What is a "white hat" marketing consultancy?
In short, we help companies for the sake of making them and the world better.
We believe that transformational marketing is one of the most powerful vehicles for helping companies, individuals, and societies advance. It gives a voice to those who have something valuable to say. Yet, we also recognize that keeping up with the ever-evolving world of modern marketing is hard. It requires creating order out of chaos, navigating ambiguity, and combining knowledge, technology, and empathy in an unprecedented way. This environment creates challenges for even the most skilled marketing leaders, and with those challenges, there is ever more room for the "dark hats" - opportunists ready to take advantage of the ever-changing landscape for their own short-term gain.
Origins:
DigiMarketeer's "white hat" model was born in Ashley's earliest days at Google, when the ambiguity around best practices for Google's search and display advertising platforms created an unfortunate mountain of misinformation about how the system works that still plagues the advertising world today. After cleaning up too many messes created by poorly informed agencies and in-house teams, Ashley worked directly with the Google team who created the first "GAP" exams and training materials aimed at combating the misinformation, but alas, it wasn't enough. For better and worse, the idea that digital advertising is a "game" came into being, and with it, a revolving door of "tricks" to win the "game" came with it. While technical skills and knowledge of how the various ad systems work are important, this over-simplified view of how to "win" at digital marketing has caused thousands of companies over the years to overlook the pivotal role of "no-brainer" truths that are too commonly underemphasized or ignored completely, including: knowing and respecting your target customer(s), understanding how online and offline marketing channels interact with one another whether or not you can measure a click, creating emotional messaging and content that provides actual value for the user, and making a product or service that people actually want to buy or use.
Helping marketers stay afloat in the rapidly changing marketing landscape:
In addition to the misinformation and gamification that began to plague modern marketing, the explosion of third party vendors that charged to the scene about seven years ago, bringing analytics solutions, data mining, cross-platform management, and many more niche offerings created a headache for many skilled marketers rushing to keep up with the rapidly evolving environment, and made it easier for unscrupulous vendors and agencies to upsell products that didn't meet business objectives and/or that couldn't reasonably be implemented with the resources and in-house team available. This problem persists today, and in many cases, it continues to worsen as certain aspects of marketing, such as programmatic buying and data warehouse access using SQL, have become commonplace despite being significantly more technical than they were even five years ago.
After working through several cases in which unscrupulous agencies had blatantly defrauded their clients, and several others in which contracts that were being evaluated included unnecessary offerings at unreasonably high prices, the need for "white hat" consulting in the space was clearer than ever for DigiMarketeer.
Some of the most outrageous examples that DigiMarketeer has found are useful for the general marketing populace to keep in mind, including:
The power of transformational leadership:
At the core of many of the problems DigiMarketeer has solved over the years is a common scenario: A leader whose vision and/or experience is not the right fit for their company (and team) makes important strategic and investment decisions that turn out to make a mess, not just for their marketing org, but for their entire company. The mess is often worse if said company or executive is under pressure for a short-term "big win," for which they employ multiple tactics that are executed without the proper strategy, resources, and/or executional expertise in place for success.
That mess often involves:
After a company and a team has been through the gauntlet, morale can be low, budgets can be harder to come by, and remaining senior leadership can be skeptical about the efficacy of tactics that may still drive business goals when strategized and executed well. However, with the help of an unbiased expert who has seen many programs and teams rise from the ashes stronger than ever before, armed with the learnings from their prior attempts, the catastrophe of a collapsed initiative or program can turn into a blessing. It is important for teams and companies to rebuild their foundations as soon as possible, before valued members of the team seek greener pastures elsewhere, and for companies to integrate working remnants into a coherent movement forward.
Helping companies avoid these growing pains from the get-go and helping those who have struggled rise up to harness the unique power of their own painful learning experiences are core foundations of DigiMarketeer's mission.
It is these examples, along with a deep respect for the power that a fully optimized, integrated marketing program can have to transform a company's future and her passion for cultivating future leaders who will drive success in their current roles and throughout their futures, that motivated Ashley "the grandmother of optimization" (according to the teams she trained 14 years ago) and her company to create the "white hat" marketing consulting model.
We believe that transformational marketing is one of the most powerful vehicles for helping companies, individuals, and societies advance. It gives a voice to those who have something valuable to say. Yet, we also recognize that keeping up with the ever-evolving world of modern marketing is hard. It requires creating order out of chaos, navigating ambiguity, and combining knowledge, technology, and empathy in an unprecedented way. This environment creates challenges for even the most skilled marketing leaders, and with those challenges, there is ever more room for the "dark hats" - opportunists ready to take advantage of the ever-changing landscape for their own short-term gain.
