Public Support Forums: An Underrated Marketing Tool

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November 30, 2017

Public Support Forums: An Underrated Marketing Tool

A decade ago, vendors didn’t sell public support forums because they assumed only an insane entrepreneur would want one. They were afraid prospective customers see the complaints and then run away. In my experience, public support forums are one of the most underrated “growth hacking” tools – if you use them wisely.

When I launched JotForm in 2006, we built our own public support system. During August 2017 alone, the forum had over 150,000 unique visitors. In this article, I’ll discuss how to create and manage this growth hack, and why it’s so valuable.

Content People Want

Marketers furiously create content people want. If you have a public support forum, you don’t have to worry about it since users choose the content. Today, JotForm has about 1 million support threads, 400,000 of which are public. This is how we create them:

Someone submits a question, problem, request, etc. The default setting for new posts is “public,” but visitors can make a thread private (and we sometimes privatize threads to protect personal information).
Often, people submit tickets with a title such as, “I have a question,” which isn’t very useful to other visitors. So, our support crew categorizes and titles every ticket. Maybe “I have a question” was really about a “Salesforce integration for JotForm.” We write a new title and add tags to make the pages SEO friendly. We do this because we want the support threads to appear in Google searches.
Public posts do not appear in the forum until we’ve responded. This is critical. While we respond quickly, but we don’t want stacks of unanswered questions visible to anyone. We address each query in the order received, regardless of whether a free, paid, or potential user submitted it.

In public forums, it’s tempting to censor negative content about your product or service. I’m a firm believer that it’s beneficial to be vulnerable instead.

Dropping the Veneer

Every tech product has flaws, yours and mine included. Being transparent about those flaws makes your company more attractive for several reasons.
First, if you’re embarrassed about a glitch, you’ll be motivated to fix it. The issues that hide on private threads don’t ignite us into action like good ‘ol public shame. Your forum will become a scrapbook of all the times you listened to users and found solutions to their problems.

Second, if everyone knows about your product’s weaknesses, new customers won’t be disappointed. Imagine an online dating profile that says, “My apartment is messy and the photos make me look handsomer than I am. But, I’m an honest guy, and I’ll treat you with respect.” The public support forum, like that hypothetical dating profile, makes you disappointment-proof. I can’t tell you if that actually works in online dating – I’m married with two kids.

Third, a tech company can’t anticipate everything that might go wrong. Sometimes people announce a bug with outrage, but that person is helping us debug and improve JotForm – for free! Since it’s public, other users have good odds of finding that thread before they alert our support crew. Thus, we save money and address new threads quicker. It’s like having a crowd-sourced fire alarm system.

Also Read: 5 Ways to Create a Compelling Landing Page

A Responsive Roadmap

I described how our public support process and vulnerability serve JotForm’s interests. Did you know public forums can “hack” growth by improving your product?

In 2012, five people started public threads asking if JotForm could support “form calculations.” They wanted forms to complete mathematical equations such as adding up living expenses or computing a sales commission. The threads built momentum. One commentator said, “’Calculated field’ is the sole feature that is keeping my 450-location retail chain from using JotForm as its forms platform.” We launched the popular Form Calculation Widget in 2014 thanks to the forum, which identified a blind spot.

Here’s another example:

Until 2015, the European Union’s Safe Harbor laws enabled US companies to store EU data in US datacenters. Then, a European court invalidated Safe Harbor, and customers sounded the alarm on our forum. In response, we introduced a setting that enables users to store EU data strictly on servers located in Germany. That action got us coverage in The Wall Street Journal.

There are countless examples like these, and to list them all would consume far too many words. The point is that the forum enables us to demonstrate that we care and make improvements that we know will resonate with users.

Social Proof

The public support forum is a growth hack that improves with age. The thousands of threads ultimately show the world that you have a big, active user base. That social proof is what people need before adopting a service that will affect their business and relationship with customers.

A decade ago, only an insane entrepreneur would have made customer support public. Today, only an insane entrepreneur wouldn’t take advantage of this massive growth-hacking opportunity.

Also Read: Effectively Incorporating AI Into Marketing and Sales

Don’t be the Guy Wearing the Fake Rolex: Support Ads.txt

By

John Peragine

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November 30, 2017

1

Knock-offs have long been the bane of the fashion industry. One need only visit Canal Street in Manhattan to see “solid gold watches” peddled on the sidewalk, and Versace imitation purses hawked on the cheap. No brand wants to see a copy of their designer label sold on the black market. And no buyer wants to discover that their Rolex is really a faux-lex.

Unfortunately, knock-offs aren’t confined to the fashion industry. The reselling of long-tail inventory under fraudulent terms has become common practice in the digital advertising world. With the video market flush, and profit margins high, a ‘black market’ of long-tail inventory has emerged, filled with posers hawking resold ads under misrepresented terms. This particularly shady crew of ad agencies, SSPs and exchanges pose as direct partners of brands, taking their second-tier inventory and reselling it as premier content: essentially sucking dollars from the ecosystem without adding any inherent value.

This is a problem for the entire supply chain. No publisher wants imitators siphoning off ad dollars by hawking their inventory, and no advertiser wants to waste money on a counterfeit; they want to reach real audiences and reward publishers directly for their original content. For buyers, resold inventory isn’t brand-safe and worse, can even cheapen brand value.

So how do we stop uncertified sellers and bootleggers from peddling counterfeit inventory and trying to pass it off as the real deal? How do we ensure publishers and their authorized partners are fairly compensated for their inventory, and that advertisers get what they pay for?

That’s where having a single, industry-wide source of truth would make it a lot harder for bad actors to fool advertisers with fake impressions and cheat publishers out of money.

Enter Ads.txt.

Aimed to help ad buyers avoid illegitimate sellers who arbitrage inventory and spoof domains, Ads.txt is a way for companies to list their legitimate partners. Essentially, it’s the ultimate whitelist: it shows all of a company’s direct relationships and certified sellers.

What’s more, is it puts power back into the hands of the content owners and distributors by giving them a simple and secure way to declare who is authorized to sell their inventory. No longer can indirect sellers pose as direct or official partners: they’re not on the list. Suddenly, a buyer knows whether they’re dealing with an authorized seller or the shady hawker guy on the corner in a trench coat. No name, no game.

Ads.txt is something the media supply chain should rally behind. The additional transparency it provides will give advertisers and programmatic buyers a means to validate authentic media sources in real-time and ensure media spend reaches legitimate and deserving publishers. It’s a no-B.S. way to detect if you’re buying real quality from a trusted partner or a cheap knockoff.

Supporting Ads.txt would also be a step towards digital’s shared goal of bringing transparency to what Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard called the “crappy media supply chain.” If embraced, Ads.txt can clean up the entire ecosystem by bringing back trust among legitimate partners and approved sources so we can more effectively do business.

Cleaning up digital video and ensuring ad dollars get in the right hands is especially important; if digital video is big, it’s only getting bigger. eMarketer expects US digital video ad spending will see double-digit growth annually through 2020. If we can prevent bad actors from siphoning off value, we all stand much to win. Even better, by supporting ads.txt, you’ll never be caught doing business with an imitator. Because ultimately, the only thing worse than a vendor selling the bootleg gold watches are the people who bought them and thought they were real.

TechBytes with Gregory Fulton, VP, Product, AdRoll

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 30, 2017

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Gregory Fulton
VP, Product, AdRoll

Personalization, performance, and precision are the three new P’s of marketing for B2B teams. Targeted advertising is not new to B2B industry, even as AdRoll announced the general availability of its AdRoll ABM for HubSpot and Marketo customers. AdRoll ABM is a full-funnel platform for marketers and sales departments to personalize ads with CRM data and see the impact directly inside their CRM dashboard. To understand the finer nuances of AdRoll’s ABM product, we spoke to Gregory Fulton, VP of Product at AdRoll.

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MTS: Tell us about your role at AdRoll and the team you handle?
Gregory Fulton: I have been AdRoll’s global head of product for the past seven years, but recently handed the reigns over to Aaron Bell, who moved from CEO to CPO. That freed me up to step into my new role as Head of Innovation, where I’m responsible for identifying and evaluating new areas of strategic investment. From there I then oversee the teams developing that next generation of products. It’s a really fun role — I get to learn a lot about new product categories, and then work with incredibly smart people across product, engineering, marketing, and sales to bring new ideas to market. The only downside is I now have one of those ridiculous titles you’d only find in Silicon Valley.

MTS: How does an ABM Advertising platform differ from those used for social selling and B2B commerce?
Gregory: Social selling, B2B commerce and ABM platforms all help to engage targeted prospects with relevant content, but ABM advertising platforms like AdRoll offer a more strategic approach for B2B marketers who are trying to scale growth and revenue. The typical B2B sales process is complex and the path to conversion can take months. It often involves online and offline touchpoints with people across siloed departments who are tracking leads with different tools — ABM helps to eliminate this. AdRoll’s ABM platform helps B2B companies eliminate the silos between their marketing and sales departments to target prospects with personalized ads. It’s the first ABM platform of its kind that is completely personalized and tailored for B2B companies. It enables them to easily target key roles at their named accounts and create highly-personalized ads. Marketers can also show the impact of their efforts harnessing both the power of their CRM and programmatic advertising.

MTS: How are modern marketing and remarketing platforms poised to better leverage attribution across all channels?
Gregory: With so many different devices and touch points, the customer journey is becoming increasingly complex. Modern marketers are using their data to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns, instead of just giving credit to where customers start or finish their journey. More and more, they are moving away from last-click and first-click and instead adopting custom attribution models, which helps them better understand every touch point.
However, there are still challenges. Often these custom models are still rule based, rather than data driven. I think until the market adopts data driven algorithmic attribution, they’ll always only have part of the story. One of my areas of focus is working with our attribution team to help marketers understand their options when it comes to attribution, and eventually drive them towards an algorithmic attribution solution that learns and evolves as their marketing mix evolves.

MTS: What are the key features of your performance engineering algorithm BidIQ?
Gregory: BidIQ is powered by artificial intelligence and built into all of our AdRoll products. It powers the 4 trillion performance data points that AdRoll logs every day. As a result, we’ve matched over 1.2 billion online profiles to data and devices in our IntentMap, one of the largest internet-based data sets available. Using our IntentMap data co-op, BidIQ learns how a company’s best customers behave online and finds more of them. It knows exactly what products to recommend and uses behavioral data to test the products that will drive tangible results. It can also automate budgets across campaigns and channels to reach a marketer’s goal and knows how to balance total ad spend to drive the highest ROI on a personalized budget.

MTS: How does it integrate with other marketing apps to ensure adherence to brand safety and transparency guidelines?
Gregory: AdRoll has many internal and external safeguards in place to reduce the likelihood of ads showing up in undesirable environments. In addition to a global blacklist of potential undesirable sites, we have a 48-hour takedown policy where we provide support to our clients that raise concerns. We negotiate direct deals with premium publishers to access high quality inventory, and use 3rd party ad verification partners to measure and continuously improve brand safety.

MTS: By integrating with high-level CRMs, how does AdRoll expand the reach of marketing campaigns? Is there any scope to include video content automation in these integrations?
Gregory: AdRoll’s integrations with platforms, like HubSpot and Marketo help sales and marketing better target their most valuable customers and speed up customer activations. Marketers can not only create campaigns targeting their key accounts, but can also clearly see AdRoll’s impact directly in their CRM to improve the handoff to sales. These integrations reveal new insights to access, enrich and target leads. Customers can also see the impact of their campaigns, with access to both platforms simultaneously.
We are constantly expanding our capabilities into new high performing formats – our recent product launch around native ads is an example of that. Video is obviously gaining a ton of momentum, and we’re currently exploring how best to leverage it in the context of performance marketing & ABM. But we’re hearing a lot of demand from the market for video, and our early tests are performing well – so it’s an opportunity that we’re excited about.

