Johannesburg, 10 Nov 2014
Julian Ardagh, CEO of Effective Intelligence (EI), South Africa's leading marketing solutions and data analytics company, has been honoured at the Assegai Awards on Thursday, 6 November by being inaugurated into the "Hall of Fame" for 2014. This accolade honours the achievement, innovation and inspiring leadership of an individual whose work represents excellence in the direct marketing industry.
As a visionary entrepreneur and leading innovator in direct marketing, Ardagh has, over three decades, devoted his career to interactive direct marketing - finding solutions and innovative approaches for corporations to grow through direct customer experiences. He has an unrivalled passion for information systems and analytics, uncompromising about ethical standards, and a leader about his role as a mentor.
Ardagh has been involved with the DMA for the past 25 years. He was Past Chairman of the Database committee and vice-chairman for the Western Cape; he served on the postal forum committee and supported the lobbying with government on postal matters, as well as legislation like the CPA and POPI. He now serves on the Ethics committee.
Ardagh was trained in programming at IBM, is a business management graduate (EE) and an advanced marketing graduate from the UCT Graduate School of Business. He has lectured widely on the specialised topic of direct marketing and data quality systems.
Thirty years ago, Ardagh launched his career with the Reader's Digest, with international marketing and IT best practices, as product manager with IT programming experience, before moving on to MAS Holdings (SA's then largest public listed direct marketing company).
Integrating his experience with IT and analytics, Ardagh left MAS and founded Advanced Application Databases, which was purchased to form the basis of the financial services company, Direct Axis, which he built from an idea to a profitable reality in a period of just three years.
Customer experience has always been a core focus in all Ardagh's operations - so he left Direct Axis to pursue his main passion: developing data, IT solutions and processes that combine science and data to improve organisations' engagement for customer benefit. And so Effective Intelligence (EI), which has just celebrated its 16th birthday, was spawned. It has grown to service over 300 clients and supports 32 staff.
EI is now South Africa's leading marketing solutions and data analytics company. It has developed a proprietary data quality software suite for African contact data (InfoArchitect) as well as campaign management and execution systems (InfoXplorer).
EI continues to develop new modules and solutions, and lately, "real-time" engagement with consumers using the latest software and analytics platforms. This assists companies to create profitable customer interactions at every phase of the customer life cycle - from acquisition and activation to cross-sell and retention expertise.
Ardagh is a visionary entrepreneur and leading innovator in direct marketing, leaving a trail and legacy for the industry with opportunities, solutions, out-of-the-box thinking, turning them into realities, and even patents. This is done by taking along dedicated, motivated ever-developing colleagues.
Ardagh's interests are not too boring: Outdoor Lifestyle, 4x4 Touring in Africa, engineering and electronic work and clay pigeon shooting.
His specialties include: direct and database marketing, credit marketing, insurance marketing, marketing models, predictive statistical modelling, data quality software and development, designing business solutions, discovering opportunities and thinking outside the box.
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