A Conversation with Brian Sisolak of Trilogy Interactive
Email expert Brian Sisolak has deep experience with email across many industries, including politics. He shared his perspective on email, and dug in deep on the ramifications of Apple Mail Privacy in this extremely email-geeky conversation. If you’re wondering what to do about open rates and campaign metrics, you definitely want to check this out!
AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing should say good afternoon. And my guest this afternoon, a guy I've really been looking forward to speaking with about all this email stuff is Brian sisolak. Brian is VP of this, that and the other end is going to introduce himself at trilogy interactive. Take it away, Brian, tell people
Brian Sisolak
how I'm doing well, doing well on this this afternoon. After and I'm going to throw in this evening in case anyone is listening to this while you know doing dishes after the
Matthew Dunn
event that was so dark out from the smoke. I barely know. That's right. Exactly.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah. VP of Technology Services at trilogy interactive. We're a full service digital agency, we serve as kind of nonprofit advocacy and political campaigns here in the United States. But primarily, I wear a lot of email geek hats from deliverability, to new tech to what is this thing Apple is doing is my latest kind of joy?
Matthew Dunn
Yes, yes, Brian and I are smiling at each other because somehow we've ended up is sort of, like kind of go to people because we actually are bothering to sit down and test betas and stuff.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah, and it's I mean, I will say it's been fun. I mean, it's, you know, email is we don't have a lot of pivotal moments in email, let's be honest. And this is certainly one of the most, it is really the most pivotal. I mean, I've been doing it for so for 15 years, you're
Matthew Dunn
gonna say you've been, you've been in the, you know, really in the email space a lot more deeply than I have. So it's curious to hear your read on it, because because, you know, relatively newer, long, but relatively new to email, particularly marketing, it just seemed like, Whoa, this woke everybody up.
Brian Sisolak
Oh, for sure. And it's such a, it affects so many different things. In terms of tactics we can use, in terms of the data we're going to have. And as you know, those of us who have been testing it, kind of dig into it more and more, we keep going, Oh, and then there's, I have this Twitter thread that I did like the first day that the beta came out. And then the next day, I was like, Oh, yeah, but then there's this other thing I had to go add to that. And then two days later is like, oh, we're gonna lose this other data point. Right. So now we can't tell this. And so it's been really an evolution. And I will say it hasn't changed much since then. Because the beta hasn't really changed. We really need to see this thing at scale and go and go live at this point.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And the scale behavior for as your friends at Litmus said, they're gonna cache half the world's email images. Just a small task, just a non trivial thing to turn on. Well, we'll we'll come back to that. Let's talk about more interesting stuff. How did a liberal arts college guy from poly sigh end up in email?
Brian Sisolak
Ah, well, so this many years back, I worked on the john kerry campaign, I was a volunteer, I was literally doing some data entry of donation data in the room, you know, you can think about volunteers don't get the nicest space in a political office card tables. And so the room next to us was what they affectionately called the internet team back then, whichever was like one of those people's use of the internet Go, go be next to the volunteers. And someone came over and was like, You seem to be typing fast. Do you know these things called computers and the internet and I started when on the other side of the wall and join the internet team there did a couple different things on the Kerry campaign and have been in that world ever since. Wow.
Matthew Dunn
Wow. Yeah. net that was carry campaign was early 2000s.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then george bush's reelection? Yeah. George HW Bush's Really?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. The other guy. And then you also spent some time working on the Obama campaign, right?
Brian Sisolak
Yeah. So after the Kerry campaign, I kind of something else for a little bit. And then I joined Mayfield Strategy Group, which was a couple of folks who were on the Kerry internet, internet team. Started Mayfield Strategy Group. I went enjoyed them. We were working for Hillary Clinton, one of the first emails I actually sent I did not send email for john kerry. The first email I would have sent would have been for Hillary Clinton's senate reelection campaign in December of a year that's going to escape me on the top of my head, but those were definitely the first emails I sent. And then Mayfield Strategy Group ended up merging with some other firms. Couple years later, I will spend some time on the Obama campaign on their Ben digital team. And so yeah, I've done a couple a couple of those. And you know, I still to this day, hit the big red flag button for a couple of our clients here at trilogy.
Matthew Dunn
Nice. Nice. Well, that's, that puts you in a kind of the, you know, the cutting edge of, of the political world adopting and adapting to the to the net sounds like,
Brian Sisolak
Indeed, indeed. And you know, sometimes we do things that, you know, the corporate space doesn't we do at first sometimes they do at first, sometimes it goes back and forth. You know, we move very quick and very aggressively in the political space. I mean, you know, we not jokingly do work 18 hour days, on those campaigns, particularly in the end. And you know, it's one of those, you know, there's a deadline that you were, you can't move, there's an election, if you want it done, you have to get it done before election day, you can't be like, Oh, well, we were going to ship that product in q1. But now we're going to ship it in q2.
