Braze for Impact

Nick D'Amelio, Director of CRM at Slice, shares his passion for CRM and pizza! He also gives us look under Slice's martech hood to see how they're creating interactive emails with Google AMP. Search functionality, feedback forms, browsing… all within an email!!

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your MarTech Industry discuss digest. So thrilled to have with me today Gurbir Singh, Product Manager and good friend here at Braze. How are you doing Gurbir?

 

[0:00:31]

Gurbir Singh: Good. How good of a friend are we? You still don't play video games with me, so.

 

[0:00:35]

PJ Bruno: That's true. Also, he's my Rocket League compatriot that I haven't been able to get a game with yet, but now apparently he's a higher level and I'm a little nervous. To my right, your left, I have with me Nick D'Amelio, client of ours, Senior Manager at CRM at Slice. Nick, how are you?

 

[0:00:56]

Nick D'Amelio: What's up guys? It's very great to be here. Beautiful new Braze office,. Very impressive. I need to get in on this Rocket League situation.

 

[0:01:04]

PJ Bruno: Oh man.

 

[0:01:05]

Nick D'Amelio: If anyone's ever done for some Smash Brothers, I'm definitely the guy to go to.

 

[0:01:08]

PJ Bruno: Wow, wow.

 

[0:01:09]

Gurbir Singh: You know what? Forget the podcast.

 

[0:01:11]

PJ Bruno: We're done. So for all you listeners today, our focus is Google AMP. AMP is accelerated mobile pages. So we're going to talk a little bit about what that means, what that is, how it affects email, and Nick was willing to give us some of his time to show us how he's using it at Slice. So email has been largely the same for the past 40 years or so. People constantly talk about the decline or death of email, but it's still the standard for customer communication. But in the past few years, email has experienced a big level up in terms of interactivity, and no surprise, one of the leading trailblazers is Google as they released Google AMP. Gurbir, you're our resident expert with Google AMP. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is, how it came about?

 

[0:01:59]

Gurbir Singh: Yeah. First of all, I hate that I'm the resident expert. I hope I'm not marked that way. But ...

 

[0:02:07]

PJ Bruno: You mean a lot more to me than that. You're not ...

 

[0:02:08]

Gurbir Singh: Thank you.

 

[0:02:12]

PJ Bruno: ... Just an SME.

 

[0:02:12]

Gurbir Singh: So Google AMP, as you said, is the accelerated mobile pages. So Google launched this initiative more than five, six years ago. The goal was to have mobile pages render faster, right? So websites that are being shown on a mobile device, just render it faster. One of the big things about this particular initiative was to get rid of JavaScript because JavaScript was viewed as bloat on a website. It caused a lot of loading issues and a lot of server to server exchange of data. So that's how AMP kind of started. Then from there, very recently, I would say in the last two years, Google basically created a AMP for email version of this. So it takes a subset of this overall project. This is all Opensource now and it creates an email version of this. A lot of the functionality that you would normally want to do an email, a lot of that interactivity, which people would do around, that they would want for JavaScript reasons, they now can leverage AMP HTML to do this, right? So that's how AMP email got to be born. Google basically pioneered this. They led the way and made it Opensource, so huge community behind this. Now you're seeing other vendors kind of attach themselves and say, "We also want to support this. This is great." We have a lot of clients who are super excited about it and they see the power that this can have.

 

[0:03:43]

PJ Bruno: So the impetus for AMP pages was more about size, I guess, right? But for email it's less about size or ...

 

[0:03:52]

Gurbir Singh: It still is about size. So as the mobile device came and people started using more and more of it, it became like, okay, anything I load on a device, the faster it is, the less bloated it is, the better it's going to work on my devices. So we live in a great country where we have fast access to internet, some really powerful phones, but if you think about globally, that's not always true, right? People still have older phones, older 3G systems that they connect to, so Google's attempt was to say I want information spread throughout the world. That's their mission and they want to make sure that can happen regardless of where you are. So AMP was kind of born through their mission statement and said I want to make sure that people can figure out how to get websites loaded on an older phone, things like that. So from their email kind of benefits because email can have a lot more information shown in it, but using this more lightweight newer technology so you can actually send in things like Java forms or carousels and you can have all this interactive cool features that email marketers always wanted to do, but have always been fearful for because it requires a lot more coding, a lot more specialized skills. Now Google's like here's a template. Here's basic components that you can use. Here, just do it. It's kind of cool.

 

[0:05:13]

PJ Bruno: Very cool. Also just considering like so many times a blocker is not having the engineering resources to get something done, just putting the power in a marketer's hand, I think it's a beautiful thing. Nick, any hot takes on Google AMP as far as the origin story that Gurbir just gave us? Is it total BS or is it ...

 

[0:05:34]

Nick D'Amelio: Lies and forgery, all of it. Yeah. No, 100% correct. Yeah. I only really started paying attention to it when it was announced for email since that's kind of my specialty. But yeah, everything Gurbir said, totally correct. I'm really excited about the speed benefits. You have about maybe three seconds of an email loading before a user just says, "Oh, this is blank. I'm going to close out, delete it." Also the functionality is just going to be incredible. It's a total step change in email.

 

[0:06:08]

PJ Bruno: Nick, let's hear a little bit more about your story before we jump into all the facets of Google AMP and the functionality. So you're pretty excited about interactive email obviously.

 

[0:06:18]

Nick D'Amelio: Yep.

 

[0:06:19]

PJ Bruno: And I read on your LinkedIn passion for CRM and pizza, and I've learned now that you are also a pizza maker.

 

[0:06:28]

Nick D'Amelio: That is correct. Yeah. So that actually came before my time at Slice and I think resulted in my time at Slice, but always been a big chef, but pizza I developed a serious love for. I've got a ton of equipment in my apartment. I have a baking steel, which is kind of like an enhanced version of a baking stone. I once hacked my oven to get to temperatures that probably were not safe for a Weehawken, New Jersey apartment.

 

[0:06:58]

PJ Bruno: Hacked the oven.

 

[0:06:58]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, very irresponsible, but all in the name of good pizza. Yeah, and I've always just been really passionate about kind of the craft and artisianry of pizza making.

 

[0:07:08]

PJ Bruno: So a passion for CRM, a passion for making pizza, and you play Smash Brothers. Are you single?

 

[0:07:16]

Nick D'Amelio: No.

 

[0:07:18]

PJ Bruno: See there's the rub.

 

[0:07:19]

Nick D'Amelio: I have a very wonderful girlfriend.

 

[0:07:19]

PJ Bruno: There is the rub.

 

[0:07:20]

Nick D'Amelio: There you go.

 

[0:07:21]

PJ Bruno: Well, I hope she plays Smash with you.

 

[0:07:22]

Nick D'Amelio: Yep, she does.

 

[0:07:25]

PJ Bruno: Awesome. Well dude, why don't you just take us through your journey because it looks like you got a lot of really cool things that you've had on your plate.

 

[0:07:31]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, totally. It's been kind of an interesting little journey. So I majored in Media Studies and Communications and German in college, so a bit of a weird combination. Where that landed me was a little German medical publisher actually in the same neighborhood my office is in now, Flat Iron District. So yeah, they said basically, "Hey, you're a child and you know about the internet. Why don't you handle our content management system? Why don't you handle our social media and why don't you handle our email marketing?" And not knowing anything about any of these things I said, "Sure, that sounds great." Yeah. So I kind of learned as I went and of those three kind of components I really kind of honed in on email marketing. That was where I saw the most impact. At the time at that company it was really the channel that was most trackable so I could directly see the impact I was having on the business, how many textbooks we sold as I was sending out these emails. So pretty exciting for a young kid. That led to my next role, which was purely email marketing, email marketing specialist at Macmillan Publishers, a little bit bigger of a publisher. They had a really interesting program. I was kind of in charge of the technical aspects. We had a grand total of around 20 users in our ESP at the time, which was exact target, none of whom had any coding experience. So I was on kind of QA duty, cleanup duty, so I got to learn a ton about kind of the ins and outs of email and email coding in particular and really kind of coming to grips with the frustrations that Google AMP, is actually going to address in terms of layout, in terms of functionality, stuff like that. So eventually I got a little tired of dragging a very ancient industry behind me in terms of trying to do new things and digital marketing, so I moved over to the startup world. I was at an ad tech company in the travel space called Intent Media. That was mostly B2B focused, which wasn't quite as exciting to me. I was still kind of longing for that kind of interaction with a customer. So eventually that led me to Casper, the mattress guys. That was a really exciting phase.

 

[0:09:58]

PJ Bruno: I have a Casper actually.

 

[0:09:59]

Nick D'Amelio: Oh nice. How do you like it?

 

[0:10:00]

PJ Bruno: I do like it. Great mattress.

 

[0:10:01]

Nick D'Amelio: How do you like their emails?

 

[0:10:03]

PJ Bruno: I ...

 

[0:10:05]

Nick D'Amelio: Tread lightly.

 

[0:10:06]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. You know what? Are they a client? Are they a client? Do we know? They're not. It doesn't matter. You know why? Because I love the branding. It's all over the subway. Simple. Beautiful. Sold me on the branding and sold me at the end of the day, the product. Big fan, Casper.

 

[0:10:21]

Gurbir Singh: And if anybody from Casper is listening, you should come join Braze.

 

[0:10:24]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, come join Braze. Why not? We'll take good care of you.

 

[0:10:26]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Go for it.

 

[0:10:27]

PJ Bruno: We'll take your email marketing campaigns. We'll make them beautiful.

 

[0:10:29]

Nick D'Amelio: It's funny. We're on a podcast right now and maybe we could get them to sponsor us considering that's kind of what they do.

 

[0:10:36]

PJ Bruno: That is what they do.

 

[0:10:37]

Nick D'Amelio: This is brought to you by Casper Mattresses.

 

[0:10:40]

PJ Bruno: I may or may not edit that out. So from Casper then, I guess how long have you been at Slice now?

 

[0:10:47]

Nick D'Amelio: A little over two years now.

 

[0:10:49]

PJ Bruno: Okay. So about two years ago made the jump from Casper to Slice. Pizza's your passion. Everything was starting to coalesce. This makes sense. What was the email programming like when you inherited that at Slice?

 

[0:11:06]

Nick D'Amelio: Needed a little work. It was at a period of time where they were struggling to find an identity. They had just rebranded from an entirely different experience a couple of years earlier. Slice was formerly known as My Pizza and then kind of brought in some new people and rebranded. Yeah, so still trying to find their identity in terms of the branding, and then in terms of the technical aspects of the email program, very limited. Not much in the way of engaging email templates. Their audience size was incredibly small. They had limited it for effectively no reason. I had the suspicion that the IPs actually had not been properly warmed because we were seeing incredibly low open rates that really shouldn't have been like that.

 

[0:11:58]

PJ Bruno: You didn't find out whether it was improperly warmed or not? You just were like, All right, well let's just find a solution.

 

[0:12:03]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, kind of the assumption based on what I knew at the time about engagement levels and now based on kind of the improvements we've seen, I think there was definitely some behind the scenes stuff wrong with the deliverability.

 

[0:12:15]

PJ Bruno: You got got to warm those IPs.

 

[0:12:17]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Yeah, Very important.

 

[0:12:19]

PJ Bruno: Like a pizza.

 

[0:12:20]

Nick D'Amelio: Exactly.

 

[0:12:21]

PJ Bruno: You're going to eat cold dough?

 

[0:12:23]

Nick D'Amelio: The difference is pizza is still good cold. IPs are no good when they're cold.

 

[0:12:26]

PJ Bruno: You've got to preheat. Get those IPs up.

 

[0:12:29]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, that's true.

 

[0:12:31]

PJ Bruno: For those of us who don't know what Slice is, why don't you explain what Slice is for those sad, sad folks that don't have it in their lives.

 

[0:12:39]

Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah. We've got to correct that. So yeah, Slice is basically online ordering for pizza. People have used online ordering platforms for their favorite restaurants before. We are exclusively focused on pizza, which lets us do a couple of things. We can provide an experience that's explicitly tailored to pizza. So a lot of other places, getting half pepperoni and half peppers and onions involves writing out special instructions that the shop may or may not see. We kind of have a little bit of a pizza builder within the app so you can choose which items you want on each half, which is technology that local pizzerias have been kind of slow to adopt.

 

[0:13:27]

PJ Bruno: Because that's the charm of the mom and pop set up, right?

 

[0:13:31]

Nick D'Amelio: Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of low tech. It's very homey, very local, but the problem is these guys are kind of getting killed in the space by some of the larger pizza players. So we really want to kind of get them into the digital age and get people ordering online because that's where our customers want to be. Yeah.

 

[0:13:53]

PJ Bruno: So what's the differentiator for Slice? What makes you guys stand out above the rest?

 

[0:13:58]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. A lot of the other places you can get pizza online, you've got the big chains and then you've got kind of the, what we call aggregators, kind of the big, big online ordering companies. Main difference between us and the larger chains, you're getting that mom and pop quality, which is really important. Main difference between us and the big online ordering companies is that those companies actually take kind of an enormous cut out of the restaurant's pocket when a user orders online. Basically what we do is provide marketing and technology and online ordering, paid search, a ton of services to these pizzerias for a very small flat fee on every order, which really allows them to grow their businesses and keep local pizza alive.

 

[0:14:52]

PJ Bruno: God, I love that. Gerb, you're a pizza guy I've got to assume.

 

[0:14:55]

Gurbir Singh: I do. I love pizza. [crosstalk 00:14:57].

 

[0:14:57]

PJ Bruno: What's your type? What's your poison?

 

[0:14:59]

Gurbir Singh: I actually just like a nice, good margarita pizza.

 

[0:15:02]

PJ Bruno: Oh yeah.

 

[0:15:03]

Gurbir Singh: If you can do that well, I'm a customer.

 

[0:15:05]

Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah, absolutely. Did you know that yesterday was the official birthdate of the margarita pizza?

 

[0:15:11]

Gurbir Singh: I did not know that.

 

[0:15:12]

PJ Bruno: What year was that?

 

[0:15:15]

Nick D'Amelio: 1889. Queen Margarita of Italy visited a small Focacceria in Naples and he kind of adorned the pizza with the traditional tomato sauce, but also basil and mozzarella to represent the colors of the Italian flag. She apparently wrote a letter kind of praising this creation and yeah, that was the birth of the margarita pizza.

 

[0:15:38]

Gurbir Singh: I'm surprised you didn't order some margarita pizza today for this podcast. I'm kind of disappointed now.

 

[0:15:43]

PJ Bruno: Well, you know what? You guys just ruined the surprise because when we wrap up, guess where we're going?

 

[0:15:48]

Nick D'Amelio: Oh man.

 

[0:15:48]

Gurbir Singh: Margarita pizza.

 

[0:15:50]

Nick D'Amelio: Nice.

 

[0:15:50]

Gurbir Singh: Or is it just Margaritas?

 

[0:15:52]

PJ Bruno: When was the birthday of buffalo chicken slice?

 

[0:15:54]

Nick D'Amelio: Oh, I do not know that.

 

[0:15:56]

Gurbir Singh: It was like 10 years ago.

 

[0:15:57]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, probably.

 

[0:15:58]

Gurbir Singh: It doesn't matter. It's not real pizza.

 

[0:16:00]

PJ Bruno: Not my slice, man. Not my slice.

 

[0:16:02]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah. Yeah.

 

[0:16:04]

PJ Bruno: All right, cool. Let's jump back into your time at Slice because you take the reins. You had to clean house a little bit with IP, with deliverability. Obviously you have to create some of kind of like your first onboarding user journey things. When did interactivity become a priority for you?

 

[0:16:23]

Nick D'Amelio: So yeah, we've always wanted to provide kind of a delightful experience to the user because pizza is inherently delightful, so we explored some other vendors for interactivity a couple of months into my time, but none of them were really a great fit. But now with Google kind of putting this out there, basically giving it away for free, we're really excited to start jumping into it again.

 

[0:16:49]

PJ Bruno: It's just free then.

 

[0:16:51]

Nick D'Amelio: Pretty much. I mean, Gurbir, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no charge to use it and yeah, it's just ... Yeah.

 

[0:16:58]

Gurbir Singh: Yeah, AMP's free. You just have to basically register with Google right now. But I believe that's also going to change in the long run as it becomes a more community-focused initiative.

 

[0:17:10]

PJ Bruno: Of course. They're probably looking for champions and then eventually it's like ...

 

[0:17:12]

Gurbir Singh: Yeah, I think right now it's like you get registered so your email can render within Gmail, but as soon as some of the other ISPs like Yahoo and Outlook who have signed on make this change on their end, I think that process is going to slightly get updated as well.

 

[0:17:30]

Nick D'Amelio: Right, makes sense.

 

[0:17:32]

PJ Bruno: Let's get into the nitty gritty details. How is Slice leveraging Google AMP for email?

 

[0:17:37]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, so we've got a couple of use cases lined up. We have a working prototype of our AMP emails right now, which is awesome. We have an email coder out in Macedonia on my team. His name's Arso. Arso, if you're listening, you are the man. He basically was able to ...

 

[0:17:53]

PJ Bruno: Shout out to Arso. He is the man.

 

[0:17:55]

Nick D'Amelio: He is the man. He was able to put this thing together in no time flat. So we are ready and raring to go once we have everything in place for him. But yeah, there's a couple of use cases that we've gotten really excited about. One as we've kind of alluded to is just the layout and design options that you get. Anything just as simple as an accordion menu or a sidebar or an image carousel, who doesn't want to scroll through a bunch of images of delicious pizza? It just kind of gets people in the mood.

 

[0:18:26]

PJ Bruno: I'm starving right now actually.

 

[0:18:28]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, I know me too.

 

[0:18:29]

PJ Bruno: Just talking about it I felt my salivation gland just start going insane.

 

[0:18:33]

Nick D'Amelio: This is my life every day by the way, is just stock imagery of pizza and photo shoots from pizzerias just constantly on my screen. Oh, it's torture.

 

[0:18:44]

PJ Bruno: All right, so what else? Other functionality.

 

[0:18:47]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, other stuff that we're incredibly excited for, gathering customer feedback just directly within the body of the email. So Google AMP will have form submission available for emails. I would love to just have a user review a pizzeria just right in their inbox. Just make it incredibly easy so we can surface that data up to all our other users and continue our mission of just being the authority on pizza.

 

[0:19:11]

PJ Bruno: That's exciting, man. You guys are on that. That front wave.

 

[0:19:14]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, exactly. It's exciting times. As we've talked about email hasn't changed in, you know, basically since the inception of HTML email. So this is the first real turnabout in a very long time.

 

[0:19:27]

Gurbir Singh: I'm curious how this change for you guys, because I've heard this comment from other email marketers where a lot of the attribution they do today is driving traffic towards a website and a lot of the functionality you're actually talking about right now will allow customers obviously to remove that friction and just do it within the inbox, but now you're not going to be able to track website traffic.

 

[0:19:48]

Nick D'Amelio: Exactly.

 

[0:19:49]

Gurbir Singh: Email budgets when they're handed out at corporations, they're typically on what can you drive to the website? Now all of a sudden you're going to lose that. I'm wondering does Slice have a strategy for that or any thoughts on that area?

 

[0:20:04]

Nick D'Amelio: We have not gone into it yet. You're right, just because this is such a step change, it's going to be kind of difficult to explain this to a lot of folks, especially when there's money involved. But if we can prove out the ability to kind of interact and eventually hopefully even transact in the body of an email, I think things will start to change slowly over time.

 

[0:20:29]

Gurbir Singh: Cool.

 

[0:20:30]

Nick D'Amelio: So no plan yet, but thank you for putting that in my head because I'll probably need to plan for that.

 

[0:20:36]

Gurbir Singh: I just want to make sure Arso gets paid. That's all.

 

[0:20:38]

Nick D'Amelio: Oh yeah.

 

[0:20:40]

PJ Bruno: Well guys, this has been awesome. Nick, thanks so much for coming in.

 

[0:20:42]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, absolutely.

 

[0:20:44]

PJ Bruno: Gurbir, thanks for giving me some of your time, bud. Always appreciate it.

 

[0:20:46]

Gurbir Singh: Anytime.

 

[0:20:47]

PJ Bruno: And Rocket League.

 

[0:20:49]

Nick D'Amelio: Yeah, let's do it.

 

[0:20:50]

Gurbir Singh: Rocket League and pizzas?

 

[0:20:51]

PJ Bruno: Rocket league and pizzas.

 

[0:20:52]

Nick D'Amelio: Boom.

 

[0:20:53]

PJ Bruno: Thanks for listening, guys. Come back again and see us.

[0:20:55]

Julio Lopez (Client Strategy at Movable Ink) joins us at Braze HQ to share the concept of a visual experience platform and how it can be used to create not just dynamic, personalized emails.. But also to keep that unique experience in tact as customers move across channels and even onto a website.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest. And I'm so happy to be joined today by Julio Lopez, associate director of client strategy at Movable Ink. Julio, thanks so much for being here.

 

[0:00:32]

Julio Lopez: Yeah, I'm happy to be here, nothing like a podcast for a marketing nerd like me to participate in.

 

[0:00:37]

PJ Bruno: I love it, podcasts on a Friday. And thanks for coming in under these heat conditions. It's a ridiculous.

 

[0:00:43]

Julio Lopez: It's really warm out. I'm happy that I got to make it into your office and cool off a little bit.

 

[0:00:47]

PJ Bruno: And I'm glad that this isn't a video podcast because you'd see us both melting in our pants right now. But anyways, let's cut to it. Julio, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

 

[0:00:58]

Julio Lopez: Sure. My role within Movable Ink is to partner with key clients to identify and deliver strategy frameworks that drive meaningful results. I started my career at CheetahMail focusing on strategic email development and deployment. Then went on to lead the customer success team at RevTrax, which is an offer management platform. And before joining Movable Ink,I was leading integration work streams for Eversight, which is a retail pricing and promotion optimization firm. I've now been with Movable Ink for a little over a year, and it's my pleasure to be here today to discuss the exciting world of email marketing.

 

[0:01:32]

PJ Bruno: Yes, and I'm so glad you were able to fit us in the schedule, man. Really appreciate it. So, why don't you just tell us a little more about Movable Ink for those of us out there who have not had the pleasure to experience your brand?

 

[0:01:42]

Julio Lopez: Of course Movable Ink is a visual experience platform. And our technology enables digital marketing leaders to create unique, relevant and compelling visual experiences across email and web and display at the exact moment of engagement. We work with over 700 of the world's leading brands and have over 300 employees across the globe.

 

[0:02:04]

PJ Bruno: Wow. I heard you say visual experience platform. Can you expand on that? What is that?

 

[0:02:10]

Julio Lopez: Sure. A visual experience platform is a SaaS solution that allows digital marketers to free their data from the silos that they're typically housed in and activate that data to generate intelligent creative with millions and millions of unique variations based on things like consumer context, consumer behavior and third-party insights. And all of it is done in real time.

 

[0:02:33]

PJ Bruno: Oh man. Cool. That sounds really valuable. So yeah, data silos can cause a lot of frustration for marketers, as I'm sure you've seen, who try to activate them. But applying that to email specifically, what are some of the ways that Movable Ink helps marketers take email to that next level with visual experience platforms?

 

[0:02:54]

Julio Lopez: Well, our primary goal is to help brands create these one-to-one visual experiences that based on data, and there's a lot of ways that we can do this. It could be something more sophisticated, like pulling any customer's loyalty data into an email in real time and converting a points value to a specific reward recommendation. Or it could be something as simple as pulling in a customer's name into an email header and using a custom branded font. One of our travel clients use that strategy to add their customer's name to a header image, and it was an image of a boarding pass, and it was a really clever and eye-catching way to get the customer's attention. But to be clear, we do like to focus on more sophisticated use cases. And some of my favorites are realtime pricing for hotels and airlines, as well as real time inventory for eCommerce brands. And when I say real time, I mean that at the exact moment that the email is opened, the information updates automatically. And again, these are just a few ways that our clients are using Movable Ink to take their emails to the next level. But there are tons and tons of use cases that we've developed across all verticals.

 

[0:04:03]

PJ Bruno: That's amazing. So, this real time aspect, it sounds like a fairly novel solution to a newer problem as marketers have access to these increasing amounts of consumer data. So how do you see Movable Ink bringing traditional marketing into the new age?

 

[0:04:22]

Julio Lopez: Well, if I stop and think about the current state of marketing, it becomes really apparent that we're living in a visual era. Images and visuals are now the language that moves people. And I think this has led to an all new set of requirements for digital marketers. Brands need to create compelling visual experiences that are unique to the individual every single time that customer engages with the brand. But creating these personalized visual experiences at scale is really, really difficult. And the difficulty stems from the fact that traditional martech stacks weren't designed for the visual era. So, as a result, many marketing investments are no longer moving the needle. And not to put too fine of a point on it, but as the number of digital touchpoints continues to increase, the problem will snowball, and those unique visual experiences will only become harder and harder to create. So with that in mind, I think that marketers are kind of faced with a false choice. They can either create personalized experiences for small segments in a non-scalable way, or they can create generic experiences that reach a broader audience. And this is where I see Movable link bringing marketing into the new age. Using our visual experience platform, companies can thrive in today's visual era by freeing their data from those silos and activating that data to generate creative with millions of unique variations. And you're doing that across multiple channels and personalizing for every individual at every touch point.

 

[0:05:51]

PJ Bruno: It feels like we're living in the future. So I want to hear more about visual experience platform because this is new to me. This is the very first time I'm hearing about it. So what other benefits do you see for organizations who leverage this?

 

[0:06:03]

Julio Lopez: Sure. I think the core benefit is the scalable and personalized creative that's generated in real time, at the moment of each engagement. The scalability translates to marketers finally being able to move away from focusing on segments to focusing on creating these one-to-one, unique and relevant experiences. Also, because of the scalability, production becomes highly automated, which means that teams can now focus less on low level tactical activities and more on strategy to create those innovative, on-brand experiences that drive revenue. And I'll also add one more thing. One of the best things about a visual experience platform is that there's no need to rip and replace anything. You can use it with your existing martech stack, supercharging the value of those investments that you've made.

 

[0:06:52]

PJ Bruno: That sounds like a game changer. But so something like Movable Ink that has such an impact, I mean it sounds like it could be complicated potentially. How simple is it to inject Movable Ink into a company's marketing initiatives, into their stack?

 

[0:07:06]

Julio Lopez: It really is very simple. So the way that our platform works is that we look for a data source that houses customer information, and call up that data source every time the customer is engaging with the brand. So those data searches can be internal, for example, an API into the data warehouse. Or they can be external, say an API into a brand's offer management platform. Because our core focus is on activating existing data sets in real time, we are effectively partner agnostic and work really well with third parties. And we've actually got a robust list of existing partners that result in a ton of out of the box solutions. And we also regularly launched client-specific specific integrations. So because we're partner agnostic, we can supercharge the investments clients make in their existing martech stack by activating the data that's housed across all their vendors.

 

[0:08:00]

PJ Bruno: Can you give us an example of how that might work though?

