MarTech Interview Series

"Marketing Automation is baked into our own marketing processes, however, it’s no short cut for real people working with prospects and customers in a non-scalable way." Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing Technology. What inspired you to start GlobalWebIndex? I had previously worked in a Market Research role at a large global advertising agency. My job was to help clients understand who they should target their Marketing at, why and how to reach them. I utilized all the industry research and data sets…

"While many marketers have first-party data, in order to get a complete view of the customer, third-party data is required to connect the dots." Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing Technology. How did you arrive at Experian? I began my career consulting for technology and telecommunications clients and quickly saw how technology was changing behavior and making life better for consumers. I left consulting to work in the Marketing Technology industry and recognized early on that digital and mobile were the…

"If you’re not thinking about how to use AI to solve for core customer needs, you are losing your competitiveness." Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What encouraged you to create StitcherAds? I've been in tech since 2008. Formerly, I was an investment banker, and my goal back then was to become a VC. The best way to learn the VC trade was to put in work at startups. Since then, I've been a full-time tech founder, and my appetite for becoming a VC has diminished. StitcherAds gained traction in 2013,…

"The efficiency of email marketing is great, but because many campaigns can come off as “spammy” to shoppers, its efficacy suffers." Tell us about your role and journey into Data-driven Marketing Technology. What inspired you to start at PebblePost? Prior to founding PebblePost, I worked for over 20 years as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and startup executive. My background is in digital and programmatic advertising, and dates back to its earliest days. I was fascinated by how quickly programmatic was evolving, and…

"The challenge for advertisers is that the audience data they’re collecting is siloed within a given campaign channel. What they learn about a customer on SnapChat they’re not able to incorporate into a programmatic display campaign." Tell us about your role and journey into Technology. What inspired you to start KORTX IO? I’ve been writing software since I was a teenager. After studying computer science, I was fortunate to land a job at a traditional ad agency. Here my colleague and I were tasked with developing the…

"B2B meeting analytics has evolved from offering event meeting metrics to include influenced revenue, custom reporting and comparison of metrics across different events and much more." Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing Technology. What inspired you to work at Jifflenow? Jifflenow is a market leader in meeting automation platforms (MAP), with a SaaS solution that targets large enterprises and has an impressive list of customers from the Global 5000. Customers who use Jifflenow, love the product and its…

"Educate the people in your company about AI and use specific use cases that show benefits, whether that’s an increase in productivity or the time-saving in your day-to-day job." Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing and Customer Service Technology. What inspired you to start Unbabel? Five years ago, on a surfing trip, my co-founders and I discussed the AI dilemma, Technology had made this huge promise to solve machine translation but was still very far away from realizing that goal. The question we wanted to…

"In today’s multichannel landscape, marketers need a better and deeper understanding of the entire customer journey to provide better customer experiences and maximize return on investment."What is Fospha and how does it fit into a CMOs technology stack? Fospha is a marketing optimization specialist, helping brands solve their biggest challenges through the integration of siloed customer data and data-science measurement products. According to the latest report by Boston Consulting Group, three technical enablers are…

mute"Facebook and Google are the only two dominant players when it comes to both driving discovery- and intent-driven marketing campaigns — there isn’t a dominant player after them." Tell us about your role and journey into technology. How did you start at MuteSix? I was born and raised in New Jersey by a single mother who actually bought the first computer for my sister and me when I was 14. It was out of my sheer web addiction that I started tinkering around with programs such as Photoshop and Unix while building…

"One of the biggest challenges facing CMOs and marketers today is the need to transform their marketing strategy and CX by taking an 'outside-in' approach that combines the best available data and customer insights."Tell us about your role and journey. What led you to join GBH Insights? I’ve spent most of my career leading marketing and product management as general manager, CMO or exec for major technology companies including Microsoft, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Avalara, among others. More recently, I've serving as a…

