A Leading U.S. Home Mortgage Provider Rebuilds Its Taxonomy in 6 Weeks

After years of struggling to maintain consistent data taxonomy across its brand portfolio, this leading U.S. mortgage provider knew it needed a well-defined, streamlined marketing taxonomy process. Combining data from its various brands had produced major inconsistencies in both taxonomy and reporting — the team was burning hours building manual, ad hoc reports just to try to fill in the gaps, and the picture stayed incomplete no matter how much time went into it. To get the performance tracking leadership wanted across marketing and advertising, the company needed an organization-wide data standardization process — not another spreadsheet workaround.

The Challenge: Three Gaps, One Root Cause

The team needed to solve three connected problems: taxonomy inconsistency across channel teams, no tooling to enable governance and standardization in the first place, and major gaps in centralized reporting caused by missing performance-tracking metadata. Selecting Claravine’s Data Standards Cloud to standardize data inputs, naming conventions, and metadata across every digital channel was the first step — but getting the implementation right would be just as critical as the platform itself.

The Solution: Claravine and Slalom, Together

To gain adoption and define a future-state taxonomy strategy for the enterprise, the company’s marketing leaders turned to Claravine’s implementation partner, Slalom, to make sure the rollout set the organization up for lasting success.

Slalom and Claravine collaborated to identify gaps in the company’s existing campaign taxonomy and where best-in-class data standards could close them. In just six weeks, the joint team completed a full assessment — stakeholder interviews, a gap analysis, an implementation roadmap, a communications and platform onboarding plan, and a new taxonomy strategy and design — surfacing uncoordinated taxonomies across teams, an unclear audience-versus-channel distinction, a disconnect between strategy and activation, and informal (or missing) ownership over taxonomy decisions.

From there, the team built a Taxonomy Design Framework around five building blocks — channel/focus area, templates, users, inputs, and outputs — mapped across every major channel, from global campaigns to paid social, paid search, email, and affiliate programs, so the resulting structure would actually hold up across all of them.

The Results: A Usable Standard in Six Weeks

The company came out of the engagement with a workable, custom-built plan: consistent, standardized naming conventions across marketing platforms; effective governance over the marketing taxonomy itself, including naming conventions, URL and lead tracking, and metadata fields; and a clear roadmap to guide implementation and set timing expectations across leadership, marketing, data engineering, and business intelligence teams. Following implementation, the marketing analytics team saw roughly a 50% reduction in time spent cleaning data.

About Nick Miller

Nick Miller is an end-to-end marketer turned management consultant and digital strategist. As Director of AdTech & Media Strategy at Slalom, he helps brands navigate the convergence of MarTech, AdTech, and media to future-prepare their marketing efforts — putting the customer’s experience at the heart of every strategic decision. On this engagement, Nick led the taxonomy audit, gap analysis, and future-state taxonomy development as the project’s primary manager, keeping the work on an aggressive timeline while bringing the mortgage provider’s own team in to prioritize the channels and templates that mattered most.