E1: What the highest growth B2C businesses are changing about their Marketing & Sales

In this episode, we had the pleasure of discussing several topics with the CEO of mParticle and VP of Performance Marketing at SoFi. mParticle is a Customer Data Platform and SoFi (NASDAQ: SOFI) is an online personal finance company. 

‍

Here are the key takeaways from our conversation: 

1. How Apple’s recent changes in its privacy policy has pulled the rug out from all marketers. 
2. Brands today need to have a first-party data strategy with a direct relationship to their customer. 
3. Your attribution models and the intention with which you build them should be tied directly to budget and resource allocation decisions. 

‍

In this episode you will learn: 

• What are the fastest growing B2C companies changing in their marketing and sales strategy?
• How do marketers think about the trade-offs on spending on ‘walled garden’ channels such as Facebook versus other channels?
• How does the evolution of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) landscape impact the role of marketers?

To learn more about everything Outbound Contact Center, read more posts at regal.io/blog or email us at hello@regal.io.

Transcript

Alex: 0:00

Mike, you have like a very interesting seat given you guys, you know, send data to all the platforms that marketers are using. Like where are you starting to see people sort of spend more money, spend more time and tension?

Michael: 0:10

Yeah. Well I think that there's obviously been this huge story around like the explosion of, of data over the course of the past few years. There's also been this explosion of, um, places to send that data to and opportunities. Leverage that data to do cool things. Um, you know, you start to throw like privacy into the mix and it complicates it. You throw some of the changes that have been thrust upon everybody by like Apple and, and, and Google into the fold. And it goes from like complicated in, in nature to like somewhat complex. And so I think, um, yeah, to your point, like the walled gardens were once, uh, a place that represented like a bit of an easy button where you could do user acquisition at scale, and it was like pretty cost effective. Yeah. Um, but like the changes with like iOS 14.5, like that kind of pulled the rug out from, from underneath everybody. So now what you see is just a, a ton of testing across a wide variety of channels, whether. the other walled gardens, whether that's like DSPs, um, using like contextual targeting or using other signals to, to try to engage users. Or they're just also like making that migration from dumping a bunch of money into user acquisition and doubling down on just like building better customer experiences and retaining users and kind of putting the onus on them. to say, you know, it's, it's harder to acquire a user, so I'm gonna do more to keep them around. Yeah. And yeah, and I think that's been the big, the big shift.

1:57

Oh

Alex: 1:57

no. Yeah. And I've doubled down on that. I think the story, the headline that a lot of people hear is, you know, apple made privacy changes, thus people are leaving Facebook. But I think actually underlying that, there's something different. There's a different sort of theme that's happening that we hear from a lot of customers, which is, The larger B2C brands, you know, whether it's in retail or more considered industries, like in finance, realized that by working through those walled gardens, they lost all connection with the customer. They had no ownership over the customer. The customer acquisition happened through the platform. The, you know, the, uh, winback happened through the platform, cross sell happened through Facebook. They didn't own the customer. Uh, you know, Amazon being the other great example where a lot of times, like you actually had no ownership over the customer. You know, all the orders came through Amazon. and I think in retail, people first learned the, the risk to this when Amazon started having white label brands. And I think now people are starting to see actually that the same risk exists for other industries where, you know, it may not be Amazon, but if you're on Facebook and you're relying on that to have that customer relationship, Facebook can all of a sudden send all that traffic to somebody else and you're, you're shit outta luck. So I think brands are realizing that having a first party relationship with that customer is transformational, whether it's you. Over SMS or voice or you know, email or, you know, through the website, you know, they're changing their spend and to point their investment so that it's not, you know, only through those walled gardens for sure.

Michael: 3:14

Yeah. You're, you're, you're also seeing, like, you've seen it in the whole movement, like direct to consumer as well, so it, it extends into like the c p. Space. Mm-hmm. it extends into like the, the, the automotive space. Like you can't outsource your relationships to, with your customers, to somebody else. You can't rent your results. Like the, the center of gravity has like fundamentally changed. And so I think like all these things are like kind of orbit around the same general themes, but they're all part of the, of the same overarching.

Alex: 3:49

Yeah. And you know, so Kevin, to, to this point, like obviously Uber was famous for being very data at first, and I assume SoFi is as well. Like, how do you guys, now that you have so many channels that you have to be testing, like how do you guys manage it? Like how are you able to tell what's working and what's not?

Kevin: 4:05

Yeah, I think that, you know, there's. obviously like tracking the user and owning that owner, like owning that user relationship, you know, is hypercritical and capturing that information of your users, you know, and really building upon that is critical. I think that measuring across channels, it's a very tricky one. Right. I think me and you have talked about this before where you know the typical marketer is like you. You wanna start with a way of measuring. So you start with every, every model is flawed. You start with the one that's easiest first, right? Yeah. And that's some type of touch base type of attribution. And I think a lot of, you know, companies and appear, a lot of people on this call are very familiar with that and probably is how we, they certainly do today. But over time you start to understand it, look, When you're making decisions based on this model, this touch base, you are naturally going to skew your decisions based on the wall of garden channels. The channels that do require do have a lot of data on their users, so they know how to optimize for that one metric, right? And I think over time, what I saw at Uber especially is, you know, we were making decision as model and it works well in the beginning, uh, you know, when you're trying to scale. But over time, Your users' behavior change, the type of audience you're talking to now are not the first ad, uh, first product adopters. Their behaviors take more time to actually move them to the consideration phase, and you kind of have to rethink the way that you're measuring and, and it ties all to privacy as well, right? Like that touch base attribution becoming more and more difficult with the privacy changes. Not alongside the iOS, you know, Google now enforcing their ga i, ab anonymized, uh, being anonymized as well. Cookies are eventually going away and I. Naturally, you're moving more towards a higher type of media mix model type of environment as well, right. To truly understand the impact you really have to understand the incrementality of your media holistically. And what you sacrifice is the granularity of things. And I think that's where the industry is evolving to in the long term. And that's kind of how we progress as well. When I was. Especially when I was at Uber, where we actually went to a solution where we had Mex model for really measuring the impact of our marketing dollars. But you leverage something like touch base attribution for more granular optimization.

