CMO Perspectives: Matt Larson Of Collective Measures On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget and Why
In an age where marketing landscapes are rapidly evolving and consumer behaviors are constantly shifting, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a pivotal role in steering their organizations’ marketing strategies toward success. With a plethora of channels, platforms, and techniques at their disposal, the decision on where to allocate the marketing budget is more critical than ever. We’re seeking to explore questions like: What factors influence their decisions? How do they balance between digital and traditional marketing channels? What role does data play in their decision-making process? And importantly, why choose to invest in certain areas over others? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Larson.
Matt oversees the Media and Connection Strategy departments at Collective Measures, a mid-size independent full-funnel media and analytics agency in Minneapolis.
Matt has a strong track record of building high-functioning teams across media and marketing strategy and has done so across multiple agencies in the Minneapolis area. He has an expansive wealth of knowledge across digital and traditional media, coupled with technology consulting experience. Matt is a strong collaborator and an expert at solving client business challenges. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most successful brands including White Claw, Alaska Airlines, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I was seemingly the rare case of knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up. As I entered college I knew that I wanted to work in advertising, specifically at an agency. It simply seemed to fit culturally with who I was and I was fascinated by the field as a whole. The ability to stretch across multiple industries and disciplines and the blending of creativity and business was something that resonated with me.
What I didn’t know was that I would end up in media. At the time, I was teaching myself graphic and web design while pursuing a marketing degree, and I enjoyed creative strategy and visual arts. I thought I would end up in account planning and work at a creative agency. However, as it turned out, I was better at math and technology than I was at art and design.
When I found media, things clicked into place for me. It allowed me to combine my skills and passions and I never looked back. That said, I do still like to apply creative thinking to the work I do, which has allowed me to jump back and forth between digital and performance media to brand building and communication strategy.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It truly is amazing how when you’re young, you think you know everything when you truly know so little, but you have some wild sense of confidence that only being in your 20s can produce. I am sure in those early days there was no shortage of mistakes. I will never forget the biggest mistake I made back then, however, I am not sure how funny it was to me at the time.
It was the early days of programmatic media and I was leading our trade desk. The platform was in its infancy and didn’t have the slick user interface and controls that they do now. For context, think about the graphics quality of Oregon Trail but instead of dying on the trail due to a snake bite, a wrong keystroke may lead to spending millions of dollars in an afternoon. We had a campaign that kept getting pushed and pushed for many many months, and at the time, the platform — if you can believe it — didn’t have a campaign pause/enable button, and if the calendar date passed the start date of the campaign, the campaign locked and couldn’t be edited. So rather than simply having things in pause mode and changing dates when you were ready to launch, you had to continually push the date back. Well of course, I picked an arbitrary date that I knew I wouldn’t forget and thought there was no way the campaign would not launch before then, and when ready, I would simply push the date back and go. On December 25th, 2013, I accidentally spent $17,000. It was a true Christmas miracle that it wasn’t much worse as it certainly could have been, but thankfully, not all creative assets were uploaded and I remembered it that day and logged in. This seemed like a fortune at the time and I was sure I would get fired. While I caught it pretty quickly, I avoided talking to my boss until I knew the invoice was going to come in. For weeks, I was stressed and finally came clean with my boss, to which she said something to the effect of “You have made us way more than $17,000 this year.”
The biggest lesson I learned that day is to own your mistakes, and own them quickly. Sitting on them doesn’t make the mistake go away and the faster you face them head on, the quicker you will be able to move forward. Often, something you think is a huge issue may not be as big as you think. This is true in business and media, but also a good lesson for life in general as our anxieties about the mistakes we make are often worse than the consequences of the mistakes themselves.
