Partner Spotlight: How Silverbullet Uses First-Party Data to Deliver Trusted Customer Experiences

In our latest Partner Spotlight, Silverbullet’s Managing Director, Americas, Andrea Ghibaudi talks about navigating the new privacy-first era, what it truly means to deliver meaningful customer experiences through first-party data and data enrichment, and how Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can help.

Treasure Data: What’s the most important challenge you’re helping your clients with today?

Andrea Ghibaudi: This is a tricky one to answer simply, as it covers a huge spectrum of challenges (and opportunities)! The main area of concern is “how to deliver powerful, trusted customer experiences.” Now, this may seem like an obvious statement, but, in today’s climate, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to harness the power of compliant, rich data—at scale—while ensuring the consumer gains your trust and loyalty.

In the modern marketing era, “how” we interact with brands and “what” we need from them as consumers, has transformed exponentially. We are navigating constant change amongst external economic, environmental, political, and social forces—and amid so much disruption, we are continuously re-evaluating what is important to them.

In addition, businesses also need to have the enterprise-wide imagination, vision, and empathy for the customer that will drive them to find creative ways to engage and serve people who crave simplification and agency. By evaluating what brings value to customers and reconsidering how a brand promise fits with customer needs, companies can refocus their efforts to drive growth and relevance.

And, a large part of understanding customers and prospects lies within the power of data and technology.

Treasure Data: What do you see as the greatest hurdle to greater use of data-driven marketing in enterprises?

Andrea: The first challenge is governance. Designing and executing cross-channel customer experiences requires the involvement of several teams both in and outside of an organization. A rigorous and well-thought out governance is the key ingredient for success. All stakeholders need to be very clear on what their role is and what responsibilities they carry, as well as which shared KPIs they need to work towards. A lack of clarity on the other end, could translate into misalignment, delays and lack of effectiveness.

The second potential challenge (and fantastic opportunity) is understanding how to create a well designed, ever improving ROI value framework. It is paramount that every small tactical data-driven marketing activation works towards business goals that mean something for the company as a whole. Many marketing practitioners start measuring campaigns against marketing efficiency KPIs.

That is a perfectly fine approach for a pilot or for the first phase of a data-driven marketing program. However, the risk of maintaining that as the only measurement approach in the long term is that the wider business could struggle to appreciate the real value that can be realized by personalized customer experiences delivered with data and technology like a CDP. A better approach would be to design a data driven marketing program that can be measured against business goals that everyone in the company can get behind (e.g., sales, retention, share of voice).

Treasure Data: How do you see CDPs playing a critical role in helping companies grow in the future?

Andrea: CDPs are going to be a key tech component of the martech industry as we edge ever closer to a privacy-first era. Considering how quickly technology is evolving as well as the exponential growth of available data, these platforms will play a critical role in enabling companies to perform data-driven marketing actions and to make informed decisions. Marketing and advertising without data will not be an option anymore.

Treasure Data: How does the Treasure Data CDP fit alongside your company’s offerings?

Andrea: Silverbullet relies on Treasure Data as our most valuable enterprise CDP offering. Treasure Data’s CDP allows our clients to collect, store, and activate first-party data, but it also has impressive computational capabilities, as well as plenty of possibilities for custom development.

In our view, Treasure Data is:

• An established platform: Treasure Data has a solid history in the CDP ecosystem, long before it became a trending category.
• Versatile: Most of Treasure Data’s functions (e.g., models and workflows) accept custom code if what’s already available OOTB doesn’t fit your needs.
• User friendly: Treasure Data CDP makes it easy to perform complex operations (such as data model normalization) instead of burdening your IT team. The result is democratized data for marketers to use.
• Secure: Treasure Data CDP has an industry-recognized framework. Once in the Treasure Data infrastructure, your data will benefit from enhanced security.

For modern marketers, the explosion of digital communications has created massive amounts of data streams which overwhelm their internal organizations. Huge pools of data can be found throughout businesses and are packed with customer insights. Treasure Data helps Silverbullet’s customers leverage these untapped business opportunities.

Treasure Data: Technically, how is your product used with Treasure Data CDP? Which tasks does it handle?

