 I'm Martin Itcher and I'm your host tonight and I will give you one or two minutes until the last participants who are just registering at the moment are coming online and it would be great if you show me that you can find the chat and just put in the chat where are you at the moment that would be interesting to me. I am in Pinneberg which is near Amber so I put in here Germany and there is Abby and she is from Bern in Switzerland. Well we know that Abby but there might be some others. We have Barbados again. Always Barbados. Barbados is always one of the first ones and I'm looking out of my window. It's cold. We have snow in Hamburg at the moment which is rare and I would like to be in Barbados. Then we have South Africa. We have Tbilisi which is great. I was in Georgia in July and it was a fantastic holiday so that's interesting. Then we have South Africa. We have Austria. Montreal in Canada. Hey it's early there. What is the time in Montreal? It must be something like 10 o'clock in the morning or something like that or even earlier. 10 a.m. Yeah that was right. Then we have El Salvador. We have Hong Kong. We have Palestine. Well great. So again Russia. Snowy Canada. Yes I assume that's snowy as well. So let's discuss in the future we are all traveling to Barbados and we will make the next meeting in Barbados and we will do it offline. We will talk about online and offline in the next minutes that the next meeting should be online, well offline on Barbados I think that would be my preferences. And the five days meeting. Five days meeting. Yes minimum and on the beach. Japan. It must be late in Japan already. What is it now in Japan? Is it like 10 p.m. or even later? Thailand as well. It's very late there. So it's great to have you all online and as we are already more than 50 participants I think let's start. We will have a great innovation talk. I'm really interested in that topic but before I really start to moderate I will give over to Olivier Boussard from the UPU and he wants to say probably hello to you as well. So Olivier up to you the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you Martin and again good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everybody. It's fantastic to see all those participants from everywhere in the world. Thank you very much for connecting and being with us today. It's really a great pleasure to welcome you all to this innovation talk. It's actually the number eight of these series of webinars that we are organizing under the umbered out of the direct marketing advisory board of the universal postal union. As you all probably know the direct marketing advisory board is a group of postal operator but also private sector organization that works to promote direct marketing as a postal product and also discuss the challenges and opportunities for the development of direct marketing. During our innovation talks the seven innovation talks that we had this year we have indeed addressed many of the drivers and trends that are influencing direct marketing today and that will influence direct marketing tomorrow more importantly. The last session that we have today will address the core of the dilemma that is facing the direct marketing business. I'm talking here about the digital versus physical nexus. Some are considering that digital media are a threat to physical communication when others are seeing the combination of both offline and online channels as the best way to achieve customer acquisition and this discussion is today absolutely critical for many postal operators in the world in building their direct marketing strategies. That's why I'm therefore extremely happy and very excited that we are today benefiting from the views and the analysis of our guest speaker Dr. Ralph Kreitzer. Welcome Ralph to this innovation talk. Ralph is a professor of marketing at Berlin School of Economics and Law and I'm sure that we will learn a lot from him from his experience both from his impressive academic background of course but also from his business experience. So I really wish you all a very very fruitful and successful webinar and fruitful session and back to you Martin and see you all in an hour. Thank you. I hope it's a little bit less than an hour because I'm quite sure that you will have some questions as I know. Probably. Thanks Olivier. Thanks Abby for giving us a good start and I would like to introduce actually our guest today which is Ralph Kreitzer. It's a very German name. I'm sorry for that and even his first name is written not with a PH as normally all Ralph's in the world are but with an F which is the German version of Ralph. So but I think that the pronunciation is nearly the same so you can just say Ralph and you will know who you mean when we are talking about. So Ralph is somebody I know for probably at least 15 years now and he is one of the persons who from my personal opinion is not only the academic guy but has a good combination of practical knowledge. He was working in the industry for lots of years. He was even working for a subsidiary of German posts in some time in the past and so he has a good practical know how and at the same time he is somebody who really wows his students. So he is a great professor and I can tell you that because I know some of his students and they are all talking very good about him. So I'm quite sure that he can do both. And he is somebody who is well actually directly at this line between online and offline. So we were on several in the dialogue tours together in innovation topics in Japan in Southern Korea and especially in China and we saw a lot of interesting companies over there together. But on the other side Ralph wrote over 50 books and all of them are published on paper. And as you see in the background this is not a zoom background with some virtual books. It's real physical books behind him. And so he has some very interesting background in both of these worlds offline and online. And I think this is something that really makes him the best speaker we could get today for that topic. So because before I talk any longer which is already too long. Ralph I would like