INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Foursquare has just hired Liz Ritzcovan as Chief Revenue Officer.Ritzcovan hails from BazaarVoice, where she also served as CRO
She previously held CRO positions at Sizmek and Parade Media Group, and before that, spent time at Yahoo, Time Inc, and Interbrand.Though
Foursquare has been around since 2009, things have changed a lot for the company
What started as a consumer-facing app to log and share location information has become a SaaS company focused on helping brands understand
their customer’s real-world habits and convert those habits into meaningful transactions and experiences.That started with the unbundling
of the legacy Foursquare app into Foursquare (a Yelp competitor centered around recommendations) and Swarm (a social location check-in app)
As of 2016, both apps have more than 50 million active users, which—along with insights from partners—has in turn yielded the data
necessary to create enterprise tools.For example, Pinpoint by Foursquare (an ad product) has more than half of the Ad Age 100 as
advertisers, and Attribution by Foursquare (a measurement product) has doubled its revenue in 2017
And that doesn’t include the Pilgrim SDK and Places API, which helped contribute to Foursquare’s 50 percent revenue growth year over
year for the past three years.Ritzcovan is aware that, despite the growth of e-commerce, 90 percent of consumer spending and memorable
experiences happen in the real world
But getting clients, usually internet-facing companies, to understand that is her new great challenge.Here’s what she had to say in her
announcement blog post:So what is my first priority as CRO Client centricity
Foursquare needs to deepen our connection with our partners: explaining to business leaders why it’s critical to leverage more than a
single Foursquare solution—be it ad campaigns with Pinpoint, measurement with Attribution, or location-based CRM and messaging with our
Pilgrim SDK and Places API—by taking all of these parts together and connecting the dots
Foursquare is more and more about bundling technology licensing, mapping capabilities, and marketing optimization in a suite of solutions
It’s the reason I joined, to help lead the team into packaging these broad “solution sets” for leading organizations and brands.