Andrea: At Silverbullet, our core business is centered around expert services that wrap around technology platforms such as Treasure Data’s CDP. The Silverbullet CX team takes the “heavy lifting off a client’s hands,” delivering complex enterprise implementations and services for its global clients. In fact, Silverbullet is one of the few independent gold services partners within the Treasure Data partner roster globally, and offers proven expertise across the entire Treasure Data technology suite, from TD Console & Toolbelt, Data Workbench, Workflows, Treasure Insights, and reporting.

However, further to our services layer, we do in fact have a Treasure Box offering with our advanced contextual targeting and insights product, 4D. Silverbullet built 4D back in 2019 in response to the shifting market towards a cookieless, first-party data centric future. With the onset of the humble cookie deprecation, legacy methodologies such as contextual targeting are making a huge comeback—and for good reason. I won’t do the full 4D sales pitch now (I’ll encourage your readers to reach out to me for further details!) However, in short, 4D enables businesses to tap into advanced machine learning and AI capabilities, to target consumers based purely on their interests and the digital environments that they spend time in. No personal IDs, no cookies, nothing. It is the next generation contextual solution helping add scale and insights to an existing first-party data strategy.

The 4D Treasure Box is an industry-first approach in combining contextual data insights with the Treasure Data CDP, which enables marketers to activate data enrichment across their customer profiles. You can find out more about the 4D Treasure Box here.

Treasure Data: What is the most interesting difference between your solution and that of your competitors? Is it unique in some way?

Andrea: The beauty of the Silverbullet offering is that it’s unique by design. We act as a new kind of service layer; one that provides a variety of bespoke specialisms, from consultancy services and system integrators to data-driven marketing activation and measurement.

Our collective expertise originates from the world of agencies, traditional consultancies, system integrators, technology vendors, and marketing teams. This crossover of professional backgrounds, expertise, and exposure to different areas of marketing puts us in a very unique position in the marketing industry. A true example of “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”

Treasure Data: Can you talk about how you solved one or two customer problems with customer data?

Andrea: A leading British television network and broadcaster has spent the past few years accelerating its digital strategy to ensure it stays relevant for the consumers of today. Part of its digital transformation journey is focused on creating a subscription based streaming service that will offer ad and ad-free options to help improve user experiences.

To fully unlock value out of digital marketing and ad sales, the leading broadcaster understood it needed to utilize technology to unlock its data for better customer experiences. Subsequently the client placed the Treasure Data platform at the very centre of a modernizing consumer experience tech stack.

Once selected, Silverbullet implemented and integrated the Treasure Data CDP on behalf of the client, and successfully completed the below projects:

• Ingested all data from various source systems (customer data, metadata, and other) via a secured methodology and then built the required orchestrations to process the data.
• Configured the CDP so that the audience building tools could deliver totally new audiences to take marketing to the next level, driving measurable consumption & subscription growth with bespoke reporting. This included brand new comprehensive data capabilities, advanced modeling opportunities and ultimate control over granular segment builds.
• Designed a Data Matching and Ad Sales offering which enables the broadcaster’s own advertisers to target their first-party data audiences via their streaming service, with powerful reporting for the client’s bespoke campaign conversions. This was also compounded by insights and prospecting to prospect out to the entire broadcaster’s audience with a coverage across 45% of the market users, and ability to deliver against an additional TD-powered predictive conversion model.

To learn more about key trends in the market, check out Silverbullet’s DataTalks Blog series, including Andrea’s discussion with Treasure Data’s own Andy Gremett. Discover Silverbullet’s full thought leadership library here.

Andrea Ghibaudi  | Managing Director, Americas
Silverbullet’s Managing Director, Americas, Andrea Ghibaudi has over 10 years’ experience in the digital marketing and martech industry. At Silverbullet, he focuses on building bespoke and successful data strategies for a variety of clients, as well as developing key partnerships with enterprise organizations and technology vendors. You can reach Andrea at andrea@wearesilverbullet.com

About Silverbullet
Silverbullet is a leading Boutique Customer Experience (CX) Partner, designed to support organizations in the delivery of transformative marketing customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. In essence, we help our clients to better communicate with their customers, whilst maximizing their investment in data and technology. For more information, visit www.wearesilverbullet.com.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this blog was published in 2021. This blog was revised on 6/15/23.