Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Leaders in Customer Loyalty, Powered by Loyalty360
Loyalty Live | Personalization Without Compromise: Exploring Wunderkind’s Role in the Future of Marketing
As marketing, and the technologies powering it, are becoming increasingly complex, brands that are striving to connect with customers on a deeper level must navigate emerging challenges like anonymous website traffic and fragmented data. To stand out, companies must embrace advancements that enhance personalization and drive loyalty without compromising privacy.
Enter Wunderkind, a respected partner in identity resolution and performance marketing, which helps brands unlock the full potential of their customer data while ensuring compliance with privacy standards.
In this edition of Loyalty Live, Mark Johnson of Loyalty360 sits down with Tim Glomb, Vice President of Digital Content, Product Marketing, and AI at Wunderkind. Together, they explore the transformative power of AI and identity resolution in driving customer loyalty and revenue. From the nuances of privacy-compliant data usage to the future of autonomous marketing, Tim offers invaluable insights into how brands can forge meaningful connections with their customers in 2025 and beyond.
Good afternoon, good morning. This is Mark Johnson from Loyalty360. Hope everyone's happy, safe and well. I want to welcome you back to another edition of Loyalty Live. In this series we speak to the leading agencies, technology partners and consultants, and customer channel and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that impact the brand's ability to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement but, most importantly, impact customer loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Tim Glam. He's the Vice President of Digital Content and Product Marketing and AI at Wonderkin. How are you doing, tim? Great, great. Good to see you again, mark, great to see you as well. Always a pleasure talking with you and looking forward to the discussion. First off, for those who may not know, you would like to know a little bit more about yourself, your current role at Wunderkind and a little bit about your background, because it is very unique.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, yup, vp Content Digital AI also oversee some of the product marketing, as you mentioned here at Wunderkind, a identity resolution and performance marketing solution. But I've been on the technology side, let's say the vendor side, of MarTech for probably about the last 10 years and prior to that spent nearly 20 years on the brand side, so B2C. So I've got a little bit of flavor on both sides, working with a number of different brands across different verticals and globes Mark Cuban companies to private equity ownedowned sports companies, et cetera. So really into digital marketing, that's my big thing. And then, of course, spent time at Cheetah Digital, which became Marigold, a giant loyalty platform where we've done some work together. So also love the loyalty space as well.
Speaker 1:Excellent. And for those who don't know Wunderkin, you guys do a number of different things, very unique. Can you tell us a little bit what you guys do, the industries you work with and maybe even some enhancements to the product that you're rolling out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, I'll give you the top line elevator pitch. I mean, at the core, we're a performance marketing engine that really becomes a new revenue channel for brands. We specialize in being a identity resolution partner, so we track about 9 billion consumer devices laptops, phones, everything, et cetera. We've got about a billion opted in consumers, but we oversee nearly 2 trillion actually over 2 trillion. This past BFCM just put us over 2 trillion digital events for the year and what that allows us to do is understand who's on your website, sometimes when they're anonymous to you.
Speaker 2:Most brands, 95 plus percent of their traffic is anonymous, even if it's a repeat customer and their most loyal customers, but sometimes cookies expired or they're logged out when they come to book a ticket or a room. So we stitch that together and then understand their behavior, not only across our own clients' websites but our giant network of ad publishers and other retail, e-commerce and travel hospitality brands, so that we can understand what their behavior looks like and then trigger the best message in your own MarTech stack email, sms, app notifications et cetera to get them back to purchase. So that's it in a nutshell. It's a 60-second overview of Wunderkind.
Speaker 1:Identity resolution a very powerful idea and process. It's going to be new to most people in the customer loyalty space. There definitely is a growing interest for it, but can you explain to us how it works from a high level and the potential benefits for those who have customer loyalty strategies?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So let's say you go to book a car on a travel site. Maybe you're a loyalty member, maybe you're not, but the brand and I won't use names, but we have most of the car rental brands and we'll talk in that space If I show up and I'm just browsing for rates, the brand may not know me because I'm not logged in, even if I'm a member. If I'm not a member, we can help understand that. So in a second, in a nanosecond, we can ping their database and say, okay, brand X, you don't know who this is, but we do. Oh, and he's in your database. Hey, brand X, this is Tim Glom. Tim Glom at Gmail, he's in your loyalty rewards program etc.