to give over to you the floor is yours and we are very very interested in your presentation and like always we are interested in dialogue as well. So we will have now about half an hour presentation and then we all can ask our questions. If you have questions please put them in the chat or directly when you have the question or later on. And we are looking forward to the dialogue with you. Ralph did you get your computer working so that we can start with the presentation? Yes first of all I would like to thank you for the very nice introduction. I thank you for the attentiveness of the figures we have today. And I'm going to share my screen with you. Martin are we able are you able to see my screen? Not yet. Not yet then we already did it successfully. So all the audience you see that we are live. Okay now I can see your screen. Yes ready to go. Perfect so have a lot of fun with us. Okay thank you. So the big challenge the very exciting question online or offline the combination of the best of both. Now I would like to cover with you some key questions. First of all online marketing has taken off. We should understand why to have a convincing answer to this situation. What could help convince our customers to invest again or at least also in offline media? KPIs could show the way and I will end with a little conclusion from my point of view. If you first focus on the question why online market advertising has taken off we have to take a look at this development digital advertising spending worldwide. We just see one direction significant growth rates year by year. We need to understand what are the main reasons that advertising in the online world is so important. We should understand why our customers switch to the online world in many cases. First of all we can see that there are very short set up times for online marketing campaigns and we can always compare it with our offers as postal operators how short are our set up times. It's very easy to track often in real time in the online world and we can also very easily optimize our campaigns again based on real time advertise retail data when we are in the online area. We often see an ease of use. We can order something. We can book something via online platforms. We have really a large number of different communication channels with almost infinite varieties of advertising. The online competitors offer our online availability 24-7 a wide range of customization options and it's really question I will cover a little bit later whether these are these opportunities these online opportunities are really covered or connected with lower costs. What we need to do as a postal operator is to conduct a digital gap analysis what's meant by it. We have to look at the development over time that there is a huge potential for change. There are a lot of competitors offering new solutions technologies offer us very interesting solution as well and we need to find out how strong is the willingness for change in our own organizations. Do we have I hope smart managers like you the audience today to use the potential for change or do we wait for breaking points where we are forced more or less to change something but you can see here is still a gap between what is possible and what we as organizations use and this gap is nothing but the potential flight path for competitors. So by doing nothing or by doing not enough we invite competitors to attack us to attack our markets to acquire our customers and all these things are supported by what we call the disruptive technologies. So it would be very nice for all of you to find out which alternatives which alternative solutions which competitors use the potential more successfully than ourselves and how much of this potential do we really use in our own organizations because if we don't use it somebody else will therefore especially as post operators we have to answer several questions. When we focus the short setup times we need to ask ourselves can we compete with the set up set up times of online channels if there are a need for improvement and the potential to become better. When we focus the ease of use is booking our services as easy as with online media and available 24 seven and if not what can we do to improve it a quick advertising check is indispensable can we offer these kind of tracking solutions similar to those of our online competitors. When we focus on the individualization of communication this is a mega trend in marketing do our price concepts promote or prevent the individualization of communication. Now remember when I worked for the German post we have lists wonderful price lists and when customers want to do a little bit more of individualization in the tax in the mailings it's a okay this is not a mass communication any longer so we have higher prices for it so do we punish our customers when they want to follow this mega trend in marketing and that this trend of individualization is really important I would like to share with you some leading benefits from individualization based on a study in the United States where we can see what we can achieve by a higher level of individualization improved customer experience increased conversion rates increased engagement increased lead generation and so on so individualization really has a very strong impact on the success of our customers and the question is do we support our customers by having a lot of individualization possibilities or do we punish them by higher prices there are some additional questions to answer optimization of ongoing processes is often a standard in the online sector do we offer similar possibilities as well to improve an ongoing campaign convenience is a key drive of success how easy it is for our customers to book our solutions online and very nice question is it fun do our customers really love our the experience we offer to them or is it as nice as going to the dentist marketers love the variety in innovation do we block or support this creativity without solutions and finally many online platforms offer comprehensive data pools to optimize the booking process what do we offer here and you can go