Cory Munchbach, COO of BlueConic - How IT & Marketing Can Work Better Together

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:06) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Cory, the COO at BlueConic, and we discuss the consequences for the advertising industry of killing third-party cookies, how IT and marketing can work better together, and how to foster a culture of empathy within your organization. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:33) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43)

(Cory at 00:00:44) You know, I don't know that you can sort of pinpoint the moment that that happened for me necessarily. My kind of first job out of high school, like, first kind of real job was working at an Apple store. And, believe it or not, one of the best experiences of my life, despite the fact that selling iPods at Christmas is like the worst thing ever, and I will never ever want to go back to doing that. But you learn a lot. And, you know, Apple is so well known for customer experience and how they approach all of that.

(Cory at 00:01:16) And so to have that experience when I was 18 coming out of high school was awesome because you're around super cool tech, but also learning a lot of really important skills about the difference, for example, between a feature and a benefit and how to explain those to a customer. And so there's a lot of really kind of early roots in terms of my longer-term career. I think also part of it is just a little bit generational, like, sort of that, I'm that age where I'm growing up with a lot of these early technologies and sort of getting into it as a result of that. And, you know, I think the reality of it is that most professions now are either directly involved in tech in some way or another. And so it's more been inescapable part than just like a natural I was always obsessed with technology.

(Cory at 00:02:03) It's sort of a byproduct of how my career has gone, honestly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:07) That makes sense. And actually, the IT manager at Cars.com told me he also got his start in retail Apple.

(Cory at 00:02:16) Yeah. It's amazing. Right? Like, the lessons, the training to just be a boring Mac specialist, all of that. But you learn so many valuable business skills.

(Cory at 00:02:27) And, you know, it's been a long time since I've been in there, but I will never forget that experience and a lot of the things I learned as a result of it. So it was truly formative.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) That's really cool. So where did you go from there?

(Cory at 00:02:40) So after I graduated from college, I actually, I was a political science major. So, again, no sort of obvious tie to technology or business necessarily. I was really interested in doing research. So I actually started my career at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and working on research administration and conflicts of interest and all of this stuff, which was super, super interesting. I had an early kind of fork in the road where I chose between going to get my master's in public health and going to Forrester Research to be a research associate.

(Cory at 00:03:14) And I ended up going the Forrester route for a number of reasons, not least of which was I wasn't ready to commit to a public health or kind of a master's degree. And that is really where kind of, I think, the most seed of where we ended up going is to be found. I got this opportunity. I was working on the CMO and marketing leadership team at Forrester at the time. So for me, again, I had no formal business background at all.

(Cory at 00:03:41) I'd never taken a marketing class. It was completely new to me. But I had the opportunity, kind of a mini MBA, to be interacting with the senior most marketers at some of the most notable brands. And so it was kind of a crash course in working with those individuals, with the analysts covering that range of things. So I just got such a concentrated exposure.

(Cory at 00:04:04) When I became an analyst myself, I was focused, again, more on that marketing strategy side. But the technology enablement piece was really the theme that I kept coming back to and being drawn to. And there was an opportunity on a different team. That's how I moved over to covering marketing tech within the Forrester ecosystem. And I wrote the first Wave on the so-called marketing clouds back in, I guess, 2013.

(Cory at 00:04:30) And that really is sort of, I think, the most kind of formative step for me in terms of concrete, like, here's how I ended up in marketing technology specifically. And then that's built into covering that and being now almost a decade of sort of fully embedded in marketing technology and the strategy around it, from those early days at Forrester now to the last seven or so years at BlueConic.

(Intro Narrator at 00:04:54) Wow. So tell me about how

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:55) you met the team at BlueConic and ended up over there.

(Cory at 00:04:58) Yeah. You know, this is where the fortune of the sort of Forrester network in a lot of ways. I had a colleague who had actually covered marketing tech several years before me before he moved on to a new opportunity. And when I told him I was starting to think about leaving and wanting to do something other than being an analyst, he had known the co-founders of our company who are two guys out of the Netherlands, actually. And so they had just moved to Boston.

(Cory at 00:05:27) This is like mid-2014, taken a Series A to found BlueConic here and make it a US-based organization even though we still have very deep roots in the NL. And so I was connected with them and interviewed, and it was sort of one of those very pragmatic kind of meets in the sense that I had been covering marketing technology at a very broad level, competitive stuff, and obviously, in Forrester doing a lot of writing about the space. And so in those early days when we still hadn't even picked how we were going to kind of identify what category we were going to be in, I had a lot of good subject matter expertise to bring to bear for them. And meanwhile, it was a, you know, less than 20-person company coming to the US. And for me, it was an enormous opportunity to get everything I wanted and that was not being an analyst. Right?

(Cory at 00:06:18) Hands fully into everything, learning the whole range of the business and being part of growing that. So it was kind of a very complementary fit, and I joined at the beginning of 2015 and been at it ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:32) That's really cool. Yeah. It's really exciting when you join a small company instead of your career path looking like you grow up through the company, the company grows underneath you.

(Cory at 00:06:44) Totally. And a lot of left and right. It kind of reminds me of a little bit of Chutes and Ladders. You know, you just never really know. And sometimes you got to take a step back when someone leaves and you got to recover what you had covered before.

