Zach Van Doren:

Thank you. Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Dustin.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. It was great talking with you at CES back at the first of the year, and I want to thank you for joining us today. And so why don’t you go ahead and start by giving our listeners a snapshot of your background, and what brought you to this point in your career.

Zach Van Doren:

Thank you. Yeah. It’s been, I’d say a long circuitous journey to get where I am today. I’ve been three years at ActionIQ in this role. And going way, way back, I started in paid search, believe it or not. I’m going to start in paid search back in the late ’90s, and this was one of the west days of going from black hat SEO and then pace search just beginning to emerge in the market. And you had splintering of players across Lycos and AltaVista, and Omniture, and a little search engine called Google started to emerge in that time. And it provided me a foundation of very data centric marketing, I think, if you will, and I really enjoyed that time. And so this was during The Dot Com boom, and there was the bust during that time, if you recall, paid search became the one element of the internet economy that was running and working and actually making money during that time. And so I was held on during that time.

And then as the market swung back, I brought in. So I went from just paid search into media. So I hopped from that agency to another agency and got into broader digital media, planning strategy, but always had that foundation of paid search, which gave me very data-centric approach to it. So did that for a few years here in San Francisco, worked with a lot of brands, a lot of agencies, and then eventually got board with the planning and strategic elements of media, especially as Google and Facebook really became predominant in that space from an inventory standpoint. So I just got bored with the duopoly that was occurring. And so I went more into the data side. So I went into from the media planning and buying strategic layers to the measurement analytics, reporting layers. And I did that and started leading those initiatives. And then from there I started my own agency.

So I saw a big need in the market to help agencies get out of Excel-based reporting into web-based reporting and measurement, and tying components together via APIs that are beginning to emerge. And then from there I started working with a startup called Datorama, and then I eventually became a pretty big services partner, and I built an agency around Datorama at the time. And then that led from media measurement analytics. Then went into, “Okay. Let’s start talking about customer analytics, user-centric analytics that converges with media analytics.” And then from customer analytics got into, “Okay. We need to go upstream. We need to start looking at collection and refinement, and [inaudible 00:04:16] learning to inform the analytical models.”

So then it got into tagging, and then broadened my agency to get into tagging, and then CDPs emerge, right? So, “Let’s go from tagging into from user-centric analytics and measurement, let’s go into user-centric personalization, and experience, and aggregation and audiencing.”

And so got into CDPs and eventually we broadened my agency further to become a CDP tagging media measurement strategic kind of team, if you will. And that’s actually when I started working with Axiom, because LiveRamp was a partner and then there was that convergence of Axiom LiveRamp, and I was working with Diorama and the Datorama acquired by Salesforce. And so I brought in and got to know a lot more of the market. I got really in depth and really into CDPs as a technology practice and space, and eventually decided to hop over from the agency services consulting side into the software side. So that’s 20 years and three minutes I just gave you all.

What is very fun and what’s very interesting right now is as the convergence, so MarTech and adtech. So me coming from this media adtech background, and then into MarTech, and then seeing just everything coming together and this new conversions for me, it’s been very gratifying and fun and I’ve done a lot of leadership in Action IQ and in the market relative to that conversions and relative to bringing media based application, top of funnel planning practices and design into CVPs, and applying that in a larger capacity.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. That’s a fantastic history there on not just your own journey, but the journey of the market. It’s been in all the right places along the way and seeing a lot of what’s happened over the past 20 years in both ad tech and MarTech industries.

Zach Van Doren:

I’ve seen a lot.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. So that is super cool. So thank you. You are definitely the guy we need to be talking to.

Dustin Raney:

I would just say that I think we just listened to literally the history of the CDP and the underpinnings of what actually starting with paid search, you talked about The Dot Com bust, then the buildup of other digital channels that culminate into a customer data platform. So man, I’m looking forward to go back and listening to this podcast again just to get a history on how this all came to being. Kyle, like you mentioned in the beginning, the word composable, so it’s not just a CDP, a composable CDP in that ActionIQ is taken on this kind of composable CDP strategy. So Zach, can you tell us a little bit what composable means and why it’s so important?

