Welcome to the second installation of our Voices of Acoustic blog series! Throughout this series, we’re spotlighting members of our team across different backgrounds, geographies, and parts of our organization to give our audience a closer look at who we are and what we believe in.
If you missed the first installation, we sat down with Scott Opiela, CMO of Acoustic, to discuss marketing priorities and best practices. This time, we’re connecting with a teammate who leads our engineering vision. Meet John Riewerts, SVP of Engineering at Acoustic.
Acoustic: Thank you for joining us today, John! To begin our discussion, we’d like to start at the beginning of your MarTech career. What inspired you to pursue a career in this field?
The marketing and advertising world has a couple of unique advantages that were appealing to me. First, the volume of data is astounding. Making sense of it in a way that is actionable is even more of a challenge, which is a very attractive problem to me. I’ve always enjoyed solving problems that people have when using data and there is no shortage of that in MarTech and AdTech.
In addition, marketing spans each and every industry, so it’s one of the few areas where you can get a glimpse into how different industries function. To see unique challenges but also be able to solve problems by using patterns that have been successful in other industries excites me.
What do you find most interesting or rewarding about your work? And what’s the most challenging?
Acoustic has the ability to positively impact brands and consumers worldwide, and I get to work with a diverse and talented team of engineers, designers, and product developers to solve key problems for our customers. I enjoy collaborating with a global team to create innovative and user-friendly solutions that meet the needs of our clients. I also find it rewarding to see the impact of my team’s work on the growth and success of our company and the industry.
One of the most challenging and yet rewarding aspects of my job is balancing the competing demands of quality, speed, security, and scalability. Each day, we work diligently to use the right tools to solve real problems while not getting distracted by the buzzword tool of the day. At Acoustic, we don’t pick tools and try to squeeze them into a solution so that we can say, “We can do it too.” Instead, I work with my team to identify the best solution for a challenge or pain point, research and test it, and then once we’ve determined it can make a real impact for our customers, we move forward. The trick is doing this in a streamlined, agile way so we can continue rapidly innovating for our customers.
What is your proudest professional accomplishment?
I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with some of the biggest brands in the world and built things that have had a tangible, positive impact on our customers. I’ve seen customers realize a 20%+ improvement in ROI and even worked on projects that have led to patents in cloud-native architecture.
But none of this compares to the satisfaction and pride I get when my team and I foster a strong culture internally that has the right focus, the right drive, and the right attitude toward our jobs. We often spend most of our days with each other and when those days are spent supporting each other and being customer-obsessed across a couple hundred people, it’s the best feeling. It leads to innovation and satisfaction, and everything just clicks.
Based on your experience, can you describe what makes a MarTech platform “modern” and able to meet the challenges of today’s marketers? What criteria should marketers use to evaluate whether a MarTech platform is right for them?
Modern MarTech platforms must be able to handle speed and action. Whether it’s loading content and audiences into a platform to initiate a campaign or providing deep analytics that can be used to engage with customers on a hyper-personal level, everything is about ROI.
The product also must be able to grow based on the demand of its base. As companies grow, their needs change, so the technology they use must be able to adapt with them. Elasticity is key in every facet of a modern MarTech stack.
So, when marketers are evaluating whether a MarTech platform is right for them, they must dig into the platform’s ability to streamline their work, produce actionable insights, and scale effectively. Time is money to marketers and giving them the ability to act fast both programmatically and based on insights is key.
That’s a great transition to our final question. Recently, Acoustic announced its collaboration with Snowflake to build the new, all-in-one Acoustic Connect platform on the Snowflake Data Cloud. In simple terms, can you explain what this means and why it matters for our customers?
Marketers have come to expect insights at-scale, with precision, at the time they need it. This requires data technologies to support a tremendous amount of throughput, aggregate data effectively, and serve up this data in a way that makes sense to the marketer. With Snowflake’s architecture, we are able to elastically scale and right size workloads to the appropriate demand.
This means we’re able to extend the data we cultivate to and from Acoustic Connect. Marketers can integrate multiple data sources to gain a more holistic understanding of the customer’s behavior and intent throughout the customer journey, in real time. By giving marketers the ability to leverage the Snowflake Data Cloud as a resource for real-time personalization, Acoustic Connect enables them to understand and act, all from one platform.
We’re excited to see how marketers will take advantage of this new approach to understanding customers on a deeper level and creating hyper-personalized experiences that resonate.
Thank you for joining us and providing your insights, John!
If you’d like to connect with John, you can find him visiting his teams across the globe, spending time grilling with his family, attending Texas Longhorn football games, or directly on LinkedIn.
This is the second installation in a multi-part series focused on the people at Acoustic. You can check out our first installation with Acoustic CMO Scott Opiela here.
Keep an eye on the Acoustic Digital Experience Blog for future editions!