(Cory at 00:06:56) And, you know, you're always going generally up, but there's a lot of hidden sort of accelerated moments and also setbacks that are kind of a better representation behind the curtain, and I totally feel that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:10) Yeah. Absolutely. So can you just give me like the brief overview of what BlueConic does?

(Cory at 00:07:16) Yeah. Absolutely. So I mentioned, founded in 2014. Yeah. But the cooler part is that as a product, the platform was actually being incubated in a previous company that the same group of folks had founded prior.

(Cory at 00:07:30) So we've got, like, at this point, more than a decade of sort of product development and experience, and it was very much a customer-driven initiative from the get-go, which is something that I think has really carried through. I mentioned that I was part of kind of figuring out our original positioning, and that is something that we've really invested in over the years. So we are what's known as a customer data platform. So sort of fitting within the marketing technology ecosystem to support our customers on how they engage with their customers and consumers. So, you know, one of the real challenges historically in marketing tech has been that each system sort of has its own either database or other infrastructure kind of way of managing data that's specific to what you're trying to do with it.

(Cory at 00:08:15) So, you know, an email platform typically oriented around email addresses. Right? A web platform typically oriented around cookies. You needed something that would actually take all of that and combine them into a profile that speaks across all of those different systems. So you really get to who is this person regardless of where and how they're interacting with us.

(Cory at 00:08:39) And that is usually the responsibility of a marketer or sort of someone who's on the front lines. Right? They're figuring out how do we grow our business, and they didn't have a system that was designed for this. Right? IT had the database or the data warehouse, data lake.

(Cory at 00:08:55) Analytics had their big, you know, big data platforms, and these kind of growth-focused marketing customer experience folks didn't have a system to let them use the data in a way that they need it, which is for activation to actually apply it in context. And so BlueConic and the customer data platform category was solving that kind of unification and activation side of the equation by creating that profile that's all about the actual customer or consumer that you're dealing with and all of the different sort of fragments in places that you get information about who that person is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) Okay. So it's about like aggregating all the different data sources to create like complete identities of each customer.

(Cory at 00:09:38) That's exactly right. And really importantly with an eye toward how are we going to use this. So, you know, not so much data collection for data collection's sake, but to be able to say, okay, I need this information to help either facilitate some part of the customer journey, kind of pull that information forward. But, also, a lot of it has to do with kind of operational efficiencies.

(Cory at 00:09:59) A lot of organizations have very either old tech or sort of high-maintenance technology that make it difficult for folks who aren't necessarily technical users. They didn't learn how to write SQL queries. They're thinking about what campaigns and creative and messaging that they're going to bring to market. So it also needed to be a solution, not just about creating that masterful identity of all these people, but also how do we put this in a way that's accessible to that user. It's not enough just to create that entity.

(Cory at 00:10:30) It needs to be accessible to the systems that they're using in a way that they can kind of get at it. And that was a pretty big void that had existed in a lot of the technology that marketers had been using, either hard for them to use directly or they couldn't use it directly at all and it was used, you know, partners or paying a lot of money to agencies, to their IT department, and it just made things very cumbersome and slow. Meanwhile, the consumer is interacting with the brand faster. Accessibility is a really crucial part of how marketers, customer experience, et cetera, are really keeping up with their consumers and interacting with them intelligently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:12) So what does that look like? Is it like a UX layer that you've put on top of this CDP for the marketers?

(Cory at 00:11:21) That's right. So in our case, and this varies a little bit platform to platform, but to get a little wonky, so it's an Apache Cassandra database underlying everything that we're doing. So that was a really deliberate choice because Cassandra has super high read-write speeds as compared with sort of relational databases and some other kind of options that could be out there. It also scales really well. You know, if you're thinking about some of the customers that we're dealing with, UEFA during the Champions League or the Euro, the European League.

(Cory at 00:11:49) Right? We're talking millions and millions of people engaging per second with those properties. So it needs to have really high scale, but also be able to handle the variety of data that I mentioned. Right? It can't just be only for web or only for email or only from your CRM system.

(Cory at 00:12:05) And it's coming in at a super high rate of speed. So, you know, you need to think about it from those kind of three angles. It's got to have volume, variety, and velocity accounted for. And so that's the underlying architecture, kind of the philosophy there. And then the interface on top of it, exactly right.

(Cory at 00:12:21) You need to be able to go in and create a segment or interact with the data just through that, you know, a click interface as opposed to having to write queries and have a lot of technical skills. So it's both kind of that front-end experience for the user, but without compromising the capability of the platform underneath it. Also recognizing that every customer that we work with is in a different part of their journey on this. This is sort of all new muscle for some companies. Others have been doing it for a while.

(Cory at 00:12:51) So being able to kind of meet them where they are and giving that tool the accessibility that it has has been kind of one of the key components of our overall design philosophy really from day one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:03) That's really cool. That's, I feel like just another application of a trend I've been seeing a lot recently, talking whether it's someone in crypto or quantum computing or what have you, advanced technology. The key to adoption is reducing friction for the users. Like, open, security. We were just talking with a company called Auth0, which is like a huge identity company. And that's like a big focus for them is increasing security by decreasing the friction that users encounter when they're being secure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) This sounds like the same thing, like increasing adoption of these marketing technologies and enabling marketers to work better by decreasing the friction of using them.

