A Conversation with Dr. Ada Barlatt of Operations Ally
Dr. Barlatt has been making quite a stir in her chosen field of email marketing! Her decades of deep data experience and expertise, with a fresh perspective and the irrepressible attitude of a "Cheerful Data Scientist", made this a standout, fun conversation. We talked about email, email and email, and also made time to traverse Blackberry and Waterloo, moving from academia to industry, the charm of Canada, and much, much more! A must-watch for any email marketing program working at scale.
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
Good morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. And my guest this morning, the other doc. Yeah, in email, Dr. Bartlett, cheerful data scientist for email and founder of operations, Ella, ADA, we finally get to talk. I'm so excited about this. It's going to be amazing. I'm really looking forward to it. Do the company intro and then what we will completely ignore that and talk about something else for a minute.
Ada Barlatt
I'm excited. I'm saying to all email and the techie bits and all sorts. I'm going to learn more about campaign genius. So operations ally, I think you did a great job of explaining it. But we're interested in helping email marketing organizations make the most of their data. So there's lots of tons of data out there email marketing. And I think now especially as Apple is changing, what data is collecting the reliability of that data, it's important to look at all of your, all the data points that you have, and see if there are insights that you can gather about your your market segmentation, and then people's behaviors, and how can you use their behavior to improve your email marketing and improve your your goals, your revenue?
Matthew Dunn
So top line question thing I've been curious to ask you. Yes. Is why email?
Ada Barlatt
Ah, that's such a great question. It's been such an interesting journey. And you know, it probably ties very much into why I'm curious and why I'm interested in chatting with you and about campaign genius. So email for me is this combination of data, really cool data stuff, but then there's has this HTML programming coding component, I think I am a web designer by should I put this like, interest, not my definitely not my professional skill set, but it's something I like my dad, I know a lot about HTML and CSS. So I love that component. And I love the creative components. And then it's a bit different than websites and that you have these structured sequences of activities. So there's this process piece. So in short, there's all these fascinating things happening all together in email that you can collect data on. And so I just love learning about that. So before I decided to dive into email, I looked at processes of all different kinds of manufacturing processes, medical processes, and so I find process in general will be fascinating. But then the fact that I get to get to my home, not gonna lie, it's awesome. And, and that integrates creative, as well as data and just all these different things I find to be really cool technical
Matthew Dunn
show show when you when you go through the often time consuming dance of a finding end up with a new new client saying yes, help us, yes, where they tend to be in terms of leveraging and getting the value that's there.
Ada Barlatt
They are, um, I don't want to lead in this. I feel like this is the wrong word. But it's the only one that's coming to mind, but in a plateau place. So they are like we've gotten ourselves as far as we can go. We have awesome professionals. But maybe those professionals are really great in developing or they're really great at creative. And they may be creating weekly or daily, depending on their cadence and stuff reports, but they just have this feeling that there's something more and they don't know what to do with it, or how to get that those insights. And so they usually find me through a variety of different ways. And I get to get really excited about oh my gosh, you have all this data that you're not using, that's typically always happen. Things that you're not looking at, information about your customers behavior and the trends of that behavior that you can use to come up with often. We have conversations about Like new offerings, or interesting segments, or groups of people that they can focus on maybe sometimes segments and groups of people that they can focus a little less on, which sometimes goes over Well, sometimes not so much. But interesting ways for people to get in touch with their subscribers, that they, you know, so hopefully they can sell more stuff for cheap, whatever their goal is,
Matthew Dunn
right? Okay. Okay, let's take that slightly technical dive for a second, when you're working with that hypothetical new client, you to get your hands on and work the cheerful magic with their data. There's a pragmatic, getting the bits for them into your hands, hands, it has to be a bit of a lift, and a bit of a mindset change for them.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah, for that, yes, sometimes, but for the most part, the projects that work the best is not is when they give me the keys, so they will add an account. And, you know, they kind of let me let me go, I find that to be the best option, one, because I can do a bit of an audit. And that's when people really can understand sometimes how their database hygiene might have gone, gone, where there's missing data points. And that happens with everyone. So it's not like there's no shame in here, but just where, hey, this this information exists for this subset of your subscribers, where is it, you know, sometimes automations and, and moving data from one place to another, depending on how your database is set up, sometimes those things break and people are not aware. So the first part is really the way that I like it is Give me the keys. And obviously we sign all the appropriate documents. And, and then I can dive in and kind of show you where everything is and where things aren't. And then sometimes there's a cleanup process. And then we go from there, I think that's the most surprising thing sometimes for for people is it can take a little bit of time, from like, Okay, let's go to Okay, here's a nice little chart that summarizes stuff, because there is that I need to understand I need to clean it up, sometimes I need your help to clean it up sometimes. And and that can take some time
Matthew Dunn
and a bet every client completely distinct, right? It's drifted its own direction. It's not like pattern, you know, pattern number three, and it falls into one of those buckets,
Ada Barlatt
completely, completely different, what they sell how they bundle, sometimes the sequence of the things that they're they're selling, their priorities also can shift. And sometimes that can really be reflected in who might main contact person is usually I'm working with someone in the marketing area, sometimes the email marketers themselves sometimes, you know, more general marketing, folks. And if they are new to the company themselves, that's been really eye opening. Sometimes they have a different vision before maybe the previous people there. But yes, it can. It's very, very different. But at the same time there are these core elements in email, right? Like you send messages, send emails, people open them, well, maybe we know people. There are people buying, because I'm working with more established organizations like to have historical records of people purchasing. And so that those core pieces are there, but how they put those pieces together is very, very, very
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. And then yeah, make make sense. And we will we will get into the measurement and the the apple thing, but I'm determined enough to just talk about that. Yeah, I want to your ROI on your ROI blog post I thought was fascinating. So I got a rabbit hole. And sometimes you just got to write to get it out of your head, right? Yeah. Are you named for Ada Lovelace?
