Courtney Tierney spent years on the agency side telling brands what their CRM strategy should be. Now she's the one whose name is on the result. As director of CRM and customer engagement at Papa John's, she owns how the brand communicates with 42 million loyalty members across email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app channels. The gap between advising and owning is real, and this conversation gets into exactly where it shows.
Before Papa John's, Courtney was the senior director of account planning and research at Digital Additive, a Salesforce Marketing Cloud agency, where she worked with brands such as Grammarly and WeWork. She also spent time in-house at IHG. She's crossed the agency-to-client line more than once, which makes her perspective on what each side gets wrong about the other harder to dismiss than most.
This episode covers QSR category assumptions that fall apart in a pitch room, why deliverability is insurance, not overhead, how franchise models create competing contact strategies in the same inbox, and why the conventional wisdom to stay in your lane, agency or client side, is worth ignoring entirely.
Timestamps
03:55 — Agency energy vs. in-house ownership
05:10 — QSR pizza is not QSR
09:10 — Certifications, genuine expertise or the game
12:53 — Launch before your reporting is ready, and you're guessing
17:50 — Generalist agencies vs. CRM specialists
25:37 — Deliverability jail, a real story
30:17 — Cross-channel frequency and the national versus local fight
38:35 — Geo-targeting competitors at the zip code level
47:24 — Ignore the stay-in-your-lane advice
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