Matthew Dunn
Like we were dad doesn't Yeah, doesn't work. Does it work and and corporate email marketers, from what I could tell from our customers or our either, it all has to happen yesterday, or they'll kick it down the road and other, you know, months, or something like that. It's kind of it's vexing. When are you going to do this again? Because we're kind of standing here waiting to help. Hmm. So do you still enjoy the the I mean, you guys are your trilogy fairly heavily involved in politics? And I think nonprofits as well?
Brian Sisolak
Yes, yes, we are very heavily, I work with some of our larger nonprofit clients. But we have a lot of, you know, we have some clients that use us as a tech stack platform, some clients use us as a full service agency, kind of varies from client to client. I still, in fact, just before we recorded this today, I was coding up an email, and this I will be putting up another email, um, you know, I, I, I actually really enjoy that. I enjoy the production of it. It also allows me to, you know, when things like Apple come out, or, you know, Gmail annotations, or any of the kind of big changes we've had recently, it allows me to have someone to, you know, test things with to play around with see the data.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And I'm glad to use that, you know, the phrase play around with because I mean, you didn't you didn't go through a comp sigh program. Neither did I. And, like, that's how you that's how you stay technologically up to date is you got to stay curious and Tinker and get under the hood. Because that's ready to get reinvented next year anyway.
Brian Sisolak
That's right. I mean, I was one of those kids. For kids know what this is anymore. desktop computers. Take a desktop computer apart. And you know, it's sat there without the case for six months while you swap different audio cards out? Yep. And so yes, I'm a tinkerer. I mean, no one, you know, we can do a whole episode on how do people get into email marketing space, I can guarantee you this. No one went to college to learn email marketing
Matthew Dunn
is for sure. That's for sure. It's, it's, it's a way to sort of Mutt afield in terms of skills required and likely career paths and stuff like that. But part of that's part of the fun. And indeed, no, i and this has been a big moment to have some fun. So yes, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, people are not desktop computers, but a, they sort of started making a little bit of a comeback when when the pandemic hit, and people were like, Oh, I'm gonna sit and work in the same place and, and I have the beast here, my incredibly souped up almost 12 year old Mac Pro. And they're getting pressure from my cold, dead fingers, so to speak, because because I can keep cranking things up, because I can still get under the hood and tinker with the machine. Right? Like, huh, yeah, it never ceases to amaze me that the bubble just keeps getting bigger. And the edge that you've got to learn on keeps getting proportionately larger is not there aren't enough hours in the day?
Brian Sisolak
No, there are not. And, you know, there's a thing that still astonishes me about these changes that are coming up is how many people need to learn about them. You know, there are a lot of techniques that we use in email marketing that 90% 90% of email coders will never use, or 70%, whatever, you know, they're more advanced techniques, they don't they require Advanced Data Sources or things like that. This impacts everybody. Yeah, every, every platform, no matter what you use to send your emails, this will impact you.
Matthew Dunn
And I'll stick a big ol ping pin in for a second. So if you're listening to this, and you're saying, What are these guys talking about? Apple announced that their worldwide developer conference this summer of 21 2021, I think called email privacy and they're going to change how they handle On images in email, most prominently pixel images that marketers have been using for a couple of decades to to get indicators of things like email opens. So it's it's a, it's a really big deal. Like someone just took away the speedometer or tachometer or something out of out of half of the cars that people are driving. And there's more than a bit of consternation and a surprising amount of blind ignorance. A lot of folks who do email marketing in a significant way, don't don't know this is coming yet. Would you agree?
Brian Sisolak
Oh, absolutely. I am. I'm shocked. Shocked is the wrong word. I shouldn't be shocked. But I am surprised. Even in the depths of like the email geek Slack channel where we talk about this a lot. You know, I there's still occasional question will come up. And it's like, oh, no, that's not, that's not how it works. You know, no, this, this tactic is not going to work in the future. But via even beyond that world. You know, as far as I know, very few of the major email service providers have informed their clients, and they're going to be the real outreach for that. And it's now it's a little tough, because we also don't exactly know what's gonna happen. No platforms have announced any kind of great changes in the way they're going to do things. Because it's all kind of still we think we know, but it's a little up in the air. So it's what do you tell your clients? We're having that internal discussion here?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also think, you know, pretty strong suspicion about this, because we, we campaign genius, we partner with a fair number of DSPs. And as I've reached out to talk, say, here's what we're doing with the things we do with real time content. I'm, I'm a little surprised that the folks I'm talking with are either like, yeah, we sort of heard about that. Or, yeah, we wondered what you were going to do. Because what are you gonna do? You're gonna do, right? Cuz you're gonna have everyone your customers gonna say, Why did my open rates all of a sudden look completely different? And you're going to have to explain, explain what you're going to do about it. Explain how they can make sense of it. Like, I don't see how you get out of that frontline position, if they're using your platform to send stuff and paying you for it.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think it's gonna be, like, Come, we're gonna make up a date here. So Apple is announced, this will be released in September. So we're gonna play September 20 is today? Sure. That is not correct. I have no inside intelligence here. This is a made up date, it doesn't mean September 21, our numbers are gonna radically change overnight. In fact, they may change so slowly over the next three to four months that a lot of people even miss it. If they're not informed. You know, people have to upgrade iOS, they have to opt into this male privacy protection, which everyone will do, everyone will agree, yeah. But then there is the other unknown as to what scale Apple is going to run this app. And if I had to guess, now, I am going to guess they will not be running it at 100% of accounts that are on iOS 15 devices. So there's also a scale and a ramp up period there. I kind of come around in the last couple of weeks to we probably have a little bit more time than we had been worried about, we might be able to get through October, end of November with some bad data in there, but not a ton. We may even be able to like snapshot, our data, you know, right before this comes out and kind of stretch that through the end of the year. So that's where my head is at the moment. But you know, talk to me, let's record this.
