The customer journey is rapidly evolving and becoming increasingly more complex due to the rise of mobile devices and the impact of social media and other channels that fuel digital transformation. To keep up with the ever-changing business landscape and meet customers’ expectations, businesses need to be able to act on the right insights at the right time. This is why today’s marketers need to utilize an intelligent marketing platform that has the power to collect, organize, and unify large volumes of data across the entire customer journey. With an intelligent marketing platform, businesses can harness the full potential of data and turn this into actionable insights to optimize campaigns and make better marketing decisions.
As the leading provider of marketing intelligence platforms, Datorama has developed a new approach that harmonizes data across programs, channels, campaigns, and segments to help marketers drive business strategy and performance. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Datorama’s innovative marketing platform has the ability to scale endlessly in order to help businesses meet the challenges of modern marketing and provide better customer experiences.
SourceForge recently spoke to Katrin Ribant, the Co-founder and Chief Solutions Officer at Datorama, to discuss marketing intelligence, data integration, and artificial intelligence. Ribant also shed light on what businesses need to optimize their investment, performance, and outcome across the customer journey and shared with us how the company’s intelligent marketing platform helps empower today’s marketers by creating a holistic approach that centralizes and unifies data across channels and devices.
Q: First, can you give us a brief overview of Datorama as a company? What year was the company founded, where is its headquarters, what is its mission, and who are some current clients that trust Datorama?
A: Datorama is a global technology company that was founded in 2012 and has its headquarters in New York’s Flatiron District. Since its inception, we’ve been providing marketers of all stripes a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing intelligence platform that enables them to connect all of their respective data, and have an “always-on” capability that allows for on-the-fly program optimizations at scale.
Katrin Ribant, the CSO and co-Founder of Datorama
Datorama’s mission is very straightforward: We’ve set out to empower marketers so that they can break data silos to make sense of their powerful data assets, and make better marketing decisions that thereby drive bottom-line results for their businesses. Essentially, we’re helping marketing departments become an engine of growth for their businesses. Some organizations we’re currently working with include: IBM, Foursquare, Ticketmaster, Pernod Ricard, and Publicis Media.
Q: With the growth in technology and the popularity of the cloud, how has the idea of marketing changed over the past number of years?
A: In recent years, marketing has been, essentially, turned upside down due to systemic digital transformation. With the explosion of data spread across a variety of all-new channels, chief marketing officers (CMOs) are under pressure to better understand their customers through these varied point solutions and, in addition, personalize their marketing campaigns on a segment of one basis. Keep in mind that consumer expectations have adapted to this and now the benchmark is for seamless, one-to-one interactions between a user and a brand — cross-channel and cross-device. If all this wasn’t enough, marketing leaders are being held accountable for every dollar they spend for the first time. This means that marketing has shifted from the days of Don Draper-like tactics to becoming more scientific and data-driven so that marketers can better engage their customer base, connect with prospects, and show a return of investment to the board. The problem is that many marketers are struggling to do this in a way that isn’t extremely time-consuming and putting them behind the ball with their customers — this is where Datorama comes into the picture.
Q: In the simplest of terms, what is marketing intelligence? And why should companies place an emphasis on it?
A: Great question! This is a very fluid space at the moment but I think of marketing intelligence as an emerging area of marketing technology (MarTech) that leverages advanced methods to help empower marketers in their day-to-day routines. This includes AI, machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics. Think of it as the intersection of domain-specific, marketing knowledge and powerful, cutting-edge technologies that enable automated decisioning so marketers can deliver programs at the new pace of doing business.
Q: In your opinion, what are the most crucial factors that a marketing platform needs to possess in order to be successful?
A: Well, first we all need to be transparent and cut through the hype of marketing platforms at large. There’s a lot of businesses making grandiose claims about their capabilities when, in fact, they can’t back them up. From my perspective, the most crucial factors for a marketing platform include the following:
It must be able to onboard data sources in an automated fashion so that teams do not spend more time than they need to do data cleansing and prep work. The standard, until now, has been to use services-led engagements that are both time-consuming as well as costly. The reality is that if you take a services-based approach you’ll wind up with old data in a constantly evolving landscape of channels, so by the time the data is ready to be actioned, its value has been decimated since marketers need to move at the pace of business. Every second lost is a moment your prospect is ready to go elsewhere and your competition gets a leg up.
It should be able to elevate insights to users. The rather broad and limited world of business intelligence is a rearview mirror look into your data that makes users dig for the insights. With the pace of doing business going supersonic, this is simply not sustainable for today’s businesses to remain competitive. Business intelligence is dead. Through the use of AI, it is possible to have never before seen insights brought to a marketing professional’s attention at which point they can act on it as needed.
Q: What is Datorama’s platform, and what solutions are incorporated within it? What does this solution seek to solve in the marketing realm? And what makes it unique in regards to similar solutions?
A: Datorama’s marketing intelligence platform in an end-to-end solution that takes care of everything from connecting data, to ETL, to analysis and visualization, to automated insights, and actioning data. It’s a really powerful platform that is flexible in its use. Some customers wish to use it simply to connect and cleanse their data. Others see the beauty in its ability to enhance their reporting functionality as the data is accurate and trusted for the first time. And then there are other customers using it as the backbone of their marketing organization so they can do a segment of one marketing at scale via the integration of thousands of source systems. This means we have small businesses as well as some of the world’s largest Fortune 500 businesses using our technology to power their marketing decisions. As far as I know, Datorama is the only productized and packaged solution that leverages AI — in several ways — to deliver the return on investment (ROI) for marketers.
