Scaling AI-Powered Personalised Marketing - Eric Frankel - AdGreetz

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Personalization of advertising is a really important topic, but many people find it very difficult to do that. So I've got one of the gurus of ad personalization, Eric Frankel, who's the CEO of Ad, greets on the podcast today. Welcome to the podcast, Eric.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker A: It's great to have you on the podcast. So we like to start off with our, uh, guests introducing themselves and also talking a little bit about their background. So tell us about your career and what made you decide to found adgreets so briefly.

Speaker B: I'm a New York metropolitan area kid who upon graduation from college, went to work for a company called Warner Brothers. I spent the next 30 years there, starting as a young trainee, one could argue, and eventually ended up president of a multi billion dollar division. After 20 years at Warner Brothers in New York, they moved me to sunny California. And, um, I spent another decade there. And during my tenure at Warner, I learned very quickly that it wasn't about doing what you did the day before or the day before the day before. It was looking around the corner and figuring out what the next thing could be, should be, would be, and trying to figure out how to master it and all of that. So one of the things that I led the charge in was streaming television, which is of course what we've all embraced. And when we originally spoke to our clients, all of the various media companies, about the opportunity to press a button and watch what you want, they all thought that was the stupidest thing in the world. And Warner Brothers made more movies, more television shows, had the world's largest library. So we were a bit of the 800 pound gorilla. So I spent a great deal of time convincing the entertainment industry to embrace that, which they eventually did. And then I woke up one day and I realized that as a highly paid entertainment executive at a major film studio with a wife and children, and we were all sort of giant consumers, that I barely ever saw an ad or marketing message that was relevant to me because it was a world of generic, traditional, one size fits all. And in my opinion, what we saw on our phones, our computers, on streaming platforms, on websites and on email was really no different than the same marketing I grew up with on analog. And that just happened to be called an ad in a newspaper or an ad in a magazine or an ad on a linear television channel or something. We got in our post box a direct response ad. And it was just, and it was very, very similar. But there was no reason to because in the world of digital there's, there's data, uh, there's targeting capabilities and everyone knows who you are so we can talk to people differently. So after 30 years at Warner Brothers, I decided to take a, uh, shot at reinventing marketing and founded Ad Greets. And what we do is we make, I mean a good example is we produce 35,000 ads just for the US, for Honda every week. So we talk to you about your car, a Honda or an Acura, and we tell you where your dealership is to bring it in for a tune up and so on. And we do it in video, we do it on display. And so we do smart, data driven, relevant, personalized marketing that people pay attention to versus go, why are they showing this to me? And now we've gone above and beyond that and launched an AI creative platform form that allows anyone to make ads in about six minutes, rather simply that depending on one's point of view, looks somewhere between 90% as good as anything you've seen or 105% as good, depending on who's judging it. And it's done very, very affordably and very, very quickly. And so that's our new business called Bizkrets. And that's who I am and that's what I do.

Speaker A: And presumably, I mean, AI has been a big factor in terms of personalization, allowing you to create all these different ads at, uh, scale.

Speaker B: Well, what's interesting is no one's really using it for that today. What they're primarily doing. Because if we go back to my original premise, I would argue that 95% of all advertising is still what I would call generic, traditional, one size fits all. McDonald's more or less never runs an ad that I've seen that tells you where your McDonald's is. It's 2km from your house or mine, that's a mile from my house. And neither does Mercedes or what have you, or in the world of B2B, we push things out that will hopefully catch that customer's eye, um, significantly more than that generic, um, message. So now what we're doing is so everybody's just trying to now make AI creative that looks as good as what we'll call the old tried and true, rather expensive. Takes weeks or months to build this creative. We're busy merging our old business where we make 35,000 ads for Honda and all these other brands all around the world with this AI and being able to disrupt, meaning, relevant, creative that you embrace and pay attention to, made affordably via AI. So that's, you know, what our goal is. And we're actually not seeing a lot of that yet because the world's just learning how to make good creative with AI. But we believe that's where it'll go. It'll be a combination of both of those.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. That, that really explains things. I'm interested. You know, when you get customers coming to you, what do they see as the problem? Are they seeing, you know, lack of performance from their ads or do they just feel that they're not doing it right?

