Zach Van Doren:

Thank you guys.

Dustin Raney:

So Zach, one, we’re super excited to have you here at Acxiom. You bring so much to the table. You’ve been in the ecosystem, the marketing ad tech ecosystem for a while getting started. Why don’t you just go ahead and share a little bit of your background again and how you came here to join us at Acxiom?

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you guys. A pleasure to be here. Yeah, my background, gosh, 20 years, 20 plus years in the digital marketing identity data space. I’m based here in the Bay Area. I started my career way, way back in paid search back when it was really just formulating and launching. This is during the dotcom boom days of multiple search engines and frenzy of startups and around in that first.com era. So definitely gave me a big background and depth and the idea of data-driven marketing and analytical driven marketing in that time. From there, I eventually evolved into larger, bigger media planning and buying and strategy on the agency side. So I did that for a number of years and I drafted from planning, buying strategy more into the data and analytics side over the course of those years, and then got deep into the data analytics of media at the time.

And so from the agency world, I jumped into the SI consulting world, really focused on marketing analytics or media analytics, and at the time helping agencies move from Excel-based reporting into web-based reporting and then got into tagging tag infrastructure, client site infrastructure, and then got into CDPs and then eventually found myself running and owning and operating an SI that was really addressing media analytics, tagging, data modeling, and then CDPs formula tion of customer three sixty’s foundations, use case design, deployment technology, design deployment, and then went into the software side, so joined a CDP. And so I went from ad tech to consulting to MarTech and got deep in that side in the identity and data integrations and solutioning. And so that’s of course how it leads me to Acxiom. So I led the partnership with Acxiom while ActionIQ led the coast solutioning and integrations and co-selling and go to market and just got deeply invested and interested in the data and identity side of that process.

It gave me really an opportunity to bring together all my experience and background starting in media and ad tech and then to into MarTech, saw the convergence happening with between MarTech and adtech, saw the acceleration of that with the emergence and rise of data clouds and centralized unified data foundations and now AI as an absolute accelerant to that convergence unification. And so started talking with certain folks at Acxiom and came up with a role that really fit my background experience relative to what Axio was looking to do and the direction they’re moving. And it just fit the role and the timing just really fit. And so I made the jump and now I am week three of the new role. So here I am. So that was 25 years, certainly. Welcome five minutes, right?

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. And you do have such a great background there and very relevant to what Acxiom is doing and what our clients are looking to achieve and really where the whole market is kind of converging around those concepts. I mean, you’ve kind of hit a lot of different parts, but they’re all kind of drawing closer together. So welcome. So what we want to do today was go through some recent news in the industry, get some hot takes on your perspective on what’s happening in market, and just have some conversation around that. And so wanted to start initially with some recent big purchase news across the industry. We heard Salesforce acquiring Informatica, which is just an 8 billion equity deal and very significant. What are your thoughts regarding that move?

Zach Van Doren:

The big macro movement right now is of course ai, of course, the acceleration, adoption of ai. And I think there is a realization that the big challenge in really enabling true scale of adoption of AI in the enterprise is the data is the management of the data, the grunt work of the ingest, the ETL, the management, the transformation, the storage, the computation. It’s truly the underlying foundations and plumbing that would enable AI as a operational function that really would provide meaningful output and ROI and value to businesses at scale requires an underlying foundation of cleanse and structured and modeled data to inform the ai. And so there’s a realization market that those foundations need to be put in place. And so Informatica, decade long experience and IP and infrastructure are dedicated to that purpose. I mean, it was a natural fit relative to Salesforce’s, I would say, goals and objectives and aspirations to be that engine to enable that, right? I think you see that in other acquisitions and m and a movements, it’s all about acceleration of adoption and usage. So either it’s a foundation like IE Foundation of plumbing or it’s a more of an end user front facing acceleration of adoption.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, we’re definitely seeing this trend of vertical integration where it’s like all the different CDPs, even that Holdcos companies that we’re part of Interpublic Group and the Omnicoms of the world, it’s trying to really have a full scale solution front to end, almost like a one-stop shop. And one of the key layers in the ecosystem is the data layer. And I could see where Salesforce, it’s primarily viewed probably more in the software realm trying to really bolster that data component, the ability to maybe cleanse. So they’re trying to vertically integrate down into the lower level infrastructure, right?