Zach Van Doren:

Yes. Let me back up a little bit to just define what is composable, because there’s varying and evolved definitions of that, and it’s similar to identity resolution. You get a definition depending on who you talk to.

And so the way I look at it is you have almost like a broadband definition of composable or broader definition of proposal, which is I think you would agree with the modulation or the atomization of elements, functional components of a broader stack, that would allow a brand to basically solution and design a very specific data and technology stack, picking and choose components, modules, if you will, of data and technology. That modulation as opposed to a closed design. You have a more narrower definition, like a narrowband definition, which is in the context of CDPs. And that is traditionally evolved into this desegregation between the application layer and the data compute layer is what some CDs would define it as.

And then, in that narrow definition, then you have CDP, you might’ve heard the bundled CDP definition bundled CDPs and comparable CDP. So bundled CDP in that narrow definition means the application sits with the data storage and computation. They’re bundled together the data application. Then a composable CDP in the narrow sense, is the disaggregation of that data when that data stored and computed within cloud infrastructure, right?

So Snowflake, or Redshift, or Databricks data is there computed there, the customer 360 infrastructure is set there and then you have a CDP as an application layer on top of that, that is a means for marketing operations, or media planners, or channel managers to go into that application and to extract and enable experience delivery, experience design, journey design and to [inaudible 00:09:14]. So again, it’s important to set that lens, because what we look at it in the broader sense, a broadband sense of composable. And we approach it, and we’ve designed our technology in the context of the broader definition of composable, where if the brand needs components where the data computation storage sits within the CDP environment to inform a specific use case, they have that. If they need certain data elements or in one cloud, but they’re in another cloud, we can enable that.

And so what we’re seeing, especially in the enterprise space, is that they need just inherent underlying agility and they need inherent underlying solution power to inform this. Like not very few companies are in a place where they just have this beautifully structured data infrastructure within a Snowflake or Redshift environment, and it’s just ready to be used by a personalization application layer that is moving one-to-one journeys at scale. Very few companies in the enterprise market have that are in that state. So the problem with these narrow definitions of composable is that it’s a very limiting relative to how you can solution and solve business problems when you’re dealing with such complexity.

Kyle Hollaway:

No. That’s super helpful. Because as you said, so much of technology definitions are in who you’re asking. And so that’s a great foundation there into really that disaggregation from the application to the data to the execute or compute layer. And certainly feels very apropos to the general strategy going on in the market around cloud, but moving from cloud as just being a distributed compute function to now exposing it accessibly and nimbly into the application layer, because a lot of people put stuff in the cloud, and then it’s now got to take it out of the cloud to go do something with it.

And you had all that ingress egress expense broke down the value proposition of the cloud.

Zach Van Doren:

Exactly.

Kyle Hollaway:

And then now you guys coming on top of that and actually leveraging the data where it sits, and allowing for brands to choose where it resides in the compute infrastructure of their choice, but still being exposed that into an application that’s highly functional, and can drive true journey.

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah. And you might have a brand running compute cost optimization processes across different clouds.

You might have one where the media teams are using one cloud for MTMMM measurement design. Another team is using another cloud for modeling and AI application layer and work benching. So very common examples, where you need a true composable framework that can be very agile relative to these scenarios going on.

And the other one that is very critical, and very important is it’s not just cloud storage, and computation and the marketing application. It’s also goes to the importance of at the point of data collection within the browser environments. And so critical to this foundation is that piece, and connecting with other identity spaces and other identity ecosystems that require addressability, and in the context of emerging disruptions in the market, we can talk about. So data collection is an integral and foundational piece of a broader composable design. So again, to make the point, it’s just not just storage and computation application. There’s that piece as well.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. It seems like the days of the monolithic platforms are over, right? You think about what’s happening in the entire MarTech, adtech ecosystem, how many new players are getting involved even from AI, and brands are wanting to experiment with all these new tools and capabilities and it has to be interoperable so that the thought of buying into a monolithic platform, it just seems to go against the current. So thank you for sharing what it means to ActionIQ on composable, and articulating the depth of what that means. It really makes sense. And Kyle said from a strategic perspective, you said a trigger word for Kyle and I, that identity. We love to talk about identity. I think it’s interesting that you started there with the point of data ingestion with the browsers. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the biggest challenges CDPs face in the identity space, and maybe some ways that you guys are overcoming those challenges?

