A (3:26)

Fantastic. And I mean, I've been very impressed with what I've looked at with Wayne. It really is sort of a Swiss army knife set of tools for creating all sorts of different angles and campaigns. And as you say, it's about reaching the consumer where they are online, not just kind of dumping it all on your website and hoping that they'll come. This is about reaching out and grabbing people's interest in a variety of clever and funky ways, I might add.

B (3:52)

Yes, indeed. And I think there's a couple of different sort of angles to this. One is, if you think about it, if you think about the old model, which is I build my website and then I actually go and pay for paid media to actually drive people to my website and then I try and convert them there, you know, that has real problems in today's digital landscape. I'll give you a practical example. So if you're on Instagram Stories, something which is, you know, something which has taken off and is doing phenomenally well, and you're a brand and you put out an Instagram story, whether that's paid or organic, when you, you know, you'll have some call to action, which is learn more or whatever, that call to action goes to the website and actually all your listeners will have experienced this themselves. If you swipe up on a call to action on something like an Instagram Stories post, what it actually does is it brings in the whole website through Instagram's in app browser and a similar experience on Twitter and Facebook and every other platform. When you click on an app and actually it takes three to five seconds for this website to load through the in app browser immediately. The digital native, the person that's looking at stories, oh, I can't be bothered. I'm being redirected to website. I'm clicking onto the next story. That's just a user experience, which is just not good. What you really want to do is when you swipe up is you want to have an instantly loading experience that's contextually relevant to the advert, doesn't have all of the website navigation around it and all the things that are not necessary and actually just takes the consumer into more of a brand experience and hopefully Converts them in some way such as collecting marketing opt ins and data there, while they actually feel like they're natively inside the Instagram platform, then you can get much higher rates of engagement. So that's just one practical example how the world is changing. And the second is actually ads themselves are turning people off. There's way too much reliance by brands to try and reach people with with adverts. Let's shove video and images in people's faces in an interruptive format without any kind of value exchange and hope it works. Well today things are changing. I think we see that with people turning off ads and installing ad blockers and what have you. And people like the CMO of P&G, Mark Pritchard at ANA Media just finished his keynote speech with a rallying call to action which is how can we make advertising in digital advertising a useful consumer experience?

A (6:28)

My goodness, ads that are useful, there's a concept.

B (6:33)

Yes. And our view on this is why shouldn't they be useful? If you think about it, a digital ad is literally just a bit of real estate that someone is connecting with on a digital channel. It doesn't have to be just here's a video, watch my video. And so I give an example to folks when I talk about it. Think about this, right? I don't know, say you're a fashion brand and it's now March and you're thinking about trying to get people to buy summer clothes. So rather than just have an ad which is an image or a video of your clothes and a buy now button which links you off to the website, what about this kind of experience? The call to action is find your perfect summer style or something like that. And actually the advert is an interactive experience, so it'll show you the latest summer styles which have been shown up on the catwalks of Milan and Paris and London and New York and you can respond to that conversation. Do you like that style or not? For different things, dresses, shoes, whatever it may be. And as you're interacting with that content and showing which you like and which you don't like it, then at the end of the advert experience serves you up. What would be your perfect summer style? Based on the very latest styles and fashions that are going on on the catwalk and says that you have a chance to win that whole outfit in return for your data. So an instant win. So you put your data in, you know, marketing, opt ins, etc. Perhaps it asks you some further questions so it can understand what kind of buyer you are and further profile your interests and collect marketing opt ins and then boom, you see if you won or not. Now for everyone that doesn't win, they can automatically get sent an email saying, right, well, we now know what your perfect style is. Here's a, you know, coupon for 10% off or whatever for that perfect style that as an advertising experience delivers value to the consumer. Very different from just shooting a video in someone's face.

A (8:42)

Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the questions I wanted to ask you is do you think 2018, it's business as usual for marketers or do you think there's some real shocks in store for them? And I think from what you said, there are definitely some, some shocks in store for people if they just carry on doing things the same way they've done season after season. Do you just elaborate a little bit on that?

B (9:02)

Yeah, no, that's, that's a really good question actually. And actually I, you know, I think, I think someone might want to share that digital advertising is a strategy for digital marketers that don't have a strategy.

A (9:14)

Let's do some ads, let's sell some stuff.

B (9:17)

Yeah. Which is actually, I think quite apt in today's world because if you really look at it, you know, the current forms of advertising which are literally just push a video and an image of people have horrendous rates of click through. You know, we're precipitously low now. It's very hard to KPI and justify pushing content in an interrupted manner without some sort of value exchange or trying to rethink the engagement that you're having with people.

