INBOUND Bold Talks: Brian Wong "Stop Ruining & Start Rewarding Everyday Moments"

Key Takeaways

thank you thanks Laura uh I know I'm between you and Cocktails so I'll uh make this fun so today I'm going to be talk about getting caught up in the moment and you're probably wondering why there's a 12-year-old Asian kid in front of you talking about I know I can't grow facial hair it's it's really difficult um but I'm actually 22 now a little older than 19 I feel really old now um but uh I'm sorry uh and I want to spend some time today sharing a bit more about the moment now this is actually a banner that hangs off the rafters in our our offices in San Francisco and uh right now this probably means nothing uh to you and the things below it just again probably don't have a lot of meaning yet but hopefully at the end um you'll understand why we hold this so true and make this actually our Mantra as a company that moments indeed matter now first a bit about me so uh those of you who recognize this screenshot you rock it is a Counterstrike Source a firstperson shooter game now I was an awp which basically meant that I need to be very accurate with my mouse uh for sniping people in the face um and uh I tried to make the argument to my parents that uh this was helping increase my I hand coordination in my graphic design and they did not buy that argument now gaming has been a large part of my uh I guess child wish was like last year but uh the whole idea of uh me spending all this time actually uh kind of gave me the idea of trying to figure out how to skip grades so I ended up skipping uh four grades at elementary school and high school grades 27 911 and I ended up uh uh well it's a lot of skipping to to happen there but basically I graduated college when I was 18 I ended up moving down to the Bay Area not to work not to start a company but rather to work for another company it was dig and uh in my transitions typically I show this app after which is the beer fridge uh at dig really there was an HR person who worked there who really did not like the fact that I was underage when I worked at dig and as you know dig had a big beer drinking culture and I was no I was not allowed anywhere near it so this is a story of uh moments and and and so I got laid off in May of 2010 um and I remember you know sort of you know being really lost you know being Canadian you actually lose your Visa as well so there was other things that I had to figure out uh that's all figured out now thank God uh but I ended up finding myself in a long haul flight uh from San Francisco to somewhere in Asia I don't remember exactly where but I remember walking up and down the aisle of the plane I call it the aisle creep and uh I remember looking to my left and to my R noticed that every single person that was awake was playing some kind of a game on their phone and I'm sure all of us have had this moment we're like whoa there so many people and I was like this is crazy there's so many eyeballs concentrated on one medium that must must mean that there's a big advertising opportunity no that's not what my next thought was but in general because I had studied Marketing in college that was one of my initial thoughts about if I were to start a company it should be somewhere where people are already doing a lot of things which in Mobile gaming it seemed to be at least anecdotally now I also noticed that in these moments um were in these games were these things we call achievement moments and we've all experienced these so this is when someone levels up or hits a high score or uh you know sort of Beats the boss we've all experienced this but this was a universal trait across every single game so it really hit me that this was uh a really Universal trait that we should try to figure out how to leverage that I actually know when someone is happy when looking at these achievement moments and by the way they were happening uh a lot uh and were happing in games that people had already downloaded in the tens of millions of times so there's a lot of these moments a lot of these happy moments these e moments as I like to call them and so as a company now we see about half a billion of these e moments across uh many many apps that we've integrated with and so my question though when we first started off was what would this moment look like and how would we be able to uh interact with someone without I'm feeling like they're being advertised to but unfortunately and again there's an animation and all these but PowerPoints PowerPoint is the whole idea of moments that unfortunately had been abused so we've seen banner ads like this before where you're in the middle of an experience and something flies in your face you get kicked out right no one likes it of course but everybody really complains about it but really didn't have a solution so I was like what solution could that be and the inspiration was quite simple is when you're happy and you feel like you've accomplished something what's the best way to inter interact with someone well it's through a acknowledgement through a reward through reciprocity so we came with the idea within the moment of an achievement what if you rewarded someone um so let's say leveling up in a game and getting a free latte from Starbucks was the most simple idea but I was reading at the time a book called predictably irrational which some of you may have heard of and I believe some Dan actually spoke did he speak I don't know the whole point is in the moment rather than dangling a carrot uh actually serendipitously rewarding people so you don't really know when the reward is coming you're just doing what you're doing already and the reward kind of is there as a surprise and Delight so these are some of the brands we worked with already we're a three-year-old company so I mean we're old uh as it's old like 21 years and dog years uh but uh that's so reciprocity was a key part of what we wanted to do and as a company we like to celebrate our wins and actually a few months ago we were named into fast company's most Innovative in the World list now we beat Microsoft booah apparently their eight billion doll R&D budget is no match for our 15 Engineers uh but anyways this one of those funny things so we uh we soon noticed m m soon we noticed that moments were everywhere so almost half a a billion of them a month and uh we don't make any of our afar games we leverage the ones that people are already using and you can kind of see some of with a scale there but again in the animation in the background you would have seen raining moments so this is going to be uh very fun as I animate these things while I'm dancing on stage and I hope this is is this video GNA play I hope this video is g to play if it isn't I'm gonna act it out you guys ready to have rewards be a part of your everyday life was something that we really truly wanted to do since the beginning here at Kei you like to feel appreciated would keep and to keep reward you get that feeling back you get rewarded for being good at what you [Music] do he allowed us to create a stream of Revenue that's based entirely on rewarding the players these achievement