Federico Bianco knows the difference between good data and all the data

As part of our Salary and Career Survey, we interviewed people about their experiences in marketing. Today we’re talking to Federico Bianco. He’s a strategist-team lead at InfoTrust who worked in sales before moving into marketing.

What attracted you to marketing?

I didn’t particularly enjoy sales. I thought marketing was a lot more interesting. … The kind of marketing I like to do is more focused on strategy, on quantification versus the production of marketing creative and collateral. I’ve always been very drawn to using as much concrete data as possible. I did an MBA and I think that in particular some of the business statistics courses really solidified this interest in supporting things with data.

Read next: Are you a Marketer or Maestro? The answer has a big impact on your salary and career

Getting customer insights, taking understanding from sales teams and customer facing teams, as well as additional research that one might do. You have analytics sources. You might have apps, you might have website data…taking that all together and doing an analysis of the industry and understanding what are the competitive advantages of a given company versus competitors. And be able to break that down and in some way important way to help drive business strategy that was. That’s how I see marketing 

Are there any tools you wish you had?

There is so much available on the market, I find it overwhelming. That’s why I signed up for Martech, to understand what is going on. I understand that different technologies trend and some seem to have bigger trends and more use cases than others, like CDPs. And in the industry itself, there’s so much going on, so much merger and acquisition. There are so many companies adding product features constantly. Honestly, I’m not sure if there are any tools that are missing. If anything it’s more likely I just have not uncovered what I need.

What is the biggest challenge for you? 

People need to think about what they want to accomplish. The amount of data is infinite and there are so many systems which can use it in so many ways. Even before integrating and activating all of the data, it’s essential to have an understanding of what data you want and why. There’s a big question there about data minimization. So, instead of first collecting this massive amount of data, you determine what data do you need? Asking that is an exercise that offers clarity because it forces you to think through, what do we really want and why do we want it?

About The Author

Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.