(Cory at 00:13:54) Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, we get a lot of requests for proposals, right, RFPs. And the language that these companies are using is around transformation. We want to transform our business. And from my perspective, transformation is a process.

(Cory at 00:14:09) It's not an event, nor is it an outcome. And so, you know, I think a lot about sort of the technology behind or that's powering transformation is one that gives you a better way of working. It's not necessarily going to happen overnight. I sort of liken it to, you know, if you were going to become a bodybuilder, it's not a wave of the magic wand. Right?

(Cory at 00:14:32) You need to start. There's diet. There's lifestyle. There's how your workout regime gets put together. And so you have to kind of approach, like, what am I doing to get to that goal? And the technology is one piece of that, but I think it's oftentimes, I think it's underappreciated because it's not as sexy.

(Cory at 00:14:51) But being able to say, if we can cut out, you know, a week's worth of work for a number of people on a team to get to the same outcome, it might be hard to quantify the ROI on that. But I think anyone who's been doing this would tell you that is an enormous value. If you just gave someone a week back, or you cut out, you know, a couple of redundancies in a process or a system, and it's not always part of how an organization is measuring what they're doing and their output, but it's a massively sunk cost to think about. If you could turn something that you need a highly skilled person to do that's pretty routine and you have to do it every week and you could make that an automated process that runs on its own, that person now is freed up to do much more interesting things that are far more differentiating and interesting for the business. So it's not just a question of like cutting people out.

(Cory at 00:15:43) It's how are they using their time and how are we maximizing their actual skills in ways that aren't, you know, so repetitive or monotonous or sort of not necessary. And I think when I look at the companies that have really embraced this transformation mindset, that's exactly how they're thinking about it. This technology is either a time saver, sort of helping build a muscle that they don't already have so that they can use the muscles they do have for creativity and kind of innovation and experimentation. That's what moves them forward on that transformation journey and is what is exciting to me about, you know, the customers that we work with, their flavor of how they tackle this and what they're doing. And I think that that understanding is really starting to pick up speed and put distance, quite frankly, between the companies who kind of get that and those who are still lagging.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Yeah. So let's take a hypothetical startup that they have like three people in there, but they're going to grow really fast. Right?

(Cory at 00:16:40) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:41) At what stage are they starting to consider using a CDP, and at what stage should they be?

(Corey at 00:16:49) It's a great question. So I think, at least for us, the problem that we're solving is generally one that is directly correlated to a certain level of complexity. And so, you know, smaller companies that maybe only have one person running all of marketing and they've only got two systems probably don't need to think about a CDP yet because they're not necessarily dealing with that level of complexity. That said, once you start to hit a certain level of scale where you have a ton of people, whether, again, customers in B2B, consumers in B2C, interacting with you and generating a lot of data, you need an answer for how you can manage that. And that's where having a CDP earlier in the process can be incredibly valuable.

(Corey at 00:17:36) Where the market is right now, it's a lot more about solving for an existing kind of mess or gap in a lot of bigger companies in particular. And I think, honestly, it's one of the reasons that some startups have been able to disrupt some of these much bigger, more entrenched companies in their industries is because they've actually started from the beginning with the focus on the customer. They didn't start building with technology designed for something totally different and then try to retrofit it to make it work for customer orientation. They took a much more holistic understanding of saying, here's what we need to know, here's how our consumers are already going to engage with us.

(Corey at 00:18:17) How do we make sure that we are already equipped with that? And so in a lot of cases, I talked to a company who, it's funny because they started as sort of a startup, had built a lot of this technology in-house. They sort of started in that. But then they reached a point about eight to ten years in where they would have been spending more money on engineers than on the rest of the business, and that's sort of where you flip from.

(Corey at 00:18:41) I think you can do kind of a build in the early stage where you then shift to the buy, and then sometimes end up, you know, at massive, massive scale deciding that you're going to build internally again. But really, it's just a matter of, you know, with the costs to maintain technology in-house, sometimes it's just disproportionate. So I think there is sort of that pivot point where it becomes clear if we're just hiring engineers to maintain our internal infrastructure as opposed to having systems that allow us to do that much, much more efficiently through a partner. That's kind of the moment where we start to see those scale-up companies start to act a little bit more like their bigger cousins because of the fact that it's just not possible to scale up the people required if you're building all your own infrastructure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) Yeah, I mean, we talk about the build versus buy discussion on the podcast a lot, and it seems like the answer is usually buy if it's not your core competency. Like, I bet that company you're talking about that built their own CDP for eight years probably wishes that they just bought it earlier rather than sinking so much engineering cost and then still buying it.

(Corey at 00:19:55) Yeah, it's hard to say right on the outset, and this is the most age-old debate in IT and tech in general, I think. But it does seem, you know, if you don't have really, really great criteria about why you should build something and why either core competency or immediately adjacent to your business model, as you say, with the cost of, you know, there's just always unintended costs to that. And it's really difficult unless a company, I think, has that sort of not just a core competency, but sort of in their DNA to do it this way and is eyes wide open about the implications of doing that. You know, I've been at this company a long time, and we've had a lot of folks who've kind of come back around after, hey.

