It’s ALL about the Data!! SPECIAL GUEST!! CEO of Data Axle 🔥 Andy Frawley 🔥| Ep. 526

0:00Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That, and we have a big deal guy here. We have an incredible guest here today. So who is here? Andy Frawley is here. Now, Andy is the CEO of Data Axel. If you don't know what Data Axel is and you're in marketing, I don't know what you're doing for a living because I'm not just saying this, and Andy didn't tell me to say this. I don't think there's another company on the planet that is more important, more relevant, more critical as relates to data that is powering marketing campaigns and all things, whether you're a business-to-business marketer, a nonprofit marketer, a consumer marketer.

0:53They are a beast. They have over 40 ,000 businesses that use all their information. They have over 3 ,000 employees. They're huge. I've been working with Data Axel for a zillion years. The data quality is ridiculous. And Andy himself is a big deal. I'm not going to tell you how long I've known Andy because that's going to embarrass both of us. But he's been doing this for a minute. All right? He's not just the CEO of Data Axel. He was the CEO of Epsilon. He's founded companies, one of the earliest MarTech companies that has existed. The guy has really helped to shepherd in how data can be used for all marketers.

1:27And we're going to dig into data, data quality, AI, all the things. Andy, welcome to the show, Matt. Hey, it's great to be here, Jay. It's going to be fun. It's going to be fun. So I want to jump right into it because you're sitting in the seat that you sit in as relates to the data that we are all using for marketing campaigns. no matter how big or small you are as a marketer, data axle, people don't realize that you're probably fueling a lot of the campaigns that people are even doing out there. And one of the things I'm curious about is data quality. You know, if it was 10 years ago, it was like, okay, data quality is important.

2:00And then it seemed like we had it all fixed and data was getting improving and now there's AI and now data can be perfect. Is data quality no longer an issue for marketers? Is this no longer a hot topic? Well, it's interesting, Jay. It's actually becoming a hotter topic now. So if we think back to our shared long history together, you know, 20, 30 years ago, when people were doing a lot of direct mail, data quality was really important because direct mail is really expensive. But over the last, you know, 10 years or so is the digital activation channels have really become very prominent. We went through a period of time where, you know, brands who are like more data is better than less.

2:42And I don't really care about the quality as much. And we've seen a big shift over the last two years as people are trying to build a real, what I call data fabric, but a standard set of data that they use to operate their business on that is going to empower AI. the data quality becomes very important because AI can make a lot of really good decisions really fast or can make a lot of really bad decisions really fast if the data foundation is weak. And so, you know, as we work with companies of all sizes, because again, we work with Fortune 100 brands and we work with, you know, the dry cleaner down the corner from your house, they're all focused on, you know, are these really the right people?

3:30do we have the right information to actually contact them do we have permission to contact them etc so as it relates to data quality and ai for a second because i'm curious about something everybody's like okay let's figure out how to bring ai into our business i don't care big or small yeah we got to use ai right and is ai and how really how can you use ai to improve the data quality in your database, regardless of how big or small you are, is that something a lot of companies are doing now? Is AI becoming that extra layer to deal with data quality? It's a piece of it. So, you know, certainly as we, you know, construct our, you know, foundational data assets, so a business-to-business set of data or a business-to-consumer set of data, we use AI to validate that data to go out and get a sort of a checkpoint and say, you know, is this attribute right?

4:27Is this address right still? Now, we also do human verification still too. So we call 25 million businesses a year and verify that they're open and that address, et cetera, et cetera. So we use sort of a AI human assist model in the data construction, which, again, is how we get high quality. But I think the other interesting place is, you know, AI can democratize access to the data. So I think everybody's sort of been through the cycle where you ask a question of data, you get an answer back, and that creates five more questions. And if, you know, you're not a data analyst, and you have to have somebody go do that work for you, which is the case in a lot of organizations, it slows the process down and you're forced to make a decision before you have the complete answer.

5:24And so the ability for people to have access to data, having access through a human language interface to get prompts around maybe what you're missing or not missing, that's where we see the really big thing going forward. So, all right, every time I go into a marketing meeting these days, I get this topic comes up of something like we're trying to get a 360 view of our customer. OK, and I want to bang my head against the wall. I know that that's important. I know everyone wants to know everything about every customer or whatever. But but is that is that what businesses are doing? Are they really what does that even mean?

