(light electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> We are back in Las Vegas here at AWS re:Invent alone with Rebecca Knight and I'm John Walls and I know what you're thinking. Email, oh my god, email. The avalanche, the problems that are causes here folks in IT. Well, I tell you what, Chris McFadden is here to solve your problems. (mumbles) engineering at SparkPost. Chris good to see you this afternoon, thanks for joining us. Good to see you, I'm happy to be on The Cube. >> Yeah, great. >> It's my third time at re:Invent, but first time on The Cube so happy to be here. >> Welcome. >> So a Cube rookie. >> (laughs) >> We ever find, to leave you with it on the way out, remind me to get it for you. Alright, so tell us about SparkPost first off, about, we talk about email, what your primary focus is and just the challenges that you are trying to solve to your clients. >> Sure, SparkPost is the leading email delivery provider. So our customers send over five trillion emails a year. That's over 37% of the world's commercial email. That's obviously a lot of email. So we're focused on B2C email and what that means is that any app who has the need to send email, we help with getting that email on time into the inbox. That really helps product managers and product teams with ensuring that they can get the right performance, the analytics and also the human services to make sure that they can get customers to adopt their service, grow engagement and ultimately revenues. >> I understand you have a new product, SparkPost Signals, tell our viewers a little bit more. >> Yeah, so I'm very excited to talk about SparkPost Signal. So as everybody knows, your email is super important to people, and with email being such a high ROI for most companies, when you have a different email performance that could really impact a company's revenue as well. So I'm excited to talk about SparkPost Signals because what that could really help with is being able to provide some dashboards and tools so that you can have more data driven predictive, actionable insight so that ordinary customers can have that kind of email expertise at their fingertips really to be able to then boost their performance. So I can certainly talk about some of the particular challenges that this would solve for people. So in particular, we have a health score and also a spam chart reporting. So for example, what could happen is, if you or maybe somebody in the organization that you don't even know about, they could go out and acquire an email list. More email addresses, the better. >> Sure. >> The next thing you know, you end up landing on spam traps, you're getting blocked, you're email's not going out. So it's better off to get early notice about whether there's some sort of problem so then you can actually react and correct the problem before it starts impacting your business. >> So is it a delivery problem or challenge or is it a firewall challenge or problem. Kind of, how do you balance that out because you, it seems like it's a little bit of both actually or it could be a little bit of both. >> So email is a very much an open network. There's no one particular tech company really owns it so anybody can send any email. That's why most email that's sent is actually spam. So on the ISP side, these are the internet service providers who are Gmail or Hotmail that are actually receiving the email, they are very protective of their users. So what that means is that if you buy email addresses or you're sending too much to people and they say, I don't want this email, then the ISPs can actually say, you know, you're doing this too much, you're being abusive and we're actually going to start blocking you so none of your email is actually then going to get delivered. So none of your password resets, none of your auto-confirmations, none of your marketing email. So you have to be very, you have to have very good email sending practices otherwise you run into trouble. So for most customers from most companies we work with, they're expertise is elsewhere, you know. They're in social media, they're in banking, >> Marketing >> whatever it is. They don't necessarily know all the best ways to be able to manage their email streams. >> And yet email is mission critical to their businesses. >> Exactly >> This product launches in January but you've already been testing the waters a bit with some of your customers. What are you hearing, what are they saying? >> So we've heard a lot of very good things. The usual response from customers is when can we get it, you know. So we're frantically working to roll this out. But we've actually, when we were doing the demos with customers, we were actually showing them real data so this wasn't hypothetical. We were actually showing them real data with their own health scores, with their spam trap reports. Also showing, which is really interesting, their engagement cohorts. So what that means is that if customers, or companies that work us are not sending to their most engaged users but are also sending to users that don't actually engage much at all, then that can actually hurt their overall deliverability and engagement so when we show them these cohort reports, showing them that if you actually are sending more to your more engaged users, ultimately your engagement and revenue's going to go up. So we've actually worked, even before Signal is a product, we've worked with customers to do this. We have some very high-profile customers who've actually reduces the volume of email they've sent through is but their actual engagement has gone through the roof as well as their revenue. We've also worked with customers and that's more on the engagement cohort reporting. On the other side, when it comes to span trap reporting, we've had customers who've actually run into problems where they inadvertently started emailing to addresses that are on spam traps. Spam traps if you don't know are essentially bogus email addresses