Tealium: Moving from Data Insights to Action in Seconds

In a world where data is more valuable than oil, having a partner who can help you make the most out of that is invaluable. 

It is here, Tealium, a software company led by a trio of seasoned leaders, has developed a tag management solution that not only gives you the data, but instant insights from it so you can take action. 

With a combined experience of over 50 years in real-time analytics, CEO Jeff Lunsford, Co-founder Ali Behnam, and CTO Michael Anderson have been instrumental in shaping the future of data utilisation and they give insights into what it has taken to build a company that now processes nine billion data points a day. 

What can you tell us about the executive team at Tealium?

Jeff:  I've been partners with Mike and Ali for 22 years, meeting on April 1, 2002, at WebSite Story. We're not a hierarchical organisation at Tealium, but rather a group of partners with distinct roles. 

What issues was Tealium created to solve?

Ali: We faced frustrations back in the WebSite Story days, where we would deploy solutions for customers, they would get the reports like, and say “Oh, this is really great data. Now, what do I do with it?” There was just no action tied to the analytics. So, our vision has always been to be this unified data layer for the enterprise. 

What are the most significant challenges facing enterprise data management today?

Jeff: So we work with about 750 of the largest enterprises in the world in a variety of fields: finance, pharmaceuticals, insurance. Each and every one of these industries has some unique challenges, but the one common challenge is, they all need to collect data from across their customer experience systems.

What does Tealium bring clients’ data and how has its approach evolved over the years?

Michael: In order for a marketing team to do what they needed to do, they needed to understand their customers a bit better. When we built the first customer data platform back in 2013, we had an immediate uptick with customers very interested in this future of understanding their data.

The analytics vendors, Google analytics, omniture or adobe analytics, all had vendor specific data layers that they required you to tag. We therefore put that data back into their hands so that they can understand it and we feel that it solves a lot of the downstream problems of the company doing so. We’ve taken tag management and used it to get right into the creation of data.

What is the significance of these real time data events Tealium provides for customers?

Michael: There's not a single ETL process that happens in our platform. It always goes into the systems that it's going into. So instead of dragging the whole user profile, we are able to instead analyse a specific set of hints around who that visitor is so that we can react to that visit with personalised content or adverts or products in below 50 milliseconds. 

How do your tag management, API Hub and customer data platform and data management work together to create value for your clients?

Jeff: So we really think of it as one continuous data supply chain. So the tag management is just the web data layers. We're collecting web data. 

The server side data collection is collecting from everything that has an API, which integrates with 1,300 vendors across this ecosystem, like Mobile and IoT and kiosk and branch and store. 

Then the customer data platform takes all that turns that into humanised data and then allows you to label that data in your own business language with badges and metrics and lists of things people might have looked at or bought and that also gives you the activation capability out the back end of the data supply chain into the customer experience systems.

Then the data management piece is where we store all that data and synchronise it with their back end data warehouse like they may be using Snowflake or Databricks, or AWS, or Azure.

What can you tell us about Tealium Predict?

Jeff: Tealium Predict is something that helps you do propensity scoring.

For instance, this customer may have a propensity to abandon their shopping cart. If they do, then you might want to interact with them along their journey and try to incentivise them, not to abandon that shopping cart and so we have customers who have used to and predict for all sorts of various use cases, and it will be where we run AI on Telem's platform and give our customers the ability to run models on their data within our platform. 

What will Tealium’s biggest future opportunities be?

Jeff: The advancement of AI is going to fuel the ascent of AI agents. Also, conversational AI is going to be the next major interface that gets layered on top of Web mobile to determine sentiment and enhance an experience based on that. 

Mike: In a world of abundant choice, the few things that will separate competitors from each other are user experience and the best experiences are driven by the best data. So for us, that's the focus, a tech initiative.

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