(Corey at 00:20:38) Two years ago we were going to build this, and then two years later there's been some turnover and now, okay, we're ready to reengage with you. And, you know, again, it's not a hard and fast certainly, but I am struck, and this even dates back to the Forrester days of, you know, getting consulted about some of these kind of questions, and I'm with you.

(Corey at 00:20:58) More often than not, the buy option makes more sense. But I think it goes to a general more kind of conversation and discussion that I feel like we don't have enough, which is really there are very few companies that I have seen that I think excel at assessing their technology requirements and how they're going to select partners, how they're going to use them, manage implementation. And I think this is a good example where I do find that the technology available is often very far ahead of where the organization is in terms of their readiness to use it. And it's really difficult to kind of close that gap. It's why I think a lot of agencies stay in business is sort of that stopgap between the ambition and the actual kind of activation.

(Corey at 00:21:45) I think we're getting better at that, but I think this is sort of the growing pains of a technology-enabled business world where we haven't quite right-sized organizational readiness and knowledge and skill sets for the potentials of the technologies that they're evaluating and bringing in.

(Intro Narrator at 00:22:03) So I want to talk a

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) little bit about, you were mentioning the relationship between IT and marketing. Yeah. I want to get into that a little bit because you hear about IT and marketing butting heads a lot. How can they work together better to enable each other rather than butting heads?

(Corey at 00:22:24) Yeah, it's funny because when I was at Forrester, we did a, I don't know if we ever did it more than once actually, but we did a CMO-CIO summit. And the whole premise was, at least the first one that I was at, and maybe they did it after I had left the company, I'm not sure. But the whole premise was to bring together the Forrester groups, the CMO team and the CIO organization, and bring those leaders together in a forum, a smaller kind of forum to really talk about this and sort of get on the same page.

(Corey at 00:22:57) And I think one of the things that Forrester dubbed, and I really have always loved this, was to call it business technology, not just information technology, and sort of make the point over and over that technology is an enabler of business strategy. And if it's not doing that, then there's a disconnect. And so I think there's a couple of kind of pieces to this that I have always been struck by. But the biggest one for me is sort of a complete misalignment between the goals that each half of the organization, let's be reductive and just call it two halves—it's usually a lot more than that.

(Corey at 00:23:31) But just totally misaligned goals. And then what the CIO is tasked with has really not a lot to do with what the CMO is tasked with and vice versa. And so a lot of it just comes from better leadership and strategic planning around what each organization is responsible for and how they're designed to support each other. I think also an element of shared ownership for those business outcomes is a big one. You know, IT should not just be even brought in to consult on a technology purchase.

(Corey at 00:24:04) There should be some element of longer-term investment in that to make sure that once it's selected, it's still, you know, it's meeting requirements, it's kept up. But I think a lot of times, treating technology as sort of a one-stop, like we made the decision, it's implemented, and now we're sort of hands off, ends up degrading the value of the platform over time. IT has a lot of awesome expertise that can still be very valuable to the sort of non-technical side of the business. But again, if it's sort of seen as a necessary evil on the side of IT or on marketing, which I think is a common perception, I think a lot of that just roots from the fact that when you're not tasked with the same outcomes and you're not mutually responsible for the same outcomes, that's just going to breed frustration because you're just not working off of the same end state.

(Corey at 00:24:56) And I don't think enough work has been done at that level to get alignment, quite frankly, between marketing and IT organizations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) I've heard a very similar kind of thought process around more specifically security and the rest of the organization. For sure. And something that I thought was really cool that I heard recently is that older organizations tend to have a little bit more trouble with that because security is a newer thing, and they're trying to put a security layer on top of what they already have. And I think you could make the same case for IT. It's like integrating IT and marketing is a bit of a newer thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:38) And so if a company is trying to just throw tech on top of their current marketing initiatives, that's not going to work out as well. Whereas with newer companies or just companies that are embracing technology in the right way, it's like you have the IT underneath the marketing as support for it rather than just telling the marketing people like, hey, you need to be implementing this.

(Corey at 00:26:06) Yeah, I mean, you're getting at a key point here, which is that so long as marketing and IT kind of coexist as pillars, there's no reason that they're going to work well together. They're holding up different parts of the building. Whereas, kind of what you're just describing, if it's thought of maybe more horizontally or in a different kind of cross-functional arrangement, I see a lot of our customers taking a much more thoughtful approach to how they matrix the staffing for, in our case, CDP implementation, but as part of a broader technology initiative. And in fact, you know, our sales team will hate me when I say this, but we've had some folks who've delayed their CDP purchase because they've sort of realized that they're not adequately resourced right now to take it on.

(Corey at 00:26:52) I get that on the short term, right? That's a slipped deal. But at the same time, when they come back after two quarters and they've thought about this, they've hired a, you know, right program manager or the different roles that they think that they need, they actually end up setting themselves up for such better success. I think one of the things that is so common, I mentioned right from the beginning, right? Business is technology-enabled right now, whether it's privacy, whether it's, you know, any other kind of aspect of technology, but it's always there. But it doesn't necessarily give leadership an opportunity to pause and sort of reassess where we're at, right? It's like trying to change a horse midstream, and I think that is really overwhelming. There's not a lot of leaders who have good change management experience at the kind of scale and speed that we're talking about.

