Marketing Darwinism: Clement, tell us about Quantarium.

Clement: The company is inspired by insights from Quantum Physics and the potential inherent in applying them to Machine Learning approaches within an A.I. framework. We have organically gathered the analytical methods of fields as far reaching as Quantitative Genetics to build a leading Artificial Intelligence company that enables competitive advantage in vertical industries via advanced predictive and propensity models along with smart decision-engines. To be sure, there remains a lot for Quantarium to accomplish and indeed we have the ambition to match, though we are quite proud of our synthesis to date and the benefits our customers are enjoying each day.

Marketing Darwinism: Can you tell us which verticals you focus on mostly?

Clement: The beauty and peril of A.I. is that it can seemingly apply to everything and that can be intoxicating, thus both market and organizational focus to execute become paramount. Our first salvo is residential Real Estate, a $20 Trillion asset class that represents in a meaningful personal perspective, the most important of all sectors because it constitutes the largest purchase a family ever makes. Quantarium looks at Real Estate from a perspective not only of Data (and there is a lot of Data!) but also of modeling scenarios of what “could” be. For both financial institutions that “own” and service mortgages and for the individuals who own homes, understanding the “deep” economics is very important. From valuations to other analytical models, Quantarium intends to revolutionize the approach and economics.

Marketing Darwinism: Clement, you have a background in large companies like Microsoft, how is it being a CEO of a start-up.

Clement: Thanks for the question. There is nothing headier than building something with world-class people who humble me every day with their vigor and intelligence. At Microsoft, I learned how to manage A+ teams and to think about products and customers at scale. Applying that to the need for speed in the startup world is my biggest challenge and joy.

Marketing Darwinism: Clement, I must ask you this. A.I. has become a “buzz phrase” …how do you distinguish yourself.

Clement: You are certainly correct about that. The technology business is very much about fashion and phraseology. Unfortunately, it is also often about false claims as well. Quantarium’s founders team, with Ph.D’s and accomplished experts in the field, undertook the approach that A.I. is best when it enhances the ability for people to both arrive at a valuable truth in a quicker and more judicious fashion, and then start to predict future truths, or certainties, given the current business exigencies. Quantarium established itself as an A.I. company from the get-go, it’s in our DNA; as a matter of fact, the first platform Quantarium built, QVM/Quantarium Valuation Model relied on M.L./A.I. technologies such as evolutionary programming when “Artificial Intelligence” was not such a buzz phrase yet. Our team consists not only of award winning Mathematicians and Engineers but also of some of the best “technology translators” in the industry. Algorithms and A.I. are indeed assets, however when you add them to the human agency and agility, you get real applications of real A.I.

Marketing Darwinism: What’s in store for Quantarium in the next phase of your growth?

Clement: Good question. While structured as a tridimensional growth approach, with a clear focus on increasing market share, innovation / differentiated I.P. and product expansion, in many ways we’ve been silent for too long. We enjoy genuine, solid relationships with our customers and partners but haven’t “splashed” in the market yet. That has been by design but the time has now come to shout from the rooftops. We’re showing up at conferences like the O’Reilly AI Summit and Strata. While we remain humble and true to ourselves, we are bold at the same time so watch out for us.

About Clement
Clement is Co-Founder and CEO of Quantarium, an Artificial Intelligence company enabling vertical industries via advanced Predictive and Analytic models, and smart decision-ing engines. As the name of the company suggests, inspired by Quantum Physics and fueled by the power and potential of Machine Learning such as synthesizing and leveraging approaches from Quantitative Genetics, towards resolving significant predictive challenges, Clement is an accomplished international professional for leveraging Data Science and A.I. as well as a proven business leader.

With degrees in Computer Science, Clement spent 14 years building large-scale and Enterprise-level software products and services in areas traversing Content Management and Enterprise Search. Responsible for strategy and product development, Clement directed enterprise teams for Microsoft such as SharePoint, and MS Enterprise Search, while building a proven track-record for recruiting and developing teams with exceptional culture. Prior to Microsoft, Clement started and ran several software companies.

Originally hailing from Romania, Clement lives in the Seattle-area with his wife and children. He is actively involved in a variety of philanthropies and applies philosophy to technology as he builds lasting companies.

