Getting ready to cut things up? Digital Marketing Segmentation with AI.
Digital Marketing continues to evolves and the heart is all the data available. This data can be segmented for better results, and now with AI and Machine Learning it is taking it to a whole new level.
Enjoy a great podcast with guest Joel Otton Creative Executive at Optikal a seasoned veteran in Web Development.
Now he is sharing what is the difference between application development, web development, and web application development.
- Omni Channel Digital Marketing
- Segmentation of the Digital Marketing Campaign
- Impacts of Analytics and Machine Learning in the future.
- And more..
Listen in for to the podcast now...
Transcripts are also below! If you would like to be a guest, learn more and schedule your podcast with Jeff Stanislow here.
Also, if you like this and want to up get a certification in web development by taking an exam check them out
The Host: Jeff Stanislow, CEO of Chief Internet Marketer
Jeff Stanislow
Hello, this is Jeff Stanislow, the chief at Chief Internet Marketer. I’ll like to thank you for joining us today, and we have a special guest Joel in Joel Otten. Joel is an industry innovator who's done a lot of different things out of the California marketplace, and now he's with Optikal. We're going to talk to Joel today about digital marketing, where it's going, the types of things that he's seeing, especially when his skill set is diving into a lot of the segmentation, the analytics, even the AI in the artificial intelligence and machine learning. So how are you doing today Joel?
Joel Otten
I'm fantastic. How you doing today Jeff?
Jeff Stanislow
Good, man. Thanks for joining me. We had some conversation a little while back, and I thought we kind of hit it off. And Man, I wish I would have recorded it back then because it was good. But now we got it set up and we're going to talk a little bit about digital marketing so….
Joel Otten
That sounds great. Thanks for having me on today.
Jeff Stanislow
Tell us a little bit about your background. You went to Santa Clara, and you were in New York for a little while and then back to California. And it seems like you've been kind of in the digital space for a little bit, and…. Just a little background.
Joel Otten
Yeah. So I went to Santa Clara University, majored in economics, because I realized I wasn't smart enough to be a computer science major in school, that I had a lot of really smart talented computer science individuals. And I just when I say that, but you know, Santa Clara is known to have been right in the heart of Silicon Valley at the time, was really putting out some really special new programmers. So you know, I started off in Wall Street working in sales. And then after a brief intro into that, I really found that retail brokerage was okay, but I was more interested in the marketing side of things, right, because that had a large part of it. So then I moved back to LA, and I started working in mobile marketing with a division of the hyper factory and company that later sold to the Meredith publishing for $30 million. And it was really a strategic mobile marketing agency. And it was an average mobile advertising network. Now, you got to realize this is 2006, tight? This is before the iPhone really came to be; this is when the BlackBerry was the hot phone on the internet.
Jeff Stanislow
Most cutting edge.
Joel Otten
Yeah, most cutting edge thing. And actually, some people along with myself, we really saw it as the future because an advertiser's dream is to have a one to one relationship with their consumer. And we said you know what, if you can be on somebody's phone, there's going to be nothing more intimate than that. Low and behold, how true that has become. We created some mobile magazines that were specifically for the Blackberry. We took people's before responsive websites or anything like that, we took people's websites and we took their RSS feed, and optimize it for the BlackBerry and then sold ad inventory against it. It was really a unique concept of the time. And then Steve Jobs transformed the iPod into the iPhone, and all of a sudden, that became obsolete, because now you could actually have a complete web experience, even though it wasn't truly complete, but you could have a more complete web experience on your Phone.
Jeff Stanislow
Right, right.
Joel Otten
So then after the hyper factory sold the American publishing, myself, my brother and one of my associates at the hyper factory, we started up First Agency. And what it was really all about was marrying technology brands and digital marketing platforms. One of the largest pieces of digital marketing is understanding how the infrastructure works together. You know, we're approaching 2020, and I can't even tell you how many large to medium sized businesses I work with and consult with; Fortune 2000 companies that don't have their pixel tracking and cookie tracking and analytics setup properly so that they can really get a complete view of their customer.
Jeff Stanislow
Yeah, I find that pretty amazing to Joel. One of the things that I do is try to create a list of assets, and the pixel tracking is on that list. And you get kind of start start peeling back the onion, and all of a sudden it's like you realize they didn't really know what they're were doing when they got set up for.