(Corey at 00:27:41) And I have a lot of sympathy for folks in that position. This is really difficult stuff. The stakes could not be higher. Right? People lose their jobs when they've chosen the wrong tech or an implementation goes the wrong way or they get hacked.

(Corey at 00:27:56) Right? Again, whatever it might be. And so, again, I feel right now we're at that, we're in a bit of a challenging moment where we haven't caught up organizationally, structurally, strategically to the challenges and opportunities that technology represents. But it does span much more than just saying, hey, how do we get IT and marketing to work together?

(Corey at 00:28:20) To your point, with GDPR and CCPA, we also need, you know, legal and governance potentially weighing in and being part of that conversation. And so, you know, that's very non-traditional. We haven't necessarily had to go through that. And unless you have kind of clear leadership and org structure and sort of outcomes aligned across those different teams, it can be kind of painful. It can create a lot of friction.

(Corey at 00:28:45) Sometimes you can push through, and other times it ends up derailing a lot of projects and you kind of lose further step. But this is a much bigger question, to your point, than just sort of getting marketing and IT to work happily together. I think it's fundamentally a rethinking, honestly, of how business works in a lot of ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:02) So you've been at BlueConic since the beginning. Were you a part of guiding the organizational structure at your company around these principles?

(Corey at 00:29:11) Yeah, I mean, we're lucky, right? And you already made the point about a startup. You just have a lot more room when it's an empty canvas than you do when you've got, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of employees globally that you have to shift, right? Change management is not a linear progression. It's exponentially more challenging. But absolutely, we have to think about that and how, as we grow every part, especially in a software business where arguably every component of the company needs to be part of that flywheel, right?

(Corey at 00:29:42) Marketing needs to be able to tell the stories from happy customers to sell more customers, and then CS and PS, professional services and customer success, have to make them successful. And product has to be deeply aligned with, you know, what are we getting asked along those stages. And so, you know, as you grow, each one of those disciplines, of course, becomes more challenging to make sure that they all stay aligned. And so it's thinking about, you know, a lot of it has to do with how we set incentives and OKRs and goals to make it really clear that, you know, product isn't just building things for product's sake. It's building things that are strategically relevant for the business and actually making sure we call that out as part of our annual and quarterly planning.

(Corey at 00:30:27) You know, being able to make sure that advocacy is part of our account manager's comp plans, right? Not just don't just renew and upsell, also get them happy and get them to be able to tell their story. And so, you know, it's thinking about where we are in the stage of the business and what each of those roles is responsible for. But in every case, to the extent that we can, making sure that they're never existing kind of fully on an island and isolated from the rest of the company.

(Corey at 00:30:54) There's also, I think, from me personally, there's a cultural element to that where I think it's really important, as long as you can, to make sure that you're creating a level of empathy across the business. I don't think that, you know, it's easy to do that early on when you know the person and it's, you know, it's empathy between people and small groups. But as bigger groups, people you may not know, right? You may not know who the product engineer is that built the thing, but you're getting yelled at by the customer because it's not working.

(Corey at 00:31:25) You've got to figure out a way to make sure you're facilitating that empathy even between strangers, so to speak. And I think that is both kind of a, again, a cultural aspect as well as something that you have to be really deliberate about in terms of leadership structure and organization to make sure that you're fostering that, honestly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:43) So what are some of the things that you do at BlueConic to kind of foster that culture? Do you have happy hours or events to get people together and talking as people, not just as coworkers?

(Corey at 00:31:55) Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of things that have gone into this over the years. A big piece of it, and we talk about this a lot, is a sort of idea that we have called "Building the Dream," which is something that goes back to my very, very early days when we started, where on Friday afternoons we get a group together and someone each week just sort of presents a little bit about themselves. And it's taken a couple of forms over the years. But it's really an opportunity for people to share who they are with their colleagues and to, you know, do that in a hugely personal way in a lot of ways. Other times it's incredibly funny, and everything in between.

(Corey at 00:32:36) But it's a chance to kind of push pause on your role, on your job, and tell us a little bit more about, you know, about your family, about your life, things that you're proud of, things you've screwed up in your past and sort of humanize each person. And I think, you know, those kind of things that have become a really big part of our kind of canon and employee experience, they do a lot to foster a lot of psychological safety. But as we grow, right, and people are in different time zones and all kinds of other things, we have to think even more about that. And so, you know, it's little stuff like having—we use a plugin in Slack. I know a lot of folks use it called Donut where you get randomly paired with a new person every two weeks just to chat with them and make sure you're having those conversations.

(Corey at 00:33:20) I also have to say, especially since with the pandemic and everyone being remote, I know there's a lot of everyone hates meetings and there's a lot of anti-meeting mentality. Meetings done well are invaluable. And so making sure that we have a touch every two weeks with the team, with the whole company, to talk about—we call them shots of positivity—where you could, you know, hey, these are great things that happen, and we talk about it, and I telegraph with the whole company about it. And just an opportunity to showcase people's successes and make sure everyone's also aware of what their colleagues are doing.

(Corey at 00:33:52) So we do a lot in this area and making sure that people feel comfortable. And as we grow, it'll happen more within teams, not just across them. But it's something that, you know, I never lose sight of. Is what we, or the things that we have done, are they still working? Do we need to change them? You know, that happens too.

