Building marketing consent into ecommerce journeys, with One Creation’s Zohar Hod

Forward-thinking brands have long known that customer consent is a crucial component in effective marketing. This has come into greater focus recently with stricter regulation around the proper use of customer data, and the long expected death of third-party cookies finally coming to pass. 

But how do you actually secure that consent, at scale, without becoming intrusive? Zohar Hod, a serial entrepreneur with experience in fintech, has crossed over to the martech world to answer that question. 

His latest venture, One Creation, is a low-code customer preference solution. By seamlessly integrating into any part of the digital consumer journey, their solution can confirm or acquire new data, enrich existing customer profiles, and allow for personalisation that doesn’t veer from the attentive into ‘the creepy’ (in Zohar’s words). 

In the latest edition of Martalks, I talk to Zohar about the importance of zero-party data, about how One Creation integrates with other solutions in the modern composable marketing stack, and his key learnings from founding five startups over the course of his fascinating career. 

You can listen to the podcast in full, or read a transcript of the key moments here: https://bit.ly/4aZWNIy.

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

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Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to Martox. I'm Darrell Rosenston. I'm your host. Mark Thompson is where we discuss contemporary issues in the e-commerce and marketing technology landscape. And today we're joined by the founder of OneCreation, Zilhar Hamad. Zilhar is a serial entrepreneur from the financial technology landscape and had some very substantial exits before coming to join us here in Martech Land. And he has developed a solution that enables marketers to rapidly acquire first party data in a trusted environment. And we're going to discuss what it means to be trusted today with Zohar. Zohar, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Thank you very much, Darrell. Very nice of you to have me.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Well, we'll we'll see about that. We'll see about that. But to start off, your tagline for OneCreation is building your relationships with your customers through trust. And you know what exactly does OneCreation do in order to facilitate that?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

So OneCreation in short form is basically a preference, dynamic preference engine. Basically, it's a it's a product that sits in between your customer engagement uh channel. So it could be anywhere, you know, the point of sale, email, all of the different channels where you meet your customer, and your customer data platform in order to be enable basically cookie-less personalization. But cookie less personalization that is based on trust and transparency, and even an exchange of value, which we believe are the main factors in order to establish trust and to progressively build uh a personal experience for your customer over time.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Well, you know, I am in sales and kind of the the fatal thing to say to any customer is usually trust me. But you know, I mean, uh it if you're actually giving me something in exchange for trusting you, I'm I'm a little more apt to listen. So that that does make sense to me, to my to my reptile brain. But what what was actually the uh the idea behind you creating this?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Well, let me um let me first elaborate a little bit about what you said about trust. You're right. Uh if you put up uh trust me, it's not a really good uh marketing uh uh you know uh strategy, and I won't uh trust is built. Uh it's not built in in one transaction, it's built in interactions throughout your customer experience that are transparent and are based on you know very transparent uh use of what we're doing with your particular preference here, and uh maybe rewarding you for being a little bit more transparent and more uh you know, having an equal type of relationship between the customer and the brand rather than today's you know uh feeling that's very creepy, that things are you know uh tracking us in the back uh without us knowing, that creates an untrusting relationship between the brand and the customer. We're we're pulling towards uh uh a different type of business model, uh, which will basically create a lot more um ability to personalize your customers' uh experience than you can with just tracking them without or or tricking them, let's say, into giving you consent to do something with their data. Now, where did the uh idea come from? As you said in your introduction, I'm really a financial technologies guy, more of a data type of person uh throughout my career. But this started with a personal story. Uh my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. We went to the hospital and I had to sign a few documents, as most people, most parents that go to the hospital. I didn't really know, and you always say, I don't know what I'm signing, and you're filling in a couple of uh information. But what happens is that soon enough we started getting bombarded by medical device companies uh advertisements, and it was really uh a barrage of that advertisements in multiple different channels, and that really upset me because it was my son's condition, and I didn't really mean for that to leak anywhere out. It's not illegal what they did, but uh it's still creepy, and I wanted to change that, and therefore, you know, started One Creation in order to change that for the brands.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Well, I I'm sure everyone listening can identify with creepy. It is the worst thing to be called creepy, and the difference between being creepy and giving someone the attention they want is their essentially their consent to get your attentions. And uh that is the essence of any great relationship. Hey, don't be following me.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Yeah, I mean, everybody doesn't like uh marketing uh campaigns towards them that are not personalized. That's one thing. So it's an important thing to try and personalize your customers' interaction. You will gain more from a return on investment related to that. But then how do you do that, especially in an age where AI is going to be uh implemented, then there's gonna be hyper-personalization. Now, the question, how do you do that ethically? And we propose a different business model uh to do that. And there are many mechanisms and issues related to this, you know, the regulatory side and uh um and what's happening with uh third-party cookies uh and cookie deprecations, but I'm sure we're gonna get to that uh at some point.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Well, I mean, how did your how did your vision for the product change as you started uh going about developing it?

