Customer engagement company Urban Airship, has appointed Wes Nichols to its board of directors. Nichols is a serial technology entrepreneur and active investor, advising companies around the world on innovation, predictive analytics, AI/machine learning, marketing technologies and the changing role of CMOs. He is currently a board partner at Upfront Ventures, one of California’s largest venture capital firms, and most recently was the chief strategy officer at Neustar, which was taken private in $2.9bn acquisition by Golden Gate Capital.

Prior to Neustar, Nichols co-founded and led two marketing analytics companies, MarketShare and Direct Partners, which were acquired by Neustar and Omnicom Group respectively. MarketShare has become the world’s largest planning and attribution analytics software firm for marketers. At Omnicom, Nichols was president and CEO of TBWA’s digital business, where he worked with Nissan, Pfizer, Sony, amongst other brands.

In the last year, Urban Airship has doubled both its all-time message volume and the number of customers adopting its data solutions to analyze and act on customer behaviour in real-time.  Newly released predictive AI solutions use this unique data to reduce churn and ensure the right message is delivered through the best channel at the optimal time for each customer. Recently, Urban Airship was named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms, where it was positioned furthest to the right for completeness of vision in the Leaders quadrant among 15 vendors.

The company was also named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2017 report, where it earned the highest scores among all 11 vendors for the Analytics Capabilities and Execution Scale criteria.

“As an independent board of directors member, Wes brings an incredible breadth of experience and expertise in many areas our customers have strategic requirements along with a keen eye for what’s top of mind for today’s CMOs,” said Urban Airship president and CEO, Brett Caine. “His guidance will accelerate our efforts to enable marketers to make direct connections with their customers anytime, anywhere, using the real-time customer data, breadth of channels and global scale that our open platform uniquely provides.”

Nichols said: “Mobile usage by consumers is a game-changer for businesses. Mobile devices and tools are allowing today’s marketers to take a forward-looking, predictive view of customers’ real-world behaviours to fuel astoundingly disruptive engagement, and these capabilities will grow exponentially with the emergence of full-scale Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives. “Urban Airship has been at the centre of this marketing renaissance since the beginning, and today its open approach to data, channels and AI is winning over marketers around the world who need to unify their martech stack and all of their business systems around customers’ real-time behaviours.”

Nichols joins Urban Airships current board of directors, including John Johnston, August Capital; Chris Moody, Foundry Group; Puneet Agarwal, True Ventures; and Brett Caine, Urban Airship.