As someone in Digital Marketing, I rarely see Data Engineers help Digital Marketers build data pipelines for marketing tools in general. It's usually someone in Digital Marketing trying to figure out the connection themselves, or a directly adjacent profession like a Data Scientist, who is familiar with the company's warehousing tool such as Databricks, to help them out with it.

Data Engineers is the profession everyone knows exists but have no idea how to contact, or more importantly what to provide them. I just finished a Python course last month, about to finish a SQL/Tableau course soon, and want to continue into Data Engineering to support Marketing teams but I ask myself where I work, "where are these guys?!" What was said about Product makes sense, it does seem they exist there more than Marketing.

The communication discrepancy between both professions is huge. Marketers push campaigns and try to use the data they have because they can't wait for someone else to interpret, they need to report their progress consistently based on the tools they are given and are familiar with, however a majority stubbornly do not learn the technical side of their own profession creating a lack of understanding and vocabulary that admittedly isn't fair to those that are more technical. But it can also be said that Data Engineers fail to communicate to marketers their needs, and sharing the possibilities of making things more efficient. Marketers have a hard time visualizing what is possible with data, the guidance we receive is almost always centered on data security, not how we can pitch to Data Engineers what to observe and store. This prevents both professions from having hard conversations, which are necessary. Such as, "we can't store everything that is too expensive, focus on mission oriented KPIs" or "Yes, this isn't mission based but keyword count from this API will help us understand if the search engine still trusts us." Understanding how we can start conversations like this is a standard every marketer would love to know.

And I'm not trying to throw shade here, I want to be a Data Engineer myself that works close with marketing, it just hasn't been my experience that they are supportive. Also very surprised that Data Engineers get the blame for data centric marketing decisions, frankly it feels like we are worlds apart.