A (9:44)

And it's very interesting because the, the agencies will all spin you the line of, oh well, you know, it's all about, you know, branding. It's not about the interaction with the ad obviously on display. Traditionally it's very low click through rates and that's kind of what we expect. It's branding, branding, branding. You don't subscribe to that view. I can see.

B (10:03)

Well, you know, not just me, I don't think anyone that actually knows what we're talking about subscribes to that view anymore. Forrester just came out with a report a few months ago called the End of Advertising as we Know It. And they're not saying advertising dollars are going to disappear. They're just saying that the ad interactive format that we have at the moment, which is just shove loads of video and image at people and hope they buy, needs to be rethought. And already billions of dollars are starting to get re portioned to more interactive brand experiences. And that was the whole tenant of their report. Now when you actually go and look at what our brands wanting to do, well, brands are wanting to redefine the experience that they have with consumers. I mean, the average amount of time that you interact in an ad in a newsfeed is 1.7 seconds on Facebook, 1.7 seconds. That's not a lot of time to get anything useful done. And that's because people are just flicking through and they're not really interested in, in the advertising. There's way too much out there. Another thing interesting stat is that the ANA was saying that an advert, the optimum time for the amount of times that an advert is served to someone is about three to four in a particular campaign. If they see an advert three to four times, that's great. But actually most brands were doing it 10 to 12 times. So they were actually just annoying people with the frequency of the interruption of shoving the advert at people. The other side of it is for those that say it's all about branding, branding, we just need to have mass reach. It's all about branding. They're ignoring some very fundamental shifts in what's actually happening in the industry at large. Amazon is taking over the world and Amazon is an extremely data rich business. It is taking over the world because it understands in detail about its consumers, their behaviors, their habits, what they buy, what they're not. Amazon's fastest growing product segment is their private label brands, which is basically them going off and saying, forget the brands, we're going to go and build anything in China. They're just doing it with sportswear. They basically decimated the battery market. They're doing it across a whole series of different brand categories. They just bought Whole Foods in the US which had loads and loads of their own brands. So Amazon is a giant threat to brands, directly to brands, and they're data rich business. So if you're a brand saying, I don't need to know who my consumers are, all I care about is putting TV out there or treating digital like TV with better advertising and hoping that people walk along the aisle of Walmart and buy my products, you're living in a different world. The only way you're going to protect yourself against the likes of Amazon or other very data rich subscription businesses and people like Harry's and Dollar Shave Club really put pressure on established players like Gillette because they're sending the products to you. This subscription business is in pretty much everything these days. There's been a huge amount of money from the venture capital community going into the subscription economy. Businesses, they create stuff for you. They send it to you. Because they send it to you. They know who you are, they know what products you're using, what you're buying, they know your birthday, they know where you live, they know whether they've upselled you. They're starting to build out more information about your motivations, your likes, you're interest. They're the ones that are taking down a brand. So I think one thing you could categorically say is the winners in the future are going to be those companies that have more data around consumers and can personalize their experiences, their marketing and their products to that individual. They're the ones are going to win. So brands now need to think very differently. The world isn't all about branding. It's all about profiling, collecting data on your consumers and personalizing your marketing, your experience to them.

A (13:56)

Okay, now you, as a business, you're very good at creating interactive experiences. And you do that, as you say, on a variety of different platforms where the consumers actually are. I really wanted to just focus our talk now on to various different technologies that you guys use, because I think it'd be really good to just delve into sort of some specific areas and just explore those a little bit. So the first one I'd like to chat to you about is chatbots and chatbot campaigns. So what are chatbots and what are they really good at? Just for those who aren't up to speed on them.

B (14:31)

