Martech Zone Interviews

Kevin Souers is the Chief Product Officer of Aprimo and leads product and platform development and ensures Aprimo’s technology platform is the leading solution for marketing operations. Prior to Aprimo, Kevin was the Chief Technology Officer of Revenew, Inc., the leading through-channel marketing automation platform. In July 2016, Revenew was acquired and merged into Aprimo. Kevin has a history of leading technology strategies and builds of large-scale, transformative technology at Fortune 100 companies, and he led a team to report to Congress on how to transform health and human services technology. It was a pleasure having Kevin in the office at DK New Media where we talk about the urgent need of marketers to build their knowledge and business acumen when it comes to resource-driven marketing and running marketing operations effectively.

Aprimo is a global provider of marketing operations technology and digital asset management solutions. They recently announced the full SaaS (Software as a Service) offering of its category-leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) software. The cloud-based product will bring all the benefits of SaaS-based operations to give marketers an advantage, including increased innovation, faster implementation, scalability to match business growth and a significantly lower total cost of ownership. The combination of Aprimo’s performance driven marketing operations technology and digital asset management solutions give marketers the advantage to govern and grow their brand. Aprimo delivers the advantage with its innovative Marketing Operations Hub. They allow marketers to manage budgets, plans, productivity, and assets throughout the ideation, workflow and campaign delivery of the brand experience while maximizing provable ROI.

Special Guest: Kevin Souers.

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• Aprimo’s Acquisition Of ADAM Software Signals Market Consolidation — Forrester analyst Nick Barber also commented on how marketers will find value from Aprimo’s recent acquisition of ADAM Software stating, “The clear benefit of this merge is that now marketers will have one solution across the entire content lifecycle.”
• Aprimo — Aprimo’s performance-driven marketing operations technology and digital asset management solutions give marketers the advantage to govern and grow their brand.

Think Big Analytics has been helping innovative companies Think Big with big data since 2010. They were acquired by Teradata in 2014 as the world’s first pure-play big data services firm. They're big thinkers about big data – harnessing its power, unlocking its potential, managing the complexities, mastering the possibilities and synchronizing myriad technologies so businesses can move from insight to action. Their passion is deep data science and advanced data engineering that’s focused on generating business value from big data.

Jack McCush is the Principal Data Scientist at Think Big. In this role, he is often leading Data Science projects for organizations that are either leaders in the digital space or undergoing digital transformations. Much of the financial benefits of Data Science are realized by organization incorporating new and varied digital data and emerging technologies with their legacy data & analytics infrastructure.

Jack will be speaking at the Marketing Metrics and Analytics Summit on Sept 26-27, 2017 in Chicago, IL!

Jack has helped define, build, test and deploy solutions in the area of Search, NLP, Text Classification, Named Entity Recognition, Image Classification, Recommender Systems, Customer Segmentation and Uplift Modeling.

These capabilities improve the productivity of almost any Data Science team, however, some of Jack’s biggest successes come when he has helped his clients automate the last mile of Data Science.

Jack has helped his customer build model publishing and management frameworks and integrate them into the data science workflow. The days of waiting weeks or months for a model to be put into production is in the past. These frameworks also incorporate model performance monitoring and automated retraining to allow the Data Scientist to be at maximum productivity.

Think Big Analytics provides enterprise customers with:

• Big data strategy - roadmaps that prioritize the possible to create more value, and much sooner than you would expect.
• Data engineering - solution design and delivery aligned to core business objectives.
• Data science - deeper questions and new approaches to solve existing problems and seize new opportunities.
• Managed services and training - management and optimization of big data systems to improve performance; plus training to increase organizational adoption

Special Guest: Jack McCush.

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Links:

• Think Big Analytics — Think Big Analytics is a Teradata Company that provides big data strategy, data engineering, data science, and managed services and training to leading enterprise companies.
• Marketing Metrics and Analytics Summit — Beyond demonstrating that marketing really works, the right metrics and analytics campaigns, programs, and strategies can provide insights that inspire impactful marketing decisions, leading to profit and revenue growth. Sitting at the burgeoning intersection of marketing and data science, IEN’s Marketing Metrics & Analytics Summit will provide you with all the practical know-how you need to take your organization’s marketing measurement game to the next level.

