Red Herring has been selecting the most exciting and promising start-ups and “scale ups” since 1995. Finalists are still evaluated individually from a large pool of hundreds of candidates based across North America. Twenty major criteria underlie the scoring and process. They include, among others: the candidate company’s addressable market size, its IP and patents, its financing, the proof of concept, trailing revenues and management’s expertise. Each company goes through an individual interview after filling out a thorough submission, complemented by a due diligence. The list of finalists often includes the best performing and prominent companies of that year.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the company’s actual track record and standing, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

2013 will be remembered as a special vintage. “The finalists list confirms the excellent choices made by entrepreneurs and VCs and the start-ups’ solid roots in corporate America, embracing their innovations. By all metrics, it emphasizes the United States’ entrepreneurial excellence,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring.

Finalist selections for the 2013 edition of the Red Herring 100 North America award are based upon technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the fields of security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, life sciences, cloud, mobile and others completed their submissions to qualify for the award.

Finalists are asked to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring North America Forum in Monterey, Calif., May 21 to 23, 2013. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of May 23 at the event.

Please follow the Red Herring conference at https://twitter.com/digitalherring hashtag #RedHerring100

About IDInteract:

IDInteract, Inc. enables enterprise digital marketers to proactively identify and convert market demand into revenue with an easy‐to‐use software-as‐a‐service platform called Demand Exchange™.  Their solution abstracts and analyzes raw consumer data from multiple sources, and consolidates that information into individual, group, event, and community “Personas,” indicating real‐time consumer demand for brands, products and services. Using these demand signals, Demand Exchange recommends and automates interaction with the most qualified prospects while continually measuring business results and return-on‐investment. For more information, visit www.idinteract.com, follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

“Our inclusion in the Cool Vendor report is confirmation of our ability to deliver highly qualified leads with greater than a 10X customer acquisition rate creating immediate measurable value for our customers,” said Matthew Standish, Chairman and CEO of IDInteract. “With Demand Exchange™ our customers more effectively convert leads to sales while massively improving customer retention, engagement, market intelligence and up-sell or cross-sell.”

About IDInteract:
IDInteract, Inc. enables enterprise digital marketers to proactively identify and convert market demand into revenue with an easy‐to‐use software-as‐a‐service platform called Demand Exchange™. Their solution abstracts and analyzes raw consumer data from multiple sources, and consolidates that information into individual, group, event, and community “Personas,” indicating real‐time consumer demand for brands, products and services. Using these demand signals, Demand Exchange recommends and automates interaction with the most qualified prospects while continually measuring business results and return-on‐investment. For more information, visit www.idinteract.com, follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

Disclaimer:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner Analysis of IDInteract by Robert Hetu
Published by Gartner: 25 April 2013

Why Cool:
IDInteract provides demand identification and automation of personas that empower marketers to identify and interact with highly qualified consumers. IDInteract finds demand signals across mobile apps, social media, picture sharing, videos, forums and blogs to interpret unstructured data into meaningful and contextual data for both retail and consumer markets. Demand signals are patterns that emerge through an analysis of the online behavior of individuals, groups and communities — IDInteract calls this behavior “digital body language” and uses it to identify what consumers are saying and to help predict which customers are ready to buy or engage, leading potentially to highly qualified leads.

Through highly qualified lead acquisition, IDInteract fulfills demand with automated prospect identification, interaction and revenue conversion with a fully integrated software as a service (SaaS) product platform and innovative visual interface. It consolidates data into highly contextual profiles called “personas” to target individuals, groups, events and communities that indicate a high propensity to purchase, leading to a sales conversion opportunity. The complete contextualized personas enhance the retailer’s ability to target market and campaign messaging and reduce the need for expensive use of broad promotional materials, potentially increasing conversion.

Enhanced dashboarding capabilities enables the user to view personas and take actions using a visually informative application to drive engagement. IDInteract holds patents pending that outline market identification using demand signals that lead to the most highly qualified likely buyers of a brand’s product or service. Typical use in retail includes:

■ Customer acquisition — Identify and engage prospects for specific products and services, including a competitor’s customers who are expressing dissatisfaction and looking for alternatives.

■ Customer retention — Identify and engage existing customers who are loyal to a brand and product. Reward loyal customers with special offers like events, limited offers and discounts on future purchases.

■ Upsell or cross-sell — Proactively identify interest areas of existing customers, and suggest additional offerings to increase customer revenue contribution and brand engagement.

■ Market intelligence — Understand and track market awareness and perception for topics, issues, brands and products. Identify significant opinion leaders and influencers, and understand the size of their personal networks.

Challenges:
IDInteract’s initial product launch was in December 2011. It has 15 client contracts with 14 deployments, as well as a pilot program for The Sports Authority and a few other retail chains, providing experience with product marketers. In contrast to a market price of more than $15 for highly qualified leads, an IDInteract persona costs $1.50 for a one-year commitment and is continuously updated, presenting leads that never expire. IDInteract’s ability to directly tie the performance of personas to their response rates is a significant advantage of this type of pricing approach. The subscription-based pricing model fits very nicely within a project that must show organic value. Privacy, compliance and audit are built into this enterprise-based solution that has all the feeds for audit compliance.