that are out there, like honeypots and if you email them, then it tells the spam trap owner that you obviously didn't get a real person to subscribe to this or to opt in so you're obviously following bad practices and I'll report you to maybe a blacklist which will then prevent all of your email being delivered. So we were able to work with that customer to really identify the rate of spam trap hits that they have and they were able to clean up their own practices based on that and then get back in business and actually have better engagement for what they're doing. >> So you're here at AWS, so there's a public cloud play here somewhere. Is this about a customer migration, are you educating people and bringing them along as well for the public cloud experience. I mean, what are you doing here. >> Right, so we have our cloud services and that's built on AWS. We've been in AWS for over four years now and we love coming here and learning about a lot of the new technology. We also have a booth here, we're providing our own services. What we also have is that ewe had an on-premise product, Momentum and PowerMTA and both of those products are heavily used throughout the industry for sending email. So we have a number of customers who are coming to us and saying, we're looking to move to the cloud. So we can either help them move their mail streams to SparkPost which can be very convenient or if they want to continue to run their own MTAs and some of their own infrastructure, possibly maybe they're a bank or maybe it's just not the right time for them then we're able to look at other options. Potentially things like hybrid analytics and that's a way for them to be able to get the addition analytics and things like SparkPost Signals but without actually moving everything. But I'm definitely very encouraged. Yesterday's keynote had Guardian and that's quite an ambitious project to be able to move to the cloud so I'm very excited. We're also, SparkPost is one of their SAS providers that they chose to use in part of their migration. So rather than continue to try to run their own infrastructure, they said, here's an API, I trust SparkPost, they've got the right security, support services to be able to get the job done. >> I'm curious about the future and sort of, will email always be an integral part of doing business for companies and how SparkPost is thinking about its future business model. >> Right, so email's been dead about 20 years. >> Supposedly, that's what they keep saying. (laughs) >> However, every year, email volumes keep growing. Everybody has an email address, really it's the preferred method of communication even among millennials nowadays. Emails also again, it's an open platform so it's not controlled by the big tech companies so it's very ubiquitous. It's also a good system of record and also there's certain things that don't really make sense to send over push or SMS. So email continues to be a (mumbles) for companies both in triggered email as well as marketing email. So we have a number of customers who are in these next generation martech vendors who are providing even more services. They use us as the back end for doing that delivery but they're seeing even more demand for again, on the marketing side and again, there's more and more apps being built. There's more and more opportunities there. They all need to send email and we see certainly with SparkPost Signals and otherwise, that with the smart use of data, there really becomes an even better opportunity to grow those relationships with your customers. So rather than just being a transaction, that's an opportunity for a relationship building interaction. >> A value add. >> Right. >> Well, five trillion emails, I think half of them, I think I've sent in half of those these days so maybe you and I aught to talk 'cause (mumbles) Thanks for the time. Thanks for coming here on The Cube and again, leave you with a parting gift, please, >> Thank you, I appreciate it >> by all means. Chris McFadden joined us here and we'll be back with more from AWS re:invent, we are live on The Cube from Las Vegas. (light electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio this morning for a CUBE Conversation talking about content marketing, attention economy, a lot of really interesting topics that should be top of mind for marketers, that we're in very interesting times on the B2C side and even more, I think, on the B2B side. So we're excited to have Randy Wootton, he's the CEO of Percolate. Randy, great to see you. >> Thanks very much for having me. A real pleasure to be here. >> Absolutely, so for those who aren't familiar, give us kind of the quick and dirty on Percolate. >> Percolate has been around for about seven years. It started as a social media marketing platform. So helping people, helping brands, build their brands on the social landscape, and integrating campaigns to deploy across the different social channels. Over the last couple of years, it's been moving more into the space called content marketing, which is really an interesting new area that marketers are coming to terms with. How do you put together content and orchestrate it across all the different channels. >> And it's interesting, a lot of vocabulary on the website around experiences and content not a lot about products. So how should marketers think and how does experience and content ultimately map back to the products and services you're trying to sell. >> Well, I do think that's a great point. And the distinction between modern brands, who are trying to create relationships with their consumers, rather than pushing products, especially if you're B2B, or technology pushing speeds and feeds. Instead, you are trying to figure out what is going to enable you to create a brand that consumers pull through versus getting pushed at. And so I think the idea around content marketing is that in some ways advertising isn't working anymore. People aren't paying attention