Making Data-Driven Decisions with Dan Temby, President of Proove Intelligence

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Dan, the SVP of Technology at the DAC Group and President of Proove Intelligence. We discuss how to use data analytics to illuminate the path forward rather than to just provide support for decisions you've already made, why companies need to put more trust into their data, and how to get buy-in from executives to make more data-driven decisions. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Dan at 00:00:40) Here we go.

(Outro Narrator at 00:00:42) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Well, tell me about your background, man. How'd you get into tech?

(Dan at 00:00:57) I grew up in Australia, actually. I've been in Canada since 2004, and I'm born and raised in Adelaide, Australia. I got out of high school. I wasn't a great student, didn't really enjoy school, but I loved computer sciences and found myself blitzing anything that was sort of scientifically inclined at school and everything else sort of fell by the wayside and was just sort of a disturbance to my otherwise very important day. And then I took on college after high school in information systems in the early '90s.

(Dan at 00:01:35) And then I got out of that and got into—once I was done with that, I got into sales actually in the packaging industry just to sort of get a job. And this is mid-'90s and I was good at it, but man, I hated it. I really didn't enjoy it. And I learned about—I was very young still, but I learned about business and relationships and how to sort of grow confidence in a space that I wasn't super confident with the subject matter, but I had to kind of learn about how to deal with the people. And then a long story short, I got fired from my first job after four years because I was kind of just dialing it in, and I didn't because I wasn't enjoying—I wasn't stimulated by it at all. So that kind of gave me a moment to sort of sit back and take stock of what was going on. And shortly after that, you know, as everyone knows, mid to late 1990s, '98, '99, the internet became a thing, and it really—it was new and emerging. My studies hadn't really prepared me for HTTP and the web, doing programming in C++ and that type of thing didn't really align, but fundamentally, I kind of had a real interest in that. So a very good friend of mine named Michael Potter and I started a business doing web development and doing websites for people.

(Dan at 00:02:57) And it was funny. He was a musician as well, interestingly enough, a session guitar player, fantastically talented man, and a really good person. And he and I kind of set about cracking, working out how to make the internet a business for just small businesses. And when we started a small business, we rented—we started in his sort of basement office, and then we moved out into a little studio. And we got really good.

(Dan at 00:03:24) We picked up, you know, we built an e-commerce platform for a national sports retailer in the year 2000, and it's awful. I could look back and think about it now. By today's standards, it was just terrible. But I did that and I got a great education in the reality of putting this stuff together. We built an online auction catalog management system for a government surplus auction house, where the core, you'll love this, the driving KPI was reduction in photocopying costs.

(Dan at 00:03:56) It wasn't about anything else because people would show up to the auction on auction day and they would put their hand out for an inch-thick auction catalog that these guys would have to crank out of their printer. And they said, hey, most people have a computer at home, they have access to the internet. What if they could go and view our catalog online, handpick the stuff they were interested in, print their own catalog and bring it in just the stuff they were interested in? And then, and they saved $45,000 a year in photocopying costs. And that made the Financial Review, which is like the Wall Street Journal in Australia.

(Dan at 00:04:27) And we got an article in the Financial Review about how we helped this auction house reduce printing costs. And again, I think it was really interesting by today's standards. We think about the KPIs and the metrics driving digital business today and how different they are, but still there were metrics. There was a measurement. There was a reason for doing it back then.

(Dan at 00:04:48) And it was super fun. And I remember selling the guy on the vision of that thing. And then on the way home, stopping to buy ASP in a Nutshell by O'Reilly, which is the book that was gonna teach me how to do everything I just promised this guy I was gonna do for him. And then we went back to the studio, took our ties off, and got to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) That kind of reminds me of how you said that you got a write-up in the Wall Street Journal about you improving this strange KPI. I actually saw it was last year, but the Wall Street Journal article on how Domino's Pizza outperformed every tech stock because of the digital transformation that they went through as a company. And the efficiencies that this pizza shop got made their stock do better than every tech company that year. So that—

(Dan at 00:05:33) It's a driving force. I mean, try to name an industry or a business that's not being driven by digitization and digital transformation. Right? And you'd be hard-pressed, I think, to find one that's worthy of a conversation that isn't directly connected to what's going on in the digital world and analytics and the relatively inexpensive compute power today. It's driving so much of our world for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:03) So the first company you were at, or that you founded, was basically an agency for building whatever needed building.

(Dan at 00:06:12) Right. And this is where I reflect on that. I'm like, man, if I could have a do-over there, it would have been different because it wasn't—it was funny. It wasn't about the money. It was about learning how to do things.

(Dan at 00:06:23) So we built a website and a scheduling calendar system for a gym. They didn't pay us money, but we got access to the gym for free. So we worked out every day. So we did so much stuff on barter and contra and deals. You know, I drove a beautiful Honda Prelude at the time because we did a dealership, a chain of Honda dealerships. We did their website for them. We got them into the internet for the very first time. But there wasn't—it was kind of right around the dot-com bubble, but in Australia, we were kind of insulated from that. It wasn't the same as it was out west in North America at the time. There was hesitation and a little bit of—it was this thing happening in the US, but in Australia, we were behind the curve a little bit.

