Jason Gurule, Sr. Director, Strategic Planning

It's true. I have a new puppy and it is amazing how I can tell what is going on with him just by looking at his poop. Gross, right? That is what I used to think until I realized how valuable it was. I now know what to feed him, what not to feed him, if he is allergic to something, if he is sick, if he has a parasite, etc., etc. It's pretty amazing. But before I got a dog, it was just disgusting.

Well, I'm seeing that same change in the marketing and advertising industry. No, were not exactly all examining dog poop. But we are all starting to appreciate something that we once thought were just as bad... numbers. They tell us so much about what, where and on whom we should be spending marketing budgets on. For all of us who got into advertising because we hated numbers, well, the game just changed. As the biggest economic downfall since the Great Depression began, we started seeing our clients screaming for ROIs. Their budgets were getting slashed left and right, and they had to justify what they were spending before it was gone. Sure, the Dot-Com Bust in early 2000 changed how marketing dollars were spent, but this was something entirely different. Back then, companies just stopped spending stupidly on the extravagance that was once the sheen of the ad world. Now, marketers have to know exactly why every dollar is spent. That scrutiny just keeps going further.

When I moved to an ad agency that focused on direct marketing, every recruiter I talked to told me how stupid I was because I was never going to be able to get back to a general agency. Well, going to that agency was the best decision I ever made. As a Strategic Planner I had to learn how to back up every insight and every recommendation with data. The data was not just from surveys, but also from behavioral data like transactions and usage data that our clients had on their customers.

Now I work for a Customer Marketing agency where everything we do revolves around the customer and the data we have on them to make insights more impactful, more actionable and more successful.

So just like I examine my dog's poop, I dig through numbers all day long to understand what to do for our clients' customers. Never before has the messaging, the media placement and the frequency of communication been so right on.

And guess what? Now I have every recruiter calling me, trying to lure me away to those same agencies they told me would never want me. I just tell them to go look at dog poop because they might learn something.

Next: The Birth Agonies of Big Data
Previous: What's your Sweet Spot?