Summer Thompson on Real-Time Personalization

marketing 10 Sep 2025

1. What does your approach to real-time personalization different from other CDPs or journey orchestration platforms?

Most CDPs and journey orchestration platforms limit how much data can be used for real-time personalization, often restricting brands to a narrow set of behavior signals and limited customer history. Hightouch removes those limits. Our approach is built around full data access and flexibility, enabling marketers to combine real-time behavioral signals with the complete depth of customer history from the data warehouse. With our new take on same-session personalization, we made it possible, for the first time, to react to in-session activity using the entire customer profile. Whether you're delivering an experience in under a second or orchestrating it over minutes, our real-time product suite is designed to meet the full range of real-time needs with no trade-offs between speed and data richness.

2. Same-Session Personalization is a bold claim. What was the core challenge in marketing that this feature is solving?

The core challenge is relevance in the moment. Without understanding current customer behavior, personalization efforts can create a disconnect between user intent and brand response. Same-session personalization solves this by allowing marketers to react to in-session signals, like product views, cart behavior, or site search, in less than a second. That means offers, messaging, and experiences can adapt as the customer is browsing, not after they've bounced. Our approach to same-session personalization goes one step further, and makes it possible to combine behavior signals with complete customer history in under a second. Brands can interact with their customers as a person, not just a set of digital behaviors.

3. Many CDPs force marketers to choose between speed or historical depth. How do you remove that trade-off?

Hightouch is uniquely positioned as a Composable CDP, which means we use the data warehouse as the source of truth for rich customer profiles, while also integrating real-time event streams. This approach means marketers don’t have to sacrifice depth for speed. You get the historical context of warehouse data and the in-the-moment context of behavioral events. It’s not about choosing between the past or the present. With Hightouch, you get both.

4. How do you handle identity resolution in same-session scenarios where the user might not yet be logged in?

We can use anonymous identifiers to stitch session activity to a profile. Whenever an anonymous user authenticates or provides identifying information, we can retroactively connect their session data to their historical profile in the warehouse, and be ready to address that user’s anonymous identifiers in the future as well. This enables persistent, privacy-safe personalization that respects user consent, while still delivering highly relevant experiences in the moment.

5. What’s your take on how AI and decisioning engines are collapsing the gap between insight and action?

AI is transforming marketing from reactive to predictive. With tools like Hightouch’s AI Decisioning, we’re enabling marketers to operationalize insights the moment they emerge. Rather than waiting for analysts to surface trends or build segments, AI models can evaluate user behavior and context in real-time. AI Decisioning constantly experiments and continuously improves delivery based on the results of each experiment. The result is personalization that’s not just fast, but smart—driven by data, governed by logic, and scaled through automation. Even with this rapid iteration, it’s also really important to surface key insights back to marketers, so they can improve their overall strategies and create more effective content and campaigns.

6. How do you envision yourself evolving to support marketers as zero-party and consent-driven data become the new norm?

Hightouch is built on privacy-first principles. As the industry shifts toward zero-party and consented data, our composable architecture gives brands full control over what data is collected, how it’s used, and where it’s activated. We’re also investing in features that help marketers surface and act on self-reported preferences in real time, whether that’s through consent banners, preference centers, or in-product feedback. The purpose of personalization is to create connections with people, and that starts with trust. With Hightouch, security, privacy, and trust are not an afterthought; they are core components of our architecture and company culture.

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Cristy Ebert Garcia on Partnership Marketing

digital marketing 10 Sep 2025

1. In what ways are you leveraging partnerships to build authentic communities that enhance brands’ trust and credibility?

Marketing is quickly moving from ad-led to partner-led. That makes partnerships – collaborations with creators and other partners not just nice to have, but essential strategies for businesses to acquire customers, drive trust, loyalty, growth, and relevancy with today’s modern consumers.

Trust and authenticity are vital components of credibility, and partnerships - with creators, publishers, affiliates, customers, and even other businesses - are one of the few ways brands can leverage them.

It has become clear that consumers are now in control. They’re no longer an audience, waiting for brands to tell them stories - they're informed, empowered, and turning to their communities for guidance, whether through YouTube demonstrations, direct feedback from their peers online, or TikTok reviews (with more than half of Gen Z now using TikTok as their primary search engine).

At the same time, customer acquisition costs have soared by over 220 percent in the last eight years, but traditional advertising has become ever more expensive and less effective. Against that backdrop, community-based marketing has become an incredibly powerful tool for brands. The creator economy, which is right at the heart of this shift to partnerships, is set to more than double in the next five years, surpassing $480b.

Partnerships allow companies to engage authentically, scale for growth, and drive meaningful conversations that influence purchases in ways traditional channels can’t. Brands on our platform are able to do really exciting things. For instance, we’ve worked with Best Buy to launch the Best Buy Creator program, a new platform that allows influencers and creators to partner directly with Best Buy and help shoppers discover new technology. Within that is Best Buy storefronts, which gives creators the ability to create a one-stop shop to highlight tech featured in their content and earn a commission on sales referred through them.

2. What challenges have you encountered in managing diverse types of partnerships (e.g., affiliates, influencers, customer advocates), and how are you addressing them?

