Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your business composition, are you a product business or a services business?

Damon Ragusa: That’s a great question and we’re both. When we started the company, we talked about being a Software-as-a-Service platform. We still do have a SaaS platform that delivers insights and allows our customers to essentially develop a more agile marketing process. We also provide services because without that, it’s difficult for a lot of these organizations to fully integrate the insights that come out of systems like ours and understand best practices and how to move forward. We have customers who view us as an extension of their marketing planning organization. There are other customers who work very hands-on with our software and have very little interaction with us. We provide both as part of our product and service, with a majority of our revenues from the SaaS platform.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of use cases and you can pick whatever customers you want to showcase. Walk us through what that looks like.

Damon Ragusa: Sure. There are a number of customers we can talk about directly and a fair number who we need to keep confidential. I usually talk about the challenges that we have working with them. Attribution, forecasting, and optimization are all things that are general, but how customers use this information is critical. I’ll give you a couple of examples. We work with one of the bigger retailers out there. Urban Outfitters is a really good customer. Some of their critical issues were having to deal with some of the legacy platforms that they had—things like catalog and more traditional methods of promotion.

For them, it was a challenge to figure out how to best allocate their spend across all of these traditional things and new emerging platforms. In a business model such as theirs where a majority of their sales are going to come from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s harder for them to think about how to attribute online media and online marketing to an offline sale. That was one of the areas we helped them out with. They were able to make decisions that have changed some very long-standing historical ways that they promoted themselves. They were only able to do that by building credibility through forecasting and utilizing the attribution results to understand where the bests places were to invest their dollars.

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to understand how you do that. For our audience, what would be more interesting to understand is how you do that. That’s a fairly interesting and complex problem to figure out attribution of where the customer really came from.

Damon Ragusa: The short answer is math. We use a lot of math. There’s an increasingly large amount of data that is measuring a known thing—click, impression, watching a video online. These are very specific things. There are a lot of data that are very specific to a behaviour, more so than ever. But we still have quite a bit of activity that is not directly attributable to an individual. The big challenge is how do you connect the things you can track to create an idea about how individual consumers walk through a journey and then utilize the mathematics and algorithms to connect the rest of it.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine
1 2 3 4 5