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#496: Leaders in Customer Loyalty: Industry Voices | Blings: Putting the Personal into Loyalty Programs

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Blings, a global company headquartered in New York, New York, is using patented AI-powered MP5 technology to help companies create personalized, interactive videos that connect with customers in real-time. The platform pulls in live data to create each video and customize loyalty offers and gamified experiences, engaging customers and boosting conversion for clients. 

Loyalty 360 spoke with Yonatan Schreiber, CEO and co-founder of Blings, about how this AI-powered personalized video is reshaping loyalty programs and customer experience. 

SPEAKER_00:

Hi everyone, this is AJ Schneider from Loyalty360, welcoming you to another edition of our Leaders in Customer Loyalty Industry Voices podcast. In these episodes, we talk to leading agencies, technology partners, and consultants in customer, channel, and brand loyalty about the technology trends and best practices that impact the ability of brands to drive unique experiences, enhance engagement, and most importantly, customer loyalty. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Schreiber, co-founder and CEO of Bling's, an AI-powered video personalization platform that helps brands turn their customer data into real-time customized video experiences. Jonathan, thank you and uh thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you very much for having me. Great speaking with you, AJ.

SPEAKER_00:

Excellent. No, we're glad you're here. Um, why don't we start off um talking a little bit about you? Um, what is your background and how did you come to start Blinks?

SPEAKER_01:

All right, so I'm a, as you said, the founder of Blinks. I was uh doing video technology for the last decade or so. So I'm coming from the intersection of video and technology, uh, doing product and tech roles in leading uh video technology companies. One of the things I realized while working on video products over the last decade is how not suitable for the web video is. So if you think about the video format behind the web, it could be MP4 or others, this is a black box. So you can create it with any tool you can imagine, but once created, it's just a static black box. You cannot change anything in the video after creation. Now, this is very good if you think about television or cinema. So you you stream a video and everyone sees the same things, and it's not engaging, it's not interactive, it's super engaging, it's not an interactive experience, you're passive. But how does like a normal HTML website works? Is it's coded. So this means I can program it to be relevant to each and every user, I can make it interactive, so I can click on stuff and explore. So the entire experience of web is very far from what is uh video today on the web. And this is uh from my experience, this is what we are at Blinks trying to change, trying to build a new kind of video that is more uh data-driven, more live, more relevant to each and every user, more interactive.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. So um that's a great jumping off point into maybe a little bit of how Blinks works. Um so let's talk about that interactive part, and then I think down the road we'll talk about personalization as well. So, what is it about a Bling's video that uh as a as a user feels different than you know the than the situation you were describing before just a regular YouTube video or something you get served in you know in on Facebook or on uh Instagram or whatever the case might be?

SPEAKER_01:

For sure. So first you as you said, like uh you are as the user, you see a video on YouTube. That's going to be the same. If I'll see the same video, if you'll send me the link, I'll see the same thing. But with Blinks, I can the company that sends the video can make it relevant to you based on data and other things. And more than that, you as the viewer have the ability to interact with the video. You can click on stuff, and that will open a different route. You can input into the video, you can uh have uh different kinds of forms in the video, and and building your own route and path throughout the video experience, exactly like you're doing with any website. You're just it's not a passive experience, it's a two-way kind of communication.

SPEAKER_00:

And and and the building of those videos is something that Blinks allows uh your clients to create. Um, so there's a there's an interface that um, you know, if I wanted to build those videos, there's an interface within Blinks that allows you to, you know, much the same as maybe building you know the the the website editor, you know, kind of software. Is it a similar kind of thing as it relates to building these videos?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, we have we have two kinds of uh building kind of uh of designs of videos. One of them is uh through a website builder or video builder that is uh very easy to use, very convenient. And we also have something more advanced for professional video editors that they can use Adobe as an amazing video to creation platform, and they can create any kind of video that they want with the existing tools. What Blinks give them is on top of that an interface that they can program the video, which is something we are the only one that offers that, that they can say, take the specific design, or let's say it's a text layer, or there is an image and it's a product offering that you created in the video. Now connect this text and this image of product offering, connect it to logic. Each user will get different things, each user will get his own name and the specific offer he needs. And if you click on a specific layer, that's going to open a new scene. So all of this programming of video you do with Blink's interface quite uh easily.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. And and you you you mentioned the fact that you you you kind of just started to bridge into the personalization aspect a little bit too. Um when when that happens, when the when the user is experiencing that, upon what data might that that decision be you know be made, um, that I'm gonna see one thing and you're gonna see something different, uh, but all related to the same product or service or whatever's being marketed.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, here we're providing full creativity freedom for our customers to build whatever they have based on the data they own. So if you think about a CDP system that customers have, so they have their own uh HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever, they have lots of information about this user, his behavior, his demographics, etc. And then they can very easily build this kind of logic that says who gets what and why. They already have those tools to build on emails and on landing pages and on push notifications. But we tell them you can do the same things, but now with video. And with video, you get way more creative freedom because it's it's like 30 seconds of visual stuff, it's not just 2D image in your mail or something like that. So they can be very creative and and and first like build this business logic to each and every user based on uh what they think, and also shoot out different versions and just see what works for each segment and it the video improves.

