The Future of Advertising from Cannes Lions 2024

00:00:00 Max Max Max Max Max Sater welcome to Ken thank you for having me so we're at we're at day three now of Ken you haven't yet been to the conference have not been to the conference slept a total of eight hours and about 12 coffees [Music] deep so excited to chat today I'm just curious like I mean I I was going to ask you about like what you think of the conference like from your perspective I don't know if I'm I'm the most qualified to uh give my my experience so wait wait let me just put some context out there

00:00:36 for for people who are listening so can lions it's an international ad Festival really for agencies and agency recognition for um you know the different work that they've done throughout the year there's you know there are a couple of different festivals like this for agencies and and work recognition but uh I think it's pretty rare where you get everyone in in Europe mostly celebrating agencies we were talking about this last night we usually like neglected in in normal Commerce conferences as like a provider

00:01:09 or someone who's trying to pitch services but here we celebrated you were no longer the black sheep for once yeah yeah yeah what I what I will say my experience has been is that kind of like you're saying it's actually been way less salesy than all other conferences I've attended granted I've only attended the dinners and the happy hours or I think there's this unspoken commitment to not being super salesy and trying to sell your stuff but it's been nice I think everyone is kind of a kindred spirit in that sense well I think this

00:01:37 one's like much more partnership Focus because it's agency saturated so I'm not going to sell another agency it's just like you're here to meet meet people that's the that's the status quo like you go to a Tech conference you go to like shop talk or like etail or any of these other events they think like agency's just going to pitch them on Services I think that's a stigma that's been developed because of like you know honestly D Toc and also just that's why agencies go to these other conferences

00:02:03 right is to actually pitch and close Brands but here there's just not that MOS so there's no even you know question okay so today I want to talk about I want to talk about unveiled I want to just talk about these these these new solutions that have really popped up over the last five years which is like deanonymization AI audience segmentation um and kind of the the kind of like sifting through the noise because I think a lot of brand Founders they hear about these Solutions now and like there's a lot of conjecture around

00:02:34 it um and the technology is super interesting um and I it's it's obviously powerful it does really good things for Brands but um kind of want to understand the differences between the solutions and then where the tech is actually going so tell start start us off with unbuild and and what you guys do maybe it makes sense to start talking about the problem that we solve and kind of why we why we exist before getting into unveiled and the technology that we actually deliver in the solutions that we drive at a at a very high level the

00:03:04 reason why unveiled exists is because we hear marketers and Brands saying the same thing over and over and over again and that is it's not 2018 anymore it's not 2019 anymore where you put $1 into meta and $2 into Google and you get $30 out and brands are happy and smiling and everyone is Rich and it's a great time and we're all successful but it's not 2018 anymore it's 2024 and for many reasons one of them being just the increasing how easy it is now to effectively Sprint up a brand given tools and companies like Shopify but

00:03:39 also in large part because of how antagonistic Apple has been towards consumers and Brands as well so when I say this what I mean is that back in 2018 Apple enabled thirdparty cookies and there wasn't much signal loss gap between what's actually happening on any given company's website and their ability to recognize what's happening on their website there is no signal loss Gap over the last four years everyone heard about iOS 14 and then Apple Through Safari had something called ITP and then I uh iOS 16 there has been a

00:04:17 huge huge deprecation in the amount of signal that Brands and other solutions that are installed on Brand's website are actually able to pick up on so kind of actually now boiling it boiling this down more more tactically with the most recent version of safari launched in December 2023 if I come to Lucas issues.com I sign up on day one and I come back just 25 hours later I am now showing up as an anonymous first-time visitor rather than a known returning visitor huge signal loss Gap and there are a bunch of Downstream implications

00:04:53 from this from cleave flow revenue or whatever ESP you use not getting triggered as much as they should be getting triggered to event match quality deprecation on meta in Google so this is kind of the the highlevel problem that we solve such that we are enabling Brands to recognize what's actually happening on the website just like it was in 2018 2019 2020 before this huge Fallout by Apple I mean we talk about you know the implications of privacy tracking and degradation of cookies on this podcast a lot um there's a whole I