MTS: How do you see programmatic capabilities influencing ABM success?
Gregory: We have 10 years of experience in performance and programmatic advertising and over 16,000 B2B clients, so we are bringing a performance-first approach to ABM. This means we deliver personalized ABM campaigns at scale and help marketers to improve click-through rates by nearly double and improve cost-per-clicks by nearly 30 percent.^[1] ABM helps to close the traditional disconnect between sales and marketing departments. By combining the capabilities of our performance stack with robust integrations (such as HubSpot and Marketo), organizations are able to better identify and target leads who are similar to current high-value customers.

^[1] ¹ Q4 2015 -Q1 2017, AdRoll internal metrics.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Gregory.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Also Read: AdRoll Launches New ABM Advertising Platform to Increase ROI for B2B Marketers

Interview with James Gilbert, Head of Marketing, APAC, Hubspot

By

Rohan Jagan

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November 30, 2017

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[mnky_team name=”James Gilbert” position=” Head Of Marketing, APAC, Hubspot”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/jatgilbert” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/jatgilbert/”]

“One advantage we had while building our CRM was that we were able to look at what other CRMs had done before. What worked, what didn’t, and designs we thought would be effective and enjoyable for the end user.”

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role at HubSpot and how you got here?
I head the APAC marketing team. We’re split between an office in Sydney and one in Singapore. HubSpot is reasonably new to the region – we opened up the Sydney office about 3 years ago. It’s a really exciting time in HubSpot as we are growing fast in this region as Inbound Marketing has grown in popularity. In Marketing, it’s hard to not know about HubSpot as we practice what we preach. If you’re looking for help with Marketing or Sales, you are likely to have come across us. So when I saw HubSpot was expanding into new regions, I knew I had to apply. I was really happy where I was but the opportunity to come to HubSpot and learn from other great marketers was too compelling.

MTS: How can marketers in APAC benefit from HubSpot’s free CRM?
Well, the price is right! Hahah, half joking. I love our CRM – speaking to people that have had to use a CRM before sounds like an oxymoron. One advantage we had while building our CRM was that we were able to look at what other CRMs had done before. What worked, what didn’t, and designs we thought would be effective and enjoyable for the end user. As a company, it is something we are investing a ton in so you can be confident that it will continue to be enhanced over time.

MTS: Which of the following sectors– SMB, Mid-market or Enterprise– are you seeing the highest traction from and why?
We primarily see traction in the SMB and mid-market. Our software has been designed to help smaller companies gain efficiency by having all their tools in one place as it helps them compete with bigger companies.

MTS: Why do your biggest customers choose the HubSpot over other competing offerings?
They want to run all their marketing efforts through one platform that’s simple to use instead of a composite of other tools. There are great tools out there, I’ve used a lot of them in my job before HubSpot. However, there’s always one problem which was never properly solved – how do you integrate everything together? At some point, I had to remember 6 different logins and the ability to use which platform for different parts of the marketing funnel.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Two of my favorites are Canva and Safety Culture. I am friends with the founders of both and they have the kind of humble, authentic and raw ambition that I admire.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
HubSpot. Seriously, we use our own tool and I love it.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?
Last year, some members of the APAC team and I, made a free tool which helps you generate an email signature. This has since become HubSpot’s biggest source of new leads bringing over 100,000 new leads every month. Our target audience was people starting a new job people or people who were new in a role. Both of which could be relevant people for HubSpot to start speaking to.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
You embrace it, you don’t have a choice. I think this is the future of HubSpot. We’ve made some great moves with our predictive lead scores but we’ve got a lot more things coming. I remember making a lead score before AI. In hindsight, it is embarrassing. None of us should be trying to deduce what we think the right lead is when we can get a computer to do it. It’s a dream of any sales team to come in and filter their leads by the best predictive lead score. Not just on a per sales rep basis, but the same for any company as a whole. I’m so excited for AI — it will help marketing and sales leaders work leads in the most efficient manner, doing away any biases individuals might have.

Also Read: Dreamforce TechBytes with Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot

This Is How I Work

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

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Asana, Boomerang for Gmail, Evernote, Google Documents, Slack, Facebook Messenger

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I love using boomerang for my email, it makes sure I don’t let any emails slip through the cracks.

MTS: What are you currently reading?
Sapiens, Poor Charlie’s Almanack and then I save a ton of articles to pocket.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
I didn’t receive this personally but Charlie Munger has a saying. “The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want” and another I like is “you want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.”

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I think my key strength is curiosity and subsequently asking questions. It comes in waves but I love exploring new ideas and processes.

MTS: Tag the one person, from the Martech sector, whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
It might be a stretch to say he is in the Martech section but I would read every interview Ken Lerer gives, he seems to have the best understanding of timing his entry and exits of business.

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

Also Read: HubSpot Acquires Motion AI, One of the Top Visual Chatbot Builders

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About James” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80ed6c6e-3c88″]

James is the Director of Marketing for APAC. He leads the marketing teams in sales enablement and demand generation. He has experience in both B2B and B2C companies from startups to large size companies with an in-depth understanding of how to scale their businesses. His passion in numbers helps him to come up with insights that will help drive a business forward.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Hubspot” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80ed6c6e-3c88″]

HubSpot is the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform. Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, 31,000+ customers in more than 90 countries use HubSpot’s software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. HubSpot is a global company with offices in Cambridge, MA; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; Berlin, Germany; and Portsmouth, NH. HubSpot has been recognized by Inc., Forbes, and Deloitte as one of the world’s fastest-growing companies. HubSpot’s software has helped companies worldwide change how they market and sell, while our innovative approach to company culture has helped redefine transparency and autonomy in the modern workplace.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmartechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com%2Fcategory%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Why Brands Need to Adopt a Vertical Mindset

By

Josh Ong

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November 29, 2017

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Why Brands Need to Adopt a Vertical Mindset

Of late, a new trend has been sweeping the Internet – and no, it’s not the next iteration of the fidget spinner. Everybody’s doing it, from that guy standing on the corner with his coffee in hand to news organizations such as the New York Times and National Geographic.

I’m talking, of course, about the vertical video, the stuff that Snapchat videos and Instagram stories are made of, and the format that is increasingly taking precedence over the long-established landscape mode.

In 2010, only 5% of viewing time on any device was spent in vertical mode; by 2015, people were spending 29% of their total viewing time in vertical view. It’s estimated that people now hold their phones vertically 94% of the time, which has had a serious impact on the way content is shown and produced for mobile consumption. Mobile phone users still switch to landscape mode for specialized tasks like games and extended video watching, but the vast majority of smartphone time is spent in vertical.

Vertical video is now the format de rigueur for most social media platforms. Facebook has made a push for vertical on all of its platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and its own Messenger app. Snapchat has, of course, been pioneering vertical video since its inception, which in turn has forced content creators and advertisers to come up with unique ways to use the format.

The fact that companies like Apple, Snap, and Facebook are now trying to get into the television business has also created new opportunities for advertisers on those platforms. Those brands that wish to advertise on those shows will have to play by company rules – which in Snap’s case means ads that are solely in vertical mode. But the risk comes with a considerable reward: according to Snapchat, vertical video ads have 9 times as many views from beginning to end than horizontal video ads do. Other studies show similarly high completion rates, with one study finding that Snapchat users will watch a brand’s story from start to finish 88% of the time, and another platform finding an average completion rate of 89% for their videos.

But vertical video is not just a useful tool for advertising on social media. It’s also immensely useful for native in-app advertising, because it causes minimal disruption to a user’s experience. After all, which ad would you be more receptive to: the one that requires you to turn your phone in order to see it properly, or the one that you can watch without any extraneous movement or head-tilting? Moreover, which ad is more likely to elicit positive sentiment? Naturally, the one that mimics the existing orientation most closely.

This goes to show that having a vertical mindset when it comes to video is not just essential for social media platforms, it’s also a must when thinking about how to advertise on mobile in general. The chances of a mobile user paying attention to an ad that flashes over their browser in landscape is fairly minimal – unless they’re expressing outrage, annoyance, or general dissatisfaction with the method of delivery.

However, brands should not merely reformat the horizontal content they already have and repurpose it for vertical usage. Instead, brands must be willing to embrace vertical formats wholeheartedly, limitations and all, and create content specifically for vertical use. It might be more complicated and expensive in the short term, as creative directors and content creators test out the positive aspects and drawbacks of shooting vertically, but the fact is, no one wants to see an ad that they’ve already seen a million times before on television resized to fit a phone screen. The best content for each advertising format is conceived specifically with that format in mind.

The fact that market research suggests that people keep their phones in portrait mode 94% of the time is staggering, considering the popularity of platforms such as YouTube that privilege horizontal video. This means that vertical videos have a natural advantage compared to their landscape brethren, which marketers would do well to pick up on.

The biggest argument in favor of vertical video is, very simply, that people are already filming, watching, and sharing videos in that format. Furthermore, audiences are rewarding the ads that offer the least amount of disruption to their experience – in other words, ads that show an understanding of the platform they are presented on, and don’t disturb a viewer’s reading (or scrolling, or playing) experience. Like it or not, the future is vertical, and brands have to equip themselves to deal with this new reality.

Recommended Read: Mobile Video is a Challenge for Mobile Marketers Despite its Dynamic Growth, says YouAppi Report

Is AI-Enabled ‘Marketing to Things’ the Future?

By

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh

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November 29, 2017

0

Is AI-Enabled "Marketing to Things", the Future?

In a connected world where things are linked to other things and people, there are multiple touchpoints to manage. To a marketer, this means – they have to manage these touchpoints, which are invariably expected to increase in the days to come.

With the way AI is proliferating, it is time for us to rethink who our customer is and explore the concept of Marketing to Things! Is it going to be a human selling to other humans by creating better experiences with hyper-personalization, contextual messaging and more? Or are we going to see a mix of selling to humans as well as to machines? Though the question seems silly now, let’s look at it more closely to fathom the magnitude of Marketing to Things.

Is It Time to Start Marketing to Things?

The fundamental pain-point for marketing professionals today is the overload of messages reaching the targeted prospect, thus becoming increasingly difficult to break through the clutter.

Though the Martech landscape today comprises AI tools such as Fiind Smart Signals, to help you break the clutter by identifying signals indicating prospect’s intent and fit to your products & services, the key question is how much are we leveraging it?

How about marketing directly to machines such as your CRM, ERP than the people championing it? Humans can consume only so much information on a given day!

Empowering machines with AI will make them consume the marketed information, compare the information across its signal library and make an informed decision in minutes. For example, it can compare the price and service offered across the internet landscape and make an unbiased decision on vendor-selection.

Another instance could be the ability to help your supply chain choose the best hub for aggregation and the best combination of logistics to cut costs and more.

Also Read: Datalog.ai Joins the OpenPOWER Foundation and Brings the MyPolly Conversational AI Platform to Enterprises

AI + Connected World: Increase in Marketing Opportunities

Marketing opportunities in itself are likely to increase almost instantly, in such a connected scenario. Once AI begins to balance factors for decision making, the ultimate opportunity for marketers and data science experts would be to understand the algorithms used to calculate & compare and then offer bundles or pitches that suit the machine.

In other words, the most basic qualification of AI vendors enabling marketers would be the ability to crack the intent data.

Now, if that’s not super-relevant and timely marketing, what is? But it all depends on getting the basics intact.

Here are a few key factors to be addressed–

Data accessibility and integration
The quality of output is directly proportional to the quality of input. Make sure that data is integrated across internal & external touch points and is consolidated in a centralized data lake.