Speaker B: They don't know that anything is wrong. So they don't typically it's very infrequent. So old bad habits, in my opinion, not to sound like the Grinch, die very, very slowly. So I spend my life writing to and meeting with brands, agencies, streaming platforms, publishers and strategic partners and showing them the type of ads that they run. And then we show them what could be. So we're pretty much in the before and after business and try to convince them to spend a little additional money to test, you know, this better idea. My, I am an empty nester, my kids are grown. So if you show me an ad that shows a smiling family, that's not as much of a turn on or relevant to me it was for 15 or 18 years. A, uh, family oriented message isn't compelling to my 20 something year old son who's out with his buddies and girlfriends. So primarily we chase brands and agencies and we show them what they do and we explain what the potential could be and try to get them to sign up for affordable and easy trials where they're very statistically based and we get access to all of their historic engagement and activation and every metric under the sun. And our goal is to make these ads that talk about West Sussex on a Thursday afternoon for you that you pay a lot more attention to and maybe it features a man of your age versus a 21 year old and because of the relevance, your ears and eyes perk up and you pay more attention to it.

Speaker A: And that feels quite complicated. I mean there's a lot of, you know, things you can look there, location, age, you know, family situation. Just for a consumer ad.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I mean, how do brands manage to get their heads around that and you know, how do you work with them to create so many different ads?

Speaker B: Um, so the answer is they don't they just are. And shockingly enough, after a decade plus of selling what we call that dco, the personalized product, we're now pushing very hard into the AI product and combining them. And all of a sudden, I think because of AI and people reading about AI every day, there's like a new influx in interest in the DCO personalized, um, content. So it's kind of shocking. We haven't had as many potential partnerships cooking where people say, we have 1600 retail outlets. Yes. We should indicate the addresses. We should say, there's never been a better time than this Thursday to do this. Um, or, you know, morning, afternoon and daytime. Back to your question. You know, the world. What digital did was create profiles and lots of data, all in a compliant, legal manner. Um, and there are all these companies and like it or not, they know 2,500 things about us and brands above and beyond their own data that they might know about. Customers buy that additional data. So they know more things about you and me or any other customer, potential customer they might have. And they've used that to target. They say, ooh, we don't want to talk to your next door neighbor because they're not a potential client for our business, but we want to talk to that person. And so they target primarily as a way to save money. So targeting has been all about, how do we not talk to my son about a product that they don't believe he's a likely customer for? Our point of view is you use all of that targeting data. Person's a male, they're married, they're a homeowner, they're a renter, they have cars, they have a dog, they have a cat, they're interested in this, they like to fly to Paris, whatever it is, depending on any specific brand, whether it's B2B or B2C. And you sit there and say, how do you adjust the creative. And the answer to your original question, I believe is, is we developed technology over 10 plus years that was, you know, we shed lots of tears, lots of blood, lots of sweat to build technology where in 20 minutes we can make 35,000 ads. Video display, every size, shape, format that exists, built integrations with every kind of channel where you can push these out on whether it's integrating with a brand's email vendor or whether it's pushing it, uh, on Meno or LinkedIn or YouTube or whether you're watching Netflix with ads and it runs. And that's just, you know, like anything in life. You come up with an idea and you work on it, and it starts off being hard, heavy lifting, intolerable. And you either fail or you eventually get good at it. And it becomes agile and nimble and fast and skilled, and you build feedback loops and you're able to optimize and change things and upgrade them all the time.