Who Should Care:
A CIO, CTO, CMO, chief digital officer, senior vice president of loyalty or senior vice president of e-commerce who is seeking a way to improve customer conversion rates for promotional activity via personalized offers, will find the personas provide excellent demand identification capabilities.

The partnership will allow MA to implement the Seattle-based company’s powerful demand identification and marketing lead acquisition platform for Michigan companies, providing access to valuable consumer purchasing behavior through demand-based analytics. The Platform will enable companies to identify real-time interest in specific brands, products and services, empowering hyper-targeted, in-the-most customer engagement.

“At Marketing Associates, we are committed to seamlessly integrating emerging technologies into our traditional marketing services,” said Sameer Desai, Executive Vice President of MA.  “We are excited to partner with such an innovative company and help our clients use social media channels to engage their target audiences more powerfully than ever before.”

IDInteract opened a new office in Detroit this February to support strategic relationship-building following the successful launch of its flagship product, Demand Exchange™.

“Our relationship with Marketing Associates is indicative of our continued customer momentum with a focus on Automotive and Consumer Products.,” Matt Standish, CEO of IDInteract said. “We are very excited to expand our footprint into key Detroit-area markets and collaborate with MA to deliver actionable customer insights to regional and national companies in innovative ways.”

About Marketing Associates:

Founded in 1967, Marketing Associates is a technology-enabled marketing services company headquartered in Detroit.  Marketing Associates has served clients for over 45 years as a developer of analytically driven integrated sales and marketing initiatives focused on delivering measurable results. For more information, visit www.marketingassociates.com, follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

About IDInteract:

IDInteract, Inc. enables enterprise digital marketers to proactively identify and convert market demand into revenue with an easy‐to‐use software-as‐a‐service platform called Demand Exchange™.  Their solution abstracts and analyzes raw consumer data from multiple sources, and consolidates that information into individual, group, event, and community “Personas,” indicating real‐time consumer demand for brands, products and services. Using these demand signals, Demand Exchange recommends and automates interaction with the most qualified prospects while continually measuring business results and return-on‐investment. For more information, visit www.idinteract.com, follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

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A key strategy for anyone working within RTB in 2013, will be to approach the mass of data available to us with a set of questions that you want answers to, and key achievable goals that you want to reach using in-depth analysis.  In 2012, the industry has fully woken up to the idea that audience insight is required to make RTB an effective, efficient and targeted way of buying an audience. In the year ahead, this understanding needs to be built upon by focussing on specific outcomes that you want to see from your data analysis – be it third party, first party or impression data – with the aim to consolidate your efforts in the never ending maze that is the world of Big Data.

I think we are going to see CMOs put a large focus on analytics (and hiring/acquiring talent (human IP and software) with a acumen for analytics and measurement) with the CTO playing counsel through their analysis. With the advent of myriad digital tracking mechanisms we can no longer track “campaigns” at a micro level—we have to look at larger macro marketing KPIs and direct link to the viability and effectiveness of how everything works together, collectively using products like Tableau.

With the emergence of digital medium at the core of any marketing outreach and it ability to produce huge amount of consumer data; marketers will be faced with an enormous task to analyze the data and ensure that they alter their channel/strategies based on the intelligence and not necessary blindly following the so called current marketing trends. They need to analyze what works for them and how. Therefore I believe more and more marketers would require garnering their analytical ability to understand the space based on large amount of consumer data.

Thanks to consumers’ increasing use of mobile devices and social media, the volume and variety of data points available to marketers continues to grow at a staggering pace. In 2013, we will see marketers focus on implementing processes that enable them to react to both historical and real-time data to create more personalized online customer experiences in the moment. In order to keep pace with consumer expectations and competitors, marketers must focus on harnessing Big Data sets that determine the location of a customer, his or her past buying behaviors, the current weather conditions in their particular area, in-session behavior, and more. This will enable marketers to better tailor the online experience to the individual customer, resulting in a more positive experience and, ultimately, more revenue.

Big data has already become a reality for many in 2012, and the trend for 2013 is the capacity to act upon this information.  The challenge in the long run is not collecting all of your data in “big data” but applying making this data available for hypothesis building and business tests.

‘Big Data’ will evolve by necessity into ‘Big Insight’ as this buzzword gets a much needed refinement. There has always been too much data. It’s just that now it’s has been democratized and metastasized into an unwieldy mess that only benefits storage companies and tech pundits. Expect victims of Big Data hype to lead an insurrection against use of terms like ‘Big Data’ and ‘Native Ads’.

