An Associate VP of Marketing Is All Lit Up About Data

Lucas Johnson lights up when he talks about the impact good data has had on his marketing organization. Johnson is associate vice president of global marketing for Zippo, yet he jokes with his team that he doesn’t really do much—he’s just a catalyst for them to succeed. His overflowing inbox would dispute that, however, as would his achievements over the past three years.

After implementing a new data solution, easily accessible insights have helped Johnson and his team shift their resources to the highest-performing channels, bring more unity to their marketing campaigns, and achieve their best holiday e-commerce campaign ever.

We sat down with Johnson at Domopalooza 2024 to discuss his data journey. 

How did your data journey begin? 

About three years ago, we started changing our marketing mix to be much more performance based. But we didn’t have a great way to holistically understand how campaigns were doing. There were disparate data sources and different people responsible for each one.

And we lacked a comprehensive marketing data warehouse to capture the performance of our efforts. Manual report generation, tedious platform exporting, and long wait times to get the data we needed to make decisions were common and outdated occurrences.  

We needed something that gave us the technical depth for all the data nerds, but also had the ability for non-data nerds to easily visualize data in an actionable way. Pretty quickly during the tool evaluation process, we narrowed it down to Domo, and the rest is history. 

One of the things we wanted to look at was the success of campaigns. And one of the components of a successful campaign is the creative, right? But throwing a table of data at a bunch of creative folks isn’t the greatest way to communicate with them. 

What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them? 

We’re a big brand, but a small team. Yet it’s a global team. And initially, that global team was a challenge. There are lots of stakeholders across lots of departments and across lots of regions—so getting everyone’s understanding and buy-in was important.

Also, we’ve got more than 30 automated data sources with API connections that feed in. We needed that holistic view with timely reporting that measured apples to apples. Some reports would take two days to get, some reports two weeks, and we’re like, “Okay, what time frame are we looking at here? Am I looking at the same thing together?” Domo was the solution to put it all together and look at it holistically.  

We landed on Domo as the perfect fit for our objective of being data-driven in all things we do. We saw how Domo could support our global marketing goals and data adoption across our organization.

What impact have your efforts had? 

I think one of the biggest advantages of Domo overall is that it brings things top of mind, because the data is so simple to see. You can’t address a problem if you don’t know it exists.  

Having Domo has really changed the approach our marketing team takes. The expectation now is that we’re not going to make a decision on something without having data to support it. There was probably some resistance to this at first, but because of our crawl, walk, run approach, we did a good job of not overwhelming teams.

Teams quickly saw the benefit and they were like, “Hey, when are you going to ingest my data? When can we start looking at my stuff?” It’s amazing how when you have the data and you can put it together to focus on something, you can actually impact the results! That’s why we had the most successful holiday for ecommerce we’ve ever had in our history—with less effort.  

I think that one of the biggest impacts to the organization is improved efficiencies. Domo has really improved our returns and our spend of both human capital and financial capital. It has also given us a whole new layer of visibility within marketing and beyond.

Have you had any aha! moments during this process? 

I think the aha! moment was that you need to have good, clean data going in—and understand where that data is coming from to really make it actionable. That’s kind of an overall lesson that I think most of us understood. But when the lesson is slapping you in the face, you’re like, “Ooh yeah, here it is.” 

Quality data inputs were something we really needed to work on, so we did a lot of cleaning that took a while. And we continue to work on that. But from the beginning, we saw that we needed a better roadmap to get us set up.  

We had to ask ourselves, ‘What’s our roadmap for data? What are the systems and processes that we can put in place to ensure the integrity of the data?’

What advice do you have for other marketers? 

Stay curious. And remember that data can only take you so far. What matters is the interpretation of that data and your understanding of what it’s telling you. One thing that has come through in this process is now that we’ve got great data, we still need good people to make decisions and to change the way we do things—if we want to really have an impact.

Also, don’t think that you’re going to immediately import a trillion rows of data from 50 sources, and revolutionize overnight the way in which your company utilizes data. It’s not realistic. Start small, show some wins quickly—even if they’re small—and expand from there. And make sure that your data is ready to be ingested to be utilized.  

Our agency of record is one of the largest ad agencies in the world, and when we walked some of their new people through our Domo dashboards, they kept asking ‘What about this? Can you show us this?’ They’d never seen a client doing what we’re doing with data. That was a proud moment for us.

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