Podcast appearances and mentions of jackie walker

On today's House of Comment, co-hosts Charlotte Henry and Emma Burnell focus on the Diane Abbott situation and other selection sagas within the Labour party. What does it all say about factionalism and the party leadership? The also head Stateside to discuss Donald Trump becoming a convicted felon. Timeline of Diane Abbott's suspension: From her comments on racism to Labour ‘election ban' – Independent Karen Pollock responds to Jackie Walker's Comments  As it happened: Trump found guilty on all hush money charges – AP Conservative Mark Logan defects to Labour - saying 'we need a new government' – Sky News Charlotte Henry on Threads Charlotte Henry's website and newsletter – The Addition Emma Burnell on Twitter Emma Burnell's newsletter, Hard Thinking on the Soft Left House of Comments on Twitter The Election Campaign is going to be a busy time for us. Support House of Comments on Patreon - just £5 a month – to help us create the best, independent coverage. House of Comments is a C.A.H Multimedia production in association with Political Human.

In this episode of the Patrick Henningsen Show on TNT Radio which aired on March 4, 2024, Patrick talks to writer, filmmaker and veteran human rights and anti-racism campaigner Jackie Walker, about the recent shock win propelling George Galloway into the UK Parliament, and the meltdown by Westminster establishment at the prospect of having a powerful pro-Palestinian voice in the House of Commons. Also, Jackie talks about her own experience being banned from the Labour Party over the phony accusation of ‘anti-semitism'. All this and more. More from Jackie: X/Twitter  TUNE-IN LIVE to TNT RADIO for the Patrick Henningsen Show every MON-FRI at 11AM-1PM (NEW YORK) | 4PM-6PM (LONDON) | 2AM-4AM (BRISBANE): https://tntradio.liv

GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Jackie Walker is an Ex UK Labour Party Dissident. GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: Basil Valentine is a philosopher, poet, broadcaster, writer, musician, horse racing aficionado, and Leeds United supporter. He is a prolific Twitter poster and a regular contributor to TNT and the SUNDAY WIRE WITH PATRICK HENNINGSEN. You can learn more at https://21stcenturywire.com/sundaywire/ and follow him on Twitter/X: @says_basil.

America's primary and secondary educational systems are standing at a post-COVID crossroads, and few school systems are facing more changes than Ohio's. The state's recently-approved budget included higher funding for schools, a dramatic shakeup in school oversight that transferred authority from the State Board of Education to the Governor's Office, and a vast expansion of the availability of vouchers parents can use to take their children out of the public education system entirely. With student performance still lagging as a result of pandemic lockdowns, vouchers that will blur the line between public and private education, and school officials caught in the country's culture war crosshairs, what does the future hold for Ohio schools? The panelists are: Dr. Angela Chapman, Superintendent and CEO of Columbus City Schools Scott DiMauro, President of the Ohio Education Association And Dr. Susan Tave Zelman, Former Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the Co-Author of "The Buying and Selling of American Education.”  Our host is Jackie Walker, Executive Director of SkillsUSA Ohio This week's forum was sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, Battelle, and WCBE 90.5 FM and was supported by the Grange Insurance Audubon Center. The livestream was presented by The Center for Human Kindness at The Columbus Foundation and The Columbus Dispatch. This forum was recorded before a live audience in Columbus, Ohio on August 2, 2023.

HVAC Masters Of The Hustle Podcast would like to welcome Jackie Walker into the Hot Seat on episode 227. On this episode we talk about the new seasons and journey with HVAC Masters Of THE HUSTLE and challenging seasons. How as working as a POWERHOUSE will overcome your BIGGEST FEARS!

Lucy Grogan was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia when she was 8 years old. By the time she was 11 she decided that she was "Done" with cancer and wanted to do something to help other Pediatric Cancer patients.  On today's podcast Executive Director Jackie Walker will talk about the Non-Profit LUCY'S LOVE BUS which Lucy started, 6 months before her passing at the age of 12.  This Non-Profit focuses on bringing Integrative Therapies to these kids which bring them comfort as they battle with their individual cancer treatments . 

Jackie Walker AKA my mom, shares her life story and how she has walked a blessed path by the lord.  Support the show