Data enrichment
Sanctity of data is paramount, especially with customer data. With data decay being a natural phenomenon, data enrichment needs to be a continuous exercise. Expect the need for data enrichment to increase as the connected world takes off.

Need for closed-loop learning
In a new Marketing to Things environment, with such heterogeneous data, results cannot be 90% and above from Day One. AI algorithms need closed-loop learning, especially to accelerate and be effective at the fascinating intersection of technology and humanity.

It’s Not the Fittest That Survives, but the Most Adaptive

Business problems get increasingly complex and it takes enormous creativity to frame that problem quantitatively, choose variables that approximate the conditions you want to model, stage the data for analysis, and evaluate. Ones that create and adapt their models to changing conditions, yet ensuring sanctity of data, will have the upper hand.

Evaluate AI vendors and their capabilities based on their adaptability. Check if they enable and simplify your life as a Marketer. Ensure that they integrate with your existing ecosystem, thus making it possible to leverage the existing data. Are they agile? Are their explanations, case studies and promises realistic?

Maybe, it’s time to have a Chief AI Officer!

Interview with Jeremy Fain, CEO, Cognitiv

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 29, 2017

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[mnky_team name=”Jeremy Fain” position=” CEO, Cognitiv”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/teamcognitiv” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/fainjeremy/”]

“The biggest challenge for a CMO to create a comprehensive marketing solution is the walled-garden social platforms themselves. “

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role at Cognitiv and how you got there. What inspired you to start a deep-learning company?
I am the CEO and Co-Founder at Cognitiv. My partners and I are lucky to have strengths in mutually exclusive areas that make us a very effective team. We’ve also been close friends since we were 10. We all started as computer science guys in middle and high school but I went off and wanted to do the business side of technology. Now, decades later, we have mutually exclusive specialties. I handle the business side of the company, Marc Hudacsko is our CTO, and Aaron Andalman got his PhD from MIT in Neuroscience and is therefore our Chief Science Officer. We started Cognitiv because we had wanted to start a company together since high school. Our lives went in separate directions in college but two years ago we came back together and all of us were at the right place, to quit what we were doing, and start this Deep Learning company.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of data available to marketers, how do you see AI evolving by 2020?
Data is only getting richer and more interesting. Although the regulation of data continues to evolve, the mobile device along with the IP-addressable outdoor and television/OTT spaces is making a centralized AI for marketing much more realistic. That’s one of the many reasons we started Cognitiv. The ability to more fully describe and understand a consumer’s behavior is more complete than ever before, and that kind of data will make AI marketing tools even more effective over the next few years.

MTS: How should B2B marketers leverage “neural networks” to improve the omnichannel experience with greater authority?
Marketers, B2B or otherwise, can use neural networks to solve any discrete problem where there is a lot of data and the answer needs to be the better prediction of outcomes. The challenge some B2B marketers have is the large amounts of data required. Data strategy has been the key to success over the past decade for B2B marketing, and neural networks make that even more important now. The more data a B2B marketer can gather on its customers, its target audiences, and its omnichannel experience, the easier it will be to apply neural networks to any of the challenges they have along the entire path to conversion and the customer lifecycle. Cognitiv then takes that data, makes it easy for neural networks to consume, and pushes it through our NeuralMind platform, thus creating a neural network algorithm that is unique and specific to the problem the marketer is trying to solve.

MTS: How is deep learning different from machine learning? How does it benefit marketers?
Deep learning is defined as a subset of machine learning, but it is a big paradigm shift in the discipline. Before Deep Learning, machines were not very good at approximating human-like insight and understanding. It is easy to see how powerful and ground-breaking Deep Learning has been to the world. Before Deep Learning, phones did not understand your voice, cars could not drive themselves, and Facebook could not auto-tag your pictures. Every day, a new innovation is now being released, powered by Deep Learning, that is making advancements in computer-led capabilities that were only science fiction a few years ago. We are entering an age of technology-enabled solutions that will drive efficiency throughout business, and every-day life, speed-up scientific discovery, and automate many manual tasks.

MTS: How do you see recent regulations in data privacy laws impacting personalized customer experiences?
Protection of consumers privacy is important to all of us. Consumers should control what business and government know about them. However, personalized customer experiences will still be an important part of everyday life as long as they offer, at a minimum, fair value exchange. A personalized customer experience at Disney World based on what you have done during your visit, Siri or Alexa learning what you like and giving you more of that, or even enabling advertising on your favorite subscription-less site will continue to be enabled by the consumer because they offer an important benefit that enriches their lives.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their customer data analytics work effectively and accurately?
Data centralization.

There have been a lot of discussions about data portability. That is important because marketers’ data sits all over the place right now. But the data has to be brought back to a central place in order to take full advantage of Deep Learning’s power. A complete view of customers’ experiences with a marketer’s site, offline experiences, CRM, advertising, etc, will be necessary for marketers to compete and be successful now. Most marketers do not centralize their data. We see this as a big opportunity for tech solution providers right now.

MTS: With growing noise across the offline, online, the web and social media, how does Cognitiv democratize disparate and complex data sets to build a singular definition of a customer?
Right now, the easiest way for us to do this is by either placing pixels in the appropriate places on the marketer’s site(s) or using a universal ID system like Liveramp’s IdentityLink. This is not really a technical problem right now, though. The bigger problem is the accuracy of the data being made available.

MTS: What is the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their social selling decisions work with accurate marketing attribution?
The biggest challenge for a CMO to create a comprehensive marketing solution is the walled-garden social platforms themselves. Without the freedom to find possible consumers and then understand their interactions with your brand at a very discrete, detailed level, those consumer interactions will remain separated from a shared data strategy. Those interactions will not be centrally enabled through the CMO’s AI solutions.

MTS: What startups are you watching/keen on right now?
Beyond marketing AI startups, I mostly keep track of augmented reality and blockchain startups. Augmented reality because I see that as the next huge evolution of the way our society integrates and works with technology. Blockchain because everyone else thinks it’s going to change the world.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? (Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?)
Our Deep Learning products have enabled our client marketers to take their campaign goals to the next level. A financial services company wanted to convert more consumers, able to deposit large amounts upon opening an account.

We worked with them to get the right 1^st party data from their CRM system, train a neural network to look for more of those people, and then began managing the media they bought through programmatic channels.

By dynamically valuing every impression based on the user, site, time of day, type of device, and everything else we knew about the target users and the new prospects, Cognitiv drove 20X return on ad spend for them as compared to all other campaign partners. Deep Learning was able to find the right people with less waste, enabling the client to find more of those people with the same amount of money.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
Again, it’s all about data. Today’s marketer needs to use all the data points available to them. All the data is useful to neural networks if you have a company like Cognitiv to translate it for you. It will be many years before most marketers have Deep Learning data scientists working for them, so putting together a centralized data set is the most important task. Then partnering with the right Deep Learning company will give them all the advantages of AI without any of the heavy lifting.

This Is How I Work

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

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
iPhone, Google Docs & Drive, PC (not Mac) laptop, Whatsapp, Kindle.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Block off time in the calendar on a daily basis and wait until then to get all the small tasks that build up done at once.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour and The Last Good Man by Linda Nagata. History and Science Fiction. That’s about all I read as books go. I want to learn from the past and dream about the future. I read everything on the Kindle app on my iPhone. I can read anywhere at any time with it.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Always finish what you start.

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?
I think to be successful in business you have to listen to your gut. Often, you have to make a decision quickly with less than complete information, and your instinct is all you have. If your gut is right much more than it is wrong, you are in the right business, doing the right thing, and you will be successful. If it’s wrong more than it’s right, unfortunately, you should probably find something else to do.

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read.
Sabio Mobile’s CEO, Aziz Rahim

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Jeremy” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80ed”]

Experienced Interactive Advertising leader with specialization in:

digital marketing strategy
audience and data-driven solutions
ad technology, innovation, and marketplace
interactive advertising policy
real-time bidding (RTB), programmatic buying, exchanges

Core Expertise: Revenue leadership, digital marketing and media strategy; interactive advertising revenue operations and policy; interactive product management and creation; advanced inventory monetization strategy

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Cognitiv” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e51b0-80ed”]

Cognitive Cognitiv builds custom programmatic buying algorithms using the latest advances in Deep Learning. Our platform enables DSPs to offer custom algorithms to all of their clients, advertisers to build custom algorithms for all of their brands and ROI-types, and agencies to offer more sophisticated targeting solutions to its programmatic clients.

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[mnky_heading title=”MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmartechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com%2Fcategory%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

TechBytes with Jay Stocki, SVP, Data and Product, Experian

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 29, 2017

0

Jay Stocki
SVP, Data and Product, Experian

A majority of online shoppers consider consistency as a very important aspect of their buying experience. Marketers that offer a personalized shopping experience create a noticeable influence on buyers who prefer consistent branding along the journey. Now, customer data is critical to driving consistent branding across all marketing and advertising channels. To understand how marketers should use data to enhance customer experience and improve engagement, we spoke to Jay Stocki, Senior Vice President, Data and Product Strategy of Targeting, Experian.

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MTS: Tell us about your role and the team you handle?
Jay Stocki: My role is to lead the product and data strategy team for Experian’s Marketing Services division. We focus on helping marketers utilize our data to help better understand their customers, and how to deliver the right marketing message, to the right person, at the right time. Our ConsumerView database is the leading third-party data source in the market today.

MTS: How do you use data to enhance the customer experience and improve omnichannel engagement?
Jay: The customer must be at the heart of every marketing strategy. To successfully acquire new customers, or keep a solid relationship with existing ones, a marketer needs to create and deliver personalized messages that center on and resonate with the customer. At Experian, our comprehensive ConsumerView database underpins our entire approach to help brands better connect with their customers. Marketers use our data in four major ways. The first use of our data is to determine who the right customers are to reach. The second use is around channel: marketers can use our data to gain insight into channels and devices customers are most likely to use when engaging with brands. Third, our data also helps marketers determine what messages will resonate best with customers. The final use of our data is for attribution and measurement, so marketers can make adjustments to campaigns and optimize content throughout their omnichannel strategies.

MTS: How does Experian uncover the potential of social media marketing platforms to deliver better and more relevant messages to audiences?
Jay: All good marketers today have realized having more quality customer data is a good thing. Most marketers are in the process of building the tools to manage their first-party CRM data and working with companies, like Experian for their third-party data. The missing piece of the puzzle is consumer-generated data: What consumers are saying and doing naturally? How do you understand the unprompted interactions that are occurring on social media? How do you understand a user’s authentic interests, attitudes, and experiences with a brand? Social media is the key. We have four ways to help marketers: Social Media Models helps predict who to target. Social Media Analysis to gain insight on any social media audience. Social Media Linkage to help connect existing data to social media, and Social Media Data Appends to help enrich first-party data with follower information and other custom social data.

MTS: At Experian, how do you utilize AI/ML technologies to work through unstructured sets of customer data?
Jay: We examine and leverage unstructured data to generate business insights in a variety of ways – but when we apply machine learning, we’re able to uncover deep insight. We have a research and development group, called the Experian DataLabs, where we use breakthrough experiments to create a better tomorrow for our clients and customers – constantly testing new data sets and new tools for insights. In fact, we work with many major brands to give them a ‘sandbox’ where we can help them employ the latest ML/AI techniques to improve their understanding of what is possible with their data.

MTS: Given the rate of MarTech and SalesTech adoption, how do you see businesses lacking a digital footprint for product reviews and customer experience faring beyond 2020?
Jay: If you aren’t maximizing your ability to get customer feedback data, you will be supplanted by somebody who does.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Jay.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Six #GivingTuesday Email Examples That Caught Our Eyes

By

McKenzie Gregory

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November 29, 2017

0

Is your brand ready for #GivingTuesday?

