As part of our commitment to provide our customers with the leading marketing technology providers, Lima Consulting Group partners with the leading innovators in the industry. Our partnership with Tealium is another demonstration of how LCG can help marketers reach a higher return on their marketing technologies.
We recently had an opportunity to interview Jeff Lunsford, Chief Executive Officer of Tealium
1. Why did you start Tealium?
I was a founding investor, but I didn’t start Tealium. The company was started by two of my former colleagues at WebSideStory, a leader in SaaS-based web analytics, which we sold to Omniture in 2007 and is now part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. After Omniture, the founders, Mike Anderson and Ali Behnam, started a consulting company that helped companies better manage their digital marketing vendor tags. Seeing the market need, they built and launched an enterprise tag management product in 2011, and began signing up customers very quickly. I became their first angel investor, and joined full-time in January 2013 after several years as the CEO of Limelight Networks. I love the hyper-growth phase, when markets are being defined and you’re in that land-grab mode with super-fast product development. We’re now leading the market with more than 350 customers worldwide, representing thousands of brands, including Priceline, Travelocity, Vodafone, The Weather Channel, Petco, Lenovo, A+E Networks, The Wall Street Journal, and many more.
2. How do you differentiate your tag management solution?
Tealium differentiates on all dimensions – ease of use, performance, advanced functionality, depth and breadth of partner ecosystem, and so forth. We are also a proven team who our customers know will build a lasting company rather than one that will disappear into a larger acquirer. We also have a much larger vision for helping the industry. We provide a foundational, vendor-neutral data platform that allows our customers to unify their siloed marketing applications so they can launch more impactful and personalized marketing campaigns across channels. We essentially allow organizations to build their own “marketing cloud,” using the best solutions in the digital marketing eco-system. We do this through a unifying data layer that allows applications to speak the same language. We then provide, through our AudienceStream product, an easy way for marketers to segment and enrich key audience segments, and share those profiles across the digital marketing stack to drive more profitable, real-time interactions. We call this unified marketing. You can see one of our customers, Ancestry.com, talk about it here. We are proud to have been recognized for this unique approach. In March, the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) named AudienceStream its New Technology of the Year.
3. What new technologies will complement your offering?
The great thing about Tealium is that nearly all digital marketing technologies are complementary with our platform. We can seamlessly deploy any tag-based digital marketing solution, including mobile solutions, and then help fuel the performance of those applications with rich, cross-channel customer data. A key to our success is having a robust partner eco-system, and we’ve worked hard on building that. We currently have 650 turnkey tag integrations with major vendors, and are building a robust data distribution marketplace with key vendors like the Oracle Responsys, Silverpop, and StrongView. We also have great agency partners, like Lima Consulting.
4. What has surprised you about this industry since you`ve started?
The pace of innovation. The industry has moved extremely quickly, much faster than even the web analytics industry. We’ve always known tag management was about the data, but it’s evolved very rapidly to play a key role in uniting marketing data and applications. We are helping marketers do something they’ve never been able to do before, not without investing heavy resources in data warehousing projects. We are proud to be part of the innovation that has moved the industry forward, and thankful to our partners and customers.
5. Why did you partner with Lima Consulting Group?
The digital space in Latin American is growing in maturity every day. To truly serve the market, you need feet on the ground with a deep knowledge and understanding of how to meet the needs and vision of the emerging industry. Lima Consulting has the resources, experience and intimate knowledge to help us achieve this success. We are proud to partner with Lima and look forward to a long, productive relationship.
6. What does the future hold for Tealium?
Right now, we are focused on scaling our platform to meet rising global demand. We have an extremely agile development team and are constantly working on powerful new capabilities for the benefit of our customers. One of our key focus areas is mobile, including mobile web sites and mobile apps. Mobile marketing is clearly top of mind among our customers, and we provide the same benefits for the mobile channel that we do for the web. We also continue to build out our robust partner eco-system, and make sure we work synergistically with all vendors and strategic partners.
About Tealium
Tealium helps savvy brands bring order to marketing chaos and engage customers in innovative ways. Using Tealium as the foundation for their digital marketing operations, smart marketers can fuel real-time unified marketing initiatives and drive more profitable customer interactions across all digital touch points. Tealium is the recognized leader in enterprise tag management and was recently named one of Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America for 2014. Each quarter, Tealium serves 1.2 trillion tags on behalf of its global clients, representing an estimated $75B in annual online transactions. For more information, please visit www.tealium.com.
Jeff,
We’re excited to count Tealium as part of our line up! Our technical staff had a terrific experience in the training and I wanted to extend a special “shout-out” to Clint Ivy – what a terrific trainer. I knew within about 20 seconds of his taking the floor that it was going to be electric. The training team there really did a super job of preparing us to lead our first few engagements.