A Tailored History of Marketing Personalization w/ Patrick Tripp

Julian Bracey-Davis: Yeah. But I was trying to show you that I do listen to all the words that come out of your mouth, or at least most of them anyway.

Speaker 4: Uncaged Wisdom, Cheetah Digital's podcast for modern marketing.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Hello again, and welcome back to another episode of Uncaged Wisdom, the podcast for modern marketers, I'm Julian Bracey- Davis.

Kayla Siegmeier: And I'm Kayla Seigmeier.

Julian Bracey-Davis: On this special episode of Uncaged Wisdom, we'll be checking our vitals to see if personalization in the world of digital marketing is alive and well. Our very special guest has dug himself out the at least three feet of snow to be here today. He's our sport- loving, saxophone- playing SVP of product marketing, a Patriot to New England, probably starred in Goodwill Hunting and host of posts, Cheetah Digital's product podcast, it's Patrick Tripp! Welcome Patrick.

Patrick Tripp: Thank you, Julian and Kayla. I'm excited to be here.

Julian Bracey-Davis: I was particularly proud of that intro, so I hope you liked it.

Patrick Tripp: Very on point. The weather here in Boston, a ton of snow, and you're picking up some great cues that we had from signals this past fall. So love it.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Kayla, we're going to be talking the wonderful world of marketing and personalization today and what a journey we're going to take with Patrick Tripp. But as always, could you kick us off with our icebreaker question?

Kayla Siegmeier: All right. As Julian mentioned, Patrick, you are a co- host of the Pulse. You guys talk a lot about music, a lot about old school rock and roll, our icebreaker question today, what is the first band that really got you into music and kind of brought your passion into it?

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, that's a great question, Kayla. I've been playing the saxophone for 30 years, so it's funny as a kid in elementary school, I started on classical and jazz type stuff and made my way all the way through the spectrum. My musical interests are so crazy diverse. It's hilarious. But one band, The Police, was big for me early on and the whole Foxette thing, which was obviously way post the band coming out. But yeah, I just really dug into that whole category as a teenager and went from there.

Julian Bracey-Davis: On to the main thrust of today's conversation, which is personalization. I guess, Patrick, we thought we should probably collectively start discussing what personalization actually means in the world of digital marketing. There are lots of different angles we could take at that. In the world that you, me and Kayla work in with all the great brands and marketers that work with us in Cheetah, where do we start with trying to understand personalization?

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, sure. Personalization obviously is a term that's been thrown around in this industry for over 25 years, and it means a lot of different things to different brands, to different marketers. I think ultimately what we're trying to deliver is a unique experience for every individual that will really help drive them to be an engaged consumer with the brand and really build that affinity over time, delivering value, right? Ensuring that there's real meaning in the engagement that you provide. But boy, there's so many different manifestations of that and digital, even traditional channels today, we really see the gambit across the board and I think that's really evolved too, over the years. The definitions have really stretched.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Generally, how wide is the spectrum when it comes to brands and their approach to personalization that you've seen, because brands are all over the spectrum in terms of how sophisticated or not they are in terms of approaching it.

Patrick Tripp: Know me and show me that you know me, it can be everything from a personalized email. In fact, 70% of brands today fail to use personalized email. So I mean, boy, that's a real straightforward example that you could generally really improve everything from dear name, insert product, incorporate last transaction, any kind of demographic information you have about me in a channel communication, right? To maybe derived insights, things that you can then learn about somebody, are they gluten- free? Are they a health conscious? Are they health concerned? Then how you communicate that is obviously another way. Then of course, much more advanced is everything from the offer to the content, to then the sequence of events, right? How do you engage with a consumer over a number of touch points? That could be automated, that could be modified based on what happens with the consumer.

Kayla Siegmeier: No, one of the things that we talk about a lot is, I think people are still just confused about personalization in general and thinking, I think we talked to one of the Forrester analysts around personalization and they made the comment that, too often they have brands that are approaching them that think personalization is still just adjusting a subject line with a first name in it, or sending out an email on a birthday. Then it's getting to the point where people are just starting to kind of get through that top layer to really understand how deep the personalization can really go.

Patrick Tripp: Totally agree with that, and it really does depend on the brand and their maturity in the vertical as well. Financial services, insurance can gain a significant amount from being able to just engage in a little bit more of a granular level then maybe, retailers are a little bit more sophisticated and mature here, have gone through the paces a bit and with CPG, being an emerging as well, but there's all kinds of great stats about personalization and the impact that it can provide. On a median basis, personalized email can generate an ROI of 122%. Here's another one, 65% of email marketers say dynamic content is the most effective personalization tactic. So there's a lot of the ways to look at this.

