
 and as you say, it's accelerating enormously, is away from getting as many eyeballs
 whoever they belong to on your message. That just doesn't pay off anymore. We're all
 deluge with advertising. If you're giving me, showing me a message that's not forming,
 it's not something I want to hear about, it's just going to go right up in my head.
 So true. And I think that's where I'm really interested in your opinion on this, and I know you
 aren't an ad agency person. You're writing about marketing technology, but you're certainly seeing
 so many of these stories and technologies. As an agency owner and someone that we pride ourselves
 on being great storytellers as well, and really being and coaching our clients not to forget
 about branding. Like you said, you know, I feel like we've reached this pendulum, you know,
 where it's all about the technology and targeting and data. And it's like, you know, it's like,
 I'm data and confused. And it's like, so, but it's the pendulum swung too far. It's like,
 all this tick, all this stuff. Oh, yeah, we've got our brand and we've got to tell people why
 they should care about us and all those things. Has it swung too far?
 If it is swung in that direction, then that's a big mistake. And that's certainly something
 we've learned over the last 15, 16 months. Brand is absolutely essential. And by brand,
 I just don't mean a nice logo with the right colors. I mean, brand values, brand reputation,
 what the brand stands for. Because as I said, you're addressing specific audiences. And you'd
 better be able to know who you're addressing. And those audiences today, especially now, are going
 to care about things much more deeply than the product or service they're researching. And oh,
 boy, your brand had better be on message for the consumes you want to reach. And obviously,
 I would hope sincerely on message because sincerity is going to be, you know,
 ferrited out by the audience if I can use that expression.
 Do you guys talk about brand at martec, you know, specific to the martec brand? You know, like
 you guys have had some evolution, obviously, even the time that you've been there. I mean,
 do you guys have that kind of conversation? And how do you guys think about martec as a brand?
 Yeah, we've actually been having those conversations recently because as some of you
 has probably no martec is a relatively new creation coming out of bringing together martec today
 in marketing land into one entity. So yeah, good deal of thought about branding, how we present it.
 And we're presenting it as martec is marketing, which as I said earlier, doesn't mean it's the
 the wires and plugs on the floor marketing, but it's the whole mindset and strategy and approach
 which evolves out of putting technology at the center. What you're doing. Yeah, I love it is,
 what are the are there any kind of stories? I mean, we'll get real topical now like today. You know,
 is it there's stories that we should call out maybe to our listeners and watchers that are just
 you can't ignore them anymore. Like this in you we've hit you've hit on a few things already
 with targeting and all that, which is really smart. And but I think I'd love to know if there's
 whether it's in this could be anything a technology capability or it could be more functional or
 or broad than that, but I'd love to know if there's stuff that's just you know, we should be putting
 on the forefront because you can't ignore it anymore. Yeah, I'll call out three things for you.
 The first is the data challenge. Let me explain what I mean there. I looked back over the last few
 years and it's as if marketing technology was built backwards. It started off with really good
 execution systems delivery systems systems to take the message that last mile on the journey for
 the customer. And then you realize that needs to be data driven and people started trying to pull
 their data together and discovered that was really hard because organizations and especially
 big ones, they have data in so many places and they have data about the same consumer in so many
 places, you know, from the call center to sales to to marketing and so on and bringing that all
 together in a way that you can actually execute on it in a reasonable amount of time, not like having
 a team of data scientists pulling reports about what I did last you know six months ago. It's a real
 challenge and that's why there's a lot of talk these days about customer data platform CDPs.
 May or may not be the solution. That's something we're covering very closely. That's number one.
 The second thing which you really can't ignore now is Google's deprecation of third-party cookies.
 Even though it's been pushed back to was about say 1923, 2023, it's a real challenge to advertising,
 especially programmatic advertising and there's a lot of competition now to provide alternative
 IDs, but these IDs generally rely on some piece of first-party data like an email address.
 And guess what I mean even if a publisher like the New York Times has me as a subscriber and
 have a login, I'm often going to be looking at it without login and they don't know I'm there.
 You just lose a huge percentage of the audience without third-party cookies.
