Epsilon CMO Jeff Smith on Marketers’ Biggest Tech Stack Challenges

In December, the marketing technology firm Epsilon named Jeff Smith its new chief marketing officer. Smith succeeds the company’s former marketing leader, Jon Beebe, who stepped down last year to found the consultancy, QuirkWerk.

For more than 25 years before joining Epsilon, Smith worked in marketing or data-adjacent roles at companies including Oracle, Nielsen, LiveRamp and several high-growth startups.

“I can say that I am old enough to have seen what marketing and advertising looked like before the whole digital revolution took hold, and really been a part of that journey since it did,” Smith told ADWEEK. “The common thread? It’s always been focused on servicing the CMO and helping marketers better wield data.”

In 2019, Publicis Groupe acquired Epsilon and now relies on it to power its PeopleCloud audience management platform—media planning and activation software that guides clients’ investment strategies. For its holding company, Epsilon plays a crucial role as an in-house data asset and opens new revenue streams with its product offering, since technology assets like PeopleCloud often sway media agency review outcomes. Now, holding companies are competing for the most comprehensive dataset and technology platform interface. By the end of 2022, Epsilon was rolling out a PeopleCloud rebrand that simplified its product by comparing data to building blocks.

Before accepting the CMO role last year, Smith was a senior advisor at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and an independent consultant to brand marketers. In both roles, he noted chief marketers’ pressing challenges. After exploring Epsilon’s offering, he realized its product suite provided solutions to common problems his former clients flagged.

“There’s some low-hanging fruit with Epsilon, in the sense that the company has invested very little in marketing historically,” Smith said.

He spoke further with ADWEEK about what drew him to the CMO role and marketers’ biggest tech stack challenges.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ADWEEK: What about Epsilon, specifically, was attractive to you?

Smith: When Epsilon first reached out to me, I had not thought a lot about the company since the Publicis acquisition. When I started doing a little bit of due diligence, I saw all the things my clients were telling me that they needed. I saw a CDP; I saw a cleanroom; I saw a DSP; I saw a retail media network; I saw an SSP … Everything that marketers are asking about right now, this company has.

You’ve spent a lot of time in your career advising CMOs, and now you are a CMO. Talk me through some of the advice that you have given that you’re going to employ for Epsilon.

As a consultant, there were broad-based challenges that I would hear from marketers very consistently when it came to marketing technology, advertising technology, identity resolution and their tech stack in total.

One, the tech stack is not doing what it needs to do—cost-effectively delivering sales in the near term while at the same time building the brand relationships that ensure sales continue in the long term. If you spend enough money on either branding or performance, you can drive the needle up. But the point is, you’ve got to do that cost-effectively and in a way that makes sense.

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Why do marketers think their tech stacks aren’t doing what they need to do? What is missing?

The ability to pull the different pieces together.

Marketers have to engage through channels in order to engage at scale, and channels materially limit their ability to engage in those natural types of conversations that help them build a strong relationship with the consumer. They have the ability to build consumer profiles. They have the ability to engage with consumers in different channels. They have all the pieces, but they can’t pull that all together so that the brand is speaking to the consumer with a single, harmonized voice across all those channels.

The second challenge is that the tech stack is overly complex. Marketers want to invest their energy working with a limited number of vendors who don’t just bring point solutions to the table but bring everything they need to accomplish that goal of building a brand while driving sales.

That may lead you to think, ‘Oh, okay, you’re saying everyone should be using a marketing cloud or wants to use a marketing cloud.’ But the issue there, is that it usually precludes marketers from being able to do something else they want to do, which is work with cutting-edge new technologies that greatly improve their ability to hit objectives.

So, they’re caught in this ‘in-between’ space, thinking, ‘I’ve got to go all-in with the marketing cloud; I’ve got to stitch together a bunch of point solutions—ID resolution; DSP; CDP; cleanroom, etc…—to make this work.

Three is, this is all changing ahead of cookie deprecation. Marketers have already got tech stacks they don’t think are working ideally. The tech stacks are about to start working a lot less ideally.