Building Smarter Marketing Systems Through Technology and Data With Dave Scott

Intro: 00:00

Welcome back to the Response Drivers Podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers Podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how they can stay ahead in the evolving marketing landscape. Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. My guest today is Dave Scott. Dave is the Founder and CEO of Evil Genius Games. 

He’s a national expert on customer acquisition, marketing, and automation tools. He brings over 25 years of experience leading marketing initiatives for companies including Amazon, Twitter, AT&T and Oracle, just to name a few. He’s also a serial entrepreneur and founded and sold three VC backed technology startups, including an on demand streaming service he sold to Kevin Hart. He’s taught marketing at several prestigious schools and has received a number of industry awards, including CMO of the Year and Marketer of the year. He’s an author and has two bestsellers on the topic of customer acquisition and lead generation The New Rules of Lead Generation: Proven Strategies to Maximize Marketing ROI.

Dave is very passionate about growth, customer acquisition, digital and performance based marketing, and in his free time, he’s an avid board gamer. Nationally ranked in Chess and the board game Risk. Wow. Thanks for joining me today, Dave. I’m excited to learn from you.

David T. Scott: 02:12

Thank you very much. I think your introduction made me look really old.

Rick Rappe: 02:16

I think you’ve done a lot. I had to edit it down to that. There was so much out there about what you’ve done. Those are just some of the highlights, actually.

David T. Scott: 02:26

Yeah, it’s been busy.

Rick Rappe: 02:29

You have been busy? Well, you’ve had a very diverse career and have worked for tech giants and innovative startups. What pivotal, pivotal experiences have shaped your approach to customer acquisition and performance marketing?

David T. Scott: 02:44

So it’s interesting. I’ll tell you a little bit about my origin story. I didn’t start out thinking I was going to be a marketer. And in fact, I went to Wharton for my MBA and I used to sleep through my marketing classes and Professor Lynn Lodish, who has now retired. He ran into me a little while ago.

He’s like, dad, I just never understood why you kept slipping through my classes and I was like, you know what? It just looks like a lot of fluff, you know? It’s just like, whether or not it’s blue or it’s teal, it just didn’t interest me. But. But as a computer science undergrad, as a programmer, as a designer, in theory, as soon as marketing became programmatic, as soon as it became analytical, it really piqued my interest. 

 Right. And so rather than determining whether or not the website should be teal or navy blue, you know, you could just A/B test it and started to think about A/B testing from that perspective. I got really excited. Then I realized that, you know, it wasn’t just the introduction of technology that started the science, but, you know, direct marketers like you guys have been doing this science forever. You know this concept of data driven marketing?

Rick Rappe: 03:56

Yeah, right.

David T. Scott: 03:57

And so that’s kind of how I got into it. And that’s how I became passionate about it, is the fact that you can really, truly use data to make smart marketing decisions.

Rick Rappe: 04:07

That makes a lot of sense. How do you think automation and technology are shaping marketing today and affecting marketing? What platforms have you found to be most effective?

David T. Scott: 04:22

Well, I don’t think that you could run an effective marketing organization today without technology. In fact, a report came out a while ago from Forrester saying that the average CMO has 28 technologies in their technology stack. Not only that, but I do believe for a large amount of companies that the the the the IT expense line item for marketers and for CMOs is either close to or equal of the CIO, meaning that we’re spending just as much on technology now as the as the as the CIO used to spend on technology. Now that we’re starting to see third party technologies, we’re starting to see business led IT investment decisions. And so now I really believe that the modern day CMO is really a CIO.

Rick Rappe: 05:17

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned something when we were talking earlier about your experiences at AWS when you came in and started working there. Talk a little bit about that experience with their tech stack.

David T. Scott: 05:30

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I’ve been at this for, gosh, 25 years and I’ve seen the tech stack grow, grow and grow. And every single time I’ve gone into a new environment, whether or not it’s a fortune 500 tech company or whether or not it’s a startup, the very first question we have to scratch our heads around is all right. What tech stack we’re going to create. What CRM tool, what email service provider. You know what landing page creator or what you know which cloud based platform we’re going to serve our website on.

