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- [00:00]
David D.K. Kim
Foreign.
- [00:13]
Katie McAdams
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends
- [00:18]
David D.K. Kim
in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.
- [00:23]
Sarah Sluice
This episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omnichannel activation.
- [00:46]
Allison Schiff
I'm Allison Schiff, and you're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks. Thanks for making this podcast a part of your day. My guest this week is David D.K. kim, president president of Verizon Value, a group of eight prepaid brands under Verizon's umbrella, including Straight Talk, Visible, Total Wireless, and tracfone. We'll talk about how Verizon Value is reshaping the prepaid market from a simple price play into one driven by smarter customer segmentation and what that means for distribution, partnerships, measurement, and the customer journey. But first, allow me a little promo spiel for an upcoming webinar. What your competitors are doing may matter more than what your dashboard says. Join BI Science and AdExchanger on June 10 at 11am Eastern for a free webinar on how leading brands use competitive intelligence and cross media insights to stay ahead of market shifts and drive growth. Head to adexchanger.com webinar to register today. Hey, DK if I may call you DK welcome to the podcast.
- [01:51]
David D.K. Kim
You may call me DK. Thank you for having me.
- [01:54]
Allison Schiff
So is that your. Is that your nickname in life and in work? I know for some people life is work.
- [02:01]
David D.K. Kim
It is, it is. Everyone, since I was a kid, always called me dk. The only person that doesn't is my mom. So people who call me by by David. I feel like I'm in trouble.
- [02:12]
Allison Schiff
You know, it would be kind of funny to say, dk, go to your room.
- [02:17]
David D.K. Kim
That's right. That's right. Just, you know, it doesn't sound as scary as when my mom would yell at me. David.
- [02:24]
Allison Schiff
My parents would always tell me if I got in trouble that they were disappointed in me. That classic line, I wouldn't really get sent to my room. They were just disappointed.
- [02:33]
David D.K. Kim
Right? That is the worst, right? When someone tells you they're disappointed in you. Absolutely.
- [02:39]
Allison Schiff
Well, I want to start out with a version of my favorite first question, which is, what is something about you that not a lot of other people already know? But I'm going to prompt you because you've been in the telecom industry for a long time. Decades. But I hear that your path to the prepaid wireless world wasn't exactly a straight line. So I'd Love your origin story. A bit about where you grew up, your early jobs and how all of that eventually led you to where you are.
- [03:09]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, so I grew up in Tucson, Arizona and you know, my parents, they're, they're from South Korea. And so growing up, you know, Korean was our primary language at home. And so ever since I could remember When I was 10, 11 years old, I would be translating for my parents as, you know, I know how to speak English and I translate back to my parents kind of what was going on. So for me, I remember when they wanted to go get a cell phone. I'm trying to understand what cell phones are. And it was very early on, obviously with cell phone technology. So that got me really interested in cell phones. And so when I got to high school, the first job I did was actually selling phones at Radio Shack, selling Verizon and Sprint at the time. And I loved that job. But I also loved the location at which the store I worked at. It was very diverse, a lot of multicultural families coming in. And oftentimes I would try to explain things in the simplest way because obviously buying a cell phone at the time and you know, as quite frankly still is, it's a bit of a process and a bit scary. So that's when I really started getting into cell phones. And then as I progressed throughout my career, I always found myself back at prepaid and backed in the no contract space for several reasons, but the majority being I really love the simplicity that is prepaid. Prepaid often has this negative connotation that it's lesser than. And here on this podcast I'll definitely tell you about what we've done to change that dynamic where it's not prepaid by need, it's prepaid by choice. Because the industry has changed so much over the last 20 years. But yeah, I grew up in it. I believe I am a value customer. I take a lot of pride in supporting this very diverse customer base that shops one of our eight commercial brands that we sell.
- [05:23]
Allison Schiff
Sounds like wireless and prepaid. Prepaid wireless was your destiny in a way.
- [05:29]
David D.K. Kim
It's funny you say that, you know, I, I, I, I, I was at T mobile at the time when I saw in Las Vegas where Cricket, Metro and Boost all launched in Las Vegas at virtually the the same time. It was one of the first markets that that happened. So I was on the ground floor as prepaid became less of a regional pre product and more of a a national carrier national brands. So it was just a great opportunity where I got to see it firsthand. And then I got to learn really, the industry outside of the mainstream, postpaid type products of what it, what it takes to serve this customer base, often the unbanked, often customers who are looking for, for great value for their dollar families looking for great value, the digital divide, et cetera. So I'm really passionate about how we support this community, not just with the products that we sell, but also the distribution, which, again, I'd love to talk about here today.
