On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at Cision and how you got here? (What inspired you to be a part of a media intelligence company?)
I’m Cision’s Chief Marketing Officer, responsible for our global marketing strategy. My team is responsible for digital marketing, PR & communications, product marketing, web strategy, social marketing, customer advocacy and content marketing.

I arrived at Cision based on my experience with marketing and brand strategy for companies that grow through acquisition. If I had a marketing superpower, you might say it’s taking a complex or diverse set of product assets, and developing a story that makes it easy for the general public to understand.

Before Cision, I ran global product marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud. There, we acquired and integrated products into a portfolio. At Cision, we’re on a similar journey. We’ve spent nearly $2B on technology and services aimed at transforming the way companies do public relations and marketing communications. I’ve assembled a team here that will help our customers understand all the unlocked potential they can get by making their marketing communications programs more targeted and data-driven.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of online engagement with customers, how do you see marketing analytics platforms for media communications evolving over the next five years?
Moving forward, communicators and marketers will require analytics that show them how their campaigns drove specific business or revenue-generating outcomes. Today, most marketing metrics still focus on engagement metrics for engagement metrics’ sake. In comms, the focus tends to be vanity metrics like competitive share of voice. Now that marketers can track users down to the device or browser, we need to demonstrate how the totality of their interactions drove revenue. The way this will be accomplished is tying marketing analytics to more transactional systems of record, like CRM or ecommerce systems.

MTS: How does CISION’s Visible Intelligence platform ease the burden of social media monitoring?
This capability is now an integrated part of the Cision Communications Cloud, and is purpose-built for communications professionals. Many aspects of social listening and monitoring have become fairly commoditized, so our focus with social in the Comms Cloud is to help brands do two things: first, understand how their target influencers affect customer behavior on social channels; and second, analyze social media results in the context of an overall communications campaign In Cision Comms Cloud, brands can monitor social media alongside traditional media outlets, like print, television, and even radio. We recognize that social media is part of a larger comms strategy, and should be monitored and measured as such – not solely as a standalone function. Because results can be tracked as part of a larger communications campaign strategy, communications professionals will see a more complete picture when analyzing results.

MTS: How does CISION analyze audience data to improve marketing campaigns?
We look at customer and prospect data across a few different variables. The first is based on customer attributes – or simply put, who are we engaging with? Is the person a manager or director versus a VP or c-level executive? Since each requires a different customer experience from our team, we tailor their experiences a little differently. We collect attribute data both implicitly – such as through anonymous cookie tracking – or explicitly based on something they tell us (such as sharing their title during a content download). Just as importantly, we then focus a lot on their behavioral data – or simply put, what does a customer or prospect do? This includes a variety of behaviors that span our paid, owned and earned channels, such as engagement with an ad, attending a webinar, or visiting our website based on specific press coverage.

MTS: With the recent changes in data privacy policies, how do you see audience identification and tracking platforms delivering personalization?
The technology today allows you to deliver a personalized experience to both known and anonymous users across a variety of different channels. You, of course, need to think about the legal and philosophical implications of how you do it. Data can now be tracked down to people’s specific devices and browsers. That is a responsibility that marketers shouldn’t take lightly. In fact, if it’s too good to be true from a privacy perspective, you should assume it is. For me, it’s all about transparency and user empowerment. In all regions around the world, you should give users the ability to opt out. For regions like Europe, you need to be in even more overt about the fact you’re tracking users and you should be absolutely sure you’re in compliance with local rules. To keep yourself honest, you should assume users don’t know because it’ll force you to think carefully about your policies.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
I still think 80% of the marketing world relies on soft engagement metrics to justify their craft. As someone who believes deeply in the art of storytelling, I’m keen on startups that focus on the science of marketing to justify more of those stories being told. I think the first wave of attribution companies made some good faith efforts, but they were riddled with problems as historical things like last-click attribution demonstrated. So anything that improves the marketer’s ability to measure return across their paid, owned and earned channels is compelling.