Speaker 2:So we kind of unearth and understand the device that's visiting and match that to a consumer and what we really do is stitch together their email and mobile numbers if they've given you both and also additional devices. So let's say I constantly go to Budget or Avis or Enterprise or whomever on my phone. Well, if I show up on a new laptop or a new iPad, wunderkind's in the business of understanding those devices for Tim. So now we can also recognize somebody because it's a net new device that maybe budget Avis Enterprise don't recognize. That allows us to then obviously activate and change their web experience as well as send off the most optimized offers. We use a lot of AI and identity. We have again 9 billion devices, 2 trillion transactions to click, browse and buy behavior on consumers. So we're really good for the last 14 years of understanding how to get Tim to convert on an offer versus the offer that Mark needs. So it's really about hyper-personalization, but understanding devices, turning them into people and unlocking that for the power of brands.
Speaker 1:As a quick follow-up to that, you use a process hashed ID without your network right, you can look at people's transactions in a PII-compliant manner, use a kind of a green room process where you take all this data, ingest it in and you can go back to the brand and say this is what we know about this person in a very PII compliant way. That helps really frame from a personalized perspective. You know what you can give them offers, timing, all those attributes that are very important, correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm glad you brought that up because privacy compliance is key. So let me clarify something at the beginning. We do not store first party or zero party data PII for our clients. We activate the data that they have. So let's take I'll just take Brand X. Let's say BrandX has a million people in their marketing database opted in. We ping off of that. Now we keep our own database of devices and you mentioned hashed IDs. That's just one way that we store data.
Speaker 2:But we have a ton of different privacy compliant ways depending on where you are in the globe. We also go way beyond cookies. We're not cookie dependent. We're using all kinds of server side technology, using all kinds of different ways to understand those. So, beyond what a brand could do on their own, or really their own CDP could do, we're in the business of making that match to your own first-party data. But, mark, the second part of what you said is exactly true. We understand that consumer probably better than the brand does.
Speaker 2:But because of privacy compliance, it's not that the brand can call me up and say, hey, tim Glom is back on my site. Can you give me a rap report on Tim and everything you know about him? We cannot do that. We can't divulge information that hasn't been exclusively shared with the brand, but what we can do is use that insight to now make recommendations. So the brand won't know that Tim does X, y and Z, but we're using that through an AI algorithm to say, for example, I'm making this up, but Tim needs, on average, a 17.5% discount to convert for this type of product, whereas maybe the flip side is well, tim really cares about loyalty points. We've seen him activate through loyalty rewards rather than price discounts.
Speaker 2:So marketers pull their hair out, and I'm one of them. I've done it. What's the best offer for the best person? How do I do this at scale, at a truly individual level, and what we end up doing is usually building segments Males of this age group and this demographic or this area of the country. We give them 20% off or this offer. With our data, your first party data and our click browse behavior data that we're collecting for you, we truly can get a bespoke individual offer via email, sms, in-app notifications, other channels. That's really optimized conversion and it sounds too good to be true, which is why I love talking to marketers at trade shows and stuff and all of our case studies on our website where we're powering these amazing conversions using this AI and the data that we have. That augments what a brand can do.
Speaker 1:No, I think that's really compelling what you do and when you talk about identity resolution, it's a kind of a nuanced term, sometimes difficult to understand, but when you kind of break it down, the data you have and the process you have helps brands add a significant amount of color to their customer and it helps them personalize the offer so that they may know them and if they send them conflicting messages, it gets back to that challenge many brands have of knowing your customers right. We all know that the consumer wants the brand to know them in a very personalized manner. At the end of the day, you help brands streamline and increase the efficacy and efficiency of that complete process.