- [06:36]
Allison Schiff
I want to talk about all of those things. But why Las Vegas? Why was that such an epicenter for the launch of prepaid?
- [06:44]
David D.K. Kim
I think Las Vegas is a highly prepaid centric area, especially the, I would say, early days of prepaid wireless, because of the tourism. I mean, in Vegas you can go back in the day, you go to the, the mall, and there'd be kiosks and there'd be stores that just literally sold airtime and sold service for short bursts of time. So I think that's when for Vegas, you know, prepaid was, was always a big product in terms of the, the prepaid ecosystem, but also, again, the diversity, you know, we, before we started the podcast about people who want to move to Vegas, it's so diverse from, you know, folks all over the U.S. but even the world who moved to Vegas, and they're all looking for cell phone service. And oftentimes, especially customers coming internationally to the US they often don't have credit, so they could be, you know, anywhere in the world. And they come to the US and they don't have credit. And so it's harder for them to get a postpaid service, so they rely on prepaid. And so that's where I think Vegas became kind of an early market for prepaid. And I was just very fortunate to be there as brands started to grow up and to start to see what the different value propositions were amongst the different brands as well.
- [08:04]
Allison Schiff
I want to make sure our listeners have a clear picture of what Verizon value is, because it's not a brand that I think most people would know offhand because it's more of an umbrella. So explain what it is, how it connects to Verizon and what brands sit under it.
- [08:20]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, so Verizon acquired tracfone and based upon that, inherited just an incredible group of brands. And really there's eight brands that we actively sell commercially. And some of these brands you may have heard of because they're large and iconic. You know, Verizon, overall, we have about 20 million subscribers under the prepaid portfolio. We have the largest distribution moat in America. We believe it or not, sell either airtime or airtime and phones in 100,000 points of distribution across the US amongst these eight brands. So brands like Stray Talk. Straigh Talk is the third largest prepaid brand in America and it's exclusively sold at Walmart and has the largest square feet in terms of their display. In terms of the brand being showcased, we own brands like Visible, which is a brand incubated at Verizon, which is a digital first. Very savvy brand, I'd argue some of the best rate plans in America. And then we have brands that we just recently revitalized like Total Wireless which is really designed for the core of prepaid, the urban core. And then we have several other brands like tracfone, Simple Mobile, Verizon Prepaid, et cetera, Safe Link, which is our government discount program brand. So eight brands really designed over the past two years to be segmented towards the different markets within the US and our mission over the last two years has been each brand needs to stand on their own. Each brand needs to be able to serve a customer where they are. It has to stand for that customer. So you know, every day we look at 30 different brands that support the prepaid community and we ask ourselves, do each of our brands stand up against the competition and do we have value props that makes the customer want to be with us? And so eight brands across the Verizon portfolio, we call it the House of brands. And the beauty of it is that we can serve anyone in America based upon their needs, whether it's short term airtime, whether it's, they're looking for low costs or what are they looking for a premium experience
- [10:40]
Allison Schiff
to allude to something you just mentioned before about the prepaid wireless market getting treated as a monolith. Like it's just one big undifferentiated group of price sensitive customers. That's not how you guys think about it. So lay it out for me like who is the Verizon value customer? And why don't surface level demographics tell the whole story of who they are? And that of course informs how you want to reach them. And perhaps it makes it easier to have a house of brands because you don't have to, you know, have one message going out to a large group of people you can segment by brand.
