CES Platform Updates + iOS 15 Mail Updates

Patrick Tripp: Welcome to PULSE: The Cheetah Product Podcast. I'm Patrick Tripp, SVP of Product Marketing at Cheetah Digital, joined again today by my esteemed colleague, Nick Einstein. How are you, sir?

Nick Einstein: I'm doing great, Patrick. Great to be here.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah. Great to be back again and talk about some great topics. We'll talk a little bit about Jazz Fest and our collective love of music and what's happening there. We'll talk a little bit about the Apple Mail Privacy Protection announcement that happened, that will take place this fall, as well as, a pretty big product announcement that we made just a couple of weeks ago around the Customer Engagement Suite.

Nick Einstein: Let's get into it.

Patrick Tripp: Welcome back to PULSE: The Cheetah Product Podcast. Nick, lot to talk about today, let's start off with Jazz Fest. It's been rescheduled to October in New Orleans. A lot happening, right? Is that October 8th through 17th?

Nick Einstein: I think it's October 8th through 17th this year. Just the weekends, but yeah, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Patrick Tripp: A lot of content on each weekend. For those that aren't familiar, you see on the first weekend, it looks like we have Dead& Company, Foo Fighters, Lizzo, The Black Crowes, Demi Lovato, Wu- Tang Clan, and even Ziggy Marley, who I've followed his music for a long time.

Nick Einstein: It seems like that first weekend has a lot of the big names. Randy Newman, I see there as well. A lot of the big names seem to be coming out first weekend.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah. Kermit Ruffins, long time. Ricky Skaggs. Then on the second weekend, you have a number of other people here, great performers: Stevie Nicks, Jimmy Buffet, Norah Jones, Tedeschi Trucks Band. Some of your favorites, right?

Nick Einstein: Indeed. For sure, for sure. As well as a bunch of the locals: Dirty Dozen Brass Band, George Porter, Tribute to Dr. John. So a lot of good stuff. It's probably a tough choice, first weekend or second weekend this year.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah. It'll be a lot of fun. It will happen right around the same time as our Signals conference for Cheetah Digital, so stay tuned for that, but we'll try to make it happen. Let's get into business here and talk first about the Apple Mail Privacy Protection announcement that they made recently in the fall. On our Thinking Caps episode, Richard and Tim talked about this, but some refer to it as pixelgeddon. Nick, what's your take on the announcement by Apple?

Nick Einstein: I wrote a recent blog post on it too, it's on the Cheetah Digital blog at the moment. Just a little background there, during the Worldwide Developer Conference, I believe it was two weeks ago, Apple announced their Mail Privacy initiative. It's going to be implemented with iOS 15 coming up this fall, and basically what it's going to do is remotely load the tracking pixel in emails, basically rendering the open pixel useless for tracking open rates. People are referring to it as pixelgeddon, which may be blowing it a little bit out of proportion. It is going to require some changes. You're not going to be able to measure open rates moving forward, so that's an issue. Also, other things like personalization at moment- of- open. So dynamic personalization based on weather or based on countdown timers and that sort of stuff that happens at open, will no longer be able to happen at open because the pixels can be remotely loaded. Pixelgeddon may be pushing it, but marketers are going to need to react to it for sure.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah. I know Apple Mail represents approximately 10%, maybe 12% of all email opens, and you certainly have the ability as a consumer to go in and turn that switch off to not be tracked, but I don't feel like the sky is falling. I think open rates have been damaged for a long time. That metric, if marketers rely solely on open rates, I think they need to really evolve their thinking.

Nick Einstein: I think marketers who rely on open rates heavily are pretty lazy marketers oftentimes, and open rates have not been historically that accurate. Individuals can load an email message without loading the images, which renders that pixel useless, and most marketers realize that that opens aren't really necessarily strongly tied to the business objectives. Clicks are more closely tied, and then other measures, conversions, key business metrics... Sophisticated marketers focus more on those. So I think, perhaps, this will force some marketers who've been a little bit lazy relying on open rates too much to refocus on metrics that are closer to the business. But again, people are going to have to react. No more measuring open rates with confidence.

