Thomas Zawacki, Data Axle's Digital Leader - Strategy and Innovation, is a successful business leader, motivator and innovator with successful experience in both established and entrepreneurial settings. He is known for consistently achieving positive financial results through outstanding revenue growth, product innovation, marketing strategy and operational efficiency. Think of a marketing strategy for the four C's: customer, channel, creativity, and conversion. Using data analysis and AI / ML predictive modeling, consider each element differently depending on your KPIs.

MEDIA 7: Please take us on your professional journey. What motivated you to join Data Axel?
THOMAS ZAWACKI: My career has been full. I graduated from university as an anthropologist who is inclined towards technology. My two passions at the time - outside of drinking and traveling - were coding and anthropology.

Anthropology is about diving into cultures and understanding, which makes them tick. It may have seemed a strange profession to my parents for a major, but it laid the perfect foundation for my digital marketing journey. In the early days of the Internet, I was lucky enough to be part of a team that built the first banner ever posted on the web. Then we built the key elements of digital marketing, and it was all based on customer empathy, understanding how people used new technology to improve their lives, and inventing new ways for brands to participate.

As the behavior of consumers and business clients changed, so did my career. Over time, the use of the website evolved for social and mobile use. I turned my career to helping brands communicate on social networks and helping Fortune 500 companies turn their business into a mobile world. Basic e-commerce and digital advertising became mobile commerce and mobile advertising on a much smaller screen. Then came the next big shift in business strategy - the use of data and artificial intelligence to optimize the consumer experience. And those were the areas where I reshaped my career.

Throughout my career, the common denominator has been the triangulation of consumer behavior, technological innovation and business needs. This took me to Data Axle. At Data Axle, I apply all the same techniques and methods I learned in my anthropology days to use data and artificial intelligence to understand what makes consumers and business customers tick. We then use this knowledge to help Fortune 500 companies change their business and exceed their goals.

M7: What do you think 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 client determine which target audience to target. First, start with the basics - the key elements of your audience that don't change much over time. Depending on your goals, this can be demographic or firm. However, regardless of the case, accuracy at this basic level is essential as it drives the level of marketing downstream.

Once you have your basic data, you want layers of interest and psychography. You may be targeting mothers, but there is a big difference between garden gardens and heavy metal-loving mothers. You need to be able to recognize in your marketing who these people are on a human level, and you achieve this with this second layer of intelligence.

On the third level, if we focus more on freshness, you want to see if someone is in the market for your particular product at that time or has a life stage trigger related to the need for a new life. So again, when a car company targets mothers with SUVs, they want to know who in your audience has watched a video or read a report on SUVs and may have had a new baby in the last 30 days. In other words, you are looking for intentional or behavioral observations that indicate that they want to turn someday soon.

Finally, there are moments at the top of the customer information pyramid: is it the right time to interact with the person who has shown a willingness to buy? Is it the right time and place? Do they have the right mindset to allow your brand to talk to them as a potential customer? That's what we're talking about when we're talking about real-time marketing to our target audience. You can't make everyone happy all the time, but if you live with empathy, you can minimize risk and deliver strong performance across the region with a variety of actions.

M7: Which marketing channels do you use and which ones do you consider to be the most promising for your target customers?
TZ: As an omnichannel marketing partner, the bigger question here at Data Axle would be, "What channels do you not use?" We live in a world where media consumption is incredibly fragmented.