- [11:21]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, great question. Prepaid in a, in a simple sentence has always been three things happen to prepaid customers. And this is why I get so fired up about it and why I'm so passionate about it is traditionally prepaid has the way that the brands or carriers have serviced these customers is it's often deprioritized, which I'll explain here in a second. It's often capped in terms of the amount of data that you give your customers and it's often less than the best possible phones out there to serve this customer. Because again, traditionally prepaid has been short term, transient or credit challenged. So deprioritize means where your postpaid customers get the best of your network. We wanted to break that mold two years ago when we came together as the new Verizon Value Group. Capped is where you give customers a certain amount of data and then you slow them down. So imagine being on YouTube, you're watching a video, you hit your cap, so now your data is throttled or slowed down so you don't get a great experience. And then, you know, because you're a prepaid customer, you're not going to get the latest and greatest iPhone or the best Android device. You're going to get a less than device. That's how prepaid traditionally has been bucketed in one big bucket and how consumers have been treated for, for several years. When the Verizon Value group came together in 24 under Nancy Clark, you know, she brought in a wealth of expertise, both internal Verizon, external Verizon, people who have experience in customer satisfaction, customer service, customer experience and traditional prepaid and really developed a dream team that looked at this industry completely different. And we had the support of Verizon overall as well, where the intent was let's do something radically different and see if we can go get new customers in what we call greenfields, where traditional Verizon wouldn't go get that customer. So the quickly thing, the things that we did was one is we did something that most carriers didn't do at the time, which was we give you our premium Verizon network, the best of the best on our prepaid brands. And that was an industry first. Right. I didn't see a lot of carriers who did that. Where you get the best network experience in an unthrottled, uncapped und prioritized environment. So one of the brands we started this on was actually Total Wireless where we looked at consumer research and we asked ourselves, what are things that consumers really care about? And the number one thing was they want the best possible speed and the best possible network. So that's where we started with that brand, where we started to develop unique value props, where we gave the consumer what they wanted. And thus over the last two years, Total Wireless is the fastest growing prepaid brand in America in terms of the number of stores we have and the amount of growth that we've had at such a quick pace. And there's actually an interesting story. I'll tell you about Total Wireless here in a second, but that's one great example of how we did that. And then the second I'd say is what we've done with Straight Talk. So Straight Talk is an iconic brand that's been with Walmart for several years. And one of the latest campaigns that we did is what we call same price since 2009. And what that is is that our iconic rate plan, which is $45 a month for unlimited talk, text and data, has been the same price since 2009. And so we really started to articulate that because recently there's been a lot of price ups for customers. Obviously, from an economic standpoint, consumers are always looking for ways to save money and, and they're also looking for stability. So those are some of the ways that we really change the norms that prepaid customers often didn't get. And we really take a lot of pride in being industry first and doing things that are different in terms of how we service our customers.
- [15:39]
Allison Schiff
So the same price, kind of like a Costco hot dog. And I bring that up because. Or an Arizona iced tea.
- [15:46]
David D.K. Kim
Arizona iced tea. That's what I was going to say. Arizona iced tea. Right.
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Allison Schiff
People would be up in arms if the price went up. And there's kind of a, I don't know, like a challenge. Right. In tying some of your value to a certain price. But then again, it's about helping your customers and you have to keep that price to give them what they, what they need.
- [16:13]
David D.K. Kim
Absolutely. And again, like where I'm just so prideful about this customer is again, I would say two that we constantly think about. You have your prepaid by need, which is what we're really talking about now. And then you have your prepaid by choice, where you have the customer who is just really savvy and they know that they can get a great deal under a prepaid brand, especially now that the major telcos all have different prepaid brands under their umbrella. But Straight Talk is one that I have near and dear to how I think about this is, I'll give you an example. A lot of times I'll go spend time at Walmart. And at Walmart you have customers who come in every single month to where they go buy a top up Card, which is their airtime that they go by, where they grab a card, they get a scanned, they scratch it off and they add airtime to their, to their cell phone service. And many times at the first of the month I meet families or I meet people who come in and as I ask them questions, you know, the cell phone is a necessity. It's a utility product. It is the first thing that people grab every single morning. It's the first thing that they use to communicate with those that they love. And we often have heard customers where they share, they have to make a purchase decision between buying their airtime and buying other necessities such as, you know, different food or diapers or you know, other things that they're looking to buy. But they often buy their airtime at the first a month or they buy it the first week of the month because that's when they get paid. And so those are the type of things that inspire us because one of the things we, we took back with that is, hey, this customer has to make trade off decisions based upon their discretionary income. How can we help them? Where maybe we create something that's what we call a bridge plan. And what that is is hey, if a customer's short on cash or they can't pay, they can buy a seven day plan and keep their service going so that when they do get paid, they can buy their monthly top up service. But if they need a short period of time where we can give them a low incremental plan but that doesn't disrupt their service and let's figure out a way to do that. And we recently launched that and we've had, you know, Almost, you know, 700,000 redemptions of this particular plan choice. But that makes us feel good because at the end of the day we kept their service and service continuity but we also gave them a different way to how to pay for their service and again, listening to customers of what they needed firsthand. So those are the different ways that I would say, you know, to your previous question of how did Verizon value come together? How are you looking at the business? It's always trying to find ways where you can put the customer first and solving that problem for them. Because guess what, when you do that, you drive incredible loyalty and trust in your brand. And with so much competition in the wireless space, there's only very few ways that you can differentiate yourself. And one of them is being, is driving loyalty to your customers.