(Dan at 00:07:06) So people said, yeah, I'm interested in getting a website. It was more like having a digital brochure, like the kind of thing that you would otherwise have on your coffee table. That's what people wanted. And then we brought some dynamism to that conversation and said, well, have you thought about doing this or adding this feature or this functionality? And that got people interested in talking to us, but the revenues weren't huge. There wasn't a lot on the line. If things went sideways, not like today, right? Nothing we did was mission-critical. It was just interesting.

(Dan at 00:07:34) And I learned a lot about how things work. Actually, today, it's funny when I'm interviewing people. I've interviewed no fewer than six, seven hundred people in my career for different roles of different levels of technical acumen. And oftentimes, I'll ask somebody in the interview to explain to me how the internet works. Just explain it to me in your own words. And it's funny how many people who are looking for jobs in the digital realm can't do that.

(Dan at 00:08:00) They can't give you a cogent description on how the internet works. And that's because not a lot of people came up through the grassroots where there weren't web platforms to do a thing or there weren't frameworks developed. You had to do it all from scratch. And doing it from scratch meant you got down a few layers, and you actually understand how things come together. And that's what's really helped me in my career.

(Dan at 00:08:23) Having this foundational understanding of how things work has helped me get to where I am today, even though the people that I surround myself with now are far superior to me in terms of their skills and capabilities and whatever it is that they do. Having that kind of working knowledge from the grassroots of the internet has really helped me kind of stay relevant and current. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:44) That's really cool. Yeah. Just how the internet actually works isn't something that I ever really put that much thought into until we actually had Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, on the podcast.

(Dan at 00:08:56) Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) And then on a later episode, we had one of the co-founders of Stellar, the cryptocurrency payment network.

(Dan at 00:09:04) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:05) And Joel's doing that interview, and he brought up that we just had the inventor of the internet on the podcast. And the guy who founded Stellar was like, no, no, you didn't. He invented the web. And then he went through a very detailed explanation of the internet and all the layers.

(Dan at 00:09:21) Yeah. Yeah. No. The worldwide web and the internet are two very different things. Right? It's all function of protocol, and this is the stuff, you know, and it's funny depending on who the person is when you're interviewing them and you ask them that question, the look of death kind of washes over their face. But it's similar to, you know—and again, we don't expect people to be network engineers, but I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic that didn't have a working explanation of an internal combustion engine. Right? And I think there's a lot to be said for that. Again, interfaces and platforms have made very complicated stuff kind of trivial.

(Dan at 00:10:01) And if you want to be in the agency world or the advanced analytics world or somewhere where you're claiming to be able to come in and solve problems, then I think you need more than just an interface working knowledge of what's going on if you want to be credible in those conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) Yeah, absolutely. Troubleshooting requires such a further depth of knowledge than operating something. But so tell me about where you're at today. Is it DAC Group or the DAC Group? How do you—

(Dan at 00:10:32) It's DAC. It's an initialism, not an acronym. So I like to educate people on the differences of those just because it's a fun little grammatical trivia. Yeah. So DAC Group, and I've been fortunate enough to be with the agency since 2008 when I was introduced to Norm, the CEO, through my network and sort of came on as one of the instigators of sort of our own digital transformation.

(Dan at 00:11:01) How are we gonna go from being a long, you know, successful Yellow Pages advertiser, Yellow Pages agency, and then pivot to digital? And he had the foresight to understand, you know, in the early 2000s that the Yellow Pages medium was going away rapidly and the internet was gonna usurp that entire position. And then sure enough, it did. And you know, all the competitors we had when I joined the agency are all gone. And we persist and have grown from strength to strength and become quite a player in the performance digital marketing space.

(Dan at 00:11:37) And then more recently, we've taken our analytics practice that I established probably back in 2011 or '12. We got our first—I was the web analyst until I wasn't, and then we got somebody in to do a better job than me and grew it from there. And we've grown that into quite a practice, and that's sort of where the Proove Intelligence brand has come from, where we've established inside DAC as a dedicated analytics center of excellence, a secondary brand, and we focus purely on advanced analytics, data science, integrated business intelligence, and marketing technology that really drives a lot of the measurement that goes on in the digital business. And so we act as sort of the internal analytics department for DAC and every client that we touch, plus we work exclusively with other clients as an analytics service provider directly. And that gives us access to all kinds of experiences and really exciting project work that we get to have a real influence on the way those businesses use their data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:42) Well, DAC's always been ahead of the curve on analytics. Right? Weren't you guys first to do tracking on how those Yellow Pages ads performed?

(Dan at 00:12:54) Right. Yeah. And so we did, we call it RCF, remote call forwarding, which is really just an IP-based phone number. Or back then, it wasn't. It was actually done on the PSTN where they would switch a phone number from one to the other.

(Dan at 00:13:07) So something as trivial as putting a different phone number in the Yellow Pages ad than you have as your main phone number so that you can track calls to that number and attribute them to your investment in the Yellow Pages. It sounds like laughably trivial by today's standards, but that was real revolutionary stuff back in the day that helped bring some sort of tangible ROI to the investment people were having in the directory space. As you fast forward now, you know, call tracking is a whole industry. Right? And there are a lot of players.