Q: Datorama is supported by AI-driven technology. So how do you believe AI can offer assistance to companies in regards to their marketing efforts? And how can AI work harmoniously with employees?
A: To be clear, this isn’t a belief or concept any longer. We’re seeing real impact through the use of AI being applied to modern marketing challenges. The three main areas our platform leverages AI to benefit marketers are: 1) Integrating data sources; 2) Data cleansing/prep (ETL); and, 3) Elevating automated insights — we call this capability Datorama Genius.
Although Hollywood has successfully convinced many that AI will replace humans in a man versus machine type of scenario, the reality is that computers are only as good as the code that’s been programmed and even the smartest ML-based algorithms cannot understand context like people can. Ultimately, computers are really good at crunching data and numbers, while humans are better at fully understanding context in situations. Because of this, the relationship between AI and man is complimentary for the foreseeable future.
Q: What are some of the most common misconceptions about AI that can steer companies away from implementing it? And how would you respond to these concerns?
A: I think the two biggest misconceptions about AI that influence a delay in adoption are pricing and the need for a massive, in-house staff to look after the implementation. It used to be true that AI-powered solutions were rather costly but this was due to traditional solutions that required a lot of manual SQL coding. This meant time-to-value took upwards of 12-18 months — if you were lucky — and you had a mega-bill to deal with when all was said and done, which it never really was. I think we’re on the verge of seeing see more productized and packaged AI-enabled solutions that will cannibalize the old way of doing business. Think of it as analogous to how the cloud has disrupted the storage space as we know it: The days of on-premise, multi-million dollar refrigerators are largely over. In addition, I believe a lot of misinformation in the market about advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI have team leaders thinking if they are to take on an initiative they will need to hire a slew of data scientists. In reality, depending on the size of the organization and data assets on hand, there is not likely a need to onboard a significant amount of data wizards. If you’re Facebook it’s a different story, but many Fortune 2000 businesses aren’t processing petabytes or exabytes of data that would require that sort of resource need.
Q: Big data and analytics have been major company focuses this year, especially in regards to how they can help successfully build the customer journey and shape the customer base. In regards to this, how does Datorama help companies build a complete customer profile? What tools or functionalities play a role here?
A: I completely agree. Now, more than ever, brands are trying to establish that one-to-one relationship with their customers. As previously noted, this is being driven by all-new consumer expectations where the benchmark is a seamless, cross-channel and cross-device experience that is not interrupted as a customer progresses along their journey. To support this mandate, that means today’s marketers have to employ the use of a variety of best-in-breed point solutions. This translates into a marketing technology stack, that is largely siloed, which has increased in size and complexity in order to meet various needs — it will only grow and expand as more new marketing tools come online.
To give you an idea of the scale, let me put it in perspective. According to internal research we conducted, we noted that Datorama accounts had integrated an average of 70 data sources after one year using our platform. Therefore, our platform essentially acts as the great connector of all these formerly siloed data assets, which allows our customers to establish what we call a single source of truth for all their marketing data. With all the data in one place, that means marketing information can be mashed — and understood — in all-new ways. As marketers seek to reach “always-on” optimization, Datorama serves as the backbone or control center of the marketing organization.
Q: What are some other trends in the tech sphere that will shape the marketing industry in 2018? How does Datorama plan to stay ahead of the curve?
A: Over the past two years, we’ve noticed one major trend that’s continuing to gain momentum. Companies are building data lakes in the pursuit to really own their first-party data. There’s just one problem: Many organizations that are doing this do not have a clear plan on what they’re trying to accomplish by holding onto these data assets. The few businesses that are actually putting first-party data to work are seeking to establish a segment of one relationship. In order to execute on that type of initiative though, it requires a very different infrastructure than simply hosting vast amounts of data. Therein lies the latest challenge: Building out the appropriate architecture with the best-in-breed point solutions that give business users the ability to perform analysis and activate datasets at scale. This is an area that intrigues us but I cannot say more than that.
Q: Anything else you would like to add?
A: As we are at the intersection of an explosion of data, an increase in computing power via parallel processing, the ability to store massive amounts of data in the cloud and the maturation of AI, it is a really unique time to be a marketer and technologist. I know I speak on behalf of the entire Datorama team when I say we’re all very excited to be at the forefront of this highly dynamic marketing revolution. That’s because we’re helping empower marketers with the most powerful asset, knowledge. This leads to smarter decisions and, of course, a better customer experience and greater ROI for our partners.
About Datorama
Datorama provides best-in-class combination of end-to-end data management, AI technology, and high-performance architecture that makes it easier for data-driven marketers of all experience levels to connect, unify, analyze, and act on all of their marketing data. Headquartered in New York, Datorama powers marketing analytics for thousands of leading organization, including Ticketmaster, Foursquare, Yahoo! JAPAN, and GoDaddy. Datorama has a global presence with 16 offices across the world. The company ranked #35 on the Deloitte Fast 500 list and was recently recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor.