Matt McNeany, CEO & Founder Just a few decades ago, the only way for brands to attract customers was the billboards on highways with "one liners" that defined a brand's popularity. But, the world is a much smaller place today. Customers get a personalized "billboard" in their pockets—whether it's the smartphone, the desktop, or any other gadget that has an internet connection. However, with the shrinking attention span of the audience and the booming market competition, brands need to not only curate the content but also optimize its delivery across these channels to succeed. While there are multiple methods for brands to deliver personalized content, the question that remains is how they can leverage the internet's full potential to optimize it and power their marketing initiatives. "Before I started my company, I was working in marketing services agencies, particularly in retail. That experience led me to believe that the process of implementing marketing services is very inefficient, expensive, and slow. Companies often missed several marketing opportunities, and we wanted to do something to change that," says Matt McNeany, the founder & CEO of Code Worldwide. "We established Code Worldwide with the mission and vision to help clients invent a new future for their marketing, through data and technology."
"We use mass personalization theory to improve data quality, enhance customer segmentation, and reduce cost"
Code Worldwide is a retail marketing solution provider that brings a fresh perspective to marketing. The company combines marketing technology, data science, and unique content development and delivery strategies to help retailers deliver customized customer experiences. With Code Worldwide, retailers can not only understand customer behavior but also gain insights into the effectiveness of their marketing content. This knowledge helps companies take decisive actions and be in complete control of the customer journey.
Seeing the Big Picture in 21st Century Digital Marketing
"Many companies complain about the missing return on investments on the latest and greatest marketing technologies. The fact is, changing marketing technology will not help. The retailers should fine-tune their internal processes and have the right content strategy to engage the customers," says Ed Freed, chief strategy officer of Code Worldwide. The company believes that clients and brands could serve customers better by understanding them, listening to their needs, and offering improved services and, more importantly, measuring the engagement.
Through technology and automation, Code Worldwide eliminates many siloed, redundant processes that exist in brand marketing today. Code Worldwide's end-to-end marketing automation platform adZU enables today's marketers to streamline and optimize their marketing processes. It helps identify bottlenecks in the marketing implementation life cycle and creates ways to optimize it.
Code Worldwide augments this powerful platform with its engagement strategy, wherein they pay close attention to the clients' internal processes. This starts with understanding how clients develop new content and how they version it. After this point, Code Worldwide begins the actual marketing process for the client, starting off small and scaling the content gradually.
The company builds and deploys several proprietary algorithms that offer the analytics framework to measure audience engagement with the designed content and then tweak the content generation process. This strategy helps the clients learn which content results in better outcomes. "We use mass personalization theory to improve data quality, enhance customer segmentation, and reduce cost," says McNeany. Mass personalization can drive the value of marketing, enabling retailers and brands to achieve maximum benefit.
We established Code Worldwide with the mission and vision to help clients invent a new future for their marketing, through data and technology
adZU—The Operating System for the Future of Marketing
adZU excels as an operating system for agile marketing, helping brands and retailers tackle inherent complexities in creating and optimizing their content. It helps clients create, deliver, measure, and improve personalized experiences quickly across channels, including web, print, email, and social, among many others. Besides, it lowers production cost, improves customer communication, and optimizes the customer journey across these channels. adZU also bears a strong impact on the performance of CRM and CMS through the rich content it generates. The proven solution supports 45 languages and is designed to democratize access to modern technologies.
adZU is made of 6' studios,'—components within the platform, each designed to solve a specific challenge in the marketing content lifecycle:
1. The Marketing Content Studio, which allows clients to store, share, and tag their marketing content. Content can be repurposed and re-used , ensuring it delivers maximum value.
2. The Experience and Advertising Manager, adZU’s automated dynamic content solution. This differs from other competitive products with its ability to cover all media channels, allowing Code Worldwide to produce content for online display advertising, websites, social, CRMs, or for traditional press/ POS systems. It enables clients to manage a cross channel customer journey.
3. The Strategy and Performance Studio handles the upstream and downstream components of the client's content lifecycle. It allows clients to plan their marketing campaigns and share that across distributed business units. For retail networks like Nissan and Jaguar/Land Rover, Code Worldwide manages all the global marketing plans and investment budgets for each of the individual auto dealerships. adZU can measure the investment by product/ channel and make sure that it is at the appropriate level for the sales target. The performance elements can be correlated with the audience's behavior to discover the factors driving engagement, the expenditure, and the difference in effectiveness. This data leads to better optimization and improvement in marketing strategy.
4. The Audience Integration Manager acts as a connector into the datasets—CRM or behavioral datasets. adZU can build the bridge between the targeted audience of the client and the content that should be used. It can then optimize that content by the audience, using Code’s AI powered ‘Content Intelligence’ algorithms.
5. The Marketing Operations Manager studio controls the workflow to streamline the process of "getting the work done," between clients and agency partners. It also extends to the client the ability to model their business within the data to match their business and product structure.
6. The Integration and Services studio, which contains connectors to facilitate the publishing or ingestion of the content. This will help adZU work with their clients' existing product systems or identity management systems so that it can become a part of their solution.
Ed Freed, Chief Strategy Officer
adZU also offers the added benefits of personalization and speed. Clients can take all of those studios or pick specific ones, and Code Worldwide can add custom pieces to it if required. The versatile platform also offers a myriad of integration options that allow clients to bring content into their system with open APIs that can connect to asset management systems or product information systems. Code Worldwide has recently integrated with Samsung's product information system, which enables them to bring in data of close to a million different product lines every day that can help them market those products better. adZU can connect that data to assets, complete with an audience integration service, which allows it to connect to audience data as well. All of this is performed irrespective of where the data is sitting, i.e., a CRM system, a data management platform (DMP), or as a part of the Omnicom audience data service, which is the largest collection of 3rd party data sets in the world.
Stronger Each Day—Growing From Within
Having doubled in size in just under two years, Code Worldwide has 11 offices in four continents today, serving some of the largest retail brands in the world, including Jaguar Land Rover, Domino’s, and Ralph Lauren. The company receives insights and requests from over 1000 marketing agencies each month. Code Worldwide wants to leverage its client network to improve their visibility into the market and serve its clients better.
Innovation and transformation is a part of Code Worldwide's DNA—a key component of their culture, values, and processes. "The expectations we set for people when they join the company always value the elements of innovation and transformation. Maintaining a degree of radicalism is a key part of who we are, even as we grow," says McNeany. The company holds values around the "say what you think, and do what you say," ideology. This is the core principle with which Code Worldwide regularly inspires its people and believes in those who will roll up their sleeves and do the work.
McNeany says, "We emphasize the value of humility. Throughout our history, we have been spending a lot of time on building diversity, and measure it in many ways. We have done a good job of enabling women to grow successfully in our organization with our outreach programs for STEM students." This is evident, as today, 60 percent of Code Worldwide's leadership team are women.
For the future, Code Worldwide aims to invest in content intelligence and orchestration. Besides, the company also plans to remain focused on consulting and building partnerships in the industry to scale up its operations across the U.S.
