What Would Terry Do?

This article is from my newsletter series called “Personalized! Prompts from the Frontlines.” You can sign up for my newsletters here.

This week, we should all step back and recognize the loss of a great pioneer in digital measurement, Terry Cohen.

Back in the 90's, when digital started taking off, Terry was part of the team that became Digitas, and jumped very early into being not only our lead analyst, but also a vigorous innovator who constantly sought new ways to understand incremental impact, created one of the earliest tagging taxonomies, and became a nationally-known stage presence at digital marketing conferences.

Humble and generous with her knowledge, Terry went on to lead measurement strategy development for the Amer. Assoc. of Ad Agencies, pushing the bar forward on what agencies should be tracking.?

Although Terry served on my analytics team, I was her student, learning so much about how metrics can tell the story of customer behavior. As we move forward into a world of AI-driven automated tools, it's important to remember many of the strong beliefs that Terry shared.

In particular, she believed in using the data to understand people as people. What some people responded to that others didn't. Trying to understand the "why" by using other data. Looking for anomalies and explaining them. Finding sudden changes in patterns and tracking back to the likely drivers of new behavior.

The challenge with tools today is that they tend to be a black box.? They just find patterns and aim to exploit them.? They push out dashboards with tons of data, but don't stitch it together.?

I believe that if we lose the human aspects of data analysis, we lose the stories.?The "why's." ?And we need those "why's" to get into the heads of our customers.? To know what is motivating them and where they are frustrated.? What are their new influences.?

What explains outlier behavior that could be the start of a new trend. You cannot deliver breakthrough innovation without deeply knowing your customers. Just letting the AI learn about them will just lead to incremental, tactical; improvement.?

That's fine, but it's likely to hit diminishing returns without you adding new breakthroughs.

I had been thinking about "what would Terry do" when faced with declining NPS, high churn, and lots of service calls from one of our customer sets when I was a CMO.?

The data didn't just say it, but it became clear that health insurance had gotten so complex that people did not understand it.? We had to come up with new ways to onboard them, so they would be smarter users of their insurance.

Eventually, we found a service that could create personalized videos, SundaySky, and when we rolled it out, it was a home run.? All the numbers turned around.? But we would never have gotten to innovations like that if we had just let the data run in an automated way.?

We had to look deeper at why people were calling, who was calling, who churned, etc., and then go out and actually talk with them. Personalization can be managed and optimized by AI, but the breakthrough ideas about what and how to personalize, to create new value for customers, will still take creative, human investigation and ideation.?

So though we lost a great thinker, and to many of us, a great friend and colleague last week, we can all benefit from Terry Cohen's legacy.

Remember that people have stories, and understanding them is the key to unlocking the innovation that will empower them, and elevate your brand.?