 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation featuring Branch. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. My guest joining me today is Mike Nabovsny, the VP of Sales at Branch. Michael, welcome to the CUBE, great to have you here. Thanks Lisa, really good to be here. To talk to us about Branch, give the audience an overview of the technology, the mission of the company, what is it that you guys do? Yeah, certainly. Thank you for the opportunity. So we were founded in 2014 and the mission is to create a more open, connected and relevant digital ecosystem. And of course that's very kind of top level and so what does that mean in terms like how do we do that? We do that in two ways. We have two large products. One is our mobile linking platform and this is like specifically the thing that people click on. So you might think of like a hyperlink. We think about branch links. We want every link in the world to be a branch link and why? Like why would that be helpful? Two reasons. One is it's gonna give the user the best experience, the most relevant experience, the fastest experience and we're very kind of passionate about those delightful user experiences. We'll talk more about the importance of those as we go on. And then the second reason is we provide great accuracy and great data in measurement. And so second product is our mobile measurement platform or mobile measurement partnership that enables marketers to help understand what parts of their marketing are working as they buy for consumer attention and buy for consumer dollars. So yeah, that's the mission and kind of one we were founded. That consumer experience these days just seems to be more and more critical because one of the things that has waned thin the last two years is patience on the hand of I think all of us at some point, right? So being able to help brands deliver a seamless, frictionless customer experience is table stakes for businesses in any organization. Talk to me in, down it in 2014, lots of change and evolution of the business of the technology and of course of the world since then. How has life changed for mobile modern marketers? What are some of the key challenges that they have that they come to branch and say, help us 60s? Yeah, that's the question, right? Is if you zoom out, if you zoom out and take just the 10,000 foot view and go back in time, like marketing was certainly simpler, right? And with each new platform creates new opportunities for marketers to reach their consumers in new ways but also new complexity to master those and also prioritize which ones are marketers going to invest in versus which ones are they not going to invest in? And today the platform that is the top of the heap here of course is the mobile phone. It's where the attention is, the insights, the data that are out there, your audience is more than well aware of those things. And so these are where the eyeballs are but within the mobile phone you have a whole host of walled gardens and new ones pop up all the time. The latest kind of biggest has been TikTok but you can kind of go backwards from there and you can also go forward from where we stand today that is not going to be the last one. And each of these are platforms into themselves for marketers to go reach their consumers. So two challenges for marketers. Number one, how do you reach your consumer in those places and also ensure a consistent amazing brand experience? Because this all kind of started with you mentioning the importance of that user experience and when we're talking about mobile phone tens of seconds matter, honestly hundreds of seconds matter and there's data and studies that show that you get delays or you get a little bit of friction and your conversion rate will plummet. And so branch is that linking infrastructure to ensure that regardless of the platform you're trying to reach your consumer on which is getting more and more complex and there are more and more of them that you can trust you're gonna get the best user experience without having to dedicate a ton of engineering resources. And then second, that you're gonna have insights you're gonna have the best available insights to how those campaigns how those endeavors are performing to help you then prioritize and make informed decisions for your next set of campaigns. And that's so important as we've seen marketing evolve so much in recent years to become really a science. So being able to deliver those insights to organizations I imagine across any industry on how campaigns are performing where they're losing people how they can facilitate conversions faster with less friction is a competitive advantage for any business, right? Yeah, a hundred percent. Talk to me about, give me an, a customer example like walk me through a customer any industry one that you think really articulates your value and kind of walk me through that experience if I'm engaging with this brand on my mobile phone maybe my laptop, different devices how does all that work together to be able to deliver that seamless experience to the consumer? Yeah, I love that you mentioned different devices that one's huge. So yeah, let's talk through a customer example. I'll just suffice to say that this is a customer that does, sends music to tens of millions, hundreds of millions of phones worldwide. And they were using actually a competitive platform in the marketplace and they cared very deeply about having a delightful user experience in every single channel that they could have it in. And they wanted to see if branch was a stronger user experience. And to do this on the left-hand side you have all the different places you might wanna reach your consumers. And so let's think about some of those maybe let's think about it in the music industry. Let's say I've got a great playlist that I know you love Lisa and I shared with you and let's say I shared via text message and you click on it, what does that user experience like? Let's say I share it on my Instagram feed and you click on it, what does that user experience like? Let's say I send it to an email these are all different platforms that you could click on this link and this music platform wants you to have the best possible user experience. Now over on the right-hand side let's talk about all the different devices and technology. You could interact with that link on your iPhone but maybe