 We're going to talk to you guys about how to thrive in this world of challengers and embedded brands. Michael's going to talk about a case study around Zell, which I think is really interesting. So just out of curiosity, how many of you guys went to a Super Bowl party last weekend? I hosted one, actually. So I cooked all day, prepared. I had about 25 people over. And my daughter and my son helped me. And my friend said, hey, I'm going to be late. And he had the football pool. So at the last minute, we had to do the football pool, the 100 square football pool. And we had to divvy them up and hand them out. And then I had to collect money. So anybody participated in an illegal football pool? They are illegal, by the way. Maybe you don't raise your hands. Don't worry. There's no police at the doors. But how many of you guys participated in a football pool? Mine were $2 a square. So I had to collect $2 for every square, count up all the squares, and figure out who to report them to. Now, we had kids. We had parents. We had so many different types of people. Some people had cash. But other people had PayPal, Venmo, and Zell. I thought to myself, wow, I'm coming up to present with Michael. And I have this experience at my house that two years ago would have been completely different. And that's disruptive. For me, it's very convenient. So as we jump into this, it is about that opportunity of disrupting. It's interesting to look at Zell because Zell is actually the large banks. And they have to figure out how to react to those disruptors. So it's a challenge on both sides. From our perspective, thriving in this environment is about understanding the people. And if you listen to a lot of the presenters today, they're focused on understanding the people, the human side of the consumer, their customers, and their prospects. And that's how you're going to thrive in today's market. We all know that data is growing. This is a slide that just about everybody puts up. But it's not about the growth of the data. It's about how you utilize it. And again, that belief of how to connect with those people is getting harder and harder. So Resonate does make that easier to do. I love these stats because it's about, by 2025, the average number of interactions will be 4,785 per person. That's unbelievable. So while people are more connected today, it's harder for your brands to connect with them. So you have to make that connection at a different level. And it's not a secret about how to do that. But it is kind of a secret from a marketer perspective today on how to connect the dots, how to actually scale that out to the universe of consumers that are going to resonate with your brand, that have the same values as your brand, that believe in the values and motivations of your brand. Not just your brand, but your products as well. And we know that this is getting harder and harder for you guys because there's more and more cost entering the market. There's more and more systems. There's more and more products and diversity that you have to interact with on a daily basis. So this isn't getting any easier. And the disruptors are actually making it harder. Because I've got my loyal consumers that I've had if I'm an incumbent brand for years and years. And I've also got to go after the younger generations that have very little loyalty to brands in general, and that are gathering momentum with the disruptors. So it's a very interesting challenge that we face. As we've looked at the marketplace from a disruptor perspective, they're using very customer-centric strategies. And in order to have a customer-centric strategy, you have to utilize insights about the people, about your customers, about the prospects, about how big your market is. And it's not just a one-time thing. You have to do this continuously. Because the changes that occur in today's marketplace just happen very rapidly. Today's disruptor is next year's incumbent that's going to have another disruptor that they have to face. The people that are doing this right are getting rewarded. So they're growing at a clip of 30% on an annual basis when you're utilizing insights. This stack comes from Forrester. I believe it's in their consumer insights report that they delivered out last year. So a couple of keys here. So build your brand for humans. This is one of the easiest things to forget that it's not about the product necessarily that you're selling. While it's partly about that, the other side of it and the other perspective I have is, who is that human on the other side and how am I going to resonate with them? When they have those 4,000 interactions a day, how do I get that mind share with that person? And remembering that your audience is human, there's a why element, right? All these human elements of people, their values, their motivations, their drivers, their beliefs, matter to who your brand is and how you interact with them. And there's a lot of whys, right? Every decision you make has a why behind it. Why am I making that decision? Why am I buying that brand? Why am I leaving that brand? Why would I consider this disruptor? Why am I watching a particular TV show that's connected with that brand? So it's not just the reasons for buying a product. It's also where can I go and find these people? How should I be speaking to them? It's easy to look at the world and demographic world. We've been doing that for years in the marketing world. So looking on the surface, these two ladies look very similar. I would say they're in that 35 to 44 range from a demographic perspective. They have a child under the age of two. So we're gonna market our product to this demographic. But once you go a level deeper, they are actually very different from a values and motivations perspective. And if you think that you can continue to be efficient from a demographic perspective, we find that you're actually mistaken. You have to start to dissect and diversify into values and motivations to get that next level of efficiency. And it's all the way through your whole process about who these people are, right? And what your product is about that's gonna resonate with these folks. So key number two, aligned to values. So values are absolutely the foundation of the decision making. A