Building First Party Relationships with Cheetah Digital's Personalization Engine

Tim Glomb: Hey guys, welcome back to Thinking Caps. This is a very special edition because I have somebody who just flew from Prague to Denver to sit down and talk to me about some really interesting things. You know at Thinking Caps we talk about zero party data. We talk about customer acquisition. We're going to show you some really awesome stuff. So, let's have a conversation and dig in right now. Tereza, thank you for coming in from Prague. You are a senior product manager with really the specialty and the Cheetah Experiences end of our customer engagement suite.

Tereza Kirk: That's correct.

Tim Glomb: Thanks for coming. And welcome back to Denver. You've been here before, you were here.

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, that's right. I've worked for cheetah experiences in London office and Denver office. So, I've been around.

Tim Glomb: All right. Well, the pandemic is lifting. People are coming back to normal. I appreciate having you here. And I think this is really important, because you have your finger on the pulse of where the vision is and where the production and the future of our Cheetah Experiences platform is. And I'm going to give this real quick. If you don't know, the customer engagement suite is our full platform, messaging, loyalty, acquiring data from unknown context, turning them into known, getting them loyal, in- app wallets, all kinds of stuff. Tons of information on our website. Cheetah Experience is really just the tip of that spear, I think, where we turn unknown into known consumers. What's your elevator pitch on what Cheetah Experiences is for a marketing organization?

Tereza Kirk: So, turning unknown users into known is obviously a big part of it. You mentioned acquisition, and that definitely is one of our core use cases, but I think it's more than that. Cheetah Experiences is a tool that helps marketers to build beautiful, amazing experiences that collect data, but offer a value exchange on the back of it. So, we're really helping marketers to make a connection with their consumers and get to know them on a deeper level. So, helping to deliver that one- to- one marketing at scale while keeping all the resourcing under control. Because of course we work with a lot of enterprise brands. Multi- market, multi- brand solutions can get really expensive if you're outsourcing it with a third party agencies, if you're building everything from scratch. So, Cheetah Experiences really tries to make that process efficient and offer the right tools to engage audience across the customer life cycle.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Fully. And there's a million different ways you can engage people. I mean, there's sweepstakes forms, there's survey forms, there's, hey, you registered a product now, will you tell us a little bit about that? You've got scratch and wins. You've got things that are fun. You've got things that are very sterile. Do you have any best practices if somebody is like, oh yeah, I want to get into this world? Or maybe they have Cheetah Experiences. What are some of your favorite ways to engage and learn about people?

Tereza Kirk: So, we have something called Experiences Library, which is the home of where most of our marketers start. And we look at the engagement mechanics from the marketing objective standpoint. So, there's a lot that marketers are trying to solve. The problems that they might be solving, may be anything from building, starting, building their database from scratch. And that's in that case, we probably will want to go with some really simple, straightforward mechanic that is built for conversion. So, that's something really straight forward. But also we have a lot of customers who already have data. The amount of data is not the problem, but the quality or the depth of data is what they're trying to solve. So, there are multiple more sophisticated engagement mechanics that not only help you build a richer profile, but make a connection with the consumers.

Tim Glomb: All right. So, I'm going to turn my hat around and viewers know that we're getting serious. We're getting into the weeds here. It's like a roll up your sleeves tactic. Let's talk a little bit because we just rolled out in the platform, progressive... Well, we've had progressive profiling. And can you define that shortly for people that...

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, absolutely. So, it all builds on the kind of turning unknown users into known. And doing that is great. But what do you do when the users come back the second time? We don't want to ask them the same questions. We want to make them feel heard that the brand listens, that we value their data and what they tell us about themselves. And so progressive profiling helps with that. When we recognize a known user, we hide or show a certain question based on that context and make sure that we surface only the relevant question based on the fact that we've already asked that before.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Makes total sense. And then which dovetails into that, which is kind of a newer release in the late spring here is branch logic. Something that I've always been a huge fan of. I think it's great. Do you own a dog or a cat? Dog. Cool. New set of questions. I know you've been working on a long time. What are some use cases there? Like what's an example of how people can use that and why do you think it's so beneficial?

