Datalogix has hired a seasoned agency alum to spearhead brand marketing globally, and to strengthen ties to the agency world.
Steven Wolfe Pereira, previously the EVP of Publicis-owned MediaVest and managing director of MediaVest Multicultural, comes to Datalogix at a time of great acceleration for the company.
The data services provider, which matches its clients’ customer databases with online audiences for ad-targeting purposes, has grown its headcount from 150 to more than 250 staffers in the past year or so, partly on the strength of its recent work with Facebook and Twitter. It has also opened new offices in Detroit, San Francisco and London.
AdExchanger spoke with Wolfe Pereira.
AdExchanger: What’s your remit?
STEVEN WOLFE PEREIRA: My remit is global in nature. Everything that has to do with the Datalogix brand, product marketing and vertical marketing. There will also be oversight of privacy, and most exciting will be leveraging my background at MediaVest to oversee global agency partnerships.
What will the agency piece involve for you?
I’ve learned a lot about Datalogix not from the media companies like Facebook and Twitter and not from the ad-tech companies, but really more from the brand advertisers. As an agency partner, all agencies are trying to figure out how best to play in digital data and analytics at a macro level. The media agencies are kind of like the investment banks of the media business. That’s where the money is. As stewards of the capital for clients, it’s really important for them to understand everything that’s happening in the marketplace.
The most important thing for agencies is figuring out audiences. We’re being challenged by clients … who are saying, “How can we find the buyers of our products?” Datalogix has been popping up everywhere in media partner conversations, because they work with everybody. They sit in the middle. They work with brands directly. They work with ad-tech companies like the Turns and BlueKais of the world. And they’re working with media companies.
We haven’t spoken publicly about it, but we work with agencies all the time, because when the brand advertiser is in the room, so is the media agency.
We think there’s a lot of value in developing a deeper relationship at the client team level – whether the team is running P&G or Coca-Cola – and at the holding company level. It’s having relationships from the bottom up and top down.
As CRM matching becomes more of a reality across all the social media platforms, is there a need for agencies to centralize the way they manage audience buying and database matching?
If you think of the evolution of targeting, there’s been this evolution from demo[graphics] to psychographics to contextual to behavioral. Now we’re at the highest stage in the evolution of targeting, which is purchase-based targeting. For Procter & Gamble, it might be targeting an audience based on “Who buys CoverGirl?” or “Who buys Tide?”
We can use your data and the technology we’ve built to look at purchase data and then do the predictive analytics to figure out who is likely to buy this and show that they’ve bought in the past. That to me is the exciting part. No one’s been able to show that.
For clients as well as agencies, it’s about where they are on that journey to focus on the most important business impact, which is sales.