Here’s a great video of me and Aseem Badshah the CEO of Socedo, a social media lead generation tool, talking about 7 ways Blockchain can transform marketing! We hope you enjoy it …

Two of my very good friends, Romi Mahajan of the KKM Group and Aseem Badshah of Socedo shot a video discussing our most recent blog post on the Return of the Marketing Mix. Ultimately, marketing is a mix of channels, tactics, and bets, of which some are measurable and some are not. It’s time for marketers to reclaim their role as engagers, risk-takers, and experimenters!!

Fashions change. 

This cliché doesn’t apply just to hemlines and jeans, but to business as well.  Anyone who claims that business is all about logic and data needs to get a reality-check; Marketers are perhaps the worst offenders here, much to their detriment.  Of late, Marketers have suffered from a deep alienation from the real essences of their profession and we hope that 2018 will usher in a return to sanity.

This alienation – or departure from sanity in Marketing- stems from the over-indexing on Data and Measurement.  While this sounds strange, even counterintuitive and heretical, it stands the test of logic and does not require a deep knowledge of Marketing to understand.  Data and Measurement are no doubt valuable but they can also be the refuge of scoundrels.

The key in the above paragraph is the term “over-indexing.”  In other areas of life, the tendency to over-index is called zealotry.  In Marketing, the zealotry of measurement has created an untenable situation in which Marketing is asked to be as resilient as Physics or Mathematics; So too are Marketers, who feel forced to conform to the fashions of the day.  For the past decade or so, the fashion has been “Performance Marketing” or, in a wild conflation of strategy and channel, “Digital Marketing.” 

The genesis story here is a good one.  Marketing for a long time appeared to be a cocktail of guesses mixed with a dose of manipulation.  Organizations started to get frustrated with the lack of predictability and rising costs associated with Marketing and the ecosystem of agencies and media companies that had to be invoked when even considering bringing a product, service, or brand to market.  Theories of consumer reception abounded, but the overall logic of Marketing appeared to be something akin to “do it and it will work.”  Since no company could afford to shut off all Marketing, they continued in an inertial frame for decades.

Then came the Internet.  Almost overnight- or so it seemed- behavior patterns changed.  In addition, the almost infinite real estate and low cost of replication on the Internet, allowed for a completely different cost structure for Marketing. Completing the hat-trick was the fact that digitized Marketing can be “revved” quickly and tests of efficacy can be run in record time.  A heady mix indeed!

And for a while it seemed great.  Marketers could “go to market” quickly and bypass the usual middle-men.

Soon, however, the false “quants” took over and started writing how Marketing was both a “Science” and “Predictive.”  Tomes could be written about the false attribution that plagued the marketing scene with the eminent measurability of Digital Marketing.  We neglected Pater Semper Incertus Est. 

Marketers new to the profession became one-channel ponies. They only knew Digital Marketing. They also grew up under the totalitarianism of measurement.  They believed in the falsity of attribution and hewed only to the channels that provided an easy story for attribution.

Lo and behold, pundits declared the demise of “traditional” marketing.  Some said TV was dead. Others eulogized radio.  Still others print and outdoor.  Digital Marketing was ROI Marketing and ROI Marketing was King (forgive the pun!)

The zealotry created real problems for real Marketers.  First, they were subjected to Wall Street-type time-frames. What would in a sane world take a year, had to be measured in weeks or months.  Second, the need to show ROI created a channel bias in which they were forced to market in only those channels which were eminently measurable.  Third, they lost the Art which defined Marketing and chose, instead, to genuflect at the altar of a false science.  CMOs lost their jobs in 18 months because they could not prove the ROI they agreed to.  Marketing lost its way.

Fast forward to now. 

Are Marketers ready to reclaim their profession?  Are they ready to bring back that Evergreen-yet-needs-to-be-green-again concept that defined their art?  Yes, you know what we mean- The Marketing Mix. 

We predict that 2018 will be the year in which Marketers re-embrace the notion of managing a portfolio of bets, of which some are measurable and others are not.  The rush to measurement restricts the channels Marketers pick to engage with, not unlike a Chef with an infinitude of ingredients but only one ladle and one pan with which to create a gourmet meal.  

