In this Speak PR podcast episode, host Jim James interviews Danny Levinson, CEO of Transformania, a marketing‑tech startup focused on anthroponomy – the parsing, formatting, and enrichment of personal name data. Levinson explains that Transformania offers both an API and a DIY web‑app that ingest contact lists (from CRMs, web forms, business‑card scans, etc.), clean up inconsistencies (typos, maiden names, nicknames), and return enriched records. A key differentiator is the trademarked “Dear Me” fields (formal and casual) that enable personalized salutations at scale. The service also provides analytics via an Insights Report, detailing nickname frequencies, sender‑domain reputation, and per‑record processing codes that flag issues such as gender ambiguity or extraneous characters. Levinson discusses compliance with GDPR and California privacy laws, noting that the platform can enrich data using third‑party sources where permissible and also mine existing file data. Segmentation capabilities include geographic breakdowns (states, cities, congressional districts) and plans for gender, age, and other demographic slices. A substantial portion of the conversation covers handling Asian name formats—Japanese surname‑first order, Korean single‑syllable surnames, and the complexities of Chinese dialectal spellings—demonstrating the platform’s global applicability. Transformania is currently in beta, targeting North American customers first, with European and Asian versions forthcoming. Listeners are directed to transformania.com to join the beta program.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners who know they've got value locked up in their business if they can just find some cost-effective and some simple ways to unleash it and to tell everybody about their company. And today I'm really delighted to welcome Danny Levinson, who's the Chief Executive Officer at Transformania, to join us today. from Washington, from the Potomac in the USA. Danny, welcome.
Hey, Jim, thanks for having me. It's good to see you again.
Danny, you've had a long and illustrious career in technology. What's the latest offering? What's Transformania and how's it going to help business owners get noticed?
Great, yes, so Transformania, we started late last year and we're a marketing tech company that focuses on names. So if you're a scientist, you might know us as an anthroponomy type business, but for the average Joe Schmo on the street, we focus on formatting enriching names. So if you have a database of contacts and people add data from manually or from an API or from a web form, or maybe they scan their business cards, that name data goes into their database all sorts of ways. Sometimes first name, last name, last name, first name. Sometimes there's typos. Sometimes a maiden name gets thrown in the mix. Sometimes it's difficult to understand if it's a maiden name or a nickname. We handle all that. We parse it, we format it, and we send it back at you so that you can easily identify who's in your database.
And what kind of applications are you looking at here? Is this sort of a CRM function? Is it a direct marketing function, Danny?
Those CRM marketers, folks that are using Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho Marketing, that's who we're targeting. Anybody with a list of contacts would be using our system, and what we're coming out with is both an API so you can plug it into your backend and also a do-it-yourself app. So you come to our website, upload a list of contacts, and we spit out the corrected and formatted and rich data for you in a few minutes. So it's very easy to use, and you know, it's targeted at marketers. You know, our main competitor For this is a company called I think it's IBM, and IBM has a service like this that costs millions and millions of dollars. But they target financial crimes and national security. We don't care about that. It's important to us as individuals, but as a company, we're focused on marketing. So when IBM gets something wrong on the national security side with a name, maybe somebody dies. With us, we just have mud on our face, and. And so how would this work?
So somebody's got a database, are you then ensuring that it's accurate or are you helping them undertake what we call personalization at scale? Because the big challenge for people now is to communicate with a large number of people but with the appropriate personalized message.
What we do is we help folks with the personalization at scale, and the way we do that is we either plug it directly into your CRM, so Salesforce, HubSpot, Will send us the unformatted data and we send back the formatted data. Or after you download that CSV or Excel document from us, you re-upload it. And we have these trademarked new columns of data called the Dear Me fields. We have formal Dear Me and casual Dear Me. So for your name, Adrian, we'd still put in the first name column. James, we'd still put in the last name column. But based on other data that we enrich, either we go out on the internet to find or from other data in the file itself, we'll know that Jim is your nickname. And also Jim is your casual dear me. So if someone's going to send an email to you and they say, hey, Adrian, you probably think it's probably someone from the government asking me for money, right? But if it's to Hey Jim, then you think, ah, it's someone that I probably have a prior relationship with. Let me see what they have to say. And so that's how we format that data to make sure that it's personalized at scale and that you can then interact with the folks that respond to you.