moments or these moments that are already rewarding and it's ratcheted that up these everyday victories these moments they're everywhere we wanted to reward everyday life and keep finally enables us to do just that we actually had an epiphany six months ago as we started to build up the model more that hey you know these these moments don't just exist exclusively in games so work with me here so you look at games as a very explicit achievement moment but what about Fitness right you know what about logging a run or counting your calories um what about in productivity uh where you finish a to-do list right I'm the type of person who would add a to-do to my to-do list just to that I've already completed just to check it off right we've all done this and it's again a very moments driven approach and then on the far right you've got food and and I I'm not in this demographic because I have not touched my stove in a year uh but the whole idea of bookmarking a recipe and favoring a recipe and submitting a recipe these are all very uh potent moments cuz you now have something that you're excited about cooking uh and so we realized that there were tons of people doing this and the app ecosystem continues to evolve in these series of moments and uh I guess none of the examples are going to show but there was a few examples of a uh Todo lists like one called any do which we've integrated into some of you actually may use it and the whole notion of finishing it to-do you could we actually are rewarding people with Uber credits now the interesting thing is we started doing it actually based on weather so let's say uh it was raining in your city we would immediately trigger Uber credits as the reward as a serendipitous reward because it just makes more sense when it's raining uh the next example is of a exercise app where as you finished your exercises in that moment again you don't know that it's happening we reward you with uh and again this is not working but there is a uh Propel reward which is uh a fitness water brand from Pepsi um and then this is also in a recipe app but this skipped right to the actual ual reward which is when you get the recipe in your email but I'm going to go ahead and skip that now what is the success of this now how do people actually respond to these rewards now again we realized something quite unique which was when you are annoyed a lot right and you see something that's consistently a part of a screen you immediately figure out how to tune it out it's just how we are as humans if I made a really annoying noise for a very long period of time you'd figure out how to tune me out or kick me off um but the idea would be in this moment how could people actually not just perceive that it's not an ad but rather actually it truly be adding value and that was always our objective was how do we have the right reward at the right moment to the right person and so for now what we've seen is a a staggering number of people that actually once they see the reward actually redeem it and about 17 and a half% of the people who see the reward actually put in their email address to claim it now I'm one of like glass half empty type of guy and I go where did the 80% go and why did they not claim it now again looking at traditional engagement rates and the fractions of percentages that you guys see a lot of people don't ask that question anymore we continue to try to push the envelope into finding what is perfect for that moment for that right person uh and by effect again with the animations it would have been a dramatic counting effect of the numbers from the top to the bottom of in the last 10 12 minutes that I've been talking uh how many people have completed a to-do list well you know 23,000 people uh how many uh people have uh logged run how many women have logged run looking at that specific number count again this is all happening these moments are happening as we're just sitting here and it's the most explicit form of fomo right like fear of missing out like you just know this stuff is happening and it scares a lot of marketers but the whole idea we're trying to synthesize it we want to make it really uh digestible which is these moments are occurring we're tapping into existing patterns of behavior realize that trying to make someone do something new is a much different uh process than actually just tapping into what they're doing already right and we already have the ability to peer into that and that's the reason why we've been able to see numbers like that so why moments why am I so obsessed with this moments concept I I truly believe moments is the key primarily because mobile is a series of moments now we consume our phone based on our needs right so we uh let's say I'm really hungry I'll load my Seamless app right if I'm really bored I'll go and play a game if I want to check off a few things that I've just done I'll load my to-do list and and so the idea is we don't always have it out in front of us just sitting there like a TV or any type of lean back media but rather it's something that we evoke in a time of need now when you look at it we realize and this is how the gaming thing kind of became the DNA and helped us grow into other categories was you're not just going to play games all day right you're going to have other moments that you're going to be engaged in so the idea of finding people throughout the day and the moments they're engaged in throughout the day was not really new it's how marketers really think but the question was how do we properly identify it Beyond just an activity but into the actual moment in time uh and this is actually if you notice all the products around this wheel are from Pepsi and so the ability to work across different brands within a larger brand is something that we found incredibly key once you find how to identify these moments throughout the day so we really see one of the coolest Parts behind this too is actually seeing some additional data that you wouldn't otherwise see so we're huge junkies and the whole idea is how do we actually know who you are or what types of things you like based on the things that you have and you're using but not only just the apps you have downloaded but the moments in which you're engaging with those apps so let's say I know someone's using a to-do list at uh you know 900 a.m. and a fitness app at 600 pm and a recipe app at 7 p.m um and we know the locations based on those types of moments we can reasonably deduce okay maybe this is a working mom and let's figure out what's more appropriate based on that information and so knowing that metadata Beyond just knowing what people have installed or what types of physical demographic information you have about someone is really key so there's a few other things that we actually can see moments Insight so we had a theory that okay we see a spike in gaming activity in airports does that mean that there is a delay well the answer is yes so if we can see a spiking gaming activity across any major uh us airport we will know if there's a weather pattern that's causing a delay and so we actually last week announced an investment from AMX um and the uh