ZIO Relaunches as OpenMartech: Redefining Marketing for an Intelligence-Driven Era

March 4, 2019

INDIANAPOLIS (Mar 4, 2019) – ZIO announces a relaunch as OpenMartech, extending its customer intelligence-driven marketing, after raising $1.5 million in funding to create retail’s first open marketing hub. OpenMartech is also unveiling its early access program offering retailers the opportunity to use the hub now that it is out of beta-testing. The hub enables retailers to gain access to an industry-leading shopper data platform, a suite of ready-to-monetize customer insights, and the ability to craft both adhoc and fully-automated marketing programs. The OpenMartech platform is deployed into the client’s own existing cloud environment, perpetually licensed to them, with no software subscription or license fees.

The development of OpenMartech technology comes during a time when modern marketing is at a crossroads. Marketers used to rely on their own instincts to create strategic marketing programs, but machine learning is now capable of providing those insights, at scale, continuously updating.

THE CHALLENGE

Retailers have been struggling with questions that, if answered, would drive transformative value to their business. “There are seven questions that should create the foundation of every retailer’s marketing programs,” states Angel Morales, OpenMartech founder. “Our mission was to answer them, at scale, to create retail’s first customer intelligence-driven marketing hub.”

“The concept of the seven questions obscures the complexity of retailers’ challenges,” says Reuben Vandeventer, OpenMartech co-founder. “We leverage simple statistical models through deep learning in order to deliver hundreds of millions of customer insights which ultimately fuel both audiences and content for hundreds of marketing programs – all rooted in our core seven shopper lifecycle optimization strategies. This is an emerging practice we call “opportunity-driven marketing.”

While OpenMartech’s production-ready solution transitions technology from tactical barrier to strategic accelerant, the software’s unique design allows them to pursue a much larger, far reaching problem.

A BROKEN INDUSTRY
“Martech (marketing technology), as an industry, is broken,” asserted Danielle McDowell, OpenMartech’s CMO. “It’s a bi-product of vendors’ focus being primarily on marketing channels vs. strategic business objectives. This created a deluge of vendors delivering dozens of marketing channels and point solutions, but little focus on strategic customer opportunities.”

“If martech was reborn today, it would be opportunity-focused,” added Morales. “It would radiate outward from shopper data, to insights, then marketing execution. Each piece is required to achieve the strategic customer outcomes that are part of opportunity-driven marketing. This is the future of marketing, and the vendor community at large has acknowledged it.”

Morales is referring to a surge in vendors claiming to help retail chase, what BCG estimates is a $800 billion in market share opportunity. This surplus of vendors has created an overabundance of noise with a distinct lack of value, evidenced in Forrester Analytics’ October 2018 Report that states vendors in this B2C market, “over promise and under deliver.” Retailers, suffering from vendor fatigue, are still searching for technology that unlocks the strategic value of shopper relationships. This signaled the industry was ready for something new, something different.

ENTER OPENMARTECH

OpenMartech is funded with over $1.5 million to date from their founders, industry insiders, angel investors, Elevate Ventures, The IU Philanthropic Venture Fund, and the Innovate Indiana Fund.

OpenMartech is now available to retailers through the Accelerate360 Early Access Program, which includes a package of strategic, tactical and technical services intended to unlock the value of OpenMartech technology within retailers’ clouds. The technology will be freely available to all retailers in spring 2020.

“We are uniquely positioned to change the conversation within the industry,” declared Kelly Schwedland, OpenMartech’s president and CRO. “We have the opportunity to remove the technical barriers preventing marketers from achieving their strategic goals – and we can do it for all of retail.”

“Our path is clear and has been paved by other amazing open source vendors,” Morales closes. “If you listen to your customers, give them the innovation they need, the data ownership they’ve wanted, a community that supports them, and resources that complement their efforts – not only can you build an amazing business, but perhaps even transform an industry.”

To learn more about OpenMartech or apply for OpenMartech’s Accelerate360 Early Access Program, visit http://OpenMartech.ci.