Ada Barlatt
No, actually, I'm named after my mother. Not not a not a technical woman at all. But yeah, for whatever reason, when I was born, my dad decided to my mom and yeah, it's really fun, though. Anytime I went to programming conferences or anything, right? That definitely popped up but no, so thank you very much.
Matthew Dunn
For someone listening who's going What are they talking about? Ada Ada Lovelace is usually the short version of the name is is historically regarded as really the first programmer although you could argue the Babbage her her hardware counterpart was as well only only legitimate Daughter of Lord Byron died
Unknown Speaker
at 36 Yeah, that's bummer Yeah. We get to live in
Matthew Dunn
brilliant mathematician and and that edge case or that that that fun boundary between math and and programming land of algorithm is she was she was there exploring it really, really early on when it was all mechanical switches, right?
Ada Barlatt
Yeah. And it's amazing to see from that point to now like, at their core that the concepts are the same, like they were algorithms and their algorithms now, but you know, what we can do and how fast we can do it?
Matthew Dunn
And how much we can you know, how much we can handle, like the capability that now when when you're handling a data set from a customer, we get to get a little technical here, when you're handling a data set that you've gotten access signed in, pulled over, pulled over the wall from a customer? Do you crunch and manage and work with that locally on cloud? Like, technically speaking, where do you put the bits and bytes to learn more about him?
Ada Barlatt
That's a cool question. It depends. It depends on the size. Um, it depends on their computing resources. I my personal preference, just for data security, and you know, all that good stuff is to do as much on their servers and their places as possible. But sometimes people just don't have that those kinds of capabilities. Yeah. And then I will do that locally. But um, yeah, so some people have their own, you know, cloud setup that can handle the number of computations that matters. And sometimes people are really particular about that. So people can specify, you know, like, Don't download anything, whatever their data sort of policies dictate I, you know, will follow. And so if that's the case, sometimes you have to update and modify the algorithm to, to accommodate so.
Matthew Dunn
And how, I'm going to ask a tricky question, oh, how, how useful are USPS in in what you do? And how often do you have to go outside the ISP to do what you do?
Ada Barlatt
Wow, I think this is a frustration or reframe it of opportunity in the industry. Because I do think that there are lots of ways that DSPs can make the data more easily accessible to both the end user like in their reporting, but also to someone with a bit more technical skills like I do in terms of their API endpoints and even exporting. I think that that that can be a challenge. And I think it's a larger challenge. And sometimes people anticipate and being able to get the data in the right format. And sometimes it can take a lot of manual.
Yeah. restructure restructuring just to get it in a format before you can do anything. Yeah,
with it. So So yeah, I think that that's a huge, huge opportunity. But I also feel, and one of the things I'm excited about being in the email marketing world, and how well and how warm I've been received in the email marketing world, is that people are starting to see that there are these opportunities, and there are ways for people to see if it was easier to get the data, they want people use the data. So it's definitely a important part. Every ESP is so so different. So yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. Have you ever touched a lot of them? I agree that the focus of what does exist and for analytics and data management tools in DSPs, to my mind tends to be sort of two to make tomorrow a little better not to make next week and next month a lot better. It's, you know, it's like, it's the it's the dashboard. It's the dashboard on the car, it is definitely not the full historical data dump that let you build a better car.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure, for sure, for sure. And sometimes it's very, like other perspective that I find frustrating in most ESP is it's very email, not love email, but very specific message focused. So the way that the data is structured, as opposed to subscriber focused or so it can take a lot of effort to massage the data or reorganize data from looking at these individual messages that were sent to looking at Mary or Bob and their experience across multiple emails.
Matthew Dunn
delve into that a little bit because I I've got some wildly crazy long term ideas, a genius in this domain. But you say email centric, do you mean? campaign centric, dot htm Okay, not because not my read on it was that? How do I put this succinctly? messages, the individual messages tend to be treated as a black box called a message. And there's almost no structure about what was in that message?
Ada Barlatt
Yes, that's also true. That's also true. So there's kind of two points. Yeah. It's kind of like what how do people interact with the message? Yeah, typical way, but what was in it? Because I think there's a lot of valuable stuff in there. And, you know, how many calls to action? What how many links? Oh, my goodness, how complicated it can be to figure out which messages over to summarize across messages to keep like to group across messages for per link, like, amazing speaking, I'm getting so excited. I take a specific URL, and I take a whole set of emails. Yeah. Tell me how people were clicking on this particular URL across a set of emails that can be extremely challenging.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. I'll see Back to sit feedback and agree with you and say the same thing a different way, if we don't have a structured understanding of the content that was in front of x million people how we're going to start to get better at, at changing the actions of the next million people, because at the end of the day, what they see and read is what they're acting on. Right? Right. Right, right. They don't really the recipient doesn't give it to which ESP you send it with doesn't matter to them at all. They don't know they don't care.
Ada Barlatt
For sure, 100%. And then even one way, and let me know if this lands or not like one way beyond that. So there are a lot of people talking about artificial intelligence, Ai, lots of thoughts about artificial intelligence and email in general, but artificial intelligence, and just this idea of being able to predictively create, copy or content that will work. And so in order to be able to make those decisions to write models that can help you make those decisions in a nice way, you need to understand what was in the email? And what was the purpose of the email? And how different emails have completely different outcomes or, or objectives, right. So even if there is a link, and there is a click, like, depending on what you want them to do on that landing page, the behavior is completely different. So it's definitely a huge opportunity for the content within the email as well as the subscribers behavior across a set of campaigns
Matthew Dunn
crushes that Yeah, no, that that's it. And and this kind of dots back to our operations ally, business, if you will, on proven and kind of unarguable that emails, actually the most highest ROI digital marketing channel. So one asset that you own, that you can't get yanked away from you by bias, you know, social media company or change in a search algorithm or something like that. So, refining and improving the game dramatically refining improving the game, that of your email team would seem like, Oh, that's a good idea for your business. It seems to me as I've gotten to know, the industry and the marketers in it, that they, they, they they tend to be kind of chasing resources and so overworked that they have a hard time saying no, no, no, this is worth investing in not just keeping alive and trading as a cash register.