(Corey at 00:34:12) But that's going to be ongoing, ever-going work to make sure that, you know, we're continuing to foster that sense of support and empathy across people, beyond just sort of their day jobs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:24) That's really cool. It sounds like you guys have been very smart and intentional about keeping the culture strong as you've grown to a point where you have to be intentional. Rather than playing catch-up, you've been proactive.

(Corey at 00:34:38) Yeah. We—I mean, a lot of that, I think, in some ways is a happy accident. You know, you don't necessarily know it when you first start doing it, and you try a lot of things and you see what works. I think, you know, going back to the very early days of the company, we were in the US in particular. We've got probably 12 people, six Dutch people, six Americans.

(Corey at 00:35:02) I was the only woman. Like, there was not a lot of automatic camaraderie that was happening in those early days. And, you know, I'll speak for myself. Like, coming to work without that is not fun, and I couldn't see that that being a real recipe for success over time. And so the whole concept of Building the Dream—the way the name of it came from the fact that when I had first accepted my offer, our CEO, Bart, had sent me a text message that said, "Hey, you know, we got your signed paperwork. Hurry up and get here. We've got a dream to build." And I remember vividly, I was sitting on a Delta flight back from Atlanta, about to take off from a strategy day at Forrester, and just feeling that energy of, like, being part of something. And then when I got here, that wasn't really—we weren't there yet.

(Corey at 00:35:49) We hadn't figured out how to make that actually feel that way. And so the whole exercise of that Friday afternoon came out of a desire to say, hey, if we're going to call it Building the Dream as a collective ambition, we've got to figure out ways to do that. And so it's grown into something far bigger and more meaningful than I necessarily imagined at the time. But, you know, necessity breeds innovation in a lot of ways, and that's what it was for me.

(Corey at 00:36:15) It was like, I'm at this company. It's not necessarily my favorite place to show up to every day right now. I just haven't connected with people, and I don't feel like I've got a lot of that feeling of, like, friendship and joy being around everyone. How do we start breaking those walls down in a way that is joint? And here we are.

(Corey at 00:36:37) Literally, I think the six-year anniversary of it is next week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:41) Nice.

(Corey at 00:36:42) So there you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:45) That's really funny how just having the ambitious name was like, all right, well, we can't call it Building a Dream and not go crazy with it.

(Corey at 00:36:54) And not go crazy with it. Totally. You've got to—that's a high bar to set. And if you're going to set it for me, I'm going for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:01) That's awesome. Well, so I want to talk a little bit about consumer privacy because that's a huge, huge thing in marketing. Seriously. And so Google's talking about killing cookies in 2023. How is that going to be affecting the industry?

(Corey at 00:37:16) Yeah. I mean, this has been probably the most common topic of this year so far, pre-Google changing their minds and pushing it back out another two years, which is like a whole other thing. You know, I think let's just even start there. The fact that one company can make such one decision and have it disrupt so much of the broader industry—like, that's just starting with the kernel of the problem here—that there's just too much decision-making and ability to sway the whole industry in a few companies' hands.

(Corey at 00:37:50) Whether it's Google, Facebook, Apple, or others. And I think, you know, we're confronting that. I am a big follow-the-money person, and I don't think any of these solutions have anything to do—any incentive to consolidate advertising within their ecosystem. And, you know, it's pretty notable that the the types of companies that are, you know, ostensibly on the front lines of privacy—when they announced the change, delaying it to 2023, that day their stock went up. A bunch of ad tech players' stock went up. Publishers stayed flat. Publishers are the ones who are getting screwed here, and therefore the consumer is actually the person, you know, getting kind of screwed here. And so, you know, I think this is—when we talk about privacy, honestly, we know less than I think we act like we know in terms of these broader implications because, you know, there's all kinds of issues again with, you know, who's making these calls. Do we want Google and Apple and Facebook and their intercompany feud to be what's driving the future of these decisions?

(Corey at 00:39:04) Meanwhile, I think, you know, in general, there's absolutely a huge amount of value in consumers having more choice and more transparency about their data. But I also don't think consumers fully grasp the way that this is a web and, you know, just eliminating one piece of this revenue ecosystem—you know, are we going to make the internet basically all behind a paywall? That's wildly inequitable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:28) Yeah.

(Corey at 00:39:28) It's a huge problem. So there's just a lot of really important structural considerations here that I don't think we've really answered at this point. You know, I think in general, the trend toward more privacy to have more of this conversation and to confront these realities is overall, without a doubt, a good thing. But I think we're still quite a ways away from a true reconciliation of these different competing tensions. And I don't know that anyone in the issue really has a good answer for this yet, and I'm dubious if they say that they do, just because this is an enormous, enormous set of questions that are all tangled up among each other still.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a big issue when a small group of people or a single person has that much power to just kind of change the industry at a whim. I mean, I remember not too long ago with the iOS 14—everyone had to change their advertising practices in order to comply with Apple's new standards. Yeah.

(Corey at 00:40:39) But it's also like—you know, I think that's a great example of, you know, that Apple is saying privacy equals what's on your device. Okay? But is that really privacy? Because then you're—you know, the default is that you opt into Apple's way of defining privacy and that, you know, that's the decision they made. I'm not totally sold on the fact that, like, my device—just because it's loaded there and not in the cloud—really solves the underlying challenge of, like, right, but Apple is still basically the mediator of my data and making choices for me on my behalf that, admittedly, the average consumer doesn't fully understand that.