- [19:24]
Allison Schiff
One more before we take a quick break, I'm going to name just Two semi random segments, say like a rural family of four on a tight budget, and they would have almost nothing in common, at least experientially with a single urban professional who just prefers not to be on a contract. So I get what you're saying about all of these different segments, but how does it show up in practice? Like how you in terms of how you develop your creative or you personalize your messaging, how you approach marketing?
- [19:57]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, great question. So your first example of a family of four in a rural or suburban environment, first thing that that comes to my head is I would sell them four lines for 100 on Straight Talk where they can get four lines of service. With Straight Talk, they can buy four phones for as low as 1999 inside Walmart and a friendly Walmart associate will help you activate that service. That service itself, not very different than what I'm going to articulate on the other side of the equation. But this family of four who's budget conscious, looking for a great deal, Straight Talk is an incredible value proposition in terms of the rate plan. But also from a phone standpoint, we subsidize those handsets off the peg hook inside Walmart where they can get a great device for an everyday low price, because that's synonymous with Walmart in terms of their credo, which is everyday low price. So when you walk in and you go to the prepaid section, you're going to see phones priced at everyday low price where you can provide the four handsets that you're looking to get and buy that service. Maybe an urban tech savvy customer. Typically what we find in that customer base is they want to bring their own device. They know esim, for example, so they want to be able to activate service, but they also want a great deal. So a brand like Visible, where visible is digital, first you go to our website, in less than five minutes, you can activate service straight from your phone and you can bring the phone that you know and love already and bring it onto Verizon service under the visible umbrella for as low as $25 a month for unlimited talk, text and data. So those are the different, I would say, ways that we bifurcate the customer. And then from a marketing standpoint, Visible, we do heavy online video, we do heavy, I would say above the line messaging relative to the brand all around, simplicity of price, price, tax and fees included and all designed towards that single line customer. Whereas Straight Talk, our latest campaign, is about a dad and his daughter and how, you know, every dollar he saves goes back to his family. And we highlight them with billboards within our commercials that talk about same price since 2009 on Verizon's network. So again, the rural suburban customer who's looking for the best network experience, it's Verizon. And so we highlight those things in different ways, but the commercials and the activity that goes within these brands are vastly different to hit that target demographic.
- [22:42]
Allison Schiff
All right, we're going to take a quick break and when we're back, we're going to talk a bit about brand partnerships, measurement, first party data and distribution. So stick with us.
- [23:05]
Katie McAdams
Foreign
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Sarah Sluice
I'm Sarah Sluice, editorial director at Ad Exchanger, and I'm with Katie McAdams, the chief marketing and Commercial Officer at Basis. Welcome, Katie.
- [23:18]
Katie McAdams
Thanks for having me.
- [23:20]
Sarah Sluice
So Basis has found that media teams today are juggling an average of nine different platforms to run a standard digital campaign. Which makes my head spin because I know when I like Switch browser tabs or Switch products, I'm like, wait, what was I here for again? So how does impact their ability to be successful as an advertiser? Sure.
- [23:43]
Katie McAdams
So it's a great question. What we find in our research is that our industry is losing anywhere from 80 to $100 billion annually in value leakage from errors, inefficiency and siloed campaigns sitting in all of those different platforms that you're talking about. And advertising is just becoming more and more fragmented, whether it's across teams, channels, tools, finance systems, and now different AI solutions software. That's a lot of context switching for one team in one day.
- [24:10]
Sarah Sluice
Wow. So what would a connected advertising system look like as an alternative to those nine platforms?
- [24:17]
Katie McAdams
What we find in talking to agencies and brands is that that journey really needs to start with consolidation. And by consolidation, I mean getting all of your media contracts, your campaign plans, your invoices, and your client communications into one place so that you have a single source of truth. And once you have that foundation in place, then something important really starts to happen. You actually have data that is clean and reliable so that your AI can function with it more meaningfully and more predictably. So the brands and agencies that get to this state fastest are not going to be the ones who are bolting on the most AI tools. They're going to be the ones who are able to build that operational foundation first.