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah. I think the same reason meta purchased scale ai, I know we were going to talk about, it’s the same patterns and reasoning, just the people forget, I mean just the underlying foundational dirty work that is needed in order to get this data into a structured modeled and designed state to really what accelerate the ai. And so the same patterns and the same reasons and your point, the verticalization of those components both kind of on the back end, the middle and the front is definitely a movement that we’re seeing.

Kyle Hollaway:

And I think with both those purchases that you mentioned, it’s the, like you’re saying, it’s really the reality of the operationalization of AI to really, for brands to begin to really realize the value of AI and the ability to leverage AI effectively within their enterprise, they’ve got to be able to operationalize it, which means you’ve got to be able to manage your data, you’ve got to be able to deliver it into the AI system in a fashion that is effective and is built off of the cleanliness of the data, the accuracy, the timeliness of the data, and being able to harmonize that into that ecosystem so that all the results coming back out of your AI are on point and are relevant to your enterprise. So I think these big moves are players really looking to shore that up and to be able to deliver against that.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, I would say too, like you mentioned scale. I read an article yesterday just talking about how Zuckerberg through this acquisition, it gives him a front row seat into what’s happening in the AI arms race in essence, because all of these different LLMs are dependent on data. If you think about Microsoft, Google that open AI and the Microsoft relationships starting to get strained as a result of the acquisition. So everyone’s trying to get in on that data layer, but because everyone’s dependent on it now, whoever has control of that most fundamental critical layer really holds the keys to the kingdom.

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah, scale is pretty interesting. You look at the operation as thousands and thousands of people just doing the underlying dirty work of just tagging and classification and not modeling, but tagging, classification and structuring of otherwise very unstructured otherwise could be very dirty data. I find that fascinating that there’s still that human layer just to do that early interpretation and labeling that otherwise just the AI instance would not be able to adopt and to leverage. I find that just the human in the loop right aspect of that, quite interesting.

Kyle Hollaway:

And so then piggybacking off of that, another major announcement was from open ai. So interesting that you had some announcements of AI capabilities being ingested by some large platforms at the same time leading AI innovation company open AI turns around and makes two large acquisitions themselves, one for Windsurf, which is an intelligence assisted coding tool, and on top of that the John Ives AI device startup io, which at first glance, it’s kind of like, wow, okay. Those were really kind of interesting, interesting purchase on either side of the spectrum there for OpenAI sitting in the middle. But what are thoughts on those?

Zach Van Doren:

Again, it’s the acceleration of adoption, acceleration of operationalization of ai, but that’s on the front end versus the back end. I am very excited about I and what that will come about. I think he’s an absolute genius and master and form factor and device hard hardware interface to mass consumer. So the idea of bringing open AI and that infrastructure, that those LLMs and those interfaces into those LLMs to device form factors, I can’t even imagine what that is going to look like. So personally, I’m very, very interested in seeing what comes about that with that. And I think windsurf, again, it’s a front end acceleration of specific use case. I think that will absolutely accelerate adoption in the context of coding and development. And I know it can be very messy and very rough, the outputs and see the idea of bringing additional layers of productionization and output just makes sense. So I think these are super smart moves for open AI on that arms race just in general.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, I think it was an interesting juxtaposition, right? One, like you said, is a purchase for the consumer side, right? Yes. For consumer adoption of AI through whatever device IO is going to bring about. And the other side was on the maker side of putting that windsurf coating tool into the hands of developers to further accelerate adoption of ai. So you kind of hit on both sides, the maker side and on the consumer side. So very interesting place.