Celebrated on the day after Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season, when many focus on their holiday and end-of-year giving. And with all the attention it generates, it’s a great way to build awareness, not to mention bring in much-needed donations.

While many nonprofits focus primarily on social campaigns for the big event, it’s important for email audiences to get involved in the action too in order to get the word out and reach even more potential donors.

Here are a few of the best #GivingTuesday email examples we’ve seen over the past few years. Marketers, keep these examples in mind.

Cheekwood Estate & Gardens

With a beautiful, mobile-optimized template and a clear call to action, the path to purchase couldn’t be more clear in this email from Cheekwood Estate & Gardens. Plus, the team smartly tied their offering to the holidays, showing subscribers that the membership was both a worthy donation and a easy gift idea for friends and family members.

Oxford American

While we don’t normally advocate for this much copy in an email, a personal letter feels just right for the occasion. And since it’s Oxford American, they know their subscribers are readers. Lay out your goals and big accomplishments from the past year to subscribers and invite them to give back with a note from your CEO, publisher, or another notable figurehead.

Dismas, Inc.

Like this Dismas example, use email leading up to the big day (and not just on it) to help drum up excitement. Better yet, show your subscribers the potential impact of their gifts with an emotion-packed video and quick explanation of how you plan to use their donations in 2018. After all, according to Wistia, including video in your email can boost your click rates by as much as 300%.

Also Read: The Fight Against Fraud: Are You Throwing Good Traffic Out with the Bad?

The Hermitage

People want to feel that their contribution is truly making a difference. Tie different donation amounts to different elements of your organization – “X dollars for X amount of people we’ve helped” or “X dollars for the number of years we’ve been around,” for example – to make their gift feel more tangible and connected to the organization’s unique identity.

Nashville Humane Association

The right images can remind an audience what they love about an organization (like pictures of pets in the below example). Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text, so forward-thinking design plays a crucial role in forming brand impressions that last with today’s consumers.

OrderUp

#GivingTuesday isn’t just for nonprofits. If you work for a publisher or even a retail brand, encourage your audience to do some good by tying a special promotion to the day’s events. A “buy one, we’ll give one” model works well, or you can even offer to donate a certain amount of money to a great cause every time a subscriber performs an action, like sharing your email or following your organization on social. Be creative!

Also Read: Why the Tug-of-War Will Continue in 2018 Social Marketing

Understanding Customer Sentiment at Scale: The Secret to Digital Maturity

By

Ben Harris

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November 28, 2017

0

Understanding Customer Sentiment at Scale: The Secret to Digital Maturity

Today’s businesses no longer compete on product, price and advertising space alone. The experience they provide to customers has become a leading differentiator, and deterrent, in purchase decisions.

Poor customer experiences cost U.S. businesses $62 billion in 2016, up $20 billion from 2013. In an effort to reduce lost revenue, Gartner predicts that 50 percent of product investment projects in 2018 will be redirected to customer experience innovations.

Now that business is often conducted online, optimizing websites and apps around customer insights is a key strategy for companies looking to get ahead of their competitors by offering an optimal experience.

Doing so successfully depends on two things. The first is gaining deeper visibility into digital customer experiences (i.e., understanding how customers behave and feel). The second is the ability to action these insights throughout the organization (i.e., being agile with improvements).

Taken together, these two things represent a brand’s digital experience maturity. From what we’ve seen, digital maturity spans five maturity phases, from companies that have minimal visibility into digital experiences and siloed departments, to those with maximum visibility and total business alignment. These phases feed off each other. The more visibility brands get into customers’ digital experiences, the more value they can see and the more they align their business around those insights.

Want a more mature digital experience? Focus on identifying and improving customer sentiment. As brands obtain a deeper understanding of how customers feel, the more agile they can be with improvements.

A Window Into Customer Sentiment

According to Decibel’s recent survey, a whopping 46 percent of companies still reside in Phase 0 or 1 of digital experience maturity. In these phases, companies are focused on descriptive reporting and are only able to determine the ‘what’ of users’ digital behavior and website performance. Those businesses still use shallow metrics like page views, bounce rate and visit duration to decipher customer behavior, missing the deeper insight gained from modern metrics that reveal customer sentiment, including frustration, confusion, and engagement.

In order to attain a higher level of digital experience maturity, brands must reach a point of understanding and empathy around customer experiences. This is something that quantitative data on user behavior simply cannot provide. The key is to unpack qualitative data about digital experience. These value-add insights about user behavior can take the form of direct customer feedback, video replays of user sessions, user testing and anything else that involves deep, direct insights into customer sentiment and motivation.

By watching replays of actual user sessions and understanding digital body language, brands gain unprecedented visibility into how users feel throughout the digital experience.

As LexisNexis’ Global Head of Web Optimization, Mark Fassbender, says: “nothing makes stakeholders take notice like sending them videos of struggling and unhappy users.”

Uncover and Fix User Frustration

Measuring behaviors and metrics that represent customer sentiment, digital teams can establish a baseline of normal behavior across their website and app, thus enabling them to uncover trends in user behavior and surface opportunities for improving customer experiences.

For instance, this level of visibility allowed the LexisNexis team to follow an individual’s journey to determine exactly what in their session caused a positive or negative experience. Using advanced digital experience analysis, LexisNexis dug deep into its customer experience to determine why a newly launched website wasn’t meeting traffic goals. Analysis from the digital business team uncovered instances of user frustration across the website, detecting areas where complex messaging and placement of the checkout button turned away potential customers. Following this analysis, LexisNexis streamlined messaging and relocated checkout buttons – contributing to impressive growth across the website with conversion rates up 77 percent year over year.

By making it a priority to zero in on digital user behavior, brands have access to direct, timely insights into how customers really feel without having to ask them a single question. Once able to unpack customer behavior and sentiment, brands can fill critical gaps in knowledge to answer the ever-important ‘why is this happening?’ to follow the ‘what is happening?’ questions. As brands race to optimize customer experience, where does your company stand on the digital experience maturity curve?

TechBytes with Guillaume Clement, Chief Product Officer, Dailymotion

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 28, 2017

0

Guillaume Clement
Chief Product Officer, Dailymotion

By the end of 2017, 2.6 billion social network users will have been exposed to an average of 32 videos. By 2020, mobile video will generate more than 75% of mobile data traffic by 2021. However, video marketing and advertising technologies haven’t evolved much in the last two years, even as programmatic and intelligent content discovery platforms continue to grow at scale. Increasingly stringent brand safety and transparency standards to protect advertiser interests could disrupt the video content experience. To understand how brands should build a video-focused mobile-first business landscape, we spoke to Guillaume Clement, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Dailymotion.

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MTS: Tell us about your role at Dailymotion and the team you handle.
Guillaume Clement: I lead the product and technology realms of the business as a hybrid Chief Product & Technology Officer. At our company these two units reside within the same umbrella, since our player technology is what powers our broader video discovery platform. Dailymotion is a technology company first and foremost, and that’s a great competitive advantage for us as compared to other video destinations.

Specifically, my global team includes engineers, product managers, and product marketers spanning all aspects of product: from our best-in-class player technology, to streaming and hosting tools and services, which include livestreaming and 360-degree video.

MTS: How have premium video discovery platforms evolved in the last two years?
Guillaume: The short answer is: not much, which is why we’ve revamped our entire user experience and created the best, most premium environment for discerning entertainment-seekers who are looking for a place to surface new content daily from the professional storytellers they love.

While user-generated videos are certainly a staple on the internet, our hypothesis is that affluent 25 to 49-year-olds prefer to consume content from publishers and brands they trust, and they do not want to wade through a stream of amateur videos to get these kinds of experiences. Whereas younger consumers are more conditioned to (and frankly, have more time to) curate their own experiences, consumers 25 and older are looking for curated, personalized content experiences from trusted publishers—and that’s what we’re providing.

Also Read: Why Video is Your Safest Platform to Increase B2B Sales Opportunities

MTS: In an era of brand safety and ad fraud, how should video sharing platforms instill trust among publishers and networks?
Guillaume: Brand safety is on the mind of nearly every marketer and was perhaps the biggest buzzword among brands and advertisers in 2017. Our movements with regard to brand safety have been proactive, rather than reactive, and we have been sowing the seeds of our new experience long before advertisers began to put pressure on the major platforms.

Our strategic focus on trusted content from premium publishers (instead of user-generated content) means that brand advertising is placed within a safe and premium ecosystem, alongside some of the best storytellers on the web. It’s an equation that benefits all parties involved: advertisers, publishers, and users.

MTS: How does Dailymotion intend to maximize video consumption and drive sustained engagement?
Guillaume: We spent a long time on the product side thinking how we could create an optimal experience for our core target. The first big consideration was crafting a personalized experience that delivers on the unique tastes and interests of our individual users. This means providing suggested content based on what you’ve demonstrated as your interests, and also personalized methods for saving and organizing your videos within a library.

A second consideration was discovery, and as you’ll see in the new app, our experience is tailored to lean-back experiences—those daily instances in which you’re seeking entertainment or information from trusted sources. Within our new “Explore” tab, users can browse trending topics and channels via an endless feed of videos from great publishers like VICE, CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, Cheddar, and Genius among others.

Also Read: 5 Ways to Disrupt Video Marketing in 2017

MTS: How do you prepare for a mobile-first business landscape?
Guillaume: We’ve invested heavily in creating a mobile app that delivers on consumers’ expectations when it comes to video content. The app features an intuitive UI that prioritizes what we call “lean back,” content experiences—that is, instances where viewers are seeking entertainment in a nonspecific fashion, rather than searching for a single piece of content.

For example, within the new app, a personalized “For You” tab pairs trusted content that’s relevant to a user’s unique tastes, and multiple explore features that make it easy to discover content that’s trending in the world around them. We’ve also created a library in which users can organize their favorite pieces of content, and even bookmark them to watch offline.

MTS: How deep is Dailymotion into Artificial Intelligence (AI)/ Would you tell us more about your AI roadmap?
Guillaume: Artificial intelligence is certainly top of mind at Dailymotion, and we have teams exploring future uses cases for how we can leverage data to create even better consumer experiences on our platform. One way that we’re already doing this is through our algorithmic approach to personalization. Our users each engage in an onboarding process designed to learn their unique tastes and interests, and the more they use our platform (and the more content they engage with), the better we’re able to help them discover the content they love.

AI will also continue to be exceptionally powerful when it comes to ensuring creators’ rights are respected in our platform. We employ multiple tools and technologies to enforce our best in class standards for content. Once an issue is reported, we have the resources in place to remove all associated assets within two hours.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Guillaume.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Interview with Jeff Sammak, President, Strata Company

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 28, 2017

0

[mnky_team name=”Jeff Sammak” position=” President, Strata Company”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/jeffsammak” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsammak/”]

“Your company needs to identify gaps in different data points and choose the best solution for its needs. When choosing a new solution or platform, it’s important to ask yourself if it’s going to meet all requirements and if it will integrate with existing systems.”

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of a technology innovation company?
As Strata has continued to evolve, so has my role. I see myself less consumed with day to day operations and more focused on long term strategies to grow and improve the business. At the same time, my role is transitioning towards mentor/consultant of our future leadership with less emphasis, in my mind, of being “the” leader.

As far as technology goes, I have long perceived technology as being ahead of most companies’ capacity to fully adopt and utilize, so that gap has always interested me as an opportunity. We first really exploited that gap in developing some custom software to resolve a challenge big Pharma had. That experience prompted us to start exploring custom software solutions to resolve process and execution bottlenecks faced by many large companies. Our particular focus is in the marketing and communications space, but recently we are finding opportunities to go beyond that and into the business management space.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of engagement with online customers, how do you see automation technologies driving ROI for CMOs?
Strata Company’s automation technologies are less focused on engaging online customers and more focused on streamlining business processes for our clients. In terms of our software, the return is on the technology investment because our solutions automate internal workflows, allowing employees to spend less time fulfilling tasks and managing back-and-forth communications, and more time on initiatives that drive revenue for their organization.