- [24:55]
Sarah Sluice
I like this point that centralization isn't just about me as the media planner, but also about having more unified data that will then help me with AI, which I'm glad you brought up AI. So tell us a Little bit more about how AI is being added on to this connected advertising system.
- [25:14]
Katie McAdams
Sure. So this is where having that solid foundation in place is going to actually help AI become more of a multiplier for your organization and your teams. As an example, Basis has Compass, which is our agentic AI planning tool. It lives right inside our platform and it solves the problem of media teams spending hours and even sometimes days synthesizing media briefs, building frameworks, building media plans, and then creating client ready presentations before a campaign even launches. So Compass actually takes that brief and generates a complete omnichannel strategy across programmatic, search, social and direct in minutes instead of weeks. That strategy then becomes connected and pushed into their media plan, which can then be activated on through the BASIS platform across programmatic, search, social and direct media buys. And what we find is that agencies and brands who are using Basis overall are seeing 30 to 40% operational efficiency gains when they operationalize all of those workflows into one place. And that really creates an expansion of capabilities with teams being able to gain back time to focus on strategy, creativity and growth.
- [26:21]
Sarah Sluice
So we have more efficiency through centralization, which then enables more use of AI, which is even more efficient. So really interesting to talk to you, Katie, and thank you to Basis for supporting our podcast.
- [26:34]
Katie McAdams
Thank you.
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Allison Schiff
All right, we're back and I want to start out by broaching something I feel like prepaid wireless, but also just wireless in general. Just your phone plan. It's a category where the product is essentially invisible when it's working. Like nobody really thinks about their phone plan on a good day. And that's great, right? You just want it to work. I'm a Verizon customer. And you in the best possible way. I don't think about Verizon very much because my phone just works. But when there's some kind of issue, that's when I become aware. And so in a way, although you described some of the campaigns and different approaches in the first half, it's a challenge because you're not always selling like Joy, you're kind of selling the absence of a problem. So how do you think about building brand in that kind of a category where you're doing your best work when you're just in the background?
- [27:58]
David D.K. Kim
That's a great question. And as you ask that question, there's a practice that I think about with my leadership team, the way you serve your customers. And the honest truth is during those critical moments that matter. And the critical moments that matter is not when your service is working, it's when Your service is not working to your point. And there's one vehicle that we look at every single day with actually the power of AI. Right? We have a gem that scours social media and Reddit and all the different forums and every morning I get a report of what is the customer saying, the voice of the customer. And Reddit obviously is a great example of this, where we are constantly watching Reddit, we're constantly watching social, where when we don't show up in the best way for our customers, we quickly figure out how to solve that for our customers, if it's a broader issue or if it's a singular issue for the customer. And that's really helped us because that not only helps us in terms of customer experience, in terms of the service or the, the value prop that we have for them, but it also gives us new insights into new product launches that we do. So Reddit, for example, Visible, has a huge Reddit following and they are loyalists, they are brand loyalists. We talk about the tech savvy customer who is looking for the best networking experience. Like they will tell you if they're having a good network experience and they'll also tell you the new things that they want to see launched. So Reddit, we've been constantly monitoring and one of the things that has come up is, hey, we love your mobile service. We wish you would launch fixed wireless access or home Internet. So we actually took customer feedback that they're looking for a home Internet product and use that as our inspiration to create home Internet. So we recently launched Visible Home Internet where it's a one of our first converged products and services where you can get your mobile service and your home Internet service all bundled together. And that's directly from customer feedback. So that's one way we do it on the positive, which is creating new value props. But on the inverse, we also look at forms like Reddit or social, where we get feedback around our app or we get feedback around our loyalty programs where something didn't work the first time that it should have for our customers. And then we take that feedback and then we use that to design our CCX and our UI in terms of the customer experience. And that helps us get better. And so we have kind of a mantra within our team which is, you know, bigger, fewer, stronger, which is, you know, bigger initiatives, fewer projects and stronger, you know, together for our customers. And that's really holds true to us in our day to day practice because we want to solve the customer riddle so that you don't worry about us. And you don't think about us. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to cell phone service, if you are confident it's just going to work like we've done our job and then our next elevation of our job is create new things that would be interest interesting to you that you would want to buy because it helps you be able to connect to the things and the people that matter most to you. So that's really how we use customer feedback to be the forefront of everything that we do.