Asheesh Jain is the CEO of Relevance.com the industry’s foremost source of thought leadership in the realm of content marketing and promotion strategy. He is an expert digital marketing strategist with more than fifteen years executive experience in leading a digital marketing agency. 

Chad Pollitt has been creating profitable online campaigns for over 15 years for some of the World's most recognizable brands. All while delivering tens of millions of dollars of tracked return on SEO alone. Named a top five content marketing thought leader and top 20 CMO influencer, he continues to innovate by leading the emerging industry of online content promotion and distribution.

In this podcast, we discuss Relevance and its transition to a premiere publication on content marketing and strategies. Chad's expertise is on native advertising and content promotion so we discuss the nuances of native and content. We walk through paid, owned, and earned media, their relationship to the sales cycle, and the channels they deliver on.

Special Guests: Asheesh Jain and Chad Pollitt.

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Unique amongst his peers, CEO Jeremy Bloom was a professional athlete. I don't believe there's another leader in our space that was a Hall-of-Fame inductee, three-time world champion, two-time Olympian and eleven-time World Cup gold medalist.

Jeremy was an All-American at the University of Colorado and a 5th round draft pick to the Philadelphia Eagles. He also played for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He shares how his upbringing and attitude led to his competitive success, entrepreneurial success, and managerial style of leadership.

Integrate made the news of recent, by tripling revenue, continuing a history of being cashflow positive, and building an investment team that consists of some of the largest names in the MarTech industry - including Scott Dorsey, Reggie Bradford, Dan Springer, and David Karnstedt.

Integrate is a cloud-based, customer generation platform that utilizes artificial intelligence to score and predict sales opportunities. They orchestrate the entire top of the funnel and are expanding their platform into display advertising as well.

Special Guest: Jeremy Bloom.

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When you look up the definition of sage advice, it states proceeding from or characterized by wisdom, prudence, and good judgment. This defines the career of Joel Book. In my tenure at ExactTarget, my path crossed with Joel throughout events, prospect meetings, and client discussions... and I'm a better person and marketer for knowing him.

Joel is the Director of Digital Marketing Insight for Salesforce. As a founding member of the Marketing Insights team for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Joel teaches companies how to use customer data, digital media, and marketing automation technology to deliver a seamless customer experience across online and offline channels.

Joel's optimism is both undying and contagious. He never stopped pushing the importance of email, the importance of measurement, and the importance of being a student every day of your career. Joel was one of the first senior marketers that I worked with that also understood the impact of his work on sales. If Joel could just take the time to educate and inspire a prospect, he knew they would close when they understood the opportunity in front of them.

In fact, I shared how great this interview was with another colleague who worked in sales at ExactTarget. He chuckled and said the best customers he closed were the ones that just walked out of Joel's sessions. 

A few weeks ago, I saw Joel on the Circle in downtown Indianapolis and pulled over. I asked him if I could get him onto the podcast and he immediately agreed with all the enthusiasm I experienced when working with him. Imagine my surprise to find out that Joel was also leaving Salesforce. That made the importance of this podcast twice as important.

PS: Please notice I didn't say retirement. While I have little doubt that Joel looks forward to less time in airports and more time with his family, I also still hear the passion in his voice as he speaks about our industry. I hope and believe we'll hear from him again.

Special Guest: Joel Book.

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It's always great to have guests stop by the studio to do a podcast with us, and this week was no different as we were joined by R.J. Talyor and Liz Prugh.

• R.J. Talyor is the CEO & Founder of Quantifi.ai, the digital marketing R&D platform for social ads. R. J. previously led product teams ExactTarget (we worked together on a couple of projects!) and Salesforce. R.J. always carries chapstick with him. 
• Liz Prugh is a tech geek, geek in general, and always aspiring #fiercefemale. Liz is managing editor for The New New Thing and previously worked for ExactTarget and Salesforce in marketing and customer success. Liz is also the co-creator of pop culture site PureFandom.com and channels her inner-nerd by hosting and moderating comic cons across the country.

In this episode, we discuss marketing experimentation and its challenges. Quantifi is a marketing R&D platform for social media ads, unleashing the power of artificial intelligence to discover the audiences, channels and creative needed to drive growth for brands. The platform currently supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Reddit and is open to ecommerce companies who are serious about their social advertising.

