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After graduating Stanford in 2010 with a degree in math and computational sciences, Anneka Gupta took her first software engineering job with a company called Rapleaf. That was seven years ago, and she’s still there – though the company and its positioning have changed utterly.
Shortly after she joined, Rapleaf pivoted into data onboarding and rebranded as LiveRamp. Then it was acquired by Acxiom for $310 million and embarked on a new phase as a provider of “identity resolution” services.
Gupta’s career also morphed, as she took on new roles in the company – product management, marketing and recruiting. Now she’s chief product officer, a role she’s held for three years.
In the early days, “We hadn’t really landed on data onboarding as a product that we were going to go out and sell,” Gupta says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. “It was an exciting time to be an engineer on the team, because we were experimenting a lot and trying out many different types of data products.”
At Acxiom, Gupta’s initiatives have led the company away from purely marketing use cases.
“The true power of identity resolution is only fully realized when you’re thinking about customer experience and not just marketing,” she says. “It’s not just about how do you get the right offer to someone at the right time. It’s about how do you create a lasting relationship with your customers. The forward-thinking brands are thinking about that.”
Also in this episode: Why LiveRamp bought Arbor and Circulate, what’s up with match rate and how the LiveRamp Consortium is coming along.
