Last week, I joined the CloudTags team as its Head of Innovation.  Before joining, I took a 3-month sabbatical following my departure from the Advanced Analytics team at 360i. During my sabbatical, several new job opportunities became available to me, leading many friends and family members to ask, “Why CloudTags?”

I was initially drawn to CloudTags because of several factors — the intrinsic thrill of working for a startup, the chance to reunite with two former colleagues who I admired on both a professional and personal level (James Yancey and Mike Glass) and the ability to work closely with my former business school professor, Steve Stuk. As exciting as those factors were, they only paint half of the picture of why I ultimately decided to join CloudTags.

As an innovator, what really excites me is the ability to approach, and hopefully solve, the world’s biggest problems. Over the past decade, online retailers and digital marketers have become much more advanced in capturing and using online intent data to increase sales by delivering more targeted ads and website content. For the most part however, the online intent data is used in a silo with the online shopping experience. 95% of global retail sales still occur in traditional brick and mortar stores, where both a customer’s online intent data as well as their offline brick and mortar intent data are not used to enhance their shopping experience.

I firmly believe that CloudTags has assembled the right team to tackle the problem retailers have of uncollected or ignored customer intent data by building a true Omnichannel data layer. With veterans from digital marketing agencies and technology solutions companies, experienced in capturing intent data across multiple marketing channels, retail experts with a broad range of industry and product experience, big data and decision modeling wizards experienced in tying together all of the intent data to develop advanced customer profiles, and technologists capable of building solutions that deliver enhanced in-store shopping experiences. This, above everything else, led me to take the leap.

I am proud to join such an accomplished team and look forward to seeing how we will help shape the future of customer engagement in brick and mortar stores.