Steph Osiol
Director of marketing analysis
Sage
Data has become an essential part of any marketer’s toolkit. And the marketer who can take vast swathes of complicated data and turn it into actionable insights is worth their weight in gold. These are the very qualities that led Steph Osiol to be nominated as a Future Marketing Leader. Her nominator highlighted her ability to turn insight into “plain English” and secure “finance’s support” for marketing investment.
Osiol has been director of marketing analysis at software company Sage for a little over a year following a decade-long stint at Google, which took in roles within its brand, retail and analysis teams. Her nominator describes her as an “exceptional leader” who has driven the standard of marketing effectiveness at the organisation – a task still underway as the analytics team continues its “transformation”.
Despite the rise of digital, Osiol believes the most “useful” tools at a marketer’s disposal have not changed at all, in particular, the importance of “good measurement” to test for lift and true return on investment.
“Data and creative professionals are sometimes suspicious of each other, but we need both skill sets to succeed.”
“The biggest opportunity for marketers is to embrace personalised, data-driven customer experiences across multiple channels,” she says. “The innovation we can drive today with data and AI is exciting and will be enabled by good first-party data strategies.”
Osiol worries, however, that some marketers think good data “grows on trees” and don’t know how they can create quality data points to understand customer experience and outcomes.
It’s a challenge which is only going to become harder, she says, with “evolving privacy regulations” and the decline of third-party data. “Balancing privacy compliance with personalised marketing requires investing in new technologies, building customer trust, and finding innovative ways to collect and use data responsibly,” she adds.
She sees marketing becoming increasingly “automated” in the near future, with marketing shifting from traditional campaign planning to something more “agile” that encompasses “real-time data analysis, creative strategy, and ethical data practices”. And while this blending of both technical and creative skills may seem intimidating – it doesn’t need to be, she says.
“Data and creative professionals are sometimes suspicious of each other, but we need both skill sets to succeed,” she adds.