- [31:26]
Allison Schiff
You mentioned customer experience, so let's talk about distribution and the customer experience. Because Verizon value brands are distributed in a really interesting way, which you already talked about. You're not just a D2C play, you're also sold across roughly 100,000 points of distribution. Walmart, like you said, also Best Buy. And there's a lot of real estate there. But it also means that you have to design your customer customer experiences across like two very different environments at once, the D2C and then, you know, via Walmart and Best Buy and all the other big box retailers. And I've seen you write about this in terms of a concept that you refer to as 3ft and one click, which is the idea that a shopper standing in a Walmart aisle and a shopper browsing on their phone at midnight or whatever are essentially in the same moment of consideration. They're just in very different places, literally. And it sounds good, but how do you actually make those two experiences feel cohesive rather than two separate experiences that just happen to involve selling the same or a similar product?
- [32:36]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, it's a great question. I'll actually tie this into a partnership that we have that I think is really interesting. So I've already spoken about Walmart, Best Buy, kind of the national retail environment, but one of the other areas that we're really proud of is our brick and mortar distribution that we're building for Total Wireless. That's where I think my passion around three feet and one click from the customer really resonates. Three feet from the customer is when they're right in front of you. One click is midnight, like you said, where they're online to see what you have to offer, where eventually they wind up at your store or they decide to buy online. And so one of the unique things that we did with Total Wireless was the brand has been designed for the neighborhood community. It is the urban community. It's surrounded by your, you know, your cricket stores, your Boo stores, your metro stores. It's on the neighborhood block where the customer lives, breathes, and socialize every single day. Like that's where we build these stores. And what we also found is that this customer is highly passionate around partnerships and sponsorships. So we actually partner with the UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship and have done a lot of localized events and activities to bring the UFC to our stores and to bring the this partnership alive. And what I mean by this is like, retail is just one dimension, but it's also a dimension of how we cross functionally do this with partnerships. So in the cultural relevance. So with Total, we do localized events, we know that this customer is super passionate about the ufc. So we bring the latest, most popular MMA artists to our stores for different, you know, signing events or different in store activities where they don't have to be a total wireless customer. They, they get benefits for being a total wireless customer, but they don't have to be a total wireless customer. They can come in, meet their favorite MMA artist or fighter, you know, take a picture with them, get to know what our products and services are. And if they choose to buy, great. If they don't, then they got to see something that matters a lot to them in terms of relevance to them inside one of our locations. And then we also obviously show up on every fight that they have on Paramount or the different venues. But that's one of the ways where we know that this customer cares about it. They're already engaged in the ufc. They're passionate about it. So, like, how do we drive that same type of passion for their wireless service? So how do you bring those two worlds together? Another one that we do is Straight Talk and nascar. So nascar, we activate activities at Walmart, we do obviously our own different events with nascar, but again, bringing things that the customer is passionate about into their wireless ecosystem and vice versa. So they have one ubiquitous great experience. And that's what we've done with, with just those two brands alone, where we try to marry the two together, where things that matter to them, matter to us, and then we put it together with the brand.
- [35:56]
Allison Schiff
How do you measure a brand partnership like the one with UFC or the one with NASCAR? Like what are the KPIs?
