MarTech Interview with James Kung, Senior Director of Product Management at Foursquare

James Kung, Senior Director of Product Management at Foursquare chats about the transforming online advertising and adtech market in this quick catch-up:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, James, tell us more about your B2B journey and more about your role at Foursquare…

I started my B2B journey in ad tech during the early days of programmatic advertising. This was when the “alphabet soup” of digital advertising started taking off: RTB, SSPs, DSPs, etc. I actually worked on one of the first display ad exchanges. It was thrilling to create an ad marketplace off of the massive scale of the internet.

From there, I narrowed in on the mobile landscape, scaling programmatic marketplaces for mobile video inventory. That eventually led to working with mobile data—specifically mobile location data. Looking back on my journey, I’ve been fortunate to work in a space like ad tech where there are always opportunities to learn, grow and innovate.

This leads to my role at Foursquare, where I am the Senior Director of Product Management, focusing on the products marketers rely on daily. My team is responsible for building products that help businesses meet their advertising needs. Specifically, we do this through two product lines, Targeting and Measurement. Targeting products help our customers reach the right audiences for their ads, and measurement products help them know how well their ads are performing.

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We’d love to know more about some of Foursquare’s recent innovations and how newest capabilities like the Attribution update will enable user goals and measurement?

We just launched a new feature, Closed Loop Attribution, which changes the game for marketing teams trying to measure results amidst the big shifts in consumer behavior. At its core, Closed Loop Attribution lets companies know whether their ad affected consumer behavior at critical points in the path to purchase. It eliminates assumptions and guesswork in understanding the effect of marketing at each point of today’s customer journey.

Closed Loop falls under our Attribution offering, and it’s a huge leap forward. The feature provides the full picture of a customer’s journey, whatever the digital or physical world outcome of that journey may be (for example a store visit, an online action, or a hybrid of both). Thanks to Foursquare’s access to historical data, the feature can measure incremental behavior; our data shows which customers and actions were actually influenced by ads versus those that would have happened regardless. That’s a layer of context that really sets us apart.

Ultimately this allows companies to know which ads are actually driving sales, so they can invest wisely and focus their advertising efforts on campaigns that are proven successful. At a time when consumers have endless options of not only what to purchase, but how to purchase, it’s vital to have that holistic view of the journey, closing the loop for a better understanding of the path to purchase.

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Given the rapid pace at which ad trends and consumption patterns are evolving, in part influenced by the constant change (or increase) of ad channels: what do you feel B2B marketers and advertisers need to keep in mind as they navigate the market?

First, it’s important to invest in data that sheds light on the whole picture of the customer journey. As shopping behavior shifts, marketers need to identify metrics and solutions that keep up with where consumers are spending time and making decisions. Marketing strategies that worked well before may not always work as these consumer patterns change. So it’s important for marketers to find partners and solutions that are able to adapt and follow changes in the customer’s holistic journey.

Second, it’s important to work with offerings that are accessible across the ecosystem. This gets to the increase in ad channels that you mention. Not only do marketers and advertisers need to invest in data that provides a holistic picture of the customer, but they also need to ensure they can leverage that data consistently from one media channel to the next. In this way, they’ll be able to continue to reach their goals as both shopping behavior and media trends evolve.

These evolving trends are exactly what led us to create Closed Loop Attribution. We’ve spent years helping marketers measure media across all channels. But when you add to that the growth in new forms of purchase options—from in-store, to online, to purchase online and pickup in store—the challenge of staying on top of true omnichannel measurement explodes. Closed Loop Attribution directly addresses these challenges by allowing marketers to apply our trusted attribution solution to measure lift and incrementality to any of these customer actions across all channels where media was bought.

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How do you feel the adtech and online ad market is set to shift in the near-future?

We will see some trends in a few areas in particular. First, the adtech industry will start to transition towards consented identifiers (such as Unified ID 2.0) as the path towards privacy-first addressability on the open internet. Second, there will be increased attention towards leveraging first-party data to diversify from relying solely on data from open marketplaces. And third, there will be an increase in data collaboration over data sharing, whereby companies can jointly bring data to an offering without explicitly sharing their customers’ personal data.

It’s exciting for us because we are actively working with partners and clients on all of these fronts to build towards that not-too-distant future. This is true not only for Attribution but for all of our products at Foursquare.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, before we wrap up!

In a way, there’s never been a better time than now to be in adtech and martech. We’re seeing all this change in terms of consumer behavior, the proliferation of media channels, and a sharpened focus on getting consumer privacy right. This continuous evolution has the potential to drive growth and innovation in an industry that is so closely intertwined with data. So I’m hopeful that we will see more new ideas and improvements in the space just like the ones we’ve discussed today!