Pegasystems, a company that offers customer relationship management and business process management solutions for B2B customers, is moving deeper into the marketing world.
The Cambridge, Mass., company last week added location-based mobile targeting capabilities to its marketing solution and appointed Robert Tas, JPMorgan Chase’s former head of digital marketing, as its new CMO and SVP on Monday.
Prior to its earnings call Tuesday, the company also said it passed the half billion-dollar revenue mark for the first time with $508.9 million in total revenue for 2013, up from $461.7 million in 2012. AdExchanger spoke with Tas and communications director Brian Callahan.
AdExchanger: What attracted you to Pegasystems?
ROBERT TAS: JPMorgan Chase is a big customer of Pega’s and when I looked at Pega, I saw that the platform is well-positioned to figure out how to connect marketing, sales and customer service channels in a thoughtful way with analytics and provide a unique customer experience across platforms.
What are your goals for the company?
ROBERT TAS: Businesses have traditionally operated in silos, but the customer is driving significant changes in what they expect from a business. So as the head of marketing, I want to create the best unified client experience when it comes to working with Pega. The way we digitize that experience and reach decision makers at B2B companies is also becoming more similar to how you reach B2C people. People go to Google, they look at social media, use mobile devices, and so I want to help drive those changes.
BRIAN CALLAHAN: All of our solutions are unified, which lets us leverage customer data across channels. If you used one of our client’s ATM machines, for example, our client can send you an offer on that ATM machine that is based on your previous transactions or they can serve that offer to you on your mobile device. No matter how consumers are interacting with a brand, we want to make sure the service level is consistent and that clients aren’t losing data when a customer switches from one channel to another.
What’s your approach to mobile advertising?
BRIAN CALLAHAN: We recently launched a new version of the marketing part of our solution [Next-Best-Action Marketing]. The new features include outbound capabilities and combines geolocation with predictive and adaptive analytics on mobile devices. If you’re Starbucks, for example, you can use geolocation to serve appropriate offers at the right time to people who have signed into your loyalty app.
We also have a mobile application development platform through a company called Antenna Software that we acquired in October. We’re in the process of integrating it into our other platforms.
Do you see a place for real-time bidding and programmatic advertising in Pegasystem’s offerings?
BRIAN CALLAHAN: We’ve been testing our way into it as a customer of programmatic advertising. We’re running a number of different tests to figure out how it works and how we can leverage, scale and connect those dots across our platforms. For example, we’re testing the use of analytics to find the right opportunities for customers across networks and media properties to figure out how to connect the Pega message to broader groups of people.