(Dan at 00:13:41) We partner with a few very big ones, and what you can do with the telephone, especially with the mobile revolution, it's quite fascinating how you can get really detailed attribution for all types of marketing activities using the telephone either through, you know, IP-based communication or traditional telephony. But, yeah, it's fun to write down keyword-level stuff and, you know, personalized events that can help you understand what triggered people to actually place that phone call or engage with you, all using the phone. It's really a fascinating space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:18) Yeah. That's really cool. I remember I also read that you guys were putting QR codes in Yellow Pages way before—

(Dan at 00:14:27) Way before COVID. Way before everybody. I'm telling you, man, we were—I was pro-QR code for the longest time, and I was told often that it's stupid and it's a waste. But now I'm telling you, I think they're here to stay now. That's for sure.

(Dan at 00:14:40) But, yeah, we actually did. We ran a few Yellow Pages ads back in the day when mobile was starting to get a foothold, right around the first iPhone and second iPhone generations where we'd pop up the QR code that could, you know, link you out to a landing page that we could then directly attribute to that Yellow Pages ad again. And, again, did we get a ton of traffic? Nope. Was that a really meaningful contribution? Did it save the Yellow Pages? It sure didn't because that's long gone now and was certainly on to much more sophisticated things. But it was definitely—you know, it's a good representation of kind of who we are organizationally is doing interesting new things to try to find if there's a way to sort of crack the code or break the mold a little bit to give meaning to the effort that we're doing because, ultimately, that's what our clients care about. They care very much about, you know, what have you done for me lately? What is the return gonna be on this thing?

(Dan at 00:15:43) And are the decisions you're making the right ones? And we want to be able to prove that. And if we're wrong, then we want to know and we want to move on to something different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Yeah. Absolutely. And the people that are in first definitely get the highest returns on any new trend.

(Dan at 00:15:58) Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) But so tell me, what is the problem that companies are having that makes them go to you today? That they're looking for a solution.

(Dan at 00:16:12) Yeah. And I'll probably talk to you about that, I think, more in terms of the Prove Intelligence brand because that's really where, personally, I see the most exciting part of our business right now and the big opportunity, not only for us organizationally, but for the clients that we're working with and the stories that we have to tell. I think people getting their head around—everyone's been talking about data activation. We've gotta use our business data, our historic business data to help make tomorrow's decisions. Right?

(Dan at 00:16:45) I have this slide that I put into some of my presentations that says most companies use their data the way a drunk person uses a lamppost, and that is to say for support rather than illumination. Right? That's the quote. So, and I think when you break that down, anybody can get any data set and pivot it to tell a story that makes whatever decision they made last week seem plausible. Right?

(Dan at 00:17:11) It's like, hey, we did this thing and look, it ain't so bad. Right? But in order to take that same data set and help it give you an idea or to make a better decision for what happens tomorrow and sort of illuminate a path forward, I think that's where a lot of organizations are struggling right now—to bring all of that information together and have the technical acumen to be able to do that, but also the business discipline to be able to say, okay, we've been relying on Bob for twenty years to help us make decision X and Y. And now we've got Bob and all of his experience, which is unbelievably valuable, but we've got all this data that also contributes to the decision-making process. And we should find a way to incorporate that and trust it and test it appropriately and help improve things that way.

(Dan at 00:18:03) And I think that's where we're finding a lot of traction is helping people kind of bring that together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:09) It sounds like it requires a really humble executive team that is—they're able to throw away what they think or their hunches on a moment's notice if the data says something's wrong.

(Dan at 00:18:24) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:27) Do you have to deal with egos a lot within your clients?

(Dan at 00:18:31) Well, not so much egos, it's trust. I think the number one thing that's derailed projects for us and our clients' opportunity, even people we don't work with, prospects that we might talk to and not ultimately work with, I think the number one thing that derails them is trust. They don't believe that the signals that we're relying on are either accurate or complete or comprehensive enough to tell the full story, and sometimes that just gets in the way. And I think the trust is a derivative of maybe just a lack of understanding. Like, data is not a guarantee. Data science is not about guaranteeing. It's got the word science in it for God's sake. Like, science is iterative and controlled and arduous and exhaustive. It's not just—it's not magic.

(Dan at 00:19:21) It's something that needs to be worked at and understood correctly and having the right people at the table that understand the new think. I believe in this thing called the conscious competence scale. I'm not sure if you've heard of that, but it's about anyone that learns anything goes through the four stages of conscious competence. Right? And I talk about this a lot with my team and with other people I interface with, and I think that critical one of being consciously incompetent is so critical.

(Dan at 00:19:52) Like, being aware of what you don't know and inviting people around that do, and then finding your way to bridge to that conscious competence where you've learned a new thing, but you're applying yourself to that new thing and you want to go on, explore that. And sometimes I find organizations and certain executives and certain people who are in positions of power and trying to navigate this complicated new world, they might not be so willing to be consciously incompetent and say, hey, you know what? This is a space I don't understand. This is a space that's new to me.

(Dan at 00:20:23) I know it's important, and I want to make sure I get there. And I think that is a huge limiting factor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:31) So I want to break it down to, like, practicality. Do you have any cool case studies that you can share about engagements where your data analytics were able to provide a path forward that the company followed?