We’ve found that diversity isn’t a challenge but rather an asset when it comes to partnerships. A mature and sustainable partnership program relies on partner diversity. The modern customer journey is rapidly changing and evolving, and a mix of partner types helps brands reach different audiences in different ways.

For instance, influencers are known to drive metrics such as brand awareness at the top of the funnel, while affiliates are conventionally used to effect a conversion at the bottom of the funnel. These two partnership types traditionally operated independently, yet our research shows that marketing teams that combine influencer and affiliate achieve 46 percent higher affiliate-based sales than brands that use only affiliate partners. Combining the two allows brands to build a full-funnel campaign that touches all points of the consumer journey, raising brand awareness, driving conversions, and boosting KPIs.

Of course, you also need a unified platform that manages every type of partnership, streamlines tracking, reporting, and data-driven marketing efforts, simplifies management, and enhances resource allocation. We are constantly investing and innovating in our products - already this year we’ve launched a range of new innovations across our products, including product gifting in Creator, Cash Rewards in Advocate and automated partner re-engagement workflows and an event risk reporting suite in Performance. As always, the aim is to give brands more control over their campaigns, more ways to engage their audiences, and more data to optimize their strategies.

3. What metrics are you using to assess the effectiveness of your partnership marketing initiatives in driving revenue growth and customer engagement?

The modern customer journey presents a real attribution challenge for marketers. While brands aspire to closed-loop, direct-attribution measurement, the reality is far more complex, given the huge diversity of touchpoints on the way to a sale. Partner marketing, which is embedded in content experiences across social, video, websites and shopping sites, is particularly vulnerable to incomplete measurement from models such as multitouch attribution, especially given that different types of partners can bring value in different ways.

For marketers looking to gain a deeper understanding of the true contribution of partner marketing or any marketing program, it is a good idea to test incremental measurement - showing which partnerships truly create new sales rather than just claiming credit for them.

Incrementality measurement is designed to understand the full contribution of a specific marketing effort, such as a campaign, affiliate link, or creative.

An incrementality test might use controls such as suppression in certain locations, or on certain pages or sites, to measure the lift in performance that a specific marketing effort delivers.

In our case, this practical shift has helped companies such as Patagonia and Zenni Optical make better decisions about partner investments, recognize value throughout the customer journey, and transform their affiliate programs from isolated channels into strategic business assets.

4. What is your approach to expand your partnership ecosystem, and how are you helping brands identify new partners that align with their brand values and objectives?

Both brands and creators want to grow their partnerships, with 76 percent of brands looking to expand their creator programs, and 86 percent of creators looking to work with more brands. The key here is alignment on both sides, which requires a mutual understanding of preferences and needs.

For instance, brands need to trust the creator’s expertise. So instead of insisting creators follow a script to the letter, brands should encourage authentic content, such as spontaneous product reviews. Creators rank creative freedom as a key factor for committing to long-term brand partnerships because consumers gravitate toward genuine recommendations and are more likely to engage with the content.

Aligning on the compensation model is also crucial for brands and creators. According to our research, brands and creators indicate a preference for hybrid payment models. When it comes to communication, US brands prefer DM and email, which aligns with creator preferences.

5. How are you staying ahead of emerging trends in partnership marketing, such as the rise of community-driven commerce and the importance of customer referrals?

The way consumers discover and shop for products has changed drastically in recent years. Where marketers once relied on the traditional linear funnel to reach audiences, today’s landscape is much more sophisticated, with an intricate web of touchpoints spanning digital and physical channels, publisher sites, social platforms, and in-person interactions.

The vast number of discovery channels presents a significant challenge for brands and advertisers, and the consideration phase now sees consumers consulting multiple digital and traditional touchpoints before making a purchase decision. Marketers need to consistently produce high-quality content tailored to each channel, maintain consistency in pricing and availability, and provide easy access to authentic reviews, ratings, and other supporting resources.

There’s also a generational component to consider. According to new research, Gen Z require more touchpoints than any other generation before deciding to make a purchase. The vital part of creating partnership campaigns that speak to Gen Z is that they reflect the singular tastes and habits of their audience. Gen Z are sophisticated judges of quality and relevance, but gift guides and influencers, including nano and micro creators, are an impactful way to attract attention and drive purchases. And, knowing that Gen Z does a bit more research than others, providing more content and touchpoints is key to a successful strategy.

Referral marketing is a relatively new kid on the performance marketing block, but one that is growing fast due to its unique ability to reach audiences by leveraging trust and personal recommendations. Referral marketing makes a great fit for partnership marketing because it relies on trust. The aim is to incentivize happy customers to share their positive experiences with others, by providing tangible benefits to both the referrer and the referred individual.

Optimizing your program for mobile, combining your referral efforts with influencer marketing, making the process fun, and helping customers share and refer within their social networks are all good bets.

6. How are you measuring the long-term impact of our partnership strategies on customer loyalty, lifetime value, and brand equity?

According to our research, brands that invested in partnerships during the two years of the pandemic - 2020 and 2021 - saw 29 percent revenue growth per year over those years, with 41 percent growth in 2021 for brands that invested in partnerships early in that period.