00:05:25 think generation of solutions now that are propping up to to kind of combat this issue um which has been really exciting to see just the ways in which the tech is evolving to kind of circumvent and give Brands back the the signal and the throughput that they need for their advertising and their marketing tactics to be effective um and that brings us to unveiled so you guys started as a deanonymization solution how are you doing that though how are a lot of how how are you like administering that like

00:05:56 how does the tech actually work does Tech actually work yeah I think that's the most that's the that's very interesting how is how is the sausage made no trade secrets here but like give us an idea of like H how you do these things totally so unveiled started off like you said exactly as an Den anonymization platform identity graph different people of different verbiage and we start off with two solutions specifically the first solution if was around helping Brands recognize visitors who have explicitly

00:06:28 opted in and given their email address that was the first solution we offered we call that rekindle this focuses on the 30% of American consumers today that use Safari the second solution and there's one set of technology for that essentially it's leveraging first party cookies right Apple has increasingly messaged if you look at their their earnings calls and their their very much public facing statements they are all around enabling first party cookies rather than third party cookies this is also what Chrome

00:06:58 is going to do moving forward so that tech for that is first party cookies that we built the second product that we initially launched with we call acquaint acquain enables Brands to recognize the high intent visitors who have not yet given their email address but they've maybe added to card or check out abandoned well and okay so for for that product though I'm really curious because the identity graph it can only capture so much right so like what what is the what is the percent match it on on individuals that you can actually

00:07:29 look locate and say this is that individual it's so like 20% or for the first product second let's let's talk about both yeah cool cool Frankly Speaking we're actually moving uh away from a quaint we see that that first product rekindle just drives so much more Revenue but to to answer your question it totally depends on the brand on average we'll say we identify around 20% of Any Given company's website visitors it can be as high as 40% or as low as 5% now we pass back only the highest in people when we've seen them

00:08:01 actually opt in into our identity graph somewhere so basically their information needs to be available somewhere else too for you to for you to match exactly they have to opt in essentially we're part of a data Co-op and in order for us to be able to recognize them they have to opt in to one of our data Partners okay and they opt in through other sorts of applications sing up like other brands or Publishers like a lot of Publishers so we work with a lot of publisher networks um some ES PS as well and

00:08:31 essentially when they have some kind of authentication event when they submit their email address to one of these data partners that data partner will then pass that data to us so you'd assume though that the the ability to match an individual or a site visitor one: one would actually be higher than it actually should be pretty high because I feel like a lot of consumers today they're opting in to a lot of different yeah it it's it ranges from the brand between on average 20% I think we like like to undersell and overd deliver so

00:09:03 frequently it's higher than this but Frankly Speaking I think kind of zooming out again we are seeing a lot of shifts in the Privacy landscape and there is this new wave of of startups coming and I think there's two distinct camps you have one Camp which there are some Legacy players maybe like a retention. comom for example that Focus squarely on kind of riding the line of what is legal and what is compliant but barely and they are taking an approach that of course identity resolution Solutions

00:09:38 will always continue to exist and persist that is the first camp and I think we also now have a new camp saying identity and persistent identity is not the future anymore the future is actually identityless Solutions and an example of a company we have there is fmat so I think very very highly of fmat and rishab and their philosophy is the exact opposite Camp of retention. comom they say no persistent identity will not exist over time rather we have to personalize offers based off the content they're engaging with so when I think

00:10:11 about unveiled we started off in Camp number one well so the identity list solution just to interrupt really quickly it doesn't It's Kind kind of like it's like identity agnostic it's like I don't care who you are it's just that you've made these certain actions or behaviors and that in it of itself creates an identity for the person you know honestly that's the same approach we take to clv it's like we care less about the psychographics like who they are Income etc etc like we really just care about the actions that they take on