Another area I’m watching is influencer marketing. It’s interesting to see paid media start to permeate that space. It could just be our society’s celebrity fascination. Either way, I’m skeptical that paying someone to tell your story and calling it “earned media” will be the right bet over time. Most of those influencer marketing services to date have focused on algorithms to show whose influence is important, but I find most of the decision-ing fairly arbitrary and not tied to business outcomes. An influencer marketing tool that lets marketing pull that lever of that program with more transparency would be interesting, as well as the ability to see what earned media it truly generates.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Depending on your point of view, my team has been blessed or burdened by the fact I have a few opinions on this one! What’s interesting about our stack is we’re at an interesting inflection point as a business. As we shared at the time of going public, we’re now a $600M+ business in revenue. To support that kind of growth, we’re outgrowing some tools that the team added early on to do some noble use cases, but now simply can’t scale to our environment. For example, we use a leading Marketing Automation platform to manage our lead scoring and customer journey management. While it’s served us well overall, it doesn’t easily route leads to multiple CRM systems without a lot of custom API or services work. We have real reasons – either product, sales org, or geo-related – for managing multiple CRM databases, so that’s a real consideration for me and the VP of digital on my team to consider over time. Elsewhere on the owned media side, we manage a large CMS environment to support the Cision.com and PRNewswire.com experience, along with Adobe Analytics in the background to measure effectiveness.

The earned media side is easy! We obviously use our very own Cision Communications Cloud and Cision Distribution by PR Newswire to instrument our earned media. That includes identifying influencers and media contacts, distributing campaigns via PRNewswire, and monitoring and analyzing how that coverage drove key business outcomes for us.

On the paid side, we do a lot of media buying with Google and some of the big players you’d expect. We haven’t yet gone in the direction of a DMP or DSP internally to manage that part of our media mix, but maybe could be something we explore next year if we see efficiencies can be gained.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
We embrace digital campaigns that are rooted in a powerful message that can resonate with our target audience across the channels that matter to them – especially earned media, social media, and the other channels where our clients spend their time.  A great example of a digital cross-campaign we orchestrated was the 2017 Cision State of the Media Report.

Both my campaign and content marketing teams developed a plan to create a primary research asset on the state of journalism in North America. Especially in light of the recent presidential election – and the erosion of trust in many journalistic institutions – we knew the timing was right. Our target buyers are people who work in public relations and communications, so issues in media are very important to them. But my digital team was scientific about it, and we identified the personas in our client and prospect segments we knew would get value from the content.  The release of the research was supported by a powerful cross-channel push. That included earned media coverage in key industry pubs, a livestream event with a panel of leading journalists and communications influencers, targeted paid social content syndication across networks, SEM, targeted emails by vertical and persona and efforts throughout the organization to maximize the reach of the content.

The effort helped us more than double the number of engaged leads sourced in March versus the year prior – including capturing leads from our earned media and press release distribution platforms.  Outside of those quantitative demand generation metrics, we were able to capitalize on the momentum of the campaign to continue a dialogue on this key topic in our successful, global events series – the Cision World Tour.  This campaign was the type of effort that helps us cement our credibility with our audience.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
I think it comes down to focusing on use cases and not being distracted by the noise of that space. AI, machine learning, predictive, and other such terms are used interchangeably in the MarTech space, which can be hard as a practitioner trying to consume it. Really, some of these are just old data append vendors trying to re-brand themselves. For our business, the account-based marketing use cases are interesting. While everyone gets jazzed about personalization at the 1:1 level, marketing and selling to businesses has the added wrinkle of group decision-making. Analyzing the data of an ideal account and then having your data models automatically adapt to find more accounts just like it is something that can be very laborious for humans to do at scale, so that’s an area I’m interested in where we can do more.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work. 


Deliberate. I’ve learned that once you get into a c-level role, you need to be extra thoughtful about where you spend your hours. When invited to a meeting or asked for an opinion, I constantly ask myself, “does the team need me to carry this forward?” And if the answer is even remotely no, I move on to something else and trust the amazing people who work for me to handle it.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without? 