 

[0:08:03]

Julio Lopez: Sure. So, say that you're a retailer with a loyalty program. A big part of your marketing efforts to this loyal customer base is going to be to have them redeem their points so they keep coming back. So by tapping into a loyalty platform, Movable Ink can pull in each member's unique rewards information into an email in real time, things like point balance. And taking it a step further, Movable Ink can then convert those reward points into redemption opportunities. So if we know that our reward is worth X number of points, we would only show the rewards within a specific threshold based on how many points the individual has in their account. We can then compound additional waterfall logic to surface the right loyalty content for the right individual.

 

[0:08:49]

PJ Bruno: That's fantastic. As marketers, you and I, we understand the importance of personalization and how that personalized experience can be more immersive, as what you've described. On the topic of immersive though, I've learned Movable Ink is now powering augmented reality in some client communications. Is that for real? How does that work?

 

[0:09:12]

Julio Lopez: Yeah, it's something that we're really, really excited about, basically because it's a newer way for us to deliver these highly personalized experiences in a very, very engaging way. And there's plenty of ways to delight customers, but AR has proven to be very, very successful. And I think a big reason for the success has been the easy customer experience. So a brand will simply send out an email with a call to action to the AR experience. That click on the email brings the customer to a landing page where they can flip through different background filters. And it's all done within the browser, so no app download is needed. One client example comes to mind, which was really, really popular and successful. It was Virgin Holiday's Wish You Were Here campaign. So when we powered that, the email had a CTA that brought the customer to the landing page. And in that landing page, customers were able to take caricature-like photos with Snapchat-like filters overlayed on themselves. And they were able to switch between five different destinations, so you had New York, Hollywood Las Vegas, Florida, and also a scuba diving destination. And the images that they took directly from that email experience were easily shareable to social media. So the reason why I think this was so successful is that, not only did this email serve as an entertaining and immersive experience, but it was also great brand exposure. You had all these shares going out that the brand team wasn't paying for, and it was on-brand. It was calling out what the company could do, and it resulted in sky high engagement rates across clicks, shares and dwell times.

 

[0:10:49]

PJ Bruno: That is so cool. What a cool campaign, and a fun way to engage customers too. It sounds relatively easy to implement. I would've thought it'd been a little stickier. But let's switch gears a little bit. So you sit within Movable Inks client strategy team. That's right?

 

[0:11:04]

Julio Lopez: That's correct, yes.

 

[0:11:05]

PJ Bruno: Okay, cool. And you focus on retail. That's your vertical, right?

 

[0:11:08]

Julio Lopez: That is right, yes.

 

[0:11:10]

PJ Bruno: So what types of companies are you working with? And what are some of the common trends that you're seeing in the retail vertical?

 

[0:11:17]

Julio Lopez: Yeah, so let me give you a little bit more background on that. So we went to market with the client strategy team in Q1 of this year, and spent the better half of last year planning our engagement model. My focus on retail is to work with our top 15 organizations and align directly with the executive teams that oversee all digital marketing, so not just email. So my goal is to understand what their pain points are and map out a framework for addressing those pain points. It's a very consultative approach that involves shepherding clients through their digital transformation efforts. And there's been quite few common themes across the clients that I've worked with, whether it's retail apparel, luxury retail or pure play econ specialty retailers. I think the biggest trend is how much more these marketers are being asked to do and deliver with less and less resources. I think we all know that retail margins are razor thin. And to survive, many of these organizations need to make some very tough choices to protect the bottom line. And what ends up happening is that, because the teams are understaffed, more and more focus goes to operations, since everyone is spread so thin, and the overarching strategy receives less attention. So I think it's clear to see that eventually this working model becomes unsustainable. So, smart marketers are realizing that now. A lot of the strategic frameworks that I design for my clients focus on automation, modularity, and more importantly scalability, so the few resources that remain can be deployed to focus on strategy.

 

[0:12:56]

PJ Bruno: Gotcha.

 

[0:12:57]

Julio Lopez: And then another trend that I am seeing is data cleanup. So over the years, brands, and all of us honestly, got caught up in this idea of big data. And we collected tons of user information, but we never really used it. And the way that much of that data was collected was fragmented and disorganized. So then we moved all that data to data lakes, which were mainly designed for data science teams to learn more about the customers. So, this ended up creating a different problem because the data became difficult for marketing teams to access, especially in real time. So, marketers are now focusing on getting access to their own data in real time to deliver these personalized experiences.

 

[0:13:41]

PJ Bruno: Oh wow.

 

[0:13:42]

Julio Lopez: Yeah. Now that I'm thinking about trends, I think this access to data is becoming more and more important because of a third trend, which is the exponential rise of direct to consumer brands. So, D2C brands are digitally native. So, from day one, they've had access to realtime data to personalize the user journey. So in order to compete, traditional retailers need to up their personalization game. D2C brands have set an entirely, entirely new bar for the shopper experience. They are more immersive, tailored, experiential shopping journeys, and all of that is made possible by how nimble they can be in activating that customer data.

 

[0:14:23]

PJ Bruno: That's awesome.

 

[0:14:24]

Julio Lopez: Yeah, I'm really excited about all this. I think that as we keep an eye on these trends, more and more retailers are going to shift their focus to these three things.

 

[0:14:31]

PJ Bruno: You're really in the weeds with retail. You weren't kidding. What are some other trends that you're really excited about for the upcoming months and this year?

 

[0:14:38]

Julio Lopez: Yeah. So, I guess taking it away from a little bit of the negative and more in the positive, one thing that I'm excited to see develop is the rise of experiential retail. So, the traditional retail model has always focused on the product first, but more and more consumers are looking for an engaging experience. And largely this is driven by the millennial generation.

 

[0:14:57]

PJ Bruno: Of course.

 

[0:14:59]

Julio Lopez: Their preference over experiences over physical things is a big part of their core values. So now you've got interesting concepts like DSW's Nail Bar. So I'm interested to see how retailers look to stand out from the pack with these experiential retail experiences.

 

[0:15:14]

PJ Bruno: Fantastic. Thanks for sharing those, Julio. So, in talking about trends, we have to bring it back to the core trend we started this discussion with, and all around personalization. For those brands out there looking to up their personalization game, what are some easy ways to start right now? What are some quick wins?

 

[0:15:33]

Julio Lopez: Yeah. I think a one easy win would be to leverage your website to personalize your emails. So your brand website will have a ton of information, including browse behavior, cart abandons and inventory levels. So pulling in that website behavior into your promo emails will make every touch point feel like a one-to-one communication to the customer. And we do this regularly for our clients and have seen some amazing results.

 

[0:15:59]

PJ Bruno: What kind of results are we talking about here? What do you normally see?

 

[0:16:02]

Julio Lopez: Yeah. So we tend to see big lifts in engagement and revenue. So, for example, we had Under Armour implement a reusable product recommendation module in their promo emails. And the recommendations were based off of website browse behavior. And with that module, they've seen a 132% lift in click through rates, and also a 49% lift in conversion rates. And I think another not so obvious result from this was that since the content is dynamic to the user, the email only had to be coded once, so Under Armour's saw a 75% reduction in the time it took to produce the email.

 

[0:16:39]

PJ Bruno: Oh wow. Okay. That's definitely a hugely successful campaign. And I'm sure Under Armour lauds you for your efforts there. Good stuff.

 

[0:16:46]

Julio Lopez: Yeah.

 

[0:16:47]

PJ Bruno: Julio, thank you so much for joining me today, man.

 

[0:16:49]

Julio Lopez: It's been great to be here.

 

[0:16:50]

PJ Bruno: [inaudible] Come back and see us again soon, won't you?

 

[0:16:52]

Julio Lopez: For sure.

 

[0:16:53]

PJ Bruno: And you guys come back and see us again some time too. Take care.

[0:16:56]

Marketing Boss Dom Gallello calls in from London to give us his story. From digital strategy in Tokyo to running marketing at Sean Parker's reboot of Airtime to now running the show at Badoo (internet dating founding father), Dom has seen it all. Hear his insights on building a beloved brand through creative positioning and emerging tech.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ Bruno: Hello again. Welcome back to Brace for Impact, your MarTech industry Discuss Digest and today joining me from foggy London town. I'm thrilled to have this guy on the podcast, friend of Braze, and he's what we call in the industry a boss. [Dom Gallello 00:00:33], thanks so much for being on with us, man.

 

[0:00:36]

Dom Gallello: I appreciate that very much. It's actually raining here, so London, will take it a step further.

 

[0:00:41]

PJ Bruno: Classic London behavior. Yeah man, I was really thrilled to get on the horn with you a few weeks ago and just hear about everything. You've got quite an eclectic journey you've had so far, my friend.

 

[0:00:52]

Dom Gallello: It's meandering. I don't know if I can say it's been purposeful, but it's certainly led me to the right places and the right opportunities.

 

[0:00:58]

PJ Bruno: It's not about the destination, Brother. You know it.

 

[0:01:01]

Dom Gallello: Exactly.

 

[0:01:02]

PJ Bruno: Cool man. So, I mean, I'd love to just chat about, I mean, as you know, this is like an email series, but I know you have some experience with email at a handful of the places that you were at. And then also winning the Cross-Channel Attribution battle. Let's take a step back and go down memory lane a little bit. I know you're first big boy job that you had with marketing was overseas, right? You were in Asia for a bit.

 

[0:01:26]

Dom Gallello: Yeah. So I am half Japanese and after graduating college in Japan, I started my career in a communication strategy firm in Tokyo. A lot of what we did was helped clients like Coca Cola or Visa developed integrated marketing communications, and really taking an agnostic view of different channels, and understanding how to weave them together to best deliver a creative idea. So I think it was sort of the first step in my journey towards understanding that not only does multichannel marketing matter, it is actually the backbone of building successful business.

 

[0:02:02]

PJ Bruno: You were heavily involved in like more of building an experience, right? You were on that creative end of thinking about not just an email or a push notification but like experiences outside of the computer or the screen.

 

[0:02:16]

Dom Gallello: Definitely, when I joined Naked Communications in New York a little bit later, I was working on a lot of global brands and really building out worlds for some of these brands. So a great example was Fanta, where we developed a world called Fanta Play, which was literally a world of animated characters that you teenagers and young adults could basically engage with. And it was not just sort of billboards or advertising, it was really playable games, and comic books, and telling stories, and building a world that we could invite audiences into, and allowed us to basically make every single touch point and invitation into some broader experience that we were developing. And that crossed the 193 markets. It was absolutely huge.

 

[0:02:59]

PJ Bruno: Geez. And your role, there was, you had the zoomed out view of how all these things interplayed together.

 

[0:03:07]

Dom Gallello: Yeah, it was a mix of sort of creative and communication strategies. So understanding how a play could be brought to life in all of these different touch points, and then weaving it together into basically market packages that could be deployed. So using different channels to solve different challenges, depending upon what your market needed.

 

[0:03:28]

PJ Bruno: And at that point were you able to pull the metrics information on what the engagement looked like? Obviously it's tricky when you're talking about real life experiences and stuff, but what was the intelligence system behind taking in your understanding of how that was received.

 

[0:03:45]

Dom Gallello: A lot of the digital content that we developed, and this is really sort of 2013 and 2012, were predominantly basic view counts, play rates on specific digital properties. Some of the basics of what we were looking at. There was certainly not tremendous sort of event-based analysis that was going on at the time, particularly in the world of digital advertising. And then you have traditional measures for sort of traditional advertising channels that were constantly being deployed by the Coca-Cola organization to understand the efficacy of our work. I would say things have advanced very significantly since those seven or eight years ago. And it's a very different world that we live in now, to understand, of all the channels that we have at our disposal, which are the ones that are really working for us. And not only that, how do you evolve your strategies within those channels based upon what you see working or not working?

 

[0:04:42]

PJ Bruno: It's scary the level of detail we have in the insights sometimes.

 

[0:04:48]

Dom Gallello: It can block your decision making some times, but it can also at least help you evolve your approach in decision making, which is something that we never had in the old and traditional world of advertising.

 

[0:05:00]

PJ Bruno: It's funny to see the pendulum swing to the other side where the influx of data can cause that decision paralysis where you're like, "Oh geez, I don't even really, really know where to go with this."

 

[0:05:10]

Dom Gallello: Exactly.

 

[0:05:11]

PJ Bruno: So Dom, so first in Asia, you said Tokyo and then was it New York, and then the West coast or vice versa.

 

[0:05:18]

Dom Gallello: So then it was in New York working again on sort of global communication strategy. That was again some of that Fanta experience I discussed earlier. Working with Visa to develop their World Cup campaign in Brazil. Really thinking about how do you build a centralized in global marketing toolkit that can be deployed and flexibly applied to different markets based upon their predominant marketing challenges. From there I spent one year at NCI, at a business school, really trying to make the transition from really sort of the creative side of what traditional advertising represents, which is creating a world and inviting consumers to come and live and breathe these worlds that these blue chip brands have been so successful at creating. And really trying to understand how to connect that to true business impact. And so that journey led me over to the West Coast to a venture studio called West, which helps build brand and go to market strategy for technology companies, big and small.

 

[0:06:23]

PJ Bruno: Nice. And then after strategy, that's when you came back to New York for Airtime.

 

[0:06:29]

Dom Gallello: Yes. So after spending some time developing brands, and understanding how to take a technology company, and inject soul and basically higher purpose values into that business, so that you can not only continue to communicate your offerings as they are today, but also extend your imagination for what becomes possible within a product or an organization in the future. I then decided to join Airtime, which was Sean Parker's group video chat startup, allowed you to watch videos and listen to music together. And really took over as VP of marketing. Early on I was a consultant helping to basically develop their launch strategy, and understand how to cold start a social network, which is no small undertaking in the world of behemoths that we live amongst today. And then from there, once we had the initial user base on, really working across both acquisition and retention marketing to understand how we could bend that growth curve up.

 

[0:07:32]

PJ Bruno: So did you, you got FaceTime with Sean Parker?

 

[0:07:35]

Dom Gallello: There was significant amounts of FaceTime with Sean Parker. Yes.

 

[0:07:38]

PJ Bruno: Did he have the idea to turn it from The Airtime to Airtime?

 

[0:07:44]

Dom Gallello: Sean for me represents a couple of things. First and foremost, he understands social networks unlike anyone I've ever met. He has a tremendous capacity to think about how networks of people interact. And so as he went from Airtime version one, which was a desktop product, in to Airtime version two, he had a very clear sense of how he wanted some of the social mechanics to work, not only to help drive the right type of experience, but also to enable growth that we needed. And I think that was a lot of his special sauce that he brought to that early Facebook days. The second part of Sean is that he has a very clear vision for where social is moving. He really fundamentally believes that the world of liking and commenting was going to give way to the experience age where we would truly be together with our friends. And so Airtime continues to be the manifestation of that belief that this world of asynchronous communication will give way to really feeling like you always have your friends in your pocket. And I think Airtime really has tried to deliver on that experience since its inception.

 

[0:08:50]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. That vision still rings so true I feel like. So from my understanding, Sean Parker founded Airtime 2010. They had some hard years to my understanding. And then around 2015 another venture round, and then you came on board 2016. Is that timeline around right?

 

[0:09:10]

Dom Gallello: Yeah. So 2016 and April 21st, I'll never forget the date, was the date that we launched the mobile version of Airtime. Which was a very different product than it was originally, back in 2012. And it was very much focused on close groups of friends who could get together in a room, and hang out as if they were hanging out in real life. It is a tremendous experience challenge to deliver from a product perspective. You're talking about how do you integrate 10 video streams, and inject music or video that synchronously plays across multiple devices and multiple bandwidth. It's a tremendous challenge to really deliver from a product and engineering perspective. And I continue to tip my hat to those guys because they are really trying to pioneer what the future of social will ultimately look like.

 

[0:10:04]

PJ Bruno: So when they, when they made that pivot and tried to focus more on mobile and tighter groups of friends, was there an equal pivot in marketing strategy? When you took the helm, was it you got some sort of directive or were you given free reign to just do what you know how to do?

 

[0:10:23]

Dom Gallello: There are some pretty fundamental principles when it comes to acquisition that matters in the world of social networking. Everything for us was about network density. So ensuring that any user that we brought onto the platform would have friends to interact with. That becomes pretty hard to deliver in a world of even performance marketing, where as good as Facebook or Snapchat might be at matching you to a user that looks like your most successful users, they're not great at delivering users that are going to be highly networked within a defined ecosystem. So we were constantly thinking about ways to try and, not only bring on high quality users onto the platform, but also create the right invite mechanics that would essentially allow us to grow the network through more attributed virality. And that was leveraged, not just across client side text messaging, but also with email, and ensuring that we were always trying to get to the recipient, with the user's consent of course, but from as many channels as made sense.

 

[0:11:34]

PJ Bruno: How long were you there for?

 

[0:11:36]

Dom Gallello: From, I started really my work with them, in a consulting form, in February 2016. And I left the business in February of 2019. So just about a three year stint.

 

[0:11:48]

PJ Bruno: Man. So I sounds like you had your work cut out for you there. A lot of big initiatives.

 

[0:11:52]

Dom Gallello: It was. I think a lot of where we first began interacting with Braze was really trying to understand how do we leverage modern multichannel marketing tools to really create the experiences that became possible on Airtime. And we had a lot of fun leveraging the Braze platform to do things like when Taylor Swift's music video dropped, sending out to our teen and college audience, 12 snake emojis. And they knew exactly what that meant. They would open up that notification and they would be dropped into a room where a bunch of people were listening to that music video. And you were able to experience that song for the very first time in a community of friends.

 

[0:12:39]

PJ Bruno: That's cool.

 

[0:12:39]

Dom Gallello: These types of tools are amazing. And a lot of the focus has often been on how do we sort of optimize these channels in somewhat of a siloed fashion. Thinking about just what are the right subject lines or delivery times or any of these sort of fundamentals of delivery that are often talked about in the world of retention marketing or life cycle marketing. And I think what's often missed out on is how do you use those channels in a way that allows you to build an amazing and unforgettable experience that your customers are going to love, and they're going to ultimately talk about. And so a lot of my focus has been, and this is true for me now at Badoo, but keeping in mind that these channels need to be treated with care and with trust. And that when we reach out to a user, that we want to ensure that we're going to invite them to something truly special, that they're going to love, not just sort of beating them over the head with messaging to do a specific action that we might be self interested in accomplishing.

 

[0:13:43]

PJ Bruno: That's a great call, man. You got to respect those channels. It's not the old world of email blasts these days. You really got to get that permission. Make sure you're sending the relevant stuff. I love it. So one more thing before we move on to your latest spot at Badoo. So at Airtime, VP of marketing, right? I mean running the whole ship, did you still have that involvement in creative strategy the way you have in the past? Like the Taylor Swift thing, for example, was that a brainchild of yours or how much involvement do you have at that level? Because it seems like that's something that you're really jazzed about and interested in.

 

[0:14:19]

Dom Gallello: Yeah. So we certainly had a relatively big user base. That being said, we were still a small marketing team. And every single person on that team had the flexibility to propose ideas to try it out. I think one of my favorite aspects about the Braze platform was that I could empower young community managers or marketing managers, who generally had very little quantitative experience, but could easily wrap their heads around what the power of a notification targeted to the right group of people, and attached with the right experience or the right content on the other end could do. And so we were constantly experimenting as a team around many of these ideas. I believe the Taylor Swift idea came from one of our junior marketing managers, who simply spoke the language of our audience, and came up with a great idea, executed it. And we saw insane open rates and insane participation on that experience. And we just continued to do that following the cultural calendar of our audience, and just intersecting with them in ways that felt relevant to the time.

 

[0:15:27]

PJ Bruno: That's awesome. And so your transition to Badoo, was that, did they seek you out or you felt like your time at Airtime was coming to an end or how did that get that kicked off?

 

[0:15:39]

Dom Gallello: It was a unusual LinkedIn message, as you can imagine I tend to receive tons of LinkedIn messages. As I'm sure anyone on that platform does in the world of automated sales outreach. But received a LinkedIn message from a Andrey Andreev, of who is the founder and CEO of Badoo, as well as the group of companies now called Magic Lab, which owns Badoo, Bumble, Chappy and Lumen. And so when Andre reached out, having sort of known about him peripherally as one of the fathers of the dating space, I immediately responded and said, "Let's have a conversation." And his brief to me, which was true on that first phone call as it is today, was essentially to help Badoo become a iconic brand. To provide clarity and purpose to this platform that has operated for 13 years but has not really had marketing leadership for quite some time. And to really sort of kickstart the development of an organization that could essentially engender the next phase of growth for them by investing in great brand, and great experiences for their users. And so that's a lot of what my focus is on today.

 

[0:16:54]

PJ Bruno: Got reached out to by the CEO of the company. That's a serious headhunting move right there.

 

[0:16:59]

Dom Gallello: It works. I mean when you're hiring [crosstalk 00:17:02]-

 

[0:17:04]

PJ Bruno: It's effective.

 

[0:17:04]

Dom Gallello: ... It generally is helpful when your founder and CEO is a deeply invested. And Andre, he built this business in 2006 before most of the platforms that we know and love today even existed.

 

[0:17:16]

PJ Bruno: I was about to say, this is one of the first internet dating apps.

 

[0:17:21]

Dom Gallello: Yeah, it was the first one to combine sort of photo albums with instant messaging. It's hard for us to imagine today, but the old world used to be, you had to get a paid membership, and then you would sort of send emails to people and it didn't feel like a chat. It felt like this sort of laborious courting process of these sort of one dimensional profiles. And he basically said, "I'm going to launch the first free product that allows people to sign up, upload a photo album and just get on instant message with people." And it's gone through its evolutions over time, but it's scaled to 425 million users around the world. It has a truly global footprint. Our major markets are South America, Western and Eastern Europe. We don't have tremendous presence in places like the US or the UK, though we are actively working on that. And it has grown predominantly organically since its inception. It was the first product to introduce so many of the features that we sort of take for granted today. They introduced the idea that you would have cards of people and you would vote yes or no. There are other competitors since then that have introduced UI to make that more fun. But the core idea came from Badoo. Or introduced the idea of using a GPS location to identify the people nearby. And today that is one of our most popular features, where you can just see the people around you, and the people that you've literally bumped into on the street. So this place has been an innovation warehouse, continue to pump out features, but they've just lacked that coherent story, from a brand perspective, that ties it all together, and that makes the product easier to talk about. So now a lot of my focus is how do I take the core brand idea and how do I inject that not only into the communications we do out in the world, but also how do I connect that back with our community. As a consumer internet product, the way we grow is not through direct advertising, it's by getting people to talk about us. And there are a couple of different ways you can get people to talk about you. You Can create the next generation product, feature, whatever it is that just blows people's minds and you just become the talk of the town. Those are really hard to come by. Those are sort of once in a generation shifts in a how people interact with products. And generally speaking, they tend to be pretty rare. What is more controllable, in my mind, is building a differentiated brand that takes higher order values and continues to connect that with their community. So a lot of our focus on the growth standpoint right now is really thinking about what are the types of experiences that I can build, and how do I use in-app modals or notifications to basically connect those experiences, whether it's an intimate concert series in a city, whether it's exclusive offer for a festival. All these types of things we sort of offer to our audience through a lot of the CRM tools that we have at our disposal.

 

[0:20:26]

PJ Bruno: No wonder Andre was interested in getting you on board as far as connecting all these experiences together and having this semblance of a real robust identity. Badoo also have this data analytics platform that's proprietary to them, right? I mean it seems like the CEO is, from the beginning was all about data and understanding how the users are engaging with the platform. So I mean what a good foundation for the company to be built on.

 

[0:20:53]

Dom Gallello: Yeah. So Badoo really prides itself on building a lot of its own infrastructure and internal tools. A lot of the reasons for that are actually rooted in privacy and security of our users. So rather than passing data between third party providers, which generally speaking third party providers in the modern era are extremely secure. The company has just taken a stance that we want all user data to never leave any physical or virtual piece of property Badoo does not have direct control over. So everything from our own data warehousing through to our own internal CRM tool has all been built in house. And that also allows for greater flexibility considering we are operating at such significant scale across so many markets.

 

[0:21:46]

PJ Bruno: So just really quick, I'm curious because going back to, you mentioned about the capability of understanding the location of potential matches around you. Have you guys hit any GDPR snags? Or has it just been as simple as you give consent and that's what you're agreeing to and it's fine?

 

[0:22:05]

Dom Gallello: Yeah, from a GDPR perspective we really have not had any issues whatsoever. Users provide us consent to share their location and we only share who you've bumped into once you've matched with them. So there's a consent, sort of a dual consent, not only from a legal perspective, but also from user experience perspective, that this person that you've both mutually expressed interest in, we're going to show you guys where you bumped into each other. We're also not like dropping a pin, we're doing a little circle that gives you a radius. But that's also because GPS isn't particularly accurate all the time.

 

[0:22:42]

PJ Bruno: Got you.

 

[0:22:42]

Dom Gallello: Really it's not been a tremendous issue for us.

 

[0:22:45]

PJ Bruno: Sweet. That's good to hear. So from Airtime to Badoo, obviously different types of products, but there's a similar, I don't know, authenticity to the message about them, right? Because Badoo's dating focused social network and it's something like dating honestly.

 

[0:23:02]

Dom Gallello: Yeah. So I'll tell you the difference of Airtime and Badoo. Airtime was all about connecting your existing friends together in a more authentic space. And it was all fighting the world of Instagram or Facebook that was teaching us to be zombies behind a phone, endlessly scrolling on the content of our friends. Badoo offers a pretty different proposition, because in the world of dating we are in the business of helping people meet. That may not be a world changing proposition. It is certainly a life changing proposition. We get messages all day long around the people that have met, that have married, or have had babies from our platform. And it's really tremendous to see the impact that a dating business can have on millions and millions of lives around the world. We have about a hundred thousand people each week, who when they delete their account on Badoo, not delete the app but go all the way to delete their account on Badoo, they select, "I met someone on Badoo." And it's that type of combination of human stories and data stories that is so powerful. And as I've gotten to know the community, and really tried to build a clear and purposeful brand for Badoo, what became obvious is that really real people are successful on Badoo, everyday people are successful on Badoo. We don't cater to Instagram models and Vogue editors and Olympic athletes. We have really sort of the full spectrum of people, of all types of paths and backgrounds, that use our product. And are ultimately successful because they are open and honest about who they are and what they're looking for. So as we continue to take this message and really connect it with our communities, so that they understand that this individual experience of opening themselves up is one that's actually shared across the community. And that there are different ways for them to participate. Whether it's commenting within the crazy comment section of our Instagram profiles, where we're asking questions to our community about what they really want, or what dating advice they'd give to their younger selves, or soliciting success stories from our users, or inviting them to community events or talks or concerts or events. The ability for us as a marketing and a brand organization to leverage modern tools becomes all the more powerful. Because as we build a world, we just create many open doors for our users to walk through. What's been amazing is that at Badoo, because of our long history, we have a tremendously enormous verified email database. And whereas at Airtime email was a nonstarter for us, because speaking with gen Z they open up email maybe once a week, during school, only because professor has sent them a homework assignment. In the world of Badoo, it actually does become extremely powerful and we're still sort of experimenting around the right way to leverage it. But certainly what has become pretty obvious to us is that we want to use it relatively sparingly. We don't want to sort of bombard our users with, here's a marketing newsletter on the Top 10 Ways to Date. There are many other brands that do that, but the thing that's going to actually make the greatest impact for us, and our business, is going to be using those touch points really wisely to bring our users into high fidelity experiences. That ultimately they get excited about and ultimately talk about with their friends. Our battle is won over the bar table where you're drinking a bottle of wine, and Becky's telling you about what a crappy guy Paul has been, and that friend recommends Badoo because Badoo stands for dating honestly. And they validated that by creating some movie cinema experience or really authentic concert experience or whatever else it is that we were able to deliver to them, because they were part of our community and they were able to open that invitation, whether it be email or notification or modal. The mindset that meeting a single person can really change your life is very true. It's a really amazing thing when you see the sort of flood of validation, again, that comes into our email inboxes, physical mail inboxes, or even just the data that we get to see. We're trying to do an undertaking right now to try and calculate if we can potentially estimate how many babies have been created off this platform. It might be fuzzy math, but it might be possible. I'm not sure that the conversion rate is going to be as good as an email, but we'll see what comes out of it.