to display ads, they're not clicking, they aren't processing the information. But, they are still buying. So the idea for marketers is, how do you get the appropriate content at the right time, to the right person, in their purchase journey. >> Right, and there's so many different examples of people doing new things. There's more conversations kind of, of the persona of the company, of the purpose, purpose driven things, really trying to appeal to their younger employees as well as a younger customer. You have just crazy off the wall things, which never fail to entertain. Like Geico, who seems to break every rule of advertising by having a different theme every time you see a Geico ad. So people are trying humor, they're trying theater, they're trying a lot of things to get through because the tough thing today is getting people's attention. >> I think so, and they talk a lot about the attention economy. That we live in a world of exponential fragmentation. All the information that we are processing across all these different devices. And a brand trying to break through, there's a couple of challenges, one is you have to create a really authentic voice, one that resonates with who you are and how you show up. And then, I think the second point is you recognize that you are co-building the brand with the consumers. It's no longer you build the Super Bowl ad and transmit it on T.V., and people experience your brand. You have this whole unfolding experience in real time. You've seen some of the airlines, for example, that have struggled with the social media downside of brand building. And so how do control, not control, but engage with consumers in a way that feels very authentic and it continues to build a relationship with your consumers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, a lot of things have changed. The other thing that has changed now is that you can have a direct relationship with that consumer whether you want it or not, via social media touches, maybe you were before, that was hidden through your distribution, or you didn't have that, that direct connect. So, you know, being able to respond to this kind of micro-segmentation, it's one thing to talk about micro-segmentation on the marketing side, it's a whole different thing with that one individual, with the relatively loud voice, is screaming "Hey, I need help." >> That's right, and I think there are a couple of things on that point. One is, I've been in technology for 20 years. I've been at Microsoft, I was at Salesforce, I was at AdReady, Avenue A, and Quantive. And now, Rocket Fuel before I came to Percolate. And I've always been wrestling with two dimensions of the digital marketing challenge. One is around consumer identity, and really understanding who the consumer is, and where they've been and what they've done. The second piece is around the context. That is, where they are in the moment, and which device they're on. And so, those are two dimensions of the triangle. The third is the content, or in advertising it's the creative. And that's always been the constraint. You never have enough creative to be able to really deliver on the promise of personalization, of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that now is the blockade. That now is the bottleneck, and that now is what brands are really trying to come to terms with. Is how do we create enough content so that you can create a compelling experience for each person, and then if there's someone who is engaging in a very loud voice, how do you know, and how do you engage to sort of address that, but not loose connections with all your other consumers. >> Right, it's interesting, you bring up something, in some of the research, in micro-moments. And in the old days, I controlled all of the information, you had to come for me for the information, and it was a very different world. And now, as you said, the information is out there, there's too much information. Who's my trusted conduit for the information. So by the time they actually get to me, or I'm going to try to leverage these micro-moments, it's not about, necessarily direct information exchange. What are some of these kind of micro-moments, and how are they game changers? >> Well, I think the fact that we can make decisions in near real time. And when I was at Rocket Fuel, we were making decisions in less than 20 milliseconds, processing something like 200 billion bid transactions a day, and so I just think people are not yet aware of the amount, the volume and the velocity of data that is being processed each and every day. And, to make decisions about specific moments. So the two moments I give as examples are: One, I'm sitting at home watching the Oakland Raiders with my two boys, I'm back on the couch and we're watching the game, and Disney makes an advertisement. I'm probably open to a Disney advertisement with my boys next to me, who are probably getting an advertisement at the same time by Disney. I'm a very different person in that moment, or that micro-moment than when I'm commuting in from Oakland to San Francisco on BART, reading the New York Times. I'm not open to a Disney ad at that moment, because I'm concentrating on work, I'm concentrating on the commute. And I think the thing that brands are coming to terms with is, how much am I willing to pay to engage with me sitting on the couch versus me sitting on BART. And that is where the real value comes from, is understanding which moments are the valuable ones. >> So there's so much we can learn from Ad Tech. And I don't think Ad Tech gets enough kind of credit for operating these really large, really hyper speed, really sophisticated marketplaces that are serving up I don't even know how many billions of transactions per unit time. A lot of activity going on. So, you've been in that world for a while. As you've seen them shift from kind of people driving, and buyers driving to more automation, what are some of the