For all the apps out there – and the revolution of mobile devices in general – I still couldn’t live without a little piece of hardware called the Macbook Pro. I know that sounds funny since the first MacBrook Pro is well over a decade old. But I get a new one every three years, and it still adds so much value to me. Even as I progress in my career to a role that’s mostly management, I carve out time for storytelling in the little time I have left over. I still have a low comfort level with anything being ghostwritten for me, so if you read a byline or a blog, you can be sure I wrote it. While everyone loves to hate on PowerPoint, I embrace the fact that corporations are nowhere close to getting off of it, so I treat it like an art form. I craft the majority of my presentations (at least as a first draft) on my Macbook, so the Adobe Creative suite and PowerPoint are vital tools for me.

For apps, certainly all the travel ones are big for me since I’m on the road a lot (Uber, United, SPG, to name a few). I also pay for app subscriptions to access can’t-live-without content. For me, that’s the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Economist. For music, I can’t live without Spotify.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I put in tough security measures against calendar burglars. We’re a ~3,000 person company, so if you don’t block out times to take care of some deliverables or review your team’s work, you’ll pay the price on nights and weekends. I obviously can’t avoid that all together, but blocking times deliberately helps.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume 
information?)
As it relates to books lately, a lot of fiction. It keeps my creativity up because so much of the other reading I either do during my work day is dense (business and tech literature) or depressing (politics). I just finished reading “End of Watch,” a detective story by Stephen King. I love his writing. Though I know modern academia shuns some of his earlier horror works, I think history will look at him as one of America’s greatest writers. Right now, I’m reading “Juliet, Naked” by Nick Hornby. I was a huge fan of his other works, such as “High Fidelity” and “How to Be Good.” He writes human emotion and love in a way that isn’t trite. A hard thing to do for a modern author.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
When you pick a job, pick a lifestyle. If you just accept that we’re losing grip on work-life balance because of technology and media saturation – and let’s face it, we are – the best you can do is pick a lifestyle that makes you happy within that context. The answer to that whole “do you work to live or live to work” question is really no longer so binary. So I try to look at it this way: My nature is to work really hard, so I might as well have some fun doing it and work with people I enjoy. There are of course life trade-offs with my job. The travel is hard, and it impacts my relationships with those close to me. But on the other hand, I get to lead people I respect, be creative every day, give things to my friends and family that make me happy to give, and pass on things that I’ve learned.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I write faster and at a higher quality than most people I encounter in the business world. Especially as we embrace new communication mediums, it’s amazing how hard it is for some people – and I’m talking really smart people I respect – to write a lucid or thoughtful email or message. Having a strong command of both the written and verbally-spoken word has served me well in so many contexts, such as the creative aspects of campaign planning or messaging, developing thought leadership, or content. It also helps me articulate exactly what I mean during more tense business meetings or in the day-to-day communications that happen in between. I’m thorough, if not sometimes exhaustive, in my communications, so it’s hard for people not to understand my intent.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Ann Lewnes, the CMO of Adobe. What they’ve built from a marketing perspective is a gold standard in the software industry so far as I’m concerned.

MTS: Thank you Christopher! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to start a video advertising technology innovation company?
I am the technical co-founder at VideoAmp. VideoAmp Co-Founder and CEO Ross McCray was originally my client at my past company, which was doing high-level technology staff augmentation and R&D for post-series A startups and ad-tech companies. We were both inspired to start VideoAmp to solve the problem of fragmentation between digital and linear.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of engagement with online customers, how do you see the existing viewability and on-target audience benchmarks for video advertising evolving by 2020?
We look at these two metrics very differently. Existing viewability metrics are a reaction to an industry that got too cozy with low quality and often fraudulent traffic sources. In the next two years, more Video will be bought directly, using automation and data. This changes the dynamic of how the industry should measure viewability – if you are getting guaranteed fill from verified sources, other metrics should matter more.