 

[0:27:32]

PJ Bruno: Cool. Contributing to overpopulation, you guys rule. Dom, a quick question for you about, you mentioned like obviously you're not trying to flood people with emails, that's not the point. But I'm curious in what ways is your team leveraging all that data that you guys get, to send more sophisticated emails? If so, just because from my experience, I've used Hinge, I've used Tinder, and I'm pretty sure I've only gotten emails when I've gotten a match. So is there anything else, I mean, not to give away your secret sauce or anything, but is there anything on top of that that you guys are toying with or trying?

 

[0:28:10]

Dom Gallello: A lot of what we do, from a transactional standpoint, is really trying to apply new machine learning models to best navigate on a more individualized level, the best opportunities to deliver a message. And so we're constantly playing and trying to optimize on that front. From the marketing perspective, it is just being sensitive about the trust that our users give us when they allow us the permission to communicate with them. And so from that perspective, try not to invest in some of those newsletter formats, and really trying to make really meaningful, impactful and inviting emails are ultimately our objective on the marketing front.

 

[0:28:52]

PJ Bruno: Dom, I mean, any parting words on winning the Channel Attribution battle. You've just left us with so much good stuff today. Anything on the horizon for you guys that you're really stoked about? Leveraging new technologies, new perspectives?

 

[0:29:07]

Dom Gallello: I think my only comment is, that as someone who comes from sort of the more traditional world of creative, that we can't forget the importance of creating incredible experiences for our customers. Those don't always have to be digital. They can be physical as well. And that every notification, every email can be an exciting open door for a user to walk through, and really engage with your brand in a powerful and meaningful way. And from our perspective and the learnings that we've had very early on here in Badoo, employing this strategy, we're seeing how it actually impacts the way people think about our product and ultimately talk about our product. And if there's anything that is an end goal for us, it's going to be how people refer our brand to their friends. And so these tools at our disposal just really allow us to take our community and really connect them with our brand. So never forget the creative and what door they're walking through.

 

[0:30:08]

PJ Bruno: I love it. So Badoo, dating honestly, connecting genuinely. Dom Gallello, thanks so much for joining me, brother.

 

[0:30:16]

Dom Gallello: I sincerely appreciate it. And again, always, always a big fan of great thinking and work that Braze does. We'll continue to obviously stay close together, but I'm also really excited about the great things that you guys are going to put forward, and help push this crazy world of multichannel marketing forward.

 

[0:30:36]

PJ Bruno: Thanks a lot, sir. Thanks for coming on and thank you all for listening. You all take care.

[0:30:41]

We've all been a victim at some point… I'm talking of course about email marketing from political campaigns. Braze's own Todd Grennan walks us through the nightmare experience we're all familiar with and the damage it can have on your brand long term.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

Speaker 2: Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest. Today, I'll be getting some help from Todd Grennan, Managing Editor of Content Marketing here at Braze. So, we talk with a lot of clients and experts about best practices and strategies when it comes to executing effective email campaigns, but we don't hear a lot from the recipients of emails, those that are actually receiving the experience, but today that's exactly what we're going to do. Learning from the strategies and results of marketing teams is one way to gather powerful takeaways, but getting a detailed breakdown of the consumer experience can be even more telling. Todd walks us through a broken email experience he was subjected to compliments of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Now, they created this strategy and it's been used in many political campaigns to date. Here's Todd to tell us more.

 

[0:01:10]

Todd Grennan: Bad political outreach knows no partisan divide. Back during the 2016 presidential election, we saw a lot of poorly conceived, ethically questionable email marketing from the Republican nominee and a sizeable amount of repetitive batch and blast emails from his Democratic opponent, but while the 2016 election came and went, political candidate struggles with their digital outreach have continued Even to this day. Political candidates and organizations have different marketing goals than brands and the rules they have to follow when it comes to outreach are different in part because politicians have exempted themselves from the anti-spam laws that apply to everyone else. Ultimately, they're still trying to use technology to raise money and build relationships with their target audience and that means that there's a lot that marketing growth and engagement teams can learn from political messaging even, or maybe especially, when it goes awry. Picture this, it's Thursday, May 25th, 2017 and you're a left-leaning individual living somewhere in the United States. You donate monthly to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a few weeks back, you gave $10 to the campaign of Rob Quist, the Democratic candidate running in a special election in Montana. When your alarm goes off at 8:00 AM, you brush the sleep from your eyes, make some coffee, and check your email, and you find yourself greeted by an email from the Quist campaign, "Todd, are you online? Todd, sorry to email so early, but this is urgent. Polls are about to open in Montana. If we can raise $75,000 by 8:00 PM we can fund our, get out the vote efforts and win the special election. If not, we could be in for a tough night". You open the email and find a solicitation for more donations from the Quist campaign. You consider for a moment, then decided against giving anymore money right now. You go about your day, head to work, a couple hours pass, another email from the Quist campaign appears in your inbox, and another, and another. Before you go to bed, you've received nine emails from them asking for money each with a click-baity, vaguely hysterical, seemingly randomly capitalized subject line. 10:03 AM: 5X match extended. Montana match unlocked. 11:04 AM: Breaking. Nate Silver's 538. 12:04 PM: Heartbreaking end. 1:03 PM; Stunning news. 3:03 PM: Please read. Do not delete. 5:02 PM: Urgent Montana alert. Five hour notice. 7:15 PM: Final request, Todd. 9:04 PM: One hour left. Quist loses, but you keep getting emails like these by the dozen from the DCCC, from other democratic special election candidates, like Georgia's Jon Ossoff, all of them begging for money. Their subject lines and body texts, swinging from champagne, popping declarations of certain victory to apocalyptic gloom. You unsubscribed from one email address then another, but the messages keep coming from the DCCC and from putatively independent groups with names like, End Citizens United and the Progressive Turnout Project. What's going on? You're a good person. Why is this happening to you? The short version, it's the DCCC's fault. Back during the 2014 election in an effort to juice the democratic parties takings from small donors during an election that, to put it lightly didn't favor their party, the DCCC pioneered a new approach to political email. Incessant messages, asking for donations, wild shifts in tone from email to email, highly questionable claims about funding deadlines and double or triple or quadruple donation matches, and the strategy brought in an enormous amount of money for the DCCC and its candidates, allowing the Democratic party to out raise Republicans by more than 30%. However, that extra cash did little to boost Democratic candidates and the emails themselves triggered widespread backlash, inspiring both a parody Tumblr account and a mocking song where all the lyrics were taken from DCCC subject lines. (music) Following the election, the DCCC doubled down on its strategy. Then a group of DCCC veterans went off on their own, founding a left leaning digital consulting firm known as, Mothership Strategies, that took this approach to email marketing and brought it to individual Democratic campaigns. Including Ossoff and Quist's election efforts. Between DCCC and Mothership, Democratic leaning donors have found themselves inundated with alarmist, frustrating emails for years at a time. Why do democratic candidates and organizations keep inundating their donors with aggressive, irritating emails? Well, because they think it's a successful strategy. Back in 2014, Steve Israel, who was then the head of the DCCC told reporters, "I apologize all over the country for the volume of email people get, but it works", and argued that the strategy had, "Revolutionized online fundraising", but while this burn and churn approached email can pay off in the short term when it comes to juicing your fundraising, there's a longterm cost. Michael Whitney, the former digital fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, described the DCCC's approach as a wildly deceptive, unrelenting approach that treats supporters like garbage. There's reason to think it's poisoning the well for future Democratic candidates and potentially driving down real voter engagement, which is what ultimately determines whether a particular campaign is a success or a failure. With the help of Mothership Strategies, Rob Quist raised more than $6 million and lost. Jon Ossoff's donations exceeded 23 million, but he lost too. Arguably, the only real winner on the Democratic side of these races was Mothership, which pocketed more than 4.2 million in fees for its efforts. Ossoff and Quist may not be the only losers over the long haul. A 2014 study found that people who receive DCCC emails made donations that were 15% lower in the future than those who hadn't received the messages, which suggests those tactics can drive down fundraising over time. What's the upside of all this? While the DCCC and Mothership have made a lot of questionable decisions when it comes to sending email outreach, ultimately it means that marketers have a chance to learn from them without having to make those same mistakes themselves and really, that's a big opportunity. So, let's take a second and dig into what the DCCC approach to email gets wrong. First, sending way, way, way too many messages and sending them too frequently. Look, no one wants to receive nine emails asking them for money in a 13 hour period. No one. That's exhausting and significantly increases the chances that recipients unsubscribe or start tuning out your messaging. Instead of sending a bunch of similar emails, send one email and use multivariate testing to optimize it. You'll send the best possible message to your audience and that'll do a lot more to drive donations or whatever conversion you're trying to encourage than a barrage of semi-relevant outreach. Second, they're sending outreach to only one messaging channel. Email's great. It's one of the best messaging channels for ROI and for a lot of customers it's their preferred way to hear from brands, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Some of your most valuable customers may not be interested in joining your email list and others are going to tire after receiving email after email and unsubscribe. If you only use one channel to communicate with your audience, that unsubscribe is the end of the story. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign aside, most political campaigns don't have a native app. That means that push notifications and internet messages are off the table for them, though there's no reason marketers shouldn't take advantage. A robust cross channel outreach is still possible even if you don't have an app. Thanks to web messaging, you can use email, web push, in-browser messages, and web content cards all in concert to engage your audience on desktop and the mobile web. This kind of cross channel approach can pay big dividends. According to research conducted by Braze, sending messages in a single channel is associated with a 179% increase in engagement compared to users who received no messages at all. However, leveraging two or more messaging channels leads to a massive 642% increase, which highlights the competitive advantage that cross channel outreach represents. Third, sending only one kind of email. Email is more than just a way to nudge people to give you money. It's a powerful highly flexible channel and it's just as good at keeping people informed and building relationships as it is for encouraging one more donation. There's nothing wrong with asking for donations. Just like businesses need revenue to operate. Political campaigns depend on donations to pay their staff, fund their ads, and support the get out the vote operations, but sending one appeal for funds after another is just as off-putting as a company that only sends messages urging you to make a purchase. It can leave a lot of people feeling like they're being treated like a living, breathing wallet. Instead of using email marketing campaigns to incessantly ask for money, the Ossoff and Quist campaigns could have mixed things up by using this channel to lay out their campaign platform, highlight endorsements and positive poll numbers, and asked people to volunteer. Making people feel invested in a campaign, or a brand for that matter, can do a lot to deepen their engagement and make them more open to your appeals the next time you ask them for money. Fourth, using repetitive and off-putting copy and creative. Let's be blunt. These messages aren't email copy at its best. They're built around scare tactics and the content of messages tends to be thin and unengaging. The use of images and emojis are haphazard and gives the emails a cheap unappealing vibe. Even worse, they keep using the same unappealing subject lines and copy over and over and over. Creating messages that keep your audience interested and engaged isn't easy. It's even harder when you send the same kind of outreach over and over, but with a little thought and care and the right marketing tools, it's possible to keep things fresh over the long haul. You just have to try. Finally, sending every message to their entire email list. This is a sin that a lot of companies are guilty of too. You have a massive email list at your disposal. You've got an email that you think is going to perform well. Why wouldn't you want to send it to everybody? Well, because one size very rarely fits all. The Ossoff campaign sent a lot of emails asking for money. While lots of people were unhappy about the outreach, some of the unhappiest where the people who experienced a barrage of these messages immediately after making a donation or setting up a recurring payment to the campaign. These people did exactly what the campaign had asked them to do and what did they get for their troubles? Even more annoying messages begging for cash. Avoiding this kind of situation isn't hard. If the Ossoff campaign had segmented their audience based on whether they'd made a donation or a recurring payment, they could have exempted recent donors from their outreach focusing these efforts on people who had yet to donate. Plus with this kind of segmentation, it would have been possible to carefully target future messages based on each recipient's donation patterns, potentially allowing them to turn one time donors into recurring ones using personalized targeted outreach. If you're trying to improve your brand's approach to email, taking a hard look at the DCCC's email strategy and doing the exact opposite is a good first step, but you shouldn't stop there. There's so much more out there when it comes to engaging your customers, whether it's additional channels, whether it's tools like personalization, segmentation, message testing and optimization. The important thing is to think seriously about what you're actually delivering to your customers. What is the experience they're getting from you? Why would they want to receive it? If you're not giving them an experience that they're interested in, rethinking things. None of these campaigns are trying to irritate potential voters. They probably all had the best of intentions, but ultimately they were serving up a really frustrating experience mostly because they didn't know any better. You do know better, or hopefully you do now, and it's something that you can avoid. It takes a little forethought. It takes the right tools, but you have what it takes to make it happen. So, please do, speaking on behalf of all your customers.

 

[0:12:33]

Speaker 2: That's about all the time we have for today. Special thanks to Todd for giving us some insight. Let's learn from the mistakes of others instead of repeating them. Thanks for joining us. Take care.

 

[0:12:45]

 

This all-star squad built out a multi-team marketing department to support multiple products for their first-to-market fantasy sports content provider. Hear how Veronica Hamel focused her team around the right priorities and hires to scale with speed and purpose. Jeff Singer provides insight into the technical side of integrations while Morgan Lee gives a marketer's perspective on channel expansion.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

Interviewer: Hello again and welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest, and this episode is the pain points of scalable production, and I'm so pleased to have esteemed guests with me today from DraftKings. Veronica Hamel, Veronica is the senior marketing director here at DraftKings. Morgan Lee, CRM specialist, and Jeff Singer, software engineering manager. Thank you guys so much for being here.

 

[0:00:41]

Veronica Hamel: Thanks for having us.

 

[0:00:42]

Interviewer: So where are we right now? It's All-Star break. Right? Is there seasonality to this? Are you guys kind of like in relaxed mode or reset mode or-

 

[0:00:50]

Jeff Singer: Definitely, All-Star break is by far the quietest time of year for DraftKings.

 

[0:00:53]

Veronica Hamel: From an execution perspective-

 

[0:00:55]

Morgan Lee: Yeah.

 

[0:00:55]

Veronica Hamel: I think it's quiet, but from a strategy and planning, this is like the peak time of year for NFL. The end of June, early July, is when we're doing most of our NFL planning and when we're starting to have meetings with our executives, and getting them involved in our strategy, and getting their approval, and all of that kind of stuff. So from an execution perspective, it's definitely kind of a quieter time of year, but from a planning perspective, this is like peak time for us.

 

[0:01:19]

Interviewer: Right? It's just a different part of the brain.

 

[0:01:20]

Veronica Hamel: Exactly.

 

[0:01:21]

Interviewer: You just got to switch gears.

 

[0:01:21]

Veronica Hamel: Exactly.

 

[0:01:22]

Interviewer: That's cool. So for those of you listeners out there, those folks who don't know what DraftKings are, who's got the boilerplate? Who wants to do it in two or three sentences?

 

[0:01:30]

Veronica Hamel: So DraftKings historically was a daily fantasy sports company exclusively so really drafting a lineup, and you kind of rack up points, and you score points that you're competing against another player's lineup to win cash. And so historically, we've been exclusively daily fantasy sports and then recently in August of this past year, we launched Sportsbook as well, so now in New Jersey only we have Sportsbook which is just traditional sports betting. Who's going to win the Super Bowl this year, for example.

 

[0:02:00]

Interviewer: Gotcha. And you guys were first to market with that. Right?

 

[0:02:02]

Veronica Hamel: We were, yes, in New Jersey.

 

[0:02:04]

Interviewer: That's very exciting. Veronica, I think you're the most tenured person in the room. Right? You've been for quite a ride with DK. Was it four or five years?

 

[0:02:12]

Veronica Hamel: Five and a half.

 

[0:02:13]

Interviewer: Wow.

 

[0:02:13]

Veronica Hamel: Yes, it's been quite-

 

[0:02:14]

Interviewer: Five half and a half.

 

[0:02:15]

Veronica Hamel: Quite the long ride.

 

[0:02:16]

Interviewer: Jeez. And I guess that wasn't even that long ago, but for some reason in my brain, it's like smartphones didn't exist five and a half years go. I don't know why.

 

[0:02:24]

Veronica Hamel: Well, some of the channels we currently use did not exist or weren't being used by us five and a half years ago.

 

[0:02:30]

Interviewer: Right. So DraftKings sprouts up in 2012, and you joined in 2014. Right?

 

[0:02:35]

Veronica Hamel: Yep, yep.

 

[0:02:36]

Interviewer: So what were some of the initial priorities and obstacles that you had to face to get the marketing engine really humming? Like was there a team in existence? Were you kind of the first one of your kind to start out some of these initiatives?

 

[0:02:48]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah. So as most startups do, we started out with a pretty big acquisition team, and when I say pretty big, I mean three people.

 

[0:02:55]

Interviewer: [crosstalk 00:02:56].

 

[0:02:56]

Veronica Hamel: But we didn't have anyone doing retention yet, so I was the first retention person to come on. At the time, we didn't have a ton of customers, and so the whole point of having an acquisition team first is because you're trying to acquire new customers and then once you have those customers, you then hire and kind of build out a more retention-focused team, and that's what I came in to do five and a half years ago. In terms of the types of things we were tackling at that time, honestly it was getting out an onboarding series. Like, we started out very, very slow, and we didn't have all of the sports that we have now. We were mainly focused on just MLB and NFL. It was a very different time where it was easier at that moment because we had less complexity in terms of sports' seasonality and the number of sports that we had. But we also were starting up as a company, and so there was a lot that we had to kind of take on and figure out how to navigate.

 

[0:03:48]

Interviewer: And as far as customer-facing comms, you were basically starting from zero. The world was your oyster. Right?

 

[0:03:54]

Veronica Hamel: Exactly, yes.

 

[0:03:56]

Interviewer: When you jumped in some of your first retention stuff, was it cross-channel right away? What were kind of the foundations of that?

 

[0:04:04]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah, so when I first started, we actually only had email. We had email in what we call site merchandising, so a couple of placements on the site that we were using to communicate to our users, and that was basically it. Those were our two channels that we were mainly using. Email we split into transactional and promotional. That was it. So it was a very few channels, and at that point we actually didn't even have an app. We were exclusively a web-based product. So from there, when we actually launched our app, we started then in push channels and started getting a little bit more into the mobile experience side. Pretty shortly after we got into the push side is both when Morgan joined and when we actually brought on Braze.

 

[0:04:45]

Interviewer: So mobile wasn't even part of the game when you were in there?

 

[0:04:47]

Veronica Hamel: No.

 

[0:04:47]

Interviewer: And now is it the biggest part of your business? I mean-

 

[0:04:52]

Veronica Hamel: So in terms of the app, the app is definitely a much bigger part of our business. In terms of the channels that we use, it's actually still a fairly even split. We see a lot of traffic coming from email. Then again, it's mobile email, so people are opening on their phone and going right into the app, so it's a little bit different than kind of when we first started where our mobile web product was interesting to say the least. Now, we've kind of mobile optimized. We both have that in terms of a mobile optimized site, but also we we direct deep link into the app and people kind of have a better experience from there.

 

[0:05:26]

Interviewer: Cool. And so acquisition team of three.

 

[0:05:28]

Veronica Hamel: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

[0:05:29]

Interviewer: Adds Veronica.

 

[0:05:30]

Veronica Hamel: Yes.

 

[0:05:30]

Interviewer: Team of four. And then Morgan joins the following year?

 

[0:05:35]

Veronica Hamel: I think it was a year and a half, maybe two years later, like June of 20-

 

[0:05:38]

Morgan Lee: Yeah, June of 2015.

 

[0:05:38]

Veronica Hamel: 15.

 

[0:05:40]

Interviewer: And what was Morgan's mandate when she started? She was brought in. You had one job.

 

[0:05:45]

Veronica Hamel: It actually was push.

 

[0:05:46]

Morgan Lee: Yeah.

 

[0:05:46]

Veronica Hamel: So when we brought her in, we were starting to experiment with push and kind of other different channels. And so originally the team was so tiny. It was me, you, Robyn, Jesse.

 

[0:05:57]

Morgan Lee: Yep.

 

[0:05:58]

Veronica Hamel: So it was pretty small, and at the time it was kind of generalists. Everyone had to do a little bit of everything, so I think Morgan got a pretty solid foundation of everything. But pretty quickly thereafter, her mandate was push and kind of figuring out this new channel that we were bringing on.

 

[0:06:13]

Morgan Lee: Yeah. So I guess it really started off with email and learning how to code an email because that's all we were doing, and then we had one website where we were sending push notifications, but it was like once a week maybe. It wasn't really a strategy. It was just kind of, "Oh, we have a big contest this week. Let's send a push notification."

 

[0:06:32]

Interviewer: And so still no mobile app at this point, or it was just kicking off?

 

[0:06:34]

Morgan Lee: We had the mobile app.

 

[0:06:35]

Interviewer: Okay.

 

[0:06:36]

Morgan Lee: Yeah. And then, yeah, for me, I came on and, straight out of college, was just trying to learn everything that I could about email marketing, and mobile push, and CRM, how to send an A/B test, stuff like that, so I think it really helped me build a foundation for a lot of the skills that I have today.

 

[0:06:56]

Interviewer: Gotcha. And so your focus was push. Is this when you started to move? I mean eventually after you hard-coded some emails.

 

[0:07:05]

Morgan Lee: Yeah.

 

[0:07:06]

Interviewer: You moved away from the generalist perspective, and people started kind of focusing and like doubling down on channels.

 

[0:07:12]

Morgan Lee: Yeah, I was kind of email and push for quite awhile actually because we had different life cycles. So I was managing the inactive life cycle, just trying to get people to reactivate, for NFL mostly. And then as part of that we started... I did email, but then also it was like specializing in push and figuring out the best campaigns to send users.

 

[0:07:36]

Veronica Hamel: We've actually had a number of different organizational structures, so we've gone kind of back-and-forth between doing it at the life cycle level versus doing it more at the channel level. So we had a push expert, and we've kind of gone back-and-forth a few times, and I think ultimately it's really where you are in your business to know whether or not which one makes sense. So we're currently more at kind of a user perspective, so we've got all of our different teams. Like, we've got some calendar-based teams, and they're all doing all of the different channels versus being really specialized in one. It's all based on what you're trying to do with your users and where you are in your life cycle as a business, I guess.

 

[0:08:18]

Interviewer: Meta. That's cool. And so, yeah, I mean also... Jesus... Having the agility to be able to kind of switch the dynamic and chemistry of your team. I mean I guess it's crucial. Right? Sometimes people just kind of stack broken stuff on broken stuff, and it's like, let's let it work itself out.

 

[0:08:35]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah. That's one thing that DraftKings has always been really good at is being agile and kind of changing with the times, and reorging, and trying to figure some things out. Maybe a good time to bring in Jeff because that was a big reorg that we had that has been kind of the most impactful, I think, from the marketing perspective, is adding a platform layer and adding some engineering resources to us. And that's something we never had before, and it basically was that. It was one of those times where we had said, "Hey, this isn't really working. Let's try to figure something else out." And we decided to invest some engineering resources from the marketing perspective, and here we are with Jeff.

 

[0:09:13]

Interviewer: And here he is. What a good segue that was. What an intro, rolling out the red carpet, Jeff.

 

[0:09:19]

Jeff Singer: Yeah. So as Veronica was saying, engineering historically hadn't had much of a mandate to help CRM. There was a Marketing Platform team, but it had been very focused on the acquisition side and sort of site merchandising type thing, so some of the critical sell flows along the app but not sort of the actual retention and-

 

[0:09:43]

Interviewer: Right, [crosstalk] products.

 

[0:09:44]

Jeff Singer: The things that Veronica's team was focusing on. So I kind of came into the Marketing Platform team with the mandate of just like, "We need to figure out this whole CRM thing from an engineering and product perspective." And so actually my first week, I went to Braze LTR.

 

[0:10:01]

Interviewer: Hey!

 

[0:10:02]

Jeff Singer: And it was a great way to really deep dive because I had no prior experience in the marketing world.

 

[0:10:08]

Interviewer: This was like three years ago?

 

[0:10:09]

Jeff Singer: No. So this was last year.

 

[0:10:11]

Interviewer: Last year.

 

[0:10:11]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:10:12]

Interviewer: Oh, right. Because you'd been with the company for-

 

[0:10:13]

Jeff Singer: I joined DraftKings in 2015. I hadn't moved over to marketing until 2018.

 

[0:10:19]

Interviewer: So you were at LTR last year?

 

[0:10:20]

Jeff Singer: Yes, I was at LTR last year.

 

[0:10:21]

Interviewer: Oh, cool.

 

[0:10:22]

Jeff Singer: And also my first exposure to the marketing world basically, and-

 

[0:10:26]

Interviewer: It was a lot.

 

[0:10:27]

Jeff Singer: It was a great-

 

[0:10:28]

Morgan Lee: He's grown up on Braze.

 

[0:10:29]

Jeff Singer: It was a great way to learn a lot about marketing really fast.

 

[0:10:33]

Interviewer: I love it. That's so cool. And so what were some of the first things that you were kind of tasked with?

 

[0:10:38]

Jeff Singer: So one of the things we had been working on at the time is... For a lot of the transactional emails, we had a previous engineering driven system that would basically take the things we knew that was going on with the user at the time, and transform that into some text, and call Brace to say, "Hey, basically this is the text, go send this email." That obviously isn't great from a marketing perspective because it makes it really hard to iterate. Like, if the turnaround time on changing the text or testing something new out is a month, you're not really going to be able to get anywhere fast. So one of the first things I did was kind of help move a transition over to have those emails be based off of events in Braze and then allow Morgan and Veronica's team to really iterate quickly on those emails.

 

[0:11:27]

Interviewer: So who brought Braze to the table? Like, when you made this switch to marketing is it around the time that... I mean you guys have been using it for awhile at that point.

 

[0:11:35]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah, so we started out using Braze just for push. So actually that's not true-

 

[0:11:41]

Morgan Lee: For any [crosstalk 00:11:41].

 

[0:11:42]

Veronica Hamel: [crosstalk] messaging.