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital Signage Experience is coming up in four weeks and I suspect a lot of people are very curious about how the long-running show will be rebooted by its new owners Questex. I certainly am, as I had long thought the old DSE was a dead trade show walking, and that something different was needed. Is this it? I dunno, and I guess the industry will find out in a few weeks in Las Vegas. I asked Marian Sandberg, who runs several shows for Questex, and David Drain, who was brought on by Questex to build the programming side of the event, to join me for a chat about what people can expect from a new and different DSE. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Hello, thank you for joining me. Maybe the first thing to do is: Marion and David, explain what your roles are at Questex and DSE.  Marian Sandberg: Sure. Thanks so much for having us, Dave. It's really an honor to be with you and your audience and to have an opportunity to talk about this.  I'm Marian. I am the Vice President and market leader for Questex. I oversee the DSE show, which we acquired last year, and we have not presented yet. It'll be presented in November, which is what we're gonna talk about, and I also oversee a show called LDI, which I know you'll have questions about. And market leaders tend at Questex tend to have two or three or whatever number of shows that they have under their portfolio?  Marian Sandberg: Sure, yeah, that's exactly right, and tend to be in verticals that make sense together, if you will. So I oversee a couple of brands that have to do in some way with technology. We have verticals in hospitality, bars and restaurants so they're clumped together.  Okay, and David?  David Drain: David Drain. I'm the director of event programs for DSE. So DSE is my sole focus at Questex.  And a lot of industry people would know you from your dark past with Net World Alliance and The Digital Signage Association? David Drain: Yeah, it changed the name to Digital Screen Media Association for a while. So you've been around the industry forever?  David Drain: Yeah, I have. I attended the first DSE in 2007.  Yeah, that's early. I think the first one was in 2005 or something like that or maybe in 2004. David Drain: 2004, but I wasn't there.  Yeah. I started in 2005, so I've been going even longer than you.  David Drain: Yeah, you win! Marian Sandberg: I can beat you both, but not in the digital signage area with our LDI show. I've been with that brand since 2004, so a little one-upsmanship there.  There you go. You must be so proud. Alright. So how is planning going? As we're speaking, it's about four and a half weeks out.  Marian Sandberg: It's going great. We're super excited and when we get to this part of the year, frankly, because this has been more than a year in the making we're just ready to get out there and produce the show. We definitely have in the weeks rolling up still sales to do, and still registrations to bring in. But in terms of producing the show and the things that we know we're gonna offer that's mostly set, right? So we have all these great networking experiences we're excited to put forth, and as we're right across the hall from our LDI show, we're really excited to see the synergies there. When we acquired this brand, we did a lot of due diligence. We spoke to tons of customers and tons of attendees, so those customers as well, to see what we should keep from the old show and what we should bring back, and I think the number one thing that we heard from people was maintaining the sense of community for the digital signage industry, that it's a dedicated show and that people still wanna come together in that community that maybe isn't addressed by other events. So that's been our number one focus, and we're in the home stretch now.  Yeah, I'd certainly got that impression as well when DSE went down. I thought that it was a show that for many years was in trouble. You could see it in the diminishing numbers and diminishing enthusiasm in a lot of ways. But the overarching thing I heard after it went down was a disappointment because there needed to be some sort of an annual event, at least in North America that really pulled together the industry, so to speak, and was the only thing people were talking about that week versus like an Infocomm or ISE or those kinds of shows, which certainly have digital signage as a component, but it's one component among many endings. You could bump into people in elevators and see they were going to the same show and realize we have nothing in common other than we're both generally in AV.  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that was obviously one of our main focuses from the beginning in acquiring the brand is we immediately saw the value we knew of the show and of the market, although no one on our team back then had worked directly in it, and then bringing professionals on who were very much veterans of the market, like Brad Gleason, who joined us very early on, and David, of course, who has been running a curating and will be running a fantastic education and content program. People have been really supportive of that effort and from the beginning saying, we absolutely want there to be a show in this market, specific to this market and there's a need for it.  Because the old show has had its hair, so to speak, there are things that people loved about it, things they didn't like about it. I've been referring to this as a DSE reboot that maybe isn't all that fair, but it's what I'm going with, and I'm curious what you think in terms of how would you position the show? Is this DSE 2 or should people go with the idea of don't expect what you saw before? Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that's a great question because I think we would be really remiss if we did not acknowledge that we are bringing DSE back in a sense, right? We're not gonna abandon everything that DSE was and that we want it to be, and people have asked us for it to be. So we have no intention of reinventing the wheel in that case.  However, from our experience, and again from a lot of the outreach that we did, I think our intention is to put a new spin on it. Now, when you say, reboot, I absolutely agree, and I think that's gonna be maybe a little bit of a challenge for people to get their heads around. David has said it quite eloquently, we wanna really hold onto the things that people liked and maybe not the things that they didn't. So some of the new things, for example, which I guess we consider new. We know that networking opportunities have always been super important. So now that we're right across the hall from the LDI show, we are really trying to leverage those two audiences without cannibalizing, and I don't think there's a lot of potential to cannibalize those two audiences anyway. We hope to bring in some new people and some new buyers, and we're tracking our registrations very closely, of course, and the kind of demographics that we have. And to date, I checked them just yesterday in preparation for this, of course, half of our registrations have never been to DSE before. Now I'm not talking about LDI people, I'm talking about people registered directly for DSE and as event people, as event producers. That number is super encouraging to us. Now it could be in the last three years that we've just gotten more people in the industry. We all know that during the pandemic, on both sides of our business, people have left the industry, and people have come into the industry. It's just a natural ebb and flow when you haven't had a show in three years. But that number, even if you expect a lot of new people it is a great statistic for us that there are that many new faces. So we really hope that people coming to the network are gonna meet new people, but like-minded people like your reference before about having that sense of community and people who do similar things. But also that, of course, we want our exhibitors to meet new customers. So that's a really important thing for us. For the people who don't know LDI, can you explain what it is? I've never actually been myself, even though I've certainly heard of it. Marian Sandberg: LDI is a 30+ year organization and brand. It is a trade and show conference that addresses what we affectionately refer to as entertainment technology. So that would be basically everything in and around a stage except the performance. So concerts, touring, theatre, even clubs, venues, lighting, sound, staging all that kind of technology that goes around a performance or in a venue, and so a typical exhibitor at LDI would be moving light company, intelligent lighting as it's referred to in that in that sector or consoles. if you were at a concert and you wanna go up to the console guy or gal, ask for the set list, that stuff that's behind that in that pit is stuff that you would see at LDI. So there's technology and creativity factor there that I think sits well along DSE so maybe there are people who do similar, are somewhat like-minded, but do different things. So I think it'll be interesting to see, who crosses over and comes together,  Yeah, I guess the crossover as you say, more than anything would probably be the backdrop displays that you increasingly see with touring acts and the technology that drives those displays like LED backdrops and transparent or semi-transparent, LED backdrops, all that sort of thing. Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and the sort of persona who would attend LDI could be anything from very creative type, Let's say a creative director for a show, a lighting designer, and then, someone those folks usually tend to be creative and technical, and then we'll have very technical people who are like tech technical directors at a theatre or production manager for a concert tour. And just like the way that AV and IT are worlds that are converging. The live events world and digital signage are converging to some degree because I spoke on a podcast a few months ago with the guy who does the wow factor stuff at the new arena in Seattle for the NHL team there and he was talking about programming at building not just what you see at the pre-show. It's the whole darn building that's coming together. I suspect that plays into how live events will increasingly be done.  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, it's interesting, we use the term, experiential, right? And immersive experiences and the thing that I think is so interesting, having come from that LDI world and that entertainment technology world is that, if you go to a theatre it, okay maybe immersive isn't the word, that kind of means something different. But experiential is what entertainment already is, right? You go to the theatre to experience something, you go to a musical or a concert tour, to be in this experience, and over the last few years, the way people are buying materials left and wanting to relish experiences. It's interesting how areas like retail and venue design and even museums are taking a cue from entertainment and that's what experiential really is, right? It's about being entertained more.  So in a way that sort of LDI world has been informing a lot of other businesses in our spaces. So exactly what you're saying is if you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you're seeing all this fabulous screen, that content is trying to draw you in. Cuz it's being paid attention to, cuz you have to work harder to get people's eyeballs these days.  Can we talk a little bit about where you're at in terms of numbers and how they would compare to the old DSE that we know?  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and I'm glad you brought up the reboot. We are thinking of it exactly the same way. So we don't have any intentions of trying to compete with the last 2019 DSE. We've had shows in our portfolio that was a record year and of course, the pandemic happening, we're cautiously optimistic about kind, trying to get back to those numbers. So especially with DSE that hasn't happened in three years, we don't think we're gonna replicate that in any way, and that's fine. Our goal for this show is to be between 4,000 and 5,000 registrations. We're absolutely on pace to hit those numbers. We're really pleased with the way registration has been picking up and people registering for content. The new certification that Bron Consulting is running for us. It's not new, we've newly added it let me be clear. It's the same certification you all know and love. So yeah, the numbers are really encouraging to us and I think what we're gonna see, I think is gonna be surprising for people in the next four weeks is how much our registration picks up, right before the show, traditionally the last six, to eight weeks of the show or when Red registration really hits, and we saw that from the numbers in 2019 also, right? So when we acquired the brand that's just the way the show paces we're absolutely on pace to hit that 4,000 to 5,000 number. Is that number unique registrations or is that roll up people from LDI who have opted to come over or whatever? Marian Sandberg: Nope, that's absolutely DSE distinct registration. For the LDI show in 2019, we had 16,000 people registered for LDI. But like an average for LDI would be 12,000 to 13,000. So the numbers for DSE are unique.  So Potentially you could have a couple thousand or more people drifting over from the other show hall to wandering into DSE, cuz I think you have reciprocity, you can get into one or the other.  Marian Sandberg: Yes, your badge for DSE or LDI can get you into either one or the other as well as there are some great offers and discounts for the conference on either side, which are obviously, paid conferences. But also some of the networking events that are being offered on both sides I think is gonna be really nice benefits. Just an example. LDI has always had great after-hours nightlife offers. With your badge, you can get into a different club each night, and if you don't know, the clubs in Vegas are very expensive, right? It's not like your $10 cover charge to go see a band at your local club. They're very expensive. We have great deals with LDI that we've been able to extend to the DSE audience to go to a club, for example. Your badge gets you into the club, for free, which can save in some cases 70 to 100 dollars a night, and then we have some networking events. There's an on-floor party if you will, a networking reception for LDI that DSE guests will be invited to, and vice versa, LDI people will be invited to the DSE opening reception, and we were really careful, obviously, to not have them overlap or compete with each other. Cause we want these two to come across the aisle, as it were. So I think that's gonna be interesting to see, and the LDI community, they're curious. They have that tech curiosity and that creative curiosity. So I think it is absolutely reasonable to think we might get a thousand or so people coming across. So you're at parity or maybe even ahead of, ultimately ahead of what past DSE have done in terms of headcount, and with the spillover from LDI, almost certainly, where I sense that it's not going as swimmingly would be on the exhibitor signup side?  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, we are where we've expected to be. I know that you love to look at the show floor as you should, and when we were in South Hall, when the show was in Southall, before my time, obviously, the show floor looked different. But I think that our expectations for relaunching the show were exactly where we wanted to be. We had expectations that were in line with, we have amazing exhibitors presenting, and we have over 90 varieties of exhibitor sponsors, people who are gonna be partners and presenting in some way, and I'm not talking about speakers, I'm talking about people on the show floor, and then I think probably in the next few weeks we're gonna see that number go over a hundred. So that's perfectly respectable, and we're proud of those numbers.  Yeah, in certain respects that's a reboot and it's a startup again cuz you're having to win the confidence of vendors who have had a rough couple of years anyways and when DSE went down, I don't know if all of 'em were left whole after that. That's somebody else's story in argument, but yeah it, you couldn't, I would imagine just expect that, hey, all you guys who used to do this, come on back.  Marian Sandberg: Yeah. There's so much more of a story to tell there too, isn't there? We have to regain some trust. We have to have people, who really loved that event and kind of look at us and say, Who the heck are you guys? Which is all stuff we expected. Early on when one of the first things we did was form an advisory board, and I know that you've reported on that, now. Probably everybody on our advisory board and really we wanted that input and that help, and that was just kind of part of the research we did from the beginning. What was good, what do we wanna change? And I just think that journey has also included spending a lot of time with customers and there's absolutely our sales team talking to people, 3, 4, 5 times. It's not a slam dunk and that's okay. We didn't expect it to be, We never came in here with. Some kind of ego that we're event producers. So we could just walk into a new industry and take over a brand and do it without thinking about it with our eyes closed.  We're good at producing events. We have a lot of leverage across our company with other verticals that we can look at to draw other buyers that maybe didn't come in from the acquisition, from our regular DSE lists, but we're really excited about presenting to those people. That kind of is where those first-time attendees are coming from. I'm also curious, you've mentioned the community a number of times and the appetite and aspiration for the industry to get together. If you build an event around attendees, particularly if you're offering a lot of free passes to get into the show proper, then you really have to lean heavily on the exhibitor dollars and sponsor dollars and all that to do it.  So does that become a challenge long term, that you've gotta build up that trade show side of it for this thing to work? Or can it work the way it's positioned right now?  Marian Sandberg: We intend to grow the show? There's no question, and David can talk a little bit about the conference program also but, of course, we need to have a viable business here. There's no question, and I think also, bringing in the right people and making sure that the audience is there was absolutely paramount for us, especially the first year. If you have the right people in the room and you have the right buyers in the room, the exhibitor's gonna be happy and they're gonna come back. And I think it's a two-sided coin. You have to keep feeding both of them, right? To make everyone happy. The attendees wanna see certain exhibitors, the exhibitors wanna see more of, X, Y, and Z types of attendees. Yeah, our long-term plan is absolutely to keep growing. And we'll see how that goes. We have some plans we won't I won't reveal yet for next year, but I'm sure we'll wanna talk after the show.  That was one other question I wanted to ask you, Marian, just before we jump over to David on programming and so on: for 2023, is it in November in Las Vegas? Marian Sandberg: Yes, and I bet you're gonna ask about the Formula One race. It will be in November, we are gonna move it about a week early. Yeah, we looked at that and thank goodness, being in production, we were hearing from all kinds of production folks about that kind of thing before it was even officially announced. We were talking to the LVCC about doing it earlier and, we could try to produce something during Formula One, which would just be crazy. But even just for our exhibitors and visitors, we don't want to position the show to make it cost-prohibitive for people even to stay in hotels or have hotels sold out. So just moving it about a week or so earlier is just gonna be the solution.  Yeah, that's gonna be like a CES week or something. Just insane pricing for everything and impossible to get around.  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, exactly.  Good move!  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, thanks.  David, tell me, you're somebody who has been to DSE many times, very familiar with it. So if people are coming up to you knowing that you're involved now and they're asking, okay, what's different, particularly on the programming and education side, what are you gonna tell them?  David Drain: When I first joined Questex, really my first job was to think about the program and to focus on the conference and the education and the speakers. And so wanted to do that first, and that's, I would say, how we built the program and ort of the exhibitors came later, right? They needed to see what it is you guys are gonna do? What's your plan? And working with Brad and with Marian we looked at the flow of the event and so I think it's got a slightly different flow. There used to be a lot of conference programming before the show happened, and so what you're gonna see this year there is some programming in the morning, just before the show opens. Some, a bit of uninterrupted time during the show floor hours with some on-floor sessions and then ending the day with more sessions. Really we have three keynotes. I don't know if DSE has done that before. So I think that's different. We will have one each morning. We're very excited about those, of course, Rafiq and Jason Cothern from SoFi Stadium talking about that 5 billion mixed-use development with the stadium and the retail and all that. Having everything from wayfinding to digital menu boards to of course the huge halo infinity screen by Samsung. So I think there's gonna be something there for everybody, and then, Nveen from Google, who you also interviewed for this podcast. We've got a great lineup and the program came together in three ways. There were things that I developed. There were things that are Association partners like DSF and DPAA and OAAA developed, and then we got session proposals from folks, so we really tried to curate the best agenda that we could and so I think that people will see an increased focus and concentration on the content and the programming, and building on what Marion said earlier, I think just the number of networking events throughout the week and then the crossover with LDI, I think that's what's gonna feel different. I heard there's a mixer on Wednesday night.  Marian Sandberg: Mixer. I'm so pleased that you're bringing it to our show. So we can't wait to attend and we're registered, so we're showing up.  Good. I'll make the bouncer aware.  One of the things as the education programming curator, person, organizer, whatever you wanna call it, is you, I suspect, have to walk a bit of a tightrope at times, because you have paying sponsors who perhaps have expectations, realistic or unrealistic around what they can say and do on the stage, and you have to balance those needs with the needs of the audience because God knows, maybe not in the most recent versions of DSE, but earlier year versions of it, one hell of a lot of the presentations were just like product pitches by sponsors, and I would sit down, listen for two minutes and I would go and leave, and that's a tough one to manage, isn't it?  David Drain: Yeah, and I've been managing these types of events for a number of years and so I certainly know about how important it is to make sure that it's got an education focused and so when I was building the program, really sponsorship had nothing to do with it. When I was building the conference program, what we determined as the best topics and the best speakers, and the program really came in process of building this show before the exhibitors that there really wasn't that kind of impact. We do have the on-floor sessions, and those are sponsored. We make that clear on the program.  Those are kinda product demos and things, right?  David Drain: They are product demos and even encouraging those speakers, those sponsors to have an education focus so they teach rather than pitch.  Yeah, I always tell people, look, if you just get up there and pitch, people are gonna leave. If you say smart things, you will leave the impression that this guy and or this woman and this company seem to know what they're talking about, so maybe I should have a chat with them after.  David Drain: Yeah, be a thought leader or present a case study, and then people will understand. You'll have an opportunity to tell them what your company does. You don't need to spend all that time going through the features and benefits of your product.  Without trying to put you on the spot, are there one or two sessions that you know that aren't keynotes but are ones that you think are gonna be particularly kick ass and ones that people should have a look at?  Marian Sandberg: You're asking to choose a favorite child. You're asking him to choose a favorite child, Dave. David Drain: Yeah. There are just a number of great sessions and if you go to our agenda, there is a way to filter by type. So if you're into digital out of home, you can see the programming aimed at that, and I'm excited you know about the session you're moderating and I'm really not blowing smoke here. Denny Levine came to me and proposed that session, and of course, he put together an all-star panel and people are very interested, obviously with these Vangogh experiences, immersive experiences that have popped up and been very successful around the world. So I think that will be similar, there's another session with Moment Factory and Dimensional Innovations on transforming lobbies into experiences, that's pretty exciting.  Yeah, you got some good people like Jackie Walker who was just like, when I talk to her, I just, I always hang up thinking, that's a smart person. She knows her stuff.  David Drain: Yes, and I listened to her podcast that she did with you and so certainly when she wanted to do a presentation, I'm like, yeah, I will just give you the room. You're gonna do great, and people will walk away with a lot of great information. All right, so wrapping this up. This has been a great chat. If people are undecided and are on the fence, but hearing this and think, oh, maybe I will go, what do they need to do? Where do they go to find out more about DSE?  Marian Sandberg: Yeah, they can go to digitalsignageexperience.com. As we rebranded also, so it's digitalsignageexperience.com, or if you have any questions, you can certainly just email me, I'd be happy to answer, and my email is msandberg@questex.com. I would love to have your feedback,  I suspect it's ddrain@questex.com, right? I'm smart that way, it had to be something. All right. Thank you so much for spending half an hour with me. That was terrific.  Marian Sandberg: Thanks for having us. We're honored.  David Drain: Thank you, Dave.

