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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#678: AI gains emotional intelligence with Joshua Goldberg, Zenapse
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- [00:00]
Author/Host
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world, and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
- [00:46]
Greg Kilstrom
The Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Podcast Host
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show.
- [01:52]
Greg Kilstrom
Have you ever wondered why, despite having access to advanced AI tools, your marketing strategies still don't hit the mark? Could it be that you're focusing on the wrong data and missing the emotional connections that truly drive consumer behavior? Today, we're exploring the intersection of AI, emotional intelligence and marketing with Joshua Goldberg, EVP of Strategy at zenapps. We're going to dive into how large emotion models are revolutionizing consumer engagement and delivering impressive marketing results. Joshua, welcome to the show.
- [02:22]
Joshua Goldberg
Hey Greg, nice to see you.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a good topic here with all the, you know, all the discussion. We talk about AI in every episode, but there's always another. Another angle to pursue and another way to look at it. Before we dive in, though, why don't we start with you giving a little background on yourself and your role at zenapps?
- [02:45]
Joshua Goldberg
Thanks a lot, Greg. You know, I gravitate towards businesses that are creative, have a high rate of change, and really at their core are about connecting with people. And we talked about the MTV experience before the podcast. I think when it really started to click for me was when I was part of a small team that was building one of the first pioneer interactive agencies, Organic. And that's where I was actually able to meet many of the Zen Apps team members. It was at Organic that we really were building these experiences for E commerce, for financial services, entertainment, and really about like, shortening the distance between brands and consumers. And it was also this incredible window into what keeps a marketer up late at night. And that is really how do I deliver an experience, how do I use technology so that it works for me, and also how do I engage consumers so that they convert. So if we sort of fast forward past marketing and strategy work for media companies and publishers and consultants and land on Zen Apps, which is where we are today, it really is great because we're in this new territory that you talked about, which is about AI business and emotional intelligence. And what's exciting about it is one just being able to connect with a really seasoned team. At Xenaps, these are people who have led big marketing and development teams within the Fortune 100. We work with the bleeding edge in AI, so we have, we're part of the Comcast Lift Labs AI accelerator, and we're also very close with the Google Cloud and Google Gemini teams. And most of all, our team has built a platform for really amazing brands and marketers to deliver experiences that leverage AI and emotional intelligence and deliver results.
- [04:36]
Greg Kilstrom
Great, great. Well, yeah, let's, let's dive in here. And you know, as I mentioned, AI comes up in every conversation, I think, lately. But, you know, so we've certainly talked a lot about large language mod and agentic AI and stuff like that. But here we're going to talk about large emotion models. And I'd love to hear first, how do you define a large emotion model and how does it compare to something like a large language model?
- [05:04]
Joshua Goldberg
Yeah, so, Greg, as you know, LLMs train on billions of words. They predict the next sequence of words, and they're used for these amazing utilities like content generation and language translation, customer service. And again, they're great utilities, but for marketers, they're really looking for a different type of value. So we built a large emotion model which trains on emotions, sentiments, beliefs and activities. And it's all really at the service of really understanding what matters to a consumer. Because when you understand what matters, then you can deliver an experience, and then you're more likely to. To see huge lift in conversion. On our side, the Zen app side, we've built the first large emotion model. Over the past 24 months, our model has interacted with over 200 million consumers. It's logged over 6 billion interactions. And essentially what it allows a brand to do is it gives it an opportunity to interact with a consumer, one they may not know much about, and to predict what is the right message, content, offer copy, and image that has the highest likelihood of converting them. We do this at scale. We do it dynamically and in real time for some of the world's largest brands. And the results are really stunning. We've seen lists in conversion anywhere between 40 to 400% using this LEM. Wow.
- [06:29]
Greg Kilstrom
Wow. So can you talk a little bit more about how does it. How does a large emotion model predict and respond? I mean, definitely to your point, it's nice to generate content and all that stuff, but, yeah, when you're. When you're tasked with driving conversions and building loyalty and all of those things like this seems really, really relevant. But can you talk a little bit more about how it works and how it predicts and responds?