Joel Otten
Yeah. And there's so many platforms that make it so easy for you. But then there are still nuances to it, right? A perfect example is Shopify. I do a lot of Shopify websites, I'm a Shopify partner. One of my clients that eventually became the CEO for their business, we went from zero to $40 million per year in about 4 years, we were one of the 1% Shopify stores a couple years ago. And this was before Facebook and Shopify had a custom setup where you just put in your Facebook ID, and then it would link all of the initiate cards, add cards and check out. And so we manually had this set up properly. And at the time, nobody was doing it, right? This is 2014, 2015. And so when we
did that, it literally gave us a leg up on all the competition.
Jeff Stanislow
Yeah, you could see the data.
Joel Otten
You could see the data not only but where the follow up is, you could then create segmented audiences based on where they were following up. And so the ability to segment based on these things is still a very relevant and important thing that a lot of brands don't do. You know, it's all about the customer journey, right? And Google Analytics has a special little tool that if you have, whether it be e-commerce tracking or goals set up properly, you can look at the multi-channel attribution funnel, right? And that will show you how many touch points it took before a particular consumer achieved the goal or bought or whatever you're looking for. And a lot of people and brands assume it's a very linear path, but then they don't analyze their own shopping habits. When have you ever seen an ad, clicked on it and then purchased that first time? You know, very rarely does that ever happen. Most people see that, they've probably heard an ad and or seen an ad. And it's going to be multiple times, right? It's got to have the right amount of frequency within a time frame so that somebody remembers it. And then maybe you click the ad, maybe you don't, maybe you look it up. Maybe you look up for something that the product does. One of my clients, they do female birth control delivered. And so because it's a kind of new space, you may see the ad…. And we've seen this before, a user will see the ad, and then they don't click on the ad, but then they look up birth control delivery. And so now we're literally doing advertising for the entire vertical.
Jeff Stanislow
I see.
Joel Otten
And so that's sort the old tides rise together. So then you've got to find a way to stand out among the crowd, because your advertising ad educated them that this was even a possibility. Now they're going to start doing some research and shopping into what's best for them. So that's an interesting aspect of what advertising can do. If you're to blue ocean so to speak, and you're advertising something that people aren't familiar with, well, then your advertising is literally paying for education, which can be a very costly thing, and you may end up benefiting one of your competitors.
Jeff Stanislow
Now, this is Jeff Stanislow, the Chief Internet Marketer, I'm talking with Joel Otten from Optikal. We're talking about diving into some of the data, how things have shifted from mobile back in the day when we were working with blackberries, but we understood that mobile advertising was a great way to go, and that these devices were going to be important. And now we're diving in a little bit more on some of the data and analytic side of things in today's marketplace. Tell us a little bit about Optikal and what you guys are doing there specifically. I know you do a lot of segmentation and data messaging.
Joel Otten
Yes. So we're really a marketing solution that provides a true one to one human connection for brands and advertisers who are looking to reach a targeted audience across digital social, mobile, programmatic, traditional and other direct response channels. It's a solution that's powered by integrated proprietary technology and database partners. We partner with some of the largest Big Data companies, Axium, Epsilon, Experian, but then we also have some smaller data partners that have access to very robust data that isn't readily available to everybody. And we really tried to transmit your message to a highly targeted audience. And we try to make sure that we hit that audience across every channel platform and device that they are on. You know, we really have a unique process that takes in our ID map and transmit methodology. What that means is first, we're going to identify who the high value prospects are for your product or service. Then we're going to map out the different channels that we should reach them on, the cadence, the different customer journeys, what the triggers are. If they do this, how they moved, into what segment, and what the messaging and offer for those segments are. And then we sort of transmit that plan across all the different channels, platforms and devices, optimizing all along the way, right? Like a big part of transmitting is then reporting any results that come back. It's very important you analyze the results, and you report on the results weekly. You may not optimize on every single result, because you need to make sure that you have a large enough of a sample size, that the results are relevant. But you always want to make sure that you understand the reports, what's coming in, and how to work and optimize these things on a weekly basis.
Jeff Stanislow
And Joel, where's it going? Or what are some of the challenges that you're seeing in this kind of data intensive world, not only from the client side or executing campaigns, but how about the talent side? I see more and more that skills gap is widening in digital marketing, because these things are not for the weak hearted.