A big warm welcome to the wonderful Jackie Walker! The author of the ever-so-popular Heartbreak Hero and the up-and-coming Forbidden Hero. We loved chatting to Jackie about her time working at Disney, her reviews on our previous podcast books, and why she wrote a plus-size, neurodivergent heroine.Books discussed in this episode:All of Jackie Walker's booksA Not So Meet Cute by Meghan QuinnSay You Swear by Meagan BrandyDrive by Kate StewartThe Ravenhood Series by Kate StewartPut me in Detention by Meghan QuinnVirgo Rising by M. J. MarstensJackie Walker Instagram: @authorjackiewalkerGirls Who Read Porn Instagram: @girlswhoreadpodPlease subscribe and leave a review if you love our podcast ❤️

In this episode we meet two current drivers and one driver turned fleet manager. Listen in while we discuss the differences between a 6 year driver versus a 4 month driver. What are the challenges at both levels? Also, listen in to hear Jackie Walker, Fleet Manager for our San Antonio Fresh facility as he talks about opportunities outside of the truck.

Ricky sits down with best selling author, Jackie Walker. They discuss the transition from HR to being a full time writer and how to use previous HR experiences to develop storylines. Also, Ricky touches on the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding vaccine mandates. Is this it? or is more coming? Want to learn more about Jackie? Here you go! https://linktr.ee/authorjackiewalker

HVAC Masters Of The Hustler is happy to announce this weeks guest in the Hot Seat on Episode 140 Jackie Walker. On this episode Jackie and I talk about a healthy relationship and supporting each other to get to the NEXT LEVEL. We talk about our struggles in the HVAC Industry as a couple and how our Faith and not giving up brought us to where we can bring YOU to the NEXT LEVEL!!!!     SHARE