Brian Sisolak
change my mind?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. I mean, we're, we've got a tentative I think November is day to do, you know, do another webinar on this. I, you mentioned November, and for the for the for profit world, particularly retailers. That's where the reasons it seems like such a pinch to me is it is depending on how aggressive as you said, the implementation and rollout and adoption, is having these measures be different, right, when you're trying to make the holiday season profitable is going to create Yep.
Brian Sisolak
Sure, yeah. And, and I do think there will be some, like, you know, as a specific example, right. automations, where you run and there's a decision based on Well, this person opened the email or didn't open the email. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah,
Brian Sisolak
I think those very quickly, you're gonna be sending the wrong email again at some time, certainly by late November, right? That, that period where retail wants to send email, that's where they're going to start having problem.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and to be fair to the, you know, to the espys, and marketing clouds and so on that are that are going to have to grapple with this sooner or later. This has been a heck of an aggressive timeline. I mean to go from announced In what, mid early June, to potential implementation three months later, September, like most companies do not have the dev resources to go, Oh, yeah, well, we'll change that really fundamental measure that's been sitting there running the same way for the last, you know, 10 1215 years. That's, that's just not an easy lift.
Brian Sisolak
No, it's not. And I suspect at some of them. So to get into some of the kind of gory technical details, one way, and ESP can tell that someone opens on an iPhone is when called the user agent. And so that user agent, when you open a tracking pixel will tell your ESP, oh, I'm opening on an iPhone. And that user agent data is going to get obfuscated by Apple. And as part of this process, well, the user agent is is a very critical piece of information, but I'm going to bet you is not saved by a significant number of msps. They have to go way back in their technology stack, they have to go back, you know, four or five layers deep, add the functionality to record it, move it from a database to a database to a database, then build some reporting on top of it. While at the same time we all don't actually know the scale this thing is going to be at so like, Is that an investment worth it? I understand. I totally understand and respect that they're waiting to see what happens. Yeah, but we're making potentially a very significant investment. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Big and one that one that unavoidably touches other things. So it's not just about this isolated module, it's all the way through to reporting statistics, and potentially, potentially, a billing reporting kind of stuff. Which is always a delicate balance, too. Yeah, it is, it's going to be at least a year of what's it actually, how does this actually work? How, you know, how much does it actually affect this? How much do people care about it? etc, etc, etc. Yeah, it? Yeah. And and there are the API we use says there's over 13,000, unique user agent strings. So I can see why they probably were not not trying to bother with that for a long time. And now all of a sudden, it's material.