Tereza Kirk: Yeah. Branching logic is a feature not only you are excited about, but pretty much all our customers were really looking forward to use it. It just helps with kind of a simpler version of personalization on the fly, really. So, what it does is you ask a series of questions and immediately as the user is answering, we react to that response and hide or show different questions. So, let's take an example of sports. Like, do you do sports or yes or no? If you say no, like, Hmm, maybe-

Tim Glomb: We're getting in line, let's get you some new questions.

Tereza Kirk: Okay, well, that's cool, but-

Tim Glomb: Do you watch sports?

Tereza Kirk: Yeah. Right. If you say yes, we're like, okay, cool. So, what kind of sports do you do? Like, do you do yoga? Do you run? And based on that, we can get to a pretty granular level of detail without asking 15 questions. It just goes straight to the point.

Tim Glomb: It's a lot like conversation. If I meet you, and I've said this a million times, if I meet you on the street and I say, " Hey, do you like spaghetti?" And you say, " No." And I say, " Great come over for spaghetti dinner." I'm a jerk, right?

Tereza Kirk: Exactly. So, I think that's a really great point. And we're trying to make experiences feel more like a conversation to make it more human like, really.

Tim Glomb: All right. Well, let's talk about the future, because progressive profiling, great. Branch logic, great. What's the future look like? I know you're working on some things to append into third- party databases. So, even the form as intelligent as you can get, get even more intelligent. What else is coming down the pipe?

Tereza Kirk: So, Experiences platform on its own, obviously doesn't hold the wider context of the user. So, most of our customers have data integrations with their third- party data systems. It doesn't matter if it's an email marketing tool, a DMP, crosstalk whatever that may be, but that's really where all their knowledge about their users is stored and what we're working on and what was the vision for the year ahead is to be able to recognize a known user by an extreme inaudible coming to us. And when we know who the user is, we can ask the third party system, like, okay, tell us the important segmentation data about this user. It can be if you're a retailer, like it really matters if you're male or female, we're going to give you a completely different range of offerings or we're going to ask you completely different questions. So, being able to ask a third party system about the user, get some segmentation data and then react to it with the right questions. That's where we're headed.

Tim Glomb: That's some real heavy lifting. I mean, that's like, you can't do that with your$ 1, 000 a year survey tool. This is enterprise at scale. And by the way, I reference all the time, Discovery Communications collected a hundred million entries but there's been billions of data points collected through Cheetah Experiences. So, the scale is up.

Tereza Kirk: Yeah, yeah. We're talking about billions over the years. And an unbelievable amount of brand opt- ins of course. Yeah. This is a big part of the conversation. Like how do we deliver all of this at scale? Because our customers are really looking at performance and scale and multi- market rollouts, as I mentioned at the beginning. So, how do we make this extremely efficient and at the same time, easy to use. Because what we say about Experiences platform is that it is a tool for non- technical marketers. You don't have to be extremely technical to build an experience. Of course it can get pretty sophisticated. And if you are technical, you can take it to another level. But if you're not like, how do we ensure that you can build a smart experience that can react to a context without any custom code?

Tim Glomb: And we've always said, we're here for marketers. We built... Marketers can drive. Middle level marketers can drive our stuff. That's important. Well, look, we have 60 seconds left, but I'm going to take most of the time to tell you, I have convinced a Tereza to do another session that's even deeper. So, if you're a Cheetah client and you really want to get into the weeds, you want to know what's coming. You want to maybe learn about what some other industries' verticals benchmark stats are going to be. We're going to talk about that. So, this was a great scratching the surface. I appreciate you coming in. We'll see you next time. Thinking Caps, I'm turning mine around. Have a great day and be sure to check out the deeper dive that we're going to have with Tereza on cheetahdigital. com. Adios.

Tereza Kirk: See you there.