On target audience as a notion is also changing rapidly. The digital and OTT markets should not just move to a GRP-style buy, it doesn’t serve advertisers or media owners well at all. If the goal of a campaign is to reach SUV buyers, there are much better targeting methods than Adults 25-54. We firmly believe in the rise of advanced currencies: taking first party data and/or verified offline data and use that as your audience proxy. How many of those people did you reach at a 1:1 level? What were the business outcomes that those people delivered?

MTS: Tell us about how VideoAmp created the functional set of TV viewership attributes to drive tune-In lift?
VideoAmp leverages a combination of methods to create the custom audience segments to drive maximum tune-in lift. Through our unique partnership with comScore, we have facility to map their massive footprint of 75M set top boxes (STB)/households (HH) to our proprietary device graph of cookies and device IDs that seeds the viewership data for the addressable custom audience segments. VideoAmp also directly matches Smart TVs with our user graph, through a partnership with TVADSYNC & Vizio, that creates bespoke audiences based on of the industry’s most robust Automated Content Recognition (ACR) seed data. With the largest footprint of seed data, the ability to create custom audiences, and working with our partners on measurement reports, we feel this is the most advanced offering in the market.

MTS: How should advertisers leverage audience attention and conversion analytics to optimize viewability and combat ad fraud challenges?
Fraud is a game of cat and mouse. Whatever metrics we go and chase, fraudsters will find an effective way to spoof these events. We’ve inflated performance benchmarks and scale based on these fraudulent numbers and the industry needs to change that. There is more fraud than is ever reported. Viewability, Clicks, Site Analytics visits, landing page visits, brand surveys etc. are all spoofed.

The industry has to try to look at the conversion metrics only and what’s driving those with a real sale. Additionally, advertisers have to not trust the numbers that look too good to be true and think beyond perceived safety by Excel report.

MTS: With the growing prominence on delivering programmatic capabilities, how does VideoAmp provide true automated buying to its customers?
Unlike other platforms, we do not take a position on inventory or arbitrage in any way. When our customers are buying programmatically, they are truly buying against the market and not another intermediary.

MTS: How does VideoAmp bring to businesses the precise audience measurement analytics across Linear, VOD, OTT, Desktop, and Mobile content?
We have taken the long approach to truly uniting the TV and digital markets. That has to be done with data, and that means combining various ecosystems. We have worked with several key partners such as comScore, Mediaocean, Experian, LiveRamp, and Neustar to scale link TV viewership and ad exposure with digital content and ad behaviors. This ends up in the VideoAmp user graph, which is actually a consumption graph. This allows us to generate analytics using the digital targeting proxy across all these screens. It’s a work in progress as items such as changing IP addresses, and non-consistent device IDs in OTT make it challenging to graph.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their media decisions deliver seamless execution across digital and mobile screens?
CMOs have a difficult job. It’s evolved into them being the largest purchaser of technology, and of course, the large-scale budgets on advertising across all mediums. The pressure to show ROI on the tech and media investments is intense. This means they are likely investing in understanding their customers, and target customers, and turning them into digital signals (via a DMP). Now CMOs and their teams have a way to unify how they plan across mediums. Is there an effort to upsell to existing customers, then there should be a separate campaign that should have specific creative and a forecast of how to reach them. Another tactic would be to conquest new customers from a competitor, so let’s suppress the existing customers, and add in targeting for conquesting, and do a forecast and creative tactic for that. Being able to run these types of campaigns and execution across mediums is a requirement for CMOs. Agencies and technology providers must be able to deliver this, or the CMO will quickly move on, they don’t have time.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
While not a startup per se, I am very bullish on what Hackers & Founders is doing to launch “Hacker Coin.” We are also closely watching the evolution of blockchain technologies and their impact on transactions for premium video and TV.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
Our integrated TV operating system for advertising consists of two major sides: digital and linear.  On the digital side, we incorporate a sizable cross-device graph giving us visibility into users and all of their devices, and we have integrations with all of the major video supply sources, and marketing cloud/DMPS. We have proprietary pre-bid solutions which enable us to optimize on viewability, brand safety, and eliminating sketchy or suspicious inventory.