MTS: How should marketers adapt to the evolving data asset management and programmatic capabilities to scale the B2B landscape?
Technology takes center stage here. It’s important to strategically build your marketing technology stack so that you have seamless integration of systems that can transfer and standardize data. Your company needs to identify gaps in different data points and choose the best solution for its needs. When choosing a new solution or platform, it’s important to ask yourself if it’s going to meet all requirements and if it will integrate with existing systems. Having well-managed, user-friendly and accessible systems in your stack will serve as a foundation for you to better manage and scale your businesses.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their customer data work effectively and accurately for workflow automation?
It often comes down to having standards and processes in place and getting everyone who has direct as well as indirect customer interaction (advertising, sales, call centers, etc.) on the same page. It’s about enabling them to identify data that is available but not currently being captured or properly utilized. It also means showing them how to effectively manage and collect that data or putting systems in place that automate all elements of data collection and transfer, taking the burden off employees and eliminating the margin for error that is higher when humans are too integral a part of the process.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2018?

Marketing automation – HubSpot
Project management tools
- Proprietary in-house system for managing development projects and cloud-based applications
- Basecamp for internal collaboration with external team members
CMS – WordPress
CRM – Salesforce
Online reporting of client marketing campaigns – Proprietary system for response tracking and analytics

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign? Who was your target audience and how did you measure success?
We worked with a leading industry media partner to create a custom eBook that provided executive insights, best practices and specific use cases that would educate our target audience about the importance of “cleaning house” from an internal operations perspective – which directly impacts a company’s ability to improve the customer experience and gain competitive advantage. We targeted marketing and communications executives at mid-sized through enterprise businesses. We leveraged multiple channels and touchpoints, utilizing social media, email, landing pages, media partner advertising and social advertising. We measured success by the number of “quality” downloads and form conversions, as well a the progression of leads through the pipeline.

MTS: How do you prepare for an artificial intelligence-centric world as a marketing leader?
The potential application of AI in marketing and communications is diverse and nearly limitless, however I believe we are far away from the point of true AI application in our field. We’ve been in business a long time. I’ve seen the cycle from concept to buzzword to the hype stage to where concept sometimes becomes reality and finally, wide scale adoption. It’s generally a long cycle. With AI, the progress will be incremental. I think it is important to be skeptical of loose marketing talk while at the same time staying on the “true” path to the potential of AI. In other words, separate the contenders from the pretenders and understand the difference between what true AI is and the volume of noise we are going to hear.

This Is How I Work

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

MTS: What apps/software/tools can you not live without?
I’m not much of a tool guy, and as a user, I’m not in the trenches. I stick to the basics in my personal use of technology but I’m often thinking about our next process automation, for me those are the most important apps/software.

MTS: What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
Skim, it will sometimes get you into a bit of trouble, but you cover a lot more ground

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)
I flit. Whatever comes across my view from any channel I briefly look at and kind of pass/fail. What I pass these days, I typically direct to others in the organization for a closer look and analysis, as they see fit.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received – your secret sauce?
The specifics of the best advice I ever received are probably a bit too long and obscure to relate here, but in essence it was about resource utilization. Running an organization is about getting maximum utilization of all of your resources. Obvious I suppose.

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Jeff” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108e1f9a-a879″]

Jeff has been a leader in the advanced integration of marketing, data and emerging technologies for more than 20 years. A natural entrepreneurial and critical thinker, his expertise in business strategy, process management and technology has helped propel Strata to the forefront. Jeff has the ability to take our clients’ complex business challenges and translate them into technology-driven solutions. He is adept at anticipating clients’ evolving needs and pioneering innovative tools and resources for them. His quick-wit and clever nature make him a pretty fun guy to be around too. Jeff attended Monmouth College, where he studied Business. Jeff enjoys scuba diving, skiing and spending time with his family.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Strata Company” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108e1f9a-a879″]

Strata Company provides marketing services and technology solutions that enable companies to increase effectiveness and revenue for their business. By leveraging industry expertise and relevant technologies, we deliver solutions that resolve process, execution and logistics challenges for our clients.

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[mnky_heading title=”MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fmartechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com%2Fcategory%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Beyond Personal – Why Individualization Is the Key to Marketing Success

By

Nick Peart

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November 28, 2017

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Beyond Personal – Why Individualization Is the Key to Marketing Success

As marketers, we’ve long viewed personalization as a good thing. Segment your users based on shared characteristics and target them with appropriate content and offers. Sounds simple right?

But with the ever more distracted consumer, it’s not that simple. New research from Cloud IQ, has, in fact, revealed a personalization paradox – brands believe their personalized approach is exceeding consumer expectations but it’s actually having the opposite effect. Consumers are feeling overwhelmed by irrelevant communication and content, with over four in five people unsubscribing from mailing lists because they get too many emails.

With an average 69% of online shopping carts abandoned and 98% of visitors leaving online retail sites without purchasing, this is a serious question for retailers. The answer lies in moving from a personalized approach to one that is truly individual. Our research shows that 69% of consumers want an individualized experience; however, only 40% of brands actually offer one today.

Consumers define being treated as an individual as being rewarded with relevant offers, being remembered, being listened to and feeling in control. Marketers must put customers front and center of their own experience if they are to resonate.

Initially, personalization was the ability to communicate at a mass marketing level; this evolved into segmentation when marketers could split out communications to certain demographic groups. Over recent years, we’ve seen this grow into personalization, with marketing messaging attuned to names and big-data-based preferences.

But simply inserting an individual’s name at the beginning of an email and targeting them based on demographics or preferences is no longer enough. Individualization allows you to create specific algorithms that align with consumer’s behavior and habits in real time. This means for example that if you don’t open an email for a week, you won’t see out of date offers and information when you do, but rather automatically updated information individualized for not only your preferences but also the time you open the email.

This is the advantage of artificial intelligence in individualized marketing – dynamic interaction of stock, altering sale prices or offers, and incorporating context, to create the most current and useful communication. It is essential that marketers dispense with canned responses, and use technology to deal with consumers effectively at an individual level.

Consumers are willing to exchange their data for a more individualized experience, with 64% recognizing this currency exchange. However, brands are now dealing with amounts of data so large that it cannot physically be processed by humans. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are coming to the fore as a means to analyze customer data. For online retailers, it then becomes possible to utilize behavioral data to best understand and speak to their consumer.

Those brands that provide meaningful experiences, individualized content and real-time, relevant offers to their customers are likely to see positive business outcomes as a result. Consumers say they would feel more valued, say more positive things about the brand, are more likely to buy from them, trust them more and spend more money with them.

Individualisation is a huge opportunity for brands, but it is only open to those that are highly focused on becoming trusted, transparent and expert in using personal data to deliver superior customer value. Ultimately consumers are call on brands to ‘remember me, listen to me, and let me be in control’ – get it right and the benefits for brands can be huge.

Cloud IQ effortless commerce platform is based on real-time behavioural and inventory-driven data to enable brands to engage effectively and dynamically with consumers tracking over 400 million ecommerce customer interactions every month. With Cloud IQ, global brands such as Samsung, EE and TUI, are acting on real-time insight of their customers to build lifetime value and loyalty.

How B2B Marketers Can Prove Their Effectiveness to the C-Suite

By

Wayne St. Amand

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November 27, 2017

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How B2B Marketers Can Prove Their Effectiveness to the C-Suite

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers are under constant pressure to prove the impact of their investments to the C-Suite. When an organization’s sales are slumping and spending needs to be cut, marketing has historically been an easy target. But in more recent times, cuts to the marketing department have become a harder decision to make – especially when marketing and advertising efforts can be directly tied to business results and, more specifically, sales success and profitability. The more that marketers can prove that their efforts are producing desired business outcomes, the harder it is for their budgets to be cut and difficult personnel decisions to be made.

With the advent of digital, there’s ample technology at marketers’ fingertips that enable them to linearly measure their contributions to business success. Rising consumer expectations are causing marketers to rethink traditional approaches to marketing and advertising, and technology can be leveraged to navigate those expectations. As empowered B2B customers have brought their consumer buying behaviors into the business world, it’s also become increasingly important for marketing to work closely with sales to understand their needs and preferences. Those who aren’t using technology or working with sales to better engage and convert new customers are behind the times – and at greater risk for old school cut backs.

So, how can B2B marketers show the C-Suite that their efforts are aiding in the organization’s success? They need to prove they are contributing to the top and bottom lines.

The Top-Line: Working Closely with Sales

An organization’s top line is all about growth, both in terms of revenue as well as in net new customers. In order to produce top-line growth, B2B marketers must have a strong relationship with the sales team.

Most marketers tend to think in terms of features and benefits, but buyers think in terms of capabilities. The better a marketer understands prospective customers, their industry, and the challenges they face, the better they can communicate with them in meaningful ways. Working closely with sales helps marketers determine what drives new customer wins as well as what deters them. Focus groups and social listening can supplement sales learnings with deeper insight into what customers and prospects want.

Leveraging this insight, marketers can equip the sales team with the tools and resources that make them more efficient, and ultimately improve sales execution and revenue. Tailored sales enablement tools, such as case studies, videos, whitepapers and more, provide the sales team with the collateral and content they need to facilitate the buyer’s journey. It also drives more qualified opportunities that improve their productivity and closing ratio.

Also Read: Dynamic Activity Management, a Whole New Level of Intelligence, Flexibility and Transparency

The Bottom-Line: Leverage People-Based Martech/Adtech to Be Effective

While the top line is all about growth, an organization’s bottom line is about profitability and centers around creating efficiencies. Marketers can ensure bottom-line success by creating effective and efficient marketing and advertising programs with a high return on ad spend (ROAS), but this can be difficult without the aid of martech/adtech.

Research shows that 56% of consumers feel more loyal to brands who “get” them and show a deep understanding of their priorities and preferences. Insights from the sales team can help inform marketing strategy, but marketers can’t curate the right experiences for the right audiences if they can’t measure the influence of each touchpoint along the path to conversion, or understand which creative messages, offers, content, and other tactics drive the best results.

Technology that enables marketers to target, measure and optimize their efforts by audience is the heart of creating better experiences, and a better return. With a holistic, people-based view of the consumer journey and insight into the channels and tactics that influence their desired audience, marketers can orchestrate better experiences and optimize their budgets to drive greater efficiencies and bottom-line business results.

Fusing the Top and Bottom Line to Demonstrate Value

To truly showcase value, marketers must create an attractive bottom line while helping to drive a more substantial top line. Success requires a close relationship with sales and the help of technology. The blending of these two elements is what leads to efficient growth, driving B2B marketers’ success and enabling them to prove their true value to the entire C-Suite.

Taking Larger Strides Toward Data Transparency – A Call To Action

By

Paul Chachko

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November 27, 2017

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Taking Larger Strides Toward Data Transparency - A Call To Action

There has long been a desire for transparency and specific guidelines around data within the advertising industry. Recently the Advertising Research Foundation partnered with the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement to propose a data labeling initiative. Still in the early stages of development, the proposal is surrounded by a plethora of open questions about how an initiative such as this can come to fruition.

While we fully support the idea of data labeling and affirm that this is a move in the right direction, a need still exists to take this initiative further. Sure, slap a label on something, but how do we know what that label means or represents? What are actual steps that should be taken to rid advertising of skepticism and uncertainty? As a group, we need to move toward confidence and knowledge that data is being sourced and analyzed correctly. Without these specific instructions and action items around a standard operating procedure when it comes to data transparency, we’re still staring at a problem that will only continue to grow with the current data revolution.

