Podcasts about bluekai

Send us a textDebbie Reynolds “The Data Diva” talks to Lawrence Gentilello, CEO and Founder of Optery, a company dedicated to removing personal data from online databases to enhance privacy and security for individuals and businesses. We discuss his career journey, beginning with his early work in the data industry at BlueKai, a firm specializing in collecting intent and purchase data for targeted advertising. He discusses how the industry evolved from simple ad personalization into a vast ecosystem where personal data is used in ways that can pose risks to individuals. His decision to launch Optery in 2020 was influenced by both his professional experience and a personal incident in which criminals used publicly available information to create fraudulent IDs in his and his wife's names.Debbie and Lawrence examine the hidden world of data brokers—companies that gather, package, and sell personal information without individuals' direct knowledge or consent. Lawrence describes how these brokers operate across different sectors, from advertising and email prospecting to risk analytics and law enforcement databases. He highlights the difficulty individuals face in protecting their information, as the average person has around 100 exposed online profiles, making them vulnerable to identity theft, cyberattacks, and even physical security threats.The discussion also covers emerging threats, including the rise of AI-native data brokers—companies that use artificial intelligence to automate the collection and sale of personal data at an even greater scale. Lawrence describes how these firms often operate without transparency and avoid legal disclosure, making it harder for individuals to track how their information is being used. He also references a recent incident involving the Russian ransomware gang Black Basta, where leaked internal communications revealed that cybercriminals were using data broker services like ZoomInfo and RocketReach to research and target victims.Debbie and Lawrence explore the real-world consequences of unchecked data sharing, including phishing scams, cyberattacks, and even physical harm. They discuss how executives, government officials, and everyday individuals become targets due to the ease of accessing their personal data online. Lawrence explains how Optery's services help address these risks through deep-crawling search technology, before-and-after screenshot verification, and automated monthly scans that continuously remove exposed information.Lawrence outlines his vision for improving privacy protections. He advocates for a standardized set of privacy laws across the U.S., stronger enforcement against data brokers that fail to comply with regulations, and the inclusion of authorized agent provisions in all privacy laws to ensure individuals can get assistance in managing their data. Debbie emphasizes the importance of ongoing awareness and proactive steps to combat the risks associated with data brokers. This insightful discussion sheds light on the urgent need for privacy-focused solutions and stronger policies to protect individuals and their data.Support the show

Omar Tawakol is a serial entrepreneur. He sold two companies in five years, including BlueKai to Oracle in 2014. But he's in no rush with his new virtual product placement startup Rembrand. He says he's having too much fun. Plus: Meditating on the end of Oracle Advertising.

Cory Treffiletti is Chief Marketing Officer for Rembrand, where he focuses on driving digital growth through AI. A veteran CMO and digital marketing thought leader, his work has helped brands of all shapes and sizes navigate various digital disruptions. We discussed all of this and more this week on the On Brand podcast. About Cory Treffiletti Cory Treffiletti is Chief Marketing Officer for Rembrand, where he focuses on driving digital growth through AI technology for B2B and B2C brands and creators. A 4-time CMO, Cory has led marketing efforts for both startups and Fortune 300 companies, including Voicea (acquired by Cisco), BlueKai (acquired by Oracle) and Oracle's Data Cloud. An industry veteran since 1994, Cory also has previous experience leading digital strategies at FIS, Carat, and Omnicom. He is the published author of "Internet Ad Pioneers,” and writes the Original Digital newsletter in addition to penning his weekly contributions to Mediapost since 2000. He currently serves as an advisor for a number of companies in the ad-tech and martech space, as well as helps develop other marketers in various categories. From the Show After listening to this, what's one thing you can do related to AI? Cory shared his one thing — “Each week I block off two two-hour windows of time. I turn off all of my texts, emails, and I just explore” new AI tools and brainstorm how they could be used. What brand has made Cory smile recently? Cory shared a recent smile from Heineken. Admittedly not one of his favorite beers, Cory loves their recent pairing with the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie. To learn more, check out the Original Digital site, Rebrand, and connect with Cory on LinkedIn. As We Wrap … Listen and subscribe at  Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon/Audible, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeart, YouTube, and RSS. Rate and review the show—If you like what you're hearing, be sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and click the 5-star button to rate the show. And, if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review to help others find the show. Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you'd like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. On Brand is a part of the Marketing Podcast Network. Until next week, I'll see you on the Internet! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed, the fiercest competitors can sometimes become friends. Omar Tawakol is a prime example. As the founder and CEO of BlueKai, he went head-to-head with Tom, Vivek, and the 'Krux mafia' for dominance in the Data Management Platform arena. A serial entrepreneur with roots in New York and Egypt, Omar eventually steered BlueKai to a successful acquisition by Oracle before creating Voicea, which Cisco acquired. Today, he's pioneering a new venture called Rembrand (rembrand.com), which innovates in product placement through generative fusion AI.Have you ever heard of a 5-year-old CEO? Omar Tawakol made his first sale by pitching coasters to neighbors. From playground profits to knockout big exits, Omar shares how he had “no choice but to build companies” from an early age. What makes the human element the most rewarding part of company building? Are better algorithms or richer data the key to winning in tech? Where does AI stand in the current hype cycle? How do you intertwine AI into human workflows?  And, how not to let success get to your head.Omar joins Tom and Vivek on the latest episode of The {Closed} Session to recount tales from the entrepreneurial ringside, insights from his journey as a serial startup champ, and a sneak peek at his latest venture that's punching above its weight in the AI arena. Plus, a totally unpaid-for-promotion: where to find the best coffee in Menlo Park.Learn more about Rembrand at rembrand.comLearn more about super{set} at superset.comFind more episodes at www.theclosedsession.com

Grant Ries is the CEO of Deep Sync, a leading data and technology company in the marketing industry. Before Deep Sync, Grant was a member of the executive leadership team at Liveramp, where he continues serving as a strategic advisor. During his time at the company, he held several roles, including CEO of Liveramp B2B, as well as running the following businesses: Data, Marketplace, Advanced TV, and most recently as the Executive VP of Emerging Markets. Grant joined Liveramp through the acquisition of Pacific Data Partners, a B2B data and technology company he co-founded. Prior to Liveramp, Grant co-founded and served as a Board Member and Chief Revenue Officer of BlueKai. When Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014, Grant co-launched the Oracle Data Cloud, a global business unit, and served as its Vice President. Grant currently serves on the board of directors of Mountain and Rembrand, is an active angel investor, and has provided advisory and operating support for his various investments in the technology sector over 20 years.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Omar co-founded pioneering data platform BlueKai and lead Oracle Data Cloud before launching Voicera and now Rembrand - and AI tool for video product placementMore

Omar co-founded pioneering data platform BlueKai and lead Oracle Data Cloud before launching Voicera and now Rembrand - and AI tool for video product placementMore

We all know that customer segmentation is critical to success in the online world, but how is this done across multiple data sources? From mobile apps to website cookies, to your CRM, offline data, and more. Is there a way to bring all of these together? Absolutely, let's learn how – together. Data Management Platforms such as Adobe's Audience Manager or BlueKai are often referred to but little talked about. Here we will go through the future of customer data for marketing, ensuring you are up with the play on making your next move into the new generation of targeted advertising as it starts to unfold.Check out upcoming DigiMarCon Digital Marketing, Media, and Advertising Conferences & Exhibitions Worldwide at https://digimarcon.com/events/

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.We have a great conversation on top this week with Jeff Richards, Managing Partner at GGV Capital. Founded in 2000, GGV manages nearly $10B in AUM and invests across stages in both the US and Asia, and has invested in companies such as AirBnB, Wish, Opendoor, and Grab. This was a great conversation as Jeff has been both on the founder and investor side, and has spent the last 14 years at GGV where he’s had a front-row seat to the incredible evolution of the firm to what it is today. He provided us with some great thoughts on the markets today, the challenges of growing a firm, and how the current geopolitical tensions may affect international investing. About Jeff Richards:Jeff focuses on enterprise/cloud and marketplace investments, and led GGV’s investments in Appirio (acq by Wipro), Belong, BigCommerce (NASDAQ: BIGC), BlueKai (acq by Oracle), Boxed, Brightwheel, Buddy Media (acq by Salesforce), Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Electric.ai, Evolv OnDemand (acq by Cornerstone), Gladly, Handshake, HotelTonight (acq by Airbnb), Lambda School, Mindee, Namely, People.ai, PlushCare/Accolade (NASDAQ: ACCD), Slice, Tala, Tile, Vic.ai, Workboard, and Zylo.Prior to joining GGV, Jeff founded two software companies: R4, a supply chain SaaS business acquired by VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN), and QuantumShift, a telecom software business backed by Texas Pacific Group (TPG). Earlier in his career, Jeff worked in Asia and Latin America with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He graduated from Dartmouth College.Our sponsor:At Brex, we build financial software and services to help startups scale faster. We understand that founders need to focus on building, not banking. So we’ve reimagined traditional financial systems to enable greater speed and productivity — no matter where founders and their teams are working.We offer a smart corporate card, business account, and mobile app that are easy to use from day one. No manuals needed here. Within minutes, you can deposit funds, send free wires and ACH worldwide, separate investor funds from operating expenses, earn great rewards, automate expenses, and more. Everything we do at Brex is to help founders spend less time managing expenses and reporting on your runway — and more time building your business.Get started at brex.com/ventureIn this episode we discuss:02:06 Jeff’s journey into venture capital08:30 What it took to scale GGV to what it is today14:32 How they had to shift internal mindset as they scaled fund sizes20:55 How the current market compares to previous cycles27:33 The health of the current venture market and areas where Jeff sees growth potential33:46 Advice to investors looking to create a venture portfolio39:30 How the geopolitical climate is affecting investing both in the US and globally46:26 Why emerging markets are still a strong place to look for alpha in the current market48:11 The best piece of career advice he’s receivedI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Jeff. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

Cory was an agency guy from the beginning of the internet and became a well-known CMO at BlueKai, Oracle and others while writing a weekly column for MediaPostMore

Cory was an agency guy from the beginning of the internet and became a well-known CMO at BlueKai, Oracle and others while writing a weekly column for MediaPostMore