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Let's say there was transparency between us, and I told you that I'm gonna use your data and I'm gonna share it with another company that's gonna sell it to a marketer. Uh, and at least you said yes to that, but it was presented in that level of transparency, and I also maybe rewarded you for that, and most importantly, time, because once data is somewhere, um, you know, they could be used and reused after that, and that's not what you want. So you want to be able to potentially control the time that I'm using your data with, full transparency, right? If I can do that, I potentially can get a lot more uh data from you. Now, the question is, how can I enforce this? How can I create a technical mechanism that if I told you that I'm only gonna use your data with this person and I'm only gonna, you know, certain activities with your data and it's actually gonna expire after a week, how do I enforce that technically? And that's really where we started with the product, meaning the ability to control how data is gonna be used remotely. And uh, can that be done? And that was really the the question that we were asking, and it was more around data authorization and the use of personal data downstream. We didn't change, but we enhanced that that experience with also the ability to ask and digitize the preferences of the customers. And when I say digitize preferences, it's not necessarily don't call me or don't email me. I'm talking about really down to the uh you know attribute level of what I'm using. I'm gonna use your GPS location because I'm offering a new service that uh every time you pass next to a Starbucks, you'll get 20% off if you walk in. That's a very transparent way of why I'm gonna use your data, but it's uh I'm already collecting your GPS location. By the way, I'm just confirming that this is your preference, and I'm gonna reward you with that 20%. Right? And this would last maybe for two or three months or uh holidays or whatever it is, um, the transaction. And this creates trust over time because you're rewarded to it, and you will get a message at the end of that period of time that says, Hey, Daryl, remember that you gave us this permission. This preference could either be continued and here is another reward, or it could be don't do anything, and the data will actually, you know, self-destruct or be deleted or archived at the brand site. That's a relationship where it would lead to more and more preferences over a longer period of time and a relationship that's built on trust, and that's what we mean when we say trust.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

Well, you know, it also uh very neatly addresses the problem of uh data degradation, which most marketers are very familiar with. It's like, you know, you you you want your data fresh uh because then it's relevant. The older it gets, the more questionable it gets. And by having a mechanism that essentially says this data is getting old, we better ping this customer and uh you know re uh get their consent once again that uh A, we can we can have your data, and B, that these attributes that we've assigned to you are still correct, that's that's a nice fringe benefit of having.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Well, actually, that's a very good uh very good observation, um, Darryl, because uh it's not just about how fresh uh the data is, it's about uh being able to go back to people rather than having a finite preference selection at one time in the customer experience. So as you're onboarding the customer and he's moving from uh unknown to known and you're trying to get him to rewrite his T's and C's, and then you bury certain preferences somewhere in the T's and C's rather than saying, hey, we're gonna let you create a dynamic preference wallet for yourself. And you don't have to answer all of these questions now. Every time, you know, we'd like to ask you for something, would you like to get you know this flavor of pet food or that flavor of pet food? Is that, you know, uh, would we pay you for the convenience of answering that? And the data will only last for the campaign's period of time, right? Uh, then you can start creating personas that are not based on a on a Russian roulette, basically. Would he sign don't market to me anything in the in in today's preference centers, okay, which are very high level. Don't market, yes, market, email communication, no communication, right? That's what's currently available. Uh, if you bother actually seeing the preference center, right? What we're talking about is much more deeper in terms of your behavior or what are you interested in and all that stuff, but you keep control of those preferences in your own wallet, each one given by the brand to each one of its customers. And that's the way to personalize the customer experience, each one with his own uh preferences.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Well, that that that's a uh first, it's giving a lot more control to consumers than they're used to. Uh and uh certainly for for someone like like myself, that uh, you know, I prefer salmon cat food, but my cat definitely will not eat any fish flavored anything. It's it's it's chicken or nothing for her, and she's really making the decisions. So I think having that control in her hands is probably a better idea. But in terms of gathering all of those many facets of customer preferences, how do you contrast what one creation is providing versus say a CDP platform? And incidentally, we just had our very first uh Gartner report on CDP come out.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Yeah, yeah. I saw it. Congratulations to uh the top three at uh at the quadrant, I believe it was Treasure Data and uh Salesforce and Tillion and those uh companies. Congratulations to them. Uh each one you know does different things, and each CDP is there's no one, you know, the same CDP. But what you could contrast with the functionality here is number one, anything that's digitized in terms of the campaign towards the customer can be embedded anywhere uh in the customer journey. And there are three types of preferences that could be uh collected: either confirming an existing uh preference, like I spoke about the GPS location that we already collect about you, either confirming a product preference, you know, I'm interested in this type of product or that type of product, or confirming or creating new preferences in the form of new questions in order to fill a certain gap that you have in your customer's 360 uh view. Those are the three different capabilities that the platform provides and could be embedded anywhere. Once that data is collected, it's in real time then fed into a CDP that then interacts with their next best action engine. And then you could immediately create a loop between what you've collected in terms of the customer's immediate preference. Let's say I'm checking out and I'm buying two pizzas and Domino's pizza. And the engine figures out that I'm buying two pizza every Friday and asks me a question. Would you please tell me if you're gluten intolerant? And if you do, this purchase is free. And if you do that, you actually go like, click, yes, okay, I am gluten intolerant. Uh, and that fades into the CDP. The CDP then realizes that you have somebody that's gluten tongue that potentially is buying pizza for his children. And now you can get another coupon immediately in the next based action to go end the same experience and give him something much more personal for a gluten-free product that Domino's Pizza provides. So that's how we enhance the CDP experience by being able to bring in other types of real-time preferences into the CDP to be analyzed, appended, uh, acted upon, and creates what I call a personalization loop.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

So it's it's almost like you're creating a one question or two question survey to gather that data. You're not going out there and and hitting your customers with 15, 20, could you take the next three hours of your life to tell us more about how much you love us, uh, which is why why people are not responding to surveys anymore. It's just one question.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

So the the point is again, it's about personalization. When you uh when you open a new account at Netflix or at uh X or something like that, you're actually selecting certain preferences and genres for the for the algorithm to work, okay? To be able to tell you what you're interested in to recommend certain things for you. That's a personalization activity. The same thing needs to happen in multiple different locations. Uh uh, we'll call it trust building experiences. And yes, if you are collecting new preferences in the form of a short survey, we don't recommend more than two questions. You know, it's a matter of how do you interfere with the customer's experience, but you have to reward them with something that's relevant and proportional to what you're asking. And that's where you can use the tool to run different A-B tests and figure out what is the equilibrium point that adds the right reward, the right location for that uh interference in your in your customer experience. But it has to be completely relevant. And what we didn't speak about is what we spoke about in the beginning, which is the trust factor, where you're adding transparency for exactly why you're asking that question. Okay, and then you are uh adding a period of time when that preference will expire. And at the end of that preference time, that will create, uh, according to our existing experience, 50% more chances that the person that you would have clicked, I'm not interested in to continue in this uh path, and I'm not I don't want the reward, or I don't want the this experience. Uh 50% more will actually click through the experience and will withstand the period of time.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

