This week we had the extraordinary experience of hosting our customers and partners at The Future of Digital Disruption, our third collaboration between Teradata and Oxford University's Saïd Business School, Future of Marketing Initiative (FOMI) led by Professor Andrew Stephen. This event was designed to discuss research from leading Oxford Saïd academics, as well as on-the-ground insights from business leaders, with the goal of addressing the future of digital disruption.
It is exactly these types of timely and relevant business-critical discussions, anchored in data and academic research, that prompted me to further explore a deepening of our partnership with Oxford Saïd. And so, we also announced this week an agreement with Oxford Saïd to modernize their already exceptional research practices, shape new bodies of research and address the most pressing business issues needed to stay ahead of dynamic market forces and exceed growth objectives.
The Challenger Mindset
When I first met Andrew, I immediately recognized in him a kindred spirit and a desire to disrupt the status quo, take risks and challenge the way things have always been done. Andrew understood the importance of industry collaboration. He was already bringing together marketing leaders with the understanding that no one organization can learn everything they need on their own, and no business school can be relevant without industry partners. In response to these needs, Andrew created FOMI, and Teradata was a founding member.
FOMI brings together the brightest academic minds with high-level industry partners representing major brands, agencies and technology companies (like Teradata!). These key players are all shaping (and being shaped by) the future of marketing.
A New Model for Industry and Academia
FOMI continues to want to challenge conventional thinking within the marketing industry. Together, we want to raise the bar. And together we will. We will fund a postdoctoral research fellow on the Oxford FOMI team. This research fellow will have expertise in marketing, AI and machine learning. The research fellow, along with other key FOMI faculty, will have access to Vantage, Teradata’s premier data analytics software.
FOMI research fellows and faculty will dive deeply into data, create models, analyze, and focus on outcomes to simultaneously advance business discussions and research insights. Together, we will focus on business outcomes rooted in science and with no bias.
The combination of our challenger mindsets, customer-obsessed focus and curated learnings will propel this partnership in exciting new directions and be a leading voice for the future of marketing, including digital transformation and AI-personalization at scale – to name a few.
The combination of Oxford and Teradata's mindsets, customer-obsessed focus and curated learnings will propel this partnership in exciting new directions and be a leading voice for the future of marketing.
We have only just begun. I look forward to sharing more, soon.