Melanie Querry owns Beyond Spots and Dots, a full-service advertising agency that frames its work around analysis, keeps client budgets on target, and utilizes proven marketing success in one industry to help businesses in other industries grow. Spots and Dots has been on the Inc. 5000 list five times.   In this interview Melanie discusses how her agency helps clients understand the customer journey and how prioritizing and implementing tactics will do exactly what a client wants . . . and meet budget constraints. Melanie claims that, for a roughly equivalent impression count, digital marketing can cost one-third of what traditional marketing costs. Still, all the layers have to work together. “You have to have synergy within your marketing budget,” she says. Tactic selection and prioritization are critical, customized to meet a client's needs, and are based on a mix of Beyond Spots and Dots' experience, knowledge, and research.   As an example, Melanie talks about geofencing, creating a technological fence to target programmed advertising to a specific audience. Another tactic she presents is secondary search retargeting, which uses proprietary software/connections to capture someone searching for information on a third-party website and then follows that individual with ads on the internet. Melanie informs us that “there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops.” Legally, large companies (Oracle, BlueKai) can disperse that collected information. Beyond Spots and Dots is one of only a few companies allowed to utilize the information . . . which they can pass on to their clients so that their clients can target these potential customers.   Melanie wanted to be in advertising from an early age. After she earned her advertising degree, she took a job selling advertising at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, then another with a cable station to learn “the cable side.” Melanie says these organizations “didn't know about their clients, didn't know about their customers,” and only focused on rating points and the number of “spots” they got. She left the cable station almost on a whim (just because it was “time”), started her agency as a media buying firm that would be “Beyond the Spots and Dots” focus of her previous employers, and took on a Pittsburgh mega car dealer as a client “for the cash flow.”  Melanie convinced the dealer to fund a digital campaign at a time when even car manufacturers were not “doing digital.” The car dealer's business grew so significantly that it eventually hired ten people for an internal digital department. Melanie jokes that. while the dealership provided sorely needed cash flow in those early years, she was not able to “use them for profits.” Today, Beyond Spots and Dots provides advertising, public relations, marketing, branding, and digital services. Once things are “back to normal,” Melanie looks forward to reopening the agency's physical locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, OH – she prefers working with clients face-to-face “120% over what we're doing currently.” Interestingly, even with clients “everywhere,” the agency does not charge clients for its travel expenses – Melanie considers travel as a way to reinvest in her company.  Melanie can be reached on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and on her agency's website at Beyondspotsanddots.com.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm excited to be joined today by Melanie Querry, owner of Beyond Spots and Dots based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Melanie. MELANIE: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I certainly appreciate it. ROB: It's a pleasure to have you here. Tell us about Beyond Spots and Dots. Where does your firm excel?  MELANIE: We really excel in helping businesses grow. We understand what it takes to grow. We've been on the Inc. 5000 list five times, which we're very proud of, and hope to continue to be there again in the future. We are able to take our experiences and really utilize the marketing efforts and successes that we have had with various industries and apply those to other industries. Our real growth has been in the digital world. We started as a media buying firm, so I kind of laugh and say that we do media buying with our eyes closed. However, the digital media buying is new and evolving, and we've been doing it for 15 years that we've been in business – which is great. Not many agencies can say that. So, we really excel at implementing those tactics for businesses, but helping businesses understand where their budgeting should be. I think what makes us different is that we really stay in line with budgets for clients and on behalf of clients and rein them in when they get out of line with budgets or things that they want to implement. Something that makes us very different is while we have super killer creative and award-winning creative, we really take an analytical approach to everything we do, including creative. That's pretty different from most agencies. Most agencies want to just be creative shops or digital firms, and we really do take a full-service approach. ROB: Got it. Congratulations on the 15 years, on the Inc. 5000 list. Those are all things – it doesn't pay the bills, but it is a recognition of that ongoing growth that you also seek for your clients. You mentioned being able to transfer tactics and strategies from some industries that we might think of perhaps to some industries we might not think of having such successful digital and media tactics. Is that the case? Are there some unexpected industries you've found yourself in the middle of? MELANIE: Yes. We really don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket. We started in 2006, and in 2008 had the economy fall out beneath us. Nothing like COVID, but certainly at the time, and through those years, we learned a lot and a great deal. What we did learn is not to put all of our eggs in one basket. We pride ourselves on working in various industries. Business is business, and while industries do have niche audiences or niche ways of advertising or marketing, there are still businesses that are being run through operations that really follow through all types of business. We have been able to successfully help businesses grow in various industries, but some of the industries that have been unique that we didn't seek out, if you will, have been property management, for example. That was one where we didn't seek it out. They sought us out. But we were able to be very successful with one property management company, and it filtered through to many others because of the tactics we implemented at a low cost and we were able to help them grow. ROB: In that case, were they seeking more properties to manage? Were they seeking tenants, renters? Not to focus in too deeply, but as a means of exploring what you do. MELANIE: Sure. Their goal is to seek out renters. They have several properties around the country, and near one of our offices – we have an office in Columbus and also Baltimore. In the Columbus market, they wanted to sell out a particular building, which was very specific, and they did it so quickly when they started working with us that they actually shut their advertising off early, but then diverted their dollars to a completely different market. That was really interesting and fun. It's fun for us. ROB: And probably meaningful for them. Behind the scenes, not always, but a lot of times in the real estate world, having something fully leased or above a certain percentage is a meaningful financial milestone. It lets you collateralize or sell the property. It's a big deal beyond just filling the space. But then on the “who you're targeting side,” finding a place, whether it's an office or a residence, is a customer journey. What does that journey look like, and how do you tackle people along that journey? MELANIE: That's a great question. You're speaking my language, Rob. [laughs] We do take that customer journey fully into consideration when we are making a recommendation for any type of creative assets or messaging and also the placement of the ads themselves, and whether it's a recommendation to do PR versus traditional marketing or advertising versus some kind of new media. In targeting, it's really fun to look at the customer journey because you have these five steps, if you will, from the point of time when someone is not even familiar with your service or product all the way to the point of no return where they have to make a decision and their decision is either “let's do it / buy it,” whatever it is you're asking them to do, or “let's not.” That customer journey has steps throughout in between those two aspects or behaviors, and there are advertising tactics that make sense for certain parts of that journey. In the very beginning, when you're trying to just make someone aware of your product, your book, your property that you have available or whatever it might be that you're selling, there are tactics that work better for that part of the customer journey versus the middle of the journey where they're now aware, they might be talking to their friends about you, they're doing their research, which is part of that journey – and then they're trying to figure out what makes sense for them and what's best for them, and whether or not they're going to buy. We utilize that customer journey for everything that we do, and we're always presenting that to businesses to understand the different parts of the journey. A lot of people will come to us and say, “We just want an awareness campaign,” and I ask them, “Why?” That is valid and relevant, and sometimes an awareness campaign is all they want or all they think they can afford, so we help them to understand that journey so that they understand the different tactics within. ROB: Right. It would seem deeper in the funnel, there's some tactics you can't afford to not do. I can imagine – and I'm just making things up here, because I don't run, let's say, an apartment complex – but if someone comes and they book a tour, they're so deep into that funnel, two things seem true to me. Number one, it seems like a lot of businesses – and I'll broaden this beyond real estate – would find it hard to operationalize the information of who has booked a tour in a timely manner. But it also seems like one of the best ways you could possibly spend your money is, let's say, remarketing to an email list of people who have visited you in the past X months. How do they operationalize that successfully? Or am I way off, number one? Number two, if I'm in the neighborhood, how do you help people meet some of those time-sensitive communications that would need to happen to execute on that sort of thing? MELANIE: We try to implement new media because of the technology behind it. Depending on a business's budget, our job is to help them understand those tactics that they can implement to do exactly what you're asking within the budget. Based on our experience and based on our knowledge and based on research, we will help that business to prioritize those tactics. For example, a tactic might be geofencing, which is one of the new ways of advertising through programmatic advertising. We can literally draw a fence, if you will – it's technology for sure, but you are drawing a fence around something. We've drawn fences on roads before, trying to reach people driving into a college when a competitive college wants to reach those potential students. We have drawn fences around convention centers, trying to target tradeshows for particular audiences. So, the geofencing is really cool. That's one tactic that we can utilize to grab people now. With COVID, obviously things have changed with geofencing because people aren't out and about and aren't going to these big events or aren't going to big tradeshows. That will start again, but there are other tactics. There's another tactic that we can utilize called secondary search retargeting, and that's one of the newest and latest and greatest, and a lot of fun to work with. We had a company that was very niche; they were implementing services to small to medium size businesses for Mac users specifically, but for companies frankly like ours, where we have mostly PC-based computers, and we have a few Macs because we have designers, and they need their Macs. This company would target businesses that were utilizing both PC and Mac, and they were specialists in the Mac realm. When you buy a Mac at the Apple Store, you can go online to search for companies like this to help us network the Macs with the PCs. A lot of companies are getting into this because people do like their Macs and they're very loyal to their Macs. This particular company was able to utilize secondary search retargeting by targeting third party searches. This is outside of the Google world and outside of just your search bar in Google. We've also been able to utilize on the spot, like you're asking, secondary search retargeting for students. College students are searching online for lots of things, for different programs, for different schools. they're searching in all of these third parties out there, and we're able to actually tap into those searches. It's really wild. ROB: What does that mean? Explore the tactic with me a little bit. Does that mean you're on something like US News, World Report, looking at college rankings, and you're searching for something and somehow that's able to feed back into search targeting? Where does this information come from? MELANIE: That's right. To give another example, probably an easier one to visualize is real estate. We have worked in the real estate realm and been very successful with that industry as well. A secondary search tactic that's really cool allows us to target – let's say you're buying a home and I'm a real estate company, and I want your business because you're buying a home and I've got homes to sell. But you are really hard to catch unless I can catch you through geotargeting by visiting other open houses. Right now, during COVID, we know that's not happening so much around the country. There are open houses, but they're few and far between. So. a different technology you can use is this secondary search retargeting. You might be searching on Realtor.com, and if you're searching for a home value or the home sale price, then I can capture you doing that search on that third party website. And when I capture you doing that through my technology, I can physically follow you with ads through the internet, which is the retargeting part. The way that that's done, to answer your question, is there are three satellites above us collecting every bit of data that we are doing on our cellphone, our laptops, our TVs, our computers, our desktops. All of our actions are being collected through this data, and huge companies such as BlueKai and Oracle now legally are allowed to spit that information back out. Companies like ours – and there are only a few companies like ours around the country that are allowed to utilize this information – we're able to use that data of that behavior from someone like you and give it to our real estate company and target those people. It is wild. It's pretty cool. ROB: That's remarkable. There's great power and there's great responsibility. I feel like I need to go close my blinds or something. MELANIE: Yes. [laughs] ROB: It's really just what I type into the computer that's probably the problem here. Take me back a little bit, Melanie. Tell us about where Beyond Spots and Dots came into existence. What led you to start running your own business that was not by any means guaranteed to be a multi-time Inc. 5000 company and so on? MELANIE: As a young child, I always wanted to have an advertising agency. And I don't know that I even knew what an advertising agency was at the time or what an agency really did, but I followed that. I probably at the time thought of more of the creative side, which is what most people think of when you think of an advertising agency. I really followed that through school. I got a degree in advertising. Back then, there were only three colleges across the country that actually offered a degree in advertising doing creative and media buying. Not many colleges and universities offered that then, but they do now, which is great. Once I graduated, of course, at that time I learned that TV was the most complicated of all media, and when doing media buying, TV was the most complex. So, I really wanted to learn about the inner workings of TV. I graduated from college, I moved to Pittsburgh – being a Penn Stater, I got to know Pittsburgh when I was very young – and started at KDKA-TV, which was the first TV station ever. That was really powerful to me. I worked like a dog as an entry level person. At the time, they also didn't allow entry level employees, so I really had to show them what I was made of to be able to even keep my job. I barely made a salary at the time. I think I made more in college waiting tables than I did at my first job at KDKA-TV. [laughs] I was going to power through it. After KDKA, I went to the cable side because I wanted to know and understand both sides of TV, broadcast and cable. One day I decided, okay, there's never a real good time, so it's as good as any. I put in my four weeks' notice and I just quit. I resigned cold turkey. I didn't take clients. I didn't do anything like that. I just stopped one day and resigned, and the next day I said, okay, I've got to figure out how to start a business. I started making phone calls to the state on how to register a business, and “What the heck is my name going to be?” When I worked in these big mammoth companies, Comcast and CBS Network, I worked with big agencies, global agencies, and they didn't know anything about their clients. They just didn't know about their customers. All the media buyers cared about were rating points and “How many spots am I getting?” The name actually came pretty easy to me. Beyond Spots and Dots became the name because I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to go beyond the number of spots someone's getting and the rating points they're getting. And the name stuck. The first day of the business, I went out to celebrate and I met who would become my husband, which was awesome. ROB: Wow. Good day. MELANIE: Yeah. He was a finance major and he helped me with the books, and as I got revenue in, I needed someone to help me with that side of it, the business side. He ended up coming on board, we got married, and now we're a full-service firm. At the time, he was already developing websites and doing Google ads. So, Day 1, we picked up website development and Google advertising, which was really great. ROB: What did those first few customers look like? Who did you start working with initially? MELANIE: I made phone calls, of course, Day 1, and said, “I now have an advertising agency. I would love an opportunity to work with you and to handle your advertising.” I was willing to do what it took to get business as far as services that I wasn't familiar with. I was willing to learn new services. One was a mega car dealer in Pittsburgh. I had talked to them about some Google advertising, and at the time, manufacturers weren't doing that. So, I implemented a digital campaign for them 15 years ago. In order to get their business, which was big, I needed the cash flow. They needed someone that knew digital, and it was a win-win – except that from a cash flow standpoint, I was able to use them as cash flow; I just wasn't able to use them for profits. [laughs] I felt that it was a necessary evil. I loved working with the general manager there, and I knew that I could help their business grow, and we did. We were able to take their business to a digital standpoint that, at the time, neither manufacturers nor car dealers were able to do. They were able to hire 10 internal people as a digital department, which was unheard of at the time. This was during the time right before the fallout in 2008, so yeah, pretty cool and definitely a good story and something that I look back on, for sure. ROB: Right. What did the budget of a car dealership like that look like at the time for traditional media? Has their overall ad budget changed much, or has it just shifted a percentage to digital? MELANIE: Certainly, the traditional media spend was big. It was bigger. That's the beauty about digital; you don't actually have to spend as much in digital. You just don't, and you can reach – the impression count is similar by spending a third of the amount. Traditional media is more expensive on a cost per spot basis or a cost per impression basis. Our job is to help the client understand all of that and what that means and how they should be spending their money. So there always was a bigger spend for them specifically in traditional, and at the time, of course, the digital was just really hitting. I mean, 14-15 years ago, digital wasn't that big. You didn't have to have it. You dabbled in it and you knew it was coming and you knew it was out there. So, we helped them to utilize some of this new media at the time. ROB: What was someone like that spending on traditional per month? Was it $10,000, $50,000, $100,000? What's the ballpark? Or am I even low? I don't know. MELANIE: This particular dealer had multiple manufacturers, multiple brands, and each manufacturer would offer them incentives, and they had budgets that they had to spend by manufacturer. So, it would vary. In general, a dealer like that could spend anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 a month. It truly varies. It varies throughout the year, it varies by the incentives the dealer is receiving, and it varies by the number of cars they have on the lot. There're so many variables when it comes to spending for something like that. ROB: It's helpful even just to know a general direction. I've certainly seen an increased appetite for digital, and I've seen even new real estate developments looking for very sophisticated website buildouts and that sort of thing. It starts to make sense when you put it in the context of the traditional ad budgets. If they've started to turn the corner on digital, you can start to understand that increased degree of investment in some of the places – a website used to be an afterthought. You might not even have one for a development, and now it seems to be a hub of activity. MELANIE: Sure. A website is a walking salesperson. I don't care what you're selling or what you're offering, any industry should have a decent website because that's where people go. And even social media. We find, in our experience – and I'm kind of floored by it, but it is what it is – people will go to social media. They'll go to a business Facebook page before they ever even get to the website. Which is also very interesting in my mind. To your point, the layering of dollars so that you can layer your tactics – your marketing tactics, your advertising tactics – the layering is what's really critical. When you have a budget – and we've worked with very small budgets and have put people on TV before, even with a smaller budget. It's all about the layering and where you're going to run and what the messaging is, and it all works together. It really has to be cohesive. I feel like the word “synergy” is so cliché, but it's true. You have to have synergy within your own marketing budget. ROB: Really interesting threads to pull on there, Melanie. When you look back at the history of Beyond Spots and Dots, what are some things you have learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting anew? MELANIE: I wish I would've started sooner. [laughs] I had this in the back of my mind. I'm very fortunate to have started when I did. Today's my birthday, actually. ROB: Happy birthday. MELANIE: I'm turning 45, and I'm blessed to have what I have and to have been able to work this hard thus far. I have a child now. We have a little kiddo. But prior to that, working your tail off – I wish I started sooner. I wish I'd started earlier because having the energy and not having a family at that time and being able to work the 80 hours I used to work before kids – it's hard to do that. As you get older, it's tiring. So, I would recommend just doing it. You only live once. I think that's one thing. For the future, growth. Growth is important. We plan to get back where we were. We were on a roll. We have good planning. We've got the tools internally to be able to expand and scale at this point. So, we do plan to open other offices. We have an office in Baltimore and Columbus right now, and Pittsburgh, obviously; that's our headquarters. But we do want to keep growing. We want to continue to help mentor others and also continue to grow and help businesses grow. ROB: How do you think about that office planting strategy? Is it rooted in some of your clientele having a local base and being able to be in person with someone? Do you spin up a small lease, or are you in WeWork land? How do you think about the planting strategy? MELANIE: Part of it is a real estate strategy with respect to investing, and that's a whole other conversation. As we diversify our own portfolio, if you will, personally speaking – and from a business standpoint – real estate is important to us. Long term, I don't plan to purchase real estate all over for office buildings. I do have to tell you, you kind of hit the nail on the head with respect to having an office and then working with a local client. We've lost business, presentations we've made, because businesses want an agency that's right in their backyard. When COVID hit, I thought to myself, does this change the way businesses believe they can do business? For example, we own our building currently in Pittsburgh, and we have an empty building right now because we have our whole staff working from home. We will keep them working from home as long as we feel that we need to, to keep everybody safe. Hopefully, that ends soon, but the reality of it is, we are doing business and conducting business all over the world from home. There are a lot of securities that go behind that, and we're dealing with a lot of data and customers' data and customers' information. The security has changed, of course. But does it change the way businesses think in the fact that we could do business – I don't have to be right in Columbus to do business for you or to handle your native or your advertising. It's an interesting open question that I ask myself as well. ROB: I understand that. I think there will always be a certain scope and scale of client that you're going to want to go see in person. When everything's normal, there's just a certain size of client that you're going to win more or not lose if you're giving them some attention in person. MELANIE: Agreed. ROB: I'm a firm believer in that. I agree, it's a whole other topic that I think we'll probably pass exploring on this podcast. Most people don't want to talk a lot about profits, but profits are important. I come originally from a software background and now also have some services work that we do, but within a services firm, there's only so much reinvestment back into the business that makes sense. It's not like a software company where you're infinitely scaling and pulling additional capital. So, figuring out what to do with profitability is its own interesting topic, I think. MELANIE: Yeah. And to answer that, for us at least, I agree with you fully. We prefer to be in person. That is why we opened offices in Baltimore and Columbus specifically, because they are nearby; it's quick and easy for us to travel there. I do have family in Baltimore, so selfishly, I'm thrilled to have an office there. [laughs] It's an excuse, anyway. Doing business in person is way better, I believe. I prefer it 120% over what we're doing currently. And we do reinvest our profits into travel. We don't charge our clients for travel. Our hourly fee has been the same for 15 years. We know what it takes timewise to do business. Now that we've been in business 15 years, we're more efficient at what we do, so it doesn't take us as long to do things. So, I don't feel that I have to gouge clients. It's just not necessary. Those profits we do roll back into travel, and we travel to our clients as much as we humanly possibly can. I think the same goes for getting work done in person. There's something to be said for our staff to be able to walk upstairs and go talk to the designer real quick or go downstairs and pull our copywriter in and say, “Hey, what do you think about this tagline?” There's some camaraderie there, and that's missing during all of this COVID. But that's reality, and we divert, and we will – I'm positive; it's a new year, and we will get back to where we were. We definitely will. I think the world will as well. But as a business owner right now, you just have to go with the flow and figure out your plan and keep at it and stay positive as much as you can and be able to stay on top of it. ROB: That's excellent. I really do like that thought of travel as a means of reinvesting in the business. I think that's a solid way to think about that, investing in relationships there. Melanie, when people want to find you and when they want to find Beyond Spots and Dots, where should they go to connect with you? MELANIE: Sure. I'm a believer of connecting. I certainly have a LinkedIn page, and I appreciate when people do connect. I love to mentor, so I love when young people reach out. I probably volunteer a little too much for mentoring, but I'll take it. I'll do it all day long if it helps someone young who's trying to get into the business and break through. As long as they're a hard worker, they're going to be successful. Beyondspotsanddots.com is our website. You can also google us and find us. Lots of places. We have a Twitter account, Facebook page, and all the good things. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Melanie. It's been excellent connecting with you and learning for you, so thank you for coming on and sharing. MELANIE: Thank you so much. I certainly appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

