Cheetah Digital Debuts in Las Vegas

I spent the latter part of last week still in Las Vegas, switching to the client conference for Cheetah Digital, the newly-renamed spinoff of Experian’s Cross Channel Marketing division. Mercifully, this was at a relatively humane venue, the big advantage being I could get from my hotel room to the conference sessions without walking through the casino floor or a massive shopping mall. But it was still definitely Vegas.

The conference offered a mix of continuity and change. Nearly every client and employee I met had been with Cheetah / Experian for at least several years, so there was a definite feeling of old friends reconnecting. Less pleasantly, Cheetah’s systems have also been largely unchanged for years, something that company leaders could admit openly since they are now free to make new investments. Change was provided by the company’s new name and ownership: the main investor is now Vector Capital, whose other prominent martech investments include Sizmek, Emarsys, and Meltwater. There’s also some participation from ExactTarget co-founder Peter McCormick and Experian itself, which retained 25% ownership. The Cheetah Digital name reflects the company’s origins as CheetahMail, which Experian bought in 2004 and later renamed, although many people never stopped calling it Cheetah.

Looking ahead, newly-named Cheetah CEO Sameer Kazi, another ExactTarget veteran, said the company’s immediate priorities are to consolidate and modernize its technology. In particular, they want to move all clients from the original CheetahMail platform to Marketing Suite, which was launched in 2014. Marketing Suite is based on the Conversen, a cross-channel messaging system that Experian acquired in 2012. Kazi said about one third of the company’s revenue already comes from Marketing Suite and that the migration from the old platform will take four or five years to complete.

Longer term, Kazi said Cheetah’s goal is to become the world’s leading independent marketing technology company, distinguishing Cheetah from systems that are part of larger enterprise platforms. Part of the technical strategy to do this is to separate business logic from applications, using APIs to connect the two layers. This will make it easier for marketers to integrate external systems, taking advantage of industry innovation without requiring Cheetah to extend its own products.

Cheetah will also continue to provide services and build customer databases for its clients. Products based on third party data, such as credit information and identity management, have remained with the old Experian organization.

With $300 million in revenue and 1,600 employees, Cheetah Digital is already one of the largest martech companies. It is also one of the few that can handle enterprise-scale email. This makes it uniquely appealing to companies that are uncomfortable with the big marketing cloud vendors. The company still faces a major challenge in upgrading its technology to optimize customer treatments in real time across inbound as well as outbound channels.  It's a roll of the dice.

Datran Media Sells Email Like Web Ads

I wasn’t able to get to the ad:tech conference in New York City this week, but did spend a little time looking at the show sponsors’ Web sites. (Oddly, I was unable to find an online listing of all the exhibitors. This seems like such a basic mistake for this particular group that I wonder whether it was intentional. But I can’t see a reason.)

Most of the sponsors are offering services related to online ad networks. These are important but just marginally relevant my own concerns. I did however see some intriguing information from Datran Media, an email marketing vendor which seems to be emulating the model of the online ad networks. It’s hard to get a clear picture from its Web site, but my understanding is that Datran both provides conventional email distribution services via its Skylist subsidiary and helps companies purchase use of other firms’ email lists.

This latter capability is what’s intriguing. Datran is packaging email lists in the same way as advertising space on a Web site or conventional publication. That is, it treats each list as “inventory” that can be sold to the highest bidder in an online exchange. Datran not very creatively calls this “Exchange Online”, or EO. Presumably (this is one of the things I can’t tell from the Web site) the inventory is limited by the number of times a person can be contacted within a given period.

Datran also speaks of having an email universe of over100 million unique consumers. I can’t tell if this is its own compiled list or the sum of the lists it sells on behalf of its clients, although I’m guessing the former. The company offers event-based selections within this universe, such as people who have recently responded to an offer or made a purchase. This is more like traditional direct mail list marketing than Web ad sales, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Completing the circle, Datran also offers event-triggered programs to its conventional email clients, for retention, cross sales and loyalty building. This is not unique, but it’s still just emerging as a best practice.

From my own perspective, treating an email list as an inventory of contact opportunities exactly mirrors the way we see things at Client X Client. In our terminology, each piece of inventory is a “slot” waiting to be filled. Wasting slots is as bad as wasting any other perishable inventory, be it a Web page view, airline seat, or stale doughnut. One of the core tasks in the CXC methodology is identifying previously unrecognized slots and then attempting to wring the greatest value possible from them. It’s pleasing to see that Datran has done exactly that, even though they came up with the idea without our help.

The notion of slots also highlights another piece of ambiguity about Datran: are email customers purchasing an entire email, or an advertisement inserted into existing email? There is language on the company site that suggests both possibilities, although I suspect it’s the entire email. Actually, embedding ads in existing emails might be a more productive use of the “slots” that those emails represent, since it would allow delivery of more messages per customer. Whether it would also annoy recipients or diminish response is something that would have to be tested.

Datran offers other services related to online marketing, such as landing page optimization. This illustrates another trend: combining many different online channels and methods in a single package. This is an important development in the world of marketing software, and I plan to write more about it in the near future.