Speaker A: I mean, that's fascinating. There's an awful lot there. But one thing that really resonated with me is you said currently a lot of brands, and I think this is particularly true in B2B, are using, um, personalization, segmentation to save money rather than to improve performance necessarily. Uh, there are other misconceptions that people come to you where they don't really understand, you know, what the benefit is of doing personalized advertising at scale.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's, you know, a great deal. It's just, first of all, because people are in the business, people take the attitude that consumers or potential customers like these ads and messages. I take the point of view that most people don't like ads and messages and want to run away from them. And depending on whose numbers we believe, and it doesn't really matter. So whether we see 85 things a day or 10,000, uh, a day, we're inundated with it. So it's all about standing out from the crowd. And it's all about, you know, if an airline knows that I like to fly to these four locations, and if I haven't flown to one, two, three or four of them for a while, I always wonder why the airline doesn't ask me if I want to book a trip to one of those. And I wonder why they ask me if I want to go to akron, Ohio, for $49 that I don't want to go to. Nothing against Akron, Ohio, if anybody from Akron's listening, but the easier sell is to get me to book my trip to London, to book my trip to New York, to book my trip to San Francisco or, or wherever it might be. So I think people start off thinking that consumers like their messaging and they just want to keep their head down and do the same old thing versus saying, what do we do to make it better? What do we do to get people more engaged, more activated, get more meetings, make more money and not go out of business. You know, it's all about disruption and innovation in my point of view, you know, every day and looking at everything you do and figuring out how to improve it.

Speaker A: And, um, I love that, ah, example of flights because, you know, for example, in my job, I fly to the same show every year at the same time. And, you know, British Airways, I've obviously got a British Airways membership card. They know I fly there every year and they still send me British Airways holidays that I've never booked. And not the flight to the trade show. I mean, that immediately feels to me. I get it. That's why personalization can result in an uplift in performance. So, you know, in typical campaigns, what do you see as the uplift by doing this mass personalization?

Speaker B: Well, the goal is pretend we're charging about 6% additional fee for this. So the question is, how do you get 25%, 50%, 100% or significantly, you know, more than that, results. That's what you have to do to make it worthwhile. Or, you know, I mean, there are still branding advantages and all of that. Um, so we very often find that we double people's business. And this isn't. We're not making this up because, you know, we now almost won't work with a brand unless we have access to all of their data because people used to mislead us. So we would look at a particular ad that was generic, dull, boring, plain Jane, and we would come up with an idea that was substantially better. You know, so now we're saying, hey, West Sussex, it's Thursday afternoon and we have data that you have a family. Hey, are you, um, the weekend's two days away and it's a great opportunity to do this with your family. But. But if you were 23 years old, um, we weren't showing you the smiling family version or whatever it might be, and you look at it and just any fairly intelligent person's gut would say, this has to be killing those historic numbers. But they would tell us verbally what they've done historically. And they would say, we're getting a 5% click through rate. And we would make these great ads and we'd get a 4% click through rate. And we'd go, how can we be doing less than they've been doing when these ads are so relevant and personalized and calling out cities days of the week and time of day and all of this other stuff and putting people in the ads who are the demo of the recipient and all of that. And then we say, can we get access to your account? And we'd go in and it would turn out that they were getting a half a point click through rate. So when we were going to a 4% click through rate, we were doing eight times better and they were misleading us. So now we don't want to work with you, unless we can see the data so we can report to you on almost a daily basis and talk about what's going on, that people have gone from clicking out and running away from the end and after four seconds to watching it for 16 or 20, which is four or five times longer, that you know that the click through rates are higher that the purchase rates. You know, we're recently doing an automobile, and because we say West Sussex, have you heard about the new blankety blank? And then we show you the dealership that you've passed by a zillion times, but we make it really easy for you. All of a sudden, we cut the cost of them acquiring a client in half. So if you're a certain person and it costs you $300 to get that new client and you can get it down to $150, that's a very good thing.

Speaker A: I mean, this, you know, sounds great and intuitively it feels right, but I guess if you're being cynical, there's a couple of things people might raise. And, you know, the first question is sort of over personalization, is there a risk that you become intrusive or creepy because you're so personalized?