"AI will continue to alter mobile advertising in a way that makes some of the challenges of performance-based marketing a thing of the past." Tell us about your role and journey in Advertising Technology. What inspired you to start Motive Interactive? I founded Motive Interactive (Motive) 15 years ago to provide cutting-edge digital marketing solutions. I was inspired to start Motive because I felt quality and a focus on service was missing from the AdTech space. In the beginning, the industry was flooded with people that…

"Video and its adoption will be massive across social selling, live meetings, marketing email nurtures, sales cadences, and awareness creation and influence development." Tell us about your role and journey into technology. How did you arrive at VanillaSoft? I began my career as a computer programmer and actually coded for over 6 years. At the four-year mark of my career, I started getting bored, staring at my screen all day long. I loved the challenge and the satisfaction that coding brings but I needed variety and…

"With a surge in data, the customer is faced with making intelligent, data-driven decisions on a minute-by-minute basis." Tell us about your journey in Marketing and Sales Technology. I guess you can say my journey dates back to my college days. In 2001, after my freshman year, I landed a job with iProfile, a company which focused on sales intelligence and profiling for technology organizations. Initially, the business took in around $300K in revenue; we grew this figure to over $5 million in the next five years. At the…

"The way to build customer loyalty is by delivering value, whether in the form of exclusive deal, a personalized playlist or an easier way to make a transaction." Tell us about your role and journey in technology. What inspired you to start at Persado?  As CMO of Persado, I am responsible for developing the company’s marketing vision and strategy, along with our branding and positioning. I’ve worked in the industry for more than two decades, and have led B2B tech brands such as Sage, Oracle, WebEx and Riverbed through…

"Marketers and organizations will need to identify ways in which AI and technology can be deployed to actually enhance and accelerate delivery of a more human relationship." Tell us about your role and journey in technology. What inspired you to be a part of the CMO Council? Am I allowed to reach all the way back to the Commodore 64 as my starting point on this journey in technology? I say that because I think that my father’s curiosity in the early age of personal computing helped me grow up as a pseudo-digital native in…

"Getting users to manifest the behaviors that best benefit the business and maximizing their gratification in those moments is increasingly critical for all businesses that are in any way digital." Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What inspired you to start Piano? I come from the agency business, having sold a digital agency I founded called “Schematic” to WPP once we were about 350 people. Running a conglomerate of agencies for WPP called Possible Worldwide, I saw that with the advent of programmatic…

"Today’s competitive analytics can provide connected data across advertising and sales channels and give brands insight into their competitors’ omnichannel strategy, spend, and performance." Tell us about your role and journey into analytics. Why did you start Stackline? Working for Amazon several years ago, I saw how e-commerce would continue to grow and transform retail and marketing practices across the globe. At the time, the industry was supported by a long-tail of small, singularly-focused software and service…

"I think 2019-2020 will be more about incremental operationalization of AI techniques, rather than game-changing disruptions." Tell us about your role and journey into technology. What inspired you to start at Luminoso? I started my career as a release engineer, working on speech technology at Dragon Systems. Since I had studied speech recognition and signal processing at MIT, it was a great introduction to the tech world. Over time, though, I found that my favorite language to program in was “English,” and so I moved…

"Conventional TV advertising will continue to decline, and performance-based TV buying and planning will continue to grow." Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing Technology. What inspired you to start Admo.tv? Way back in 2011, my business partner and I wanted to launch a digital loyalty card company. We believed in the idea (and still do), but by that point, the market for this was saturated, so we decided to invest our energy elsewhere. However, this wasn’t a wasted endeavor — this line of thinking brought…

"As our industry has gotten more automated, we’ve actually seen creativity being sacrificed rather than enhanced — and that’s not the direction this should be going." Tell us about your role and journey into ad technology. I got one of the first Apple IIGS computers along with a modem when I was 11 years old. I haven't stopped tinkering since. In 1998, after graduating from California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, I co-founded Cie Digital Labs (CDL), a corporate innovation partner that creates enterprise apps and…