A Time For Reflection for Starcount with our CEO Rowena Humby

My hope and dream for Starcount was always to reveal the emotional drivers of consumer intent by understanding what customers truly love and care about. So often, data is focused on transactional metrics and yet, when powered with behavioural data on customers, there is immense potential to reveal the psychology behind decision-making. 

As I reflect on this year and what’s ahead in 2024, I couldn’t be more excited. The best, and most successful, data practitioners and performance marketers are those who have the skills to be creative with data and who can use data for the art of storytelling. However, many people who work with data have felt hindered over the past few years, as we’ve all settled into the law changes in data privacy and protection. 

But 2023 was truly a year of transformation and new opportunity. 

There have been an abundance of innovations for growth acquisition marketing, as a response to the deprecation of the cookies. Starcount is delighted to have been at the forefront of these innovations, bringing our behavioural data into the ecosystem to create value as a displacement for the loss of the third-party cookie behaviours. We have been forming partnerships and integrations with the technologies that we believe are at the forefront of this disruptive market. And watch this space, because 2024 is full of Starcount announcements and news to share this potential…! 

Then, of course, there is the acceleration of AI. The artificial intelligence capabilities that are blowing us all away are Google’s Gemini, Chat GPT and similar Gen AI tools. What unites these technologies, is they are all built using open web data. This means they’ve (machine-)learnt from the abundance of content data available online – from images, articles, facts, writing styles and written texts. This is the reason why they have gotten so good. The truth about AI is that it is only as good as the data you put into it. For businesses, this means the journey ahead is still a long one in releasing true value as without a ground truth of what good looks like, and data inputs of quality and completeness, AI algorithms are only going to perpetuate the problems we have today. Starcount is building our contextual layer of customer behaviours that presents an imperative intelligence layer to make sure that any automated decision making is learnt from a whole view of the customer and ensure that businesses create experiences for customers that truly resonate. 

So yes, a year of cool innovations that have been keeping our geeky-side busy! And we continue to prove it works. This year we have run retention campaigns with our clients and driven millions in incremental revenue. We have run acquisition campaigns and delivered uplifts of up to 126% in exposure to target audiences driving 20% increase in sales conversions. The proof is in the numbers! But the opportunity is in the emotional connection with your customers and prospects. 

To reflect this, we have grown the Starcount team this year. We’ve expanded our product team to build evolved platform capabilities making our data easier to use and self-served. We’ve also expanded our commercial team to build stronger and deeper relationships with media partners who are experts at using data to find high-quality, growth audiences. 

So as we step into Christmas, we have a bounce in our step and an excitement for what 2024 holds. Thank you for being part of our newsletter subscriber base – our clients & partners mean the world to us – and we can’t wait to work with more of you next year to reveal the humans behind the data and create kick-ass creative campaigns. 

All my best

Rowena  

Co-founder & CEO at Starcount