Alex: 6:07

Yeah. Yeah. I'll pick on, on one. Uh, you know, everyone now talks about SMS marketing. It's been very hot. I'll pick on s m s marketing a little bit. They're probably, I find the, the most egregious offenders. Uh, taking credit for any user that happens to get an SMS from that channel. You know, anybody who's gotten an sms, you know, and converts within seven days must be attributed to sms. And I think the reality, you know, and that one as an example, is in many businesses, uh, you know, The user is getting, is giving a phone number and getting that SMS before anything else happens. So it's your point on like, you know, sort of the funnel of that user and user behavior. So because the user is getting that text very high in the funnel, like if you would, you know, attribute anything that got a text to that channel, it's always gonna be wrong. You know, it's, you're just gonna be taking conversions that really are happening through other channels or would've happened through other channels, if not, so a lot of what we like work with clients on is how do you look at holdout groups to make. You know, you're not, uh, you're not looking at it incorrectly and you're saying, Hey, what is the hold app group, you know, in terms of what is performance without sms? And then if you add in sms, what is performance there in terms of Lyft? Not in terms of like absolutely how many people saw an sms. It's a crazy way to attribute the, the, the bookings. Yeah. But I guess,

Kevin: 7:23

sorry, just hopping on that, Alice, I think something that people always, you know, miss out on is really think. What is your intention of the way you're measuring, right? Like what is it really built for? Um, you know, when it comes to your example, you give s m s taking credit, you know, the idea is that they want to know what's really driving what, right? So they have this attribution model that's flawed, that gives credit to s m s because the interaction or another channel. But when you really think about it, like what is this attribution model meant to change what decision you're meant to make for it? And most of the time, from my understanding, is also when it comes to budget allocation. and maybe resource allocation. Yeah, so when you really think about it, is it if it, a lot of it's for budget allocation. Would you really make a decision to allocate more budget to SMS and email? Like, or would you, you know, allocate more to the channels that actually require budget? As in like, let's say if this, if this attribution said SMS and email was poor and didn't get anything. would you really stop emailing SMSing your, your team, your, your customers? Yeah. And most of the time the answer is no. Like everyone that comes in, you still wanna build that relationship with you and engage with them. So you're not really making decisions based off of that. And I think that's something that's really important when you decide like what model worked for you. Cuz the intention is, is what's really gonna make that decision.

Michael: 8:37

Right? Yeah, I agree. It's all connected too, right? Like you can pull budget away from seemingly less performant channels, but then it has like a ripple effect too, right? Like you, you can't get into this like reductionist mindset because then all you'll be left with is retargeting and then like that will dry up eventually. And it's like, oh, well that's perfectly efficient. It doesn't work that way. for sure.

Alex: 9:04

I mean, some of the channels I wanted to ask about explicitly like we've seen, so I remember, uh, when we were in the home services space, we saw like the resurgence of, uh, direct mail, which, you know, for a while like was considered dead. Like nobody wanted to use direct mail. And now all of a sudden you have lab, you have pebble posts, you have, uh, share local media that with the shared mailers have become very popular. you know, I think like we've seen a lot of customers have success with this sort of more programmatic version. So to me it's like this funny trend now and obviously we're in the voice industry, which is breaking back voice. So there's this funny trend of like, what was dead is now coming back, like channels that, you know, became underpenetrated have become useful again. But what have you guys seen, uh, see or what have you seen customers do in direct mail? Like, have you seen people use that in any

Michael: 9:49

interesting ways? Kevin, you, you go and then I'll, I'm happy to follow. Yeah. I think, you

Kevin: 9:57

know, I think the, the, the unique parts of direct mail is how do you layer on. A lot of third party data sources, you know, to make your direct memo more effective. Right. Yeah. I think that the mailing mechanism, the distribution mechanism somewhat has evolved a little bit, but still very much is the same. Right. As far as, um, I think that the unique part is now that bringing some of the learnings when it comes to incrementality experiment, how do you layer third party data? To enrich your, your DM experience, so you're targeting the right people. I think that those things have evolved and we're still continuing to see a lot more players coming in to help with that. Right. And the beauty of direct mail is you do have, you know exactly who you're sending to. You can also do a holdout, right? I think that's the benefit of direct mail versus some prospecting channels you have, especially on the wall of

