“Understand your core business model. How do you make money? How do you keep expenses low? Then look for the measures that have the greatest impact on it.“
Ken Allard – CEO of L2; the importance of measuring performance online; optimizing the customer experience; Understand digital trends.
Segment 1: (Length :04:00) – General Updates; Introduction to Ken Allard and his journey as an entrepreneur & CEO; His journey leading up to L2; L2’s focus on digital strategy and data for brands.
Ken’s finer points:
I started my career right out of college. They called me an IROC, idiot right out of college, at a company called Gartner.
“When I was there Gartner was just about a hundred million dollar business. Then while I was there it grew tremendously and went public and now Gartner is a $2.7 billion in annual revenues. It’s a great start to my career.”
“Then I stuck with the analyst research slash syndicated research business model and went to a company called Jupiter Media Metrix We grew like crazy. Went from 7 million to 50 million in those special internet days from ’98 to 2000.”
“From there I just continued to have my own business and help companies monetize content data assets and that was a huge success. Now here I am at L2.'”
(At L2) We benchmark a digital performance brand. We gather data about how they're performing in four sectors. Their position in e-commerce, their digital marketing, their presence on social media, and then their mobile environment, their mobile ecosystem.
“We score the brands based on that data. We index those scores to 100 and then actually write them and put them in five categories of genius, gifted, average, challenged, and feeble. We publish that ranking.”
“It’s important for a brand to understand that because the digital medium is inherently measurable.”
If you're not measuring it and understanding how you're doing and how you're doing relative to your competitors I'd argue that you're pretty much dead in the water right at the beginning because you're operating blindly.
“That’s one of the promises of digital two brands is that they have the opportunity to make decisions as a function of data, as a function of like looking at what successful testing, learning quickly, and then changing their approach.”
Segment 2: (Length :08:00) – Talking with Ken Allard; Why digital measurement matters; 3 things a brand can do to optimize themselves online.
Ken’s finer points:
“Get the basics done well. I think even the largest most sophisticated global brand they still forget to do some of the easiest things.”
Every purchase journey for consumers today starts with search. Increasingly, search from their mobile phone or some kind of mobile device. Before they make any first decision, before they make any move, before they go out to eat, before they travel through Uber, whatever, they're going on their phone and they're doing a search or going to an app
“First, recognize that that’s where consumers start today and make sure that all of your digital assets are optimized for that user behavior.”
“Second, I would say is boring equals sexy in the digital world. People chase the sophisticated attribution models trying to figure out how to find the best return on every penny invested but the reality is the best returns are search. Optimizing for search, both your own organic search and paid search, and then it’s paid social.”
“Those things both work really, really well. That’s where most of your spend should be when you think about your digital environment.”
“For those companies that are focusing on consumers you’ve got to figure out what the right key performance indicators are for your business and absolutely watch them … Not just on a month to month or week to week basis but on an hour to hour basis.”
The best leading sites out there are changing copy and headlines by the minute based on how people are reacting to it. They have sophisticated operations in place to do multi-variant testing on what works.
Segment 3: (Length :10:00) – Understanding your business model; Knowing metrics during monetization and traffic driving.
Ken’s finer points:
Understand your core business model. How do you make money? How do you keep expenses low? Then look for the measures that have the greatest impact on it.
“If you’re making money by selling advertising then you’ve got to think about traffic to your site and click-through rates. If you’re selling goods to consumers then you’ve got to also think about traffic to your site and then how to convert people.”
“I think where I see entrepreneurs sometimes make mistakes is they’re always chasing the next shiny object versus just really thinking, “Okay, how do I make money in what I do? How do I make sure that all of my key investments and all of my operational measures are helping me make money that way?”
Generate profit, generate revenue. I think that one of my mantras as a CEO is things that get measured get done.
“When I think about the objectives for my own team and how we manage our own investment I’m always thinking about what are the ones that we really keep an eye on because I know just by looking at it that I want to ensure that people focus on it.”
“If you introduce a new product or service to the marketplace and it’s either a new invention or a new innovation that allows people to do something in a new way or do something that they’ve never done before and you become the verb for it that’s awesome success.”
“I think that at L2 I don’t think we have our clients yet saying, ‘Oh, go L2 that’ but they do highlight their rankings in the earnings reports. I think it’s pretty awesome. It does mean that they now care about what we think about how their brand is performing according to our analysis enough to highlight how they’re performing in their own earnings reports.”
Segment 4: (Length :03:00) – Hustler Thought of the Day:
When people use your brand name as a verb, that is remarkable. – Margaret “Meg” Whitman, CEO of HP
GENERAL NOTES:
Ken Allard – CEO of L2;
- Ken Allard is the CEO of L2. L2 is a member-based business intelligence firm that benchmarks the digital performance of brands. Their data and insights brands identify digital strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, hold internal teams accountable, educate teams on industry trends and digital innovation and inform and measure capital allocation decisions.
- Prior to L2, Ken was the Global Managing Director of Strategic Services at Huge, where he led Huge’s business strategy, client services, product management, data science & analytics, content strategy, and technology teams.
- At Huge Ken helped clients transform their brands and grow their businesses, developing market strategies and identifying opportunities for new digital products and services.
- Ken was the founder and CEO of Rational Research Consulting, a boutique management consulting firm that helped companies generate revenue from content, data, and brand assets.
- He has been instrumental in the launch of leading strategic advisory services businesses, including Lux Research (www.luxeresearchinc.com) where he was the COO at Jupiter Media Metrix (now Forrester) where he led the launch of Jupiter’s technology and operations research services and ultimately became the Senior Vice President of Research at Jupiter Media Metric where he oversaw Jupiter’s advisory research business.
- He has held executive leadership positions at numerous companies that offer strategy consulting and continuous research products, including Edgewatch where we was the Chief Executive Strategist
- He has appeared numerous times on CNN and CNBC and in leading publications to discuss trends in business and technology and is a frequent speaker at strategy conferences.
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