Julian Bracey-Davis: That's a good place to say we've got an understanding of what it is, certainly for the purpose of today's conversation. Also, we've started to touch on why it is important that brands are spending a lot of time thinking around this. To help grind things further, I suppose we should look at a few examples of the sort of the good, the bad and maybe the ugly.

Kayla Siegmeier: Yeah, no, I think we all experienced these examples daily. There's this delicate dance of being able to play out all of these brands, trying to be personalized, and useful and focused on using their data and insights to make the consumer experience better, versus personalizing for more creepy levels. Patrick, with your years of experience in mind, do you have any examples of bad, crazy, good. What are some things that really stand out to you?

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, I'll give a couple of good ones. I kind of like what Spotify is doing now with, they're recommending interests based on my musical tastes and there is an algorithm there that's trying to generate interesting, kind of ancillary songs and playlist that I didn't think of, that actually kind of remind me of things that I love. Starbucks, I think does an amazing job, right? What they're doing with their Star Dash program and their mobile app and what they're doing with their Stars program and the recommendations they make. Super cool. The traditional things like Coca- Cola, putting your name on a bottle, right? Kind of neat. Maybe a little more manual and even like Stitch Fix, I used Stitch Fix and it's a little more manual, you get your personalized designer and they're trying to work with you and provide that unique outfit based on the profile that you've kind of created. But man, there's a bunch of silly ones. 1- 800- Flowers, I get these emails every day. It is constant.

Julian Bracey-Davis: You're saying you're not a true romantic.

Patrick Tripp: It's true. As we kind of come upon on Valentine's day, maybe they're onto something, but boy, the urgency. It's constant. So, there's a creepy factor, like you guys alluded to. There's a content relevance factor. Then there's the velocity or the volume factor too, like how much is too much? Then I would say, I don't know, Shutterfly has been famous for putting out emails to people about congratulations on your new baby when they'd actually didn't have a baby and they've been struggling to, infertility challenges. Those are a couple of famous ones, but I know there's others.

Julian Bracey-Davis: What's happened there is, they've taken a series, a bit of a bit of data, and they've made inference from that and then taken that to mean it's this. So in this case, it's probably people looking at baby products, maybe cause they're browsing early on. Unfortunately it hasn't resulted in that time, the outcome they wanted, which is the child, but the brand has still outreached and fired the trigger on assuming that nine months down the line that a child has been born.

Patrick Tripp: Hey, I have a couple children and myself and on Amazon, I haven't shopped for my kids in many years for baby diapers or anything like that. But I'm buying things for my dog all the time, but that for them, the Amazon recommendations are diapers. Even though it's been many years since I've needed to buy diapers on Amazon. So it's either historical latency or is it just sort of making a misconnection.

Julian Bracey-Davis: One thing that's topical as well coming out of the last couple of weeks, it's having that emphasis on when you do have data and you can act on it, it's making sure that you keep your customer in mind. That is as simple as how would you feel with some of these other scenarios, if you were reached out by a brand and the one that always gets me, I heard about a brand that basically does caskets and they did caskets for baskets, instead. They were sending out baskets of food and goodies to elderly care homes to basically just sort of, in their theory, I guess, reach out to say we're a friendly funeral place, but of course, for the people who have children and family members getting a basket of goodies, isn't the best way to comfort people who are in facilities that are meant to be looking after them.

Patrick Tripp: Right. Getting a basket for condolences when you're not actually dead yet, that's a kind of creepy.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Kayla, what ones have stood out for you?

Kayla Siegmeier: My favorite creepy personalization story is that one in Target back from 2012, where the dad went into this mailbox and he got Target coupons addressed to his daughter and they were coupons for maternity clothes and diapers. He actually went on social media and yelled about this to Target and was like, why are you guys encouraging my daughter to get pregnant? She's in high school. He had to call customer service the next week and apologize because his daughter was actually pregnant. They just had an algorithm that looked at what vitamins she was buying and things she was browsing and decided she was pregnant and sent this to her home and basically kind of outed her to where parents.

Patrick Tripp: Horrible. It's like they got it right, but they shouldn't have.

Kayla Siegmeier: They managed to correct themselves over the years, I will say. They've gotten really good about their targeting, targeting at Target, in their app and their Cartwheel. I love how I always personalize offers just based off of what I've purchased in the past. It's always right there at the top. Another good example, my husband and I stumbled on this the other night. Netflix has this new feature where it has just a play something for me button, as kind of a surprise. You click it and it pops up the show based off of all the different things you've ever watched. So through that, we watched an entire, Bridgerton, we dodged that whole series and then we're onto Imposters now. Every time they do it, it's just a really good recommendation, so they've gotten that really well.