We’ve also proven that mature partnership programs offer substantial long-term benefits. Companies with mature programs can see their revenue grow nearly twice as fast as those with less mature programs. Furthermore, we know that high-maturity programs contribute an average of 28 percent of overall revenue, while low-maturity programs contribute only 18 percent.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) - the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their relationship with them - is a crucial measure that helps businesses understand the long-term value of investing in customer relationships. Higher acquisition costs emphasize the importance of leveraging efficient retention strategies, so we talk a lot about retention marketing. Acquisition is obviously important, but clearly it's critical, from a financial perspective, to invest in keeping current customers rather than just spending resources on acquiring new ones.

An engaged customer spends 67 percent more in months 31-36 of their relationship with a business than in months zero through six, highlighting the importance of efforts to keep the relationship active. Research has shown that even a 5 percent increase in customer retention can enhance profits by up to 75 percent.

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Hrizn’s Matt Copley on AI, SEO, and the Future of Automotive Retail

digital marketing 4 Sep 2025

1. Why did you choose to focus on dealership-specific workflows and inventory-driven SEO as the core of the platform?

After decades of experience across retail automotive, technology, and media, my co-founder and I kept encountering the same gap: SEO strategies often looked good on paper, but they rarely aligned with how dealers actually operate or how customers make decisions. Agencies had structured playbooks, but most were keyword-driven, templatized for scale, and disconnected from the inventory, data, and workflows that drive real revenue on the showroom floor.

As we began building Hrizn, Google’s Helpful Content updates only made the gap more obvious. Dealers and agencies needed a platform that could consistently produce meaningful, compliant, and context-rich content, at scale… while also adapting to fast-changing search dynamics and customer expectations. But no existing tools truly supported the complexity of automotive retail. So we built one from the ground up.

Hrizn was designed to meet customers at their moment of intent with content that’s not just visible, but useful. That means content that’s directly tied to the workflows dealers and BDCs rely on every day, grounded in VIN-level inventory data, and automatically linked to helpful experiences and conversion points like live offers, service incentives, and finance approval flows.

Inventory-driven SEO isn’t just a tactic, it’s foundational. When dealerships rapidly expand authoritative, unique content across their site and product inventory, the results are exponential: better visibility, higher Quality Scores in paid media, lower cost per click, and significantly improved on-site conversion rates. It’s not about chasing rankings… it’s about creating an owned content infrastructure that fuels both organic growth and paid performance.

Ultimately, we believe SEO in automotive can’t live in the abstract. Dealers don’t sell keywords… They sell cars, service, and trust. Hrizn bridges that gap by aligning content strategy with operational reality… connecting the agency, the dealer, and the customer in a way that finally makes content a profit center, not just a checkbox.

2. How do you handle localization and brand consistency across multi-rooftop groups or agencies managing multiple clients?

Historically, localization and brand consistency have been at odds. Dealers and agencies have often had to choose between one or the other; producing generic content at scale or manually customizing every page to stay on-brand. With Hrizn, that tradeoff no longer exists. We’ve engineered a platform where localization and consistency aren’t just compatible… they're a competitive advantage.

Hrizn is built to scale intelligently across multi-rooftop dealer groups and agency portfolios. Users can define brand voice, visual language, content guardrails, and editorial standards globally… then dynamically localize content by region, demographic profile, inventory composition, dealer tone, and zip code level search intent. It’s the difference between publishing for a market and actually connecting with it.

The platform supports deep learning across internal and external linking strategies, artifact training to help our models understand nuanced concepts and positioning, and hyperlocal optimization that ensures content performs in the backyard… not just in national rankings. That means we’re not driving traffic for traffic’s sake… we’re driving the right traffic with high commercial intent.

Whether it’s preserving a consistent luxury brand tone across 10 rooftops or surfacing city-specific service content based on regional demand signals, Hrizn ensures every piece of content reflects both the brand’s identity and the customer’s local context. For agencies managing dozens,or even hundreds of clients, Hrizn’s workspace segmentation features make it easy to orchestrate complex strategies while maintaining efficiency and creative governance. For OEMs wanting high-level compliance controls and brand language application, Hrizn supports the need while allowing the agency and dealer the creative flexibility to innovate and differentiate.

On a more operational level, Hrizn empowers OEMs, agencies and in-house teams to manage both macro content strategy (campaigns, seasonality, product launches) and micro content outputs (inventory markup, geo-targeted SEO, fixed ops education) in one unified workflow. The result is faster speed to market, stronger collaboration between teams, and a content infrastructure that gets smarter and more defensible over time.

In short, we help OEMs, agencies and dealer groups break free from copy-paste content at scale and move into a new era of intelligent automation. One where every word is aligned with the brand, tuned for local intent, and engineered to drive real results.

3. How does the platform support integration with existing CMS, CRM, or CDP platforms?

Hrizn was designed from day one with interoperability at its core. We know that dealers and agencies already rely on a complex tech stack across CMS platforms, CRMs, CDPs, and DMS tools. We designed our system to complement, not complicate, those workflows.

Our content delivery layer is CMS-agnostic, supporting direct publishing and export into the most widely used automotive web platforms. Whether it’s an in-house team managing a proprietary CMS or a large agency overseeing hundreds of rooftops across multiple platforms, Hrizn integrates seamlessly into existing publishing pipelines producing not just content, but the associated html code and meta data for easy transfer to CMS and automated formatting with the website CSS for beautiful native content integration.