Michael: 10:41

gardens. Yeah. Um, so I feel like for some, for some brands, like direct mail never even really kind of went out. Like it's, it's still highly effective. Um mm-hmm. not for me as a consumer, cuz like, I'll just let my mail pile up and then I'll throw it out. You're that guy. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm totally that guy. I'm horrible, horrible with mail, but like, you know, the, the, the, the majority of the country. Behaves very differently. Um, so I know for like a lot of financial services brands, like Direct Mail has been one of their most performant channels for, for a while. Um, if I can, like, I, I wanna maybe step back though, because like, I think one of the interesting phenomenon that I think everybody is dealing with is like, and, and, and Alex you alluded to this before, it's like you have so many channels and so many partners and so many vendors to choose from. Like how do you make sense of it? And I think like what happens. Every organization that that like we see is like they're driving growth tactics start to fatigue. So they start to outgrow certain partners or certain channels. So new vendors get added, maybe some get removed, event tracking changes. All this happens across like different platforms, and you have like different development teams own the different platforms. Then you have like all of the, the APIs provided by these vendors. They continue to change and like these changes like start to compound on top of each other. And more campaigns get run and more experiments get run and the cycle repeats and you kinda like, you drive a bunch of growth, you plateau, you do it again, and then you just kinda have to keep throwing more stuff at it. And then when you take into account like the notion that like identity, it is very dynamic. Um, you take into account some of the stuff we were talking about before, the changes from like Apple and, and Google. You take into account new privacy regulation. Um, everything starts to break, right? Like your data breaks, your data scheme is break your data, pipelines break, your APIs, break. Like everything is in this kind of constant state of, of entropy and. I think like to even get to being able to execute across these different channels, you have to think about like, how am I going to adapt to this? Like this data chaos that happens within, within the organization because the best laid digital strategies won't matter if everything is in this state of chaos. So it's like you can't, you can't separate. The, the activation opportunity from like the operational pain, it's all kind of like one and one and the same. Cuz those things are what, like inhibit or undermine your success. Um, and so whether it's direct mail, whether it's voice, whether it's, um, Paid ads or video or whatever it may be. Think about like, how do you navigate all of that change?

Alex: 13:58

Yeah. Oh yeah. I, I, I always, uh, my favorite thing is when, as a marketer, I'd go into whatever the system was and try to figure out, you know, what was the abandoned card event? What was the tra you know, the conversion event? And you have eight different ones. Labeled conversion event. A conversion event, what am I supposed to use for this? So I think, you know, I've definitely lived it. I mean, you know, maybe dig into that a little bit. I think one of the things you and I have talked about in the past is, you know, historically people did not have an event driven infrastructure at all. Like, that was not how companies were set up. They had maybe a C R M, they had a schema of eight different fields. You know, maybe they stored those eight fields somewhere and they'd run a, you know, an ad hoc segment and you know, you know, they'd blast everybody in. One T-shirt size fits all right? They blast everybody the same message. And I think you guys are one of the serenities that have really been out front, you know, converting people to this event-driven system and to a system where, you know, you don't have some of these data issues. maybe talk a little bit to, like, where do you think organizations are now on their tech stacks? Like what, what do you think are the, the, the big, um, uh, pain points, you know, that are causing people to like now move to doing things correctly? Like how's that transition

Michael: 15:05

going in the market? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, like what it boils down to is, um, data maturity, right? So I think. The fact is every organization will face like data quality issues, um, at some point, probably perpetually. Yeah. Um, every organization has to deal with governance and compliance and privacy, regulatory, um, requirements. Um, every organization will want to get data from a bunch of different places, sources and systems. a bunch of different places. APIs, applications, destinations, you name it. And that chaos that I was alluding to kind of makes, it, makes it hard, right? Like it's not that, you know, you can like create this like nice, laid out, highly symmetrical, like beautiful reference architecture and say like, ah, I've, I've, I've got it all working. Like those things almost like never really play out because. what happens inside every organization. Yeah. And, and all the change. So it's like the path to data maturity is really about like, how well can you adapt to, to change. And so various fo like we talked to a, a lot of companies, big and small, domestic and international. Like you can be a big company or a small company and be. very immature or moderately mature, or you can be, um, more like, more expert or, or advanced. Like it's really about the culture and the people that you have. But the things that we try to uncover the tools are one aspect of it. The, the knowledge is one aspect of it. The process, um, the culture is, is certainly an aspect of it. You start to get into the weeds a little bit and it's like, do you have. A customer data strategy. Do you have a strategy around identity? Um, are you thinking about governance and protecting data quality? Um, how many different places are you trying to get data from? And two, are you operationalizing. um, any type of, like, models mm-hmm. like, whether it's like fairly simplistic like customer l t v models or like more elaborate, um, machine learning models. And ultimately the, the goal is to help people become more mature and, and certainly like the event driven streaming architecture really helps with that because you have to be able to move with speed and, and agility and market in the moments that matter. but there's no, um, data pipeline or data platform that will take any company all the way there. It's also about change management and just being able to embrace, uh, a newer, better way of doing things. Yeah, yeah. Kevin, I

Alex: 18:09

know you and I have talked about this before, like how do you, you know, you now run a very big organization, like how do you start managing, you know, across all these different vendors you have and all the different data sources? Like how do you think about doing.

Kevin: 18:23

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, there's, you know, there's always cost associated with it. I think ultimately, you know, we, you know, It's all about priorities, you know? And I, and, and realistically, migrations are expensive. Right. And, um, you know, I think that Mike mentioned a really good point is that culturally too, right? What is, what is the priority and how is that, how, how is our perspective when it comes to having those different systems? Cuz there's also preference, right? When you're working on so many different functions, cross functions, there's also preference on top of it. And I think that, you know, it's really associating. The, the benefit that we would gain from this, what is the cost, which is the migration of it, you know, and how quickly are you growing? Right. I think that those are all, um, contributing factors because I'll say that Uber, I experienced this as well. We went through a lot of data overhaul, and realistically, it's because when you're growing like a hockey stick, your tech infrastructure cannot keep pace, right? And in order to satisfy some of this, you are adding incremental solution to it that, you know, is probably gonna make things more difficult in the future, but it's what's needed at that moment. Right? And it's more about prioritizing, like, hey, do we want to take a stop? Do we want to take that effort to migrate? Or is it actually something that, Hey, we need to prioritize our growth right now. We need to be able to solve this problem. And this takes, uh, precedence over that, right? Yeah. And those are the decisions that are happening perpetually, and it will happen perpetually.