Patrick Tripp: That's really cool. The key is to create different personas, right? So, you're not grabbing kids shows for your persona because then they get mixed in to the recommendations that happen. But they make pretty easy to set up personas.

Julian Bracey-Davis: They are unmatched, this is another sort of worlds collide, Netflix and Cheetah, but the amount of information that they could get on people's show habits, of course that informs their planning for creating future content. When Arrested development came back, it's because people were bingeing it and Netflix were frankly going, right, we need to make some more of this so people keep joining us. But as you know, quick little Cheetah experiences plugged, I'm just saying, that's one of the underutilized tools we have in that capacity because it's market research, getting information back on people just by encouraging them to give feedback on what you're doing.

Kayla Siegmeier: It is, and that's why you're going through this exercise, I actually kind of realized, when you think about it, every bad example, it was the brand was trying to encourage the users solely to purchase, right? So the funeral home example, they just wanted the families to know they existed because hey, your loved one is probably halfway to the other side at this point. You can buy a casket from us, right? Yeah, Amazon, they just want you to buy baby stuff, apparently, which was horrible. Target, they just wanted you to buy stuff. But when they swap it around and they look at how can we make the customer's experience better, when you look at Target with their app and Spotify with their recommendations, when it's actually focused on what the consumer is doing, it's so much better.

Patrick Tripp: Definitely. Creating that relationship, that trust, which is hard to establish sometimes and knowing that you're not being sold to constantly, and that they're just trying to help you remove friction in many cases from your daily life.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Patrick, with some of the stats you gave at the inaudible it's clear why we need to be considering personalization, and it's also clear why brands are so keen to do it because it was a must. Inevitably, that lead to good and bad results, which is what we just covered. But I guess at this point, let's again, sort of dip back in time, get up in a DeLorean or whatever you want to call it. How have vendors tried to help brands address this subject.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, like I was saying earlier, personalization is not a new concept and marketers have been trying to solve this problem from the beginning of time. About 20 years ago, when I was just starting out in my career, no. A lot of these vendors emerged that were trying to bring Digital to the forefront, right? They were trying to have a better relationship, try to deliver more specific recommendations, targeted offers. They're trying to test in tune, is it the red button? Is it the blue button? Who's clicking on which? Let's change that. So the whole class of vendors, many of them have been consolidated into the marketing clouds, some still remain, but it's a very narrow use case, and frankly it's anonymous, cookie- based type work where you don't really know the consumer. You don't really know the history. It's this cookie, this ID, this visitor, and you're having to do some fuzzy magic to sort of determine what the most relevant content is. In many cases, it's just sort of guesswork and learning off the back of the clicks and then trying to adjust. So that class of vendors is, it's still around. ABN testing, multi- variate testing, digital targeting, merchandising, search optimization. These things are, I think a little more table stakes now, but I think we really evolved beyond that with the approach that we talk about quite a bit, right around zero party.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Yeah, and of course the challenge for all of us is even those vendors that have been around for time, the world's changed around them. In fact, the sands have shifted quite quickly in the last few years, especially around cookies and third- party data as well, which some I'm sure it would have based their model on.

Kayla Siegmeier: Let's chat a little bit more in detail about Cheetah's own vision for next gen personalization. How are we going to be delivering what brands are actually looking for moving forward?

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, it's a great question, and we're definitely not trying to deliver the traditional, your grandmother's approach to personalization. Like a fine wine, we're blending together approaches that we've seen successful in the past, and really trying to paint a picture or provide a solution for what I would call and what we've heard from other customers is next generation personalization, right? Personalization with a capital P is I think a little bit more of a combination of real time engagement in those moments, right? When you engage with a consumer in the store, on the site, in that moment, what can you recognize about them? What contextually can you leverage in them? What can you deliver? That's a value, by evaluating not similar entities and cookies, but really the individual's profile and their zero party data, their interests, their hopes, their demographics. That, coupled with what I would call, orchestration and journey orchestration is another one of those terms. I think people get confused around, like campaign management emerged 20 years ago as well for let's take this big group of audience, people from the Chicago area. Let's blast them through these steps. All right. Step one, and then five days later, we'll go to step two and 10 days later, we go to step three and everybody's going through right? Journeys in their true sense is everybody is an individual, like you flow through based on the moments, based on the events and you go through that process on demand. It's not sort of in batch, it's not sort of in bulk. It's definitely real time, so the second part of that vision is orchestration, journey orchestration. The third, I think is adding intelligence to the content, the offers that we deliver and offers is one of those terms, another confusion point. I think it's really more about content. It could be a message. It could be thank you for being a great customer. It could be a coupon. It could be a text message. It could be a confirmation, right. But how do you add intelligence to that? So if you have a thousand different options that we can offer you Julian, a thousand different things we can say to you as a brand, right, as we talked with you in sort of this bi- directional discussion, how do we quickly arbitrate? How to quickly eliminate the ones that are absolutely irrelevant? How do we quickly surface the top one? Actually if you've already seen or been exposed to, or have an affinity to one thing, how do we change to the next one? Right. Very quickly. So intelligent offers or intelligent content, I think is the third tent pole of that story. So again, a blend of, I think markets that we've seen emerge in the past, across real- time engagement, journey orchestration and intelligent content or intelligent offer management.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Excellent. What you described there is, if you're doing that frequently, you've got a evolving feedback loop where you're constantly making sure that you're in connection and you understand your customer and your consumer. One thing we stress a lot is of course, that people are changing over time. Perhaps you already mentioned you're not buying diapers anymore. I am now, of course. So,