So you've got a great set of metrics that you're building on, you know, how to not annoy your customers.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Well, not annoy the customers, but still work in a very tight privacy environment that is gonna uh, and of course, the whole you know blocking of the third-party data that used to provide us with the ability to try and append and infer what really Daryl wants and what is he doing. Is he buying it for himself or for his wife? Is his children or not? There's a many holes in the 360 understanding of what Daryl is that less about what do you think about the product, but more about what Daryl really is from a 360 perspective. That is all done in the CDP. We're just another tool to provide that CDP with the ability to collect preferences in real time and enhance that 360 you know experience and then reward for that with both transparency and an equivalent, you know, value exchange. So security needs to be there, transparency needs to be there, and the exchange of value, those three things provide a build of trust and a different business model to be able to start getting you used to maybe interfering a tad bit in your customer experience, but you know that this experience did not collect anything in the back, no cookies. You know, you're feeling a lot more, a lot less creepy, and maybe would give up, depending again where the equilibrium of the reward and the exchange of the value and the period of time and all these different circumstances. It it's a win-win situation for any brand that's thinking, how do I work in a cookie less environment?

SPEAKER_00 18:31

And how do I ask relevant questions at the you know at the right time, but just just one or two, kind of a friendly investigation.

unknown 18:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Versus just can also be confirming existing uh preferences. So we just ask you, hey, can we use your GPS location? We're already collecting that, right? Or we can ask you which product uh are you interested in a mortgage or a credit card right now? You don't need to answer more than that, and then you don't need to answer big preferences that are static. And that creates progressive, you know, uh persona building according to their preferences. So you don't go all out in the beginning and then get 40%, they go like not interested to hear from you again.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Well, I know that you've had an opportunity to engage with some major brands already that have uh OneCreation up and running and providing value to them. What's what's been your favorite business case uh to date of what clients are using it for?

SPEAKER_01 19:31

I could tell you what is a favorite use case of mine. It's still in in pilot state, so it's not uh you know then widely used, but it's uh my favorite one. But although uh you know, we had we started in the financial services side, so we had a lot of um um experience in places where banks created partnerships with with other uh brands, either grocers or airlines or those types of partnerships, and created different types of cards where we provided a lot of help in moving the unknown and the personalization that you have in one of the retailers' data, and to be uh added on top of it the financial data, which created uh a much better service for the higher echelon executive uh member reward systems for existing you know, card and uh and grocery type of uh partnerships. Um, however, uh I'm always a dreamer, and therefore that's why I want to talk about uh you know this this really exciting uh use case. And it connects, and what is exciting about it is that it connects multiple different aspects of what you know preferences or what Daryl's uh persona would look like into a service. So let's assume that Zohar uh was 10 pounds overweight, and I wanted to lose some pounds, let's say 10 pounds, and I can actually connect my Apple Health or whatever is the other device that's collecting health information about me, and I can connect that to one of the appliances in the house, which will then generate uh chat GPT type of you know, personalized menus that if I do follow, would be presented, let's say, on the fridge or on the microwave or whatever, the oven or whatever there is a screen today, right? And if I follow these, uh I will be able to you know lose this 10 pounds in the next, let's say, eight weeks or something like that. Imagine now one creation standing in the middle and allowing for the customer to create a preferences kind of profile, which will allow for other types of ecosystem members to come in, such as the grocer. And if you then give consent and preferences around you know the menus that were created, you can create very personalized type of services that will, let's say, look like a HelloFresh, but much more personalized, you Know because it has your health information and it's considering the fact that you're trying to lose 10 pounds, and all of that based on an ecosystem that could include another bank or a card that's preferred in that ecosystem and other types of members that connect basically health information, you know, it could be insurance as well and other types of companies, right? But to collect health information, which is kind of precious for the customer, but gives you a very good utility and combines a lot of these, you know, uh both AI and privacy concerns around the data that you're providing. And that's really one of the ultimate type of use cases that I'm really excited uh to be able to execute with a partner.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Let's talk a little bit about, you know, the we have talked about you integrating with CDP. CDP's being uh a great repository for this uh first-party data. What what sort of integrations do you have live at the current time?

