Jed Schneiderman Talks About The Age of Information & How Businesses Use Our Data

Jed is the Executive Vice-President of Growth and Marketing at EQ Works. Jed has dipped his toes in many different workforces, first getting his undergrad in Philosophy and working for a little while before going back to business school, Jed decided to get into marketing which pointed him into the direction of packaging goods. He then spent four years working for Procter and Gamble which taught him a lot about marketing, strategies, and equity. He also worked in the AOL internet space when it first started and got to “cut his teeth” with internet subscription products, software, browsers, messaging, Netscape, and more. Then, Jed got curious about the working agency side so he spent a number of years working in agencies doing loyalty and permission marketing such as email. After that, Jed decided to work in the entertainment industry and had a hand in launching the MTV TV station, now called Bell Media, and helped put tv online, like iTunes and on-demand, as well as streaming and selling some of the first pre-rolled video ads. After this, Jed was on the team that relaunched the search engine business at Microsoft, Bing. Jed decided after all of his endeavors that he was deemed unemployable, so he started his own company: Tapped Mobile. For 7 years he worked there before being acquired in 2018 by EQ Works based out of Toronto.

Bringing us to the present, EQ Works helps brands use location to map the consumer journey. If you think about where a consumer goes in the physical world, they use this data to inform and create a strategy to ultimately deliver creative that connects with consumers and drives results like a store visit, an app download, etc. All the data they use is privacy compliant, solely permission-based, primarily only using the Software Development Kit data so it’s aggregated on a national level and through that they have created a tool that has all these data layers that allow you or a client to create a custom audience segment and then message them or understand their movements and patterns to do a regional or even national marketing more effectively. They have data on 18 million Canadians, allowing them to create in-depth (private) user personas that they can then use to direct advertisements to the right audiences and know what avenues of advertisements are getting the best results.

Jed believes we're in an era where brand trust matters like never before. Users data is the commodity for a lot of apps and businesses, your time and your information is how they generate revenue. “There's always the opportunity for brands to build more trust with consumers,” Jed argues, most people don’t read the terms and conditions so you might not even know what your information is being used for. Jed states that the basic fact of this day and age of data and technology is that if something is made to be free, there's probably a “quid pro quo” and it probably asks us all to agree before we do anything. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see our data being used. “If it's too good to be true, it probably is.”

There’s a fight over consumers' eyeballs and attention, so the need for data and user information is the top priority for brands these days. Things like mailing lists, emails, or phone numbers are how brands can keep hold of attention and keep direct contact with the consumer. Jed states that the importance of gathering information in this way is crucial, simply because you cannot trust social platforms to always work for you or the audiences you're trying to reach. Services like Facebook have all the power in their hands, they have the right to change their services and they have the rights to all the data that is collected on their site. By controlling your own outreach and having a 1-to-1 relationship with the customer, you must own the channel of communication through in-person communication or direct mail or email. Jed says this is the most efficient way to reach out to your audience without interference from using large platforms.

Whatever business you're in, you need to figure out what value looks like when creating your email campaigns. If you want to build your following so you can reach out to the audiences that matter, there needs to be an incentive. You don't need to commit to sending out an email every week, it matters more what value your content has. Less is more! Product updates and helpful information is what you should be sharing for optimal value.

Jed finds inspiration from these resources:

• “The Challenger Sale” by Matthew Dixon
• “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle
• Anything by Adam Grant
• LinkedIn
• New York Times

Written by Juliana Bermudez