Marketing Strategy
December 5, 2023
With so many Tealium customers witnessing their visitor traffic move from desktop to mobile in staggering numbers, the need to unify cross-channel user behavior and data in real time is greater than ever. Neal Howard George, Vice President of IoT & Technology Partnerships at Tealium, caught up with Mobile industry leader Adam Marchick, CEO & Co-founder of Kahuna, to discuss what it takes to execute successful marketing in “The Mobile Era.”
Neal Howard George (NHG): Please tell us about the vision behind Kahuna.
Adam Marchick (AM): We started Kahuna by listening to CMOs, who were watching their customer base move to mobile at a rapid pace. Paypal, Groupon and many others have already switched to ‘mobile majority’—i.e. a majority of their usage happens on a mobile phone.
We call this switch living in ‘The Mobile Era,’ and it is as fundamental as the shift from On-Premise to SaaS.
Kahuna is redefining Marketing for the Mobile Era. Kahuna empowers brands to create authentic connections with people through communication, instead of blasting out marketing messages.
It seems that many traditional B2B companies have left themselves exposed by not creating more mobile centric architectures from the get-go. What is the impact of this?
In the Mobile Era, many of the core tenants of the past break. For example, is a long session length good or bad? For Uber, it is VERY bad.
Because of the underlying behavior changes, mobility has fundamentally busted existing marketing infrastructure. If you’re identifying your customers with a single email address or a single device, that’s a recipe for spammy messages that will hurt your brand. Your architecture must have the best big data and machine learning technologies in order to keep up with modern customers—who have multiple devices, unique behaviors and diverse preferences.
NHG: Tell me more about your thoughts on the 3 C’s: Crash, Clicks and Cash?
AM: If you look at the state of Mobile Analytics, I break the market into three buckets: Measuring Crashes, Clicks, or Cash.
In measuring Crashes, my Stanford friend Jeff Siebert (@jeffseibert) changed the game with Crashlytics, which is now part of Twitter. Think of this as the next generation of New Relic. Although, I wouldn’t bet against Lew Cirne making sure New Relic winds up being the next generation of New Relic.
In measuring Clicks, this is deep product Analytics that our friends at Amplitude (shout out to Spencer Skates) are innovating around. Think of this as the next generation of Omniture.
In measuring Cash, it is all about understanding each customer’s Engagement State and running Engagement State Marketing to increase the value of every customer. When we came on the scene, every CMO talked about optimizing CPI (Cost Per Install), and we challenged them by saying, “What about tripling your LTV (Lifetime Value)?” That is what we did on the Facebook Growth team, and that is what Kahuna is doing for our customers. When you truly deliver personalization at scale, this audacious mission is achievable. When done right, it is truly breathtaking. Just ask Yummly. Kahuna is the leader in ‘Cash Analytics’ for the Mobile Era.
NHG: At Tealium, we believe that web analytics have made a fundamental shift from capturing information about visits and events to capturing visitor-centric information. Tell us more about your customer engagement engine and why mobile engagements have also fueled your interest to redefine visitor engagement?
AM: At Kahuna, we believe with our entire being that brands should engage individuals on the individual’s terms. To that end, we built a person-centric data layer for a year and a half before we sent a single marketing message. This is totally divergent than how any other Marketing Automation company has acted … ever.
We did this because we believe you have to understand the person, before you can personalize.
Kahuna’s Customer Engagement Engine enables brands to communicate with customers on their preferred device, channel, and with the perfect message. Kahuna customer’s customers actually say ‘thank you’ for marketing to them and tweet about it.
Ultimately, we want brands to move away from the batch-and-blast mentality and start communicating with cohorts of one. This is proven to increase engagement and revenue. It has worked for Facebook and LinkedIn—they have hundreds of people dedicated to building these systems custom. Kahuna is bringing that capability to the rest of the world.
NHG: With Kahuna as a soon to be AudienceStream connector, Tealium + Kahuna look to marry all event/visitor level data across desktop, mobile web, mobile app and the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to take action on that data regardless of the device used to interact with a brand. Marketing for the Mobile Era Redefined and Realized!
