by Ankush Gupta Jun 15, 2016
1. Could you tell me a little about yourself and how you came to be the senior vice president of solutions at Cramer?
I lead Cramer’s marketing, planning, analytics, and technology teams. I joined Cramer after successfully surviving start-up life, building marketing agencies and, most recently, leading digital for MIT.
Beginning in the mid-90s, I was an early member of two different start-ups that quickly became publicly traded companies. From there I went on to build and sell my own start-up to one of Boston’s largest advertising agencies. Seeing the impact and results that an agency can drive for its clients, I stayed in the agency world, where I held executive leadership positions at Ogilvy and Boathouse.
Most recently, I served as the chief digital officer for MITs largest digital properties and media brands.
Throughout my career, I led large engagements for numerous global brands, including AOL, Bank of America, ESPN, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Harvard University, The Hearst Corporation, JetBlue, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, National Institutes of Health, Novartis, Partners HealthCare and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
I remain actively involved in start-up and marketing communities, and am the co-creator of MITX Up, a Google-sponsored series of “marketing hackathons” that help start-ups solve their brand and marketing challenges.
2. Are you happy with the buy-in for Marketing Technology that exists at Cramer? Do you think the investments being made are adequate or could be more?
Yes.
We are an agency – this is a cobbler’s shoes situation.
"Where the 150 of us work with marketing technology to create experiences and address challenges for our clients, our own investments and utilization into the same platforms, products, and services is definitely a backseat to our client work."
That said, in the past two years, we have made significant advancements and now have a full, modern marketing technology stack in use.
3.What is the key problem you are attempting to solve with marketing technology implementation – could be 360 customer view, better customer experiences, crafting better journeys, full circle attribution?
Three things:
- Content: Optimizing and automating the distribution and promotion of the content we publish
- Sales enablement: From supporting individuals with focused industries, drip campaigns, and on
- Social amplification: From engaging our own 150 people to distribute content for us, to building networks of key execs, to nurturing our expanding audience base
4. What are some of the challenges your team faces from a technology & integration perspective?
"Discovering the tool is missing from the platform we have signed up for."
For example, we sign on with Pardot. All is well for many months. Then we have a good idea on how we could support our sales team. We go into Pardot and their platform cannot do what we expect it to. Happens with more than just Pardot. Reality of the software game.
5. What is your take on the massive explosion of MarTech cos across so many categories? Do you feel spoilt for choice or is it just more of a chore to evaluate additional options?
Both. I / we love the startups with their focus on user experience and/or purposefully solving individual marketing needs. But, every day there are more to sign up for, trial, and test.
It’s a good and bad problem.
6. What is the one area of investment you'd like to make in the immediate future from a marketing tech perspective?
Headless CMS is our next big build/investment.
7. Build your own stack or buy into a pre-built MarTech cloud – what team are you on?
Built own stack, with Salesforce covering the sales enablement pieces
8. Could you share for our readers, an infographic, list or description depicting your marketing stack (various marketing software products or platforms your team uses or subscribes to)?
