NEWS

Meet Steven and Spencer, your SVPs of Marketing Services

Company update
6 MIN READ
May, 2025

Summary

As we continue to grow our footprint, we recognize the need to expand our direct marketing and customer engagement capabilities, and enable us to continue delivering connected thinking for connected results.

We’re thrilled to welcome Spencer Barrett and Steven Aldrich, who bring a combined 30 years of experience to the team. Steven and Spencer are co-CEOs of award-winning MarTech company Ragnarok, and they are now joining the Apply Digital team as SVPs for our new Marketing Services offering. The team brings a stellar reputation for their data-driven approach, and have helped over 300 brands with their omnichannel marketing, personalization, and MarTech consultation needs.

Steven and Spencer sat down with us to share a little about their new roles and how they will collaborate with our global team and partners to drive more impact for our clients.

Headshots of Steven and Spencer smiling while looking at the camera

Apply Digital:

What drew you toward personalization and MarTech?

Spencer:

Oooh, I’ll go first. Steven and I have been best friends for 30 years. That’s not an exaggeration. We grew up together, and then became roommates after college. He got into marketing, and I went into the TV industry. But really, Steven and I knew we would work together eventually. We tried a bunch of stuff: we made an app, we did sales materials for a construction company…I think we even wrote a comic book.

Steven:

Oh yes, we did. Eventually, we got to a crossroads moment where we wanted to focus on one thing. We looked around the MarTech industry and realized that a lot of email-focused agencies were good at creative, but not many of them were leaning into the data behind automation. We wanted to go deeper than the classic ‘Set it and forget it’ approach to email. We saw that automation needed to be personalized, and we needed to surface the data customers already had on their users and connect it into their marketing tools to do that.

Brands needed a partner to come in and optimize their tools and content to be more personalized to generate more revenue. We saw a real need for that type of marketing, so we started Ragnarok to help brands with that. Clients started realizing, "Gee, this is great. I’m not spending incrementally more, and I’m still getting more money from the same products without using more resources." So we’ve just…kept going.

Apply Digital:

How will you drive value for Apply Digital’s clients?

Spencer:

Well, Apply Digital is amazing at creating high-end, strategic products and experiences. And it’s already helping its clients collect data through its projects. Where we come in is by leveraging our personalization knowledge and expertise to amp up revenue and profitability for Apply Digital’s clients.

Steven:

Let’s say you have a client in the entertainment industry, and they have a streaming service. At Ragnarok, we’re able to extract the data from people’s experience of a streaming product: when they’re the most engaged with content, when they’re glazing over and engaging with another app, when they skip around within an episode… We can combine that with our knowledge of who they are — their favorite show, location — to create a unified profile as leverage to make the experience better for them.

And it’s not just about finding those opportunities. It’s also about assessing them and figuring out whether or not a brand should pursue them. Like, is it even worth doing? Let’s say for a client that has an eCommerce experience, if we’re deploying an AI model that tells us that a specific customer has a high likelihood to purchase a brand’s products. Is it worth giving them a discount to finalize the sale, or is it better to leave it as is and bank on the fact that they’re close to purchasing? With predictive analytics, we can use data to inform that decision, and establish what level of discount can be offered to boost purchase likelihood while still maximizing a brand’s revenues and margins.

And it goes the other way, too. If someone is giving us all the signals that they’re about to unsubscribe or disengage with a client’s brand, we can use those behavioral markers to assess our available retention tactics and fine-tune what we’re offering them to get this user to come back instead of completely leaving us.

Apply Digital:

What do you wish more people knew about personalization

Spencer:

I think a lot of companies don’t quite understand the point of personalization. It’s not just a revenue-making tactic. It can be used to refine products and output. It tells companies important things about their customers, like, what do they care about? What do they want to see? When done right, personalization truly benefits your users. And these should be thought of as long-term relationships and not just a flash-in-the-pan moment to check the box.

Brands should be feeding their customers content that is relevant to them, that makes them have a meaningful experience. That’s what personalization is for.

Steve Aldrich Senior Vice President of Marketing Services at Apply Digital

Steven:

Investing in specific targeted communications that feel super relevant to consumers is part of that long-term relationship. You can’t just assume that one person’s experience of your brand is going to be good enough for everybody. You have to invest in the relationship, make your brand experience relevant to consumers, and put your money where your mouth is. From a client perspective, that investment can mean many things, like getting really good AI models that can make communications hyper-individualized for a user. Because here’s the thing: with our current technology, it’s possible to get a marketing asset, like an email or a promo banner on a website, to a near-individualized place for every user. It’s not easy, though: AI models have to be extensively trained to understand both a user’s behaviour and your brand’s identity to really get to that level of personalization. That takes time and effort. But that effort will go a really long way to create an experience that feels super personal and relevant to the user, which will translate into revenue.

Spencer:

Last thing: any sort of retention effort should be an extension of the brand. It’s not a profit-driving add-on — it’s a part of the experience. Never forget that customers are real people who care about your brand. That’s why they bought from you in the first place! So make sure your personalization efforts are aligned with your brand’s core and help foster a long-term relationship with your customers.

Welcome again to the team, Spencer and Steven! We look forward to serving our clients better wherever they are. To connect with Spencer and Steven or learn more about Apply Digital, please reach out to us at hello@applydigital.com.