Celebrus Digital Analytics with Bill Bruno

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techron tv. I am happy to have, uh, he's a repeat guest.

I had him on a few, a few months ago. Um, he's Bill Bruno. He's the CEO of Celebrex.

And I hope I pronounced it correctly, but I, I think I, I did. Hey, bill, welcome back. It's great to have you back on.

No, I'm thrilled, thrilled to be back, uh, hanging out with you. Alan, really, really appreciate you taking the time. No, my pleasure.

So, bill, as we mentioned, a Celebrex is the company name. That may be a name that people now know may not. Uh, just a few months ago, actually, when you were on last, we were talking about, you know, the company having under undergone a name change.

So for those who we could, we could play hardball and make 'em go back and watch the old one, but we won't. Why, why don't you give them the gist of, of the name change and kind of, and we'll, we Sure. We'll ride it from there.

Yeah, no, no, no worries. Yeah, we talked about a lot of fun stuff, so I do recommend people go back and, and listen to it in the, in the archives, right? Mm-Hmm.

But, uh, um, you know, it's really a simplification thing for me. So I, I took over the company globally a little over two years ago now. Um, I've been in the analytics industry for about 23 ish years, something like that.

Um, and I've been aware of the platform for a long time. Uh, but the business, uh, Celebrex was a technology platform acquired by a company called D four T four solutions back in 2013. Um, now from a simplicity perspective, I'm a guy that likes to keep things simple.

You're not gonna hear me use a lot of buzzwords. You, you know, I think it's important when you're selling software to make it easy to understand you need to be easy to buy from, and you just wanna eliminate confusion. So us balancing two names just didn't make sense.

It didn't really fit with the ethos of how I like to run a business and how my management team wants to build the business. So we just aligned under the Celebrex brand. It was welcomed by all of our investors.

We're publicly traded out of the uk. We're a global business. Our software's operating in, I think, 32 countries now around the globe.

Um, so it was just a, it, it was a no, no-brainer to be honest. It, it was just a matter of prioritizing when to do the paperwork, and, and we, we hit a good time to do that a a few months back. Excellent.

And, and, and what a great recap there. And that was great. Now, if you do wanna watch the whole last video though, is Bill mentioned, it is available, it's on trunk tv, as are all, I think almost 6,000 text trunk TV interviews that are up there these days.

Um, but if you search under celebr or under Bill Bruno, it'll, it'll pop right up. You can search under my name, but there'll probably be a lot of other ones that come up. So I would definitely recommend searching Bill Bruno, B-R-U-N-O.

And, and Bill, as you mentioned, you've been CEO at Celebrex for about two years now. But just again, real quickly, a little bit of your background. Yeah, so like I said, I've spent about 20, 23 odd years in the, in the analytics industry.

So coming outta college, um, I, I helped build a, a consulting firm that was, uh, focused on helping customers better use data to make decisions. Um, during my time there, I've worked with and been on the advisory boards of a lot of the vendors that are out there today, um, including CEUs way back in the day when it was under a different name. Um, eventually sold that business to a different UK company, and then spent several years running sort of their analytics practice globally.

Uh, working with a lot of media, uh, and, uh, advertising organizations, helping them optimize their spend across the globe, which was a lot of fun. Um, and then made my way here to, to Celebrex. Um, you know, for me it's a, it was a passion project.

I, uh, before they paid me to say it, Alan, um, you know, I, I thought this was the best data capture and contextualization platform in the industry, and you could find articles I've written years and years ago about that to, to prove that I'm not full of it. Um, but that's why I came here. Um, you know, it was a technology that needed its time in the sun.

Uh, it's a technology platform that solves for a lot of the industry challenges today. Um, and I knew the team there. I knew the product team, the engineering teams, and was really excited to join.

Um, when I joined, I was just running the US business. I was just, you know, running sales and growing a, growing a market, didn't expect to get handed the keys to the city. Uh, but here I am, uh, running, running it globally, and it's, it's just been so much fun.

Um, you know, to, to have a platform that actually delivers on the promise of building better relationships between brands and consumers via better data, um, you know, and living that mantra on a daily basis is my passion. Excellent. Love it.