For CRM and CDP connections, Hrizn is actively exploring enrichment through selective data integrations, enabling content to be informed by real customer behavior, lifecycle stages, and campaign strategies. This means, for example, that fixed ops content could be dynamically adjusted based on repair order trends, seasonal demand, or customer segment data… ensuring that what’s published isn’t just SEO-optimized, but conversion-optimized as well.

Looking ahead, the upcoming release of the Hrizn API will unlock even deeper integrations with CMS, CRM, CDP, and DMS platforms. These enterprise-grade connections will be available to strategic and enterprise partners, enabling powerful use cases like:

● Automated content personalization based on lead source or buyer profile

● Dynamic campaign landing pages that align with real-time incentive pushes

● Inventory-level content customization driven by aging, pricing, or merchandising data from the DMS

Our philosophy is simple: Hrizn doesn’t seek to replace the systems dealers already depend on, it’s designed to amplify their value. By turning structured and unstructured data into on-brand, compliant, high-performance content, we help OEMs, dealers, and agencies create meaningful customer experiences that are rooted in operational reality and measurable results.

4. How is performance tracked post-publishing? Are there built-in analytics or integrations with tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush?

Performance tracking is central to Hrizn’s mission - because in this space, content without outcomes is just noise. We’ve designed our platform to provide both high-level visibility and deep technical insight, depending on the needs of the user.

Hrizn encourages every user to monitor content performance through industry-standard tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and leading rank-tracking platforms. These validations allow dealers and agencies to measure SEO impact in the context of their broader digital strategy and make data-informed decisions across channels.

For users and teams who need more granular insight, Hrizn Analytics provides a robust technical suite purpose-built for content-driven SEO. This includes advanced Google Search Console and Google Analytics connectors, keyword rank tracking, page-level performance data, and competitive visibility tools… giving SEO and content leaders everything they need to track what’s working, surface opportunities, and iterate with confidence.

In addition to SEO and traffic data, Hrizn also provides comprehensive content creation reporting capturing productivity, publishing velocity, content type distribution, and collaboration metrics. This is especially valuable for dealer groups and agencies who need to merchandise their body of work, justify value to internal stakeholders, or assess performance across clients and rooftops.

Our philosophy is simple: content at scale is only valuable if it performs at scale. With Hrizn, every piece of content is measurable, attributable, and optimized for ongoing improvement… so teams can move fast, stay accountable, and grow smarter with every publish.

5. How do you ensure the “helpful content” standard that aligns with Google’s evolving search algorithms?

At Hrizn, “helpful content” isn’t a buzzword… it’s a foundational principle. As Google continues to evolve its Helpful Content System and strengthen its policies against spam, thin content, and AI abuse, we’ve built a platform that not only aligns with these guidelines - but anticipates them.

Every piece of content generated by Hrizn is pushed through a rigorous, multi-layered quality assurance process that includes a wide range of proprietary automated checks and validations. This system ensures that each piece of content is:

● Unique and free from plagiarism or duplication across internal and external sources

● Factually accurate, drawing from dealership data and trusted contextual sources

● Optimized for the specific content type in line with Google’s most recent guidance

● Compliant with spam and quality policies, including those targeting scaled AI content abuse

Beyond these automated checks, our system leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to ground content in real dealership inputs like inventory data, backlink training, service relevance, and brand documentation reducing the risk of hallucinated or off-brand outputs from language models. Structured data and schema markup are embedded directly into the content where applicable to further signal credibility, relevance, and utility to search engines.

Additionally, Hrizn gives users the ability to review, edit, and collaborate on content before it goes live, allowing for human oversight when needed. Because we truly believe that “human plus AI” exponentially outperforms either of the two parts alone… especially for regulated or nuanced subject matter.

We built Hrizn not just to scale content, but to scale trustworthy content. That means continuously evolving alongside Google, protecting our partners from compliance risks, and ensuring the content we publish is always built to perform, and to last.

6. How do you see yourself evolving in the face of new search paradigms like AI Overviews and Search Generative Experience (SGE)?

We view the rise of AI-native search, through features like Google’s SGE and AI Overviews, not as a disruption, but as a generational opportunity. These new paradigms are prioritizing answers over links, meaning content must be structured, semantically rich, and contextually aligned with real user intent. Hrizn is uniquely built for that future.

Our platform is already grounded in the principles that AI-driven search rewards: content that’s authoritative, purposeful, and tightly mapped to high-intent queries. As SGE becomes more prominent, we’re continuing to evolve by investing heavily in zero-click optimization… generating content that’s not just rank-worthy, but reference-worthy within the AI answer layer itself.

We’re actively developing tools that help our partners create and test content designed specifically for these emerging surfaces, like snippet-optimized summaries, question-based content objects, and structured data enhancements that send strong trust signals to search engines. We’re not trying to outsmart the algorithm, we’re building the infrastructure to feed it.

The dealers and agencies that win in this new landscape will be those who own their content layer and have the ability to adapt in real time. That’s exactly what Hrizn enables. We’re not chasing trends… we’re building the connective tissue between intent, inventory, and intelligent content delivery.