TikTok is the hot new social media service (Snapchat and Instragram are so last year), particularly in Asian countries like India. But India just banned this and several other apps from China over privacy concerns - and I have a feeling they won't be the last. The TikTok app was just revealed to be copying the user's clipboard contents every few seconds for some completely unknown reason (and TikTok's explanation was lame). While it has supposedly "fixed" this, another researcher claims to have reverse engineered the TikTok app and found that it's pulling all sorts of other user data - enough to put Facebook and Google to shame. Short answer? Delete this app. And there's a ton of other news this week: Zoom changes course on end-to-end encryption for free users, with a couple catches; I have more info on the recent Netgear router vulnerability affecting dozens of their products; Adobe Flash will be erased from the Earth by year's end; Oracle's BlueKai data mining subsidiary left a ton of personal data exposed with no password; Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has a wonderful privacy proposal that will probably never pass Congress; new Mac malware uses a trick to get around Apple's app security; Microsoft shoves its new Edge browser down its users' virtual throats; and Comcast is the first ISP to qualify for Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program (DNS over HTTPS) and might switch out Cloudflare without asking you. Further Info: Netgear router fix info:https://bit.ly/netgear-fixhttps://bit.ly/netgear-passwords Humble Bundle - LAST CHANCE! https://www.humblebundle.com/books/protect-your-stuff-apress-books