You know, it’s all the typical stuff. In fact, you could argue that there was a playbook doing that. But my number of years at AWS, which I just recently left to start this new company, Evil Genius Games, really opened my eyes to a different approach and a different process around that. Of course, when I went there, the first question I asked is what’s the tech stack? And they came back and said, what tech stack? 

And given the DNA of Amazon, where, you know, they’re really an engineering led company and have just this DNA of make it ourselves, they had a strong philosophy around making everything themselves. So making the CRM tool, making the the emails service tool, or using the Amazon versions of those. And even like, we didn’t even use zoom. We actually had a product called Amazon Chime. So Amazon even went so far as to create our own, you know, virtual virtual meeting technology. 

And they felt strongly that having that homegrown technology is really, really mission critical to make sure that, first of all, information stays within the company. So there’s a security issue there, but then also to make sure that it’s really, truly meeting the needs of the customer. So I was surprised to see that Amazon Web Services marketing team had a sizable engineering team that reported right under the CMO that did a lot of this work. Completely different paradigm than what I’m used to.

Rick Rappe: 07:35

Yeah. And how did that work out? Do you think that it worked out well in the long run, or was it would it have been easier to buy things that already existed outside of the company?

David T. Scott: 07:45

Well, the first thing I want to say is that, as a caveat, not everyone has the pocketbook that Amazon has.

Rick Rappe: 07:51

Right? Yeah, that’s the big obstacle that most of us face.

David T. Scott: 07:55

Not only that, but not every company also has the DNA to do it right. I mean, so you could probably imagine you could probably assume that Amazon has got really, really phenomenal engineering processes, right? And they know how to build product. And so they’re able to use all those proprietary and best practices to be able to do something great whenever any new product is developed. So they do that for their websites.

They do that for their services. But then why not do that for internal tools as well? So I think that Amazon companies like Amazon have a head start when it thinks about that. But I do think that moving forward, we as marketers have to decide how much of this stuff we’re going to bring in-house and how much of this stuff we’re going to outsource, because I think that there’s the other part of the of the argument is, every single time you bring in a new vendor, every single time you’re trying to tie those two APIs together, right, you have the API to tie those two technologies together, right? To customize that, that piece of piece of software for use, it adds complication, it adds points of failure, it adds expense. 

And then all of a sudden we’re dealing with spaghetti.

Rick Rappe: 09:09

So just thinking of that exact word, that’s amazing that you came up with that.

David T. Scott: 09:14

Yeah. And so I wonder where. And so given the fact that, you know, we’ve been in a place where we have purchased every single technology that we’ve purchased in the past, I wonder whether or not the pendulum is going to swing over to where we actually start to design and develop our own products. And I think AI is giving us the ability to do that. The fact that AI can now write its own code, for example, could I really sort of build these custom tools without having the pocketbooks or the DNA of an Amazon Web Services.

Rick Rappe: 09:50

Right. I just went to a training on late last week about AI agents and what people are doing with AI agents, and what that what the what that opens up and the capabilities that that opens up. And I can see that a lot of companies, especially the larger companies, are going to be doing a lot of customization on top of their software with AI agents and, and AI tools. And I think eventually that’ll become accessible for smaller and smaller companies over time. Right.

David T. Scott: 10:19

Yeah. And so the question is how fast will it get to those smaller companies. Right.

Rick Rappe: 10:23

Yeah, that.

David T. Scott: 10:25

Affordable for every marketer rather than just the people who’ve got deep pockets.

Rick Rappe: 10:29

Yeah. It seemed like based on my training last week, that it was still something that needed a lot of handholding support and, and, and coding help the guys that were teaching it were absolute experts and do work a ton of work for Apple. You know, it seemed like it was out of reach for most of us. But I think they said, you know, within five years, maybe it’ll be kind of do it yourself and we’ll be able to jump into that without all the technical support.

