Q&A: Gamut’s Allgood on Big Data, ROI and Brand Launches

Chief Marketer recently talked with Rachel Allgood, ‎senior vice president of marketing and consumer insights at Gamut, a Cox Media company, about the launch of the brand last fall.

CHIEF MARKETER: What were some of the challenges you faced when debuting the brand last year?

RACHEL ALLGOOD: I started with the company a year and a half ago and I was brought in to merge the best of Cox Digital Solutions and Cox Cross Media, which were two different companies, one was TV complimented with digital and the other pure play digital. The biggest part of the process was figuring out the DNA of the company and who we were and what people thought of us. The most important part of it was research and we hired an independent firm to talk to our internal and external clients to get a sense of what were and weren’t doing well. A big part of our DNA is that we provide great service, and that ended up being the core of the brand. How we productize service is the core of Gamut.

CM: The rebranding even translated into redesigning your office space in New York. What was the thinking behind that?

ALLGOOD: We created an incredible office environment as an experience of the brand, and it’s made working really fun and collaborative and a place where we can bring our customers and have video conferences. The entire environment supports that, all the way down to naming our conference rooms after really brilliant people who have automated the world, like Steve Jobs, Eli Whitney and Ben Franklin.

CM: How are you and your team leveraging data?

ALLGOOD: I’m so tired of the term “big data” because it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. When we got Experian and a couple of other products, we had all of this information and needed to figure out what to do with it and to do it quickly. We invested in a tool called Rhiza that imports our data for us and we can pull different scenarios either on maps based on ZIP code, state, DMA or congressional district. So if we want to look for Pepsi drinkers in New Jersey who are extreme athletes, we can visualize that really quickly. We can give that to our sellers and it opens up this whole window that doesn’t resonate the same way on a spreadsheet.

CM: What are some of the biggest challenges your team faces in determining marketing ROI?

ALLGOOD: Every trade show and campaign we do I have to go and prove a return on that investment. It’s about increasing bottom and top line revenue. We watch KPIs and invest in optimization reporting software and analytics software for inter and post-campaign reporting.

CM: What’s the most important investment your team will make in the year ahead?

ALLGOOD: It’s the programmatic platform, we are moving aggressively to become mostly programmatic from an operational standpoint. We have been in ad tech for 10 years now and we have a robust programmatic platform that sits in the middle of the programmatic ecosystem. So our big investment this year is creating private marketplaces and selling direct programmatic.