TransUnion: How (and Whether) to Build an Online Audience
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This time insights come from Cory Davis, senior industry executive, media and platforms, at TransUnion. Three main points:
1. Tailor your commercialization efforts to the strengths of your team. More mature companies can hire experts to own each marketing function. But small companies need to be more judicious. If someone won’t stick with content creation, don’t try a channel they are destined to abandon.
2. Building an audience is a long-haul endeavor. If you try to sell too early, your audience will flee. If you come from a place of giving — I am sharing what I know so that others can do their jobs better — and reach out to share insights and build relationships, not to sell, you will generate inbound leads and close more deals.
3. Audience building is like planting a tree. The best time to start building an audience was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
JZ: I know a lot of adtech people who are in sales, biz dev, or marketing, and they actually don't seem to be very plugged into the online discourse in the industry. It's a big missed opportunity.
CD: Absolutely.
JZ: If you were hiring a biz dev or salesperson and they were not active in the online discourse at all, would that be a yellow or red flag to you?
CD: There's always an exception to the rule. I interact very regularly with lots of people across the industry who are incredibly successful and have almost no online presence. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, but part of what works for me is to be engaged in the community, try to listen a lot, and contribute when I’m able.
JZ: Fair. So, let's say you were to talk to the founder of an adtech company doing $5 million or $10 million in annual revenue, and they've gotten that far because they have a good product. The founder is charismatic and doing founder-led sales. Maybe they go to a couple events, that kind of thing. It's a very common story. They say to you, “Cory, this has gotten me far, but now I want to go to the next level.” What would you tell them?
CD: One is you have to know who you're competing against. I think that's a controversial perspective. There are always people who say not to pay attention to your competitors. I think understanding who's the Goliath to your David in that situation matters — and trying to identify which parts of your David are authentic to you and position you to win in the market. What are we really special at versus what are we commoditized at?
In adtech, that's the general thing: can anybody really tell this DSP from that DSP? Probably not. The thing that separates you is you've figured out messaging and customer segmentation and what makes you really special. Try to figure out what your special sauce is, what your unique advantage is, and triple down on that.
JZ: Well, we're very aligned on that because the hero text on my site is “Be more than a commodity.” Once you figure out the message, the next question is the levers you’ll pull, right?
CD: Yeah, I would say it comes down to self awareness. Like, I do Twitter and LinkedIn, and I'm pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn because I like those channels. If I didn’t like them, I wouldn’t keep doing them, and I wouldn’t be successful. If you like Twitter and want to hang out there, good. But if you're not excited about it, then you're just going to fall off the wagon really quick. It's like exercise. There are lots of very fit people who only ride a bicycle, just like there are other really fit people who run 10 miles a day, just like there are others who do weight training. So, picking the stuff that you naturally enjoy and want to spend time on is usually the best path.
JZ: With larger companies, this is essentially a question of team building, right? But when you have small companies where there's a marketing team of one, if there's any marketing team, it's tougher because you can't find talent for each thing. So, you've got to pick the one or two things that you actually are going to do well.
Personally, I’m drawn to audience builders in part because I like to create content and build audiences. But also, I encounter a lot of adtech companies that are very driven by events and handshakes: 1:1, often in-person networking. Often this is because, if there’s a commercial leader in the business, that person comes from sales and is comfortable with that style of relationship building. So, when they talk to me, they’ve hit a wall, and they want to know about starting to build an audience to scale. But boy, if they had started building the audience when they started the company, it would’ve been a huge advantage.
CD: I don't think the Kardashians can exist with these giant financial outcomes they’ve generated on the basis of their audiences without that eventually flowing into our little world of adtech. Or maybe it's not the Kardashians that you're into. Maybe it's MrBeast, or maybe it's Sam Parr. They're all different versions of the same thing, and it’s just the nature of capitalism. Once we figure out a way to grow businesses, everyone will find out about it, and some people will do something about it while everyone else is afraid.
Then, building a company through an online audience works for somebody we don’t know right now who’s building a little DSP, and in five years, it will be a huge business. Then, every DSP that's raising money will get asked by the venture capitalist, “Who's your chief audience officer?”
JZ: I entirely agree. How do you go from the attention you generate via content and audience building to deals?
CD: It's just listening. I think the trick is that for almost everybody, the reason they fail at building an audience is, first, they're focused on deals. Your audience can tell. And then the second thing is, if the deal doesn't come immediately, well, then you start doing very desperate things, like DM’ing a bunch of people that follow you on Twitter saying, “Hey, you want a data license?”
Almost all the time, I say nothing, because almost all of the time, I have nothing to contribute that's of any value to anybody. Then, every once in a while, there is a topic that comes up where I feel I can contribute to the conversation, and I don’t ruin the relationship building opportunity because I know I don't need the deal.
Every once in a while, one of the people I talk to will see what I'm talking about or meet me somewhere and say, okay, this seems like a good dude. It's a good place to start — he knows his thing, he happens to work for a very good company, he’s in the area of things that I need help with at my business. So, then we talk about that. And of that group, one out of ten actually turns into a contract. I'm never going to be able to guess who the one person is that's actually the buyer. And so instead, I just try to contribute to the conversation.
JZ: I think you've captured why most people fail at building audiences, which is they are too hungry for the deal. As soon as they sense a little interest, they jump on it with the pitch. I’ve been there. It took me a while to learn to chill out and wait for good leads to come to me as a result of genuine relationship building.
CD: The other thing I would say for myself in terms of advantages is I love marketing and advertising, and I don't plan to retire. I plan to work until I'm like 110 years old, somewhere around this wild and crazy world. And so, if I'm thinking about ‘the deal,; it's not this specific thing or that thing. It's all the things that will happen over the next, let’s say, 70 years.
JZ: Yeah, I am also a sicko in that way. So, I have the same long-term view of being in the early days of whatever we're building.
CD: I interviewed Eric Franchi, the founder of Undertone, a couple years back, and he mentioned that internet advertising had grown something like 100x since he started. And then he said something like, and so 20 more years from now, it might be 100 times as big as it is today. And I was like, it feels so big. Adtech is so big. Advertising on the Internet is so big. Maybe we are still in the very early innings of the whole thing.
