Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Transitioning To A 1st-Party Data Plan About this episode CEO and Co-Founder Chris Sell from GrowthLoop, a leading composable customer data platform (CDP), discusses transitioning to a 1st-party data plan. Learn how GrowthLoop empowers marketers to build dynamic audience segments, orchestrate cross-channel journeys, and evaluate campaign performance through its advanced data cloud. Seamlessly integrating with leading data warehouses, GrowthLoop is bridging the gap between data cloud and growth platforms. Show NotesConnect With: Chris Sell: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, the executive producer of the Martech Podcast, and today we've got a special episode for you, which is going to be guest hosted by Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter. Juan is a recovering martech consultant turned creator who writes an amazing weekly newsletter about the martech industry, and I'm thrilled to invite him and some of his friends to take the mic and share their knowledge with you, our loyal Martech Podcast listeners. All right, here's a special episode of the Martech Podcast, guest hosted by Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter.
1:51 Speaker 05 Well, hello, hello, Martekers. My name is Juan Mendoza. I am your guest host on the Martech Podcast and also I'm from the Martech Weekly. Joining me today is Chris Sell, who is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Growth Loop. Growth Loop is an awesome company, which is empowering marketers to build dynamic audience segments, orchestrate cross-channel journeys, and really evaluate campaign performance through its advanced data cloud. Growth Loop seamlessly integrates with the leading data warehouses and are really sort of driving a lot of thought leadership around what does sort of composable marketing technology architecture look like? Yesterday, Chris Sell and I talked about bridging the gap between your marketing and
2:32 Speaker 05 data teams. So today, we're going on a different track and talking about this whole world of third-party cookie deprecation, how businesses are responding with building and transitioning to a first-party data plan, and what does that look like from a technical operations and also from a business case perspective as well. It's a fantastic conversation, and here it is. So here's our conversation with Chris Sell, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Growth Loop. Chris, thanks for coming back for day two.
3:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, thanks so much, Juan. I appreciate you having me again.
3:02 Speaker 05 And it's been a fun conversation so far. A lot of analogies. We talk about baseball, we're talking about Hollandaise, we talk about a bunch of crazy stuff. But this conversation, obviously, it's very relevant right now in the industry. We just had Google announce that they're sunsetting their own sunset, so to speak, which is they were planning to remove third-party cookies, putting the industry into a panic. At the start of the year, they deprecated 1% of Chrome browsers from using third-party cookies, and marketers advertised, started freaking out. So crap, this is actually happening. The cookie apocalypse is happening. But then they said, no, actually, we're not going to deprecate cookies for everyone. We're going to give that choice to the user. We're going to create a feature where the user can opt out of third-party cookies overall across all websites, and they're going to sort of work on that plan instead. And so it's been a very chaotic
3:47 Speaker 05 four or five years of like, what's happening next? A lot of customer data platforms saying, hey, brands should start shifting from third-party trackers to first-party trackers and that type of data to drive advertising. We've had this sort of plethora of solutions out there to manage Identity in a sort of third party cookieless world. So that kind of brings us to our conversation now, just as backdrop and what you're doing at Growth Loop, which is coming from it perhaps not just, hey, just use first party data for all your advertising. It's actually creating a strategy and what does that strategy and plan look like? And so perhaps my first question for you, Chris, is more around how would you define a first party data strategy? Like, what does that look like sort of in practice?
4:25 Speaker 06 The key thing about thinking through a first party data strategy is, one, I think the industry has completely tipped over. Like, Google is now, like you mentioned, sunsetting the sunset at a certain point where they are now saying, hey, they will allow for third party cookies. But what folks have realized that I speak to is they're like, look, I need an insurance policy at the very least. Meaning I should be controlling my own destiny, not waiting for news about whether third party cookies are going away or not. So over the last four to five years, a lot of brands and companies have already started to shift towards, hey, I need to take control of my data assets and understand what they are and then understand what to do with them.