Speaker 2:Absolutely and we do it with a guarantee. That's what I love about this company is we guarantee our results right. So it's not like you're buying software or something from us just on a shelf and if it works, great, if it doesn't, you're stuck with it. We perform on a guarantee. If we don't deliver on the guarantee that we tell you we're going to hit, we're absolutely going to increase your revenue, there's no question. And if we don't hit it at the rate or the increase that we say, you know we work that out with our clients. So that's really where the proof is in the pudding and you know it's AI has really brought this to scale right.
Speaker 2:Ai has been around forever. You know the consumers now see it in chat, gpt, but the reality is, in the last three years, to be able to take the amount of data again 2 trillion transactions across 9 billion devices to be able to like make decisions in real time, humans are shifting away from building segments and going in and looking at data on their own and figuring out what offers to send individuals or segments of individuals. Ai can truly make those decisions. We call it the autonomous marketing platform and it's campaign-less strategy. You know we don't have to put somebody into a human-made marketing campaign. We can literally make decisions on the fly. Given your business rules discounting, free offers back and stuff whatever you're willing to give to your customers we can create that bespoke, best optimized offer, which is why we can actually guarantee our revenue results.
Speaker 1:And you touched on it a little bit. Identifying customers is a significant challenge for many brands, being able to understand who that customer is. Everyone's focused on data. There's not a lack of data for most marketers these days, it's really the technology and the ability to action on it, to take disparate data sets from different sources, aggregate them and, as we keep mentioning, add value or add color to the conversation. Personalization efforts you know in what ways can brands utilize intent signals like browsing, the clicks, the abandon rates, to efficiently target new opportunities.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question and I'll start by saying from my experience you know, we used to lean on our CDPs. We used to lean on our CDPs, we used to lean on our ESPs and these platforms were like messaging and actions went out and we look at the data from there. What was my open rate, my click rate? Did Tim convert on the 30 email offers I gave him this year? What did he convert on? What are those percentages? And that's a great way to go, but what can really happen is when you start to see Tim and his behavior you know frequency. Where is he going? How much time do you spend on a particular product? Did he put something in the cart? Did he not?
Speaker 2:Looking at past purchase decisions, we can kind of span over your CDP, which is kind of a silo, your ESP, which is kind of a silo. When we live on top and integrate directly in for messaging, we can see all of it and because of our tracking technology across that device again, we're going to know a lot of what happens off of your own website and I think that's really the key. Brands are great pretty good, I should say. Some are great at understanding what people do on their own site, but when they leave it's a black box and that's where Wondercan comes in. We're tracking people across, like I said, thousand plus client sites. We're tracking across all types of advertisers and publishers and, to be clear, we're not sharing any first party data. We're simply tracking behavior so that we can use that insight to make the best offer when they come back and engage with your brand.
Speaker 1:And I think that's the key point, the salient point, that it puts the bow on it. So you have the information on that customer in a PI way. You take it in and you can add that color to it. You can look and see what Tim may be looking on United Airlines or what puppy food they may be looking, or if he's looking for diapers for his new kid, and then you package that up in a way that says this person who we've hashed in and out knows X, Y and Z. So their personalization, in which you help with as well, again gets back to that very sublime personalization you have that can impact and enhance that behavior in a PI way.
Speaker 2:I want to clarify a little bit there. Again, we don't give a report or we don't share all the things that Tim is doing with the brand. What the brand does is leans on us and says wonder, can we trust you? Because you can identify for more traffic than, let's say, my ESP, definitely more than your CDP, and we have more context. So if a marketer or their ESP is going to make decisions to send Tim a 10% or a 20% off or book three nights, get a fourth one free, that's their decision. We have far more data, so they let us make the decision and send the offer on their behalf.
Speaker 2:So again, this is where brands say oh, we're great, we get 2% of our revenue from abandoned cart right. Our ESP already sees people put a room or a flight or a product in our cart and they left, and the ESP sends off an email. Well, we'll identify sometimes up to 10 times more potential opportunities to send those emails, and that increases the volume of potential. And not only that, we're almost always we'd be every single ESP. You can name them out there. We beat them with our intelligence layer and our decisioning engine on which message to send.