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including: Australia “under attack” - a wrap Microsoft releases more security protections for E5 customers US to introduce “anti encryption” bill Shady encrypted phone company owned by the cops NSA to offer filtered DNS services to defence industry MORE This week’s sponsor is Kasada. They offer a service that eliminates synthetic/bot traffic from the web. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is an investor and has joined Kasada’s board. Kasada’s CEO Pascal Podvin is this week’s sponsor guest. You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here. You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here. Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing. Show notes One thing Microsoft could do to avert state-sponsored attacks - Risky Business Australia blames a state actor for major disruptions. China is already denying it. Microsoft's 'Safe Documents' feature reaches general availability in Office 365 | ZDNet Microsoft releases first public preview of its Defender antivirus on Android | ZDNet Graham, Cotton, Blackburn Introduce Balanced Solution to Bolster National Security, End Use of Warrant-Proof Encryption that Shields Criminal Activity | United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Encrypted Phone Network Says It's Shutting Down After Police Hack - VICE ‘BlueLeaks’ Exposes Files from Hundreds of Police Departments — Krebs on Security The NSA is piloting a secure DNS service for the defense industrial base Bolton book could cause 'irreparable damage' to US signals intelligence, NSA director says Federal agencies recommend blocking Hong Kong-US undersea cable over national security concerns North Korea's state hackers caught engaging in BEC scams | ZDNet Zoom Reverses Course and Promises End-to-End Encryption for All Users | WIRED AWS said it mitigated a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest ever | ZDNet Oracle’s BlueKai tracks you across the web. That data spilled online | TechCrunch How spies used LinkedIn to hack European defense companies Crooks abuse Google Analytics to conceal theft of payment card data | Ars Technica To evade detection, hackers are requiring targets to complete CAPTCHAs | Ars Technica Adobe wants users to uninstall Flash Player by the end of the year | ZDNet New Zealand freezes $90 million connected to accused bitcoin launderer Alexander Vinnik Warning: ‘Invisible God’ Hacker Sold Access To More Than 135 Companies In Just Three Years FEMA IT Specialist Charged in ID Theft, Tax Refund Fraud Conspiracy — Krebs on Security Chrome extensions with 33 million downloads slurped sensitive user data | Ars Technica Microsoft: COVID-19 malware attacks were barely a blip in total malware volume | ZDNet Russia unbans Telegram | ZDNet Facebook sues websites that sold Instagram likes and scraped Facebook user data | ZDNet Mozilla to launch VPN product 'in the next few weeks' | ZDNet Hackers Compromise a Grey Market for Roblox Items - VICE Security researcher earns $4k bug bounty after hacking into Starbucks database | The Daily Swig FBI tracked Philly protester through Etsy, LinkedIn to charge her with torching police cars Samsung Blu-ray players are rebooting in a loop and nobody knows why | ZDNet Maersk, me & notPetya - gvnshtn Twitter says some business users had their private data exposed | TechCrunch

Cory Treffiletti is a successful marketer, author, entrepreneur and student of popular culture with a deep background in digital dating back to 1994. He is currently Global Head of Marketing for Cisco's Webex.com and previously was Chief Marketing Officer for Voicea (acquired by Cisco in 2019). Cory was also CMO for BlueKai, the leading cloud-based, marketing data management platform acquired by Oracle in 2014, where he became CMO of the Oracle Data Cloud.  Here are the key links from the episode:   Join the Breakthrough Success Facebook Group Schedule a free strategy call with me   Did you enjoy this episode? It would greatly help if you subscribe to Breakthrough Success and leave a quick review.  

Backed by corporate investors that included Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, Omar Tawakol founded Voicea in 2017, and served as the company's CEO until its acquisition by Cisco in September 2019. Voicea's core offering was EVA, an in-meeting AI assistant that transcribed meetings, generated highlights, and pushed relevant meeting content to productivity tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. EVA is now being rolled into Cisco's Webex Assistant, and Tawakol is currently the VP and GM of the Cisco Contact Center. In this talk, he explores the strategies he employed as he scaled Voicea and landed it at Cisco. He also draws on his experience building BlueKai, a data exchange and data management platform company he founded in 2007 and sold to Oracle in 2014, and draws contrasts between the two very different B2B business models.

Backed by corporate investors that included Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, Omar Tawakol founded Voicea in 2017, and served as the company’s CEO until its acquisition by Cisco in September 2019. Voicea’s core offering was EVA, an in-meeting AI assistant that transcribed meetings, generated highlights, and pushed relevant meeting content to productivity tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. EVA is now being rolled into Cisco’s Webex Assistant, and Tawakol is currently the VP and GM of the Cisco Contact Center. In this talk, he explores the strategies he employed as he scaled Voicea and landed it at Cisco. He also draws on his experience building BlueKai, a data exchange and data management platform company he founded in 2007 and sold to Oracle in 2014, and draws contrasts between the two very different B2B business models.

Backed by corporate investors that included Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, Omar Tawakol founded Voicea in 2017, and served as the company’s CEO until its acquisition by Cisco in September 2019. Voicea’s core offering was EVA, an in-meeting AI assistant that transcribed meetings, generated highlights, and pushed relevant meeting content to productivity tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. EVA is now being rolled into Cisco’s Webex Assistant, and Tawakol is currently the VP and GM of the Cisco Contact Center. In this talk, he explores the strategies he employed as he scaled Voicea and landed it at Cisco. He also draws on his experience building BlueKai, a data exchange and data management platform company he founded in 2007 and sold to Oracle in 2014, and draws contrasts between the two very different B2B business models.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to democratize the skills of great leaders and make every one of us more productive. My guest is Omar Tawakol.Omar Tawakol is Chief Executive Officer of Voicea which was recently acquired by Cisco. Prior to Voicea, Omar Tawakol was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which was the leading Data Exchange and Data Management Platform company in the marketing industry. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014. At Oracle, Omar was the SVP & GM of the Oracle Data Cloud (ODC). The ODC pioneered the Data-as-a-Service category and was used by 97 of the top 100 US brands to create a 360o view of their customers across all channels. Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents.Their promise: “Voicea transforms your meetings into time well spent”. This inspired me, hence I invited Omar to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in our busy business life that are increasingly loaded with meetings, and what can be if technology and people blend in the right way. Here are some of his quotes:I was running the Oracle Data Cloud after Oracle acquired my company BlueKai.I'd meet with some great leaders like Satya at Microsoft, of course, Larry Ellison, sir Martin Sorrell, just great business leaders.What struck me when I'd meet them is that they'd be in a meeting with me completely focused on our conversation. They didn't have their laptop open so that they could take notes and then get distracted. They weren't looking at their phone, they were looking at me.And when they left the meeting, there was an email with a follow up, and you realize, of course, they have a staff around them. That's helping them, but they also had some excellent skills themselves. And so, given how much time we spend in meetings, it's one of the largest time sinks of all knowledge workers, I saw that there was an opportunity really to help democratize the skills of these great executives.During this interview, you will learn four things:That a new generation of applications is arising around the concept of a Voice First UI – and that this could open up a wealth of innovation opportunities for youWhy the best way to solve a problem is often to do the very opposite of peoples’ natural reaction. Voicea for example transforms habits such as the fear of missing out to the joy of missing out.How big impact is created by looking for areas where you can have a position of data advantage or ideally data dominance.Why you should aim to embed elements of virality in your solution – elements that people talk about, and create desire amongst others. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is a great conversation with Voicea Chief Product Officer and co-founder, David Wiener. David has been a leader in Product Development for companies like Oracle and BlueKai and is now pushing innovation in the voice category. Hear what he has to say about creating category leading AI solutions.

This is our very first episode and we're really excited to share it with you. This is a conversation with Omar Tawakol, CEO of Voicea. Omar and I have worked together for close to 7 years now. He was previously SVP and GM of the Oracle Data Cloud and co-founder, CEO of BlueKai. Omar has a history of disrupting categories with technology and a strong sense of what customers will enjoy. Have a listen to his vision for Voicea and the category of voice-activated AI as a whole.

