Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic (Part 2)

James Green: Let’s take a company like Bluefly. They’re a large online retailer. They sell fashionable clothing. If someone visits their website, we can help them do site retargeting. We can go and say, “You exhibited this behavior in this website. Perhaps we should send you an email because that’s how you like to be communicated with. Perhaps we’ll send you an ad because you opted out of email.”

It could also be that when you visit that site, we’ll customize the site so that it will be relevant to the sorts of trousers, dresses, or whatever it is that you’re in market for. We do that, which is the traditional marketing technology. Then we complement that with a signal from outside Bluefly, which they would never have. We’d say, “We saw one of your customers over here. We noticed that they’re in market for a pair of shoes. Why don’t you reach out to them?” In those three channels, that’s how we’re different from other people.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about the impact of retargeting in general? Retargeting has been around for a while now. What have been the trends in the retargeting technologies space and how have the metrics evolved? What is the state of the union on retargeting right now?

James Green: If you don’t mind, I’m going to make that a little bit broader. Two things have happened to marketing technology firms and retargeting is just one of them. If you rewind to five years ago, most companies were really hopeful that they would find one solution that they could run their marketing through. Think of the big boys like Adobe, Marketo, and Salesforce.

Over the last five years, what’s really happened is that point solutions have kicked those companies in the butt. There’s an individual specialized email marketing solution. There’s an individual social marketing solution. There’s a retargeting solution that is better than everybody else. Each of these point solutions have proven to be much more effective than one consolidated marketing cloud. That’s a big trend that’s happened in the marketplace. The second thing that has happened right alongside that is that advertising has collided with this.

Back then when you did advertising, you didn’t know who you were going to reach. You might know a demographic or psychographic. You might know that they’re interested in shoes or plane tickets. You wouldn’t know that it was James Green. That has also changed. Now you can know who a customer is when they’re on your website. You can know whether or not they’re your customer. Even if they’re not, you can find out who they are and really customize your marketing to them.

The big trend and the thing that a lot of us are going after is the combination of these two ideas. You have to have a great point solution. You have to know who people are. You’ve got to help orchestrate third parties to be able to make decisions. That’s a huge difference that is coming through the market at the moment – this idea of the known person. It’s a privacy controversial idea, the idea of the orchestration layer which has not been there before. I think there are few people who are well-positioned for it outside of the larger players. Most people haven’t had an orchestration layer. They’ve just had a full suite of solutions. Also, the idea that individual point solutions are better than buying one solution from one big vendor.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: James Green, CEO of Magnetic
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