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Accelerating Your Online Marketing Results
Mar 18, 2008 – An Interview with Acceleration CEO and Founder, Stephan Pretorius
We recently spoke with the CEO and founder of Acceleration,
Stephan Pretorius, who explained in an interview with
EnterpriseInnovator that his company is a “provider of online
marketing online technology services and solutions.” As noted on the
company’s website, its specialty is providing online marketing pain
relief.
Pretorius noted Acceleration works “purely in the area
of online marketing” with “no offline or traditional
media,” and he added that “we try to cover all the components
that the market or publisher would need to execute for online marketing. Our
focus is not on web development, but on these technologies that drive
campaign performance, and measurement and so on.” Pretorius added that
“we don’t develop that technology,” but instead
“partner with key market leaders – Omniture, DoubleClick and
Epsilon – and resell that technology, and provide services and
consulting on top of those tools.”
Proper, Careful and Sophisticated Technology
Implementation
When asked, why build a business around that kind of core
competency, Pretorius explained the “reason for us” is that
“online marketing is incredibly dependent on proper, careful and
sophisticated implementation of a technology” and there is a
“massive gap in the marketplace between the promise of the technology
and actually executing on the ground.” And while “our channel
partners all have service divisions, they are fundamentally technology
businesses,” and there is thus a “massive need in the marketplace
for the skill to implement these technologies and execute them – that
requirement for expertise, real enterprise level insight, to implement this
stuff properly is increasing by the day.” Indeed, one might even say
it’s accelerating.
Hence, Acceleration’s purpose – to serve this
need, which is a market opportunity that Pretorius describes as “huge
– and it’s really expanding.” He noted Acceleration’s
“client base is largely mid-market to enterprise-level clients,”
and that “as you get into the larger clients, bigger budgets, and more
e-commerce revenues, the complexity of what you are dealing with becomes
bigger and bigger and bigger.” Accordingly, “the value of what we
offer increases exponentially.”
Pretorius explained that clients come to Acceleration
“for a number of different reasons – such as the need to
outsource to us when they have no skill in-house, or if they have the skill
in-house but need training to improve and to tweak things; or they have the
need for complete outsourcing, and don’t have the technical people
in-house but know they have the need to implement this particular piece of
technology,” or even sometimes, “all of the above.” Hence
Acceleration will help clients meet all of its online marketing needs,
“with the technology, the skills and knowledge. And the skill to
execute on a continuous basis.”
A Service-led Approach in a Product-led
Marketplace
Interestingly, Acceleration often comes up against its
channel partners as potential competitors, but while these partners can offer
their expertise in their own area of specialty, Acceleration can offer its
expertise in all of these areas. “Each one of our practice areas comes
up with specialists in that one area.” This helps when it pitches
against companies like Atlas, against whom Acceleration “very often has
to pitch against.” Pretorius noted that Acceleration “comes up
against channel partners as competitors repeatedly on the resale
level,” but much less often on the service level.
That’s because its partners at the service level are
primarily product companies, and not service companies per se. “Very
few companies provide the services for either one of our channel partners or
their three practice areas. It’s still very much a product-led
marketplace rather than a service-led marketplace.”
Acceleration stands right at this crossroads where services
and technology products intersection, and at this “crossroads, what we
find is that clients do not need a shrink-wrapped box of Siebel software,
they need it properly implemented, analyzed in their business, and rolled up
so they can use it. For the market technology business, it’s very
similar to what some of the large integration businesses, for instance, like
what Siebel solution implementers do for a client.” One might liken
what Acceleration does to that of the Systems Integration (SI) business, but
Pretorius explained “the reason why I don’t forefront it more
(SI) is that it is just one of the requirements – very often, just a
vertical implementation such as an email solution. But our sweet spot is a
differentiated offering – we implement a number of solutions that work
together and speak together in a highly, highly complex environment –
very often there are huge inefficiencies in their legacy business,”
putting Acceleration in a “unique position to solve that for
clients.”
The Acceleration Marketing Automation Platform: A
Middleware Solution
Pretorius added that Acceleration has developed its own
middleware layer, called the “Acceleration Marketing Automation
Platform (AMAP)” and it “allows us to do certain integrations,
executions, some of the marketing automation of reporting – we’ve
done that, not to be a product company but to close the gaps between our
various partners technologies and solutions.”
