Infinite Data. Infinite Insights.

Targetbase helps enterprises aggregate, integrate, analyze, and creatively activate their customer data, utilizing a single view of customer relationships and experience to drive new opportunities to deepen customer relationships and wallet share. It’s about turning customer data into marketing intelligence and creative impact. And the Tidal Automation™ platform keeps it all running seamlessly.

Download the full Case Study (PDF).

The Vision: Less is More

When it comes to customer data, the team at Targetbase believes less is more. As Vice President of Technology Chris Joos puts it, “There’s a staggering amount of customer data out there, but our clients only need the data that’s actionable and that they’re going to use. Our approach is to isolate, identify, and connect this critical data in a timely manner, and use it to generate intelligence that fuels meaningful actions for our clients, such as driving customer interactions and behavior.”

So how does Targetbase aggregate, integrate, analyze, parse, and activate the key data subsets required to drive quantifiable marketing intelligence for their clients? Through a complex, continuous bi-directional sharing of customer data between the agency and its clients, all automated and orchestrated by the Tidal Automation™ platform.

“If data is the heart of our business,” says Chris, “then Tidal workload automation is the heartbeat that ensures the data is accurate, comprehensive, continuously shared in a seamless flow, and continuously transformed into insight that delivers value to our clients.”

With the entire data-into-insight workflow automated by Tidal, Targetbase’s Marketing Platform is able to maintain an accurate view of all aspects of a customer’s interaction, drive communication through all channels with the customer, and provide clients with dashboards into the opportunities to deepen customer relationships and accelerate revenue.

A Legacy of Excellence

Tidal has been helping to power Targetbase’s business model for decades, a long and fruitful partnership anchored in a shared vision of the strategic value of automation. With Tidal as the centerpiece of the automation strategy, Targetbase’s IT and business teams have built and perfected an industry-leading approach to data intelligence that is driven by three core components:

1. 30+ years of customer marketing expertise. The Targetbase customer service team has an enviable reputation for activating individual brand experiences and delivering personalization at scale, helping clients build exceptional individual end-user relationships. The Targetbase team calls this, “the artful activation of intelligence.” Their success – and the success of their clients – all starts with an automated workflow that delivers the right intelligence at the right time.
2. Proven processes and architecture. The data-centric workflows managed by Tidal are predictable, reliable, and infinitely scalable. “We aggregate, integrate, enhance, analyze, activate, analyze again to confirm results, and then start all over again,” explains Frank Summers, Director of Infrastructure and Shared Services. “The focus is on learning from current results to make the next outcomes even better.”
3. Superior technology tools. Tidal is automating complex cross-application, cross-platform workflows that link Oracle/ Exadata, Informatica, SQL, IBM Campaign/Unica, SAS, Tableau, Adobe Campaign, various servers, FTP, and Kornshell scripts across both on-premise and cloud environments. “Tidal integrates and automates all of this and is answerable to both internal and external users,” says Chris. “Its inherent support of FTP/Secure FTP is huge, supporting enormous bi-directional flows of data and information.”

Enterprise-class Automation vs. Job Schedulers

While isolated job schedulers have their role, Targetbase could not deliver the high-impact intelligence their clients expect without Tidal’s enterprise-class automation capabilities. “Tidal links data, applications, middleware, and systems in a way that conventional schedulers cannot,“ says Chris. He and his team point to a number of Tidal advantages:

• Cost efficiencies leading to a competitive advantage. Tidal automates complex processes that would otherwise require significant cycles by the IT and business teams. This allows Targetbase to expand its service offerings – and support more customers – without incurring significant additional operating costs or overhead.
• Easy to use with a high adoption rate – More than 30 users across Targetbase are actively using Tidal with minimal training required and no intervention from IT. No custom scripts are required, so users just launch and go. Daily usage and stickiness are high.
• Reduced infrastructure costs. The IT team likes that Tidal runs on low-maintenance servers with a low overhead. The platform can quickly scale with minimal additional servers. And Tidal is virtually maintenance-free, which liberates the IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives for the company.
• Peerless reliability. “Put simply, Tidal has never let us down,” says Doug Roane, Systems Engineer. “Runs 365 days a year, averages 7,000 jobs a day. I don’t have to think about it.”
• Super customizable. “We can make Tidal do virtually anything,” says Doug.

Client Security – Critical to the Targetbase Mission

Client privacy for Targetbase’s customer community is assured with Tidal’s multi-tenant security capabilities. Targetbase can easily segment which users get access to which information within Tidal’s workflows. These employees are identified as “trusted users” and allowed into a specified client’s database.

“Tidal has integrated well into our security processes and protocols,” says Frank. “The privacy of each of our clients is fully protected and this security is assured no matter how many new clients and delivery teams we add.”

Looking Ahead

Targetbase currently runs a hybrid environment that mixes on-premise and cloud, but the future is clear – the company will be migrating toward a 100% cloud implementation.

“The question is, how fast?” notes Chris. “We believe Tidal will be instrumental in helping us manage and minimize the risks associated with moving to the cloud. Tidal has already proven adept in both cloud and on-prem environments. Tidal workload automation is woven into the fabric of our business and will be key as we methodically embrace the cloud.”