Right. So ultimately, at the end of the day, what you're trying to do with the chatbot is have an automated conversation with somebody. Right now, the majority of money that has been spent around chatbots is automating customer service. And there is a very natural business use case for automating that whole area with chatbots. And artificial intelligence. Marketing have started to experiment with chatbots, but they're way behind the sort of customer support industry. And it's a very interesting subject because you could say, well, surely there's lots and lots of opportunity to leverage chatbots successfully for marketing, but you've got to keep sight of what you're actually trying to do. If your goal is to actually build a better relationship with the consumer, you have to be very, very careful with your use of chatbots. And the reason why is because there's been a lot of data about actually the experience that people have when interacting with a chatbot. And unfortunately, the technology is just not there yet for you to have a Completely free form AI powered conversation, which leaves the majority of people walking away with a better impression of that brand than they had before. Unfortunately, all of the data says they walk away actually more, you know, dispirited or annoyed with the brand because the technology isn't quite there yet. Now, now the interesting thing is you can, you can actually have a less free fall chatbot experience where you're not relying completely on AI and machine learning to interpret that individual, what they're trying to do and have a conversation. You can still have a chatbot experience which isn't so freeform. And the way you do that is more in like question and answer. So I'm going to ask you a question and give you perhaps, you know, three options and you're going to tell me which one of those three, but out of which of those three options you selected, I'm now going to ask you another question which is relevant to your answer. So these are more structured conversations that can be delivered through instant messaging, platform, social channels, etc. And that they do have a much higher rate of performance in terms of how satisfied somebody is with that engagement. But you still as a marketer need to think about what is your end goal. There's a very good example. I was talking to Chief Digital officer a little while ago last summer who had one of their agencies had pitched this great campaign for one of their brands which was a condom brand. And essentially what they wanted to do was to create this chatbot experience that basically allowed people on various instant messaging and social channels to ask questions before they went on a holiday in the summer about sexual health related things. If I do this, am I at risk of this? Et cetera, et cetera, and to get answers now, good idea, good campaign for a condom brand. So it was all nicely executed in terms of what they were trying to do and how it supported the brand goals. But at the end of it, you also still want to sell, in this instance, condoms or other sexual health or sexual products, sexual aid products. Now the Chief Digital officer was sort of throwing his toys out of the cram quite upset because he was like, nobody's thought through the user journey. We're just going in, people having the conversation and finding out that, you know, well, if they got to stick to certain behavior to, you know, not get STDs, whatever, great. And then they leave. And he said, what I want is based on the conversation in that chatbot, I then want to have a number of endpoints that I drive people to which sit on my own platforms, which can give someone a more of an interactive experience to take that conversation on and then capture data from them, marketing, opt ins, etc. And personalize product offerings to them based on that interaction that I'm having with them on my own platform. I don't just want to end it as a conversation in social. So that's where we get involved. We don't have a platform that automatically configures chatbots. Our services team have built out chatbot style experiences for people. But ultimately what we're really interested in, then driving them from that chatbot into an interactive destination which actually captures data and can deliver a personalized experience and, you know, hopefully shift some product or drive some sort of conversion for the brand.

A (19:10)

Really interesting, and an interesting example, and it does sound, from what you've said, that they literally, in more ways than one, killed the moment with their questions and their chat bot. Yeah. So let's talk about interactive ads. And I can see you're a big fan of interactive ads and they definitely look like a good way forward. There's some sort of examples and some benchmark results that you could share with the audience to get people a bit more engaged with these.

B (19:36)

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll talk about two styles of interactive ads, because advertising networks or destinations that sell advertising have different levels of functionality in terms of whether you can actually deliver an interactive experience through their ads or not. So if you look at Facebook and Instagram, they're very closed environments, so they don't allow third party technology that might be owned by the brand to create and configure an experience that actually lives natively through their ad unit. So you have to use their standard ad units. And then it really is what happens when you click on the call to action as to how you can make that advertising experience interactive. The example I was talking about Instagram stories is a pretty good one. So the standard ad unit is the basic story. Then when you swipe up to learn more or whatever the call to action is, that's when you get that three to five second wait. And actually 99.9% of your audience have just clicked on to the next story. With Wayne, we can turn that into a fractional millisecond loading of an experience as you swipe up with all the gesture controls that mimic Instagram Stories as an environment. And the consumer doesn't really know that they're not in Instagram stories. For them, the experience is that I'm just natively interacting with this brand in Instagram stories because it's native. It's completely fast, doesn't have website navigation, it mimics the gesture controls, etc. For all intents and purposes it is an interactive advertising experience, but it's one that actually when you swipe up from that moment on, it's completely controlled by the brand. And because it's completely controlled, you can start to do things like well, tell your story. And with not just brand content, but also perhaps user generated content, other content you used our system to find from Instagram to make it native, you could make it incentivized to engage by perhaps doing an instant win or a competition or something. You can capture data in that experience. And for the consumer, they just think they're delivering, interacting with this great native experience with the brand inside Instagram stories. And you can do that with Snapchat, you can do that with Twitter, Facebook, all of these different advertising destinations. However, some of those platforms actually allow you to embed your experience directly with their ad unit. So Google DoubleClick is an example of that. You can take away an experience, you can completely configure all of the interactive mechanics, the behavior that you want, the data you're capturing, etc. And have it actually live inside the Google DoubleClick advert. So they don't even click out anywhere. You're not having to mimic something. It is literally native into that ad unit. You can do the same thing with Twitter video cards ad unit. We do some interesting stuff with Twitter around that. So it depends on the platform. I mean there's other more experimental platforms. We do stuff with Shazam and they're an ad funded business and you can create weigh in experiences, embed them directly inside the Shazam app. Real estate. Advertising. Real estate. So there's different options for different networks.