David T. Scott: 11:01

But yeah, I think, I think that where when people talk about AI and they talk about some of the impacts that will have on productivity, for example, I think a lot of people assume that they can just buy a ChatGPT plus account and start doing it, and I just don’t think it’s there yet, right? I mean, I use I use ChatGPT to rewrite my emails, but I’m not using it to build a website or a landing page at this point in time.

Rick Rappe: 11:23

Right. It’s the advancements are rapid, though, and there’s so many tools out there besides ChatGPT. I think that’s what’s interesting is that it just requires someone to spend an enormous amount of time and study it, like almost full time to really understand what the capabilities of it can be. Well, let me take us a little bit back towards marketing, I guess. And I wanted to ask you what metrics, when you start to work on marketing campaigns, what metrics do you prioritize to assess the success of your marketing campaigns?

David T. Scott: 12:02

You know, so as you mentioned, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not necessarily the most classical marketer. You know, I’ve held I’ve held a you know, I’ve also held sort of CEO roles and executive roles, and I also sit on some boards. And so I think of marketing, I think of metrics a little bit differently than a lot of marketers, which is I think it’s best when you align with the other stakeholders in the company. So I’ve written a couple blog articles about why your CFO is your best friend, why you’re you know, why your why your sales sales is your best friend. And I think really to do it right, you really have to get metrics that we all agree upon.

One of the great parts about working in Amazon Web Services is that we all agreed that the one metric that we would care about, both in marketing and sales was, was marketing contributed pipeline.

Rick Rappe: 12:58

Okay.

David T. Scott: 12:59

So if you know, if the company wants to hit $10 million of pipeline and they think it’s going to convert at a 30% conversion to a book sale, then what percentage of that $10 million of pipeline can we contribute? And the reason why I like talking in those terms versus talking about stuff like cost per click, cost per lead and stuff like that. I mean, sure, you could talk about that kind of stuff. And it’s interesting from the perspective of how do I make sure that my tool is performing better and better? But in terms of really sort of servicing the needs of the, of the, of the business.

I think you got to get to the point where you all have the same shared goal.

Rick Rappe: 13:42

That makes perfect sense. We I would totally agree with that. And what’s really helpful is when everybody’s talking about the same key metric and you get alignment on this is how we’re going to judge things. This is how we’re going to look at things and when it includes when it’s further down the funnel so that you can include all the points that go along the, along the process and the cost and things like things like that. That’s pretty important I think as well.

David T. Scott: 14:11

Yeah. I mean, so like I’ve been in organizations where they’ll be like, you want leads, I can get you leads. They may not be any good, but just tell me how much you want. You can get them, right? I mean, so there’s lots of different ways to game the system.

If you want open rates, you. Everyone knows how to use open rates. Whatever. Right. So I think that when the rubber hits the road is what happens that lead once it gets into the pipeline.

Rick Rappe: 14:34

Yeah. Sales is the end of the day, right? We all have to be judged based on the sales.

David T. Scott: 14:40

Yeah, yeah. You know that you can’t go down with the ship going. Well. You said great leads.

Rick Rappe: 14:44

Yeah, exactly.

David T. Scott: 14:45

You know it’s got to convert, right? And so I do spend time starting with starting, starting with sales and working backwards in terms of what my goals are.

Rick Rappe: 14:54

Yeah that makes perfect sense. And then obviously understanding each point in the process what’s happening and how do we affect those conversion rates or those whatever the response or whatever it is. How do we influence those things? How can marketers today balance data driven strategies with creative intuition? I know it sounds like you’re very focused on data driven strategies, I am too.

But there’s a lot of people out there that rely on creative intuition, and maybe that’s just not a good approach anymore.

David T. Scott: 15:32

Well, it’s so funny because, you know, as I mentioned to you, it’s very clear that I’m data. Data first. Right. And when I wrote my first book, which is The New Rules of Lead Generation, it’s very data. I think I even have a sentence in there where I say don’t ignore your, your, your, your, you know, your, your creative mind because it doesn’t, just doesn’t matter.

