• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 13, 2020

Searchmetrics appointed Doug Bell to global CMO from VP of marketing and U.S. CMO, and now he is helping to lead the company into machine learning and deep learning that will help it create data libraries and gear up for international growth.

As a child, Bell was interested in becoming a computer programmer or an artist at a time when the language Fortran was new and people climbed the steps into a mobile trailer to code.

By the time he reached college his interests and fascination in art and data led him to marketing. “Otherwise I would have been third baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies,” he said.

On his time off, Bell likes to take his wife and kids safely “scrambling up rocks, hiking through a slat canyon, rafting or kayaking.”

He likens his outside interests to his new position of global CMO. “These are all part of perennial problem solving,” he said. “Aside from insomnia the great benefit of an active mind is curiosity.”

Searchmetrics is beginning to use techniques in machine learning, the ability to train code, to create a library, as more companies become data aggregators and marketing mixes change. The company has been using deep learning, when codes learn on their own, for about three years.

“We will use deep learning to simplify search in a dramatic way, so we can take it from experts in marketing departments,” he said. “It will change the way complex things are put out there into the public.”

Bell believes companies will move from enterprise software and toward machine-learning libraries or toolkits. Integration will become critical. Companies like Searchmetrics will contribute by selling licenses to machine-learning libraries to selling data.

Searchmetrics acquires teraflops of data annually, Bell said, because the company does its own crawling of the web.

“Literally you will see the machine-learning library, businesses intelligence layers and people acquisition data because they realize how difficult it is to acquire through aggregation,” he said. “If we’re moving correctly it will lead up to a new business model and away from enterprise software.”

Some of the biggest challenges for Searchmetrics have been in European data protection laws, GDPR, but it has made it easier to tackle restrictions like CCPA in the United States.  

Business models are changing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes retailers must do a better job of leveraging the data they collect on consumers, “rather than dumping tons of money into search advertising on places such as Google and Facebook with mixed success,” Yahoo Finance reported on Monday from the National Retail Federation conference in New York.

Christian Broscheit, former VP of sales and services for EMEA, was promoted to global chief revenue officer. Bell and Broscheit join the global management team alongside the CEO, COO and CFO.

Dirk Wolf, CFO; and Jordan Koene, CEO of Searchmetrics, will leave the company. Matt Colebourne steps in as Searchmetrics’ global CEO. Searchmetrics will announce its new CFO appointment shortly.