Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing here. Marketing automation is a very crowded field. Try to help me pinpoint where in that very crowded space you fit in. There are all kinds of things going in. There’s campaign management, email marketing. There’s Marketo. There’s Eloqua. There are all kinds of stuff. From your point of view, how does the world look?

Samir Addamine: All the ones you mentioned are decades old. They’re not designed for the real-time marketing and the always-connected customers of today. If these guys started with email, email is not real-time.

Sramana Mitra: Right now, getting people to open emails is very difficult because there’s too much email.

Samir Addamine: Exactly, but the push notification is like a text message. You receive it on your phone. If it’s relevant, you’re going to open. That’s real-time. You can send tons of emails. People are not even opening them. You cannot fail in sending a push notification. The first thing is, all these platforms that you mentioned are decades old and are not designed for the always-connected customer and real-time marketing. We are solving this problem in mobile. We are adding this real-time component to the existing systems.

What is crowded is the mobile marketing category. We mentioned a few of them. All these guys are on the mobile marketing category. Some of them have more intelligence in their product. Some of them don’t have that. They’re more on the push and marketing automation approach. Some of them are moving to multi-channel. They’re like mobile-first, multichannel platform. We don’t do that.

What I think is that our category is going to evolve in two ways. We’re going to see some of the players being more enterprise-focused, deep integration with backend systems, and specialized. Some of them are going to be mobile commerce or mobile banking. We start to see some really interesting companies in this area. The founder of Demandware started a new company called NewStore. He’s reinventing the same kind of approach but for mobile. That’s the future. Some of these companies are going to get more specialized.

Some companies are going to be more focused on specific markets. We are focused more on the enterprise. SMBs require multi-channel products versus just a mobile product. That’s why I think companies that have mobile and email have a huge opportunity there. Enterprise companies are looking for long-term investments. These guys are going to look for best-of-breed in mobile with deep integration. What I’m talking about is today.

If we talk about the future, mobile marketing platform will be more ambient-oriented. It’s more the platform of the future. You want to add the context to the interaction to the brand. The email platforms of today are not designed for the always connected consumers. We’re going to announce that very soon. Customers today are spending millions of dollars on their mobile channel. Think about retailers for example.

I saw an interesting article about Home Depot where mobile is going to be half of their revenue by 2020. These guys have been spending millions of dollars on their mobile strategy designing apps and doing acquisition campaigns. To be able to help these brands, we’re creating a mobile first cloud consortium with different companies.

We want to be able to answer to the need of these CMOs and CIOs for a consolidated mobile offer. It’s not about consulting. It’s more about the right platform and the best of breed on mobile and the right products all interconnected together to serve their mobile commerce strategy.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Samir Addamine, Founder and Chairman of FollowAnalytics
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