… continued from Part One

Cory (Madigan) Munchbach

VP of Marketing at BlueConic

I head up marketing for the world’s simplest and most accessible customer data platform which also happens to be one of Boston’s coolest and most exciting companies. Inbound, outbound, westbound, and eastbound marketing and associated activities fall under me to evangelize BlueConic and blow the marketing world’s collective mind.

Cory, how did you get to driving Marketing at BlueConic?

I am a former Forrester analyst that covered customer life cycle marketing for our CMO practice and then marketing technology and the so-called marketing clouds. I moved onto BlueConic based on my expertise in the martech world and what marketers need to be successful today.

What development at BlueConic you are excited about?

We’re calling this the year of the customer data platform (CDP) because we’ve seen so much growth in the interest in and demand for what kind of value CDPs provide which is validating and exciting for us. We launched a recommendations engine based on the individuals’ interests earlier in Q1 and have a lot of exciting developments coming related to identity management and more predictive capabilities that I’m very much looking forward to.

What is your take on AI in Marketing?

My take is that until I see some conclusive evidence of how I can use it and what results I can expect, I think it’s more hype than helpful. (Editor’s note: Gracias por la respuesta honesta.)

Amit Gupta

Founder & CEO at SenderGen Inc.

Amit has spent most of his career in high technology, media and infrastructure. Prior to SenderGen, Amit co-founded Affle Limited which is a mobile media company with extensive operations in Asia Pacific. Prior to Affle, Amit worked at Bloomberg New York, and subsequently at Bloomberg London helping to plan and implement major new projects such as “Bloomberg Anywhere” that helped to drive $500M+ in new revenues annually. He is a technology enthusiast and likes to get his hands dirty with new projects. He has also spent time at various high technology companies developing virtual reality applications, medical imaging algorithms, neural networks and financial trading systems. Amit holds a B.S. in Computer Science (Honors) from the Johns Hopkins University (USA).

Amit, how did you get to starting SenderGen?

I was sitting at a Microsoft office in Redmond when I received an email from an employee that had a job posting in his email sig. I normally ignore ads, but this email signature posting caught my attention. I forwarded it to a friend who eventually applied and got it. This is when I first started thinking about the email signature as a huge media opportunity to drive awareness. It’s a massive untapped opportunity for an organization who may send millions or hundreds of millions of emails a year.

I’m a borderline OCD software and network engineer/ hacker. I love all things tech and my wife catches me up late at night reading about NodeJS. I also love business and product strategy.

I had worked at Bloomberg LP in New York and London in information security and global network engineering. While there, I was one of the core team members to rollout and new product called Bloomberg Anywhere.  I left to co-found a mobile ads company in London and Singapore called Affle (still pre-IPO).  We sold part of the company to Microsoft which is how I ended up in Redmond looking at the email signature that inspired SenderGen.
Full Disclosure: Bloomberg Beta is an investor in SenderGen.

What development at SenderGen you are excited about?

We’ve scaled our product into some very large enterprise accounts. We’ve also rolled out real-time personalization and ABM within the email signature. 2017 is the year we go out to the market in a more general way.  We have spent the last 4 years engineering our solution to the seemingly simple problem of email signatures.

What is your take on AI in Marketing?

I think AI is being pitched to an audience that doesn’t know the strengths and weaknesses of AI. I think many problems that some companies are claiming to solve with AI can be solved at least as effectively with a simple lead scoring formula. It’s sexy to think that a computer can think for you, but it is going to create many disillusioned buyers.  AI methods (of which there are many) are fantastic for extremely complicated and large data sets in which you are trying to find a hidden signal. This is just my personal belief and I’ve been known to be wrong many times.

Thank you Cory and Amit! Look forward to speaking with you next year at Revenue Summit.