lessons learned, and what should learn more from a B2B side from this automated marketplace. >> Well, a couple of things, one is the machines are not our enemies, they are there to enable or enhance our capabilities. Though I do think it's going to require people to re-think work, specifically at agencies, in terms of, you don't need people to do media mixed modeling on the front end in Excel files, instead, you need capacity on the back end after the data has come out, and to really understand the insights. So there is some re-training or re-skilling that's needed. But, the machines make us smarter. It's not artificial intelligence, it's augmented intelligence. I think for B2B in particular what you're finding is, all the research shows that B2B purchasers spend something like 70 or 80% of their time in making the purchase decision before they even engage with the sales rep. And as a B2B company ourselves, we know how expensive our field reps are. And so to make sure that they are engaging with people at the right time, understanding the information that they would have had, before our sales cycle starts, super important. And I think that goes back to the content orchestration, or content marketing revolution that we are seeing now. And, you know, I that there is, when you think about it, most marketers today, use PowerPoint and Excel to have their marketing calendar and run their campaigns. And we're the only function left where you don't have an automated system, like a sales force for marketers, or a service now for marketers. Where a chief of marketing or a SVP of marketing, has, on their phone the tool of record, they system of record that they want to be able to oversee the campaigns. >> Right, although on the other hand, you're using super sophisticated A/B testing across multiple, multiple data sets, rather than doing that purchase price, right. You can test for colors, and fonts, and locations. And it's so different than trying to figure out the answer, make the investment, blast the answer, than this kind of DevOps way, test, test, test, test, test, adjust, test, test, test, test, adjust. >> You're absolutely right, and that's what, at Rocket Fuel, and any real AI powered system, they're using artificial intelligence as the higher order, underneath that you have different categories, like neural networks, deep learning and machine learning. We were using a logistic regression analysis. And we were running algorithms 27 models a day, every single day, that would test multiple features. So it wasn't just A/B testing, it was multi variant analysis happening in real time. Again, the volume and velocity of data is beyond human comprehension, and you need the machine learning to help you make sense of all that data. Otherwise, you just get overwhelmed, and you drown in the data. >> Right, so I want to talk a little bit about PNG. >> I know they're close and dear to your heart. In the old days, but more recently, I just want to bring up, they obviously wield a ton of power in the advertising spin campaign. And they recently tried to bring a little bit more discipline and said, hey we want tighter controls, tighter reporting, more independent third party reporting. There's this interesting thing going now where before, you know, you went for a big in, 'causethen you timed it by some conversion rating you had customers at the end. But now people it seems like, are so focused on the in kind of forgetting necessarily about the conversion because you can drive promoted campaigns in the social media, that now there's the specter of hmm, are we really getting, where we're getting. So again, the PNG, and the consumer side, are really leading kind of this next revolution of audit control and really closer monitoring to what's happening in these automated ad marketplaces. >> Well, I think what you're finding is, there's digital transformation happening across all functions, all industries. And, I think that in the media space in particular, you're also having an agency business model transformation. And what they used to provide for brands has to change as you move forward. PNG has really been driving that. PNG because of how much money they spend on media, has the biggest stick in the fight, and they've brought a lot of accountability. Mark Pritchard, in particular, has laid down these gauntlets the last couple of years, in terms of saying, I want more accountability, more visibility. Part of the challenge with the digital ecosystem is the propensity for fraud and lack of transparency, 'cause things are moving so quickly. So, the fact, that on one side the machines are working really well for ya, on the other side it's hard to audit it. But PNG is really bringing that level of discipline there. I think the thing that PNG is also doing really well, is they're really starting to re-think about how CPG brands can create relationships with their consumers and customers, much like we were talking about before. Primarily, before, CPG brands would work through distributors and retailers, and not really have a relationship with the end consumer. But now as they've started to build up their first party profiles, through clubs and loyalty programs, they're starting to better understand, the soccer mom. But it's not just the soccer mom, it's the soccer mom in Oakland at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, as she goes to Starbucks, when she's picked up her kids from school. All of those are features that better help PNG understand who that person is, in that context, and what's the appropriate engagement to create a compelling experience. That's really hard to do at the individual level. And when you think about the myriad of brands, that PNG has, they have to coordinate their stories and conversations across all of those brands, to drive market share. >> Yeah, it's a really interesting transformation, as we were talking earlier, I used to joke always, that we should have the underground railroad, from Cincinnati to Silicone Valley to get good product managers, right. 