1. Tell us about your role in TapClicks?
I am the CEO and Co-Founder of TapClicks. I chart the mission and vision for the company, develop its culture and overseeing talent acquisition, partnership strategies, M&A, revenue growth, customer retention, product roadmap, and sales. I also serve as the guardian of the TapClicks brand and ensuring that we deliver a top-notch customer experience. I am an evangelist for the company and work to ensure we’re always exceeding customer expectations.
My job is also to inspire the TapClicks team to believe that they are part of something bigger than themselves. I am a firm believer that
we can accomplish more as a group to disrupt the industry and make a difference in the world.
Being a steward for the company is my top priority which also translates into being in charge of promoting our investor’s confidence in our accomplishments and the future of the company while working to bring on new investors as part of the TapClicks opportunity.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
At one point in my career, I was managing larger and larger marketing organizations for fortune 500 companies and I came to realize that the marketing industry is underserved by IT. Marketing had not seen the same level of innovation as, for instance, software engineering or other tech sectors. It became apparent that there was a gap in the marketing industry for a globally adoptable and adaptable analytics and reporting solution. This led me to the realization that we can innovate in marketing just like any other industry.
When I started TapClicks, there were a number of quickly emerging martech products coming to market, but I didn’t want TapClicks to be just another vendor. The goal was to create a solution that encompassed all the parts of the martech infrastructure. In addition to the lack of comprehensive analytics and reporting solutions, there was also a great need for a technology platform to manage operations and data, which is why TapClicks takes pride in being an omnichannel marketing operations and intelligence platform — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
3. How do you think technology is changing the Marketing Sector?
Technology is helping marketers become more efficient, more precise, and is enabling them to maximize ROI. It’s also making it easy to gain access to different marketing solutions.
TapClicks is focused on using advanced technology to ingest huge volumes of data for customers and bring together solutions that optimize marketing. As a result, TapClicks provides a predictive analytics recommendation engine and optimization models across channels. The platform allows you to visualize all relevant channels and leverage data to inform business intelligence. Our value proposition is that we bring together data and provide the tools to optimize it and create actionable insights to make marketing more intelligent.
4. How are marketing operations platforms benefitting the Advertisement sector?
Marketing operations platforms are bringing ease of use and management for advertising operations, reducing the number of errors that can happen in the process of ingesting large amounts of data in advertising and marketing activities. With complete data ingestion, visualization and analytics capabilities in a single platform, we empower businesses to optimize optimizes advertising and marketing mix across channels.
5. How do you explain the increased application of data science and AI in Customer Service and satisfaction process?
Data Science and AI are important enabling technologies that ultimately help companies become increasingly customer-centric at the individual level. We are committed to and focused on delivering an exceptional customer experience. As a result, our person-centered, intelligence-driven approach to marketing is much more likely to earn customer trust for brands than the spray-and-pray method that currently predominates marketing efforts. Data-driven solutions will enable marketers and media companies to better align with the customer journey and customers’ service needs. Moreover, the human mind isn’t capable of understanding hundreds of audience sub-segments — but a machine mind is. With AI support, segments can be as small as one person. You could potentially develop custom messages for each customer, at scale, and create personalized customer service practices around that individual.
With AI, we can make better use of it by integrating data sources into platforms that make quick work of centralizing internal and external data sources — from intelligence tools to social media to email marketing and beyond. You can bring this data together, run advanced analytics, and leverage visualization tools to bring it to life. A whole new world of hidden opportunities, intelligent decisions, and targeting capabilities await and all of this can better inform customer services practices.
6. How do you differentiate your Marketing Platform from your competitors?
One of the major differentiators of our platform is the ability to integrate huge datasets from more than 200 native data sources. Our marketing data management solution is second to none in the industry and it provides the automated capability to create links between datasets for even greater visibility into marketing performance. TapClicks is also fully scalable. It also offers the ability to automatically deliver customized, long-term analytics directly to companies and/or their clients. TapClicks provides the only platform that has orders and workflow capabilities included along with SEO, site auditing, SERP and other specialized marketing offerings.
7. While researching we came across the latest news about your partnership with Snap, Inc. How according to you this partnership will benefit TapClicks?
