Braze for Impact

Cara Fischer from Ibotta shares the world of the Technical Marketer. Rather than her focus being on strategic messaging and campaign building, she gets her hands dirty with webhooks, paginated HTML in-app messages, and Liquid personalization. Listen in to learn more about the technology behind great customer experiences. *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Hi again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discussed digest. We're back again with another episode of our humanity series. So thrilled to have with us today, Cara Fischer, who is on the Marketing Automation team at Ibotta.   [0:00:33] Cara Fischer: Hi everyone. How's it going?   [0:00:34] PJ Bruno: So good. Thanks for being here. And also with me to my right, good friend and coworker from the success orb, Taylor Gibb.   [0:00:42] Taylor Gibb: The success orb, coming to you live.   [0:00:44] PJ Bruno: I'm trying to make that stick. It's an orb, we think spherical, we think-   [0:00:46] Taylor Gibb: Yeah. We're in there, we're ideating. This is what the podcast booth is all about. And thank God, Cara is here with us to witness this innovation.   [0:00:55] PJ Bruno: Exactly. Cara, thanks again for carving out some time with us. So you're from Ibotta, so for folks out there who don't know, why don't you give them a little snippet of, what is Ibotta's mission? What do you guys do? What's your focus?   [0:01:07] Cara Fischer: Sure. So Ibotta is at its root, a rewarded shopping ecosystem, if you will. We provide real cash back rewards for shoppers and users who use our app. And I think that's really important to them that it's not some confusing points system where you have to do the translation, like a hundred points is a dollar or something like that. If we tell you you're going to get $2 back, that's exactly what you're going to get. We have writer... Sorry, we have users who write into us every day on our social channels and whatnot, telling us how they're Ibotta earnings help them with their day to day lives. Maybe they had an unexpected car repair that they needed to pay for, or they wanted to take their family on a vacation or wanted to buy gifts for their children for the holidays or something. And that's how Ibotta helps them.   [0:01:53] PJ Bruno: Nice.   [0:01:54] Cara Fischer: And then on the other side, where marketing comes in is we have so many offers in the app and how do these users, if they don't have the time to go through the app all day, marketing, with the help of Braze, can surface the content that's relevant to them. And use our learnings to personalize the content so we can get those offers in front of them.   [0:02:15] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:02:15] PJ Bruno: Love it. That's great. Talk about humanity too. You guys are bringing this to these busy users who may not be able to get the impact of your app by going in every day. I think that that's a very thoughtful way to approach your messaging. And it sounds like you're really making a difference in people's lives.   [0:02:29] PJ Bruno: I love it. But you mentioned before we started that you were very much on the technical side of things. So you're not going to tell us about crafting a message today. You're going to tell us about something different.   [0:02:39] Cara Fischer: Absolutely. So we use Braze webhooks in a few different ways to bring new content to our users. One of the ways we do that is we connect the webhooks with our internal database, and we're actually able to trigger new rewards for users based on their actions or inactions. So an example, maybe we have a new product piece and we're trying to push forward adoption of it. If a user tries it out for the first time, and then maybe they don't try it out for a second time for another three days, we can automatically trigger a new incentive, a bonus for them to try it out again. We can also do it if they've never tried it and maybe they're 20 days after registering and we want them to try a piece of the app that they haven't tried, we can make an incentive for them.   [0:03:31] Taylor Gibb: Wow. That's so advanced. I got to say, I'm geeking out as a member of the success team. Using webhooks for something like that.   [0:03:37] PJ Bruno: Webhook is serious.   [0:03:39] Taylor Gibb: Inspired.   [0:03:39] PJ Bruno: That's sophisticated business.   [0:03:40] Taylor Gibb: Inspired. I think that's great. And so it sounds like you've got, users have purchased X item or maybe have not done X engagement in a while. Do you build journeys and personas based on these as well? Or is this just kind of action-based learnings?   [0:03:57] Cara Fischer: It's definitely very action-based. I believe in the future, we are looking into more journeys. We do use a few nurture tracks based on different purchases you make, whether maybe you purchase from an apparel retailer or a travel retailer. If you bought a flight through us, we have an idea that you're going to be traveling soon so we can send you messages based on that.   [0:04:19] Taylor Gibb: That's so great. And I also have to say, geeking out again, that your Canvas flow for onboarding is one that I like to kind of tout to all of my customers and tell them to go download the app and see how warmly they're welcomed in.   [0:04:33] Cara Fischer: Oh, that's fantastic.   [0:04:33] Taylor Gibb: So you guys are doing great.   [0:04:35] PJ Bruno: She brags about it. She knows intimately your Canvas flows.   [0:04:38] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely. I dream about them at night. It's really, I'm just defending your Colorado stance as well. As a fellow Coloradan, we got to stick together.   [0:04:46] PJ Bruno: That's good. Buds for life. Well, since you mentioned webhooks, I mean, we're already in the vein. Let's talk multichannel approach.   [0:04:53] Taylor Gibb: Nice.   [0:04:54] PJ Bruno: You guys go across many different channels. So how do you leverage the channels that you do have to reach users and regenerate interest when they've gone silent?   [0:05:04] Cara Fischer: Well, I'm glad you brought up Canvas. We made that transition to using disparate Campaigns, to using Canvas for our early life cycle about a year ago. And I'm so glad we made that change because it's so much easier to iterate when you're using a Canvas. We definitely use the full suite of emails, pushes, in app messages. We have been recently using custom HTML paginated or swipeable in app messages.   [0:05:30] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:05:31] Cara Fischer: And I think those are performing really well, especially when we have new pieces of the app that we want to educate our savers about.   [0:05:37] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:05:38] Cara Fischer: Yes. And we have a joke on our team, can we do it with webhooks? It's just a thing we talk about all the time. As the more technical side of the team, as opposed to the marketing strategy.   [0:05:53] PJ Bruno: Right.   [0:05:54] Cara Fischer: Different members of our team will come up to me and be like, "Can we perk it in this way?" And I'm like, "I think I can do it with a webhook."   [0:05:59] PJ Bruno: Right, right. It's cool, because a webhook, it's almost like a gorilla approach. It's kind of strapping things together, but in the same token, it is automation and it can scale if you do it the right way.   [0:06:12] Taylor Gibb: And so I'm curious to hear about the ways in which you interact with your marketing team. As being on this tech team, it sounds like you guys have a good thing going, right? They're saying, "We're going to provide some messaging. We're going to be building all these different automations, but we want you to help us iterate on the best way to optimize this." Is that the way that things kind of go?   [0:06:30] Cara Fischer: Yes, I would say so. I really value the way Ibotta's marketing team is set up. We're very specialized, where I work very technically and can provide that kind of consulting with other members of our team.   [0:06:45] PJ Bruno: Love it.   [0:06:45] Cara Fischer: And we do try to cross train a little bit so that they understand some of our capabilities, but I think the specialized roles really help everyone to get really good at what they're doing rather than a jack of all trades type of marketing team.   [0:06:58] Taylor Gibb: Totally. You guys are like the Avengers of marketing over there.   [0:07:02] PJ Bruno: So what do you guys see as far as expansion into channels? Is there anything that's on the docket for next to explore? I mean, the fact that you're talking about HTML, I mean to me, when someone says they're doing HTML anything, I'm like, "That's a sophisticated team. They're probably doing it the right way." So I'd love to hear what you guys are looking to the future and what's exciting.   [0:07:21] Cara Fischer: We actually are building out our HTML dev team on our... So we don't even have to worry about that so much.   [0:07:29] Taylor Gibb: That's ideal.   [0:07:29] PJ Bruno: Let's go.   [0:07:29] Cara Fischer: Yeah, it's really tremendous. We're very fortunate for that. Next, we're definitely excited to use content cards. We're learning more about SMS, as you all are developing that tool.   [0:07:41] Taylor Gibb: SMS, that's the hot topic today.   [0:07:43] Cara Fischer: Yeah. And we partner with Radar, a third party geolocation provider.   [0:07:51] PJ Bruno: Love it.   [0:07:52] Cara Fischer: And they just released a new piece to their product where we can look at segments of users who are frequenting different locations and target our content with that.   [0:08:04] PJ Bruno: Nick Patrick at Radar, they're doing a great thing over there.   [0:08:07] Cara Fischer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   [0:08:07] Taylor Gibb: That's one of our Braze alloys too. And the ability to segment based on people's habitual going to different locations, do you have any plans for that? Are you going to target someone like me, who is ironically addicted to Target the store, differently than you would someone at Walmart or something like that?   [0:08:23] Cara Fischer: Most likely. I probably can't speak too much to that just because of my role of being less the marketing strategy.   [0:08:31] PJ Bruno: She's winking right now. You can't see that but she knows. She's just not going to tell us.   [0:08:35] Cara Fischer: But I am excited when the rest of our team says, "Cara, we want to do this with the new Radar feature. Can we do it?" And then I'll get to test it out, write the Liquid. Excited for that.   [0:08:47] PJ Bruno: I love it.   [0:08:48] Taylor Gibb: You're writing the Liquid too?   [0:08:49] PJ Bruno: Oh, you're writing the Liquid?   [0:08:49] Cara Fischer: Oh, yes.   [0:08:49] PJ Bruno: Wow.   [0:08:50] Cara Fischer: I guess we haven't talked about that yet.   [0:08:53] PJ Bruno: We haven't talked about that.   [0:08:53] Cara Fischer: Yes, all about the Liquid.   [0:08:53] PJ Bruno: We both, we love Liquid.   [0:08:55] Taylor Gibb: We live in Liquid.   [0:08:56] PJ Bruno: I did a speaking session at LTR last year on Liquid. She wrote the book on Liquid. You did. I mean, she wrote the updated deck to train ourselves internally on Liquid.   [0:09:07] Taylor Gibb: That's more like it. Yeah.   [0:09:08] PJ Bruno: For those of you who don't know, Liquid is a templating language created by Shopify back in 2006. But it's so cool.   [0:09:16] Cara Fischer: Is it that old?   [0:09:17] PJ Bruno: It is that old, yeah.   [0:09:17] Cara Fischer: I had no idea.   [0:09:17] Taylor Gibb: It is, yeah.   [0:09:18] Cara Fischer: Okay, wow.   [0:09:18] PJ Bruno: Fact check me if you want.   [0:09:20] Taylor Gibb: Constantly iterating though.   [0:09:21] PJ Bruno: That was literally copy paste from my deck. So it just stuck.   [0:09:23] Taylor Gibb: The more you know.   [0:09:25] PJ Bruno: That's just so cool though because it makes sense to me now, because you're a tech person, you deal with Liquid. But in my head, I guess I just want to facilitate marketers and crafters of messages to be able to use it too. But that's rad. You're a consultancy within your company, basically.   [0:09:43] Cara Fischer: I love that.   [0:09:44] PJ Bruno: You love that, don't you?   [0:09:46] Taylor Gibb: Somebody get this girl a raise.   [0:09:48] PJ Bruno: That's brilliant. Cool. Well Cara, thank you so much for joining us for this brief moment in time to share with us what you're doing at Ibotta.   [0:09:55] Cara Fischer: Thanks y'all.   [0:09:56] PJ Bruno: And Taylor, always, thank you for the company. Thank you for the color commentary. Thank you, my compatriot.   [0:10:01] Taylor Gibb: Oh my gosh. Anytime.   [0:10:02] PJ Bruno: And thank you all for joining us. Take care. [0:10:05]

Andrew Cordes, UK CEO at Alite International, joins us to shed light on digital transformation, giving insight into the consultant's role in not just creating additional capability and capacity, but also turning companies into responsive organizations built for change. *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

Mai Tran, CRM Manager at Blinkist, gives us a glimpse into the Blinkist company mission behind snackable insights. We also delve into the shift we're seeing in KPI focuses, and the power of personalization and recommendation engines. *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:16] Taylor Gibb: Are we recording?   [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: We're live. We are fire right now. So whenever you want to give us the kick off.   [0:00:23] Taylor Gibb: Oh, fire flames. All right, here I go. I'm going to probably say it wrong. Welcome back to Braze for Impact. Remember guys, this is the MarTech Industry Discuss Digest, and we're right in the middle of our humanities series. This means we're talking to some really interesting people who use Braze. We actually are at LTR right now recording. My name is Taylor Gibb. I'm a CSM on the Braze team. Across from me here is Mai Tran who was at Blinkist as a CRM manager. Mai, it's so good to meet you.   [0:00:53] Mai Tran: Nice to meet you too.   [0:00:55] Taylor Gibb: And to my left, as ever, we've got PJ Bruno who runs Client Education of Braze. PJ, how's it going?   [0:01:02] PJ Bruno: Very, very well. Glad to be back here with you, Taylor.   [0:01:05] Taylor Gibb: Well, excellent. You didn't see everybody, but I just got a salute from PJ. That's a new one.   [0:01:09] PJ Bruno: I was thinking about it as I did. I was like, "No one's going to hear the salute."   [0:01:12] Taylor Gibb: Oh no. When you're with me, everybody will hear the salute. I'm going to make sure to keep you honest on that one.   [0:01:17] PJ Bruno: What a pal. Friend and coworker forever.   [0:01:20] Mai Tran: Sounds great.   [0:01:20] Taylor Gibb: Oh, that's right. Mai, thank you again for joining us here today. As we've been going through this humanity series, we've been talking a lot, not only about the ways that you use Braze, your marketing tech stack, but about you, how you got to where you are right now and about the company you work for.   [0:01:36] Mai Tran: That's nice.   [0:01:36] Taylor Gibb: I know. Well, that's what we're hoping for.   [0:01:38] Mai Tran: Cool. I'll start with a little bit about myself because I think it's connected very well to how I ended up at Blinkist. I started out my career quite traditionally. I study creative writing and I wanted to work for publishing because I realized very quickly that I wouldn't be able to write so much or make a living writing, which is very, very tough.   [0:02:02] Taylor Gibb: That's a tough [crosstalk] The starving artist.   [0:02:04] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:02:04] PJ Bruno: Diverse the skills. I get it.   [0:02:06] Mai Tran: Exactly. Yeah. You really have to have a very specific personality to be able to pursuit art in any kind. So yeah, I decided to ... Very early on, I wanted to devote my life to supporting artists and being able to work with authors that I believe and I loved. I started on my career in publishing and it was not an easy industry to get into. It's a very old industry. A lot of things doesn't move as fast as the startup world that we have nowadays. Yeah, kind of at the one year after I graduated, I discovered Blinkist. It was a very nice discovery because I was a little bit fed up with the corporate world and how things are being done there. I started to look more into the startup world and see how people work differently, how products are being put together in a different way. Blinkist is like a happy in between, because everything that they do in terms of culture there at Blinkist, I truly love. Then on top of that, they have a product that I do believe in and it's very much connected to my heart, which is books. [crosstalk]   [0:03:31] PJ Bruno: I love that so much. So the publisher you came from, was that in Berlin as well?   [0:03:36] Mai Tran: No. I actually used to work for Random House here.   [0:03:39] Taylor Gibb: Really?   [0:03:40] Mai Tran: Yeah, in New York.   [0:03:41] PJ Bruno: Cool. Welcome back.   [0:03:42] Taylor Gibb: You're an ex New Yorker. Well, I mean once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker.   [0:03:45] PJ Bruno: For life.   [0:03:45] Mai Tran: I guess so.   [0:03:46] Taylor Gibb: But we're glad to have you back. It sounds like you move from publishing because it was, as we know, a slightly more traditional industry. You said it's more slow moving, to something that's a little techier, it is an app, a software. Blinkist does that as well, right? If I understand correctly, Blinkist is taking something that's intimidating to some people, these big, oftentimes nonfiction, tomes, quote unquote, and making them more digestible.   [0:04:12] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:04:12] Taylor Gibb: Can you talk a little bit more about that?   [0:04:14] Mai Tran: Yeah. So Blinkist, we like to believe that we're on a mission to be the leading destinations for the modern lifelong learner. It's a very, very nice mission statement that I always hold dear to my heart because I truly believe that our product is going to that direction. Everything we do is to help people learn more, not necessarily finding shortcuts when it comes to learning or finding shortcuts when it comes to reading, but ultimately you have to face the reality that nowadays people don't have that 10 hours in their day so that they can just sit down with a good book and read for 10 hours straight. It's not going to happen. The reading and the learning is going to happen on the subway, on your way to work. It's going to happen in the 10 minutes that you are trying to dress your kid to go to the nursery school. Yeah, and Blinkist does help those people with a very, very busy lifestyle to be able to squeeze in a little bit of learning and a little bit of reading into their day.   [0:05:21] Taylor Gibb: I love that. It's not offering shortcuts, but it's making this learning and this wisdom accessible, no matter how much time you have.   [0:05:28] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:05:29] Taylor Gibb: PJ, you earlier said that you were intrigued by Blinkist.   [0:05:32] PJ Bruno: I am. I mean, I unfortunately likened it to CliffsNotes, which is incorrect in terms of the mission, because CliffsNotes is like shortcut, here, now.   [0:05:42] Taylor Gibb: Right. I don't want to read Romeo and Juliet. Who dies?   [0:05:45] PJ Bruno: Exactly. They both died. Got it. Got the whole story understand it.   [0:05:48] Taylor Gibb: And we're done.   [0:05:49] PJ Bruno: But Blinkist, it's actually more distilling those valuable insights when it comes to those books. So for someone like me, I do love to read Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Sinek. But when it's not a narrative, sometimes I end up just reading the same paragraph over and over again. For some reason I will find mental blocks where I get stuck. Because in a narrative, a story can exist somewhere. Even though it's in my mind, I can feel the physical space. When you're talking conceptually about things, and Simon Sinek is just explaining page after page his thoughts, letting them unfurl. That's something that sometimes I get lost or I just get distracted. So something like this from Blinkist, it can keep me on that path. It can keep me focused. Sometimes you feel like you're waiting around for the big payoff with some of these writers, because Simon Sinek, just like all these guys, they have a general idea of their arc, of what the book should be, A, B and C. Then it's like, "It's time to stuff 80 pages in each of these." So sometimes some chapters are a little long winded. I'm just, I don't always have the patience for it. So something like Blinkist for the ... What did you call it? The forever learner or ...   [0:07:01] Taylor Gibb: Lifelong learner.   [0:07:02] Mai Tran: The lifelong learner. Yeah.   [0:07:03] PJ Bruno: So good.   [0:07:04] Taylor Gibb: Get that alliteration in there.   [0:07:06] Mai Tran: That's great.   [0:07:07] Taylor Gibb: Remind me, when did you start at Blinkist? How many years ago?   [0:07:10] Mai Tran: It's been a little bit over two years now.   [0:07:12] Taylor Gibb: That's great. Have things changed. So going from the world of publishing, where everything took a million years to move forward, I bet here things move a mile a minute. How have things changed in terms of your tech stack, in terms of even your marketing strategies since you started?   [0:07:26] Mai Tran: Well, quite a lot. When I first started, it was literally just me and another person in our team. Now we've grown to be a small team of four, but in terms of the capability of what we do within CRM has changed so much. Originally, when we first started, we focused, because we only have limited human resource. We focus a lot of things on conversion because that's what everybody cares about. That's what marketing cares about. We're under marketing at that point. I spend most of my time talking to very new users who are soon to be customers and trying to help them understand the value of Blinkist and try to find a price point that makes sense for them and convert them. It's very interesting. It's my first time working with more conversion-based communications. It's very different from the kind of work that I do at publishing. But it was very fun. I think what I appreciate the most is that it's very easy to understand that funnel, because the KPIs are very clear. You either purchase or you don't purchase.   [0:08:43] Taylor Gibb: That's true.   [0:08:44] Mai Tran: It's very simplistic in some ways. Now, about a year ago, I started to move to the engagement space because as a company, we realize that we grow in such a high pace that we started to see a drop in retention naturally, because you started to acquire more customer or more users that have less intent, doesn't understand Blinkist as well. Because of that, people are less likely to stay on for the product.   [0:09:19] PJ Bruno: Just from the general volume you guys are doing, it's balancing.   [0:09:22] Mai Tran: Exactly. Yeah.   [0:09:23] Taylor Gibb: Makes sense.   [0:09:23] Mai Tran: We decided to put a lot of focus on customer engagement and customer retention. I decided to move into that space. I thought that it's a very nice comeback to the publishing world because then, again, it's about getting people to engage with content and getting people to know what is new, what is relevant to them, et cetera, et cetera. It was very exciting for me. Then it's also a big challenge because with engagement, it's not as clear cut as conversion. There's a lot of KPIs out there. You don't know which one makes sense. You always optimize for the immediate one. So open rate, click rate, which copy makes more people engage with that content. But it's not necessarily that, because what you want to impact in the end is renewal. So how many people stay on over time? That's such a long time span that you start to test with different KPIs. Okay, what exactly is it? Is it reading five books that gets people more likely to stay? Is it spending more time in the app? Is it spending more time listening over reading? All of that is very exciting and challenging for me.   [0:10:39] PJ Bruno: Just that shift from the understanding of conversion event to being a goal to renewal, that in of itself, that's an infinite minded [crosstalk 00:00:10:50]. That's looking to the future as opposed to like, "Oh, it's ..." sometimes, I don't want to put salespeople in a bucket, but you have a quarterly goal so you obsess over that quarterly goal. Sometimes you do things that actually do not help you long term just to hit it.   [0:11:03] Mai Tran: In the long run, exactly. Yeah.   [0:11:04] PJ Bruno: So I love that you guys are looking so far down the line. It's great.   [0:11:07] Taylor Gibb: One thing I wanted to talk to you about as well, so as you are moving forward with these new KPIs and a more fleshed out, perhaps forward-looking attack towards getting users to ... Getting that retention further, how are you looking at the data? Have you guys engaged with anyone in a tech stack or are you just kind of looking at the numbers as they come through? On top of that, you spoke a little bit about actions like listening or reading books, what kind of actions are you looking for people to complete in your app that you think lead to that retention?   [0:11:42] Mai Tran: Yeah. I thought that you would ask that question.   [0:11:45] Taylor Gibb: I know.   [0:11:47] PJ Bruno: Were you scared that she would ask that question?   [0:11:49] Mai Tran: Yeah.   [0:11:49] Taylor Gibb: Oh gosh.   [0:11:49] Mai Tran: I was kind of.   [0:11:50] Taylor Gibb: Not meant to be a scary one.   [0:11:52] Mai Tran: No. It's because it's still a learning experience for us. It's very difficult to find that tipping point or to find that one key action that actually will ensure that 99% of people who does that action is going to stay on. But it's very important to find that important action. We're in the process of discovering that. We're very much at the beginning, which is to define the baseline. What we're doing now is instead of trying to artificially scale up a certain action, like read five books, not knowing if that is going to impact at all the renewal rate in the end, what we're doing now is actually spread our efforts across all different KPIs that we consider to be baseline KPIs. We're looking at everything in terms of time spent in the app, time spent actually reading or listening. We call them content consumption. Then we look at the finished rate. If you start reading something, do you finish it? If you finish it, are you more likely to stay on? Are you more likely to engage further? We also look at discovery rates. If you discover more content, are you more likely to find value in the app? Yeah, all kinds of things. One very interesting findings that we recently discover was that was variety, which is very interesting because-   [0:13:25] Taylor Gibb: That is.   [0:13:26] Mai Tran: Yeah. Personalization is all about offering up what you like, what is relevant to you based on what you've read in the past. But we've come to realize that people who read more outside of their comfort zone are more likely to renew.   [0:13:43] PJ Bruno: That's rad. That's very cool.   [0:13:44] Mai Tran: Yeah. So it's really a fine balance between, "Okay, we know what you like, and we offer you more of that." And then introducing to you more new things that we think you might like. So things like taste breakers, essentially, is also very, very interesting to us. But going back to your question, yeah, right now it's finding that baseline and seeing where that blip happened.   [0:14:11] PJ Bruno: I love that mission, the high-value-action mission, which all of us should be concerned with and doing. You said you guys are just starting your mission. The truth is it takes a long time to figure that out. Even when you figure it out, it changes.   [0:14:26] Mai Tran: You're not sure.   [0:14:26] Taylor Gibb: That's right. It's always evolving.   [0:14:27] PJ Bruno: You're not sure, it changes. Like you mentioned, you just have so much data coming in. There's so many ways to look at it and splice it. All I can say is hats off to you on doing it and best of luck in doing that, because it's huge. When you're able to discern those two to three high value actions, that three X, five X, that LTV of a customer, I mean, it's massive. It's game changing.   [0:14:50] Taylor Gibb: And surprising, it sounds like, the fact that variety has a part in all of this. It sounds like you did some testing and it's kind of fun when you're surprised by the results. That's really exciting. Final thing that I want to talk to you about a little bit here is what's on the horizon, both for you and your team and for Blinkist right now? Obviously don't talk about anything you're not allowed to. Unless we're all going to keep secrets here. But let me know what's coming up on the horizon.   [0:15:21] Mai Tran: Something that's coming up for CRM at Blinkist is, I guess, ramping up our recommendation system and really leverage connected content and personalization at Braze to bring that personalized content directly to the user, instead of waiting for them to come to the app. This is something that we literally started testing last week. I'm still waiting for results.   [0:15:48] Taylor Gibb: Oh, brand new.   [0:15:48] PJ Bruno: Exciting.   [0:15:48] Mai Tran: Yeah. I really hope it worked well Because I've heard many funny stories from our customers about personalization, because you never know how they're going to interpret that recommendation.   [0:16:03] PJ Bruno: Interesting.   [0:16:04] Mai Tran: We had one user writing in saying that, "Why are you such a racist company? No, not racist, sexist company. "Why do you offer me only female books?" We were really surprised because we don't know our user's gender. We never ask, we don't track that. Our data-   [0:16:27] PJ Bruno: So you had to respond, "This was just based on your history."   [0:16:29] Mai Tran: Exactly.   [0:16:29] Taylor Gibb: This is what you've been reading.   [0:16:31] Mai Tran: It was based on the last book that they read.   [0:16:34] PJ Bruno: Do what know what was their response after that? Do you know?   [0:16:37] Mai Tran: No. I didn't know.   [0:16:38] PJ Bruno: They were like no response.   [0:16:40] Taylor Gibb: Oh wait, no. Nevermind.   [0:16:41] Mai Tran: But yeah, so recommendation, it's really cool for us and especially being able to bring that into CRM and to be able to offer up content when it's relevant to them is what I'm looking forward to.   [0:16:55] PJ Bruno: Yeah. I mean, all I would say for connected content, I mean, it just works in terms of personalization if you set it up and if your systems are set up to handle the speed with which it's hitting it. That's when problems can occur. So make sure you're set up for speed. God, that's awesome. I'm excited for you guys.   [0:17:13] Taylor Gibb: You're you're taking a crack at CSM-ship here, PJ.   [0:17:16] PJ Bruno: I don't know.   [0:17:17] Taylor Gibb: I love to hear it.   [0:17:18] PJ Bruno: I hang out with you too much, I guess.   [0:17:19] Taylor Gibb: I think that might be the problem here. Well, best of luck to you. I'll be so excited. I'm going to start trying, I think. I will not complain if I get too many female book recommendations because now I know.   [0:17:31] PJ Bruno: It's just an algorithm.   [0:17:32] Taylor Gibb: It's just the algorithm.   [0:17:32] Mai Tran: It's just the algorithm.   [0:17:33] Taylor Gibb: It's just ... And taste breakers, who knows. Next time we talk, I'm going to be full of wisdom. I feel it.   [0:17:38] PJ Bruno: I'm going to hold you to that.   [0:17:39] Taylor Gibb: I know. We'll see. Full of something. Thank you so much for joining us.   [0:17:44] Mai Tran: Thank you for having me.   [0:17:45] Taylor Gibb: It was so great to meet you. PJ, as always, thanks for joining me here on the mic.   [0:17:49] PJ Bruno: Thanks again.   [0:17:49] Taylor Gibb: On the ones and twos. And all of you guys out there, thanks as always for dialing in. I'll talk to you later. [0:17:54]

Zoltan Szalas, Senior Product Manager of Growth at IBM, saddles up with us to talk machine learning, his early days at startup Croissant, and how to get buy-in across teams to hit goals. We also get a little spacey and talk quantum computing! *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ Bruno: Taylor, take us there, we're hot.   [0:00:19] Taylor Gibb: Here I go.   [0:00:20] Zoltan Szalas: Let's rock and roll.   [0:00:20] Taylor Gibb: All right. Welcome back to Braze for Impact. This is your MarTech industry discuss digest. And we're here in the middle of our humanity series, and I'm lucky enough to be seated across from Zoltan Szalas who is the senior product manager for growth at none other than IBM. This is a big deal guys. And Zoltan, we're so happy to have you in the studio with us.   [0:00:42] Zoltan Szalas: Well thanks for having me   [0:00:44] Taylor Gibb: Anytime. And to my left, as always, is PJ Bruno who runs client education here at Braze. PJ, how's it going?   [0:00:52] PJ Bruno: Feeling so good, feeling right. I'm excited for this one.   [0:00:54] Taylor Gibb: Oh, this is going to be a really good one. Zoltan, I know that you've done a little prep with PJ before the session.   [0:01:00] Zoltan Szalas: I did, I did.   [0:01:00] Taylor Gibb: It's exciting to think that you were thinking about this before coming in. I just want to hear from you a little bit about, I mean IBM. IBM is think, but what does that mean?   [0:01:10] Zoltan Szalas: Think.   [0:01:11] Taylor Gibb: Exactly. So obviously brand recognition isn't a problem these days, but are there ways that you're working to do things like leverage machine learning or push the limit in increasing your user base overall?   [0:01:24] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, that's a great question. And you're right, IBM, there's no brand recognition problem there.   [0:01:30] Taylor Gibb: Right?   [0:01:30] Zoltan Szalas: Like I got a job at IBM and my mom's like, "Oh my God, that's amazing." She has no idea what we do, or what I do. But she was so excited. But competition is fierce. I mean IBM alone has over something like several hundred products. And there are startups entering from all over the place, like entering our space and kind of biting away at the business. So growth for IBM, there's a granular level growth where we utilize things like machine learning. So one of the things that we're implementing right now is a retention AI tool. So what that does is when an account is going into defection, so when it comes up for churn.   [0:02:09] Taylor Gibb: Lapsing user.   [0:02:10] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. It sends a notification to the according CSM or whoever owns that account. Now on the flip side it also does it for expansion. So for example, let's say somebody is expanding on their usage of natural learning processing or Watson Assistant, it's going to notify the CSM so they can reach out to them, have the conversation of upsell, cross selling. And we're going to be implementing that into, I know you guys didn't want to talk about Braze, but we're going to be implementing that into Braze for customers who don't have a CSM assigned, right?   [0:02:41] Taylor Gibb: Really?   [0:02:41] PJ Bruno: What's Braze?   [0:02:42] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, never heard of her. Who is she?   [0:02:46] PJ Bruno: Keep going.   [0:02:48] Zoltan Szalas: So that's at the product level. And it's really kind of eating your own dog food, and really implementing things to grow the user base but on a macro level. Things like the Red Hat acquisition, right? Like understanding that and the significance that it's going to have. You have to ask the question of why did we spend $36 billion on an acquisition? That's a 15 to 20 year return. That's where the market is-   [0:03:11] PJ Bruno: That is a long game.   [0:03:12] Zoltan Szalas: It is a long game.   [0:03:13] Taylor Gibb: And smart.   [0:03:14] Zoltan Szalas: But that that strategic partnership is going to allow us to exponentially grow our user base.   [0:03:20] PJ Bruno: That's future-proofing right there man.   [0:03:21] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly.   [0:03:22] PJ Bruno: Very cool. And I just love, like I know we talked about it a little bit, you and I got time to strategize and chat. And I just loved the idea that you're able to run a relatively lean operation with your guys in this big company. And it seems like you guys have already had a bunch of traction. And when I talked to you, you kind of were in the pivot situation where you were able to like, "All right, the stuff we're doing is working. I've gotten this buy-in, and now we're onto bigger and better things."   [0:03:51] Zoltan Szalas: It's interesting because initially, as you said, I was in this position, pivotal moment. And it was really interesting because growth and innovation, sure, you have your growth stack, you have amplitude segment and things like that. But for a company like IBM that's over 100 years old, that's three digits.   [0:04:13] PJ Bruno: Jesus.   [0:04:14] Zoltan Szalas: There aren't a lot of companies in the world that have three digits.   [0:04:17] Taylor Gibb: And definitely not a lot of tech companies in the world. Right?   [0:04:19] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. Exactly. So you have to ask yourself where does innovation come from? And it really happens within the culture, within the people. And kind of going back to that is when my managers started the growth program, one of the hardest things we had was to get that buy-in. So when people started to see that, "Oh wow, this actually works. This is producing results", then that buy-in comes a lot quicker. And now we're in this luxury place where people are like, "Oh yeah, yeah, do whatever it is that you do. I'm not really sure. But just go do it. And get some amazing results."   [0:04:55] Taylor Gibb: That's great. And you guys have made room then for innovation, right? Other people within your company can feel more empowered to step forward with their ideas to start making these changes. And so it sounds like you're doing the right work.   [0:05:08] PJ Bruno: The way you mentioned it, your first position with IBM, right, you had to get buy-in. You were a team, a guy, that had a solution, that had to go around, kind of shop it around. When you started there, how much was being prescribed to you by your boss and how much was like, "Figure it out"? It's like how much was a mandate and how much was that creative layer for you to like, "All right, let's get weird with it."   [0:05:34] Zoltan Szalas: I was lucky to have great managers who gave me a lot of autonomy. I came on at the early stage of the growth program. So a lot of it was like, "Hey, figure it out, and find people that are willing to work with us to prove out this model."   [0:05:51] PJ Bruno: So long leash then. I mean it just was like, "You're here to make things better."   [0:05:56] Zoltan Szalas: Right.   [0:05:57] PJ Bruno: Go.   [0:05:57] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. And I just transitioned from a startup of five people. And I'm like, "All right, you want me to execute?" I execute. I did a couple of things and I got yelled at for breaking a couple of pages.   [0:06:11] Taylor Gibb: You got to break a few pages to make an omelet. Isn't that what they say?   [0:06:14] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. But what I did break the page, it resulted in, I don't know, like the annualized, I broke the page on something and somebody reached out to whoever owns a page. Because IBM's a matrix organization. So there is a person for everything, right? So it's hard to just kind of go in. And my mindset coming from a startup is like, "Okay, this should have been done yesterday. Let's get this done." But IBM doesn't work like that. And you have to figure out. I think the best analogy I got is it's like a duck. The duck floats on top of the water, right? It's very elegant and kind of flows through. But underneath its little legs are churning away.   [0:06:54] PJ Bruno: Mile a minute.   [0:06:54] Zoltan Szalas: Churning away. Exactly. So working on multiple projects and growth initiatives, that's how I figured out. Like how can you execute ... You just have to be able to focus on several things at a time and wait for things to come in.   [0:07:06] PJ Bruno: And you got to break pages. I mean it's a special projects team. If you're not breaking pages you're not doing it right.   [0:07:11] Taylor Gibb: You're doing something wrong.   [0:07:11] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly.   [0:07:12] Taylor Gibb: That's right. And you were working on all the different projects. One of them that PJ actually brought to my attention before we got in the room here was Croissant, which sounds like it started as a hackathon project, and then you were able to make it into this brand and this huge initiative-   [0:07:27] PJ Bruno: A global brand.   [0:07:27] Taylor Gibb: Global brand and initiative. So clearly you weren't just breaking pages, you were really making things happen. Do you mind talking a bit about that?   [0:07:33] Zoltan Szalas: No, I'd love to. And do you guys mind if, my co founder Adam asked me to give him a shout out.   [0:07:39] Taylor Gibb: Oh please.   [0:07:40] Zoltan Szalas: And he wanted me to call him by his code name Savage. Is that okay?   [0:07:45] Taylor Gibb: I think, do you know what?   [0:07:45] PJ Bruno: Do you have a message for him or is it just?   [0:07:47] Zoltan Szalas: Nope, he just wanted me to give him a shout out. Savage.   [0:07:49] Taylor Gibb: That's the first-   [0:07:50] PJ Bruno: Keep breaking pages Savage   [0:07:52] Taylor Gibb: ... The first shout out in Braze for Impact history and I can't think of a way that it could have gone better. Well done. Savage, this one's for you.   [0:07:59] PJ Bruno: We're making history here. Ba-da-bing.   [0:08:01] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, it came out of a hackathon project. We were working on this business that obviously didn't go anywhere, and one weekend we went to a hackathon and we kind of coded up this product that would essentially allow you to book a seat at a coffee shop. Because that company arose from like a very natural need. We were running around the city, working out of coffee shops. And it was a pain in the ass. Can I say ass?   [0:08:26] Taylor Gibb: You saw that meme yourselves. Yeah.   [0:08:27] PJ Bruno: Yeah, you can, we can't.   [0:08:29] Zoltan Szalas: So it came out of a hackathon project. And in that one weekend we saw so much positive feedback from the people through media, through PR, that we just said, "We have something here." So we did a little bit of market testing. We shopped it around to coffee shops. Coffee shops didn't want it. They're like, "Oh no, no, no. This is a coffee shop. This is a democratic place. Nobody's going to get a seat here." But somebody had given us, like months prior, a map of all the coworking spaces in the city. And there were something like 200. And this was back at the time where the WeWorks was unknown. You would be like, "WeWork." People would be like, "What's WeWork? What's coworking? What's shared office space?"   [0:09:07] Taylor Gibb: Interesting.   [0:09:08] Zoltan Szalas: So we walked in randomly on one day, we're just like, we walked into a coworking space and he said, "Hey, we're building this platform. Would you guys be interested in coming on as a space partner?" And they said yes. And then we said okay. So the supply side is resonating positively. And then we sent out a bunch of emails.   [0:09:28] Taylor Gibb: I think you emailed us.   [0:09:30] PJ Bruno: I know where this is going, sorry.   [0:09:32] Zoltan Szalas: We sent out a bunch of emails advertising our $300 product for MVP that just barely existed, and people bought. So we said, "Okay, we have something here. So what's next?" So we built out the product and we took it from inception to ... we've had over 10,000 customers on the platform. But it's really interesting because the story, as funny as it is, when you're building a business, you have very limited data to work with.   [0:10:03] Taylor Gibb: Sure. You're starting from the ground up.   [0:10:04] Zoltan Szalas: So every feedback you're using as a compass, right? Like, "Okay, this direction makes sense. This direction makes sense." At the very early stages, right, before you're collecting like hundreds of thousands or millions of data points, you're almost using qualitative data to get feedback on which direction to take your company.   [0:10:26] PJ Bruno: Yeah, that's tough though sometimes. Sometimes you, I don't know about you, but I've taken lots of feedback and sometimes I'll give it the wrong weight. I'll take one person's feedback and make some sort of pivot that's going to affect the next quarter or something. So when you have all the data to work with, you have the quantity to work with.   [0:10:45] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, and you know what it is? You know that saying ignorance is bliss?   [0:10:50] PJ Bruno: Yeah.   [0:10:51] Zoltan Szalas: When I look back on the Croissant journey, it was the most reckless insensible thing I did. Just straight up quit my job and just follow this instinct. Right? But that ignorance is bliss to a degree because you're just following whatever is working. Right? So it's kind of almost a blessing to not have all the data that early on, because you're just, don't take this advice as sound, this is not guarantee, there is no money back guarantee. But if you follow ... Life gives you feedback, people give you feedback, the market gives you feedback. Right? So I think it's important to be proactive and just trying to get that feedback early on. But it was a lot of fun and we scaled it into, we're in over like 120 cities now. And it was a lot of fun.   [0:11:36] Taylor Gibb: Wow. That is incredible. And you got there from following your gut, right?   [0:11:39] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah.   [0:11:40] Taylor Gibb: And trusting those instincts. Are you still able to bring a little bit of that to your day to day when you're at IBM?   [0:11:46] Zoltan Szalas: Yes, but I have to get buy-in.   [0:11:48] PJ Bruno: Got to get that buy-in.   [0:11:50] Taylor Gibb: Some things have to change a little bit. But it sounds like you've been able to build that up.   [0:11:53] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, and I think IBM is a great learning ground for me. Because at IBM, more of your soft skills have to come into play. They have to come to the foreground. Because you're dealing with cross functional teams that each have their own objectives and a lot of times they're not aligned. So the question becomes is, "Okay, I want to change something on this page. How do I get the development team, the design team, the product team to come together and align to make that change happen?" And that's the biggest difference. When you're running a startup you have an insight and you're like, "Okay, well let's execute on it." You execute on it, you ship it out the door, done. Wait for the feedback loop, iterate or implement or do something else. Right? But with IBM it's been a real amazing time to learn how to use those soft skills. And I'm still able to use, you still go by your gut, like there's patterns that you recognize so you already know like, "Okay, we should do this, we should do this nurture or that nurture." So definitely.   [0:12:57] PJ Bruno: That's so interesting to me, and it just identified a huge gap, and that's obviously understanding technology and your tech stack, that's something that we're all obsessed with. You mentioned soft skills. This isn't the same as leadership or conflict resolution. This is governance across teams. And like how you orchestrate, facilitate those conversations when you're not necessarily getting the right support from up above. So it sounds like you're cutting your teeth doing this stuff, man. This is fantastic.   [0:13:24] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And luckily my managers are all great and the people that I work with are all amazing.   [0:13:31] PJ Bruno: Your team has been stoked just watching you the [crosstalk 00:13:33].   [0:13:33] Zoltan Szalas: They're so supportive.   [0:13:35] PJ Bruno: You can't see it.   [0:13:36] Taylor Gibb: Is Savage out there?   [0:13:37] Zoltan Szalas: Savage is not out there. Savage is at TransferWise.   [0:13:41] PJ Bruno: Well Sav, we're thinking of you buddy.   [0:13:43] Zoltan Szalas: We're thinking of you.   [0:13:45] Taylor Gibb: Oh man. So all right. You've got all these different projects that you've done. You've been able to work within IBM using this startup mindset, but also some of the soft skills that you've learned, and it sounds like you're iterating on there. What I'd be most excited to hear about now is anything that you can share that's coming down the pipeline, for either you and your team at IBM or larger initiatives that you're working on. We want to hear what you're excited about.   [0:14:08] Zoltan Szalas: Personally, I'm really excited about quantum computing.   [0:14:12] PJ Bruno: Oh yeah.   [0:14:13] Zoltan Szalas: Especially since the headlines this week that Google is claiming quantum computing supremacy.   [0:14:19] Taylor Gibb: I hadn't seen this, wait.   [0:14:20] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah.   [0:14:21] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Fill her in.   [0:14:22] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, fill me in on quantum computing. This sounds like Star Trek.   [0:14:25] Zoltan Szalas: It is kind of like Star Trek. So think of the most powerful computer in the world, and X that by 1000 or a million.   [0:14:36] Taylor Gibb: I can't even conceive of it.   [0:14:38] Zoltan Szalas: It's a very strange thing because, unlike traditional computers which work off of a chip, for a quantum computer you're basically emulating an environment where almost atoms and ions are just making the calculations. I mean we haven't been able to run an app on a quantum computer to date, but just kind of Google did something along those lines this past week. But why is that important? The reason that it's important because right now there are so many complex problems out there, whether it's logistics, cyber security, pharmaceuticals, or modeling that even the most powerful computers can't handle those problems. And if quantum computing gets there, we could potentially solve these problems.   [0:15:30] PJ Bruno: Right. You were saying something like a calculation that would normally take weeks or months could be done in seconds, or something like that.   [0:15:38] Zoltan Szalas: Exactly. So there's a really interesting article in Tech Crunch that came out. So Google is claiming they're ahead of the game. And what they did is they did a simulation with the most powerful computer that's available in the world. And I'm forgetting, but I think it's at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The supercomputer took something like a week to produce an outcome, where the quantum computer took I think 200 seconds.   [0:16:03] PJ Bruno: Sounds about right.   [0:16:04] Taylor Gibb: Oh my God.   [0:16:05] Zoltan Szalas: So imagine that power.   [0:16:07] Taylor Gibb: This is not a minuscule change. This is going to absolutely turn everything on its head.   [0:16:11] Zoltan Szalas: Absolutely. Especially if you're looking at anything from ... If you're in security, that's troubling.   [0:16:18] PJ Bruno: That's a red flag.   [0:16:20] Zoltan Szalas: You should start preparing now because those quantum computers will just break your encryption like nothing.   [0:16:27] PJ Bruno: Watch yourself.   [0:16:28] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, geez.   [0:16:29] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah.   [0:16:29] PJ Bruno: Talk about future proofing.   [0:16:30] Taylor Gibb: Yeah seriously.   [0:16:31] Zoltan Szalas: I don't think, I mean you and I, PJ, when we talked that kind of went off crazy philosophical. Like, "Imagine if everybody had this, [inaudible 00:16:38]."   [0:16:37] PJ Bruno: Yeah, we were nerding out. It was not late at night either, it was the middle of the day. Like, "Quantum supremacy, it sounds like the empire. Oh yeah."   [0:16:47] Zoltan Szalas: Yeah. I don't think it'll ever go [inaudible] because I just don't think consumers need that type of computing power. But it's going to be interesting to see what happens when governments get ahold of it, and major corporations get a hold of it.   [0:16:58] PJ Bruno: God save us all.   [0:16:59] Taylor Gibb: And the hands of you at IBM, breaking pages. Be careful over there. Quantum page breaking.   [0:17:06] PJ Bruno: Quantum page break.   [0:17:08] Taylor Gibb: [inaudible 00:17:08]. Oh my God. Well, thank you.   [0:17:09] PJ Bruno: No better way to end it I guess than-   [0:17:11] Taylor Gibb: I was going to say, you've made me excited about what you're excited about here. I'm going to look into quantum computing right after this podcast. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great speaking with you and hearing all about this great stuff.   [0:17:23] Zoltan Szalas: Awesome. This was a lot of fun. Thank you guys for having me.   [0:17:25] Taylor Gibb: Oh definitely.   [0:17:25] PJ Bruno: Absolutely man.   [0:17:26] Taylor Gibb: PJ, as always, thank you so much.   [0:17:28] PJ Bruno: So very welcome. Great to be here.   [0:17:30] Taylor Gibb: And all of you on the line, thanks again for dialing in. This is Taylor Gibb, CSM, Braze for Impact. We'll catch you next time. [0:17:37]

Ashok Rajan, director of the board at Lister Digital and cycling enthusiast, gives commentary on how personalization strategies are more about human connection than technology. He shares a profound customer experience that shaped him, and stresses the importance of "data for purpose." *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

Collette Mosca, Lead CRM at Busuu, talks mission for global connection and the guided approach of the beloved language learning platform.  *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

Global Head of CRM at JustEat, Marie Feliho, shares with us how use of data has evolved throughout her career, the future of email, and how the skills needed to be an effective marketer are changing. *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

Founder of Phiture Andy Carvell joins us to muse on his early career in mobile gaming development, his pivot toward marketing tech, and what it takes to consult on tech stacks, app store optimization and growth-minded strategy. *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*     TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ Bruno: Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your Martech industry discuss digest, and we're back again with another episode from our humanity series. Today we got with us one of our very good friends, close partner, Andy Carvell, partner and co-founder at Phiture. Andy, thanks for being here.   [0:00:34] Andy Carvell: Thanks for having me.   [0:00:35] PJ Bruno: Absolutely man. And also to my right. Dave, the golden boy, Goldstein, head of Global Solutions Alliances. Dave, this has been a long time coming,   [0:00:44] Dave Goldstein: Long-time coming, so happy to be here.   [0:00:47] PJ Bruno: Andy, for those people out there who don't know what Phiture is, why don't you just give us a little summation there.   [0:00:52] Andy Carvell: Yeah, sure. We're a mobile growth consultancy based out of Berlin. We're a team of 30 mobile growth experts, and we help companies with mobile apps to get a grip on some of their mobile growth challenges. Quite specifically, that would be things like app store optimization and data-driven experimentation. With CRM.   [0:01:10] PJ Bruno: It sounds like the need there is probably just growing bigger and bigger every year. Right?   [0:01:14] Andy Carvell: There's plenty of demand. Yeah, it's pretty healthy.   [0:01:16] Dave Goldstein: I'm actually just curious Andy, cause obviously it's incredible what you've done building out Mobilegrowthstack.com you're clearly like an incredible industry leader and the thought leadership that you guys put out is unparalleled, and it's free for everybody. Even your competition can go and read all that content, which is just unbelievable that you actually put all that-   [0:01:37] PJ Bruno: That's confidence right there.   [0:01:37] Dave Goldstein: That is confidence. That's exactly what that is, and it's fantastic. But, can you tell us a little bit about your journey? Your background, how did you get to start this consultancy and develop all of this thought leadership? Where'd you start, and how'd you get to kind of where you are today?   [0:01:51] Andy Carvell: Yeah, sure. And thanks for the kind words, Dave. When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was make games. My father brought a home computer for me and my brother when we were pretty young. I was like five years old or something. And he taught us how to program it. My father was like one of the first generation of computer programmers, so I was kind of fortunate enough that I got taught how to code, long time ago, and all I wanted to do was make games. Just was really into computers, really into games. Went to university, did a bachelor's degree in computer science, and after I graduated, I just fully expected to go into the console games industry and make PlayStation games, and I've done a PlayStation game for my final year project. It was straight forward career path as far as I was concerned, but actually ended up working for Nokia who were hiring for games programmers to make games on mobile phones, which were kind of a new thing at that point. I didn't have a mobile phone when I joined Nokia.   [0:02:39] Dave Goldstein: Wow. Do you remember what year that was?   [0:02:41] Andy Carvell: Oh, that was 1999.   [0:02:42] Dave Goldstein: Oh wow. Okay. I probably had the StarTAC, the Motorola StarTAC flip phone at that point.   [0:02:48] PJ Bruno: The project, the PS game that you created, what was it? What was the concept of that?   [0:02:54] Andy Carvell: I made a puzzle game. So it was something... There was a TV show in the UK called Blockbusters, which kind of gave me the idea of... You have to basically create a path like a cross, not exactly a chessboard, but something similar. And the idea was... With this puzzle game, you kind of had this character, and you would run around a board flipping over tiles, and they would flip over in different colors. You had to build a path of the same color from one end to the other.   [0:03:21] PJ Bruno: Very cool.   [0:03:21] Andy Carvell: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I joined Nokia back in 1999, making embedded games. I made a game called Space Impact, which is one of the first like side-scrolling shoot'em up arcade games for a mobile phone. And I just really fell in love with mobile and the technology, the disruptivity of it. And also actually for making games on really resource constrained devices. It was an interesting optimization challenge, and I stayed in mobile games for about 10 years, eventually kind of decided to go do something new, so I went to business school, got my MBA and there is where I kind of specialized in marketing and marketing strategy and it was kind of after that when I came to Berlin and joined SoundCloud, I was kind of able to marry those kind of two disciplines of sort of technical background and all the sort of new marketing stuff I'd learned and apply that at SoundCloud, helping them to kind of transition from being a web-first company to a mobile-first company and that's kind of where these two things kind of came together.   [0:04:21] PJ Bruno: Is that when you moved to Berlin, or you were already there?   [0:04:24] Andy Carvell: Yeah, actually, I moved to Berlin to do a 10-week project to finish my MBA. I had to write a dissertation based on some research that I'd done in industry, and I did that with an ad tech company called the SponsorPay now called Fyber. So I wrote my dissertation at Fyber but decided, actually, I wasn't super keen on staying in ad tech, so I looked around what else was happening in Berlin and yeah, SoundCloud were hiring for somebody with a... With mobile experience. So it was kind of like perfect fit really.   [0:04:51] Dave Goldstein: It's amazing. And when I think about some of the savviest digital marketers out there, what comes to mind is folks in gaming. I mean, it's unbelievable how tight they are around marketing processes and conversions, right? It seems like that industry was the first to lock it down, and it's like if you knew that industry you, would do well anywhere, right? You could take that to Legacy Enterprise and blow people's minds.   [0:05:19] Andy Carvell: The games folks are always kind of ahead of the game I'd say like a couple of years ahead. In terms of a lot of the best practice, you see usually happening first in games. Yeah.   [0:05:28] PJ Bruno: Do you miss gaming?   [0:05:29] Andy Carvell: I don't miss it as much as I thought I would when I kind of like made the switch. Actually, I really thought that I was going to go back into gaming industry after business school, but just didn't... It didn't turn out that way.   [0:05:39] PJ Bruno: That's life, isn't it?   [0:05:40] Dave Goldstein: Truly. And so as you kind of made this transition from your SoundCloud days to starting this consultancy, I imagine folks are trying to kind of capitalize on this incredible knowledge base that you've developed over the years. What are some of the challenges that, common, maybe uncommon these days, as it relates to enterprises that are in businesses of all types that are trying to figure out how to do growth cause you clearly understand it intimately?   [0:06:10] Andy Carvell: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of challenges. It's hard to generalize, I think, to a huge extent. But we definitely see a few kind of common themes with the kind of companies that are coming to Phiture and asking for our help. We see a lot of companies just sort of struggling to navigate the vendor space and the tool space and just sort of understand what is the right kind of tech stack that's going to work for them and what exactly will that enable for them and what are their options there. We see that a lot, and we also see companies, particularly on the app store optimization side, just companies either don't realize quite how complex an operation they need to really operationalize ASO at scale across like multiple geographies. And we can sort of help them first of all to understand that and help them to either build out that process in-house or we give them an outsource solution for it.   [0:06:57] PJ Bruno: So Phiture can do things like what you're just talking about at a very macro level, but you guys also can do the very tactical HTML design as well when it comes to in-app and other things. Is that right?   [0:07:10] Andy Carvell: Yeah, that's right. We've built out actually a bunch of cool stuff on top of the Braze platform. For example, you have the in-app template technology that we've built. Yeah, we're doing some pretty cool stuff there. I think it's really important for me personally that our company is not just telling people like, "Oh, you can do this or you know, this, this, this would be a good way to do, you know, do something and," and building out a strategy with them. We definitely do the strategic work, but I think it's really important to me that we stay really current, and we stay at the cutting edge of what we're doing, and we really want to be like leading the way with the implementation side of things as well. I think it's important that... Otherwise, we get stale.   [0:07:44] PJ Bruno: Right. And it's all conjecture until you actually put something together and have something to show. Right?   [0:07:49] Andy Carvell: Yeah. Right. And be able to drive measurable impact with it. We're all about measuring things and real impact.   [0:07:55] Dave Goldstein: It's incredible the level of sophistication and complexity, right? When you think about... To your point, right? People are trying to choose the right technology to do the job. That in itself, I mean, seems like a full-time job. Just to evaluate all the technologies out there and align it with what it is that you're trying to do as a business. On top of that, you've got organizational structure challenges, right? Where people are just... They're not organized. You could give them the best toolset in the world. You could put in the best plumbing, and they're just not organized to use it effectively. Right?   [0:08:27] Andy Carvell: I'd say that's a really big one actually. In fact, that's probably the most common thing that we're helping companies with. It's not really the tool setup. It's more about building good processes around whatever tool stack they're using. We can work with companies with very varied tool stacks. But typically their biggest challenge is operationalizing the actual kind of growth process, and that's really comes down to having a really strong experimental process kind of rigid instrumentation and sort of dedication to actually measuring impact properly and then getting into a good strong experimental cadence. And that's the kind of stuff that actually is our bread and butter that we help companies with.   [0:09:08] Dave Goldstein: We're always talking about nailing the fundamentals and ensuring that... I mean, you've got to get those down first, right? Because so many people get caught up in the hype of new technologies. Speaking of which, there is a lot of kind of quote cool technology out there, voice AI, bots. I'm trying to think of all the different things that I've seen and heard as of late. Right? And there have been some, what I consider to be pretty interesting implementations of them. Is there anything in particular that you're really excited about to see the evolution of and can actually envision how it might fit into the future of growth for some of the organizations that you help?   [0:09:47] Andy Carvell: So, I mean, I think the technologies that I'm super excited about... I'm a bit of a sci-fi nerd, so I tend to look a little bit further ahead. I'm excited for quantum computing kind of brain-computer interfaces. This kind of stuff, which will for sure have implications for growth, but it's probably a little further out. So if I would kind of bring it back a few years, I think I'm kind of interested to see how mobile evolves as... I think the screen will kind of eventually disappear and we'll just get like retina projection and things like that. I think that the device will kind of evaporate, but the mobile computing capability will definitely stay with us. I think wearable devices, conversational interfaces, I think we're seeing the kind of early stage of that with devices like Alexa and Google Home and Chatbots and things like that. But I think conversational interfaces will... You'll have a way to go as well. And that, of course, then merges with AI and yeah, a bunch of fun stuff.   [0:10:42] PJ Bruno: Retinal interference.   [0:10:45] Dave Goldstein: It's not long until we're living in the world of Minority Report.   [0:10:49] PJ Bruno: Have you seen these tech tattoos yet? Have you seen these?   [0:10:52] Andy Carvell: I haven't seen the tech tattoos.   [0:10:53] PJ Bruno: It's basically an ink that is a conductor with some sort of circuit in there, and basically, I guess the thinking is, in the future, instead of getting your regular physical checkup, this is some sort of circuit that actually can check your vitals regularly and keep you kind of not just doing it annually, but day to day, kind of know where you're at with physical health.   [0:11:17] Dave Goldstein: Wow. Where do I sign up?   [0:11:19] Andy Carvell: I think personalization in the healthcare sphere is also super interesting. Especially when you get into gene editing and-   [0:11:24] PJ Bruno: Oh, man. Yeah. I mean not just wearables, but I mean, where does it end, right? I mean robotics in general, adding to your body. When does it, when is it no longer you?   [0:11:34] Dave Goldstein: Well, technically, it is no longer you, right? We are bionic. We carry around this supercomputer in our pocket, and many people have it attached to their wrist. Right? In essence, we've got the knowledge of all mankind right here with us.   [0:11:48] PJ Bruno: I'm a little bit of a sci-fi nerd as well, and I had the conversation with my roommate about where does humanity end if like Oh like years from now, great, you got a bionic arm, you had an accident. Like you know what? I want to add some stuff as well, and I just kept pushing the limit. I was like, all right, if everything's a robot, but your head is human, are you still human? So yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I'm still me, and I just kind of kept pushing it like, all right, your consciousness is downloaded into a hard drive. It's replicated. Is that still you? No. I don't think that's me anymore. I love pondering those things.   [0:12:18] Dave Goldstein: I've long thought we're just the caterpillar waiting for our robot overlords to blossom into the beautiful butterflies-   [0:12:25] PJ Bruno: Does that scare you at all? AI at all?   [0:12:28] Andy Carvell: Yeah, it does actually. One of my favorite books is Neuromancer by William Gibson, which is really all about a rogue AI, which is trying to kind of augment itself and join with it's other... It has like...But there are basically two AIs based in different places in the world, and they're trying to kind of connect a network together because then they'll basically become this like super-entity-   [0:12:50] PJ Bruno: Disguised, as an ecosystem, takes over the world.   [0:12:53] Andy Carvell: Yeah, I mean, it's a great story. It's a great book, but it's... I think we've seen many times over the last like kind of 10, 20 years that technology takes on interesting... Has interesting effects on the world, which are not entirely predictable. I don't think anyone would have necessarily predicted Cambridge Analytica or the Facebook stuff. And the ways that social media is being kind of subverted. And I think things like AI will be no different. And it's also already being heavily kind of weaponized and invested in, as the new frontier in warfare. So yeah, I think it's going to be pretty scary. But also there'll be some really cool applications for it. So...   [0:13:34] PJ Bruno: Yes. Well, I also... I got to get around to promoting your podcast, Andy, as a fellow podcaster. It's very clear that you have a passion for what you do. And I fully believe that those who have a strong passion for their careers are the ones that are going to succeed the most. And so from all the great stuff that you guys are doing outcomes, Mobile Growth Nightmares and I just love to hear about what brought that about. And I mean, clearly, it's something that you care about, and Dave mentioned you guys give away a lot of your content for free. That feels like a cause that feels like a mission. That's something that can actually kind of stand the test of time. So I'd love to hear about it.   [0:14:13] Andy Carvell: Sure. Yeah. So Mobile Growth Nightmares... We'll also to say for the record; it's not a feature production. I do it with Jessica from Blinkist, which was also kind of very deliberate that... We didn't want to just do another corporate kind of podcast-   [0:14:29] PJ Bruno: Not selling something here.   [0:14:30] Andy Carvell: Exactly. It was just kind of a bit of fun. We're both kind of working in the industry. We have a pretty good network of people that we can kind of just invite on the show. We record it when we have time, which is why there's not many episodes out. It'd be like... It's kind of like best efforts kind of thing. So it's all kind of quite informal, quite casual and it's kind of a fun project, but it's a great way to connect with people in the industry and just have a chat like we're doing now. And yeah, the kind of general concept is that we talk about growth fuck-ups basically like times when people have done something which they've learned from. Which that they've made some kind of mistake and yeah. What they've learned from it, which we find is just a fun angle to take.   [0:15:13] Dave Goldstein: Do you have a favorite nightmare that you've heard or perhaps even experienced yourself? Like something in particular like, "Oh man, I clicked send to 10 million people," an oops campaign. Anything to that effect that you would share?   [0:15:28] Andy Carvell: So we actually... We had a guy called George from [Glovo 00:15:31]. We did an onstage kind of a variant of the Mobile Growth Nightmare show. It wasn't actually with me and Jessica, but we did it at our ASL conference in New York lately. And yeah, I mean basically his... I won't give too much away because it's a really fun story and I guess we might get him on the podcast at some point, but it ended up with, I think the police being involved and yeah, his boss... Emails from the boss at nine o'clock in the morning. So yeah, I think those kinds of nightmares are the best ones where he... As he pointed out after, it's like, look; this is a real nightmare. This is not the not, not an [AP] test that's gone wrong.   [0:16:10] PJ Bruno: This is a real nightmare. This is not just a growth nightmare.   [0:16:15] Andy Carvell: I think when law enforcement got involved. That's a good mobile growth nightmare.   [0:16:18] PJ Bruno: Jeez loueez. Can't imagine.   [0:16:19] Dave Goldstein: Unbelievable. So I suppose one of the questions I had, right? Is as folks who are looking to level up their growth game. They look to experts like you. If you can give away one actionable tidbit, one massive takeaway that someone who would be listening to this would be able to take back and ponder over and apply to perhaps level up their growth engine and their growth strategy. Anything, in particular, come to mind?   [0:16:49] Andy Carvell: So yeah, I'm not a big fan in general of sort of growth hacks or sort of specific tactics that you could apply it across the board. Because I think you want to look at sort of things specifically in terms of your situation. However, I'm going to now contradict myself and say one thing which I would pretty much always recommend, which we also don't see very often, even in pretty sophisticated setups. Often this is missing. And it'll really help any growth marketer. And that's to have a global holdout group. It's actually pretty simple, but keep a group of users back and have that holdout group kind of refreshing with new users as you get new cohorts in and basically just keep back, whether it's 1% or 5%, whatever you need to get a significant... Statistically significant result in a meaningful amount of time and have those not exposed to whatever growth experiments you're doing. And [I see this work 00:00:17:42] particularly for CRM and for folks using Braze this is really valid, but if you're doing growth work and you don't this global holdout that's just not exposed to any of the experiments that you're running, you won't be able to prove the ROI and the overall impact of your initiatives. So you'd think as any growth marketer or growth professional in the industry, I'd really recommend you do this because it's really going to help you when you're going for promotion next year to be able to actually demonstrate the value that you've actually delivered for the business and the only way you can really do that, particularly with something like CRM, where you have loads of different campaigns going on with the different touchpoints, is to look at the aggregate impact by having a holdout group.   [0:18:21] PJ Bruno: And I guess the whole point of that is complete randomness. Just take a bunch or-   [0:18:26] Andy Carvell: Yeah, absolutely. It should be just a random sample. Yep.   [0:18:29] PJ Bruno: There you go. Holdout groups, control groups, do it.   [0:18:31] Dave Goldstein: As always, an open book sharing of information. It's just incredible. Thank you so much for all you do for our industry.   [0:18:38] Andy Carvell: Thanks for having me on the podcast, and thanks for your kind words.   [0:18:41] PJ Bruno: Yeah. Thanks, Andy, and thanks Dave, for joining us and thank you all at home. Take care. [0:18:46]

CRM Sr. Product Manager at OKCupid, Ana Albornoz, talks about the power of connection and how OKC lets that sentiment permeate their messaging, events, and even the way their messaging systems are set up. PS. They're hiring engineers! *Hosted by Taylor Gibb and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

CEO of Notable Growth, Rebecca Nackson, talks being the "marketing therapist" in the martech space. She brings us the 3 T's: Team, Tools and Tactics. You need to have all in place to create a best-in-class engagement solution. *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*

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.

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.

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.

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]