Zach Van Doren:

Dustin,

Kyle Hollaway:

What

Zach Van Doren:

Categories? Yeah, go ahead.

Dustin Raney:

No, I agree. One, I’m super intrigued to see what these new devices look like and how we’re going to engage. It’s like is it going to be as disruptive as the iPhone? I would guess yes. Can Joni, I have strike gold twice. He seems to have his hand on the pulse of what’s going on and is kind of in the center of everything. But I think what’s also equally intriguing is the sovereignty of the data that’s collected. So you have across different jurisdictions, for instance, Microsoft getting into self-sovereign technology, especially in Europe where you can’t track people across all the online properties and there’s much more restrictive use of data. So people are starting to, the bigger massive giants are starting to experiment in this concept of allowing consumers to have more control and ownership of their own data. So will that be natively built in to some of these devices and how’s that going to impact then all the players in the field in the advertising and marketing space?

Zach Van Doren:

I was thinking the same desk, and I really look forward to seeing what categories they go after on the consumer side and how disruptive that will be. I would imagine there’ll could be very incredibly disruptive, but will it be game changing on par with mobile like smart mobile phones? We’ll see, but I look forward to that.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. And will it be haptic centered voice, like seamless? Is it listening and translating and interacting in real time tied to a lens? It’s multiple modes of interaction now, which raises the stakes too on the reason why more of a self-sovereign approach might be required. Honestly, I always think about that use case of would LinkedIn at some point or one of these other platforms allow kind of a cool experience where you’re walking through the city of New York and I tell people, it’s like, Hey, whatever I’m allowed allowing certain people groups to know about me, that’s hovering above my head that, Hey, I just want to know when somebody’s walking around that works at my same company so I can go say hi, but I just randomly look at them through my lens on the streets. So now this kind of concept of visual AI doing facial recognition in real time, streaming that back and hitting an identity service and looking at consent, serving that back, I think all this is leading up to that point, a little bit of minority report, but you see the writing on the wall, this is where we’re going. People want a more seamless experience, they want a more augmented reality, not just how can you leverage data in your everyday life without having to log in at a thousand places. It just feels like more of a natural fit.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, I think the challenge, like you said, is going to be what seems at times kind of opposed viewpoints of privacy. And then like I said, that kind of consumer experience, and even the consumer I think doesn’t really know where they land right now. Do I want privacy or do I want all the benefits from an ecosystem like Dustin just spoke to, and how do you bring those together? So it will be interesting to see if that’s somewhat kind of embedded into the device side of how that privacy is instantiated or if there’s going to be additional legislation and external mechanisms to dictate how that privacy is managed. So I mean, we’re in some really interesting, even ethical kind of times. What does this mean? And we’ve already addressed it some on the AI side of all of these LLMs ingesting large amounts of data. Is that consented even from copyright perspective and from the content creators aspect to now, how is that interacting with the consumer? And is consumer wanting their information, not just their identity, but other attributes about them associated in an AI such that it’s more broadly available to other consumers?

Dustin Raney:

And we keep saying it the word over and over again. I mean data, data, everybody. It’s the required component. It’s our digital DNA that links everything together. And I think that sovereignty component is one of those things that I don’t know, it is going to be interesting to see which way on the scale it goes. And then how much does government come in and try to legislate or regulate in that area? We’ve kind of leaned or tilted more towards innovation than regulation here in the US where in other jurisdictions they’re leaning heavier towards regulation. But it is exciting to start to see some of the components come together and they’re not quite mature in combination. But then you have, I mean, here’s another story I think, was it builder AI or I think they might be going bankrupt. They’re associated with, I think they ended up being discovered to have 700 employees. It wasn’t actually ai, it’s people hands on keyboard acting as an automated chatbot. So how do you start to, I don’t know, govern all of this and make sure that it’s done the right way and people aren’t getting blinders put over their eyes as these massive investments are coming in to the space. Zach, thoughts?