00:10:42 site that's a bigger predictor of how the customer is going to behave in the future exactly and I think that that unlock right there what you just described is why we have shifted effectively from Camp number one like the retention docs of the world to Camp number two and I I think that has also informed our product road map where we still have Solutions around persistent identity but I kind of back to the point you hit on initially is where is the puck going I think the puck is going and how do you act on top of this persistent

00:11:18 identity and it's about personalizing and figuring out the best next action based off the actual behaviors they've done rather than who they are where where does uh what does that mean for your product site yeah so we have this effective data layer which I just described uh identity graph now focusing more so on people who have explicitly opted in and given the email address and this allows Brands to solve the signal loss gap between someone who signs up on day one and comes back on day 11 before

00:11:48 they show Anonymous now we can recognize them where we're moving is now how do we act on top of this how do we build an intelligence layer on top of this identity layer So tactically speaking right now we are live with with two products in the market one of them is about personalizing the uh popup to improve the rate of first-party data optin so essentially showing the popup at the right point in time to improve the rate of people who sign up it's not a pop-up itself it's about orchestrating the popup and the second solution where

00:12:15 we're seeing a lot of tailwins as of late is analyzing building a custom AI model on top of this data layer and figuring out which website visitors are high LTV and low LTV and then creating custom audiences and and Google to improve roas and so that's I've I've I've heard of solutions like that before so let's just describe for the Layman here like how does the custom audience get built out and then you're basically exporting that into meta as like a lookalike audience right yeah spoton so we'll create two audiences we'll create

00:12:51 one prospecting audience we be a lookalike based off of the second audience which is a retargeting audience so right now a lot of retargeting campaigns work as you do last s days last 14 days last end days I mean how how does dark room do it yeah I mean we have a ton of different uh Windows uh in terms of how we look we look back at things I think for me I'm I'm more Curious on the AI audience it's like how does that actually get built out what is the you're all about you're all about the how's the sausage made okay sure not

00:13:24 even that I just like I think my whole thing is I think there's like actually a lot of conjecture out there there's a lot of Technology Solutions branding some of these products and being like it's an AI audience it's going to give you a higher return on ad spend it's like what is an AI audience mean you have first party data you know are you creating a collection of like predictive audiences using random emails that's what I'm more curious about for sure okay so I maybe I'll walk you through yeah step by step how how it works so

00:13:53 step number one implementation customer will just install our JavaScript tag if you're using Shopify a custom Shopify app pretty straight forward and then what happens over the next depending on how much traffic you have over the next 7 to 10 days is we will be analyzing all the website behavior and effectively what happens is we see when somebody converts we say okay cool this person this is all done you know automatically via AI we're not actually watching yeah but we see when a person converts and we

00:14:22 can say Okay interesting now we saw 100 conversions in let's say seven days or a thousand conversions uh there has to be enough through pit in order for us to actually train the model but after a certain number of actual conversions we can very early on in a new website visitor or returning website visitors customer Journey say okay this person looks like someone who's going to convert at a high value or this does not look like someone who's going to convert at a high value and from this effectively imagine we have 10 desiles

00:14:53 of your website visitors and today you're retargeting let's say you're spending about the same amount each each Des based off of intent what we're effectively I'm oversimplifying a little bit here but what we're effectively able to do is say Okay interesting these are the top three desiles based off of intent expected LTV whatever you're trying to optimize around and spend 60% of your ad dollars in the top death aisle 10% of your ad dollars on the second death AIS another 10% of your ad dollars on the third death aisle and the

00:15:23 rest on the you know the bottom 70% so effectiv you we helping Brands retarget the highest intent highest expected lttb visitors and we're figuring this out by understanding what people who convert do on the site early on and their customer Journey so that's how it works for the retargeting and then for the prospecting just do a look like based off of this to see the audience no you're basically saying we need to analyze website Behavior over time you take when you say desile you mean like cohort yeah so you

