10 Minute Martech

Ana Mourão: Don't Leave Your Marketing Tech to IT

Episode Summary

Marketers who leave technology decisions to IT, a vendor, or a consultant end up running systems someone else designed. The fix is walking into those conversations first.

Episode Notes

Marketers who leave technology decisions to IT, a vendor, or a consultant end up running systems someone else designed. Ana Mourão, brand-side marketer and author of Strategic Marketing Skills, argues marketers should lean in and start those conversations themselves. 

She tells Sara Faatz how a technology project becomes the opening to sit down with legal, IT, and e-commerce and say "let's address it together." That same instinct shapes how she runs experiments. She gets the CFO, CTO, and legal to agree upfront on what a test can and can't measure, then reports results in terms finance can put a value on. She also explains why knowing what not to automate is becoming a core skill. 

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3 Takeaways:

• Marketers who start technology projects themselves become the architects of their marketing systems. The ones who hand those projects to IT, a vendor, or a consultant stay operators of campaigns and platforms.
• Before a test runs, agree with finance, IT, and legal on what it can prove and what it can't. Skipping that step is how teams end up treating correlation as causation, or treating walled-garden incrementality as the whole picture.
• Knowing what not to automate is becoming a core skill. Hand AI the boring, repetitive tasks and protect the parts of marketing people actually enjoy.

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(00:41) Skills Matter More Than Tools
(01:50) How Marketers Need to Evolve
(02:56) Experimentation That Proves Causality
(05:10) The Most Overlooked E in Marketing
(06:12) Reporting Metrics Stakeholders Actually Understand
(06:58) What You Should Never Automate
(08:26) The Biggest Aha Moment While Writing the Book
(09:24) Who Ana Follows Right Now

About the Guest:
Ana Mourão is a brand-side marketer and the author of Strategic Marketing Skills. After earning her degree in economics in Brazil, she moved to the US and spent 15 years at Fortune 500 companies, including 3M, Charles Schwab, and Marriott. There she worked on digital transformation projects that changed how those marketing organizations operated and used technology. That hands-on experience became The Experimental Marketer Framework, the foundation of her book. Today she helps senior marketers build the customer data strategy that makes AI, personalization, and cross-channel marketing deliver results, and helps them win back a voice in the technology decisions that shape their work. She volunteers on the Association of National Advertisers' Martech & AI Committee, contributes to MarTech's publication and conferences, and writes two marketing technology newsletters, one in English and one in Brazilian Portuguese.

Connect:
Ana Mourão: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamourao 
Sara Faatz: www.linkedin.com/in/sara-faatz-b67213
Progress: www.progress.com 
Ana’s Book: https://strategicmarketingskillsbook.com/