Data Strategy
April 18, 2024
To keep up with evolving technology and customer behavior, it’s essential for companies to work with partners sharing similar long term approaches to address current and future challenges. Read below to learn about Tealium’s guiding product development beliefs that help ensure new products and features deliver significant value.
This is Part 7 of a 7-part Series. Read earlier parts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Matt Parisi, Interviewer: (cont’d from Interview Part 6) And finally Core Belief #6, “first-party data is a company’s most valuable strategic asset.” Why is that? And how does Tealium’s platform reflect that?
Mike Anderson, Tealium Co-founder and CTO: That’s been our focus from day 1.
First Party Data as Foundation of Organization’s Data
What sets us apart is that we are about bridging that first-party data relationship between a customer and a company. Allowing companies to get customer data from anywhere and move that data around to where it needs to go to make sure the data is validated and governed and defined in such a way that will protect end users is the goal. This consumer data is extremely valuable. This is why Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon all have amazing market caps because they understand they have a lot of data and can understand people. If you can understand people you can market and create richer, more relevant experiences.
Our goal has been to help build the strongest experience for the consumer and to do that you need to make sure you have high quality data about that consumer flowing into the system and that you also don’t ever fall short of expectations. That’s best done with first-party data as the foundation.
MP: These days there are a lot of challenges controlling data flow for various reasons including data security, to compliance with regulations, to making sure you’re building trust with consumers and not using data without consent. How do you collect and use data in a way that addresses all these challenges?
MA: So there are a lot of people that don’t like the fact that they look at a couch on a website and then a day later they’re reading an article with an ad for that couch.
The third-party data commonly fueling marketing can make people feel like they’re being spied on. We have a lot of features for first and third-party data around privacy management capabilities and further consent management features. We give that capability for our clients that want to have a transparent relationship with their customers, and say, “I’m collecting data across these specific technologies, this is what they do, this is what I’m collecting the data for, and this is the experience I’m building for you.” You can opt out of any of them, and if European you’re opting out by default.
There’s still a relationship that needs to be built and that sort of middle person that sits there and says “this is what we’re doing from a tech perspective and this is how we’re looking at your behavior, but we’re going to put you in control and say that you can opt out and opt in.” Doing all that creates a lot of pain across our customers that we try to listen to and solve.
With GDPR, companies were panicked because there are fines associated with it, like 4% of gross revenue or 20M Euros, whichever is higher. You can’t just go off and have 10 or 15 infractions because you’re mishandling data. You have to follow the law. A lot of these companies that are doing plane reservations or clothing sales or finance, it’s not their expertise to understand where this data originates, where it goes, how I control where it goes, how do I present something that shows how we’re using their data— that’s where we come in and that’s our job.
Our job is easy because we solve that problem of getting data to all these different places and we know where it’s going and convey that back to the user.
We’re in the data supply chain for our customers, so we become a great vendor to solve a lot more problems than just tag management. For us, it’s always been about the data.
Thank you Mike!
End of Interview. Read earlier parts here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
This was part 7 of a 7-part interview with Tealium CTO, Mike Anderson, about how Tealium’s core beliefs guide product development.
