Speaking to TechGraph, Mani Gopalaratnam, CEO & CTO of Resulticks has said, “The programmatic or marketing ad tech space has been dominated by a few DSPs that allow organizations to send communications to the Wild West—the social media platforms, the web, and digital touchpoints not covered by first-party data.”
Read the complete interview:
TechGraph: Could you help give a sense of how far Resulticks has come in its eighth year of existence? From when it began to where it is now?
Mani Gopalaratnam: Resulticks has come a long way from its launch in 2014 as a solution to enable data-driven omnichannel customer engagement. A group of passionate marketers and Martech experts conceived Resulticks to truly empower marketing teams across sectors. The solution is a distillation of all their expertise and first-hand experiences from running a global digital agency founded in 2004.
Our journey since then has been quite successful thanks in no small part to our exceptional customer base and partners. We were also one of the first to create a customer data platform, which was designed as the foundation of our already innovative solution and reflective of our enduring belief in the essential value of data. When Resulticks was created, the customer data platform was not even a commonplace term, so we referred to our data engine as the Customer Information Hub.
On top of that robust data foundation, we added capabilities for real-time marketing, cookieless attribution, custom event management, omnichannel orchestration, integration with over 100 different systems for data consolidation, and more.
The result is a truly integrated, marketer-friendly real-time customer engagement solution, one that is evolving with the latest trends in marketing and digital transformation. From 2019 onwards, we have focused on making Resulticks among the top 10 premier solutions for enabling digital transformation instead of just a tool for marketing automation. So, this is where we are right now, and if our roadmap is any indication, the path ahead will be even more exciting.
TechGraph: How is Resulticks utilizing its sectoral expertise and technology to solve the unsolved tech gap in the marketing industry?
Mani Gopalaratnam: Resulticks is a horizontal product with a presence in multiple industries such as banking, finance, telecommunications, retail, and more. For each sector, we have built tailored templates, developed use cases aimed at addressing the most critical scenarios in the industry, and created sector-specific data directories to eliminate any obstacles to accurate targeting.
Now, these industry-specific offerings are rooted in the cutting-edge foundational technology of our SaaS solution. Built on the edge and serverless infrastructure, Resulticks arms organizations with three powerful capabilities.
Firstly, the ability to ingest and process large amounts of data. Secondly, the capacity to monitor events occurring across a large array of touchpoints—from mobile apps to IoT devices to an ATM and so on—and accurately execute attribution at the segment-of-one level, which is a major gap in the industry. And lastly, the ability to identify who the specific customer is, without resorting to one size fits all technology.
What we have is a solution capable of consolidating data from diverse sources to precisely target customers across touchpoints and distill insights that decide how these individuals can be even more effectively engaged—in real-time and at scale.
We’re helping organizations move past the phase of congratulating themselves for having reached out to a million contacts. We’re giving them the arsenal to engage in meaningful, lasting conversations and drive top-line growth, with reliable metrics that they can use to assess their performances.
TechGraph: How does the marketing industry look these days?
Mani Gopalaratnam: The marketing industry has made major leaps, but retains many of the same old problems, such as siloed data and lack of attribution. The confusing blend of COVID-related disruptions, evolving consumer behavior, and growing demand for self-service has led to the emergence of niche or point solutions that aim to address very specific pain points.
As such solutions pile up, they tend to create more confusion—on both operational and technical levels. There are also solutions promising to solve every problem under the sun for marketers but falling woefully short in practice.
I think these are obstacles that the marketing industry will be able to overcome in the next few years. Among many things, the answers will at least involve addressing the fusion of customer engagement and customer experience.
Next, we will see organizations utilizing predictive AI models to analyze past patterns and determine the next-best actions to optimize their efforts. All of such advancements point to a bigger underlying shift from multichannel communications to omnichannel conversations that lead to concretely measurable outcomes, with detailed attribution to indicate what has worked well, what has failed, and where improvements need to be made.
TechGraph: How does Resulticks add value in the programmatic or marketing ad tech space?
Mani Gopalaratnam: The programmatic or marketing ad tech space has been dominated by a few DSPs that allow organizations to send communications to the Wild West—the social media platforms, the web, and digital touchpoints not covered by first-party data. This partially explains the monumental successes of, say, Google and Facebook.
The marketing community has realized that it needs to have some control over its fates. To achieve it, they need to establish deep integrations with these key platforms and harness more value from them directly.
At Resulticks, we have been making concerted efforts to integrate our solution with these ad platforms outside of the DSPs. For example, we have integrated our CDP with Google Ads Data Hub, Google Cloud, and Google Marketing Platform—beyond the many digital touchpoints with which it can already connect.
This means that organizations will have access to relevant data available from Google Ads Data Hub. Perhaps more importantly, we enable them to associate conversions with specific customers and facilitate those individual journeys across channels in a very seamless manner.
These important integrations are made possible by our Smart Duo technology and the solution’s ability to match impressions to existing customers. The latter capability gives organizations the chance to fine-tune who and how the ad platforms should target for better outcomes.
TechGraph: What are the new trends in the advertising and marketing industry?
Mani Gopalaratnam: We’re seeing rapidly growing demand for more precise targeting and attribution. Organizations are also unwilling to burn their budgets on spray-and-pray campaigns. They want to optimize how, where, and who to target to maximize ROI.
To address the age-old problem of the media mix, organizations should focus on determining how they can monetize first-party data, integrate with ad platforms to bring in more prospects, and drive cross-selling and up-selling to relevant contacts. Many B2B and B2C companies in marketing and advertising have been working towards providing solutions for these needs.
TechGraph: How do you prepare for the highly disruptive digital marketing space?
Mani Gopalaratnam: To continue making progress in this volatile digital space, one needs to maintain a consistent focus on creating value for the customer. The technology itself is never the point; the concrete value that it can generate is what matters.
Can the value be measured in quantifiable terms? Can it provide insights into improving future efforts? Does the solution address the very specific challenges of this particular industry or customer? There is not a single blueprint. It’s also important to embrace co-creation of value, in practice and principle, when trying to design or improve solutions for the marketing space.
TechGraph: Resulticks has been collaborating with different technology partners to enhance the marketing experience of brands. Going forward, do you see more such engagements?
Mani Gopalaratnam: There is a surging appetite for innovative collaborations between technology platforms to empower organizations. One will find many levels of engagement within every industry, such as Fortune 500 banks and mid-tier banking brands.
This necessitates fostering collaborations across levels to create meaningful new offerings that transform marketing technology into integral components of that ecosystem. It is also critical to develop partnerships in terms of data and monetization as well as digital signals and event processing that enable specific use cases to come alive.
TechGraph: What do you see as the roadmap?
Mani Gopalaratnam: At the big picture level, we’re focused on bringing the physical and digital worlds together for organizations. In the next two years, we will make Resulticks an even more robust outcome-based solution that delivers more value for different organizations through a variety of upgrades. The upgrades include our work with Google to leverage some of their technologies such as BigQuery.
Our roadmap comprises advancements to real-time engagement capabilities, more industry-specific models, and the introduction of a complete co-creation framework that allows our partners to construct new solutions with Resulticks at their foundations. There is also our ceaseless focus on improving efficiency, minimizing infrastructural footprint, and identifying new value-generation potential for our clients.