Speaker 2:By the way, we also orchestrate? Should we do email or SMS for this given individual? What's the percentage or offer we should give? So they lean on us. We're really a technology with a managed service, so that the brands don't have to worry about all this. And again, I think we're all sick of buying seats to software and trying to figure out how to fly that plane. We just want partners who are going to guarantee outcomes revenue in our case and that's why they lean on us to not even get into the weeds of what did Tim do? Just can you get Tim the best offer and get him to convert into the?
Speaker 1:weeds of what did Tim do? Just can you get Tim the best offer and get him to convert? So you talk about that personalization, personalized offers you do a significant amount of research studies, continuous studies, that kind of build on one another about customer expectations with regard to brands, especially with regard to personalized offers. Are there any best practices brands should follow when it comes to personalized messaging for their customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. It's very timely. We have quite a few reports at Wunderkin. We just launched our Consumer Insights Report. We do it every year.
Speaker 2:You and I have talked about this at other places. I've done reports. I'm a big fan of original research. I've always wanted it when I was a brand marketer. I wanted to be able to differentiate. We just launched a report so you can find that at wonderkinco completely free.
Speaker 2:We did the US, uk and Australia all independently, as well as a psychographic survey around holiday how and why do people buy in holiday? And you know, just, it depends on the client and their product line and their vertical. But the one thing across the board if you sell and have a product shipped, free shipping and expedited shipping I don't care your age, I don't care your gender, I don't care what country you're in. It is the number one hottest thing you can offer people right now from a loyalty perspective or net new, you know, just converting a sale. Outside of that it gets kind of nuanced down to the uh, the age groups and the genders and also geo. So free shipping though across the board. Email also, just for everyone's sake. Every age group prefers email from brands when they looking for offers direct from a brand.
Speaker 2:Uh, one other tidbit I will share is brands have an uphill battle when it comes to marketplaces. Marketplaces, uh, win by about 10%. I believe, on average, in trustworthiness over buying directly from a brand site. So that little tidbit right there should have brands thinking about how do I I create more loyalty programs? How do I actually build that trust? How do I get more things in their inbox that you know don't have them thinking about going straight to Amazon or Temo, whoever else, where they're going to have their margin eroded? But that report's full of all kinds of insights and we'll also be breaking them down by vertical. I think we're doing about 10 different verticals by the end of February. So all that will be available for free for anybody.
Speaker 1:Excellent the end of February, so all that will be available for free for anybody. Excellent, and in the marketplace today, a great deal of new technology brands are being sold the promise of personalization, deeper insight into the customer, but it can be very difficult for them to differentiate and understand the different types of technology out there. And so how's the marketing technology stack change recently, and how should brands pivot their tech stacks as they look to better target their customers?
Speaker 2:I'm incredibly excited about this Great question and part of me wants to go back to the brand marketing side, like in a B2C brand, because AI is changing everything. What I mean by that is you know the things that we knew machines could do really well for us, like forecast or analyze data, or you know, even think about options for personalized messaging. Machines can now do that right. So that's one thing we all know. We can go to ChatGPT and have it write subject lines or product descriptions. You can get far more intelligent when you're getting into, like, custom GPTs, but the agent side of that is changing everything, meaning, if AI is making all these decisions as light as copy changes or hey, use this image instead of this image for a given person that's on your website or in an email you're going to send. Beyond that, ai agents are now making that stuff actionable without a human having to take data from A to B to C and down that conveyor belt. So I'm extremely bullish on humans, marketers, especially human marketers getting time back to do more human things. Think about the brand, think about the connections and machines doing more. The second thing is which is why I love Wunderkin and one of the reasons I jumped over here a little over a year and a half ago. Was they guarantee outputs I have bought? In my last year as a brand marketer on the B2C side, I signed 33 SaaS agreements. I was buying software like crazy for all these endpoint solutions. I needed all these problems to be solved.