'Cause back in the day you still were doing PRD's and MRD's and those companies have been data driven for a long time and work with massive shares and small shifts in market percentages. But, as you said, they now, they're having to transform still data driven, but it's a completely different set of data, and much more direct set of data from the people that actually consume our products. >> And it's been a long journey, I remember when I was at Microsoft, gosh this would have been back in 2004 or 2005, we were working with PNG and they brought their brands to Microsoft. And we did digital immersions for them, to help them understand how they could engage consumers across the entire Microsoft network, and that would include X-Box, Hotmail at the time, MSN, and the brands were just coming to terms with what their digital strategy was and how they would work with Portal versus how they would work with other digital touchpoints. And I think that has just continued to evolve, with the rise of Facebook, with the rise of Twitter, and how do brands maintain relationships in that context, is something that every brand manager of today is having to do. My father, I think we were chatting a little earlier, started his career in 1968 as a brand manager for PNG. And, I remember him telling the stories about how the disciplined approach to brand building, and the structure and the framework hasn't changed, the execution has, over the last 50 years. >> So, just to bring it full circle before we close out, there's always a segment of marketing that's driven to just get me leads, right, give me leads, I need barcode scans at the conference et cetera. And then there's always been kind of the category of kind of thought leadership. Which isn't necessarily tied directly back to some campaign, but we want to be upfront, and show that we're a leading brand. Content marketing is kind of in-between, so, how much content marketing lead towards kind of thought leadership, how much lead kind of towards, actually lead conversions that I can track, and how much of it is something completely different. >> That's a great question, I think this is where people are trying to come to terms, what is content, long form, short form video. I think of content as being applied across all three dimensions of marketing. One is thought leadership, number two is demand gen, and number three is actualization or enablement in a B2B for your sales folks. And how do you have the right set of content along each of those dimensions. And I don't think they're necessarily, I fundamentally think the marketing funnel is broken. It's not you jump in at the top, and you go all the way to the bottom and you buy. You have this sort of webbed touch of experiences. So the idea is, going back to our earlier conversation, is, who is that consumer, what do you know about him, what is the context, and what's the appropriate form of content for them, where they are in their own buyer journey. So, a UGC video on YouTube may be okay for one consumer in a specific moment, but a short form video may be better for someone else, and a white paper may be better. And I think that people don't necessarily go down the funnel and purchase because they click on a search ad, they instead may be looking at a white paper at the end of the purchase, and so the big challenge, is the attribution of value, and that's one of the things that we're looking at Percolate. Is almost around thinking about it as content insight. Which content is working for whom. 'Cause right now you don't know, and I think the really interesting thing is you have a lot of people producing a lot of content. And, they don't know if it's working. And I think when we talk to marketers, that we hear their teams are producing content, and they want to know, they don't want to create content that doesn't work. They just want a better understanding of what's working, and that's the last challenge in the digital marketing transformation to solve. >> And how do you measure it? >> How do you measure, how do you define it? And categorize it, so that's one of the challenges, we were chatting a little bit before, about what you guys are doing at CUBE, and your clipper technology and how you're able to dis-aggregate videos, to these component pieces, or what in an AI world, you'd call features, that then can be loaded as unstructured data, and you can apply AI against it and really come up with interesting insights. So I think there's, as much as I say, the transformation of the internet has been huge, AI is going to transform our world more than we even can conceive of today. And I think content eventually will be impacted materially by AI. >> I still can't help but think of the original marketing quote, I've wasted half of my marketing budget, I'm just not sure which half. But, really it's not so much the waste as we have to continue to find better ways to measure the impact of all these kind of disparate non-traditional funnel things. >> I think you're right, I think it was Wanamaker who said that. I think your point is spot on, it's something we've always wrestled with, and as you move more into the branding media, they struggle more with the accountability. That's one of the reasons why direct response in the internet has been such a great mechanism, is because it's data based, you can show results. The challenge there is the attribution. But I think as we get into video, and you can get to digital video assets, and you can break it down into its component pieces, and all the different dimensions, all of that's fair game for better understanding what's working. >> Randy, really enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for taking a minute out of your busy day. >> My pleasure, always enjoy it. >> Alright, he's Randy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto Studios, thanks for watching. (digital music)