MarTech Interview with Dan Lowden, Chief Marketing Officer at White Ops

With most marketers aiming to create stronger online marketing initiatives today, will marketing leaders now start to also realize the importance of paying attention to the various kinds of online marketing frauds prevalent today? Dan Lowden, Chief Marketing Officer at White Ops weighs in:

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Tell us a little about yourself Dan…we’d love to hear about your role as CMO at White OPs, take us through a typical day at work?

I’ve been a storyteller in technology marketing for over 25 years, and am fortunate to have represented some amazing brands that have had a great impact on the world. Being the CMO of White Ops has given me the greatest opportunity to share the company’s story of protecting brands from sophisticated bot attacks and fraud across the customer journey at a scale of 10 trillion interactions per week. It is a big responsibility as our customers rely on us to collectively protect them and ensure their interactions are with real humans, not bots. From a marketing perspective, everything we do and create, ties back to this promise of delivering value to our customers. A typical workday includes reviewing our strategy and the tactical actions we are planning and implementing that enable our customers to be even more successful.

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We’d love to dive into some of your biggest marketing learnings in tech and marketing technologies that you’ve relied on through the years?

The key directive throughout my career has been to ensure that every engagement brings value or creates an experience that helps build a personal relationship with a customer and garners meaningful results for each company’s objectives. This approach has enabled me to remain friends with customers I met 25 years ago. Leveraging marketing technology in the right way is critical for achieving this. Before the pandemic, more than 50% of our marketing spend was for in-person events. Over the past year, we’ve been creative, leveraging technology and our MarTech stack, such as Hubspot, Uberflip, GoTo, Splash, and other platforms, to stay true to that directive. It has worked well for digital campaigns and events and has brought us even closer to our customers during these challenging times.

A few predictions on how you see marketing technologies change the game for marketing and sales teams in future: how do you feel this landscape will evolve?

With the pandemic, we’ve seen a race to digital by companies across the globe. This has enabled many to continue to operate and thrive remotely, but it has also opened the door to more attacks and fraud as cybercriminals follow the money.

My prediction is that every company will realize that marketing fraud is a much bigger problem than they’ve realized and can no longer be accepted as being a cost of doing business. Currently, marketing fraud accounts for an estimated $5 billion per year. Marketing campaigns are being impacted by these types of attacks, accounting for as much as 37% of their traffic and marketing leaders are underestimating the negative impact it is having on their campaign effectiveness, marketing spend, conversion rates, sales follow up, retargeting, and compliance. White Ops’ 2021 Marketing Fraud Benchmarking Survey and Report found that 20% of respondents believe that at least a quarter of the contacts in their marketing and sales database are fake, fraudulent, or bots.

With bot fraud becoming an increasing area of concern, my second prediction is that marketing leaders will leverage new marketing technologies. A Forrester report from January, State of Online Fraud and Bot Management, cites that 83%e of marketers believe that bot attacks are a problem, and nearly two-thirds noted that there is more awareness across the company of the need to manage bot fraud. This awareness extends to the C-level as well; 52% noted that their executive team has asked about bot attacks within the last six months. By implementing technologies marketers will have increased visibility into attacks and be able to stop them, improving conversion rates and their business results.

What are some of the biggest challenges today’s CMOs still struggle with despite access to a range of marketing data and marketing technology to help streamline processes and outcomes?

The White Ops’ Marketing Fraud Benchmarking Survey details how marketers are struggling to ensure they are engaging with real humans. Today, 60% of marketers are said to be “worse than average” at handling marketing fraud and 43% of marketers who see suspicious behavior on their website can’t estimate how much of the traffic to their website is sophisticated bots. Working together to combat marketing fraud will help marketing leaders streamline processes and outcomes and drive better, quality business results.

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Take us through some of your most successful campaigns and learnings that came from it? A few thoughts on the marketing technologies that helped drive these efforts?

Our most successful digital campaign to date has been ‘Keep it Human.’ Most technology or measurement companies focus their marketing on technology feeds and speeds. At White Ops, we have an incredibly sophisticated platform and multi-layered detection methodology that verifies the humanity of more than 10 trillion interactions per week for the largest internet platforms and brands. We don’t lead with that technology story as we focus on the importance of real human engagement as that is what is important to our customers. The ‘Keep it Human’ campaign has become its own movement across verticals including:

• Keep Music Human.
• Keep Advertising Human.
• Keep Marketing Human.
• Keep Applications Human.
• Keep Connected TV Human.
• Keep Social Media Human.
• Keep E-Commerce Human.
• Keep Banking Human.
• Keep Healthcare Human.

I would love to see our mission continue to disrupt the economics of cybercrime.

Lastly, a couple of best practices you feel today’s CMOs in tech need to follow to stay ahead of the game!

My view as a CMO is that we need to do everything we can to ensure that the customer journey – with real humans – is exceptional. The more friction customers face to get what they want to see or buy, the less chance we have of creating a long-term relationship. Humans should not be tested to see if they are bots. Bots should be stopped by the MarTech available with no impact on the customer experience. That leads to happy customers. 

Other best practices: Do things differently and do the opposite of what everyone else does to stand out. Be bold. Fail, learn, fail, learn and then succeed.

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