The inside scoop: How FIFCO built an award-winning in-house agency with data with José Murillo

Edward:

Hi, I'm Edward from Supermetrics, and this is the Marketing Intelligence Show, the podcast that empowers marketing leaders to work better with their data and make sure every marketing dollar counts. Now let's get into today's episode.

Fanny Heimonen:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Intelligence Show by Supermetrics. I'm Fanny Demand Gen, team lead at Supermetrics and your host for the episode. Today we're joined by Jose Murillo, regional Head of Connections Marketing at FIFCO. Jose has quite a unique journey transitioning from an agency owner to working for one of his clients and then building up an award-winning in-house advertising agency within the organization. Jose will tell us how he set up FIFCO's Data Foundation and how a clear strategy and a more data-driven culture has helped drive marketing success. So let's dive in.

Hi Jose, and welcome to the Marketing Intelligence Show. Would you like to quickly introduce yourself and FIFCO to our audience?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Sure. Thanks, Annie. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and I have been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life. As you mentioned, I did transition from my boutique agency to my current role at FIFCO, where I am the head of Connections marketing, which essentially means that I oversee the entire connections ecosystem or communication ecosystem, including media, both traditional and digital media, digital transformation, data strategy for marketing experiences and sponsorships, influencers, agency partnerships, and of course our MarTech ecosystem. Also, we also managing the team, our in-house project joystick.

Fanny Heimonen:

So you made the shift from an agency owner to joining one of your clients FIFCO. So what was this transition like for you and how did it shape your perspective on marketing?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Great question. It was quite a journey. First of all, becoming an agency owner required me to learn pretty much every aspect of what we did thoroughly. I first started out as a community manager, but then to call the roles within the company, like Create media Planner, become an account executive, I had to do pretty much everything we did, and eventually I hired a team, set up a department, and then the department later grew on and was handed to the director allowing me to step finally in the role of CEO for the company. Then the acquisition to this position and began somewhat a similar process. I started with a small team doing things by myself, but later on I scaled it up to the point where it made sense to have a manager for each position, right? And what it gives you, it's just a lot of empathy because when you have done the work yourself, you truly understand how various factors can affect delivery.

So every time I set a strategy or a plan that has that in IT core, and in the other hand, being inside the company gives you a big 15 perspective, but we're all in focus because yeah, I mean, we can anticipate that perspective is different from being inside for sure. But when you run a business, you also provide a service. So you have the service, you have the business itself, you have to take care of client relationships, you have to take care of the team. There are a lot of things happening, but when you are in the in-house project, the only business you have to take care of the project itself, and it's quite a shift because those that were clients at first become teammates, and that makes a huge difference. And fco, it's for me, quite a unique company to be in because we are a company that has over a hundred years of existence, and we started out as a ice company, but we have evolved and transformed the business several times along the years. We are now currently in nine countries, and we have six major business categories, including retail, hospitality, beer, foods, RTDs, non-alcoholic beverages. So we're quite a unique company for sure. Yeah,

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah, I can definitely imagine that. The change has been quite big going from an agency owner to working inside of the company, and I loved your point about having empathy. I think that's a super valuable skill to have, and having that understanding towards your team is really crucial. So what were some of the opportunities and challenges that you faced in moving from the agency environment to an in-house role?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Challenges where to start, right? I have to say for sure that the biggest challenge I face here is that when you're a business owner, you make a decision and the headcount, the budget, the focus all goes after that decision, right? It's pretty straightforward, but when you're in a corporation, you make a decision and then you have to convince every stakeholder that that's the right decision. And only then might the budget, the focus, the headcount be considered. That has been for sure the biggest challenge from being an agency owner and having my own business to being a part of a bigger team and a bigger corporation. But in terms of opportunity, I have to say that scale has been the biggest opportunity here. It took me five years to scale my team from zero to 30 people, but it took me just two years here to double that. So scale for sure is the biggest opportunity that we have here.

