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[x + 1] |
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August 26, 2013 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Offering an Integrated and Open Approach to Data-Driven Digital Marketing, [x+1] is using Data, Analytics and Insight to create a Highly Personalized, Engaging and Effective Way for Brands to Connect with Customers |
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The [x+1] Origin platform offers an integrated and open approach to data-driven digital marketing. Origin's Data Management Platform (DMP) offers multi-channel execution capabilities and is powered by a patented real-time decision engine, Web Services APIs and advanced analytics.
This unique combination of
capabilities allows companies to create a digital marketing hub to
synchronize their messages across a broad range of paid and owned media
channels: websites, display, landing pages, email, SMS, mobile, direct mail,
chat and call centers, in real time. Campaign performance and ROI is managed
in a consistent, scalable and measurable way.
Top companies in financial
services, insurance, automotive, retail, gaming, telecommunications, online
services and travel have significantly increased the performance of their
digital marketing investment by using [x+1]'s enterprise data solutions and
services. The company is headquartered in New York City, with offices in
Connecticut, Illinois and Michigan.
After several brand management roles at P&G and Pepsi, John was a pioneer in establishing the internet as a marketing vehicle. As VP Client Strategy (1994-1996) for trail-blazing internet ad agency Modem Media, he placed the first paid ads ever on the internet, and created the first digital strategies and websites for major brands at Delta Airlines, Coors, CBS, Kraft Foods and MasterCard and created the industry's first pricing model to value internet advertising.
As Modem Media's VP of Media, Research and Database marketing (1996-1999), he built the industry's first online media planning and buying group, and led some of the industry's first online research initiatives: to evaluate the brand impact of exposure online; for usability testing for websites; and for tracking consumer usage of the internet. Teams and technology developed under his direction were ultimately launched as independent companies, including Centrport, a pioneer in behavioral targeting and Dynamic Logic, now owned by WPP Group.
In 1995, John was elected by industry peers as a founding board director for the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade advocacy group for the digital industry. He was re-elected twice and served on the board for almost six years (1995-2001).
After leaving Modem in 2002, John co-founded a marketing analytics software start up which was purchased by Aegis Group (the parent of Carat and Synovate) in 2004. John was subsequently named Co-president of Aegis-owned Marketing Management Analytics, the company that created the first econometric "marketing mix models" to measure the sales impact of advertising. At MMA, John co-led a repositioning of the company from research provider to analytically driven strategic consultancy, and MMA quickly set an industry agenda for marketing transformation. Working with CPG, banking, retail, telco, and dot coms establish "accountable marketing" programs. These programs typically established statistically based measurement and metrics tied to the business planning cycle, and were supported by transformation efforts covering people, process, data, and technology.
In 2008, John became the Chairman/CEO role at [x+1], an analytically-driven digital marketing technology company. At [x+1] John is again on the vanguard of industry transformation. [x+1] is helping clients such as Verizon, Delta Airlines, FedEx, JPM Chase Allstate and Capital One harness the power of "big data" to drive real-time marketing decisions. [x+1] enables these clients to process terabytes of data through complex statistical models to make decisions of what content, offer or advertising to provision to each individual consumer at every digital interaction. These efforts are first steps to an ever broader transformation of marketing driven by more data, cheaper data processing and the continuing "digitization" of marketing communications.
John holds an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and a BA from Duke University. |
Analytics
[x
+ 1]
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Interview
conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – August
26, 2013 CEOCFO: Mr. Nardone, what was the concept when [x+1] started and where are you today? Mr. Nardone: It is been quite an evolution. The company started out in the ad serving business. It competed with doubleclick, which is now owned by Google, to provide infrastructure to deliver the ads to the page when you are looking at a website using a browser. [x+1] is all about using data, analytics and insights to make digital marketing a highly personalized, highly relevant, highly engaging and highly effective way for brands to connect with customers. It is about making the best decisions about what ad should appear, how content on a page should be customized or what offer to present to a particular visitor. Therefore, it has really moved from being an infrastructure and pipes company to an analytics and decisioning company.
CEOCFO: Analytics and big data are key buzzwords today. Just about every company says they have got the right way to do it. What have you figured out at [x + 1] that is better, cheaper, easier, faster and more effective? Mr. Nardone: There is a lot of talk these days about big data, as you say. It is almost a cliché at this point. However, the real challenge for marketing on the internet is that interactions with customers happen instantaneously. Therefore, it is not just about harnessing a lot of data, but being able to harness that data in a millisecond; in the time that it takes for someone to click on something on a website and to have that information be brought to bear to influence what the consumer sees. We have learned a lot about data, not just about its collection and management, but how to build analytic structures that execute in seven milliseconds or less in order to make the right decision without impacting the consumer experience. For companies whose businesses rely on those online customer interactions, speed – or what they would describe as “not having latency” – in terms of the way that their websites operate, is critical. We work with many big banks. We work with gaming companies, software companies and logistics companies, for these types of clients their websites deliver critical business applications responsible for driving revenue.