Speaker B: Um, so the answer is yes. Uh, most brands want to do. They're, they're so stuck in the past that they won't go there. But at the end of the day, it's really about the numbers, in my opinion. So you can forget about what a couple of grumps may feel if all of a sudden you're doubling someone's sales. This is a very good thing. We live in a world where people talk about 1% and 3%, you know, and, uh, and oh, it was a great year. We did a 4% improvement over last year. So when you're doing 100%, 125% better, those are hugely significant. So you have to look at all the people who embraced it, paid attention, and did what that brand wanted them to do, versus a few people who said, you know, why are you calling out West Sussex and Thursday afternoon and showing, you know, a smiling family, um, and what have you, and where you really. Where it maybe gets creepier, but where it's really effective is there's the difference between ad tech and Martech. In adtech, you can only do things like call out West Sussex and say it's Thursday afternoon. But if you've opted into a mailing list and it's an email message or an app message, you can literally say, you know, hey, Mike. Hey, Eric. Hey, Susie. Hey, you know, um, we haven't seen you in six months and we know you like to fly to San Diego. Um, and you're just 2387 loyalty points away from getting a free trip, whatever it might be. So that's creepier, but it's also phenomenally effective. And then what we try to do is get people to stop doing marketing that looks like a print ad from a magazine in 1962 or 1982, and at least make it what you call rich media or rich media leading to video, so that people actually spend 25 seconds with it instead of looking at a static image and clicking ignore, delete, um, unsubscribe.

Speaker A: That makes sense. And I totally love the point about using the results to measure whether, you know, you've gone too far with personalization. I guess the other question that, you know, some marketers might be thinking, if they're feeling a little bit cynical, is what about, uh, maintaining brand consistency? You're kind of handing over the brand to automation and computers. Is there a risk that you can get better performance, but you actually lose some consistency with your brand?

Speaker B: Nobody will let you do anything without all of those, uh, steps in place. So the machines have not taken over the world. Um, if you go back to our historic business, what you're primarily doing is taking an ad that someone already made. They may have spent £200,000 or a million pounds or whatever it is, and you're taking it apart and saying, let's put in cities, let's put in different people, let's put in different SKUs, put in B2B. We'll do things where, like looking for the success that we've garnered with. And we call out other brands in that person's vertical and use it, they go, yeah, I want to be just like P and G. And if they're using this product and they're seeing success and show a person in and say, looking for success in West Essex the way Campbell Soup does. And you're a, uh, uh, company who's in the super packaged goods business. Um, so that's how that's worked. And then you make a bunch of templates. You say, here's the West Sussex, here's the Leeds, here's the Liverpool, whatever it might be, male, female, this, that version, they sign off on it. Then you manufacture lots of them. They sign off on all of them. You know, they have access to see everyone. And if your name is LG, you may have some poor kid look at 10,000 versions and sign off on them, um, with AI, what's really interesting that we've only seen one other person do yet I'm sure somebody else is doing it. We have now added a gigantic brand guideline portion to the platform. And we can either literally go into that brand and absorb all of those brand guidelines. So all of a sudden we know based on your website and everything, we could find what your color palette looks like, what your font looks like, uh, what your logo looks like. And AI can start to determine all these rules or the brand can load it in. So most brands have these brand guideline books, so to speak, and that can all be absorbed. And then the AI sits there and says, we better follow these rules. And it can include everything from the tonality of the ad. Don't do a down bummer ad. Always be upbeat and happy. Or our call to action is learn more more versus, you know, click now versus Shop now or, or whatever it might be. So, yeah, you have to take all of those precautions just for every. Anyone listening or. Or watching. You know, in AI, the biggest challenge is for certain products, it's still a bit hard to make the product look as good as the traditional lab. So Mercedes still wants to shoot that ad on the Autobahn or driving through your neighborhood or by the beach or whatever it might be, you know, on the highest quality traditional technology which then that footage can be loaded into the AI platform and used because the AI model of it will be a little off, although that's changing every day. And there are ways to shoot the car and make these things called Lora models that replicated quite well.