 

[0:11:42]

Morgan Lee: That's how I became like the Braze expert because I was doing push as a mobile channel and then we started off using Braze, and it was like, "Okay, another mobile channel. Morgan, you can take this, and kind of run with it, and figure out basically how we want to use the in-app channel, and how we can use it to upsell users, and cross users over to different sports." And it just kind of became another channel that we could use for upselling and crossing users over and reactivation.

 

[0:12:11]

Veronica Hamel: So it actually came from our product team.

 

[0:12:14]

Morgan Lee: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

[0:12:14]

Veronica Hamel: So our product team had brought on Braze as a way for us to pop notifications in the app itself. So if there was like a place where rather than them kind of having to build a new placement or a new pop-up at any given time in the flow, they hooked us up with basically the ability to be able to use the in-app messaging for us to be able to manage a lot of those pop-ups. Whether it was like, "Hey, user, take the survey, rate your experience," all the way through to we have a user or a player out in the lineup, and we need people to know. So we were using it more for the product side, and then we had kind of realized, "Hey, this is pretty intrusive to the customer experience." On the marketing side, we actually would really like to use it and manage it to make sure that it's being used properly and really being used to benefit the user experience rather than just kind of pop-up notifications everywhere.

 

[0:13:07]

Interviewer: Gotcha. Cool. So we've got Morgan working with in-app and push. We get Jeff in the mix. He's going LTR. He's learning all this stuff. You guys start to scale, and it's with sophistication. So I mean how does the nature of your business complicate email marketing? Is it pretty nuanced?

 

[0:13:23]

Veronica Hamel: Honestly, it's not just email marketing. It's all marketing. The big thing for us is the complexity of the business. Even when we just had DFS, it was a ton of different users, and we know so much about them that you want to be able to use that data to personalize and give them a better experience, but we almost had data paralysis. We had so much to use that it was kind of hard for us to know, well, what's the most important split or the most important for a segment to create? And from there just getting more sophisticated. So that was when we just had DFS. Then we launched two more products. So we mentioned that we have Sportsbook, and we're live in New Jersey. We also have Casino Games within embed in our Sportsbook app, in New Jersey as well. So basically we now have three products and now-

 

[0:14:09]

Interviewer: And that's all owned by you guys, you all-

 

[0:14:11]

Veronica Hamel: Correct. So that just increases the complexity because now you have users that are playing one only. So you're playing only DFS, only Sportsbook, only Casino, or we've got people that are playing kind of all of the combinations in between of of all of the different products.

 

[0:14:26]

Morgan Lee: The sports world too is changing daily, and we have contests daily, and you can basically bet on any sport, so it's just constantly moving and changing, and especially for email which is a channel that is a little bit more difficult to personalize. Like, you receive an email in your inbox, and that's it. It's not going to change.

 

[0:14:46]

Interviewer: A lot of tools out there for that.

 

[0:14:47]

Morgan Lee: Yeah, Braze has definitely helped.

 

[0:14:49]

Interviewer: So, again, let's wind back. We're talking about multiple products, multiple channels. How do you even manage that? I mean was this going on before the multiteam things started happening or did that kind of bring about the need for a multiteam setup?

 

[0:15:08]

Veronica Hamel: I actually think that was one of the biggest reasons why we then decided to invest Marketing Platform resources. So engineer resources for our marketing team was... As soon as we got to a place of having multiple products, we were managing the complexity on DFS. It was difficult, but we were managing it, and we were kind of coming up with some different solutions for us to use. But as soon as we kind of got into this place of having three products... And one of our biggest advantages in that space is actually that we have a customer base already who might be interested in those other verticals. And so in order for us to be able to leverage that and do it well, we needed some sort of automation, and we needed to be able to better personalize to these users without manually creating 10 different versions of a campaign. And that's kind of what we're working on now.

 

[0:15:54]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:15:54]

Interviewer: I haven't seen any of your campaigns because it's none of my business, but do you guys work with Canvas? Do you use that cross-channel... You know throwing promotions between people across products to kind of get them deeper and deeper into the DraftKings bubble?

 

[0:16:09]

Morgan Lee: Yeah, I think right now we're using mostly campaigns, but we have setup some things as a Canvas. Jeff was talking about how we're moving all of our push notifications, the transactional ones, over to Braze as one of the big projects that we're working on. And we're building all of those in Canvas so that we can test copy, and test personalization, and how we kind of want to alert users of tickets, and stuff like that.

 

[0:16:38]

Interviewer: So the three products are Sportsbook, DraftKings Live, and Casino?

 

[0:16:44]

Veronica Hamel: It's Sportsbook, Daily Fantasy Sports, and Casino.

 

[0:16:47]

Jeff Singer: There is also DK Live, but that's-

 

[0:16:50]

Veronica Hamel: DK Live is more of a content platform.

 

[0:16:52]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:16:52]

Veronica Hamel: So it's like complimentary to our products.

 

[0:16:54]

Interviewer: Oh, cool.

 

[0:16:54]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah.

 

[0:16:55]

Interviewer: And do you guys plug that as well? Do you have whole campaigns around it?

 

[0:17:01]

Veronica Hamel: It's mostly secondary, so it's kind of in the same campaigns that we're doing. We're already talking about placing a bet, or we're doing whatever, and then we're also giving you content in order to have you make better decisions in drafting your lineup.

 

[0:17:13]

Interviewer: Nice. Any other cool tech toys or strategies that you guys are using?

 

[0:17:18]

Jeff Singer: So one of the interesting things in our industry is that there's so many different regulations, and almost every state has different regulations around what users are allowed to do, and that's probably going to continue to happen with the way the regulations seem to be shaping up in the U.S. Around sports betting and casino. So we've actually been playing around a little bit with Radar for being able to trigger things around knowing where people are and kind of adding more location context to some of our campaigns.

 

[0:17:50]

Morgan Lee: Yeah. And we've also been able to personalize messaging in campaigns using Radar. It's different to say, "Hey, enter this contest," but it's even more personalized where you can say, "Hey, thanks for entering this stadium. Plan DraftKings tonight because you're already there watching the game." So I think that aspect too has been really cool for us.

 

[0:18:13]

Interviewer: Did you see the CEO of Radar, Nick Patrick, at LTR when you were there for that first time?

 

[0:18:18]

Jeff Singer: I actually didn't, but I think-

 

[0:18:19]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah, funny enough, I actually think that's exactly where this came from.

 

[0:18:22]

Interviewer: Oh!

 

[0:18:22]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah. Yeah.

 

[0:18:23]

Morgan Lee: I was blown away. I thought it was a really cool product, and I was like, "Veronica, we should really look into implementing Radar," and we kind of ran with it.

 

[0:18:33]

Interviewer: What?

 

[0:18:34]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:18:35]

Interviewer: I got to let the marketing team know this. This is fantastic. And so now you guys have the multiteam difference from what I have come to understand. You have your calendar team and your triggers team. I mean how did the idea for a multiteam setup come about and was it difficult to rally support from that executive team, right? Because I mean I guess it's kind of you, Veronica, who has to kind of round up with Dan and kind of let them know this is a priority. This is what we need to invest in.

 

[0:19:05]

Veronica Hamel: So in terms of us deciding we needed it, basically where we ended up landing was 95% of our effort was really going towards these calendar-based campaigns that were, "Enter this contest today or place a bet on something that's happening today." And we weren't really focused enough on user life cycle, so we had some kind of set it and forget it onboarding treatments, but we weren't paying enough attention to things like better notifications for a better user experience, or you've got a player in your lineup that is projected to score zero points because they're out for the day, and all kinds of these small different things that were both user experience and player life cycle that we just didn't have time to focus on. When we were focused on the things that were happening today and tomorrow, we filled up 99% of our plate, and we just never had time for anything else. So we decided to kind of break off a team and have them very specifically think about things that are a little bit more user life cycle. It was made possible by Jeff and his team. So in order for us to be able to do a lot of these things, we needed these kind of event-based triggers and data that we were able to then use in Braze to trigger those communications. So it kind of was both. We weren't focusing on it, and we realized that there was a huge opportunity, and too, we now had the resources in order to be able to enable this team to be effective.

 

[0:20:27]

Interviewer: Gotcha. And so, like you mentioned, you just didn't have the bandwidth because there's just so many of these high possibility conversion moments around user behavior. Right? And you just can't grab them all. So when you expand to these two teams, was there concerns that it could be too much? Every little thing they do, they get a ping, and maybe it's overwhelming for a user?

 

[0:20:51]

Veronica Hamel: It's a great question. When we started thinking about how we would setup this team, we also started thinking about needing a Preference Center and needing the ability for a user to opt out of very specific communications. We also then were piloting an internal tool. We were working on [inaudible] prioritization. So to make sure that a user could only see one contact in one day from the broadest sense, so there's still obviously transactional emails that a user can see, and transactional notifications a user can see in the back-end. But if we were trying to get a user to... Either they're inactive, and they dropped off, and we're trying to get them to come back to the site on some specific promotion that we know that they've reacted to in the past versus, "Hey, it's MLB All-Star break, play in that.' We started kind of prioritizing the life cycle campaign above the promotional campaign, so we were trying to be a little bit careful with that. But these two can actually speak a little bit more to an upcoming project that we have on Preference Center that I think is probably going to help that even more.

 

[0:21:52]

Morgan Lee: Our Preference Center right now does have some communications that you can opt in or opt out of. We have leagues where you can play contests with your friends, so there's a lot of notifications in your league if someone posts a contest. So we have some of those, but it's not as personalized as we'd like it, so we want a notification center that includes push and email and also has a lot of the different trigger notifications that we've added. So we have a push where if you have an injured player in your lineup, you can receive a notification and letting that user know that the person is out, so having a preference for that. Also, user preferences in terms of what teams they like, what sports they really like. So that's also a project that we're taking on, hopefully pretty soon, Jeff.

 

[0:22:43]

Jeff Singer: NFL's coming up, so we've got-

 

[0:22:44]

Morgan Lee: Yes,.

 

[0:22:45]

Jeff Singer: A lot of other things too.

 

[0:22:46]

Morgan Lee: Yeah.

 

[0:22:47]

Interviewer: Are you guys big sports fans? Is it a prerequisite to join?

 

[0:22:50]

Jeff Singer: Definitely not.

 

[0:22:51]

Morgan Lee: No.

 

[0:22:51]

Jeff Singer: I mean I am a pretty big NFL fan. There's a lot of people here at DraftKings who actually aren't sports' fans. I remember having to explain once to someone on my team, what I touchdown was.

 

[0:23:06]

Morgan Lee: Oh, wow.

 

[0:23:06]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:23:07]

Veronica Hamel: So [crosstalk 00:23:07]. From a marketing perspective-

 

[0:23:09]

Jeff Singer: Maybe that's an engineering thing.

 

[0:23:10]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah. That's definitely an engineering thing. From a marketing perspective, I think it depends on what they're going to do. So it's definitely not a prerequisite, but we do tend to hire, or we try to hire people that at least understand or want to understand because they're writing a lot of the copy, and they're talking to our players.

 

[0:23:26]

Interviewer: I was just going to say copywriters.

 

[0:23:26]

Morgan Lee: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

[0:23:27]

Interviewer: Right?

 

[0:23:28]

Veronica Hamel: So from our perspective, it's much more important for people to kind of understand sports and have a couple of people. We do a pretty good job of almost having a balance between the super heavy sports fans that can kind of help and share some of that knowledge. And then more of the like creative, innovative marketers, we're not going to turn someone down if they're an awesome marketer but just don't understand sports. It's just a balance of making sure you have the right amount of both on your team.

 

[0:23:53]

Interviewer: I mean it might be an idea to update the onboarding process at DraftKings to teach some of the... You know Football 101. What is a touchdown? How do I do it?

 

[0:24:02]

Veronica Hamel: Well, maybe on the engineering side at least.

 

[0:24:03]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:24:05]

Interviewer: So with this dual team structure, do you guys see an expansion to even more teams outside of Calendar and Trigger, or what does the next evolution kind of look like from your perspective?

 

[0:24:17]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah. We actually just added a second team that is kind of cross product, and so we have someone that is very specifically focused on tech tools and process, and we're working with Jeff's team pretty heavily on trying to get to a place by the end of 2019 where we're pretty automated. And that has been a lot of work on both his team and my team in terms of coming up with the strategy and figuring out how do we test some of this stuff first before we just turn on automation and make sure that it's actually valuable. And automation is so broad that it's been a lot of strategic conversations around, "Let's bite off a piece of it, automate that, and then move forward, and kind of sequentially get to a place of better automation." So we have someone, Jesse, who actually was my second hire at DraftKings, and used to be Morgan's boss, who's been working very closely with Jeff's team on kind of automation, and tech tools, and process. And that's been really helpful to kind of push things forward a little bit faster than they were moving before.

 

[0:25:20]

Interviewer: What other things in your stack are you guys working with? You mentioned Radar.

 

[0:25:24]

Veronica Hamel: We use Segment today.

 

[0:25:25]

Jeff Singer: Yeah, we use Segment pretty heavily for some of the event stuff I was talking about earlier. I know we're evaluating some kind of analytic tools. That's more on the product side than the marketing side, but as far as being able to understand how many of our users went through some flow and then the result of where they ended up.

 

[0:25:46]

Interviewer: So between the three of you, you've seen a nice handful of iterations of the marketing team here at DraftKings. Do you have any like parting words for our listeners that are trying to build out a marketing org and balancing/juggling priorities?

 

[0:26:03]

Jeff Singer: I think a big thing for me is just staying flexible and kind of being able to react to opportunities as they come up.

 

[0:26:11]

Morgan Lee: Yeah. And I think so too, and it's actually gave me an opportunity to kind of move my career in the way that I wanted to. So I started with mobile, got really invested in that, and then learned a lot about Braze, and so that's now helping me on the triggers team where we're using a lot of the features in Braze to trigger notifications. So honestly think it can be good for a team to grow, and people can specialize and learn more about what they want to.

 

[0:26:38]

Veronica Hamel: Yeah, I'd say the biggest thing is don't be afraid of change. Again, we've gone back-and-forth between segment-based to channel-based a couple of different times, and I think it really just depends on where you are as a company and what makes sense at that time. So hopefully, we have hired a great team of people who are super flexible, and they're willing to learn new things, and kind of take on new opportunities. And that's been the biggest thing for us, and just having a team that's flexible, and is willing to learn, and change with the times has been the most impactful.

 

[0:27:10]

Interviewer: Don't be afraid to change. Stay agile. Will I see you guys at LTR this year? Maybe?

 

[0:27:15]

Jeff Singer: Yeah.

 

[0:27:15]

Veronica Hamel: Probably.

 

[0:27:15]

Morgan Lee: Yeah.

 

[0:27:16]

Veronica Hamel: We usually go.

 

[0:27:17]

Interviewer: Excellent. All right.

 

[0:27:18]

Veronica Hamel: Maybe we'll find another cool tool that we want to use.

 

[0:27:20]

Interviewer: I think you just might. Keep your eyes and your ears open.

 

[0:27:22]

Morgan Lee: Let us know who's going to be there.

 

[0:27:24]

Interviewer: Absolutely. We will send you guys the lineup. So Jeff, Veronica Morgan, thank you guys so much for being here. Or, you know what? Thank you for allowing me to be here in your headquarters in Boston.

 

[0:27:34]

Jeff Singer: Thanks for coming.

 

[0:27:35]

Morgan Lee: Thank you.

 

[0:27:35]

Interviewer: And thank you guys for joining us as well. Take care.

[0:27:38]

Grubhub CRM lead and No-Shave November Co-Founder, Christine Hill gives us insight into, operationally, what it takes to have a successful IP Warming, survive a migration, and achieve high deliverability. Our very own Nicole Codd, previously at ReturnPath, adds her commentary from countless email setups.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. I'm PJ Bruno, and I'm here today in Chicago in the Grubhub HQ. Joining us today, Christine Hill, who is basically a Renaissance woman in the marketing org here. How's it going? Thanks for being here.

 

[0:00:36]

Christine Hill: It's going well. Thanks for having me.

 

[0:00:37]

PJ Bruno: And rounding out the group today, I have Nicole Codd, who's also in town from our success org at Braze.

 

[0:00:43]

Nicole Codd: Hey, PJ.

 

[0:00:44]

PJ Bruno: Thanks so much for being here.

 

[0:00:45]

Nicole Codd: Course.

 

[0:00:46]

PJ Bruno: This episode is focusing on avoiding migration migraines, and also talking a little bit about IP warming. Christine has gone through a number of IP warmings, and so she's going to share some of her experience there. But before we jump in, Christine, correct me if I'm wrong, you were a part of kicking off No Shave November, is that right?

 

[0:01:03]

Christine Hill: That's correct.

 

[0:01:05]

PJ Bruno: How did that come about?

 

[0:01:06]

Christine Hill: That's a family effort. My siblings and I, we lost our father to cancer a number of years ago. No Shave November for us was a way that we could take that pain and grief and do something about it, knowing that a lot of people are affected by cancer in their lives, whether it's a close relative, a friend, a neighbor, we grow our hair for those that lose it. That's No Shave November. It was a way that anyone of any bit of means could donate something small or something large and raise awareness by growing out their hair and starting that conversation.

 

[0:01:39]

PJ Bruno: I love it. I'm sorry for your loss.

 

[0:01:42]

Christine Hill: Thank you.

 

[0:01:42]

PJ Bruno: I'll be growing my beard extremely long, big, wispy mustache. Nicole, you're going to take part.

 

[0:01:48]

Nicole Codd: I will not. I'm sorry.

 

[0:01:50]

PJ Bruno: Well, not the mustache on that, but you know, just letting it go.

 

[0:01:53]

Nicole Codd: I'll let my hair grow out. I'll probably-

 

[0:01:55]

Christine Hill: Skip your trim.

 

[0:01:56]

Nicole Codd: I'll skip my trim that month.

 

[0:01:59]

PJ Bruno: Beautiful. Were you involved in the marketing strategy around that as well? How did you divide up your team there?

 

[0:02:05]

Christine Hill: Sure. It's something that my siblings and I kind of divide and conquer. I'm one of eight. People joke about having a baseball team. We tell our mother that she had a business. So I'm a marketer, I have a brother who's an engineer, another one who's in finance, and you fill in all the spots and it's basically a business. We take all of the skills that we have in the backgrounds that we've established and we came together to do it.

 

[0:02:29]

PJ Bruno: That's unbelievable. You guys are dangerous. I got to assume there's an ongoing text thread. It's like, "When are we all going to just start the real company?" That's got to be ongoing conversation, right?

 

[0:02:39]

Christine Hill: That's been a background conversation probably since I was in my early teens, like, "All right, what are we going to do? Hill Enterprise. It could be something."

 

[0:02:48]

PJ Bruno: Oh my God, that's so exciting. Eight. God bless your mom. What were some of the lessons and techniques that you took with you from that experience which launched you onto this bigger mission you have here at Grubhub?

 

[0:03:03]

Christine Hill: Sure. With that one, definitely learning how to build an audience, knowing that there were people out there that could relate to our cause and our mission but how to have them hear of who we are, how to get that awareness out there. We started with maybe a hundred or so followers, and how do you grow that? We took to social and all the digital means, because that's where people are. And using that, we were able to kind of be explosive and target a lot of people with minimal effort and minimal resources and really get it out there. From there, it took off because people relate to what it is.

 

[0:03:38]

PJ Bruno: Well, if you guys out there looking to take part, go to no-shave.org to learn more info. We'd love for y'all to get involved. I know I will be. Moving on to IP warming academy, luckily both of you have a good amount of experience with this, some horror stories, I believe. First and foremost, IP warming is crucial to get right for your deliverability. For those of you who don't know what it is, it's sending first small amounts of email and then incrementally larger and larger amounts of email day after day so you can get the respect of your ISP and they know that you're not sending out blasts of email to people where it may not be super relevant. What do you need to be able to do that? Those are your first sends. What needs to be in order before you click the send button?

 

[0:04:26]

Christine Hill: First and foremost, you need a plan with IP warming. I think a lot of people want to jump straight into it, and it is something you can jump into and ramp up fairly quickly. But you should have a plan with calculated risk because if it goes wrong at this point, it's a lot harder to get out of the hole if you had instead set yourself up with a solid foundation.

 

[0:04:46]

Nicole Codd: And I think that's the main thing that people tend to forget about, is they don't necessarily think about the ramifications of if it doesn't go well. There's always these business needs that are like, "All right, we got to get this IP up and running. We have X deadline. Let's do everything possible to get it there." And because of that, they end up rushing through it and don't necessarily have a successful warming and they got to start from ground zero again.

 

[0:05:09]

PJ Bruno: And this isn't a new problem.

 

[0:05:11]

Nicole Codd: No, no.

 

[0:05:12]

PJ Bruno: So why is it still happening? Why does it still happen?

 

[0:05:17]

Christine Hill: We live in a world where we want things done yesterday, and so we think with that we rush it. And second to that is that we don't think about all of the stuff that's foundational to ensuring successful IP warming. So setting up all the authentications on the backend, registering your IPs, verifying your records, splitting your audience, cleaning your list, I don't think a lot of people do that before they start IP warming or migration. If you do that, you're going to set yourself up for success because you'll be sending to people who do want your messages, versus becoming someone who is spamming everyone at once. And the email clients pick up on that, and they'll block you.

 

[0:05:53]

PJ Bruno: You mentioned list cleansing. Now, what exactly is that for people who don't know what that is?

 

[0:05:58]

Nicole Codd: Yeah, so at a base level it's essentially getting rid of email addresses that aren't valid email addresses. If I'm going to a website and I know I don't necessarily want to receive mail from that specific company but I want the deal or whatever they're offering, I'll enter a fake email address. We'll see email addresses that are just a string of letters or something completely unintelligible, or there's potentially typo errors. So, see a lot of those. Gmail.con, or Yahoo with one O. So list cleansing is the process of running your email list through some sort of service or something you have on your own backend to get rid of those fake email addresses, get rid of typo errors to ensure that you're sending to real humans or real email addresses as opposed to fake ones.

 

[0:06:51]

PJ Bruno: Gotcha. I forget who it was that we had the conversation about list cleansing, but we had a client who was adamant about not doing it because he said, "We don't give up on our users." I was like, "You're not quite getting it, though."

 

[0:07:07]

Nicole Codd: You've got to hang on to those strings of unintelligible letters. It's very important.

 

[0:07:10]

Christine Hill: It might turn into someone.

 

[0:07:13]

Nicole Codd: It's very important.

 

[0:07:14]

Christine Hill: To what Nicole said, removing the mal form users, unknown users, and those who haven't engaged in years, and I get wanting to hold on to them for business needs, but there's a certain cutoff point that it does not make sense to contact them through an email channel. There are other channels.

 

[0:07:29]

Nicole Codd: I think that's a big, big, big, big one. People are always sitting there being like, "But what if they come back? What if I send them this one thing and that's what revitalizes them and they want to order from us and engage with us?" The thing is, if they haven't opened a message from you in years, they're probably not going to.

 

[0:07:49]

Christine Hill: The likelihood is slim.

 

[0:07:50]

Nicole Codd: Right, and especially with most companies these days, marketing is everywhere and I'm not going to need a email to think about your brand. There's going to be other methods, which I'm like, "Oh! Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Let me go back."

 

[0:08:05]

PJ Bruno: All right, story time. Let's hear about your first IP warming. We don't need to name drop or anything, but I just want to hear a little bit about the first time you came up against it, some of those challenges.

 

[0:08:17]

Christine Hill: Oh man, there's been so many. The first, I have a feeling it didn't go according to plan. I'm sure we didn't really have a plan. It was one of those rush case scenarios, "Let's get it done in two weeks," when I think even in the best case an IP warming probably takes a solid 30 days, even with a small MCL. We probably went out the gate sending to all records and wanting to trigger a very large program, versus starting with a small send size, gradually increasing it, and in that hitting our most engaged before those who are less engaged. I do know that in that first IP warming, we hit blocks with Gmail, with Microsoft, with AOL. Once you hit blocks, it's a lot harder to get into the user's inbox and you are digging yourself out of a hole.

 

[0:09:05]

PJ Bruno: So blocking meaning the users blocked you, not an ISP.

 

[0:09:09]

Christine Hill: The ISP blocked you.

 

[0:09:10]

PJ Bruno: Got you. Okay.

 

[0:09:12]

Christine Hill: Because you were, in fact, spamming people.

 

[0:09:17]

PJ Bruno: Was there a comeback from that? What was the reaction from you and your team?

 

[0:09:22]

Christine Hill: Usually for that, you need to register it with the ISP and get de-listed and say, "I am a true sender. I'm going to take step back and send to you in a rate. Will you recognize me and like allow me to be authenticated to get into the user's inbox?" And Nicole, if you want to add to this from your return path experience?

 

[0:09:39]

Nicole Codd: No, that's exactly right. I think with mailbox providers you're kind of guilty until proven innocent, honestly. Their job is to protect their users, so the people signing up to use their inboxes, and because of that you're starting out with basically a reputation where they're going to treat you very carefully. So their initial inclination is going to be like, "Okay, you jumped up volumes too quickly. We're going to just shut it off because we don't trust that you're an actual good sender."

 

[0:10:13]

PJ Bruno: So what kind of metrics are you looking at as far as IP warming? Is it really just like open, so it's just getting through it alive?

 

[0:10:20]

Christine Hill: Yeah. Looking at sends, looking at your rate of deliverability, your bounces, hard bounces or soft bounces, and some of that would be your list cleaning, looking at engagement, so your opens and clicks, as well as the spam complaints that you're getting and unsub. So it's really looking at the full spectrum. What is happening positively, what's happening negatively, and what is our deliverability? What is the rate of sends landing into the user's inbox?

 

[0:10:46]

PJ Bruno: What about any big either misconceptions when you went into your first or second one that you're like, "Oh I didn't know that's how that worked," and/or biggest takeaways from one of your first two IP warmers where you're like, "Yes, this is going to stick with me forever because I recognize how valuable it is."

 

[0:11:04]

Christine Hill: One for me, looking at the metrics, looking at unsub versus spam, spam is worse to have a than unsub because unsub, you're telling me you don't want to receive my messages. I'll remove you. That's better than you marking me as spam, because when that happens then the email clients have that and it can push you off of landing in the inbox. Going through the first few, I realized that that's more important, and tied to that would be the list cleaning because if you had lists clean, you'd be sending to people who will likely be opening and not unsubscribing or marking you as spam.

 

[0:11:35]

PJ Bruno: Interesting question here. Have you seen strategies where people make that unsub link a little more visible? Just because obviously pretty much every time I've seen it, it's the same thing that you've all seen. It's super small, it's at the very bottom, there's no context around it. Then you click and you link out and you do the motions.

 

[0:11:53]

Christine Hill: So of the best practices is to put that unsub in the header. There are a lot of ESPs that make that very easy to do, or in Gmail if you have it a you're more likely to get through. And then those users who don't want to hear from you can click it versus marketing you as spam or filtering you to your spam folder.

 

[0:12:08]

PJ Bruno: Nice.

