Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 1)

James points out that in e-commerce and digital marketing, point solutions have become more effective than the broad suites from players like Adobe and Marketo. Read on and see if you agree!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Magnetic.

James Green: I’m the CEO of Magnetic. Magnetic is a marketing and advertising technology company. The simplest way to think about us is we learn about what you’re looking for when you’re looking to buy something on the Internet through very large and distributed data networks. We help our customers communicate with you either by showing you advertisements or by customizing their web pages or by sending you emails. That’s what we do.

Sramana Mitra: Are e-commerce companies your primary buyers?

James Green: We have about 300 retailers that use our full suite of products.

Sramana Mitra: It’s offline and online?

James Green: We have 300 online retailers who use us and they use us for all of those three products – email, web recommendation, and advertising. Whether they be online or offline, a brand or anyone who wants to do custom communication, we can engage with them. Some might want to spend advertising dollars but might not want to buy a web recommendation product, others might want to buy a full suite of products and we can work with them all. We work with a very large number of brands, many of the major auto manufacturers and large financial institutions.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take one of your customers. Let’s do maybe two or three different use cases that highlight different ways that your customers are using your capabilities. Let’s understand them at a more detailed level.

James Green: We’ll focus on a retailer because they use the full suite and I think it’s easiest to understand. If you’re a retailer, one of the things you’re obviously looking to do is to maximize the conversion rate of the people that you’re communicating with. Usually, you have two sets of companies that come to you. One would be a real marketing technology firm that would help you look at the data around your own customer set and make sure that you’re reaching out to them and the other is an advertising technology firm that will help you bring in new customers. There are tons and tons of companies in this space. I think the last count was 3,500.

They do a variety of different aspects of that. I’ll pick on one because it’s a good gateway between the three different services that we offer which is site retargeting. Site retargeting offers you the ability to know who someone is when they reach your website, and our algorithms understand their purchasing behavior so you can go out and advertise to them as well. We give our clients the opportunity to leverage their own data along with our own fully-paid for data network that is connected to many other places that people are searching for things like shopping comparison engines. We’re not just using your data. We’re using our dataset to add to that.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic
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