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah. You can even say identity should and can be composable, a composable identity relative to the tactical functional components and relative to the underlying data services and ID spaces and graphs, you would connect to. That it also should and can be composable, right? Absolutely. And a lot of the partnership work we’ve done with Axiom is around that is being very agile and being very flexible in accordance to the client’s need to solution together with these components that you bring to the table, and we bring to the table. Yes. With regard to identity resolution like now and how we look at it as a CDP is again going to historical foundations and where we started and what’s going on right now. So keeping in mind that the underlying function, the underlying reason that we exist is to enable personalization at scale, is to enable relevancy of experience, relevancy of content, relevancy and communication across owned and increasingly now paid media at scale.

This is the idea of one-to-one personalization scale. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to deliver the experience, and you need to have some knowledge of that customer relative to their attributes, relative to their need, relative to their history, relative to how they’ve engaged with you as a brand. And you synthesize that knowledge of customer with the content and the medium you’re delivering. So at the core, that is our function, that is our business objective is that. So for that, of course you need the segmentation components, like you need the ability to create personalized and effective segmentations relative to those customer attributes, and you need the ability to activate the ability to create journeys and experience relative to that. So that’s just application components. And then underlying that, you need the data foundations. So you need knowledge of customer, and that requires aggregation of all these disparate sources of data into a consolidated and cleansed profile, if you will. And then you need called the addressability. You need the means to be able to address, or serve, or deliver experience, profile that consumer.

And that goes to the identity resolution components, is you have the need for a converged and master profile, if you will, and you need the means of addressability of that profile, right?

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. And yeah. That’s such a critical statement to be making in the context that there’s what I would call the inbound identity signals, how to pull those in, collect them, aggregate them, get that view of the profile. And then there’s the outbound aspect of, “How do I now take that profile, and distribute it, or connect it effectively into the broader ecosystem?” And that could vary by channel, right? Because going back to your original life from search to all the other different addressable channels and even engagements of the specific consumer journey on owned media and even moving into physical interactions directly at point of sale and others. It’s so easy to just be like, “What’s an identity? It’s Kyle, and Kyle everywhere. And you can engage with them correctly.”

The challenge is that the signals that both Kyle provides in a consented fashion, and what’s also leveraged across a very diverse ecosystem can be varied. And so being able to manage it is critical.

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah. And that goes too, as you said, the collection at the point of signal collection, consumer visits a web experience, they engage in some form of fashion with the web experience. So it starts at the point of those digital brand engagements. The composable solution has to inform me and that collection component has to be part and parcel of that composable design. Otherwise, you’ll miss the inherent one depth of signal and the inherent addressability design relative to starting to connect with other identity spaces and identity tokenizations that are now true replacing third party cookies. As the traditional way of doing all this would be to receive that signal within these digital environments, and adhere and create a profile object using a third party cookie, and use that as the means to substantiate a profile digital profile object.

Use that as a means to measure and track user across the internet, use that as a means to activate using it, a means to measure output of that. So all that is disappearing, and everything is now converging into a first party context structure. So this goes into the need of durable digital IDs, the ability to synchronize with other first party identity spaces, the need to have a very tight synthesis with consent and the permissioning components, and then the need to of course, store and compute and provide an audience and segmentation layer to that. So going back to the identity, when I got a composable identity, the way I look at, it’s like in three parts, you have identity in the context of this real identity sinking.

Some people call it identity edge, or identity at the edge. And then you have identity stitching, which is the taking of disparate sources of data and converging these disparate sources based on deterministic, probabilistic keys. And then you have resolution not to be confused with stitching resolution, which is resolving the identity against some true sets, some authoritative outside true set. And this could be an action graph for instance. That’s how we look at it, and that goes then again to composability and it goes again to what we do as technology, what let’s say action would do as a data services provider, working together as part of this process of converging these components together.

