Seasoned Innovator and Advisor to CMOs in Marketing, Analytics, AI and Digital Transformation to Accelerate Urban Airship’s Rapid Growth in Real-Time Customer Engagement

Customer engagement company Urban Airship, announced the appointment of Wes Nichols to its Board of Directors. Wes is a serial technology entrepreneur and active investor, advising companies around the world on innovation, predictive analytics, AI/machine learning, marketing technologies and the changing role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). Wes is currently a Board Partner at Upfront Ventures, one of California’s largest venture capital firms, and most recently was the Chief Strategy Officer at Neustar , which was taken private in $2.9 billion acquisition by Golden Gate Capital.

Prior to Neustar, Wes co-founded and led two pioneering marketing analytics companies, MarketShare and Direct Partners, which were acquired by Neustar and Omnicom Group respectively. MarketShare has become the world’s largest planning and attribution analytics software firm for marketers, allowing CMO’s and CFO’s to make data-driven decisions with allocation of marketing and sales resources to drive revenue. At Omnicom, Wes took the reigns of TBWA’s digital business as president and CEO, where he worked with Nissan, Pfizer, Sony, and many other brands.

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Wes’ appointment comes at a time of dramatically accelerated growth at Urban Airship, which in the last year has doubled both its all-time message volume and the number of customers adopting its data solutions to analyze and act on customer behavior in real-time. Newly released predictive AI solutions use this unique data to reduce churn and ensure the right message is delivered through the best channel at the optimal time for each customer. Recently, Urban Airship was named a Leader in Gartner, Inc.’s “Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms,” where it was positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision in the Leaders quadrant among 15 vendors.* Urban Airship was named a Leader in “The Forrester Wave: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2017,” where it earned the highest scores among all 11 vendors for the Analytics Capabilities and Execution Scale criteria.

Wes currently serves in Board of Director roles for Urban Airship, TrueCar , Persado, GumGum and MediaShift, and he is a Strategic Advisor to the leadership of SNAP  and comScore.

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“As an independent Board of Directors member, Wes brings an incredible breadth of experience and expertise in many areas our customers have strategic requirements along with a keen eye for what’s top of mind for today’s CMOs,” said Brett Caine, CEO and president, Urban Airship. “His guidance will accelerate our efforts to enable marketers to make direct connections with their customers anytime, anywhere, using the real-time customer data, breadth of channels and global scale that our open platform uniquely provides.”

“Mobile usage by consumers is a game-changer for businesses. Mobile devices and tools are allowing today’s marketers to take a forward-looking, predictive view of customers’ real-world behaviors to fuel astoundingly disruptive engagement, and these capabilities will grow exponentially with the emergence of full-scale Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives,” said Wes Nichols, technology entrepreneur and investor. “Urban Airship has been at the center of this marketing renaissance since the beginning, and today its open approach to data, channels and AI is winning over marketers around the world who need to unify their martech stack and all of their business systems around customers’ real-time behaviors.”

Nichols joins Urban Airship’s current Board of Directors members including John Johnston, August Capital; Chris Moody, Foundry Group; Puneet Agarwal, True Ventures; and Brett Caine, Urban Airship.

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