lot of the whys about why people interact with brands are based on their values. So let's take a quick look at Columbia versus Patagonia enthusiasts. On the left-hand side, you have a very product-centric view from the Columbia sportswear. On the right-hand side, the copy, the creative is actually not product-centric at all, right? It's actually message-centric. It's actually resonating with a particular type of user. So why is that, right? They're both actually pretty looking ads, so they're stimulating. But when I look at some of the data that we have, this is our top values report from a resonate perspective and is looking at Columbia enthusiasts versus Patagonia buyers. What it tells us is the Columbia buyers actually have a value that they value authority. The Patagonia buyers value independence. So let's go back to those ads really quickly. Patagonia is actually hitting those values. But that product-centric view over here from a Columbia perspective really doesn't hit that authority, that leadership quality and value that their buyers are actually there. So they become at risk with not residing with their current customers. And that's a challenge from a lifetime value perspective that you really have to consider when trying to reach and engage with that audience. Lots of builds. So the idea here is there's a value exchange, an exchange for that attention that you're asking for based on those interactions that people are having at great volumes today. You wanna create a great experience. You wanna have a message and a creative that's gonna resonate with somebody to gain that attention. And in order to do that, at the core, you have, oh, sorry about that. I wanted to use my pointer. At the core, there is that human element, right? Which says these are, this is at the core of everybody. Those human elements, the values that I grow up with, the motivations, the drivers as I go through different life stages in my life. And these help to create the right experiences on content on your website, the right offer, the right solution for the greatest level of efficiency against my audiences that are embedded in my segmentation around the consumers. So the case in point that I mentioned is Zell. Michael is here to tell his story about how he utilized Resonate to help launch the Zell product. Thanks, Jason. And I'm Michael, I'm from Huge. And for any of you who don't know Huge, we're going into our 20th year. And we're a user centric design and transformation shop. What that really means is that, just as Jason's talking about the role of the human element in marketing and communications and branding, is that we're focused on bringing that human centricity throughout the entire product and marketing experience. And I've been at Huge for about three years. As chief data officer, before that I actually worked at Resonate kind of before your time. But I feel like it's an amazing practical example here to talk to you about how we apply those types of values and motivations in an actual marketing brand context. So first of all, how many of you have used Zell within your banking app? I'm guessing about a fourth. Oh, even better. So Zell, as the marketplace would talk about it, had this very confrontational stance. It was all about banks are teaming up to launch a Venmo killer. And I think that what's interesting about it is a lot of the initial buzz about Zell was very product centric. It was about how banks have this challenge about free, secure, easy transfers. They need to launch an alternative. What's interesting though is as an incumbent brand, it's kind of a hybrid challenger and incumbent challenge. It's true that Zell and the banks relate to this payment category, right? Venmo was already out in the market. And there's also this longstanding consumer behavior that every time you use cash, every time that you use checks, it actually costs the bank money. They don't want to handle all that expense. So they needed an alternative. Then they've got the incumbent challenge, which is the fact that these are seven massive organizations that are both used to being competitors, but they own the banking marketplace largely. So they have to come out with an initiative that's compatible with their objectives and with their own brands. So simultaneously, how do you be a challenger and an incumbent? And when you look at this from a data perspective, you actually see both the product and the human dimensions reflected, right? You see the product usage, right? Which is around how often do you use cash and there's very significant difference between peer-to-peer payment adopters versus those who are primarily using cash and checks. But then you see a whole lot of relationship attributes, right? How much of you using a financial product is really about your trust, right? In the institution or with other people. How much of it is about the staff? Like the people you actually interact with within your financial organizations. And then how much of it is about who recommends that you use a bank? And what we find here is that there's a really, people who are using Zell or Venmo, they still have to clear these thresholds of meeting the expectations of relationships. And so as we thought about this as a brand challenge, we had to think about the symbiotic relationship that Zell has to confer upon the banks this FinTech startup benefit, right? It's all about modernity, technology. These are the product attributes, right? The product attributes of ease and security and speed are met by Zell while the banks provide recognition and security and trust which are human attributes. And so as we kind of built this out as a brand and as a campaign, you can see how those delineations from product to user values about how it is that money either separates or connects people, that ended up being just as much the brand challenge of demonstrating Zell as decreasing friction between people around payments. So the example that Jason used about Super Bowl Party is exactly that type of moment that might otherwise become quite awkward or even contentious, right? You owe me money, why can't you pay me money? Why don't you have any cash? Instead it's reducing that friction and increasing the speed and security of that transaction. We