Ada Barlatt
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 100%. And I find that the the organizations that I've been able to work with the most, the ones that I find coming to me are very, almost, they were built around email. So there you go, that, you know, either might be e commerce only, or a lot of really large, online course platforms, people that sell online courses, online coaching, can be a big industry, and a lot of their revenue is driven through email. So those types of people are obviously the ones that at least for now, but I'm open to new, you know, new opportunities are the people that I that I've been working. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
it makes a ton of sense. Certain sort of email native.
Ada Barlatt
Yes, yeah. Email primary. They're the ones that are that are recognized. And maybe because in some of those industries, people have been really burned by, you know, a Facebook change or a you know, we're dropping some feature in social media platform than usual. Following I think, in those circles, the importance of email as well as importance of doing email really well. Yeah, definitely ties directly to their bottom line. Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
I'm actually glad you brought up the courseware niche, and you obviously must have customers in there cuz, right, that's a, I've got a I've got a course on a couple of platforms that I built years ago and yeah, I don't It doesn't get any TLC from me it just kind of goes along and but you know, a couple of couple 1000 couple 1000 people have taken it so like, okay, that's kind of cool. But it's email that keeps me in the loop of Oh, that's how someone promotes the Jeepers out of their course and gets more people signing up for their course and then expands that to their next course like you can see folks who make their living as online instructors building their list. Oh, there is there is a keyword there their list and and they're really starting to you know, to build a relationship and subscribe a value and all that other stuff. Like,
Unknown Speaker
oh, this works.
Ada Barlatt
It does it doesn't that industry in general is a beautiful example of how email can be really really powerful. And then also making small changes in your email sequence or in your in the process of your emails can have some really big, big impacts and taking the extra time to also segments from my experience and working in that industry. It's been really some major a house. Well, let's
Matthew Dunn
talk about one of my one of my favorite topics a little more, which is you Wow, you made the jump. Yes. from academia to entrepreneur, you know, in in, in what looks like a very different space tough, tough journey a bit.
Ada Barlatt
Oh, wow. Yeah. So I would say that I'm still I mentioned earlier prophecies is what I've studied in school. It's what I taught. It's what I, that's how I look at email and the world really now. So it's very grounded in that process perspective. But it was fascinating to leave graduate schools and finish, you know, PhD, and start as a faculty member, and realize that like, Wow, this is great. My dad was a professor, my husband is a professor, my in laws are professor. So I've got lots of academic
Matthew Dunn
family tree.
Ada Barlatt
Family traits. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But then to realize, whoo, okay, this isn't for me long term. I'm happy for them. And that this has been awesome. And I was really fortunate at the time when I wasn't happy, remember to serve on the Board of our regional Small Business Center. And that was really what got my entrepreneurial bug going. Because I was meeting entrepreneurs and learning more about the world of small business and startup and those types of things. And realizing that people had really lovely ideas. And they were very passionate, but they needed some support. And in systems, they needed some support and process like, not not, not everyone thinks in terms of processes. So I found that that was a really cool opportunity. And that's when I transitioned from academia. That was my focus so and helping people sort of take some of the lessons that you can learn from really successful, large process oriented companies Toyota's and McDonald's and the Walt Disney worlds of the world. And how do you take these concepts and apply them on a very, on a much smaller scale? So I did that, and I worked with a variety of companies in a variety different industries. And then it was more recently that I discovered, oh, I really liked the tech stuff. And for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, I really liked email. It was just the most fun projects were the ones I got to work on, you know. Yeah. And so that was kind of how I made this made this transition. And then I discovered that Oh, wow, there's like a whole industry of people that are really passionate and focused on this area with so I jumped in with both feet.
Matthew Dunn
Nice community.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah. Oh my gosh, luckily, compared to you know, I'm an engineer. I'm a proud engineer, but it's very, very different going to an engineering conference, at least in my experience is going to email conference.
Matthew Dunn
Have you been? Have you been to live email conference, not alive one yet. But even the online ones are lovely. Matthew Burnett, who I think we both know Raja has a Canadian specific email sent would be in your backyard. But um, I only got to two live conferences before the Great interrupt of pandemic hit, but they're just as fun live as you would think having done them virtual, it's just as as tight knit community and mutually supportive a community as you can ask for and you're talking to a guy who loved con loved live conferences for many, many years. I actually can't wait to go to the next live email conference. I god it's good to be so cool.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah, everyone seems like they're friends. And they know, it's just really beautiful. Yeah. It's it's really, really, really good.
Matthew Dunn
It's a nice thing. And you know, plug plug insert plug here for only influencers, if you're listening to this podcast, and email is your thing. And you're not an only influencers member, only influencers.com go apply. We can't wait to meet you and see what we can do to help you. Insert insert email, insert spirit of email, I hear that it is a shift though, from academia. Yes. To entrepreneur land, like the I might. My academia, time didn't overlap with my other industries, plural. But, um, that there were points. In fact, one of the reasons I live in the town I live in is that I was when I when I left big software company, I was like, I really miss teaching. I want to go back to that. And I do miss teaching, but I, I don't have the patience to be in academia, honestly,
Ada Barlatt
a different set of skills, a completely different set of priorities. Um, yeah. How you think about the world for sure. It's a it's different. It's valuable. fantastic things come from academic institution. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And so I'm grateful for them. But yeah, I'm happy that I've made this career transition. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn
Do you find Do you find the the difference in collegial and team work? works better for you or do you are there things you miss about life? Classroom live colleagues live students committee meetings. I'm sure you miss a ton.
