AiThority Interview with Mike Anderson (Tealium) and Momchil Kyurkchiev (Leanplum)

Could you tell us about your respective roles and journey into Technology?

Mike Anderson: After founding Tealium in 2008, I’ve since served as the Chief Architect behind the company’s market-leading tag management and unified customer data orchestration platforms. Previously, I worked at WebSideStory (Adobe Systems), where I served as a Senior Engineer on the core Architecture team. As the builder and leader of the company’s Professional Services team, I oversaw analytics tag implementations for Disney, Target, Cisco, Citi, FedEx, and more.

Momchil Kyurkchiev: I serve as Leanplum’s CEO and Co-Founder. Prior to starting Leanplum, I worked at Google, where I started my career as a Software Engineer. During my five years at Google, I launched multiple quality improvements to YouTube’s ranking algorithms, which resulted in millions of dollars in additional revenue. I was also able to build some of the core A/B testing infrastructure for featured video ads.

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What is the engine driving your unified data and campaign orchestration integration? 

Mike: Leanplum is the leading multi-channel engagement platform and Tealium is the trusted leader in real-time customer data orchestration. Together, we’ve been able to combine Tealium’s AudienceStream Customer Data Platform (CDP) and EventStream API Hub with Leanplum’s Mobile Marketing and Optimization platform Campaign Composer, which has enabled our customers to easily sync user data across platforms to increase campaign personalization and maintain a consistent record of customer interactions.

Leveraging Tealium and Leanplum together, brands are able to break information silos and tap expansive reservoirs of captured customer data and infuse that data into mobile campaigns. Brands can then hone in on key insights that highlight drivers of user actions and use those insights to further optimize campaign orchestration and delivery.

Google acquired Looker; Salesforce acquired Tableau this year. How do you see the CDP and Data Orchestration space further disrupted with you two coming together as partners? 

Mike: With the impact of GDPR, CCPA taking effect on Jan 1. 2020 and 17 state provisions that appear in comprehensive privacy statutes broken into two categories – consumer rights and business obligations – with the most recent being the New York Privacy Act, there is a new wave of data restrictions on marketers. And with several businesses having been hit with penalties under the new regulations, it’s evident that consumers are now in control of how their data is collected and used amongst brands.

However, while brands must be compliant and ethical about how they gather and utilize consumer data, they are still expected to build complete customer personas in order to provide relevant, personalized experiences. In order for brands to provide tailored brand experiences to consumers, they must become more deliberate in their data collection and Marketing practices – this is where our strategic partnership comes into play.

By partnering, Tealium’s unified customer data orchestration solutions with Leanplum’s engagement platform we are allowing brands to effectively engage their customers and drive conversion in a compliant way. Our partnership will allow marketers to create sophisticated personalized campaigns using holistic first-party data – which will allow brands to build complete customer personas in order to provide relevant, personalized experiences with data-driven directly from the consumer.

Momchil: This partnership helps break data silos and puts marketers in control so they can do effective customer engagement – the biggest problem marketers face today.

How do you plan to extend the benefits of your partnership jointly to your customers? 

Momchil: Leanplum is enabling our customers to better engage with their end-users on mobile, as individuals, on an aggregate level. It’s critical to make the most of that interaction and engage with users in the context of their entire history, across all channels and touchpoints, with your brand. Whether they recently purchased a pair of shoes on the web, submitted a customer service ticket, or are first-time visitors – you want the user to feel known and understood.

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Who are you targeting with this new announcement? How can your Engagement Marketing customers and prospects see better results from their respective investments with you? 

Momchil: We are targeting leading brands that truly value their users, want to keep them engaged and offer them something unique. These brands know their customers and want to deliver a differentiated, personalized experience for them. Our target audience knows the value of first-party data and how it can help them more effectively reach, convert and monetize their user base. Furthermore, they understand the critical role that multi-channel customer engagement platforms play in delivering that content in the right “format” and at the right time, without feeling that they are being spammed.

In summary, the key point of this integration is that we are lowering the barrier to entry and enabling marketers to do things right out of the box. We are optimizing the time to value ratio for them by making the data actionable and putting it directly in their hands.

How much have the definition and industry applications of Big Data, Visualization, and Analytics/Intelligence evolved in the last 2-3 years? 

Momchil: There has been a lot of development in the space with players like Tableau and Looker that offer analytics and intelligence solutions. Our job is to make sure our product can fully leverage these tools.

How does all the buzz around AI ML and Mobile Marketing Automation help acquire CDP customers and grow revenue in new markets?  

Mike: The umbrella of AI and Mobile Marketing Automation will change the CDP market the most over the next five years. By offering these capabilities through our Machine Learning technology, Tealium Predict, and our new partnership with Leanplum, we are able to provide enterprises with increased visibility across their technological stack – resulting in richer, more personalized experiences. 

Every industry can benefit from adopting CDPs, but it all depends on how much data they have. Enterprises with large amounts of customer data tend to be the fastest to adopt CDPs because they need a solution that helps manage all of it.

The reality is that companies can’t become real-time in one day – they can’t just make the switch that quick. However, when it comes to making this switch, Tealium is a hose, other companies are buckets (they are much slower). Because of Tealium’s various integrations, we are well connected to an ecosystem so large organizations can mitigate their data volume issues.

Most businesses are using data to drive experiences, but it’s usually siloed by channel. When freed from silos and made visible across an organization, datasets have the potential to help businesses better understand their customers’ lifestyles. By investing in a CDP, enterprises are able to solve a huge and growing problem: the need for unified, accessible customer data.

How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Business Leader? 

Momchil: AI is the technology that has been coming next year for the last 10 years or more. The reality is that for most day-to-day marketers data is siloed and they don’t even have what they need to tackle their current issues. That’s what we are going after, which is of utmost relevance now –  predicting customer behavior and optimizing engagement timing and frequency.

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Thank you, Mike and Momchil! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.