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I've yet to meet Jackie Walker in person, but in our chats over the phone and video, she's quickly impressed me with her knowledge, insights and enthusiasm for digital signage. Many of the people I've dealt with at big media companies speak an unfamiliar, very buzz-phrasey language that I barely grasp, but Jackie works for one of the biggest - Publicis Sapient - and speaks like normal people. Based in Houston, she's the head of strategy for that giant agency's work in what's called dining and delivery. That puts her front and center in planning out and then executing things like digital menu displays and the overall ordering experience at major QSRs. Drive-thrus and their digital displays were a big part of how many QSRs got through COVID lockdown periods - when in-store ordering was restricted - and now we're seeing a lot of operators who didn't have drive-thru adding that capability. Jackie and I had a great chat about the value proposition and ROI model for drive-thru display technology - including mashing up a lot of things like loyalty apps, readers and other technologies to customize or optimize what consumers see when they get in front of screens. If you sell into or service the QSR space, this is a valuable listen. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Jackie, welcome. We've spoken in the past and know each other a bit. I don't think we've actually met in person, and who does that any more?  You work for Publicis Sapient, and you've been leading strategy for digital menu boards for a couple of big QSR brands. What does all that entail?  Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Publicis Sapient, for those of your listeners who aren't super familiar with us, we are a digital business transformation firm. So we work with many brands, many QSRs in particular, around how they can use digital to really optimize the way that they are connecting with their customers. It's on a lot of fronts, there's some mobile work, of course, loyalty work, customer relationship marketing, all of these suspects. But I specifically have really been working very closely on digital menu boards which have been really interesting. The brands that I've been working with and I've now worked with five of the top twenty-five and different categories, right? A couple of the burger brands, a coffee brand, a chicken brand. What's really interesting, I think, for these larger brands is that they're really trying to push the envelope on what they're trying to achieve with their digital menu boards. But nobody has really figured out how to do that yet. So when we go in on the strategy engagements, we're really focused on the customer experience as a lens. So the team is generally, me, a couple of strategists, a product manager sometimes, and a couple of UX people, so visual designers and user experience folks who can really think about the way you organize an experience for our customer to make it super easy, and we really look at three lenses, right? We look at where the brand is from a brand identity customer experience perspective. So as they think about how to transition from just translating a print menu, which is generally the way that this starts, right? How do you move from translating a print menu to actually thinking about broader digital capabilities? So we try to understand where they are with that. What's their mobile experience? How do they think about this on their digital channels today?  We think about where they are from a technology standpoint. So that's really interesting work, right? Talking to their restaurant technology groups, sometimes their customer technology groups, trying to understand what they're doing from a loyalty standpoint, where they are with the point of sale capability where they are with their digital menu board vendor. If they're already down a path, so what are the capabilities they have and what do they don't have, and really thinking about those lenses so that we can get to a view on where they go from a user experience standpoint and then also, how do they continue to push the envelope as they build in more and more digital capabilities?  So you've talked about pushing the envelopes. When digital many boards first started being applied in larger QSR chains, it was all around the operational issues that changes could be made a lot more efficiently and you can do dayparting. I gather what you're saying is the larger brands, at least in their heads, are way beyond that now?  Jackie Walker: Yeah. It's a funny thing, right? I think we're still talking about some of those basics. Everybody thinks of Mcdonald's as the gold standard, which makes sense. They're the largest, they were the first to scale outdoors. But that's recent, right? So they just finished their rollout in the US at the beginning of 2020. So it's not actually that long ago that some of this hardware was being installed. So I think dayparting is still something that brands are very much thinking about. They're thinking about how to leverage dayparting. So if you look at the McDonald's menu, there are some obvious changes with the dayparts. You look at the background color, for example, breakfast is blue, lunch is yellow, dinner and late-night is black, right? That's the most obvious, but if you squint, you can't really tell the difference between the products that are laid out for lunch, dinner, and late at night. They're doing very subtle things with reorganizing products, but they're not really leaning into that capability yet. So as brands are starting to think about dayparting, thinking more about. What can you do from a business perspective with that? Can you do promotions that are specific to a time of day, right? Can you have a special late-night menu that has different pricing on some of your most snackable items, as an example, do you play with brand voice?  So some of these QSR brands really have quite playful brand identities. You think that some of these brands could have a really fun and differentiated late-night experience versus what they're trying to accomplish during lunchtime, that would be consistent with their brand. So still thinking about that, I think now the big thing is loyalty, and so with loyalty and I keep beating the drum on this one, that is really going to fundamentally change the drive-thru experience. Again, McDonald's pushing the envelope here.  They completed their national loyalty rollout in July, in the US, which is their largest market, and what's sneaky, and I don't know if everyone's recognized it is now in McDonald's app, you can actually set it up so that when you go through the drive-thru, you can pay with your stored credit card via your app. So you go to the window, just you go up to the menu board, just like you normally would, you talk to the crew member, you place your order. You give them this code, and now it's applying loyalty points. It's using any coupons or offers or points redemptions that you've applied but it also does the payment through that mobile interface, which is really interesting. It's subtle but if you think about the experience of a customer, they don't have to go to the pay window anymore at all. You've just really streamline that. You don't have to hand your credit card out through the window. You avoid all of that kind of silliness. So I think that's a really interesting change, and I think other brands are really going to be forced to emulate that, and that's going to be a huge shift.  Yeah, and that's part of it, right? If you have a lot of active use of your loyalty app, also blends payment in there when they get into the drive-thru lane long before they even get to the presale window, a system like what McDonald's bought with that Israeli company Dynamic Yield is that they pick that stuff up, they know that Jackie's back in and she's got her kids with her maybe or whatever, and when you get to the presale and when you get to the order window, they can dynamically recast that menu to suit your preferences or what they think might be your preferences and how they can upsell you on stuff? Jackie Walker: That's where it's headed, yeah. So no one is really doing that particularly effectively yet, but that is absolutely where it's headed. The challenge that a lot of these brands are still working on is customer identification, and we've been talking about that for so long, we used to talk about license plate recognition, still talk about Bluetooth. How do you figure out who's in the car? Are you creepy and use cameras? What are you doing? So brands are really still experimenting and figuring out what is the best tech for that. McDonald's right now is just doing a shortcode so the customer still has to do some work, they have to open their app, they have to see that code, they read it to the crew, right? Code is different every time. So you have to actually look to see it, in that transaction, what your code is.  But certainly even testing Bluetooth, DNKN is interesting. DNKN's been partnering with a company called Blue Dot not so secretly, which does pretty advanced geolocation. So they're actually using really tight geofencing to trigger customer identification and doing some customer greeting based on that.  So it would actually say, “Hi Dave, or Hey Jackie”? Jackie Walker: Exactly, which is, I think still a questionable use case, right?  Yeah. People will start looking in the rearview mirror and go, “okay, who's following me?”  Jackie Walker: Yeah, exactly. My favorite actually is not the “Hi Dave!” at the beginning, but the “Thanks, Dave!” at the end of the transaction like that's been a topic is how do you personalize that screen at the very end of the order confirmation, which is funny because if you actually sit in a drive-thru for a while and watch, which I do, because that's part of my job as the digital menu board super-nerd.   “Who's that strange woman standing in the parking lot?” (Laughter)  Jackie Walker: Oh God, Dave, I have so many funny stories. My husband always makes fun of me. It's like, “Excuse me, there's a suspicious woman in leggings and a Volvo in the drive-thru!” It's yeah, it's funny. But you realize that most customers have already driven away by the time that thank you sign presents anything, so they're not seeing that. So if you're investing a bunch of time and energy figuring out how you're personalizing that screen, all you're really doing is creeping everybody out because you're showing the next customer in line, the previous customer's information. That's an interesting thing, and then Tim Horton's is playing with scanners. So actually installing QR scanning hardware in the drive-thru lane, the customer opens their app, has the QR code open, and scans on the scanner, which I'm intrigued to see how that's going to go. I think there are definitely some pretty strong cons with that in terms of that hardware investment is not going to be small, and then, we've all done grocery checkout, self-checkout, and you try to scan something even in good lighting, that can be quite challenging. So now you have a mobile phone trying to scan in direct sun. I'm predicting, there'll be some challenges with that.  In Canada with snow and -30 and everything else.  Jackie Walker: Yep. Sticking your hand out the phone with a big mitten on. Edmonton in February doing that. I'm not sure it was going to be a big take-up, but you never know.  Jackie Walker: So I think, brands are, to go back to the original question, what are they doing? There are still a few basics, right? Let's figure out how we're going to identify the customer. Let's build that foundation. It's really about how we're going to use dayparting more effectively really, gets the promise of that, suggestive selling is another area. That's quite interesting. So we've been using those examples in the industry for 10 years. Show ice cream when it's hot out, show hot coffee when it's cold out, but now the technology is definitely there to do much more sophisticated things. So that's where things like McDonald's dynamic yield do come into play in a big way, is making some suggestions for customers that go well beyond what you could do with rules-based kind of recommendations, and then now it's like let's start using our imagination and getting creative.  What does personalization look like if you know a customer, do you make it really easy to reorder recent items? That's a great benefit for both the operator and the customer, right? So if you show somebody buys their Whopper Jr., mine is no pickle, no Mayo, with cheese, if you know that I order that every single time you show that on the board and you just say, I want my Whopper Jr. my way, and there's a POS integration for the crew member to hit one button. You just saved a bunch of time, and really provided some additional value for the customer. So I think those types of executions are going to be really interesting. Certainly in places like Canada, where you have a pretty substantial number of commuters who would go into a Tim Horton's every morning and they're going to order their Double Double or whatever it is, and they're not going to move off of that because that's what gets them on the road. To be able to just know that, okay, Dave's here and he's gotten his Double Double, and there's nothing involved other than payment, or maybe even not that if if you flash your phone right away. Jackie Walker: Absolutely. Yeah, it's really powerful, and it's those moments, I think that are going to be the most interesting or where there's clear value to the customer and there's clear value to the operator, right? Everyone benefits from that kind of investment.  Is that seamlessness a big part of it where there are different systems and it all just works and it makes your drive-thru experience better? Jackie Walker: That is I think the kind of gold standard and that's where it's headed. I think it's really interesting, for a long time, brands were buying digital menu boards and it was really, they're buying a piece of hardware, especially outdoor because everybody's really terrified about making this big hardware investment. You really focus on the hardware and then you get some software along for the ride and you hope that the software has the out-of-box capabilities that you need to do what you want to do with it.  I think now more and more brands are recognizing that that's not really how it's going to work for them. It's really about creating this customized experience that can integrate with their systems. It can integrate with their point of sale. It can integrate with their loyalty program. It can integrate with their master product data. These are really powerful benefits to an integrated system, that is software first and experience first and the hardware is just supporting it.  I'm curious about drive-thru right now because of COVID. Prior to COVID, the idea of selling drive-thru was that it could do all these things, here's the value proposition, and so on, and it was being marketed that way.  With COVID and the inability, at least in some jurisdictions, to even go inside to dine and order stuff, if you didn't have to the drive-thru, you were in a world of pain in terms of operating your business. Has that deferred the whole idea, that you could do all these things with it and just made it operational for the moment, or at least in the past year, we needed to put in drive-thru just so we could do transactions and sell food? Jackie Walker: Yeah, I think that was a huge benefit for QSR. You think about the drive-thru that was pre-built for COVID, it's the ultimate kind of contactless almost service method. So I think quick-serve has a huge advantage over other types of restaurants, even if you think about fast-casual where some of them may have had drive-thru or curbside pick up, but that was a very small part of their business, whereas quick service has been trying to optimize drive-thru for years and years, and spend a lot of time and energy and money investing in ways to make that channel more seamless. I wonder what's different now, and exciting is that the emphasis for a long time has been on the operational aspects of drivers. So how do you improve the speed of service and how do you improve order accuracy? Those are the two big things, and how do you drive throughput? Now there's this question and I think loyalty is a big part of the impetus for that. How do you create meaningful customer interaction? So not only how are you getting the customer the food they want, at the speed you want to get it to them and they want it to go. But how do you actually provide some additional value in that interaction and provide a differentiated experience? Which is exciting!  