MarTech Interview with Obele (Brown-West) Hinsley, President at Tracer

Obele (Brown-West) Hinsley, President at Tracer chats about a few proven data practices for modern marketing teams:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Obele, tell us about yourself and more about your role as President at Tracer.

Thank you for having me! At Tracer, I am in charge of strategic growth initiatives and lead the global executive team in scaling the company’s business operations. As President, my chief responsibility is creating value for employees, customers, and shareholders. I oversee all revenue and operations activities in addition to building Tracer’s first marketing and sales capabilities to further solidify our position as a revolutionary force in the industry.

I’ve been in the advertising industry for 20 years and have been fortunate to be recognized by Ad Age, Adweek, Chief Marketer, and other amazing institutions. Prior to joining Tracer, I managed Tinuiti’s 800+ media, lifecycle, commerce, and creative specialists as Chief Solutions Officer. Prior to Tinuiti, I led the North America digital group for IPG’s Weber Shandwick and was also an early employee of iProspect and 360i.

With two decades of integrated marketing expertise, I witnessed various subpar solutions to “the data problem”. I was attracted to Tracer for its remarkable vision, team, and leadership. I have known Jeff Nicholson [Tracer Co-Founder and CEO] for almost 20 years, and I really respect what he’s built with [Co-Founder and CTO] Leighton Welch. To be able to help them reach new heights and dominate in the tech space is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

We’d love to hear more about the Tracer platform and how it’s benefiting end users today? What inspired the platform? 

As Chief Media Officer of VaynerMedia, Jeff was spending billions of dollars annually and could not find a technology that allowed him effective and agile management of client media insight. That’s why he and Leighton pitched Gary Vaynerchuk in 2015 on building Tracer to automate reporting and analytics for VaynerMedia clients. By 2018, Tracer’s success led to the formation of an LLC that officially spun out into a standalone business in 2021 when we raised our Seed funding.

Today, Tracer is an independent company and proudly serves over 200 clients, both direct and indirect via our ad agency partners, including Sanofi, Condé Nast, Papa Johns, Headspace, media.monks, January Digital, and our friends at VaynerMedia.

Tracer is a data intelligence platform that revolutionizes modern data stack management by eliminating technical complexity. Tracer empowers global brands, data partners and agencies to make strategic decisions by seamlessly consolidating data sources and enriching it with business insights. Our technology integrates and contextualizes cross-platform data and our differentiation lies in our flexible product design, user interface and the ability to create automated reporting and analytics across any data source without unnecessary overhead. Automated rules configure how data sources talk to each other and data is organized into constructs relevant to each business. Tracer’s use of data strategy elements — people, process, product — make our approach to data aggregation unique and results more significant.

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Tell us about your recent funding and what near term plans the team has for the platform?

We have raised $30M to date, including our recently completed, oversubscribed Series A led by strategic institutional investors like NewRoad Capital Partners, Progress Ventures and BDMI (part of Bertelsmann’s corporate venture arm Bertelsmann Investments), which provide guidance on how best to navigate our future growth. Our investors play a pivotal role in propelling the company forward, bringing much more than just financial resources to the table — they provide valuable industry knowledge, strategic insights, and extensive networks that can further accelerate our growth trajectory.

We are proud to count some of the world’s most impressive investors and business minds among our supporters, including Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore’s VCP Ventures, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, Stephen Ross and Matt Higgins’ RSE Ventures, S4S Ventures, Arbour Way Investors and Gary Vaynerchuk.

As far as what’s next, we are focused on expanding our sales and marketing efforts to reach new markets and expand an already diverse customer base. Additionally, we will continue to invest in advancing the Tracer technology to ensure we remain at the forefront of innovation in the industry, from our use of machine learning to remaining platform agnostic so virtually any business organization and their sources of data can quickly benefit from our solution.

When it comes to data and insights/analytics best practices for B2B marketing and media teams: what tips come to mind?

Given today’s economic realities, removing unnecessary complexity from the data process is the most important tip I would provide to B2B marketing and media teams.

B2B and B2C marketing and media teams are facing similar data and analytics headwinds — budgets are getting smaller, but the demand for proving the ROI of a marketing dollar has increased. Specific to B2B marketing and media teams, targeting the right audiences has always been costly and proving ROI can be hard to navigate, given the longer length of the B2B buying cycle.

For all marketers and media teams (but especially B2B teams), optimizing your analytics infrastructure will not only empower you to better understand your data, but also to more quickly analyze marketing performance to drive smarter decision making with ROI at the forefront.

What thoughts do you have surrounding the future of data and intelligence for marketers?

Industry analysts have discussed at length how the pandemic accelerated digital transformation and technological innovation. As companies moved from the office to online, and traditional advertisers increased their reliance on digital media as a result of the pandemic, Tracer was an ideal solution to better manage a distributed business and a more complex data equation.

As companies continue to become more digital (even as some return to office and hybrid setups), there is a massive amount of data they need to aggregate and interpret to make business decisions. The major challenge all businesses face is aggregating and interpreting this data in a simple, cost-effective manner. Tracer exists to enable businesses to do just that.

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Can you comment on the growing use of AI in this space and how you feel it will impact the segment? 

 AI will only work if you have your data in order.

Tracer’s application of AI is the last step in a long line of processes the platform automates. For example, to determine which creative concept is most performant across every media campaign a brand has ever run, you need a dataset that has a normalized KPI for measuring performance, across all of your campaigns, grouped by creative concept, before you can even begin to think about AI. That is where Tracer excels.

One of Tracer’s key areas of competitive advantage is the quality of our data. Not only is Tracer’s data aggregated across a huge number of sources, it’s been normalized with relevant business context overlaid for each of our clients. This makes AI far easier to train.