We sat down with Jon Friedman, who leads the Marketing Solutions team at Cuebiq. Learn about Jon’s vision for the team, what he sees as Cuebiq’s biggest differentiator, and how he envisions the company evolving over the next year.
1. Can you tell us a little about your role and what you’re working on?
I am the SVP, Marketing Solutions, and my job is to help our clients solve business problems. Location is an extremely powerful data point, and by understanding the dynamics of a client’s category and its specific challenges, we can empower brands and agencies to leverage real-world behaviors to inform all aspects of media/marketing efforts, from targeting through campaign optimization and measurement, as well as the analysis of consumer mobility and visitation trends.
2. What is your vision for leading the Cuebiq Marketing Solutions team this year?
The location space is incredibly complex, made even more complicated by broader marketplace forces including industry consolidation, an increasingly aggressive regulatory environment, and operating-system changes that threaten data supply. Since Cuebiq’s inception, our focus has always been to help our partners navigate through the “noise,” and my vision for the Marketing Solutions team is that we will continue to develop as solution sellers, super-focused on understanding how location can help our clients win.
3. What is the biggest opportunity you see for data right now?
I think the biggest opportunity is for companies to (finally) prioritize privacy compliance and data quality over vanity metrics. Companies on all sides need to demand transparency with respect to data sourcing and to insist partners and suppliers maintain a consumer-first focus.
A prime example is that our platform is 100% informed by first-party data (focused on a named-consent framework) to ensure not only the industry’s most stringent compliance to current/future privacy regulations but also that consumer rights and sensitivities are considered beyond the mandates of the law.
As another example, the location business was built on “scale,” defined as “how many devices a platform ‘sees’ over a given month.” At Cuebiq, we’re convinced that “seeing” a device sporadically with no context renders it useless and we have been working hard to change the conversation from MAUs to DAUs. It’s necessary to understand an opted-in device’s behavior over time to gain any real insight from offline analytics and attribution.
4. What is the biggest challenge you anticipate in the coming years for the advertising industry?
It’s well documented that the past few years have accelerated the changes traditional media companies needed to make in response to the consumption trends we’ve been anticipating and starting to see for years. An even greater complicating factor of the past few years has been the pandemic’s substantive impact on business models across almost every vertical. For example, e-commerce, curbside delivery, and BOPIS have become integral to many business models during the pandemic. I think the biggest challenge of this year will be finding a common ground between the resulting “new” business needs of brands, and the models being developed by media suppliers and the rest of the adtech ecosystem. Complicating matters further, consumers will be emerging from the pandemic, which will create yet another “new normal,” which, of course, promises more change.
5. In your opinion, what is Cuebiq’s biggest differentiator as a company in the location-data space?
I think Cuebiq’s biggest differentiator is how our commitment to our principles manifest in our business practices. We hold our partners to the same standards to which we hold ourselves. For example, one of our key tenets is privacy, and all of our partners not only agree to strict contractual terms that prohibit any attempt to merge our data with personally identifiable information, but we also require that many undergo an annual third-party audit of their compliance with those terms.
Social responsibility is another key principle of ours, exemplified by our Data for Good program. During the pandemic, we provided free access to our Mobility Insights dashboards so that brands, journalists, and organizations including the New York City’s Mayor’s office could illustrate mobility patterns to help save lives.
6. How do you see Cuebiq evolving over the course of the next year?
Over the next year, we will continue to innovate to solve problems. We have dedicated resources and processes in place and we are excited to help our partners understand how to unlock the power of location data to address their challenges.
7. If you were to summarize how you feel about the new year ahead in three words, what would they be?
Hopeful, persevering, and unifying
Want to chat with Jon or a member of his team to learn more about how Cuebiq is innovating this year? Set up a time to talk.
Cuebiq’s Data for Good initiative is being continued with support from the Spectus.ai data cleanroom and their Social Impact professionals. Their commitment to positive social impact through the ethical and responsible use of location-based data makes further insights possible. We invite you to visit https://spectus.ai/social-impact/ for more on contributions to academia and research partners.