things that we've been doing with them include like you know let's say you are delayed we know this you're playing a game we know you're at the airport we know that you've been delayed because of the weather here's a lounge pass right here's a free coffee so the whole idea of taking what would be a negative moment and turning into a positive one is really quite cool relative achievement this is really interesting it's more interesting for Fitness because for me a 10K is like I'll like I'll die if I do a 10K but like people just do it in the morning just for fun like it's like so who will that person who does the 10K every morning get better and bigger Rewards well we actually wanted to see how people's relative achievements matched over time and you also see sort of this whole idea of re- rewarding so if people have claimed something what does that indicate about them so Georgia Pacific is a big consumer package Goods brand the likelihood of someone who has got Dixie who's bought it or have redeemed it for a barbecue uh event they have got on the weekend will most likely want paper towels I know it sounds you know very riveting but you know when you think about consumer package Goods companies they got a turnover product they need to figure out how to make paper towels sexy and this is one way to do it um velocity is also really quite an interesting one mainly because different apps have different speeds in which people use them so recipe apps and this was not our idea one of our c clients came back to us and said can we make a moment not when someone's just bookmarking a recipe but what if they've left an recipe open for longer than 10 minutes right so that means that they're cooking it so we could actually start rewarding people there too so just really interesting ideas around timing and especially when you know the moments it gets really really interesting you can actually see throughout the day when the peak happiness happens so like at noon obviously when people are off for lunch and playing games that's when a lot of happiness is happening so you can see this quite quite cool like as as a macro view across the day but as marketers I like to say you know with you know with great power comes great responsibility yes I just quoted Spider-Man's uncle and the whole idea is you have this great power and right now the billions of dollars that's being spent on marketing is being spent on unfortunately ways to tune people out like essentially you're paying money to train people to not look at it um which is kind of unfortunate but we've all seen this dialogue before of like hey would you like to pay money to remove ads now we're all very talented people in this industry and I'm not saying all of us are in advertising but I'm talking about you guys the ones in advertising the there are millions of people every day actually paying money to remove you as an industry and it's quite frightening and it's a it's quite a crisis especially on mobile and what we want to say is with that power in that moment rather than annoying why not actually delight and create an entirely different type of relationship this looks Jank but it looked a lot prettier in the original deck where you have uh moments in the middle which is the Adam essentially describing visually what the moment looks like but if you see from the top to the bottom you've got the media component which is just the eyeballs we're all very aware of this it's very obvious that in a moment in which someone loged a run that's an eyeball that that's worth something to a brand but you look through the rest of it there's a lot more that can be done in that moment right you've got the ability to convert someone you've got loyalty value you've got data you've got social media you got content creation so when you look at this concept of a moment now you see a lot more than just reaching someone just to tell them about who you are and what product you have but you have the ability to connect so I want to talk about moment off the device very quickly so we talk about mobile being in Mobile but what about actually redeeming things off mobile so we did a thing with 7-Eleven where if you were in a city and playing games where the temperatures had risen above 70 degrees you could potentially get a free slurpee so was quite fun um and again leveraging moments not just on the phone but that are happening off the phone that your environment is leading you to perceive a certain thing and perhaps what's interesting is when you look at mobile the biggest challenges are how do we optimize our page for mobile devices or whatever it may be but the interesting thing is most people don't want to browse the content that you're serving to them then and there they want to do it on their own terms so they want to be able to claim it at home on their the couch when they're on their desktops when they're on their iPads and we actually found a fascinating stat where 20% of the people that claimed their rewards open these rewards on their desktops again looked a lot prettier but we also realize that there are moments off the device that are actually quite Forward Thinking so you guys are familiar with Nest the the Wi-Fi enabled thermostat you can basically change your I can change my temperature at my home from here uh back in San Francisco but imagine you hit your energy consumption savings goals right ConEd could reward you and your family with a certificate to AMC you got so many opportunities to take moments that again don't just exist on the phone but exist in other moments that you can actually reward so last but not least doing it right as marketers we have huge responsibility as I mentioned but you want to do it as s oh why wow just a few things just got cut off uh I'll just continue to Riff on so the moment has to be something that as you are rewarded serendipitous and surprise and Delight now I cannot stress that enough like we are humans we're not pavlovian dogs it's very tempting to do short-term metric driving by dangling carot and so we feel that to do it right is to respect the user to do something almost gentlemanly right and to realize that it's very human when I get a gift from a friend I don't question how I earn that gift and try to game the system it's thank you it's a great gesture I'm really appreciative of that and that reciprocity then begins you begin to reciprocate and you build a relationship so at the end of the day advertising was never about just showing a picture or showing a billboard it was always about creating a Rel relationship between the brand and the consumer and the most visceral way we felt to do that was through reciprocity so the question I will leave you with is what is your moment as a brand as a marketer as someone who's got your own brand you want to figure out that moment that you want to own that you want to align yourself with many companies already know this about their products they design their products around a moment to serve and so the question is finding those moments and then respectfully owning them and to respect the custom customer ultimately and to do something meaningful for them thank you very much