The Shipyard’s Lance Porigow on measuring brand love without getting lost in data

For eight years, Lance Porigow has been helping to redefine the relationship between data and brand growth at The Shipyard. It’s partly why he likes to describe himself as a growth engineer.

Porigow joined The Current during Advertising Week New York this year and spoke about what makes a consumer fall in love with a brand, offering advice for marketers trying to foster long-term brand love while measuring the performance of their media.

He also elaborated on why he thinks all media is performance media in an age when almost everything is measurable.

What does being a growth engineer mean to you?

It does get deep into understanding how to drive converging. It’s about thinking of the bottom of the funnel and up. Sometimes we’ll call that “flipping the funnel.” How are we going to drive converging at scale, and what are the things that have to happen before that to get [the consumer] to fall in love with the brand? You have to figure out the ultimate destination and the thing that’s going to get them to immediately connect and draw attention to you.

As a growth engineer, what do you think powers the most growth for brands?

The best thing you can do is drive more penetration, which means acquire more customers. Once you do that, you have more people to work with. Some of them might fall out along the way, but you have a lot more that you can actually build towards driving more loyalty ultimately.

What do you think is the best way to measure the effectiveness of ads?

There’s really not a single measure usually. There are different moments that require different measurements, and you try to figure out how to stitch them all together. We think about it less as measuring an ad but more [as] measuring a brand and their relationship to consumers. How do you actually measure brand love?

We started out looking for tools to measure brand love, and everything is so fragmented — the media’s fragmented, the measurement’s fragmented — that we decided to make one ourselves. So we built this program called Pulse. A bunch of data scientists basically try to figure out how to pipe all the data together from all sorts of different sources to come up with different measurements to figure out whether you’re actually attracting people, if you’re engaging them and ultimately converting them towards love. We just found there was no other way to do it other than to do it ourselves.

You’ve said that “all media is performance media.” But brands are still leveraging traditional channels. Could you expand on that idea?

All media is performance media for sure because everything is measurable now (maybe linear TV less so). If I’m trying to drive awareness and if I’m pushing towards impressions, I can model and look at whether that is having an impact two or three weeks later, and we can figure out what’s happening over time. Even at the top of the funnel you can measure, and at the bottom of the funnel, of course, it gets easier. But you have to stitch those together.

Do you have advice for marketers who want to strike this balance you’re talking about, focusing on long-term brand love at the same time as the performance of their media?

I think what happens, especially during COVID when there was a lot of stuff happening online, marketers fished the bottom of the pool and there was nothing left. There’s no more advantage there, everyone’s doing the same thing and they realized that all of a sudden: “There’s not enough there. I can’t get more incrementality out of that. I’ve got to open up the top of the funnel and find more people to come in.” You can get seduced by all the metrics at the bottom of the funnel and you can get really focused there, but it’s going to run dry pretty quick and you’re going to run out of places to go. Learn that lesson that you can only go so far. While that might sound better to the CFO to show all these conversion metrics driving revenue, you’re going to run out of time pretty quick.