Zach Van Doren:

Well, I think the technology will always be ahead of the privacy and legal machinations that would react to it. Even if you look at the patterns we’ve seen on other paradigms, that’s usually the case. But yeah, I mean just looking at the sort of the data scraping going on by the big LLMs and the reaction in course corrections and legal privacy machinations going on as a result of that, just a lot going on. Rare, to your point, opening up whole new legal and ethical paradigms that need to be thought about and addressed and worked through. But it’s going to be, I would say just we can expect one that the tech to be had the consumer offerings to be had. And I think we can expect a lot of just reaction and course correction both from a legal and privacy standpoint. And I think over time you’ll get to an equilibrium that is a balance of, to your point, Kyle, experience relevancy and personalization balance with privacy and creepy factor, right? Minority report, ask creepiness, right? Over time you’ll get to equilibrium, but it’s going to take time. It’ll take I’m sure years to get to that, but it’s going to be chaotic in the meantime. That’s why I would expect.

Kyle Hollaway:

So with all this change and uncertainty in today’s environment, noted by some of the things we were just talking about, some of these big acquisitions, but just the underlying impetus behind those. Zach, what do you see are some of the biggest challenges for brands when it comes to data and identity specifically within their enterprise?

Zach Van Doren:

I think it’s the same pattern is operationalization acceleration of adoption and usage of the data that is resolved through kind of an identity process or enrichment process and put in some kind of storage and computational layer for adoption. I think the challenge is realizing ROI, realizing value of the investments and the data, the identity processing, the data infrastructure, the computation layers. That’s the challenge is that, and I’ve seen that for quite a long time. And that can be a question of people and process question of strategic layers of core principle and vision and execution. It could be a matter of just resource or a non allocation or non understanding of the resources required to really truly extrapolate value. I absolutely think we are in a precipice of realization of more value, like going back to AI and usage and adoption of ai. These are agentic layers and the evolution of machine learning and AI for things like next best action and real time capability. I think there’s going to be an absolute upcoming revolution of acceleration of the value realized the underlying investments of data and identity through these additional layers. It’s very keen to what we talked about. There needs to be a convergence of these components coming together and without a true interoperable convergence of data and identity and as AI is an accelerant, that’s the core challenge is again, just the underlying realization of ROI, and that’s tied to the usage and acceleration of adoption and operationalization. These are the key themes that I see time and again, I hope to be able to attack that in my role here. So go ahead. Dust.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, so one of the core benefits, if not the core benefit of AI is prediction. The ability to predict next best action based on all the data. And that’s the whole point. So as more and more of these agent solutions, whether it’s baked into Salesforce, Adobe new companies that are going to come up from out of nowhere, all the lms, does that function become commoditized to a point where how quickly is that playing field leveled? And then does it ultimately go back to the product? Because if everyone has this super powerful predictive capability, it’s automated and there’s, at some point, you’ve got to think that the curve of differentiation is going to kind of level off.

And we’ve talked about this. Kyle mentioned the value exchange all the time. It’s like what is it that you have to offer? And I think ultimately this goes back to the true differentiation is going to be do you have a good product that works? You can predict somebody’s behavior, but once they buy it, if the product didn’t satisfy the consumer, they’re not going to go back to that brand. So there’s the predictive side of marketing to get somebody there for the first time. But yeah, ultimately I’m just sitting here going, where do you think this all ends up and who’s going to have the leg up in the end?

Zach Van Doren:

That’s a bit of a metaphysical question. Yeah, let’s say everyone’s at parity. Everyone has just the perfectly optimized marketing function through ai. Then how do you differentiate? How do you realize value to consumer when they have so many choices? Yeah, it’s product, right? I would argue though that experience is also part of the product, right? Good point. How you interface with the brand from a relevancy standpoint is part of the product. I think creative, the human-based creative application layers will always be a differentiator no matter how advanced AI is and just will be a means to really accelerate value and adoption and layers of the underlying creative. But we’ll see. These are excellent points.