 

[0:12:09]

Nicole Codd: And also, even outside of that list unsubscribe header, something I've advised clients to do in the past is to move the little unsubscribe link at the bottom up towards the top, potentially. Because if I don't want your mail, my initial inclination is going to be to mark it as spam, not to scroll to the bottom of the email and click the unsubscribe link. That's going to take too much work and requires me going through the entire email.

 

[0:12:36]

Christine Hill: In some of the migrations that we've done, when you've been part of another brand that then became part of Grubhub, we've put it in the body of the email, which might sound crazy, but it is that way for the user to hit unsub versus spam.

 

[0:12:48]

PJ Bruno: And also they're making that transition, and so you guys are being super forthcoming with that opportunity. Well, I'm glad you mentioned migration. Why don't we migrate over to migration conversation? You've had a handful of those, and it's great. It means you found a better tool to support you and everything, but how can you be more agile and efficient beforehand? Because sometimes that eagerness can blind you to what it actually takes to get it done. So what does it take?

 

[0:13:14]

Christine Hill: Again, IP warming, having a plan and having a realistic timeline. This is something that people rush a lot, but before all of that, it really is data. Understanding the data you have, how to map the data over to the new platform, and data in, data out. So what you're starting with is what you'll be working with. A lot of people will rush it with unclean data and will fix it later. Then, again, you're putting yourself back behind the starting line. So it's really the time to take to do it right, if allowed.

 

[0:13:46]

Nicole Codd: And I think something people forget about is the time piece. So if you're on one platform and contract's coming up for renewal and you know you're migrating over to another platform, it's so important that you're putting that into motion well before you have to be off of that other platform, because mistakes happen. It always takes longer than you think it's going to, and it's way better to be fully moved over before you have to be off than to be trying to add months on and be like, "Oh my gosh, we need a few more months here before we can be fully on to this other platform." It'll just go much more smoothly if there's plenty of time in between.

 

[0:14:30]

PJ Bruno: Without getting too nitty gritty into the details, are there steps to a migration? Obviously, the data needs to go from here to here. We need to make sure there's enough time. What are the pieces in between all that?

 

[0:14:44]

Nicole Codd: The data mapping, ensuring that ... Something I see with a lot of clients is, like Christine said, it's kind of like a hodgepodge of data. And so ensuring you have something on your backend that is like, "This means X and this means Y," so that when you move it over it matches exactly. Because it's going to be a problem if one side says one thing, you move it over, and someone's like, "Oh, I thought this meant that." So ensuring you have proper data mapping on the backend.

 

[0:15:16]

PJ Bruno: How much time do you like to give for a migration? What's the timeline?

 

[0:15:20]

Christine Hill: It really depends on the amount of programs you're moving over and your list size. Part of it is that IP warming piece where you have to establish the IP and the domains and grow that up to be able to send, and second to that is being able to send your program, so your welcome stream, your reactivation, one offs, abandon cart, all of those things. Your list size could be 1 million, it could be 16 million. Those would take different lengths of time to migrate. The other thing that I've noticed a lot with migrations is people want to go out and launch a program that's easy to get up and running, so maybe like a one-off campaign, so a blast. That's not the way to do it. It's to do the gradual sends. So establish a program that isn't gated by a specific time. A welcome series could be a good one because you know that there's users just signed up and are engaged with your product or service, but in a way that are you okay with them receiving it in the first five days of becoming a user or the first one? Because if it's the first one and you have a large increase of users and you're not quite yet warmed, you won't be able to send to them.

 

[0:16:24]

PJ Bruno: Okay. Story time once more, and you can choose what the prompt is. It's either/or. You can tell us about your biggest success with migration or one thing you wish you could do over again.

 

[0:16:37]

Christine Hill: I have a biggest success one, I'd say. Grubhub, as we do, acquired another brand. We were given a very, very tight timeline to turn it around and migrate the users over into our full Grubhub experience, which would offer more restaurants, drivers, and a more powerful network for our users and our diners. There were a lot of records, and ones that typically we would scrub out, people who haven't been engaged in a very long time, that we wanted to hit, because as a business we believe that there could be some return. So there was a very big lesson. I was working with Braze's deliverability team. My initial thought at seeing this plan is, "There's no way we can hit these records. We will be blacklisted on every platform." I was pressed to do it and I said, "Okay, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this in the most calculated way that I can, a calculated risk, that ensures that we can maintain deliverability in some of the ESPs, like hopefully." It was a very, very old audience and I sliced the heck out of it to find the most engaged of this entire unengaged audience. I called it unfavorables, and I said that given the volume that we're sending to people who are engaged, who want to hear from Grubhub, we can only 10% of unfavorables of that total volume getting emails a day. And I started with the most engaged of this least engaged, stacked against Grubhub's very engaged. And day over day, and this was a 14-day migration that should have probably been 30 plus, I monitored it in the morning, in the mid day, in the evening, in the late evening. I knew that if any one thing went off, that I needed to be able to adjust it. I said, "I will do this, but I need the keys to be able to adjust it." We get through day one and day two, surprisingly not hitting any blocks, and I'm getting pressure to increase that 10% to a 20. Held my ground and did not and continued to say, "You know, we're prioritizing the most engaged of the unfavorables, and this percentage." We get through it and we're trickling through all the way through the list. And I think it came from Andrea on your delivery team was, "That's amazing. I'm not quite sure how you did that, but you were able to get through it." So that's my thought, too. Some deliverability god was looking down upon me. Again, as calculated of a risk as I could take, but knowing that what I was doing is not what I would choose to be doing, but for the business it made sense to push through. It was probably my most proud moment. I said, "If I can get through through this set of audience, I could migrate any audience."

 

[0:19:12]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, totally. So when it comes to migration, good rule of thumb is do it bit by bit, monitor all the way.

 

[0:19:20]

Christine Hill: And don't be afraid to adjust. If you do run into a block, it's better to adjust to take the time to do it then, versus to really put yourself back.

 

[0:19:29]

Nicole Codd: That's huge. That's something everyone always forgets, too. They set this plan in place and they're like, "All right, I'm just going to let it run and let it sit." Having the ability to be able to be like, "All right, we're going to bump back today, or maybe we stay at the same volume for another few days," that's huge and that's not something people always think about. It tends to be a set it and forget it exercise, which doesn't work.

 

[0:19:53]

PJ Bruno: It's a common thing we see with people taking automation in their hands. They think it's like, "Oh great, the job's done now." But I think the job's just beginning. You need to stay close to that.

 

[0:20:04]

Christine Hill: I think for us, especially moving more and more over to the Braze platform, we shifted our email and our push and we use your in-app. Looking at our marketing holistically, omni-channel messaging for our users and hitting them on the channel that they are most engaged. So understanding that it might not be email, it might be push, it could be in-app, and having that congruent flow for a user. If we push you, what are you then seeing in our app? What are you then getting in your email later? And it's really opening up the door for us to be able to do that and to do it in real time, which is something before this, and when I first joined two and a half years ago, we were on multiple platforms and nothing was talking to each other. We couldn't have a program like that.

 

[0:20:47]

PJ Bruno: Two and a half years is such a small amount of time. It's crazy. When you were telling me earlier that it was a team of two when you started, and now it's massive.

 

[0:20:56]

Christine Hill: That's just an explanation of the growth here. It truly is explosive, and with that, we're not afraid to be taking risks and innovating. That to me is exciting, and it's nice to have a larger team and that manpower to do it.

 

[0:21:09]

PJ Bruno: Love it. Also, you guys recently bought Tapingo, which is kind of Grubhub for college kids. Since you do have your hands in most things marketing here, is there something you guys are doing differently with your approach to that demographic?

 

[0:21:26]

Christine Hill: We are. Tapingo is becoming Grubhub campus dining, and it's a whole new instance of Grubhub tailored to students, things that are in and around their campus, identity experience fit for that demographic that they'll use in their time in college. And as they graduate out of college, they'll graduate onto full Grubhub. But something that is more personalized for them.

 

[0:21:50]

PJ Bruno: Now we've got to just do it for toddlers. We got to start them super young.

 

[0:21:54]

Christine Hill: If you get them young, you can keep them longer.

 

[0:21:57]

Nicole Codd: It's all about retention, you know?

 

[0:21:59]

PJ Bruno: That's what I'm saying. We don't give up on our users. Awesome. Christine Hill, thanks so much for giving us your time.

 

[0:22:05]

Christine Hill: Yeah, thank you.

 

[0:22:06]

PJ Bruno: Nicole, thank you so much for being here in Chicago.

 

[0:22:08]

Nicole Codd: Yeah, thanks for having me.

 

[0:22:10]

PJ Bruno: And thank you for being here. Bye.

[0:22:13]

Braze founders, Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman, recount the beginnings of Braze. From fast times at Bridgewater to top honors at TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, hear about the humble beginnings that soon evolved into best-in-class customer engagement platform.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact your martech industry discuss digest. So thrilled today to have two esteemed guests with me. You know them as the founders of Braze, CEO, Bill Magnuson and CTO-

 

[0:00:32]

Jon Hyman: Jon Hyman.

 

[0:00:32]

PJ: There he is to my right. Jon, Bill, welcome.

 

[0:00:36]

Bill Magnuson: Thanks for having us.

 

[0:00:36]

Jon Hyman: Thank you PJ.

 

[0:00:38]

PJ: And so you know why we're here, right? We want to hear the story. We want the uncut, behind the music for Braze, formerly Appboy.

 

[0:00:48]

Bill Magnuson: We first met in Westport, Connecticut working for a company called Bridgewater Associates. They have been notorious more recently for a lot of things about their culture. You know that I would encourage our listeners to go and read about either in Dealbreaker if you like a good story or in the New York Times, if you want a slightly more journalistic integrity, if you will. But, when I joined Bridgewater after finishing up my master's degree, I joined up and I was actually on Jon's team, he was my team lead when we got started.

 

[0:01:19]

Jon Hyman: Yeah, actually had to give Bill a great project of going through all of the services that we owned on Internet Explorer 6 and seeing if they could work under Internet Explorer 8.

 

[0:01:30]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah, I think it was about 235 different projects and I didn't know how any of them were supposed to work. My directions were just try and figure out how each one of them works and see if any of them don't work when you go into a more modern browser. And this was, I think, still years behind cutting edge.

 

[0:01:47]

PJ: Gotcha. Jon, was Bill hard to manage?

 

[0:01:51]

Jon Hyman: No, he actually was really good. I did try to save him from the despair of a couple of those different projects, but Bill was like, "I can do it, just give it to me," and he then quickly outgrew my team onto his own team and started running product for Greenfield Development that we had at Bridgewater, while I stuck with what we called at the time sustained engineering, which was just managing the 80 plus technology assets that our department had managed.

 

[0:02:19]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah. So fast forward about a year and a half and Jon starts to get a wandering eye a little bit and decides early on in 2011 that he's going to leave and strike out.

 

[0:02:32]

Jon Hyman: Yeah. Basically at the point for me, I had been programming since I was young, programmed all through high school and college. That was how I paid for my tuition and beer and pizza money and there was a lot of good creativity in that. And at Bridgewater I essentially felt that I was both far away from what I'll call is, like a win, I wanted to just kind of celebrate the success of something. There was a huge financial institution, I didn't have any delusions of grandeur that as a 25-year old kid I would impact their bottom line, but I wanted to be able to just celebrate a win with the team. Didn't think I was getting that. And at the same time, I felt that the new tech world was evolving. We had the cloud starting to come out mobile and was explosive. I actually was one of those people who left work in the middle of the day to go stand in line to get the first Android phone that Sprint ever carried, which was really fun. So, I was really excited about it and I thought that I was not going to learn those technologies at Bridgewater. I wasn't doing something that was creative. And so, at that point I just decided that I wanted to either start some kind of tech company or join a small tech company and just be a little bit closer to the product itself.

 

[0:03:45]

Bill Magnuson: At that point I had been at Bridgewater for less than a year. And prior to Bridgewater I was actually at Google and I was a fortunate enough to be able to do this hybrid thing where I got my master's degree and continued working on working for Google at the same time. And the work that I was doing at Google was with the Android team and it was right as Android was launching. And so I had been exposed to mobile in its earliest innings and just had enormous conviction that it was going to fundamentally change the world. And so, Jon left and I had only been there for 10 or 11 months at the time, which was a little bit early to be making a jump, especially on my first real job after getting fully out of school and leaving grad school. But we kept in touch and Jon started working on some really cool stuff working with cool teams, just kind of exploring out in the New York City tech area. And fast forward a couple months later and Jon gives me a call and, I think Wednesday before the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, he had had a partner that he was supposed to be doing the programming competition with that had to cancel at the last minute. And he was like, "Hey, what are you doing this weekend?" I was like, "I'm going up to Vermont with my girlfriend. We've got this really romantic weekend planned." And he was like, "You want to cancel all those plans and do a programming competition with me in the city?" And I was like, "Of course." And so-

 

[0:05:06]

Jon Hyman: I still have that draw.

 

[0:05:07]

PJ: Really?

 

[0:05:08]

Jon Hyman: I can still cause people to quit, cancel their plans.

 

[0:05:10]

PJ: Bag that. What did you say? What did you get? What were your words to convince him to bag it?

 

[0:05:15]

Jon Hyman: "Bill, we're going to be working on this together." Glory.

 

[0:05:18]

Bill Magnuson: ... Yeah. And so the program that we built was called [Gilty] . I think it was perfect for the TechCrunch Disrupt audience, because it was a little bit subversive. It was a little bit mischievous. Gilt was very much an ascendant brand at the time. These flash sales were really exciting. And what it did was it took advantage of the fact that when a flash sale sold out on Gilt, it would not be sold out for everyone who would actually stay in members' carts. Because when you purchase something you had 10 minutes while it sat in the cart, to decide whether or not you were going to complete the transaction or not. So we built an ability for items that were placed in your car to get registered as auctions. And then if you came to the site and it was already in members' carts so you could actually bid on the items that were in people's carts. So there's a lot of consumer surplus there and you know, to be able to arbitrage that risk-free was pretty cool. And so we built this browser plugin that built an auction system on top of it. You could also imagine this had something like OpenTable. You go and there's no restaurant reservations left tonight but you've got a couple of them are up for bid and you'd be like, "Ah, I'd pay 15 bucks for that eight o'clock table time." And you can do that out of band. OpenTable would, of course, never sell you that. But imagine a third party plugin that could.

 

[0:06:27]

PJ: Wow.

 

[0:06:28]

Bill Magnuson: And so that was the project that we did and we ended up winning top honors for that at the Disrupt Hackathon. We actually ended up meeting an investor in a crosswalk as we were walking to the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon to present, a couple of days later. And so we're walking to the conference and Jon was on the phone and I just started talking to the guy next to us in the crosswalk. He was an investor and he's actually the CEO of a company called Rubrik now, a guy named Bipul Sinha, and he spotted me on stage when we presented later that day and sent us an email that was like, "Hey, I don't know if you remember, I met you in a crosswalk. I know this guy living down in Texas who's thinking about starting something in the mobile space. I think you guys should connect and talk." And I got a hundred emails that looked exactly like that over the course of that week because Jon and I had had a video interview on TechCrunch and it was a hot tech blog at the time. And I just filed it away and went back to my job.

 

[0:07:24]

Jon Hyman: I didn't even know this whole ordeal had happened. I was actually on the phone, didn't even know Bill had a conversation and wasn't on that email that Bill later got. But, Bill came over for dinner and, then we were just talking about what had been going on in the last couple of weeks. And I was sharing the exciting things I was talking to people about in New York. And I asked him if he had seen any interesting opportunities and he was like, "No, not really." And I was like, well you should go through your inbox and see if there's anything that looks really good. And, what about the crosswalk investor in Texas? Was that just the first of many and that was it?

 

[0:07:58]

Bill Magnuson: I didn't have great work-life balance at the time, and I would include in the life part of life-balance, checking my personal email. And so it just kind of went into a big pile of a lot of outreach that we got after, the notoriety that we received from getting written up in tech crunch and such. And I just hadn't transacted on any of them. I just went right back to my day job the next day.

 

[0:08:20]

Jon Hyman: Bill then ends up just shooting me a text or talking to me a few days later, just being like, "Hey, come in to New York City, we're here, we'll get drinks with this guy." And I'm like, "What? What are we doing?" And he's like, "Yeah, I'm going to talk to some guy who wanted to start a company called Appboy. And he was gonna meet us for drinks and just come on." And I didn't really know anything about this. It turned out that Bipul Sinha was, as Bill mentioned, advisor to this guy, Mark [Ramazian 00:08:44], who lived in Houston, Texas. He's a CEO of an oil and gas company and he had created, actually a product called Appboy, which was a live website. And it was mobile app-related, but he wanted to kind of pivot into building an SDK that would help connect mobile app publishers, developers with their consumers and increase engagement, increase discovery and be a little more social with your mobile application.

 

[0:09:12]

PJ: So, what was it doing without that? What was Appboy ...

 

[0:09:15]

Bill Magnuson: There's a funny, unofficial history of Appboy that goes back years before this. There was a social network that he had built for mobile app developers. So every mobile app would have its own landing page and you could have a community of fans around it and the developer would be able to communicate with them. And, funny thing about it is in hindsight it seems a little ridiculous, right, to have a website to be an index for mobile apps and have that be a social network. But that's what appboy.com was. And you can actually go find, the BBC named one of the best sites on the internet. Or, one of the best sites, excuse me, on the worldwide web back in 2010 or something. Which doesn't ... It's an interesting choice by the BBC, but we always hawk that as our own press in the early days.

 

[0:09:56]

PJ: Oh yeah.

 

[0:09:56]

Bill Magnuson: But, he had shut that down, because it was a side project that he had been working on while running the oil and natural gas company, and was ready to take another look at it. And, I had all this excitement about mobile from my time at Google and my time being a part of it. We all were at this stage in our life where we wanted to go and strike out and do something. And so, I remember reading a lot of things afterward that were, when you find your co-founder, when you decide that you're going to start a company together, it's a lot like a marriage. You got to make sure that you vet people heavily and you need to date beforehand and you everything else. And, I had a phone call, actually the first phone call I had with Mark, I forgot about it. It was hard to access your personal calendar, your personal email while at Bridgewater. So I just got a phone call from him and while I was driving home from work and I literally turned it on speaker phone and was holding my phone against the steering wheel while I was driving home because I didn't have a headset with me in the car or what have you. And that was the first call. And then we exchanged a few emails and we had dinner in New York one night, dinner and drinks. And we all just decided to quit our jobs and move to New York and start up Appboy.

 

[0:11:02]

PJ: How old were you guys at this point when you have that dinner?

 

[0:11:05]

Bill Magnuson: I was 23.

 

[0:11:07]

Jon Hyman: I was 25.

 

[0:11:09]

PJ: Wow.

 

[0:11:09]

Bill Magnuson: I think Mark was 28-ish. So yeah, we definitely didn't follow that advice of heavily vetting each other. But, we connected really well. We were all excited about working in the same space. We all saw, I think the massive potential in the mobile ecosystem that wasn't really being realized. There were a lot of apps, there was a lot of money going into mobile apps. There was a lot of excitement around it, but no one was really building sustainable businesses in mobile. And similarly, the existing sustainable businesses, the enterprise, had not really figured it out yet. They hadn't figured out how their products and services would evolve and change in response to this new mobile technology coming to the world. But we had strong conviction that massive businesses would be built, that traditional businesses would be disrupted. And so what we wanted to was really take advantage of, what was unique about the capabilities of mobile that's going to change the way that people do business. And so when you really look at that common thread all the way through our product from the very beginning it was, we're in a new world where technology has changed the rules of how humans interact with each other, how they interact with brands, their relationship with technology. It's also given us, as people on the controls, a capability that we didn't have before because we can communicate directly to people. We can do it with massive server infrastructure. We can deliver messages across a lot of different contexts and places that we can really understand people better and then we can communicate with them. And so we just kind of started from there. It was like, all right, if we want to really turn a mobile app into a business and we want to do that by building great customer relationships and a great way to build relationships is to talk to people. Right? And that's the starting point. And I think that we really benefited actually from a kind of ignorance of the broader marketing technology space at the time. Because, mobile apps also didn't have marketing teams in 2011. They were typically just product teams. They were launching into the app stores and the magic of the distribution mechanisms to the app stores allowed them to be successful without real marketing or customer engagement strategies. And so, we built just for that business purpose without a specific set of competitors in mind or without some sort of preexisting capabilities that we benchmarked ourselves against. We really just wanted to generically solve that problem of understanding people as they're interacting with a primarily mobile app experience at the time. But just understanding how they're trying to interact with a product or a service and then communicate with them along the way.

 

[0:13:31]

PJ: So that philosophy, that's been intact pretty much since the beginning. That hasn't shifted much. But what is the first version look like practically when you guys started spinning it up?

 

[0:13:41]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah, so the first version, it had a lot of the messaging types that we have today. So we had a slide-up message, which we would call an in-app message slider today that only came up from the bottom. But that was an ephemeral in-product experience. I call this the Appboy as a proper noun phase of the company, because we had this idea that people would click on something called Appboy, and then it would, within an app, and it would bring up a interface that would be familiar to you in multiple apps that you were using. And that interface would include your user profile. It would include a news feed which was a card stream, we called it a mini blog inside your app. Although nowadays we can just call it a news feed and people know what that means. It had customer support in it and it had app recommendations. And so that was what we today have as the Content Cards feature, which is this kind of persistent card-based messaging that's personalized and delivered to you inside the application. And then we also had email and push that we would deliver. But the email and push was hard-coded at the time to go with you through your journey of using an application. So you would use it the first time and it would be like, "Hey, congrats for using this app for the first time, here's a badge, you're an App Newbie." And then as you would use other sorts of features, we would tell you about things inside the app that could be programmed or we would give you badges for using it. You could recommend it to your friends. I would call it hard-coded as an engineer. It was like a more hard-coded experience, but it was really communicating across all those different channels. It was building up a user profile over time based on the things that the user is doing, and also things that they would tell us in their own user profile. And then utilizing that to personalize the whole experience. So, all those foundational building blocks were there.

 

[0:15:19]

Jon Hyman: Well the user profile actually I think is a fairly novel idea at the time for mobile. Because when we look at app analytics providers back when we were in 2011, it's extremely device-centric. And the fact that we were thinking about user profiles, it was social. You even had friends, you could connect Facebook to it. That was a new idea and that actually really then led up to our benefit of us being able to now have that 360-degree user profile across devices, platforms and channels and online and offline. Because we started with it literally from day one that we were viewing the people who use your product, not the devices that use your product. In fact, the first version of the user segmentation engine was just the user directory. We wanted to show publishers here are the people who downloaded your app this week. Here's everyone who's made a purchase, and actually show the people, not just the device statistics there. And so I think that was a different light and different way of looking at the data then that now you just see, not only is just being so obvious, but that everyone's just driving towards because we're trying to engage people for who they are and have good brand [inaudible] and you can't do that when you just look at device to device.

 

[0:16:31]

PJ: And so as you guys were building this team, what was the first crew?

 

[0:16:37]

Bill Magnuson: So the early crew was primarily engineering, we had to get the product built and out the door. We originally built for IOS only, so the vision was obviously to eventually be across all different platforms, but IOS was kind of the dominant place that brands were starting to make money at the time. Because if you go all the way back to 2011 you also have to remember that things like in-app purchases and digital goods were these scary, crazy things. And people were like, "Why would I ever spend $2 on something that's not real?" And, we kind of evolved with all of those cultural changes over time because it really took apps to coming businesses. But yeah, the early team was primarily engineering. I was actually the CTO when we started and Jon was CIO and it was such a luxury to have two technical co-founders to really get that early product built and get things out the door. And so I, you know, worked on the dashboard and the SDKs and Jon worked on the API's and the back end and the infrastructure and you know, together we, we built out teams to, you know, help increase velocity. And we got that first product out the door as an SDK that would integrate in your app and there'd be a button that you would press either the app boy logo or the lightning bolt logo and it would kind of pull up the user profile at the newsfeed and everything. And, and you know, we didn't do a very good job of building the, the MVP, you know, and kind of being lean about it. We really had a fully featured system when we did that first launch. But I think that that has really benefited us over time because we, we've seen a lot of the architectural, I think mistakes or limitations that exist in a lot of the other people that operate in the space. And I think the fact that we forced ourselves to figure out how to communicate with people in a lot of different ways and we figured out how to understand people as Jon Mentions as humans, not just as devices made that initial version of the product a lot harder, but it meant that our foundation was more flexible and stronger.

 

[0:18:31]

PJ: Did you guys have trouble getting companies to integrate that native SDK early on because maybe it might not have been, you're in their code that probably wasn't very, normal.

 

[0:18:43]

Bill Magnuson: Well actually at the time it was actually pretty common for apps to just have an outrageous number of SDKs, like a dozen or 15 or something, and just kind of smash them all in. And it was definitely the wild west. We now deal with that legacy a little bit in that a lot of the smaller companies at the time, we started to run into this pretty quickly, is that one of those 15 SDKs was not a good citizen in your application. And so then people started to get a little bit nervous about it. But, in the early days it was just, you built apps, and you tossed a whole bunch in and people were willing to really experiment and try things out quite a bit. I think that trying to build any business though, it was easy to get people to sign up and be interested. It was harder to get them to integrate. It was even harder to get them to pay. And so that was a progression that we certainly had to go through. And it took a couple of years, I think, before we had our first real annual enterprise customer.

 

[0:19:37]

Jon Hyman: I think that some of the challenges we also had was just the initial product of being an app inside an app or a social network, was fairly hard to explain and hard for people to understand. Like Bill was just saying that you would tap the Appboy icon or lightning bolt icon and you'd go into Appboy, and I remember we used to demo the application and we'd be like, "So, you're in your app and then you click this button and now you're in Appboy." And people would be like, "What? Now I'm in an app inside an app but, can I white-label this so it's not Appboy and it's just my app?" And I think that was really a hard sell for some companies, but also at the time a lot of the apps that we were talking to, or possible customers, weren't real businesses. They were just people who had a huge number of downloads in the app store. This in 2011, you'd have someone who built a flashlight app and it was one person and they had a tremendous number of downloads. We had a very big early customer, this was probably around 2012 or 2013, that had 40 to 50 million monthly active users. It was one developer who built a photo collage app when you used to be able to stitch together different photos into a collage and put it on Facebook, and he just wouldn't pay for anything because he was like, "I'm just one guy. I'm not running a business. I'm just, I sell these digital frames." And he'd make some money but isn't a brand. And I think that was one of the challenges we were up against was the app store was just so immature that you weren't having people think about the only businesses. Brands were just having something as an app available for people in the download. It wasn't the way they really thought to run their strategy.