Meet Michael Sengbusch Since leaving Influence Health in 2017, Michael Sengbusch joined ATDC as the CTO-in-Residence. ATDC is Georgia's oldest, largest, and most influential startup incubator. At ATDC he mentors and advises over 40 startups in Atlanta. Michael continues to be actively involved in both healthcare and marketing technology. He will be speaking at Healthbox Studio in October on healthcare marketing topics.   More info on ATDC: http://atdc.org ATDC Healthcare Technology Vertical: Georgia Tech to Launch Health Technology Initiative at the Advanced Technology Development Center. Healthbox Studio Healthbox Studio Report Twitter handle: @msengbusch1  On the Get Social Health podcast, Janet interviews Michael Sengbusch about Facebook and marketing for healthcare systems. Give a listen or review the transcript notes below: Janet: 00:00 Podcasting is a fun, yet sometimes time-consuming passion. As some of you may have noticed, I took a little hiatus from podcasting so I could focus on the launch of the Healthcare Marketing Network, a company that brings together healthcare companies with healthcare writers. I'll tell you more about the Healthcare Marketing Network at the end of the podcast. However, in taking my little leave of absence, I had previously recorded a few interviews that hadn't been published. Today's conversation is with Michael Sengbusch, a healthcare technology and marketing expert. In my intro, you'll hear that I mentioned where he was working at the time of the interview, but I've got a little update on Michael's career since we recorded this interview. Janet: 00:42 Michael Sengbusch, left Influence Health in 2017 and joined the advanced technology development center as their CTO in residence. ATDC is Georgia's oldest, largest and most influential startup incubator. Hosted by Georgia Tech at ATDC, Michael mentors and advises over 40 startups in Atlanta. He continues to be actively involved in both healthcare and marketing technology and will be speaking at Healthbox studio in October on healthcare marketing topics. Janet: 01:14 Now let's jump into our conversation, a Facebook, so needed for marketing yet such a challenge to manage for healthcare. Today I'm speaking with healthcare marketing and technology expert, Michael Sengbusch about Facebook tracking and CRM on Get Social Health. Announcer: 01:37 Welcome to Get Social Health, a conversation about social media and how it's being used to help hospitals, social practices, healthcare practitioners and patients connect and engage via social media. Get Social Health, brings you conversations with professionals, actively working in the field and provides real-life examples of healthcare, social media in action. Here is your host, Janet Kennedy on Get Social Health. Janet: 02:05 I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different people in my field, but occasionally I run across someone who we should have crossed paths ages ago. I don't know how I haven't met or talked to Michael Sengbusch. Yes, but the day is my day. I'm really excited about it. Michael is currently serving as the Influence Health senior VP and GM of Consumer Experience. Michael has established credibility through the healthcare industry as a thought leader in digital healthcare marketing and with expertise in leveraging Facebook as a successful patient acquisition channel. I know my listeners are going to be really excited about how that works. Welcome to Get Social Health, Michael. Michael: 02:48 Thanks for having me today. Janet: 02:49 All right. I want to jump right to how does Facebook bring patients in, but I think we need to set a few background stories here to get people up. Speed. So first off, do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you got into healthcare and social media? Michael: 03:07 That's actually kind of an interesting story. So my background is in technology and in computer science, so I've been kind of trained and spent the first half of my career as a software developer as an engineer and it kind of took that path and got more into product development and then sales and startups. And then I was at a startup. I was one of the early members of a company called bright whistle and we were doing digital marketing technology and we were exploring different spaces and we kind of stumbled upon a gap in a healthcare marketing technologies, particularly in the provider space with hospitals and so I don't think when we started that we decided to go attack healthcare marketing for healthcare providers, but we did kind of stumble into that based on some connections that we hadn't realized that it was an underserved area. Michael: 03:56 There was a lot of opportunity there and we decided to just go heads down and work on digital marketing for healthcare providers and health systems across the country and that's what was created as Bright Whistle which was acquired about two and a half years ago by Influence Health and I've stuck around here for the last couple of years and helped integrate those platforms together and it's really kind of a grown from there. Janet: 04:20 No, that's exciting. You actually survived an acquisition and ended up coming out on top, so congratulations to you. Tell me a little bit about the award that you won in 2014 at Bright Whistle. Michael: 04:32 One of the early things that we were doing was experimenting with Social Media Marketing and if you go back to 2000, 10, 2011, social media was new and social media marketing was extremely new and in healthcare it was bleeding edge if not unheard of. And so while we were doing a lot of search marketing and social marketing for, for health systems and hospitals, we were bringing that to the table and one of the reasons why we were able to do that kind of so early was we were one of the early companies that was building software and technology on top of the Facebook marketing API and when we worked with Facebook early on, the different marketing partners that they accepted in program all really had to have something unique and different about them. So you know, what were you going to bring to the table? Now some of these companies brought scale. They brought big advertisers, big dollars. We brought healthcare and that was just kind of a weird. It was, it was kind of weird for Facebook at the time. What are you guys doing in healthcare? That seems a little, it seems odd. Michael: 05:34 but that seems interesting because we know it's important. So we didn't represent a huge market share as it relates to marketing. We didn't drive a whole ton of advertising, but we brought a really interesting story to the table. So working really closely with Facebook to do marketing a technology. We participated in the 2014 Facebook innovation competition and that brings all the Facebook marketing partners together. People submit different case studies and applications from all across the globe. So there's thousands of Facebook marketing partners, and we were awarded the winner and in our category and we were able to win that for some of the really interesting marketing group doing it Facebook, but more importantly, not just the marketing, but what we were doing with the data and how we were actually measuring the results of those marketing campaigns. So, we won that by actually using Facebook targeting Facebook marketing and then tying that to a healthcare CRM to figure out attribution and figure out what type of marketing campaigns actually generated results in a clinical setting. Janet: 06:42 So that's really, really exciting. Now, is that still an operation? Is that part of the Influence Health program? Michael: 06:48 Yeah, that was actually the beginning stages of what we would call kind of our next generation CRM solution and CRM and healthcare has been something that's been changing a lot over the last few years and one of the key components to any kind of CRM system is being able to use that not just for the outbound targeting but also that consumer experience which happens after somebody responded to a marketing campaign. So how do I learn more about that person, how do I personalize that information and then how do I use the data that I have in the CRM system, clinical information, claims information, diagnosis information in order to learn more about how that person made the healthcare decision that they made and then which channels can I better communicate to them through that? Michael: 07:34 So that was kind of the early stages of what we call a healthcare CRM and that makes up a big portion of what we do here at Influence Health. Janet: 07:42 Well, I do want to ask you a question about CRM and crossover. So when you talk about CRM, you literally are talking about patient information, not a marketing database or the email lists that's used by the marketing team to send out the newsletter for the hospital. Michael: 08:00 Yeah, I think those start to bleed together. So in a sense, depending on who you're talking about, sometimes it could be two different things and sometimes it is the same thing and that's kind of where I think you've seen marketing bleed into what you would call, you know, either CRM or into data to analytics to population health, customer service, patient satisfaction. All those things start to come together. The more you centralize that data source. Janet: 08:27 Although I am confused or concerned at what point does a patient's HIPAA information become a problem? I know you're obviously not looking at individual patient records and you don't have access at that level, but at what point is it reasonable to assume that if I am a patient of a particular hospital and you have this information about me that you have tied together, the fact that I like your Facebook page and I click on these links, is that what you're saying you're able to do? Michael: 08:59 It's a little bit more decoupled than that. So we do deal with a clinical information and patient records and that makes kind of the bulk of a healthcare CRM. So a healthcare CRM is really a combination of the clinical record combined with demographic and socioeconomic information. We use that information to run analytics, to do outbound campaigns, to pull an email list. Michael: 09:21 That's a very simple example when it comes to the Facebook side of things. What we're using is the native Facebook targeting capabilities and then we are using the conversions that we're getting through a target audience that we maybe have identified inside the Facebook and any conversions that happened through that. Whether it's somebody making a phone call, you know, maybe somebody's talking to a call center, somebody filling out a form or registering for an event. That information does make its way into the healthcare CRM database and that can be used for marketing standpoint, in which case none of the PHI has revealed or it can be used from an analytic standpoint in which case you mind into the clinical data to look at things like procedure codes and diagnosis codes and contribution margins and that type of more detailed clinical information. Janet: 10:10 I didn't even realize that this magical ability to combine social data and patient information actually existed. Janet: 10:20 So for instance, with your tool, you can create an advertising campaign on Facebook and say, I want to target prediabetic diabetes patients and I know I need to be including these kinds of demographics. Or is that an oversimplification? Michael: 10:40 Facebook opens up literally thousands of different demographic and socioeconomic targeting attributes directly in Facebook. So that's probably something that anybody who's new to Facebook marketing probably doesn't understand about how Facebook actually makes money. I think most people think about Facebook marketing to in terms of I'm going to go after my fan base, you know, and targeting your fans is what we would call organic social and you have a relationship with your fans and that's a way in which you can communicate to them, I would say kind of the first generation of Facebook. That's kind of what people did, right? That was kind of the standard way to do any type of marketing. Michael: 11:22 There's a lot of limitations to that. Couple ones are your fan base is limited. I'm your fan base is not necessarily made up of people that you want to market to. Especially with the health system. You'll find that a lot of people who are fans of a health systems Facebook page aren't usually patients. A lot of times their friends and family of people who work there, so it's not really a great targeting pool. So then it opens up the rest of kind of Facebook marketing and what people don't usually understand about how Facebook actually makes money and how they sell ad space to marketers is Facebook is buying, you know, millions upon millions of consumer records. So Facebook will partner with folks like Experian data logics, Axiom, Bluekai, who are the same type of consumer companies that you use to do any type of consumer analysis, right? Wherever you could do direct mail or, or whatever. Facebook buys all that data and then they match it to your record inside of Facebook. they do a cross reference and they make all of those hundreds and hundreds of attributes available back to marketers who are doing marketing. And that's how you get access to things like demographic, socioeconomic, income, education, ethnicity, all those types of targeting parameters become available via Facebook, through their acquisition of third-party consumer data. Janet: 12:43 Okay. I have actually purchased ads on behalf of some healthcare clients and we're doing things generally with demography, but more targeting who likes this page, who likes this association, who has an interest in this, a healthcare organization or this health issue. So, because I'm usually with my clients doing B to b business to business tracking. But what you're saying is the hospital could be actually looking for patient profiles in. Michael: 13:18 Yeah and the best analogy for that is healthcare CRM has existed for healthcare for probably the last seven, eight, nine years. Those types of marketing databases, the same type of queries that you would run on those, you can find good substitutes for those just querying directly into Facebook. So that's a real easy way to open up Facebook audiences to be much bigger than just your fan base. You know, Facebook really about four years ago, five years ago, really turned their ecosystem into a pay for play kind of environment where there was not a lot of free marketing left inside of Facebook. You had to go pay, you had to run ads. It was inserting suggested content in newsfeed posts and sponsored stories directly into the newsfeed, was the way in which to actually reach your audience that you wanted to get to. so from a healthcare standpoint, that opens up a couple things. Michael: 14:12 The first thing that opens up is it's the largest audience that you can reach at any given point in time, online period, end of story, right? So if you had to pick one channel, if you are going to focus your dollars on Facebook's going to be the channel that you're going to want to spend those dollars. It's the largest and most engaged audience that you can find online. Certainly in North America. And you can spend $5. Yeah. And it's very cost effective where if you try to compare that to what you might do in Google, so the Google would be the other primary paid channel. Google is also highly effective and most health systems are very familiar with how to do Google ad words into how to use google to identify and capture demand. The thing with healthcare in Google though is that it can be very expensive because medical related keywords and Google can have a pretty high price tag, so highly effective, but it could be less efficient with your marketing dollars because it can be very expensive. Michael: 15:13 Facebook has a wider reach and a more engaged audience, so that was the first part. Second part is that it also opens up mobile where most of the traffic that you're going to see on Facebook is mobile. If you're going to do a mobile first web strategy, you should have a mobile first marketing strategy and for us we think that that's a Facebook strategy. I think the stat is something like one out of every five minutes spent on a mobile device is spent within Facebook, which is just an insane number. Very embarrassing for me to admit that that's true. I get to say I do this for a living, so I have a reason to keep opening Facebook. Exactly, and it cuts across. You know, if you're, if you're going to go mobile, right? If, if, if that's your strategy. The reason why I think it's effective is I think mobile's the one medium that kind of cuts across demographic and socioeconomic boundaries where you know, mobile, you can reach a urban audience in a rural audience, you can reach an older and a younger population. Michael: 16:11 You can reach a affluent and a middleclass and a poor population. Everybody has a smartphone, and this wasn't true five years ago, six years ago, but now the numbers are astounding about where people choose to use their dollars and that first purchase really from a technology standpoint, is to have a smartphone where that, you know, that technology barrier they used to talk about was, you know, there's homes in households that couldn't afford a computer, you know, and that's still true, but they can afford a smartphone and you really capture everybody in that medium and Facebook is the way to do it. So Facebook's the way you're actually going to have the paid channel to go open up that audience on mobile. So that's the other reason. In addition to the targeting capabilities, which I mentioned earlier, when you talk about doing Facebook marketing and advertising, obviously I assume you you're working with the marketing channel, but do you find the clinical side of the house is interested in this data as well? Michael: 17:10 I think the clinical side of the house is more interested in understanding the data, less about the marketing. What I hear when we talk to marketing departments is the difference between the clinical folks, the marketing folks, the population health financial folks. I think the thing that they all have in common is they all want to see some type of results and they want to see some type of measurement. That's where I really like to focus on the data side of it and that's why the CRM side of things is, is pretty interesting. Social for me starts to become kind of that second pillar of a two pronged kind of paid digital strategy and I think everybody is comfortable with using social as a channel just for engagement but also for acquisition and that wasn't always the case when we were doing this kind of five or six years ago. Michael: 17:55 We got a lot of blank stares around how we were going to use that channel. I'm not just for communication but also for for acquisition. I think everybody's really comfortable with that now to the point where they actually expect it and I think the users have come to expect it as well and health systems have caught up to the point where they're very comfortable working in that medium where it was. That wasn't the case three or four or five years ago. Janet: 18:21 What would you say healthcare is still uncomfortable with? Michael: 18:25 That's a good question. I have this discussion a lot with marketing departments in. It's usually the difference between what I call, you know, HIPAA and PHI versus their privacy policy and I think these two things get conflated quite a bit in the healthcare marketing environment where what is usually a limitation of a privacy policy is kinda confused with legal guidelines and recommendations under HIPAA because they're two totally different things. Michael: 18:55 Right? So how you choose to communicate to a patient or prospective patient is usually covered under a privacy policy and what you see for most health systems and a privacy policy are very old, very antiquated privacy policies that were put together by an overly conservative compliance and legal department and those type of rules and restrictions usually have to deal with. If somebody has given me their information online or through the patient portal or through a form or from an inquiry, what am I limited in doing with that information and that has nothing to do with HIPAA. That has to do with the privacy policy and the website says, if you fill out some information here, we're not going to use it for marketing. Well, plenty of health systems have more liberal policies and their privacy policies, which then gives them the ability to do standard type marketing communication such as send me an email, but respect if I opt out, you can communicate to me in many different channels, but respect if I opt out or tune out that message. Michael: 20:03 Those things are applicable and available depending on the privacy policy. All that says is if a patient is providing information, how do you treat that information? Do you keep it secure, then mitigate risk, how do you choose to use that information