Speaker A: I mean, this has been interesting. We've talked a lot about consumer companies doing this. You know, do you think that what a lot of people are saying that B2B is becoming much more like B2C? It really is a trend, you know, business to business. Marketers have to be more human. And is that going to drive more B2B companies to adopt these kind of tactics that consumer companies have?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, anybody and everybody should because it's just an ad that you. That gives you a bit of or a message that gives you a bit of a smile versus a frown. So you should. The difference is when you're the Gap and you're selling T shirts or blue jeans to hundreds of millions and tens of billions of people, all of these financial decisions are very easy to make because it's costing, you know, peanuts. The challenge that we found with B2B is a couple fold. One is much smaller lists. So it's like we have. There are 1,287 potential buyers of our product. So, um, so, you know, it's, it's, it's very, very, you know, specific. However, on the other hand, there are times where those 1,218 or whatever I just said, people are going to purchase something that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions, tens of millions and even more. So, yes, I think if I was a pharma company who are very, very traditional, I mean, and they want to talk to doctors. So they're not, you know, it's not the ads that you and I see telling us that we should talk to our doctor. It may be more compelling if we show a female oncologist at this particular hospital in West Sussex, someone that maybe, I don't want to say looks like her face, but whether they're 35 or 65, whether we call out even the name of a hospital or something, because they're obviously being clobbered with lots of messaging. So challenge number one is much smaller lists. So some of these costs end up costing more per customer. And, and then there's a challenge in being able to locate them. So yes, if you have an email address, you can send an email to that oncologist who you're trying to pitch a cancer drug who happens to work at the West Sussex hospital, for example. But that email address may not align with her social media or other accounts where that's her Gmail that no one may know, um, is how you find your, on Facebook or TikTok or things like that. And so we've seen big, uh, discrepancies in the match rate. So your list is small to begin with. And when you're going on traditional, when you're going on traditional media, you can miss some of these people, you know, because if you're, if you have 1200 person list and you're only getting a 25% match rate, um, it becomes even, you know, uh, it becomes even, you know, less effective or affordable.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of B2B marketers have, have done exactly that on platforms like Matter and tried to match email addresses. And it's hard to be super targeted to B2B audiences on those platforms. For sure. Yeah.

Speaker B: I mean you can, you know, you can touch a lot of people, but if it's literally, if there are a thousand, it's obviously better if it's a technology or it's something that millions of people could touch, use, recommend to their boss, to the buyer. But when it's something so Specific that so few people actually pull the trigger. It gets harder.

Speaker A: That, ah, makes sense. Eric, this has been really interesting. Before you let you go, there's always two questions we like to ask our guests. Um, so the first one is, what's the best bit of marketing advice that someone has given you?

Speaker B: I worked for a guy for 20 years and eventually he retired and I became him, so to speak. So I would say regularity and consistency. So first of all, many, many brands don't really, you know, market and are inconsistent. So when I was at Warner Brothers doing what we did, one of my investors in my new business said, I'm investing because I think anything you do. And I'm not trying to be egotistical and weird here. But he said, I had one inbox for you and one inbox in those days, call it for seven other studios. And you probably out delivered them more creatively and more often and more consistently by 3 to 1. So it's having a message and putting it out there regularly that would be number one. And then also, you know, seeing what the competition's doing and trying to kick their butt by doing smarter, cooler, more, um, you know, relying on your unique selling propositions and just pushing them out and not assuming that anyone knows. And even. And when you get sick of that message, people are maybe just starting to see it for the first time.

Speaker A: That's great advice. Um, the other question we ask, and we've talked a lot about how quickly marketing is changing. You know, what would advice would you give to a young person just starting out in their marketing career?

