View Transcript
Speakers:
- Carlos Doughty: Founder, Martech Alliance (Moderator)
- Stuart Gordon: VP EMEA, Blueshift
- Frederik Salzedo: Director of Retention and CRM, Discovery+ EMEA
Welcome and Introduction
Carlos Doughty: Hello and welcome everybody joining us today! I can see lots of people bouncing into the session as we speak. Really looking forward to this one. I'm Carlos Doughty, founder here at the Martech Alliance, and I'm also your moderator for the day.
This is going to be a particularly fun session. We are going to be talking about the latest in driving customer engagement in a distracted world. I think we've all noticed just how much of a challenge it is to get people's time and attention, and this session is going to touch on exactly that.
Before we jump in, I do want to say a big thank you to Blueshift for making this possible. Without them, we wouldn't have this amazing session that's coming.
Joining me today is the VP of EMEA Blueshift, that is Stuart Gordon. Stuart, welcome. Stuart leads the company's growth within the region and has spent the last 10 years working within MarTech to solve problems for his clients and partners.
We are also going to be joined by Frederik Salzedo, Director of Retention and CRM at Discovery+ EMEA. Frederik has implemented an AI-based marketing automation environment in order to improve the customer journey, experience, and retention. And there you have Frederik. Frederik, welcome!
Today, Frederik and Stuart are going to be chatting through:
- How principles of omnichannel personalization apply to all companies, not just streaming companies (although you'll be hearing some fantastic insights on what Frederik is doing at Discovery+).
- How to crawl, walk, and run to omnichannel personalization. I think that's brilliant because sometimes you get this fantastic dream at the end of running in omnichannel, but it's fair to say it's not an overnight thing. There's a fair amount of stages that happen before you get there.
- How to personalize at scale. Another fantastic opportunity that's particularly challenging but offers some amazing opportunities.
Just before I hand over to Stuart and Frederik, a note to say, please add your questions on the way. At the bottom of the screen there, you should see a Q&A section. Don't wait until the end. Start firing over your questions. We have got 15 minutes dedicated at the end to answer your questions. But don't hold back.
Equally, after today, I would strongly recommend that you reach out and connect with Stuart and with Frederik on LinkedIn. They put out some great content around data-driven marketing, and you'll get some great insights. Right, that's the final bit for me. Just before I hand over, one more thing: we've got some interactive polls. So keep a lookout for them. We'll be producing some little pulse insights, so you'll get some fantastic takeaways from what your peers are also doing.
Blueshift and Discovery+ Overview
Stuart Gordon: Thank you very much, Carlos, for that introduction. It's a pleasure to be here. I suppose I'd like to just very quickly start off with who Blueshift are. I'm sure everybody knows who Discovery+ are, and Frederik can come on to that.
Very quickly, Blueshift is a smart hub CDP, which means we:
- Ingest, curate, and segment all of your data.
- Provide the marketing automation tools that allow brands to drive one-to-one experiences across their entire omnichannel customer journey.
In this session, we're going to be speaking to Frederik about how he has evolved throughout his journey at Discovery+, specifically in the marketing automation area.
I think lockdown has likely affected many people in the audience today regarding screen time. But now we're moving away from those restrictions that kept us indoors. Is it going to be more difficult for the TV or streaming app to grab your attention? And I think let's start off with some audience interaction in the form of a poll.
We want to gauge the path that you've taken over the last year or so. Have you used the time to catch up on your box sets that you had on your list? Or have you done the opposite and immersed yourself in other activities? Maybe purposely keeping yourself away from screens outside of the working day?
Poll Question: How much time per week do you spend watching TV and streaming services (excluding social media)?
- None
- Up to 20 hours+ a week (three hours or more a day)
Nobody's judging you here. If you're one of those people who manages to stream TV whilst working, I'm actually quite jealous that you're able to do that.
Stuart Gordon: We have the results. Nobody has no time, which is amazing. And there are some people with a small amount, 6%, with over 20 hours. So I'm going to ask you then, Frederik, if you have any insight into the changes in screen time across the user base over lockdown. How does the poll of our audience today compare to what you've seen? Nobody's watching no TV. And a few are watching a fair amount of TV, more than three hours a day. Have you seen a change over lockdown with your figures?