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's a huge shift into companies like Wunderkind saying we're going to give you an outcome.
Speaker 2:We're not going to sell you 10 seats or 20 seats or limit you with levers and technology and train you on a piece of software. That's great if that's what you want, but in reality, you want a partner that's going to move your business forward so that you can get the achieved outcome. Usually that's revenue, and then you can focus on your brand and the other fires you have. And that's what Wunderkin does and I love that. And I think we're pushing other brands in our space to say are you selling software or are you actually selling an outcome? Because it's far easier to retain people when you're hitting outcomes and revenue rather than saying, oh I'm sorry, you don't know how to use our software. You probably should have done this and that Nobody wants to buy software and be told later that they used it the wrong way. So I see this huge shift going to outcome driven solutions rather than SaaS seats, and I hope more marketers are pushing technologists like us to do that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. When you look at the trends you've talked on it a couple of times Black Friday, cyber Monday what do you observe this holiday season when you look at things that enhance driving purchase, repeat purchase and loyalty, and how can brands utilize that holiday data to improve their customer loyalty and customer experience strategies after the holidays?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, I wonder, can we probably do 70% of all the revenue that we create for our clients? It happens in the BFCM and I'll say holiday period, right, so let's call it Black Friday all the way through to the end of shipping deadlines for Christmas. So we've been doing it a long time. We know what's going to happen. A couple of things I'll give out, but again we have this psychographic survey that everybody can go download for free at our website. It's not published today, but it'll be published in early January.
Speaker 2:People are fully willing to engage with your brand, whether they've gotten off your list or they've never been on your marketing list. They will start that on Halloween. That's when consumers start looking for deals, so they will. That's a great time for you to go out and use your marketing on social, even your print or maybe TV, to say, hey, are you on our mailing list? If you're not, deals are going to hit your inbox. So people get a huge appetite for that in Halloween. And we see it. Spike Urgency is everything I could show you. Spikes of the last 10 minutes of every day from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. The last 10 minutes, at least in America, in each time zone. That's when people convert. So when you start to use urgency around shipping deadlines or this ends at midnight, that stuff works. We see huge peaks. So that's a second insight.
Speaker 2:The other one I would say is people are we asked what are you using? Are you storing up your loyalty rewards points for holiday season shopping? I don't have a baseline because I've never asked that question in the past, but this year absolutely. People are definitely converting their loyalty reward points and buying for others, so not just themselves. 67% of people said their online purchases throughout the year for themselves makes sense, but people are definitely looking at buying for others for loyalty rewards. So I'd look at brands and say what could you do before the holiday or during the holiday to get them to build those points up? Whether it's, you know, non-transactional loyalty rewards, emotional loyalty, can you store them up and then have people execute that in holiday and then get them? The other thing we saw average order value and items per basket are definitely up through the holiday season. So another way to say great, you're redeeming some rewards or maybe you're getting a discount. Can you add these free accessories? That is a time you're most likely to get people to go over and buy a little more.
Speaker 1:You touched on it a little bit. We did an AI study on the brand side, looking at how brands are leveraging AI from a customer perspective, and it's very much in the infancy with regard to what they're doing A lot of copy testing, offer optimization and, as you mentioned earlier, measurement on the backend what's working, what's not working, segmentation, prism type data that you can leverage from a psychodemographic perspective but they're not truly using AI in a very proactive manner, but it's something they want to do going forward. In what ways do you feel that AI can impact revenue and customer loyalty for brands in 2025?
Speaker 2:Look. The number one thing is you know AI has been thrown around a lot. We know that, and I think there's a couple of different levels of AI. One is AI paint. Hey, we added this feature I'm not going to name ESPs but in the last few months, hey, we're now going to cycle through and give you AI generated email subject line opportunities. Okay, cool, Thanks for that, but are you going to guarantee revenue? So I'll call that AI paint, right? That's like putting a coat of paint on an old car. It looks nice and new and shiny, but is it really changing the efficiency of your gas mileage or getting you anywhere faster? Probably not.