Ada Barlatt
Oh, yeah, those those definitely though those at the top knowing that I don't miss those. I feel like the one thing that if I were to make a connection, the work that I do now is almost like when I was able to teach elective courses, so people are there on purpose, and they've chosen to be there. And they're very interested in the results. And they're very engaged. I found that one of the more frustrating teaching was, you know, a great experience for me, I enjoyed it. But one of the more frustrating experiences was when it was a required course because there's that extra like, Yeah. Like, let's do it. So what I love about is Dr.
Matthew Dunn
Barlow is just gonna be on the final. Yeah, exactly. I just want to smack them.
Ada Barlatt
And I need the I feel like I deserve these three points. That is definitely. That was definitely an interesting
Matthew Dunn
sound. My, my, my I come from a family of teachers as well. And I hear through the grapevine that parents have become much more of a pain in the backside in the last decade or so it wouldn't have been good. I wouldn't be good at that either. Like, yeah, so Tim, yeah, Timmy gets to see it. Because Timmy did see work. Next conversation, please.
Ada Barlatt
And even at the university level, where it was great. Got it, but I didn't have too many interactions with parents, thankfully. But that it definitely happens. And it's definitely a
Matthew Dunn
which is to me is bizarre. Like Barry. You're supposed to go stand on your two feet learn step by sea. Yeah, we'll send a check but by sea. Yeah, it's an interesting time. It's an it's there you go. Simply puts in interesting time. Water. Waterloo is actually I don't know if you know how legendary Waterloo is in the software world. Yes. Oh, very much aware. Oh, yeah. Cuz I, I spent some, I spent a good almost a decade at a big software company just southie here and we hired Waterloo grads, like crazy. But we hired Waterloo math grads. Back in the 90s. Not software grads was like, Oh, interesting was the priority. The hiring priority was math grads, like they had the they had the high level thinking skills. Right. And like this language, that language these API's you can learn. Right? Yeah. Yeah, some just some brilliant folks out of there. And blackberry was kind of born out of, yes. Waterloo as well. Definitely. Definitely,
Ada Barlatt
that people here are very proud of. Not that it's a it's interesting. So, so much ever to Michigan. That's when we graduate school. And I can remember learning about this the job, though blue. Yes, that's right. I'm learning about the job opportunity. And to be honest, and I guess I'll out myself, I had never heard of Waterloo. I was like, Okay, let's see what happens. And it was really lovely coming here. And to learn of this, this tradition, and where all of the alarms are. It's that not too many Canadian institutions
Matthew Dunn
have that? random. So Canada
Ada Barlatt
state, yes, I have that sense of alumni loyalty. But I think it's very much bred in the United States. Like, you know, there isn't a lot of collegiate like, there's not there's collegiate sports here in Canada, but it's not the same level as the US and I feel like that has gives a different vibe to it. But Waterloo definitely has this protecting its own. We're going to you know, come back and recruit no matter where in the world. Its alumni are gone. And I think that that's a beautiful thing.
Matthew Dunn
MIT but colder. That's,
Ada Barlatt
that's true. I tell people to describe it. I do not think MIT describes themselves as the Waterloo of the United States. But perhaps,
Matthew Dunn
and what illusion either but you're I thought about that, but you're right about and it fits the lovely innate modesty of the many Canadians I've worked with over the years that their universities would be kind of like, like, oh, gosh, should not not do that rabid loyalty saying that US universities do. No, you grew up in the US. You come to us now. Can
Ada Barlatt
I work for the US? Yes, yes. move to Canada for this opportunity. And right. Hi, my husband is a faculty member. We met at Michigan both moved here to be faculty members. And so yeah, that's been Waterloo has been the catalyst for our Canadian experience. Oh, cool.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And Aiden, I have a have a Venn diagram overlap because I'm married to a proud Michigan grad. So I was required to say Go Blue since she That's right. In the Northwest, where I live is is the largest alumni cluster of University of Michigan grads outside of Yeah, outside of Michigan. itself. Yep. The Seattle area is like Canada. swing a dead cat without hitting. I have friends from from Michigan that live out there. So that's interesting. That's cool. Yeah, yes. And that's also it's also a great school. Were you at Waterloo during? Let's call it blackberries. Yeah. precipitous decline.
Ada Barlatt
Oh, yes. Yes. It was exactly not the, the high years of blackberry when I was here, but um,
Matthew Dunn
yeah, Deaf go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. sideswiped by paradigm.
Ada Barlatt
Yes. Yeah. But it was interesting. Also, that people I think Canadians in general are very loyal to, yeah. Canadian companies. And so they're still I think even now to this day. And for sure, there's still lots of people that are very fond of the organization.
Matthew Dunn
Well, it was I, I carried, I carried more than one crackberry as we used to call them. And I mean, we can we can actually connect this quite directly. I would argue that what made the BlackBerry was email, boo. And what killed the BlackBerry was email.
Ada Barlatt
Oh, I see the making what can talk to me more about the killing?
Matthew Dunn
Well, BlackBerry's handling of black shirts the making of um, for those of you who never held a blackberry in your hands, it was a beautifully designed device where you could type on physical keys Gosh, I missed those. And what what got the BlackBerry on on hips across business? You know, business world everywhere was staying on top their email? For sure. It wasn't it wasn't really texting had texting hadn't become even remotely a thing you did, then I mean, and it was a hijack of sideband from cellular control towers anyway. But blackberry came along, you're like, I can have my email my pocket? Where do I sign up? And so hearing those things? Yeah, if you look back at it, historically, you might have done this there. The way they handled HTML email was was kind of squeegee awfully proprietary. And, and it was not, it was not great. And so iPhone comes along, and it puts two things in your pocket, you know, one web browser, yes. To Oh, this actually looks like email. Um, and you know, in a million other things, it's the Swiss Army Knife device on and and, and Android, obviously, following much the same much the same paradigm. Yeah. But and blackberry was, was, you know, this is what you do is this thing, maybe maybe they stuck too much to email being the only thing where, where jobs and jobs in iPhone said, you know, anything you want, someone will build an app for it. But yeah, and I do remember that the HTML email, Blackberry was a pain in the butt. And it didn't look good. Honestly. plaintext emails were like, great. No, no, and you preferred it on a blackberry but HTML, richer, more, you know, a little more media. The email, not not at not a super great experience. Yeah.
Ada Barlatt
Interesting. That would be an interesting piece. But I'm following you, it makes perfect sense. Go ahead for and forgive me, if I haven't listened to the episode where you've done this. But I'm super curious. You've mentioned your your experience in big software companies. How did you get to email and how did you get to campaign genius? I'm curious.
Matthew Dunn
I will, I will. I will try to keep this brief. As I said the other day, and I think I think skip skip for doors face felt the first job I had with email in the title was 19 9090. So I was at Microsoft, for almost nine years, at 89 to 98. And that was in the days of corporate land. Well, corporate lands, were starting to spread Novell NetWare taking off really fast. And emails sort of wrote into companies on the back of lands and personal computers, obviously, as well. But Microsoft had a surprisingly good Mac. Mac email program. Interesting. They did. We did. We did yeah. This this really terrific Mac email program. And it was a Mac server as well as Mac client. On not windows, right. The one of Excel was on Mac, by the way, on and in Microsoft bought a company in Canada, Vancouver. I think they were called consumer software, who'd built quite good and taking off like a rocket land. email program for the for the PC World. Okay, because because Microsoft could see, okay, this email thing is going to go somewhere. So they bought this Canadian company I had with, with with some some people I worked with in the in tech support because I started in tech support there, right like starting like a janitor. But we'd seen the email thing starting to grow on the Mac side, we'd heard the rumors about, maybe we'll acquire a PC, you know, Windows DOS, email company. So I moved into management and I said, Okay, guys, here's the deal. I will write, because nobody likes writing, you know, internal documents and proposals. And those of us from academia. Like I said, I will write the why we should have an email support department separate from Excel and Word and stuff like that. I'll write it. Here's the caveat. I want to run the team. And they're like, heck, yeah. Great. So the manager was like, Yeah, that makes sense. So boom, there we were with this email support team, and about two months later, the the acquisition of that Canadian company happened. Cool. Well, okay, so one, one last little personal story. I always hit home on a Saturday my phone rings. Okay. Matthew Dunn. Hi, this is Mike maples name doesn't mean anything to you. But senior vice president right hand guy to Bill Gates at the time I bow I bought swallowed the phone. Yeah. The unlike Yes, sir. The acquisition was going go all the acquisition stuff was going along with that, with that Vancouver company. Sure. The founder, husband, wife, founder. She went, Oh, wait a minute. No one's said what's gonna happen to our support team and support was was her baby. She was like, she almost put a hold on the acquisition because no one was paying attention to their support, folks. So Mike maples is like you go to Canada. Okay, no problem. Up the highway to Vancouver to meet to meet the really cool support team who'd been ignored in all the acquisition discussion. The poor guys, I walked in, they all look like like, they were waiting for me to come in with a sword. So I, I kicked out the the Microsoft corporate dweeb, who is talking to him, and I said, All right, guys, what do you know? What do you want to know? How do we get through this because it's not going to run without you. You are in the driver's seat here. You actually know how to make this thing work on a bunch of people, great bunch of people. So but that was, you know, that's, that's 30 years ago, 30 years ago. But I was so I was involved in email from a from a technical perspective, really early on Microsoft in 8990 actually ran everything on a Unix based xenex based on email system, we would have the the Mac guys would have a separate kind of crappy PC just for for corporate email. Interesting. Yeah. And and it was actually part of the culture. This fascinated me because I could see that email was a was a medium, not, you know, not just a not just an app.
people refer to each other by their email name. In in front of the Add sign. Oh, I got such and such from Bill. Gee, that was the verbiage. Interesting and if I said, Mike, m Mike maples. Oh, my cam it now. Fascinating. That is fascinating. Like, this is powerful. And then you can see that, you know, the the email overload started a little bit early. The email overload, we've all got right, that started a little bit early in internal in the company, communications there and you can see the patterns really early on of awful use of email for communication versus effective use of email for communication. Like I think it taught an internal class like, Look, here's how to use this this medium. Yeah, you know, effectively, here's how not to use it. Right, we had the problem, we had the problem of the backwards thread problem. We like, catch up with this read backwards and try to make sense read backwards in chunks and try to make sense of it. What a stupid design, right?