SGE is just the beginning. The future of search is generative, and Hrizn is engineered to lead it.

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SurveyMonkey Expands to Costa Rica: Elias Conejo on Growth & Culture

marketing 4 Sep 2025

SurveyMonkey, the world’s most popular platform for surveys and forms, recently announced its newest office in Heredia, Costa Rica. We connected with Elias Conejo, Director of Engineering at SurveyMonkey and Site Lead of the Heredia office, to discuss how the company's global expansion, particularly into Costa Rica, supports its growth strategy, workplace culture, regional engagement, and global innovation efforts.

1. How do you evaluate the potential for Latin America as a growth market for SaaS and technology platforms?

Latin America presents a dynamic and rapidly evolving landscape for SaaS and tech. The region has a growing digital economy, a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and an increasing demand for user-friendly, scalable solutions that solve real business problems. At SurveyMonkey, we already serve over 19,000 paying customers in Latin America, which signals both trust in our platform and appetite for digital transformation. With local languages, cultural fluency, and on-the-ground support, we see incredible potential to grow our impact across the region.

2. How do you balance the need for local talent versus global talent mobility when expanding internationally?

We see global and local talent as complementary forces. Our goal is to build high-performing, culturally fluent teams that reflect the markets we serve. In Costa Rica, we’re tapping into a highly skilled local workforce across engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, operations, and more. At the same time, we foster global collaboration—sharing expertise, aligning on strategy, and creating growth pathways for talent across our offices. It’s not about choosing one over the other; it’s about building a networked organization where knowledge, innovation, and opportunity flow across borders.

3. How important are employee well-being initiatives (e.g., meditation rooms, pet-friendly zones) in your workplace culture strategy?

They’re central to our culture. We believe that a healthy, engaged team is a high-performing team. Our new office in Heredia reflects that with spaces and amenities designed to support both productivity and well-being, whether that’s a quiet space to recharge, a barista to brighten your morning, or simply being able to bring your pet to work. For us, these are more than perks. They’re expressions of our commitment to building a workplace where people can do their best work while feeling like they truly belong.

4. How do you leverage regional cultural values, like Costa Rica’s “Pura Vida,” to enhance team cohesion and company culture?

“Pura Vida” is more than a saying. It’s a mindset rooted in authenticity, optimism, and community. That spirit aligns closely with our own values of inclusion, balance, and human connection. As we build our team in Costa Rica, we’re intentionally creating a culture that honors both local identity and global belonging. This means embracing what makes each region unique while fostering a shared sense of purpose across all our offices. “Pura Vida” helps us stay grounded and connected as we grow.

5. With over 19,000 customers in Latin America, how do you tailor your product and marketing strategies to regional market needs?

Local relevance is key. Our platform is available in over 56 languages, including Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, which helps make it accessible and intuitive to users across the region. Beyond language, we listen closely to our customers’ needs—through feedback, support channels, and usage data—and adapt our product experiences accordingly. From marketing campaigns to customer success programs, we’re focused on showing up in a way that’s thoughtful, culturally resonant, and value-driven.

6. What is your vision for the role of international offices in driving innovation and customer experience in a global SaaS company?

Our global offices are not just operational centers, they’re engines of innovation and insight. Local teams bring fresh perspectives, closer proximity to customers, and deep cultural understanding that shapes how we build and support our products. In Costa Rica, for example, our engineering and customer teams are helping us better serve users across the Americas, while contributing to global priorities. When we empower regional teams to lead, we strengthen our entire organization and create better experiences for every customer, everywhere.

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Chris Rosica on Crisis Comms & PR for Resilient School Districts

marketing 3 Sep 2025

1. What are the most common communications mistakes districts make during reputational crises and how can they avoid them?

There are three primary things school districts can do to ensure better crisis communications outcomes. These include:

- Adopting an immediate response mindset, which entails being crisis prepared (i.e., assigning an internal crisis management team and developing a scenario-based crisis communications plan that reflects education’s ever-changing environment). It is also wise to utilize outside PR/crisis counsel for issues, which mitigates risk and de-escalates reputation-damaging circumstances.

- Ensuring legal counsel and PR/crisis counsel work seamlessly to protect your district. Legal crisis counsel does not focus on protecting your image/reputation but will, of course, protect your legal interests while PR firms are not experts on the laws that govern.

- Telling your good news proactively so when a crisis does occur, your reputation is intact. Storytelling and advocacy are indispensable in education today.

2. How do you tailor crisis communications for school districts, where stakeholders range from students and staff to media, unions, and community leaders?

This is an extremely informed question as tailoring messages for various stakeholders is critical – not only when dealing with issues, but also in proactive PR and communications. We develop a message matrix for each scenario with clear delineation for different stakeholders to ensure we are touching on things that are relevant to them. It’s a matter of identifying the pertinent communication points for each stakeholder group and emphasizing or leading with those, following up with facts and supporting messages.

3. What role does local SEO and online reputation management play in district competitiveness and how should districts get started?

Another smart question because historically districts have not utilized SEO and rarely focus on online reputation management (ORM). This is because, heretofore, public education has not experienced such intense competition. Public schools have to think more like businesses and SEO and ORM are examples of how they must plan and work differently. With school vouchers on the rise, our agency views SEO and proactive ORM as imperatives.

