MarTech Interview with Eric Vardon, CEO at Morphio

Could you tell us about your journey in technology and how you started at Morphio?

Since the early 80’s and my first Atari Computer, I have been a closet nerd that loves progressive technology. In the founding days of building one of  North America’s fastest-growing Marketing Technology agencies, it became apparent that the size and complexity of Digital Marketing spending was increasing and that only machines could crunch large sets of data quickly enough to make accurate and scalable insights.

Finding technology that could assist with our needs was not available or affordable to an SME business like ours – so we decided to build our own. Three years later the market and our industry are ready for a new way to scale their business.

What is Morphio? How does it empower various businesses with AI in Marketing capabilities?

Morphio is an AI-driven anomaly platform built for advanced marketers. Businesses start by setting the KPIs that they want their Digital Marketing strategy to achieve and Morphio’s does the rest.

Morphio starts by catching ‘threats’ such as Tracking; Web: 404s, broken forms, Ads disapprovals, and credit card failures before they become problems. This security ensures that the Marketing foundation is in place and marketers are ready for Scale and Automation. Morphio’s algorithm then detects Marketing and Analytics anomalies faster and deeper than humanly possible. The real-time detection will alert teams via Slack saving team time and money while protecting against ROI threats.

In the last 5 years or so, how have “AI in Marketing, Sales and Communication’ evolved with maturing of Deep Learning capabilities?

AI for Marketing itself is still relatively new. I would say that yes, advancements in computing power and the opennesses of major platforms now allow Marketing to be ripe for disruption with AI. Morphio aims to lead this disruption across the SME space that has largely been unaffordable previously. We have the idea that a “light-enterprise” option like Morphio can add massive value at a great price-point allowing even the smallest brands to scale through Automation.

What makes Morphio different from others in this unique Digital Marketing Automation space?

Morphio is one of the first platforms to offer data and anomaly detection across major integrated platforms at an affordable price point. The largest differentiator is that Morphio is enabled by business logic, meaning that users must tell Morphio what they wish their Marketing investment to achieve. Morphio handles the rest.

Technology Insights and Advice

You provide unique tech integration for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and LinkedIn Marketing analytics products. What kind of data engine runs and optimizes these integrations?

The Morphio algorithm powers all integrated data to monitor against users set, KPI’s. Morphio employes Deep Learning, Linear Regression, Natural Language Processing, and goal-driven segmentation across our main features to optimize for user success.

Which industries and geographies have been the fastest to adopt and succeed with your product integrations?

As Morphio integrates with all major platforms, there is no limitations to geography or industry. We are seeing success across many global countries but our main focus for initial growth in the US.

Tell us more about your work in Explainable AI and the kind of adoption you are witnessing within your customer base?

Explainable AI (XAI) refers to methods and techniques in the application of Artificial Intelligence technology (AI) such that the results of the solution can be understood by human experts. Our focus is to develop unique content and resources to do our part and communicate why AI matters as it relates to our platform.

As a CEO, how do you tackle the challenges arising from data governance and security standards?

We employ best practices across all data platforms and ensure we monitor things closely. As an online platform in the data space, our continued KPI is system-wide security, speed, and overall governance.

How do you ensure compliance with data privacy laws, especially since you service to a wide array of B2B Marketing and E-commerce players?

We are unique in that Morphio is aggregated middleware between data such as Google Analytics and so Morphio does not collect any personal data directly.

Forecasts and Advice

Other than AI and ML, which other technologies are you keenly following?

I would say that we are still in the early stages of true AI adoption, so we are closely monitoring how initiatives in this space will affect how we build our business.

What is your opinion on “Weaponization of AI, Machine Learning and Blockchain”? How do you promote your ideas in the modern Digital economy?

The important part when not falling into a trend, is to stick with what you know while aiming to cut through and connect to your audience. This means over-communicating with what customers care about, their work-flow, concerns as well as collaborating on how to be successful together. It’s in this mindset that technologies will drive the greater good and build a foundation for success.

What kind of skills/technical specializations are you currently hiring for to lead Product and Marketing teams? 

Our focus for growth right now is across the entire company actually as well as employing AI where we can. We are currently bringing on developers with specific skill-sets to round out our development team, leadership team, sales-force and ramping up an aggressive content strategy.

What digital technology start-ups and labs are you keenly following?

I am quite excited about what Amazon has in-store for IMDB and the growth of this channel. Purley from the point of how IMDB could change how we all look at content, celebrity, and e-commerce.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:

Rand Fishkin

Thank you, Eric! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.