(Dan at 00:20:51) So this retailer we've been working with for under the DAC banner for a number of years, doing their media and their marketing, and they actually had a data science team. And most companies do have a data science team now, big company, sizable organizations, and there's Purdue grads in there. And I remember actually before one of the meetings, I'm not a Purdue grad. I didn't study data science at all, and so I was a little intimidated actually before I met these people. But as soon as I did, as soon as I met them, I'm like, oh, now I understand why they need us.

(Dan at 00:21:25) I knew right away because of all their academic—of all their capabilities and academic skill, they really didn't know how to connect what they were doing into sort of material business outcomes that were going to influence the bottom line of this company. They knew how to do a regression model all day long, right, or any number of other models they could do, but they didn't really know how to carry the conversation through to how it could influence a business. And that's where we really stepped in to help. So we were able to work with this brand to look at their custom—they had a great customer data platform.

(Dan at 00:22:06) We took a pass at that. It was a little too generic, so we went a layer deeper, and we pulled every transaction from every point of sale system they had made in the last ten years—hundreds of millions of rows of data. And our team got to sort of cleaning this and engineering features within this data that were meaningful to the business, and ultimately, we created customer segments rather than going through this sort of aspirational persona development using market research to say, who are the different kinds of customers and who are the different types of people and how are they gonna interact with your brand and how are they gonna respond to your message? We said, you've got ten years of actual stuff going on here, and here's what it tells us about your customer base in excruciating detail. And we were able to build out these personas that they were extremely excited to see.

(Dan at 00:23:02) The data science team were very excited. I mean, we took them through the detail, the math of it all, how we arrived where we arrived. But the executive team and the marketing team—we went in and presented this, and there was a huge boardroom full of people from product development and from real estate and from merchandising, from all corners of the business. They brought them in to hear this thing because what we had to say kind of infiltrated the inner workings of their business, and these persona segments that we created for them became sort of staples in their internal taxonomy. So when they were developing new product, they were developing it for Maria. Why? Because it was red and it was small, and it was gonna go into this part of the country first geographically.

(Dan at 00:23:43) They would remerchandise some of their retail stores based on our findings to put different color palettes into different stores primarily because they knew that the data suggested that the people in that particular area were more susceptible to a blue color than a red color. They launched new products on a Thursday rather than a Tuesday. Like, these things actually happened downstream from the work that we did, and they were able to see sort of measurable upticks in the key performance indicators that mattered to their business through the application of the insights and the findings from the work that we did.

(Dan at 00:24:30) So that's one that we—and we still work with this company today and we do a variety of different things for them. But this model that we built, and these, you know, this process for understanding the transaction data and categorizing their customers and learning from them is persistent to this day. And so it's very interesting to see how that's evolved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:52) That's really cool. Yeah. Because I know, like, traditional marketing segmentation you do with whatever census data or Gartner data that you buy or whatever, but that's just kind of a blurry outline of what you could be using if you had ten years of your own data.

(Dan at 00:25:10) Absolutely. Yeah. And if you've got that asset, like, put it to use. Like, bring it together. Like, we also actually—it's funny you say that, like, the third-party and the external data also super relevant because from an acquisition point of view, if I'm looking to grow my customer base and I want to find more people that look like this customer group, or I want to find more people in this part of the country that has these socioeconomic factors that affect it, then I need to look beyond my own walls to get insight and relevance and information from other sources.

(Dan at 00:25:47) So we actually used our data and our segments that we created became the basis for third-party research. So we put real-world descriptors around them, and we went and found those people in all of these other data subscriptions that we have. And we built sort of detailed personas on top of this data-driven stuff for the marketing group so that they could understand them. But internally, like the understanding of the actual customers based on their actual business variables and features, that was good enough for the internal teams to do what they needed to do. So it really did create this sort of springboard into various parts of the organization.

(Dan at 00:26:23) And again, that's something that we've referred to—we've leveraged similar tactics and the techniques that we developed in that engagement for other clients. And again, that's just part of the value that we try to offer is that we're never starting from scratch. With anything that we're doing ever, we're never starting from zero. Whereas some companies that might hire data scientists and try to go it alone, they're kind of starting from the ground floor. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47) Yeah. Absolutely. So tell me about the Prove Intelligence Outcome Accelerator, just because I saw it, and it sounds like a really cool name. I don't know what it is.

(Dan at 00:26:57) Yeah. So actually, that's something that we're actually reframing. So what that was, it's really about—remember the point I made earlier about trust in terms of hamstringing a data project? People don't trust the data. They're not going to do anything with it. They're not going to want to do anything. And I think that Outcome Accelerator really was our sort of—it started off as sort of an operating framework where we wanted to execute every project through these sort of four categories. And it sort of evolved more to an ethos because as our portfolio has broadened and the type of work that we're doing, it's become sort of a thing that we hang on the wall. And it means that it doesn't matter what we're doing, whether we're doing a data pipeline thing for an integrated dashboard, whether we're doing a complicated engineering and data science project like the one I just explained, or whether we're deploying an analytics platform and a marketing technology stack to help, you know, add to the data set for a particular customer, that these sort of four things that we call analytics imperatives have to be at the forefront all the time.