Frederik Salzedo: Well, absolutely. Especially at Discovery+ EMEA, we have our service in several different countries. And the fact that you have some countries in Europe that had a lockdown while countries haven't had the same way. So we've seen a very much a big trend seeing that people being locked at home having not so much to do. Of course, the streaming has increased because then you're not allowed to do anything else than just being home. And then you need something to pass the time. So we've seen a very big increase in the consumption on the service. But then if it's only due to COVID or it's also because the behavior is changing because people are now more streaming than watching linear TV, that's a combination of those two, I would say.
Stuart Gordon: Yeah. Interesting. I guess we could have probably guessed that. But I speak to my wide group of friends. Some people have really turned away and made sure that they're not watching too much screen and gone the opposite direction.
Frederik Salzedo: I don't remember the name of the person over at Netflix who said that. But you are the streaming services, and Netflix especially, are competing against sleep. Because it's just the amount of hours you have per day that you want your user to spend on the platform. So basically, it's not maybe only money anymore. It's also just the amount of time. So if you can make your customer to just watch this one more episode instead of going to sleep. And I guess we're going to talk and discuss more about how over at Discovery+ how we do that to increase the consumption, how to make the users increase the amount of hours per week. But yeah, that's definitely a trend that we've seen increased.
Stuart Gordon: That's an interesting one. I wonder how many people in the audience put down as their competition sleep. Ultimately, it's going to win at some point. But it's really interesting. Fascinating to see kind of all here behind the scenes.
Customer Engagement and Personalization at Discovery+
Stuart Gordon: Capturing and keeping customer attention is increasingly challenging, especially in a competitive space like digital streaming. How do you approach customer engagement? And how have your strategies evolved?
Frederik Salzedo: For us, one both positive and negative side of Discovery+ is that we have a very, very broad library. So we have what we call all the local content that we have in all the specific markets. If you look at Sweden, we are one of the biggest TV channels in Sweden, which is Channel 5, that produces a lot of local content. And then you have international content and you have US content, which means the library is really, really broad. And not only in terms of a lot of shows, but also in terms of what type of shows it is. You have, if you look at the American content, you have everything from Gold Rush or Ice Road Truckers. But then on the local side, you have X on the Beach or some famous people in that specific country, reality shows.
And that means it's really hard. It could be hard to navigate and to really make use of this huge library. So for us, personalization is really where it comes to, to be able to identify the different type of cohorts of users that we have so that we can brand the service depending on what type of user. So people are talking about personas. For me, it's not even personas anymore because I want to be so personalized that I can be. So really be down on a one-to-one level and to be, okay, you've been watching that type of shows and therefore being able to brand the product and to expose shows that we think you might like, not what your persona might like, but what you as this specific individual might like. So for us to be able to personalize is very important because otherwise you can just drown in the amount of content that we have.
Stuart Gordon: Sure, sure. Of course, TV and video streaming is something that almost everybody can relate to in our home lives. People who've registered for this webinar work in a variety of different sectors. And of course, we want to ensure that this session is also relatable to retail, e-learning, finance, travel, other sectors, as well as media. But the core topic that you've mentioned there, continuously gathering momentum across all the sectors, is personalization.
So, Frederik, can you give us some insights into what role personalization plays in your customer engagement strategy?
Frederik Salzedo: For us, it's been, maybe too bold to say it's the most important, but it's definitely among the top three, top five most important things we have is to be able to be personalized because we've seen that in the user journey, for example, we know that users, the more, of course, you consume, the more likely you are to stay with us. One big challenge a streaming service has is that you could release a season and then you have customer coming, buying a subscription, watch that season. And then as soon as they've been into the season, they cancel the subscription. So for us here with personalization, the goal is to really try to expose them to other shows so that when that season of the show you joined for ends, then you're already hooked on this other show that we recommended for you so that you continue your journey with us. And then we just continue delivering shows that you, yeah, you can watch and then you feel that this service is something that we're happy with, basically.
Stuart Gordon: And I know we were speaking previously. Can you remind me of the metric of whether you, when you contact, when you engage with your, the viewers after a certain episode, how many of the dramatic difference that it makes on the likelihood of them watching the next episode or taking an action in that case?
