Our recent conversations with senior retail marketing professionals show that the pain points they face are consistent. Retail marketers tell us they are just not managing their marketing investments efficiently. Tasked with managing a multitude of channels, marketers must maintain control of brand message across expanded media channels, and engage a wider audience to include younger customers. With so many channels, it is difficult to gather and assess analytics in terms of channel effectiveness and ROI, and nearly impossible to provide macro and micro views of all marketing operations

Retail marketers possess an ever-increasing need for a constant one-view of merchandising, marketing, and store operations.

This very need is what inspired CEO, Craig Bushert, to found CrossCap in 2001: to help senior-level marketing executives manage their marketing investments. Driven to provide a solution that addresses the difficulties of channel management, one-view marketing, and marketing effectiveness, Bushert began developing CrossCap’s “real time” Marketing and Media Management tool that helps major corporations and marketing departments do just that.

CrossCap began life in Toronto and currently works with over 700 retail and CPG clients with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, and offices in Chicago, Toronto, and Delhi, with plans of expansion into Central and South America by 2012. The CrossCap team has grown to include 80 top-talent employees with retail, marketing, engineering, and account services expertise.

The CrossCap solution offers a variety of modules in the different areas of planning, execution, and analysis. Using innovative, graphical, and simple to use tools, our clients are afforded full visibility of marketing activities from the planning to historical stages. Within our system, clients manage every step of the marketing process from its preliminary stages (annual planning, budgeting, campaign creation), to the middle stages (soft-proofing, versioning, executing), to metrics analysis (archiving historical promotions, competitor media, lift and loss).

With our bench strength lying deep in retail, CrossCap is a unique crossbreed between departments. Working on both sides of the coin, the software has been designed to think like a retailer; making it easily understood, implemented, utilized, and beneficial for the entire organization.

Innovation is critical to remaining relevant in the marketplace, so the CrossCap engineering team is continually re-evaluating and re-configuring the tools to make them more useful for retail clients. With extensive onboarding and training programs in place, CrossCap delivers real time Marketing and Media Management tools designed to provide senior marketing professionals with a 360 view of marketing, merchandising and store operations ... in real time.

Bearing in mind that retailer marketers’ primary pain points are managing a multitude of channels, gathering and analyzing analytics, and providing macro and micro views of marketing performance, we have developed tools that match each of these challenges to a solution.

• Multi-Channel Marketing and Media Calendar

  The backbone of our Marketing and Media Management system, the Marketing Calendar helps manage all stages of the marketing process, allowing clients to coordinate marketing activities across multiple channels, geographic regions, and calendar dates. The Calendar helps clients plan and execute campaigns with a drill down capability that tracks each vehicle’s details (ex: vehicle medium, theme, budget, status, time period, target customer, etc) in real time. In one click, clients view a full break-down of vehicle metrics. KPIs overlayed on the calendar provide an understanding of what marketing media support was received or will be received to achieve a target. This 360° view affords clients complete accessibility to marketing programs and events across the enterprise, enabling them to streamline marketing initiatives, sharpen strategic focus, increase ROI and ultimately raise revenue.

• Marketing Effectiveness Scorecards

  Our Marketing Effectiveness Scorecards gather all metrics behind marketing initiatives and present them in a clear, consistent manner, to allow clients to spend time analyzing their data rather than gathering it. Using a visual reporting tool, Scorecards display metric analyses (sales, quantities, margins and other KPI’s) alongside the corresponding media. Within this tool, marketing effectiveness can be broken down at the store level to gain store insights. All historical measurement reports are stored to help set KPIs for current marketing programs and plan future promotional programs effectively based on real time business results.

• The Wall: Media and Competitor Insights

  The Wall provides a virtual, real time view of clients’ brand landscape across multiple channels by displaying the media associated with campaigns of all mediums (print, radio, video, web, etc). Addressing a competition POV, the Wall tracks competitors’ activity in the marketplace in comparison to that of our customers, by archiving media side by side. This data is archived into a Promo History search database that can be filtered by week, month, and season for easy visualization of competitor tracks and trends.

Bearing in mind that retailer marketers’ primary pain points are managing a multitude of channels, gathering and analyzing analytics, and providing macro and micro views of marketing performance, we have developed tools that match each of these challenges to a solution.

• Craig Bushert

  Chief Executive Officer, San Francisco Office

  Fusing his long-held personal interest in publishing and technology amidst an opportune digital marketplace, Craig Bushert founded CrossCap in August of 2001 with 4 employees. After a successful career in engineering, Craig spent several years as CEO of a real estate investment advisor company with $3 billion of assets under management. Shortly after the company was acquired by Morguard Financial Corporation, Craig was named CEO of the corporation until he “retired” in 1998. Unable to get the idea of CrossCap out of his head, Craig spent his short-lived retirement researching the publishing industry and ways in which the switch from analog to digital would impact business processes and how a company could help customers adapt to this newly digitized environment. Two years later, his brainchild was born and continually evolves with Craig’s unrivalled expertise and comfort with analytics and engineering. A Toronto native, Craig received his BASc and Masters in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo and his Professional Engineering designation from Professional Engineers of Ontario. In addition to his professional achievements, Craig holds a pilot’s licence, races motorcycles, and is a master SCUBA diver.

• Rahim Kassam

  Chief Innovation Officer, Toronto Office

  Since Rahim Kassam joined CrossCap in 2002, he has set a clear, strategic direction for the company’s technological innovation as well as a consistently high standard of integrity throughout the office. Providing exceptional expertise to both the engineering and business sides of CrossCap, Rahim manages cross-functionality of the value chain. A true double-threat, Rahim received his BASc in Electrical Engineering and his Masters of Engineering from the University of Toronto, his Professional Engineering designation from Professional Engineers of Ontario, and his MBA from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Prior to his 8-year tenure at CrossCap, Rahim worked as a Senior Software Architect for Descartes Systems Group, a leading software-as-a-service group, and a Software Engineer for University Health Network.

• Harris Loeser

  Vice President, New Business Development, San Francisco Office

  Business services expert, Harris Loeser, joins CrossCap to further CrossCap’s growing reputation as the marketing management solution for large retailers. Harris brings his experience marketing and managing cloud computing, retail logistics and sales operations to CrossCap. Previously, Harris worked with The Internet Archive, Metricom/Ricochet, GoGrid and Circle International. Harris received his BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

• Darrell Fry

  Director of Customer Experience, Chicago Office

  Retail guru, Darrell Fry, was inspired to join CrossCap in 2007 based on his experience installing and utilizing our system as one of our clients. Sold by the efficiency and originality of CrossCap’s product, Darrell holds that unlike many EMM Systems, CrossCap’s system “thinks like a retailer”. Darrell brings 36 years of valuable retail experience to CrossCap, garnered primarily through his position as VP of Advertising Production at both OfficeMax and Sears. As Strategic Alliance Manager, Darrell is essential towards helping clients utilize our software capabilities most effectively and developing client work processes that are based on best industry practices. Darrell received his BA in English and German from the University of Missouri-Columbia.