CEOCFO: Would you give me a concrete example of how that would work; what you are able to do in that instant that makes a difference? Mr. Nardone: Imagine that you are a bank and you have retail banking customers; but you also have a credit card business and a mortgage business and other financial service products. Let us say someone comes to your website and is looking at the mortgage page. In real time we can determine whether that person is a current customer, look up their customer data, understand their value as a customer – based on their assets at the bank, credit score and so forth – and decide whether it is worth the investment engaging with them through the call center about mortgage products. If the stars align, the customer’s phone buzzes with an SMS message that says, “Hi Lynn. As a valuable banking customer we would like to share information about our mortgage program. We have a mortgage consultant waiting on standby to help you. Click here.” When the customer clicks they are connected to a call center rep has all of the relevant customer information in front of them so they are empowered to actually close the deal. In a fraction of a second we have matched the visitor with current customers, evaluated their customer attributes, run a statistical model to understand their potential lifetime value score and decided whether they are eligible for a mortgage offer. All of that has to happen virtually instantaneously and that is what we do.
CEOCFO: Would you tell me a little bit about the range of your offerings? Mr. Nardone: Yes. The offering starts with the data management platform or DMP. The DMP is exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to manage all of your customer and prospect interaction data in one place. All the interactions on your website, in online advertising, in search, through chat-enabled call center interactions and all the other online or digitally-enabled touch points flow into the DMP to make the data available for reporting, analysis, modeling and so forth. There are also applications that you buy that sit on top of the DMP; the website optimization module and the online advertising module for example. There is also an analytics and attribution module and a hub framework module that allows customers to plug in their SMS, call center and email systems into the [x+1] data infrastructure. These products can be purchased individually or together as a complete digital marketing stack.
CEOCFO: Do many people take advantage of the full range or do they tend to add on as they go along? Mr. Nardone: They tend to add on as they go along. Virtually all of our large clients are using at least three of the modules, but not always the same three. However, almost all of them start with the data management platform. Then it is a question of which other add-ons will best meet their needs.
CEOCFO: Are there particular industries that work with you more than others? Mr. Nardone: Yes. Our two largest industries are banking, where six of the top ten banks are clients, and several of the large gaming companies. On the surface this may seem like an odd combination, but in some ways gaming is similar to a bank that needs to match products with customers and make the right offers to everyone. There have been some really dramatic changes in video games in the last few years with the advent of the “freemium” model where it is free to play the game, but where players are presented with in-game commerce activities. For example, you have to buy the sword with the extra powers if you want to get to the next level. Both industries are incredibly sophisticated analytically in terms of understanding their customers, understanding the types of products and services that are going to appeal to different audiences and provisioning the right messages to the right audience through the right channel. Our platform plays an important role in the analytics and message delivery for both industries.
CEOCFO: Do you work with agencies and marketers as well as with directly with companies? Mr. Nardone: For the most part we work directly with brands but we do also work with agencies. We like to say, “Clients have agencies and agencies have clients.” However, eighty percent of our revenue comes from our work with the end clients.
CEOCFO: How do you reach perspective customers? Mr. Nardone: We have a sales organization; it is not a real large one but it is effective. We do a fair bit of marketing; online advertising, search marketing and we a lot of what we call “thought leadership work” in terms of writing white papers and speaking at conferences and even commissioning industry research that gets our perspective in front of potential buyers.
CEOCFO: Are most companies today aware that they need some system like yours or is it still a little bit ahead of many? Mr. Nardone: I think it is still in the future for many company. The really large and more sophisticated marketers – the Proctor and Gambles, the IBMs, the Citibanks and the Chases of the world – are very much aware of this emerging space and are taking advantage of it. However, as you go to the mid-market it is all rather mysterious and a little bit scary to them.
CEOCFO: How is business these days? Mr. Nardone: Business is great! We are tracking to be up thirty-five percent for the second plus year in a row. We have recently done a couple of acquisitions to accelerate that growth and we have more on the horizon. We think that 2014 is the year that the business “hockey sticks” from a thirty-five percent annual growth rate to a one hundred percent annual growth rate. It has been very, very exciting. We are getting ready for an even wilder ride in the next couple of years.