Frederik Salzedo: Yes. So, thanks to Blueshift, we've managed to put in place an automation where, for instance, the most typical setup that we have shows is that we release one episode a week. And then of course for the user, it's hard to know when, or to remind yourself that this episode is now being launched. So what we've managed to do is set up an automated workflow that if you've been following this season, as soon as we publish a new episode, you will qualify for a notification saying, "This episode of the show that you're watching has a new episode, click here to watch it."
When we implemented it, we saw that:
- If we looked at the control group, about 32% of people watched the episode within a three-day window.
- While those exposed to this automation, 92% had watched the episode within a few days window.
This is, of course, three times more watch time. So it's huge. It was a real success. And that's really a proof of what marketing automation is about. Sorry, now I'm finally allowed to drive out the ferry. I will just be driving out and then in 30 seconds, I'll be parked and I'll be completely yours again.
Stuart Gordon: Okay. So, so, I mean, that metric is astounding. I struggled to comprehend it when you first mentioned it to me a couple of weeks ago. But yeah, 300% more views if you send that message at the critical time, sort of midway through the season. It's amazing.
I threw out the word personalization before, as if there's a simple metric that can be measured, but we all know it's not that simple. Personalization is a very broad topic. How do people start thinking about personalization at scale if they're just getting started or only doing basic personalization today?
So, Frederik, what would you recommend for those people starting out? What are the first things to consider? Maybe some actionable insights that the audience can take away?
Frederik Salzedo: What I would say is very important also is that people tend to have a goal that is, "Okay, we need to reach omnichannel. We need to be able to reach you in all the different channels." Where I think it's really important also is that, let's say you have all of those channels in place. You have in-app, you have push, email, then social, but also to be able to know that, "Okay, this user is, for example, most likely to interact through a push notification," or "This one with an email," or "This one with a Facebook ad," and not just use every time you have some communications to be sent to just blast it out on all the different channels. Because then you end up with users receiving at the same time, email, a push, and then everything happening at the same time.
And then you lose a little bit of purpose of omnichannel, because for me, omnichannel, it's about being able to identify, "Okay, so this user is most likely to interact through a push notification," and therefore then we should only send a push notification and nothing else. So I would say this is one of the first steps to be able to differentiate and to know what you're sending. So they just not on the channel, having the possibility of reaching out to the users, not all of those different channels, but also to being able to orchestrate of that from one place and to be able to really select and to be, yeah, to be smart about it, basically.
And you see, sadly today, many companies use all of those channels with the same content, regardless of who the user is. And then you just, because it's, again, it's just one more channel amongst others. And then you have the marketing department come out, we need to send out to that many people that don't really care about the, maybe effectiveness or the, to be relevant. So, so I would say this is a strategy that is really important today, if you want to go ahead with that.
Stuart Gordon: Sure. Well, that combines personalization with omnichannel and moving from that sort of single to multiple, multi to omnichannel approach. Carlos, maybe I can bring you in. You've worked with businesses from startup through to enterprise, transforming the way that they engage with their customers. What insight can you give us on that? And I noticed there's a poll up here as well, which people can fill in whilst they're listening.
Understanding Multichannel vs. Omnichannel: A Maturity Audit
Carlos Doughty: Yeah. I thought I'd cheat a little bit and I thought I'd get the insight from the audience too. I would say, first of all, that the terminology is interchanged at times without appreciating the distinction. And so some people may use the word omnichannel, but not do it correctly. Conversely, you may have people that are actually more mature in their marketing and are actually delivering rich omnichannel experiences that they call it multichannel. So the first thing probably is just differentiation, understanding what we mean with those terms.
When you have that clarity, you start to think in levels of maturity. And that way you can be a little bit more honest with where you actually are. And actually that you need to take action. Because if you don't really appreciate that using lots of channels isn't the angle, isn't what you're trying to achieve. You're ultimately trying to achieve a seamless connected experience. And in order to do that, lots of channels isn't the answer. The answer is how do you architect and orchestrate in a way that's meaningful and contextualize throughout that.
So I think it really starts with distinction of the different levels of maturity with the understanding it's then doing a deep audit, going through that customer journey and mapping kind of layers on a cake and going, "Right, what does it really feel and look like for our customers today? What are the actions they take? What are the feelings they have? What are the friction points? What's the technology we have in those steps? And what the hell can we do better?"