The portfolio will no doubt contain elements of Digital Marketing but will also likely concentrate on what the current and future audience really needs and could, thus, index on physical marketing, TV, Radio, Outdoor, even Print.  Who knows.  Why discount ideas and channels a priori? 

Ironically, the zealotry around measurability and ROI lands Marketers in an ironic soup- they restrict themselves from generating real ROI by thinking of it as an input and not as an outcome.

All fashions have their arc.  It’s high time we reclaim Marketing from the ROI zealots and re-engage with the world as it is and as it could be.

Guest post by:
Romi Mahajan, Blueprint Consulting
Steven Salta, Agilysys

Data is the watchword in organizations large and small. In fact, how an organization frames data is the single most important determination of future success or failure. As some put it, Data is the new “oil,” the commodity of most value in the modern age.

Many business leaders understand this intuitively. As business-users in the organization are forced to make larger number of critical decisions with larger “payloads” on a more frequent basis, the idea that these decisions must be data-driven is at the fore. Gut instinct is fine but gut instinct inflected with timely, contextual, and comprehensive knowledge of relevant data is a winning strategy.

While the idea of being “data-driven” is fundamental and powerful, most organizations fall short. Intentions are necessary but not sufficient. For most organizations, the technology and operational infrastructure that defines their “data” is predicated on notions that made sense in an earlier era in which there were simply less sources of data and less change to existing sources. The “size” of the data question makes for a complexity that is not pre-defined and therefore the solution to the data problem has to be flexible and adaptive. Data infrastructure maturity is necessary in today’s business environment and has 4 basic qualities: Governance, Security, Agility, and Automation.

Without these 4 qualifiers, 2 core facets of the solution are absent- democratizing access to data and liberating IT from the backlog and fatigue associated with constantly-changing business needs. Business-users work in the “NOW” timeframe while IT has its own rhythms. In order to truly be data-driven in a way that scales, organizations must empower business-users while simultaneously freeing IT to innovate. While there are cultural hurdles to this state, the biggest blockers are infrastructural.

Until very recently, good enough was, alas, good enough. The internecine conflict between Business and IT was considered just a fact of life, a “cost of doing business.” With automation technology, business users’ data needs can be managed on the fly and without the need for reactive hand-coding, conferring agility to the business teams and handing time back to the IT teams to innovate and more resources from lower value tasks to higher value tasks. This structural win-win is available today and harmonizes the needs of Business and IT.

If data is the new oil then an infrastructure to capitalize on it is necessary- an infrastructure that is mature and “Hub”-like. While all organizations are different, they are similar in their data needs and the data platforms that win will accommodate diversity and change inherently.

Guest post by:
Romi Mahajan
Chief Commercial Officer, TimeXtender

Agile marketing increasingly is being recognized as a powerful key to content effectiveness. Buyer interest and trends can change in the blink of an eye, in particular as social and other media drive the news. Breaking news creates windows of opportunities, but only if marketers are quick and smart enough to take advantage of them.

On topic of agile marketing is what some have called newsjacking, which means responding quickly to news items of the day. More than just quickness for its own sake, the increased focus on what customers are interested in greatly improves content relevance.

And did I forget to say it can produce stupendous ROI results? It can produce stupendous ROI results!

I’m proud to say my latest efforts in this area on behalf of PwC have been recognized by ITSMA with its highest honor, the diamond award in its 2016 Marketing Excellence Awards global competition. Below, I’ll explain some of the elements of the winning program.

The quick or the dead

Keeping up to the minute with who’s buying what, matched with what you’re selling, and how you’re connecting and delivering for your customers is a dynamic and fluid challenge. As Financial Services and U.S. Brexit Marketing Leader at PwC here in New York I have a particular interest in rapid-response content creation, in particular how it can benefit our customers in their day-to-day decision making.

But professional service firms often impose inherent drags on marketing response. Internal reviews and multiple approvals have to be adhered to, and design and layout of messages, and distribution via Web, e-mail and social media, consume big chunks time.

That’s a shame, because firms like PwC are well-positioned to offer keen, insightful analysis of breaking financial news—analysis that’s effective only if it’s quick out the door. Think of it as a client calling a very knowledgeable friend to get “their take” on the news. Marketing best practices demand it, but more importantly so do current and prospective clients who have to make rapid decisions based on sometimes complex new regulations often rendered in government speak.