CEOCFO: Would you tell me a little bit about the last acquisitions? What is it that you have been adding and what are you looking to add? Mr. Nardone: The first acquisition was a tactical one of a tag management platform. This may be a bit of inside baseball, but tags are snippets of code that actually get placed out on the Internet and act as the intake valve to enable data collection. Our goal for the acquisition was to have a more efficient way of getting data into our data management platform. As I said, it was quite tactical. The second acquisition was of a mobile marketing platform. Smartphones and tablets are extremely personal, portable and powerful devices. Marketers desperately want to unlock their potential as a means to reach their customers and prospects. Mobile marketing is still very much in the early stages and we felt that we needed to do an acquisition and own the technology to be able to advance it and create the kinds of data driven linkages and experiences that marketers want.
CEOCFO: You mentioned additional acquisitions. Do you have a plan for the pieces that you want to add or will it be more opportunistic? Mr. Nardone: We definitely have a plan for the next piece that we want to add. Social media, particularly Facebook, is a unique environment for digital advertising. We already have a fair number of capabilities in that area but we think that Facebook in particular, as well as Twitter and Pinterest and other social environments, are really important growth areas. Therefore, we are planning another acquisition in the social marketing space.
CEOCFO: What is your geographic reach today? Mr. Nardone: We have offices in New York, Connecticut, Chicago and East Lansing Michigan. We also have people scattered around the country – Florida, the West Coast, Pennsylvania. Because we are an Internet company and can have people located anywhere and still be very, very productive. For many of them, home is their office but they are very, very much part of the day-to-day operation of the company.
CEOCFO: Do you see international as an area for the future? Mr. Nardone: We do indeed. Lynn, you must have ESP! That is our number one on our agenda for 2014. Many of our clients have international operations. While we are doing some limited work outside of the US today, that is an enormous opportunity for us. In fact, so much so that it is not just an opportunity; it is an imperative. That is because if we do not start to meet our clients’ needs outside of the US they will be forced to find other partners and of course we do not want that to happen. That alone puts it at the top of our list. Our plan is to kick off our international expansion with Europe early in 2014.
CEOCFO: What surprised you most as the business has developed and grown? Mr. Nardone: When you are in the Internet technology space as we are there are surprises virtually all of the time! We have Google on one side, which is a competitor and supplier and partner all in one. Then we have Adobe’s marketing technology on the other. We have to be nimble and be able to zig and zag and react to what those two software giants are doing. In that context, I think that maybe the most surprising thing is how receptive clients are to working with a smaller company like [x+1]. By bringing innovations that benefit their businesses, even big enterprises are willing buy software solutions from a company like ours. The Googles and Adobes of the world have a lot of weight and resources and so on, but the ability to deliver innovation that catches the attention – and business – of large enterprise companies is really very exhilarating. That has been a positive surprise for me.
CEOCFO: Why should investors and people in the business community be paying attention to [x + 1]?
Mr. Nardone:
I think there are two
reasons. One is that the discipline of marketing is changing and evolving at
an incredible pace, based on new devices, new consumer behaviors and new
data capabilities. Virtually every business at one level or another relies
on marketing to acquire new customers or grow the revenue from existing
ones. This makes understanding the changes that are taking place very
important. The second reason is on the investor side. There is tremendous
value being created by companies that are innovating in big data analytics
technology. [x+1] has been innovating in this space for several years and is
poised to continue and grow. I think investors should be paying attention,
because it is through this type of innovation that they are going to find
their growth opportunities. |
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“[x+1] is all about using data, analytics and insights to make digital marketing a highly personalized, highly relevant, highly engaging and highly effective way for brands to connect with customers.”- John Nardone |
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Digital Marketing, [x + 1], Business Services Companies, CEO Interviews 2013, Integrated, Open Approach to Data-Driven Digital Marketing, Personalized, Engaging Way for Brands to Connect with Customers, Predictive Optimization Engine (POETM), Professional Services Company, xplusone, x plus one, Recent CEO Interviews, Business Services Stock, Professional Services Stocks, real-time decision engine, Web Services APIs and advanced analytics, create a digital marketing hub to synchronize their messages across a broad range of paid and owned media channels, websites, display, landing pages, email, SMS, mobile, direct mail, chat and call centers, in real time. Campaign performance and ROI is managed in a consistent, scalable and measurable way, X+1 Press Releases, News, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, business services companies seeking investors, digital marketing companies needing investment capital |
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