Origins:
DigiMarketeer's "white hat" model was born in Ashley's earliest days at Google, when the ambiguity around best practices for Google's search and display advertising platforms created an unfortunate mountain of misinformation about how the system works that still plagues the advertising world today. After cleaning up too many messes created by poorly informed agencies and in-house teams, Ashley worked directly with the Google team who created the first "GAP" exams and training materials aimed at combating the misinformation, but alas, it wasn't enough. For better and worse, the idea that digital advertising is a "game" came into being, and with it, a revolving door of "tricks" to win the "game" came with it. While technical skills and knowledge of how the various ad systems work are important, this over-simplified view of how to "win" at digital marketing has caused thousands of companies over the years to overlook the pivotal role of "no-brainer" truths that are too commonly underemphasized or ignored completely, including: knowing and respecting your target customer(s), understanding how online and offline marketing channels interact with one another whether or not you can measure a click, creating emotional messaging and content that provides actual value for the user, and making a product or service that people actually want to buy or use.
Helping marketers stay afloat in the rapidly changing marketing landscape:
In addition to the misinformation and gamification that began to plague modern marketing, the explosion of third party vendors that charged to the scene about seven years ago, bringing analytics solutions, data mining, cross-platform management, and many more niche offerings created a headache for many skilled marketers rushing to keep up with the rapidly evolving environment, and made it easier for unscrupulous vendors and agencies to upsell products that didn't meet business objectives and/or that couldn't reasonably be implemented with the resources and in-house team available. This problem persists today, and in many cases, it continues to worsen as certain aspects of marketing, such as programmatic buying and data warehouse access using SQL, have become commonplace despite being significantly more technical than they were even five years ago.
After working through several cases in which unscrupulous agencies had blatantly defrauded their clients, and several others in which contracts that were being evaluated included unnecessary offerings at unreasonably high prices, the need for "white hat" consulting in the space was clearer than ever for DigiMarketeer.
Some of the most outrageous examples that DigiMarketeer has found are useful for the general marketing populace to keep in mind, including:
- Offering website re-designs with unnecessary customization levels that would require on-going paid support for the site post-launch (not included in the quoted price) -> this scenario is extremely common.
- Setting up tracking incorrectly to over-report conversions
- Changing settings in conversion tracking to over-track revenue tied to conversions
- Placement of retargeted ads on the clients' own website to track view-through "conversions" for users who visited their help center
- Removing client manager access from Facebook ad accounts so that the client couldn't see that the supposedly organic engagement was, in fact, paid
- General mismanagement and poorly structured ad accounts that basic knowledge or application of best practices could have avoided
- Contracts given to personal contacts of the former executive without due diligence
- Over-emphasis on digital channels that pay agency commission
The power of transformational leadership:
At the core of many of the problems DigiMarketeer has solved over the years is a common scenario: A leader whose vision and/or experience is not the right fit for their company (and team) makes important strategic and investment decisions that turn out to make a mess, not just for their marketing org, but for their entire company. The mess is often worse if said company or executive is under pressure for a short-term "big win," for which they employ multiple tactics that are executed without the proper strategy, resources, and/or executional expertise in place for success.
That mess often involves:
- Marketing strategies and investments that are made without a holistic view of the entire marketing landscape
- Incorrect or incomplete metrics used to judge and optimize performance
- Tactical errors in execution of campaigns that create long term problems across marketing platforms
- Analytics, CRM, and/or data management business logic executed without a holistic view of the customer journey
- Unclear definition of the target customer(s) and/or marketing tactics executed without the target customer top of mind
- Incomplete vision of what user actions drive long term success for the company and brand (ex. 100% focus on immediate revenue without consideration for lifetime value of a user, brand integrity, opportunity costs, and other holistic value-adding factors)
- Vendors hired and integrated into a company's business eco-system without proper oversight, business logic, or due diligence
After a company and a team has been through the gauntlet, morale can be low, budgets can be harder to come by, and remaining senior leadership can be skeptical about the efficacy of tactics that may still drive business goals when strategized and executed well. However, with the help of an unbiased expert who has seen many programs and teams rise from the ashes stronger than ever before, armed with the learnings from their prior attempts, the catastrophe of a collapsed initiative or program can turn into a blessing. It is important for teams and companies to rebuild their foundations as soon as possible, before valued members of the team seek greener pastures elsewhere, and for companies to integrate working remnants into a coherent movement forward.
Helping companies avoid these growing pains from the get-go and helping those who have struggled rise up to harness the unique power of their own painful learning experiences are core foundations of DigiMarketeer's mission.
It is these examples, along with a deep respect for the power that a fully optimized, integrated marketing program can have to transform a company's future and her passion for cultivating future leaders who will drive success in their current roles and throughout their futures, that motivated Ashley "the grandmother of optimization" (according to the teams she trained 14 years ago) and her company to create the "white hat" marketing consulting model.