How would that work and look?  Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think one of the things that's different about quick-service restaurants is that they still have a very large portion of their customers that are cash customers. You think about Starbucks, they've been extraordinarily successful at getting a ton of customers to just use mobile order pay and it's easy peasy. And then the challenge from an operation standpoint is just how do you get those mobile orders customers served quickly.  QSRs are going to have a steeper hill to climb with that. They're trying to drive digital adoption. They're trying to drive known customer rates, like what percentage of their customers do they actually know that are registered customers or credit cards that they can attribute to a customer. But that behavior of people is gonna start on mobile ordering everything. So far, there's not really any evidence that there's going to be consistent. Customers like deals and offers that provide a lot of value. But if there's a way that you can hook into deals and offers without the customer actually having to complete the transaction in the mobile app, that's really powerful. Drive-thru is all about impulse. I can just pull in and grab my thing and go, and I don't have to think about it. I don't have to sit here go through the fifteen steps and in a mobile app to order. So I think it's really going to be that balance between bringing forward that enhanced digital capability with loyalty, which includes reordering, personalized offers. It includes all of those things and bringing that to bear in the drive-thru lane itself, and the menu board becomes a very powerful tool in reinforcing those value adds.  If your customer is asking questions in the drive-thru you're in big trouble, right? So if you have a loyal customer, they don't know that you've registered with them, but you know it's them that's there, or they can't tell that you applied their points the way that they thought the points were going to get applied, to get a free ice cream cone you really create some significant operational challenges. So menu boards, I think, are becoming more and more of a tool to be able to reinforce to customers that you've got their back and things are going to be accurate in the way that they expect them to be. That's super powerful. Is there an easily defined, easily sold, and easily acknowledged ROI model now for these drive-thru displays? Because by and large, they are being put in by the local franchise owner, not the head office, so that there's a significant $10-30k infrastructure investment to do this, and local operators are looking at this one and going, “I didn't save for that,” or, “Why would I do this?” or “What am I going to see?”  Jackie Walker: Yeah, I will say that there does seem to be a pretty big sea change with regard to the franchisee's state of mind when it comes to this investment. I think there's real acceptance and I've worked with a couple of brands now where the initiative is spearheaded at the brand level, right? There's much more power when it comes from the brand and that capability is built centrally. The franchisees are just footing the bill for installation in their individual restaurant or set of restaurants but the franchisees are basically saying, let's go faster. How fast can I get this thing installed? And, they can't go as fast as the franchisees want them to go.  I think what's interesting with the ROI model, in the early days, the math worked better for indoor because the capital investment indoors is a lot cheaper. There's a little bit of the cost savings of printing and having people up on ladders and the liability that goes along with that, the inflexibility of print. You could make a pretty good case for the return on investment with those indoor boards on cost alone. With drive-thru, your capital investment is quite a bit higher because the hardware has to be much more rugged to be able to withstand that outdoor environment. I think what is shifting is now the value prop is not just about the cost savings and the increased flexibility. But it's also about the direct upside. So now that you have these additional digital capabilities, how do you actually build a customer's check by adding capabilities that are unique to digital? So getting really strong with the way you're using day partying or really thinking about suggestive selling and how do you do that in a consistent way, which is really driving. How do you encourage customers toward your more premium menu items? And you can get quite sophisticated in the way that you use that channel to build checks. Is there an acknowledged metric around that? So pulling this out of my head, if you make this investment, it should pay for itself in the first 18 months or the first 26 months or whatever it is?  Jackie Walker: Yeah, the economics depend a little bit on the restaurant, but generally the kind of rule of thumb has been, you're going to get like a 3% to 5% lift just by moving from analog boards to digital because the customer experience is just much better. I think the challenge is that wears off eventually is your customers get used to digital. You don't have that Disney effect on the third visit and fourth visit. But over time, it's all about driving that incrementality and the numbers are hard there, Dave, because a lot of people don't want to share. The brands don't want to share how successful or not successful their suggestive sales capabilities are. But generally speaking, it's all about driving that ticket over time, and then you can do the work back on the break-even time.  But I think in general, what you said 18 to 24 months is in most cases probably about right.  And I'm sure as in many things, the other QSR operators, regardless of category or size, pay very close attention to what the giants do, like a McDonald's and if they're doing a full rollout across their whole estate, across the United States, they're not doing that for giggles and they've thought this through? Jackie Walker: Absolutely. With the ROI model, part of it is, what is the direct benefit, from an economic standpoint, but then the other part of it is very much keeping up with the Joneses kind of mentality or keeping up with the McDonalds in this case. How do you actually ensure that you're meeting customer expectations because once customers get used to that slick experience, you pull into a random Taco Bell with a ten-year-old backlit WITH half of them are blown out and they're all scratched up and dingy, customers do notice that stuff? So I think there is a little bit of just leveling up that guest experience and it is going to be contagious.  All the big brands are really starting to think about how they do this, and I think now with the price of hardware coming down and the big players converting, so McDonald's is already there, RBI is rolling out across Burger King, Popeye's, and Tim Horton's, they're going to be the next big player to reach scale. It's really just a matter of when, and not if everyone's going to go digital on these drivers.  So let's talk about inside the store. We talked mostly about drive-thru displays, but inside the store, digital menu boards have been around a lot longer, but they're changing too because you're going to see a lot more service ordering and a lot more pickup and you need digital menu boards that have to also function as queue management or notification, right?  Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think what's happening is there's actually a proliferation of use cases if you want to think about it that way. So the digital menu board at the front counter is really just about providing a menu to customers that are in the restaurant and you're right, it's pretty well understood. I think that's interesting when I talk to customers about drive-thru, they get really excited about its personalization, and the word I always pushed to use is optimization even more than personalization because you get the benefit for unknown guests as well. But once you get that working like a well-oiled machine, you start to understand customer behavior at the store level, you can actually apply those same principles at the front counter, right? So you're not targeting your messaging to an individual customer because that front counter board is meant to be a one-to-many experience, but you can 100% tailor that experience to the restaurant. So you can curate the menu for the types of purchase behavior that exists in that store or that type of store. So I think the front counter is going to continue to evolve, with regards to that, to become a little bit more curated benefiting from the investment at the drive-thru.  The kiosk is another huge piece. I laugh and I think we've talked about this before, when COVID started everyone thought, oh my God, it's like the death of kiosks, nobody's ever going to touch it, touch screen ever again. But actually, it's done quite the opposite as we've understood better, that face-to-face is much worse than touching a screen and using some hand sanitizer. But what's interesting is that from a rollout perspective. Brands still think of kiosks as very different from menu boards, which I find fascinating. The way that it ends up shaking out is, brands think about their mobile experience and most brands are furthest along on mobile ordering. Then when they think about kiosks, it's the app, but on a big screen and a lot of brands actually manage it that way. So it's not the in-store tech groups that are managing that kiosk, it's actually the digital groups, the customer experience, technology groups that are delivering them. And then you have the menu boards and they are very much firmly still in the restaurant technology side of the house. So there are different problems to solve altogether. I think more and more, there's going to be a little bit of consolidation across that. I always encourage customers to think about as you're doing drive-thru, you're building these mechanisms from a backend standpoint to actually deliver curated content and be smart in how you're merchandising product dynamically. There's absolutely a play for that on front counter boards and a play for that on kiosks, and the kiosk is after all another piece of in-store hardware, and then to your point, Dave, there are these other use cases, right?  So are brands going to start to put more queue management screens up like McDonald's has, where they have now served these customer numbers and they have the list for in-store and list for mobile. Do they start to do some things with digital displays near pickup areas as more and more customers are starting to use take-out options? I've even heard some thought around, are there going to be digital screens at mobile pickup? I'm still not sold on that one. Like a sign made out of metal does just great for, telling you a customer where they need to park. We'll see who's able to first define a use case that has a clear ROI for putting screens at those parking spots.  The last thing I wanted to ask about was some fundamentals around digital menu boards. One of the things that I've found through the years and seems to be getting better as people learn is you have these eye charts that they try to cram so much stuff into a single display that you really can't read anything and it's mentally overwhelming, you look at it and go, oh my God, I'll just order the thing that I've got in my head and get the hell out of here.  Is that sort of thing important? Color choices, font choices, certainly the volume of text, the size or point size, all those things? Jackie Walker: 100%. Yes, and I think I'm glad you asked this question because this is my favorite question, right? If you look at how most of the brands: McDonald's is a good example, Burger King is a good example. It looks like the problem they've been trying to solve is how do you jam all the shit that you had on six panels print now on to two or three digital screens. Like if you just look at it, you can see that's what they thought they were trying to do. Really the opportunity with digital menu boards is to get more precise about what the content is because you can have advanced analytics, you can link what you display to a customer to a transaction. You can start to have a much better data-driven merchandising strategy. So you can really think about the use case for the drive-thru, which to your point is you have a customer that's freaked out, they're going to be in front of that board for probably 10-15 seconds looking at it at a peak time before they start talking or the crew member starts talking to them. So if you're trying to show them 85 SKUs, there is no way that any human is understanding 85 SKUs in 10-15 seconds. So the opportunity is really about curation, and I think when we approach menu board design, we don't think about it from an old-school menu sings print menu point of view. We think about it from a digital frame of reference.  How do you guide wayfinding for a customer? How do you establish a kind of system design and a foundation that's going to allow the operator of the brand to substitute products in and out and see how they perform when they're in these different slots? Think about designing a poster, you think about designing a digital framework. I think curation is key. That's that to me really all of these personalization tactics that you talk about, it really comes back to how do I show less stuff that's more meaningful and the tactics are all different ways of getting at that problem. So I think that's what's most exciting about the move to digital menu boards is we can start playing there and as an industry get much smarter about how you actually serve the customer at that moment? How do you show them the least amount of information to get them through success? Either help them get what they wanted to get, they knew they wanted, or inspire them to try something new. Build tickets, improve their level of confidence. These are all the things that become front and center in this new digital menu board experience. All right. Super interesting. I appreciate you taking the time.  Jackie Walker: Lots of fun. Dave, always looking forward to talking to you soon and maybe meeting you in person.  Yes. If we ever travel once again and do things like Trade Shows.  Jackie Walker: Amen. Thanks so much, Dave.  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT QSR has always been an interesting and very active sector for digital signage, with chain restaurant operators being early adopters of the technology for menu displays. But the pandemic has shifted digital screens from being a better, more cost-efficient way to manage menus to being mission-critical to many operations - particularly when in-store ordering and dining was shut down in many places and the only way to do business was in the drive-thru lane. Global Display Solutions (GDS), which makes outdoor displays for situations like drive-thrus, had an online panel session recently that explored the digital transformation of QSR. I was asked to moderate - a job made easy because I had really great panelists. Along with Robert Heise of GDS, I chatted with Jackie Walker of Publicis Sapient, Dana Stotts of Arc Worldwide and Jeff Hastings, the super-smart CEO of BrightSign. There was no presentation to sit through first, so what you have with the audio version of the session is about 60 minutes of insights on what's happening with digital signage in QSR. In short - lots!  Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS  