 Whether Google's flock alternative will solve the problem is yet to be seen. It looks like a way
 to create a world garden for Google a bit like Facebook, but that's the other story which I'm
 thinking about every day. One more quickly when I think cannot be ignored today is diversity and
 inclusion in marketing organizations, marketing teams, agencies of course and publishers like
 ourselves. Horror stories I've seen just over the last year, startups, technology marketing,
 technology startups trying to raise capital. You're much more likely to raise that capital if
 you're a white man. If you're a woman you do worse, if you're a black woman you do even worse,
 and if you're a black woman who identifies as the LGBTQ, what are you going to have struggle?
 And it shouldn't be like that this year, so that's the story I can't overlook either.
 Interesting, all really good and I'm glad you're there because I've got I'm going to send you a story.
 I got an idea. It was your number two there actually all around the cookies going away.
 I've got some good stuff for you so I'll send that to you after the episode, but those are great.
 All top of mind for us as an agency, especially the cookie stuff and first party data is so
 important now for companies. They've got to be collecting it. You've got customers that are
 having a relationship with you. You've got to learn to collect that data in a smart way and to
 communicate with them appropriately and not misuse it, which is the key, right?
 But the danger here though, and I don't say this self-serving is a digital agency owner,
 but like the danger I see in all of this is I am all for privacy, but I also don't want
 you know me personally, I don't want fingernail polish in my Facebook feed as an ad.
 You know, I don't want to go back to 15 or 10, 12 years ago of irrelevant ads either.
 Totally as an experiment, anyone watching this can try. If you want to see what that's like
 try browsing in Cognito, go decide to usually visit and see ads which have nothing to do with your
 tool. I know. So we got to be careful. We asked where I'm hoping we can find the perfect balance and
 we have some strategies and things that we're deploying for our clients down that first party
 as well as shared party data and things like that, but trying to find that balance of privacy and
 all of those and adversity inclusion is super important. You know, I talk about it a lot, you know,
 we can't solve the problems of the did it today with the solutions of yesterday and you know,
 like the perspective that you get and the what comes to the table when you have diverse
 people working together is really important. Not only is from a fairness standpoint,
 it's just crazy that in 2021 we're even having this conversation, which is all another story,
 but but you don't realize the perspectives and the additive nature of having that diversity and
 how important that is. Yeah, and how are you going to reach all those specific fragmented niche audiences
 if you don't understand them? Bingo. Exactly. Exactly. So is there anything, you know, with COVID-related,
 I know we try to try to keep it out of the episode as much as possible because we're coming out
 of it hopefully, but do you reach trends or stories that you've seen or things, you know, maybe
 have absentee of like Zoom calls. So those are probably sticking around some, but anything that's
 kind of, you know, what you think is going to hang around and what genies aren't going back in the
 bottles from from COVID? Oh, for sure. I think this is going to be one of the most exciting stories
 to follow over the next 12 months is to see what sticks and what doesn't. But yeah, we're living in
 digital world now. We've all got used to that over the last 15, 60 months and lots of the behaviors
 we've developed certainly as consumers are not going to go back to exactly what they were before.
 I mean, if you've had your groceries delivered for the last year and it's been effortless,
 you're not necessarily going to start going around half a dozen stores or you might go to some
 specialist place with some particular product. So those changes are going to stick around.
 The B2B side, I have to mention that as well. That's really exciting. They had to go through
 an astonishing digital transformation. These traditional businesses construction, you know,
 hardware used to having field marketing, meeting people, doing demos on site, having five or
 six events a year where they could bring all their customers together. They had to start from scratch
 and become pretty much completely digital. And that's not all going away. And I'm actually next week
 traveling to my first in-person event since this all started. And that's the other exciting thing
 because people have realized that virtual events have a huge audience reach relatively inexpensive,
 don't require travel and the carbon footprint that goes with it. So I don't see virtual events
 going away. But we're going to see in person again. So all these changes we're going to be looking at
 coming up in the near future and be really fascinating. It is. It is. And you know, just the growth of
 e-commerce. Like you said, you talked about a little bit the convenience factor of different things.
 You know, that I think grew, they said, by 7X as planned. Or in seven years, they expected the amount
 of growth that we had in one or something like that as the data changes. And it's certainly been
 recognized with our clients and certain things like that. I do think the travel things going to
 be interesting where you see these blends of virtual and in-person. I still think there's some value
 depending on the type of event for that human touch and different things. So it'll be interesting
 to see what the balance of that is. Are you any other big conferences on your radar this year
 from a marketing perspective that you will attend? I don't think it's going to be much this year.
