Partner spotlight: Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital

For the third episode of our partner spotlight series, our Partner Manager Sam Spira met with Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital.

During their conversation, Dan shared his opinion and experience on working with enterprise clients, the challenge of establishing ownership of analytics, why Profit On Ad Spend (POAS) is a metric that makes sense, and his personal view of ethics in marketing for one of the hottest takes of the series so far.

Watch the full video below, or continue reading for an overview of some of the standout quotes discussed inthe chat.

Working with enterprise clients and the question of analytics ownership

Opening up the conversation, Sam and Dan discuss the specificity of Duga Digital and how the agency got to work with large enterprise brands:

Typically we are up in the enterprise scale because we, as a business, have experience with that (...) You end up in a situation where you are more comfortable with bigger-type clients and understand their problems and challenges. And actually, they often need sort of scalability brain behind them, rather than a point-to-point fix.

- Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital

That naturally brings the two to discuss the challenge of establishing where the ownership of analytics lies at companies, particularly within larger organizations:

That is a subject I always struggle with, and I know you guys do as well, because it’s like: ‘who do you talk to in the organization? Who actually owns that? ’

- Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital

Based on his experience, Dan explains that the answer is rarely clear-cut, and the ownership can fall onto:

• The marketing digital team, who wants to understand where their money is going.
• The IT team, which is responsible for the technical side of things and delivering the website.
• The e-commerce team, who wants to understand the performance and how to improve conversion rate.
• The financial team, which is seeing money spent and wants to increase ROI.

In the full conversation, Dan follows this by explaining how the team at Duga Digital manages this dynamic, identifies the key stakeholders, and clarifies where ownership lies.

Server-side tracking and profit over revenue

Sam and Dan then move on to the topic of server-side tagging, covering the technical side and the benefits for businesses. One of them is the ability to focus on Profit On Ad Spend (POAS), instead of being limited to Return on Ad Spend (ROAS):

The idea here is to get a much more targeted, real value of customers. Because previously, with ROAS, you could be spending a lot of money to acquire a customer that isn’t actually that profitable for you. Equally, this gives you the ability to look at the product level (what kind of profit are we making on specific products) and to target that way as well.

‍- Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital 

For Dan, this shift illustrates the goal of marketing data speaking the same language as the rest of the business by trying to “get the advertising closer to the business outcomes,” rather than reporting on clicks and conversions in a vacuum.

Hot take: Can marketing be ethical?

Asked about whether new privacy regulations are influencing better behaviors at organizations, Dan doesn't hold back:

I think any idea of ethics in marketing is absolute B.S... If we had any ethics at all, we wouldn't have tracking. That just wouldn't be a thing.

- Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital 

But the Managing Director draws a line between what he sees as genuine ethical concerns (such as not manipulating people) and what he considers performative branding, more concerned about looking virtuous than disclosing what is really happening:

If we want to talk about ethics, there’s absolutely a place for it, but I don’t think we should all necessarily subscribe to the idea of ‘I am holier than thou’.

- Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital 

Dan’s argument is in favor of a straightforward, transparent approach, emphasizing that server-side tracking isn’t a way to get around consent, and that collecting more data is a byproduct of that approach, not its main goal.

The one thing to fix first

To wrap up the conversation, Sam asked Dan quick-fire questions ranging from the top misconceptions about server-side tagging, all the way to the top metrics to track to measure success, and the top things brands should prioritize right now:

The first would be to fix your consent, because it all flows down from there.

- Dan Truman, Managing Director at Duga Digital 

Watch the full video to discover all the insights from Dan, follow him and his team’s work on the Duga Digital website, and book a time with our team to learn more about server-side tagging.