Mike and Jackie Walker have been long time mentors of mine. While they will admit they are not perfect people, their love for each other is something to be admired. In this episode, you get the chance to learn from them about singleness, dating relationships, and marriage. They share scripture, how they have been able to keep God at the center of their relationship, the coming alongside model, encouragement for the singles, advice for the married, and more. This is a raw conversation with two honest, humble, and faith-filled human beings. Mike's Instagram Jackie's Instagram We also mention “How to Pray,” by Pete Grieg, John Maxwell, and Craig Groeschel's Leadership podcast. Much love, Sidney Webster The Letter Me Up Podcast Shout out to Matt Schroeder for producing this podcast and Trey Brockman for the tunes. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sidney-webster/support

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED - DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a long history of very large companies of all descriptions finding their way into the digital signage industry, but they have tended to come in with fanfare and then exit quietly out a side door. Often, the digital signage effort is a bit of a skunkworks that doesn't have a lot of energy behind it within giant companies that do a 1,000 other things. That does not appear to be the case with Publicis Sapient, a giant interactive agency that has offices all over the world, 20,000 staffers, and a product and service called Premise, that does digital signage among a bunch of things. The company has been working on it for 10 years, and has some very big, but unnamed clients using a platform that is all about data and speaks directly to the concept of omnichannel and the goal of producing content once and publishing to many devices and platforms. Jackie Walker has been working on Premise since it was just a notion, and is what they call the capability lead. We had a great chat about the roots of Premise, how the team works with clients, and the present and future of signage, which is all about APIs, data and the end of walled software gardens. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Hi, Jackie, we haven't met in person, but it's great to meet you virtually. I have certainly known about Publicis for many years at Sapient and when you were dabbling or when the company was dabbling in signage through Sapient Nitro. So I was intrigued recently when I saw a press release about Sapient and a platform called Premise, and I wanted to find out all about it, and you're the product manager (product lead) on it?  Jackie Walker: That's right. I have been working on it for the last 11 years, so I am very close to the solution.  This is your baby.  Jackie Walker: This is my firstborn, yep.  Is it temperamental?  Jackie Walker: Yes. I have had two human babies since, but this is the one.  Okay, let's go to the very basics of it. What is it?  Jackie Walker: Yeah. So let me tell you who we are first, for those of your listeners who don't really know who we are. The Publicis group is, of course, one of the largest media holding companies in the world, with about 80,000 employees. A few years ago, Sapient, which was an independent company, was acquired by Publicis. So now we are Publicis Sapient. We're about 20,000 employees, in 53 offices worldwide and in terms of our capabilities, we’re basically the digital transformation hub of Publicis group. So we think about strategy, consulting, customer experience, and then agile engineering, and so about half of our people are really technologists and engineers. And we think about how we digitally enable our clients in terms of both, the way that they work and also the way that they serve their customers. So pretty broad scope.  I've been with the company for over 10 years. This was my first project. It wasn't called a Premise when I joined, and really what we were trying to do was, back then, that was when everybody was just learning how to spell omnichannel and put it on a PowerPoint slide, and really my first project was, we called it the Super Secret Airport Project and back then the idea was to take the airport space (because it is a slightly underserved market) and really think about how we fleshed out an omnichannel solution. So we built this end to end platform that was all about content management, real-time data, airport flight data, and built the solution that would enable our clients to drive their websites, their mobile applications, and then later digital signage from one common platform. So that was really the frame.  Was this driven by a client ask or was this like a hole in the market that you guys thought you could fill?  Jackie Walker: I think it was a “hole in the market”/”wouldn't it be cool if”, right? So there was a group of people in Boston, the spouse of one of our team members who worked for SH&E, an airport consultancy, and they were talking about the ways that airports really struggled to communicate consistently with their customers across channels, right? Back then it was not uncommon that an airport would be operating 3-5 content management systems for each of their individual platforms, and so the idea was that we should consolidate this, right? We have a unique point of view, we have a skillset to do all of this, website development, app development, content management, system development from an enterprise lens. Let's see where this goes. And then we started signing up airports to actually deliver some of those capabilities. Now, is it in the DNA of the company to build your own platforms as opposed to partnering? Because 10 years ago, it's not like somebody was wandering around the streets saying, “Please, God, somebody come up with a digital signage CMS.” There were all too many of them.  Jackie Walker: Yeah, that's very true. So we partner a lot and typically, even from the beginning, when we started this program, we were using SDL Tridion, which was a pretty well-established, web, and mobile CMS at that time. That was really the content foundation of what we were building. We didn't want to build a “CMS” to use that kind of terminology, because most of our clients if you think about it, are operating enterprise CMS solutions, and so part of the “what if?” was, this novel idea that a customer could change their content in one place and that content change would immediately publish on their website, their mobile app, their digital signage, which is a little bit of a different frame of the problem, I think.  Yeah. Certainly, you know you're joking about omnichannel and learning how to spell it, the whole premise has been around for a very long time, but I've noticed in the last two or three years, it's really come to fruition and you seem to get a lot of pushback from larger companies, potential clients essentially say, “I don't want to have 4-5 different platforms to do my messaging, I want to do it off of one thing and it should go everywhere. I don't want to have this walled garden for digital signage and another walled garden for mobile, communications, and so on.” Was that the thinking?  Jackie Walker: A hundred percent, and again, back then, like omnichannel, was a word on a PowerPoint, right? We had these cute diagrams that contained phrases like “all your enterprise services and you're going to have this API layer”, and everybody had to learn how to spell, right? And then all of a sudden magically all these consumer channels are just consuming data consistently through these APIs and it's all gonna work. That was really, I think the North star of that vision, but it's taken a little while for clients to actually get to that level of sophistication and that's been one of the things we've been watching closely is that progression where this dream of having these fully API enabled enterprises is now getting to a point where that is the expectation, right?  Clients have all their infrastructure in the cloud, they're using common systems. They're starting to do consolidation across content, and now they're starting to do consolidation of data. And to me, that's the other key piece of the puzzle, it’s not just thinking about the content and the customer experience and the POS or the product inventory systems or their content management system, but then also thinking about how their customers interact with all of that data, all of that experience, and making sure that data is able to be used consistently across channels. So no content silos, no data silos.  And when you started down this path 10 years ago, shared data was not easy. You could have these conversations, but they would say, integrating with our data set and all that is a quarter-million-dollar job, or it's just not possible, or you can't see it where it's not secure or we're worried about it being secure and on, there were all these problems. Now, data's pretty easy to get out, right? Jackie Walker: That's right, yeah. It's definitely gotten much easier and just the flexibility has improved greatly as well. I think clients are used to it as well. You know, you're going to have an interface that you're exposing and then all of your channels that you're deploying are pulling from that content. So I think, yeah, there's been a huge transformation there, which has been a big enabler.  Do you have to, when you're working with clients, explain that integrating data is more than just being able to pull a number from one directory or folder or whatever it may be and make it show up on a screen and make it show up on another device, that there's more to it than that?  Jackie Walker: Yeah. So I think that's the thing that's really interesting about digital signage, and I had the benefit of building websites and building mobile apps before we started on digital signage, so I had that digital experience frame of reference, right? This is how it works, this is how you're going to build a web page that's going to be pulling content from 10 or 11 different data sources, stitching that together and you understand how that works. And then you look at digital signage and it's a little bit of a novel problem, right? Because there are some differences with digital signage. Like the analogy I use is, if you build a mobile app, you're going to build one piece of software, you're going to deploy it on a cloud infrastructure, back then it was a physical infrastructure. You deploy it on infrastructure, your problem as the enterprise, like the client-side is worrying that you're hopefully releasing defect-free software and your infrastructure, your cloud is stable, right? You don't have to worry about Tom, Dick and Harry's mobile phone. Do they have connectivity? Is their phone charged? Like all this stuff, right? That's not your problem and the customer understands that.  With digital signage, every little digital sign you put out in the world is your baby and now you're responsible for making sure that it has power, it has the internet, it has content, no matter what happens, it has content, and so there was a little bit of reframing that we had to overcome to be able to make sure that we were solving that problem comprehensively. And those differences really ended up being what guided the product development for premise and the digital signage solution was this idea that we were thinking about bridging that gap between an API enabled customer ecosystem and deployed digital signage at scale. So we were trying to fill that hole between the two.  Yeah, there's been any number of very large companies that have decided, we're going to write a digital signage module or we're going to branch into this. And they get a basic platform working where files are playing one after another, maybe not even with a black gap in between them or whatever, and they're rubbing their hands together and saying, “Hey, we've done it!”  There are a lot of problems that can develop, as you've said, and I suspect you guys discovered over time that once you have all these deployed devices in all kinds of different environments, all kinds of hell can break loose.  Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely and I think that's an important differentiation too. I think there are so many signage solutions that were born out of looping media, right? And so the conversation is how do I build the best playlist? And there might be interruptions, there might be things that go into that but by and large, you're thinking about full-screen video, how many video segments of the screen can I have, maybe I'll have an RSS ticker, like you're thinking about slicing and dicing the screen, but your primary content is video content. And I think for us, we've always been approaching this thinking about modularized data-driven content. So even if you think about what we are doing in the airports, we weren't just thinking about a video playlist, we were thinking about what's the list of restaurants that's going to show up. What's the list of restaurants that are going to show up that might be different if I know that there's a flight delay next to that gate, and so all of that is query-based data.  Back in the day, our first clients were using Flex for the interface. Obviously now everything is HTML5, but it's all modularized content and so I think it's a different way of looking at the content problem as well. Are you thinking about big  full-screen content? Which again, then you're thinking about how you manage a playlist and make sure that your large video files get moved down to the device without getting corrupted, all that kind of stuff. Whereas if you're thinking about this HTML5 content, it's just a little bit of a different frame of reference in terms of what you have to be able to do, the different pieces that come together to enable that, and then the analytics as well, right? Like how are you getting a level of analytics that is again, akin to what customers are used to from web and mobile channels.  So tell me what Premise is, and if I'm a cranky CMO or CEO in a meeting with your team, and I say, “why do I need this versus brand X digital signage CMS that I'm already using?”   Jackie Walker: Yeah, I've had many experiences where I've worked with customers who have already gone through a digital signage selection process, they've already picked their partner. And they say, “Okay, we are working with X platform and now we want to deliver an experience on top of that platform, what can we do?” And the problem is typically that they didn't ask the right questions about the software capabilities when they were doing the platform selection and then when it comes to the time to actually think about the experience, now they're designing backward from the platform capabilities, as opposed to designing forward from the customer experience, which is the position you always want to be in. So I think when I think about what Premise and how it's different, it's really thinking about in-venue experience enablement.  We say in-venue because we might mean a QSR, we might mean a retail store, we might mean a hotel. So any physical place, we're really focusing on the real-time analytics and AB testing capabilities, and we're focusing on integrations and that is really at the forefront. So if I'm working with a QSR, the starting point is going to be the point of sale, it's going to be their product database, it's going to be their product photography. We're going to want to know as much as possible about their data models and so that we are thinking about it from what can we reuse, what do we tack onto, what are the places where we can create leverage points from what they already have, and then we're filling in the gaps, to be able to support the additional needs for digital signage that are maybe slightly different than what their needs are for web or mobile.  