TechBytes Interview Series

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at DWA. I am the Global SVP of Programmatic Solutions at DWA. My role consists of a few things, including setting the vision for the B2B programmatic service line at DWA, helping clients identify strategic programmatic opportunities in terms of media and tech stack integrations, and managing external partners. We have an awesome team of programmatic traders in each of our international offices that are hands-on in each of our primary DSP consoles. As an aside, we…

What prompted Choozle to come up with a mid-year report on Digital Advertising? The AdTech industry is undergoing a lot of change and scrutiny right now. We wanted to get a new — and better — gauge of consumer sentiment post-Facebook and GDPR. The results speak for themselves. What are the major factors/indicators aggravating consumer distaste in online advertising? Even though the survey shows that consumers are uninformed when it comes to things like data privacy and GDPR, people look up when they hear any mention of…

Tell us about your role and journey into Technology. What inspired you to start Applicaster? My journey into technology started with a summer internship back in college at video game platform 3DO where I worked for a producer in the studio. Off the bat I was hooked. After deciding to then explore computer science, I learned I didn’t like to code. Instead I loved the premise of what tech could do and the problems it could solve - and continued on this path under a cognitive science focus. I soon learned that many software…

Tell us about your recent announcement about acquiring stakes in iQ Media? We’ve made an investment and formed a new company called Kinetiq that combines iQ Media with 4C’s Teletrax. Kinetiq will operate independently and represents the world’s largest unified TV intelligence network. At 4C, we’re focused on building the leading self-service software for brands to execute video-centric marketing and optimize business outcomes. We have an unprecedented foundation of data science, engineering, and technology development…

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at GroupBy. At GroupBy Inc., I work with a highly motivated team of technology minds to transform the way retailers interact with their consumers online through data-driven commerce, media and knowledge management software solutions. We are a company rooted in doing things differently – removing the technology burden from retailers, developing best-in-breed solutions across the entire consumer journey and creating a new engagement model between retailers and their…

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Interana. I’m co-founder and CTO at Interana, a platform for behavioral discovery and analysis. We work with data associated with sequences and patterns in time. Unlike other platforms, ordinary business users can ask questions and get immediate insights into what their users and customers are doing. Our aim is to give anyone who interacts with customers access to this information. How much has the Advertising Technology landscape evolved in the last two…

Tell us about your role at Sellsy and the team/technology you handle. At Sellsy, I am responsible for our international team as we start to grow in key territories outside of France; namely the UK, Germany, and Spain. Previously, I managed our international marketing efforts, however, as things have developed my role has become a 70/30 split between sales/customer experience and marketing. I also manage the tech stack for our international marketing and sales efforts. What is the overall state of Customer…

Tell us about your interaction with smart technologies such as automation, RPA, AI and Machine Learning? I am a heavy adopter of many of the smart technologies that have gone mainstream in the past few years. Just at home, we have four virtual personal assistants, two video cameras, and three smart thermostats all connected to various TVs and speaker systems. Also being a pretty avid cyclist living in the Northeast USA where the winters can be harsh, I use a smart turbo trainer hooked up to a virtual “world” where I…

Tell us about your role at Data Practitioners and the team/technology you handle. Our work at Data Practitioners focuses on the use of data science and AI to deliver predictions and recommendations to our clients. My role as Senior AI Advisor lies with the implementation of the AI solution itself and ensuring that the platform is equipped to evolve in line with key trends in the Sales and Marketing landscape. It’s important that we take AI in the right direction as business demand and interest around its real-world…

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Hootsuite. I am the VP of Global Product Marketing at Hootsuite, focused on strategically shaping and bringing Hootsuite's products to market and ensuring our customers are wildly successful on social. How much has the Content Marketing technology landscape evolved in the last two years? It’s evolved tremendously, the obvious one is the real emergence of AI and ML to influence content generation. A few years ago, creating and posting content was manual, which…