through the list on your own to find out whether might be some room for improvement to make it less easy for our competitors to attack us and to acquire our customers these are really questions all postal operators should answer I already mentioned that I will take a look a closer look at the low cost criterion which is often often mentioned in the online world and we can see that a lot of companies focus on performance marketing short-term conversion do whatever converts now priorities on immediate wins and a lot of companies of small and bigger companies found out that they have focused too much on performance marketing and they miss to invest a bit more in brand marketing where we generate long-term brand equity where patience is required and we should focus the point that short-term conversation is easier to achieve than brand building but and this is an argument this is a reason which you can use in your sales processes as well that online often reabs what was on offline so online is harvested what was created in the offline world beforehand and this is something we need to take into consideration because some of the companies already said we focus too much on performance marketing and performance marketing in many areas is online marketing so we need the balance we have to create real value here as well because you can only harvest here in the online world which you have saw in the offline world beforehand and it's once again about the combination and a key question is in this context how could we help convince our customers to invest in the offline media and here I would like to share with you some interesting results based on the Savanga Declaration and this declaration really addresses the future of reading so how will we read or how should we read in the future about 200 scholars and scientists of reading publishing literacy from across Europe researched the impact of digitalization and reading practices and the target of the research was to find out the best ways to utilize the advantages of both paper and digital technologies and this across age group and purposes there are very interesting findings which you can use in your acquisition process as well when we focus on digital text they offer excellent opportunities to tailor text presentations so initialization is key in this area and digital the digital tools the tick tick digital technology makes it very easy to tailor presentations benefits for comprehension and motivation have been demonstrated when the digital reading environment was carefully designed for the reader in mind so if I really tailor my content it could have a very positive impact on the comprehension of my content and on motivation nevertheless there's a big but as well and this is very important and you should take this into consideration for your sales process as well online readers very interesting finding are more likely to be overconfident about their comprehension abilities in when they read in the digital world in comparison to reading print and we know that many of us as well are more skimming and we are often less concentrating on the content we have online in front of us this is something we should take into consideration when we try to motivate our customers to use more the offline concepts as well and they conducted an additional study with about more than 170,000 participants and they found out that the comprehension of long informal long form informational text is stronger when we read it on paper so we can really say when people write a read on paper they will have a better understanding of the content and this is something we can use in our sales process as well what do we want to achieve it's only performance do you want do you only want to get a high conversion rate right now are you or do you want to share some of the insights which should last longer in the brains and maybe in the hearts as well of our customers it was very interesting as well that's a so-called digital natives people growing up in the digital world they also show inferior or the screen inferior effects they're even stronger than with the digital immigrants so when we see when we say the digital natives are better in using digital media it's just one thing it's wrong and I unfortunately experienced this in my classes as well they have to find out again and again that basic information is no longer available in the brains of my wonderful students they don't they don't read offline they only scan online content and they don't have a convincing picture even on the master level of my students in their brain and when I want to talk to them about ongoing discussions aware of necessary there is no knowledge they even don't know what the term fracking means in our world not so convincing and there is one additional thing which is quite interesting and we call it embodied cognition that means when we use our hands as well when we read something we have a pencil we mark something and so on it has an impact on our own body so when we do something with our hands when reading and I wonder how often you write on your screen maybe we are in a special stick yes but in general we just scan it so the embodied cognition is something educators readers and also we as marked here should take into consideration that we try to motivate people to use to do something with their hand as well because it will have an impact on our brain and whether we have a better understanding and that the information lasts longer in our wonderful brains how could we use how can we use the findings of the starvanga declaration we have to ask our customers the following questions what do you want to achieve just short-term reactions then very often unfortunately we have to say then online versions are very effective and very efficient as well or are you also interested in the long-term development of brand reputation for example and a deep anchoring of our service in the customer's consciousness if this is our target we at least should recommend our customers that they should think in addition to online channels of offline channels and wonderful mailings for example as well beside these interesting