Fanny Heimonen:

Amazing. And then once you joined fico, how did the idea of building an in-house agency function come about?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Great question. I would love to say that it was quite a hostile. It was really hard, but actually it wasn't. My former boss did all the heavy lifting before I arrived, to be honest. The thing is that FIFCO has always been in a constant process of transformation, and that's the thing, I admire the most of this. There came a time when they decided that we needed to step up our game because we didn't use to have a CMO. Marketing was a function that reported to trade marketing was part of the commercial team. Marketing was not a strategic function within the company, but FIFCO could decided to make that shift. They hired my former boss and he had a clear vision of what the future of marketing looked like, right from that core vision. The in-house project was born once I landed here. The question was not whether we needed an in-house agency or not, but the question was how we were going to do it. With over 20 brands in across nine countries with really, really complex agency ecosystem, we work with more agencies that I can count. Setting the right timing and the right direction was crucial. We had actually no time to spare. They were pressing us pretty much with this project. So the real challenge was establishing the right services for the right brands with the right people, looking for quick wins, and assuring that the model that we set up was seamless to scale up. That was really the name of the game, the name of the challenge.

Fanny Heimonen:

So the idea was kind of already there, but then you had to figure out how to make that happen.

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Yeah.

Fanny Heimonen:

All right. So what steps did you take to establish the agency and how has it evolved over the past few years?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Well, it was a long process. Well, or was it maybe not, maybe not. It took me four months from the first day in the company to the day I presented the first draft to the executive team four months. And the first challenges that we face is that we need to decide what kind of agency we wanted to build, and overall ensuring that the project was financially feasible. So once we had those things sorted out, we received our first approval from the security committee and began working right away on several fronts at once. And this was challenging because we have to do branding, we have to do tons scouting, office location, set up templates, frameworks, vision, culture, and more, right? It's crazy. Actually, a quick story. We are named Joystick because we firmly believe that advertising should be funny and should be enjoyable. Again, not only for the consumers that are watching our ads daily, but also for the people that are working every day on advertising to joystick six to handle the joystick, the power, the control to the creative team. Again, because we feel like in the way advertising lost its way, right, lost bad, because we are all looking for more data and more detail driven things and more media and more planning and more strategy, and that's great, but I think we forgot in the way that we wanted all those things to have better ideas and better creativity

Not to have them at side. So that's why we call Joystick. Just a quick

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah, I love that name.

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Thank you. Yeah, we do too. So when the first tier of the team was ready, we took chances and started betting on two fronts. The first, we wanted to set up a best in class reporting team, and we wanted to bet on bold creativity for sure. So from the beginning also, I had a secret weapon, so to speak, a small experiment. I built a small data team inside joystick. I hired a couple junior data scientists that were fresh out of their first job, and we did not have many tools nor actually the proper knowledge, but we did have a clear vision of what we wanted to build. So we knew we needed to start from foundations, and I know it's not sexy, it's boring actually, but you had to work nonstop for about a year or so to just lay the foundations, right? The CDP implementation, the data lake, the data cleansing, the automation processes. It's tough because time goes by and the outside team, it's expecting to see magic from this squad, but nothing seems to happen right away at least. And we decided that this was the right thing to do, and now we think it's definitely worth it for sure. We now have an award winning agency that scaled to three countries and a 60 plus person team. So yeah, it's been quite a journey.

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah, that's really impressive. And I definitely agree that it's a lot better to kind of lay the foundation at first and do that well, rather than first doing something and then going back afterwards and try to fix it. So it's a good start too. Start from the foundation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but now the Marketing Data Foundation that you actually started from joystick has become a strategy for the whole organization, right?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Fanny Heimonen:

Can you talk a bit more about that journey and how the strategy has evolved over time?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Sure. Tough question. It's a great one also. It has certainly become an internal best practice. That's that for sure. We're proud to say that we work closely with other data teams in the company and our practices, our case studies, and overall our way of working are held in a high regard within the organization. Were really proud of that. But it wasn't always like that. At first. We were somewhat rogue, if you want. We were a team aiming to challenge the status quo, do things differently and dream about possibilities that we weren't actually sure that were feasible. Initially, the technical team was part of my structure, but they had a daughter accountability to the center of excellence, takoi of advanced analytics in the company. We worked tirelessly for a year or so with no actual results. In theory. It was a beautiful sketch. I had the vision and the Coy had the technical knowledge.

