Mathias Elsässer the Mathman
Physicist, marketing consultant, and Partner for Agentic Customer Solutions at PwC Germany, Stuttgart.
I take pleasure in embracing change and thrive on challenging myself, my clients, colleagues, global thought leaders, and CMOs to reimagine how to excel in the transition from traditional “mad-men” to analytical “math-men” and AI-augmented marketing.
Three eras of marketing
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Yesterday
Madman
Gut feeling, creativity, and a flash of inspiration on a cocktail napkin. Budget in, impressions out — and a question mark in between.
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Today
Mathman
Data-driven and customer-centric. First-party data, a customer data platform, and an operating model that measures what it does.
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Tomorrow
AI-augmented mastermind
Agentic AI that observes, acts, and learns in loops. Marketers become the conductors of an orchestra of digital colleagues.
What I do
I transform my clients from a mad-men towards a math-men target operating model. Evidence from numerous marketing projects is that addressing customers based on your own first-party data increases marketing efficiency by a factor of three. The aim of every CMO must be to transform the organisation, the processes, and the underlying IT clouds into a math-men ecosystem for data-driven and customer-centric marketing.
Over 28 years in consulting I have worked with global organisations in retail, consumer goods, entertainment, automotive, pharma, and financial services — strategy, business, and cloud transformation projects for major European companies.
Speaking and teaching
Known for applying physics to marketing. Talks at OMR, D3Con, dmexco, Dreamforce, CeBIT, Handelsblatt, and the FAZ KI-Konferenz; lectures at HSG, WHU, HFU, FAU, and ISM.
Salesforce Innovation Award – Marketing, issued by IDC, in 2020 and 2023.
Career
- 2020 – today
- Partner, PwC GermanyCustomer, Marketing, Data & AI
- 2017 – 2020
- Director Digital, PwC GermanyData-driven marketing
- 2010 – 2016
- Associate Partner, Infosys ConsultingEuropean Head of Data-Driven Marketing
- 2006 – 2010
- Principal, IMG – The Information Management Group
- 2000 – 2005
- Project & Marketing Manager, METRIS GmbH
- 1997 – 1999
- Project Manager, metafinanz Informationssysteme
Education
- 2003 – 2005
- Executive MBA, international business managementHFU Furtwangen, Jiao Tong Shanghai, Sorbonne Paris, HSG St. Gallen
- 1992 – 1997
- Diplom in Physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)Solid-state laser physics
- Executive Program, INSEAD
Intelligent Data-Driven Marketing
When physicists start thinking about marketing: from mad-men to math-men marketing. The book strips the marketing universe down to its leanest frame of reference, then rebuilds it dimension by dimension — and describes 56 small “ma.tomics” for a maturity assessment of your marketing. ibidem, 2022.