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Monica C. Smith looks to inspire marketers and agencies with her belief in holistic data aggregation and its ability to power winning campaigns.
"This is not just about direct response," says Monica C. Smith, founder and CEO of Parsippany, N.J.-based I.Predictus. "It's about direct mail, Web, E-mail and all of the different types of social media. Where there's data, there's I.Predictus."
Smith, who also founded DR industry stalwart and fellow Direct Response Marketing Alliance (DRMA) member Marketsmith 15 years ago (she also still serves as CEO), launched I.Predictus in 2011, about three years after Marketsmith began serving the direct response space in earnest. "The concept for the technology and the delivery platform was born of necessity," Smith says of I.Predictus. "At Marketsmith, in the role of campaign manager, we'd become very comfortable with industry data. But because the data was so disparate and so inconsistent, it caused Marketsmith to add headcount, which meant our margins weren't getting any better. I wanted full automation, and that's how I.Predictus was really born."
Smith - a hybrid technologist, strategist and brand champion - has worked with Fortune 50 companies to niche marketers throughout her career. Marketsmith's growth (the company ranks No. 389 on the 2013 Inc. 500) afforded her the insight and opportunity to create I.Predictus with the goal of serving the betterment of the entire business community.
But the road has not been completely smooth. "There have been three staging areas of I.Predictus," Smith says. "First was understanding whether or not investing in the DR industry was something that I wanted to do and should do. I canvassed industry leaders and the feedback was positive. The second piece was that what I wanted to create was an environment where marketers and agencies could use data holistically and in partnership. I needed to be able to create a data platform where everyone was on the same page."
It was the third part that caused a bit of a setback. "When I initially presented it to the marketplace last year (in September 2012), I recognized that some folks got it, and some folks felt it was too complicated. I made a very big financial decision to...