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah, so we're integrated into Claudio and into Segmin. And what we've done is we've actually created a native type of API hook that can connect to any downstream CDP. And that means that uh literally with not a lot of uh knowledge, um uh even marketers uh, yes, can actually go through a simple wizard on the platform that can connect the flow of the preferences and the real-time information that we're collecting. This is not like end of the week, uh, here's a Word document with the results of the uh of the of the preferences and the um the answers and all those permissions. Uh, it flows immediately downstream and through this hook that we've created, you can connect it to any downstream uh CDP which will take that data in, and then there's an additional integration of what's done being done with that data, but that's done inside the CDP, meaning it goes to the next engine or the next best action type of engine in order to automate you know uh that process as well.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Well, uh, you know, so so obviously you're giving you those marketers a low-code front end to determine where where that data goes, but that uh I believe.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

We also allow them to build campaigns through that um GUI. We we also allow them to, as and you called it correctly, a no-code uh interface. Uh you you also have um uh an ability to create multiple different campaigns and then to literally click a button and copy the code onto any property, meaning your website, your mobile application, your email as a link inside the email, your text if you'd like to uh have a text sending um system. All of that is basically a marketer can finish a campaign, which will say, as I told you, I'm using, I'm gonna use this. I need your preference or I need your confirmation that this is what you're interested in. And for this amount of time, for this amount of reward, it creates a code. It gets you go to your website or to any of those um marketing automation side of those platforms or any marketing automation platforms, and you can integrate that code, which will appear as an embedded part of you know your website, your mobile application automatically, literally with a few clicks of a button.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

Previously, the solutions that you developed for the financial services industry uh are different from OneCreation in a fundamental way, in that OneCreation is a cloud native, API-led solution with microservice architecture. And I'd like you, just from your experience, to just describe how that has made OneCreation's functionality easier to deploy and uh a faster processing engine than what you've worked with prior.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Well, it's fun, you know, uh given how many times I tried this in the past and how many times, you know, we built products together with other uh other engineers. You know, it's it's much more intuitive and easier and faster to build cloud native architecture. What we've done is we've provided two types of access controls to our API, either through a SaaS service where you're connecting the API, and we're a back-end um cloud that that collects those preferences and sends it to your um cloud. Uh that's the easiest, um uh cheapest, uh, fastest way to integrate our solution into your existing workflow. Um it's really, really fast, uh uh, really easy to integrate. We also considered, well, because we started in the financial services side, to uh provide an installed version where you install this on your cloud as well. But we are um supporting something called Kubernetes, and it's which is a virtualization type of uh and and you know and and uh uh uh containerized um type of deployment, and that's already available for both AWS and and Azure. And you can go to the AWS marketplace and literally download the app to your cloud and and see what's the next steps in terms of integrating it um downstream and upstream to your CDP and to your marketing automation platform.

SPEAKER_00 27:38

Let's let's switch gears here because uh we we uh we're I'm talking with you and you're you're a veteran founder. This is uh is this your third or fourth startup?

SPEAKER_01 27:51

This is my fifth, actually. If you can, you know, uh and and when I say you know, not all of them, I was the actual founder, you know, I was a co-founder and and and a couple. Um, but uh yeah, I've been I've been uh I have a lot of scars on my uh back uh you know from this type of an experience, but it's an extremely uh exhilarating one.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

Yeah, we we've okay so we've established that you're a masochist, and you you clearly enjoy uh self-flagellation, but what has been your biggest challenge as a founder this time around? That's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Um my biggest my biggest challenge is education, and when I say education, meaning being able to get really, really quickly, you know, in retrospect now I look at this and then to get as quickly as I can to um the message that started this podcast. What does one creation do and how does it differ than any type of other solution? To get to that message with a very complex technical uh solution that's very advanced and uses you know tomorrow's technology and not today's technology, you know, a founder that's technical or that has some technical background might might consider uh uh expressing or uh amplifying the technical aspects of the solution rather than the functional or meaningful or what solution are you solving and how differently you're doing it. And that's really the biggest challenge that I think I went through uh in the beginning of the company's uh history.