findings there are some additional advantages which we can use in the sales process we need to figure out whether our customers are aware of the following facts and these are results from a worldwide basis around globally more than 40 percent of the internet users use ad blockers each month so they try to get rid of this i call it advertising attack online the click-through rate for paid search ads is around 1.7 of social media ads even lower because here i'm in the search mode here i'm in social media it's 1.1 and the click-through rate for display ads is around 0.03 on a worldwide basis on average for all the formats and the average reading time for an email is just 10 seconds and in addition from my point of view a very interesting information as well is that the online environment is really a red ocean a lot of competition only click away and in the online offline world is it's very often less red and a bit more of a blue ocean because less competitors use the traditional offline channel now and so when i take a look in my little letterbox i don't have so many mailings any longer even so i'm quite active customer but i have a lot of traffic in the online world so more red ocean in the online world and a bit of a blue ocean in the offline world and from my point of view one additional good reason for offline advertising when we take a look at the offline world we have physical materially tangible elements and in the online world we just have digital elements so we can reach in the online world our customers via five sensors and we only have two sensors to use when we are online and this is also something we should clarify what is really needed by certain campaign are five sensors enough or do we need more sensors to really convince the customers and when we once again ask the customers how happy they are with the online world then i would like to share with you some insights from the united states uk and germany as they say for example i'm often annoyed by advertising on the internet or it annoys me when i receive online ads based on my research history and i use ad bloggers when browsing the internet so there is somehow a hostile environment for online activities and it's well much more balanced when we are in the offline and kpis can help us and our customers to show the way because these customers can help us to compare offline and online campaigns a lot of customers use only companies use only cpi cost per interest or cost per lead as it's also called and cost per order to compare the online and the offline media but this is not enough in this area very often the online offers are much more convincing when i just take a look at cpi and cpo but this is only the front end response you should take a look what's what will happen after we have a quiet elite or we have gate and order because these figures only focus on the front end response we should also focus on back end response and we can help our customers as postal operators to focus on the back end response as well concerning the back end response we should use kpis like the return rate of purchase goods which is not included here the turn rate of the customers and very often it's higher when we acquire customers via online channels we should focus on customer lifetime value based on different channels online and offline and also the referral rate and then we focus on back end response as well and by doing so by using these kpis on top to cpi and cpo we can get a holistic view of of the communication success and this is needed and this is something where we can support our customers to have this holistic view as well what is the conclusion from my point of view here i would like to show you the interesting results of some studies where we can learn something about the combination of online and offline this study is based on the data from a up insurance company and it has a focus on the analysis of the effect of direct marketing on the conversion funnel and was easy to find out that direct mailing has a significant influence or impact on consumer activity in the online channel as well so direct mailing activities had a positive impact on the online activities as well and very interesting that direct mailing was effective towards the whole conversion funnel so not just at the beginning on the middle but on the whole conversion funnel there was a positive effect of direct marketing and very interesting as well they then identified a joint effect of direct mailing and display advertising so it's about the combination between between the best of both worlds so you can see that synergies between direct mailing and display advertising and it really proves that there is the key result is that there is a wonderful opportunity to combine the online and offline world and it might be helpful for you as postal operators to conduct similar studies to convince your customers maybe in a partnership with other postal operators to convince them that it's about a combination of the online and offline world there are some additional developments on your side we are all discussing the post cookie area which will limit the online targeting options we still have several in the offline world the dependence on google facebook and co will increase and the question you should you can you need to discuss with your customers is whether they want to be even more dependent on google facebook and co in the future with their world gardens and also one interesting aspect is the question of brand safety brand safety means that we need to protect the brands from showing their ads in a questionable or inappropriate content and of course it's much easier to assure brand safety in the online in the offline world than in the online world so the key challenge is it's not an either or decision we still have these key steps of the within the conversion funnel but the customer is is active in the online and offline world switching from one area to the other from one channel to the other from one instrument to the other and what we need to achieve is that we train our customers that they should behave no line because the customers really don't think am i online am i offline when i use my smartphone or my tablet being in a brick and motor store am i online or offline customers don't care so much about online or offline they just use what is helpful in a certain situation so we need to train our customers to think more no line and the key question is don't we ourselves we as postal operators only has a consulting competence to advise our customers optimally the holistic design of the customer journey so this is what is required what we try to achieve what we should try to achieve that we use our knowledge to combine the best of both worlds and if you need help convincing your customers feel free to contact me now i would like to hand over once again to marty and here i am thanks ralph that was a tour de force through offline and online and i really like some of the ideas you presented the first questions are already coming along but let's start a little from the beginning you started with telling us that there are some advantages for the online advertising market like short setup times or easy to track and so on but you didn't tell us about the advantages of offline marketing so um so i like the idea to say okay we have to find out how we can learn from the online experience and how we can give this over to the offline experience but i'm quite sure that there might be some advantages for offline marketing as well so what do you think these are yes of course i thought that it's not necessary to carry colds the new castle because you are the experts in the advantages of the offline media but first of all one one main aspect from my point of view is that you have something or you can deliver something which will be in the hands of the customers so you are really using or you are addressing much more senses as i mentioned it a little bit earlier that you really stop your customers just clicking away a certain message because they have your message in the hands and when you have an envelope there is already key benefit mentioned where you simulate creativity where you have certain material i have to confess i just got a christmas present from lang und söhne where bought a watch from a little bit earlier christstollen and i saw the passer and i again started to love the brand so it's experience in the offline world it rarely happens and it was done in handwriting so i really have i'm not kidding i have it here in front of me it's a christmas card and you see here handwriting uh lieber Herr Kreuzer und froh für diese Weihnachten ist ihr best for christmas and i'm going to write a thank you to this company even so i know that they send out maybe 10,000 20,000 but i'm always surprised and i was happy to get it and i bought my watch i think seven or seven or six years ago and we are still in a relationship and this is something we can achieve and i know from my time at the german post a lot of wonderful mailing opportunities where we can use certain databases to tailor our target group and so on so these are from my point of view the key benefits and we need to convince our customers and maybe based on studies as well that there are a lot of huge advantages and that they should not always focus on costs only now we know that some of their executives are not really fond of long term incentives but more are looking more for short term successes so the the medium the average duration of the cmo or cio is 18 months or 24 months or even let's say 30 months he or she is probably looking to some successes when when he is still on and not after he is already with the next company so what what do you think are the main points the the main arguments i can do for for an executive to convince him or her that i should look into the long term performance of campaign and that this makes sense how can i convince them so i'm with you that we have the short term perspective in many areas it would be nice to go to the ceo who has a longer contract very often than the cmo but this is not always the best solution it would be very interesting to focus on the kpi's i mentioned earlier customer lifetime value so i'm really a fan of this as it's called value based customer management value based and that we should take a look at the front end kpi's as well because this is very interesting for the cmo as well whether he can generate additional value based on the existing customers on the newly acquired customers this would be very helpful as well and of course at least the majority of the cmo still had the responsibility for brand building as well and so it's not either or it's a combination and then they and there were very interesting discussions of procton gamble for example saying we focus too long just on performance marketing and we have to refocus on brand building as well and this discussion really spied me to at this point to my presentation as well that we often harness online what was so on offline beforehand and there again we have to saw and we have to to harvest it's the same time but different things so it's about the combination once again between the two between the two worlds so this is going in both directions you told us okay there's sometimes something sawn online offline which is used online but i think it might be the other way around as well so i see an online online advertising and then i see the shop somewhere and i go into the shop and buy something so it might might go in both directions it can go in both directions when we really conduct what we now call the omni channel approach and i regard it as so let's say ridiculous when i receive a message online by email a voucher and the company tells me but you can only use this voucher online i said i would like to go to the shop as well and maybe i buy even more if i see the wonderful products around it so what we really need when we want to achieve what is from my point of view one of the key criteria criterion for success this is convenience let the customer decide where to use a voucher and don't tell him martin you are only allowed to use this voucher in this channel no in this one not so we need to be as convenient as possible and convenience is something which is very often