A (22:53)

Okay. And what are the sort of benchmark responses when you go interactive? And I know that's a really broad question, but obviously we've, we've spoken about how just throwing stuff up there and putting adverts out there doesn't work very well. What sort of results have some of your advertisers seen in terms of response rates?

B (23:12)

Yeah. So if you think about kind of the sort of three main areas where you're getting measurable value, one is because you're delivering more of an interactive native experience inside the network, you're actually engaging more people than you would through a standard ad format. You know, you're offering something different and that actually does have a direct correlation through to the amount of people that then click through from that ad to your website on average. About 18% higher click throughs to the website. The other, the other second piece is there is a massive increase in terms of the time on media spent through interactive ads. Because it is an interactive experience. You're actually getting far higher rates, anywhere from five to 36 times the amount of time on media you get with a standard ad. And then the third piece is the actual brand recall when you have an interactive experience over a standard image or video ad. And from the studies that we've seen, it's about a 10x increase in terms of brand recall because people are doing something, you're doing something different. That's the whole point of advertising is to, is to not be the same as everybody else.

A (24:25)

So I want to move on to some of the changes that are happening of late. In social media in particular, it would seem that sort of organic reach is just not what it used to be. It's certainly organic reach and sharing isn't what it used to be. Is that assessment right?

B (24:40)

Oh, no question about it. I mean, Facebook have been on a mission to reduce, restrict and ultimately kill pretty much as much as they can, all type of organic reach for brands and now publishers. And they've been doing that quite clearly to drive paid media advertising revenue on their platform. And their quarterly results have shown that they've been very successful in actually doing that. I think what's interesting with publishers and the latest stuff they've done to restrict the organic reach of publisher content is actually how that's going to change behavior on the platform as a whole. They're saying that it's in order to ensure there's a higher quality of engagement between people. So within your friend network on the platform, by reducing the amount of news content that's getting created and shared, we'll have to see whether that actually happens or not. And then where is that content that currently has been disseminated or previously has been disseminated on Facebook going to be disseminated? Is it going to move off to other platforms and is user growth also going to move to those platforms that are supporting the publisher community more? I don't know. We'll have to see how it plays out.

A (25:57)

One area that they don't seem to have throttled back is in sort of live streaming and live video. Has that been your experience?

B (26:04)

Well, they pushed very, very hard Facebook Live and for a period of time you were getting such massive organic reach from Facebook Live just because you were doing it. And they wanted to really push the use of Facebook Live as a medium across their platform. You Know, it was great. I mean, you could literally, as a brand, you could create a Facebook Live experience. And we do have the ability to sort of roll over kind of interactive experiences on top of Facebook Live. So, you know, getting people to, you know, vote, for example, by the use of emojis and laying that on in a visualization over the live video. So we do a bunch of stuff for people and, you know, brands are getting fantastic organic because Facebook, oh, Facebook Live, let's promote it. You know, the algorithms are there pushing it to lots of different people. But like anything I told brands and said, you know, make hay while the sun shines because they're going to cut down pretty soon. As soon as it's an established medium, they're going to cut down the organic reach. And I believe we've seen that so far that they have. But, you know, live video is a big way with which they want to monetize consumers. And so I think what we'll see this year is we'll see Facebook and others actually coming out and putting really big bids on the table for things like, you know, Premiership soccer and, you know, cricket and whatever else, because they want to, they want those audiences watching, you know, those, those, those live sports on their platform so that they can monetize advertising.

A (27:33)

And do you think there's still room for niche live streaming?

B (27:36)

Oh, yes, yeah. I mean, no question. I think the only thing the Internet has really shown us is that fragmentation is extreme. Facebook is a fantastic result. But it knows the writings on the wall for its main property, Facebook. That's why it's buying up WhatsApp. That's why it's buying up Instagram. That's why I tried to buy up Snapchat. That's why it's innovating all the time. You look at the kids, if you want to reach kids, they're not on Facebook anymore. They've moved off your grandson.

A (28:11)

We did some interesting research recently where we just compared the sort of published regular users for the different social media platforms and we just compared January 2017 with what was published in January 2018. And it is really telling what's going on. They just seem, particularly within the youth audience, to be a big shift away from very, very public systems where you share everything with everybody into much more niche closed personal networks. In particular, one of big successes in growth areas was in the live chat and the instant chat notification kind of area.