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Well, let's talk about your first startup.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

It was a company called View Trade. It was a company I I um uh you know I came to the United States a little later than most people uh would come in their lives. I came in a diplomatic um uh mission and I then stayed here and uh went to school and then started in a working in a bank, basically, uh in uh in a trading capacity, and uh started that uh company by uh asking a couple of my colleagues and boss to to leave uh the bank and to start uh to start the company. Um so that really how I had that already from the first uh job, and uh um you know that that was my first experience. And it was in the commodity space and commodities and equities digitization space.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

So you headhunted people. Yeah, I you know, I I real from the heart, well done.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Well as a young, as a young, as a young person, you know, to look at that, um, the difference between me, of course, and many other people my age at that time, and maybe I was 27, I think, at the time, was that I was, you know, I had a military background, so I definitely think that veterans um, you know, get to become more mature than the average person because of what they see and what they do, and um and take things in a much more mature way and and a very pragmatic way. Look, if you want to start a company, you better have uh a couple of people that will help you out and that believe in your vision. And if it had to be had hunted from uh within the company, the financial company that we were working in, then that's how it happened. And and and two uh poor souls uh came came with me and they were pretty senior, I believe, at that organization.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

So you've uh mentioned that Andy Brown has been a mentor.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Well, the prestigious Andy Brown.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

The prestigious Andy Brown. I didn't know he had that moniker, but yeah, I like it.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

I like it. Uh he's British, so you know you have to you have to give them that rights. You have to get him some some sort, I'm sure there's some uh prestige, sort of uh lineage, lineage um some somewhere there. But Andy is a wonderful man and a very, very smart man. And I learned very early in my life that if you do find somebody that's a kinder spirit and that appreciates maybe who you are and finds you almost like as a diamond in a ruff, um uh then then you should cherish that and you should listen and use that person. And I think everyone in their careers need to find somebody, maybe in their lives, find a mentor. Um, it's something I would recommend to everyone. And good mentors are there for you at all the time, and they and they give it to you straight. Andy is very knowledgeable. He used to be the CTO of Merrill Lynch and a couple of other very famous organizations. Uh, he saw me in one of the interviews that I interviewed for a position with him, and I think the answer was uh you need to go and do start a company and not uh go into the bank. And that was uh great advice. Uh and that was, I believe, either my first or second company.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

So he saw in you some the the entrepreneurial muscle, and he said, Look, you're not somebody who's going to fit in to a role. You have to create it, you have to go out there and make something new uh to realize your. So you've had to go out and raise funds, as most startups do. What are what are your thoughts and or or lessons that you've learned thus far on the uh dog and pony show circuit?

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Wow. Uh it's been very challenging in the last four years, I would say. Maybe three years, okay. Uh challenging, and I see it still challenge being challenging in 2024 for early stage companies to gain enough money to really exercise and to have enough stamina with the first round to last for for enough time to exercise what they wanted to do uh technically and and and also from a go-to-market perspective. So it's been challenging to get large sums of money, although I've seen you know successful companies uh do that. I I would say the lessons that I learned is that don't ask for money too early. Um, lesson. Number two is do a lot of research on which VCs or which uh early angels or whatever your stage you are are are actually experts in your field and show that in that port in their portfolio and that they're in their uh activity. There's a lot of people out there that just would um be glad to talk to you so they could learn something new about the market, but not but not really have any intent to invest in your uh in your area of expertise. And I would recommend that you that you do your research uh and have a simple pitch towards those uh people in terms of exactly what's your problem you're solving and how how you're gonna go to market with it.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

So, in terms of you know your next round, your next raise, what kind of investor do you think would make the best partner for you?