based on what they've authorized you to use it for? So it's usually two different things and I talked to kind of compliance departments and marketing teams about understanding the difference and what necessarily is legal versus what is allowed under your own guidelines. Janet: 20:39 Okay. So in the Facebook world, and if I am a small business or even a healthcare organization, I have an email list of marketing email list. I can upload the email addresses only, no other information whatsoever. Facebook will try to match them and they'll say, oh, guess what? We found about a third of your patients or customers we have now matched and we've created this magical file that we have tagged who your customers are. We now are going to destroy your email list. We don't keep it, we don't use it, we promise, we promise, and then you, you, you can use that to build your own custom audience. And then you can tell Facebook, okay, now find people who look like my people but who are not my people. Sounds great. But somewhere along the line, because this is patient information, is there an approval process necessary? Michael: 21:34 Yeah. And that again goes back to your privacy policy. So a couple things on the process that you just walked through which is in line with what we've, what we do with some health systems. If their privacy policy and their compliance officers approve it. So a couple things on that. First thing is you never send an email address to Facebook. So that's kind of a misconception is the email just never gets to Facebook. On our own servers, we do what's called a hash encryption and that information is sent to Facebook, so the email address has never sent and the information that you send to Facebook can never be unhappy, so it's completely like a one-way encryption essentially of that information. So because of that, there's absolutely no way to ever have a breach. Would that information and the HIPAA and privacy guidelines, the intent of them is to mitigate risks, risk to make sure that you don't have some type of inexperience or an Equifax breach and there's absolutely no way in the protocol that's used to send that information to Facebook that you could ever have a breach. Michael: 22:35 So that's the first thing. The second thing is when they do identify those people, they never tell you what people are actually identified. So if you send a thousand people that's been hashed information, Facebook, they matched 700 of them. You never actually know which 700 and neither does Facebook. So it sits in a way in which it's a one-way mapping which can never be downloaded or breached or have any type of intelligence about who that person is. So that scenario, we've worked with many kinds of compliance departments and legal folks at health systems and that's usually sufficient once you walk through that and explain to them how it works, they're cool. In fact, what I find, what happens more often is people use the same email addresses and they're sending them to Mailchimp or constant contact or other far less secure places than sending it to Facebook. Janet: 23:28 Okay. I'm glad you said all of that because that was obviously the one disconnect that I needed to have clarified and that little five minutes is now going to be the piece I share with everyone because I have talked to lawyers about it and they do fall back to the privacy policy, but for most part they're not really aware of the ins and outs of how data a gets to a location b. all right. So I feel really good about that. So I'm going to encourage a lot of people to consider doing that. but tell me about where you want to take all this fascinating data and intelligence. Are you doing anything with data visualization and, and looking at a bigger picture about trends about how people are, are using a Facebook and, and is that actually triggering visits to a healthcare provider? Michael: 24:20 Yeah. So I think as it relates specifically to Facebook, I'm a couple of years ago when I would talk about Facebook, I kind of changed how we frame Facebook. So it used to be kind of framed as hey are you doing social media marketing? And then a couple of years ago I kinda changed our approach and that kind of stopped calling it social media marketing and just lumped it in with digital marketing because it's less about the social side of it and more about this is just the dominant place to reach people online. And the fact that it happens to be social in nature is kind of besides the point now where, you know, Facebook is. I mean it hasn't gone anywhere. It's been around for over 10 years, continues to grow their numbers, look, continue to look strong. Their revenue numbers are strong. Michael: 25:09 Other competition that comes up like an Instagram, they buy Instagram, Snapchat comes up and they just replicate all of Snapchat's features. So they buy Whatsapp, you know, they create messenger so they're kind of here to stay. So it's Kinda like, you know, rather than saying, do, do you do search marketing? It's like it's google, you know, google is kind of like Google one, right? Facebook kind of one this side of it. And when it comes to digital ad spend, there's two dominant players. It's Google and then Facebook and everybody else behind that are niche players at best when it comes to the ad dollars that they consume. So it's really less than it being social because there's lots of cool social things about it. And almost anything you do online today has some type of a social component, right? Is plugged into some type of a social graph. Michael: 26:07 It has some type of engagement or commentary or some network effects in place. So everything's kind of social. So treating Facebook as a social media marketing I think is kind of besides the point, and I think of it as I have a limited number of channels that I can go out to with my limited marketing dollars because we deal with health systems and in the grand scheme of things, health system is still kind of a small business when it comes to the amount of marketing dollars that they spend. You know it's not IBM. It's not Coca-Cola, you know they don't. They don't have a ton of money and so you have to be really careful about what channels you use because your marketing dollars are limited and you want to make sure that they're going to the most efficient channels. And to me, the top two are going to be Google and Facebook and everything else. You have to make a really strong case to want to spend money in those channels after you've saturated Google and Facebook. Janet: 27:02 When you work with clients, you're coming in because you have a lot of answers and capabilities in the digital space and the online space. But the way I hear you're talking, I'm hearing that while there shouldn't be social media marketing or digital marketing, now I'm wondering is, is it all just marketing now and at what point are we going to stop having a digital online budget and a traditional budget and it's all just one budget? Michael: 27:31 That's exactly the way people should be thinking about it. And I think what I've learned from doing this over the last six or seven years is people used to ask, you know, they would say, well, what channel is better or what's better should I use this or that? And what I've learned is, you know, it depends, you know, different service lines have different calls to action, different, goals. And you know, running an orthopedic campaign is a lot different than running a pediatrics campaign or a breast cancer awareness campaign. You know, we're running a bariatric surgery, campaign and all those things have different nuances about who's the audience, how do you want to engage them, where do they respond, what are the costs in the individual channels that you could use? And I think they're all kind of different and you do them enough and you start to figure out that there's a different combination that works and all those combinations of channels and budget levels are really just kind of starting points and then you figure out what's working in that individual market for that specific health system and then you go from there. Michael: 28:34 So I think that's a long way of saying, yeah, it should be treated as all one budget and then you figure out what's my most efficient allocation that are the channels that are going to drive the best results. And then you go from there. I don't think it's one hard fast rule about what you should use or shouldn't use, let alone do I carve out different budgets for your digital versus offline. I think it should all be looked at together and then you make a decision based on what you believe is gonna be the most efficient allocation. Janet: 29:02 Now one of the things I'm hearing from you is really an evangelism for understanding the holistic role of marketing and of digital in the whole. And I understand that in the sense you are a thought leader and you're going out to share this evangelism, you're really on a speaking tour, are hitting a lot of conferences. So where are you going to be going in the next few months to tell people about, these new ideas. Michael: 29:31 Thanks for mentioning that. I try to stay engaged with the healthcare marketing community as best I can. We were at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago and coming up here October 23rd through the 25th is going to be HCIC healthcare Internet conference that's going to be an Austin, Texas and I'll be doing a panel discussion there, which I'm really looking forward to. It's going to be on the role of healthcare CRM and what does that mean moving forward. And like I was saying before, you know, CRM is a big piece of what I've been working on recently and marketing is a huge component to a, to a CRM system. So if anybody is going to be in Austin, Texas, October 23rd to 24th will be at the HCIC, a healthcare Internet conference that center since it's, since we brought it up that they actually, the health care conference I think has always been the best, for the customers and for the industries and the products that I work with lately. Michael: 30:34 I think it's always the right mix of people. It's not too big. It's not too small. Always has a pretty good sense of what is trying to accomplish. The speakers are usually pretty good at the conference is not too long and again, it's not too short. so hci is coming up and then also in 2018 I will be speaking at HIMSS this year and looking forward to that hymns. For anybody who's not aware is enough. That's going to be March fifth through March ninth in Las Vegas and I'll be doing a speaking session there with Christus health. Christus health is a health system in Texas, actually much larger than that, but their headquarters in Texas. And we're going to be talking about how to leverage healthcare CRM beyond marketing and since we're talking primarily about kind of social and social media marketing on this call today on this podcast, I really start to see marketing bleed into a lot of different areas and marketing I think has got a lot of attention over the last five years in healthcare, but I think they're taking on more and more responsibilities and various departments are starting to kind of bleed together. Michael: 31:50 Is it a patient satisfaction? Is it customer service? Is it population health? All of these things start to converge and marketing's, they're converging with it as, as well. with how do you actually manage a patient population? How do I communicate with the community? How do I know more about my healthcare consumers so that I can better not just better market to them, but then how can I better engage with them once they come in to the health system. And that's something that healthcare, particularly the healthcare providers are learning how to do. And as compared to other industries, they're really not very good at it, you know, and they're, they're getting a lot better. Janet: 32:26 Well, let me ask you to put your prognosticators hat on and as you are a little bit on cutting edge here, when we talk about CRM and things happening in the digital space, what you see as big changes coming down the pike, either that we can avoid the, might as well embrace it or that really could be game changers from a standpoint of healthcare marketing and slash or social media. Michael: 32:52 Let me touch on the last point there first. So as it relates to healthcare and social media, first of all, Facebook isn't going anywhere. I think after four years or five years of Facebook, people are like, oh, is this a fad? Is this going to be my space? Or something like that. Nope. Facebook one, it's dominant. It's a platform for the next 15 to 20 years. Easily. Facebook is not going anywhere. Twitter's kind of a dud when it comes to marketing. So I was really positive on Twitter about two or three years ago and have not seen any of the campaigns that we've run in Twitter, provide a meaningful challenge to what we're seeing in Facebook or google. So I think Twitter is kind of missed the boat when it comes to a paid marketing channel. Like I said before, Instagram is part of Facebook and I see a lot of great things in Instagram. Michael: 33:43 So Facebook makes it pretty easy to extend your marketing campaigns into Instagram now. So I think that's big. Snapchat I think is you're kind of number three player in the social space. I dunno if it's great for health systems yet they haven't really figured out how to turn it into a direct response or a conversion channel. It's more for brands, you know. So it's getting big branding dollars from national and international advertisers don't see it being a big channel for, for health systems yet. I'm one of the channels I'm more interested in from a marketing side is actually next door. So I don't know if any of the listeners have used next door. Next door is a neighborhood social network and as far as an ideal audience for health systems, I think next door could be really interesting, so that's something to be on the lookout for. Janet: 34:33 I actually joined my organization that I've been living in my neighborhood for 15 years and next door has been around actually for quite a while, but I finally bit the bullet and joined I know six or eight months ago and I now actually no my neighbors all days. You take cookies next door you'd meet, people know everybody stays inside, but I feel like I know them virtually through next door and the amount of recommendations and or questions for services is amazing. Plus people give away a lot of great free stuff. Michael: 35:06 Yup, Yup. It's highly trusted. They're starting to open up from a marketing standpoint, I think it's to be determined how health systems could use it, but it seems a natural fit for community interaction for a health system, for a physician practice, for an urgent care to be nearby. Highly, highly relevant. I think for healthcare, I don't know if it's going to pay dividends from a marketing standpoint, but I would keep my eye on that. When it comes to kind of new and innovative things to look out for kind of coming up in the kind of the healthcare or the marketing technology space, I've had this question a lot and it's not a really sexy, interesting answer. It's really actually kind of boring if I think it's things like call center. So the front lines of patient communication is who answers the phone when somebody responds to a marketing campaign, it's kind of an overlooked but really critical thing that health systems do really poorly and as they get marketing sorted out, whether it's search or social or digital or offline or email or direct mail, they're getting those things figured out and they have their own problems and that's getting sorted out. But the problem that persists is, hey, that's great. You did a great marketing campaign. What happens when the person signs up for something or when they make a phone call? It's a highly broken process from an operational standpoint, which requires a lot of technology to integrate to things like scheduling a two callbacks to follow-ups and that all connects directly to marketing if you ever want to figure out what's happening. Michael: 36:45 So it's not a very interesting kind of, you know, high tech answer. It's kind of fixed the call center. Janet: 36:50 Well, and that's the challenge, right? Nobody wants to work on the boring everyday stuff. They all work on the sexy new things, but I understand your title is a Senior VP and GM of Consumer Experience. That's unique. Yeah, and I think you're going to see that trend a lot. Even in health marketing. Our marketing teams are moving away from the marketing term and it's kind of becoming more a patient experience. Consumer experience. When I talk and when I do, I'm a collateral or presentations. I tend to downplay words like patient because I think in healthcare now I think patient implies somebody's sick and so much of what we're doing is about wellness and preventative and being involved and taking care of your health and if you're taking care of your health, I don't think you're a patient. Michael: 37:40 Right. And then things when it comes to, you know, terms like acquisition rather than acquisition, things like experience where the health system is now trying to engage with the community to be able to influence the healthcare decisions that they're making. And that crosses a wide gamut of is it preventative, is it wellness, is it child care, is it pediatricians or is what we normally think of kind of acute care, right? I'm hurt, I'm sick, I need to go to the doctor. So I think you're seeing a lot of terminology change there and that's happening because health systems are, are growing in their responsibilities and also that's why you see marketing kind of bleeding into other groups and it's becoming more about consumer healthcare, consumer experience rather than particularly how do we treat or find sick patients? Janet: 38:31 Well, everything you're saying is so exciting because it sounds, if not easy, doable. Speaker 3: 38:38 Yeah. I think a lot of this stuff is pretty like I said, I think marketing's been getting better. it's come light years in the last four or five years. I think now they're struggling with data and making sense of the data because there's a lot of data from a lot of different disparate systems within the health system and then how do I actually close that middle layer? Some of it is kind of basic blocking and tackling and it's kind of the boring stuff sometimes. But you know, a lot of successful companies, a lot of successful people got that way by solving kind of the boring problems, ones that no one else wants to tackle. Janet: 39:14 Exactly. And make them seem fun on the front end because they weren't focused on user experience. Michael: 39:20 If you had asked me 20 years ago if I was going to be doing healthcare marketing and talking about a healthcare call center, I would've told you you're crazy, but there's a lot of stuff that you can do there. And I think it's a hugely kind of overlooked, a niche in the industry and I've been happy to be a part of it over the last six or seven years. Well, that is exciting and I look forward to reading your posts and social and following your talks at coming up events. I think you've got a really great solution and I expect even better things coming from you all in 2018 and forward. Michael: 39:51 Well, thanks again, Janet. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. No problem. Talk to you soon. Announcer: 39:57 And now here's our social media success tip. Jeff Callaway: 40:01 Hi, this is Jeff Callaway. I'm the Senior Content Specialist at Cook Children's Healthcare system based in Fort Worth, Texas. My advice would be to not be too PR, which sounds weird because I work in PR and I know a lot of you listening do as well, but we try very hard to write as journalistic as possible to make the stories interesting and to make what we do appointment viewing and to create a trust with our audience that when they read it, it's going to be real and accurate journalism. Announcer: 40:34 You've been listening to the Get Social Health podcast. The show notes are located@getsocialhealth.com To join our healthcare social media journey, follow at, Get Social Health on Twitter and start a conversation. Janet: 40:50 Thanks for listening to the Get Social Health podcast, a production of the healthcare marketing network, and a proud member of the healthcare podcasters community. Janet: 40:58 I like to take a moment to tell you a bit about the healthcare marketing network. We're a community of freelance healthcare writers. Our Organization can match your company or a healthcare practice with clinically accurate, specialized or general health care and medical content from blogs to white papers to Cmi. The healthcare marketing network has the writers that you need to reach your business audience or patients to find out more, visit healthcare marketing network.com, or contact me via social media, or you can email me, Janet@healthcaremarketingnetwork.com. Thanks again for listening to the Get Social Health podcast.  

