Jaime Romero, Fortinet on Data-Driven Marketing | Spotlight Video Interview

🎥 Feb 15, 2021 📺 DemandMatrix ⏱ 4m 👁 74 views

In this Spotlight interview, Jaime Romero shares his insights on Data-Driven Marketing: The latest data sets that are available to ...

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About Jaime Romero

Jaime Romero, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Fortinet, discussed the company's focus on AI and security consolidation at RSA 2025. He stated that customers are managing over 50 tools in their tech stack, leading to a lack of visibility and inconsistent security policies. Romero said Fortinet's platform approach reduces the attack surface and resource needs, and that its 40AI technology works across the security fabric to automatically fix network problems, triage alerts, and create policies. He also noted that Fortinet's SaaS business is growing triple digits quarter over quarter, attributing this to the company building its own cloud infrastructure. Romero emphasized a focus on transparency, saying Fortinet believes customers need to trust their security partners and that he is excited to educate the market on that message. In a 2021 interview, Romero discussed data-driven marketing, stating that the most important data is first-party data such as website visitors and email engagement. He said third-party data, like content data, can help trigger marketing activities into new accounts. Romero described data as a commodity and said the key is finding a vendor whose algorithm extracts the needed insight. He added that intent data is valuable for filtering millions of potential accounts down to tens of thousands that are actively researching. Romero also mentioned that he reads, listens to audiobooks, and engages with peers through the Revenue Collective community for professional development.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jaime Romero's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (4 segments)

Jaime Romero0:12

For me, we could talk about data available to marketing all day long. I mean, literally spent hours. And so for me, the most important thing is really what data is going to actually move the needle, what data can you operationalize. And a lot of the most important data is obviously your own first-party data: website visitors, email engagement, and so on. But I think once you can get your hands on some third-party data, like content data, to me that's where you can start triggering activities and marketing behavior and actions and motions into white space accounts that you can help grow your business.

Most times you'll need a partner to help you, like the Man Matrix, Success MRP, Bumboro, all these companies. They're resolving identities using different techniques, using different data sources to try and identify accounts that are actually proactively doing research on specific topics. For me, the data itself is a commodity to some extent. So what you need to do is find a vendor who you're comfortable with and whose secret sauce works for you, who have built their algorithm, who've built natural language processing into their software that extracts the insight that you need. Any marketer can get access to the raw data feed; you just plug into any ad exchange or any 100 sources of data, you get all this data. But what are you going to do with a billion lines of code? So the real magic is the formula to extract that intent, and I think that's where these companies are going to start separating themselves out. And that said, you can aggregate a lot of different data sources from a lot of these different vendors and come up with your own formula to some extent. But you definitely need a good partner who's put the work in and who really understands how to extract the value.

What's important to decide is what data sets are going to move the needle. There are thousands of data points you can select from, but if they're just going to add incremental growth to your business, oftentimes it's not worth the work, effort, and energy to optimize those data sets. So figure out what's going to move the needle for you. For me, intent data is really important because it's data that we don't have access to internally, and it helps us identify, out of millions of accounts that are looking to buy our software and products, which ones are actually doing some sort of research to at least point us in the right direction. It's not always the end-all and be-all, but having something to point you in the right direction to filter down from millions to tens of thousands is a really good thing. And to me, that moves the needle, and you can point your marketing motions in the right direction.

For me, it's really looking at reading a lot. I love to read, love to listen to audio books, and then also engage in conversations with my peers. I join Revenue Collective; it's a great source of networking for me. Engaging with other marketers who are facing similar problems and being able to just go in and ping the community to find out how people feel about certain topics has been really great for us.