On the linear side, we work with massive data sets which tell us who watches what across the US, and for which we join to our graph. With this, we are able to deliver use cases which index both directions from digital to linear. This gives us incremental digital plans based off existing TV buying plans, and conversely TV buying plans based off first-party digital data. We also have the only API integration into the Mediaocean National TV systems, this is critical to not disrupt the workflow of allocation, billing, reconciliation, and in closing the loop on performance.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
Tied to our new Tune-in deck revamp, below is the new case study slide that answers how we measured success which obviously centered around tune-ins along with viewability, VCR and lift. We didn’t have just one successful campaign, but a client across a handful of campaigns so we reached their target audience but that varied by show.

1. National broadcast turns to VideoAmp to drive tune-in for entire fall line-up.
2. VideoAmp leveraged it’s exclusive TV data partnerships to create custom audiences based on historical viewership of shows similar to the broadcaster’s fall line-up. Using highly qualified and accurate TV data, coupled with a proprietary cross-device graph, VideoAmp helped the broadcaster reach their target audience anytime, anywhere. Advanced video DSP capabilities – such as impression level fraud and viewability integrations, verified player size targeting, and multidimensional inventory optimizations – ensured each impression was impactful.
3. The result: Amazing digital video metrics, fantastic lift, and a ton of tune-in.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Bulldogging

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
My life is simple. For talent procurement and BD, I use Chrome, Slack, Github, Lever, Gmail and all Google Apps. For technical R&D, I use the Linux terminal, the vim editor, and all command line forms of database tools and diagnostic tools.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I’m on the phone all the time, so tools like the former “Sunrise Calendar” or MinMax to send multiple options for booking calls is invaluable.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I am currently reading “Crash Proof 2.0”, by economist Peter Schiff who accurately predicted the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. As far as information consumption I watch tons of technical and economic information on YouTube, usually at 2x speed.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
For Business:  “Only a fool would start a company without an exit strategy.”
For Engineering: “Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.”

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I disagree with the term “Jack of all Trades, Master of None”. I believe in being a Jack of all Trades, and a Master of Some. In my case, I still actively enjoy programming and systems engineering, and I’m always doing some kind of R&D.

When it comes to recruiting new talent, I reach out as a “Hacker… NOT a recruiter”, and by appealing to engineers as a peer, have been able to direct-hire the vast majority of our team.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Tom Chavez – Co-Founder and CEO of Krux

MTS: Thank you Dave! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to start an AdTech innovation company?
I’ve been obsessed with data and the insights they provide for as long as I can remember. In particular, I love the the immediate gratification of being able to drive results & decisions by leveraging data and insights. During my time at the NexTag, I knew there was a need for applying data science to the discipline of marketing, which is becoming more and more data-dependent, but seemed to lack a solution to pull actionable insights from the data explosion we are seeing today.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of search and social engagements, how do you see the marketing automation and analytics market evolving over the next five years?
For a company to succeed today, it needs to be a data company.

Data should be core part of the DNA. However, there’s simply too much data out there for individual human beings to parse. This field has become insanely challenging – today’s marketers must be more multidisciplinary, more astute and more talented than ever.

This is where the power of machine learning-powered automation – which can use the insights derived from the data – can intelligently lift performance from a marketing perspective.

To summarize, I envision marketing automation and analytics to see a proliferation of data and use of machine learning to make sense of that data. We’ll then we able to use this insight to deliver the right experience for our customers & users.

MTS: How should CMOs leverage the customer experience platforms to drive omnichannel campaigns with a greater authority?
Customer experience has become mission-critical in marketing. The advertisers that succeed will be the ones that deliver the right message to the right customers over the right channel at the right time. Others will be ignored, blocked out and potentially see their brand tarnished over time as “that one annoying advertiser” whose irrelevant ads pop up wherever customers go.

This has become increasingly important as ad blocker usage has surged to 30% according to BusinessInsider, and Google itself will be adding a built-in “ad filter” to the most popular browser in America, Chrome, in the near future.