The AMAP “allows us to a lot of data integration, data
transformations and all that – a lot of triggered schedule campaigns
recurring campaigns – report views, dashboards, it takes multiple data
feeds from different clients and displays them on a single dashboard view,
this makes it highly flexible.” Acceleration thus “focus[es] on
making it a really powerful development platform,” and noted
“some of the work we’ve done for Intercontinental Hotel Group,
they use the platform for doing a complex marketing gateway – a
bookings and availability system” built upon a 3GB database that
“can run all kinds of business rules to deliver custom content,”
using an “internal platform and not a client facing product.”
Acceleration has also done a “nice integration” with Sazzle, the
on demand personalized product company, helping them to “measure and
see how people use their site.”
The Rise of Online Marketing
Pretorius explained how “for all our clients, online
has become a very integrated and central part of what they are doing and
business generally,” and this goes for both pure plays such as online
publishers and e-mail companies as well as “clients who are traditional
businesses now with strong online revenue streams.” He added,
“One of the things we have to confront for clients is how to integrate
traditional measurement models with online measurement models,” as
clients are often doing both off- and online marketing.
But “the methodologies aren’t the same,”
with online presenting “all kinds of ‘fuzzy’ ways of
measuring that aren’t available off-line,” causing traditional
CMOs to declare, “This crap, you’re using four different
methodologies for online,” while in their offline marketing analysis,
they’re used to measuring an “immediate conversion.” Added
Pretorius, “They look at these things online, but they aren’t
taking into account the online element.” On the publisher’s side
it’s much the same, as “lot of publisher clients are regional
newspapers, print clients – their reality is losing revenue on the
traditional side every quarter, but they’re starting to make it up on
the online side, but it’s not evening out for them. From the revenue
perspective for publishers, there’s clearly an overlap,” but
it’s “very complex.”
In Pretorius’ opinion, “it actually cuts both
ways. While online, various tracking options often reveal the shortcomings of
traditional, offline tracking and measurement, but at the same time many
online practitioners – agencies, search companies – have very
inexperienced account management who have never run large enterprise
marketing campaigns, and do not understand basic concepts like net
contribution and P&L analysis of the campaign.” Thus they may
think, “I got you a 10 dollar CPA – ten dollars for every sale
– but what about upsells? They don’t understand the P&L
process, it’s very simplistic up to the hand-off point. I always get
kind of annoyed: offline people don’t get it, they don’t want to
learn – it’s old school!”
In the emerging world of online marketing,
“you’ll actually learn a lot at the same time, but at the same
time what is happening is traditional marketers are struggling to standardize
on how to measure,” as “offline is inherently harder to track and
less accurate in some ways – you have to do sampling,” and the
“best they can do, it’s really a mix of both sides of the fence
– if there is a fence. They are guilty of not really learning what
the other side has to offer. Moreover, what we do more often within the
environment of the online space, we help companies to make sense of these
various, complex but actually quite incorrectly and misused methodologies.
It’s amazing to me – when you have a medium that’s
measurable and attributable, it’s still so inaccurate and so
un-standardized and the abuses are myriad the way people claim conversions,
causes of sales, without any qualification.” But the industry is
evolving, and with each passing day it’s “getting smarter about
conversion measurement generally.”
Pretorius explained that “what happens is not just one
agency at fault,” as companies are often “using one agency for
search, another of e-mail marketing, another for network buys, another for
affiliates – none of this is integrated,” and “all are
claiming the same conversions. This is what we love helping clients
with,” as “we save people money hand over fist, it’s
beautiful!”
Pretorius added, “We’ve grown it from the bottom
up. We started with technology and added service layers, then a solutions
layer on top of that, on a rock-solid foundation; many people can talk the
talk, but you ask them to implement it, and it’s a frickin’
disaster. We’re a very un-dotcom business, and focus on results and
outcomes: if you sell it, this is what needs to be done, show the value
– it’s fairly straight forward for us.”
For more information on Acceleration, please visit its
website at: http://www.acceleration.biz. This is the
first of a two-part article profiling
Acceleration.
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