Why we need more help

No one wants to be labeled a ‘bad actor’. Most data providers are quick to tout the accuracy of their data and create noise around why their product is better than the next. Maybe the data is accurate, but there is still a black box around how that data is collected, built and validated. As a result, brands and marketers don’t truly trust the data they receive. Although they continue to use that data, doubt still abounds. Advertiser Perceptions even recently found that 80% of advertisers use audience insights, but that only 33% say they ‘completely trust them’.

In nearly every industry outside of advertising, there is data regulation. There is clear delineation on how data is sourced, kept and secured. Take HIPAA legislations, for example, which put highly strict regulations on what type of medical data can be shared and where personally identifiable information should be withheld. These type of regulations don’t exist for the mass amounts of general, publicly available data that exist. There is no official standard. And this is not acceptable. On top of data labeling, this is the standard that needs to be set and how we all get there together.

Providing clear and accurate reports – Inaccurate reporting often stems from identifying sample size and consumers at the individual level versus the household level. In these cases, the baseline of the data collection is left unknown as the data suppliers create false match rates simply using an address and last name, thus making sweeping assumptions about a household as a whole. Everyone in that household is essentially ‘matched’, but without transparency on the report, simple qualifiers at an individual level — age, ethnicity, occupation, gender — can be extremely wrong and suddenly all the information is invalid for the consumer of that information. To avoid this, data providers should be required to disclose the level at which their data is being represented and whether or not that sample is consistent with other information in the database or identity graph.
Describing how the data is built – Data can be collected in any number of manners, so as data providers, we should be sharing the methods we use with clients. This boils down to whether or not data is collected in an appropriate manner, that it is recent and updated regularly, what the point of collection is (online surveys, transactions, web scraping, via phone, with consumer notice that we are collecting data). Again, was this data collected at the household (inferred) or individual level?
Clarifying proprietary vs. white labeled data – Let’s look at scenario. Company A may want to license data from company X and Y, but company A doesn’t realize that company X is white labeling from company Y and that the data is the same. In this scenario, without full transparency, company A is potentially left buying the same data twice and wasting time and money. If you’re buying data, you’d like to know that you are dealing with the originator of the data or at the least, where that data’s origins are. Companies can sell data, but we often see white labeled data presented as proprietary, presenting a substantial need for more transparency around where data is truly coming from.
Creating a standard sample set — When data providers supply samples they often try to put their best foot forward. It’s easy to mask what they are doing poorly if they are allowed to drive what that sample is and only supply the best data upfront. For this reason, there should be a standard sample set that people can adhere to. If there were standards around what the samples should be, there would be no way to hide this and everyone would get a clear, accurate sample of data to test before committing fully.
Developing data accuracy compliance — It’s difficult to imagine a world where companies fully disclose the names of their sources or are truly 100% transparent. Yet if every other industry has data security and privacy standards, why shouldn’t the advertising industry? In addition to labeling data, we need to develop a compliance checklist that ranks companies in terms of their level of transparency. This would give brands and advertisers the option to be selective about the firms they choose to work with based on whatever standards they deem fit.

This may require giving up a few sources or opening up previously closed doors, but if the whole industry was held accountable to this standard, it would be common practice. If you feel strongly about your data you will be willing to follow these standards and stand together as we take more steps toward full transparency.

TechBytes with Ted Jaffe, Senior Product Manager, RingCentral

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 27, 2017

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Ted Jaffe
Senior Product Manager, RingCentral

RingCentral, the leading provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) recently announced an AI-powered extension to its workplace communication technology suite. The UCaaS leader already offers advanced AI-driven integrations for Glip team collaboration with Salesforce Alert Bot, Kore.ai, and Gong.io. Unveiled at the ConnectCentral 2017, the new bot integrations provide advanced artificial intelligence automated workflows for calls, tests, and video meetings. Ted Jaffe, Senior Product Manager spoke to us about RingCentral’s Connect Platform.

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MTS: How do you see Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions converging with modern MarTech platforms?
Ted Jaffe: The way enterprises are communicating and collaborating at work has immensely evolved over the last 3 years. Mobile applications and cloud-based services in the workplace have proliferated, clearing the way for innovation that was not possible with on-premise installations, such as the ability to communicate with people inside or outside the company across multiple mediums of communication (voice, message, video call) or the ability to receive a transcribed voicemail in text format that can easily be searched in the app later for future reference.

MarTech platforms specifically are one of the early adopting segments of mobile applications and cloud-based services. MarTech platforms thrive on fast data and information-transfer between different marketing tools and solutions in real-time. With a flexible and open UCaaS solution, marketers can leverage out of the box tools or build a custom integration that infuses their team communication with the data being sent across various platforms to enable their teams to be more data-driven but also enrich the quality of their team communication. By integrating a MarTech platform or service with the UCaaS, a marketer could build a workflow where key marketing and analytics data is reported into a single place on a regular cadence that can be quickly acted on and new information can be shared in real-time with other team members or other MarTech platforms for further enrichment.

In general, the infusion of MarTech with communications becomes a key piece of the business intelligence strategy, where more rapid workflows can drive and expose new revenue opportunities.

MTS: Phone systems and collaboration apps are increasingly focusing on a consistent, intuitive interface. What separates RingCentral’s technology from others in the market?
Ted: RingCentral puts an enormous amount of investment and focus on application design. Specifically making the apps easy for anyone to use – we believe this is a key part of our differentiation in the UCaaS market from competitors.

To further expand on this, for mobile applications, RingCentral’s design philosophy leverages native operating system design guidelines for iOS and Android since users are already familiar with how to use these platforms from experience.

In addition to our design philosophy, we see a major differentiation in having a unified communications experience across team messaging (Glip) and UCaaS (RingCentral Office). This enables users to have a seamless collaborative communications experience – for example: sending a message, listening to a voicemail, sending an SMS/MMS, and making a phone call all from within the same app within a single conversation.

MTS: How does the RingCentral Connect Platform use data to deliver a superior user experience? How can users customize their notifications and scale their productivity using RingCentral?
Ted: By allowing our customers and partners access to open APIs through the RingCentral Connect Platform, new boundaries can be reached for how communications transfuse with the business processes. For example, an SMS-based workflow can be created to enable a company to alert all of their employees of a critical incident or an important reminder. Or, an enterprise can integrate internal messaging (Glip) with their website for support inquiries where support agents can respond to customer questions and inquiries through the same app they use to communicate with other employees. This leads to faster response times since the agent does not need to switch platforms to communicate and can get answers to questions they do not know more quickly, either through asking other coworkers in a group message or searching their account to see if the question was answered previously by another agent.

MTS: In the age of mobility and Just-In-Time integrations, how does RingCentral ensure seamless connectivity and uncompromised security for best performance?
Ted: RingCentral has consistently delivered five 9’s of uptime and service to its customers by means of ensuring high investment in people and world-class tools to keep systems up and running and in event of a disaster, having a seamless backup and recovery policy to ensure no downtime is experienced.

MTS: How do you use machine learning algorithms and AI technologies? How do you see AI/ML transforming On-Premise PBX by 2020?
Ted: There are many exciting opportunities for AI in the communications realm. Recently, RingCentral announced new advancements to its Glip team collaboration platform to better automate processes and enable seamless workflows. These integration advancements include:

Salesforce Alert Bot: Salesforce Alert Bot in Glip captures Salesforce events and sends notifications to Glip teams. This feature enables sales managers to have immediate updates on opportunities without having to open Salesforce in a separate application. We expect to have this Bot be available in early 2018.
Kore.ai: A chatbot platform partner of RingCentral, Kore.AI has enabled four leading bots within the Glip platform, including Salesforce, Twitter, Asana, and Trello.
Gong.io: A conversation intelligence platform for sales teams, the Gong.io integration provides call transcription and analytics within the collaborative Glip platform, so teams can replicate best sales practices and drive effectiveness at scale.

In today’s multi-cloud applications environment, legacy on-premises systems cannot meet the needs of digital enterprises. Open platform integrations are critical to enabling intelligent business workflows, and RingCentral takes an ecosystem-friendly approach to workplace communications with powerful AI, chatbot, and application integrations that enable greater productivity.

MTS: What’s the next frontier for open, self-service enterprise communication technology providers?
Ted: AI (as mentioned above) is a massive opportunity to exploit new opportunities in UCaaS that were not previously possible.

As more data is collected through software-based interactions, service providers can leverage that data and hand it back to customers in the form of rich and more intelligent interactions in the business process. However, service providers will need to ensure they have very clear transparency over how algorithms in the applications use the data and enable subscribers to maintain administrative control over the account data and how it is used.

Another frontier on the rise is building a platform for a richer application integration experience – going beyond the traditional SaaS integration style and enabling the users to define and even design exactly how they want the integration to work without writing any custom code.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Ted.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

Also Read: TechBytes with Agatha Rymanowska, SVP, Enterprise Operations, Conversant

Interview with Ryan Phelan, Vice President, Marketing Insights, Adestra

By

Sudipto Ghosh

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November 27, 2017

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[mnky_testimonial_slider][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“An intelligent data platform needs intelligent operators. Many marketers lack the sophistication and training to set up the kinds of complicated integrations that hyper-personalization often requires.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be a part of a MarTech innovation company?
I’ve been in the email space for 18 years, and I’ve worked for a lot of different email companies on both the client and vendor sides. I’ve seen this industry mature over that time. What inspires me are the smart companies operating on the edge of innovation, leading the way with a clear vision of the future.

After working for a previous employer, I looked around and saw Adestra, which had been developing a very good story while working under the radar. I fell in love with the company’s mission and vision. I’m always looking for a career, not just a job, and that’s what I got with Adestra. I get to have fun, enjoy the people I work with and be at the forefront of innovation with a company that cares about its workers as well as its clients.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of engagement with online customers, how do you see email-driven technologies impacting the ROI for CMOs?
ROI for email has always been high. Every study I’ve ever seen has email at the top of the chart for ROI. What we need to work on is how to take advantages of email’s capacity for engaging with customers, not just promoting to them.

Most emails are focused on promotions, not engagement. Engagement is not “What offer can I persuade you to act on today?” It’s using email to build individual relationships with our customers, using data to drive personalized messages, to include products in messages that resonate with that customer and content that reflects past activity.

The goal for the CMO is to adopt strategies to drive higher ROI with engagement as the basis for messaging, not just promotion.

MTS: How should intelligent data platforms extend the benefits of audience engagement and conversion analytics to email marketers?
They can make it as easy as possible for marketers to use customer data for segmentation, targeting and other tactics that create highly personalized messaging. The data have always been there for marketers to use. But they need a platform that enables them to use every signal the customer produces.

An intelligent data platform needs intelligent operators. Many marketers lack the sophistication and training to set up the kinds of complicated integrations that hyper-personalization often requires. The platform should make it as intuitive as possible to help users succeed, not just to set up integrations but also to gain insight from them.

MTS: What are the benefits of deploying data monetization and programmatic capabilities into email marketing platforms?
I can understand the appeal of having one dashboard to manage instead of five or six – one platform to rule them all, so to speak. I use a brand-name platform myself for lead management and nurturing. Other platforms incorporate SEO, text messaging, analytics and other functions. But I stick with a separate email platform because the module that comes with my all-in-one doesn’t have the deliverability management, reporting and intuitive user interface that I need.

Many marketers seek out single-platform providers because they want to work with one set of integrated tools. However, many all-in-one platforms still have integration issues, especially when working with legacy or in-house databases. So, you still end up performing some functions manually.

