Why does marketing need to become more like engineering? With Sorin Patilinet from Mars, aka The Marketing Engineer.

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, your host Sam Knowles is joined by Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director of Marketing Effectiveness at Mars. Sorin is also known as the Marketing Engineer.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 4 April 2024.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Sorin took an unusual route into marketing and has an unusually scientific approach to making every last marketing dollar count. Trained as a telecommunications engineer at university in his native Romania, Sorin applies the rigour of engineering to the not always substantial world of marketing science. In the dozen-plus years he’s worked at Mars, he’s routinely and rigorously put into practice the theories of the How Brands Grow marketing professor, Byron Sharp.

Liverpool and Anderlecht fan, Sorin, is based in Belgium, Brussels. He’s currently writing a book from the perspective of the marketing practitioner, showing how structured, systems thinking can make the “colouring-in department” label sometimes levelled at marketing a thing of the past.

Marketing has changed out of all recognition compared to where it was when Sorin started his career, from 80% of ad spend on linear TV to 27 creatives on 35 platforms with no reliable or consistent, cross-platform means to control reach or frequency. Amid all this complexity, his evidence-based approach to marketing measurement is a breath of fresh air.

So, too, is the ad testing methodology (Agile Creative Expertise or ACE) that Mars has developed under Sorin’s stewardship, based not on claimed intention but instead rooted in actual consumer behaviour. Eye-tracking, attention, and emotion have been found time and again to trump declarative survey findings. This really works at scale, too, with insights derived from more than 800 creative executions a year.

Sorin’s an enthusiastic sceptic when it comes to AI, but he’s keen to point out that the November 2022 appearance of ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg. Mars has been using AI – in the form of machine learning and deep analytics – for years.

An enthusiastic modern-day Stoic and fan on Everyday Stoic, Ryan Holiday, in ten years from now Sorin hopes to be applying the rigour he’s developed for marketing effectiveness to communicating the importance of grand projects such as the European Union or the United Nations to disaffected citizens.

Sorin is a board member of the Attention Council and a guest lecturer at Wharton Business School.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Sorin’s blog: “Engineering Marketing” – https://www.sorinp.com

Sorin’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/patilinet/

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