6:04Should we care about that? Should that be something marketers should be focused on this this total view of the customer? Am I living in the dark ages that that annoys me? Well, we've been talking about it for a long time, certainly. Yeah, it is important. And the thing that a lot of companies miss is understanding the professional profile and the personal profile together. So if you want to market to a person, particularly in a post-COVID pandemic world, how you talk to me, how you actually connect me, it might be on a personal device, it might be on my professional device. You may want to run connected TV to me for your B2B product.

6:49But if you know I like golf and I'm going to be glued to the television watching the Masters this weekend, would you like to be able to do CTV? and so adding that whole person connection is is what i think is the missing gap in the marketplace right now um you know we help brands do that obviously but uh it's sort of the you know the next step of that 360 degree view okay i want to just say something back to you because i don't know if everybody realizes they could do this um and listen this isn't a commercial for data axle but they just happen to be a really great source to do this but there are other ones out there okay great.

7:24If I'm out there and I'm a business to business marketer, okay, and I want to run, you know, ads on Instagram or Reddit or whatever. And I know that when I upload my, my business to business email address database, cause I've required work email address for all my contact into my CRM, I get a really low match rate. I can't hit these people on connected TV or an Instagram, whatever, because those are all consumer addresses that they use on those platforms. Are you saying it is relatively easy to partner with a company like DataAxel to say, here's my B2B database, hook me up with the consumer information for these B2B contacts?

8:04Yeah, that's the perfect use case from an activation standpoint. So, you know, the linkage between Andy Frawley at DataAxel.com and, you know, Andy Frawley at Gmail.com, we put those two things together. And then we bring attributes as well. So if you want to have a segmentation scheme on Facebook that is not just my business persona, but also has aspects of my personal life in it, you can create those audiences. You see, I don't think enough people realize that. And I think people are sleeping on that. Is that one of the big motions within your company that people come to you for to actually be able to do that cross-pollination between B2B and B2C?

8:47Yeah, it's one of the most unique aspects of Data Axle's solution. And again, it's a hard problem to solve. How do you know Andy Frawley in Boston is the same Andy Frawley that runs Data Axle in Texas? It's not an easy deterministic link. And so we rebuilt all of our linkages around those using AI last year. Over the last couple of years, we've adjusted a lot of digital signal in. And, you know, we've got 150 million linkages now. So we have that at scale. Now, this is going to be totally useless to all the listeners, but I'm just morbidly curious. I don't understand. You said you still make 25 million calls to verify business data.

9:35I don't pick up my phone for even my relatives because everybody annoys me, whatever. How the hell do you get 25 million people to verify anything? Do you have to make 8 billion phone calls to get 25 million whatevers? Yeah, well, so we use AI. Curate the list of the businesses based on how likely we think they are to actually pick up the phone. Because if you just pick the random 25 million across our data set, you're right. You get a lot of hangups. Wow. Do you pick up the phone? Will you verify the data? Probably not. That's fair. That's fair. All right. I'm totally switching gears on something else, though, because we don't get a chance to talk to somebody a lot that cares about direct mail.

10:20You and I both care about direct mail. Let's start out with some basics because I'm losing half the listeners here because, like, what? Direct mail? I don't even go to my mailbox. But I love postcards, 100 % open rate. It does great. I'm a big fan of direct mail. Where does Andy fall in direct mail? Is direct mail dead? Is it working for people? What is going on with direct mail? Oh, it definitely works. You know, probably in a narrower set of use cases than it did 20 or 30 years ago. But we certainly, you know, direct mail works very well in the auto industry. And, you know, we're seeing companies like Amazon lean into direct mail right now.

11:01You know, so the commerce companies are saying, well, your point, this is 100 % open rate. Yeah, it's expensive compared to a digital ad, but it's got shelf life, you know. People are going to probably look at it more than once. So it definitely works. You know, definitely more, you know, the printing technology, not to really bore your listeners, but it's gotten much better in terms of, you know, doing completely custom print. So it's not just a form-filled letter anymore. Yeah, but we see it very performative in nonprofit, automotive, you know, a number of industries. Yeah, I'm a huge fan. And I think that people are, they wrote off direct mail and it's working incredibly well.