Brian Sisolak
That's right. Exactly. Yeah. No, and and it probably I mean, before the other proxies in the world existed, Gmail, Yahoo, and to a lesser degree outlook. I bet it was a much larger number than 13,000. And now, with a much smaller number, which actually has some from a technical standpoint, makes it a little easier. Maybe Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. But
Brian Sisolak
still, they don't if they if you don't record the data, you can't flow it all the way to your customer. You can't alter reporting, you know, the, the example that is often used is, well, could my ESP show me my open rate, excluding all of this Phantom? Unknown Apple data? And the answer is, yes, absolutely. Everyone can. But to do that they have to record the data a lot, you know, for platforms away internally and get that in over update reporting.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And as we talked about, I think the other day, if, you know, if Apple sticks with here's the user agent string, because that's not standardized. No one makes anybody do anything in that world. I mean, I've made up user agent strings, for testing just to keep myself awake. So if Apple either changes at the last minute, decides to vary it or something else, it makes the job a whole lot more complicated, which goes to your basic, I'd wait and see, too. If I were one of these platforms, I like, Okay, I know that's gonna be an impact. But, and to be fair to vendors, you me, he has pieces included, I, none of us were sitting here going, I got I got a plan for just in case, Apple does this or Google does that, like we all had a full plate already. And so adaptiveness sucks,
Brian Sisolak
for sure. And it's so hard to test. I mean, that's, that's the thing that, you know, when it first came out, and I will say that the beta has functionally not changed since it was since it was released. As far as we can tell, right? There may be a lot going on in the background. But we don't know, it's even been hard to test because we see this behavior Apple's talking about sometimes, but not others. And, you know, they're, we're talking here about, I'll talk for a moment about the prefetching of these open tracking pixels, which will cause the images to load before the user actually opens the email. Um, we don't know when this is going to happen. We don't know how regularly is going to happen. There are different ways accounts can be hooked up to iPhones, iPhones can be on Wi Fi, they can be on cellular, they can be their battery can be running out, they can be running out of storage space, and we don't have any insight into any of that into how those different kind of fluctuations in the iOS environment will impact this functionality that they've talked about. What they hyped up and, and you know, some people kind of I think are leaning towards that
Brian Sisolak
Well,
Brian Sisolak
you know, we don't see this happening a lot. So maybe it's not going to be a big deal. If someone wants to put 50 bucks on whether Apple is going to be successful in this or not, I would not bet. The bet. Yeah. Yeah. Don't take that don't take the bet. I mean, Apple has the resources to do this, we can already tell, for example that they have, they're working with multiple vendors, for their distributed proxy, right, we can see based on IP addresses, and who's owns those IPS, that they're already working with some of the biggest names out there. And they're working with multiples of them. This is a massive investment they have made. I mean, you know, I'm gonna guess they've been thinking about this for six years. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and it's part of a larger, it's a, it's a small part of a much larger direction for Apple as a company. Then Ben Thompson, who I quote, frequently, because I have a high regard for his his thinking and writing his calls it a strategy credit, like Apple is going to get brownie points from the universe for this, whether it's easy, whether it's hard, they're going to get brand brownie points for this move. And and that amazing sort of pivot they've pulled off to become the privacy company, absolutely. Gets gets burnished all the more. And, frankly, email marketers just kind of collateral damage. I doubt it. I doubt it was particularly front of mind in the decision.
Brian Sisolak
Absolutely. I mean, and and, you know, when they did app tracking, you know, they've prevented a lot of apps from doing tracking in version 14.5. This is kind of an extension of that. Yeah. It makes it I do kind of like, play this thought experiment with myself. What are they gonna do next? Like, what's the next thing that they could mess with? Yeah, yeah. And because they have branded themselves as the privacy company, because the others have gone the other direction? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. And the others, the others, you know, apple, most of their money is made, they have substantial advertising business, people seem to forget that. But most of their money comes from people buying these and buying into the ecosystem of these and buying apps on these. And if like, you know, I've said this before, if Apple sells, you know, iCloud on steroids, the safe internet two years in the future, my lovely wife will be at the front of the line saying Sign me up because she would love she would pay for the perception of privacy.
Brian Sisolak
And for a buck and a buck 99 a month or whatever it's gonna cost gonna be like, two bucks a month, that's fine. two bucks a month times, you know, a couple 100 million users. Mobile turns out to be real money.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, dollar here a billion. They're talking real money. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. The other thing, and then we'll get off the get, we'll get off the Uber gig train. The other thing that makes this sticky and complicated is that testing stuff on mobile devices, is a hell of a jury rig. I mean, I know there are mobile Dev and app companies that do this, but why Oh, boy, oh, boy. Like, like where's my network? General? sniffer? I'm dating myself here. Like, what are the tools that you'd use? On a real computer? isn't available on that?
Brian Sisolak
I cannot I cannot crack this iPhone open. Yeah, and get into its memory? No, no, does
Matthew Dunn
not exist. No, you can't you can't clamp a wire on the side. And, and what I did watch the watch the signal set is big. No, no, I did.
Brian Sisolak
I did try a little bit. I hooked up my iPhone to Fiddler. And you can you can just watch some of the traffic but within the app themselves, you can't see what's going on. And you know, some people have said, Well, can you? Can you see the images when they're cached on the iPhone? And like, those things are buried so deep and encrypted? We're not being gonna be able to, can you can you delete them? No, you can't. No, we have no control over this.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I Yep. I mean, I'm, we've just taken it, it is what it is, it is let's plan for the most aggressive case. And, and make hay if it's less aggressive than that. So we know kind of we're kind of have a little sort of, you know, disaster prepping or something like
Brian Sisolak
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Right. I mean, it's because we we do expect the worst and and it probably won't be that, although I think it will get to that eventually. Yeah, a little slower than we've kind of feared initially.