 

[0:21:18]

Bill Magnuson: And, we really realized that, I referred to it earlier as the Appboy is a proper noun phase, what we needed to do eventually was, we started to unbundle that feature set so that it could really get integrated into the first-party experience. So, the user profile went into the background and the news feed got integrated into an activity feed or some sort of other updates or what have you into the native experience. Seeing that message was always over the top and it wasn't really problematic from that perspective. And we actually ended up cutting a number of features over time. And one of the things that was a really, I think critical signal on that as Jon mentioned, is we would demo it and people would say, "Oh, can I replace that Appboy logo or that lightning bolt logo with my own?" And it seems like a natural white-labeling request, but if you actually think about the customer experience, you go into the Yelp app as an example, and then there's a Yelp logo in the Yelp app that you're supposed to click on, right? Like that feature request didn't make any sense. And so if you take a step back from that, it's like, "Oh, this person's not asking for something dumb. This is just evidence that what we're trying to offer and the way that they're conceptualizing it doesn't make any sense, writ large. And so, we had to really go back and rethink about how do we integrate into the product experience and how do we take this feature set where the feature set makes sense, but it's just not integrating and in the right way.

 

[0:22:37]

PJ: So people were using Appboy on smartphones. Is that what you're saying?

 

[0:22:42]

Bill Magnuson: Well so, Appboy was like ... So did you ever use OpenFeint back in the day?

 

[0:22:47]

PJ: No.

 

[0:22:47]

Bill Magnuson: Or imagine going into a game and having a gamer profile, right? Where you go into the gamer or profile and then there's, "Here's some news for you and here's some stuff you can edit about your profile."

 

[0:22:56]

PJ: That I understand.

 

[0:22:57]

Bill Magnuson: It was like that. Right? But we wanted to make it generalizable across all different applications. And so that was just something that, at the time, a lot of the way that the app store was developing and the way that a lot of apps we're developing, something like that made sense in 2011 for a lot of those apps and the feature set made sense for businesses. But as apps actually started to develop into businesses, we had to modify that.

 

[0:23:21]

PJ: Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Any early days debacles that you guys had to deal with in the first few years? Like big, big, fire drills that you guys had to run in terms of technical?

 

[0:23:33]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah, there were, we could go through a couple of those. I think one of the things I laugh at the most from our earliest office was that we actually were in office space, that we were squatting in, long story. But we were in the offices of a now bankrupt real estate company. And it was in the Starrett-Lehigh building, which is a big building with a lot of fashion companies in it over in 2011, and there was no reasonable internet into the building. But, this was the early days of WiMAX and we had line of sight to some WiMAX towers. We were like, alright, let's try out WiMAX. And so we got these WiMAX modems. And the modems for early WiMAX, we obviously didn't realize this but, they didn't support both charging them and running them for long periods of time, at the same time. They were built to be high bandwidth, but not to actually be used for the use case we were using it for. So we had it up on a ladder, hanging off of this rope from the top of a ladder-

 

[0:24:30]

PJ: That is not safe.

 

[0:24:30]

Bill Magnuson: ... So that it was pointed directly at the antenna on top of a building somewhere else in Manhattan. And then had a fan running on it with the battery cover off the back because the battery would overheat if you had it running with the charger and running all day. And that was our Internet connection for the office.

 

[0:24:45]

PJ: What a rig.

 

[0:24:46]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah.

 

[0:24:47]

PJ: Holy cow.

 

[0:24:48]

Bill Magnuson: When we moved out of that office, we actually-

 

[0:24:53]

PJ: But you were squatting?

 

[0:24:54]

Bill Magnuson: ... We were squatting. So we were there for five or six months rent-free, beautiful office.

 

[0:24:59]

PJ: But, they knew you were there or somebody knew you were there?

 

[0:25:01]

Jon Hyman: Yes, essentially it was Mark-

 

[0:25:02]

Bill Magnuson: They knew we were there. [crosstalk 00:25:03].

 

[0:25:03]

Jon Hyman: ... Mark's family had essentially acquired this property that they didn't need and the lease was running up in a couple of months and they said that they could give it to us. It was actually this huge 3,500 square foot office that had literal offices, Bill and I each had a 15 by 15-foot office. You could close the door and-

 

[0:25:23]

Bill Magnuson: Two of them had windows and so that was where we set everyone up to work. And then the other two didn't. And those were actually where we set up the air mattresses because Jon and I were living in Connecticut at the time, and it was a lot easier to just sleep at the office. We had extra offices.

 

[0:25:36]

PJ: Oh, been there.

 

[0:25:37]

Bill Magnuson: There was actually one morning where I woke up, one of our employees had gotten there early. It was just the two of us in the office, but I had still been sleeping in the office and he came over and he knocked on the door and he was like, "Hey, they're evacuating the building right now because there's a gas leak." And I was like, "Oh, man." And he's like, "I don't know what the deal is but the alarm's not going off in our space. But I saw the blinking lights out in the hallway and I went out and I found out what was going on." And, I've gone over that in my head before where if he had not been there, I would've just kept sleeping and I would have woke up in this building that had been completely evacuated due to a gas leak and I probably would have just opened my laptop and gone to work without even realizing that anything was amiss.

 

[0:26:21]

Jon Hyman: Yeah, I remember that we got out of there and, Mark, I don't think was in town then.

 

[0:26:26]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah. He hadn't moved up to New York yet. It was the first few weeks.

 

[0:26:29]

Jon Hyman: We had told him what happened and it was just a shock. We also were in that building when an earthquake struck.

 

[0:26:35]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah. Which was the next week. And I remember the whole building evacuated again and everyone was really worried that there had been a gas explosion because it was only one week after the gas leak, and the earthquake evacuated this whole building. And the Starrett-Lehigh building, I think it's the second or third most square footage of any office building in the city because it's an entire massive block on the West Side. And so the whole building evacuated and there were just 10,000 people wandering around on the sidewalks outside the building.

 

[0:27:02]

PJ: Well I'm glad you guys survived that.

 

[0:27:04]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah.

 

[0:27:04]

PJ: That sounded like the biggest debacle to-date.

 

[0:27:07]

Bill Magnuson: I guess. Yeah. We didn't have the product launched at that point yet so that we didn't really have the opportunity for technology debacles. It was really more of a facilities. [crosstalk 00:27:12].

 

[0:27:15]

Jon Hyman: Yeah it was like six weeks in, basically.

 

[0:27:18]

PJ: So what about channel agnosticism? Was that something that was even a thing or a thought back then? Because from what I've heard is, the way that we are built, we're future proofing for multiple channels and things that maybe we can't even conceptualize yet.

 

[0:27:34]

Bill Magnuson: Yeah, well I alluded to this earlier, but this idea that our initial product launch had messaging which was push by its nature. So we had push notifications in email. One of those two is in the context of the product, which is push notifications. The other one is outside and is addressed in a different way. And then we also had messaging which was completely inside the product experience, both ephemeral, which was the slide-up and then persistent, which was the card stream. And so when you look at that, push by it's nature, pull by its nature, ephemeral, persistent in the product experience and out of the product experience, you've basically covered all the dimensions of messaging. And so when we look at new ways of communicating with people across new message channels, either as we develop support for existing ones or as new ones come into play, we've already got an archetype of messaging in the system which looks like that. And that's really important because it means that all of the other features that we've built further up the stack, things around user targeting or content personalization or orchestration across channels, they all were built from the very beginning, taking into account that the way that you communicate with someone could go across any one of these dimensions. And I think that one of the things that you see in a lot of platforms that start out as a single channel or as a single set of channels, is that when they tried to expand into other places, they'll find parts of their feature set that aren't compatible with, for instance, pulling down a personalized stream of messages when it was architected to just send a campaign out to someone. And as a result, when we look at message expansion, we end up with this consistent and predictable experience for customers who are used to all the sophistication further up in the product where you're doing your user targeting or your classification, you're personalizing things, you're orchestrating across channels. Those are all going to work in intuitive ways as we add new channels. And we're going to get the advantage of all of that sophistication that we've built even as we add things that are completely new. And so that I think has both, it's future-proofed us and it's also really helped our customers push their own boundaries. Because I think that a really big part of what caused a lot of messaging to end up siloed inside of companies, a big part of that is a learning curve and a skillset. And, the technology being siloed certainly matters. But when you can use a platform like Braze and you can come on board to it and you can learn how to send push notifications with it and, 90% of that knowledge is transferable to sending email. And then of that you can then transfer that into sending SMS or into delivering messages inside the app. That ends up becoming a really good mechanism for teams rapidly build ROI and spread it across all these different ways of communicating.

 

[0:30:08]

PJ: Well guys, we're almost at time here, but I got to say, and I should've opened with it, happy eighth anniversary of Braze. It's been about eight years. Congratulations to you both.

 

[0:30:17]

Bill Magnuson: Thanks.

 

[0:30:18]

Jon Hyman: Thank you.

 

[0:30:18]

PJ: Huge deal. I just want to know before we close out, what are you most excited about in your ninth year of this company?

 

[0:30:26]

Jon Hyman: For me, I'm really excited about just continued growth in our company, both with our people and the types of businesses that we work with. I'm really excited that Braze is just so plugged into the fabric of the digital world. We engage more than 1.7 billion monthly active users now and we do that for financial apps or lifestyle apps, retail and eCommerce, huge consumer brands. And I'm really excited as we continue to go up that brand chain and work with the best companies in the world. What that's going to mean for our business, but also we have such a tremendous amount of talent here supporting those. The people that work on different teams here, whether you're on the sales side, the engineering side, success, support, marketing, there's so much great dedication and real passion. People who are very sharp, smart, and I'm just excited to continue to grow the company with that kind of caliber of talent.

 

[0:31:21]

Bill Magnuson: The thing that I really like about being a technologist and being at a technology company is being able to solve new problems with new capabilities. And so when I look into our next year, we've got new teams that we've been building out. We've got existing teams that have gotten much larger. We've put a huge amount of investment into new capabilities, whether that's new tools, technology, skills, acumen, partners, whatever it is. Those things all multiply and compound together. And I feel even here in our ninth year, we're still vastly accelerating our capabilities, our execution velocity, the way that we reach out in the market, the impact that we've had. And so when I look forward, it's rapid growth as usual. I think, as we look at the last couple of years, we really hit this inflection point as the problem that we had been really soldiering on, working on for six years really started to become a massive priority for businesses of all kinds. And we've really enjoyed, I think a acceleration and inflection point in our growth, and we're still in the early innings of that. And when we look into the next year, I'm just really excited about what the team's going to accomplish.

 

[0:32:27]

PJ: Guys, this just hasn't been enough time for me. So I'm thinking I got to get you guys back on the podcast in a few months time, and we can maybe tell more of the story. All right?

 

[0:32:35]

Jon Hyman: Sounds good.

 

[0:32:35]

PJ: Jon Hyman, Bill Magnuson, thank you guys so much for coming on, making the time for us. And thank you guys for listening. Take care.

[0:32:42]

New challengers in the content streaming space! HBO Max and Disney+ enter the race for video delivery dominance. Listen in to hear VP of Growth, Spencer Burke, and Strategic AE, Patrick Forquer, discuss the lay of the streaming land, offering packages, and the frontrunners.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

Spencer Burke: Have you guys watched ET recently?

 

[0:00:20]

PJ Bruno: Pretty much every Christmas, yeah.

 

[0:00:22]

Spencer Burke: Really?

 

[0:00:22]

PJ Bruno: No.

 

[0:00:23]

Spencer Burke: Oh.

 

[0:00:24]

Patrick Forquer: This is our best content in years.

 

[0:00:25]

PJ Bruno: It's the best yet. Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your martech industry discussed digest. My two esteemed guests today, close friends and colleagues, once again, Spencer Burke of the [house growth] and Patrick Forquer from the sales org. Gentlemen, welcome back.

 

[0:00:41]

Patrick Forquer: PJ.

 

[0:00:42]

Patrick Forquer: What a pleasure to be with you and Spencer again.

 

[0:00:46]

PJ Bruno: I'm very excited about today. Spencer, good to you. You're looking very tanned.

 

[0:00:49]

Spencer Burke: Thanks, Pat.

 

[0:00:50]

PJ Bruno: Where did you go?

 

[0:00:51]

Spencer Burke: Thanks for having me, PJ.

 

[0:00:52]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, man. Always good to have you back on. You always have insightful big words.

 

[0:00:55]

Patrick Forquer: I just drank some excellent cold brew on tap. I'm fired up.

 

[0:00:59]

PJ Bruno: That's good. Me too. I forgot that you're supposed to dilute it with water.

 

[0:01:02]

Spencer Burke: Yup.

 

[0:01:03]

PJ Bruno: I just do straight-up.

 

[0:01:03]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah.

 

[0:01:04]

Spencer Burke: Wow.

 

[0:01:04]

PJ Bruno: That's right. I'm fired up. My vision is vibrating a little bit, so let's jump in before I can't see. So this episode, we're getting in the streaming wars. We're all aware of how many different companies are trying to capture the apple as far as streaming services. We've got Netflix, which has been around for a long time. There's Hulu. Now we have two big contestants jumping in the ring. First of which, HBO Max joins the growing mob of streaming services, chasing after Netflix. Their parent company AT&T, they unwrapped this direct-to-consumer streaming service this past week. HBO Max will feature 10,000 hours of content from HBO, Warner Brothers, DC Entertainment, CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and other Warner media properties, planning to launch next spring. It's the first major venture to come from AT&T's $104 billion takeover of Time Warner. They're going to have a lot of titles. They're taking Friends off of Netflix, which is pretty huge. I know every once in a while, I'll jump into a few random episodes just because it's chicken soup for the American soul. It truly is. Also, Patrick mentioned to me that some Reese Witherspoon movie is coming to HBO Max too, and you're the Reese Witherspoon fan.

 

[0:02:21]

Patrick Forquer: I am a huge Reese fan. I'm on the board or director of the Reese Witherspoon fan club, a huge supporter of all of her work. Very excited to have that.

 

[0:02:33]

PJ Bruno: Yeah. What's it called?

 

[0:02:34]

Patrick Forquer: It's called The Reese Witherspoon Story.

 

[0:02:37]

PJ Bruno: That's good.

 

[0:02:38]

Spencer Burke: On a serious note, which ... Do we do serious on this?

 

[0:02:42]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, we can slide into the serious.

 

[0:02:44]

Patrick Forquer: Let's try it on for size and see how it feels.

 

[0:02:46]

Spencer Burke: As Netflix loses content, I often feel like I'm on an airplane, a little bit trapped. I'm not really excited about any of my options, but I'm at home on the couch. I want to watch something. Do you guys think Netflix can sustain its edge as it's losing some of this content, Friends and The Office or some of its most streamed shows? When you sit down and put on Netflix, are you really excited about the options? How do you feel about their current content library?

 

[0:03:14]

PJ Bruno: I think their sweet spot as far as ... It all comes back to original content because yes, they were first in the space. They were quick to absorb some of our favorite shows, but as they start to lose some of those tried and tested sitcoms that we love so much and keep going back to, they still continue to put out really, really great "original" content. When I say "original", there's quotes around that because it's not super original. It's just paying people for their content and branding it Netflix, but the original content that's come out of there ... Stranger Things, I just burned through in a day and a half, season three, and I'm ready for season four. They just keep putting out great things.

 

[0:03:51]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah, I think the interesting part if you look at the evolution of Netflix since it really doubled-down on focusing direct-to-the-consumer, evolving from the DVD business back in the day-

 

[0:04:02]

PJ Bruno: They still have that DVD mailing service, though, by the way.

 

[0:04:04]

Patrick Forquer: Do they really?

 

[0:04:05]

Spencer Burke: Do they?

 

[0:04:05]

PJ Bruno: They do. It still exists in case you guys want a mailed DVD.

 

[0:04:09]

Patrick Forquer: Ugh, I would love that.

 

[0:04:10]

PJ Bruno: It's nostalgic.

 

[0:04:11]

Patrick Forquer: But they took all this content from the big linear players, NBC, CBS, etc, before the linear TV folks really knew the gold that they had on their hands. So to see this now retraction of that to say, "Oh, wait ..." They built this tent pole around this really popular chicken soup for the soul type of content, Friends, etc, and are pivoting now to towards the original content. So they built the audience, leveraging all the great content from other folks, and now that those folks are pulling that back, they have critical mass. So I actually see it ... I don't see that as a huge threat to Netflix overall because they're putting out something like 80 to 100 original movies every year. Think about that. Think about that scale.

 

[0:04:59]

Spencer Burke: Half of them are Adam Sandler movies.

 

[0:05:00]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah.

 

[0:05:00]

PJ Bruno: Oh man.

 

[0:05:02]

Spencer Burke: He keeps doing it, though, doesn't he? He's trying his best. He's staying.

 

[0:05:05]

PJ Bruno: He is trying.

 

[0:05:05]

Patrick Forquer: But they're playing a volume game right now. They're putting out a massive amount of content. Only 5% or so needs to hit. As long as they're getting single digit hits out of the massive volume they're putting out, they're going to continue to see subscriber growth. They raised their prices recently. They now have that mass where it doesn't matter that things are going away, as much as it helps those other services. To Netflix, they've already got that.

 

[0:05:32]

PJ Bruno: HBO Max and chill doesn't quite have the same ring to it, I don't think.

 

[0:05:36]

Patrick Forquer: Right. Well, the interesting thing about HBO, though, if you think about the different big players, HBO is obviously one of the big ones out there where they're known for lower volume but extremely high quality content. Game of Thrones, etc. But what'll be interesting to see now is as they scale that ... And their CEO has talked a lot about that, especially since the merger with AT&T. They'll scale that, and the idea is keep the extremely high level of content, and maybe not get to the level that Netflix is getting, but you're getting at a much higher "hit rate" of things that work and things that resonate with the audience, even though the overall volume may be lower than Netflix. It'll be higher than where they are now. There are so many different universes coming together with DC, Turner, etc. I'm excited to see what that looks like and takes shape. The original lineup that they've come out with looks awesome in addition to ... Yeah, you probably know double-digit people that watch Friends every night before bed. So that alone is just like ... It's one of those shows that people just watch and feel better about [inaudible].

 

[0:06:47]

Spencer Burke: With Netflix, it's not just that they need 5% to 10% of the shows to be winners. Their equation is slightly different because their audience is so broad. They're creating really niche content, and in linear TV, niche content takes up a time slot. So the opportunity cost of that is really high. Do I want this show for middle America to take the 7 o'clock time slot, but I know no one in San Francisco is going to watch it? Versus on Netflix, we can ... I don't even remember what that Ashton Kutcher show where they're out on the ranch is called. The Ranch? Is that it?

 

[0:07:20]

PJ Bruno: Oh yeah, I think it is called The Ranch. Sam Elliott.

 

[0:07:23]

Spencer Burke: Yeah, we can release that and Stranger Things and Dark. There's this horror sci-fi thing going on at the same time as this western-type story. So what they're trying to do is create content that really hits different parts of their audience and have winners for each of those segments. I think HBO and Disney have both done the opposite, really high-quality, broad appeal, Game of Thrones. Disney has a huge history of some amazing winners in that category.

 

[0:07:53]

PJ Bruno: Right. Not taking risks is just fully inline with that vision. When you look at the remakes of recent with Aladdin coming back to live action, Lion King ... I'll probably go see that on Friday.

 

[0:08:04]

Patrick Forquer: Definitely.

 

[0:08:04]

Spencer Burke: Ooo, date time?

 

[0:08:06]

Patrick Forquer: I think it's Friday date night.

 

[0:08:07]

PJ Bruno: We do work directly next to a movie theater.

 

[0:08:10]

Spencer Burke: We do. Yeah, just walk next door.

 

[0:08:12]

PJ Bruno: Speaking of Lion King, we might as well move on to our next big one: Disney. Disney+ streaming service. The release date, the price, the shows and movies to expect. So as we know, Disney is betting big on its 2019 streaming service, Disney+, the future home for streaming almost all things Disney. It'll be the hub to watch the big budget Star Wars series, Marvel Cinematic Universe films, all the Pixar movies including the just-released Toy Story 4 sometime next year, and a bunch of original shows and movies based on those franchises and others.

 

[0:08:49]

Spencer Burke: Yeah, so I guess the rivalry with Netflix is heating up.

 

[0:08:52]

Patrick Forquer: What's interesting about the Disney+ product to me is first of all, I'm really excited about the original content they have coming out on Pixar and in the Star Wars universe and the Marvel Universe. Again, they're pulling all that Marvel content off of Netflix, for instance. So they have what HBO has, which is this blend of the tent pole original content that's very high quality, and they have a history of putting out great content, but also having the older Disney shows and older Disney movies to pull you in. But the third pillar that they have that I think is unique to Disney is parks. So what they have ... Spencer actually sent me an article on this a month or so ago, but what they have is they build these universes like Marvel, Star Wars, Nat Geo, etc. People get really into those ecosystem plays, but then they're also drawn to then go visit those types of experiences in real life. Spencer and I were at Disneyworld last year, and I can tell you business is booming. If you look at the-

 

[0:09:58]

Spencer Burke: It's amazing.

 

[0:09:59]

Patrick Forquer: It's amazing. It's amazing what they're able to do in real life at the parks, and then you look at their earnings reports and they are crushing the margins on that.

 

[0:10:07]

PJ Bruno: Have you guys been to a park recently? Have you seen-

 

[0:10:10]

Spencer Burke: Last year. We'll be back.

 

[0:10:11]

Patrick Forquer: We're going back. Yes.

 

[0:10:12]

PJ Bruno: Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. Did you get to see some of these experiences?

 

[0:10:16]

Spencer Burke: Disney is incredible. The films, absolutely, but in the parks, they've thought through every detail down to ... The bars in the hotel are experiences. There's just really nowhere like that where you get the thrill of an amusement park combined with such a thoughtful experience. Everyone who's there, the cast members as they call them, is really engaged as a character in that experience. It's amazing.

 

[0:10:50]

Patrick Forquer: If you look at the price point for all of those top end services that we're discussing here, HBO, Netflix are going to be comparable in the $12 to $20 range depending on where they land. But Disney's is much lower because as they build these fanbases on the streaming service, that then points them to the in-park experience where they make up the difference in how much lower they are than the other services by pushing people to their other experiences that are live. That's where they make a ton of money.

 

[0:11:26]

PJ Bruno: I haven't been to a park in maybe 15 years. I think it's time.

 

[0:11:28]

Patrick Forquer: PJ, you would love it. Let me tell you.

 

[0:11:31]

Spencer Burke: I think that's an interesting thing about this space, though, because even ... PJ, you opened it up, the streaming war. I think people look at music streaming. All right, there's Spotify. There's Apple Music, and it's zero-sum. There has to be a winner, and everything is a trade-off. In the music space, the catalog of tracks that are on each platform is really similar. They're all licensing the music from the major labels. Spotify, Apple Music, largely going to be the same except for some of the curation that they can do. Netflix was the first mover, really, in the streaming space, especially at scale. So they at first bundled everything together. It looked a lot like your cable package. It looked a lot like Spotify might. Now that's coming undone as these other content creators are creating their own platforms and their own services. I think to have Disney really invest in that and to have consistent access to some of these titles where previously on Netflix, you'd lose it season to season, things like that, I'm super excited about that. I probably will end up spending more. Let's say you're a parent and you're looking at Disney+. You already have Hulu. You have Netflix. It's a no-brainer to add to your catalog.

 

[0:12:50]

PJ Bruno: All right. Well, let's just jump in to taking a look at best video streaming services of 2019. This is a top three from PC Mag. We'll see what they say, and I'm interested to hear your favorites too, gentlemen. We'll get into that in one second. Number one topping the charts is the front-runner, Netflix, at $8.99 a month as you know. It's been around a long time. Impressive catalog. Shows like Altered Carbon, Black Mirror. Bojack Horseman, hilarious. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I also watch. The Crown, Lost in Space, Mindhunters, Narcos, Orange Is the New Black, Santa Clarita Diet, and Stranger Things. Another cool thing about Netflix: what they do as far as video quality alongside Amazon Prime video, is they allow 4K streaming and it supports offline downloads should you be traveling and want to be able to watch a film on a flight. Coming in at number two, YouTube for $49.99 a month. I was going to say that is a high price point for me. That is too rich for my blood, but one thing I will say that does interest me is they offer that excellent selection of live sports, including other cable networks, ABC, AMC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, FX, and NBC. Also, they have unlimited cloud DVR storage. Number three, Hulu. Good one. $5.99 a month or $44.99 for Hulu plus live TV, just undercutting YouTube there. Yeah, Hulu impresses with its best all-in-one options for cord-cutters ... I love that term ... Given its diverse set of streaming options. In addition to the strong library of classic shows, it also has a good selection of movies, live TV options, more than 60 channels of news, sports, and entertainment programming. Humans in the room, what do you guys have as far as apps on tap? What are your top things that you watch?

 

[0:14:47]

Patrick Forquer: In our house, Netflix, HBO, and then Hulu is a distant third, I'd say. I think of the ones on this list ... I don't agree with this list, but of the ones on this list, I think Hulu is the one that will change the most over the next 12 to 24 months. Disney basically, through the acquisition of Fox and buying out the other additional investors, are taking control of Hulu. The market guesstimate at this point is that ESPN will be their home for sports, Disney+ is going to be their home for original content and children-focused entertainment, and then Hulu is going to be more the "adult", more comparable to an Amazon originals or Netflix originals for adult shows.

 

[0:15:33]

PJ Bruno: Where do you watch your sports?

 

[0:15:35]

Patrick Forquer: We have Verizon cable and Internet package.

 

[0:15:40]

PJ Bruno: Gotcha.

 

[0:15:40]

Patrick Forquer: But it's this-

 

[0:15:41]

Spencer Burke: So you haven't cut the cord yet.

 

[0:15:42]

Patrick Forquer: Well, so I cut the cord, and then I uncut the cord because the streaming got a little untenable where I couldn't [inaudible] the various games I wanted to watch. Verizon, AT&T, it's an interesting thing. They figured out that people are cutting the cord, so then they made it so you couldn't buy just cable. Buying cable plus sports channels basically is what we have. We have the sports package. We get ESPN and all the sports channels so that we can watch football, basketball, etc. They figured it out a couple years ago, so their bundle changed. Then I got back into it because it didn't make sense to do just cable, for instance.

 

[0:16:24]

Spencer Burke: That's the nice thing about YouTube TV. I did a trial of it last week during Wimbledon. You can watch live sports. You can watch live TV. So it fills that gap for cord cutters who still want to watch sports or who want to watch some stuff live. For me, Hulu had filled that gap a little bit since it was a partnership across a lot of the traditional broadcast companies, but now Hulu fits in this different spot where for me, the ranking is similar. I subscribe to some of the same services. I just don't watch Hulu quite as often.

 

[0:17:01]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah, and they're going to lose ... A lot of their popular content is the NBC content, which they're going to lose when NBC launches their thing. So it'll be interesting to see how they backfill that because that's what we, frankly, use it for is watching the shows on NBC that we miss and essentially using it as a DVR-type service.

 

[0:17:19]

Spencer Burke: Same. Same.

 

[0:17:21]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah. I don't-

 

[0:17:22]

PJ Bruno: Like the Bachelorette?

 

[0:17:24]

Patrick Forquer: Yeah.

 

[0:17:25]

Spencer Burke: Like The Good Place.

 

[0:17:26]

Patrick Forquer: The Good Place. Jimmy Fallon.

 

[0:17:29]

Spencer Burke: Oh, you watch Fallon? Ugh.

 

[0:17:32]

Patrick Forquer: Seth Meyers.

