Build Me This Travel Planning App, Please!

Summer travel is about to begin. I am deep in the throes of planning our Sicily trip in May. In doing so, however, I miss not having access to an app that could make life dramatically easier and cut hours from my workflow.

Let me describe what my travel planning workflow looks like.

Step 1: We decide on the general area and the dates.

Step 2: We assess how much time we need to budget to do justice to each place we visit.

Step 3: We book the long haul flights.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As you brought up a little bit earlier, all web marketeers tend to do customer landing pages that are specifically speaking to certain segments or certain search terms. Is that something that people do with your product? Do you have the full functionality or do you have a different front-end?

Jason Wallis: Sometimes, it’s just a landing page. Sometimes, it might be an entirely different visual treatment of a site that is subject to just a portion of the site but the domain is still the same. Sometimes, it is a completely different domain. It carries its own SEO value. It depends on the needs that the marketer sees at that moment in time. We have the ability to share that data in one backend, and we have very strong visual tools for managing pages and creating pages. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your point is well-taken that retailers need mobile sites and mobile presence. There are a lot of people who have platforms for mobile sites. What is special about what you do?

Jason Wallis: What is special and different is that the platform has one common data backend. The front-end is optimized for mobile and desktop. As a merchandiser or marketer who’s working to provide content, promotions, or any of the things it takes to provide the site experience, instead of having to do that in multiple systems, they can do it one time with Mozu. It’s synchronized out to all those places where consumers are instantly with no additional work or overhead required by the retailers. It’s just incredibly efficient at delivering consistent experiences and content across all the platforms that consumers are now using to interact with retailers.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider as your closest direct competitor? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Jason Wallis, CTO of Mozu (Part 1)

Mozu is a line of business within Volusion, one of the key small business e-commerce platforms that we have covered extensively in the past. Mozu caters to mid-market retailers. Jason discusses the trends he is seeing in that space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Mozu and yourself for some context.

Jason Wallis: Mozu is a modern commerce platform that has entered the market a couple of years ago. We’re a cloud platform designed to streamline and simplify the process of retailers adequately serving commerce needs that their consumers expect. We’re the first platform to be built since the mobile revolution was brought on by modern smartphone platforms. I’m the CTO of Mozu. I have been with Mozu since its inception and since we started on this journey to bring this platform to retailers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ryan Golden, CEO of Moasis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Fair enough. I agree with almost everything you said there. Let’s switch to the 30,000-foot industry question of what’s happening in the location-based optimization of advertising space in general. What are you seeing and what are the overriding trends?

Ryan Golden: Currently, there’s not much going on in dynamic optimization. I think the current trend that has grabbed CMOs’ and advertisers’ attention is attribution. Attribution is a very important part in the media mix. The challenge with attribution optimization is that you need an extra amount of device to get the data back. Once you get the data back, how do you store it? It’s good to say, “These are your coffee drinkers.” That’s more of a segmentation versus reacting to data in real-time.

It’s a whole different challenge. It’s lacking in mobile space and that’s what we’re tackling and are focused on. If you think about it, 99.9% of optimization in relation to mobile is an extension of what you did in desktop. When you think about location, it’s almost worse. How is location optimized? If I have a two-mile radius >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ryan Golden, CEO of Moasis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take maybe three customer use cases and talk us through how you have optimized their campaigns.

Ryan Golden: We work with a lot of QSRs. As opposed to traditional ways of just drawing the radius around their stores, we focus on taking a macro location in finding pockets or areas where lift is occurring. Based on time, location, and other data points, we’re able to make adjustments in real-time to then course-correct the campaign in-flight to increase performance. McDonalds, Burger King, or any QSR can say, “My customers are all over San Francisco. When is the right time to speak to these people and I need to talk to them now.” That makes it dynamic fundamentally.

Sramana Mitra: What is the answer to that question if I’m McDonald’s and my customer is all over San Francisco? What am I optimizing for? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Ryan Golden, CEO of Moasis (Part 1)

This discussion delves into location based mobile advertising optimization, an emerging arena that will likely grow substantially.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Moasis and yourself.

Ryan Golden: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Moasis. We provide in-flight location optimization. We discover location opportunities for brand marketers and ad agencies at scale and what we do is we continuously optimize by adjusting the content and ads within location, based on results to increase effectiveness. We believe location is a critical layer in bringing context and relevancy to real time.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Let’s double-click down on customers. What customer segment are you after? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Stephanie Newby, CEO of Crimson Hexagon (Part 5)

Stephanie Newby: My vision here is that we can end up with more and more companies in the world that have customers who really love them and are passionate about them. So much so that you can eliminate the hate in marketing and advertising. The reason that I think that this is even possible is that people use screens for learning and entertainment.

If companies are truly listening to their customers about what they’re doing and learning from that feedback, giving the reaction, and tweaking how they’re serving up information to customers, then I think we could transform a lot of that negative perception of marketing and advertising because they would have the insights that they need to do things. That would really empower those companies. Maybe, the thing that I’d like to finish on is what’s important here is that making data-driven decisions is really the Holy Grail. >>>