So, let, let's talk about kind of our topic of discussion today. And that is the release of a, a new version of, of, uh, the Celebrex platform containing something we're calling Celebrex Digital Analytics. So CDA and, uh, and that has a lot of new capabilities, including, dare I say it, ai, um, everyone else is saying it, why not?

You gotta throw it. But, uh, yeah. Um, tell us, bill, what, what's the deal with this new, the new version and what's CDA all about?

Yeah, no, so, so again, it kinda stems from my background again. Um, you know, we, when you look at the industry today, there's, there's a big challenge in the industry for analysts all around the globe and it's data quality. Um, and that has been something that the CEUs platform through all of our various in, uh, feature releases and enhancements and innovations has been striving to, to fix.

Um, well, one of the areas that's really sort of diminished in my opinion in terms of quality is, is analytics reporting, you know, the ability for organizations to be able to understand what inve investments are working, what their return on investments are, et cetera. And so we saw an opportunity and we decided to go for it. And what we, what we wanted to do was build a better wheel, I suppose.

Um, now within that wheel, uh, there's a lot of reporting that organizations have been using for years, uh, to report on their campaigns, report on their digital traffic, et cetera. But with the Apple intelligent tracking prevention changes, with the Mozilla total cookie protection changes, with some of the most recent updates in, in the last few weeks from Google, those historic systems have become very inaccurate because the way that they identify consumers is depleting and, and degrading by day. And so your things like visitor counts or being able to maintain a history of what campaigns a person has interacted with have become extremely difficult.

Uh, those platforms are third party in nature. So when you're setting them up as a, as a brand, you're sending your consumer data out to some third party at the end of the day, right? And in the states, it's becoming more and more of an issue globally.

It's been an issue for quite some time with various versions of GDPR, but here in the states with healthcare and HIPAA compliance, um, with some of the FTC regulations recently, sending your consumer data around to third parties is frowned upon. So we, we looked at all of that and said, I think we can fix this. Um, and so we launched CEUs Digital Analytics, which is a fully enclosed solution.

What I mean by that is brands own it, control it, and the data never leaves their four walls. It's all the reporting that they know and love. You know, reporting is a commodity, in my opinion, right?

You're not really gonna build a new innovative report like they've all been done. But what's within the reports, the data itself, as I mentioned, has become garbage. And we fixed that with the Celebrex platform capabilities that we've had in place for years.

And a lot of our patented capabilities around digital identity verification, consent management, et cetera, such that all those challenges I mentioned go away and you end up with all of the reports, you know, and love with better data available more in real time and secure. Love it. That's a great thing.

Um, you know, bill, for people who aren't familiar, the, the platform is, it's, it's SAS based, or no, So it, it is, but it's a bit unique in that regard. So I'm glad glad you asked that question. So we don't do any shared architecture, and CEUs is not a shared platform.

So if you're one, uh, banking institution and a travel company working with us, you have your own dedicated, uh, private cloud existence of CEUs, right? So we stand everything up. So it's hosted, But it's hosted but not multi-tenant.

Exactly. It's a single tenant private cloud instance specific for each customer and for customers that are afraid of the cloud. And we do still have a few that don't want to go to the cloud, we do offer the ability to install it in and host it in your own environment, but most customers today choose to have us manage it for them 'cause it's easier, and it gets them up and running more quickly.

And, you know, we just signed a new customer that we announced, uh, a few weeks ago, and they're already collecting data, um, you know, within the first week of having the solution deployed. So, you know, the benefits of us managing that, that, uh, single tenant private cloud instance for a customer, you know, uh, with all of the security that you would expect and all the compliance you would expect has become quite welcomed in the industry by our customers. Very cool.

We mentioned ai, you can't, you can't take three steps without tripping over ai. Yeah. That's, there's gen, yeah, there's generative ai, there's kind of the machine learning kind of model of ai.

When, when you are referencing AI in regards to CEUs and the, and the platform and CDA, what exactly are you talking about? Yeah, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna split it into two topics. Um, 'cause I think, I think often when people talk about artificial intelligence or machine learning, um, they kind of cobble it all together as this amazing thing that's just gonna work, right?

