In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week Damian Scragg, Managing Director for EMEA, introduces marketing intelligence company Evidon.

What does Evidon do?

Evidon is a marketing intelligence company that grows businesses by giving them insight into a part of the marketplace they’ve never been able to see before—the value and risk that comes with the widespread deployment of marketing technologies across the web. Powered by Ghostery® data derived from 10 million opt-in “GhostRank” users, Evidon Labs solutions enable brands, their agencies, publishers and technologies to make more informed decisions that guide their data strategies and drive better results. Evidon also provides market-leading privacy controls for more than $2 billion of display media and e-commerce transactions annually.

When did Evidon launch and what growth have you seen?

Evidon launched as The Better Advertising Project in 2009. Company revenue is growing at 100% a year.

What are your main goals?

One of the company’s main goals going into 2014 is to help enterprise businesses bridge the gap between the CMO and the CIO. While both groups have the same ultimate goal, to engage customers and sell more, each is faced with an array of their own particular objectives and they apply an array of technology solutions (DSPs, SSPs, DMPs, Exchanges, Retargeters, etc etc) to achieve them. These solutions provide great value, but when the marketer and technologist each apply them without a centralised data strategy, the invisible web of tags left on their pages and apps creates problems (data leakage, latency, etc.) that work against those greater goals.

We’re bringing Evidon Labs data to these businesses to help solve those problems, giving them new insight into how vendor tags are deployed across their properties – and across the ecosystem – and the value and risk that each brings. So it’s really about getting the CMO and CIO around the right kind of data – a “single version of the truth” – to drive the business’s bigger goals.

Where do you see Evidon in three years’ time?

We see ourselves as becoming the standard by which major brands, their agencies, publishers and technologies measure the value and risk in the aforementioned “invisible web,” and make fundamental decisions about their data strategies as a result.

What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?

As internet users have moved from desktop to mobile device, the use of tracking technologies in applications and mobile websites has increased tremendously.  Companies, in their zeal to capture the mobile consumer, have not done enough to tame this ‘wild west’ of mobile tracking, which can hurt performance and drive away the very customer it works to bring. Our clients are now realising the need for a mobile data strategy that will alleviate customer frustration with slow load times and poor functionality. We are excited to see companies paying more attention to which third-party vendors are running through their mobile applications and how well each of these vendors is working.

What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?

This one is easy, privacy.  The ‘wild west’ of mobile tracking has an effect on consumer data sharing. Thanks to improved awareness through press outlets, services like Ghostery’s mobile browser and the EU “AdChoices” programme, consumers are becoming more aware of data collection, and they are looking for tools and solutions to help them gain some control over their personal data.

Apart from your own, which mobile companies are the ones to watch in the year ahead?

The accelerated growth we are seeing with cross-platform advertising companies – particularly Tapad – is interesting.  Their success is making it easier for advertisers to silo their ad buys and achieve better ROI.  I will also be interested to find out if Experian’s recent purchase of AdTruth is validating Device Tracking as an advertising technology, or whether it is something they will end up keeping for their own use.

Damian Scragg is Evidon’s Managing Director for EMEA. Follow Evidon on Twitter.