(Dan at 00:28:13) And they are trust, meaning you have to be able to believe that the data is going to be accurate, and we need to do what we need to do to let everybody know that it's accurate. The second one is perception. Data and analytics is a highly cognitive space. It can sometimes blind people that don't love it, and they just glaze over. So we have to make it perceptive. Right?

(Dan at 00:28:36) We need to make sure that people understand and perceive what we're talking about. So communicating at different levels, making sure people are really enrolled in what we're doing and not just nodding along blindly. So perception is the sort of second pillar of our accelerator. The third one is intelligence. So we have to use, you know, state-of-the-art methods and approaches to actually doing the work. So great machine learning tools, great engineering and statistical modeling methodology that really gives scientific rigor to what we're doing. And then ultimately, the last imperative is influence, we call it. And that really is about, do we know what we're gonna change in the business when we're all done? Because if we're just doing all of these great reports and doing all this great analysis, it's just gonna become a very expensive spreadsheet at the end of the day.

(Dan at 00:29:34) And so we have to have a plan from the beginning about how are we gonna use this to influence the business and ultimately drive some sort of measurable outcome that's gonna be meaningful to the people that we're working with. And we found from our experience that if we check those four boxes, those four imperatives are always in the conversation, then we have tremendous success. We get everybody enrolled. We move things forward. We do good work, and everyone's happy.

(Dan at 00:30:00) So trust, perception, intelligence, and influence are those sort of four imperatives that we focus on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) That's really cool.

(Dan at 00:30:09) Yeah. They're—and again, like I said, we've evolved that a little bit. We used to have a little bit more—last year, we had a more wordy explanation for that, and we've simplified it to those four imperatives. And that's what I was just double-checking that I had the language right because I'm so used to the original version of that.

(Dan at 00:30:27) But people really respond to that, and they recognize the difference between, you know, vendors that come in and say, hey, my platform is gonna solve all your data problems because they want you to implement something, and they think that that'll be it to, like, an agency or an analytics partner like us that wants to work at the table and make sure that we're gonna move things forward appropriately and be accountable for the outcome. Ultimately, that's what we're trying to sell our clients is a number, an improvement of a number over time. That's what we're selling them. The work is just the medium to get us there, but the work itself doesn't have value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02) Yeah. Exactly. So I saw that DAC Group also has a podcast. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

(Dan at 00:31:10) Yeah. I can. So my very good friends and brilliant colleagues, Nasser Sahloul, who runs our strategy and insights group, and our—and Jenna Watson, who runs our media department, which is a massive operation, and she's awesome at that. The three of us get together once a month and pick a topic that's sort of relevant to what we're feeling in our industry, in our business, and we'll sort of go deep on that. We'll bring guests in from time to time.

(Dan at 00:31:40) It's called Inside the Funnel. We're in our sort of second full year of that now, and we're having a lot of fun doing that. And sometimes the topics are laid out well ahead of time and we researched them. Whereas the one I think we did in December, we said we should do a "what do we think is gonna happen next year" episode?

(Dan at 00:32:00) And then an hour later, we jumped on and recorded it. And it was actually one of the better ones because it was super natural landscape. It was like the first time we'd had a conversation about it. We did one about the metaverse as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) Oh, nice.

(Dan at 00:32:11) Similar type of thing where it was literally the first time the three of us had had a conversation about that topic since Facebook rebranded and everything happened. So we captured our kind of initial thoughts and reactions and idiosyncrasies without any rehearsal whatsoever, and it was actually a lot of fun. So, yeah, that's definitely something we enjoy doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:33) That's awesome. So what do you—how do you define, like, what the metaverse is going to be? Like—

(Dan at 00:32:40) Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Because there's—I feel like there's such a spectrum between, like, some cheesy Sims-like world where we have avatars that we're moving around with our mouse or, like, an AR on top of the real world.

(Dan at 00:32:55) Mmhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:55) I don't know. Like, how do you define it? How do you think it will look when it takes off or if it takes off?

(Dan at 00:33:02) Well, there's a couple of things. And again, if anyone's interested in this, I would invite them to listen to our Inside the Funnel episode on the metaverse because we do cover a lot of those topics. But I think in a nutshell, there's a couple things that I would say to that. One, I think people need to understand that the metaverse is a concept rather than a construct. So it's not one organization that will have a metaverse.

(Dan at 00:33:33) There will be a metaverse and it will be interoperable, and it will run largely on decentralized, sort of web three computing, which will democratize the access and the ownership and the governance and even the growth of that platform. And that's where I think Facebook's announcement confused a lot of people because they were like, oh, Facebook owns the metaverse, although that's not true at all. They're just trying to do a bit of a land grab.

(Dan at 00:34:10) They were getting in early trying to become the Kleenex of the metaverse, right? So tissues are tissues, but everyone calls them Kleenex because of great branding and great timing. And I think there's something to be said for what's going on there. But fundamentally, Nassar made a really interesting point that I've reflected on that he borrowed some readings from—I can't remember who it was, but I'll have to look it up.

