“The Logistics of Logistics” is a podcast dedicated to exploring how things get places and the people who get them there. It is hosted by Joe Lynch, who talks with logistics and supply chain leaders about innovation, industry trends and the future of the logistics business.
Lynch said, “When Adam worked at Cerasis, I worked at a 3PL and we got to know each other because we were both content marketers. And I felt like I really understood supply chains and I learned about logistics, but I was never a marketing guy and Adam was very much a marketing guy. So I learned so much from him over the years and I’ve probably known him for 10 years.”
“As Joe said, I was at Cerasis the last time I was on this podcast. And since then, Cerasis was sold to GlobalTranz,” explained Robinson. “I continued to get more interested in the role of technology in freight and logistics and had a brief stint at Turvo, a company that is building a pretty cool product. When I was at Cerasis, one of the websites I went to often was FreightWaves.com. And I learned about FreightWaves’ SaaS product, SONAR. Craig Fuller, the founder and CEO of FreightWaves and I just started talking and he asked me if I would join the FreightWaves team to help market SONAR.”
Robinson continued, “I looked at the SONAR platform and what really attracted me is that FreightWaves had already built this huge community. With Craig and the FreightWaves team, I would be marketing an amazing platform that had a strong subscription base and an audience. So that’s what brought me to FreightWaves and SONAR. And I’m excited to be heading up marketing for SONAR.”
Lynch reacted, saying, “I always call FreightWaves the pirate ship. And I think FreightWaves sometimes calls it that too. FreightWaves was creating an enormous amount of content. I think it prints around 25 articles a day, is that correct?”
Robinson answered, “Yes, at least that, plus FreightWaves TV and a dozen different podcasts, a subscription research product called Passport and many other offerings.”
“Thanks for that overview, Adam,” Lynch said. “Why don’t you give an explanation of SONAR?”
“SONAR is a subscription-based product, and you can access SONAR one of two ways,” Robinson explained. “Many subscribers log into the SONAR freight forecasting platform, and use its data, metrics and freight analytics on the web. SONAR also has subscribers that ingest SONAR’s API and feed that into their own platforms. But at a high level, SONAR is a new breed of data platform that unifies freight benchmarking, analytics, monitoring and forecasting into a streamlined experience. It’s a lot like the Bloomberg model on the financial side.”
Robinson added, “Brokers, shippers, carriers, tech providers – almost anybody in the freight market who needs to get more information in real-time benefits from SONAR. And it isn’t stale data that is lagging by seven days, but data that provides subscribers real-time insights and provides them with actionable insights to make sure that they can plan for capacity by market or lane for example. SONAR helps subscribers price appropriately, know where to allocate resources when markets are difficult or when lanes are hard to cover or when they’re easy, how to not spend too much time on that specific decision. SONAR allows users to make decisions faster and meet or exceed goals faster.”