had a couple of them at the party. Yeah, I'm sure you did. But this was obviously a long journey. And so we actually had six different kinds of ways of trying to crack this nut. And so Resonate was part of this in providing that type of syndicated audience data, but it also required us to go in and understand at a very human level what those users are facing, what are their points of frustration, their points of joy. And so from that proprietary category research to brand research to user testing, my team partnered very extensively with both the client and with other outside side partners to be able to answer those questions and solve the brand challenge that could otherwise not resonate with that audience. And so over the course of about three years, we actually had 18 different tracks of work to build the product, to define the brand, to define the comms, initially to market the brand to banks, because banks had to adopt Zell as an internal standard before we could go to market and convince consumers to use it, and then finally all the consumer marketing. And so the challenge is getting all of that human element of kind of the decreasing friction and tension while being an authoritative and trustworthy brand, that being the challenge. So we had to define the brand itself to be very unbank like, because you have to confer that modernity and the FinTech startup element comes through in the brand while having to live nicely with all the other owner bank brands. We had to create this playbook, which translated again those very human motivations and needs that come out, especially in the photography. How do you show people in motion, people transacting? This isn't like the cold FinTech brand anymore. This is not about technology and price. This is around human connection and how it translates into the brand. And then as we went into market with national TV, the story of Zell was actually told through this transaction between friends, right? One owed the other money, and rather than this be a point of stress between them, they had to use Zell effectively to solve that moment. And it ended up being this very humorous but kind of like playful adaptation with David Diggs, you may recognize from Hamilton, just being able to show that rhythm and flow, the dynamism that Zell could bring to the market. You see the same thing in the playfulness around the way the brand manifests itself in traditional media. Again, it's about the connection between people. Here's the person you owe, here's the person who will receive the money, and how do you make that as simple as possible? And then even playing out in more tactical solutions like social, how do you use the shareable qualities of social media to actually make that happen, right? To have David Diggs saying, hey man, you owe me money, use Zell to pay me back. So these types of executions were really successful for us all the way through to traditional media partnerships, getting on Ellen, having this be like the social currency of connection through transactions. So fast forward a year, we go from being a late adopter to the space to overtaking Zell as the predominant peer-to-peer payment method. And with a lot of the backstory of this being around the change of behaviors. At the end, just like we started and we said this isn't really a product story, it's really more about people's connection. So a lot of the focus is just on changing behaviors away from cash to peer-to-peer payment as an adoption which saves a tremendous amount of money for the banks. And ultimately now there's $35 billion transacted in the last quarter across their network, up 61% from a year before. The volume of transactions up 81% from a year before. So this is simultaneously as we talked about a challenger brand disrupting a category while at the same time the incumbents were actually able to transform themselves. So I think that the lesson for a lot of us here if we're coming from an established brand and we're under pressure to transform and respond to disruptors and challengers is that you can work together, you can act like a challenger brand but you have to understand those values, the motivations, the tension in the category that you're seeking to resolve. So have that user-centric, have that human-centric approach. Thanks, Michael. So the three keys again just as a reminder, building your brands for humans, aligning with those customer values is critical and doing that throughout your process. It's not just about a one-time study, it's about ongoing, measuring that and seeing how the values change for different segments of your audience and then creating those unbreakable relationships with great content, with great messaging and with great creative. Resonate's able to do this because we have 200 million people in the US, it's all US-based, US adults in our platform. We know 12,000 things about those people. So 200 million profiles with 12,000 things. That's how Michael and other brands like a SunTrust, like a, gosh, I'm forgetting my customers. It's like the Pandora guy that forgets his favorite music. Like Hershey is utilizing our data to create their segmentation, understanding what they're gonna say to their actual consumers, getting to a bit more of a micro-segmentation so that my messaging and my creative is actually gonna resonate more instead of that broad strategy that's gonna be largely inefficient. Going out and executing and then measuring your segmentation strategy as well. We've recently released our State of the Consumer Report which you can download at our website and we also have a room here with demos available downstairs. If anybody's interested in having further discussions or seeing a demonstration of the platform and what those 200 million people look like for your brands, there's thousands of brands in the platform that we can analyze within seconds. So thank you very much for the time today and I think we have a few minutes for questions and answers. Any questions? All right, there we go. So Zel being a mobile company and obviously you having purview over more brands than just Zel as the chief data officer at huge which I think is one of the coolest offices of any agency in the city, so kudos for that. I'm interested in sort of Zel's philosophy