connected with the online world and less with the online world and this is a piece so it's no line again again it's no line yes a combination yeah there's a question how to boost personalization in the post cookies era with the depreciation of post cookies so how can we optimize our first party data to compete with online channels it's coming from me some oh i have always problem to pronounce these names probably it's the same for you for my name so first of all i would recommend every company that they try to find out what kind of first party data they already have acquired based on my experience a lot of companies have a lot of data in their company but it's not connected maybe it's not in line with the wonderful data protection rules or people are just not aware of the data which is already available we still have a lot of information silos in the companies so my first step would be to find out what kind of information is already available in the company itself and maybe this was something we did as a germ post as well we helped our customers to find the golden nuggets in their own data to connect the data sometimes there were different databases and we were able to match it to have a holistic view as a single view of single point of truth as it's often called so this is something we need to achieve and hopefully we can help our customers to connect the data and try to help them to identify the gold nuggets and then we can also try to find out what kind of third or second party data might be helpful as well and very often here i connected once again with my story at the germ post we developed a micro geographic segmentation system where we can really help our customers to target their communication much more successfully as in the past and so again we need to become a kind of data consultant as well for our customers to help them to be more successful also in the area of individualization so i think this is a very interesting thought because what you're telling us that a post-operator is not only the one who well transports my meetings from a to b but he should be at least should be as well my data consultant my data scientist delivering data delivering know-how delivering analytics perhaps so helping me as a customer as a big bank or insurance company or whatsoever to do my marketing better do you think that postal operators have this abilities question one and even if they have the abilities that they question to that they are well that they have the renomy the trust to do that because well some of the clients just think they will only tell me to make more direct mailings because they are interested in direct mailings nothing else so is there do they have the abilities and do they have the trust i start with the trust first so trust is what you earn when you have done a good job in the past if nobody in this team ever cheated the customers so trust is a key point if the customers of ours have the impression that our results will always be biased and say okay sorry but again the mailing is the best solution ever then they will never never never trust us so trust is key and i really regard trust and the new currency and when i was working for the german post i get some let's say nice offers as well to do this or that with data and i said okay i'm part of the german post i will never want to cover with my story the headline of famous new newspaper in germany so whenever i have whenever i would do something wrong it will be in the media so i was always sure and i i was in the data business for more than 30 years and i have never a single conflict concerning the data usage so trust is from my point of view the key resource to be successful in this business so this is a basis when we haven't invested in the creation of trust in the past i don't want to say we need to shut our doors but then we will not be successful in the 80 business concerning the ability i want to to say sentence who owns the data owns the industry owns the business who owns the data owns the industry owns the business so data knowledge and data management is from my point of view and not only from my point of view a key drive of success we can later on connect it with artificial intelligence and so on so some postal organizations some postal operators might already have this ability and they should use it for the well development of their customers and the others should check whether they could develop themselves in the direction of let's say data manager a data scientist because if they don't do it and now we can come back to the digital gap analysis i showed you earlier since somebody else will come in and they will always start the competitors will always start with the so-called low hanging fruits they can attack us in a little area and a bigger one and so on and then in the end we will be reduced in just delivering things the question is do we just want to be i say it in quotation mark a stupid delivery service or is our mission to be an enabler for being more successful in communication in business and i want to motivate the postal operators to become enablers for companies for their customers to be more successful in the challenging online world and this would be from my point of view a wonderful vision for postal operators an abler for digital business as a postal organization because in the end there is when we think of e-commerce there's often a parcel and this has to be delivered so why not start earlier in the value chain so it wouldn't be the enabler for digital business but the enabler for omni-channel business in some way to to give the ability to use all the channels yes i really focus on online business to make it more challenging and of course you're right it's all about no line once again it's about the the omni-channel approach and we need to start earlier in the food chain or in the value chain that we try to develop convincing solutions for our customers and to focus not only on one part logistics within the value chain but start a bit earlier and i have to tell you that the possibility to create value and good profit is often much easier when you are in the data business i think