B (28:50)

Without a doubt, it's been really interesting seeing those demographic shifts. And for a long time Facebook was trying to pretend that it Wasn't happening and then had to face up that actually, yes, it was happening and they pretty much lost the tea market now, of course, because they'd quite wisely bought Instagram and I think that's one of go down in one of history's best buys. They actually get, you know, the audience, the teen audience is on Instagram as well as Snapchat. So they, you know, they just moved off Facebook. So, you know, they, as an advertiser, they still gives you, give you the way to reach those audiences, but it's just not on the main platform that you might have used, you know, six or seven years ago to reach a teen audience. Yeah.

A (29:30)

Well, what do you think is going to happen in the whole augmented reality, virtual reality space? Do you think that's an area we could see? It could explode into, into the mainstream this year, next year.

B (29:41)

So I'm more bullish about augmented reality than virtual reality or a number of reasons. So whilst I absolutely love virtual reality, I think, you know, it's really interesting, you know, set of experiences. The software is really good now. There's some fantastic experiences out there. You've still got at the high end to put out four or five grand. To get the hardware able to support really good VR experiences, you're going to have to get an Oculus rift or an HTC VOD. They're $800 or whatever. So there's a big capital outlay that's at the one end and then on the other end you've got Google Cardboard and other cheaper devices. I actually bought a Google Pixel phone just for the VR and got the 80 pound headset. It's a reasonably good experience. Just absolutely hammers your battery.

A (30:50)

That's the Google Dreamtime platform, is that right?

B (30:52)

Exactly, exactly. You know, it's pretty good, it's quality experience for what you're paying. But the reality is you're not going to be wandering around the street with a headset on, otherwise you're going to get knocked over by bus. Augmented reality is a different kettle of fish. You know, everyone's got a mobile phone, everyone can get into AR experiences. There are millions of use cases where AR can add value to people's everyday lives. And I actually think for marketers there's a real opportunity to leverage AR in some great ways. We've done some tests and some campaigns with various different AR apps. Take Blippa as an example, is a UK funded startup that's done very, very well in augmented reality. You can deliver away an experience through a blipper AR experience. And that's actually quite valuable. So I'll give you an example. Say that you are, I don't know, Rice Krispies, right? You're running the Rice Krispies brand. And, you know, you know, Rice Krispies are always doing sort of competitions and stuff like that. Sometimes you have to cut out the competition entry on the Rice Krispies box and send it off, you know, because they do want to know who consumers are. They are trying to build out data. Well, how about you have an offering whereby, you know, either someone's walking down Walmart and you've got an AR code there, or they're sitting at their breakfast table and there's an AR car will code on the big box, and they actually just look at that AR code and it turns the three characters in Rice Krispies into a fun interactive experience. They're dancing around and you're looking at this AR through your phone, and then it's like, hey, would you like a chance to win a trip for the family to Disneyland? Whatever. Give us your details. That all can be delivered through an AR experience. When you combine Wayne with Blippa so you can start to capture data around your consumers in a really kind of cool, fun way. And, you know, for me, that's. That's kind of advertising, right? You're delivering this great AR experience. It's a. It's a new form of advertising. I think, to Forrester's point, you can have more money being spent on stuff like that than just shoving a video at someone, you know, on Facebook or, you know, on tv.

A (33:04)

Fantastic. Well, Richard, it's been fascinating chatting to you. I've really enjoyed our discussion. If we want to find out more about weighing and what you guys do and how you help, where do we go? Who do we speak to?

B (33:14)

Yeah. So go on to our website, www.weighin.com. and there's contact us forms, there's more information. There's lots of white papers for how to actually be more interactive. How do you capture more data through marketing experiences to start to profile your audience. And all the benefits of what we call declared data. When you get information from people about their motivations and their interests and behavior and how that can perform, increase your marketing results. Lots and lots of data, lots of examples, lots of lookbooks of campaigns for everything from travel through to cpg. So go on to our resources page. Good stuff there. Whether you do anything with Waylon or not, it's a great library of great examples of interactive campaigns. And if you do want to have us come and chat to you one to one. Just click on the Contact Us button. We'd love to speak to you.

A (34:05)

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time and we wish you the best of luck in 2018. Thanks for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by Target Internet. If you're investing in your digital marketing skills, take a look at our free Benchmark Skills Test and look at the wealth of online learning we provide. To help marketers get up to speed and stay up to date, just visit targetinternet.combenchmark.

B (34:39)

SAM.