Ori Gold recently sat down with Darren Woolley, Global CEO at TrinityP3, to discuss science and marketing for TrinityP3’s ‘On the Couch’ interview series.
Ori originally trained as an IT engineer and now leads Bench, a global integrated platform for managing performance marketing. Ori’s background in science and his marketing experience allow for an interesting perspective on the industry’s current state.
Math Men vs Mad Men
Ori believes that science is to marketing is what blood is to our body. It’s ubiquitous and acts as the fuel that powers the entire system. He sees the scientific method as being the foundational framework that should be used to manage marketing.
‘Mad Men’ and ‘Math Men’ need to collaborate in order to achieve the greater marketing good.
Forget Media Maths, Focus on Marketing Outcomes
There is an obvious scientific basis to the programmatic trading and buying of media. However, Ori sees science as being an enabler that allows for a better way of doing marketing, not the main event.
It’s about using the scientific method to quickly test hypotheses and either reject or accept them based on objective proof. Marketers don’t necessarily need to know about the underlying structure of algorithms or the complex math that powers their applications. They just need to understand how exactly all of this science empowers them to achieve more.
Ori compares this to marketers swapping their ‘media horses’ for ‘programmatic cars,’ which they now have to learn to drive. You don’t have to understand what goes on underneath the hood to be a great driver.
Algorithms Are Commodities, Strategy Is Not
Ori asserts that artificial intelligence is now cheaply available ‘on tap’ in the cloud. As a result, algorithms have become commodities that every marketer has ready access to. Your job as a marketer is to know what questions to ask, which is the key to a sustained competitive advantage.
Why Science Doesn’t Spell the Death of Creativity
Ori stresses that science and creativity can co-exist quite happily together. More than that, science – like philosophy – can be applied to different areas of life. Employing the scientific method in marketing allows you to scale your creative efforts, not stifle them.
The ‘renaissance’ periods of various European capitals act as proof of this assertion. When great scientific discoveries were being made in cultural centres such as Berlin, Paris and London, the arts flourished alongside the sciences. Science and creativity are now two sides of the same marketing token.
One (Real-Time) Breakthrough to Rule Them All
Many advancements in diverse scientific fields led to the current status quo in marketing, rather than any one single breakthrough. This is how Ori sees the evolution of marketing and he cites the advent of the internet and mobile phones as being two such examples.
However, if pressed to find a single turning point, he suggests that real-time bidding was the biggest contributor to shaping the modern marketing landscape.
The ability to get access to data in real-time, analyze it and make media bidding decisions on-the-fly incited the science-driven revolution that all marketers are current benefactors of.
Watch Video Interview
Watch the original video interview to see Ori share his views on camera.