11:44And, you know, the nice thing is if you can marry up the business data, the consumer data, you can't actually find when people always worried about, you know, remote workers, because that's still a big thing. I get plenty of business to business direct mail at my home now. Right. I mean, you need to contact people where they are. A hundred percent. Okay. So let's talk about where it's all going, though. because you're kind of driving the industry forward in terms of data. And in certain ways, we kind of touched on a little bit, but I feel like data has gotten commoditized, where what I see in a lot of organizations is they have these KPIs.

12:22They have these dashboards saying, how much do we grow our database? And is our database bigger? And they're very, very scared to remove data, remove bad data, all this stuff. Where is it all going? Are you seeing the same things? Should we be out there saying, listen, your data set being smaller is okay because you want to have a clean data set and don't use this kind of data, use this kind of data? What are we getting right? What are we getting wrong? Yeah, well, again, I think it comes back to the quality issue. I'd rather have a smaller set of data that's high quality than a big set of data that's not reliable.

13:01And you just think about it. But if you've got a B2B marketer, the cost of a sales call, somebody actually picking up, making a call, getting a connect, having a hopefully 15 to 20 minute initial conversation, that's an expensive channel. And if you can't actually make contact, if you don't know anything about the person and the brand you're calling, it's going to be low productivity. And so, you know, we're big believers in quality, whether it's your client, your customer data, your first party data, your customer data, whether it's prospect data, which we provide a lot of, you know, getting that as right as it can be is really the foundational capability right now.

13:49And again, whether you're a small business, you know, cold calling to try to find new clients or whether you're, you know, the biggest insurance company in the country. So, all right, now I'm going to a hard 180 here, and I want to talk about one final topic that is not even data-related. But DataXL as a company, as a business, I see you all at a lot of events. I see you have booths at a lot of events. You're exhibiting. You're sponsoring in-person events. And I'm really asking you this more as the CEO of this large organization that is trying to provide services and get new clients. And I don't know what your answer is going to be.

14:24but do you do you get a lot of value do you get a lot of roi should people out there that are running businesses should they be thinking about exhibiting and participating in events still and again if they stopped because i think you're out there doing a lot of it your organization is and i'm curious is is that a win it's a great question and you know post pandemic i was very skeptical, honestly. And so I've forced our teams to be very ROI based. If they want to go to an event, they've got to have an ROI story and then we're going to close the loop on the back end. And what we find is they're very productive now.

15:08It might be, we index a little bit more to smaller, more vertical events, maybe as opposed to the 20 ,000 person trade shows we used to go to and have a lot of fun at back in the day. But in-person works. People still buy from people at the end of the day. And so, yeah, I think we doubled our event budget last year. That actually makes me really happy. I actually believe that in-person events are going to be the things that outlast AI, that more buying is going to happen. And I love seeing you out there. I love seeing you guys support just basically the marketing ecosystem the way that you do.

15:46So, all right, everybody listen, everyone needs to go and connect and follow Andy. We're going to put his stuff in the show notes. It's Andy Frawley, F-R-A-W-L-E-Y. And he's the CEO of Data Axel. I'm telling you, and he didn't tell me to say this. I'm not being paid by Data Axel to say this. They're awesome. Their data quality is ridiculous. I don't know a market that they don't serve. So if you don't know them, check them out at dataaxel.com. And Andy, man, I appreciate you being here. Yeah, it's been great. It's been fun, Jay. Always good to connect. Yeah, thanks. Wait, I have two huge things to share with you.

16:20First, I have a book coming out. Stupider people have done it. It's coming out the first week of June and all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. This book might be terrible, but who cares? When you buy this thing on Amazon or anywhere else, you are gonna be helping to kick cancer's butt. Let's do that together. The second thing is you can go to jschwedelson.com. On the upper right-hand corner, there's this thing that says partner. My agency wants to help you. If you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, it doesn't make a difference. I want to help you drive net new sales, registrations, growth, change the design, all the stuff that you are doing.

17:01Hit me up there. Also, if you want to do brand collabs, I want to know about your brand. I want to help you amplify that message. Go to jschwedelson.com. Click on partner. Let's do stuff together. And the last thing is, leave this show a review if it wasn't the absolute worst podcast you've ever heard. And you're awesome for being here. Later.