This month we released one of the biggest positioning changes in Rockerbox history. We went from touting our identity as the industry leader in MTA to showcasing the full value of our product and how it targets specific marketer challenges through the Data and Analysis Product Lines and the six products contained in them: Collect, Track, Export, Optimize, MMM, and Journey.
Post-launch, we sat down with Rockerbox co-founders Ron Jacobsen and Rick O’Toole to talk about this launch on a macro level and what it means for marketers. Read the interview below.
Why is Rockerbox releasing Product Lines and the products they contain?
Ron Jacobson: Over the past several years, we’ve taken Rockerbox from first a media buying platform to really the standard in marketing attribution and measurement, but we’re not satisfied with just stopping there. Flexibility is truly in our DNA as a company, and we know that we need to continually adapt to get to that next level.
Our goal with this product launch is to improve our product for the hundreds of companies that use us day-in-day-out, but also for those companies that might not even know what kind of marketing measurement they need today.
That’s the key thing here with our two new Product Lines: they’re customized to what our current customers really need and how they see success with Rockerbox, and we’re confident that those use cases will translate to the rest of the B2C market. If there’s one thing we really know at Rockerbox, it’s our customers.
Rick O’Toole: We've spent years and years building out the foundation around how we collect data, how we centralize it, how we do user-level data, aggregate data, all these different types of analysis. This is us finally positioning ourselves to take advantage of the hard work that we've already done in a more strategic, thoughtful, and focused way where we get the right piece of product to the right customer for what they need.
What’s important about the Data Product Line (Collect, Track, Export) and who will benefit from it?
Rick O’Toole: So I think as we think about our role as being a business and a company, it's helping marketing organizations at different levels of maturity become data driven. They're turning to Rockerbox because they need help with core business problems. Rockerbox has kind of stepped in for most of the customers that we've worked with and solved a lot of these fundamental data problems that help marketing organizations be able to take action. We’ve helped them turn what is something that's pretty nebulous to them into something that's actionable through our data centralization and analysis.
The new Data products for Rockerbox are really focused on marketing organizations. The data that we're collecting can be used by product teams, it could be used by finance teams, it could be used by lots of different people, but our data products are built for marketing organizations.
Our unique approach to building out a data product is to be able to focus on these marketing organizations, to provide them with the right data and the right transformations on top of that data so it matches back to their use cases, and get it accessible into the places that they need it to be so that their organization can run successfully.
Collect and Track are two fundamentally different types of data and Export is really making that data accessible to the right people and the right types of stakeholders within an organization.
What’s important about the Analysis Product Line (Optimize, MMM, Journey) and who will benefit from it?
Rick O’Toole: The Analysis products are really kind of leaning into the idea that there's lots of different analyses that can be performed on top of the data that we collect to help marketers make decisions. We really want the Analysis products to facilitate decision making with the right analysis for the decision that they're trying to make. This steps into our commitment to offering a diversified approach to measurement, instead of forcing an approach that we don't believe is the best.
Essentially, there are two things that customers are looking for from these analyses. One of them is insights—so they have specific questions that they're trying to answer using Rockerbox —and the other is making decisions. And the product lines that we have for analysis focus on both of these.
Optimize is recommendations on how to adjust budgets. Journey is providing deep insight into the conversion and marketing funnel, and MMM is helping to forecast the impact of macro changes that you might be making across your marketing mix. These are three big and different areas that marketers have challenges when ultimately running their organization, and they're targeting a bit of different personas and a different set of decisions powered by different data sets.
Why is this release important for the future of Rockerbox and our customers?
Ron Jacobson: Our goal with this product launch is to make Rockerbox a better business, a better organization, a better company, and also to better showcase the value that we are actually bringing to our customers. Our previous value proposition served a lot of customers, but also it minimized a lot of the very important work we do around data collection, around identity resolution, around a first party pixel, around different types of analyses that we have built that provide value in different ways to our customers. So essentially focusing so much on MTA as the foundation and then other products on top of that kept the spotlight off all the different things that Rockerbox has built.
MTA is not always the best way to make marketing decisions. Full stop. We know this, and it’s never been a secret. MTA can answer certain questions, but for example, is it the best thing for analyzing linear TV? Probably not. It's not the best way to think about forecasting and budgeting either. This doesn't mean that there's not any value there, it’s just this is not the sole value that Rockerbox provides in any way and it's not a panacea—this perfect way to answer every single marketing measurement question in existence.
All this has led to a world where we need to continue to adapt. The only constant in the B2C marketing measurement world has been adapting. And that's exactly what we’re doing. We need to be able to better reflect the value that we do provide.
Learn more about the Data and Analysis product lines and reach out to our team today for a full demo.