00:15:52 see site Behavior there's some Predictive Analytics you're basically saying these are the top converting cohorts based on I'm assuming like predictive clv that's like what the model is it's like a python model that looks at predictive clv so we can optimize around different metrics sometimes at clv sometimes Brands I'm just saying like the way you find the highest value audience is through clv right are you using that metric as the that that is the most that's the default metric we we revert to occasionally Brands will say

00:16:23 Hey listen people the custom model for us around a different metric which we can do it just takes more time I'm sure that's very rare though right yeah yeah yeah like most people just want High clv I mean this is the academic approach because clv is a determinant of the value of your company if you have higher converting customers you know totally that's school of thought at least at dark room so okay predictive this is your highest converting cohort you extract that audience you push that to Facebook exactly and Google yeah and

00:16:52 then tactically in Facebook you have just two audiences okay so break down demystify the AI part of that the AI part is then the model it's the predictive model saying we're using this sort of machine learning algorithm to say these customers are going to be highest performing over time yeah the AI is exactly like you said right it's in the being able to figure out very quickly on in a customer Journey who looks like or who act it's not about who looks like who acts like someone who's going to have a high clv versus who's

00:17:22 someone who's going to have a low clv and then creating that audience so figuring out who to put in that audience is that's where the actual is how much differentiation how much better can your model be that's what I want to understand than than another than another competitor like that's what I'm saying like is there commoditization between the models or cuz we buil custom clv models or is it a question of time like I'm assuming the more you work with the brand the stickier you get the better the model becomes because you

00:17:56 have a larger data set is that true this product has only been in market for 3 months we the way we set it up is a 30-day free trial everyone has seen a massive lift on those first 30 days so I I don't think this product has been in the market long enough for me to be able to confidently say that the RAS lift that we drive on month three is higher than on month one Frankly Speaking it takes a week to train the model and after that you see a pretty immediate lift so you have immediate value capture

00:18:26 and then I'm more saying just like the way that you would identify top performing cohorts would get better over time hopefully honestly it's it's too early to say this is the beauty of this space I I love I love DC because it literally changes like every six months for for us on the agency side we've had to like re consistently reinvent our services our P totally what are your thoughts I mean I think like you were saying this is a very Buzzy it's a very Buzzy area and I think for good reason right now if you go to any single brand

00:19:00 you say you know what keeps you up at night everyone kind of defaults to more efficient marketing more efficient marketing but like on the actual vendor software side what's your perspective on all these Solutions because a lot of people kind of are just promising the world well yeah I think it's actually pretty character degrading in a way I mean that's why I we we've taken the approach as an agency to be like brutally honest like we have a really interesting vantage point I think in terms of being very close with

00:19:26 our Tech Partners you know we work and we work really close together obviously and I love the work that you're doing in this space um I've seen other people do similar things right and have totally different approaches that uh actually dictate how we think about introducing those people to Brands um I think my perspective is like a lot of there's a lot of conjecture like across technology across agencies there's just like a lot of people having different perspectives the approach that we take is like brutal

00:20:02 honesty and you know just telling Brands like there's definitely Tech you should be using that's you know going to help your marketing be more efficient right you should explore those Solutions make the best decision for you use them you don't want to be like you know behind um but then there's also just like recognizing that like no single Tech solution no single agency solution is going to like make your business successful right that was the conversation we were just having with Jackson um around like there are certain

00:20:36 inherent qualities within your product that are going to define the repeat purchase mechanics of it right like and then um there's only so much like your performance agency can do right it's like if you have great partners and great people in your corner um they're going to give you the proper advice but I think the biggest issue surrounding Founders especially like solo practitioners solo operators is they're paying way too much attention to the echo chamber that's happening within the agency at technology space and they're

00:21:11 working with different partners thinking those are going to be solves for um you know issues that that uh they're not paying attention to on like the brand marketing or or or organic side totally so I think it's a mix of both I think my advice to entrepreneurs is just like you know build a good business and that's the easiest thing to say but like build a good business and uh six years in yeah yeah build a good business and uh talk to your customers and figure out how you can you know make your product