But interestingly enough, in my old age, I’ve actually shifted from that perspective. I actually do think there’s some value in the creative aspect of it and thinking through some of those things. And I myself have even picked up a couple techniques on brand that’s allowed me to have even better performance on my lead generation campaigns in the future.

Rick Rappe: 16:14

Yeah, we believe I definitely believe in the power of creativity and marketing, because I’ve seen I’ve hit a few home runs with really creative ideas in my career, and I guess, but it always goes into a structured testing environment. You know, after we create it, it has to go into a structured testing environment where we’re sticking with our control and testing against it. You mentioned a B testing that, you know, we have to always gather the data and learn the specific effects of things before we sort of roll things out. I think where it gets really risky is when people just jump into ideas that don’t, that are untested. Right?

David T. Scott: 16:56

Yeah. I mean, so interestingly enough. I think there’s a fine line, right? I remember I was working for a startup as a CMO, and we spent eight hours determining whether or not the C in the, in the, in the logo looked like this or it looked like that or, you know.

Rick Rappe: 17:17

Oh.

David T. Scott: 17:17

That’s kind of C or is it that kind of C? Yeah. And at that point in time I thought diminishing returns. So, you know, definitely pick your battles. But I, you know, I mean listen like I still remember Steve Jobs’ approach on marketing, and when he first created the first Apple Macintosh, and people thought the thing was ugly, and he said, well, you know what?

There’s you know, we designed it so that 25% of the population would think this is the ugliest thing in the world. Because it sparks conversation.

Rick Rappe: 17:48

Yeah.

David T. Scott: 17:48

Conversation builds brand. And so I’ve always thought of that. Put that in mind. And I love a little bit of controversy in my marketing.

Rick Rappe: 17:58

Must be how Tesla came up with the Cybertruck.

David T. Scott: 18:01

Exactly. I think that’s exactly the strategy. Same thing with the VW bug when they redesigned it. Yeah, the design to be stark enough that it would debate it would ignite conversation.

Rick Rappe: 18:13

Yeah. Well, you know, that plays into what we do here with direct mail marketing because we often get our creative ideas, often get passed across a big committee of people on the client side, and it becomes very difficult when we have to try and make everyone happy. You know, when we’re trying to design things, sometimes we’re shooting for a small group, a small subset of the population, and if we’re successful with that small subset, then it’s a success. But, you know, if you’re committee is editing it, trying to make everyone happy, it just takes the punch away from the creative, if you will. Having led teams across many different organizations, what are some of your strategies you found effective in building and nurturing high performance marketing teams?

David T. Scott: 19:07

Yeah. So I you know, listen, I, I love I love OB organizational behavior. I love the idea of being able to create an environment which protects the psychological safety of your team. Because I think if you do that, then you get some of the most interesting and innovative work, right. And so one of the tricks that I’ve used is, celebrating failure, because I think if you could, if you could be okay with failure and you can, that means that you’re okay with risk.

And if you’re okay with risk, then you’re okay. Encouraging that one crazy idea that just might work.

Rick Rappe: 19:42

Yeah.

David T. Scott: 19:43

And in creative, you know, and then in marketing I think that’s really mission critical. Right. So when I was at Twitter, one of my employees came up and said, I’m thinking about doing just a crazy podcast and I’ll be the host or whatever, but we just want to talk about people’s businesses and how they launched a campaign. And we’re like, I don’t know. Sure, let’s give it a shot.

And it turned out to be a really wonderful program that really was sort of recognized across the industry as being a best practice. You know, when he came to me, he’s like, you know what? This is probably going to fail. You know, I’m going to try a couple of these things. It’s going to cost us X number of dollars to do it. 

Can I have the money? And, you know, that was one of those crazy ideas where. We didn’t expect necessarily to succeed. And that was okay. That was okay. 

And so I love creating a space for people to be able to provide suggestions and in a constructive way, and to really try some things out with, without fear of it having to be successful for us, having to have been successful as a company.