 

[0:17:32]

PJ Bruno: He's not a client, right?

 

[0:17:35]

Patrick Forquer: Jimmy Fallon. Great guy. I'm hanging out with him this weekend.

 

[0:17:37]

PJ Bruno: Your apps, Spence. Your top.

 

[0:17:40]

Spencer Burke: Same as Pat. I've been getting into Amazon Prime for the movie selection just because it feels very broad but also really random titles that I'm not seeing anywhere else.

 

[0:17:50]

PJ Bruno: What are some examples?

 

[0:17:52]

Spencer Burke: Teen Wolf.

 

[0:17:54]

Patrick Forquer: It's pretty specific.

 

[0:17:56]

Spencer Burke: Dune. There's some really nerdy stuff that I like that's in the realm of either-

 

[0:18:01]

Patrick Forquer: Which Dune movie?

 

[0:18:03]

Spencer Burke: The original. Is there a new one? The guy from Twin Peaks.

 

[0:18:08]

Patrick Forquer: Twin Peaks.

 

[0:18:09]

Spencer Burke: Oh, classic.

 

[0:18:10]

Patrick Forquer: Remember? Then they brought it back in 2017.

 

[0:18:10]

Spencer Burke: Yeah, I've never watched it.

 

[0:18:10]

Patrick Forquer: So PJ, what would be your ranking of the apps?

 

[0:18:16]

PJ Bruno: Oh, by use, I would probably say Netflix and HBO have to be right there at the top just because I think half of my watching is documentary. From what I've seen, they have some of the best catalogs.

 

[0:18:28]

Spencer Burke: What kind of docs?

 

[0:18:32]

PJ Bruno: I'm obsessed with cult documentaries. I've seen every cult documentary that exists.

 

[0:18:38]

Spencer Burke: Doing some research?

 

[0:18:40]

Patrick Forquer: PJ is going to be an up and coming-

 

[0:18:42]

PJ Bruno: You've noticed I'm charismatic, right? I'm not letting this go to waste. No, there's the Wild, Wild Country, which was very popular on Netflix, but then there's also my favorite one called The Source Family. Super, super interesting. I'll just give you the boilerplate in 30 seconds. So this guy, he was dubbed the world's strongest boy at age 12 in the 40s or something like that, and then fought in the war. He was a sniper and had 14 registered kills. Moves to Southern California and opens up a chain of health restaurants, and this was before healthy eating was actually a thing. He kicked it off in Southern California. At this point, he's in his mid-50s, and this group of mid-twenty-somethings just rally around him because he loves yoga. He loves eating healthy. He loves free love. So all of a sudden, he has this group of people they call the Aquarians. It's 12 twenty-somethings and this 50-some year old guy is leading them. Of course, in every single documentary, series, or film, it's like they worship this person, this person starts to think they're God, and then all hell breaks loose, basically. But that's the formula for pretty much every single one.

 

[0:19:59]

Spencer Burke: I'm speechless, PJ. That was amazing.

 

[0:20:01]

PJ Bruno: Oh, there's plenty more.

 

[0:20:02]

Patrick Forquer: I regret asking. We'll cut that.

 

[0:20:07]

PJ Bruno: With Amazon, we have that as well through our Prime membership. That's the interesting part about it is that-

 

[0:20:12]

Spencer Burke: You ever thought about canceling your Prime?

 

[0:20:15]

PJ Bruno: Well, here's a question, Spencer. You're married. Do you guys have one Prime account or two Prime accounts?

 

[0:20:21]

Spencer Burke: One, of course.

 

[0:20:22]

PJ Bruno: Right.

 

[0:20:25]

Patrick Forquer: Did that foil your follow-up question?

 

[0:20:28]

PJ Bruno: Same.

 

[0:20:31]

Patrick Forquer: You thought you were going to fool him.

 

[0:20:32]

PJ Bruno: No, I just-

 

[0:20:32]

Spencer Burke: Oh, you simple man.

 

[0:20:33]

PJ Bruno: We haven't consolidated yet. So that's stupid. Also, you're going to see that Apple is coming out with a TV product. Amazon already has Prime Video, which is out. We're going to see a bunch of other tech players get into the space as well. Over the next two years, I think we'll see a glut of new entrants, and then over a five year period, we'll see who's going to win out because it's not going to make sense to invest the type of money that Netflix and HBO, etc, are investing in this if you're not going to come full-on because people are coming at this with a lot of money, a lot of attention, and a lot of great content. If you're not up to execute at a really high level across every aspect of the business, it's not going to make sense.

 

[0:21:18]

Spencer Burke: And potentially build a theme park.

 

[0:21:20]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, you also-

 

[0:21:20]

Patrick Forquer: Oh man, what a differentiator that is.

 

[0:21:22]

PJ Bruno: You should build a theme park.

 

[0:21:22]

Spencer Burke: A Stranger Things theme park?

 

[0:21:25]

Patrick Forquer: Oh my God.

 

[0:21:27]

Spencer Burke: He'll love it.

 

[0:21:27]

PJ Bruno: [crosstalk].

 

[0:21:28]

Patrick Forquer: Oh wow. Perfect.

 

[0:21:29]

Spencer Burke: That's exciting.

 

[0:21:30]

PJ Bruno: The last question that I have for all of these services is as the smart home evolves, as Amazon and Apple are building more and more smart home products, the cable companies own the pipes. But if you're Apple and you own the TV of the future, or Microsoft or whoever, then similar to the app store and all of the stuff that we see on our phones, you're going to prebake all of your original content into the device, which is the unspoken thing because we're not really there yet from a smart home perspective. The quality of the screens, etc, isn't there from those products. So as a Amazon home device, even Facebook, etc, as they-

 

[0:22:08]

Spencer Burke: Self-driving cars.

 

[0:22:08]

PJ Bruno: Self-driving.

 

[0:22:09]

Spencer Burke: Guys, as we wrap up, I'd like a prediction from you. Old Town Road. Is it going to continue to be number one? Is it going to hit 17 weeks? Break the record?

 

[0:22:20]

PJ Bruno: I think that it will. I care very medium for that song. I'm just so impartial. I'm like, "It's all right." But I think it probably will continue.

 

[0:22:32]

Spencer Burke: Do you think you could do a better Old Town Road?

 

[0:22:34]

PJ Bruno: Like take the song and cover it?

 

[0:22:36]

Spencer Burke: No, like-

 

[0:22:37]

PJ Bruno: Write a song.

 

[0:22:38]

Spencer Burke: Yeah.

 

[0:22:39]

PJ Bruno: Yeah, I think so. I think if I have our BI team's bandwidth for a week, it's all about doing some research. All right, it's this cadence. All right, all the hits are in this key. Here are some top words that we hear from most popular songs. Systematically, with this company, we could create hit after hit after hit.

 

[0:22:56]

Patrick Forquer: I do think that was some of the most clever marketing of the year.

 

[0:22:59]

Spencer Burke: To put a hip-hop song on the country charts? It worked, obviously.

 

[0:23:04]

PJ Bruno: Yeah.

 

[0:23:05]

Patrick Forquer: I love the song. Lil Nas is [inaudible] great Twitter follower.

 

[0:23:07]

Spencer Burke: He's your follower?

 

[0:23:10]

PJ Bruno: He follows you?

 

[0:23:12]

Patrick Forquer: He's a huge fan of mine. No, sorry. Great Twitter follow. Yeah, definitely. The Internet is going crazy. Every time he puts out a remix, it just continues to stay [up].

 

[0:23:22]

Spencer Burke: Mariah Carey might be the next one.

 

[0:23:23]

Patrick Forquer: Mariah Carey.

 

[0:23:24]

Spencer Burke: I think people are trying to be really clever and use new platforms. This is getting totally off our topic, but it's related to music streaming, and actually streaming on YouTube as well.

 

[0:23:35]

Patrick Forquer: TikTok.

 

[0:23:35]

Spencer Burke: TikTok, yeah. I think the two really exciting and cool things and clever things about what they did ... First, if you're a hip-hop artist, breaking into the hip-hop charts is really hard. There's just a lot going on there. A lot of people are trying to do that. A lot of things sound pretty similar. Country, however, way easier to disrupt. So from a marketing perspective ... And this happens in the App Store too. People look at which categories and try to figure out what's the best category for me to rise through the rankings. So just being super clever about doing that, then it happened to get him all of this press because they kicked it off the country charts. That's when Billy Ray came in. Some really brilliant marketing there. Then using social media, including emerging platforms like TikTok, to help build a following, he's done that in a way that no other modern artist has to this level.

 

[0:24:27]

PJ Bruno: HBO and Disney could take a note, I guess, from the kid.

 

[0:24:30]

Patrick Forquer: Or PJ Bruno.

 

[0:24:32]

PJ Bruno: We'll see.

 

[0:24:32]

Patrick Forquer: We'll have to put you out there, PJ.

 

[0:24:33]

PJ Bruno: That's about all the time we have for today, gents. I'd like to thank Spencer Burke and Patrick Forquer for being here with me. Thanks, guys.

 

[0:24:41]

Spencer Burke: Thanks, PJ.

 

[0:24:41]

Patrick Forquer: Thanks for having us.

 

[0:24:42]

PJ Bruno: And thank you for stopping by. Take care.

[0:24:45]

How can you leverage new tech to ride the personalization wave into a best-in-class swell of engagement? Taylor "The Creator" Gibb and Jaz "Personalization Queen" Noble join me to discuss the future of personalization and how to make it work at scale.

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:18]

PJ: Hi again and welcome back to Brace for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest and today I have two very, very esteemed colleagues with me both from the Success Org to my right Taylor Veronica Gibb and to my left Jaz Victoria Noble. It's good to have you guys here with me.

 

[0:00:37]

Taylor: Well it's great to have you here as well. PJ, the Victor Jay-

 

[0:00:44]

Jasmine: Let's give him a V, yeah.

 

[0:00:45]

Taylor: Maybe a V, to fit in here.

 

[0:00:45]

PJ: You guys missed it, we opened with talking about the origin story of both these lovely women have V middle names and so we were just kind of like hearing a little bit about their ancestry.

 

[0:00:54]

Taylor: Absolutely. As we start every podcast with deep personal questions to the guests in the room really gets those creative juices flowing.

 

[0:01:02]

PJ: Exactly. Tries to get us in the zone.

 

[0:01:04]

Jasmine: I'm real excited to be here, you guys.

 

[0:01:06]

PJ: Yes, Jaz is back. She was on our very first podcast, which was merely a hackday project about six months ago and now finally we have her back for another one.

 

[0:01:17]

Jasmine: I'm micced up. I have headphones. It's official.

 

[0:01:19]

Taylor: Much more official.

 

[0:01:21]

PJ: It's official.

 

[0:01:21]

Taylor: If I remember correctly, the first podcast, everyone was kind of talking very close to PJ's laptop.

 

[0:01:26]

Jasmine: Yes.

 

[0:01:28]

PJ: No headphones. Didn't know what we were doing.

 

[0:01:30]

Taylor: Nope.

 

[0:01:30]

PJ: Picking up a lot of ambient noise. We've gotten a little bit better and it's good to be here.

 

[0:01:34]

Jasmine: Hilarious, though. I was very funny in that.

 

[0:01:36]

Taylor: Hilarious. That's a great one.

 

[0:01:37]

PJ: You were very funny in that one.

 

[0:01:38]

Jasmine: Yeah.

 

[0:01:38]

Taylor: I think we need to release that someday. Like a little bonus track.

 

[0:01:42]

PJ: For all you listeners out there. Our listeners will receive a special Easter egg treat of the hackday first ever podcast.

 

[0:01:49]

Taylor: For those of you who pledge a certain amount of money we'll be sending to you with a set of Ginsu knives.

 

[0:01:56]

PJ: Absolutely. Well, you know we're a big family.

 

[0:01:58]

Jasmine: Make those checks out to Jasmine Victoria Noble.

 

[0:02:01]

PJ: It has to be in full. It's the only way they'll pay it out.

 

[0:02:03]

Jasmine: Get the V.

 

[0:02:04]

PJ: Well, we're fresh off a 4th of July break. Hope you guys had a lovely time. Go America, Women's national team winning the World Cup. A lot of cool things have happened, but today point break personalization. I mean, I'm thinking of the movie obviously because I loved it and not only that, this week is the 28th anniversary of when Point Break was released.

 

[0:02:26]

Taylor: Oh my God.

 

[0:02:27]

Jasmine: Oh really.

 

[0:02:27]

PJ: It is.

 

[0:02:27]

Taylor: Point Break could rent a car. Point Break, you know is getting settled in the world, like Point Break is-

 

[0:02:33]

Jasmine: Finally making some money.

 

[0:02:35]

Taylor: ... 28, yeah, 28 years old is a good time to be around. But I was actually just asking PJ before we got on the air here. I'm like, I love Point Break. I love personalization. What does Johnny Utah have to do with Braze and personalization here?

 

[0:02:50]

PJ: I'm so glad you asked. So really we're thinking the movie fantastic, but we're thinking more about the concept of point break and what point break is, it means the wave, it gives you enough time to spend the most possible time on the board standing up. So a point break is what surfers really look for because it gives you the perfect ride, and that's what we're talking about. Personalization being the perfect method because as you move forward with your marketing initiatives, there's going to be more and more competition. People get overloaded in their inboxes every day. How can you stand out amidst the crowd and make your message heard? Personalization is the number one way and it doesn't have to be perfect today. It doesn't even have to be perfect next week, but a more perfect campaign will help you stand out amidst the crowd and call out your users by name and let them know that you know them.

 

[0:03:41]

Taylor: I'm glad you cleared that up. I actually came in a president mask today ready to rob a bank with my surfboard. For those of you-

 

[0:03:49]

PJ: Are you Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter?

 

[0:03:50]

Taylor: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter.

 

[0:03:53]

PJ: And if you haven't seen Point Break for the love of God, please go see it. We won't really talk any more about Point Break during this podcast. It was just kind of-

 

[0:04:01]

Taylor: That's a you thing.

 

[0:04:02]

PJ: But yeah, I mean what the first thing and last thing that I'll say about Point Break is it was really lauded for the relationship between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. This like, you know, bros for life. It was a heterosexual chemistry that could only have been created during that time, if it was accompanied by guns and waves and all these manly things. It's like through that atmosphere, it's okay to show a nice heterosexual close, intimacy between two men.

 

[0:04:32]

Taylor: The origin of the bromance is what I'm hearing. All right.

 

[0:04:37]

PJ: Yeah, jeez.

 

[0:04:37]

Taylor: All right, well I think we've got to spin off podcast at the ready.

 

[0:04:40]

PJ: I think we do.

 

[0:04:40]

Taylor: But let's talk a little bit now about personalization.

 

[0:04:44]

PJ: Actual personalization. When we say personalization, my God, you must've heard it a million times already just in the-

 

[0:04:50]

Jasmine: It should be a drinking game at this point.

 

[0:04:51]

PJ: ... Last five minutes.

 

[0:04:51]

Taylor: Yes.

 

[0:04:51]

PJ: Yeah, exactly. If you're following along at home, you should be wasted. But personalization at Braze, it means being able to email out a huge campaign to all these individual people and within the campaign have texts, call out users by name or reference specific things about those users based on their behavior in app or on the website. The way we use personalization is through a template language called Liquid. And this was created by Shopify and it helps us input things like first name, the very common one that I'm sure you've all seen. Hello Taylor, hope you're having a good day. Here's some deals relevant to you. And those deals can be in a specific category that Taylor has been known to search very often. More complicated examples is like dynamically pulling in content or materials or thumbnails based on information that they're collecting about how you interact with the brand. Do you guys have any examples of really smart personalization that you've seen? You know, being in the Success Org, these two are in the weeds of campaign creation day in and day out.

 

[0:05:54]

Taylor: We're in the trenches as you mentioned, and it's kind of fun be able to be a part of a lot of our client's planning, about getting strategic about the personalization that they use. I'll probably bring up a couple examples as the podcast goes on, but off of the top of my head, I work with a dating app and they started using personalization with Braze using Liquid and connected content. By the way, shameless plug, go check out the lab course on this, if you guys are interested in learning more about these things. PJ is featured as well. But they use this to essentially customize the version of an email you get based on if you're a man or a woman, based on if you're looking for a man or a woman or maybe none of the above, you'll get a different personalized email for you with different content and different styling. So they're doing a little bit of this kind of micro personalization and getting really down to exactly what you're looking for and it's something that's so simple and seamless. You may not even realize that it's personal to you, but it just feels like you.

 

[0:06:56]

PJ: Jaz, do you have any?

 

[0:06:57]

Jasmine: I definitely do. So we talked about how Liquid allows you to insert dynamic variables. The simple example of the first name, we also touched on how you can pull in dynamic URLs, right, image URLs, things like that. One of my favorite ways to use Liquid is actually what we call conditional logic. So I can start saying within my message, if X equals Y, send this message to my user. If A equals B, send this other message, right? So I can start to build these conditional statements, if you will. And one of my favorite ways to use this is actually with weather. Braze is really flexible in that we can connect to external weather APIs. And quite literally say if it's raining right now, send this email and this is one thing, one of our customers does, is send out an email to say it's raining, why don't you order it. Or it's sunny, so get outside and make that reservation, I should say. So I really appreciate the conditional logic and think weather is a cool example of that.

 

[0:08:00]

Taylor: And Jaz for all of you listening in is actually the queen of connected content here at Braze. Taught me everything I know, but she is your-

 

[0:08:08]

PJ: Is that official?

 

[0:08:08]

Taylor: ... Personalization wizard. She is. She doesn't always wear the tiara, but for special occasions she will dawn the crown and connected content queen.

 

[0:08:17]

PJ: Where's the sash though?

 

[0:08:19]

Taylor: Ooh, next time.

 

[0:08:20]

PJ: Scepter?

 

[0:08:21]

Taylor: Scepter, we'll see. We'll see.

 

[0:08:23]

PJ: Conditional logic, that's all happening in the same campaign. Even in the same like text field. Right?

 

[0:08:29]

Jasmine: Exactly. So quite literally you're putting in the different versions of the copy depending on what variables you have in place. So using that example of weather the conditional Liquid statement in the Liquid logic language would say, if degrees equals below 50 send, "hey, it's cold, grab a coffee." Alternatively, if the weather is higher than 50 degrees, send this generic message that I was planning to send to the user anyway.

 

[0:08:59]

PJ: Cool. That's just a little sample of what you can see as far as personalization in the Braze platform. Conditional logic using Liquid. If you have access to Lab, please check out our Liquid course. Also, there's plenty of free resources on Liquid online, so just do some searching. Now let's jump into some other articles that are going to help us understand a little more about personalization in terms of what the future looks like and how you can do personalization at scale. The following articles were provided to us by McKinsey. McKinsey, thank you so much for your research and all you do. So this first one, let's jump off Tay Tay. What do you got?

 

[0:09:34]

Taylor: Oh, hey there. Well, not only do I have this article, but I went ahead and brought along my crystal ball here cause we're going to be taking a look into the future of personalization. That was a terrible dad joke, but moving on. First-

 

[0:09:48]

PJ: I can add like kind of like...

 

[0:09:50]

Taylor: Like crystal ball.

 

[0:09:50]

PJ: Sound in the background.

 

[0:09:51]

Taylor: Ooh, I love that. All right, well then perfect. Well we'll edit it in the future of personalization. Physical spaces will be digitized. We've seen this a little bit. Jaz, you and I, I think are both Sephora fans, so you may be familiar with this already, but essentially the fact that when you walk into a physical store space, brick and mortar, what you see is going to be personalized to you. Some of the examples pulled out in the article were places where you could try on makeup or clothes just by standing in front of a mirror. In the future it could be that you'll see on screens around the space, places where you can try on clothes just by looking in the mirror, things that recommend a color for you based on your skin tone or things that you like. And I thought this was particularly interesting because I feel like just a few years ago we were talking about the fact that brick and mortar is on its way out, especially with the rise of Amazon. So can you see this as being maybe the resurgence of brick and mortar just by using this idea of personalization?

 

[0:10:48]

PJ: I mean, you hit the nail on the head with the rise of Amazon and all this stuff, it seemed like physical is on the way out. But with all of these things, fad or not, it always feels like there's some sort of pendulum at play, where the pendulum goes to one side as we do more and more online purchasing. I'm not going out of my apartment. I don't need to go try things on. Like I know this brand, I know their sizes. And now I think we're starting to see the pendulum go the other way because physical storefronts are still going to be a part of the business, especially living in New York City, what is it, Sixth Avenue that's just a mecca for storefronts and for a brick and mortar businesses. So I think the secret sauce is being able to capture all that information in the store front and tether it to all these other touch points and this is not my idea or a nuanced perspective on it, this is something we've all been talking about for awhile. So I don't think brick and mortar is on the way out. I think this is a way to bolster or supercharged that brick and mortar experience when you're in front of one of those mirrors and you have that try-on experience probably makes you want to go back again.

 

[0:11:55]

Taylor: How about you, Jaz.

 

[0:11:56]

Jasmine: I actually just recently had an opportunity to visit Amazon HQ and hear from some of their panel of leaders that work there. And one of them was brought on to bring Amazon back into the brick and mortar space. You guys have seen these Amazon stores popping up.

 

[0:12:11]

Taylor: The Four Star Store.

 

[0:12:13]

Jasmine: He admitted, they're not necessarily profitable yet, but the company that really closed down a lot of brick and mortar spaces is now recognizing, realizing the value of bringing these experiences to your point outside of someone's apartment and off of their couch and in physical spaces. I think the challenge that Amazon and other companies who are rethinking about how they approach brick and mortar is in what ways do the digital and the traditional shopping experience play together and how do they play nicely and where does digital enhance. I mean, Taylor you mentioned Sephora, by the way, I just became a rouge member.

 

[0:12:46]

Taylor: Oh, congratulations.

 

[0:12:47]

Jasmine: Which means-

 

[0:12:48]

PJ: What does it mean.

 

[0:12:48]

Jasmine: It means I spent a lot of money at Sephora. But anyway, I was in the Sephora store and online you have the opportunity to kind of, they have some new technologies that we can try on different shades, but one of the hard things as a women is, especially with summer, we're trying to tan right? And now my foundation color has changed because my face color has literally gone several shades darker. Thank you Bahamas. And so I had to go into the store because I trust them to kind of match that. And they have face matching software, like a program where you sit in the chair and they quite literally scan your face and then tell you, okay, here is your color profile and here are the different foundations that match that and they direct me to the place in the store where those are found so I can pick them up, hold them, look at other aspects of marketing. Right. The bottle, is it pretty, right? There's a lot of things that go into that purchase decision, but it started with a digital experience, a technology coming into play to, essentially pull out where I should start.

 

[0:13:45]

Taylor: And you brought something up earlier. Maybe a quick segue into another point that the article made. Talking a little bit about both with Amazon and in your Sephora experience, kind of that end to end personalized experience. And it's interesting to think, I would hope in Sephora, we'll see this some more, it sounds like Amazon's focusing in on it, that your experiences in the store don't end in the store. So if I go in on the store, I try on a certain shade of lipstick, maybe that will follow me and I'll see an ad later or I'll see an in app message that says, you looked really great in this shade of lipstick earlier. Would you like to order, there's a sale. Things like that that make you feel like you're understood and you're seen as a person both in and outside of the store. That's all personalization at work. And one other thing that I wanted to kind of bring up in this article before we transition over to Jaz's article that she looked at, is something I thought was interesting. They pointed out that empathy will scale within personalization. Now at Braze, our favorite besides personalization drink, our other favorite hot button topic is humanization, right? Making it feel like a brand not only knows you, but that they understand you as a person, that they empathize with you. And it sounds like brands again, like Amazon, are starting to think about becoming more human. One thing that was brought up in this article was the fact that they've patented technology. We're in the future. Voice recognition devices. We'll realize if you sound different than usual, so let's say you've got a stuffy nose, you can begin getting deals or outreach for brands of cough drops, for chicken noodle soup recipes, things like that, that it'll know that you're not feeling well. It's interesting and something that I want to hear from you on, first of all, is that creepy or caring?

 

[0:15:33]

PJ: I don't know if it is creepy just because you know what is creepy is when you say something out loud amongst your friends and then you look at your phone and there's an advertisement for something you said audibly, that creeps me out, right?

 

[0:15:44]

Taylor: Oh, big time.

 

[0:15:45]

PJ: But, to introduce this intuitiveness into technology, I think it's definitely going to be considered creepy to some people and it's going to be a learning curve, I think for us. But that is the exact kind of humanization in technology that I want to see more of. That doesn't feel like they've captured something that I've said, or they've captured an action that I've done and it's like, we all know it, right, when you see something in your phone like, oh, I know exactly where this came from.

 

[0:16:09]

Taylor: Right.

 

[0:16:10]

PJ: Either something I said, or something I clicked on. But then when a computer program offers you cough drops because it can hear your voice a bit hoarse, you're going to have a moment of like how, you know. And I think that almost introduces a little bit of magic until the whole relationship with the brand. That's one that I'm really excited for. Jaz hot takes?

 

[0:16:28]

Jasmine: One thing I will share is we were just talking about Sephora, still top of mind, because did I tell you guys, I'm a rouge member.

 

[0:16:35]

PJ: You said rouge, right?

 

[0:16:36]

Jasmine: Oh yeah, rogue, in case I didn't already mention it.

 

[0:16:39]

PJ: That's like red.

 

[0:16:40]

Jasmine: Yeah, red, rogue. So a recent experience I had shopping with them to actually, this is the experience where after I did it, I got the confetti lipsticks that said I made rogue, right? I shopped for several things, I needed a new makeup brush. I needed like setting powder, a few things, right. Sent them all to my house. One did not arrive.

 

[0:17:03]

Taylor: Nightmare.

 

[0:17:03]

Jasmine: And each item is north of $50 so I wasn't going to just let that go. And this is, I think, where companies, we haven't seen a huge shift necessarily is when it comes to customer service, right? So I missed this brush and instead of being able to, like right now with an Amazon app, I know we're talking about Amazon and Sephora quite a bit, but clearly I shop there a lot. With Amazon, if something didn't come in my order, I just like go through this tool where I say, I select options from a list. It didn't arrive, what didn't arrive, it gives me the list of things in the order. I click that. I click the one it wants. Where do you want it shipped? I click my address. I'm never talking with someone, or it doesn't feel like I'm talking with someone. With Sephora, they encouraged me to send an email to a customer service representative and that might never be their real name, but like a Stacey B emailed me back, right. To say that she was so sorry that I had that experience, wanted to make it right, like using words like that and that's where you feel the human piece of that brand as well. Both are good experiences. I think with Amazon it happened instantaneously, within five seconds, within five clicks, I was able to get that piece that they had missed sent to me. With Sephora, I had to talk with someone, but at the end of the day I kind of felt like Sephora was sorry about what happened.

 

[0:18:15]

PJ: That's a really great point. Like when does the initiative bubble up where customer service has to meet the same high standard that our personalization tech does?