SPEAKER_00:

Interesting. Okay. So in terms of the use cases that you know for from your clients' perspectives, what are the types of campaigns that have been um sort of the most impressive to you since you you launched the the company? Um you know, what works really well um with this platform, um, and and maybe even some surprising stuff that you weren't anticipating um you know once things started to roll. Can you think of some some examples?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, for sure. So we'll we're working with different segments, different industries on different use cases, everything related to loyalty usually. But if you want me to highlight one or two examples, very successful use cases. So uh I would say the first one was quite uh some time ago with McDonald's. This is how we started. I think that was the first project we did with them. They launched a campaign um for like um buying McDonald's products based on past behavior, and we saw that this campaign converted, I think the number is 4x more in sales versus control. So that was very carefully measured, and that was a very simple one, but that uh ignited the entire work with McDonald's spent to different uh uh campaigns as well. The other one I'm thinking of, which is um uh a recent thought I had. So we we were working with the Live Nation, with the VIP team, and they had this uh campaign to send to everyone that is coming to a concert. Uh uh his invitation to the concert as a video, telling you, hey AJ, uh your seat is at uh place this and that. Don't uh forget there is like IP, uh VIP-specific benefits you can get. Click here to get more information, and even in some concert, like type in some message for the performer. So it was a very cool idea. And it was also very successful one. But the reason I'm mentioning that is because I thought that that was a very good point of view that they wanted to treat any one of the users as a real VIP. This is the VIP ticket, you pay for that, so you get the VIP experience, and then thinking actually, this is what we do, not for VIP members. The video builds the ability for any brand to send to a mass of users, to a mass of customers, but let them feel VIP, each and every one of them, because they get you know personalized video experience that that resonates.

SPEAKER_00:

So you're really kind of blending the concept of loyalty with the concept of customer experience as you kind of move along. And that and that's actually probably a good segue to my next question, which which was you know, along the continuum, along that continuum of um uh potential customer who's maybe not a customer yet, uh, to you know, somebody who has had some experience with the company in question, uh, all the way through to, you know, like you say, VIP folks who have regular users of the product or service or whatever. Are are there are there some specific things that you've noticed among your client base that you know that it that this works better or is more effective at one particular stage in that life cycle, or you know, or do or is it is it effective all the way through?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, we we do have different use cases for each and every step. So, for example, if you think about um the first stage of a customer's life, think about a welcome video activation kind of so explain the program, the benefits, etc. The values you get at this stage are different from the values you get at the end of the funnel. So you don't know a lot about the user at this point. But this is where you can maybe collect information, maybe ask him things that uh you might be interested in. Why is he joining, uh, what kind of demographics uh he is, etc. So you can collect data and you get like uh activation kind of uh of values. And then uh following the customer's life cycle, so we can think about anniversaries, milestones in the life of uh of a user, the life cycle. So, for example, tier upgrade, etc. So this is strengthening his brand loyalty while he might be very loyal or not. Um if he's drifting away, so you can think about winback and preacher and those things. And uh as as more loyal is, then you don't get the loyalty, but you get the ability to build more interesting things based on more data that you have. So if you think of this uh two-sided, so you start from no data, but here is your chance to build your name and brand, and you go to a very loyal customer, you you have lots of knowledge that you can use to improve his uh uh acts and and make him buy something or or keep uh for another year, etc.