CMOs looking to a customer experience platform should seek solutions that help them provide the right ads for their customers along their decision journey, but understand that they also need the intelligence to consistently locate their prospects at the right point in their journeys to push them through the funnel and eventually convert them to paying customers.

MTS: How should CMOs plan their stack integrations to maximize the benefits from AI assisted conversation and predictive analytics platforms?
I believe CMOs need to have full-funnel visibility for all customer stages, plus comprehensive analytics fueled by data from all sources. There doesn’t exist a solution that compiles marketers’ data from every single source (primary publishers, secondary channels, exogenous sources) and empowers them to create a complete, holistic picture built entirely on empirical data (rather than guesswork and gut feelings), from which they can extract exceptionally accurate, and actionable, insights. Yet.

MTS: What startups in the MarTech ecosystem are you watching/keen on right now?
Cliché answer, I know, but my attention is laser-focused on my own team. I’m incredibly proud of the people we’ve managed to bring together. And I’m humbled by their creativity and dedication every day.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We use automation solutions for marketing, sales and email such as Salesforce and Marketo, as well as fairly conventional solutions for task tracking and collaboration, such as JIRA and Slack, as mentioned.

As a rule of thumb, if we find ourselves faced with a time-consuming task that we can only resolve manually, “the hard way,” more than three times or so, we’ll look for a better solution that can save our valuable time and help us focus on the task at hand.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
A few months ago, we added Rosetta Stone to our ever-growing customer list. Despite being a huge, established global brand, like any other savvy advertiser, they were unwilling to settle for the status quo and sought ways to increase their advertising performance. In just 8 weeks, we cut their CPA costs in half, increased their conversions 50%, and lifted their revenue 42% by using our solution’s granular data science algorithms to squeeze out incremental gains across the company’s entire performance marketing portfolio, leading to significant aggregate lift overall. This was a big win for everyone involved and a strong proof of concept for our product.

MTS: How do you prepare for an Artificial Intelligence-centric world as a marketing leader?
I welcome it with open arms. I don’t believe the future is going to be a world of robots and software that completely replace humans, but rather, one where intelligent technology empowers already-talented people to reach the next level of their abilities. In a recent survey we held on our website with the top influencers in marketing, 97% of them basically said the same thing.

This is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Purposeful.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
It isn’t completely perfect, but I and my team make good use of Slack as a communications and info sharing tool. The abilities to hold instant conversations, and to archive and search older content, are both very useful for me and my team, particularly for our international offices in Argentina and Canada as we coordinate across different time zones.

I also love WorkFlowy. I would be a mess without it.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Focus on the core purpose of what you’re doing and hold no process or tool sacred. Is your approach really the most direct and efficient way to accomplish your goal? Or are you just doing what you’re doing “because we’ve always done it that way?”

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I’m currently reading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE. I typically alternate between fiction and non-fiction. I use my Kindle and a RSS reader for digital content.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received– your secret sauce?
It’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
I’m an admirer of Elon Musk.

MTS: Thank you Chaitanya! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? (What inspired you to be a part of a technology innovation company?)
I’m currently the CEO and Founder of TwentyThree, a video marketing automation platform. Having been a part of the tech scene in Copenhagen for over 20 years, I’ve become very passionate about building companies here and expanding the overall tech scene through communities like #CPHFTW.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of engagement with the online customers, how do you see video marketing platforms evolving in the years to come?
Second to in-person conversations, video is the strongest communication method we have. The main trend we’re seeing and driving is video integration being a core element of a company’s marketing stack. We’re seeing a trend in harnessing and supporting all the employees working and communicating with video.

MTS: How should video marketers leverage audience attention and conversion analytics tools to better the omnichannel experience?
Just as they do with all other communication elements. Video has long been a second level citizen of the marketing stack, relying on vanity metrics like views. With video marketing platforms, we’re seeing the change that is necessary to properly measure and analyze video content.

MTS: How should marketers plan the adoption of video-based content personalization for account-based marketing?
Test, test, test, and then test some more. We’re supporting a lot of customers in experimenting and validating before implementing a video ABM strategy.

