Q&A with Thomas Zawacki, Chief Digital Officer- Strategy & Innovation at Data Axle

Thomas Zawacki, Chief Digital Officer- Strategy & Innovation at Data Axle, is an accomplished business leader, motivator, and innovator with a successful track record in both established and entrepreneurial settings. He is known for consistently achieving positive financial outcomes via outstanding revenue growth, product innovation, marketing strategy, and operational efficiencies.Consider the four C’s of marketing strategy: customer, channel, creative, and conversion. Using data analysis and AI/ML predictive modeling, weigh each element differently depending on your KPIs.

MEDIA 7: Please take us through your professional journey. What prompted/inspired you to join Data Axle?
THOMAS ZAWACKI: My career has come full circle. I graduated from college as an anthropologist, with a bent toward technology. My two passions at that time — outside of drinking and traveling were coding and anthropology.

Anthropology is all about immersing yourself in cultures and understanding what makes them tick. It might have seemed like a strange choice for a major to my parents, but it really laid the perfect groundwork for my journey in digital marketing. In the early days of the internet, I was fortunate to be part of the team that built the first-ever banner placed online. Back then, we were building the foundational elements of the digital marketing industry, and doing so was all rooted in customer empathy, understanding how people were using new technology to improve their lives, and inventing new ways for brands to participate.

As the behavior of consumers and business customers shifted, my career shifted as well. Over time, website usage evolved into social and mobile usage. I pivoted my career to helping brands communicate within social networks and helping Fortune 500 companies to transform their businesses for a mobile world. Basic e-commerce and digital advertising became mobile commerce and mobile advertising within the confines of a much smaller screen. Then came the next big sea change in business strategy — the use of data and artificial intelligence to optimize consumer experiences. And so those were the areas where I refocused my career.

The common thread throughout my career has been the triangulation of consumer behavior, technology innovation, and business needs. That’s what brought me to Data Axle. At Data Axle, I’m applying all of the same techniques and methods that I learned back in my anthropology days to use data and artificial intelligence and understand what makes consumers and business customers tick. Then, we leverage those insights to help Fortune 500 companies transform their businesses and exceed their goals.

M7: What according to you is the best way to find a qualified audience for your platform?
TZ: There are four levels of data and intelligence that I would use to help a customer determine which audience to target. First, start with foundational data — basic elements about your audience that don’t change much over time. Depending on your goals, that might be demographics or firmographics. But whatever the case, accuracy is absolutely essential at this foundational level as it drives downstream marketing performance.

Once you have your foundational data, you want to layer on interests and psychographics. You might be targeting moms, but there’s a big difference between moms who garden and those who love heavy metal. You need to be able to acknowledge who these people are at a human level within your marketing, and that’s what you achieve with this second layer of intelligence.

At the third level, as we get more focused on recency, you want to look at whether a person is in the market for your particular product at that time, or has a life-stage trigger related to needing new items. So again, if an auto company is targeting moms with an SUV, they’ll want to know who within your target audience has watched a video or read a consumer report on SUVs, and perhaps had a new baby within the past 30 days. In other words, you’re looking for intent or behavioral observations that would suggest they’re looking to convert sometime soon.

Finally, at the very top of the customer intelligence pyramid are moments: Is it the right moment to communicate with a person who has demonstrated intent to buy? Is it the right time and place? Are they in the right mindset to give your brand permission to talk to them as a potential customer? That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about real-time marketing to your target audience.You can’t make everyone happy all of the time, but if you lead with empathy, you can minimize risk and deliver strong performance across a wide variety of measures.

M7: What marketing channels do you use and which ones do you see as the most promising given your target customers?
TZ: As an omnichannel marketing partner, the bigger question here at Data Axle would be, “Which channels don’t you use?” We live in a world where media consumption is incredibly fragmented, even within a given c