Patrick Tripp: Yep, and it's all about the downstream metrics: the opens, the clicks, the conversions really do have a bigger impact. Certainly at Cheetah we can trigger off of things like clicks and conversions. So it's really gone well beyond the open rate, and certainly like you mentioned, the real- time vendors out there that are focused on open time personalization, this becomes a challenge for them and really need to rethink the way they engage and the way they decide on what contact, what data, what target they should use and what channel will really disrupt that group.

Nick Einstein: Indeed, indeed.

Patrick Tripp: Now getting into some more Cheetah news, in our Customer Engagement Suite announcement, we do a larger announcement every quarter, and in Q2 we announced the latest innovations to the Cheetah Customer Engagement Suite, a unified platform to drive revenue, build lasting customer relationships, and deliver unique value change for the entire customer life cycle. Nick, help us unpackage that a little bit.

Nick Einstein: Sure, I will help you unpack that a little bit. A lot of really great stuff bundled there. We broke it up into three main buckets in June. Our first bucket is driving revenue and accelerating time to value through marketer- friendly workflows and UX. We've done a lot of work over the past... Well, released in June, but have been continuing to do a lot of work on UI/ UX, next generation experiences. Some great work done in Cheetah Experiences: simplifying, streamlining the UI, allowing you, as marketers, to more efficiently build and launch Cheetah Experiences. Some great stuff there, and really exciting stuff in Cheetah Personalization: our Journey Designer tool, the ability to leverage self- service journeys, go in there, orchestrate on a really beautiful marketer- friendly canvas, sophisticated cross- channel journeys, one place to do that. Really big stuff.

Patrick Tripp: Love it. Yeah, so next gen experiences, streamlined UI/ UX, and self- service journeys available at the fingertips for our marketers today. Second theme is engaging customers at the precise moments that matter most by building lasting customer relationships.

Nick Einstein: Indeed. Yep, a lot there too, and a lot there around our sending framework: our platform sending, the ability to send right on top of all the rich data on the platform, using all the customer data, machine learning tools, and sophisticated personalization, and then the ability to execute those at unmatched speed and scale. Really important stuff and making a big difference for high- volume senders, especially. Real- time personalization workspace: the ability to leverage real- time events, and re- target and personalize based on those, presenting personalized messages onsite and beyond. Great stuff there as well.

Patrick Tripp: Yeah, a lot happening there in terms of platform sending at speed and scale, as well as that workspace for real- time personalization in our Cheetah Web Tag. Okay, and the third theme is powering the next generation of intelligent digital experiences to offer unique value exchange. Talk about that.

Nick Einstein: Yeah, great stuff happening. New adaptive branching experiences in Cheetah Experiences, giving marketers the ability to more quickly and easily generate zero- party data at scale. Then rules- based decisioning in our platform, giving users the ability to target their users with personalized offers, the next best offer, generating insights around that. Some big stuff there.

Patrick Tripp: Great stuff, Nick. A real unified platform, branching experiences, and Cheetah Decisioning for uber- personalization for the next best offer. Look for a blog post from us coming out any day now on the announcement, and we'll be putting out more very soon. I want to spend a moment to talk about the future state for the Customer Engagement Suite and where we're headed this year and next year and beyond, is really three key themes. First, is really trying to better understand customers and get that single customer view. Secondly, it's about activating data and using a common set of shared services. Third, it's about engaging across all channels and touch points. This is really going to be guiding our work throughout this year. So as you go into each layer, understanding customers include a real single customer view, really includes integrations, machine learning, models, really formulating that granular view of the customer and being able to integrate and ingest any data type. Secondly, it's about activating data through shared services. This is things like identity, search, analytics, assets, even decisioning, and more, real common set of capabilities that will be able to be shared across the entire platform and used by all of our applications. The third level is really systems of engagement. Really, our solutions, as we know and love them today: Cheetah Experiences for zero- party data capture, Cheetah Messaging for cross- channel campaign management, Personalization for real- time digital experiences, Cheetah Loyalty for loyalty management and loyalty marketing, and then really UI and UX experience really wrappered around the entire platform to have a single look and feel for all marketing users. So there's a lot in that, and we'll talk more about that in the near term, but Nick, it was great talking to you again, and we look forward to doing more of these soon.

Nick Einstein: Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Tripp: Thanks.