MTS: What is the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their social selling decisions work with video marketing attribution?
Empowerment of their organizations to access and use the right updated video material.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Corti, an AI startup supporting 911 staff members to save lives.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
The TwentyThree marketing stack consists of Marketing Automation Software (HubSpot), that integrates with our video marketing automation platform for videos, live events, and webinars, along with data enrichment tools such as Clearbit and Zappier when we need to create an integration between the tools. We use Intercom for direct connection with our customers and prospects. We use Trello for project management and planning, Slack for internal communication and collaboration and Podio for documentation. For SEO and digital advertizing, we use Moz, Google Adwords, LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, AmpLive, Twitter and Facebook advertisement.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
We are trying to sell to marketers, and to stand out in today’s digital marketing noise you’ve got to be doing something smart and something that proves instant value for the prospect. Our marketing campaigns consist of being the best at what we sell, which is video marketing automation and management. If we post a blog post, it also features a video because that’s what we’re asking our customers to do. A standard digital campaign will have few steps: create strategy for the campaign, come with measurable goals and objectives, create the content and execute, promote and optimize.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
Keep focusing on the ultimate differentiator that is the heart and soul – technology is just empowering us with greater capabilities and data.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Collaborate.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
My laptop, old school.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Blocking days to actually create and think.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
It’s hard to pinpoint one specific piece of advice, but I do know I should’ve listened better along the way.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I’ll leave that for others to describe.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Rand Fishkin, the Founder of Moz

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

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to found an AI image recognition company?
For all we know, today we have stepped into an era of picture-reading. Most of the information is conveyed through pictures and videos. So the demand for image recognition, image analysis, and image understanding are growing much stronger than ever before. Some companies generally don’t have any AI engineering and technical capabilities, but they do have a strong demand for dealing with image data. Therefore, the prospect of image recognition is more than promising.

MTS: How does Tuputech’s Image recognition API work?
Firstly, the image data from the customer’s service is transferred to our API through cloud. We take this data and use our image recognition system to recognize the image. The output result will be returned to the customer through the cloud. Under normal circumstances, the whole procedure only takes 1 second and the system can deal with 50 images at a time.

MTS: How does Tuputech’s offering integrate with various DMPs/CMS?
The output results of image recognition involves scoring the image, whether the image is acceptable and whether it needs to be reviewed. Most of our customers will group the images based on the results we provide, and then do relative processing on their auditing platforms. For example, the pornographic content auditing platforms will delete the pornographic images and manually recheck the suspect images. Usually, images suspected of being pornographic account for less than 5%, which means that customers only have to recheck 5% of all the data. For live-broadcasting platforms, they will send the illegal-suspected items to a specific auditing position and the auditors can deal with those images. In this way, the efficiency of auditing can be improved.

MTS: Which sectors do Tuputech’s image recognition services cater to?
Tuputech excels in recognizing offensive images and videos, including pornography, violence, terrorism and spam. We can train our models based on the different requirements of our customers. In other words, we can solve the identification problems for people with different skin colors. Additionally, our image recognition system can not only identify the normal pornography but also child pornography.

MTS: How would you commercialize AI in a step-by step manner at Tuputech?
AI commercialization is a step-by-step process, instead of a one-stop process. Due to the specialty of AI technology, it can achieve a 70%-good model very quickly, but it is difficult to  improve the model to its 100% perfection. TupuTech provides costumers with quality-assured services while preserving the basic image-recognition. We are trying to enhance our accuracy, perfecting the whole recognition loop.

MTS: Would you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success)
Our targeted customer types include social media and websites for live-broadcasting, short videos and pictures sharing, etc. Except for adult sites, most of the websites do not allow pornographic content. What’s more, video-socializing websites are extremely popular today and because of their privacy, problems in management and supervision could happen from time to time. Tuputech’s service can be accessed via API as well as SDK. So far, SDK for pornography recognition is available and can be integrated in apps to moderate videros in real-time. The SDK can be embedded in the app and could supervise video conversations in real time. As for social video apps, we can also identify whether the user is juvenile or not, and prevent them from using this type of app.