Rick Rappe: 20:52

Yeah, I, I totally agree with you on that. I mean, when we build teams around direct marketing, where we always encourage everyone to contribute ideas and, you know, almost, almost demand that everyone commit, you know, bring ideas. Yeah, we’ll have focus groups and, and sit around and talk about concepts and make everyone draw concepts. And you know, sometimes the kernel of a fantastic idea comes from the most unexpected places. It’s really interesting.

For those that are entering the field of marketing today, what skills or experiences should they focus on to excel in customer acquisition or other marketing roles?

David T. Scott: 21:38

You know, it’s so interesting. I teach marketing at a couple universities and what I’ve come to learn is there are so many amazing training opportunities that are free of charge on YouTube. You know, you know, training course sites like Udemy and even websites like Hubspot’s website that you could actually come into a job actually being extremely experienced, right? I mean, and what’s funny about it is this has always happened in the developer space, right? Which is you can teach yourself how to code.

You could become a pretty good coder before you get into your first interview for your entry coding job, and you could put in ten, 20, 100 hours a week of work to become an expert before you even walk in. In fact, you almost have to, because they’re most likely going to give you a coding test, right? Same thing, I think, with marketing as well. I think that you could come in. I mean, for no money at all. 

You can come in as a HubSpot certified CRM manager. You can come in as a Google SEM specialist. I mean, there’s so many free certifications out there and so much free tooling that you should not feel like you’re coming in to have to learn on the job.

Rick Rappe: 22:57

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know my daughter just graduated from college and she’s still taking classes on YouTube and learning things all the time for her, for her first job.

David T. Scott: 23:08

So what is she? What is she majoring in?

Rick Rappe: 23:11

She majored in business and she’s going into financial advising. So she’s got a lot of tests to take to get her certificates and things.

David T. Scott: 23:18

Yes, that’s a big certification.

Rick Rappe: 23:21

That’s right. It’s an exciting time for the young people today. I think there’s so much out in the world that there’s, there’s got to be that’s changing everything really rapidly for their careers. How do you think AI is going to impact us in the marketing world? I know that’s a huge question.

David T. Scott: 23:38

Well, you know, I don’t know yet. So, you know, first and foremost, like I think it’s I think as a productivity tool, it’s already affecting marketers. I think marketers can become extreme, better at writing by being able to have the ChatGPT weigh in on their work. I think people find that it’s not always perfect, but it at least gives you sparks new ideas and can also get you sort of 80% of the way there. I’ve experimented with tools, which uses AI to be able to create blog articles or create mark email posts, sorry social media posts based off of a one prompt prompt that a single prompt that you might give them.

None of them ever worked really great for me, but I think all that stuff is improving, you know? And so I think there’s some opportunity there to really sort of leverage AI in a very interesting way once it gets there.

Rick Rappe: 24:39

Yeah, it still needs a lot of human interaction and human intervention to sort of create the right end result. But it’s coming along for sure.

David T. Scott: 24:49

Yeah, I’ve even tried to use Midjourney to create, you know, you know, how you need like a nice photo to go with your blog article. Right. Or the background on LinkedIn. And they just never get it right. You know, I’m like, hold on, this thing’s got six fingers.

I don’t want six fingers executive or something along those lines. And so I’m cautiously optimistic. What? Speaking of your daughter, one use case I’ve been focused on. I’ve been really excited about is the testing and learning use case. 

So yeah, you know, hey, you know, you know, give me a curriculum on search engine marketing. You know, give me a build a pop quiz on SEO to see if I understand if I understand what I’ve just learned. Yeah, I think those are really, really fun and interesting use cases. And my brother, for example, is sitting for the orthodontist exam, the boards. And every single day he’ll grab a cup of coffee and then he’ll say, give me a ten question exam that would be on the boards. 

And they’re legit, legitimate, extremely accurate questions.

Rick Rappe: 25:55

Yeah, I imagine that AI is going to revolutionize education because I know I’m using it all the time to like, hey, I don’t understand this. Explain it to me, you know, and it’ll explain it to you at whatever level you want to ask it about. So it’s amazing how you can design your own, Design your own classes using it. It’s very interesting.

