Company Showcase: Velocidi

Hello! It’s time to do another startup showcase here on Hickam’s Dictum, and for this post I’m partnering with an innovative marketing intelligence company, my friends at Velocidi. With this article we will get a pulse on the marketing intelligence landscape today, give a high level overview of what CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) are and dive into Velocidi’s value proposition. Many thanks to the awesome team at Velocidi for partnering with me for this article! Let’s get to it.

The Current Marketing Intelligence Landscape

In 2017, Velocidi commissioned Forrester to evaluate the marketing intelligence capabilities of mature companies in the marketplace today. The study sampled 273 marketing decision makers at B2C companies and their ability to turn information into actionable insights. The findings from the study are quite alarming, at least for marketers. These included:

• Most marketers use backward-looking (retroactive) intelligence (61%).
• Marketers use marketing intelligence tools for basic capabilities (access to media and customer data) rather than to activate insights.
• Marketers are struggling with data management (ownership, quality, storage, accessibility and automation).
• Most marketers saw marketing intelligence as a reporting dashboard — a source of information — rather than for insights and actionable recommendations (very important point).
• The study concludes with the finding that marketing intelligence is the key to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and marketing ROI.

Despite the advancements with marketing analytics in recent years, the study revealed that marketing decision makers are not making marketing intelligence and data management a focal point in their strategy. Proactive, forward thinking analysis to help with future planning is lacking, and the void created by these issues is what CDP solutions offered by companies like Velocidi aim to fill.

So what is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

CDPs are a relatively new concept, and are a solution that speaks to Big Data activation with regards to marketing intelligence. CDPs utilize much of the same database technology and concepts that Data Lakes and Data Warehouses use. CDPs however operate at the lower end of the funnel, having the ability to process, harmonize and activate data from any first, second and third party data source.

So how is a CDP different from a Marketing Cloud (e.g. Salesforce)?

Marketing Clouds like Salesforce are powerful repositories that are by default CRM based and tend to focus on marketing automation. Some Marketing Clouds have evolved to be able to ingest DMP data, allowing them to add additional layers to customer profiles, but this layer in most cases is still only based on static, digital data. A CDP on the other hand is designed to process data from multiple online and offline touch-points, inclusive of event level data (with event level data you can add as many attributes as you want to a profile). A CDP has the ability to collect raw, real time event level data through Hadoop, Postgresql and/or Elasticsearch technology to compliment the automated CRM data from a Marketing Cloud. A CDP can process all that information and provide segmentation, predictions and insights through its marketing stack. The processed insights from a CDP can be pushed back into the Marketing Cloud or to any targeting platform (e.g. DSPs). This latter point illustrates another key feature of CDPs: their ability to communicate with other systems.

Velocidi

Velocidi is a Customer Data Platform capable of ingesting 1st , 2nd and 3rd party data into a centralized platform (Velocidi CDP), and outputting that processed data as audience segments for marketing platforms, predictive insights, and reports. Velocidi has the ability to combine and process over 100+ first and third party data sources and provide robust marketing intelligence solutions. For example, the Velocidi engine can:

• use a combination of event level data and campaign data for predictive modeling (e.g. can predict impressions for DSPs and SSPs)
• create audience segments that can be linked on the execution or analytics side to multiple marketing platforms, including most DSPs, Google Analytics and Omniture.

Velocidi’s segmentation tool, showing how users can create segments based on predictive attributes.

• Velocidi can even track touch-points in the digital customer journey through their own proprietary tag (attribution), an additional bonus to their ability to ingest and process other kinds of data from varied sources.

Like most Data Warehouses, the Velocidi platform uses an ETL process to transform the data for use. From a recommendations and analysis perspective, their engine looks at all dimensions around any KPI, and with event level data can make predictions and calculate metrics like Customer Lifetime Value.

Velocidi’s Story interface, used for reporting and aggregate level analysis.

Private CDP

A key differentiation in Velocidi’s product offering is their private CDP:

Velocidi is deployed on the client's private cloud, so each client maintains complete ownership and control of their data. The private CDP also helps keep first-party data private in the digital advertising ecosystem by providing a way to share "blind" audience segments with DSPs using anonymized tags.

This compliance capability is especially relevant when we take the recent GDPR data usage regulations that were announced this past May into consideration. The Velocidi platform provides a central infrastructure for drawing value from data; from collection, to quality management, to analysis, to predictive modeling, to segmentation, activating audiences back to the DSP/SSP for campaigns, and real-time user interactions on the web.

Summary

One challenge for marketing programs within companies has long been the ability to connect and activate data from disparate sources in a centralized location. Data Lakes do address data aggregation, but those are large enterprise wide solutions that are usually activated piecemeal and on an ad hoc basis. CDPs are specifically designed for this purpose: a processing engine capabale of ingesting and processing varied data sources tailored to marketing intelligence.

Velocidi is a key player in the CDP space, and their platform has the ability to process and analyze multiple data streams and provide a rich marketing intelligence package that can help any marketing program enhance their segmentation, personalization and forecasting efforts. Personally, I like the fact that as a company Velocidi goes the extra mile to show command of their space, acquiring companies like ShiftForward to enhance their privacy and innovation capabilities and even going as far as sponsoring Forrester to compile the marketing intelligence research study. They were very open, friendly and helpful throughout the process of creating this article, and their team provided thoughtful answers to all my questions.

If you are involved with marketing intelligence, whether on the agency or client side and are in leadership, I recommend you reach out to the Velocidi team and have them come in to give you a demo of their product. You can find them at www.velocidi.com or on their LinkedIn page.

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