Once you kind of look at that almost like a bingo sheet, you can isolate and start to go, "My God, we are operating in a multi-channel way. And we need to think about this differently." And so it allows you to kind of dissect each layer, take away from it and go, "Right, let's think about our creatives. Let's think about our messaging. Let's think about the copy. Let's think about the channel and thread it together in a really smart, intelligent way."
Now I'm saying it as if it's easy. It certainly isn't. And I do think some of it's kind of step back in the old school 3D world. You do this with post-it notes and get round a room and sort of map out these journeys. You obviously can do it online as well. But I think starting with that deep audit, once you have that deep audit, there's the opportunity to really define a rich, intelligent vision of what you want to achieve and then ask yourself, "How the hell can we really do this?" And when you ask that question, I think inherently you're going to find that there is only so far humans will get you there is a need to embrace AI. There's a need to embrace the right technologies that can basically operate in a way that you build rich decisioning taxonomies that can apply that personalization as you need to across each part.
As I've said all that, should we jump into some of these results as well?
Stuart Gordon: Yes, let's have a look. What's happening?
Carlos Doughty: So I think we've got some honest people here: 44% in the multi-channel stage. Omni-channel 33% and then the mix at 22%. Interesting. So spread across the board.
I mean, I know that Blueshift clients love to feed as much data as possible into the platform because it allows the machine learning to provide far greater insight into each customer. So, Frederik, back to you at Discovery+. What role does data and AI play in creating those relevant experiences at scale?
Frederik Salzedo: For us, it's super important because if you think about the amount of shows that we have, it's impossible for us to do that manually. So, of course, if we want to be able to scale up, we need AI to be able to help us with that. So we have a recommendation engine that is based on everything that you're watching and who you are as an individual. And then we make use of that in our marketing to be able to be personalized and to be relevant. So I would say AI is a really big part and data is a very big part of this.
Stuart Gordon: Sure. And of course, that provides the personalization. And I suppose to tie that in with your comments earlier about being truly omnichannel. You know, customers don't care about the channel. And they're engaging on way more channels now. How do you deliver that personalization and that relevance across the channels in a very, well, in a way that you described as being truly omnichannel and not a single message across the board?
Frederik Salzedo: I guess that the answer you want here is that we use Blueshift for this, of course.
Stuart Gordon: I wasn't fishing for that, but thank you.
Frederik Salzedo: No, but we use Blueshift to be able to orchestrate that. So for all of those channels to be able to tie the knot, to also have the recommendations, of course, because it's in Blueshift that we have the recommendation engine. So what we do is that we make use of Blueshift to be able to orchestrate all the lifecycle journeys and to be able to reach out to the users at the same time that we use the AI that's available in Blueshift to do this communication.
Sorry, now I'm finally out of the ferry and now I can park the car and I can be fully back to you, fully concentrated. So, yes.
Stuart Gordon: Well, that's good. We're getting near to the end of my, I guess, my question is to move to the audience questions. So hopefully we've had some of those coming in soon, as recently. I suppose, you know, all of this relates back to the technology that underpins the success of the personalization and the customer engagement strategies. What, and again, don't just say Blueshift because I know there's others in your stack. What technology is required to facilitate this?
Frederik Salzedo: Well, you're going to have to have something, people call it CDP or whatever you want. You're going to have to have a platform where you tie everything up. Because, of course, every company has different types of platforms and legacy platforms or whatever way you have the data. Could it be customer support? Maybe you have Zendesk or whatever system you are using there. And then you want to tie it up with, okay, the user behavior, website, all of that. You're going to have to have this, let's call it, point of contact or just tunnel or in the chain. Then this is where everything can be possible. Because once you have this user profile where every time the user interacts with you and that you have the data at that same place, then that means that it enables you to be able to, for example, do the marketing automation, to be able to do AI, because then you have this single profile view. So I would say this is the main, yeah, maybe a little bit of Blueshift there. We are not only solely using Blueshift for our marketing. Of course, we have different tech platforms. We have, we use a platform called mParticle too, that we have highly integrated together with Blueshift that enables us all of this. And once you have this single profile view, then life will get much easier for you working with marketing automation, because then that's when this door opens up and gives you those opportunities.
