At ObservePoint, we know firsthand how important maintaining accurate data and becoming data-driven has become for enterprises, which is why we’re pleased to announce that we’re expanding our offering with our recent acquisition of Strala’s touchpoint management and attribution technologies. Read the official press release.

The following is a Q&A session between myself, Chris Baird, ObservePoint’s VP of Marketing, and the primary executive members of ObservePoint and the Strala business unit as they outline the details of the acquisition.

John Pestana, CEO & Co-founder of ObservePoint

Q: What is the big news?

Today we are excited to announce that Strala has become part of the ObservePoint family.

Q: Why are these two companies better together? What is the unifying mission that this acquisition helps accomplish?

Both our companies come from the same idea: to ensure enterprises are collecting accurate, actionable data.

We’ve acquired and integrated Strala’s technologies to help ensure accurate data collection and attribution throughout your organization—from creating standardized performance measurement, to validating analytics data collection, to generating accurate attribution insights that drive revenue.

Q: What does this acquisition mean for ObservePoint and Strala Customers? How does it benefit them?

You’re trying to create experiences to connect with your audience and drive your business. But you need to have the right processes and technology in place and be able to trust the data.

We’re making sure your data foundation is solid and allows you to spend less time questioning and cleansing your data and more time using it to drive your company forward.

Mikel Chertudi, Co-Founder of Strala & General Manager of Strala Business Unit

Q: Where did the idea for Strala’s solutions come from?

The idea for Strala was really born out of my own experience and the challenges and struggles that I encountered trying to understand where to deploy dollars and teams and resources to grow a brand, to acquire new customers, to retain them. So over the course of my career, I noticed that many of the other marketing leaders that were my colleagues also struggled with this problem.

I had $150 million of marketing budget at my disposal and over 130 marketing professionals that I was responsible to lead and help them understand where they should be deploying their resources to drive the optimal revenues and customers. And so those were big challenges that we faced. And that idea of where Strala came from was really born out of our own experience trying to solve those problems.

Q: More and more attribution companies are entering the marketing technology space. What is unique about Strala’s capabilities? 

There are really three things that make Strala’s platform unique in being able to provide very accurate measurement across the customer experience and specifically marketing as well. The first thing is we solve the data problem. The problem is that a lot of organizations will collect their data and then that’s where they start.

Strala’s platform approach is that we start upfront, and we pre-standardize the data. We’ve all heard the old adage, garbage in garbage out. Well, if you’re not getting good data in that’s pristine and pre-standardized, then you’re not going to have good results that you can trust and rely on. So we solved that problem.

The second problem is more of a methodology problem that we combined with a technology solution—and that is: many organizations in the space really focus in on paid advertising across advertising channels, whether it’s traditional or digital channels.

We take a much more holistic approach—we say if there’s a customer experience and an interaction with a customer, you need to be measuring that. And so our technology allows for our customers to standardize and send standardized data—both offline and online—to our solution.

The third piece is making sure that we’ve got the right models applied to solve the problem. So we have multiple insight models that can be applied. Some of them are algorithmic in nature, some of them are heuristic in nature. So when you add these three elements together, it makes us very unique in the market. And we’ve essentially productized what used to be lots of services and data cleansing in a platform approach.

Q: Who is this solution resonating with and what value are they seeing from it?

We see that a lot of our customers get really excited about the quality of the data. And the insights that they’re able to achieve. A lot of our customers are the chief marketing officers of fortune 500 brands, and they get very involved in the conversations from the get go because they need to know where should they invest their dollars and their teams and their time to maximize this.

Heads of marketing, heads of experience are becoming much more accountable to the CFO and to the CEO to drive growth within an organization. And they have to do it more efficiently. And so they get really excited when they see the dimensionality of the data, but also the fact that they can really trust it.

Rob Clarke, Co-Founder of Strala & VP Product for Strala Business Unit

Q: Could you tell us about the three different products, how they work together and what makes each of them unique?

Strala has three main offerings. It starts with Touchpoints. Most companies are still building tracking for their campaigns in an outdated, limited way: with spreadsheets. Touchpoints allows you to build predefined and highly standardized campaign tracking of every single touchpoint across your customer journey.

Once every touchpoint has been defined, JourneyStream captures all online and offline interactions with those touchpoints across every stage of the customer journey, from marketing to sales to post-purchase interactions.

And then Prism is where it all comes together. Through rules-based and algorithmic attribution models, you can prove the value of your efforts and justify your investments.

We’ve gone far beyond attribution by channel, and are able to show attribution to specific pieces of content, so you know what messages are resonating with your audience. Prism delivers world-class insights on top of world-class data.

Patrick Hillery, VP Product at ObservePoint

Q: What is the problem ObservePoint was founded to solve?

ObservePoint was created to help enterprises collect and trust their analytics data. Our products enable these organizations to automatically test, validate, and monitor data collection across their digital properties.

Q: What is the new challenge ObservePoint’s customers voiced that integrating Strala’s technologies will help to solve?

More recently, our customers have come to us with needs for supporting the process of creating, launching, and measuring the performance of marketing campaigns.

When we found Strala, we knew it would be a natural fit to help a larger audience with these data collection challenges.

Capture Every Touchpoint. Ensure Quality Data. Uncover Attribution Insights.

Strala’s products—Touchpoints, JourneyStream, and Prism—will help you: standardize data before you even start collecting it, automate campaign tracking and touchpoint management, and provide deep insights into your attribution and ROI. ObservePoint enables you to test and validate all your data collection technologies to ensure accurate data. Together, these technologies provide you industry-leading solutions and processes for performance measurement across marketing channels and the entire customer experience.

To find out more about how ObservePoint and the new Strala offering can benefit your business, schedule a demo.