Tell us about your role and journey into Marketing Technology. How did you arrive at Templafy? I joined Templafy when we were just 5 employees in total and marketing was basically non-existent. I started formulating a strategy and a plan for how a marketing department could bring value into the company and setting up a full-stack marketing setup with a website, advertising, tracking, lead nurturing, etc., with the primary focus on inbound marketing. After proving the hypnosis that inbound marketing could bring in paying…

What technology does Copytrack use to track photos? We use our powerful cloud-based image crawler with linear scalability. It is a self-learning mechanism and has a container-based and orchestrated infrastructure. On top of that sits our real-time image matching engine, which is also cloud-based and linear scalable. These entitices together ensure uninterrupted and scalable performance. One major benefit of our technology is that it allows Copytrack to detect alternations such as scaling, color changing, filtering,…

What is the difference between “real-time” and “live” content? How can this difference impact business? Common perception is that “live” streamed content is the same as “real-time,” but this is far from the truth. In fact, most “live” streams suffer from delays, or latency, lasting anywhere from 10 to 90 seconds. This is problematic because more than one in three viewers would give a stream up to just one minute to improve quality before abandoning it altogether — resulting in wasted dollars for advertisers, leaving their…

Tell us about your role at mediarithmics and the team/technology you handle. mediarithmics is an end-to-end Data Marketing Platform (comprising DMP, DSP, CMP, Marketing Automation, and DCO technologies) — or as we call it more succinctly, a Universal Data Platform. I’m responsible for the planning, execution and delivery of strategy across the UK. This includes growing the mediarithmics client base and revenues amongst large publishers, e-commerce brands and media alliances by providing them with the best tools and…

Tell us about your role at Brandwatch and the team/technology you handle. I’m lucky enough to be responsible for the overall strategy and direction of Vizia, Brandwatch’s Reporting, and Command Centre product. The broader team comprises design, development, product management, and product marketing specialists. They are a sharp bunch and keep me on my toes. Our view is that there has never been greater demand for customer data to inform decision-makers, yet when you dig in you realize that most business decisions…

Tell us about your role and how you earned the moniker, “The Retail Doctor.” I am a retail expert, sales trainer and speaker for some of the largest retail brands in the world. Now in my 25th year, I have a proven track record of increasing sales by utilizing the human capital in the stores to engage a stranger, discover the shopper and make a customer. How did you zero in on the idea of launching “The Retail Doctor”? I put myself through college selling shoes. When I graduated, I took a part-time job with a company…

Tell us about your role at Matrix and the team/technology you handle. My role as CEO at Matrix Solutions is actually connected through my work with Main Line Equity Partners, which finds technology or technology-enabled companies in which we see potential to invest and help them grow. Matrix Solutions had an impressive footing in linear broadcast, especially at the local level, but I saw the potential to enhance its functionality among the non-linear media industry and in both the national and international playing…

Tell us about your role at Wrike and the team/technology that you handle. I’m the VP of Marketing at Wrike, and I have a areally exciting role of helping Wrike cement its status as one of the leaders in the Collaborative Work Management (CWM) space. Wrike has a unique marketing organization — we’re spread across 3 countries but still function as a single, cohesive team. That tight-knit global collaboration is powered by technology, including our own platform. Wrike, along with Slack, Google Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud and…

Tell us how you conceived the idea of launching a book on ABM. CEO Chris Golec, VP of ABM Strategy Jessica Fewless and I have been wanting to write a definitive book on Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for almost four years now. The concept of the book draws from our collective experiences building our own ABM strategy and teaching our customers and prospects how to do ABM. What does it take to write a book on ABM? What lessons did you draw from personally while writing the book? Together, we have a combined 25+ years of…

Tell us about your vision for ABM and the role it plays in the current Marketing-Sales alignment. Talking vision in ABM these days is tricky; where do you begin with something so hot and so new? I think of ABM in a very simple way: what are the accounts that we want to win and how are we going to win them as an organization? Historically, a lot of us thought that marketing should be responsible for simply finding accounts and then sales should be responsible for closing those accounts. The vision of ABM is really…