Alex: 19:39

Yeah. Yeah, it's hard for sure. Yeah. Like I said, I remember, I mean, every organization I've been in has issues with data quality. Like, I think it's just a perpetual thing and very different, difficult to overcome. I mean, as you, one of the things I always wonder about, and I I, I wonder your perspective, Mike, like, if I think of, uh, you know, so take, um, I, I think I can talk a little bit about, uh, SoFis in public. Like SoFi uses particle, uses bra. Uses, Rico uses a couple of these tools that are, you know, helping them move data around and, and optimizing these channels. Like, you know, in your market, as you think of like the role of the C D P I see like Segment now extending beyond just being c d P now with what they're calling Twilio engaged, they're actually starting to send s m s send email like there. You know, the Iterable and braces of the world are starting to look more and more like a CD P in some regards. Like they obviously have not built all of the integrations yet. They certainly have the infrastructure. Like how do you think that market's gonna go? Like are there gonna be standalone point solutions, point being a relative word that are sort of CDPs versus the customer engagement software? Or do you think that you'll start extending across actually engaging the customers well through channels or other people in the CDP space? Well,

Michael: 20:54

yeah, it's a, it's a great question and something. You know, the, we have to address quite regularly. Um, so as you can, as you can imagine, I have some views on, on this one. If we, if we take it back to like maybe one of the things that we were talking about. Before, which is like all of the change that's happened in the space, especially like the need for, for brands to be able to, to own the relationship with the customer. Um, well, what does that require? Requires building it really strong foundation rooted in, in first party data. Right. So having a first party data strategy and just, uh, commanding ownership over their, their first party. and, and what you've seen is like CDPs have, have emerged as kind of like the, the leader in helping companies think, um, uh, holistically and um, in some ways objectively about, um, leveraging the, their first party data. And you'll typically hear them talk. Three parts of it. It's like ingestion and segmentation and, and, and activation. Um, and the value is like connectivity across like partners and, and, and channels. Um, to your point, like kind of feels like everybody's a C D P these days. I didn't say it. As long as you're saying it. Well, you know, it's like they're saying it. I'm just like, I'm just, I'm just hearing it and, and repeating. or like everybody has c d P capabilities these days, or like Yeah, you know, you, you, if you listen to like the garbage from like the, the modern data stack, it's like everybody's the C D P killer these days. You, you know, like, let's talk about the job that we are ultimately hired to do. Yeah. It's to help unify data, protect data quality. instantiate a layer of governance so that you're not outta bound from the perspective of like privacy and, and, and compliance. And then be able to connect that data really anywhere. And when you start, uh, bundling together, like campaign execution capabilities, it eliminates that neutrality. And then you start seeing channel conflict inherently, like a platform can't be a. A feature of an application, right? Like the world doesn't work that way. We think about ourselves as, as infrastructure. Yeah. Um, and, and yeah, I, I think like us versus segment, like those days are, are pretty much over because they've been so intertwined with, um, the, uh, the team and, and, and it makes total sense for, for TWI. but does it make sense for their customers and, and for the market? I mean, we've had a ton of customers switch over from segment to to end particle over the course of the past couple years because of that. Um, yeah, so, you know, this is, this is just my view, but like, even, even the part around activation and being, being neutral. I go back to one of the things I was, I was talking about before, which is like, how, how do you focus or like how do you, how do you help people address the need for greater adaptability and resilience and dealing with like all the stuff that's going to break so that you can do the activation part and. you know, the campaign execution tools don't solve for that. The, the reverse ETL tools don't solve for that. Most of the. Application CDPs that just focus on like audience insights. Um, and, and, and activation. Don't solve for that, but you can't just pretend that like everything is like in this like steady state of, of like calmness and, and serenity. Like things break inside every single organization. Every single day. And if you're not dealing with that, you're not actually addressing the problems. Yeah, agree.

Alex: 25:08

I mean, uh, you know, I guess Kevin, you've been on the other side of this as a buyer, or I've been a buyer too, I suppose, but I wonder your, your perspective, like, how do you think about building out your tech stack? Like do you want like one unified application that does everything? Like we were talking about ingestion and, you know, say, you know, connecting the data and actually activating it, or like, do you like having point solutions, you know, where you have, you know, an email marketing tool, a phone marketing tool, uh, you know, a C D P different?

Kevin: 25:34

Yeah, I think it's, I'll say that it's clear the lines between these different technologies are blurring more and more, right? Because companies recognize that there's so much synergies and efficiencies to be gained, uh, for having some certain consolidated systems. But in reality, you know, when you. You know, when you're looking at all these different systems, you know there are certain systems that do things better than others, no matter what. Cuz they have the focus right in that area, and they're focusing on those integrations. They're focused on those features and having a system that does everything. In an ideal world, I'll say yes. But in the real world, do I believe one can do it well in every area? No. And because of that, I feel like you'll always be in the world where you have some solutions that can do multiple things, but then you'll still need some point solution systems. Right. And I think that there are certain things that you need to recognize that hey should be managed in one place that can then speak to these other systems, um, and some of the things that aren't required. I think an example of this, Ma managing your customer journey, right? Mm-hmm. you can manage your customer journey in your E S P or you know, in Embrace or some of the system. You can then manage a different customer journey in another system. RICO is an example of that. You can have a specific journey there as well, but those, if those systems don't talk to those journeys together. That, that becomes a challenge. You're not really building a holistic lifecycle journey, right. Versus having something like a c d P, like and particle that could be the master of your journeys, you know, that speak to the different systems. So, um, so long way to answer your question, but ideal world, yes, but in the real realistically, I just don't, yeah. Don't see that happen anytime soon.