Dustin Raney:

I think if I was to use an example, for instance, you think about the wellness industry and all the supplements and all the nutraceuticals and all the things that you’re getting hit with in your newsfeed to eliminate the gray hair, reduce weight, get rid of those wrinkles, all the things that everybody wants, like longevity. I think there’s a sense that there’s been very little accountability on if these products actually work, but you have these ecosystems that are built that have this personalization engine and AI behind it to go reach audiences that are most likely going to be interested in those products. So I just think it’s going to be fascinating to see. I ultimately predict that this will put more pressure ultimately on the brands to serve products that actually work. And I think that’s going to end up, the model itself will get trained on the efficacy of the products that are getting promoted out to people. So that’s just my prediction. Kyle, you have any thoughts there?

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, I think you are kind of driving down the right path there. I was reading a article by Jamie Smith and he was actually quoting another article by guy named Stuart Winter-Tear that I had this statement that said whoever controls the entry point to intent controls the economics of relevance, ranking and revenue. This isn’t just a UX upgrade, it’s a redistribution of power. And a Gentech AI is driving towards that because there’s another article that it was a staggering number, and I was just trying to pull it up here, but it was a staggering number of searches in even 2024, kind of more on the cusp of this stuff. But certainly in 2025 that in Google actually didn’t result in a click because of the AI information being brought up in the search versus the tin blue links of Google now. And so AI summarizing, giving more information to the consumer is actually changing the consumer’s behavior on how they’re engaging.

And now there’s whole new motions through a Google Pay capability directly from the search versus going to the brand’s website. So I think all of that is all mixed in is that how information is being disseminated, how decisions of what information will be disseminated through agentic ai and then the consumer’s consumption of that. And going back to our earlier conversation, who knows what kind of device is coming next, and I can guarantee you whatever that device is, it’s going to have a commerce component to it to be able to do commerce directly from the device versus traditional go to owned media or go to some other platform to actually execute AI is enabling all this stuff to kind of converge and to be presented to the consumer in a way that has two very two sides to one. It puts a lot more control in the consumer’s hands. They’re not having to interact the same way they used to and they can get a lot more information at the front end, but also then you got a lot of the ethics around who’s managing and curating those ais that are presenting that information. Are they tweaking it or are they biasing it in some way to drive certain consumer behaviors? So I dunno, that was a roundabout answer to your question, but it’s a really interesting dynamic time that we’re in regarding these questions.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, it’s interesting that we, I dunno why I thought of this when you’re talking Kyle, how we’ve split marketing and advertising. I have a marketing degree in college. I don’t remember there being an advertising degree. It’s like, are we going to see with all this technology kind of mad tech, are those two terms going to get intertwined? And Kyle, to your point with search and things like that that are getting disrupted right now because of ai, it’s like people are engaging with content differently. They want it more conversational and it’s going to be, again, it kind of pulls back into that seamless interaction or user experience talking to a brand or conversing with a brand rather than getting these kind of one-off advertisements and things like that. It’s like Zach, do you see this all kind of converging and us even our vernacular changing over the next five years to decades?

Zach Van Doren:

I think it will absolutely become one thing I mentioned earlier in my career, I bounced between advertising and marketing, agency consulting, client side, software side, and I always saw just tremendous inefficiencies, silos, lack of opportunity. I could never understand why it was so disconnected. And just saying to your point, delivering of creating customer experience in the form of advertising that is as relevant as possible and deriving and initiating some relationship with that between the brand and consumer and driving some sort of action or experience or a delivery of value. And then they go to some owned media, they do something and then maybe they convert to a leader or they convert to a sale and then boom just goes off into marketing. And there’s always traditionally been this huge wall between the two different teams, different data foundations, different tooling, different cultures. Everything was different.