you're not an iPhone user maybe you're interacting with that on a Samsung. Maybe you're on an older version of Android. All of these things actually matter because in the deep technicals of how these links work and how these walled gardens operate they're making changes and all of those changes can cause breakage. Okay, this was all the background now the actual story. So head-to-head test one of my favorite most unique companies that illustrates the importance of user experience out there is a company called applause. Applause literally puts together a user panel of hundreds, if not thousands of users with all these different phone makeups because they recognize that it's really hard to do this type of testing in the wild if you're just a brand like are you gonna have hundreds of different phones and lots of different setups in your lab? So they do this for you with a user panel and they put branch links head-to-head with the competitor link in all of these different spaces and they said we want our panel to click on link A and then write down specifically how long did it take and they actually have like a timer did it you get the expected outcome? Did it take you to the place that you expected and just generally other things about that experience? And when rated head-to-head they put it in green, yellow and red buckets branch was getting a green rating over 85% of the time and the competitor was getting a green rating under 20% of the time. And in that difference for this music company was downstream metrics that really mattered to them such as consumption of the media, user happiness conversion to free trials and conversion to paid trials. And so by having that better foundation better user experience, there was massive ROI that over the course of this six month test we proved out and then initiated a multi-year partnership. That's a significant difference, 85% to less than 20. When you're in customer conversations what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're talking about branch and why it is leaps ahead of the competitors out there? Certainly we start there, right? So like we care most about that user experience, right? So if you, when we get over to the measurement side which I hope we get to measurement is all about telling you did the conversion happen and where should you give credit to, right? And the conversion could be an event could be streaming a song could be a purchase whatever a conversion is for you but conversions don't happen if you don't have a strong user experience, you know and so you can't measure a conversion that didn't take place. And so in terms of our differentiator we start with that user experience. And so we talk about within the mobile ecosystem we've identified 6,000 edge cases. These are Instagram builds on a certain cell phone maybe an older operating system. So 6,000 cases that you as a marketer should care about but you don't necessarily want your engineering team spending time staying up to date on all of those. And if one of them changes if one of them breaks the big ones that are out there that people will be familiar with of course is we're May 25th right now on June 6th Apple will have their developer conference and they do have a history of announcing some changes there that then cause engineering teams to go running. You want branch to be that partner to know that we will run faster than anybody else and ensure that you're ahead of the pack for whatever those changes may be to ensure that that solid customer user experience that you could build upon. And then over on the measurement side we're going to give you best in class insights because one we're giving you better conversions but two we have a best in class fraud platform. We have best in class data to increase your ROAS. We have very high accuracy across 700 ad networks. And we're going to shield you from these systematic disruptions that happen in the digital space. So we talked about the mobile linking plan from the MFA let's now talk about the mobile measurement program the MMP because measurement is so critical for organizations to be able to understand see that data and act on it in real time. How does branch help? Yes, certainly. So on the mobile measurement platform side generally when people think about this and they talk about this they are largely talking about paid ads and we think paid ads are very important and we do talk about that quite a bit. And so with that you're spending money with a lot of the big networks. So Google, Facebook, Apple, et cetera. And we enable you to get an insight into which network was truly the last touch because when you're dealing with self attributing networks they tend to all take credit for them. So, hey, yeah, Facebook we saw this user, Google we also saw this user and they both take credit. And so we give you some insight into where was that touch point in kind of a series of touch points to enable you to like assign credit as you see fit for future decisions. And then beyond the self attributing networks there's hundreds of other networks that you should be testing. Like you should consider to be testing because like to me this is the competitive advantage for marketers is the ability to find valuable users where your competition is not. And in general, if you're one big retailer and another big retailer you're both spending on the same keywords on Google or the same things on Facebook. But if you could find some kind of niche networks for your audience and branches enable you to one test that with confidence and two, the smaller networks tend to have maybe a little bit more susceptible to some fraud. And so have confidence that there is going to be fraud blocking should it pop up. That is going to increase your ROAS and increase your decision making over time. The technology sense fascinating. I wish we had more time. I would love to dig in this deeper but you've done a great job of articulating the value of branch. What it is that you guys do the value in it for customers in many industries. I love the music example. Thank you so much Mike for joining me today and sharing these insights into branch and the website is branch.io. Yes, that's correct. All right, folks can go there for more information. Awesome, Mike's thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Lisa. For Mike Nabosny, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation.