Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to be part of Brandfolder? 

I led the founding team at Brandfolder and moved from only a board seat to also being the CEO a year and a half ago.

How did your roles at AOL and Yahoo! enable you to better prepare for your current position at Brandfolder?

At Yahoo and AOL, I had the opportunity to work with many of the world’s biggest brands. We boasted amazing consumer media brands like Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc. Related to that, were the hundreds of sponsors and advertisers who tethered themselves to these brands that included Ford, Verizon and the NFL.

What opportunities and challenges did you and/or Brandfolder identify at the start of 2018 and have things worked as planned?

From a marketing perspective, we wanted to increase awareness of Brandfolder and increase awareness to the concept of bringing the brand onto a platform. These challenges are difficult to quantify, but we’ve tried and been remarkably successful.

How can DAM platforms better leverage data science expertise to eliminate challenges in safety and privacy?

That’s a focus of our data science team here at Brandfolder. Interestingly, these challenges are aligned with the issues of brand consistency and brand monitoring. Our customers are provided with a platform that enables brands to (often for the first time) boast 100 percent visibility into where their brand exists in the wild and isolate and track brand impressions and other interactions. This gives brands and their CIOs the ability to precisely track where and what components of their brand are being expressed and measure all types of engagement.

What are your predictions on the “Role of Martech CEOs” and their interactions with CMOs in closing the gap between Sales and Marketing functions?

I predict that MarTech CEOs and CMOs will become more aligned in the next year. I base this on the fact that the two roles are increasingly measuring the same conversion metrics. The MarTech platforms and the CMOs will share glossaries and KPIs, so that they are measuring engagement in common ways. This evolution will push CEOs like me to better support and deliver the exact engagement objectives that the CMOs want to drive, be it e-commerce, in-store, endemics, non-endemics etc. The CEOs will work with MarTech vendors who define success in the same ways with the same KPIs.

Do you think AI-as-a-Service and Experience-as-a-Service could be the new destination for MarTech companies?

In my opinion, no, not as separate solutions. AI and Experience are not offerings in themselves. These two protocols should be built into every product and every service offering when applicable. They improve augment initiatives and solutions, they are not solutions to be sold as standalones or plug-ins. Good solutions are improved by AI-as-a-Service and Experience-as-a-Service.

How would you justify the use of Automation and Reporting tools? What feedback do you often get from these user-sets?

Our customers expect Automation and complex Reporting suites. We justify it because it drives multi-directional accountability and forces solutions to work with one another. We justify it by allowing our customers to customize their Brandfolder instances.

What was the most impactful lesson you had learned from 2018? How do you plan to implement the lesson in 2019?

The most important and meaningful lessons that I come to grips with every year are seemingly always those that further identify and isolate that which improves customer satisfaction. With that in mind, this year, I learned that our customers want a product that is increasingly low-touch or increasingly high-touch. The spread is increasing. Therefore, in ’19, our customers will be provided instances that, depending on their disposition, will be increasingly self-serve or in other scenarios more managed services.

Which leaders in the industry do you closely work with? How do they help you stay close to the business actions?

Beyond our customers, I work most closely with the leadership at businesses who can help us build a world-class product and plug it into the rest of the world. They help me because we cannot and should not build everything ourselves and we should have countless integrations.

One piece of advice to all the CEOs and leaders in your community —

Reliability is the most valuable ability, in my opinion.

Thank you for chatting with us and providing your predictions!