Stuart Gordon: Sure, sure. So being able to capture the engagement that happens from the campaigns and feed that back into your CDP or wherever you're storing that in order to enrich that is what I'm hearing there. So perhaps before we just go to questions from the audience, what do you think marketers should consider when they're evaluating tools to do this? I mean, you've got the tools, you've been through that journey. What are the considerations? Maybe, if you can share, have you made mistakes? Before you, you've got successful in, in, in this particular journey.
Frederik Salzedo: (On the move, apologizing for car noise) Sorry. Could you say your question again?
Stuart Gordon: Yeah. I was just trying to get some insight into, you know, you've come through this journey over the last few years. You've probably made some mistakes before you were successful at this particular section. What should marketers consider when they're evaluating tools to do this? The do's and don'ts?
Frederik Salzedo: I would say, I know that people tend to see that, but you really have all the business with you. And I don't want to sound too negative, but even when you are implementing, if everybody's on board, it's going to be one big part of the job is to keep maintaining that because even though, let's say you have implemented a CDP, you have recommendation engine, you have prediction, short modeling, your everyday work is going to always have everybody being on board because this is new for people. Believing or trusting data is something that is not that easy for everybody.
So one thing that's been hard for us, even though we implemented Blueshift many years ago, and that we've been doing that is that every now and then we need to, we, we, we, we reach or maybe not reach, but we encounter some, some issues with where maybe people don't want to rely as much on the data as we do. So we need to retrain them and re-explain and say, "Yes, but with this and this, we've done this previously and you see that this is the outcome." So, I would say really important from start to always be really transparent, really be transparent about what is working and what is not working and explain what you're doing so that you have people trusting you because it doesn't matter if you have all the best platform, the most shiny and nice looking one that can do everything. If people are not with you, it's going to be a lot of politics and it's going to be a lot of struggle to make use of that platform or all of those, this, this greatness that you have. So I would say number one is really to have everybody on board and understanding what it's about.
Stuart Gordon: Yes. No, that's great. It's not a magic bullet and they have to set the expectations just because you install some, some, like you say, a shiny new piece of technology. It isn't just going to run itself. There still has to be some effort and there still has to be resource put behind it to keep it ticking over. And you have to set the expectations of the entire business on that that's going to happen, you know, a year or two down the line.
Frederik Salzedo: Because now, I mean, even still some weeks ago, even though we've been using the recommendation engine for about two years now in our marketing, I encountered people who don't really trust the recommendation. I had to, but we still would like to hard code some emails and send it. But why would you hard code an email if you have a recommendation engine? "Yes. But we think that they may be like this more." No, we have the response. We know that the data is, I mean, we, we, we, and also that we always have outperformed. So everybody, all the time, really making sure that everybody is on board and really trusting you also.
Stuart Gordon: And I assume you went through a series and probably still do of A/B testing some of these ideas against the machine learning in order to kind of prove that point.
Frederik Salzedo: Of course. And I would say that the A/B testing never ends and it should not, because it's always about trying to improve. Even though maybe let's say you have a part of your lifecycle journey when a user canceled a subscription. Okay. We want this different types of triggers to happen, different types of campaigns. It's not because you have built it, that it will be the forever best version. So it's always about, okay, how can we improve it? Should we test? I mean, I'm maybe stating the obvious here, but it's going to be about, yeah, you could test the different types of CTA takes or where do you want to put everything? How should the campaign, the push look like, or the email, the in-app or whatever. So it's going to be, it's very important to never stop testing. And really making sure that you evaluate also, because it's one thing to do an A/B test, but then to also take the outcome of it and learn from it. Because I've seen also that people do a lot of A/B tests, but then if you get the outcome of it, it's not all the time that you actually take it into consideration into the future. So really take your learnings and make use of them and implement them into the further next A/B test or evolution or a new version of your lifecycle.
Stuart Gordon: Yeah, absolutely. Don't, don't get complacent, stay innovative. And that's how you got there in the first place. So don't, don't stop. Carlos, have we got any questions? I think I can see some stuff about direct mail, which incidentally is becoming a hotter topic now because it went away. Everything was digital and now, and now the sort of ink on paper is becoming a little more popular again.
Carlos Doughty: Definitely. I'll be honest. You shouldn't handpick the responses based on, should be the order of who asked them, but that was a great question. Interestingly, some of the research we've just produced talks about one of the biggest focuses for organizations when it comes to customer experience is bridging that physical and digital and the forgotten channel of direct mail. I think, yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think it's going to become more important than ever.
