Owen Renn

Solution Lead at Zeta Global.

The work

I work in the gap between what a marketing team wants to say and what its platform can do, and I close it from both sides.

Real-time email, from first pitch to production

Liveclicker decides what an email shows when it’s opened, not when it was sent: prices and stock that are true at that moment, an offer code no one else has, a loyalty balance and tier as they stand when the reader looks. Most of my work is wiring that to a brand’s own data. At open, the email calls their API and renders the result against their business rules. Brands bring me in to work out what that feed has to guarantee: how fresh the data must be, a graceful fallback when the source is slow or empty, and the metrics that prove its value, since opens alone don’t. I stay with it through delivery and into production.

Inside Zeta, I work across product, engineering, and go-to-market, bringing field evidence into their decisions and helping deliver the scoping standards, pilot paths, and training our teams sell with.

A knowledge base I started, now company-wide

A good answer shouldn’t depend on who’s free, when you ask, or knowing whom to ask, so I built a place where it’s always there. It started as my own method for distilling what the work teaches into something repeatable, and every page is held to one standard: say what’s known, what isn’t, and what to do next. A reviewed edition is now open to everyone at Zeta.

Stravinsky, a desktop instrument

Stravinsky is what I built for myself: calendar, email, the news, a live map of the world, and the health of my projects and my own, in one desktop instrument instead of a dozen tabs and apps. Originally a simple web app, it now runs in a native shell, so alerts and information become actions I can take right where they appear. Its light comes from the real sun, and it holds one rule I’d put on anything: when a source goes quiet, it says so. See it

What I wished existed, built to share

Much of what I build is for other people, so it gets revised until it holds up. At Zeta, it’s the work behind a message that’s still right when it’s read. At icnt.cloud, it’s a studio of small tools, each started because what I wanted didn’t exist yet. icnt.cloud

Timeline

  1. Solutions Consultant → Solution Lead at Liveclicker (now Zeta)

    2019–present
  2. Sales Engineer at WhatCounts

    2013–2019
  3. Technical Services at PossibleNOW

    Built an automated win-back workflow on APIs there: the first time enterprise marketing made sense as code.

    2009–2011
  4. Writer, DJ, promoter

    UK bass music and southern rap: wrote about Lee "Scratch" Perry for NPR Music and for Big Up in print, helped run an independent label, and spent years getting the right music in front of the right room, in Atlanta and across the East Coast.

    2008–2013

Standing interests

Code
Tools that bring people closer to what they love doing: radio scanning, training, and music for me, sporting clays for a family member. The ones worth sharing live at icnt.cloud.
Sound
How genres connect across geography and time, traced through a listening history that goes back to 2006, about sixty listens a day.
Visuals
Photography and film, drawn to atmosphere and visible craft. In stills, range over a signature style; on screen, Mann and Friedkin.