 

[0:18:25]

Taylor: Well, and that's where personalization tech can shine, right? Because it makes empathy and it makes humanization scalable so everybody can feel like Stacey B is paying really close attention to them. That knows is exactly what you're talking about. I mean to avoid a bit of a Her scenario if those, if you guys have seen that movie. Maybe there's a point where it goes too far, but I personally really love the fact that when you have a customer support experience, when you have a shopping experience and it feels like they know you, exactly. That's that hyper personalization.

 

[0:18:59]

PJ: Well, until it does go too far. Stacey B, thanks for all you do.

 

[0:19:03]

Taylor: Stacey B this one goes out to you.

 

[0:19:05]

Jasmine: Shout out Stacey, pour one out.

 

[0:19:07]

PJ: Jaz. What do you got from me?

 

[0:19:09]

Jasmine: We've talked a lot today already about the tools that Braze has, right? Which are really just vehicles for providing the personalization. Taylor touched on strategies and why you'd actually want to use some of these tools to put those programs in place, but now we need to talk about a team that's actually going to action on them, right? If a company decides they want to care more about personalization, they want to provide more personalized experiences, how do they do that, particularly if their tech stack isn't in a super fluid place where everyone's playing nice in the sandbox. And one of the ways that McKinsey talked about it and one of their most recent articles called Marketing's Holy Grail, Digital Personalization at Scale really talked about building a war room of people. Because at the end of the day, this is going to be a marketer, this is going to be a data engineer, this is going to be a software engineer that's going to help you bridge these gaps, get the data where it needs to be to ultimately action on things like including first name, including previous shopping behavior. All of the amazing examples that we walked through today would be nowhere without having the data and infrastructure in place. And so that's one of the things that this article touched on and it kind of reminded me of some of my own client experiences working here at Braze, as a CSM, I got a chance to see the types of teams that our customers are bringing together to ultimately action on this. And I would say it's interesting how some are very nimble and small, while others more at maybe enterprise sized corporations are thinking about, no, it's actually doesn't end here. Let's pull in an agency, right? Let's outsource some of this. Let's fill our stack with a bunch of tech partners including a Braze who can help us achieve all of these things. Like creating that right lineup of a team doesn't necessarily have to be someone at their own company. It could be outsourcing some of that talent, bring it in to be able to action on it.

 

[0:20:56]

PJ: And also even with the enterprises, right? They think, you know they have agencies, they got a really souped up tech stack. They're outsourcing a lot. But I think the key here is having that small group of decision makers. So even though you have this monster stack and you have all these different moving pieces, you still have that core group of decision makers that can move quickly. So even though you have this big group and you have all these resources, you have the right people that can flip a switch, shoot out a campaign and do something. Because that, you know, I'm sure we see that right, the bigger the company, the more red tape, the more approvals. So how can you stay nimble as you expand?

 

[0:21:34]

Taylor: Absolutely, and interestingly enough, this kind of very digital idea of this digital marketing personalization takes a lot of humans to make it run and to make it feel human. So maybe the robot uprising is farther off than we thought.

 

[0:21:48]

PJ: Skynet we're looking at you.

 

[0:21:51]

Jasmine: I mentioned kind of pulling together this team of specialists that could be people within your own organization with the ideas. You could also be bringing people outside from agencies, et cetera to for that strategy, right? The core group of people who are deciding how do we actually action on this, provide personalized user experiences. One of the things that you have to think about is what stack do you have in place? What technologies do you have at your fingertips to be able to action on this? And one company that I think did an excellent job at this and I actually had the pleasure of working with closely is Burger King. Fernando, their CMO talks extensively about this in an AdWeek article about how he assembled a stack. He knew that when they wanted to do and roll out this detour campaign that they were going to need someone to be the action layer. That's Braze actually getting these messages out to people. They are going to need someone to do location. That's Radar. They were going to need someone to connect their POS purchasing to user profiles and making sure that brick and mortar restaurant data actually got to a place where they can see the conversions, right, that's mParticle. And then they also have Branch, encouraging people to get those app downloads from an attribution standpoint. There are others obviously who played a piece in this tech stack that allowed detour to happen, but I think it started with Burger King saying, we can't do this alone. We need to assemble the right players who are flexible enough to play nicely with each other to allow that data to come back and forth and ultimately deliver on this user experience, which ended up being people downloading their app, going to a McDonald's, saying they were at McDonald's, and then getting a one cent whopper. How do you deliver on all of that? And that's one of the things that I thought they did a really good job at was actually thinking about rewiring and hard-wiring.

 

[0:23:37]

Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I would hope that the great success and the story of working together with this Avengers of a stack that you just mentioned, will kind of help other large enterprise size companies to realize that they may need to take another look at what they've set up over time and do a little bit of reworking. So many of the teams that Jaz and I work with are working with outdated software. Something that was best in class 10 years ago for this personalization to really work seamlessly and to make these great experiences. You need the best in class right at the bat.

 

[0:24:10]

PJ: Right on the money. So take advantage of personalization tools at your fingertips.

 

[0:24:15]

Taylor: That's us.

 

[0:24:16]

PJ: Pay attention to the tech, to the team. Make sure it's the right people that can move nimbly. As far as the tech, always be reworking, always be focusing on the right tools that allow your teams to move faster. And that's about it for Point Break Personalization. Taylor, Jaz, thanks so much for being here.

 

[0:24:34]

Taylor: Hang loose.

 

[0:24:35]

Jasmine: I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you both.

 

[0:24:37]

PJ: And thank you as well for being with us. Take care.

[0:24:40]

This week, I was accompanied by Ryan Doyle (Digital-first AE) and Shezeen Ali (Customer Success Manager) to discuss a few companies that try to expand outside the scope of their main product offering to seize up some auxiliary revenue. Facebook is getting into crypto, Salesforce wants a cut of the CDP game, and Sony wants to give you a ride. Stay in your lane!

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

[0:00:17]

P.J. Bruno: Hi, again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. I'm your host, P.J. Bruno, and with me today...two close friends. I have to my left here Shezeen Ali, to my right, Ryan Doyle. Ryan of sales, Shezeen of success. Hello to you both.

 

[0:00:35]

Shezeen Ali: Hello, thanks for having us.

 

[0:00:37]

Ryan Doyle: Great to be here.

 

[0:00:37]

P.J. Bruno: Yeah, thanks for coming on short notice. I just realized I'm going to be away next week, so we need to get into this week and I don't know what brought us about this topic, but this week's topic is, stay in your lane.

 

[0:00:50]

Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.

 

[0:00:50]

P.J. Bruno: And we're going to be discussing different companies that are trying to expand their company operations and revenue streams into, maybe, some things that are more trends, but definitely opportunities.

 

[0:01:00]

Ryan Doyle: Right.

 

[0:01:00]

P.J. Bruno: How you doing, bud?

 

[0:01:01]

Ryan Doyle: I'm doing fantastic. It's a back to back to back day with customer meetings. I'm glad that we got to do some of the stay in your lane content because I haven't even had a chance to digest some of the stuff that's gone down this week.

 

[0:01:13]

P.J. Bruno: Be a good refresher. Shezeen, how we feeling?

 

[0:01:15]

Shezeen Ali: I'm feeling good. You know, it's been a good week. This morning I had some good calls with clients and I feel that...I'm a customer success manager for those of you who don't know, and I feel that it's really fun when I get to put my own experience into my client's questions. This morning, I have to tell you guys, because I just felt so cool, a client asked me...a dating app client, was just asking me some questions. And it was so cool because I got to tell them how I use their app, what I think about the space, what I think about New York City, you know?

 

[0:01:46]

P.J. Bruno: A dating SME.

 

[0:01:48]

Shezeen Ali: Yeah. What I think about New York City dating, which is where they're targeting their customers, and it was just really fun. Guys, I just love my job.

 

[0:01:58]

P.J. Bruno: That's awesome. That's great that you were equipped with the advice, too. As this is the stay in your lane episode, let's jump right into our lane right now and get going. In case you haven't heard yet, Facebook is moving into cryptocurrency. Their subsidiary, Collibra, will offer a digital wallet for the coming Libra Coin. Now, you turned me on to this, Ryan, and as soon as you did I just started digging and learning a ton about it. It's an interesting topic and Facebook moving into something as secure as sharing money, or currency, it's a little scary, actually.

 

[0:02:33]

Ryan Doyle: When they've been so loosey-goosey with our data before.

 

[0:02:35]

P.J. Bruno: Right, exactly.

 

[0:02:36]

Ryan Doyle: And I think we've all seen how this space is also ripe for scamming and really bad things going down where people take the money and run. And what could Facebook do? Given some of the secrecy around cryptocurrency.

 

[0:02:48]

P.J. Bruno: That's what I'm saying. I think they need to repair some trust before this happens. But quickly, let's kind of digest and understand what it is. Obviously, we know the popular cryptocurrency, which is Bitcoin, and the whole idea behind it is it's not run by any sort of government body. And their trying to do the same thing with Libra, but further than that, it's not governed by any one anything. It's governed by all the different data miners. They all need to validate and approve every transaction. The whole point of crypto is it's decentralized. Libra, it seems like, it is centralized in a way. It's not a government body, but with Libra came the Libra Association, which is 28 companies that will partner in governing the currency. The likes of Uber, Lyft, Spotify, Visa, Ebay, PayPal, Stripe, Vodafone and more. And each company has an equal vote when it comes to decision making, but Facebook owns subsidiary Collibra, which will be the app that the sharing will happen through. It's tricky business because, yes, no government body is ruling it but... A large group of corporations, and obviously, they each have a vote and there's checks and balances but there's no sense of protecting the consumer as much as protecting their own hides.

 

[0:04:05]

Ryan Doyle: I would say first and foremost, in the old crypto paradigm you described, it's the miners and the people supporting the transactions that get the earnings of the newly minted Bitcoin, or whatever crypto they're working within. It's not just in this Libra example, something that is governed by a consortium of companies, but they are also going to earn a percentage on every transaction that comes through. So, it's less of Facebook saying, "Hey, we are going to make something great that the whole world and the un-banked can use." And more like, "We're going to start putting out our own currency now, we're going to make some money off of it, and we have the reach to hopefully make it successful." I think that it's a little bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I would prefer Facebook didn't go this route because I'm really scared of them.

 

[0:04:52]

P.J. Bruno: Yup, terrifying.

 

[0:04:54]

Shezeen Ali: I think when I read that some of those partners are governing the currency, like you said, I kind of thought, "Oh, maybe this is okay, because we have some big companies here and they don't want to have their name attached to something that's going to go horribly wrong." But I still think Facebook claiming that they have some sort of process to verify the identity of users...I feel like we need to see that, before we actually trust it.

 

[0:05:16]

P.J. Bruno: Right. Already, House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, called on Facebook on Tuesday to halt development of Libra until legislators have a chance to evaluate the plans, and take action. So they're kind of already getting warning signs, and stop signals from various politicians. It's also been flagged to me that there's other associations that would be concerned with this sort of thing. The whole point was that, with Bitcoin, there's no agency as far as the governance. But now that we have this group that's kind of monitoring the governance, that comes with responsibility. And so, Libra is a permissions-based system, and the validaters are known, and I don't think they're ready for the implications. Because the U.S. Treasury has regulations and there's the know your customer and anti-money laundering laws and money made from currency exchange volatility, these are taxable events. So there's even more implications as far as IRS holding payment processors accountable. It just feels like there's a lot more-

 

[0:06:17]

Shezeen Ali: It's complex.

 

[0:06:18]

P.J. Bruno: Oh man, there's a lot at play. There's a lot of hoops to jump through and, for my call, I hope that it's enough to shut the thing down. Because even if you frame it as this thing that could be better for the world, right? Non-government run currency, the idea...I love it. But you still have to earn back some trust after Cambridge, you know?

 

[0:06:37]

Ryan Doyle: Right, and you see that the House Oversight Committee has already tried to bring Facebook to Capital Hill to have them testify before, and they just did not understand Facebook's business. The senator asked, "How do you make money if you're not charging users?" And Mark Zuckerberg says, "Senator, we run ads." They just don't understand how Facebook makes money. What won't we understand about them once they get this? If they have it their way just one more time, what's going to happen now? In a bubble, it seems cool. Maybe even safe. But even the U.S. Dollar is used to do bad things. What happens when the currency here is out of the consortium's hands and out into the world? Who will use it to do the next bad thing? Even when the money was coming directly to Facebook, they still accepted those Russian ads to influence the 2016 election. Stay in your lane.

 

[0:07:24]

Shezeen Ali: What made Facebook, do you guys think, even want to venture into this avenue?

 

[0:07:29]

P.J. Bruno: They see the opportunity in it, you know? And I think maybe to them it seemed like the cross-hairs of...honestly, opportunity for control but also an opportunity to seemingly give back. The whole idea philosophically, is making governments the bad guys, because they are controlling currency. So I think that's the positioning for it, but still it's not enough.

 

[0:07:52]

Ryan Doyle: Yeah, I would say they're always trying to become a layer of the internet. So they've become a authentication layer for so many sites, they've become an advertising layer...a way to make money and sell space for so many sites. And now they're getting even closer to that money by getting into the financial realm. Think of how much their advertising business could be bolstered if they understood the financial transactions of two billion people, and think of how well their financial business would do-

 

[0:08:19]

P.J. Bruno: Geeze.

 

[0:08:19]

Shezeen Ali: I don't want them to know any of that, please.

 

[0:08:23]

Ryan Doyle: So this is just one layer deeper for them, but a broad, reaching layer.

 

[0:08:28]

Shezeen Ali: Those are good points.

 

[0:08:28]

P.J. Bruno: I don't want them to see all the moisturizers that I purchase on Amazon. They wouldn't have access to that, right?

 

[0:08:33]

Shezeen Ali: I hope not! I was genuinely confused why they went down this avenue so those are both very good points

 

[0:08:39]

P.J. Bruno: And you know what, let's wrap this one up because I feel like we're staying on it awhile. But one thing I will say is a book that Ryan first read and shared with me, The Four, which just kind of talks a little bit about, really, the magnitude of the...for lack of a better word, treason that was involved in what went down with Facebook. I think people don't really understand the gravity of that. And there still has been minimal to...yeah there's been fines but, any other media company in that situation would be shut down immediately.

 

[0:09:10]

Ryan Doyle: There's a certain likeability that protects them at the end of the day, I think.

 

[0:09:13]

Shezeen Ali: Exactly.

 

[0:09:14]

P.J. Bruno: Anyways. So Facebook, please-

 

[0:09:16]

Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.

 

[0:09:20]

P.J. Bruno: All right, next up. Ryan, you want to talk the helm on this one, buddy?

 

[0:09:23]

Ryan Doyle: Salesforce lent its hand to the CDP industry this week. A long time legacy technology who has a history of acquiring and bolting together different technologies has finally announced that it would like to integrate those technologies by having a customer data platform. Customer data platform, for those listening and not familiar, is a way of tagging events, attributes, moving data around in your tech stack to different ends. Like Braze, even, where we could send them engagement data and they could send us customer actions as they occur. It's just a great way to make sure that data flows seamlessly between all systems and Salesforce has finally decided that they would like to do that even though they have preached for so long, "We're helping the next generation of marketing companies. We are enabling real-time marketing." To see this now, after CVPs have already been in a space for so long, it's just like, stay in your lane! What are you doing? You're already so far down this path. What makes you think this is going to work now?

 

[0:10:28]

P.J. Bruno: In a way, it seems like a natural progression. Just because we talk about the Salesforce Frankenstein monster, you have so many pieces to the puzzle, the customer data platform seems like adding some grease to the wheels. Right? Because you're just going to ease the sharing between all those pieces, but you know, that said it is yet another layer that you're stacking across all of this fragmented ecosystem. We should have seen it coming, though, because they acquired Datorama in 2018 and then less then a year later, "Hey, we have a CDP." Do you have a CDP, or did you just purchase one, and slap a sticker on it?

 

[0:11:05]

Ryan Doyle: Hot take.

 

[0:11:06]

Shezeen Ali: Oh.

 

[0:11:07]

Ryan Doyle: It's in service of saying that they are trying to stay next gen by releasing all these new features and now we can enable all these use cases, but to quote Dan Head, who just walked us through our legacy marketing battle card, or how we approach conversations with people who might be of a legacy marketing paradigm, "The architecture is just fundamentally misaligned with the purpose you're trying to solve for." So, in that sense it will never work.

 

[0:11:35]

P.J. Bruno: Was that Dan Head, as played by Tom Hardy from Peaky Blinders?

 

[0:11:38]

Ryan Doyle: Yeah, Alfie Solomons, in the Peaky Blinders, yeah.

 

[0:11:42]

Shezeen Ali: So good.

 

[0:11:43]

P.J. Bruno: Do you know how he closes every deal? He literally just slams the paper in front of...what have you got there-

 

[0:11:46]

Ryan Doyle: Just sign right there.

 

[0:11:47]

P.J. Bruno: Just sign, right there-

 

[0:11:49]

Ryan Doyle: Your name.

 

[0:11:49]

P.J. Bruno: And then I'll own fifty percent of Shelby Company Limited. Oh my god.

 

[0:11:56]

Shezeen Ali: Wow that was great.

 

[0:11:58]

P.J. Bruno: Peaky Blinders shout out. And so, we'll say to that, Salesforce-

 

[0:12:01]

Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.

 

[0:12:03]

P.J. Bruno: Stay in your lane, bro. All right, moving on. Shezeen, what have you got for us?

 

[0:12:07]

Shezeen Ali: Awesome. Sony...which...you all know Sony-

 

[0:12:12]

P.J. Bruno: Oh, we know.

 

[0:12:15]

Shezeen Ali: They have officially launched a taxi hailing app to rival Uber, specifically in Tokyo. When I think of Sony, I think of all their electronics. I think of PlayStation, that's a big one.

 

[0:12:29]

Ryan Doyle: Headphones.

 

[0:12:29]

P.J. Bruno: Yeah, love it. PS4. That's like how me and Ryan became friends.

 

[0:12:32]

Shezeen Ali: Oh, there you go.

 

[0:12:33]

Ryan Doyle: Mm-hmm (affirmative) That's the only place we are still friends.

 

[0:12:35]

Shezeen Ali: So I was pretty confused by this headline, so they actually announced last year that they were planning to do this, and then they have officially kicked off the service in Tokyo. It's called S.Ride. Essentially, what's going to happen is they're trying to rival Uber, and they've claimed that there are 10,000 licensed taxis in Tokyo. Because right now, the way that it works is there's already so many taxis in Tokyo, so Uber has already partnered with these taxi companies. It's there right now, and that's how they get these drivers.

 

[0:13:07]

P.J. Bruno: So you're saying there's like a maximum number of licensed taxi drivers that can exist?

 

[0:13:11]

Shezeen Ali: Right now. Apparently that's what it-

 

[0:13:13]

P.J. Bruno: It's like alcohol licenses in Philadelphia.

 

[0:13:15]

Shezeen Ali: Yes.

 

[0:13:15]

P.J. Bruno: It's like you need to buy one or pass it on.

 

[0:13:18]

Shezeen Ali: Yeah. And I'm not sure of how they could expand that, but Uber's already there and they're already doing it. And there's also JapanTaxi, which... I just went to Tokyo two months ago, and JapanTaxi was what everyone was talking about. That's like the...I guess you could think about it as YellowCab in New York, but most people just use that.

 

[0:13:39]

Ryan Doyle: Is it app-based?

 

[0:13:40]

Shezeen Ali: It is, yep. It used to not be, it used to not be, and then they integrated it into apps. I had a really bad experience with trying to get cars in Tokyo, you know, they have an amazing subway system. People talk about it all the time. It's like New York City on steroids. Definitely one of the more confusing subway systems I've ever ridden. No one it Tokyo speaks English, so as a tourist, which...they get a lot of tourists, some times it's late, it's like midnight. The subways aren't running anymore. Even though they are efficient, they stop running. So that's when I started to be really grateful for New York and our 24 hour subway system. And we were kind of-

 

[0:14:16]

P.J. Bruno: No one speaks English in Tokyo?

 

[0:14:18]

Shezeen Ali: Yes! Plot twist. Plot twist. No one told me.

 

[0:14:20]

P.J. Bruno: I thought everyone would.

 

[0:14:21]

Shezeen Ali: Nope.

 

[0:14:22]

P.J. Bruno: It was like the end of Big Little Lies, I just got knocked on my butt.

 

[0:14:25]

Shezeen Ali: So that was something no one told me before I went and I was pretty humbled by the fact that I cannot speak anything but English, pretty much. And so, using a lot of Google Translate, and also I was with my brother and his girlfriend but we both were like, "You know, we don't want to just stand on the side of the street and wait for a taxi to come," because we didn't see a lot, "so why don't we use Uber?" And so we did, it took a while to arrive and it was the cutest old man just showed up in his taxi. So it was like a fancy taxi, he was wearing a suit...he had to be 80 years old. Didn't speak English. And it was so bad. We got really lost and it was just not a great experience.

 

[0:15:06]

P.J. Bruno: Really?

 

[0:15:06]

Shezeen Ali: And he got super lost. And he was so embarrassed but we couldn't really say, "Are we going to get charged for this?" Because he didn't know what we were saying, he didn't even understand the Google Translate app that we kept showing him with the characters, so it's one of those-

 

[0:15:18]

P.J. Bruno: But he was very cute.

 

[0:15:19]

Shezeen Ali: He was super cute. Japanese people are-

 

[0:15:21]

P.J. Bruno: Yeah, that's what you were paying for.

 

[0:15:22]

Shezeen Ali: They're so respectful. They're so polite. They love tourists. So long story short is, I started to kind of say, "Oh, Uber in Tokyo? This is not ideal."

 

[0:15:31]

Ryan Doyle: But what makes Sony think they have the special sauce to crack this nut?

 

[0:15:35]

Shezeen Ali: That's where I'm kind of in a weird place right now. Where I'm like, "Yeah, Sony. Let's see what you can do." If you think that this is a...You know what? I'm speaking from personal experience. Maybe other people have had good Uber experiences but we...we rode it a couple of times and it was not great. So maybe they can launch a partnership with these taxi companies that will allow for, I don't know, a better app or maybe GPS...the better GPS system for these taxi drivers, because most of them are really old and they don't even have GPS systems. So you're kind just telling them, "Hey" and they're not using their phone when they're driving so-

 

[0:16:11]

P.J. Bruno: Is this the one time that we allow somebody to-

 

[0:16:14]

Ryan Doyle: To switch lanes.

 

[0:16:15]

Shezeen Ali: I think it might be.

 

[0:16:16]

Ryan Doyle: Sony, feel free to skirt? Merge?

 

[0:16:19]

Shezeen Ali: Feel free. So I'm really curious to see what happens and-

 

[0:16:22]

P.J. Bruno: Yeah, Sony it sounds like the lane is relatively open.

 

[0:16:26]

Ryan Doyle: Wide open, yeah.

 

[0:16:27]

Shezeen Ali: You'd think Lyft would do something but apparently they don't have...they've expressed interest in Japan but they haven't officially done anything.

 

[0:16:36]

P.J. Bruno: I hope that means that on the inside of the cars that pick you up, the entertainment system is the bomb.

 

[0:16:41]

Shezeen Ali: That's what-

 

[0:16:43]

P.J. Bruno: That would be so good.

 

[0:16:44]

Shezeen Ali: That would be the best.

 

[0:16:45]

P.J. Bruno: PS4 in the back seats, what is up? I'm like, "You know what? Why don't you take me around a few more times?"

 

[0:16:49]

Shezeen Ali: There we go. PS4.

 

[0:16:50]

P.J. Bruno: I got to finish my game.

 

[0:16:52]

Shezeen Ali: This came full circle. I'm hoping S.Ride can do something, but you know, JapanTaxi is also used widely, I did mention that. So if they can compete with JapanTaxi and Uber...we'll see. We'll see what happens.

 

[0:17:05]

P.J. Bruno: All right, well I'm excited to see. We have one final one and this remains to be seen whether it was legit or a publicity stunt, because of all the back-tracking that happened. So I don't know if you had heard about this but IHOP goes to IHOB. So that's International House of Burgers, and it was to promote some of their new burger specials on the menu. And it received so much hate on Twitter and the internet.

 

[0:17:33]

Shezeen Ali: I love Twitter.

 

[0:17:34]

P.J. Bruno: The internet was disgusted. It literally chewed up International House of Burgers and spit it right back out.

 

[0:17:40]

Ryan Doyle: They just did it with such fanfare. It wasn't like they one day said, "Hey, we're IHOB." They had this pomp and circumstance around releasing it where it's like something big's coming. Like the same type of hype that was built around the Segway when that first came out, and everyone's like, "It's a Segway." And everyone's like, "It's IHOB." They were-

 

[0:17:59]

Shezeen Ali: I did think that the hype was overdone.

 

[0:18:01]

P.J. Bruno: It's a serious Steve Jobs iPhone level hype.

 

[0:18:04]

Ryan Doyle: Well, because of course, you need to...I feel like, for big releases, the hype is hugely important. But you also set yourself up for a huge fall. And that's what they did here.

 

[0:18:15]

P.J. Bruno: This is not just a stay in your lane, this is a what did you expect?

 

[0:18:18]

Shezeen Ali: But I will say, I had never heard this many people talk about IHOP in years. Unless you walk by one in New York City. I had not heard about, not really, it hadn't come up in conversations. So they got me talking, but maybe not in a good way.

 

[0:18:32]

P.J. Bruno: Yeah, it's crazy because IHOP, think about how firmly that is situated in the American zeitgeist, right? IHOP is immediately, you know what it is.

 

[0:18:43]

Ryan Doyle: Everybody's puked there once.

 

[0:18:44]

P.J. Bruno: Everybody's puked there once, everyone's had subpar breakfast. And yet, sometimes you just get a craving to jump into an IHOP and just crush some buttered pancakes.

 

[0:18:54]

Shezeen Ali: There we go.

 

[0:18:54]

P.J. Bruno: But the response from the president of IHOP, Darren Rebelez, he said, "But we want to convey that we are taking our burgers as seriously as our pancakes." He said, "Most of the 1,800 restaurants still go by IHOP." Which means, I guess, and handful of them are going to go by IHOB.

 

[0:19:14]

Shezeen Ali: I want to know which ones are IHOB.

 

[0:19:16]

Ryan Doyle: IHOB. The restaurants for hobbits.

 

[0:19:19]

Shezeen Ali: Now really, this doesn't help. Him saying that they're going to take their burgers as seriously as their pancakes just makes me even more mad. Why?

 

[0:19:26]

Ryan Doyle: Because they don't take their pancakes that seriously.

 

[0:19:28]

Shezeen Ali: Stick to pancakes.

 

[0:19:30]

P.J. Bruno: I'm going to go ahead and say stay in your lane.

 

[0:19:31]

Ryan Doyle: Stay in your lane.

 

[0:19:32]

Shezeen Ali: Stay in your lane.

 

[0:19:34]

P.J. Bruno: You know what, that's all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us everybody. I'd love to than Shezeen and Ryan for joining me, guys.

 

[0:19:41]

Ryan Doyle: Thank you for having us.

 

[0:19:42]

Shezeen Ali: Thanks P.J.

 

[0:19:43]

P.J. Bruno: And thank you all for joining us as well. Take care.

[0:19:46]