Snapchat’s Ad platform offers marketers great opportunities to deliver interactive campaigns to the somewhat elusive millennial demographic, but this is just one of our 200-plus integrations. This is one of several additions to TapClicks’ that will help us continue to innovate and refine our comprehensive, holistic platform. The partnership allows us to provide even deeper visibility into social penetration and influence, which is key to managing social marketing efforts, especially for hard to reach targets.
8. What advice would you like to give to the Martech StartUps?
Martech startups, and their founders, need to be prepared for an extremely challenging period of time launching their solutions, companies, etc. If I knew then what I know now, I would have thought I was crazy to do what I did. It’s really very hard to launch and build and martech startup in today’s business climate.
My advice is that you need to make sure you are a subject matter expert and you need to be in it for the long run with a full-time commitment to make the company a success. The problem with martech is that you’ll get early success that is encouraging, but to make a real business out of it, you will need to overcome tremendous hurdles because of the number of participants already in the space. You really need to understand the details of the martech industry and how to do business.
9. What is the Digital innovation in Marketing according to you that will mark 2019?
In 2019, we are seeing and will continue to see more disruptive mobile solutions, which will increase ease of use, access to data, data visualization, and lead management.
We will also continue to see improved integrations of AI and machine learning into the marketing stack. We’re always looking for new ways to take advantage of innovations that can be applied for additional visibility to help target customers more effectively and improve analysis to optimize marketing programs.
10. How the introduction of AI in Marketing has helped in easing the functions of Marketing? How do you prepare for an AI Centric world?
As a business leader preparing for an AI-centric world, it’s important to first adopt a platform that collects all the available data and stores it, providing you with access to relevant and useful data. This will allow you to utilize AI and machine learning to optimize marketing operations and customer experience.
For TapClicks, this means we will continue to add SaaS integrations that make our own platform more efficient and more comprehensive to deliver better results for customers. It’s important to be open to collaborative solutions and partnerships that will improve data quality.
11. What are the major developments you are planning, in recent time?
There’s a lot we are developing at the moment — both on the product side and in our partnerships. The top feature TapClicks offers customers is a platform that comes with hundreds of integrations. This allows organizations to derive intelligence from a massive number of sources. We not only maintain this capability, but we actively work to incorporate more and new data sources on a regular basis so we can continue to increase access to data and the value we deliver to our customers.
We are also working to develop our AI and machine learning applications with the goal of providing AI-based insights to optimize marketing budgets, ad quality, media mix and recommend marketing channels to maximize conversions and ROI.
Additionally, we are rapidly developing mobile solutions so marketers can access their data and monitor their operations on the go. This accessibility is so important in today’s world.
We are also working on a portal for order and workflow management for brands and agencies.
12. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
I don’t think of my team in that way — it’s not about supporting me. The team supports our customers, partners and solution delivery. The goal of our team is to provide value to organizations through our platform to manage data and operations. When you have such a unified goal, things fall into place naturally. We have worked hard to bring together people who understand the objectives of the business, can lead the organization and take ownership of their roles. TapClicks’ leaders are great at executing and bringing value to the company. As the organization grows, we will continue to bring on great talent across our locations and business groups.
13. Which is the Movie that inspires you the most?
There are three movies that really inspire me. Shawshank Redemption, because of the dedication to and overcoming of immense internal and external hurdles. I have found that there are many obstacles in starting and leading a company, so this movie is a great metaphor for having to push through these obstacles to get to success.
I also like the lessons about running an organization depicted in the Godfather. In the Godfather, Vito Corleone leads his organization by generating loyalty and cultivating partnerships. This is central to the way we maintain our team at TapClicks and forge strategic partnerships to grow the brand. I really like the lessons in the film behind leadership, strategy and making alliances.
Lastly, I really enjoy Dead Poet’s Society and its Carpe Diem mantra, which means seize the day. This is important for founders of startups, because you’re so busy and if you can’t find enjoyment in the small things, you’ll miss out a lot. It’s not just about doing business — it’s about experiencing the joy in daily life.
14. We have heard that you have a very joyful work culture, so can you share with us some of the fun pictures of your workplace?
15. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
Most of the applications I use are for communication — Gmail, texting, Slack— because I like to be constant contact with my team. It’s important as a leader to available to your team to exchange ideas and discuss ongoing activities. And I like staying in touch with current and former business partners on LinkedIn.
I also keep myself updated on current events with News360, and take care of my own travel bookings with Expedia and Hotel Tonight.