MTS: As a business leader of an AI-centric firm, how do you see current AI systems evolving over the next five years?
AI will surely overturn different industries and re-deploy social resources. The influence of AI is unintended and at the same time all-round. From our country’s status, transformation of cities and the development of companies, to personal career, none of these is unaffected by AI. The whole world will change under the impact of AI and we all will face a new round of opportunities and challenges.

MTS: Thank you Mingqiang! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here? (What inspired you to start an Influence Marketing technology innovation company?)
I originally started WHOSAY 7 years ago as a way to create a marketplace for influential people and their content, all around the growth of social media use. There has always been a large amount of interest in celebrity, their images, and stories, and indirectly brands and fans had created a $1B+ media business through this in media companies like People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight.

The power of celebrity and interest in their content via social media has never been stronger but through many twists and turns, that business has now evolved into influencer marketing – not just a simple media business. WHOSAY strives to simplify the process for brands and agencies, by offering end-to-end services including everything from finding the right influencer, to content creation and distribution.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of content engagement with customers online, how do you see the automation and analytics market evolving by 2020?
There will be an increase in automation, but at the same time, that automation will lead to poorer ad performance. So in turn, the analytics and measurement will have to evolve to measure true performance. We are beginning to see this shift in the open demands big brands are making of social platforms around viewability and performance. Ultimately measurement will be able to link directly ad performance to sales – though we are a few years away from closing that last gap.

MTS: How should influencer content marketplaces extend the benefits of audience attention and conversion analytics to B2B customers?
In today’s mobile-first world, every single connection and transaction is one-to-one – whether you’re a dating service, selling to consumers, or selling to businesses. You need to take control of how people feel about you and your services via your communication and marketing. Influencer content will continue to play an important role in this, by helping to cut through the clutter on a small screen and by making better ads to ensure people understand and like your offering.

MTS: How can CMOs leverage video platforms as a scalable targeting and retargeting content monetization strategy for the B2B market?

It’s essential to have a long-term strategy where you take your video content and ads and target the kinds of customers your business is trying to reach today. Video allows you to retain and monitor which of those customers interact with your content the deepest, and then over time you will be able to turn them into paying customers by retargeting the most engaged with offers and calls to action. Video content is the trojan horse of digital marketing.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their predictive decisions work effectively?
The industry is still a few years away from being able to track marketing efforts to the last inch: purchase. But this is coming in the form of location tracking and couponing. CMOs will be very happy when they can confidently say their marketing spend worked.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Slice – online pizza discovery and delivery
Gladly – customer service reinvented

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We consider communication with our clients critical to our marketing efforts, so to that end, we built tools using a variety of vendors in the data and data visualization space that help track campaign performance and show those analytics to our clients in real time.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?
All of our campaigns are stand-out and are special! But recently we made a beautiful video for Volvo that I must say is one of our standout creative executions and is performing extremely well.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
If I hear AI mentioned again when it comes to influencer marketing, I’m going to punch myself in the face! There is a level to which technology can take you, but the ultimate optimization is up to humans. We’ve allowed tech to build all the targeting anyone will ever need and that’s great but we’ve forgotten that it’s now up to human creativity to format the experience, and then continue to re-evaluate and optimize marketing campaigns as they roll out. If you think you can have an idea based on data and then sit back and watch it do great you will be sorely disappointed – you have to react to what actually happens

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Constantly.

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Old School Software: Excel is still the most useful and productive piece of business software ever.

Newer Software: Whatsapp makes communication easier than ever for me and Salesforce makes sales monitoring far less stressful.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Hire excellent people.

MTS: What are you currently reading?
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Following my wife’s suggestion to marry her.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Larry Ellison. He’s only person in tech that really tells the truth when he’s asked questions because he really doesn’t care what people think. My kind of guy.

MTS: Thank you Steve! That was fun and hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.