But there's, there's sort of two elements in my opinion. The first is data quality. Um, and why, why that's so important is for all the reasons that you could, if you google data bias or data ethics, you're gonna see a laundry list of mistakes that have been made because of bad data or incomplete data, et cetera.

So the first thing we do in the CEUs platform is offer you the ability with a published, tabled structured data model that we give you out of the box to make sense of digital in a way that allows it to be usable, that allows data scientists to understand what the data means so that they can interpret it correctly, and they can choose how to use that in any model of their choosing. The second thing that we've done in the platform is we've naturally continued to, to roll out our own machine learning models for customers. The most recent has been around bot detection, which is a big issue in the industry.

You know, where, where you've got fake traffic that looks way too human these days and is very hard to discern. And being able to do that is saving our customers millions of dollars in advertising due to invalid traffic and getting things like rebates and refunds, et cetera. But what we've also done, and I think this is, this is a core ethos to Celebrex as a company, is we recognize that we're gonna innovate some things.

We're gonna give you some models, we're gonna continue to build more and more, uh, ways of contextualizing data to help you find the needle in the haystack more quickly. But customers are also investing heavily in this. You know, our brands have data science teams that are building their own solutions.

And so we've built the ability for, for our customers to import their own models into the platform and have celebrants train them, um, in real time with the data. So there's a lot of flexibility to the platform. Yes, naturally we're gonna continue to build machine learning, and then foundationally, we're making sure that the data itself is hitting a level of compliance and ethics that's required for these models to actually work.

Excellent. Very, very, very, very cool. Um, you know, I, if you don't mind, I, you know, people out here maybe listening to this saying, that sounds really interesting, I'd like to check it out.

I'd like to try it. What, what is the, what's the on-ramp? What, what, how did they go about giving this a whirl?

Yeah. So, you know, I'd urge you if you're, if you're interested in, you're listening to this, um, and you wanna learn more, you can reach out to me directly if you'd like, on, on LinkedIn. Um, and I'd be happy to get you access to some workshops and get you, uh, a bit hands-on with the tool with some of our solution architects.

We have some, some fantastic ways where we can actually demo it, um, and show it running on your website as if you've deployed it. Um, which is really, it's, it's a lot of fun, uh, when we get into that with customers. 'cause we can instantly show your use cases being solved by Celebrex instantaneously.

Uh, we do offer several sort of, uh, um, trial periods, evaluation periods as well for the platform. com, take a look at some of the use cases that we've been, that we've been driving in the industry and, and just reach out to us. We, you know, I I, I spent so long in my career being vendor neutral and being the consultant that worked with a lot of vendors, right?

And I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of how vendors behave. Um, and it's really important for me as a company that, that we're the vendor that's easy to work with, easy to talk to, and easy to get you sort of an understanding of how Celebrex might alter what you're doing today in a very positive way and add a lot of value to your business. So if you're interested in it, we'd be thrilled to show it to you, and we'd be thrilled to give you access to some of the phenomenal people we have here to, to help you understand what's possible.

I love it. Bill, we didn't even mention the website though. Uh, yeah.

com. com. That's, That's what I was looking for.

Hey, Matt, I appreciate you coming on and, and keeping us up to date on what's doing over at Celebrex. Uh, congratulations on the new release, uh, the new version of the platform out here, and CDA, it'll be interesting to see. I look, I mean, things are starting to really gather steam now, right?

And momentum. It'll be interesting to see. Yeah, It, it's really exciting.

Um, I'm really, really, uh, proud and humbled by the team that we've got and what they're bringing to the market and how quickly they're doing it, um, when these challenges are arising. And we, we've already got several clients up and running on Celebrex Digital Analytics. We had a few that were beta testing it before we launched it, and the feedback has been phenomenal.

Um, and, and that's all we can ask for, right? If you want to build something that people actually use and enjoy, um, and if they don't, you gotta figure out how to fix it. But fortunately for us, we've, we've got something that, that seems to be really picking up some steam here.

I love it. Bill, thanks for coming on. We hope to see you back on here soon.

com. The, uh, the Celebrex, uh, the platform is that including this new Celebrex Digital Analytics CDA, check it out. We're gonna take a break here on Text Drunk tv.

We'll be right back.