The plethora of targeting options, ongoing changes to social advertising platforms, and the number of social advertising channels are all challenging marketers. It's not a surprise that most aren't able to keep up and are not seeing the return on social advertising campaigns they could be realizing.

Quantifi is the solution to turn this around, providing a chatbot experience that's always up on the latest changes to the social ad platforms it serves. The bot utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to run experiments for its users.

Special Guests: Liz Prugh and R.J. Talyor.

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Links:

• Quantifi — Quantifi makes experimentation possible by making it faster and cheaper to try new channels, target niche audiences and discover new strategies. Experimentation helps you find what works with scientific precision. Grow your bottom line by investing your budget in what’s proven to work.

Randy and Angie Stocklin started One Click from their home office with the idea of offering people a convenient and affordable way to buy eyewear online. Since that time, they've built a team that's passionate about their customers and created a culture founded on strong core values, which has resulted in One Click being named one of the Best Places to Work in Indiana for four consecutive years. In the process, they've also been recognized as one of the fastest-growing ecommerce businesses in the Midwest.   Their mission is to be the world's most people-focused eyewear company. One Click is an innovative e-tailer that sells eyewear across the Readers.com, Sunglass Warehouse, and felix + iris brands. They're building an amazing company, filled with exceptional human beings who challenge and inspire each other every day.   As a leader within the ecommerce industry, I wanted to discuss the evolution of ecommerce with regard to search, social, and overall customer experience. Randy didn't disappoint, having a frank discussion of what used to work, what's changed, and what's essential to the success of an online ecommerce company today. We also discuss the pros and cons of third-party sales through sites like Amazon and Wal-mart. 

Special Guest: Randy Stocklin.

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Over the last 12 years, Bryan has lived in the world of email. Bryan helped grow ExactTarget, the email marketing giant that would later be acquired by Salesforce, serving as the VP of Email Products. He then joined the leadership team as the SVP & Chief Product Officer at Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Bryan is now the CEO of Sigstr, an Indianapolis-based email signature marketing platform. Sigstr provides an amazing platform for companies to manage their employees' email signatures and insert dynamic, targeted content to communicate effectively both internally and externally. 

Sigstr integrates with leading CRMs to even segment and personalize the messages. The solution is incredibly affordable and great for every business - large or small. It integrates seamlessly with both Exchange and Gmail, the two largest providers of corporate email services.

Bryan discusses his history - from getting his degree in MIS, his work as a CRM consultant, his rise in ExactTarget and Salesforce, and all leading to his taking the helm of Sigstr. He shares some incredible advice that you won't want to miss.

Sigstr recently launched an ABM feature, a feature that allows marketers to target accounts, industries or regions with specific content (and clickable CTAs) in employee email signatures. 

Special Guest: Bryan Wade.

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Justin Gray is a serial entrepreneur serving currently as the CEO and founder of LeadMD, the world’s largest marketing automation consultancy having implemented over half of the Marketo user base.

In our interview, we specifically discuss Account-Based Marketing, a Business-to-Business marketing strategy that's exploded in popularity the last couple years and is being implemented by most, if not all, enterprise B2B companies. Is it a silver bullet? Is it hype? Tune into our fantastic discussion.

More about Justin Gray:

Justin has made a career of launching successful companies and scaling them to success. In addition to LeadMD, Justin is also the Co-Founder of PaidSuite, a SaaS payment technology provider, and Greyson Organics, an organic farm in rural Missouri which he co-owns with his father.

Over the past 10 years, Justin has emerged as a strong voice for entrepreneurship and modern day marketing. As a recognized speaker, Justin has been published over 300 times in industry publications and holds featured contributor statuses with Inc., Entrepreneur, TechCrunch and others. 

Special Guest: Justin Gray.

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Chris Spangle is the web director for a nationally syndicated morning show. He previously worked in politics for many years as a producer at a news talk station, WXNT, and then as the Executive Director of the Libertarian Party of Indiana. He went on to work in marketing for the Englehart Group and the Advocates for Self-Government. He is now the web director of a nationally syndicated radio show. He is the publisher and editor of We Are Libertarians, a news site and podcast that covers national and Indiana politics from the libertarian perspective. He is the founder of the We Are Libertarians Radio Network, which brings you podcasts about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Chris also served as the Chairman of the Board of Free Enterprise Schools, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding school choice. His favorite charity is Rupert’s Kids.

Special Guest: Chris Spangle.

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