4. How can districts balance transparency with message control in today’s polarized and fast-moving media landscape?

We say, “Tell who needs to know what they need to know when they need to know it.” This means concise communications to key stakeholders with an emphasis on truthfulness and, when appropriate, contrition. It does not mean message overload and explaining every detail, ad nauseam.

We urge our clients never to be defensive, and to tell the entire story (i.e., their positive actions, when and where appropriate). They should always be advocating for themselves.

We’ve witnessed the best defense being a strong offense. We believe in this axiom because it is critical to regularly disseminate your good news, and make sure to consistently share it with your stakeholders so when something negative pops up, you’ve already created a solid foundation of positive storytelling.

The polarization issue is real and not going away anytime soon. Therefore, the words you use are of critical importance. Take the lead from a professional communicator, an agency or individual that understands these nuances.

5. What internal communication tools or strategies are most effective in multi-building, diverse districts?

We have found video to be the single most important communications tool for internal communications in multi-school districts. Via a monthly video shot on a high-quality smartphone (not overly produced), the superintendent can engender trust, build rapport, demonstrate transparency, bring levity, and rally the troops. Of course, if we did not live in an entertainment-based society, video would not be so important. But we do and it is.

6. In your view, what will define a “resilient” public school district over the next 5 years and how should they prepare?

Districts that: regularly refine their positioning and messaging; have a strong crisis communications plan in place; conduct consistent and proactive PR/storytelling and digital marketing (e.g., SEO); and build a strong advocacy network that encompasses not only the school community, but the greater community (policymakers, influencers, alumni, media, etc.).

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Bombora CMO on Contextual Targeting & B2B Intent Data

marketing 3 Sep 2025

1. In what ways do you see contextual targeting evolving your digital advertising strategy, particularly for complex or niche B2B industries?

We believe contextual advertising is a big opportunity for ourselves and also the brands and agencies that we serve with our Digital Audiences. Often, contextual advertising is thought of as a strong ‘plan B’ to hedge against changes in privacy regulations or the deprecation of 3rd party cookies, or as a programmatic ‘safe haven’ to protect against brand safety issues. We think this massively under sells the contextual opportunity. Contextual advertising, especially now given AI’s sophisticated ability to understand nuanced content across all mediums (digital print, CTV, digital audio), is an opportunity to achieve more relevant ad placement and channel integrations. More relevant placements are a foundation for better audience experiences which lead to higher engagement rates and elevated behavioral outcomes. Today’s contextual advertising takes the old adage of ‘meet your audience where they are’ to a whole new level.

2. What steps is your team taking to ensure that your ad campaigns are not only reaching the right audience, but also aligning with moments of high purchase intent?

We use our own Company SurgeⓇ Intent data to ensure that we are reaching our target audience at the right moments across the buyer journey. Our Intent data, derived from our one-of-a-kind B2B Data Cooperative, is an incredible asset because it gives us predictive insight into a huge set of “right moments”: when a prospect account is in early research phases, comparing specific solutions, and ready to make a purchase decision. We also have insights into customer behavior occurring on and (more importantly) off our digital properties. These differentiated insights allow us to customize our messaging and tactics to meet the account where they are. We also apply our Intent data to fuel strategies to mitigate our own customer churn and take advantage of opportunities with companies using alternative, “non-Bombora” data solutions. For example, right now we are running a “competitive take-out” campaign fueled by insights from our Data Cooperative.

3. What challenges have you encountered in transforming raw intent signals into actionable, revenue-driving campaigns across digital platforms?

When I look across the B2B ecosystem I see a multitude of high potential signals that could empower marketers to create highly relevant experiences that would benefit their target audience. The challenge is that these signal “owners” do not have the ability to turn them into addressable account-based audiences. Audiences that can be reached in an efficient and repeatable way through digital marketing channels.

Bombora was founded to unlock the potential of the B2B ecosystem, for the benefit of the ecosystem. We are continually investing in expanding our Data Cooperative and applying our time-tested proprietary methods to create actionable data solutions out of vast data signals. In the coming months I expect that you will see us directly address this challenge by transforming high potential raw signals, from a diverse set of B2B players, into addressable audiences that will fuel new types of campaigns for us and our customers.

4. How do you approach vendor selection when considering solutions that combine data intelligence with programmatic precision?

Here at Bombora, we live by the advice we give our customers and partners: bear in mind “not all B2B data solutions are created equal”. To this end:

i. It is extremely important to understand the source, scale and durability of any data you are using to drive your business. It is risky to build strategies on data from unconsented sources, from black box models without transparency, or that may be locked into specific platforms limiting your ability to create unified prospect and customer experiences.

ii. Prioritize solutions that allow you to activate unified audience experiences across platforms, aligned to the true buyer journey. We all know that the B2B buyer journey is a nonlinear experience with a multitude of touchpoints across tactics. Knowing is one thing, delivering against this is another.

5. With over 500 unique audience segments now available, how do you prioritize which segments to target in your industry-specific campaigns?