An all-in-one platform takes away your choice of vendors. You end up making your decisions based on the technology the platform provides instead of surrounding yourself with best-of-breed technologies. Although omnichannel marketing has broken down the old silos among communication channels, we still do our work in a siloed environment. The tools you need for email marketing are different those for mobile marketing, social, SMS/texting and the web.

When you’re evaluating vendors, the buying decision should rest not on the suite as a whole but on the quality of the individual tools that make up the suite.

Your marketing landscape is not a straight line with applications scattered all along it. It is a circle with your company in the middle. If you can’t execute a necessary function, look for a new provider. Look for the right partnerships outside of the marketing suite. The focus is on integration timelines and scalability. If you can conquer that, you have a winning solution.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make their customer data analytics work effectively and accurately for email performance reporting?
CMOs must stop relying on only aggregate reporting and begin reporting by segment. We are used to looking at holistic numbers by channel. The dynamics of email cry out for tracking different customer segments that will show the success or failure of offers and efforts. CMOs need to tackle the diversity in their customers bases and reflect that in their reporting.

MTS: What startups in MarTech and AI are you watching/keen on right now?
I’m keenly aware of many AI companies in various stages of development. What I’m curious about is what their definition of “artificial intelligence” is. It’s a buzzword-laden industry with a lot of confusion about what all these different technologies do and how they actually help marketers.

For example, many say they do “AI,” but it’s really just propensity-based modeling. I watch to see if any companies have created an “easy” button, making decisions for marketers based on the degree of input, which is an optimized use of AI.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?
We use a wide range of channels to get our content and messages out to our clients and to marketers across the industry and even beyond it. We have long believed that making marketers smarter is beneficial for the entire industry. So, we try to put out content where people will read it, whether as podcasts, articles, in earned and owned media, whatever we can utilize to get our messages out where the marketers are.

MTS: Could you tell us about a standout digital campaign?
Adestra worked with NakedWines.com, an online wine subscription service that delivers customized wine selections from exclusive suppliers at wholesale prices. The company uses its customers’ previous purchases and wine ratings to create highly personalized recommendations and came to Adestra to provide this experience at scale in their email campaigns.

Adestra helped NakedWines.com add personalized product recommendations to its email messages by working with its development team to add relevant code to its messages, set up automated campaigns and test/QA the emails.

We were pleased to help NakedWines.com realize an increase in email engagement, with the company enjoying a 40% conversion rate on the emails, a 5.2% increase in site conversion with customers who clicked through the email, and a 7.9% increase in gross profit per customer, or 8.5% uplift in contribution per customer.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
I want to make sure my data is clean, correct and organized so it’s easy to retrieve. This might sound like a simple task, but, for years, we as an industry have acquired customers and converted them haphazardly without source-reporting and segmentation. This breeds sloppiness in data.

We have to normalize our data so it can relate to every other piece of data. Then, I look at my marketing stack and ensure I’m using best-of-breed software at every point. This helps me know I’m taking full advantage of my vendors and channels.

I’m also reading everything I can find about AI and what’s next. But, I don’t ignore what came before AI, from big data to propensity to third-party data. We can’t look to AI as the next big thing and forget about these past developments because they build on each other. You need expertise on all of these big buzzwords to understand what their places are in the data ecosystem. If you don’t understand, you might not realize that what some are passing off as AI is really propensity modeling. Being able to recognize that is key to being a CMO in an AI world.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.
Excited!

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
I rely on TripIt, because I travel so much, and it keeps all my travel schedules, meetings, conferences, and hotels organized. I also use ScheduleOnce, an online calendar, to schedule time with reporters, analysts, marketers and team members. I indicate where I have time in my calendar, and they can pick the time that works best for them.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
I block out up to 20% of my work week on my calendar to avoid overscheduling myself. This gives me breaks throughout the day between meetings so I can catch up on other things.

MTS: What are you currently reading?
I make a point to read industry publications every day, but I also read for relaxation. I travel a ton, and when I’m on the plane I read to relax. For business reading, I’m currently recommending Taking Down Goliath: Digital Strategies for Taking Down Business Competitors with 100 Times Your Spending Power. It’s by Kevin Ryan, whom I met earlier this year at Cannes, and Rob “Spider” Graham. For relaxation reading, I’m deep into submarine books right now, such as Michael Dimercurio’s Threat Vector.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Two things: “Fail fast.” Also, “Sometimes, email just doesn’t work. Pick up the phone.”

MTS: Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read.
John Caldwell, President, Red Pill Email

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

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Ryan” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27aca64-108eb50a-4c7f”]

With over 15 years of online marketing experience, Ryan has focused on driving strategy and high growth SaaS software companies and advancing winning digital strategies. In working for companies like Acxiom, Responsys, Sears & Kmart, BlueHornet and infoUSA, Ryan’s experience and history in the industry are unequaled in his focus on both the client and agency side. This experience is unique and has driven a fundamentally different view of the industry and the companies Ryan has worked with.

Ryan is also a nationally known speaker at conferences and industry events on subjects relating to digital media. In 2013, Ryan was named one of the top 30 digital strategists in the United States by the Online Marketing Institute and keynote speaker at EEC12 & EEC14. He is also the former Chairman of the Email Experience Council Advisory Board through the DMA, Advisory Board Member for Direct Marketing News (DMNews) and am on the board of directors for the EPSC. Ryan currently lives in Dallas, Texas and has a degree in Psychology.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Adestra” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27aca64-108eb50a-4c7f”]

adestra logo
Adestra is a trusted provider of First-Person Marketing solutions for global and growing brands.

The company’s industry-leading email platform provides a powerful infrastructure for one-to-one, contextual messaging and marketing automation, helping marketers communicate more effectively with their customers and subscribers. Robust reporting features allow marketers to efficiently evaluate and optimize their campaign results. The flexible structure and open integration architecture allow businesses to connect disparate technology platforms to create a seamless customer journey.

Along with a best-of-breed platform that drives customer engagement and boosts ROI, Adestra was founded on the principle that marketing success takes more than technology, which is why customer service is at the heart of its business. Adestra was a winner of the 2014 and 2017 Customer Focus Award from the Customer Service Institute. It also won Bronze for Customer Service Department of the Year at the 2017 Stevie Awards for Customer Service, as well as being presented with the 2017 Supplier of the Year Award from one of its longest-standing clients, UBM.

Adestra continues to maintain one of the highest customer retention rates in the industry. It is trusted by top companies including UBM, Condé Nast Digital Limited, and Tile, among others.

Established in 2004, Adestra has offices throughout the UK, USA, Canada and Australia.

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The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Interview with Guy Weismantel, EVP Marketing – Marchex

By

Avinash Duduskar

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November 24, 2017

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Interview with Guy Weismantel, EVP Marketing - Marchex

[mnky_team name=”Guy Weismantel” position=”EVP Marketing – Marchex”][/mnky_team]

[easy-profiles profile_twitter=”https://twitter.com/guyweismantel” profile_linkedin=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/guy-weismantel-5075b3″]

[mnky_testimonial_slider flex_animation=”slide”][mnky_testimonial name=”” author_dec=”” position=”Designer”]“Give credit, take responsibility.”[/mnky_testimonial][/mnky_testimonial_slider]

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here.
I’m currently the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Marchex, a leading mobile advertising analytics company that connects digital marketing online to real-world, offline actions. I have over 20 years of marketing and financial leadership in companies such as Expedia and Microsoft, as well as going through the start-up grind and mid-sized PE companies. Throughout that time, I’ve really tried to focus on bringing differentiated products to market and providing the “compelling reason to purchase” for customers and prospects alike.
Prior to joining Marchex, I was the Vice President of Marketing for Vertafore, the leading provider of technology to the insurance industry.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
The role of the CMO has changed so dramatically in the past few years. CMOs are now the profit center for the company and in many places are becoming responsible for the long-term engagement strategy for the organization. That’s great news from a career standpoint, but it also brings increased scrutiny and expectations. Whereas marketing used to be looked at only to manage the brand and produce award-winning ads, now it’s involved in every component of the customer journey and every part of the company’s operations.
It’s no longer just about creating awareness and interest, it’s about how the company ultimately converts prospects into customers—the point of sale. With prospects moving across channels at the speed of a click and swipe, and with so much money pouring into paid search and digital marketing budgets, CEOs and boards are keenly interested in knowing what the company derives from all the marketing spend—and the answer had better be more than just “awareness.” You need to justify that spend and demonstrate how your marketing converts prospects into customers. Technology is the way to do it.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
We’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this at Marchex and one of the struggles we see the industry grappling with is how to leverage the power of AI—the corollary is identifying whose budget it falls to. A lot of solutions on the market today use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze millions of calls and automatically classify and score calls based on spoken words such as “credit card” and “appointment” or on marketing keywords that reference your promotion, discount, or advertisement. This outcome of understanding performance or efficiency of a call generally falls to an ops role. But there is an enormous argument to be made that marketing is at the heart of these interactions. Marketers need to pivot, double-down, or quickly modify their marketing and media plans to respond to what prospects are saying and find more of them before the competition, and AI can help with that.

MTS: How can marketers achieve holistic understanding of their customers’ path to purchase, or prospects’ path to conversion?
I’m biased here, but I think Marchex is uniquely positioned to drive this solution, particularly in industries that define conversions offline in the real world, like a phone call. There’s research across the board that demonstrates almost 70% of the buyer’s journey is finished before they raise their hand and introduce themselves to your company. Getting that holistic understanding of the customers’ path of purchase or conversion is critical to helping accelerate the journey, then identify more prospects who you can turn into customers. To make the vital connection from digital prospect to physical customer, more and more marketers have adopted a multifaceted approach. At Marchex, we think about it as 1) finding your audience, 2) personalizing your marketing 3) measuring every channel 4) converting the call into a customer and 5) using that insight to go back and retargeting those customers online that didn’t become customers offline.

This Is How I Work

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

MTS: What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
LinkedIn and Twitter.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?
Technology is great, but I still love crossing an action item off an old fashioned to-do list. I keep a paper notebook for items I need to accomplish today.

MTS: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Give credit, take responsibility.

MTS: Tag the one person whose answers to these questions you would love to read:
Steve Bendt, VP of Marketing – PitchBook Data

MTS: Thanks Guy! We hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.

[vc_tta_tabs][vc_tta_section title=”About Guy” tab_id=”1501785390157-b58e162d-0ae25a4b-c27a1d97-16cc”]

Guy is currently the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Marchex, a leading mobile advertising analytics company that connects online behavior to real-world, offline actions. With 20 years of marketing and financial leadership in companies such as Expedia, Microsoft, Business Objects, and Baxter Healthcare, Guy’s career has focused on bringing differentiated products to market and providing the “compelling reason to purchase” for customers and prospects alike.

Prior to joining Marchex, he served as Vice President of Marketing for Vertafore, the leading provider of insurance technology to agencies and carriers in the industry, where he was responsible for the company’s corporate, product, and digital marketing operations.

He is a regular blogger, spokesperson, and contributor for publications and thought leadership topics in marketing and technology across the industry.

Guy has a Bachelors Degree in Accounting from the University of Notre Dame, a Masters Degree in Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of Illinois.

[/vc_tta_section][vc_tta_section title=”About Marchex” tab_id=”1501785390320-2d44fa50-740c5a4b-c27a1d97-16cc”]

Marchex is a mobile advertising analytics company that connects online behavior to real-world, offline actions. By linking critical touchpoints in the customer journey, Marchex’s products enable a 360-degree view of marketing effectiveness. Brands and agencies utilize Marchex’s products to transform business performance.