Michael: 27:10

Well, Kevin brings up a, a, a great point too, which is that like n no individual application will have all of the data to map to the entire customer. Right? And so the entire customer journey goes beyond just like the marketing channels, right? There's the. Website or in-app personalization. There's the required measurement. There's like the customer support tools, like a Zendesk for example, right? You have to get data into like your, your analytics and BI stack, right? And so like no one individual application is going to have all of the data that can do it holistically. Like, and that's, that's part of the value that you get from CDPs. And it's also why we've. So steadfast in saying like, we are not going to get into the execution layer. Like we are not going to become a campaign activation system because like while we would have every opportunity to do it, like if, if we were going to do it, we probably would've already done it by now and maybe it would make like. some people's lives easier, like primarily like marketers. Mm-hmm. Um, but customer data infrastructure is for the whole business, including marketing, but not limited to marketers. Yeah.

Alex: 28:30

Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, let's, let's pick on, uh, Twilio a little bit more as, as they're not here. Uh, but, uh, the, the, one of the questions I always sort of find interesting, you know, when you're running these big marketing orgs is for certain, uh, channels, do you use off the shelf products or do you go to a provider like Twilio and build it yourself? So as an example, like do you go and pay for a send grid and build capabilities on top of SendGrid, or do you use like an interval or braze and, you know, use that off the shelf tool? And I'd say by and large, I've found that the more, uh, successful orgs like end up using off the shelf tools so they don't have to invest engineering time in, you know, building a journey builder and connecting with these other systems and doing these things. But it, it feels to me like sometimes, like organizations, they wanna believe they're unique. They wanna believe that they should build it themselves. Like how. how do you, I mean, I guess you see it firsthand, obviously from my particle because you know, I'm sure you have customers, some that have built their own custom systems and some that are using off the shelf ones. Like how do you help guide customers as they're thinking about which way to

Michael: 29:31

go? Yeah, I mean, build versus buy is kind of the, you know, it's the, it's the decision that I think every team has to, has to make. Um, probably continually, and, and one thing I would say is, Um, what we see in inside a lot of organizations is like this, this natural trajectory where like early days of, of a startup, they'll start with like a bunch of third party tools and. it'll work. And then eventually they start to outgrow those tools. They're like, screw this. We can build this. We have engineers and it's like, all right, no more third party tools. We're gonna own everything in-house. And for some reason, like they go down that path, but then they hire like a new how a product or a new executive. And they come in and they're like, well, why are we spend. millions or tens of millions of dollars building systems that like we can just buy off the shelf. Like, and it becomes a, a CapEx versus opex, um, conversation. Yeah. Right. And then they start to like slowly re-embrace third party tools and it's like, it's this kind of weird S-curve. Um, and what I've, what I've found is like, you know, everybody kind of has to like go through that journey on their, on their own pace. Like I can provide'em historical context and we can provide them like the, the pros and cons, but like our job is not necessarily to make those decisions for them, but ultimately it's about getting data from wherever they want to, whatever they want. And most of the time there is going to be internally built tools and third party tools cuz they'll never wanna build. um, like say mobile measurement for, for example, right? Because they have to get access to certain APIs, which just aren't, uh, readily available or like easily accessible. Mm-hmm. Um, I think in, in most cases though, especially when you're looking to connect data to lots of different systems, it's not just like a builder or. um, conversation. It's a build and maintain versus buy. Mm-hmm. So like, yeah, you, you, you think it's a great idea to go out and build and you, you throw a, you know, handful of engineers, but then everything starts changing and everything starts breaking. All the stuff that I've been talking about. The next thing you know, you have like a small division just to keep up with like your internally built stack, which will never move at the pace of innovation that you'll see from. Third parties who are focused exclusively on, on that and nothing else. Yeah, for sure. So

Alex: 32:15

I have a couple more questions, but just for the audience, if you have any questions, put them into the, um, chat and, you know, I can ask those afterwards so, you know, feel free also to direct them at specific people if you like. Yeah. Um, but we have, you know, approximately, you know, 25 minutes left. So, so if those questions please, please add them. So, um, In this industry, like both of you guys have been very successful, you know, obviously, uh, on, on different sides of the quantum one, on the vendor side, on in marketing industry. And one sort of internally, like, one thing I wanted to ask is like, what do you think has made you guys successful, uh, in this marketing industry? Like where, like were there certain people who really sort of push you, where there are certain sort of ways of approaching these problems that you sort of think, uh, you, you use differently or led to success? what made you guys successful ultimately in this marketing industry? I, Kevin, if you wanna, uh, pick on you, if you wanna go first.

Kevin: 33:08

Yeah, I think there's, there's no one, like one size fit all type of way to be successful here. I think that it's more from your approach to your marketing efforts. I think that the one thing that has stuck by with me, that I feel like you know, matters no matter where you go, is just being very customer ex, um, obsessed, live by those principles, understanding that. You want to provide the best experience possible for whoever you're reaching, wherever you're reaching them, right? And the cap you developing your strategy, your capabilities of how to get there. You know, it's all fued by that idea that hey, personalized experience, um, great experiences, great storytelling. Very customer access is what's going to get you your business. And then everything will fall online, right? And you'll apply it differently depending on the business that you're working on, on the audience and the people you're trying to reach to. But knowing that at the end of the day you want to drive the best experience possible that'll leads you to the decisions that you're gonna make when it comes to technology, you're messaging and everything else, right? So fortunately it's, it's very high level, but honestly there's no clear, one size fit, all granular solution that you can apply.

Alex: 34:18

Were there were, was there anybody in your career like that you really credit and you say like that, you know, working for that person really like, taught me something got me there.

