I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeffrey Nicholson, CEO and Co-Founder of Tracer, for my podcast. Tracer was originally incubated within VaynerMedia to automate reporting and analytics, and has grown into a leading data intelligence platform.

Jeffrey has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and data, previously holding leadership roles at VaynerMedia. He co-founded Tracer in 2018 to solve the challenge of bringing together fragmented data sources into a unified view.

A few of the many insights from our discussion:

  • E-commerce continues to see strong growth, with the global market projected to reach $6.3 trillion in 2023, up 10% from the prior year. China's e-commerce market is already twice the size of the US.
  • Fashion, at $870 billion in 2022, makes up the largest segment of the booming e-commerce market. While many doubted online clothing sales early on, consumer behavior has clearly changed.
  • Most companies deal with over 100 partners across marketing, requiring complex data processing just to understand results. Tracer aims to give independence and control over this data.
  • Contextualization is where most "tech debt" lives - different definitions of terms like "social" between brands make reporting a challenge. Tracer provides flexibility here.
  • Key brands have partnered with Tracer to gain independence, collaborate better across teams, and optimize investments based on unified data insights.

It was fascinating to learn more about the rapidly evolving world of marketing data and analytics from an expert like Jeffrey.