1. Tell us about your role in Zeta Global?
As Co-Founder and CEO at Zeta, my primary responsibilities focus around providing mentorship to the employees at the company and working to get our business to the next level. I also do high-level strategy for the direction of the overall business by understanding the trends of where the market is going, which allows me to focus on capital formation, strategy and M&A.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
Before co-founding Zeta, I was in the wireless business for 17 years, where I founded and sold my past companies. When I left my last company I had a noncompete, so couldn’t start another right away. I had the idea that data and analytics could change the course of marketing, so I partnered with my longtime friend John Sculley to bring this vision to life. Look forward 12 years later, and here we are with Zeta as one of the largest proprietary data holders and marketing technology companies in in the industry.
3. How do you think technology is redefining the marketing sector as a whole?
Technology is really redefining everything – not just marketing. As Moore’s law comes more into play, and technology becomes more in demand, leading to everything becoming faster and cheaper, the ability to analyze data in milliseconds (that used to take days) is changing the way we think about everything surrounding a consumer. Faster data analyzation and output is allowing us not only better understand individuals, but also what their intent is around purchasing certain products and services at a specific time, location and channel.
4. How has data-driven approach optimized the performance of marketing professionals?
As we’re able to better understand individuals and what they’re really interested in, we’re able to better target based on their wants and needs. In order to do that, it requires better data, better AI and better technological capabilities so that a marketer and a consumer can connect at the optimal time, making it valuable for both sides.
5. How do you define Zeta’s Marketing Platform?
We think of ourselves as a Customer Lifecycle Marketing Platform as we help large companies create, maintain and monetize their customers. We currently have a Data Cloud of 2.4B people-based identities and the most comprehensive, results-driven AI. Our technology actively works each day to uncover consumer intent, provide personalized experiences and ultimately help drive business growth for our clients.
6. How does your CRM platform help sales professionals in better customer acquisition?
We’re more focused on how large customers create, maintain, monetize consumers – not as much with sales professionals.
7. Can you explain how acquisition of Sizmek has contributed to the growth of Zeta?
By taking Sizmek’s best in class programmatic OTT, addressable TV capabilities and merging them with our Data Cloud and AI, it’s been game-changing to build custom deterministic audiences for our enterprise level clients. Integrating Sizmek into Zeta’s technology has really created a blue ocean of total addressable market growth for us, and we look forward to continue growing that side of the business in 2020.
8. We had covered a news about your partnership with IgnitionOne, how has it benefitted your clients?
IgnitionOne has also been an outstanding partnership for us since their Artificial Intelligence and customization platform is second to none. By merging that technology into our programmatic ecosystem, it has allowed our customers to better personalize their marketing campaigns and close a much higher percentage of driving sales.
9. If given a choice to select one, what according to you is more important, developing a noble quality product or delivering a great customer experience?
Delivering a great customer experience will always bring more value for the business.
10. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
When you get to be a company of Zeta’s size, my daily job is to help the team — not the other way around. Our leadership staff will come to me with challenges, and my job is to help fix them. At the end of the day, they support me by me returning the support back to them.
11. What advice would you like to give to Start Ups?
Startups in the marketing technology industry is the same as all startups. Always make sure you’re solving a problem for your customers. If you’re not, long term you’re not going to be successful.
12. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
We can’t really prepare because we are already there – our entire business is currently built on AI! You always have to be innovating and AI is something that we saw as the next thing years ago. It has changed the course of our business and will continue to for years to come.
13. Which book are you reading these days?
“A Gentleman in Moscow”
14. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
Please check out our Instagram at @ZetaGlobal or our LinkedIn page. We have a lot of picture there!
15. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
iMessage, Outlook for iOs, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Business Insider