Speaker 2:Where Wunderkind focused in years ago was training AI on data to make decisions. So I love that we're going into a campaign-less world. So, again, if Wunderkind can look at every single individual that's in your database or that you can get to convert and opt in, if we look at them individually and we're making decisions on an individual level for each one of them, you can't do that without AI. Ai just scales it, it looks at. Again, think of your medical records, right? If an AI engine looked at my history as a 50-year-old man, it would be able to make decisions very, very quickly because I'm giving it access to all my medical history. It's the same exact thing with e-commerce. So I think brands should be looking at partners A. If you're going to build it in-house, great, but you better be ready for bumps in the road and better be ready to be spending dollars and investment of time and revenue into building it.
Speaker 2:Go find the partners, like Wunderkind that have already figured this out. But get to the core. Are they making decisions with AI or are they just doing the kind of like superfluous? You know AI paint wrapper, Because when you do campaign-less strategies, what I mean by that is every single person doesn't have to fit into a campaign that's waiting in the wings Like a machine can notice that Tim is a high propensity buyer. I spend more than the average person. Let's say, how can AI recognize that, Know my history, know what SKUs you have, know which ones you have in inventory, know which ones you're low in stock in and make a bespoke decision for Tim that fits within your business rules. So you're making margin. That's where we live today with AI for revenue generation.
Speaker 1:Excellent Closing thoughts ideas for 2025. What's Wunderkin focused on going into 2025?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are doubling down on autonomous marketing. So, like I said, it's letting machines make decisions because they've gotten the right data. So, if you give us your data and we've got our data and we do our work, we're letting AI scale the opportunities. Like I said, the proof is in the pudding. We guarantee our revenue results and we've got tons of client case studies on our site for anybody who wants to look at it.
Speaker 2:Outside of that, in a general perspective, I think this agentic AI I think marketers by this time next year will be going oh my gosh, you remember how much time I spent building TPS reports or email reports and this and that it's all going to happen in real time and it's going to move down and you're just going to approve links in the chain to let AI and these different engines, different MarTech stacks and your databases make decisions and go activate in a marketing capacity. I'm extremely excited because I think humans are going to find more human things to do. They're going to be able to build better connections and spend time on creative and making their brand come to life rather than chasing that end of quarter revenue dollar, and I really hope a lot of marketers embrace that and get some of their time back to enjoy their family and what they like to do outside of working.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, tim, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was great getting to know more about some things that Wunderkind is looking at, but now we have the quickfire question round. We'd like to keep these to a one word or short phrase. The first question we have is what is?
Speaker 2:your favorite word Efficiency right now.
Speaker 1:What is your least favorite word?
Speaker 2:Oh waste.
Speaker 1:Waste. What excites you?
Speaker 2:Getting outside sunlight, you know getting away. What do you find tiresome Getting?
Speaker 1:away.
Speaker 2:What do you find tiresome Looking?
Speaker 1:at data? Well, is there a book that you'd like to read, that you recommend to colleagues?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just got a bunch of my team. There's two you can find them in audiobooks or print books Sales-led growth and marketing-led growth. I think that's great. Every marketer should read both of those books.
Speaker 1:Okay, what profession, other than the one you currently have, would you like to try?
Speaker 2:Oh man, I'd love to be in aviation. I think Okay. And who inspired you to become the person you are today? Oh man, we'll go with the marketing capacity. A really, really smart fellow who ran Lear Burnett Entertainment, Tom Flanagan Great guy, Go look him up on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, what do you typically think about at the end of the day?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think about how do I get outside and get into these hills I live in.
Speaker 1:Oh and last question how do you want to be remembered by your friends and family?
Speaker 2:Oh man, I just hope everybody had a good time when they hang out with me. That's all. Let's all have a good time All right, great.
Speaker 1:Well, tim, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. It was great getting your perspective on customer loyalty and I look forward to learning more from Wundercanon in 2025. Thanks, mark. Thank you everyone for taking the time to listen today. Make sure you join us back for another Disciple of Life soon. Until then,