Data, data everywhere, and not a drop of insight to drink.
Data intelligence platform Tracer, which helps agencies and marketers link data sets, selected Obele Brown-West, formerly of the agency Tinuiti, to be its first president on Wednesday on the brink of closing its Series A round of funding.
Tracer declined to disclose how much it had raised from its backers since the funding round isn’t closing for a few weeks. But it’s netting ahead of expectations. “We have definitely surpassed our wildest dreams of where we thought we were going to close the Series A,” said Brown-West.
Progress Ventures and Bertelsmann’s BDMI is co-leading the round, with participation from S4S Investors and Arbour Way Investors. Previously, Tracer raised $9.9 million in seed funding in 2021, led by Marc Lore (the founder of Jet.com and former president of Walmart eCommerce), after being incubated by VaynerX.
Brown-West joins Tracer from Tinuiti, where she most recently managed more than $3 billion in media spend and oversaw a team of more than 800 as chief solutions officer. She has also held leadership positions at IPG’s Weber Shandwick and Piston Agency.
Brown-West was drawn to Tracer because of her penchant for solving data problems – particularly “in a cobbled-together, janky way,” she said. “I know the [Tracer] platform is capable of solving a lot of the challenges I’ve been trying to bootstrap for many years.”
Marketers face challenges understanding large quantities of data housed in many disparate places, from a marketing platform to point-of-sale data from a physical store. For its marketer and businesspeople clients, Tracer automates analytics and reporting and helps them understand important metrics like performance. Clients can see the impact of, say, a marketing campaign on in-store sales.
For the client Sanofi, a global health care brand, Tracer took all the organization’s data globally and put it in a clean, digestible interface. Sanofi’s marketing leaders and organizational stakeholders from its various brands could view and understand its global data sets in one centralized place rather than toggling between several different platforms.
“We’re able to separate it out market by market, but being able to understand your business writ large is huge,” Brown-West said.
As an agnostic platform, Tracer can take data from any platform and send data into whatever output clients need.
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“That’s one of our secret weapons,” Brown-West said. “Some other competitors only work within their own sandbox. They only have certain data they’re able to ingest; they only have certain places they can send that data to.”
Brown-West plans to grow Tracer by investing in its sales and client success teams, as well as marketing to get the word out about the company. AI is front and center in many conversations, too. The thinking is that AI can support Tracer’s growth by automating manual pieces of Tracer’s technology and building predictive models for clients.
But it all comes back to the clients. Tracer is in the business of helping solve problems, according to Brown-West. And though it works with a number of agency partners, dealing with a brand directly offers a unique opportunity.
“When you’re not interfacing directly with the brand, you’re working specifically in one little area of what you’re being told the brand needs,” Brown-West said. But when a company like Tracer gains direct access to the brand, “you’re able to realize that your technology can do a lot more than that one thing you’re potentially contracted to do – and really dig into their business and help them solve challenges that are wider in scope.”
