20 years of getting marketers closer to game-changing insights

As we celebrate Mediahawk’s 20th anniversary, we took the opportunity to grab a few minutes with Michael Morrell, CEO.

Read on as Michael reflects on the evolution of the business, and explains how Mediahawk will continue growing to meet the ever-changing demands of marketers.

What makes Mediahawk stand out?

“Mediahawk brings together leading-edge technology with expert industry knowledge that enables our clients to be leaders in their market.

“We care about each of our clients. When a client joins Mediahawk, it’s just the start of an exciting journey with them – working to improve their marketing attribution and insight about their enquiries.

“Our culture is centred on building and sharing our knowledge of marketing performance and providing useful, insightful information, in an enjoyable and happy atmosphere. This creates a super-innovative and fast-moving environment, where we’re able to continually make the platform smarter and better suited to changing needs.”

How are we keeping Mediahawk client-focused?

“Every client joins our free Client Excellence Programme. The programme helps us learn about their needs and problems. It’s designed to understand their marketing strategy and objectives. We’re there to support everyone from day one, and we’re always on hand, sharing our knowledge and experience, and working as an extension of their team.

“This is key to our client’s journey with us. It immediately helps them start making better use of the information they have, make better decisions about their marketing strategy and budgets, and ultimately improve their return on investment.

“We also created Xchange Analytics especially for our clients. This is our client-only annual event that features specially invited keynote speakers sharing their marketing expertise, and gives clients a stimulating environment to share ideas and learn from their peers. These events also provide us with an opportunity to get direct feedback from our clients on the features they need from analytics tools, and their needs drive our product development roadmap.

“It’s always great to get straight, first-hand comments, and to be able to learn from it and to build solutions that our clients need and will use.”

What have the key milestones been over the last twenty years?

“When we started in 2002, Google was 4 years old, they had 400 employees, Chrome didn’t exist, the iPhone and iPad didn’t exist, and the entire UK online ad spend at the time was less than £190m.

“The world was a completely different place.

“There have been so many milestones, however, if I was to pick a couple it would be the exponential growth of Google and paid search – and the need for marketers to get a handle on this channel – that led us to develop dynamic visitor tracking. Secondly, our desire to cultivate our own unique ethos and client and innovation-driven culture, that’s also friendly and focused.”

How important is innovation?

”As we’ve seen, there’s continuous and meteoric change in the digital analytics arena. We’re all aware of how quickly technology evolves and, as each generation of technology is better than the last, new technology is built even faster.

“It’s important that our clients trust in our innovative response to this fast-changing environment. We make sure they have the right solutions that enable them to take advantage of new opportunities.”

What is your vision for Mediahawk?

“Mediahawk is a world class provider of analytics that are already an indispensable part of a marketer’s toolkit.

“Even with all the information and insight we’re able to demonstrate, I often feel that we’re still only just scratching the surface of what is achievable.

“As marketing evolves to exploit opportunities provided by new technologies, it’s crucial that we understand shifting priorities and continuously strive to meet marketers needs.

“For instance, voice recognition technology is becoming more important to marketers. Our focus in this area means we’re continually making improvements to our speech recognition feature to enable our clients to understand what is said on a phone call and automatically adjust their marketing communication in response. For example, by changing keyword bidding or building online audiences.”

What are the key projects we are working on this year?

“Working even more closely with our marketing agency and technical integration partners. For marketing agencies, we recognise that it’s crucial to measure the impact you’re making. There are more channels, more messages, more pressure, more complexity. And always less time. We’re on a mission to boost your value to your clients, prove that you’re delivering results, help your customers grow – and keep winning business.

“Alongside that, we’re producing even more insightful reports and ways of interpreting data, giving our clients a greater understanding of their marketing results, and instantly highlighting actionable information.”

Can you tell us about how the landscape of marketing analytics is changing and how clients can prepare for what’s to come?

“The amount of data we have access to in marketing analytics, intelligence, predictive analytics, and automation is growing at a rate of knots. Being able to join the dots from enquiry to revenue, seamlessly and accurately, will be key.

“The most successful businesses will be those that are able to extract the most significant insights, and use that information to propel them ahead of their competitors. It’s essential that marketers have access to, and are able to understand this information and use it to their full benefit.”

How do you see Mediahawk’s features becoming more crucial to driving sales outcomes in the future?

“Mediahawk’s job is to cut through the data and present information so that businesses can make better decisions, such as dealing with a calls in a better way, or being able to make more informed marketing decisions.

“We accurately demonstrate exactly which marketing activities generate revenue and can share that with our other marketing tools by integrating with them, so we’re able to greatly improve marketing – and in turn, revenue – performance for our clients. Better marketing performance = better sales performance.”

Why are you so enthusiastic about what we do?

“Our clients often come to us when they have a problem. From there we build our relationship and become a more permanent part of the planning – helping them understand how they can keep ahead of the attribution game.

“I love solutions. I love that that we can make a difference to our clients, that we build solutions that solves their problems, and I get to work with a great team.”

How would you sum up the last twenty years?

“Exhilarating. To have been building our business during such a period of innovation has been exciting and fabulously rewarding.”