I believe that audience configuration should be defined by the campaign objective. To me, the campaign objective is a dual focus on the who (the messaging target which in B2B is typically a “buying group” or set of influential stakeholders) and the what (the intended shift in behavior within this group (e.g., enhancing awareness or encouraging evaluation). These two elements allow us to precisely select the best account segments (account lists with attribute, behavioral, or signal overlays) and the most effective mix of channels and creative formats for delivering the message which ultimately dictates the necessary mix of addressable identifiers. Of course, realistically scale and efficiency is an important consideration but these need to be secondary to the campaign objective.

6. As B2B buyers engage more digitally, how is your organization ensuring that marketing efforts are tailored to individual buyer behavior and contextual relevance across channels?

Tailored marketing is only as good as the granularity and accuracy of the insights that fuel it. We are rolling out solution enhancements that will empower marketers to be more tailored. Three different examples bring this to life:

i. We are rolling out B2B persona level enhancements to Company SurgeⓇ Intent data which give marketers predictive insight into the functions, seniority levels and geographic location of members of an account’s buying group. We also offer buying stage analytics which allow marketers to map accounts to their position in the buyer journey and customize content, messaging and tactics to meet these accounts where they are.

ii. Our Visitor Insights identity and enrichment tool allows marketers to identify anonymous website visitors providing not just the account/ domain identity but also insights into the content that this visitor has been researching most recently. In real time our solution empowers marketers to customize the content of their site or retargeting campaigns based on these insights.

iii. In April we announced a new partnership with Simpli.fi. Through this integration, Bombora data is powering 76 contextual topic clusters (including topics like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence and Marketing Technology) that B2B advertisers can use for targeting to ensure that their digital ads and content experiences are placed in as relevant destinations as possible. This groundbreaking solution was recently recognized with Just Global’s Dick Reed Award for Channel Advancements & Innovations.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

Why Modern Brands Need a Systems-First Approach

digital marketing 5 Aug 2025

1. You have redefined yourself around a “systems-first” model. What prompted this shift, and how does it reflect the needs of modern businesses?

The shift came from seeing too many businesses stall—not because they lacked vision, but because their teams operated in silos. Brand, tech, marketing, and leadership often moved in parallel but disconnected ways. We knew there had to be a better model.

So we adopted a systems-first approach: one that prioritizes interconnected thinking and operational clarity. Today’s businesses face increasing complexity and pace, and they need more than just good ideas. They need alignment—between their purpose, platforms, teams, and communications. Our systems-first model provides that foundation and gives our clients a smarter, more scalable way to grow.

2. Can you walk us through how the Four Pillars—Strategy, Branding, Technology, Growth—interact as a cohesive system?

Each pillar reinforces the next.

Strategy sets the purpose and market direction.
Branding expresses that vision in a way people can connect with.
Technology builds the infrastructure to support and scale that experience.
Growth ensures it reaches the right audience with measurable results.

Instead of treating these as isolated services, we architect them as a loop—where learning in one pillar improves performance in the others. For example, a growth insight might influence a UX change, which drives a tech update, which informs a brand adjustment. This dynamic system keeps our clients evolving with intention.

3. What frameworks or tools do you use during transformation engagements to align teams across product, brand, and go-to-market?

We start by creating shared visibility across teams—something surprisingly rare in fast-growing companies. We run collaborative workshops to map stakeholder priorities and align on goals using frameworks like:

OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)
Customer Journey Architecture
North Star Narrative Alignment

We use tools like Miro for systems mapping, Notion for project documentation, Figma for design collaboration, and Trello to manage delivery cycles. This toolset becomes the “operating layer” that enables agile collaboration, regardless of discipline or timezone.

4. Can you share how your systems-first model helped avoid fragmented or redundant workflows in a recent client engagement?

Absolutely. We worked with a growing B2B marketplace that was scaling fast across Latin America and the U.S. Each regional team had their own priorities, CMS, and marketing materials. We quickly uncovered duplication of assets, brand inconsistencies, and mismatched product messaging.

By implementing a systems-first model, we introduced a centralized content architecture, unified their CMS into a scalable structure, and rolled out a global design system. With one source of truth across regions, we reduced duplicate efforts by 40%, improved brand consistency, and allowed their teams to collaborate instead of compete for resources.

5. For brands operating in multiple markets, how do you manage multilingual and CMS complexity without sacrificing UX?

We focus on flexibility in the backend and consistency in the frontend. First, we choose the right techstack, whether it’s the right cms or custom application to the right infrastructure environment, we structure content types in a modular way so local teams can customize without breaking the experience.

From a UX standpoint, we create adaptive templates that respond to different languages and reading patterns, including right-to-left scripts when needed. We also account for cultural nuance in imagery, CTAs, and microcopy. That way, every market gets a tailored experience that still feels like the same brand.

6. How are you preparing for continued AI and automation disruption in the marketing space?

We see AI as a co-pilot, not a competitor. Internally, we’ve integrated AI into multiple parts of our workflow—from content prototyping and concept exploration to visual generation and predictive analytics.

We’re also building internal processes to ensure AI supports our team rather than replaces it. That includes training creatives on AI tools, using custom GPTs for brand voice consistency, and developing automation pipelines for reporting and asset versioning.