that is a very interesting thought you just made because that would have been my additional question to that is there the data consultancy data analytics data part of the business is it a cost center for a postal operator to have more money on the on the on the delivery site to make more money there to have the profits there or is it a profit center where i can do make money on both sides i can make money on the data analytics side and as well on the delivery side what do you think i would in the beginning of course you have to invest some money and you will not be profitable when you start this new business but if you want to have the best possible services you need to be as competitive as possible and then you can ask for the services as well we never when i think about my six years at the german post we all sold our services these were data services and companies were willing to pay on top but if we are able as a postal operator to connect the data world and the realistic world in a convincing way then we have a competitive advantage other companies don't have when they only focus on data and don't have the direct link to logistics then they have as it is disadvantage and try to make money out of it because then you can afford to have the best people in this area as well and the cost center i don't want to say that people the cost center are less let's say motivated and so on but if you really have to fight for the profit of your of your of your division then you sometimes work harder because you really try to convince customers and i want to say once again referring to the term of trust in a reliable and trustful way this is and when an online campaign is better than an offline then we need to tell our customers as well be a fair partner this is my credo in this area i think that's a very good very good points there are a lot of questions i'm trying to combine them always a little bit in the discussion there was a question for bolivia with all those great insights packed and figures you gave us how do you explain that digital marketing spending is growing so fast so shouldn't it be the other way around if offline is so great why is offline not growing so fast i would say yes i'm very honest traditional dialogue marketing is not sexy anymore all people talk about online when you talk about online everybody will listen to you when you talk offline with an old old school so we need to yes we need to refocus by having convincing arguments convincing reasons by offline media is a very interesting one so we need to to change the direction and i really have to tell you i had a book about dialogue marketing and it sold very good at the beginning but then dialogue market was out so my latest book is customer dialogue online and offline so you always need to combine it and this is also coming to the point of trust building once again if we as postal operators only say offline offline offline offline offline is the key nobody will believe us if you say offline and online or sometimes only online and sometimes only offline you can create trust in our recommendation so if you are always biased in our statements then nobody will trust us when you say okay it's about the best combination the synergies between the two channels then we will create additional credibility and this is what we need to achieve but we need to reframe dialogue marketing this is necessary i totally agree but it's interesting that we have to new to use new birds to make an old topic more sexy but i think that's marketing as well in some way one other question i got when i heard you talking about the genetics but you didn't talk about genetics but what i was thinking is when you told us that even with the younger people they are not really that good in reading online and they don't get the whole full full idea behind it they cannot remember that good i thought okay so the genetics is the same as our as the two of us as we are older so genetics is not changing fast enough to give us humans the ability to well read online as good as we are reading offline which would be a target and then i thought okay but maybe maybe it's just the experience which is different or maybe the the current experience is not good enough so for example you told us if you have something in your hands then you can remember it better so i can write on a touch screen with this with the with the apple apple stick or something like that apple pen as good as i can do on paper maybe or even step far ahead we are looking for facebook which is now renamed to matter naming the metaverse and i'm thinking of um augmented reality virtual reality so is it something where you think that in the in the future we will have online media which is as good as the traditional old offline media in giving us the possibilities to understand things to to to have them haptical to to tangible to well you know what i mean i think yes well we are we are just 40 years in online now we have thousands of years for offline so maybe online is just not good enough already so that we will get some future online media which is better than our current online media i expect that the online world will offer us much more fun but learning is not always fun sometimes learning is hard work and people can't concentrate any longer there is a very interesting study from microsoft saying that goldfish has a longer attention span than the average internet user and when i hear from my customers from my customers which are students in many areas that they don't read anymore and we have students at university saying i never read a whole book in my life never so it's about getting some information on the fly while you are in the bus and so on uh listening to podcasts whatever night things but to learn is some sometimes hard work as well and when we only have fun in the metaverse later on where we don't need to write anything any longer we have alexa and google home we don't need to write or we have whatsapp where we hardly find a complete sentence i'm exaggerating a little bit um so we are not forced to write any longer so we will only talk voice marketing the next big thing and then