Matthew Dunn
Well, the main thing is, it's you know, any degree of uncertainty equals now you have to handle the statistics differently. So if it's 10% 20%, something like that, it's still like, Oh, my open rate wasn't what it used to be my triggers can't behave like they used to. So we'll have to grapple with this stuff. Anyway. There's real time content stuff that we're just going to shoot between, you know, shoot between the eyes, because of this, frankly, it's not stuff that I was going to miss that much anyway. And then there's other things that are actually will probably improve a little bit, we'll figure it out. how to how to do something that you're like, Hey, thanks for edge caching for free. I appreciate that, guys. Yeah, so, um, that gives, that gives trilogy year plus Whoo, probably good that this is an off cycle thing for the, you know, 2020 to mid term, it should be kind of bedded down by then.
Brian Sisolak
Oh, yeah, for sure. By then we'll have adjusted every I mean, you know, I think q1 of next year, is a concept of looking at opens that we've already adjusted our reporting for clients, right? We already, you know, yes, we are still showing some opens and some open rates and some numbers and, you know,
Brian Sisolak
clients
Brian Sisolak
that you know, those numbers were already it's actually been really fascinating now that I have dug more into this world of prefetching. I can now like see the Gmail app, doing it pretty regularly. I'm now seeing the yahoo app doing it this as well. And we always kind of, we always knew that happened. We're still still the scale is much smaller than what we're talking about here. But it is one of those things that reminds you that Yeah, we we have these data points, but they're not even terribly reliable already. Apple is really taking something that was fairly reliable and making it not at all reliable. Um, probably, maybe they're gonna throw in the caveat of like, we think so here. And but yeah, no, we on the political time, space, we have some time to adjust my nonprofit clients with end of the year fundraising, tax ability that's been a little rough. But I think what, we can definitely write out the data, right, we can write out the data up until the iOS 15 release, or shortly thereafter, I was just actually, you know, pretty much the day iOS 15 comes out, we're going to be going in snapshotting a lot of our clients data, when it comes to open, like last open date, for example. And, you know, go snapshot it, because we don't know what's going to happen with it. And it's kind of hard to recreate that you always can be done limitless time and money, anything is possible. But it's much easier on that day to go in and snap your last open date for every record you have in your database. Just save it to excel, or CSV. If it exceeds that and have it around, just in case. You know, like two weeks later, we go. Whoa, like 60% of our records all of a sudden have opened in the last two weeks. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of that kind of stuff in. But Come to think of it. I gotta wonder some of the really, really complex CRM systems are gonna have all sorts of wires getting crossed. Yeah, they're, it's, um, oh, yeah. I don't have that job. Yeah, no, I don't want I don't want that I want that job. I was talking with agenzia, the day different a different podcast episode, and he's a HubSpot Platinum partner, like, Cool respect, No, thank you. Can you do that stuff? Well, let's get off the geek train for a second talk a bit about where email fits in, in the world of in the world, the cycles of activity for your political clients is still, you know, mother's milk and the main the main train and stuff like that. It's, it's a huge
Brian Sisolak
deal. Still, I mean, the thing that I was just talking to someone the other day, so on that internet team on the john kerry campaign, I'm gonna say at the end of the campaign, we have about 30 people or so, between staff and volunteers on the internet team. Those, that's like the email team, on some reason, presidential campaigns, the teams are just gotten massive. And it's because there's so much more to do. It's such an integral part of every different aspect, from fundraising to field work, get out the vote work, email can be a part of all of that it's actually a struggle. I think that a lot of particularly larger campaigns have gone through, like it partially an academic conversation, as to which is the right approach because you can't A B test this one. Is the internet, like, is the is the digital team a thing or destroyed every part of a campaign have a digital portion of it, right? Dude, does your field program which is also has a massive data component. I mean, that's everything that's changed exponentially along. Digital is the data or the data scientists and the data, the data programs and the get out the vote data crunching that now happens it's just astronomically larger than it was two decades.
Matthew Dunn
Hmm. It's, it's a lot to coordinate and a lot to a lot too. What's the word I'm looking for? sort of throw on a channel that that wasn't necessarily designed to do that. What's that? What's that platform that's so prevalent? For particularly Democratic candidates on email platform, sent send, send, send, send blues, there's one called send in blue. But that's not it, though. Are you thinking of aqua blue, perhaps act blue? That's the light blue,
Brian Sisolak
dark blue is a donation is a fundraising platform. Right? So they they don't send, you send emails and you direct people to actually
Matthew Dunn
know the follow ups if someone gets from them are still coming from the campaign, not from that platform.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah, almost. They're like received emails, there's some transactional emails that come out of active blue, but when you consider kind of traditional marketing emails come from, from their platform
Matthew Dunn
from the, from the campaigns or their dominant players, specifically in that niche, are those conventionally SPS? No,
Brian Sisolak
there are some very specific players and in that realm, many of them have recently been acquired by a company called every action NGP van. There was there, you know, over the years, people have used things like Luiz de digital action kit, salsa, Action Network, nation builder, a couple of those are no longer in existence, you know, things that have been around for a long time sometimes have to end up life for, you know, because they get old. And there's been a lot of actually consolidation in in the industry recently. Interesting around every action. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.