- [36:04]
David D.K. Kim
The big one obviously is consideration. So like for example, with Straight Talk, our latest ad that we did, our latest commercials that we do, we look at consideration, we look at the positive reactions that they get. We also look at when we do different activities, do we see an uptick in branded search? So, for example, when we do things with Total Wireless on the USC fights, we're looking at branded search and search terms. And we typically see a decent uptick when we do the brand as a part of one of the events. So we closely look at that. The other thing I'd say that we look at is just overall consideration and overall awareness of the brand, aided and unaided. And as we look at that, we start to see that the brand Total Wireless is starting to get recognized. Because, keep in mind, this brand, we revitalized it, like, two years ago. So although customers know the brand, we also have work to do to make sure that the customer looks at the brand as a right fit for them and, you know, to segue this. Actually, here's an interesting. I was. I was thinking about earlier, as we were talking about is Total Wireless is a brand that, as we revitalized it, we took the very brave and courageous thing to do, which was originally, this brand was not Total Wireless. It was Total Wireless. Then it actually morphed into Total by Verizon. And then we rebranded it again back to Total Wireless. And people might think that we were crazy for why do we do that? But I'll tell you, the research was indicative of why we did it. And so when the brand was totaled by Verizon, when I first joined Verizon, I would spend hours just sitting at stores and listening to customers, and 7 out of 10 customers would walk in thinking it was a Verizon store. So they'd come in asking for help on their Verizon service because the brand was total by Verizon. And so then we did customer research, and we realized that from an awareness standpoint, people associate their brand with Verizon, but they thought it was just an extension of Verizon. So we decided that, hey, this brand needs to stand on its own. And so we went back to Total Wireless. And so it was a courageous decision because Verizon is a powerhouse name, One of the most recognized names in America. But we took it off the signage of our front of our stores. When you walk inside our stores, you see powered by Verizon. But the exterior of our stores is all about Total Wireless. And if you ever look at our logo and you see, like, our. Our logo on a USC fight or anywhere out there in the wild, the design of our logo as we redid it was all about the heartbeat. So, like, when you look at the red background of Total Wireless, it was inspired by being a heartbeat and the heartbeat of the neighborhood, the heartbeat of the community. And then as you look at the color proliferation of what we have with our turquoise, you see this reverb effect and that's the heartbeat of the community. So we took a lot of focus on being that neighborhood beacon where we can give great service to our customers, to those that matter most to them, but also again, having the courage to take away the buy Verizon and making the brand stand on its own. So that's just one of the ways that just to tie it all together. Something very unique and interesting that we did with, with Total Wireless. And now again, like I mentioned, it's the fastest growing brand from a prepay standpoint in America.
- [39:42]
Allison Schiff
Then one other measurement, ish question, like, for a business like yours, where you've got multiple brands and there's no contract, you really have to focus on building long term customer relationships and retention rather than just a single transaction. So are there signals that you track that tell you that someone might be about to churn and then what can you do about it?
- [40:05]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, no, there's a lot of ways we look at that. Yeah. To your point, especially with prepaid, every month that customer has a decision to make. Do they go buy airtime for your service or do they port out and go somewhere else? So we're starting to get into device financing where customers get financing through us, but the primary customer, every month they have a decision to make. So there are signals that we look at, like for example, when the customer is looking to get their port out pin, we know that at that point, you know, you probably lost that customer because you did something to hurt their experience. But this is where we look at, you know, going back to what are the things that matter? We look at, you know, quality of the network experience and do we have signals that show us that the customer has called into care because they had a poor network experience? Experience. And then what are we doing to actually solve that for the customer? Is it that they were in a tough area where our coverage may have not been the best, or is there something that we could have done to ensure that they have good experience and good service? So we look at quality of the network, we look at, you know, the amount of times the customer is adding airtime to their service. Frequently we look at early, what we call payment history and we find that if customers stay with you the first three or four months, they're likely to stay with you the long term. But that first 90 days really matters in terms of how you show up for them. So you have to make it easy for them to pay their bill. You have to give them many locations to be able to pay their bill. So that you have maximum flexibility for them. And then again, that network experience matters. The beauty being backed by the power of Verizon's network is the customer typically has incredible experience when it comes to the service of data as well as voice. So typically that's not the fundamental issue. It's the experience that they had with setting up their phone, their experience they had with our app, the customer experience, et cetera. So there's a lot of different cues that we look at. But to your point, churn is a very key metric for us because again, every single month they have the right to leave you. So things like that, loyalty programs, partnerships that we do, that's unique are all ways that we try to provide incremental value for the customer that makes them want to stay with you.
- [42:28]
Allison Schiff
You get people to stick around though, and you develop a pretty meaningful first party data asset. And yeah, these are people who have opted into your service, they're actively using your service. How do you activate like your first party data for marketing, like for retention, upsell building, lookalike audiences, maybe, things like that?
- [42:49]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, we do some of that. First party data has, there's some cues that we can get from that, but it's also kind of difficult in the prepaid space because what I'll tell you is that I would say three out of 10 customers actually will give us information. Right. In terms of. A lot of these customers want to be anonymous. So we don't have 100% first party data. And quite frankly, it's, it's difficult to use that data to, to conquest customers because the prepaid customer is so dynamic. So we have some of that data, but the, the thing that we look at more is the competitive set. Distribution, again, is critical for us. Why we try to participate in a ton of retail distribution is because that serves as our marketing, as our billboard. So we know that when we're near a Cricket Metro boost location or we're in the right trade areas, we know that our brands could compete relative to our value proposition and what we offer. And then again, in the national retail environment, we try to be big, bold and have our value prop resonate really well there too, because we know that's where the customer shops. So that's really how we look at how we compete in a highly competitive landscape. It is. Distribution is really critical in terms of how we market to our customers.