Dustin Raney:

It makes sense too, that having that composability on top of the data clouds, like you mentioned, snowflake, Databricks, they have their data stored in these different locations. And we’re seeing this trend of decentralization across the entire ecosystem where now in these data clouds, if you have that composable capability as a CDP, where the marketer is actually doing the work and being able to connect data across brands, maybe from brand to publisher that also have their data sitting inside of these environments like Snowflake, then it eliminates the need to actually move all the hops that data has had to make in the past. And a lot of people call that the clean room use case, but in essence it is, I think better for the consumer, it’s better for the brand. And it seems certainly to be the trend, how things are going to start working more and more going forward as it relates to activation [inaudible 00:21:52] measurement. All these use cases that we enable today is the elimination of movement of data, right?

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah. We’re seeing that. We’re seeing that big time. And that goes back to the conversions of adtech and MarTech and MedTech, the elimination of flows of data, the centralization of workflow, which a lot of that is enabled by these horizontal data layers, data lakes that are being brought to the market by Snowflake and Databricks and Redshift, those players. And these horizontal data links where we sit on top as a CDP axiom is certainly an element of that directly interfacing with that data environment. Clean rooms are connected to that to enable those joins with advertiser to publisher joins, or being [inaudible 00:22:39]. Or reseller to manufacturer join, whatever the use case is. It’s all a spoke within that hub, which is that data foundation, and that’s the promise. I would argue that most brands are not there yet. And so again, that goes to our stance on a composable CDP is there needs to be a hybrid of cloud-based application layer and versus internal competition storage components. There just needs to have that agility in place.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. And certainly the reality of the market and the evolution of technology is leading in this direction with the aspect from a technological perspective, as you said, optimizing where your data is and compute, and there’s different reasons or different focuses that drive that. And certainly, we know how large enterprises can have very perspectives internal to different departments, because their use cases differ. And, “I don’t want to be compute heavy or I want to do analytics and I feel like Databricks, so it’s more suited for my use.” “Hey. I’m more on the marketing side, and I want to collaborate. So maybe it’s a Snowflake.”

“Or, maybe I’m just really just residing related to some government stuff, so I want to be in Azure or something.” There’s a lot of different aspects. You guys are approaching that. Talk to me for a minute. You briefly mentioned it and it was really around consent.

Let’s bring the consumer into this. So we’ve talked a lot about the ecosystem, the brand and some of the relationships there. CDP customer data platform, right? It’s talking about the consumer. What’s your strategy around that, specifically around consent, and how you’re composing that into your stack?

Zach Van Doren:

A lot of it is to talk about conversions. So I would say the inclusion of or the convergence of consent and permissioning protocols and layers within that customer journey is also paramount, is also critical. And so when you have a brand at a consumer touchpoint, whether it be offline, or it be online, and you have the medium or the media of that system powering the consent permissioning kind of components, then you need a centralization of that within a binded profile object. And so managing the components of cassette, and permissioning, and allowing a brand in a very efficient workflow design, again with minimal hops, minimal redundancies, and that activation audience and workflow, in a way that is conforming to the permission and consent frameworks that are established from that consumer is a big part of what we do. As a technology solution is to aggregate and centralize and create efficiencies relative to the recency of the permissioning and consent and then all the disparate components that go into that. Because from a tooling application standpoint, it’s very highly complex and very challenging. It’s quite challenging.

So that’s how we look at it, and that’s how we play a role in that is to really inform and enable the brand to be compliant, to adhere to the governance structure, to reflect policies, permissions, that they have to be designed by them and how they want to relate and interact with their consumers, and provide them a means to do that, provide the marketers and the business users a means to do that in a way that’s compliant permission and respectful of those, that governance they’ve set. Yeah.