Matthew Dunn
So like any other domain, right? Is, as is like, did you hear the news the other day, by the way, that it's a rumor at this point, male,
Brian Sisolak
male champion $10 billion, billion, you know that. You know, at moments like this, I always want to call back, someone who has kind of removed himself from the partially removed himself from the email industry, Lauren McDonald, and say, Hey, Lauren, can you go through all the mergers and acquisitions history again, for us? Because, you know, over the last 20 years, it's, it's whether I mean, the political space has actually been much more recent, this is a phenomenon in the last three years really, kind of at scale. But no, I mean, the email marketing industry has been, it's been the mergers and acquisitions, whether by its private equity, or, you know, the big players call it out Salesforce. Going up and buying
Matthew Dunn
Oracle,
Brian Sisolak
yep, Oracle, Adobe, or it's, you know, private equity coming in and actually purchasing, you know, the former silverpop. Now, acoustic platform out of IBM.
Matthew Dunn
Right, yeah,
Brian Sisolak
that's a different approach. That's, that's happened there. But Campaign Monitor group and we go on and on. It's been, it's a lot of, I mean, you mentioned the MailChimp, number. It's big money, because there's big money to be made in email. And the pandemic has just increased that kind of artificially. Yeah, in terms of like, it's compressed it, it was always going to happen. But we have not we now compressed it because lo and behold, all of a sudden, a lot of people went online.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, we all get a, you know, six to 10 year boot boot. Yeah, yeah. And unavoidable. And, you know, you've worked in it. I've worked in it a long time. Like, Okay, welcome to my world. I figured you're gonna show up sooner or later. Right.
Brian Sisolak
Exactly. And, and, you know, some people will float back, but you know, I will tell you, even here, I probably even do more online shopping than I did before the pandemic started for sure. Like, well, I kind of got that thing set up on a subscription and they just shows up every month, so I'm just gonna let that go. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Yeah, I mean, that that the mean, broad box online inside that box, the the subscription shift is its own fascinating thing to watch. And I see a lot of gains there, actually. Otherwise, you wouldn't keep doing it. I wouldn't keep doing it drives my wife crazy. But once a mind. Big pumpkin big bag of mixed cocktail nuts shows up from our friends down in Seattle at Amazon. She's like, are you still ordering those as like? I said, a subscription. I just goes up. I can't stop it. I get them here. I'm hungry at five. And you know, and maybe dinner's not ready and you don't want me bothering you. So go have a beer in a bowl and nuts. So and I don't see us like, that's great. Like, they show up. Okay, fine. Yeah,
Brian Sisolak
it's a good equation. When people do that, if you run a subscription service, they are subscribed to your email list. And you know, they are custom like they're, you get so much data about them. Like I you know, I recently signed up for a monthly mocktail subscription, raise the bar. And it's been great. Plug plug their name out there. And you know, they asked like, Did you like this one last month? I mean, after a year or two years worth of data, the real zero party data they built on me They know that I'm engaging. I mean, what an email program? I wouldn't, you know?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And and what am i or expect to Apple I know I'd had to go there one of my irks about that move is that I see a lot of really responsible, respectful marketing among the email marketers that I've been spending time with. I mean, there are bad actors in any domain, but it's a remarkably effective industry itself, policing and, and, and improving its game in a way that works for those end customers in and taking away What a chadway called taking away that conversational nod that says yes, I'm still interested. It's like, Oh, come on, you made life harder. And I don't think it was actually a huge human cry about pixels out there in the world. Yeah,
Brian Sisolak
I mean, I still have there, there are three specific aspects where I think this might actually backfire on Apple and cause the reverse of what they expected to actually happen. This might result in a lot of people sending a lot more email, because we go, you know, what, I know, there are a bunch of Phantom openers in here, because like, we've had Phantom, some low level Phantom clickers and Phantom openers for decades. This isn't. Now it's just at scale. But you know, what? emails relatively cheap to send my deliverability is okay. Okay. Yeah, let's throw another 50,000 Records, because they say they've opened in the last six months. So you've got that problem. You might have they may have we may be in a future where there's additional data sharing, you know, one of the things we can do in the United States is a lot of data sharing between vendors, you know, obviously, if your terms of service allows. And so we may have opened up a world where there's a lot more data sharing going on, you know, who's alive? You know, I see this person click an email. Yeah, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to click on another marketers email. But at least we know, there's a person on the other end. I mean, I've got email addresses in databases from 17 years ago, at AOL. Sorry, I pick on AOL. But they're usually they're 17 years old. that's usually where they're from. And the email addresses still receive email, but there's literally not another human being on the other end.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Nothing's ever clicked in there. Right.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah, exactly. And so I think it there's this weird world where Apple may have opened up some a little bit of Pandora's box here. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. No. Well, because the feedback, the feedback, signal, week is it was at least there was a feedback signal. And now you know, clip clip the statistical validity of it. You just, yeah. And because it's cheap to send the unsubscribe if they were gonna, yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Great. I also think I think we'll, we'll end up with weird cycle times for large scale campaigns, because you'll think, Wow, gee, it'd be if we could figure out which hero image is better. And then send that to everybody else. So if
Brian Sisolak
Yeah, oh, that was that. There was a third one, I was like this not coming to mind. Um, and I hate the term, but I'm afraid we're gonna see a rash of clickbait emails, right, like,
Matthew Dunn
because now we can't trust open so signal that'll give us the signal is bad,
Brian Sisolak
at least. And of course, it's not gonna be a great signal. But to your point earlier, it's something and, you know, I would prefer those clicks are generated through, you know, the high end content user engagement. But at some point, I've got an audience of half a million people that say they've opened in the last six months, but literally, four of them have clicked What am I supposed to do with those half million records? Like, is there a value in there? How do we dig that out? And that will be that will be a challenge? For sure. Yeah, there are ways to do it, though. And you know, it will. I mean, I think ultimately ended just means a lot more work.
