Cheetah Digital Making It Easier for Brands to Navigate Data

Tim Glomb has some very simple advice for brand marketers who want to know what is at the core of personalization when it comes to customer engagement and loyalty.

“If you’re going to invite a new neighbor over for dinner and you ask, ‘Do you love spaghetti?’ and they say ‘No, we actually don’t like spaghetti,’” he says. “And then you invite them to a spaghetti dinner. That would be a bad experience.”

Glomb, the Vice President of Content and Data at Cheetah Digital, takes his example a step further when it comes to brands who struggle to make customer inferences through data analytics.

“I wouldn’t assume that my wife wants to go to dinner with me and my best friend,” Glomb says. “I would ask her first before I committed us to it – brands should be giving their customers the same courtesy. Ask them and use that data, but don’t get wrapped up in inference and behavior, assuming that somebody wants something in the future.”

 

It’s Not All in the Name

Glomb emphasizes how he and his team at Cheetah Digital embrace personalization with their brand clients. But he says there are too many brand marketers who may not truly understand the right approach to customizing offers and optimizing engagement with their customers.

Successful personalization comes down to one premise, Glomb says – it has to be at the one-to-one level. And that means communication via the right channel, with the right message, at the right time, using the right content, and making the right offer.

“Personalizing a name and a subject line in an email is not personalization,” he says. “True personalization is matching the psychographic needs and wants. That’s where we should live today.”

A better understanding of the perspective Glomb and his team at Cheetah Digital bring to all things customer experience may be gained by illuminating the non-traditional professional path Glomb has traveled. Starting out touring with Mötley Crüe and then managing the rock group Everclear, Glomb went on to become a television producer for MTV and work with the Jackass crew and creator Bam Margera.

Prior to joining Cheetah Digital, Tim’s stops included executive marketing roles at brands such as AXS TV, Wayin and Bowtech Brands and is the founder of Audience Sherpa, a niche firm providing personalization strategies for smaller endemic brands in outdoors, beverage and entertainment.
 

Hanging Big Numbers with Vans

At heart Glomb considers himself an entertainment guy, and it is that unique connection to the rock scene and TV that led to Cheetah Digital landing Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and his wife, American internet personality and actor Brittany Furlan-Lee, to host the company’s Signals 2020 late last year – a nine-week virtual conference featuring industry leaders, panel discussions, interviews, product launches, demos and more.

Glomb’s unique perspective as a life-long skateboard enthusiast was also an asset as Cheetah Digital partnered with the Vans shoe company, a cult classic in the skating community, to execute on a highly experiential engagement campaign that included growing the Vans Family loyalty program to over 12 million unique members.

Originally a brick-and-mortar retailer, Glomb says over the past couple of years, Vans has embarked on a rapid digital transformation, enabling the brand to gather the behavioral and preference data required to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with its customers – truly creating a family of brand advocates.

But with so many followers and loyal members, Glomb says the key to success with Vans was bringing order to chaos in the data it was collecting from its customers.

“It’s easy to say we have a lot of data, we have a lot of insights, we have a lot of behavior, we have a lot of actions, but how do we make sense of all this when we’re not all data scientists?” he says. “That’s exactly what Cheetah Digital is here to do – to take complex data sets and find the needle in the haystack, or the anomaly, or the trend.”

Since launching their partnership in 2018, Vans has been pleased by the success of the program as almost 50% of direct-to-consumer sales in North America — whether in-store or online — come from Vans’ Family loyalty program members. They are also registering an above-average customer satisfaction score, and members are highly engaged and spend significantly more than non-members.

 

Making It Easier for Brands to Navigate Data

More importantly, Glomb says the technology Cheetah Digital uses with its clients is making it easier for the brands to navigate the data and not harder.

“We have one client who is crushing it globally and has four people on a marketing team for seven brands,” Glomb says of Pure Archery Group. “Our Customer Engagement Suite consolidates all of this, so you don’t have a bunch of different people having to work a bunch of different levers and tools across a bunch of different platforms. You can consolidate, but also focus on the things that are going to actually effectuate change.”

A mistake he says that some brands make is getting wrapped up in constantly looking at metrics from the past. Glomb says they should be learning from lead measures instead of lag metrics from the past.

“You shouldn’t have to be an IT guru to actually understand your platform,” he says. “If a brand has frustrations, then kick the tires on other vendors because absolutely there are better platforms out there.”

 

New Partnership Yields 10x Boost

Personalization powered by the right platform can be a huge win for retailers as evidenced by the results Glomb sites from Salling Group. This large Danish retailer began working with Cheetah Digital in 2020 to establish a loyalty program for their chain of grocery stores.

Using a digital personalization engine and machine learning, Salling Group — a $13 billion grocer with a 35% market share in Denmark — saw a “10-times lift” in their grocery loyalty app when personalizing and suggesting the right products using the Cheetah Digital platform.

“It’s all about finding the right technology to get the right strategy to collect the right data,” Glomb says. “The results are proven; this is not a theory. This is tried and true and happening with brands across the globe right now.”
 
Visit https://www.cheetahdigital.com/
 

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