5:04 Speaker 06 So many brands are already down that path, but even the ones I expected after this, the cookie apocalypse going away, that folks would be like, oh, maybe we're good with third party cookies. I'm not seeing that, though. People are still saying, hey, I need to have a first party data strategy. And I think in a large part, actually, I think AI has helped because people are realizing AI is pretty worthless if you don't have your data assets in order. So it'd behoove you to get them in order so that you can use AI. I think it's happening. Now, in terms of what does the strategy look like? Overall, I think it gets back to what you and I were talking about yesterday is I think what typically people do is they form an 18-month roadmap and try to get to what they call a customer 360.
5:45 Speaker 06 So they do a data discovery, they decide, hey, what are all the different interactions we have with our customers? Whether it's in the website, the application and our point of sale or through third-party vendors. And then they try to design a data schema around those. They then start to interview identity providers out there to say, hey, if we were to bring together this perfect picture of our customer and merge all the IDs into a single identifier and have all of these interactions with them, dovetailing off. Of that, what would that look like? They do these big specs, they do the RFPs, it's going to cost $5 million. They say, hold on a second, what was the use case? Why are we doing all this? What is the data asset useful for?
6:25 Speaker 06 What a real first party data strategy to me, yes, you do need to understand what data assets you have in the interactions with your customers. But that's just table stakes. Then the real work begins of which pieces of that are the most crucial for the value adds that you're actually going to activate and use in your business. So it's a perfect example. I know we were talking about sports and using ticketing data. That matters the most in the business, start there. So I think taking that extra lens to your big behemoth customer 360 is the starting point of having a first party data strategy.
6:56 Speaker 05 Customer 360 and single view of customer, they're sort of related concepts, right?
7:01 Speaker 06 Yes.
7:02 Speaker 05 A few years ago, gosh, this was a while back, back in 2020, we covered a bit of work from Gartner. They came out and said that the single view of customer, the 360 thing, it's like a waste of time. And we were kind of querying that ourselves because it almost seems unattainable, particularly for large enterprise businesses, to have a single view. But I get the value proposition, which is you can get all of the different variables that relate to a customer. How long they've been with you, all of the different, before they hit your own channels or their website, all the ad tech integrations. You're having all of that data in one spot. It gives you a visibility over what you can create with use cases. Years ago, I used to work with a customer data platform and I really struggled with it because we had that 360 sort of view.
7:43 Speaker 05 We, we had actually quite a e-commerce business and a lot of the work that we were doing was just collecting and enriching profiles. Single profiles, stitching profiles across website sessions. And then of course, looking at, okay, what's all the transactional data? What's all the other things, returns, customer service? And then we actually had a really cool profile. But the problem I had, Chris, was that when I went to query that data to analyze it, which is super valuable, right? Like, what are the opportunities? What's the insight where we can build new use cases? What are we missing in terms of the journeys? I couldn't query it and I won't name the CDP, but definitely was a point of frustration where I think a lot of this is visibility. When you say customer 360, is that what you mean? Is it visibility and all the actions, all the events that relate to a single customer?
8:26 Speaker 06 I'll use, uh, because we love our metaphors here. I'm gonna use one more. So one of my other mentors, Braden Moore, he works at the 76ers and New Jersey Devils. What he says in a first-party data strategy is, "I don't want you to build me a Ferrari that goes 200 miles an hour, because I don't want to wait for you to build it. What I want is a skateboard, then I want a scooter, then I want a bike, then I want the car." Because he wants something that improves his transportation speed at every single checkpoint. First-party data strategy is the same to me, is in your example of the CDP, putting together that full 360, but then you can't query it. The thing you need to do is you need to start with a skateboard. It's like, "Hey, picketing data or my purchase data is the most important.