[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_tabs]

[mnky_heading title=”About the MarTech Interview Series” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fstaging.loutish-lamp.flywheelsites.com%2Fmts-insights%2Finterviews%2F|||”]

The MTS Martech Interview Series is a fun Q&A style chat which we really enjoy doing with martech leaders. With inspiration from Lifehacker’s How I work interviews, the MarTech Series Interviews follows a two part format On Marketing Technology, and This Is How I Work. The format was chosen because when we decided to start an interview series with the biggest and brightest minds in martech – we wanted to get insight into two areas … one – their ideas on marketing tech and two – insights into the philosophy and methods that make these leaders tick.

Is Your Company Domain Vulnerable To Email Impersonation?

By

Yolande D'Mello

-

November 24, 2017

1

Is Your Company Domain Vulnerable To Email Impersonation?

A Guide to Email authentication Can Protect Your Company and Customers, Says ValiMail’s CEO & Co-founder Alexander García-Tobar

ValiMail’s 2017 Email Fraud Landscape Report revealed that just 0.5 percent of the top million domains have taken steps to protect themselves from impersonation by email authentication.

One in five messages sent today is suspicious (i.e. it appears to come from a domain that has not authorized the sender).

There are technical controls, known as email authentication, that can help mitigate the email fraud threat, but only a tiny percentage of domain owners are taking advantage of them. Email authentication refers to a suite of open standards that can stop the most common and hardest-to-detect type of email fraud: Impersonation of people or companies by using their domain names. Without email authentication, fraudsters can easily impersonate any domain simply by putting it into the ‘From’ field of their messages.

For its report, ValiMail examined more than 127,000 DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) aggregate reports for 12 domains (a subset of the domains we process for our customers) during the month of October. Out of more than 2.8 billion email messages processed for this set of domains, 526 million failed DMARC authentications. Of those, they categorized virtually all as suspicious: possibly fraudulent messages from senders not authorized by the domain owners. That means almost 1 out of every 5 emails failed authentication — in other words, was potentially fraudulent.

DMARC is a widely used standard that ensures only authorized senders can use an organization’s domain name in their emails. However, the report also found that among the top million domains, 96.4 percent still have not published DMARC records — despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of email inboxes support it. These domains are not using a valuable, accessible tool for protecting themselves against fraud and phishing. This is the DMARC adoption gap.

Furthermore, 77 percent of domains that do publish a DMARC record do not get to enforcement — a rate comparable to what we found when we first analyzed the top million domains in November 2016. They leave their DMARC policies in a monitoring-only mode, and thus fail to actually lock down their email domains to stop impersonation attacks and protect their brands. This is the DMARC enforcement gap.

Also Read: BrightWave Receives Top Client Satisfaction Score in 2017 Email Agency Buyer’s Guide, Ranked As Leader For Third Consecutive Year

ValiMail’s analysis of the most popular 1 million global domains shows that most domain owners have not attempted to implement fraud protection through the latest and most complete form of protection, DMARC. Of those that have attempted DMARC, only 23 percent are actually achieving protection from fraud.

The report attributes these shortfalls in adoption to the difficulty that domain owners have in fully implementing and maintaining DMARC and its underlying standards (SPF, DKIM), particularly in complex environments where companies use many different cloud-based email services (often without full knowledge of IT staff).

ValiMail’s CEO & Co-founder Alexander García-Tobar talks to MTS about what companies can do to protect themselves from email fraud.

The challenges of implementing the DMARC policy

Configuration – identification and authentication of 3rd party services
Difficulty of interpreting DMARC aggregate reports
Standards limitations/repeated risky DNS changes
Maintaining authentication ongoing

DMARC is difficult for many companies to implement for a variety of reasons. One is that the underlying standards (SPF and DKIM) were made for an earlier, pre-cloud era. Now that most companies use a dozen or more different cloud services, many of which send email on their behalf, configuring SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to whitelist all these services can be tricky.

Another reason is that DMARC reports can be hard for companies to interpret. These reports are indispensable for feedback, but they are basically XML files with long lists of IP addresses. It can be hard to figure out which IPs correspond to which services.

Finally, email delivery is a high stakes game. Nobody wants to make a DNS change that suddenly stops critical emails from getting delivered. This makes many companies nervous about moving DMARC to enforcement. It gets even trickier as companies’ email partners change: A SaaS provider changes the servers it’s using, for instance, or someone in your company engages a new cloud provider.

How SMBs can tackle the same issue

SMBs have less resources but generally simpler ecosystems (fewer email services) while large companies have more resources but more complexity. In the end, these cancel out (see chart below) and 70-80% failure rates are about the same.

When using third party cloud services

The answer is two-fold:

Internally: lock down your domain via email authentication. With the right implementation, this provides your company with visibility and control over 3rd party solutions. Only authorized vendors will be able to send as you.
Make sure that the authorization of a 3rd party service includes a security and authentication review. If the vendor fails this, re-consider allowing them to send as you.

Don’t Compromise Brand Safety

Without email authentication at enforcement (locked down so that messages failing authentication are quarantined to spam folders or deleted), any criminal can send as your brand. This compromises your brand reputation outright. Would a client trust your company if they get a fake email that appears to be from you?
The use of your domain/brand by a criminal can drastically impact your company’s email sending reputation – lowering your deliverability rates. So your #1 communication method with your clients is now crippled.
Every time you read that a fake email as company XYZ caused damages you immediately see the impact. Just one example: Coupa was impersonated by a fraudster looking for employee W-2 forms.
One thing to note: This kind of W-2 fraud increased sharply in 2017, according to the IRS.

We know from various research studies that email impersonation is the leading type of phishing attack that leads to account compromise, wire fraud, or W-2 fraud. (Here’s a recent example of this research, from Great Horn.

Impersonation means that the phishing email contains the exact company name and email address, even though the message is coming from a fraudster and contains malicious links or attachments. This makes it very, very difficult for recipients to tell that the message is fake. The advice to “look carefully at the sender” doesn’t apply in this case, because the sender looks completely legitimate.

How ValiMail solutions works towards keeping clients safe

ValiMail was founded to ensure 100% enforcement in a fully automated approach for every company attempting email authentication. The fact that doing it yourself or using the current vendors results in only 20-40% enforcement rates, after 6-12 months of manual work, is not acceptable.

ValiMail automates email authentication with a cloud-based service that guarantees that DMARC and SPF records are always up to date and that each receiving email gateway gets complete, correct information every time.

In short, we manage our clients’ global whitelists as opposed to providing consulting services and forcing the client to manually tweak their DNS. We do this with a patented DNS service that delivers tailored global white lists to each mail gateway that requests it.

We also have the world’s most comprehensive database of email senders, enabling us to turn the inscrutable IP addresses provided by DMARC aggregate reports into actionable information about which senders are using your domain.

Finally, we are the only email authentication vendor to offer a guarantee. We get 100% our customers to enforcement (a DMARC policy of “quarantine” or “reject”), guaranteed.

TechBytes with Vanessa Thompson, SVP, CX Insights, Bluewolf

By

Sudipto Ghosh

-

November 24, 2017

1

Vanessa Thompson
SVP, CX Insights, Bluewolf

According to the latest Bluewolf report, early adopters of AI technology demonstrate a higher degree of confidence in driving superior customer experiences and having a positive business impact. The report titled, The State of Salesforce found that 77% of companies using AI, are expecting their investments to grow in the next 12 months, showcasing that the best in the business are open to work with Salesforce for better innovation to deliver smarter and faster decision-making using Salesforce’s embedded AI capabilities, across their entire organization. We spoke to Vanessa Thompson, SVP of Customer Experience Insights at Bluewolf, an IBM company, to understand how the Salesforce-IBM partnership would ensure “AI is for Everyone” and how they would enable companies to supercharge their sales funnel using smarter technologies.

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MTS: Tell us about your role at Bluewolf and the team that you handle?
Vanessa Thompson: I am the SVP of Customer Experience Insights. My team documents and evangelizes our client’s success throughout their journey with us and also helps them measure that success. I also work directly with clients in our Align practice helping align expectations and business outcomes alongside prioritizing initiatives.

MTS: How does the Salesforce-IBM partnership ensure that “AI is for everyone”?
Vanessa: Together Salesforce and IBM deliver an unrivaled experience for customers. Einstein knows your buyer intimately, who they are, the influence they on your business, and puts their individual needs (or the account they influence) into focus and context. Watson helps you assess large amounts of data for segmentation, profiling, and understanding but Watson can also understand individuals personally, their tone, sentiment, intent. When you combine these two views of your customer you have an unrivaled profile to act on.

For example, Sally Smith is running a large retail chain – her computer system to run sales just went down.

When she contacts your company, Watson understands from her tone that she is upset and needs service, Einstein understands that Sally also buys $2 Million in products and services from you every year. Together they ensure Sally bypasses your service team and jumps to the front of a Tier 3 support queue for immediate service.

MTS: What are the major pain-points for businesses that are yet to invest in actionable data analytics technologies?
Vanessa: A major pain point for businesses is having incomplete information about a customer or situation when interacting with them. According to the State of Salesforce Report, only 8% of sales teams are investing in contextual analysis. The literal translation of contextual analysis is an analysis of a set of text that helps assess that text within the context of its historical and cultural setting. We could refer to weather data as contextual data because it adds value to an existing interaction. Think about an insurance company warning customers about an impending hurricane and helping them get prepared. This serves two purposes, it helps the customer feel safer and could contribute to a reduction in claims.

MTS: How should businesses plan their roadmap towards self-service portals across all channels for higher customer retention?
Vanessa: It may not make sense for businesses to have all customers self-serve. Before even getting to a roadmap, the first step would be to align around business outcomes targeted within retention, are you measuring customer satisfaction, support cost, process efficiency, learning/training, etc. Then map customer/partner/employee archetypes to understand the moments of lasting positive or negative impression. Having a deeper empathy for these moments will help identify how to prioritize and solve for self-service. Some of these moments may require a human touch so that can be addressed here. This would be a starting point for the roadmap.

MTS: How do you look at Dark Data Analytics and its impact on customer experience?
Vanessa: When looking at dark data analysis, there is an opportunity cost of not doing anything and quantifying that would be a great way to highlight the opportunity. Meeting customers where they are requires businesses to understand more about where and how a customer wants to interact with you in order to deliver a superior experience. Businesses have this data and as we mentioned earlier, Einstein knows your customers and Watson can help analyze large sets of data (dark data) that can provide additional insights about your customers. It is the combination of these that can solve for the superior experience.

MTS: What would be the Power Couple of the decade— AI+ Automation, or AI+ ABM, or Programmatic + Customer Mapping? Why do you think so?
Vanessa: Over time, Augmented Intelligence will become part of everything we do so I don’t think there is one ‘power couple’. The critical difference between Augmented and Artificial intelligence is that augmented is focused on systems that enhance and scale human expertise (augmented intelligence) rather than those that attempt replicate human intelligence (artificial intelligence).

In the pursuit to deliver superior customer experience, organizations will look to smarter, faster decision-making capabilities in the form of AI. One interesting place we will see AI is in the creative process. Humans use many cognitive strategies when approaching a creative problem. We deliberately create harmony, discord, symmetry, asymmetry, balance, and imbalance through the creative process. The challenge is that it’s not logical, and therefore difficult for machines.

The majority of the creative process is exploration and research so it seems logical for AI to support this. Finding the right options, understanding their values, and doing this in a hierarchical way is fundamental to the creative process. It’s not a replacement for the creative, but it could be an incredible partner for creative problems.

The powerful combination of AI and ideation can create deeper connections with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees, and enable organizations to find new ways to meet and serve the rapidly changing expectations of all users.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Vanessa.
Stay tuned for more insights on marketing technologies. To participate in our Tech Bytes program, email us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

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