Ada Barlatt
Like, oh, lucky me. Wow, wow. Okay, so you're working in Microsoft. This acquisition happens. And then what happens? Oh, I
Matthew Dunn
bounced. I hit 13 jobs in nine years there. So I did a lot of others. Yeah, it's a great learning opportunity. I did the PhD while working at Microsoft. So not not trivial, but I have a wonderful wife. Um, so I did a long story short, I did a ton of other things and started doing almost a serial entrepreneur thing because I wanted to stay in the town I'm in and have had my family be a priority, which they are. campaign genius, sort of came out of a project that we did a few years back on building a web based video maker. Oh, yeah, it was, it was it was going like, wow, you know, cuz I, we've done a ton of video stuff. And I said, This video is going to start to be more and more important, you could just see it coming. Because that's, you know, that's my field media and built a web based video maker. And then we looked at the market and said, I don't think we've got the muscle as a bootstrap, I don't think we've got the marketing muscle to actually make this thing go there. All of a sudden competitors popping up, you know, with with VC backing behind. But in the course of figuring out how to make, how to make video sort of almost live and on the fly. I kept doing things in email and like, why are we not doing real time content? in email? The plumbing has been there for 20 years. Right? Right. Right, the plumbing has been there for 20 years. And I looked through my inbox like nothing. Why is email alone among digital channels? So obdurately text and copy centric when everything else has gotten more and more and more visual? Great question. Derek. Great question. Yeah. Well, I wasn't satisfied with the answer. So So campaign genius is like, you know what, we could build this because the the like, the the standards are all there, there are literally billions of email clients that are wired to do real time content already. Huge, like just huge opportunity. And it was one of those don't do this. It's stupid, build it and then start figuring out where it fits in the market. I know you're supposed to go out and, and your input and all that other stuff. So you know, so slimy. Okay, it's working for you. I think that's great. But I understood the fundamental the technical fundamentals that were there, and then had to, you know, we had to learn a ton more about the actual plumbing and wiring and stuff like that, um, having spent a good couple or three years on building that. I have a much better bead on the impact and the not impact of what apples yes to do. Yeah, with with pixels. And here's my one. Here's my one refer that on the the actual thing and Apple thing in relation to real time, I think email. Yes, email marketers. frickin deserve this one, because they've had the capability to do more visual, more real time more interesting things in email for 20 years, and frankly, haven't done it. Hmm. And the only thing they've used that capability for is is for their own benefit as marketers, right? The pixel to give me metrics to pixel to give me open rates and stuff like that. The fact that Apple's move will have almost no visible impact for recipients. Yes, it's kind of like we kind of deserve that one, guys, because we didn't do anything that made a difference to them out of the game, who's gonna cry? Oh, my countdown timers don't work. So we can we can dispense with those. I think a lot of other things are actually not going to get broken based on based on technical research we've been doing since Apple's announcement like, I don't think it's actually as catastrophic. As you as you might think, I suspect. Location, look, IP base location stuff is out. Yeah, for correlating opens and clicks is going to be different. But it's actually it's like missing is starting to look like maybe 10 12% impact in terms of our broad toolset and campaign genius. So not too bad. Not that
Ada Barlatt
thick. So there's still there's still this capability for delivering real time content. You know,
Matthew Dunn
even if Apple did the most draconian thing that they could and we've sort of run run the different scenarios. All right, what if they completely ignore all cache headers and just go one time? Suck it up? Here you go. Yeah. I've talked. We're doing a webinar tomorrow, Gene Jennings and I will be there No, yeah. We'll talk about this in more depth tomorrow, but wow, okay, rabbit hole. One of the problems with email is that the mental model is too strong. Elaborate, please. If I say male, yes. You know exactly how that works, right? Yes, put a message in an envelope and it goes to someone and they open it and we're done. Right? And email implies that the same thing happens. That's not actually how it works. It's mostly how it works. But it's not fully how it works. And the difference between those two things is awfully, awfully big. So when someone's thinking in terms of email, email production, email marketing production at large scale, like your clients tend to do, right? I'm pretty sure that that mental model tends to assert itself unconsciously. And, okay, well, now everything's gonna be in terms of real time content pixels, everything is going to be scooped up all at once at the moment have said, right? Give me your description to the mental model. Yeah, that's 30 scription of like, when people there is no one moment of send in a scaled email program. That's true. That's true.
Ada Barlatt
It's something it's it takes time. The hundreds of 1000s and millions of messages Yeah. It
Matthew Dunn
takes time and and emails are not written in a in a scale email program. emails are not written composed assembled. Five minutes before they go out the door. Definitely not. So more practically, it looks more like manufacturing. Hey, operations girl. Yeah, it looks it looks more like like a manufacturing things like it. I think the averages to last time I read it two weeks. I don't know what you're expecting. Yeah, that makes it that's it. That sounds great. Yeah, right. The planning stages in though, we're gonna put this in there. We're gonna have this product in this mess, like huge amounts of time going on there. Yeah, the thing about real time content that that remains is that remains exactly the same mechanism. Even if you keep the all sent at once mental model for a minute. Yeah, you can change your mind about stuff at the last minute. Which is pretty flippin valuable. In that daisy chain of breath, it's like, it's, to me a metaphor. It's a bit like what, just in time get brought to manufacturing? For
Ada Barlatt
sure, for sure, for sure. Live in the aisles. I think an understatement for her. That's why I was so excited to chat with you and learn more about campaign genius, because I see huge opportunities for you know, even right now, I have a client where we were we were planning the calendar was setting event in a year in advance. Right. And, and life happens. And now the the launch that we were planning for July 9 has been moved to the 19th. Right. And so that has lots of for how the system works right now and a production this production process. Yeah, there's a lot of moving pieces that need to be go back and be fixed. Yeah. So the ability to be to be able to change that on the fly in a more in an easier way. I think, for some people make sense. Like it hasn't been sent yet. Like, why can't we just changed it when you're there not realizing this larger production process? So I think Yeah,
Matthew Dunn
yeah. larger, larger, larger, larger production process indeed, on then, and then change the mental model for a second say this campaign is actually going to be sended. Intentional over time. Yes. If can we learn and refine? Yes. Fast. From the initial part of the Send, and change the value proposition? Let's call it 8020. Just for the sake of discussion? Sure. Sure. Can we can we learn enough from the first 20% to maximize the remaining 80%?
Ada Barlatt
That's interesting. And what I find fascinating about that ability is that the the message itself doesn't need to change like in the the work in the ESP doesn't change. It's only the work with whatever is connected to this real time.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can think of real time content, you know, campaign genius, move Blake or whatever else, metaphor, but kind of a V, kind of a VM virtual machine for messages.
Ada Barlatt
I love that that is an extremely powerful capability like that. It's just fantastic. I think. For me, it wasn't until, like, we've met through these only influencers, Thursday conversations, and I was like, Oh, yeah, he's fabulous. But then it was only during the festival email demo. I was just like, Wait, what? Well, you just,
Matthew Dunn
you just got a very sophisticated, you know, user, but you just validated what I said about mental models. Yeah. Don't think that email works this way. Because mail. Yeah. is such a, it's quite a powerful mental model. Right. Send, send done. That's my shorthand for send done. It's not how email works.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah, there's that part. But for me, it was more the flexibility because there are often people especially how do I say this in a succinct way. But sometimes people in this there's this larger production process that we've established, sometimes people within the process are not fully aware of the preceding steps and the following steps from where they are. Yeah. And so to give people more time to make decisions, and to adapt and to adjust what they're what they're doing is a really powerful, powerful, powerful tool. I can't tell you how many times thing people, there have been panics and things have happened because the train has started leaving the station here and open another analogy, but you know, this long process has started. And someone in the middle is like, Well, can we just wait? Or can I decide later? And it's just like,
Matthew Dunn
no, no. And so there's a huge, huge capability of that the technology exists to enable that efficiently I think. So even post pixel geddon ability to change your mind and affect the message after said, Yes, yeah, after, and I love to use the 8020 thing, because it's like, it's a, it's not a bad handle on it's like, to be able to change your mind after 20% of people have opened it, and maybe start doing your statistical sampling more of, of Android for the time being. The scenario we run that I'm like, this is what this is, what we're going to work with guys is is the most pessimistic, like no cash, no cash control, and, and frankly, other inbox providers following suit with Apple, like, let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that everyone's going to start doing this, like, Cool performance just went through the roof. Yay. Why local device cash can't get a link can't get better than that in terms of performance on open. So thanks, Apple for taking my bandwidth bill. Apple's gonna be cashing 47% of the world's email content. That's not a trivial lift.
Ada Barlatt
not anywhere near? Well, good. Yeah. That's exciting for them and their engineers. And they're, you know, yeah,
Matthew Dunn
that's what's your what's your sort of? Personal first professional second reaction to that? proposed move about the handling of pixels? Personal first, personal. I'm an Android user. Did you understand the like the the privacy side?
Ada Barlatt
Yes. But the privacy side, I find that I'm personally, I feel like, I'm like, how do I want to say this? I feel like in sometimes the current campaign, this apple campaign for privacy, I think in some ways is it's a feel good, like, Oh, well, yeah, everything should be private. But there's something about and that's probably why I loved your ally article. And I'm like, oh, there's something about this, that just was sort of rubbing me the wrong way. Like, it's not like, it's really to the users benefit, not 100%? I'm not sure. There's just something about especially the beautiful commercial, they are fabulous. I enjoy watching all the new Apple commercials on privacy. And you're just like, Yeah, and I see how it's presented in a way that for people that are not maybe technically educated or are interested in the technical details of how their data is collected, like, oh, wow, that's Yeah, that's what I want. This is what I want. Yeah. But there's something about it that you're just like, and then as I read more and more professionally, I'm like, Oh, yeah, there's like really big opportunities. I'll put it that way that Apple is creating for itself. In being the holder of data and the gatekeeper of its user status, who tend to be very loyal, like the Apple users that I know, in my family, personally, are extremely loyal to this company. So it's interesting. I mean, I'm actually kind of a diehard Apple guy, even though I had to become quite expert with Windows. Big,
Matthew Dunn
I've just, I've just always found that ecosystem works for me, iPhone included, so I find it. One, it's consistent with Apple's corporate DNA to make this move like that. It doesn't feel like it's made up. It's like know that that Tim, Tim Cook has always said this, done this, etc, etc. Does it mean they're not getting credit? Maybe more credit than they deserve? For the move. Ben Thompson uses the term strategy credit. It's sort of when it's easy for a company to do something, and it's really great for their brand, and they probably would have done it anyway. But they kind of get a halo. They get a halo out of it. Oh, oh, I have all taken care of my privacy. It's also one of the most deft branding shifts of digital getting up on the plateau that historically speaking getting up on on the plateau. It I think we'll look at this in business case studies in you know, five years ago. Oh, wow. Is that smart? Because they're the white knight brand wise. Well, for sure, for sure. Write for consumers. You can you picture the scenario of someone going, Oh, I'm going to get my first smartphone. Yeah. Right, who's got the brand association with privacy? Right. Right. Right. Apple, right. So really smart move whether or not it is you know, whether or not you're, it's meaningful privacy, whether or not and here's a key thing, whether or not they get different permission than what they're giving everybody else. I mean, I was always we're gonna do I post you mentioned, yeah, I took a minute went to apple.com. Your rent ran the toolbar plugin that says, what's running on this site? I'm like, Oh, look, a bunch of tracking pixels on your website. The lady doth protest too much, or something like that. So it's not just as simple as making it out to be but frankly, most consumers don't care. Yeah, no. Now, what do you think? How's email, let's assume, like a relatively pessimistic scenario, no more open rates, and so on? What's going to happen to marketing decision processes? What's going to happen to deliverability? What's gonna happen to send time optimization? Like, what?