Matthew Dunn
There's a Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking that like Amanda did, maybe, Lizzie maybe that's the problem. Maybe it's been too easy. And so you know, yeah, it's been sort of cheap and available and and fairly instantaneous. Yes. Which I think has been part of the attractor the fourth one I'd stick on your stack that credit should go to Scott Cohen at purple but he said he said is early on you were on that zoom conversation. He said this is going to give the email guys an even better excuse to go get their hooks into the other data across the company. Ah, yes right. Hey you ecommerce guys. I'm not saying we need that report. I'm saying give me that freakin report period. Why? Because Because otherwise, I'm not going to put anybody on your front door. Do you really want that?
Brian Sisolak
Right And I mean, it always one of the had an op ed recently in campaign and elections and one of the key points of that once you get the house in order This was pre thinking about snap snapshot in my open data, but was getting the data house in order. Because you know, a lot of people have relied on opens on clicks. And that's all they have. I mean, it always astonishes me. How many, you know, small, medium, major multinational, don't have conversion data in the same place. They send email. Yeah, yeah. And that's just not fun anymore. I mean, we are losing this major data point we used to use, and we got to have, and who knows, maybe someday we'll lose another one like, clicks? I mean, there is. Yeah, there is a there is a technological way. I mean, you know, it already happens. You know, it's happened for the better part of, oh, gosh, 1213 years, I believe, Barracuda spam filters, which are not used a lot in the b2c space. used. I see that like a 12, email systems, law firms, hospitals, things that have very high security requirements. They're clicking every link in every email. Yeah. Well, if someone anyone out there decide at scale decides to go that route, we then lose click data. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. I mean, apples building an infrastructure that they could turn into like the world's biggest flippin proxy server for your clicks on the Indigo. Oh, do you want us to leave the query string off until we're sure it's safe? And like, sounds technical. But is it possible? No,
Brian Sisolak
no. And they haven't. I mean, I cannot even fathom the infrastructure they have built to support this. And they will be successful in it. We will have to adjust there is there is no feedback loop to Apple, or they're listening to us. You know, that there was one aspect of the Gmail image proxy when they released it years ago, that they adjusted to allow real time images count. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
my mobile link and live clicker I think said about 2012. Right. Hey, guys, you're killing us here for no benefit. Exactly. And
Brian Sisolak
in March of the following year, all of a sudden, and there was no announcement or anything like that people often just noticed a gmail change that thing that's my expectation is 0%, that Apple will make that change their purpose? And, you know, like I said, I wouldn't take the $50 bet that they're, they're not going to be successful at it. Because to go to your point earlier, this is about the brand of apple. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, it is. Yeah. I mean, for for the, for the companies in the real time content. niche is Bula, campaign genius, etc. If they would just do do the protocol thing with with cache headers and repeat load of images. We could keep doing stuff that we'd all that we'd all worked our butts off to bill. I don't expect them to do that. No, it doesn't. It actually doesn't impair their privacy thing. But like, why bother? Why would they bother?
Brian Sisolak
Exactly right? No, they could absolutely make the exact same chain Gmail did and maintain their their embassy pillars, the constructs that they're going for? Yeah. Not a problem. Do probably create some more network load, but in the category of they built this giant thing anyway. But now why they don't they don't need you.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Why bother? They do By the way, I don't if I told you this, they do. Pass the language flag through from the user, which I was delighted to see. I'm not surprised, but I'm delighted, you know? Oh, yeah. And look, okay. Yeah. Yeah, change your iPhone to I changed mine to South Africa English, because if I change it to French, I'd never be able to read. Like, honey, you speak French fix this damn phone. No, I switched it. And then we ran tests and like, accept language header actually came through accurately? Oh, yes. Okay. Okay. That's that's a niche thing here. But if you're a marketer, in EU that actually may matter.