So you've mentioned here this term enriching the data. So how are you actually going about enriching the data and at the same time complying with, for example, GDPR?
So we're coming out with a North America version first. And the North America version is going to be what we come out first, probably in about 2.5 to 3 months. The European versions and Asian versions will be coming after that. But still, we have to keep in mind that regardless of where we are in the world, we still have to keep GDPR, and also California has a new regulation similar to GDPR, in mind. Because although we're sitting here in Potomac, Maryland, We can have clients from anywhere. So as far as GDPR goes, actually folks who are interested in data governance will be using us as well. And the reason they'll be using us is because according to some of the data governance rules, both at the legal side and also some corporates have their own data governance regulations, you can only maintain and keep data for a certain period of time. And if you're only going to keep it for a certain period of time, you have to maximize the value on that. So one of the ways you maximize value is by getting the most bang for your buck from what's in there. And that we help with enrichment of that. Now, as far as going out and finding other third-party data, you're absolutely right. In Europe, we have constraints on that, rightfully so. But we can also mine what's in the file itself. Oftentimes what clients give us, we can find lots of gems as far as what's already apparent there. We can estimate someone's gender, we can estimate somebody's age, and other novelty things that really help supercharge a marketing campaign.
When you are looking at this sort of data enrichment, what kind of analytics and reports are you giving back to the client? Because that's another key part of any sort of CRM and personalization at scale?
Great question. So we spit out a good insights report. So our insights report is available both online and also as a PDF report. And to give you an example of what type of data is in there, first of all, we, we do some nice things like break out what are the largest nicknames, what are the largest number of formal names, the largest number of casual names. So you can kind of get an idea, okay, I seem to have a lot of Hernandezes and Smiths and Jones in my list. I also have a lot of Mikes, Sallys, and Janes in my list, things like that. But what's really actionable is understanding your sender reputation. So sender reputation revolves around your domain name and how other ESPs, email service providers, look at your domain name. You know, are you good or are you bad? Now we don't provide data on your goodness or your badness, but what we do provide is a look at the type of domains that your contacts have. So for example, is it very heavy Gmail? Is it very heavy Hotmail? Are there lots of individual domains in there? And we give you processing messages and codes on things that you might need to pay attention to. The other thing that we give you is we break apart every single record. We give full transparency on it. So if your record, if your file has, let's say, a million records in there, For every single row in there, every single Adrian James in there, we'll give you multiple codes on what we did with that record. So for example, Adrian James, once we format and enrich that, we might give you a code that says, okay, A, we split the name. B, we added a nickname because Adrian James doesn't have a nickname built in, but we found one and we added one. Let's say it had Adrian James with an 8 on the end. Well, 8 isn't part of your name. So we remove that. We remove the extraneous text. So we'll give you a processing code on that. If we have a name like Adrian, also, you know full well Adrian can be both a male or a female name, right? So we'll also flag it as, you know, go back and check, make sure that, you know, we said Mr. James, but Adrian can sometimes also be a female. So we'll flag it so that you can go back and double-check to make sure that we marked it correctly. So lots and lots of data to give back to you, but we also don't want to confuse people. We want to also make it super easy for you just to grab the data and put it in and use it. That's what the CSV is for. But for folks who are really big data wonks, who really want to drill down, that's what we give them the Insights Report for.
From a practical point of view, if I'm getting this data, am I able then to start to sort that into different campaigns? Because I will have a campaign by geography, for example, to release emails at certain times a day by geo-targeting or for gender. Am I having to do that myself or is the software Transformania helping me to decide the next path of action for the communication?
That's a good question. I At this point, we don't give you the ability to, to, to send the message, but we did give you the data that you can then segment based upon. So what that means is we separate— if there's data in there based on geography, so people's addresses, we separate it based on, you know, if you're in the US, based on states and cities. We also can give you congressional districts in the US and other ways to parse and format that data. Outside the US, we're still looking at different ways to do that. Again, we're coming out with a North America version first. And I spent over 20 years in Asia. I know Asia better than Europe. So I think we're going to probably do an Asian version before we do the North American version. But it's all very exciting stuff that we're looking at because it does give you the tools to then figure out how I should segment the people. But as far as the actual toggling, for example, toggling a button and clicking send, that's still on you to deal with.
