Protecting Their Turf
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With data protection top of mind for many companies these days, one marketer offers his perspective on what it takes to position privacy software to win in a tech category brimming with old stalwarts and new entrants BY MOLLY SOAT | STAFF WRITER
 msoat@ama.org
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he Home Depot’s data breach—one of the most recent in a string of digital information thefts at large retail outlets— resulted in 56 million customers’ credit and debit card information falling into hackers’ hands. The home improvement retailer’s experience is yet another example of the perils of doing business in the digital age.
While it presents a formidable challenge to many brands’ success, the increasingly precarious position of customer data in the digital realm has reinforced a burgeoning market category: corporate security software. The financial data theft at The Home Depot represents just one type of digital invasion—a malware infection at point-of-sale card readers—but it has reaffirmed the need for protection of financial and personal information across every customer touch point. According to Gartner, the information security market grew 5% last year, with vendor revenues reaching $19.9 billion. The three category leaders—Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro, which rank Nos. 1, 2 and 3, respectively, according to Gartner—combined hold a 35% market share. However, the market is large enough that smaller players still are managing to attract Fortune 1,000 clients. Ensighten, for example, a San Jose, Calif.-based company that was founded in 2009 as a tag-management software provider, now offers “Ensighten Privacy” software to clients including Wal-Mart, United Airlines, Microsoft, Capital One, E-Trade and T-Mobile. Ensighten’s
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What does Ensighten do? How do you differentiate your product from the throngs of privacy software offerings out there?
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When people talk about ‘privacy’ on the news, privacy and security tend to be used interchangeably. In some cases, they may be similar, but our privacy offering is really about ensuring that only certain data is being leveraged in the ways that are appropriate, whereas security is more about malware pieces, for example,
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privacy-management software suites manage outside websites’ ability to track a site’s visitors, and also organize the data that marketing teams glean from tracking their customers online—and keep that information safe from theft. Ensighten’s software doesn’t deal with malware, specifically, but rather protects customer data from peeping third-party vendors by managing browsers’ cookies, which track consumers’ movements and data entries online. Darr Gerscovich, vice president of marketing at Ensighten, says that his company’s technology builds off of other providers’ offerings using an open platform. In other words, Ensighten’s clients can use the company’s technology to organize and protect the data that they gather through their other technology vendors, such as their e-mail marketing platforms and analytics tools. Marketing News spoke with Gerscovich about why marketing teams are getting more involved in privacy software selection and how his job as a privacy software marketer has changed since major customer data breaches have been making front-page news.
which our offerings aren’t designed to take care of. … We’re using technology within the browser to prevent the browser from communicating to any third-party service. It’s a unique approach and by far the most comprehensive approach to take.
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Your client base includes airlines and financial services firms, and you’re competing against brands such as Cisco and McAfee for their business. How do you market
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your software? How do you create a unique value proposition in a crowded space?
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Helping tell our customers’ stories through content marketing and testimonials—that’s the key piece for us. That’s what it takes to cut through the clutter and have other global brands recognize that the leaders in their space are doing this and, therefore, they should be paying attention to it. … With this notion of privacy and security, there are a lot of scare tactics in the market and some of them may be valid, but the important thing is to position it as, it’s about generating positive interactions with customers. For our customers who [demonstrate to the marketplace that they] have privacy concerns, it positions them well for their customers. It communicates that they care about them, and they want to give them visibility into how they are or are not being tracked, and give them options to make changes so they could feel that the brands they’re engaging with care about their privacy. That’s key at a high level. …
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Content that is driven by one’s customer base has a big appeal because it’s not the brand’s voice, but the customer’s. That resonates much more strongly than anything I could say. It’s important to be very educational, and it’s important to back that up with clients’ voices as opposed to your own.
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Who do you work with at these client companies? Do you go directly to the C-suite or tech departments? Does the marketing department get involved in the decision making, considering how involved marketers are in data management?
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The market is changing. Historically, these conversations were driven within corporations within their legal and privacy compliance teams. IT gets involved because anytime you’re touching a website or needing to add or remove something, they’ll be involved, but the conversation, itself, is being driven from legal.
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What we’re seeing now, though, is that it’s marketing raising their hands because marketing is stuck in the middle. A lot of the pieces that they need to run their business and drive and optimize marketing initiatives are the various tools or offerings that are also allowing for this kind of potential leakage of data. As a result, they’re stuck in the middle between legal compliance and their projects. As awareness is being raised, they’re the ones who are raising their hands first and starting to drive the conversation. It’s not typical right now, but we’re going to see more and more of that.
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Speaking of privacycompliance teams, how much of a factor are federal privacy regulations in your marketing initiatives?