I might not have big video assets for the web, or certainly for mobile. I might want to use different types of product photography, I might need some different ways of thinking about that. So that's really the approach for us and I think a lot of our clients understand it because they've dabbled and what they've seen with other solutions is that they're not able to get the level of integration that they're expecting. So they'll go through the initial conversations, the technical design and think we're going to integrate with our CMS. And I think, when you say those words, they can mean different things to the vendor and the client, right? The vendor might mean I'm going to pull a data dump every seven days and the client thinks, if it's integrated to my CMS, I'm going to make a change in my CMS and it's going to publish, and so I think a lot of clients are now starting to get to that level of sophistication and understanding where they're realizing that there is a little bit of a gap between what the current capabilities are in the market and what they want to deliver. I had a conversation with someone in the hospitality business that manages a bunch of properties. They do a lot of merchandising of their onsite restaurants, their shows, all that. You can think like a Vegas casino type, that frame of mind, so they have all kinds of stuff that they're trying to sell customers and all of it is manual. So if they need to change the priority of a piece of content, there's a huge manual effort to go in and update their playlist on all of their screens. So we talked with them about what would it look like to build an AI engine on top of that?  It could look at occupancy in restaurants. It could look at ticket sales, yield projected versus what they've actually sold. So it could prioritize what are the things that I merchandise to my customers that are meaningful. I don't want to merchandise a restaurant that's sold out, that doesn't help me, it doesn't help the customer.  And what we found is that the level of metadata to be able to fuel an AI engine to be able to start to do some of that, even on a rules basis, just didn't exist in the digital signage solution they were using. Even at that level, when you start to want to deploy AI and start to get more sophisticated about the ways that you're deciding what content goes on the screens, I think the current vendor set, the current solution set in digital signage is somewhat lacking and that's really why we're in the business and we're pursuing it so aggressively is that we keep hearing more and more of our clients talk about this unmet need. And is that a function in a lot of cases of them being in there refresh cycle where they're there four years in with a particular vendor realizing they like the notion of this, they like the outcomes of screens and so on, but they need to do more, and they're now realizing their initial platform that they went with just doesn't cut the mustard, so to speak?  Jackie Walker: Yeah, it's a mix of both, some of our clients are in refresh cycles, some of our clients have just done pilots and they're realizing that maybe what they thought they were going to get out of it isn't really coming to fruition and then some of our clients are starting to look at this for the first time, right? They're recognizing, especially QSRs at the drive-thrus, that's a huge area of focus for us right now, because of COVID obviously you look at the market in the US, like 80% of QSR still have paper at the drive-thru. Now 90% of their business is going through the drive-thru. So there's this huge gap between the capabilities that they're able to deliver. How are they going to meet customer expectations and the solutions that they have available? And we're really saying if you're going to do it for the first time, don't think about what you want to do tomorrow, because maybe you just want a JPEG of your menu tomorrow, but once you make that huge CapEx investment, especially outdoors, be smart about what you're going to do there because in the next five or seven years, you're going to be wanting to do a lot more, probably. You're co-investing in data initiatives, in loyalty programs, how do you connect the dots? That's always my big call to clients, is to think about what's the customer experience roadmap? And being a little bit aggressive so that you're not making a mistake on the hardware you're deploying, or even if you're buying an all-in-one solution that you're working with a partner that's not going to be able to grow with you. This sounds much more like an engagement, a project, as opposed to “All right, I'll buy my software. I'll use Publicis Sapient’s Premise, and you know, Bob's your uncle, that's it. You may get some support.”  It sounds like you guys want to be in the weeds with the client, from the ideation stage, all the way through to execution, right? Jackie Walker: Yeah, you're hitting the nail on the head. So the play for us is not the digital signage licenses, so to speak. That's not the piece that we're interested in. It's not a set it and forget it solution. I think there's a well-established part of the market that does that really well, like grab it and go. What we're really trying to do is work with customers who are looking for more involved customer experiences that are really trying to use this channel to make an impact on their business, that recognizes the value of analytics and AB testing, and that are thinking about how do they pave the path to driving differentiated customer experiences over time? And so there's a little bit of consulting, there are a few creative services, there's a ton of technology, all that kind of comes together when we're engaging with a client.  I'm going to assume that your preferred client or the clients that you end up getting are those who have a history with agency services and work already, because they know how you guys roll and how things happen versus somebody who maybe started out with brand X digital signage CMS and has never really worked with an agency other than maybe producing some creative for them and all of a sudden there's a full-tilt engagement, which is, you still got a few zeros attached to it and there's a lot more involved. Jackie Walker: Yeah, I think that's right, and it could be either, It could either be the marketing services side or it could be the systems integration side. So we definitely have had a lot of success in using the solution with existing clients where we already have a technology footprint with them and then it becomes about how do you leverage what you're doing in one part of the business on this additional channel? I think that's a huge part of the value proposition.  Yeah, and certainly a macro trend within digital signage is this idea of one throat to choke or turnkey solutions, I don't want four vendors, all pointing fingers at each other when there's an issue.  Jackie Walker: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that can be a little bit of a double-edged sword, right? Sometimes I think about what happens, and I've seen this with a number of clients where they treat digital signage as a siloed point solution. “I'm going to buy digital signage,” and even the terminology, like a digital menu board is a great example, it sounds like you're buying a physical thing.  “I'm Bill, I'm buying an object.”  Honestly, that's a lot of how it's sold by a lot of companies, which I think is goofy, but nonetheless, they saw it as SKU, as a thing. Jackie Walker: Yep, absolutely, and I think what is becoming accepted is this idea that digital signage is a digital channel. It is like your website. It is like your mobile app. It is a digital touchpoint for a customer, and I think we, as an industry, haven't done enough to push the capabilities and the thinking around the types of experiences that clients can deliver. It's been allowed to function as this kind of siloed thing on the side. So you have, even in an organization, the people who are buying digital signage are often not the same organization that's managing the rest of their digital customer channels, which is also a little bit mind-boggling sometimes. So that's another piece that I always try to encourage customers to think about. This is not a, not just a marketing problem, it's not just an IT problem, and it's certainly not just a store-ops problem. It's actually an intersection of all three and you need to make sure that you're bringing all three of those organizations along for the ride, to make sure that you're going to end up with a solution that actually works and delivers value to the business. Yeah, years ago I had a very large multinational brand consulting client that was putting signage solutions into their stores and the department I was working with was relationship marketing and they referred to themselves as the land of misfit toys.  It was just like skunkworks, they caught all the stuff that nobody else wanted to do. It makes me curious because I've seen this with other very large companies where they have created digital signage business units or effort, and it's functioned largely as a skunkworks and you can tell it's a skunkworks, and sometimes the people who are running it are people who put them there to get them the hell out of important meetings or whatever. (Laughter) I’m not saying that in the slightest with what you're doing. Jackie Walker: I’m glad I gave you that impression.  Not in the slightest. You know your stuff, you've been doing this a long time, so in the larger context of Publicis Sapient, how much of an effort and how much visibility does this have in terms of the overall company? I know it's hard to give a percentage, but...  Jackie Walker: That's a great question. I think there was a period where it was a little bit of a side business, so to speak. We were doing things like this airport managed services platform for wayfinding. We had a bunch of different clients. It ended up extending to like retail casinos, we had a sports stadium that was using our wayfinding platform, but it was a little bit of this thing that was allowed to continue to progress, and then, I think what has happened in the last couple of years, as we've shifted our focus to digital business transformation, and I actually remember really well a conversation I had with my boss, like when we started internal communications around that change and frame.  I said, I'm really excited about what this will mean for the work that we're doing with the Premise because it's so tightly aligned to our strategy as a business, and he looked at me and I said, if you think about it, so many of our clients do so much of their business through their physical footprint when you think about retail, when you think about QSR, it's insane for us to not have an offering that directly addresses the opportunity, to drive business impact in their physical venues, right? And the reality is, if you look at the solutions that are available, it's not a place where we're going to be able to readily partner with existing companies, existing CMS, digital signage solutions, to be able to deliver those types of outcomes. So for us, we actually think about it as the market is moving in this direction. We had a ten-year plus headstart, I think. A lot of people in the industry will say that the future of digital signage is probably going to be driven by software, and I think we're in a really great position to springboard that for ourselves and realize outcomes for our clients, in an accelerated manner because of this asset with Premise. Yeah, there are not many good things to say about COVID, but it has forced an accelerated digital transformation plans of a whole bunch of companies, retail, QSR, and beyond, from something that we're going to do in three to five years to something they had to do in the next three to five months to survive, and I gather you've benefited from that.  Jackie Walker: Definitely. I think it's just been this, at Publicis Sapient level, it's really validated our strategy. I am a little bit of a Kool-Aid drinker, like I really believe in the work that we do, that's why I've stuck around so long personally. And that's also why I haven't made the choice to go to a more traditional digital signage company. I think that the unique perspective that we bring to the table because of the scope of work that we do for our customers every day, the focus on omnichannel, the focus on customer data, the focus on AI, the focus on marketing efficacy and performance marketing, we just have a completely different perspective and a completely different group of people and experts that we can bring into engagements to deliver outcomes that would be just absolutely impossible otherwise.  Now the last time I went to the National Retail Federation Show, there must have been at least 20 booths, maybe a lot more companies, all showing retail analytics, shopper analytics, computer vision-based stuff, sensor-based stuff.  You're talking to a lot of retailers, you're talking to a lot of large corporations. Do they see this as being as important as the vendors seem to think it is? Jackie Walker: That's a great question. I personally get frustrated with all these point solutions because I think they do end up being just that.  It's like queue management, so we're going to instrument the environment, we're going to understand the queues and then that's going to help us optimize customer service, or we're going to now measure everyone's temperature when they come in and that kind of theater around it is going to make people feel safer and better, and so there are all these little solutions that pop up that isn’t well integrated. It doesn't all come together particularly well, right? Beacons, one of my favorite examples, we talk so much about Beacons and it's like the mobile beacon and what are we going to do? And the push notifications, and now there's a ton of movement around geo-fencing and QSRs too, you know, to hook into kitchen operations, but they're really the same technologies that could be, if done right, enabling a ton of different types of capabilities of customer interactions, of different ways of driving value for the business on the customer, but instead, they're thought about as these little things, dot one kind of additions, that doesn't particularly connect.  So I think that's a hard pill to swallow. They each has their own, it's a different SaaS model. You have a SaaS subscription for this, you have a SaaS subscription for that, so I think that's a big challenge. So that's something I try to think about when I'm working with customers, what are the existing initiatives they have? What are the existing capabilities they have and how do you stitch them together in meaningful ways so that you're maximizing their current investment, but also thinking about how you connect the dots moving forward.  I think QSR has some great opportunities ahead of it, with regard to different service methods. So now they're pushing so many customers to mobile order and pay, which is fantastic, but they're going through the drive-through still, like how do you deal with these customers? Because if you're showing them the same menu board that you're showing somebody who's. trying to order, you just wasted an impression, so to speak, with that customer, right? You could have told them something new and different. You might have totally different messaging for them because you know them, or even if you don't know them, they already ordered, right? Or if it’s a delivery driver, you know that it's a delivery driver. You could know that. So how do you start to think about the intersections of these different service models and different technologies to create better customer experiences?  You mentioned customers. Are there any customers you're actually allowed to reference and say, yeah, we work with these guys?  Jackie Walker: Not today, Dave, you know how that goes. (Laughter) Oh yeah, the big agencies and big clients, you don't mess with those accounts and upset them in any way, but we can think of Fortune 100, Fortune 500 kinds of companies?  Jackie Walker: That's really the target group and the group that we work with the most. Yes, absolutely. All right. this was terrific. We could have chatted for a lot longer. It was very nice to virtually meet you and hopefully, we meet each other in person someday.  Jackie Walker: Absolutely, when there’s offices again, right? (Laughter)  All right. I really appreciate you giving me some of your time.  Jackie Walker: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Dave, take care.

