Adam Greco joins Hightouch

After 20 years in digital analytics, I'm making a change! This week, I started a new product evangelist role at Hightouch, a smaller company in a different space. While I’ve given my heart and soul to digital analytics, I love learning and am ready to branch out and try something new. I'm excited about this opportunity and would like to share why I am making such a significant change.

In your career, there are key moments where, if you’re lucky, you can identify macro trends taking place and capitalize on them. I’ve been fortunate (or lucky) to recognize a few of these trends in my career. At the start of my career, I recognized that technology would be the future, and I left finance to be a computer programmer. In the early 2000s, I saw that digital marketing and data analytics were game-changers, so I took a chance on a startup called Omniture (now Adobe Analytics), which dominated the enterprise digital analytics space. Next, I felt that Salesforce would upend the traditional CRM market and joined the company to help market its products. A few years ago, I believed that the different digital analytics disciplines of marketing, product, and experience analytics would converge, so I joined Amplitude to help drive that change, and the industry followed. I’ve always found that it’s more fun to help lead industry change than to watch it unfold around you passively.

Over the last year, my “spidey sense” was again triggered. There were a few interrelated macro trends that I kept seeing over and over:

1. The Rise of Cloud Data Warehouses - As organizations look to find one place for all customer data, cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, and BigQuery have emerged as the destination of choice due to their flexibility and cost advantages over other platforms.
2. Warehouse-First (or Composable) Mindset - As cloud data warehouses become faster, more powerful, and more central to businesses, many organizations have shifted to a “warehouse-first” mindset. Instead of your customer data “system of record” living in a handful of distributed SaaS tools, many organizations now consider their cloud warehouse the source of truth, and there's a new burgeoning wave of SaaS products that directly leverages this worldview. It offers far more control, privacy, flexibility, and future agility—especially for complex enterprises.
3. Digital Analytics Isn’t Enough - While digital analytics tools are great at improving websites and mobile apps, this data must be combined with all other customer data to enable true personalization and experience optimization. Organizations have complex data that goes far beyond behavioral data. Because of this, I have seen many digital analytics teams begin sending digital analytics data directly or indirectly to cloud data warehouses, where it can be part of a 360-degree view of the customer.
4. AI Will Impact Marketing - While AI has achieved peak buzzword status these days, it’s hard to argue that it won’t significantly impact marketers. AI thrives in environments where humans have to make decisions based on hundreds of data points, and there are many cases where that’s true for marketers.

So, when taken together, what do these trends mean? I believe that over the next few years, we will undertake a technological shift in which:

• Marketing experiences and journeys, including analysis, experiments, emails, advertising, etc., will emanate from the cloud data warehouse.
• Packaged SaaS solutions that store customer data will struggle to match cloud data warehouses' flexibility, scale, and interoperability.
• Data-intensive SaaS solutions will eventually pivot to reading directly from the warehouse.
• AI will help marketers optimize and personalize customer experiences, and AI that runs from more complete data in the warehouse will be more effective.

So Why Hightouch?

Warehouse-First Mindset
Around the time these thoughts of warehouse-first and AI were swirling in my head, I came across Hightouch. In my role at Amplitude, I spoke to many organizations that started using Hightouch to build audiences from cloud data warehouses and then send these audiences to SaaS products like Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Iterable, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. In many cases, Hightouch, by blending customer data from the warehouse, made other vendor solutions better. For example, imagine a situation in which an organization has some customer data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other customer data in Adobe AEP. It’s unlikely that most organizations will put or duplicate every customer touchpoint in both Salesforce or AEP (this would be expensive!), but instead, they may route both data sources into a more cost-effective cloud data warehouse (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Azure). Once there, Hightouch’s Composable CDP can build audiences by combining customer data from each vendor and stream data and audiences to any destination (e.g., Google Ads, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, Marketo, Hubspot, etc.). Hightouch acts as an orchestration layer on top of the ultimate source of truth, which is increasingly the cloud data warehouse. There are countless scenarios where a warehouse-first mindset can have a synergistic effect and add value to prior investments in existing cloud data warehouses and SaaS solutions.

Leader in AI
Another thing that drew me to Hightouch is its AI strategy. I’ve been in technology long enough to roll my eyes at whatever “the next big thing” is– and, of course, every company is pitching an AI product right now. But when I got to try AI Decisioning for myself, I felt like I had finally seen a product worth the AI hype.

Imagine you are a marketer with thousands of customers to communicate with, but each customer is at a different stage and has different needs. Historically, marketers have manually configured super-complex message journeys using unruly flowcharts and decision trees. Even then, most customers get just a handful of different messages that are only slightly personalized.

AI Decisioning removes the manual work and headaches associated with message optimization and personalization. Its agent looks at customer data, tests hundreds of different messages, creatives, timings, etc., and then uses reinforcement learning to adapt and improve over time. It leverages customer data from the warehouse to optimize/personalize and feeds results back into the warehouse to improve future interactions. Seeing it in action and hearing from customers using it (webinar today!) drove home these trends I’ve been seeing with the data warehouse and AI– and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

A New Adventure
The more I learned about Hightouch, the more I saw that its founders' views on the centricity and inevitability of the cloud data warehouse and AI aligned with what I had heard from customers. Hightouch, more than any other marketing company I have seen, has gone “all-in” on the idea that warehouse-first and AI are the future. I want to be at a company pushing this type of industry-leading change.

In future blog posts, I’ll explain why I think Hightouch’s first set of products—Composable CDP and AI Decisioning—have advantages and/or can complement existing SaaS solutions. But for now, I just wanted to share the macro trends I am seeing, why I am excited to pivot into the cloud data warehouse/AI world, and why I felt Hightouch was the best place to undertake this journey!

If you want to follow me along on the journey or discuss any of the topics above:

• Please follow and/or DM me on LinkedIn.
• Learn more about Hightouch and register for a demo on the Hightouch website.
• Schedule time with me to chat.
• Check out the cool jobs available at Hightouch; join me on this adventure!