Speaker B: Well, first of all, the question is, do you really want to do this or not? Because there is a lot of factory like marketing out there. So I'm constantly shocked by the sameness or, you know, I don't understand. I mean, I talked to some of the largest travel brands in the world. So why would they want to push out one ad saying that you should sign up one of these, you know, companies that will let you book any hotel, any airline, any rent a car in the world. So they're talking to billions of people about millions of locations and things you can do, and they make one m, you know, static ad. I just signed up with one again, who I'm in conversation with, and they send you what looks like a print ad. My email that I get every day is, is a print ad. I mean, travel is fascinating, travel is sexy, travel is colorful. You know, so in New York, you would be talking to people about how freezing cold it is, or in West Sussex and You would be telling them whatever the resort is that you could be taking your family to as early as this weekend or next weekend if you wanted. Um, so the question is, do you want to do it? What's your niche? And to me, the whole world is sort of based on. You know, again, when you talk about unique selling propositions and differentiation, um, I think you have to try to embrace things early in life. So when I was in college, you know, my first day in this communications intro class, I sat there. I was used to being in classrooms with 22 kids or something. All of a sudden I go to some conference room and I don't remember, but it's got 350, 450 kids. And I go. Every one of these kids, parents or took out a loan and they're paying all this money to go to this college and they all want this one job. And most of them are just going to go to these classes and we'll learn a modicum about the industry and it will be helpful. Well, no more than we did four years earlier. But what's that job I should get? What's that internship? What do I do while I'm in, while I'm, you know, having this education, what do I do in the summer? So that when you graduate from school and if you're lucky enough to get an interview and someone calls you in and says, tell me about yourself, you don't want to say, well, I just graduated from XYZ University and I had a good grade point average or I was a top student, you want to say, I also while being a top student at XYZ University, I did A, B, C, D, E, F, G and here are letters of recommendation and here are campaigns I wrote and here's a, I worked on and here and here and here and here. And then you're One of those five, 10 or 40 kids out of that 450, that's more hireable. And, and then get in early and work late and be organized. Um, you know, and uh, and it's all a numbers game. You gotta ask a lot of people. And you know, the challenge is it's not just about, you know, answering an ad, I don't think anymore where AI you know is going to. You gotta find out who's, who's actually hiring it, who runs what sounds like that division and push a note out to them and keep on going until you hopefully get a meeting with them. And the other thing is, we frequently find that people don't respond until the 8th email. I mean it's just crazy. Um, so don't say, well, I wrote an email. I never heard back. I guess they don't want me. No, they just, they got, you know, they got 72 emails or 272 emails in their inbox, and they're in meetings and they're overworked. So just keep on politely asking them if they have 15 minutes to meet and discuss it further. And. And then eventually you get in and you remind them how terrific you are. Um, and you get a job and you hope that you work for someone smart and talented who makes you smarter and more talented and a company where you can grow or move on to the next position somewhere else.

Speaker A: I love that. That's great. I mean, someone said to me recently that, you know, if you send an email, you don't get a reply. It doesn't mean no. Uh, it just means not now. And that's how you got to treat it. And I think that's really true.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Eric, this has been amazing. I mean, if people are really interested in learning more about, um, what Ad Greets does in terms of personalization or Biz Greets does in terms of creating the AI videos, where's the best place for them to go to learn more?

Speaker B: So they should. I mean, I know it's hard to. To hear weird spellings on a podcast, but, you know, either go to a-r e e t z dot com, add greet spelled funnily, or biz greets B I B I Z G R e T z dot com, even though it's AI and we have two sites and it explains what we do, and, uh, then you can click an info button. Um, and we try to respond to everyone within an hour and set up a meeting and show you what's up and so on and so forth.

Speaker A: Well, that's awesome. I hope some people go and learn more about the technology. Eric, thank you so much. It's been fascinating. Thanks for being a guest on marketing B2B technology. Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B tech. We. We hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on itunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb m2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.