I just never could understand why does it have to be so walled? And I’m absolutely seeing, like I mentioned, the rise of the data clouds, the rise of that unified customer 360 as a unified data layer. I’m seeing AI will accelerate that. I’m seeing teams converge on the customer side increasingly, and I’m seeing data and identity and what we do at Acxiom is a key enabler in creating a joins, if you will, of customer experience across advertising and marketing to enable that. That’s one of the reasons I came is to really be part of that conversions for me. That’s very interesting.

Dustin Raney:

I know we’re starting to run low on time here. We’ll start to unfortunately land the plane. One question I’d be intriguing to understand, Zach, your thoughts on if I’m a CMO over the next five years, what are some things that I have to do that I need to be doing now inside of my org to set my brand up for the future of where all this is going? I mean, we talked about all these acquisitions that are happening at the front end of the conversation. Some of the trends in market, whether it’s sovereignty, whether it’s even the way meta and places like that are going to change my media spin. What do you see being top priorities for the CMO?

Zach Van Doren:

Wow, it’s top priorities in the context of the next five years. I mean, they have to expect the unexpected. They have to understand that we will not foresee what is going to be that consumer experience and branded consumer relationship paradigm in the next three years. I mean, cut to your point, just what’s happening between the pushing and the pulling of drying people into a website versus people just going to LLMs and engaging with information and content experience, just that is a tremendously disruptive paradigm. And so they just have to expect the unexpected. But I do think what they could do now as it goes back to the underlying foundations to enable whatever is going to happen is data. Data, as we said, right? So getting their foundations in order to enable to get into a iterative kind of crawl, walk, run, state quick, being able to be very highly flexible and agile relative to what’s coming, right? So I’d say underlying unified horizontal data foundations and then highly flexible, highly agile to adapt to these coming these paradigms and being able to operationalize and accelerate usage of the data in whatever form it takes. For me, that’s sort of the key themes that I talk about. Data foundation and solution agility.

That’s what I would stress.

Dustin Raney:

Good, do you have anything that you would add to that?

Kyle Hollaway:

No, like I said, we’re kind of wrapping up on our time here. I think Zach put a good ribbon on it right there. So Zach, we do like to finish since we’ve been talking to ai. Just go back to our good final question, which is if we fed all the insights about Zack into ai, what words would come out? What three words would come out to describe

Zach Van Doren:

You? It is very funny you ask because I dunno if you know Google Gemini just came out with a feature where you can connect your Google search and YouTube search functions with their lm. So I experimented with this the other week and I asked it. I gave permission to connect that just for the interest of science, and I asked, who am I? Tell me about myself. And it came up with a pretty comprehensive, basically consumer graph of me based on my search behaviors and inputs across Google and YouTube. But it’s pretty surface level. It wasn’t going into any depth as far as who I am from a personality standpoint or values and ethics standpoint. And then I asked, well, do I want it to go that deep and understand me in a more sort of mental spiritual state? I don’t think so. But it was very, I have interest in home improvement and cooking and travel and water sports. It was more pretty surface level, but I would say introspective and value, human connection and human relationship and absolutely value the understand the value of time and taking advantage of the time we have in this life. Those are, let’s say, core themes that I try to live by, whether I want an AI engine to know that, I’m not sure.

Dustin Raney:

Alright. Well, Zach, thanks for your time today and for our listeners, we hope that this episode was as informative and thought provoking as I know it was for me. I always learned so much from Kyle and Zach, we would appreciate if you would take a few minutes to leave us a review on iTunes or Apple podcasts for all of that. Haven’t seen us before. We have several episodes you can go see. I think we’re into the sixties now, right, Kyle? I believe so. Or seventies. But you can find all of our previous podcasts on Acxiom.com/real talk, and we look forward to catching you all next time. Thanks for listening to Real Talk about marketing and Acxiom podcast. You can find all our podcasts at Acxiom.com/real talk or on your favorite podcast platform.

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