(Dan at 00:34:38) But basically saying that there needs to be a reason. My kids come down and mess with the settings on my computer here because they want to play Fortnite, and they get on and they immerse themselves in this thing, but there's a reason for doing it. People play Minecraft because there's a reason for doing it. Minecraft became so much more than it was ever developed to be, right?

(Dan at 00:35:01) It was just originally a game, but it's become a computer programming platform and a socializing platform and a challenge thing and a whole subgenre of YouTube and Twitch streaming and entertainment, and it was just meant to be a game. But all of those things existed and persisted because there's a reason everyone does it. And I think saying that the metaverse will exist simply because technology will allow it to is a step below what the reason for people to actually engage with it is going to be. And I think when we look at some of the monetization objects that are working in that space at the moment with NFTs and cryptocurrencies and that whole web three space, I think that's going to drive some of the reason for people to be in there. So NFTs to a normal person are a speculative investment vehicle at the moment at best, I think.

(Dan at 00:36:05) Whereas in a metaverse where it gives you access to some experience or some opportunity to be a representative of some community, I think that's where the reason for them existing is going to land with more people once it can be put into that sort of context. So I do think it's going to happen. It's a when rather than an if. We actually spoke a lot about the difference between augmented reality and virtual reality and how the metaverse has a role in both. And I think that distinction is lost on some people as well.

(Dan at 00:36:41) You know, the virtual reality is real. I need a reason. I've got to put on an Oculus headset and cut myself off from the world Ready Player One style. And I need a reason to do that. Why am I doing that? Is it for entertainment? Is it for what? I need to understand that. But augmented reality is something where I can absolutely see the metaverse and some overlay to the real world. We talked about as media buyers, we're always looking for new mediums and channels and ad unit opportunities to get higher performance or follow ground where maybe the demand is low, so they're cheap, relatively speaking, so we'll jump on it early.

(Dan at 00:37:21) But think about, you know, in the grocery store with your Google Glass on, which maybe the new version of that is not going to be such a failure. And as you're walking down the grocery aisle, your shopping list and your preferences are preloaded against your account connected to your glass overlay display. And as you look towards a product, you're presented with a contextual offer for that product that might be holographically imposed over the real thing that you can claim in real time in the store, right? And if that's not an absolute layup for this concept of making the metaverse have purpose in the real world and giving a reason for people to engage with it, then I don't know what is. But I really think that that's an exciting opportunity for brands that want to find their place in this emerging space in a way that's going to be meaningful to them in the real world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) Yeah. And as someone that's interested in marketing and marketing tech, that's really exciting. But also as a consumer that walks around the world we live in, I have this nightmare vision of ads surrounding me in physical space.

(Dan at 00:38:40) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:40) It's like, that sounds terrible if that's where it goes.

(Dan at 00:38:45) But think about that. The irony is so much of this is happening at the very same time that massive reductions to the accessibility of data are being imposed through enhanced privacy laws, the privacy legislation. The thing you just mentioned being a real threat. You know, third-party cookies and third-party data signals are going away next year sometime, right? So anybody that's relying on data being augmented from other partners and third-party people, they're going to have to rethink the way that they're putting their profiles and their datasets together.

(Dan at 00:39:22) All of what we're trying to build here is happening when all of that stuff is on the decline. So think about what the actual application of that would be like. You would have to have control, right? For this to work, you would have to be able to say, I'm Adam and I'm not interested in being overwhelmed with this, but I am interested in this, this, and this only. And then that's all you should receive, right? Whereas other people—because I'm a marketer and a data guy, I'm the guy that clicks allow, allow, allow on my phone all the time. When my app says, this app would like to track you across that, I'll be, yeah, sure, track me. Track, track, track, yes.

(Dan at 00:39:57) Because I don't know. I know what I'm giving up and I know that the utility that it offers me is worth it, right? And I'm fine with it. So I'd probably have a different experience than you will. And that's what makes it so awesome is that these rules have been put in place to protect people like you and I while this technology erupts around us. When those things come together, I think it could be a really high utility, low impact, not overly invasive world if it's all implemented properly.

(Dan at 00:40:34) And I'm sure it won't be at some point, but some of it will. Some of it will. And yeah, I'm super excited. You know, ten years from now, the conversations we're going to have are going to make this exchange seem pedestrian, I believe, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:50) I get a lot of my context and inspiration for stuff just from other episodes of this podcast because this is kind of my everyday world.

(Dan at 00:41:00) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) And recently, we had on this company called Spot that they work with companies to reduce their cloud costs by allocating their cloud compute to happen at times where it's cheaper for that to happen.

(Dan at 00:41:25) Sure. Like off-peak electricity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) Yes, exactly. And they can cut costs by 80 to 90%. It sounded really cool.

(Dan at 00:41:31) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:31) But their CTO, Kevin, was saying when Joel and him were talking about leadership, that one of the hardest parts about moving into executive leadership is being hands off, especially when you've been an individual contributor before.

(Dan at 00:41:50) Damn.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:50) And so I wanted to hear if you had any advice for being hands off and working through people rather than through your fingertips.