So for me, at least in paper, was the perfect setup. However, we quickly understood that the challenges we faced were quite different from theirs and their approach to strategic problems made sense for them, but not for our needs. So after a year, we parted ways and I called back my team, I sat them down, and I drew my entire vision on a whiteboard. It was a four step plan for turning the situation around. I asked them to trust me as they were all junior data scientists, about to embark on a completely new way of work with no technical supervision whatsoever. So since I'm not a data scientist, I'm not a technical person myself, to be honest, I wasn't sure it would work because I didn't even knew if they would commit or if I was being crazy and they would quit. Maybe it was a possibility, but a year later, we were running smoothly.

We had our first predictive and prescriptive model through up and running, and that's when we knew we were onto something good. So yeah, we've been transforming the entire organization to the connection strategy, which unifies all data and applying connections, strategy or a connection to a corporate vision. It's something that it's quite new actually in many companies. I would like to explain or go deeper in what I mean by connections strategy or connections marketing. So connections marketing, it's a strategic approach to media planning. It's not something we invented by any means. It has been around for years actually, and for me, it's like a natural response, so to speak, and an organic evolution of how we approach media planning. For years, brand planning has tried to answer two main questions, what we should do and why we should do it, trying to all we think in the consumer. But to me, the planning, it's mainly focused on answering where and when, where is the right placement, and when is the right timing to show an ad. However, with the rise of digitalization, we needed to address two new questions, how and who, because now with digital, we can set up audiences. So connections planning is a discipline that integrates brand marketing, media planning into a more holistic approach. We take this concept and apply it across the entire communication ecosystem, striving to integrate all comms disciplines into an articulated vision, powered by data and enhanced ity.

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Earlier you mentioned that maybe there was some doubt within the organization or some people who didn't believe that you really needed a marketing data theme. So how did you manage to change everyone's minds and create a whole department around marketing data?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Well, remember I talk about my secret weapon, and we first established it wasn't exactly a secret within the organization because it's not something that I kept from them, but I didn't brag about it either. It was like they knew we were setting up a small team. They weren't thrilled, they weren't against it, but it was some sort of an experiment. I knew the company had a history of doing things a certain way with data, and it had worked for them so far, no doubts about it. However, I wanted to pivot. So this team became my laboratory, right? It worked great, but if it worked great, but if it didn't work, there will be no harm because we were testing the concept in a small scale first, and that was crucial. When the organization realized that we were doing what we were doing with actually no resources and small team juggling multiple projects, the excitement came along and also came along some additional resources and endorsement and changing their minds was difficult, if not impossible, because how can you prove someone wrong when they're actually not wrong? It's a tough thing to manage, but I simply asked for the chance to test things out, and fortunately they trusted the process. The results have proven what I could never articulate. So it's been the results that they speak for itself.

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah, that's amazing to hear. And talking a little bit about supermetrics, so what role do tools like Supermetrics play in your marketing data strategy? Can you maybe share some examples of how you've used Supermetrics to improve your performance or your operations?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Yeah, I like this question. Fun question to answer. We have been using Supermetrics for a long time now. I first worked with Supermetrics at my boutique agency five, seven years ago when we use it for data visualization in data studio but's now Looker, and we were developing our data lake in FIFCO a couple of years ago. We began searching for ETL tools to help us ingest large volumes of data from multiple sources, such as ad accounts, from social media accounts, and after comparing several alternatives, super metric was the pure winner for us. It was a no brainer for sure. Since then, super metric has become a key tool actually in our process. We use it for that ingestion, for automating reports, even feeding our predictive models like our KPI predictive calculator. One of our standout projects has saved us after approximately, I would say, I dunno, 45 hours weekly of weekly work just in debt extraction, and that's about 160 hours per month.

