Interview with Kevin Tan, CEO – Eyeota

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here.

I’m the CEO of Eyeota – an audience data technology company. Adtech and martech are only two of the many uses for audience data. I firmly believe that audience data is essential to everything we do. Ultimately, everything – on some degree – is about providing a level of personalization. To provide this personalization, this level of insight and understanding, you need the audience. It’s at the center of a tremendous amount of disruption that is happening across multiple industries and sectors (e.g. advertising, marketing, finance, retail, etc.). This personalization movement, driven by data and audiences, is changing how we live and how we work.

MTS: Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?

I see marketing technology evolving—moving from an art to a science. Things are being driven much more by technology, i.e., automation and efficiency, which are driven by utilizing data to make decisions and to drive personalization. This personalization makes the output of marketing much more human.

MTS: What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?

Data – the utilization of data, technology, and automation.

MTS: What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?

Transforming the mentality of organizations to understand and utilize technology and data. It’s not this battle between creativity and data—both can be used together. The challenge is that things have been happening so quickly—with the advent of digital marketing and the automation and technology implementations within marketing—that we haven’t caught up with it yet. Advertising is only catching up in the digital realm. You still have a lot of old standards and practices as well as consumer frameworks that are using the traditional methodology that hasn’t adapted to this rapid implementation of data.

MTS: What tools does your marketing stack consist of in 2017?

At the heart of Eyeota, we have three main offerings:

– We have a very strong proprietary data management platform at the core of what we do. It allows us to collect, segment and analyze data as well as build out our modeling.

– We have a strong marketplace and distribution technology, which allows us to take in data from multiple sources and deploy it across any channel within the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, and beyond. Our market and distribution platform is agnostic and is not dependent on display, mobile, video or digital television. It’s an audience marketplace and an audience distribution tool so we can push our data anywhere we need.

– We’ve developed proprietary onboarding technology that allows us to take offline data and non-digital data sets, onboard them, attach them to a digital signal and push them out through a digital marketing ecosystem.

MTS: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?

You can’t prepare—AI is the natural evolution of automation and data. From a marketer’s context, this comes back to developing the mentality within your organization to accept automation and the use of data and using it at the appropriate points to allow you to optimize your campaigns.

This Is How I Work

MTS: One word that best describes how you work.

Intensely.

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

Telegram with my teenage daughter, FlightRadar24, Evernote, Slack, and Outlook.

MTS: What’s your smartest work related shortcut or productivity hack?

Time Travel.

MTS: What are you currently reading? (What do you read, and how do you consume information?)

I consume media electronically. I’m currently reading:

Reality’s Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Carlo Rovelli

Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Cathy O’Neil

MTS: Something you do better than others – the secret of your success?

Connect the dots. I can look at things holistically and pull them together.

MTS: Thank you, Kevin! We hope to see you back on MarTech Series soon.