Kevin: 34:27

I think, uh, there's, I mean there's, there's a, there's many people, you know, so I, I, I actually don't wanna name anyone cuz I feel like they not feel bad for missing on someone else. Yeah. No, no. So you think everyone, it's okay, but, but I'll credit you look. I'll credit everyone that I've worked with, you know, and, and especially I'll say that if in the Uber organization where I spent a lot of, majority of my time Yeah. On, you know, the leadership there, everything from the general managers there to the early, um, the early folks leading that growth marketing team, you know, Has really enabled me to really spread my wings and really experiment, you know, and really learn, um, by like learn, learn by trial combat, to be honest. And I think that allow me to do so, you know, is, has, has led me to my success. So all of those early, uh, leadership teams there, I

Alex: 35:11

think them tremendously for my success. Yeah. for sure. I mean, it was such an incredible growth story. And, and do you think, like as you're looking at like people who want to go internally and be successful inside of an organization, like, is there any advice you'd give them now? Like, you know, I assume people are sort of earlier in their career or the marketer, like what would you, uh, say to them?

Kevin: 35:33

I think in the performance marketing realm, like. Early on in your career, you know, you're very taught, you, you most performance marketers starts with one particular channel, right? Yeah. They, they get experts in that channel and they expand beyond there. But then you really build your, your habits, your tendencies on my channel being very organized, making decisions based on some type of attribution model. Hmm. And, and then you expand with that knowledge everywhere else. But what happens is you kind of, you're kind of boxing yourself in, right? Because you're actually like, very comfortable. Because guess what? I can take this. I can tie it directly to some data that shows how well I'm doing. Right. And you kind of get into a comfort zone when you're doing that, right? Because I can prove what I'm doing every time. But then that means you're not as, you're not creative, you're not thinking outside of the box. Right? So when I'll say this, people in early and performance market, what I recommend is, hey, It's great to be expert to your channel. It's great to understand the data model, but really don't rely on it. Don't build bad tendencies and really try to always think outside the box, no matter what the data says. What do, what are the customers really saying? Like, what, what do you think makes sense the customer for your product? Right? And really think about that first versus the data, and you can then look for data to maybe help inform your decision, but don't box yourself. And I'll say that's another thing that I was lucky enough to experience early on at Netflix. You know, I'll say that when I joined Netflix, I was there at a pivotal time where we were deciding to become an entertainment company, right? Yeah. And guess what? Every model that existed at Netflix at that time told you not to do it right. It told you not to change your market. You know, it would tell you to. Continue showing these red banners with a yellow button that says Start your free trial. Yeah. Right. And if you made decisions based off of that, we would never, Netflix would never become where it is today. Right. The type of companies today. Right. So that was my first learning experience to really like, Hey, understand data, but don't. Don't rely on it, really think about your customers, think about their business, think about your product, you know, and really st make sure you're able to things outside the box.

Alex: 37:30

Yeah, makes sense. And, you know, and Mike, you, you've built a career sort of on the flip side of the coin where, you know, for 10, 15 years, you know, you, you've now served, uh, marketers and helped them, you know, achieve their goals. Like people thinking about getting in sort of on that side, like, you know, what do you think has made you successful and sort of, uh, same question. Like what advice would you

Michael: 37:50

give. Pretty similar to, to, to Kevin to be honest. Like surround yourself with great people, um, and optimize to, to be able to learn, right? Whether that's like more in the, in the micro, if you're running a campaign or, or an experiment, as long as you're, you have like the structural capacity to be able to learn from it. Like there is no such thing as, as. Um, or just, just in general, right? Like, I know everybody wants to, to move up the ranks and everybody wants to get promoted and bigger title and more money. Like all that stuff comes if you have a growth mindset and if you're just focused on continuing to to learn. And so, you know, tho those two things, I mean, for probably the, the most successful people that I've ever seen. they just have like an insatiable, um, intellectual curiosity, um, that is like, it's never ending. Um, and so like become a, become a learn it all. Right? Um, you know, and, and, and I think like if you do that, there will be no shortage of, of opportunities for, for growth and advancement. And, um, over time it'll definitely be. Yeah.

Alex: 39:13

Yeah, I think it's good advice. So, you know, I didn't see any questions come through, so I'll switch to sort of the last topic I had, which was, let's start looking forward a little bit. You know, we can be futurist for a minute as to what's gonna happen, and I always think it's, it's, uh, interesting to think through like what the next five years will look like, you know, as we start engaging with customers, you know, will it be Google glasses that, you know, people are on? Uh, I guess that one's dead. So not that one but, uh, you know, or some other channel that really becomes big. So like, you know, if I had to make my prediction, I guess, you know, five years from now, uh, you know, I'm actually, I'm very, uh, maybe this is too strong a statement, but I'm, I'm a little bit negative on brands that are just using existing platforms, um, to reach customers. Meaning like if you're only using Shopify to reach customers and you're only differentiation as a brand, like, I'm negative on that. Like, I think like the brands that really survive will be the ones. Learn how to build a differentiated experience by customizing the flows or build differentiated service experience because they do something special where they're, they're differentiating beyond what exists. Like, banking is a great example to me. There's now so many, uh, startups that allow you to build a bank, you know, okay, they're not actually really a bank, so let's leave that aside, but build the infrastructure, you know, and people are only differentiating on brand, and I think the great ones will have to do other things. So to me, like I look for, who are these companies that. Doing something unusual outside of just the, the brand or the channel. But, you know, I guess as you know, we can start with you Kevin, if you want like, you know, think forward five years. Like, I don't know if you think within the SoFi context or just as a marketer, like what do you think is gonna be different five years from now than, than where we're at today?