00:21:41 interesting to them and then you know show up in those channels the point is so true though what you're saying is that at the end of the day an agency like dark room can create the best creative you can have the best Performance Marketing in the world but if the product isn't inherently profitable just difficult I think that we're kind of now again this is nothing new I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here but we're now seeing this this cohort of of brands that you know came online the last three or four years during the co

00:22:11 boom and maybe five years and they had this massive massive success this Crescendo during you know this the zerp times uh and now it's it's really difficult for them and that but some some brands are are really killing it totally they're really killing it and so I think you need to look at the ones that are really killing it and say why why are they doing so well and one reason they use unveiled I've done this yeah they're using unveiled in dark room um no I think the the reason that I keep coming back to is like okay uh and by

00:22:42 the way like I've never I haven't always thought this like before I was of the camp when I started at the agency I was like you just need to work with the best agency they deliver the best creative and like everything's going to be great right and uh that's that's not true but yeah the brands that are doing really well for of all I always come even when businesses I invest in it's like is the founder going to win like are they just are they just going to figure it out um and are they Scrappy and like you know

00:23:09 are they someone we want to be betting on that really informs the type of business that they end up creating because I think when I talk to a brand it's like a snapshot in time and you see the potential of like where that business can go because so many things can change pivots happen you know it's a work in progress so I look at those businesses that do well and I'm like okay great repeat purchase great unit economics um and then marketing is like kind of like the layer on top it's like how are those Founders choosing to

00:23:38 Market themselves and the best Founders or the best businesses they figure out marketing and that's either by hiring a really good CMO or head of growth who's like done it before and they they've they've been through the noise and there there's no [ __ ] um or the founders themselves are really good marketers yeah and they're just not wasting their time on exploring different solutions like they know exactly what they want to do totally I think also the founders that one of the reasons why we're

00:24:07 growing at the pace that we're growing so so quickly honestly this is the third or fourth company I've started I've failed a bunch of times so uh kind of pinching myself um like is this is this really happening um but one of the reasons why we're scaling so quickly is exactly just because marketing is not specifically Performance Marketing is not as efficient as it used to be so when Brands hear what we have to say they say really you can improve my Blended row as 15% 20% this is this real and when we actually there's a lot of

00:24:44 buzz in the market for sure I totally agree and I think the way we kind of navigate this is by saying we do a free 30-day trial so you can actually see the results before you pay us a single dollar but I think the reason why we're scaling so so quickly is because of the pain point that is frankly how do you drive efficient marketing and I I think almost always Performance Marketing is going to be maybe the biggest lineup on the budget but we're seeing a lot of success also with the brands not on our

00:25:13 end but the brands that are most successful that we're seeing are the ones that have marketing where the founders or the figureheads like you're were saying who just create content organic content cheap Impressions free Impressions really and the brand is native to whatever kind of content that he create yeah I I think you're you're right about that I that's one of the hardest things that I've been working on is just like the consistent content motion like you just need to make it a habit it's like working out you know you

00:25:43 just need to integrate it into your routine um and I think it's becoming more important obviously like today than it was you know 10 years ago a decade ago when you could really build a big business and kind of remain in the shadows I would have loved that by the way that would have been great yeah I feel like that's what I'm trying to do but I just have to like you're saying I have to create content like right now it's all been word of mouth and referrals but that only scales so so much you can you can build a great

00:26:10 business on on Word of Mouth and referrals and I think where we're at right now it's like to get to the next level it's just we need to be developing a marketing motion for the agency that's that allows us to kind of like expand our surface area for Success so that's why we're here in Ken making content podcasting no Max thanks so much for joining thanks for having me man yeah no it's been fun I'm excited to finish out the conference we got two more days good there's some good there's some good

00:26:39 brands here a lot of agencies I'm here for the agencies I'm here for the agencies as well we'll end on that note Max thanks so much uh for we'll talk soon cheers [Music]