Okay, yeah, but if you're giving us the subsets of data, that's what we need, right? And then we can port that to different campaigns. Danny, you obviously spent, you know, 20 years in Asia. That's where you and I know each other from. What about Asian languages? Obviously, you know, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, Malay. Just tell us about how you handle mixed language campaigns and data.
One of the joys of doing North America first is that we are a melting pot here, right? We have people from all over the world in the US, and by doing North America first, we actually get to tackle pretty much every name every ethnicity around the world here in North America. And so, you know, talking about Asian names, you're absolutely right. So let's go over some of the challenges with formatting Asian names. And for folks who aren't familiar with Asia, some of this might be, you know, very interesting for them. So first of all, let's look at Japan. So just a couple of years ago, Japan passed a new law that mandates you must do Last name first, first name last, in the Western sense of a last name and a first name, a surname first and then a given name last. Up until a few years ago, it was quite common for Japanese to use the Western standard of doing their given name first, followed by their surname. So, you know, on the, you know, Shinzo Abe, who just stepped down, Shinzo Abe. would actually be Abe Shinzo according to the new Japanese law. So that's something interesting about Japanese names. Japanese names as far as figuring out the surname and the given name, fairly straightforward. There's over 40,000 key Japanese surnames. But once you understand kind of the logic and throw that into your AI, then it's pretty easy to figure out who's still using the first name, last name syntax. And who's using the last name, first name syntax. Moving to Korea, Korea has just about 60 key surnames. Korea is pretty easy. And the surnames are by and large one syllable followed by given names, which are usually 2 and 3. Now looking at China, China of course is big. That should be on my tombstone. China is big. But What you're dealing with is all different dialects. So you have Hokkien, you have Hainanese, you have Shanghainese, you have, you know, folks in Singapore, folks in Taiwan who have Chinese names and different ways of writing that and maybe even concatenating their English name to that. So, you know, you might have someone named Xie, X-I-E, which in mainland China we would spell X-I-E. But elsewhere, especially from Cantonese languages, might spell H-S-I-E-H, right? Or xie can also be a given name. So it's a surname and a given name. So how the heck do you figure out if it's a first name or a last name in the Western sense, or a surname or a given name? The good news is TransferMania, we've, you know, we've done all the hard work and we figured that out.
That sounds amazing. So if people want to find out more about how Transformania can work for them, Danny, where would they go to be part of your original go-to-market strategy?
We're launching in a few months, uh, but we're in the beta period now, and we're actively working with some very large and also some very small customers right now in our beta program to make sure that we're sending out on day one a fantastic product. So you can find us at transformania.com. And that's T-R-A-N-S-F-O-R-M-A-N-I-A, transformania.com. And at the website, you can register for the beta and get in touch with me there.
Daniel Evenson, CEO of Transformania, thank you so much for joining us on the Speak PR Podcast today.
Thanks a lot, Jim. Talk to you later.
So fascinating stuff at the forefront really of technology, commerce, and communications, Daniel Levinson there from Transformania. And the reason I feel this is important is because under our Speak PR program, which is Storify, Personalization, Engage, Amplify, and Know, we talk about personalization at scale. And the challenge with personalization at scale is the data management alongside working on the different avatars, of course. But personalization at scale requires a data management tool like Transformania that can take large amounts of disparate and ill-formatted content and standardize the format so that when you do the mail merge within the fields of your database and your campaign software, that each individual person is getting personalized content, but also The address line, the Dear Me as they call it at Transformania, the Dear Me line is appropriate. And my experience having built campaigns with different media, for example, in Southeast Asia from different countries with different naming formats means that the ability of a product or a service like Transformania to take large volumes of data and sort them and give them back to me in subsets that I can use without any anxiety about sending emails to the wrong people or emails addressed improperly is going to be a great relief. Personalization at scale for media relations, but all kinds of communications for internal, for journalists, but for our staff, for our partners, and our customers is an essential part of public relations. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. This is the podcast for business owners that have got value to unlock in their organizations and are just looking for cost-effective and efficient ways to do that. If you like this, please do subscribe to this podcast and do share it with other people you think might be interested, and visit our website at eastwestpr.com to get The subscription to our weekly newsletter. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you're able to send communications to people that are personalized at scale.