- [06:58]
Joshua Goldberg
Yeah. Let me start. First off, I think if it's helpful to just start with, like, what's the challenge for marketers today? We've experienced these challenges. I'm pretty sure you have as well. So as you know, the tools that are available to a marketer today are either demographic or behavior. Demographic is, you're this old. You live here. Here's a picture of palm trees. And behavioral is, you bought shoes, so you must need socks. But when we speak to marketers, really, the barometer for success is conversion. And unfortunately, conversion rates are hovering around 2% in E commerce, maybe higher for financial services and healthcare. Think about that for a second. If you flip it on ted, that means 100 consumers raised their hand, the brand had an opportunity to engage them, and 98 of them walked away. Yeah. So what the platform, what we believe and what the platform has actually proven is people don't make decisions based on behavior and demographics. A Harvard study actually shows that 95% of decision making is emotional. If you read a book like Thinking Fast and Slow, it's the same takeaway. When you understand what matters to a person, you can deliver an experience, and that experience can deliver an outcome. That's what marketing is, experience plus results.
- [08:20]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah.
- [08:21]
Joshua Goldberg
So then let me talk a little bit about how we deliver those predictions and our LEM Captures, as it mentioned, emotion, belief, sentiment and activities. Activities are the things you do. Travel, video games, gardening. Sentiment is your attitudes towards them. Do you like cooking? Do you hate it? Is it an obligation? And then with emotions and beliefs, we look at 85 different emotions and beliefs. Nothing controversial. We're not looking at politics or religion. Instead we're looking at things like, what's your attitude towards money? Is it a spending tool or a savings tool? Knowledge. Do you trust experts or do you learn by doing family? Do you put them first or do you value your personal time? Those are sort of the key areas that we're looking at. We also train the AI on specific goals that will move a user through the funnel. A form, submit a lead, start setting up an account, calling an advisor. Let me give you a real world example of those predictions in action. A consumer will interact with a web or a mobile experience. The model detects what are the emotions and beliefs that are built into that person. And with a number of different marketing variations, which variation actually has the highest likelihood of converting that end user? The variations can vary from calls to action, to button color, to headlines, to offers. And they're very powerful for delivering these predictions.
- [09:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So to that end, you know, I want to talk a little bit more. I mean, you mentioned up to 400% conversion increases and stuff like that, so I want to talk a little bit more about that and just how marketing ROI can be improved with the large emotion model. So not only increasing conversion rates, but cutting acquisition costs. All of those things that make the marketers happy and those that they report to, even happier, I'm sure. Can you talk about, you know, how. I know you've touched on this a little bit, but, you know, how does, how does the LEM contribute to these, these outcomes?
- [10:39]
Joshua Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, the results are really amazing. And that's also because we're working with really amazing brands who are very interested in AI and emotional intelligence and also really interested in delivering better predictions so they can deliver a better experience. We work with one of the top pet insurers in the US when we started working with them, new policies were under 2%. Let's say it's about 1.7, 1.8%. The platform allowed us to redesign the funnel. Over the course of 10 months, we were able to raise conversion rates from 1.8% to almost 9%. I think actually over 9%. That's like a forex.
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Podcast Host
Yeah.
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Joshua Goldberg
At the same time, we were able to drop the CAC by about 75%. And for a big organization that we're working with, they're not looking to just reduce their cost of acquisition. This is really allows them to put sort of more resources towards more marketing. Yeah, another example, and this is maybe quite interesting, we work with one of the top fast fashion brands and they have a very low price point. So you can imagine, like dropping a fleece from $15 to $14 isn't going to move the needle. What we discovered through the platform was there was a subsegment that was really interested in the environment and they had strong social beliefs about making a difference. When we changed the messaging to made with sustainable materials, conversion rates lifted 20%. So I think what's also really interesting is how emotional intelligence actually works across diverse industries.
- [12:25]
Author/Host
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Greg Kilstrom
So along with all of the. The benefits of using AI, there's also, you know, I guess for all the hype that it gets, it also feels like there's some wasted opportunities. Right. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, despite increased AI adoption? In many ways, you know, not. Not just in one specific, but in many ways, you know, many marketing opportunities are still going wasted.