 I think when spring season comes around next year, as long as we stay on the same trajectory,
 I think we'll see some of the big conferences coming back. And 2019, I think I went to 14 conferences.
 So 2020 was a very strange year for me. Yeah, you're either really used to it and you're loving it
 or maybe you want or you're missing it. Well, I'm not sure which one. Well, yeah, it's never
 perfect. It's never the right amount. It's always too much and not enough. I love it. Well,
 we've got a little segment we like to finish things off with Kim. If you're game, we call it
 Rad or Fad. You know, there's some hot trending things or even been around a little while,
 but seem to be popping up. So I'm going to just cut through them. Maybe one word or short answer
 responses for Rad or Fad. First one on the list. Clubhouse and or social audio. Rad or Fad.
 I'm going to say Fad. I've actually never been on Clubhouse, but I think brands can do a better
 job building an identity around a podcast series or something like that. I'm not sure how the social
 audio really will play out. Maybe someone will figure it out. Ding, ding, ding. I agree. I agree.
 Been taking that from the get go. Again, we finally got into this place where we can get content
 on demand. And now I'm going to go win only when it's live when you do it. That's that. There's
 just a mismatch there with trends. I think it was just something that was also people had a lot of
 time when COVID was down. So we'll see. How about TikTok for the mainstream? You know, it's been,
 you know, the 13 to 23 year old platform for so long. It's definitely gotten more mainstream.
 There's definitely a lot of older audiences there. But are we Rad or Fad with TikTok for the masses?
 Rad, um, great campaign. I covered was elf beauty and chipotle producing a beauty pack design
 to look like a, uh, case of the year. Was it a case of the three toes? Sorry. So that reaches
 an audience bigger than just the teenagers from it to do their dancing. So yeah, Rad.
 Totally agree. How about social commerce, social media selling and e-commerce through social?
 Double rad. Why would you want to have a customer discover your product and send them somewhere else to buy it?
 That's got to be the future. Got to remove friction in the purchase path.
 Yeah, Kim Davis, man, he's nailing them. All right, cancel culture. Oh, yeah, Rad or Fad.
 I'm going to go neutral on that because there's no way it's a one word answer. I'll just say that if
 consumers feel they need to withhold their custom from a brand whose values they find obnoxious,
 I don't think it's canceling and there's no behavior. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed.
 The only thing I can't stand though is everyone's offended by everything. I just don't want comedy to
 die. I feel like comedy is dying, you know, because of cancel culture. No one's gonna be a culture.
 Oh, yeah, comedian. Oh my man. I know right now you can't make fun of anyone.
 You can make comedy's parody. You know, everything's getting dried up anyway.
 The last one. And I don't know how much this hits your radar, but imagine it does the big brands
 with internal ad agencies, Rad or Fad. Yeah, I think that's probably rad. I'm not
 rad on top of it as you say, but I do hear about it happening. But I think it's going to be for
 big brands, hasn't it? I don't know that small to medium brands are going to maintain those
 conjugate filters in house. Yeah, it's one of these pendulums that started to go this way like in
 2008, 2009, where's a lot of this happening and then it's kind of seems to swing back and forth.
 But I think it makes sense for like you said, the big brands that could do it because they
 have so much, so much content needs. It's like hard, you know, and they have to react so quickly.
 So I understand. I think it's a balance. The blended formula is always what we recommend. We
 don't want to put ourselves out of business, Kim. No. Well, Kim, man, really appreciate
 getting to know you through this and hope we can continue relationship and share stories.
 And really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast, working everyone, keep up with you,
 martec, all of those things. Let's call out a few places where they can find you guys.
 Yeah, sure. Martec, the URL is martec.org. I'm on LinkedIn, of course. And I'm on
 Twitter as Kim Davis underscore, so probably find me there. Perfect. Well, thank you so much,
 Kim. I really enjoyed it. Hey, guys, you know where to find us. We're at the radcast.com,
 all of our content. We've got a search bar. You can literally search martec in every episode,
 highlight, every clip, everything is searchable at the radcast.com. Find us on YouTube, our YouTube
 channel. Just search radical company. All right, guys, you know where to find me? I'm at Ryan
 offered. I'm there, fighting all the channels. You know where to get me. We'll see you next time
 on the radcast.