(Dan at 00:41:59) You know, it's funny that you asked me that question. We didn't set this up ahead, and I would not have prepared for it. But I had this exact conversation with somebody just this morning about the challenge with that. I think I'm a unique version of that, maybe. It's a very interesting topic. I've always been pretty good at all of this stuff, but I've never been unbelievably the best in the room at any of it, if that makes sense, right? I've always had a natural affinity for computing and databases and applications and networks and all the stuff that makes everything we're talking about here today work.

(Dan at 00:43:00) Because my career path has put me in a position where I've had to just work it out. I had formal training that was kind of tangentially relevant to what we do today, but it was old and not really there. And then I've had to sort of make my way through experiences and listening and learning. And so while I've often felt like people are looking at me to solve the problem, I never felt like, you know, this is the thing I do, so when I stop doing it, I'm going to feel this detachment from it. I felt like I'd kind of do all of it. And then I quickly learned that having a foundational understanding like we discussed earlier was a powerful asset because then I could identify who the real champions were. Who's really good at this, right?

(Dan at 00:43:36) And I could tell right away if they were excellent at it, and I would put both hands on them as quickly as possible and get them close to me so that I could represent better outcomes. I could do better work if I was surrounded by people who were way better at stuff than I was. So I actually found it easier and kind of a natural evolution to get into the leadership and management of this stuff rather than the actual doing.

(Dan at 00:44:05) So the challenge I had with that is maintaining a feeling of relevance as the people around me got smarter. I had a man working for me a couple of years ago who had a PhD in distributed systems. I mean, talk about a niche discipline. The dude was just an absolute wizard when it came to distributed computing and we needed his skills for a very particular thing. And I found myself in a conversation with him one time where we started to debate an approach to something.

(Dan at 00:44:32) And I immediately felt like, what the hell are you doing? You have nothing to offer in this conversation. But I helped the guy in the moment because I helped him see the consequences of what we were trying to do from a position where he had no experience. The way an executive at our client that we were talking about would perceive what we were doing didn't factor into his decision making at all initially, but then it did. And then that helped us find a better outcome. So I was able to kind of bring that experience in.

(Dan at 00:45:04) So I've personally found it easier than others I've spoken to to sort of be the hands-off rope puller. The problem is I only get called when there's a problem to solve. I'm never really in the solution. Although just the last couple of days, we just launched a big project yesterday, and I spent a great deal of time yesterday actually hands-on helping people solve a thing because it's something that I'm particularly experienced at. So that was fine, and I loved it because I got to get my hands dirty.

(Dan at 00:45:32) But in the main, I think this is a decision a lot of people who are in this space and who strive to be leaders need to reconcile in their own mind. Are you willing to not be the guy or the girl anymore and back away from that in order to make room for people who are going to be better than you? They're going to be freshly educated with curriculum that is representative of a more modern time. They're going to bring that academic knowledge and capability and maybe enthusiasm to the table that you're not going to have, and then your job is going to be to nurture that and apply what they can't learn at school. And that's how you help them sort of move forward.

(Dan at 00:46:12) So it's a really good question and a thing that we in the technical space navigate all the time. And I've seen tremendous engineers with terrific talent just fall flat when you put a team underneath them. And then you quickly back that up and say, you just keep being you in the corner and keep doing great work, and we'll take care of all of this other people stuff, and you just keep churning out amazing product. And then I've seen mediocre engineers and developers or technical people really thrive when they're in a position where they can get their arms around a group of people and inspire a group of people to a common goal. My job is to try to work out who's who and which way is everyone going and how best can we put everyone in the position to succeed the most.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:58) Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely the job of a leader, just empowering those that can do a better job and letting them run.

(Dan at 00:47:07) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:09) Do you have any tips for getting out of a mental slump? Every day just slowly starts to feel like a slog. And, you know, if you just keep working every day and not get any space to just step away, it's probably going to continue.

(Dan at 00:47:28) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:28) How do you create healthy boundaries and space from work in order to get back to normal and back to your A game?

(Dan at 00:47:35) Yeah. I mean, look at what's happened the last two years. Everybody has invited their work into their home. Doesn't matter what you do. We've invited the erasure, the blurring of those lines through necessity initially and now just through sort of repetitive behavior.

(Dan at 00:47:57) I mean, listen. You get to a certain level, your phone's kind of on all the time, and you hear a ding and you can't not look because you just care. You're invested in the outcome of what's going on at work. It's not just a paycheck. So that's going to happen for people, for a lot of people. But personally, I find, you know, I deal in the intangible a lot. When we build a platform, we launch it and it works and you click the thing and the thing does what it's supposed to, or we run the model and we get great outcomes. And then we execute, make decisions on those outcomes and we get better results. It's all good and real, but you can't touch it and you can't stick it on a shelf and you can't work with it the same way.

(Dan at 00:48:39) So I actually personally find sort of escape in tangible technical things. So, you know, my home office here doubles as my sort of project hobby room. And as I look around the room, I'm surrounded by microcontrollers and electronics and soldering stations and a laser cutter and a 3D printer and a plotter and a big mess actually, as I now look around. And that's the stuff that, you know, it exercises the same part of my brain that solving a data modeling problem solves. But there's a physical outcome at the end of it, and the thing works.