In today's podcast, Bradley Cooper, editor of Digital Signage Today, spoke with Jackie Walker, senior director, Customer Experience Strategy at Publicis Sapient, to learn more about how digital signage end-users can craft this customer experience strategy.

As soon as the conversation starts with Jackie Walker, you are drawn in. Here is a woman who has spent her entire career in mainstream fashion, first on the retail floor, then in HR. And then she had an AHA. She reinvented herself  and became known as the Dr. of Closetology. Author, speaker, consultant. She has written many books, including one for tweens named Expressionista. Jackie works with women, is passionate about women, and took clothing to a higher purpose so you can discover your internal personna and bring your closet into harmony with your life. Quote: “A woman’s vision of herself has less to do with how she looks and everything to do with what she thinks.” Takeaways: Your closet must be in harmony with who you really are if you are to be satisfied when you look in the mirror There is no such thing as age, weight, size - we are all beautiful and unique Never think about aging - just maintain excitement for what comes next Connect with Jackie Walker: Website:: https://JackieWalker.com Book: I Don’t Have a Thing to Wear - the Psychology of Your Closet Book: Expressionista - How to Express Your True Self, through (and despite) Fashion Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JackieWalkerDunscomb/ Connect with Gail & Catherine: Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wo70AgingReimagined Twitter: @womenover70 Instagram: WomenOver70 Website:https://womenover70.com Email: info@womenover70.com Show: Women Over 70 – Aging Reimagined Listen on: Apple Podcast, Google Play Music, Stitcher, or Spotify Please rate our show and subscribe wherever you listen.

Tom Evans in conversation with Jackie Walker on how an unexpected author and meditation guide now finds himself as an unexpected composer after unexpectedly writing a novel which might be the future history of the Earth and humanity.

The topic for this episode is scrum teams. The composition and the characteristics of your scrum team remain fundamental to you having any success with an agile approach when you're implementing business applications. I recently refreshed the content of the scrum team section in my Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps course. In this refresh, I added a new video which answers frequently asked questions about scrum teams. I thought it would be a good idea to share some of those FAQs with the Scrum Dynamics audience to give you a sneak peek into the kind of topics you'll find in the course. Student shout-out to Jackie Walker from Capgemini and Veronica Kamph from CRM-Konsulterna.

On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Jackie Walker, a life-long activist against racism and the former Vice Chair of the pro-Jeremy Corbyn organization Momentum.The Washington Post yesterday reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a group of American Jewish leaders in a private meeting that the US would seek to block Jeremy Corbyn from becoming British Prime Minister if the US detected what Pompeo called “antisemitism.” He said the US government would “push back” against Corbyn and that “we won’t wait for him to do those things,” presumably meaning oppose Israel. The Pentagon says that it is canceling Turkey’s involvement in the F-35 Stealth fighter program over Ankara’s plans to buy a Russian S-400 missile defense system. Turkish pilots will no longer be trained on the F-35, and they’ve been asked to leave a US Air Force base in Arizona. Turkish President Erdogan said that he is undeterred by the US action and will complete the purchase and installation of the S-400. Dr. Gönül Tol, the founding director of The Middle East Institute’s Center for Turkish Studies and a former professor, joins the show. The Intercept is reporting that an enormous trove of secret documents reveals that Brazil’s most powerful prosecutors, who have spent years insisting that they are apolitical, instead plotted to prevent the Workers Party from winning the 2018 election by blocking or weakening a pre-election interview given by former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with the explicit purpose of affecting the outcome of the election. Dubbed Operation Car Wash, the prosecutors’ plot began in 2014. Brian and John speak with Aline Piva, she is a journalist and a member of Brazilians for Democracy and Social Justice. Kim Jong Nam, the half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, told a Japanese journalist shortly before his assassination in Malaysia in 2017 that he was in contact with the CIA. The Western media is saying that Kim was a “source” for the CIA. The revelation will soon appear in a new book. Emanuel Pastereich, a professor and the founder and director of The Asia Institute, a pan-Asian think tank, joins the show. Jorge Ramos is arguably the best-known Spanish-language journalist in America. The chief anchorman of Univision is known as the Walter Cronkite of Latin America. As such, he interviewed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in February. But the interview was contentious. Ramos said Maduro walked out after Ramos started playing a video of Venezuelans eating out of trash cans. Univision announced last week that it had recovered the film and would air it soon. But it shows something completely different from what Ramos has said. What will the fallout be? Alex Rubenstein, a journalist for Mint Press News and on Twitter @realalexrubi, joins Brian and John. Tuesday’s weekly series is False Profits—A Weekly Look at Wall Street and Corporate Capitalism with Daniel Sankey. Brian and John speak with financial policy analyst Daniel Sankey.Today’s regular segment that airs every Tuesday is called Women & Society with Dr. Hannah Dickinson. This weekly segment is about the major issues, challenges, and struggles facing women in all aspects of society. Hannah Dickinson, an associate professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and an organizer with the Geneva Women’s Assembly, and Loud & Clear producer Nicole Roussell join the show.

On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Joe Lauria, a journalist and political commentator, and Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor lawyer.An attorney associated with Manafort associate Rick Gates was charged today with lying to the FBI. Mueller may amend the Manafort indictment, alleging that he laundered more than $40 million in ill-gotten gains. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is talking about withdrawing his guilty plea. And National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster directly contradicted President Trump, saying that there was Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, conservatives are calling on Trump to issue a blanket pardon for everybody involved in the scandal.News outlets around the Middle East reported contradictory information on what is happening around the northern Syrian city of Afrin. The Syrian government announced that it would send troops to Afrin to help the Kurds fight Turkish forces. The Kurds initially denied that there is any deal with Damascus, but a YPG representative later confirmed to Sputnik that this was in fact the case. Meanwhile, Turkish president Erdogan is claiming that his military’s shelling has forced the Syrian army to turn around. Peter Ford, former UK Ambassador to Syria, and Rick Sterling, an investigative journalist and member of the Syria Solidarity Movement, join the show.When a CIA officer going by the pseudonym James Pars reported waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement at a CIA station overseas, he was recalled to the US, stripped of his official position, and asked to resign. Instead, he filed a lawsuit. This is typical of what happens to whistleblowers in the intelligence community. Brian and John speak with Brad Birkenfeld, a whistleblower and author of “Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy”, whose writings can be found at lucifersbanker.com.States all across the country, as well as the federal government, are passing, or trying to pass, new legislation that would make it a felony to boycott Israel. How is this constitutional? It probably isn’t. Ali Abunimah, co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, joins the show.British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has dismissed as “utter nonsense” a claim made by the tabloid newspaper The Sun that he had been a recruited asset of the Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service during the Cold War. Jackie Walker, former Vice Chair of the organization Momentum, joins Brian and John.The Pennsylvania Supreme Court redrew the state’s congressional district boundaries on Friday, overturning a Republican gerrymander that was so extreme that it was mocked by politicians and late-night talk show hosts alike. Drew Penrose, Legal and Policy Director at the election reform advocacy organization FairVote, joins the show.Brian and John are joined by financial policy analyst Daniel Sankey to continue their weekly series looking at the economic issues of the day.

On today’s episode of Loud & Clear, Dr. Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, and Paul Street, a journalist, historian and author, join the show.In our first hour, we discuss the controversy over the so-called “Russian Facebook ads” that have now drawn a direct response from Donald Trump.The “Gang of Six” top Republicans have unveiled their proposal for an overhaul of the U.S. tax system. Corporations can look forward to a big tax break -- who are the other winners and losers? Financial policy analyst Daniel Sankey talks about the issue.FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified that there are 1,000 domestic terrorism investigations underway, mainly related to white supremacist groups and individuals. But has the federal government ever been serious about tackling violent, racist groups? Bill Ayers, an activist, educator and the author, discusses this development.UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gave an impassioned speech at the party conference yesterday, slamming Saudi Arabia, Israel and Donald Trump while demanding that Britain stay in the European single market. Jackie Walker, former Vice Chair of the pro-Jeremy Corbyn organization Momentum, joins the show.The Spanish central government is pulling out all the stops to prevent the Catalan independence vote from going ahead, calling in thousands of police officers. Dick Nichols, the correspondent for Spain and Catalonia for Green Left Weekly, talks about this issue.

In this short podcast, Jackie Walker turns the tables on me to find out more about my course in chakra awakening called Heart-full Living. Find out more here http://www.tomevans.co/newmagic/heart-full-living/

This week on Mom Talk Radio, we are joined by Dr. Mark Harrell, President Elect of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, shares tips for reducing your risk of thyroid cancer. Spotlight on Moms features Maria Casey of mariahcasey.typepad.com/leadermom. Drew Banks, head of marketing for Prezi, talks about developing children’s creativity. Jackie Walker, author of Expressionista, talks about how a tween, teen or woman can find out her internal fashion persona. Richard Greenberg, author of Raising Children that Other People Like to Be Around, talks about the S.M.A.R.T. parenting system.

If you have a nagging dis-ease that won't go away, it's possible it has an emotional seed or component. An interesting conversation with Jackie Walker about how she helps 'pain' go away.