Q&A: Wulfric Light-Wilkinson, Wunderkind
Wunderkind is the leading AI-driven performance marketing solution that collects consent based, first-party data and identifies anonymous traffic for brands in order to scale hyper-personalised one-to-one messages.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
For almost two decades, I’ve been a commercial leader for adtech and martech firms that help businesses scale, including executive roles at ForwardPMX (now Assembly), Ometria and Quill Content (now Jellyfish). For the last four years, in my role as General Manager for International at Wunderkind, I lead our global team – encompassing EMEA and APAC regions – as we help retailers and progressive ecommerce brands, including Clarks, Sonos, Kurt Geiger, Uniqlo and Clarins, scale their owned channels to unlock cost-efficient digital revenue.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
Wunderkind is the leading AI-driven performance marketing solution that collects consent based, first-party data and identifies anonymous traffic for brands in order to scale hyper-personalised one-to-one messages. Brands lean on the Wunderkind Identity Network, a proprietary database recognising 9 billion devices, 1 billion consumers and observing 2 trillion digital transactions per year, to trigger the most impactful offers to their target audience at the right moment and in the right channel.
This proprietary data is accessed by Wunderkind’s Autonomous Marketing Platform, an AI engine which integrates seamlessly into a brands’ existing Email Service Provider (ESP) to boost performance across email, text and advertising channels. Wunderkind is the only performance solution that guarantees a lift in revenue for its clients and delivers over $5 billion in directly attributable revenue annually for brands across a number of industries, often ranking as a top 3 revenue channel in clients’ own analytics platforms.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
Wunderkind’s Identity solution has always been our secret sauce, leveraging AI and machine learning to determine who visitors are, their historical behaviours and buying habits. This helps personalise product recommendations for customers and develop the most effective video, email, or text campaigns targeted to their preferences. And, given the shifting privacy landscape, we’ve now built on this product foundation with a series of recently announced privacy and compliance best practices that really set us apart in the market.
Wunderkind’s PrivacyID consolidates emails, phone numbers, Device IDs, browsing, shopping, and third-party identifiers into a single graph powered by proprietary machine learning algorithms, significantly increasing customer identification rates on retailers’ websites.
With the new addition of server-side tracking, we can also now extend visitor recognition across multiple visits, improving retailers’ onsite experiences through essential first-party cookies and ensuring a seamless customer journey across channels.
Which retailers are you working with and how are they using your solution?
We work with over 1,000 retailers globally, including Boden, Hotel Chocolat, Clarks, Clarins, Holland & Barrett, Crew Clothing, Karen Millen and Kurt Geiger, to name a select handful.
One of the key challenges that retailers face, when it comes to maximising the impact of their owned channels, is that all major ESPs are limited to cookie-based identification. This significantly limits retailers’ ability to effectively retarget users via owned channels – as less than 5% of site traffic is typically eligible for the highest-converting email marketing campaigns (cart abandonment, for example) without Wunderkind.
Retailers use us to identify more anonymous website traffic by device, increasing their eligible ‘send pool’ for retargeting messages – and ultimately send their highest-converting messages to their most profitable customer segments at increased scale.
By matching user devices back to an email address in real-time (without relying on cookies), we can dramatically scale the reach of 1:1 retargeting via Wunderkind triggered email and text, reaching audiences that no retailer or brand can do on their own.
What challenges are retailers facing in 2024?
The retail marketing industry is in the midst of evolution. 2024 has shepherded in a period of transition: as Google continues to tease at a cookieless future and artificial
intelligence gains ubiquity, retail marketers are having to think critically about future-proofing their strategies. Many are responding by leaning on new datasets and tools – including first- and zero-party data, identity resolution and AI.
In our 2024 CMO State of the Union Report, we polled 100+ senior retailers, and 78% said they are extremely or very concerned about increasing consumer apprehension around the collection and use of personal data.
At the same time, for many marketers, one of the biggest goals is to reduce dependence on third-party walled gardens and paid media, where control over data and customer relationships is limited.
This is why we’re seeing that over two thirds (69%) of retailers are now looking to reduce third-party cookie reliance by prioritising first-party database growth and leveraging owned channels – such as email and text – which enable them to reach consumers directly, personally, and cost-efficiently, on a 1:1 basis.
By moving towards zero- and first-party data-led strategy, brands can ‘own’, rather than ‘rent’, both their audiences and their channels. The emphasis is on a value exchange underpinned by customer consent – and this will continue to be the direction of travel for the industry.
Where do you see retail going in the next five years? And what will be retailers’ biggest priorities?
The last few years have seen a massive amount of turbulence politically and economically, and I think we’re still feeling the impacts of that in the retail industry. The next five years will be about establishing new baselines and norms – following the COVID boom and subsequent cost-of-living crash – with a rebalancing of omnichannel retail models. I think we can expect to see physical retail continue its resurgence, especially with falling lease costs for stores and brands like Sephora and AllSaints investing heavily in new store openings.
From an eCommerce perspective, I think we can expect to see a significant amount of tech stack consolidation, especially as retailers seek to reduce costs and drive efficiencies through AI. In our 2024 CMO State of the Union Report, nearly all (97%) retail marketing executives surveyed said their teams are implementing artificial intelligence in their operations in some way. And 95% report that their brand is excited about the growth of AI across marketing and all other sectors.
It’s clear that AI has finally reached a point where the technology can scale, but brands need to be wary of the martech tools that wrapper basic AI features onto their user interface but don’t deliver the outcomes marketers need. For retailers, a big priority will be finding technology partners with the quality data and AI capabilities needed to move their businesses forward.