(Dan at 00:49:18) The idea that I had, I'll design it on CAD, and then I'll print it on my 3D printer, and I'll put it into action wherever I needed the solution, and I'll see it, and I get a tremendous sense of gratification from that. So I always encourage people to find a passion. The book How Google Works, they say passionate people don't use the P word, and that's great. Find a demonstrated passion in something that you can just do, and it doesn't feel like work, and it's fun. And it's the kind of thing that can make you forget a long day or reenergize you with the ability to get back into whatever's going on during your day job the next morning, even though it might be in the same room on the same table, but feel a little bit more energized about it because you've broken it up with something that's more tangible than what you normally do.

(Dan at 00:50:12) Actually, I got a chance when we did a series of sort of the executive team at DC. We put together a series of Zoom things to just, you know, somebody did a cooking thing and some of that. And I did a CAD modeling thing, right? We don't do that work, but people were interested in it. So we all got in front of a bunch of people, got on, and I taught them how to do the basic principles of doing CAD modeling to design something on the computer in 3D.

(Dan at 00:50:39) And then talked about the workflow to bringing that to life on a 3D printer and stuff. And people were just fascinated by that and interested in it, but some people just don't know how to get started with anything like that. And I find that trying to be a resource for those people to help them sort of get started is another part of the job sometimes. But yeah, I don't know. Hopefully, we'll get back to some delineation between what is home and what is work in a more normal setting soon.

(Dan at 00:51:04) And then that will make the answer to that question much easier to answer, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:09) Yeah, absolutely. That is the big challenge, sitting at the same desk before and after hours. Absolutely. Before, during, and after. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:18) What is a piece of advice you received early on in your career that has just continued to serve you well throughout?

(Dan at 00:51:26) I think, yeah, there's so much. I mean, our CEO, Norm, and I, we talk frequently business and personal development, very similar to the conversation we're having today. And he and I, our relationship has evolved and developed over thirteen years, as you could imagine. And, you know, he's taught me a tremendous amount about leadership and about managing my own personal blind spots.

(Dan at 00:51:54) I think that's when you're used to being kind of the jack of all trades and the guy that can get it all done. It's back to that conscious competence thing, being okay to say that this thing that we're dealing with or this thing that's been put in front of me is not my forte, and I don't have a lot to draw from on it. So I'm gonna say I need help. I'm gonna say I really need somebody who knows more about this to come in and help me do it. You know, when it's inside my field of expertise, to do with technology or technical development or data, I never have a hard time. I never really had a hard time saying, "Oh, I don't know."

(Dan at 00:52:35) I don't understand that, but I know that, you know, Bill does or Jason does, whomever, so I can bring them in. But when it was about a topic where I wasn't as confident, I often resisted getting help because I felt that I had to work it out just like I've worked everything else out. And I think running up against some of the consequences of me doing that and then hearing the feedback and saying, "Oh, actually, maybe you do need to sort of stop and listen and look elsewhere for input on those things that you're maybe not quite as good at." I think that served me well. It was tough to hear at the time.

(Dan at 00:53:08) And then of course, you absorb that and you then put into practice and you see the results and you say, "Oh, actually, that was pretty good. That's a pretty good outcome this time. I should use that next time." And then it starts to become a natural behavior. And then I start to hear myself giving that advice to people who are looking to me for guidance as well now and trying to help them through the same sort of transformation.

(Dan at 00:53:30) So, you know, without giving Norm too much of a big head if he happens to listen to this, I would say that, you know, having that experience with a man like him with his experiences, and then being able to reflect on that now is probably the strongest piece of advice that I find myself going back to more often than anything else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:52) That's awesome, man. Well, before we call it on the day, anything you want to draw some extra attention to, shout out at DAC or Proove Intelligence?

(Dan at 00:54:03) Yeah. I've worked at a variety of different places over the last twenty-five years. And I think what keeps me for thirteen years at a place like DAC amidst this space—there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of things going on in a space like this, and if you were interested, you could jump around and get all sorts of experiences—is that there's a level of skill and competence and camaraderie between the people that we work with that we get to bundle up and, you know, drop into the boardrooms that we sit in with the clients that we work with and have really meaningful impact.

(Dan at 00:54:40) And I think that's, you know, for anyone that's in this space looking for digital marketing partners and looking for support with analytics, there's so many people. There's so many people you could go to. It's such a crowded space. You can go on Upwork or Fiverr and find independent contractors that are probably very talented. You can find massive holding company firms or consulting companies to come and work with you.

(Dan at 00:55:08) But, you know, when you look at an organization like ours, there's this harder to define element that we bring into the room that is just helping us crush it. Like we're killing results across the board in so many different verticals, and that has a lot to do with the tenure and the personalities of the people that sort of show up when we do the work. And the core team that I've seen grow and change and people come and people go, but there's this core nucleus of talent and commitment to what we're doing that has just persisted. And it's a really powerful asset. And I think that, you know, the people that have worked with us for as long as they have would agree. So I urge anybody who's in that space to reach out to us and, you know, if for no other reason just to have a conversation about what's going on in your business and to see if there's a fit. And often there isn't, and sometimes there is.

(Dan at 00:56:10) And either way, you know, we're good people, and we really like talking about this stuff.

(Outro Narrator at 00:56:18) 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'd 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.