Pernod Ricard Senior Director: There Can Be Too Much Data In Data-Driven Marketing

16 Feb, 2024

Pernod Ricard’s Senior Director of Insights & Strategy, Anna Estlund, swears by her creative compass to sift through the “noise” of excessive data and navigate decision making that drives results, as she talks to Tom Ollerton in the latest episode of MAD//Fest's partner podcast, Shiny New Object.

Pernod Ricard’s Senior Director of Insights & Strategy, Anna Estlund, swears by her creative compass to sift through the “noise” of excessive data and navigate decision making that drives results.

In today’s marketing landscape, we often get bogged down in the sheer volume of data available. That’s why marketers need to be able to sort through what doesn’t serve them. But how do you do that? Here are her tips.

Create a Marketing Effectiveness Framework

Anna emphasised the importance of having a clear, simple decision framework for marketing effectiveness within a company. She calls this a creative compass and it’s her Shiny New Object for making sense of data driven marketing. It’s designed to help drive quick decision making, assess impact of campaigns while they are live, and adjust strategies in-flight and for the longer term.

Simplicity and Clarity

Anyone in your organisation must be able to understand and apply this creative compass. It should serve as the North Star for making decisions related to marketing effectiveness, guiding actions without causing confusion or information overload.

For example, at Pernod Ricard, one such compass is a simple one-pager for a campaign, that outlines the critical KPIs at each stage of the campaign. It’s important to know who owns them and when action needs to be taken around them. One marketing manager cannot own all the data and there’s a reason there are specialists in each company - Anna’s advice is to not take on too much, but be very clear about stakeholders and making the most of experts in each data unit.

Address the Beginning and the End

A simple way to make your creative compass work is to focus on the beginning and the end. At the beginning of a campaign, Anna asks what are the territories or platforms you want to gather information on, and how the right questions can be asked when doing research to get to the answers that you’re looking for.

When it comes to the end of a campaign, you need to know your goal: what do you want the brand to be known for? What elements do you want to learn about or adjust? Then you can build on the creative ways to bring that to life for a consumer and what are the semiotic cues that will deliver the end result you’re looking for.

The host of the Shiny New Object podcast is Tom Ollerton, founder of Automated Creative.