9:09 Speaker 06 What does it take to land that in the, to Google Cloud and Snowflake? Let's just land it, get an ETL tool, ingest it. It takes minimal modeling. How do we then expose that to marketers? Well, the way you do that is you start to get a BI tool, or you get a composable CDP, like Growth Loop, to say, "Hey marketers, why don't you come in and self-serve and try to use this purchase data for building audiences for your Facebook campaigns?" Because then marketers are gonna come in and say, "Well, actually, I really like to use the survey response data when I'm building audiences. Do you guys have that?" And we say, "Well, we've done this huge exercise of putting together all of our potential data assets, but we're doing it based on demand and layering in the customer's 360, where every time we layer an additional layer on the cake,
9:54 Speaker 06 it's fully visible to marketers." And I think what people do typically is they hide the cake from marketers and bake the whole thing, and then they do a big surprise birthday and say, "Do you like it?" And they're like, "No, I like sprinkles." I think that's the key to the first-party data strategies. Again, you and I were talking about it yesterday. Bring the marketing team along on each layer. Is this valuable? Is this value? It's not saying don't understand your full data catalog. Definitely do that and do that research exercise, but layer it, expose it to marketing, see if it's useful for their use cases, and then proceed.
10:27 Speaker 05 I think it's interesting that when it comes to creating a first-party data plan, a strategy, the strategy is in service of some kind of ask to the business. Because yes, you want to be able to orchestrate the data and use it. But at the end of the day, you have to go to some executive. You have to go to the CMO, the head of digital, or even the CEO in some businesses. And go, hey, here's our first-party data strategy. We need X millions of dollars to actually do this. And this is how we map it out. What's your experience in that? Because clearly, a lot of these strategic intent projects are about business cases and actually getting the investment needed. What do you see as some of the blockers there when it comes to asking for investment to actually build out a first-party data strategy?
11:07 Speaker 06 If you're going to take this to your CMO or CEO, anybody I feel like that's embarked on a CDP project knows this, is you'll run an RFP and then you get to the final decision desk. And what they want to know, the executives want to know, is what is the big problem in the earnings report that I care about that this solves for? And if you don't have that on lock, then yeah, it doesn't really make sense to bite off a line item to do all this work. The way I've approached it with our partners and customers is we go after the medias problem for the business. Does the company have a churn problem? Maybe they're an e-commerce player and they have way too high of churn. Maybe the e-commerce player's first to second purchase rate is dismal and all their Google
11:48 Speaker 06 Ads are driving to the website and they have 80% of them drop off after first purchase. Well, that's a major problem. Now, how does the first-party data strategy drive that? Well, the question I would ask is, what can I discover about those users when they're anonymous up through first purchase to inform me about how I retain them before they get to second purchase to try to drive that metric up? Then I go to the CEO and say, hey, you know what I'm solving? We're going to do all this cool data stuff. But the reason we're doing it is we're going to raise second purchase rate. And he's like, yeah, I will literally put all the firepower I can on solving that problem. That's great, you're doing data stuff to do it. It's almost like the data stuff is not the end-all, be-all. It is a means to the business value and that's it.
12:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, are you familiar with the concept of polishing a turd? I hate to be crude to our audience, but it's actually a good analogy for kind of what we're talking about here is that often when it comes to things that you need to fix in a business, say churn is up or where conversion is not there or lifetime spend is not there. Sometimes if you don't get the diagnosis right, you end up polishing a turd. And what I mean by that is that you do all this great stuff. Say, for example, you create an amazing first party data strategy, you get it on lock, you're building all these amazing use cases, you've harmonized your data and then the needle doesn't move at all. Often the product is just bad. There are things that are truly outside of the realm of data and analytics that can actually influence business performance.
13:14 Speaker 05 I had an example of this where I worked with a publisher years ago and they were trying to sell subscription to news. And the deal was bad, like they're asking customers to pay way too much and the product wasn't great, the delivery and the experience wasn't great. But we ended up doing a bunch of A B testing, a personalization, and we ended up coming back to them and saying, hey, we'd love to help you, but we're kind of just polishing a turd here. I think that's to your point is that it's a very good point for marketing leaders to think through is what does the executive report on? If it is a public company, what are the metrics that go into their regular reports to their investors? What are those metrics? What are they tracking? All right. How do you align to those metrics? And then logically explain, okay, you want to change this metric, which will lead to revenue. Okay.