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There are really two pieces to compliance: One is a brand’s own corporate compliance, where they set certain standards for themselves and they want to make sure that they enforce those. For example, our clients are Fortune 1,000 brands and it’s fairly common for them to have a privacy policy that will clearly state, ‘We do not share your thirdparty data.’ But they work with so many outside technologies that it’s really hard to keep a legitimate thirdparty technology partner from taking data that they shouldn’t be taking, or another vendor outside piggybacking on that third party. No. 1 is making sure they’re complying with their own privacy policy and [the next biggest concern] is the regulatory framework in any given country or region that they’re operating in. The federal regulations come up only as much as the bite from the fines because that’s where the companies begin to notice and begin to care. The reality is that while many companies may have regulations, the number of countries that brands are actively concerned about being in compliance with, from NOVEMBER 2014 | MARKETING NEWS
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a regulatory standpoint, is about 40. My job is to make sure that they know that we ensure full compliance.
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How do you help your clients communicate that they are taking the steps to protect customers’ security? Is help with this kind of communication something that brands are looking for?
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We work with brands that want to tailor anything that appears on their site to the look and feel that they want, and that’s fundamental. For the most part, they want a solution that’s quick and easy to deploy, meets their privacy needs and gives them visibility into potential risk areas. But it really depends on who’s driving the conversation now. If it’s a legaland privacy-driven conversation, they’re much less attuned to the communications implications, whereas when marketing is involved, they’re much more sensitive to consumers. It’s really the nature of the roles at play.
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Talk about if, or how, recent high-profile data breaches have affected your job. Is there more interest in online security and federal compliance following ‘front-page news’ breaches like those at Target and Home Depot?
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In general, it’s raising awareness in society as well as with brands across the board, and that’s also going to accelerate how marketing is starting to lead the conversation more and more. It’s really about making society—and marketers and corporations are a part of society—making everyone much more aware. … We should also give credit, if you will, to [Edward] Snowden, as he made this much more of a dinner table conversation and therefore raised awareness significantly. We’ve noticed, as a result, a pickup in terms of interest in privacy.
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The ubiquity of mobile has opened a Pandora’s box of potential security leaks. How has mobile affected your job?
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We talk about ‘website’ a lot on my team and with my clients, but mobile sites and mobile apps are just as applicable to the conversation. Everyone is seeing increased usage on their mobile sites and, therefore, mobile is critically important. The world is becoming much more complex, especially for brands, because the number of digital touch points is exploding. We talk about the ‘Internet of Things,’ all of these devices that are starting to hang off of the Internet. For a brand to engage with their customers and create a seamless experience across all platforms is becoming much harder. Therefore, the need for an open marketing platform that works across all digital touch points and not only helps them collect data in a standardized way— and they can own that data—but also allows them to actually act on it in real time across all of these touch points is critical. … Our products run on a single line of code, which is the same for all of our products, we refer to it as our bootstrap. That’s placed on clients’ websites and then that gives our clients access to our open marketing platform.
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“We tend to talk a lot about laptops and tablets, and now we’re talking about mobile and beyond. … Think of United Airlines and what other digital touch points they might have with their customers, like airport kiosks. We’re deployed across those, as well.”
… Privacy has evolved and now we’re in the world of not only managing tags, but helping brands act on real data across all digital touch points. We tend to talk a lot about laptops and tablets, and now we’re talking about mobile and beyond. For example, think of United Airlines and what other digital touch points they might have with their customers, like airport kiosks. We’re deployed across those, as well.
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You are a relatively young company, but talk about having to compete with new startups.
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The startups are the ones that are most likely going to bring the innovative, new approach to things, and I put us in that category. We’re taking a unique approach and we’re a young company … but the one thing that we know is there are always going to be new offerings and we’re not always going to have the best ideas in the room, and that’s where the importance of our open platform comes into play. The open platform
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was designed from the get-go to support all technologies and all vendors. Therefore, if there’s a new offering that clients want to use, they can easily deploy that through our product and our platform. … Every year, the pace of innovation and new companies coming in increases, and that’s why every year, these competitors multiply. From a brand standpoint, marketers want to work with best-of-breed offerings and solutions within each of the categories, like e-mail retargeting and analytics. An open marketing platform like ours allows them to plug into the platform and easily deploy their vendor of choice. In essence, they’re building their own marketing cloud directly on our platform. How this ties into startups and innovation for us is that we embrace them. We have our offerings, but if someone has an offering that’s better for the client, we have to be able to allow them to use it. If you contrast that with some of the other approaches in the market, the incumbents in the cloud marketing space tend to have closed suites. Through either acquisition or development, they have a set of products
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that they loosely integrate. That offering might encompass various categories, like retargeting and analytics, but the truth is that they’re not best in breed. We believe the better approach for a marketer is to go with an open marketing platform and that will enable them to build what suits their needs at that moment in time. We are able to market our product as an enhancement of all of those specific products. All of these various vendors are working with clients on their website, mobile app, across all of the different digital touch points. They’re all collecting data, but they’re all siloed: Vendor A has no idea what Vendor B has collected. By plugging into an open platform like ours, we’ve standardized the data on a data layer and allowed them to share that data. … This is a long way of saying that we love the innovation we’re seeing because we feel like we’re a part of it, and our growth is a testament. We don’t know what’s next and we don’t have all of the answers, but we believe that the open platform is definitely the right way to approach the market. m
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