Joel Otten
Well, what I would say is there's a lot of people that talk the game. But then once you get into the tactics of what they're actually doing, they're actually just basically doing the same stuff that everybody else is doing. So that's really where the gap is, is everybody understands how to talk the game. There's enough content out there in how to talk it and what to do, but not enough people literally have their sleeves rolled up, and are in it. I would say one of the benefits that I have is…. I used to call myself a digital janitor. And I really credit my brother Josh Otten for a lot of this, because he used to be the CEO of the company we first started, and he really wanted somebody within the company to understand all aspects of digital. And he really challenged me to go in there and not to just read about it, but to do it and understand it. And I think because I was forced to be in that, I can do any single piece of the puzzle. And by being able to do that I understand how it all fits together. And I think that's the important thing, is understanding technology. A lot of people think technology is magic. But it's not magic, right? It's pretty interesting algorithms, it's all just math equations; “if and then” equations. And you'd be surprised how many people really think technology is magic. They just say, hey, do this for me. And they don't think of ramifications or the 30,000 different ways it can be done. And I guess that's a good thing, right? That's why people hire me to do that. But you'd be surprised how many people say, hey, I want to do this like this. And then I'll come back and I'll say, well, what's the goal of what you're trying to do? Because that may not be the best way to do it.
Jeff Stanislow
Right.
Joel Otten
And once people tell you the goal, and then you say, well, have you thought of this, that or the other thing? Well, then they really start to see the forest through the trees.
Jeff Stanislow
What about some of the challenges that are coming down the pipeline? We’ve got a lot of around privacy issues. You've been out in California, you have your own special piece of pie that's coming out here regarding that. Talk to us a little bit about how you guys are preparing for it there, and you know, maybe some other data, integrity privacy type things that we might get.
Joel Otten
So that's actually very very relevant. This CCPA becomes effective January 1 2020. And everybody that deals with data is going to be affected by it. Whether you take consumer data, and then you know, publishers. So publishers do multiple things. There are some publishers that bring in data and they literally sell the PII data; they are going to be the most affected, because they need to have ways for people to quickly opt out. And having worked with some of these affiliate publishers, what they do is once the data comes in…. I literally worked with companies that within a nanosecond of you clicking submit, some of that data is 1000 times over.
Jeff Stanislow
Right. Yeah.
Joel Otten
And there's a little checkbox that says, by clicking this, you agree for us to basically do whatever we want with your data. Well, with the CCPA, they are now requiring that these types of affiliates have the ability for users to then opt out of their data continually being sold. I don't know how those kinds of affiliates are going to deal with that challenge, because once they sell it, they sell it with the permission that that person can then do whatever they want with it. So that's going to be a real challenge. But it'll also be a challenge to see how the courts hold up with it. Because if somebody is gives you permission to sell something, once you sell it, in theory you're no longer responsible for what that person does with it. And that's kind of what these affiliates do, and that's kind of what this law is aimed at stopping. So it's going to be an interesting ecosystem. We've been building technologies to help publishers become CCPA compliant. It is really a lot of different software's that you have to get your data buyers to opt into. And I think it's going to be a big deal because while you don't know the ramifications, you don't want to be liable. When mobile marketing was in its infancy and people were sending out appointment reminder and marketing texts, I remember one of the first cases was Jiffy Lube sent out a mass promotional text to people that did not double opt in, and ended up costing them a million dollars. So I could see the ramifications and fines for this being something along those lines. So you've really got to make sure that you find ways that you apply, because California as progressive as it is, will be very quick to find those that are not in compliance, and companies will be shut down because of it.
Jeff Stanislow
True, true. Yeah. So it's one of the challenges that we got going on, talking with Joel Otten from Optikal. Joel, we have to pick up another segment of this podcast here. But before we do, tell us how someone can get a hold of you and find out some more of their brand and need some of your services. How can one connect with you?
Joel Otten
Yeah, definitely. So our website is [optikal.com]; Optikal with a K. And there, we really talk about how to sell your product or service, whatever it may be. Or you can follow me on Twitter, it's livittodalimit; that's @livittodalimit on Twitter. And I also have a Facebook page, it's Joel H. Otten. So you can find that in there, I really try to give tips. And you will find out about different marketing avenues there and what I'm doing to staying on top of the marketplace.
Jeff Stanislow
True. Well listen Joel, I appreciate your time, that's going to be it, and have a wonderful day.
This is Jeff Stanislow, the Chief Internet Marketer, and remember to be the Chief. Thank you and have a great day Joel.
Joel Otten
Thank you Jeff.
Jeff Stanislow
All right, take care man.