(Corey at 00:41:26) So there's—you know, you might be shortcutting the decision for them. But I don't—there's a great example of, like, this sounds good on the surface, but as soon as you kind of start to interrogate it and consider the implications of it, there's some pretty dubious logic that Apple's applying here outside of—again, it sort of benefits them and makes them look good. And I think also, you know, Scott Galloway talks a lot about this in some of his stuff—professor at NYU. You know, are we making privacy a luxury product where if you can afford an iPhone, you know, you have access to this? And if you can't, right, an iPhone is a thousand dollars these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:05) Yeah.

(Corey at 00:42:06) That's right. Like, that's—so all of a sudden, we're creating, like, a two-tier system that privacy is at the root of. Again, I go back to: there's some really dubious questions here that we need to bring a lot of scrutiny to around making sure that whatever we decide about privacy is equitable and is clear on what the implications of it are. And I don't think we are anywhere close to having a consensus, or really even honestly a fully transparent conversation about that yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:32) Yeah. I mean, there's also, like, the school of thought of people that say, "Well, why can't I just pay the company directly and not share my data?" And they say, well, because not everybody can do that, and then you just have a lot of people that are forced to share their data in order to be on the same page as you. Right? And that isn't good.

(Corey at 00:42:54) Right. I mean, or at least we need to make an explicit decision about whether or not it's good. I think that's, like, my big kind of frustration with so much of this is that the conversation is inevitably reductive because it's being had on Twitter or, you know, in sort of soundbite types of debates. I don't know that—I don't think regulators in Europe or here have a really good grasp on what's happening, you know, what they're actually regulating. A lot of the language sometimes can be—sounds great—but then again, you start to interrogate it and think, "Okay, well, what does this actually mean?" And all of a sudden, it's pretty fluffy in a lot of cases. Right? Like, I remember this with GDPR when we rolled out a pretty substantial consent management function because that's part of our business, is making sure the data is consented. And up right up until May 25th, 2018, we had customers who were like, "We actually don't know what we're doing about this."

(Corey at 00:43:55) We know some publishers that just turned off traffic from Europe, basically. We're just like, "Nope. You can't come here for now" because they were so unclear about what the implications of being in violation were. Others took a totally different route, which is basically they did nothing and sort of hoped they wouldn't get slapped on the wrist. Right?

(Corey at 00:44:12) So, I mean, that's a great example of, like, a law that got so much attention, and yet in reality, there was no such thing as a consensus around what it meant, how to enforce it, what the level of detail required was, all of that. And so it just leaves for a lot of big loopholes on the one hand and just a lot of uncertainty on the other. And so everyone's kind of muddling forward together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:36) Yeah. I like that phrasing. Everyone's muddling forward together. Yeah. And, like, you want to give them—like, the people behind creating new regulations and stuff—you want to give them the benefit of the doubt that, like, they are at least trying to make moves that have the general public's best interest at heart, but it is just such a challenge to execute on that properly.

(Corey at 00:45:01) Yeah. And you've got to remember, right? Like, these are businesses. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars either directly or indirectly attached to the choices that are being made here, whether it's on the advertising side. You could think about it again just purely in terms of spend, but also think about the jobs that are impacted by this. I mean, there's a lot at stake that has been kind of combined in this ecosystem and that, you know, there's rightly a lot of fear about overcorrecting or making one choice versus another, because there—it's not a small ripple in terms of the impact. What I think is encouraging is to see a lot of customers, at least from our side, it's who I get to spend the most time with, thinking about this in the right way and sort of saying, "Okay." Again, one of the benefits of technology in some cases is being able to experiment and try different things. So how do we kind of create sort of a data deprecation playbook around some of this stuff and say, "Okay."

(Corey at 00:46:03) You know, what are the components of this, both in terms of the consenting of the data that we're collecting, how it can be used, you know, what are some of the automation and algorithmically driven decisions that we're making that we need to maybe check on? Is this the right way to apply algorithms to our data? Who are we sharing data with in a more second-party way and making sure you have a more trusted partner ecosystem? So there's a lot of really good thoughtful things happening to sort of address this stuff. But, again, very, very early days of it.

(Corey at 00:46:36) And I think there's a lot still more change to come being imposed on everyone trying to navigate it, as well as from those folks who are doing the navigating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:47) This conversation actually reminds me—really closely reminds me of yesterday we had on head of engineering at Coinbase. I don't remember his actual job title. But he was talking about their kind of evolution as they recognized the power they held as the largest, like, exchange for cryptocurrencies for the general public. And so, originally, their approach was that they were going to pick which currencies to list based off of which ones are most useful to people. And they were going to kind of be just the big deciding force on what gets used and what doesn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:27) And that worked for a while, but there's, like, unpredictable things. Like, you mentioned Dogecoin. They made a conscious decision not to list Dogecoin because it was a joke. And it was a joke until it wasn't. And so they had to kind of change their strategy to now they're like, "All right."

