Cadillac’s Melissa Grady Dias On Performance Marketing, Multi-Touch Attribution And ‘Vibrational’ Resonance

The topic of unprecedented growth is not going away any time soon. As a result, the need for performance marketing has never been greater. Additionally, to lead a successful marketing organization, you absolutely must break down the silos that once existed between brand and e-commerce if you are to build an impactful CX ecosystem that delivers the best results for both the customer and the brand.

With all this in mind, I wanted to speak to someone intimately familiar with best practices for creating synergy between e-commerce and brand, and successfully innovating in performance marketing. I recently sat down with Melissa Grady Dias, CMO of Cadillac, and a marketing industry leader who has worked at top brands such as Jackson Hewitt, MetLife, and Motorola. The following is a recap of our discussion:

Billee Howard: When we first spoke, it became clear that you really embody the new model of what it takes to be a successful CMO today. A lot of that has to do with finding the synergy between brand and e-commerce. Can you tell me about your thoughts on best practices marketers should keep in mind here?

Melissa Grady Dias: An early conversation that Deborah Wahl and I had when I was thinking of joining Cadillac was around “where we are aligned?” For us, that alignment was the notion that marketing is all about performance. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to come work with her. I think that in the end, no matter what you’re doing, you’re trying to drive some type of behavior against some type of measure. Staying focused on that really helps you at all levels of the funnel.

Lower in the funnel, you might be trying to look at: “how am I going to drive a conversion to sale?”, “how am I going to get this lead to the dealer?”, or “how am I going to get this person interested to search as they go up the funnel?” These questions clearly inform your tactics and are easy to measure. At the top of the funnel, you’re trying to pull people into the family of your brand and you’re trying to connect with them. Brand building can be more abstract, but we still have specific outcomes and quantifiable metrics we are trying to drive. I think when you understand marketing that way, the science, and mindset of it, it leads to what I think are the best practices. What are you measuring? What outcomes are you looking for? What are your goals or objectives as a brand?

Howard: It makes perfect sense, and ties into audience propensity. Can you talk to me about the ‘funnel flip model’ we discussed around this topic?

Grady Dias: if you look at the way I just walked through how you measure marketing, I started at the bottom of the funnel and worked my way up. I think it’s an innate way to look at marketing when you come from more of an e-commerce or a digital brand background because the low hanging fruit at the bottom of the funnel is where you are going to get your best search results in everything.

We take that performance mindset and look at the people that we need to convert. Here’s the people that are maybe a few months out from making a purchase, and I need to give them the information required so I can convert them. Then here are the people who are a little bit further out from that point and require a different type of messaging. We took that mindset and view of the funnel and built a propensity model for Cadillac based on a dataset of the entire US with our agency partner. Within that, you have two dimensions. Number one, you have the propensity to Cadillac. We have that broken down into whatever level or percentile we want. On the other side is market timing.

Looking at it that way, you start at the bottom of the funnel, and you do the easy things that you can measure well and work your way up. This allows you to develop a deep understanding of your audience and where they are so you can go try to meaningfully talk to them. As you go up the funnel, you’re adding levels of people that we’re trying to drive into the Cadillac family. The propensity model helps us with both who are we going to talk to and how/where we are going to talk to them. Think about filling a jar with rocks and sand. The “rocks” of the plan are digital addressable and connected TV, and then linear TV is the “sand” that fills the gaps in between.

Howard: That’s a really good way of thinking about it. With that in mind, everyone’s heads are spinning around CTV and linear, and where all the dollars are going, which dollars are working, and which aren’t. There is a ton of emphasis on measurement through the media lens. I personally think it’s a little myopic to only think about measurement when you’re talking about TV or media. I’d love for you to tell me about your thoughts on the things you feel are most critical to success related to the evolving definition of measurement, as broadly as you can.

Grady Dias: Measurement is an interesting thing because I feel like three years ago, we were in a better place than we are today. When we look at the way the technical landscape was building out, with cookies for example, we looked at things like using the Google ad stack and then starting to understand behavior across the same type of things that other partners were offering. We were in a place where from a marketing perspective, we could measure really well. We were also in a good place looking at multi-touch attribution. As we start to more and more walled gardens, what we used to do is not even a viable option anymore. But as the saying goes, what’s old is new again.

We are looking at media mix modeling again but coming at it from more of a multitouch lens. It’s an interesting thing, because I remember being on a panel several years ago talking about unified attribution, and at the time, unified didn’t make a lot of sense because it was multitouch. Now, we are in this more unified world that lets us use a more traditional media mix. Let me look at what market conditions are. Let me look at what broad TV spending is. Let me look at all these things, but then let’s pull in impression level data and personal poll data where I can start to understand “where do I know someone saw an impression?” Where do I think they saw an impression? And then, most importantly, what were the business outcomes of sales or other metrics that we’re looking at? I think we are at this place now where we’re doing this blended approach and we’re looking at different pieces of measurement and trying to understand what’s happening, and what’s the best way to optimize things. Most importantly, understanding if we use one piece of information to optimize, how does that affect the net whole?

Howard: How does contextualization need to fit into all of this?

Grady Dias: I think contextual advertising is the way of the future. However, the thinking behind it needs to evolve. I’m not going to put my ad on a cooking site because someone likes cooking. That example is relevant for us because we found out that we had a very high propensity to culinary and that drove our version of contextual. In that moment, we created something called the ‘ELECTRIQ Kitchen’ – ending in IQ, just like the LYRIQ. Basically, we had two Michelin star chefs get inspired by the LYRIQ and create a multilevel restaurant that showcased meals inspired by the car. We could talk about the car as people went through the experience and it was perfectly integrated. We partnered with 60 Second Docs to create content around the vehicle and the two chefs to reach anyone who is interested in culinary so they can learn more about the LYRIQ in their language. Furthermore, the event was picked up nationally by Access Hollywood. Both of those things gave us far more scale beyond the 150 people who attended the event.

To me, that’s when you start to look at contextualization as number one. How do you speak to an audience in a way that’s going to be meaningful to them and that’s going to make them want to engage? The other thing is to remember the environment that someone is in and don’t just plop your 15-second or 30-second ad into that environment. Think about what are they doing? How are you going to make them not skip? How are you going to prevent them from being frustrated if they must watch it?

Howard: Very helpful and super creative. Thank you for sharing that. Why don’t we end around our shared passion for creativity, and something else that we’ve talked about that I think is very relevant to not only creativity, but contextualization, which is understanding emotion as critical to executing in a way that drives performance. Please tell me more about new ways marketers should be thinking about understanding consumer emotions.

Grady Dias: When you look at insight and creativity it needs to tie back to the brand and the future. A lot of people love Cadillac, but Cadillac needs to be a brand that someone wants to be part of. “I want that car in my garage, and I want to get in it every day.” You’ve got to be looking at the impact that you make through creative. It goes back to something that I learned in grad school that has always stuck with me. I use the word resonate. Something needs to resonate with people, and it goes back to the scientific definition of resonance. It’s about the natural vibration of objects because every object has its own vibration. When you match that, the amplification is beyond what the vibrations were on their own. When something resonates, emotionally, or otherwise, it’s about this internal vibration creating something that’s so much bigger. We need to take all the data to learn about who people are and then we must use it in a way that resonates to get the type of relationship-oriented engagement that’s so imperative today.