For me, it's crazy. Every time I think about it, it's like having an FDA full-time equivalent dedicated to debt extraction without the actual need to pay you, I don't know, 70,000 in compensation and taxes. So this is undoubtedly highlight for me because our reporting department that if you remember it was at the core of our strategy, it's not built just for reporting sake. It's not just handing reports, and that's it with the reporting to optimize, but how can we optimize if my team is overwhelmed with the structured process and investing most of their time doing the heavy lifting, and they have actually little time to sit down and do the analysis. So this not only leads to better insights, but also quicker insights and allowing a team that has also space to grow within its role, because now they're not just doing an operative process, just taking the data out and no, they're doing the analysis, the analysis that give us insights to what to change in the audience, what to change in the content, what to change in the media objectives, in the media strategy. So yeah, it has been for sure a highlight for me for the team and for the results that we are having now.

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah, definitely. I love hearing that, and especially the part about reporting for optimization and not just for the reporting for the sake of it, which would be totally unuseful spending of your time. You mentioned that one thing you do with Supermetrics is feed data into a predictive KPI calculator model. This sounds like a really innovative use case. So can you talk a bit more about this, explain what it really is and what kind of benefits has it had on your marketing strategy?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Well, establishing KPIs is a tricky process. You can either set them up by calculating, calculating your cost per result. It might be reach, might be impressions, it might be engagement or traffic or leads, whatever. And doing some simple math with the available budget. That's a way you can do it. Or you can also go and analyze historical performance data and use that as a benchmark for your next campaign for sure. You might even consider doing both, right? However, it's not like an exact science. The model we built uses at least 18 months of historical data ingested directly from each brand's account, and we employ around 70 predictive models that work together to simulate how meta or Facebook algorithm operates using past performance to shape future results. So the model is actually far from complete. We just finished our first test drive, so to speak, with four brands. Now we have some calibration we have to do before scaling the model to the rest of the brands, and later on we will be working on incorporating additional channels and making better adjustments. So it's smarter every time, right? But it's been really useful because now you have a data-driven method to set up the KPIs and not these artisanal methods to go through.

Fanny Heimonen:

Yes, definitely. That sounds really, really interesting and a super exciting model that you're building there. Cool. Then finally, do you have any advice for marketers or business leaders looking to navigate a similar journey, what you've been through or who are looking to build a data treatment team?

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Sure. I would say be honest with yourself and with the organization, because funny, we work an industry built on nonsense, a whole bunch of fancy words that at the end of the day have no real meaning and most importantly have no actual impact. So there's no need to play the know it all. There's no success in getting a PowerPoint presentation approved. When you know that half of its content, it's never going to be executed. It takes the same amount of effort to do the actual work. Learn, be humble. Allow yourself to feel lost sometimes than it does to take your way to the top. So my advice will be just be honest with yourself and the organization. It's way better always, to be honest.

Fanny Heimonen:

Yeah. I love it. Alright. Thank you so much, Jose, for coming on the show. It was really great to hear your story and what amazing results you've achieved at fico. I definitely became a fan of yours and I'm looking forward to hearing what you'll do next. So thanks for your time, man. It was really exciting to talk to you.

Jose Pablo Murillo:

Thank you, Fanny. It's been a pleasure for me also, and you're a great interviewer. It was really fun to be here. Thanks for having me.

Edward:

Thank you for listening to the Marketing Intelligence Show brought to you by Supermetrics. If you're enjoying the podcast, then we'd love for you to tap that subscribe button, leave a review, and share with your colleagues and peers. We'll see you in the next episode.