Kevin: 40:50

Yeah, I think tied to some of the, the things that you just said, I'm aligned with some of the things you mentioned, Alex. I think the only thing, I'll take a step further is I think some of it is are happening today where, you know, we're re I think that in the future people are recognizing that. The brand and the product experience and everything is the same thing. Like there's no single team that owns the brand. You know, marking doesn't own the brand. You may have a brand team and they, they definitely are putting a lot of efforts to it, and they do influence the brand. But guess what? When you come into a horrible experience, that impacts your brand. You come in, you're, you're, you're taking an action and what you expect to happen doesn't happen. That impacts your perception of that brand. Right? So I think we're moving towards that direction that where everyone's recognizing that, hey, everything needs to be more integrated because. Guess what? That everything influences the brand, right? And the product and product goes hand in hand. And even though there won't be, I don't believe there will be a one point solution that can solve all that together. I think that people, uh, marketers are being more cautious, you know, to seeing how are these systems talking together? How do we make sure that hey, this doesn't break the experience for the user, right? So that it's actually missed as possible. Um, I don't know which one is going to be those. So, but I feel like that is the direction more and more so. And I think, um, and I think like solutions like mParticle, you know, being more of the heart of all those systems, you know, are some of the things that are gonna help us get there. Right. Yeah. So, and I'm curious on, on Mike's take on that, and also I'll throw another one in there with like, especially when it comes to identity of like with web three and decentralized identity, like how is that going to impact things as well?

Michael: 42:25

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like one thing that's I think will forever be true is this kind of, um, back and forth rotation between bundling and, and unbundling, right. Aggregation and, and, and disaggregation. Um, you know, I, it's, it's tough for me to say like exactly how things will play out, like in maybe the, the world of, of marketing. I can give everybody. um, a general sense of like, where, where we're going. Um, you know, I've, I've talked a lot about like helping teams build, uh, resiliency through like data quality and through solving for like the, the data governance requirements and using that as the foundation for like activation. We've been in this, in this world that's like, that's become highly fragmented, right? So like the digital experience was once single threaded. And now I think like the, one of the latest, most interesting stats I saw a number of months ago was like the average house has something like a hundred different connected devices. So think about just like all of the data that's being transmitted, even, even passively in, in our daily lives. Mm-hmm. Um, and so there's this need to like, aggregate and, and, and wrangle all of this data, um, and kind of shape it together and make it into this nice kind of pretty picture. Um, but it's all a setup for what are you gonna do next? How do you actually help teams? um, make decisions based on that data drive better personalization. Mm-hmm. use that to make predictions and, and, and automate outcomes ultimately. So, you know, for, for us and our customers, we try to provide as much flexibility as possible, but it requires, um, a whole bunch of like manual configuration. How do we start to. A bunch of that stuff. How do we surface insights and anomalies and opportunities proactively so people can get ahead and stay ahead of opportunities or, or issues as they may arise? Um, so you get into things like, um, certainly as you connect a whole bunch of different channels, like next best action, um, or optimizing towards like the next best outcome, whatever it may be. Um, I think like that's, that's the natural evolution that I think we've, we've long envisioned, and I think this year is the year like where we start to really put our, our, our, our foot forward and march towards that opportunity. Yeah. Like

Alex: 45:11

next best action. What channel to like, does the person prefer? Now it's, it's Monday to Friday during the workday. Look what channel's. Right. Or now it's the evening, or now it's the weekend. Like how do you actually know? Yeah. Yeah.

Michael: 45:21

I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, it's not direct mail.

Kevin: 45:27

noted. Mike is not a fan. Yeah. He's gonna take off. He's not gonna waste 5 cent on, but just piggyback that I. Totally agree on, you know, the data side, you know, the, honestly the machine learning, AI driven side on how we're targeting and how we're reaching people with the next big action. I think in addition to that, in the next five years, I think the whole idea of incrementality applied to that as well. Cuz you're seeing that shift right now, right? Like, Propensity modeling targeting based on propensity model has has, it is not that it was formed before, but has really picked it up the last couple years of people trying to do more and more so, but I don't think the incrementality of that is something that's thought about as well, because a lot of people are associating with, Hey, based on their actions, high propensity, you should target them here, et cetera. I would actually challenge that, hey, those people are the ones that are actually less incremental because a lot of their actions they're taking is showing their hyper propensity and you should actually. Reaching the people that have lower propensity and how do you drive their actions and convince them.

Michael: 46:24

Right. Amen.

Alex: 46:26

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You guys started mentioning also a little bit like AL and machine learning, like I think I have a L I'm a. Maybe, maybe not a cynic but minority viewpoint in this, like, where I've seen AL and machine learning be very successful is with companies like, uh, like ASAP in the customer service space where, you know, they go work for the, the largest, you know, customer service centers in the world. You know, JetBlue has 20, 30, 40,000 customer service representatives and there's enough data that they can start automating some of the responses and doing, you know, next best actions. and where actually the company's savings are big enough that they can afford all of the cost of machine learning. Because actually, like the badly kept secret of machine learning is it's a services business, not a software business, right? The margins are not software margins. It's actually very expensive to keep training these models and updating it constantly. So like there's a, I sort of have this opinion. The same thing will happen within marketing. Where the largest organizations are able to access these very expensive tools to optimize marketing and do this, but it's gonna be very hard for small organizations to do it. So there's gonna be a, an exaggeration of the data mode as this becomes possible for the largest organizations. But you're gonna be at a disadvantage, you know, if you're a, if you're not Netflix, you know, if you're the next one coming up, you're gonna be at a huge disadvantage cuz you don't have the, the, a quantity of good data or the resources to be able to go and spend on machine learning. Yeah. I think a lot of people talk about machine learning, machine learning, machine learning. I think it's gonna be hard for a lot of organizations really to go and do it. And even if like Braze has machine learning, it's not gonna work for you unless you have enough data within Braze to go and do something with it,

Michael: 48:01

in my opinion. I guess, yeah, there's, there's ways I think to, to get around that. I think the thing that may hinder some of those opportunities may be. The privacy and, um, regulatory issues. Yeah, that's