- [13:43]
Joshua Goldberg
Yeah, I think we're seeing the same thing too. And we're marketers and so we get it. You know, marketers today face two big pressures. One is they're being asked to perform like general contractors. So in addition to their core duties, they have to be experts in it, cybersecurity, compliance, and so on. They're also under a lot of pressure to deliver value quarter to quarter. They need to show a business case immediately. Our solution, as I mentioned, is built by marketers for marketers. So some of the things that are built into the zenapps platform that are attractive not only to marketers, but also to the Chief Digital Officer and the IT team. One, it's immediate. So when someone signs up for the platform, they get immediate access to our graph of 6 billion interactions. That means that personalization can begin immediately. It's not six or 12 months down the road. Secondly, it's low code, no code. It's two lines of JavaScript that run in the Tag Manager. Takes less than four hours to deploy. It's really amazing, sits on the tech stack. Another important part is there's no pii. We do not capture name or address. It runs on the client side, but there is nothing that can identify an individual directly. It's also goal based. So we talked about this before. A lot of programs or platforms are about clicks. We care about goals and metrics. Did someone complete a form? Did they create an account? Did they select an annual plan? Did they select a multi day pass for a theme park? Also I can tell you what's very interesting is the ROI is delivered within weeks, not months or years. We've just launched a pilot now with a media company and within two weeks we're already seeing an increased roi. So it's really significant.
- [15:46]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk about another factor here which is we've added the emotional component to AI and there's certainly generative AI in there as far as content creation. There's the emotional component. Now let's talk about the real time component as well. And so when all of these things are kind of added together, how can marketers use an AI driven solution to provide real time insights that can enhance marketing effectiveness?
- [16:19]
Joshua Goldberg
Yeah, awesome question. I think at the root of this is about like testing and also listening. And I'll give a real world example. I mentioned that we work with fashion brands and I'll talk about the fast fashion brand that we work with just as a test. We wanted to ask consumers after the purchase process how they were feeling. And believe it or not, something like 20% of consumers responded. And when we asked what they were feeling, a lot of them told us they were overwhelmed. We would never have discovered this. But just by asking and asking around emotional intelligence, we got incredible insight. So what did that mean for the experience going forward? Well, it meant for that segment that felt overwhelmed having too many choices or being pressured. It meant turning down the volume on messaging, like limited time only or buy now. And instead a lot of the messages were like just for you or selected for you. And in fact, once we did that and updated that experience again, we saw this incredible lift in conversion. So when we think about like real time, it's about sort of in real time listening and then being able to adapt quickly. And the results are really stunning.
- [17:41]
Greg Kilstrom
How do you see this evolving over time. And you know, it's, it feels like in all ways, I think with, with AI and we're kind of in early days, you know, how do you see AI and this emotional intelligence connection continuing to evolve and you know, where do you think, where do you think we're going to be in the, in sort of the next phase of this evolution?
- [18:04]
Joshua Goldberg
Yeah, I think it's really exciting, to be honest. I think with this large emotion model and the combination of emotional intelligence and AI, it will give brands and marketers an incredible opportunity to build relationships and shorten the distance between them and consumers. Right now I can say from the Zen app's perspective, we're really following an omnichannel strategy. So, you know, the platform serves web, mobile, ctv, but you can imagine the emotion that's built into so many other touch points, emerging touchpoints, smart homes, the screens inside a self driving car, wearables, video games. And so for brands, I think what that means is there's a huge opportunity to connect with them on an emotional level, to be able to drive transactions and outcomes. And then importantly, all the data from those different sources can then be fed into the model and help those brands to deliver even greater engagement and experiences going forward.
- [19:11]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up here. I'd like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [19:25]
Joshua Goldberg
I love this question, by the way.
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Greg Kilstrom
Greg, great.
- [19:28]
Joshua Goldberg
First off, I always carry a book with me and my wife is a middle school librarian so her motto is get caught reading because you never know when you're gonna get in, get into a great idea. I'm actually reading this book by Chris Voss called Never split the difference. You might have He's a hostage.
- [19:46]
Podcast Host
I've read that.
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Joshua Goldberg
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I picked it up because my 13 year old is in debate club and she keeps winning arguments. But actually, you know what's amazing about the book is if you want to understand the power of emotional intelligence and how people make decisions and how to get results, this is absolutely the book to get. So I think just getting that information from different sources and always having a book handy is a big deal. And then we also talked about this before the podcast. I think maybe just to keep my mind young and flexible. I'm a blues musician and a big part of what we do is improvise and even songs that I've been playing for decades. I'm always thinking about how can I improve my technique, how can I find a new song within the song, how do I listen better to my bandmates? And that's great practice for the business world as well.
- [20:43]
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Joshua Goldberg, EVP of Strategy at zenapps, for joining us today and sharing his expertise on large emotion models and how they're transforming the marketing landscape. To learn more about Joshua and Zen Apps, you can follow the links in the show Notes.
- [21:01]
Podcast Host
Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [21:55]
Greg Kilstrom
The Agile Brand.
- [21:59]
Author/Host
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- [22:55]
Tech Systems Representative
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