Ultimately, we’re preparing by staying hands-on. AI won’t remove the need for strategic thinking or storytelling, but it will raise the bar for efficiency and creativity. We plan to meet that challenge head-on.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

How Storm Reply Built a Scalable GenAI Content Platform on AWS

content marketing 21 Jul 2025

1) What were the key architectural decisions involved in building the AI-powered content personalization platform, and how did you address performance, latency, and scalability concerns?

As Storm Reply, as official AWS Premier Consulting Partner, our first architectural decision was to anchor the entire platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This strategic choice allowed us to take advantage of AWS’s robust AI/ML offerings and global infrastructure from day one. At the heart of the platform is Amazon Bedrock, which provides seamless access to multiple large language models (LLMs) from top providers like Anthropic and Meta. This not only gave us flexibility in model selection, but also ensured enterprise-grade reliability, availability, and speed.

To address performance, latency, and scalability:

We utilized Amazon CloudFront for global edge caching, which significantly reduced latency,
We benefited from Bedrock’s fully managed backend, which automatically scales based on workload without manual intervention,
And we relied on AWS’s Tier 1 data centers and 99.99% SLA-backed availability to ensure high reliability across regions.

By designing a cloud-native architecture using AWS-native services, we were able to deliver a scalable, low-latency, and highly resilient platform with minimal operational overhead - aligned with both our technical vision and AWS best practices.

2) Can you walk us through how the solution integrates NLP and ML for content extraction and contextual adaptation across industries and formats?

The platform we built for Storybent leverages machine learning services provided by AWS through Amazon Bedrock, where access to multiple large language models - such as those from Anthropic, Meta, and others - is already built in. These models are wrapped in APIs that make it easy to plug into our workflow.

We use this setup to compare and fine-tune outputs across different LLMs, depending on the industry, content type, or language style required. By carefully crafting and adjusting prompts, we can generate highly specific, context-aware content that fits a variety of formats - from marketing copy to social media to technical descriptions.

This allows us to support a full end-to-end content pipeline: from the initial idea, through language understanding and generation, to producing tailored outputs optimized for both audience and channel.

3) What were the major implementation challenges faced when taking this AI-powered system from concept to production, and how were they overcome?

One of the key implementation challenges - common across many AI projects - was putting the right structure in place to trust the output of the system at scale. From an engineering perspective, the core components were in place, but the challenge was ensuring the generated content met the required standards across use cases.

To solve this, we implemented a human-in-the-loop workflow, where outputs were reviewed, approved, and continuously improved through expert feedback. This helped us validate results early on, fine-tune prompts, and build guardrails that ensured consistency and relevance across different industries and formats.

Over time, this approach evolved into a repeatable and scalable process. The models improved through iterative prompt design, and we established a feedback loop that allowed the system to gradually operate with more autonomy - without compromising quality or control.

4) What DevOps and MLOps frameworks have been integrated to ensure delivery, monitoring, and model updates in a production environment?

We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of its strong support for both DevOps and MLOps at scale. From an MLOps perspective, the solution is built around Amazon Bedrock, which offers fully managed access to a variety of foundation models, as well as simplified deployment, monitoring, and billing transparency. This removes much of the operational overhead typically involved in managing generative AI workloads.

On the DevOps side, the platform is deployed using Amazon CloudFormation, enabling infrastructure as code and repeatable, automated deployments. We’ve integrated AWS Config, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail to support system configuration, performance monitoring, and auditing. These tools together power a CI/CD pipeline with DevSecOps practices, ensuring the platform remains secure, scalable, and easy to maintain.

We continue to prioritize native AWS services wherever fiscally feasible, in order to maintain tight integration, cost visibility, and long-term flexibility.

5) How do you foresee the role of GenAI evolving in enterprise content strategies, particularly in terms of personalization, real-time adaptation, and cross-channel orchestration?

GenAI is already becoming a foundational tool in enterprise content strategies, especially for personalization at scale and rapid content generation. But its real potential lies in how it integrates into automated workflows - where the goal is to go from a simple idea or brief to a complete set of outputs across multiple formats and channels.

Looking ahead, GenAI will play a central role in enabling real-time content adaptation, adjusting tone, format, and message dynamically based on audience, context, and platform. When combined with agents and orchestration tools, it will support cross-channel publishing - automatically generating tailored content for social media, email, print, and even video or audio.

In this context, GenAI isn’t just a content creation tool - it becomes part of a broader system that reduces time to market, lowers operational costs, and continuously optimizes content performance across touchpoints.

6) What innovations are you planning to add next to the platform—such as real-time audience segmentation, sentiment analysis, or multilingual support?

All of those capabilities - real-time audience segmentation, sentiment analysis, and multilingual support - are part of the roadmap. We’re working closely with Storybent to prioritize these features based on their business goals and rollout strategy.

That said, the area we’re most focused on next is building a system-level optimization strategy. Beyond adding features, the goal is to create a platform that’s constantly learning and improving - streamlining content delivery, reducing time to output, lowering overhead, and enhancing performance.

In a landscape where more companies are looking to insource AI capabilities, the ability to deliver continuous, automated optimization becomes a real differentiator. That’s where we see the greatest long-term value, and where we’re directing most of our innovation efforts.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.