David T. Scott: 26:16

Yeah. Yeah. And that has impact to the marketing organization because we become more prepared. Right. Like, could you go in there and go, hey, give me three really interesting use cases on how a food and beverage company.

Right. Did their social media and then, you know, and provide some really good comparative points for you.

Rick Rappe: 26:38

Yeah. Well, I’m sure that I mean, got to be a huge impact for people that have relied heavily on like search-based marketing. Because I feel like search based marketing has gone away or it seems like it might be going away, because now I ask a question, and I used to get a list of websites to look through. Now I get the answer from I write in Google. So it’s like I don’t need to go to anybody’s website to figure it out.

That’s got to be changing things dramatically, I would think.

David T. Scott: 27:06

Yeah, I mean, I believe I had read an article talking about how Google for the first time ever, is going to be completely revamping their search engine tool to focus on AI. Probably for that exact reason.

Rick Rappe: 27:18

Yeah.

David T. Scott: 27:20

You remember back in the day, there used to be something called Quora, which was like a larger, larger. That was when search engine marketing, like search engines didn’t even respond to a question. Right? Like you’d say, you know, what’s the most populous state in California? And it wouldn’t, it couldn’t answer it.

So I came out and answered all those questions and then SEO the questions and had a pretty thriving business for a while.

Rick Rappe: 27:43

Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, pretty soon I don’t imagine we’ll have to type. We’ll be able to open a screen and there’ll be somebody’s face there that we can just talk to. It’ll be our assistant, right?

Like our online assistant. I can’t wait till we get that. I mean, I want Siri to actually have a face and I can talk to her or like, it’s got to be coming really soon, I would think.

David T. Scott: 28:05

Yeah. Why? She stares at you while you’re sleeping? Yeah, I don’t know.

Rick Rappe: 28:08

Well, there’s the creepy sort of surveillance aspect of all these things, which is a whole nother story. But we as marketers will try not to focus on that, I guess. Who are some of the people that were influential and really helped you in your career? You’ve had such a remarkable career and done so much. Who was someone that shaped you or helped shape your career?

David T. Scott: 28:35

Yeah. You know, so I’ve been very lucky to have a bunch of really amazing mentors throughout my career. The first job I got out of college, I worked for Jack Welch, and that was amazing. And then when I became a CMO for the first time years ago, I actually became friends with Philip Kotler. And I don’t know if, you know, Philip Kotler is, but do you remember that Fundamentals of Marketing book?

That was everyone’s textbook in marketing. He wrote that.

Rick Rappe: 29:06

Yeah.

David T. Scott: 29:07

He was the inventor of the four P’s, for example.

Rick Rappe: 29:10

Yes. Okay. That sounds very familiar.

David T. Scott: 29:13

Yeah. And, you know, he was like 85 at the time, and he was a professor emeritus at Kellogg, which at that point in time was the premier marketing school. And, you know, I got a chance to spend some one on one time with him. And it was really quite, quite remarkable.

Rick Rappe: 29:30

That’s wonderful. If you could give yourself your younger self one piece of advice at the start of your marketing journey, what would you tell yourself?

David T. Scott: 29:41

Just one.

Rick Rappe: 29:43

Well, no, I’m not going to limit you to just one. If you want to make a list, that’s fine too.

David T. Scott: 29:47

You know, what’s funny is I think that I would tell my younger self that if you’re really serious about marketing, it might be worthwhile to get into CPG. So you’re familiar with the Procter and Gamble’s of the world, the Kellogg’s. They all have these really amazing training grounds. And I think that they teach you just like. IBM teaches you how to be a really good salesperson early on.

I think P&G teaches you how to be really good marketing person early on. And I think that exposure would have been really enlightening.

Rick Rappe: 30:21

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I think that we’ve covered a lot of ground and this has been really wonderful. Dave, thank you so much for joining me today and have a great rest of your weekend.

David T. Scott: 30:35

All right. It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Rick Rappe: 30:37

All right.

Outro: 30:38

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

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