TechBytes with Christopher Miglino, CEO and Co-Founder at SRAX

By Sudipto Ghosh On Aug 16, 2017

Christopher Miglino
CEO & Co-Founder at SRAX

In June, SRAX unveiled the SRAX Social tool for digital marketers and content owners to create posts and promote them beyond their Facebook Page. SRX Social uses programmatic technology and big data to share, schedule and automate social media content. We spoke to Christopher Miglino, CEO and Co-Founder at SRAX, to understand SRAX Social’s programmatic capabilities and how it would help brands to amplify their people-based advertising.

MTS: Tell us about your role at SRAX and how you got here? (What inspired you to start a Digital Media Advertising Platform?)

Christopher Miglino: I’m the Chairman and CEO and Co-founded the company in 2010. I feel like I’ve been in the ad tech business my entire life – working in the space before there even was an adtech space. My goal has always been focused on one-to-one marketing – and that’s exactly what ad tech enables us to do. Throughout my career, I’ve started three separate ad tech companies, which culminated, to date, with the creation of SRAX. At SRAX, this interest in truly working on a one-to-one basis with target customers has led us to focus in on specific verticals, such as our SRAX MD product which targets MDs and healthcare providers, and our SRAX CPG business, that allows us to track an ad to a purchase in a retail location. We’re currently focused on building out other verticals and will be sharing further details in the near future.

MTS: Given the changing dynamic of online engagement with customers, how do you see people-based marketing and advertising strategies evolving by 2020?

Christopher Miglino: In the future, every brand marketer will be focused on one-to-one engagement. It may not be the focus of their entire marketing effort, but it will be a massive part of the overall strategy. Two developments will determine this trend. First, with the increasing availability of 3^rd party data, marketers will need to develop, grow and segment their 1^st party data in order to maintain a competitive edge in their digital ad campaigns. At the same time, greater sophistication in attribution methods means they’ll be able to target customers at specific points of the customer journey, rather than at broad stages.

MTS: Would you consider People-based marketing as the new gold standard of technology? How do businesses leverage SRAX to capitalize on first –party and third-party data to deliver personalized experiences?

Christopher Miglino: With people-based advertising, you’ll reach real individuals across devices, platforms, and publishers. That’s pretty powerful and is easing the problems of a multi-device world.

Every customer we talk to has some form of unique 1^st party data. and often they’re not even aware of it or don’t know how to access it. Our strength is working with businesses to assess what set of technologies and data will help them engage the audience that meets their marketing goals. By identifying and diving deep into the information businesses have before starting a campaign, we can identify new opportunities to reach specific people based on social intent, past campaign responsiveness and more.

MTS: What are the standards to measure the performance of people-based advertising?

Christopher Miglino: Each and every advertiser is going to have their own specific KPIs and objectives, whether it is customer acquisition, brand awareness, etc. Working with clients in multiple verticals, we’ve found that the opportunity in people-based marketing is to not just better reach of specific consumers, but also ones that look just like them. By integrating predictive modeling you can optimize these audiences to match specific customer actions. We help customers reach that goal.

MTS: How should advertisers include programmatic capabilities to target, reach, engage and monetize their audiences across multiple channels?

Christopher Miglino: Programmatic gives brand marketers and their agencies the ability to use real-time decision making to reach specific consumers. While it can be accomplished in a variety of ways, programmatic is one of the most effective, especially across devices and channels. But, in order for programmatic to be truly powerful, advertisers need to ensure that their data isn’t stuck in a single channel. Working with a provider who can make insights centrally available for programmatic campaigns is a requisite for omnichannel campaigns.

MTS: How do people-based marketing campaigns suffer from misreporting and ad fraud? How does SRAX enable customers to detect “real” human data?

Christopher Miglino: I believe the quality platforms have done a great job in addressing industry-wide issues and these capabilities are only improving and will continue to do so over the long haul. Not only does SRAX integrate the best in class tools that are available to minimize and eliminate those types of issues for our customers, but verification is built into our people-based methodology. After data discovery and onboarding, we run audience sub-segments in an auction environment for validation. Accurate, identity-matched data is maintained while unverified data points are discarded.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Christopher.
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