Q&A Session: Direct Mail and Streaming Ads
Carlos Doughty: So let's jump in. Thomas asks, "How do you think direct mail (physical marketing communications like postcards, leaflets, gifts) will fit into your strategy moving forwards? Considering the shift to working as a home working where customers prospects are increasingly likely to be at home during the day. Do you see the marketing channel when used in a targeted way becoming increasingly popular in the coming years?" Who wants to go?
Frederik Salzedo: I can start off from our side. In terms of current customers, this is not for the near future. We don't have our customers' home addresses. When you create a Netflix account or Discovery+ account, you could create it under a fake name. So we're not even sure your name is your real name. That makes direct postal marketing really hard. What we could do is just blast out to a specific part of the city and send it to everybody within an age group, which would be to non-customers. And then maybe if we're lucky or unlucky, you have some current paying customers who actually live in that area. I would say, no, I don't believe we will be using postal marketing that way for the coming future, not as a streaming service at least.
Stuart Gordon: I think that again, depending on the sector, the industry that you're in, that will have a different impact. We see e-learning and finance companies sending a lot more direct mail out than the likes of streaming or digital-only businesses. It depends what their customer base prefers. However, it doesn't fit so neatly into being able to calibrate and react on the engagement. You don't know whether they've opened it. You don't know whether they've read it for a number of days or even weeks until they actually engage or call the number or whatever the call to action is. So there's a big delay between sending it and getting any information back. And then how do you put that into the 360-degree view? However, anecdotally it's getting more traction.
Carlos Doughty: I was going to add on that actually. I think there's one use case where I'm seeing it quite a lot more on the B2B side of things. As part of sales cycles, you're chasing somebody down, doing your video selling, email sequences, calling people. As people get to a certain stage, you're then taking the relationship further and sending something in the post. Specifically in terms of trying to get that 360 loop, I haven't got data to prove this, but I think one thing that's been interesting is behaviorally, we've all started to use QR codes more than ever. We've started to check into places. And therefore the rise of the QR code, which I think was out late nineties, it was a technology that didn't really land at the time. And I do wonder if suddenly that mixed with direct mail might suddenly start to see a good engagement and an opportunity to kind of get that 360 loop. Obviously not every single person is going to scan, but actually for those that do, perhaps there's an opportunity to sort of bridge that experience online as well.
Stuart Gordon: I wonder though, if the ones that get on, I think it's great. It's now that the QR codes are just built into the camera on the phone rather than have a separate app. I think it's great. But are you then with your direct mail appealing to the tech savvy customer, whereas in fact, the direct mail appeals more to the traditional type of customer who would like to open something and do it the old fashioned way, if you like. You know, when a letter comes in, my children get quite excited, particularly it's for them. They get something that their name on it. They actually get excited about opening. I wonder if you've got a generation of kids who have never received mail. It's all email. And now they're starting to get some, who will do full circle. Could be.
Carlos Doughty: Let's jump into the next one. "What advice would you give for someone who is trying to move from multi-channel to omnichannel? How do we start?"
Frederik Salzedo: I guess it's a hard one because it's completely dependent on how the company looks like and what's available and where to start. But I would say a good start would be to give a phone call to Stuart, and he'd be able to help you with Blueshift.
No, jokes aside, I would say, I mean, if you're multi-channel and trying to be omnichannel, you need to have a platform like Blueshift or something else that does the equivalent. Because once you have implemented that, then you can start moving forward and orchestrating from that single orchestration place.
So I would say step one is: if your multi-channel platform can be omnichannel and do the orchestration that a marketing automation tool can do, okay, then you need to make sure you gather everything you need for that platform to be able to do so. If not, then you need to change platform, and that means implementing a new system, and that takes longer than you had thought. So I would be, that's step one.
Step two would be to get down to what exactly is it you want to reach out to the users, and what should be, I mean, all the different types of channels. Okay. You have AI that can help you telling the users. If you look at Blueshift, for example, we have the feature that gives us the possibility of automatically knowing, okay, you are an email customer. I know you're a push customer or whatever type of channels that we don't need to make the choice of that. So, if you don't have a platform that can do that for you, you'll need to be able to create those different types of funnels saying, okay, this is a type of user that should qualify for push notifications when we do a campaign. This is type of users we should qualify for an in-app, et cetera. So yeah. Hard question to really answer.