How do you develop young leaders and entrepreneurs in this fast-paced world? What is the power of investing and building multi-million dollar companies? Jeff Richards sits down with Christopher Lochhead to answer these questions and discuss why it's smart to invest in China and Silicon Valley. "There's 7.3 billion people in the world. There's only 300 million in the US. So if your market opportunity is 300 million, you're missing the other 95% of the world." - Jeff Richards Three Things We Learned It's tough for kids these days Because kids have access to social media at an early age, they have a broader preview of the world out there compared to generations past. While it's very encouraging for them to find ways to become successful apart from the traditional get-educated-land-a-job scheme, being exposed to these things as a teenager can be a pitfall. They're hit with the pressure to be creative, innovative, and get together with the right crowd early, existential crises adults back then would often encounter not until after college. Pace of play nowadays is fast Technological advancements have made it quicker to build businesses and make them successful. However, with this quick pacing comes the added pressure that trickles down to entrepreneurs who are throwing so much into the fire in very little time in order to keep up. They have no time to catch a break, and risk many other aspects of their lives because of the swift turnover of things in the tech industry. We need to go back to building brick by brick The satisfaction of building a product with a great foundation springing from doing it right can't be undermined. People need to learn how to build businesses brick by brick, painstaking piece by painstaking piece. We need to slow down and revel the process of becoming successful. So much is going on in the tech world right now that people are compelled to constantly pit themselves into the fray. We must pause and zoom out of the small corner of the world that we're building in order to gain true insights of the world at large. If we're not trying to glean and learn as much as we can, then all our efforts and money will easily go up in smoke. Bio / Story:  Jeff Richards  A Managing Partner at GGV Capital, Jeff joined the firm in 2008 after spending 13 years as an entrepreneur and operating executive in the US and Asia. Prior to joining GGV, Jeff founded two venture-backed companies, one a success and one a “huge failure” in his own words – “I learned a lot.”   His background as an entrepreneur gives him a unique perspective on the challenges of starting and running a venture-backed company, and he works closely with the GGV Talent team on Founders+Leaders.  Jeff focuses on the Software and Internet sectors, and currently sits on the boards of or is a board observer at BigCommerce, one of the top ecommerce software platforms, Boxed, a rising star in the ecommerce space, Brightwheel, the leading SaaS provider for the early education vertical, Gladly, a next generation SaaS platform for customer care, Percolate, a leading marketing SaaS platform for global brands,PlushCare, a mobile platform for consumer healthcare, Reebonz, Southeast Asia's leader in luxury ecommerce, Slice, a market network for the pizza industry, and Tile, the platform for location. Jeff also led GGV's investments in Appirio (acquired in 2016 by Wipro), BlueKai (acquired in 2014 by Oracle), Buddy Media (acquired in 2012 by Salesforce), Citrus Lane (acquired in 2014 by Care.com), Evolv (acquired in 2014 by Cornerstone OnDemand), Flipboard, HotelTonight, ShiftGig, Voicera and Zylo, and has been actively involved in GGV's investments in Domo, OpenDoor, Square and Wish.  Jeff is a frequent guest on CNBC and often writes on topics like startup management and leadership, venture-backed IPOs and shifts in tech trends across the US and China.  Before GGV  Prior to joining GGV, Jeff founded two software companies: R4,