There are more than 1.4 billion consumers spending 22% of their online time on social platforms — and that number grows every day. So for business-to-consumer companies, big data equals big marketing data, and that in turn means big social data — since social networks provide brands with real-time data about both their content and their fans.  In 2013, it will become crucial for brands to tap into this treasure trove of behavioral and preferences data.  We’ll see brands investing in technologies that can help them access and analyze this data, so they can create more engaging content and run ROI-driven marketing campaigns.

Big data is completely overused and totally misunderstood.  The subject is however important, but contextualizing what it really means and how businesses need to be more data-centric is of crucial importance.  Data scientists are the new rock stars and expect some “big data” acquisitions and consolidation in 2013 a the startups who are figuring it out gain traction.

If 2012 was the year of Big Data, 2013 will be the year of real time marketing.  Marketers will need to move beyond management of Big Data associated with social media to focus on identifying and capitalizing on the conversation drivers. In 2013, brands must learn to listen, analyze and react in real time to what is being said about their brand and competitors.  Embracing real-time marketing means setting up your marketing organizations and agencies to react in a nimble manner to what is being said in the social space. It can affect every aspect of marketing including:  creative, content, media plans, influencers strategies, detractor strategies, and PR.  Brands that embrace it are the ones that will dominate their industries in 2013.

In the coming year, expect to see more brands getting a handle on this to offer customers more targeted offers across all channels, in real-time.Essentially, if a brand can measure, analyze and directly translate this knowledge into improved decision-making and customer experiences, it will drive improved business performance.  In fact, most businesses have an abundance of useful data, however very few are using this data to provide targeted individual experiences—at the right time—in order to respond to savvy consumers’ needs.

I believe big data will be all the rage in 2013.  However, if we are to really benefit from big data, we need to address some very fundamental issues and change the ways big data is currently leveraged.  Many companies are using big data sets to correlate historical effects to predict future effects, without understanding the causation behind those effects.  Correlation does not equal causation.  Big data sets have also become extremely large, difficult to manage, and challenging to extract real insight.  Additionally, big data lacks human context; it does not tell you the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ behind the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’.  As we overcome these issues, big data will begin to come into its own.

More companies will adopt analytics and data platforms to collect, manage and leverage the insights hidden in the enormous amounts of data generated by their digital activities and systems.

For many in our industry, it has been the ‘Year of Mobile’ for at least the last five years – but ‘big data’ is fast stealing the mantle and is certain to be one of 2013’s most talked about subjects.   

Technology is enabling faster and more efficient buying of media and allocation of marketing spend. Organisations with individuals who have the analytic skills to interpret the insights and trends that are coming out of big data are best positioned to benefit from these technological changes, whilst brands are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of actionable, real time insights into consumers.

As the amount of data produced continues to escalate, the value retailers will place on working with clear and easy-to-understand data will also increase. Advertisers are taking control of their data to empower trusted partners to deliver better results.  The ability to consolidate and manage customer data in a clear and user-friendly format gives your marketing department and other business stakeholders, from executives to analysts, the power to use data to their advantage. The implementation of Real-Time Optimisation within IT systems will also impact on the user experience, as brands are better able to get a handle on their internal processes.

Performance marketers will begin make the shift to key performance indicators that genuinely make use of big data. They will start blending their reliance on transactional-based metrics like conversion rate, cost-per-action, and return on ad spend with a focus on customer lifetime value.  Big data will help marketers begin to focus on cross-sell instead of up-sell, it will help marketers to allow customers to try a new product, and it will help them understand what entry price point works. The days of not knowing which 50% of a marketer’s advertising doesn’t work are about to be a thing of the past.

It’s astonishing how we like to confuse ourselves in this industry by creating more and more names for things! Big Data is one such term. The essence of it though is more than a fad. Big Data is the promise of digital marketing realized. It is the idea that we can remove more and more wastage from our media plans, and get to the real individuals who are likely to convert. That we can surround and understand everyone, and take that data and make it actioanable.  And here we see Programmatic wrapped up with Big Data. Big Data by definition is really, really big! It is so big that it becomes hard to manage. Programmatic is proposed the solution to that – it gives us a way to combine many such data points and spit out some real value. So in 2013 everyone and his dog will realize that Big Data and Programmatic are the future, but this may create an artificial high. For instance, knowing that you can target ’30-something, female owners of blind Golden Retrievers, who live in Chicago’ is amazing if you are selling bedazzled, blacked-out canine glasses in Illinois, until you realize there are 7 people that match your profile and have to then start dropping points of data to get more scale. Big Data and Programmatic Marketing are here to come, but have to be used correctly.

Gartner believes that in 2013, enterprises will move away from the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse, replacing it with a multi-system approach that leverages content management, data warehouses, and data marts, among others, that offers a more efficient, logical approach to the Big Data management challenge.   Just as Gartner foresees a more intelligent approach to Big Data management, we believe that a more streamlined, integrated approach to data analytics will gain traction in the coming year.  Rather than analyzing data from a certain channel – such as social media or mobile – in a vacuum, enterprises will seek out solutions that cross-pollinate data across these silos to create a more wholistic view of brand sentiment and demand within the market