Stuart Gordon: I'm not going to argue with any of that, Frederik. I don't think I need to add my piece because of course it's, is it now I say you can find Stuart's number here and then it comes out rolling.
Carlos Doughty: There's a question there from Jenny who I really hope this isn't going to happen. "With the increase of streaming services and time spent, do you think we can start seeing ads incremented into the streaming streaming?" I hope not.
Stuart Gordon: Sorry. Could you repeat the question? I lost you there.
Carlos Doughty: With the almost like a captive audience watching, watching the streaming service? Are we going to see ads coming into that service? Please say no.
Frederik Salzedo: If you ask me, no, no, no. But it's a tough question and it's really a political question too. It depends also on different types of countries and the type of market. Sadly, I mean, I'm saying that me, maybe not Discovery+, but you see that on all the different types of streaming services, you see that you have some linear behavior. So behavior coming from the linear TV that are getting into the streaming industry. And this is because there's way of maybe earning money to be able to squeeze out more of the previous business. I don't know.
I know that Discovery+ in the U.S. does have this version where you have the ad-like package, for example, where you see fewer ads for a cheaper amount of money. And then if you want to be completely without ads, then you can, but then you need to pay a little bit more. That's all I'm going to say.
Stuart Gordon: There's one other, just interesting insight. I think, sorry to mention the deadly N word, but Netflix, they've launched a store, haven't they? I think that's interesting. It's not kind of advertising, but interesting kind of sort of franchising the content in a different way to kind of verticalize their offering.
Carlos Doughty: Frederik might have frozen. Just while he is coming back online, let's jump into the next one, shall we? "How do you see live streaming to multiple platforms? Will it develop for lead generation?" Oh, that's an interesting one. That's definitely one for Frederik. Well, I'll tell you what, if we can't get Frederik back, don't worry, Fraser, we'll drop you a message after this to answer that question in detail.
We have got a couple more moments for a few more questions. So I'm going to have to pick this one, which Stuart, I'm sure you're not going to hate. "What differentiates Blueshift from the other CDP vendors out there?" And that just to be clear, that is not from anybody who works at Blueshift. So this is somebody genuinely interested.
Stuart Gordon: It's a good question because there's a big pool of CDPs out there. And actually Gartner has decided to educate the audience on what we are and what a smaller group within that is as a smart hub CDP. And that really is kind of an end-to-end service CDP and marketing automation tool. So there's a smaller group of us that do that.
CDP obviously is the Customer Data Platform. It collects, stores the data, unifies profiles into a single view of the customer, and then allows you to segment that data in multiple ways in preparation for use by the marketing team. The smart piece is the AI, the behavior profiling, real-time decisioning, and then the personalization that we talked about. And then the hub is the user interface, which is the place to create those omnichannel experiences and the workflows and then deploy them across the omnichannel campaigns, going out to email, SMS, in-app, direct mail, chatbots, website, mobile, paid media, TV as well.
So, that's the difference between us and a CDP alone and a marketing automation tool alone. I don't know if I've made that any clearer, but Gartner has tried hard to distinguish that.
Frederik Salzedo: I'm back! My phone died saying the temperature was too hot. So it completely shut down. I am really sorry about this. I was supposed to arrive over two hours before this webinar was starting, and then Scanlines, a great company, managed to have a ferry be that much delayed and to arrive two hours later when the webinar was just started, and I was really in a locked situation having nothing else I can do. So I hope you can accept my apologies for this, a little bit more personal webinar maybe and view into my world.
Carlos Doughty: Very authentic. It was the real deal. It was very honest. So we're just about out of time. I do want to say, don't worry. You broke in and out, but it was fantastic insight. I mean, I learned a hell of a lot today. I found it super interesting, and I can see from the amount of questions that are fired through that everyone else did. A couple of people, we ran out of time to cover all your questions, but don't worry. Stuart and his team will follow up with you and answer in more detail. But before we jump out, I want to say a massive thank you to Frederik and to Stuart for joining us today. It's been a really interesting one. Thank you. And again, also a big thank you to Blueshift for sponsoring this and making it possible. So thank you very much, and see you all for the next one.
Stuart Gordon: Thank you.
Frederik Salzedo: Bye. Bye. Thanks. Bye.