Patrick Tripp: Congratulations.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Thanks. I love buying diapers. I'm going to try something here, before if I give it back to Kayla, and if we don't like it, we're going to snip it out, because that's the magic of editing. With those three tent poles of we do, if we took a, and I'm going to suggest a footwear brand or a cleats brand like a soccer cleats brand, a marketer selling that, how would they sort of consider using those different elements to snare their purchase? For me. Say, I'm browsing right now for new football cleats or soccer cleats, depending on your persuasion, where would we start as a marketer, thinking about it?

Patrick Tripp: Absolutely. So, you might be going to the website, might be using your mobile device. You might be engaging on the mobile app of the brand. It's recognizing you as a visitor. It might recognize that you've been there before, and then it's sort of trying to take contextual clues around, wow, you're interested in clicking on men's shoes, you're interested in this size and this style and ensuring that we kind of wink, nudge, sort of keep an eye on that and ensure that we are reminding you of that. If you decide to leave the session, it's certainly about reminding you of that or perhaps, a day or so later when you come back, it's sort of remembering that session, kind of continuing where we left off. It's not like trying to reintroduce yourself to somebody who you met a day ago and they completely forget who you are. It's sort of like, oh, hey, Julian or Kayla, it's great to see you again, and let's pick up the conversation where we left off. Then that can certainly take in the form of other channels that you might be interested in, right? Whether that's mobile push or maybe that's an SMS, or perhaps an email that includes some recommendations, right, of things that you might be interested in, from different shoes, different styles, different sporting clubs, and being able to help you along that journey with some intelligence, their recommendations, and certainly adapting to that. So, that's just an example of really weaving together web and email, and some of the recommendations on a more simple level.

Kayla Siegmeier: Patrick and I have actually had the pleasure of spending the last few weeks presenting to analysts for many, many hours. It's been a lot of fun. We've learned a lot of things, had a lot of great conversations. They have a ton of insights. Patrick, what are some of the things that you can share today that you hear the analysts are showing a lot of interest in when it comes to personalization and even Cheetah personalization as we presented over the past few weeks.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah. It's a great point. We aligned to a lot of the analysts firms, we try to understand their vision. In order to deliver great personalization, you need the data, right. You hear that famous staff from gardener, about 80% of marketers are swearing off their personalization efforts by 2025. That's a little bit of a dramatic statement they made, and frankly, they will admit to you that that was really a call to action for marketers to really get their act together in terms of how they measure the impact of their engagement and their personalization strategies. They don't believe it's going away, I think they're really saying this is ripe for reinvention and ripe for a better data- driven approach and Forrester, they talk about systems of insight and being able to have that single view, the customer that incorporates data sources and data types and data cadences. That was actually one of the big stats, even on the gardener side that they found to be one of the reasons why marketers are swearing off their personalization efforts or said they would be and had 27% of marketers claim that data was the major obstacle to success around personalization. That was like, can we get the data fast enough? Can we get it organized? Can we get it in the right place? Can we link it? Can we ensure that this is, these four things are Kayla, these are four entities, these are the four different profiles that we can consolidate or do we keep them separate? Is she part of a household that has different users or not? Those types of things have to be done very seamlessly, and it's just a massive, massive headache. So for the analysts, I think would agree on the foundation of needing a data layer to really help you with that. I think of next generation personalization, as we talked about, and that's been written about quite a bit by a lot of the analyst firms, bringing into account real- time interaction, management and identity, as we talked about, and then certainly systems of engagement where you have the ability to activate to any touch point or any moment and really the concept of channel, I feel like it's really getting tired now. It's really more about touch points or moments, and being able to activate to any different location or touch point, deliver on that insight and then be able to bring all the data back is something we hear a lot about. So it really cuts across a lot of the categories and things. Some of the analysts focus on a magic quadrant around personalization. I feel like that needs maybe to be modernized a little bit, but then you have some of the other analyst firms are talking about CDP and the data layer. You have others that are talking about the cross channel nature of things, and it's a real intersection across all these areas.