Alex: 48:15

a challenge. Currently, the model that you'd wanna have is, like, Braze should be able to say, let's look at profile data across all of our, all of the customers that use Braze and do machine learning across all of them. The trick is you can do it in an anonymous way, but if you wanted to do it in a attached way, Actually, you're technically under the new rule selling customer data. And so every single, it's not actually selling data, but you're now sharing it across organizations. Every single customer of Braze would have to ask permission of their customer to enter them into this machine learning model so that they could be learning cross customer. So I think there's a data privacy, even in the United States challenge and in Europe. Forget about it. I don't think it's ever gonna be

Michael: 48:51

possible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, you could be right. There are, there are ways to, to do it from, um, from the standpoint of having it at like at, at some sort of like abstraction, but even still, you know, you, you run the risk of kind of being or crossing the line from being like potentially a processor to a, to a controller and mm-hmm. you know, everybody points to C C P A. But you know, there's, there's actually 17 states right now that have either passed consumer privacy acts or are in the process of passing consumer privacy acts. So I think within the next five years we're probably going to see one most likely from, from every state, at least every state maybe except for like Florida and Texas. So like 48 outta 50 states most. So

Alex: 49:46

it'll change it. Yeah. And while, so while we have a couple minutes, so we're thinking

Kevin: 49:49

about the future, just say that the direct mail will still be available.

Alex: 49:53

Privacy change. Yeah. Well, we think about the future, like, you know, obviously my, my co-founder Rebecca and I have made a big bet on voice on like talking to their customers. Like we think that's the channel of the future. Like if today everybody talks about s m s marketing, we think like, you know, five years from everyone will be talking about, uh, talking with their customers. Um, but like, if you guys were making a bet, like, you know, or maybe you are already inside your organizations, is it TikTok? Is it like, what's the five years from now? What is every marketer gonna be talking about in terms of the channel to engage with customers?

Michael: 50:25

Like one channel,

Alex: 50:27

oh, what's gonna be the new one that like people don't, don't use as much

Michael: 50:30

today. That's a good question. I mean, like, what old, what what becomes old becomes new again. What becomes new, becomes old again. Like everything is is pretty cyclical. Um, I, I, I actually see there being more channels, not just like one individual single Yeah. Channel. Especially as you get into. Uh, stronger, stronger microprocessing. Um, yeah,

Alex: 51:01

as working tools get more sophisticated, you should be able to be more efficient across more of these channels

Michael: 51:06

for sure. Yeah, like connecting TV still has, has a long way to, to go. Like it's still very much in its infancy. I think, like, you know, some of the, some of the wearables I think is, is interesting. I, I think that, um, if there is something that's, really unique and disruptive, whether it's like in, in the next half decade or decade. I think just broadly speaking, I'd probably be willing to bet that it's, it's a new channel that looks maybe nothing like what's, uh, what's available today.

Kevin: 51:43

I think for mine, I think that, you know, I think Mike mentioned the old channels become new, new channels become old. I think one that. Is going to stick around is continue to, to grow, will be like honestly owning or like original content. Right? And I'm not saying just original content from this and entertainment side like Netflix, but

Alex: 52:01

user generated content,

Kevin: 52:03

user generate content. Your own content is really providing value, right? For. You're a customer base, but also like, you know, expansive of your customer base, your future total addressable market, right? Because you're providing value for them, in which case you would actually generate a lot of volume and people coming to you cuz of the value you're providing from that content and now give you a really true, sustainable, organic growth. You know, so things like. Content that drives programmatic, s e o, right? Um, those type of things. I think a lot of companies are gonna start investing more and more in that, knowing that that's how you're gonna continue to drive sustainable, organic growth, right? Versus right now you're investing a lot of paid dollars. Everyone reaches that point where they're diminishing returns and people are trying to find ways to kind of go beyond that.

Alex: 52:45

Yeah, I agree. I mean, part of this is yeah, because Google keeps getting more expensive every year. People are searching other places. I'll steal, I'll steal an idea from my co-founder. I think, uh, one, one thing she thinks is fascinating that could happen in the future is you can start having existing customers talking to new customers. So similar user generating content, but go one step further. They're not just generating content, they're actually. If they're so excited about your brand, perhaps like, think of a, uh, you know, Patagonia is a brand that I love, so, you know, would I as a Patagonia, uh, customer be willing to talk to a new Patagonia customer about my experience and what relationship do I need to have with Patagonia in order for that to be possible? Is it, is it like I'm a member or is it I have access to certain content? Is it that I get, is it financial? I have discounts? I don't know. Maybe I just get something out of the fact that I'm sharing my experience with other people. And like, that's a community I wanna connect with. So like, I, I haven't seen it, you know, really done successfully too many places, but where you can actually have that, it's like even beyond referral, it's, it's not necessarily financial. It's how do you use your existing, uh, you know, advocates to talk to your new

Michael: 53:47

customers. Yeah, and I

Kevin: 53:49

think you can do it in a lot of creative ways, as you mentioned. You know, even like when you look at a lot of productivity tools out there, you know, things that support you from, you know, building certain documentations, right? Things that help you build templates. Like you can leverage your existing user base and say, Hey, can you publish this to our existing user base? Publish this, you know, publicly, and really build a system that then, hey, you're. Now your users, you know, as they're using your system, they're able to actually generate that content for you, right? In which case you can grow in a more relevant way. And obviously you have to be very specific in how you build that system to make sure that, hey, you're still enabling, you know, the search engines of the world to recognize, you know, but you can really get creative

Alex: 54:26

depending on your product. Yeah, agreed. Well, I think we're, we're running up against time, so I, I want to first thank both of you for taking the time to do this. Uh, it's, it's wonderful to have you all in the, in the same, uh, in the same room for once. Cause I know we've never done it. And hopefully we can do it again, you know, a year from now or two years from now and see where everybody is. But thank you so much for your time today.