as a mobile company within iOS's limitations around sort of cookie-less mobile web as people obviously use iPhones pretty often. A lot of people use them, a lot of people are browsing the mobile web as cookies sort of deteriorate there. Tim Cook, Privacy ITP. How does that impact sort of the continuity of data as you see it for Zel and others for sort of marketing purposes? So let me caveat this first by saying I'm very grateful to my client for both supporting my being up here talking about this today. I think that this actually was a place where the ownership structure creates some fragmentation between what you as an individual brand would know about your users and your customers and the way you would market to them. Because Zel doesn't really own their customer relationships they can't create an identity graph to be able to market to them and link their app usage behaviors in the way that an individual bank might. So what I would say is that created a bit of a marketing challenge for us where we actually had to be more thoughtful and nuanced in our use of third-party data because they couldn't, by virtue of their relationship with the banks, free up their first-party data for marketing purposes. So that's really interesting. I think those of you that have more complicated ownership and governance structures and who are looking at your privacy practices that probably won't sound very alien to you. Because often the customer data might be owned into a different group. So the challenge is really how do you think nimbly and be able to accomplish that strategic objective while not running afoul of the understandable scrutiny in privacy practices? So it's a great question and I think that it's one that a lot of brands really have to be thoughtful about how they're going to adapt. We work with a lot of customers too that have similar challenge. Three years ago we were completely cookie-based and we've had to evolve our platform as well to be mobile ID-based from a made perspective. So it's a mobile ad ID that we can find people on and build our profiles against those people as well. So like at Disney Studios, they have a partnership with Fandango. That's, everybody uses that from an app perspective. You're not using that on a desktop. So you can actually upload, similar to placing a tag on a website now, you can now upload your mobile app IDs into the platform to get all kinds of insights like those values and motivations of those people as well. So I think the marketplace is catching up with that. I don't think cookies are going away anytime soon, but certainly you have to catch up with the mobile IDs and the iOS problem, of course. One thing that also sparks mine is that when we think about a user journey, there are early points of that journey where that user is not identified and then you learn more about them as they get kind of deeper into that customer relationship. So the great thing is being able to have audience definitions that flex with how much you know about that user. So initially when they arrive, you may know very little, should rely increasingly on third-party descriptions and understanding of that visitor. Then as you pick up that first-party understanding, it's all about that interplay between what you knew about them before they arrive, what you learned about them through their interactions. So being able to build a data ecosystem that flexes with how much you know about that user is really key. Great question, thank you. We do have time for more. Thanks a lot, guys. What's the low-hanging fruit for challenger brands with a massive resource and tool like Resonate? Like what's just the simple stuff people aren't doing that they could do to start really changing how they think about marketing? I think the simple stuff is ultimately understanding at a greater level of detail the consumers that are oriented to your brand. So I'll talk about the, Casper was up here earlier, understanding that mattress market, the people that actually will go and lie down at a store, but then will buy online, right? Similar from a retail perspective. We have all those different dimensions and those dimensions are important. The past was about doing one-time study and if I forgot to ask a question or if my market changed, I gotta go back and ask that again. With a platform like Resonate, we've got so much capacity to ask those questions and build that intelligence for you and track it over time, that's really the low-hanging fruit. As we build those segmentations, it's about actioning off of that research. So that research to activation is connected with our platform because we have all those mobile IDs and device IDs and cookie IDs to find those people on as well. I'd answer the question also in two ways. One is just white space identification. I mean, you can look at white space as being like, there should be a brand in this category that owns this and this, but you need to be able to size, like how big of a market is that? And I think that the role of third-party insights in that can be very quickly used for kind of sizing and modeling to understand, like, well, if we go after this type of user versus this type of user versus this type of user, how big are those segments and who are their existing relationships with? That's a process that, using custom research, could take three to six weeks, instead could be done in an afternoon if you've got the right data sets. The other thing is understanding affinity brands. So once you know, roughly, like who it is you're trying to reach, knowing, well, what brands have existing deep connections with those individuals? So for example, if I'm working in financial services, it may be still highly relevant for me to understand what are the automotive brands or what are the apparel brands that are key to that person's identity and their conceptualization of themselves? How much of that is around status, achievement, connection, trust? Those are things that really span categories. They're more at a human level. So starting from that challenger brand construct, but understanding the entire lives of that user, not just a category-specific understanding of what they do. I think we're out of time. Thank you so much, Jason and Michael. Thank you guys. Thank you.