One of my favorite pieces for how to think about technology platform shifts is Chris Dixon's "What's Next in Computing". Chris notes that if we look at history, we see that irrespective of the way financial markets perform, technology platform shifts happen consistently every 10–15 years. One of the most important platform shifts of the next decade is voice. Consumer markets have started to appreciate the strength of Alexa, Echo and Google Home but the recent demonstration of Google Assistant at Google I/O 2018 really expanded the imagination for what will be possible in a decade as deep learning and natural language exponentially improve. Lately, I've been incredibly interested by the impact voice will have in the enterprise. This week, it was a thrill to chat with Omar Tawakol, one of the key players in today's enterprise voice landscape. Omar is the CEO of Voicera, a voice-activated AI for the workplace; he's raised $20M to leverage AI to augment tasks, make meetings more productive and create more efficient workflows. Eva (Voicera's AI-assistant) in actionPrior to Voicera, Omar was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which built the worlds largest consumer data marketplace and DMP. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014 & Omar led Oracle Data Cloud where he scaled the team to over 1,000 people and pioneered the ODC to become the leading Data-as-a-Service provider to 96 of the top 100 US marketers. Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents. Check out the conversation and our other episodes on iTunes.

Omar Tawakol is Chief Executive Officer of Voicera. Prior to Voicera, Omar Tawakol was the founder and CEO of BlueKai which built the worlds largest consumer data marketplace and DMP. Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014 & Omar served as the SVP & GM of the Oracle Data Cloud. Omar earned an MS in CS from Stanford (BS, MIT) where he researched and published work on AI agents. This episode is sponsored by Liberty Tax, InStitchu, Elitra Health, and Right Networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this week’s episode of “Marketing Today,” Alan talks with Cory Treffiletti, CMO of Voicera, a technology company that has created an AI virtual assistant named Eva (Enterprise Voice Assistant). Eva can be invited to meetings and will listen and take notes as well as follow up on identified action items and decisions. Previously in his career, Treffiletti was the head of marketing for the Oracle Data Cloud, SVP and CMO of BlueKai, and was co-founder of numerous startups. Treffiletti also writes a long-running column for MediaPost (every Wednesday for the past 18 years, without fail), one of which, “The Future of AI? Just Watch Your Kids,” he discusses with Alan. During the podcast, Trefffiletti also talks about the importance of building teams that are driven by ideas, not egos. “You can set up any kind of culture, and process and incentives, and organizational structures you want,” says Treffiletti. “But the people that you have and their approach to business, and their balance of ego and humility, is going to define the way that business is grown.” Highlights from this week’s “Marketing Today” podcast include: Treffiletti discusses his background and career path. (1:34) Treffiletti draws distinctions between marketing strategies for startups and bigger companies. (2:58) “You should always be learning.” (6:10) Making sure the promise of the brand matches the experience of the brand. (11:07) Humility and authenticity go hand in hand. (13:12) Treffiletti on team building. (17:29) It’s OK to make mistakes, just not the same ones over and over again. (22:00) The future of AI according to Teffiletti: Just watch your kids. (24:14) Support the show.

Today I'm joined by a man who has held senior online business roles for the past 20 years. He’s been a senior manager at Dell and Apple, a Director at Skype and a Vice President at Expedia. He’s currently Senior Vice President of Online Marketing for Farfetch - welcome to DMR, John Veichmanis. On this episode of Digital Marketing Radio we discuss testing and learning in e-commerce, with topics including: How would you define testing and learning in relation to e-commerce? Is it necessary for every e-commerce business to be testing and learning or does this only apply to larger businesses? What are some of the more important areas to be testing? How do you structure a test and learn effectively so that you can have confidence in the winning result? How do you define the difference between a winner and not quite a winner? If you do find a winner, does that mean that you should implement that change thought-out your business? How do you decide on what to test? Can you give me an example of a really well structured test? What would be an example of a bad test? Is there a danger that running experiments could be taking our time away from what may be seen as more productive work? Are there some things that just can’t be tested and we have to rely more on our gut instinct? [Tweet ""Data is our real currency" says @johnveichmanis from @farfetch #ModernMarketing"] Software I couldn't live without What software do you currently use in your business that if someone took away from you, it would significantly impact your marketing success? BlueKai from Oracle [Data management platform] What software don't you use, but you've heard good things about, and you've intended to try at some point in the near future? Optimizely [A/B testing tool] My number 1 takeaway What's the single most important step from our discussion that our listeners need to take away and implement in their businesses? Data is our real currency. Any marketer typically has a pound or dollar-based budget. I often think about how we get the best return for that spend. Ultimately I think that we should change that dialogue and look at the data assets that we have and make sure that we're getting the best return on those assets, and we're using them effectively. Both in terms of measurement, but also enhancing that user experience and that to me is the real focus. The brief to my team in terms of what are we doing to make sure that we really enhance and get to that one-to-one level - not only in email, across any communication actually. I think that it's a long, winding road ahead. We'll make many mistakes, we'll learn many things form testing hopefully - but that is the most important and interesting space I think.

Social media is quite the valuable tool in an inbound marketer’s repertoire, and this is far from a secret. As social networks continue to grow, evolve, and sometimes fall out of relevancy, we must always stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the world of social media. Any inbound marketer can tell you how effective and inexpensive a well-run social media campaign can be, and that is exactly why it’s a must-have tool in your marketing arsenal. This week’s round-up will fill you in on all of the latest changes in social media that you’ll need to know to keep that edge. Enjoy! What HP’s 1 Million LinkedIn Followers Means for Marketers, From LinkedIn Blog (http://blog.linkedin.com/2013/02/28/what-hps-1-million-linkedin-followers-means-for-marketers-infographic/) HP has officially become the first company to draw in one million followers to their LinkedIn page. This is a huge win for HP because these aren’t followers you would find on Twitter or Facebook, these are a highly targeted audience of professionals that matter to their business. This means that HP is now indirectly connected to 43 million other professionals on LinkedIn, which makes up roughly a quarter of the entire LinkedIn population. Google Offers Social Sign-In Alternative to Facebook, From Ad Week (http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/google-offers-social-sign-alternative-facebook-147561) We all know that Facebook has had a pretty big monopoly on the world of social sign-ins and security, but that may be changing very soon. Google has released its own social powered sign-in option for online publishers and apps. This means that users will be able to connect with sites like USA Today, The Guardian, FitBit, Fancy, OpenTable, and more with their Google + accounts. Trendrr Reports: Social TV Oscar Activity Tripled, From Marketing Pilgrim (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2013/02/trendrr-reports-social-tv-oscar-activity-tripled-and-the-ratings-were-up-too.html) The Oscars; usually spent in the comfort of our sweat pants while we obnoxiously rant and rave about who was dressed best, worst, and stupidest. Yes, stupidest. You know you've seen some pretty stupid looking outfits at the Oscars before. But, I digress. This year was different. This year, we made our voices heard. We took to the streets…okay, we took to our respective social networks. During this years Oscar broadcast, real-time social media tracking company Trendrr kept tabs on all of our witty and not so witty comments across the Facebook, Twitter, GetGlue, and Viggie. Spotify’s Social Network Arrives: New Follow Tab is Now Gradually Rolling Out to Users, From The Next Web (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/27/spotify-the-social-network-arrives-begins-rolling-out-follow-features-to-users/) A little ways back in December of last year, Spotify announced that it would be rolling out a slew of social media features to its popular music friendly app. Well, the time has come for Spotify to announce that its social network is ready to start shipping to a desktop near you. The latest feature to grace our computer screens is the new Follow tab that will list all of the users you are currently “following”, and will be replacing the current People tab. Spotify sees this move as a way to lessen their social dependency on Facebook, which has not reaped them many benefits. Facebook Lets Advertisers Tap Purchase Data Partners to Target Customers, Categories, Like Car-Buyers, From Tech Crunch (http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/facebook-ad-data-providers/) It’s no secret that Facebook has been looking to dive deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of online advertising. The most recent news reveals that Facebook has partnered up with top online and offline purchase data providers like Epsilon, Acxiom, Datalogix, and BlueKai to provide advertisers with a hashed list of existing customers, potential prospects, and categories of people like pet lovers, soda drinkers, and car buyers. The goal is for Facebook to attract some big spenders by offering them a way to target the exact customers that have or will buy their products.

Welcome to episode #320 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. Banner advertising took hold in 1994. By 1998, I was deeply involved in the online advertising space. If you thought selling digital marketing through to the c-suite is hard in 2012, imagine what it was like back in 1998. It's hard to believe that it was 14 years ago. While I was active in the digital marketing space prior to getting involved in online media, it was fascinating trying to sell those banner ads back in the day. I remember people like Bryan Eisenberg, Joseph Jaffe, Tom Hespos and Cory Treffiletti being active back then too. Cory is currently the SVP of Marketing at BlueKai and a weekly contributor to MediaPost. More recently, Cory published his first book, Internet Ad Pioneers: The Stories Of The Unsung People Behind The Birth And Growth Of The Internet Ad Industry (Volume 1). I was honored that he asked me to be a part of this business book, and it's a great read for those of us who remember that time like it as yesterday. I was surprised that Cory hasn't been on the podcast before, and I'm thrilled that he agreed to play along this time. Enjoy the conversation... Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #320 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 44:06. Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com. Hello from Beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the Blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter.  Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. CTRL ALT DEL is coming in Spring 2013. In conversation with Cory Treffiletti. BlueKai. MediaPost. Internet Ad Pioneers. You can follow Cory at Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'. Get David's song for free here: Artists For Amnesty. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #320 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising podcast artists for amnesty blog blogging bluekai brand bryan eisenberg business book cory treffiletti david usher digital marketing facebook internet ad pioneers itunes joseph jaffe marketing marketing blogger marketing podcast mediapost online social network podcast podcasting social media tom hespos