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:48) We'll list everything that is legal to list because some currencies are technically securities by the SEC. There's financial stuff, but they're listing everything they're allowed to and just giving the information to the consumers so every individual can make their own decision about it. Yeah. And that seems—I think that's the most likely end result in—you could apply that in a lot of ways to, like, security practices or advertising and consumer privacy practices or, like, crypto and investing and just giving access and information to everyone seems to be where we're all heading.

(Corey at 00:48:33) Yeah. I mean, I'll play devil's advocate, though. That's how content moderation started at Facebook too, and we know how that ended up. Right? So I think there's this—or, you know, we—there's—that's what I sort of mean is, like, that's still one company, a for-profit company, who's essentially made themselves regulator to the best of their ability. Right? Maybe well-intended. But that's an awful large responsibility. And when your incentive is to continue your own money-making operation, you know, that might be in direct contradiction to other societal goods or government regulation. And, you know, I just think things like that and privacy falling into that camp—it can't be driven or decided by even the best-meaning single organizations or a handful of organizations, because that's how things go sideways.

(Corey at 00:49:21) And I think, you know, we're going to keep confronting that reality in unexpected ways going forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) Yeah. I think you're right. And it could also be looked at more as like a pendulum.

(Corey at 00:49:33) Yes. For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:35) I think that's a better way of looking at it. But, man, you've given me a lot to think about here. That's really a lot of really cool stuff. But before we wrap up, I just want to ask you a couple more kind of broad leadership questions if that's cool.

(Corey at 00:49:55) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:55) So alright. If you could design the perfect leadership training program for the leaders at your company, what would the most important concepts be?

(Corey at 00:50:06) Yeah. I love this. So I think authenticity is the biggest one. You know, I think there is just a lot going on in the world right now and in general. And I think leaders who start with their authenticity and work through that is really important.

(Corey at 00:50:28) I think another piece of it is kind of giving them the mentality of leading with curiosity and not with judgment. That's something that I've worked really hard at and making sure that you start with asking questions and not coming in with predefined answers. And I know that sounds trite, but, you know, just in language and sort of managing things, that can be really hard. So I think those are kind of the biggest pieces. I think also recognizing that no matter what at the end of the day, you know, you are there for the company and, you know, being able to handle and manage the oftentimes feel like competing priorities between maybe people on your team and the broader kind of company goals, and getting comfortable with being able to live between that ambiguity and mesh to the best of your ability.

(Corey at 00:51:17) I think those are the kind of core competencies that I look for and would hope to train into, you know, leaders in our organization and beyond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:27) That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, without the authenticity, it's really easy to see through a lack of authenticity.

(Corey at 00:51:35) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:35) And I think there's a tendency for leaders to underestimate their employees' ability to do that.

(Corey at 00:51:42) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:44) So what's, like, one piece of advice you would give yourself back when you were getting into your first management role?

(Corey at 00:51:51) Some of what I just said. Those are all lessons that I have learned. I wouldn't say I came into the world having known those. Another one that I wish I were better at—I continue to be a work in progress on—but a person I know who I've had the fortune of being coached by, Rob Galford, said to me, "You may be right, and it may not matter here."

(Corey at 00:52:13) And that is something that I needed to tell my two-year-old self, never mind my early leader self, and continue to tell myself now. You know, I think that can be very challenging in situations where, objectively, what you're assessing and diagnosing is true, and it just may not matter. There may be things that are more important or of competing importance, and I think that has been hard for me to learn that level of nuance sometimes. And so I would go back and tell myself that. Another thing I think I would tell myself, and this was a quote from David Axelrod in the book 10% Happier, which is—you know, he was talking about running Obama's reelection campaign.

(Corey at 00:52:56) And with so much out of his control, like, how do you kind of handle it? And he said, "All you can do is everything you can do." And that is very much something that I was struck by because I early on, right, you're trying to do so, so, so much and setting kind of a standard and a bar for what you can achieve. And sometimes just things are out of your control, and you just have to learn to live with that. So "you may be right, and it may not matter here" and "all you can do is everything you can do," I think, are kind of the two leadership mantras that earlier on would have been good for me to learn, and I'm going to keep on my own journey of learning them still.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:41) Those are awesome. I like that a lot. So I guess one last question here. What does the future hold for you at BlueConic? And just going forward, what are you really excited about?

(Corey at 00:53:57) You know, the thing that I love about my job and my opportunity at the company is that I am always learning something, and that is partially just the opportunity to work with the people that I do who are always teaching me things. But also, you know, when you're a fast-growing company, like, there's a new challenge, there's a new something, a new curveball every single day. And so I'm, you know, excited about continuing that journey, honestly, of learning new things internally, externally. I think as a company, you know, we're just getting started in a lot of ways on some of the stuff that we've talked about today. This next sort of frontier of privacy and a lot of other kind of changes that are happening in the market that what we do is really central to.

(Corey at 00:54:39) And so being able to see how that shapes up, how we influence it, how it influences us, is incredibly exciting for me. And, you know, at the end of the day, like, the gift that I have is I work with some of the most incredible human beings. I work with incredible customers. And so just the opportunity to continue to do that quite frankly and absorb their wisdom and their ideas and their energy, that is such a sustaining force for me. And, you know, I can do this for a long time given that I still have that opportunity.

(Corey at 00:55:12) So that's the stuff that I'm excited about.

(Intro Narrator at 00:55:16) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.