SPEAKER_00:

And the data in in question, to your point, if you if you look at the whole uh customer life cycle, so you to your point, you go from zero data all the way to as much as you're collecting along that path. Do you have to worry, does Blinks have to worry about the privacy issues that that kind of come along with that, you know, when you're trying to balance personalization and and and you know uh the this the the all the privacy things that we talk about today with what's being served up uh along that path? Or or is that something that from your perspective, you're like, hey, that's that's the client who's using Blinks, you know, they have they're the ones that have to be careful with that.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, one of the best things about Bling's technology, and this is uh I didn't throw the name of the technology, we call it MP5. MP5 is a patented technology, one of a kind in the world, that the video is created on the edge device, on the mobile phone that the user is opening. So the video is created in real time when he's opening the video. The reason I'm I'm saying this now is because of the implication to security and privacy. This means we have the ability to create those videos and we're not even exposed to the data. So we work today with banks, work with uh uh health organizations, with very sensitive uh kinds of clients, and they can send something super sensitive like uh your bank account, etc. It can offer you something more. And Blinks as a company never gets exposed to any kind of of uh user data, and this is one of our selling uh points.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. I see. So so you've kind of put there's a bit of a firewall between you and and your clients. So really it becomes they they have to decide the clients, the banks, the healthcare companies, whatever, they have to decide uh what type of data obviously that they want to use to create the videos and and push them out there. So you're kind of separated from that. Gotcha. Gotcha. Um I I want to I I'm still there's this piece I'm dying to ask, but I'm gonna save it a little bit because it it brings in the AI piece of it, but we'll we'll hold off on that for just a minute. Um in terms of the, you know, there there's there are a lot of different types of uh uh platforms that you know companies might use um for for their loyalty programs, for their marketing programs, and so on. Um obviously some of those that uh that that they're probably not going to stop using because they're using blings are their CRMs and their you mentioned earlier their their CDPs and so on. How how are you integrating with those uh companies and do you have partnerships with those folks on on the way into the client? Um, how does that work?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, uh we're not replacing any CRM or CDP, we're uh um adding to that. So we're not handling the journeys and the sending of emails or push notifications. We rely on the customer to do that with existing tools. And then instead of sending a mail, he sends a mail that opens a video with our technology, and the integration here is super simple. Again, based on the technology, because we don't need to create the videos before in advance. We just like send a simple web page, and the web page creates the video with data. This means that we can work with any uh CRM today, and we work with different clients with all of the known ones and even custom ones we have the ability to work with. There's no need to integration, there's no need for developing any kind of unique things, it's very easy. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, okay, that makes sense. Um and in terms of uh of of measurement, um you know, obviously the the your clients have have their own measurement as it relates to the success of their loyalty programs. You know, those are going to be related to you know the you know, a lot of the standard things, uh, you know, uh uh signups and then you know repeat business and you know how often are they using uh points and all those kinds of things. Um do you have a separate set of of KPIs that that you kind of look at and discuss with with your clients?

SPEAKER_01:

We usually start with the pain. Why are there uh why do they want to work with blings? And the pain, usually it's it's very easy to find the pain today because the standards are so low in email marketing, for example, the open rate is so low, like more than 90% of the mails are just going to the spam folders or to the archive. So, how do we improve that? How do we improve the conversion? And we usually start with the what we call the hard KPIs. So let's ask the client what do you measure, but it must be something that has very clear ROI. It could be conversion, it could be retention, it could be churn reduction, it could be uh other things or sales actually, and then we uh measure that first immediately. How many people opened the video and bought a product in your store? Or uh instead of uh clicking goodbye, decided to maybe take uh a promotion and stay. So this is the hard immediate KPI, and we do that versus a control. Usually, if we start with a company, they usually ask us to do this as an A-B test versus their existing method, so we want to show an actual ROI. This is the immediate hard KPI. And what happens a week after that or two weeks after that is also taken into consideration because maybe in the video itself someone didn't immediately click to buy, but since seeing a commercial, a promotion, visual, engaging, that affects, and we have those numbers to show, that affects your activity even a week or two afterwards, and on top of that, we have the software KPIs. So, what is the uh NPS based on what you just experienced? Or, for example, I don't know how to measure that, but what is the impact to the brand when someone sees this video? It's like watching a commercial, it's very on TV. It's very hard to measure that, but it's another opportunity to present your brand values while offering a specific promotion or a specific lifecycle uh event.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. Um NPS, for example, uh just to drill on that just for a second, just you caught my attention with that one. Um from from you know, the NPS is sort of designed to measure customer experience, you know, for just very specifically. For the for the customer. So would the client have to specifically ask about their experience with the video? Or are you saying, we'll just match up here are people who have seen the videos, and then we're asking about their overall experience. Was it positive or negative? And then we make associations between, oh, well, they're the ones who saw the video, they're the ones who didn't, and therefore their MPS score is higher or whatever. Is that kind of what that means?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, naturally, um, the hard KPI is of the easy to measure. So you're just saying like uh we we support that to the client with the BI system. So they can uh open and question the data about the effectiveness of uh of blinks versus the control. About NPS, they need to do uh their own surveys. They can ask, like, uh, you got a video, what do you think about it? And some of our clients did it, and and the result was wow, that was very nice. Uh first time I understand, especially I'll give you an example in healthcare. So uh for the first time I understand what is the procedure I'm about to experience in a week, or I'm going to uh see this is the doctor I'm going to see that's in the video, and now I know about him. It's more than just a name. Maybe the video told me about uh something more about this doctor. So uh those things you can ask, and then the reply will be uh about that. And you can also ask like general things, like you said, uh, how was my your experience with the company? But it's uh it's a bit harder to analyze those uh broader aspects. Um, but I can say that uh like all of our customers try and and analyze the results and looking for very something very measurable, something very uh very connected to the real ROI, the immediate ROI.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. Okay. Well, again, I think that's also a perfect segue. You mentioned like the the scenario with um you know a patient getting a uh a video about their doctor, whatever. Okay. So how break this down for me. Um so let's say there's let's say there's five people, four people, whatever, who who are all going to be uh end up being recipients of a of a blings video. So talk to me about how the system would make the decision that person one is gonna get this video. And to your point, and this is the part I think is a little mind-blowing, right? And and it's created on the spot and delivered to that person. Person two, same process, but but it's gonna create something different for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How does that work? And and and where is the substrate coming from to make video one look this way and video two look this way, and and so on?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know, you don't even ask this question about like a mobile app. You just know that my mobile app, when I open it, I see my next uh doctor appointment or whatever, or my uh like how many points do you need to get to the next tier? So I open my app and I see 20, and you open yours and you see some other number. How does that work? Because the data is just like different, and the app is creating the the the page for me and for you. Blinks in that sense is very simple. We don't have an amazing algorithm that decides you should get this and we should I should get that. What we have is a video that is expecting values, and we uh the client creates the video and decides that this text is going to be replaced with the amount of points left for the next year and builds more interesting logic. So, what happens if it's uh you're about to become silver, and what happens if you're about to become gold might be different visuals, but then the video just waiting for the data, and the data is what you have for as a brand, and you just connect it and you just tell the video, hey, create this video for a user that is about to become gold and has 25 points left.

SPEAKER_00:

So I picture it. This is gonna be a terrible, terrible analogy, but but I picture it, I'm trying to like you know to get down to its most simple form. Is it would it be accurate to say that in some senses um it's almost like a mail merge where you've got spots open where the data gets pushed into? Um and you know, so in in the in the old case of a mail merge or and still today, you know, when people send out emails, you know, there's the little code that that pulls in, you know, AJ Schneider versus somebody else. Um is that is that a reasonable uh analogy?

SPEAKER_01:

That's a great analogy. So we you can say that we do mail merge for video, and that's that's great, and that's true. But we also, because it's a video, you don't do just uh text, so you can do everything in the video. It could be um the visuals of a specific scene, it could be the imagery that plugs in, and it could be even the structure of the video. So you can say I have like 10 different Lego blocks that I can create different videos as a combination based on some business logic, so all of that, but in terms of technology and functionality, yeah, it works exactly like uh email mail merge.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. And and it overall, the the I mean I guess technically that that wouldn't really be AI per se, but I have to imagine that you guys are are looking at that and considering it. And and so I'd like to hear your thoughts, and not only on Bling specifically, but overall, how much is AI as we move forward gonna start playing a role in sort of making those decisions at an even more um sort of sophisticated level for for personalization purposes?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, first we do have AI um, let's call it recommendation system plugged into the system. So I I define it as mail merge, but uh as I said before, you can uh tell the video create like different versions, different, let's say it's a button in the video that says click here to get the offer. So you can put in 10 different texts or 10 different colors for the button, and and AI behind the scenes will improve the video performance over time. So this is one of the features we already provide. But if I'm taking your question on a higher level, so AI today is great in creating content, and you can create personalized uh content because you have it's not that expensive or hard to create visual stuff today. So you can just create like different contents and then use them in your communications. So we're seeing this happening. Uh blinks is trying to get into that by taking this to the next level. So if today you have the most amazing video generation AI or image generation AI, you can create 10 different versions and send that and put that in your uh in your CRM or a bit more. But once you get to the level of thousands or tens of thousands or millions, then the AI is you cannot create today with AI millions of versions yourself. It just doesn't work like that. But with Blinks, we see that as a huge backwind because now you can create with AI the visual templates. So you can create, as I said, like the Lego blocks, you can create different uh small pieces of the video, but then you can build it inside Blink system with some logic, and that will create the variations. And you can layer on top of that dynamic text and you and some imagery that comes from your assets. So that makes uh Blinks Plus AI more than just uh a uh one to ten personalization, but one to each and every person in your in your crowd.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, it's amazing. Absolutely amazing. So as we move into to 2026, we're almost here at the end of the year. What's the next big thing for you guys? And and ultimately, where do you think um loyalty programs are headed in you know, as we move into the new year and and and even beyond, you know, uh over the next couple years? Um, what what do you see as the next big thing?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I imagine that in the world of uh I'll answer your question in two parts. First about blinks and then about uh loyalty. So about blinks, we are um uh now developing, taking the last question. Now we're developing a new uh system internally that you can first, it's a self-serve tool that everyone can open now and use. So we were working with big enterprises and have like advanced uh software that we offer to our customers, but now we recently launched some self-serve tool that everyone can just blinks.io and sign up and use our uh app to create videos based on templates. And uh in 2026, what we'll add to that is two things. One of them is the ability to connect Adobe to that, so to create not just template-based videos but professional videos, create the conditions inside the system very easily. It's a very convenient and easy-to-use tool. And we're going to upgrade that with AI by writing a prompt. Hey, I want a video for my company to win back users, I am an insurance company. Ta-da-da. Here is my brand. You write this down, and the video is created for you with all of the personalization logic for you to edit and make it suitable for you exactly. So, this is one thing. Uh, this is for blings. Uh, if I think about trends I see today in uh in the in the world of loyalty, I think it's related to Gen Z customers becoming the main uh market or heading towards more and more spend from Gen Z. So we think about loyalty not as like uh promotion points only, like kind of uh uh economic system that you get points and you buy products, but now you need to think about the experience of loyalty. What is the emotional uh application of your loyalty program? Because for Gen Z especially, you need to be uh you need to make them feel seen and you need to make it more about uh the emotion involved in the communication. So I think uh brands are going and will go more and more to loyalty becoming part of uh the the journey of a customer, not just a way to get a bit more value, but like this is my personal communication with the brand.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, kind of like I was kind of describing earlier, that that merging of the customer experience and the and the loyalty program um almost into one.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Uh and and then last but not least, last question for you. Um, if you had to give one piece of advice to to companies going into the new year, uh, would it be related to to what you were just talking about? Or what would that one piece of advice be as it relates to to improving their loyalty programs?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think it's it's related in the sense that we always need the the world today is not functioning at the best for uh for marketers. It's very hard. People have so much uh going on and so many different brands trying to catch their attention. So you need to make it meaningful, right? So I would say don't oversend, right? Companies uh have like open rate of something, so they think if they'll double the amount of sending, they'll get twice the amount of open. It's not true. Like uh you get uh uh fatigue from that, and you need to make each and every communication way more meaningful, and to get the trust of the customers it's is hard. You're sending the first mail, the c maybe the person that just like registered to your loyalty, he might read that. But if it's not relevant to him, if it's not meaningful, he won't read the next one. So make the first one meaningful and so and forth uh all of your communications.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. Jonathan, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today uh on our customers, uh Leaders in Customer Loyalty Industry Voices podcast. It was great getting your perspective uh on customer loyalty, and we look forward to hearing more from you and the team at Bling's uh throughout the rest of this year and into next. We really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you very much, AZ. It was a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00:

I want to thank everyone for tuning in to our Leaders in Customer Loyalty Podcast series. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the Leaders in Customer Loyalty Podcast and follow Loyalty360 on YouTube and LinkedIn. The links are provided below. Please join us every Tuesday for another edition of our Industry Voices podcast. See you then.