13:57 Speaker 05 What are the leading and the lagging measures that influence that? Sometimes it's as small as an open rate in an email that will influence the overall revenue or the overall target. Sometimes it's something much bigger, which is, yeah, we don't have customer profiles in our system. We don't have a view of our customer, which is a much bigger problem. And once you fix that, then that leads to that overall metric. But in my view, there's this path where you have to kind of trace out what is all the leading measures that are influencing that key metric? That will obviously get you promoted at the end of the day, because that's what we're here to do, isn't it?
14:29 Speaker 06 That is our job. And if your first party data strategy lines up to the metrics to drive those metrics, that is how you get promoted, right? The way you just leave the company is you create a first party data strategy that doesn't move those metrics. And then three years in, you're like, you know what? I think I'm going to seek employment elsewhere. That's the other path.
14:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, or you get stuck in the loop of inertia where nothing really changes. You still get paid a salary. It's like self-driving cars. It's always two years away, right? Oh yeah, we're working on that. It's in the next roadmap, it's the next quarter and the next quarter never comes. A large enterprise company, a lot of people are stuck in that just a loop of not doing much at all. And so like, in my view, have you ever met some of those champions that's come in? They build that strategy, execute on it, see those outcomes that they really want to get for the business. What does it take to be that kind of person to drive that significant transformation and change of business?
15:18 Speaker 06 They're playing that marketing ops role you've been speaking to. Even if they're a leader, they're like a CIO, they're taking on that persona as the bridge. And when they do that, and they can actually get it down from a not self-driving car project where it's two years away, two years away. It's actually the customer 72 where you have a thin slice of data you can bring in on a real timeline. That hits a use case that the C level cares about and drives a metric. And then they put an activation platform like Growth Loop in the middle and they activate it. What they do is they're actually really good at getting the first thread out of, I call it the threads of value. And then they take it to the C level and they say, look, they actually ask for incremental investment.
15:59 Speaker 06 They don't ask for the full thing. So this is why composability is helped too, because it's cheaper to get started than a full package CDP rollout. Is you can say, hey, let's just ETL the ticketing data or the purchase data into the data cloud. Let's set up an activation platform. Let's get our first emails going. Let's measure the results. I am now going to bring a real thread of value to the CEO or CMO and say, hey, we were able to move this metric. We did it in three months. Here's what we did. I think there's further opportunity and requests coming from marketing. Here's the next layers I want to build out. I need X amount of dollars to do so. So they just build the layers and they report up each time. That's the folks that win and get promoted that I've seen.
16:41 Speaker 05 It's an equal part technical, strategic and political.
16:45 Speaker 06 It's all three.
16:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's literally all three. You have to play the politician. Sometimes you have to play the data engineer and sometimes you have to play the marketing hat with strategy.
16:53 Speaker 06 That's right.
16:53 Speaker 05 Well, on that note, that wraps up our final episode with Chris Sell. He's the co-founder and chief product officer at Growth Loop. Thank you so much for joining me, Chris. If you'd like to join again, touch with Chris, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his company website at GrowthLoop.com. But Chris, thank you so much for joining us.
17:14 Speaker 06 Thanks so much for having me, Juan. Appreciate it.
17:17 Speaker 04 Okay, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to our guest host, Juan Mendoza, the author of the Martech Weekly Newsletter. If you'd like to get in touch with Juan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can contact him on Twitter. His handle is JuanMendoza, but it's spelled crazy pants. It's J U four N M E N D zero Z four. Or it's a little easier to just visit his company's website, which is themartechweekly.com. Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletters and you can even send us your topic suggestions
18:00 Speaker 04 or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is martechpod, M A R T E C H P O D, on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben J. Shap, B E N J S H A P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
19:00 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the MarTech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.
Previous Bridging The Gap Between Your Marketing & Data Teams Next How Agentic AI Will Transform Sales & Marketing Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