Brian Sisolak
That's right. That's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, there are, there is a way to beat the apple prefetching. Don't do it. Once Apple figures it out. They're going to prevent that from happening late. or one of the other mailbox providers are going to start doing this there's a there's a whack a mole thing here and started going to war with it's it's it's like people who try to get there, in my opinion, get their emails out of the Gmail promotions tab. Like Yeah, don't try to beat Gmail. They have more resources than you can possibly have. And more data and more data than you can possibly have. They know how people you know everything someone is doing in Gmail. None of us have that access to that kind of data and don't try to beat the system. Don't try to beat apple.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, it's it was a Pulitzer Hearst a night Look, I buy ink by the barrel, you really don't want to go to war with them. We buy day by day to buy the you know, by the pettah. by zeta. I can't pick a fight with them. No. Yeah. So how long in Seattle, you're an East Coast guy married a West Coast lady. And now you're here on the west coast, Brian and I got a chance to actually meet live by complete accident, which was very cool. But how long here in Seattle? And how do you like it? So I have been here 12 years? Yep, yep. 12 years now. Love it. Um, you know, and I've managed it. Also, you know, I've got family back east, both in DC in New York. So we also have the advantage of, you know, going back to see them a lot. I don't go back to DC in July and August. That's when my family comes out here. Usually the better way to do it. Yeah. And then, you know, I'll head out there when the rainy season starts here. For a couple of visits on now, I love it. You know, I've got a seven year old and a three year old and they are fully ingrained in the hiking, hiking, camping, sailing lifestyle that is up you doing the North Pacific Northwest, right? Yeah. And to be totally honest, going forward. They're going to be teaching me pretty soon. So that's a good thing. Yes, absolutely. It's a good thing. Yeah, I've got my my I'm in the two boys club. They're a good bit older. And they definitely tipped over to like, Oh, you do what? Oh, can I can I go along? Can you show me how to do that? That is cool. Like I did 110 mile backpack last summer with my son. So you got stuff to look forward to? Yeah, I'm sorry. No, my, my older ones in a couple summer camps this year. And every week I'm like, Oh, can I do? That don't be a POW is kind of adults over camp. But I am looking forward to have to say I'm looking forward to live email industry conference at some point, because I've had so many great zoom conversations with you and other people. It's like, I just want to have a Hangout have a beer live with a bunch of these folks is it'll it'll be it'll be fun.
Brian Sisolak
It is. Yeah, you know, I had some visions for what conferences were going to look like, this year, those visions haven't panned out. I think everything's kind of slowing down. But I have a real hope for next year, next year. That, you know, 2022, we'll all be able to get together. And I mean, and I will say, for those who can't, that they can join us virtually, yeah, right. Like, there are absolutely times where I would love to go to a conference. But lo and behold, I've got you know, the thing that I can't wait, right, and so hopefully some of this hybrid model will continue as well. So, you know, sometimes people it's, you know, their their companies aren't willing to pay or, you know, they've got a thing that their kids doing, they can't get away from they're taking care of a parent, they can't
leave
Matthew Dunn
life stuff. Yeah,
Brian Sisolak
exactly. There's life stuff that gets in the way, but that shouldn't limit people's ability to participate in these. And so hopefully, we can we can kind of work towards some hybrid models in the future as well.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I think so. And you know, wonderful see. A wonderful see the the local conference, make, you know, find its own feet in this in this new alignments. Like, if there were, I'm just making this up to make the point. If there was a, you know, email geeks in the Seattle area gathering the 90 mile drive from me, I'd go, you know, what, actually, yeah, it's, uh, you know, no airplanes, none of that. Mass Transit stuff.
Brian Sisolak
Oh, I'll
Matthew Dunn
hop down there for that.
Brian Sisolak
Yeah. Well, um, ironically, I was planning on one of those. Before the worlds kind of changed a little bit. So when the world unchanged change. Um, when the world changes back, we'll definitely have you down. And all the other email geeks in the Pacific Northwest because
Brian Sisolak
yeah, no, get together here. A few. Yeah, there's
Matthew Dunn
a fair few. Well, did wonderful. I know it would be to sit and talk with you. And I actually, I think this is going to be a useful conversation for, for email marketers that are just trying to get their heads around changes. We spent a lot of time discussing, you know, it's like, it'll be a little different. But I think we're at least both looking down that road going, it's gonna affect things no matter how big the number is. It's going to affect things.
Brian Sisolak
Yep. Yep. The New Years. Well, the fall of the new year are going to be going to be different. That's for sure. Yeah, hopefully in a couple different ways.
Matthew Dunn
We'll make like the best of it. Well, there you go. My guest today has been Brian sisolak. vp at trilogy interactive. Where does someone find trilogy? If they're like, Oh, my campaign needs help trilogy, interactive calm. Yep. A trilogy, interactive, calm contact form down the bottom of the page. Send us a message. Look on the page. Thanks, Brian. Terrific to talk with you.