Kyle Hollaway:

I love that you guys are taking that perspective and that aspect of facilitating the governance of that, because so often in technology, we get buried in ourselves and get myopic on what we’re looking to achieve, and sometimes we lose sight of that broader aspect, which ultimately we’re here to engage consumers, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a brand, or a publisher, or technology provider within the ecosystem, where that’s really who we are ultimately reaching and interacting with.

It’s great to hear that you guys.

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah. For sure. And I’ll give you a really good example is we have a lot of media clients, and a lot of them have adopted tactically in accordance to the VPPA compliance measure that you may have heard about. This is the need to maintain permissioning and privacy related to watch behaviors related to to video views. So watching a video that contains specific title information, and keeping a privacy consent design wherein you’re not connecting an individual user to the exact content of the video title, so disassociating that. And so they needed to do that to maintain compliance with that policy, the governmental policy. It was a very complicated and challenging process to enable that governance against that policy. So again, in a composable design, not to be cliched, and to be very agile, and very solution oriented relative to and solving that problem. Which again, goes to point of collection transformation and detailing of that data management of those streams of data into within other cloud environments or other publisher environments, et cetera, et cetera, right?

It’s like an example of just helping technically solve what is a very application intense process to maintain privacy, permissioning, governance that has been established either between the brand and the consumer or through other governmental bodies that are creating or providing the basis for that.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. And it certainly is a growing challenge right across the board because with the evolution of the privacy landscape, both regulatory and driven through consumer facing interaction, that as that complexity is put on top of it’s a driving a degree of fragmentation, and then there’s some argument maybe against that. Some may be weaponizing kind of that to raise their walls more or different things, but what’s happening is that layer is impacting the full stack. It’s not just at the browser level.

People accept, “Oh. Privacy, it’s about the browser.” And it’s no. That permeates all the way down to the depths of the data layer and the governance associated with all of that, and you call out a great, in some ways, a very narrow example, yet even that example, you see different mechanisms by which you have to adhere to that and manage that governance, and then that’s just one channel. That’s just of an overall ecosystem that you’re having to do that across all of those. I think you guys are poised to provide a great value to brands as part of that. To simplify, because we live in this weird dichotomy. All this complexity and these external forces are injecting more complexity, yet the need with our customer set is to simplify.

How do you bring that simplification, because it’s so overwhelming at times to the marketer and the marketers, I just want to talk to the person, but at the end of the day, that’s what they want to do. They want to-

Zach Van Doren:

Yeah-

Kyle Hollaway:

… present a value to the customer and have a transaction, and yet there’s all this complexity, and so I think you guys are well poised for that.

Zach Van Doren:

I’m still on the hook for driving that new incrementality-

Kyle Hollaway:

Exactly. Yeah.

Zach Van Doren:

… market share growth, right? I’m still on the hook even more. How do we solve this business problem, and how do I empower my teams to be simple?

Dustin Raney:

Speaking of that incrementality and where the market’s going, Zach, no. We are closing in on the end of our time, but we always like to hear from our guests, what has you most excited about the next 12 months?

Zach Van Doren:

Oh. I think it goes back to my old days in paid search. It reminds me of just a time of mass experimentation, innovation, trying things that will fail, things will succeed, a burst of creativity in the process of facing and solving these challenges in the market. To me, that’s super exciting. Just the creative energy that’s being put into this, and the innovation around that. And the understanding, “Yes. We will try and we’ll break things, but we’ll push through and we’ll solve, we will create new paradigms relative to this disruption going on.” To me, that’s super exciting.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. Absolutely. And Zach, one, I just want to say thank you to all of our listeners are going to want to say that as well for the vast amount of knowledge that you shared, and at Axiom we thank ActionIQ for your partnership and the innovation that you are bringing the market. I think that the composability was spot on, and we look forward to seeing the success of Action IQ over these coming days and months and years.

And then for our listeners, that’s a wrap. We’re going to go ahead and put a close to this one. You can find all of our Real Identity podcast episodes at Axiom.com/realtalk or find us on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, thank you.

Zach Van Doren:

Thank you guys.

Kyle Hollaway:

Thank you.