Marketing In Five Dimensions
Epsilon is taking the next step in marketing analytics in a constantly changing business environment.
Topics
Competing With Data & Analytics
Andy Frawley is the newly minted CEO of the self-described “global marketing company” Epsilon, a post he earned in December 2014 after 5 years with the company. But don’t let his short time at the helm fool you — he’s an industry veteran with 25 years of operating experience, including 20 years at the senior management level, and expertise spanning digital marketing, email marketing, CRM, database marketing and customer value management.
The company he leads has a unique mission. In his words, Epsilon’s goal is to “fuse data, analytics, creativity and content together to connect brands with people.” In an era of rapidly changing technologies, that can be a significant challenge. The sheer volume of data, the ever-expanding multiplicity of platforms and the perennial problem of finding data scientists are but a few. But in many cases, the challenges are perpetual, as industries and companies struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing data universe.
Andy shared his perspective on these challenges — and where his industry may be headed — in a conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review’s guest editor Sam Ransbotham.
What, in your own words, does Epsilon do?
What we do is bring a series of different marketing practices together, everything from strategy and analytics to creative design and execution, as well as enabling technology, so that every interaction the brand has with a consumer can be fueled by as much information and personalized content as possible. We also do a lot of work trying to measure which of strategies are creating the desired business outcomes.
Can you talk about the different approaches to understand data across all devices, and where you are now?
It’s an interesting time for that, in our view. The amount of data that the digital channels are manufacturing, whether it’s the social feed or behavioral information on the web, all the way through to things like telematics — is more data than most brands or companies have ever seen before. It dwarfs the size of the traditional first-party data warehouse projects.
The challenge is, you’ve got a mix of authenticated data, and anonymous data and it’s difficult to marry the two.