SPEAKER_01 36:04

An investor that believes in the vision that the business model of how today's you know personalization effort works, today's digital marketing infrastructure works, is not tomorrow's for all the reasons that we've spoken about in this in this podcast. And that you know, the uh and that the future is near. Meaning if you looked at the currently a McKinsey report that just came out that that talked about um the problem with the deprecation of of cookies, and and basically the the main answer or the main uh bullet out of it that I took out is that companies that will continue relying on third-party data in order to try to personalize their customers' experience will pay approximately 20% more in cost in order to reach those same services, unless they changed their business model to the one that we've described today. That's the kind of investor that I would want to partner with. Uh now, when is it gonna happen? Look, the product is now tested and and uh you know and used. Uh, it needs to be scaled to other areas that we're working on right now. So it's really uh uh a scaling exercise, and that's the type of partners if they are uh they understand what's what's involved in that and are willing to be part of that. Um those are the people that we'd love to have a chat with.

SPEAKER_00 37:43

Sounds like someone that uh uh who really appreciates the uh the complexity of the Martech landscape when it comes to personalization and realizes that uh the existing set of solutions that are out there are not uh providing the data that uh the customers need and uh are going to be out of compliance is another issue that's rapidly coming uh to the fore in places like California and New York that are passing GDPR type legislation. Now, in terms of uh just what it's like to be with Zohar day to day, I mean, this has been perfectly pleasant, at least from my end. You may be miserable, but you know that that's really not the point. You know, how would you describe the culture that you've created there at one creation?

SPEAKER_01 38:45

In one word, empowerment. That's the when you're a small team, you need to know that everyone is doing everything, not just what they were supposed to do on a daily basis, but everything in order to make sure that the team succeeds and that the product that they deliver is great and that you know they're safe together. That needs open communication. But know that if I if if you have something to do and it's your responsibility that you're gonna do it and that you're empowered to think differently, and that you're empowered to bring it up and bring it up whenever you want, as fast as you can, uh, not waiting for anything. It doesn't have to be done in a in a meeting or anything like that, but bring it up and have new ideas all the time, and you're empowered to do those and then to exit uh execute it that way. We discuss it, of course, but you know, uh, if you met my um my co-founder, Young, this is our second company together, uh she's a tough lady and she can uh she can do whatever she wants. And she I've empowered her to, she's the head of product that where the product goes, she understands the long-term vision, but she knows which priority comes first. And I try not to argue with that. Although I do argue, but not, you know, that's her decision. Right? So it's all about empowerment.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

Well, I I believe that there's quite a few people that you've worked with previously that have joined you yet again for uh what I assume what what quite clearly is not another round of abuse, but a round of empowerment. So kudos to you. Uh I love that. I love that. You know, I am I am a headhunter, and uh I am sensitive that uh you may in fact have a role right now that you need to hire someone for. And uh if you'd like, by all means, share it with the network. Is there any is there anyone you need to hire right now?

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Well, you mentioned regulations passing in California, but massive, more stricter regulations are passing in Europe and in the UK. And we would love to get help from you know uh a young, uh, excited uh individual that wants to, you know, uh wants to basically uh take advantage of these regulations that are moving all towards a model that will require our technology and try to get, you know, and work on our sales and development and business development uh team to cover those territories. Uh that's something that I'm interested in, in potentially looking at uh someone uh that could help us and would have the right uh either attitude, which is the most important thing that I hire for, you know, skills I can teach you, but attitude is really important that you're a go-gooder and that you know that this is the uh you know entry floor to to this ride. And if you'd like to join us, we would you know really, really like to look at your resume.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

Outstanding. Any final thoughts, Omar?

SPEAKER_01 42:07

Well, no, listen, I'm I'm uh going through a process right now that's uh called trying to educate uh the brands and the uh the audience about what's the value of one creation and what problem it's solving. And I hope this was you know a good chapter in that. And I really wanted to thank you for the opportunity uh to speak to you and to your audience.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

Sora, it's been my pleasure. And uh thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Mar Talks. Please leave a review and a rating on your platform of choice. We're available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. To find out more about how the Rosenstein Group can help you find the right leaders for your client development teams in Martech and e commerce, please visit our website, Rosenstein Group.co.