Knowing how the content game is played

We already distribute thoughtful briefs on new regulations, as well as deeper analysis. What we needed was a quick-response campaign platform tied to newsworthy events that we already knew were on the horizon, and that our customers also anticipated.

Consider the U.K.’s June 2016 referendum to eventually leave the European Union. It seemed that Brexit follow-up was always catching people flat-footed, with how-come and what-if analysis that was too uncertain and too late.

But the calendar revealed key dates that would produce news and content opportunities. We knew, for example, the Bank of England would hold a policy meeting on a certain day. We knew the particular date that the UK’s GDP numbers would be released, that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council was meeting in Brussels, and more. From these and other events, we were able to prepare preliminary analysis based on expected news, and get it out the door in two days or less—unheard of in most professional services firms.

The key is not responding to events, but rather anticipating them with compelling marketing content your customers want and need. I’ll give you a single example that turned out great for us, and impressed the ITSMA judges.

A combination of hard work and opportunity

• Market trigger: We knew that the U.S. Department of Labor planned to release details of a new trading law on April 6, 2016. It was a complex revision of previous regulations that changed how broker-dealers, investment advisers, insurance agents and consultants are compensated when dealing with investment and retirement accounts. A big yawn? Nope … it was and is of keen interest to an immense financial services community.

• Web presence: In advance, we developed a classic microsite, and built it out with content, news, video and keywords.

• SEM: We launched Google search ads two days prior to the DOL announcement, scheduled to run for two full months. We wanted to own this conversation.

• Scrum prep: We threw together a five-member client services team with the sole task of tearing apart the anticipated 1,000-page DOL ruling to fully understand what was in it.

• Thought leadership: Two PwC subject area experts were identified and prepped for press interviews.

• Media opportunities: In advance, and in anticipation of the announcement, we arranged for interviews on the day of the DOL announcement with The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Reuters, Reuters TV, Bloomberg, CNBC and CNBC Closing Bell. (Not bad for a day’s work!)

And the payoff? Our keyword buy results were among the strongest ever recorded for any PwC paid-search campaign, with the highest ever click-through rates and the lowest bounce rates. And we booked business in the first week of the campaign.

If all this seems daunting, don’t worry. Pick your spots, develop content in advance and think like the folks who are going to consume it. Agile marketing works; moreover, in many industries it can be the rule breaker that makes for outsized competitive success. So roll up your sleeves and make it happen!

This has been a great series of conversations with cryptocurrency expert Alex Tapscott, and we’re just about done. Alex is founder and CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures and coauthor—with his dad, business theorist Don Tapscott— of the book “The Trust Protocol: How Blockchain Technology Will Change Money, Business and the World.”

In previous conversations, we delved into the issue of security, trust and the structure and solidity of blockchains, bitcoin’s major technical innovation. Here, we discussed a topic near and dear to my heart … regulation. In short, who’s minding the store, and what does government think about cryptocurrency?

“There’s a misconception that’s held by a lot of people that governments are ambivalent and in some cases hostile to cryptocurrency, but that’s simply not true,” Alex said. “Yes, countries like Russia, Iran or Bangladesh are not onboard with digital monies, but in most mature, developed countries, governments are looking at this as a tool and an opportunity, not as a liability.

“The reason is quite straightforward. Consider central banks, which have three important roles in business and the economy—to manage monetary policy like interest rates and money supply; to act as a lender of last resort in the case of crisis or liquidity crunches, putting credit and capital back in the system; and to act as regulator.

“And when it comes to being a regulator, what do you care about the most?” Alex continued. “You care that consumers are being protected, that companies are not violating the law or committing crimes, and perhaps most importantly you care about risk in the system. You want to ensure that risk is not being concentrated in the wrong places where it could eventually lead to a crisis.”

Alex said that a great advantage to a blockchain, from a regulator’s standpoint, is that they can see transactions happening in real time, and can identify pretty easily whether or not money is flowing in ways that might be suspicious, or to places (Iran, China) where money laundering or other nefarious dealings have been known to take place rather often.

