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Courtney Trudeau, Senior Vice President, Technology Consulting Lead, Merkle

Describe your career to date

I have always been a data-driven person, so much so that I majored in math in college. I began my career in marketing but have since come full circle. After spending my early career doing media buying, broadcast buying, and marketing strategy, I pivoted to become a data and web engineer, which lead me to working on both the agency and client side in a hands-on engineering role.  

As my career progressed, I united my marketing and technical background and now advise clients on marketing technology and the data to enable these platforms. 

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your clients and on the industry as a whole?  

We advise our clients to focus on not only their first-party data strategy but also a modern data infrastructure to support and access it. In 2024 I believe we will continue to see organizations challenged with data wrangling. This means bringing all their data silos together into a common place and then standardizing the data for use.  

Successful organizations will see IT partner with the business to understand data strategy, build the right structure, create a governance model, and then democratize that data for use at the right time. 

How are you developing the data literacy of a) your own organization and b) your clients? 

My team partners with clients to build data literacy. Just a few of these include: 

  • Build out a first-party data strategy. 

  • Inventory and blueprint to create a customer 360 – analysis of where data sits today, the state it is in, and then create a plan to bring that data together in a central place. 

  • Data governance framework – partnerships with IT to establish a data governance model including the people and process. 

  • Data-driven everything – we leverage our analytics teams to create a custom KPI framework for internal team metrics (results, testing, utilization) and external marketing (ROI, content testing). 

How are you preparing your organization and your clients for AI adoption and change management?  

AI is a game-changing technology that will make marketers more productive and give new paths to connect with consumers in new ways. I am working with my clients to prepare them through:  

  • Education and training – focusing on industry-specific trends and considerations, to regulatory and privacy, to prompt design and engineering.  

  • Opportunity and AI use case innovation – by leveraging AI frameworks, my team and I facilitate a brainstorm of potential AI use cases.  

  • AI innovation roadmap – We help clients define the path to differentiated generative AI maturity and value including tech and data, and people and process.  

  • Merkle is working with some of our clients on a custom AI product, GenCX. GenCX is built on top of a brand’s first-party data to help brands understand insights, audience creation, behaviors, and sentiment. 

Courtney Trudeau
has been included in:
  • 100 Enablers 2024 (USA)

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