Q&A With Peter Gent, Director of Data Partnerships, The mars agency
The Mars Agency connects world class brands with shoppers everywhere commerce happens. The agency strives to drive growth for the ad tech industry. As part of this initiative, they have launched the Marilyn® martech platform, the world’s preeminent commerce marketing technology platform. Marilyn is designed to ingest, connect, normalize and analyze organizational and 3rd party data—to be your team’s single source of truth.
In a first-of-its kind integration, Kargo + The Mars agency have implemented a direct API feed that enables Kargo’s reporting to be shared directly into Marilyn for full access to campaign data. This straightforward approach enables real time data check-ins and quick and accurate reporting at any point throughout the life of a campaign. With the wait time for campaign completion and wrap reports obsolete, this partnership improves the speed of campaign planning and strengthens analytics.
By working together with the Kargo team, The Mars Agency has gained valuable insights and powerful optimization capabilities and as a result, has increased their ability to perform for clients. It’s a true win-win.
In this Q&A, we talk to Peter Gent, Director of Data Partnerships at The Mars Agency about the process and the unique benefits.
Tell us what the setup looked like before you used Kargo’s API. What were the challenges you were facing?
Before utilizing Kargo’s API, we were inundated with spreadsheets which were shared back and forth until finally, they were uploaded onto our platform. Next, we would spend a great deal of time cleaning and formatting data to fit with all the other vendor data. The process, before Kargo’s API, was labor intensive and extremely time-consuming. Piles of spreadsheets are still a reality with partners that don’t have API’s.
How did you come to the idea of using the API to connect directly to Kargo?
Marilyn is the merger of human and machine intelligence and reflects a balance that showcases the strengths of each. The idea was born from a desire to let machines do what they do best, so that our team can do what they do best. Since the world of retail media is fragmented, one of the core functions of Marilyn is to help our clients understand performance across brands, tactics, and retailers. We want our clients to be able to plan their entire campaigns using our tool and capitalize on its ability to objectively measure the results at any point during the campaign. Being able to pull the data via an API ensures we get consistent data that is easily integrated with all the other program tactics on the plan. It’s rare for us to use a single platform or partner on a given campaign, and the ability to quickly measure the results collectively is extremely important for campaign optimization and success. We automate what can be automated, so that the people working in our platform can focus on the qualitative elements of the campaign.
What was the integration process like? How hard was it and how did Kargo help?
Honestly, super simple and straightforward. I don’t think we had any questions or needed any help because the documentation covered everything. It was a breeze!
What’s the situation like today with the API? What’s improved for The Mars Agency and your clients?
With the implementation of API, we’re now able to spend less time collecting data and more time uncovering insights and finding ways to optimize campaigns. Marilyn provides support for one of the most challenging aspects of campaign management by collecting and cleaning the data and delivering accurate and efficient insight on performance. The technology is able to measure ROI and model attribution to the total business impact of our entire omnichannel approach, including display, social, etc. We can track performance against other retailer specific channels in real time and provide our commerce mix modeling in a shorter timeframe. It’s been great giving back valuable time to our clients and team members.
What do you like about working with Kargo? Do you have any future plans to expand your integration?
We appreciate the partnership that we have with Kargo, and we are better equipped to drive consumers to action! We enjoy getting to work with technology forward partners to provide the high level of service and results that our clients expect and deserve! We greatly appreciate the opportunity to work collaboratively with partners who share our goals, values and culture. There’s many things we’d like to do with Marilyn, but for now we’re focusing our energy where our clients need it most: planning, performance, and measurement.