“One of the reasons why the global financial crisis happened was that regulators were unaware of how risk was getting concentrated in the hands of different intermediaries,” Alex explained. “A lot of those transactions were done bilaterally, at different parties, where Goldman and Lehman Brothers (for example) might not know how much each of them owed to each other. And often they were using really antiquated technology where the records would be held in Excel spreadsheets or filing cabinets.”

Alex noted that if these transactions had been cleared and were settled on a public ledger like a blockchain, regulators would have had much better visibility and would have been able to react more quickly when things looked like they were getting out of hand. It’s certainly an interesting position.

Another point Alex made—and that regulators should appreciate—is rapidity of response.

“Consider monetary policy,” Alex said. “When you cut interest rates—whether it’s to increase spending or borrowing, or boost investment in equities or consumer confidence … whatever—you’ve got to wait a few months to randomly sample retailers and check in with banks, these types of things, to see how credit books have grown. And that means that your response to things are slow.

“But if you had a digital dollar that was issued on a blockchain, and you cut rates, you’d be able to see in real time all the metadata about how that money was circulating and flowing through the system,” Alex said. “That would give you much better information on whether or not your policy was effective. Many regulators are saying blockchain technology could help them do their job a lot better, and it’s the reason regulators and government officials in many parts of the world are really keen on this technology.”

I want to thank Alex Tapscott for sharing his views about bitcoin, blockchain and the future of digital currency with me, and of course with all you readers. Please feel free to review previous posts in this blog series, about digital currency security, building trust, blockchain details, and reputational issues. And as always, I’d love to here your thoughts.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of How Does Social Listening Change the Way You Do Business (and Create ROI)? This webinar featured Mikael Lemberg (@Lemberg) Director of Product Management at Falcon Social, Andrew Ashton (@AndrewLAshton) Digital Marketing Specialist, Pizza Hut and Greg Gerik (@ggerik) CEO at Gerik & Company. We discussed a ton of ideas on how to capture ROI or create impact using social media!

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. The longer it takes you to collect your social media data, the less it will be worth to you
2. Don’t just listen to social media for listening sake, listen to social media with purpose!
3. Can’t get to ROI? Then at least be thinking strategically and always be looking for how you can use social data to show impact

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled The ROI of Influencer Marketing; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

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Last week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Data Made Simple: Getting Started with a Strategy. This webinar featured Ira Haberman (@irahaberman) Director of Storytelling at BrainRider, Ned Kumar (@nedkumar) Digital Strategist for FedEx and Sean Williams (@Colorado2NYC) Consumer Promotions Social Media at JetBlue Airlines. We discussed how to get started with a strategy around social data.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Know your audience – with social data there are so many sources that one could get lost trying to pull it all together – start with the end in mind in regards to what audience you are trying to reach. Let that be your guide post for any decisions on data.
2. Sentiment is better on a group than on a single post – Sean talked about how JetBlue tracks sentiment on a group of travelers (ex. travelers to the Northeast in a snow storm versus one tweet from a single traveler)
3. Most important part of a data strategy – is to commit to having a strategy for your data. According to the panel that is most often overlooked.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Cultivating Creative Thinking for Customer Engagement; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of How to Market and Sell to the Modern Buyer. This webinar was sponsored by Act-on Software and featured Amber Armstrong (@ambarmstrong) Program Director of Commerce, Social and Mobile Amplification at IBM, Jeff Soriano (@sorianojeff) Senior Director of Demand Generation at Offerpop and Rachel Rosin (@rosin_rachel) Marketing Programs Manager at Act-On Software. We discussed the changes marketing departments need to make or address in order to keep up with today’s buying habits.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Customer is driving not the marketer – Rachel laid out a 4 step content marketing plan (LINK) that really gets to the heart of the modern marketing department they include: creating buyer personas, developing a persona matrix, mapping the buyer journey and mapping your content to the buyer journey.
2. Break with Brand Boredom – Amber discussed new ways to tell your story that are more engaging – more like a conversation than a brand talking. A great example was startup competition for millennials and entreprenuers which you can learn more about here: www.ibm.com/newwaytostartup
3. Be Relevant – Jeff talked about the challenges associated with marketing the modern buyer and how to move your “suspects to prospects” with relevant content.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Social Data Made Simple: Getting Started with a Strategy; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.