- [44:12]
Allison Schiff
Interesting. Well, we've run out of time somehow. So last question, as we've been talking about this whole time, the word prepaid has a lot of baggage. It Used to mean, I guess like burner phones and no credit check. But the customer that you've been describing is more sophisticated, loyal, can have long lifetime value. There are lots of different motivations for going prepaid. So do you see a future where the industry just like retires that word and comes up with something else?
- [44:45]
David D.K. Kim
Yeah, you know, that is our kind of. Our mission, to be honest with you, is like we're a subscription product and we want customers to choose prepaid because they see it as great value. And how do you do that? You have to break the mold and you have to give them experiences that are post pay like experiences and the network being primary. So, you know, over time, I think the blurred lines between the quote unquote postpaid versus prepaid will continue to blur. You know, we do financing within some of our prepaid brands and that has typically been the delineation point is, you know, I want the latest and greatest iPhone or Android. So you have to get postpaid. Well now, you know, like you can go buy your phone and bring it to us, or you can buy that phone and finance it through us. So I think those lines are getting blurred. I think who wins in the long term is again, boils down to putting the customer first and ensuring that the value you give them is all about incremental value that is beyond just the network experience. It's about those little things that matter. Whether it's a partnership or whether it's added value in terms of different unlocks to the network, or again, giving them a great device that they're happy with, those things matter. And then again, it's all about the customer experience and customer service. So for us, those are the things that we're focused on is making sure we're doing things that are industry first, but at the same time keeping in our DNA that at the end of the day, what matters is every day we look at Reddit, we look at social, and what are they saying about us? And if they're saying that they had a great experience, then we're doing our job.
- [46:36]
Allison Schiff
I lied. I have one more question.
- [46:38]
David D.K. Kim
Okay, do it.
- [46:40]
Allison Schiff
So sell me. I'm standing in a Walmart aisle. Like right now. I have a perfectly fine phone plan. Like, why would I switch? Like, what would actually get me to switch?
- [46:52]
David D.K. Kim
Save money. If you. And I'm not going to say you're with because you're with Verizon. So let's pretend you're with somebody. We love that you're with Verizon, stay with Verizon. But if you're with another postpaid carrier, I would ask. The first question I ask you is, is your phone financed? Like, do you still have payments on that phone or do you own your phone?
- [47:15]
Allison Schiff
Am I supposed to answer the questions? I own my phone.
- [47:18]
David D.K. Kim
If you own your phone, I can get you the same network or a great network experience for probably half the price that you're paying today. And you can bring your phone and be on our service within 10 minutes, same phone, same type of network, and save up to half the price that you're paying today. And that's the difference now with what we've done with our brands. Because again, if you're with a competitor and you want a nationwide network, we can do that for as low as $25 a month, unlimited data with all the. The postpaid network that gets you the service that you need. So that's where if you own your phone prepaid by choice really becomes a huge opportunity because you can save a lot of money. So. So why not? And then look, at the end of the day, if you want to go to any one of our other brands, you can. If you want to go to Verizon, you can. We make it easy for you to go from any one of our prepaid brands to Verizon and vice versa. So that's how I would tell you to switch is primarily, you can save money to be on a great network and have the phone that you love.
- [48:29]
Allison Schiff
You know how I think Uber does this, where they have all of the executives go and like drive Uber for the day or maybe so you should go head down to Walmart and phones.
- [48:42]
David D.K. Kim
It's funny you say that. I actually do that like every quarter with my team. So we go to Walmart or we go to Total Wireless store. I'm actually here in Miami where I'll visit some stores tomorrow. And we all got to sell a box, we all got to talk to customers and. And that's one of the things that we enjoy doing. But, you know, we learned the most and I going to go back to three fleet from the customer. You learn so much by spending a half day in a store where you got to walk the walk and talk the talk. Right? And so we try to do that every quarter and then we reconvene and it helps us create new ideas, but also helps us to think about the things that we need to improve on.
- [49:20]
Allison Schiff
Yeah, shoe leather. Get the job done.
- [49:23]
David D.K. Kim
That's right. That's right.
- [49:31]
Allison Schiff
Foreign.
- [49:37]
Sarah Sluice
This episode was sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omnichannel activation. Learn more@basis.com.