Kayla Siegmeier: I love that. One of the favorite things that you say is how it's not about channels anymore, it's touch points. I think that's such a huge takeaway where so many marketers are focused on, okay, what is our social strategy? What is our display strategy? What is our SMS strategy? I think the big thing that as Cheetah Digital, or talking through our CES and underpinned all by that EDP, that data layer you're talking about is, it's not about SMS. It's not about social. It's about the individual touch points where you're going to meet that consumer in their moment and what they need to see and hear, what they want right there. I think that's an incredible message that we need to shout from the rooftops.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, the channels are a means to an end. I don't want to belittle the channels, but it's really about having a brain. Having the centralized hub that can determine what is the left hand and the right hand doing? Are they aligned? Are things all working in concert? Is this content stale? Does it need to be replaced? Yeah, I agree. It's really at the platform.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Busy few weeks for sure, on all the stuff that you guys have been doing around that analyst's work. Patrick, I think I'm going to wind it down, sorry that's the actual term. Me putting my old feet in someone else's shoes and looking at it from the marketing side, from a brand side, sorry. I know it's a big term, personalization and next gen personalization. but today sat in a chair, they may have just listened to the great Patrick Tripp, say some really interesting things. Where do they start? What would be the first thing they just need to have into consideration? Is there one piece that they could go, right, I'm going to just look at this and then see where it leads.

Patrick Tripp: It's really about understanding your customer engagement strategy and really trying to have a good plan. But I talked about the data aspect of things and there's a lot you can do. You can be quickly capturing insights around digital and mobile, with the plant of just some quick elements on your digital properties. Being able to create a value exchange through acquisition experiences and the fact that you can really answer questions and engage with the brand about what you're really you're interested in is a great way to sort of start to learn and capture and collect and aggregate. Right? So for me, it's strategy, but certainly getting the data foundation. But then boy, you can do so many great things once you can get that moving.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Yeah. That's almost your foundational piece though. You sought your data out and you know what you've got to play with. Again, with the customer in mind, how it can help their journey, then we can build on that. That's a great answer.

Kayla Siegmeier: You've had a wonderful career. You've worked on the analyst side. You've worked on our side here. You've worked at great, great companies, 20 years, I'm quoting you, promise, I'm not saying that crosstalk What is a piece of knowledge you wish you could share with everyone, whether, it could be personal or professional, what's the one piece of wisdom that you want to unteach for everyone listening.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah. Wow. Fantastic question. You got to experiment a lot. You got to try things, you have to try strategies. You need to really understand the customer? You need to really get that feedback from a product management standpoint, right? The voice of the customer is so valuable, voice for a customer for a brand is so powerful, right. It really directs the strategy that you should create. I don't think to this day, we all don't do enough of that. Right. We're just, customer advisory, feedback, surveys, collecting more insight. It's always a best practice that it's hard to execute. Shouldn't be, but it is for many larger companies. So yeah, always keep the customer in mind. You can create things in a vacuum, but without that true customer insight, without that voice of the customer, I think all of these strategies, they fall flat. So that would be the one little pearl of wisdom that I could whip out.

Kayla Siegmeier: I love it, kind of a centralized theme is keeping the customer in the center.

Julian Bracey-Davis: We've been talking about this for a while to do the second half of our crossover special. So, we got ourselves on the Pulse and we got you on Uncaged, but just before you say goodbye, do a quick Pulse plug if you wanted to, that'd be good, wouldn't it?

Patrick Tripp: Oh, sure. Yeah. So we're excited to be a part of the family here at Cheetah, that is doing a lot of great podcasts, audio, video and the like. Pulse is the Cheetah Product Podcast, we're trying to bring in some of the product experts across the company in a regular basis, even some partners along the way, and to just talk about the latest and greatest that the innovation that we're creating and you can go to cheetahdigital. com and you'll see under resources, you'll see the video podcasts for all of our series. So it's exciting to do the crossover, Uncaged Pulse or Pulse Wisdom, whatever you want to call it. I feel like we got to do more of this for sure. Yeah.

Julian Bracey-Davis: Patrick, thank you so much. Yeah, we had some good time.

Kayla Siegmeier: Yeah, thank you.

Patrick Tripp: A lot of fun. Thank you so much.

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