how can you really um dig deep into complex matters to understand complexity because when the surface is very easy to understand very convenient the complexity behind it is uh is huge and we need people to be able to master complexity but to be able to master complexity to have to have a deep understanding of things and there you have to invest time to go through it once again and again and it's not the tiktok mode to learn something like this right it's a fantastic discussion we just have it's already five o'clock but there are still coming questions so i think we take take another two questions which are already there um olivie by the way and abby if you want to come online you can your camera and your microphone are you are able to to come online as well so one question i really find interesting is um how do you deal with strong competition in the market when there are competitors who might have even more channels than a post sector so how how you can tackle them so the the classical media our agencies for example or something like that my solution to this is uh partnering you can't always do it on your own and my recommendation is that we are in the age of uh cooperation competition is sometimes the word for it cooperation competition and one uh we need i really mean what i say we really need to talk to our strongest competitors as well and maybe our main competitors are facebook and google and not the advertising agency around the corner so it's about partnering um and my my example for this is that even brands like beam uh bmw and daimler started a corporation to work together because they said we can't compete with tesla alone we are too small so let's start a corporation and they were friends like this for many years for decades friends like this now they say okay let's try to do something together because we don't have the money and we don't have the time so partnering is uh networking is one of the key results and uh as a postal operator i think in all the countries you have trust so this is a good starting point and then try to uh leave your let's say information or service silo and start to work on solutions which are good for your customers not only for you but good for your customers try to connect points which normally the customers have to connect so help them being a consultant and bringing them to new channels this would even answer the last questions we just got to about the question how do you how do you get the old customers who are more offline as a postal operator to get more online and i think it's the same answer at the end you have to show the way you have to have either consultant for them and then help them to these new channels rather that was really really fantastic and i think with all the questions we saw that everybody was very very attentive we are still more than 50 people online so um i think this is another good sign that everybody was really interested i'm getting already a lot of thank yous uh so uh thanks from my point of view i think i will give over to Olivier maybe for a second he looks like he wants to say something so i will give him that chance i i want to say so many things first thank you Ralph it's it's to be honest one of the best cases i've heard in in the long time uh regarding the this omni channel approach and and this offline online magic formula so really thank you you've given us so many things to think about and i'm thinking about my colleagues around the world that are dealing with those topics on a daily on a daily on a daily business uh i think they have taken up a lot a lot a lot of things for for for them uh to uh to improve and to uh to develop their their their business so thank you so much Ralph there are so many key words that i could just throw now from from what you gave us uh around data around trust around partnership around constant consultancy competence i think that's a keyword also that we really need to think about and uh how we are making sure that our customers understand the value and and and the convenience and and and uh the the yeah the the value of of what we can offer in this offline and online world as postal networks so really thank you i i think listening to you and and and knowing a little bit the the business we're operating in i think postal operators are really sitting on the goldmine the the idea now is with everything you've given us today is that we can transform that that goldmine into a pot of gold and and i really hope that everybody will take on all those insights and and and and use them uh in in their business life so really thank you uh Ralph for this fantastic presentation and all the answers you you have provided to uh to the to the audience today and and i'm sure it's not the the last time we will hear about you in the postal world so thank you so much and i wish everybody a very happy and and uh and a great end of the year please stay healthy it's uh we're still in a difficult situation wherever we are uh whether here in europe or africa or in asia or latin america i mean guys be safe and uh really happy new year in advance and we will probably talk again in the new year to come so thank you again Ralph thanks Martin thank you very much happy for all the support in in bringing this uh this series uh to life and uh i wish you all a very good hand of the day and of the morning hand of the afternoon thank you that was a great final work olivia thanks ralph once again thanks to you uh i'm looking forward to innovation talk number nine ten and eleven or whatsoever so if you have fun with us send abby or olivia some email and say well we should go on uh they might be able to do so and um yeah happy holidays i would say and ah by the way ralph's presentation is all also as yes a scientific guy including some some sources so if you're interested in that one i'm sure abby will be helped to to send that one to you and you'll find his contact details in there as well so if you're interested to get in touch with ralph you should be able to do so there are a lot of things i think that is for this year thanks a lot to all of you and happy holidays bye bye okay bye bye thank you bye