Ada Barlatt
I, wow, okay. Well, I feel like what what I wish is that people can refocus our energies and our efforts on those moments of conversion, and refocusing our efforts on optimizing the parts of the process that will actually how do I want to say this, but the parts of the process that actually are closer to the conversion point, I think that sometimes optimization is, is great. As an idea, I'm all for optimization. My patient was all about optimization. And I'm all for that, I feel that there are other parts of the process that we can put our efforts in and in and increase the overall effectiveness of the process. Does that make any sense at all? So I'm curious if where the bottleneck truly is in the system? Because only when you optimize? What will you actually achieve? Or can you achieve an even larger and a larger lift and a larger benefit? And so I think that this challenge, this this, this opportunity that this shift is bringing us is making us all go back and think, Hmm, well, what do I really need from the open, I don't live in work a lot from the newsletter world. So I understand how for them, it might be particularly stressful. But I feel like even there, there's probably other options, and they can look at it and with size and other things. But for where I live and work, mostly, it's all revenue and sales. And there are so many more steps after an open that has to occur, that we can look at and that we're still gonna be able to collect information. I think the other thing that's really gonna be powerful. And this one happened to Google delayed their third party, third party cookies stuff that they were looking at. But I think that this is an interesting opportunity to see what first party data we can collect. I find that at least again, in the world that I'm living in, and the client that I have, people are pretty happy to share information, as long as you can say how it's relevant to the service that you're providing. And so there's a lot of first party stuff that we can collect and then use to make decisions. So
Matthew Dunn
I agree. I agree. I agree with everything you said very in good insights. I honestly hope people are people that some high skilled email marketing programs are listening. He said call a to operations desk. Um, there's a big opportunity, I would argue for email, the email piece of the marketing spectrum inside companies in in dealing with the shift that that we're branding with Apple and pixel for now. If email if the email Department called themselves the first party marketing department instead of the email department.
Unknown Speaker
Oh, that will be interesting. It's actually probably a better label. It probably is when you put it that way.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And if you think in terms of it, I studied categories a good bit when I was working my dissertation. Category labels tell a lot. And email marketing is the label is the technology of the channel. Yeah. Which tells you it's a bit immature. Right.
Ada Barlatt
That's interesting. I would like you to write a blog post about that one, so a more sophisticated, a more sophisticated category or label is speaking more to
Matthew Dunn
well, you are If you think about it, your email marketing department, I'm totally making this up as I go along. Email Marketing. email comes out then yeah, right. So the good stuff comes out email marketing says my, you know, the focus of this work is the technical channel itself. Yes. And you go, oh, but their email recipients are that's my list. Okay, good way to lump them together and define them in terms of their relationship to the technology. They're on your list. If you said, it's my first party marketing department, then you go, Oh, so you guys handle email? Yeah, texting. Yeah. personalization, the website that should fall under you as well, ah, it's a really different department. Why? And it's defined in relation to it's defined in terms of the relationship to that other party. Yeah, right. Not in terms of the technical channel.
Ada Barlatt
And what a powerful thing it would be to be able to coordinate, SMS, email, and website personalization. I feel like that's a frustration point for lots of organizations, because they are these siloed really crucial transfer points of information and experience,
Matthew Dunn
I load in terms of typically siloed, in terms of our label is our technical definition. Right? I was a CIO for X number of years. And like you see the same, you see the same meta pattern going on just looking at the labels, the category structure will actually sometimes tell you about the maturity. I love that right. On. So if you're the first party, if you're the first party marketing department, when you go and say, We need the data about sales. So very different argument about how important that is. Yeah, it's not the email guys need. It's like, no, this is the first party. Yeah, ship. And maybe there's a better name than first party. But you know, the relationship marketing, like there's, there's there's a category, but the category defined in terms of that other party, not in terms of the technical channel, to the party. Yeah, yeah. NET NET minus every email Mark marketer I know is oh, you know, overworked under gunned. Yeah. If, frankly, they don't get the priority, the organizational priority that their ROI merits, but trying to win that argument, by talking about email marketing be important. We've had 20 years to do that. Nobody seems to make big strides at it. So maybe we've got to redefine the thing a bit.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah, that's true. As someone whose degrees are in a field called industrial engineering, I hear you on that. Marketing. Like the language versus the the impact so yeah, no, I
Matthew Dunn
think so. Here's your here's your wrap up. I cuz I've already monopolized an hour of your time, which has been awesome fun. I can't wait for us to hang out together. Conference over Yeah, no, this has been fantastic. Um, how do you find talk about the the cultural and, and sort of stylistic differences between working with marketers where you were working with engineers before? Oh, yeah,
Ada Barlatt
well, I find that the first thing actually, I really love it is language. And it was funny, my husband and I are starting to plan a home renovation. And so we're sending out, you know, contracts and looking for contractors and stuff. And that's really a good distinction that I've learned how our careers have been in different paths, because the words that he would use or how he would lay out the message to look for the bid or the contract is just completely different than how I would describe it. Um, you know, I i've over the years, I found to use the, the least technical, the most accessible words possible. And that's how I design, I'm definitely not a copywriter, but how I how I design the look of the text. Instead of one long block of text, there's lots of bullet points and how it's very scannable and things. So I think that that is one big distinction, how people communicate amongst themselves the words that they choose how they structure it, the emphasis of how how things look, I think is really important. The other big focus, it's a bit of, I think this would be more of academia compared to where I am now marketing is optimal versus incrementally better. I find that in academia, especially that where I've come from it everything you were looking for, it was optimal. You're always looking for the
Unknown Speaker
optimal solution.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah. Um, and and this provably optimal solution. And now where I where I work and I live is, you know, if this year can be better than last year. And then the next year can be better than that
Matthew Dunn
this can't be better than that campaign. Right? Exactly. This
Ada Barlatt
campaign to be better this week can be better. So it's much more than incremental incremental improvement. And maybe the time that was invested, took me five years to do my degree to optimize production planning, scheduling, right? So if you can get something a little bit better in two weeks, then that has a lot more value than waiting for the optimal solution in five years.
Matthew Dunn
Well, to be fair, to be fair to education, the the measure of its effectiveness comes about 20 years later. So it's a bit of a different thing. You have to compare and contrast. But yeah, the high levels, those those big, fascinate what your husband teaches what
Ada Barlatt
he's in the same discipline. So he teaches, so we met in an engineering school, he teaches about decision support systems, he teaches about like mathematical modeling, algorithms, optimization, that kind of stuff.
Matthew Dunn
Oh, wow. Home remodels. Gonna be a darn interesting process. Many spreadsheets. But yet, I'm sure that project unlike most remote project will probably run on time.
Ada Barlatt
Yeah, and definitely budget. I feel like that's one of our one of our claims to fame for our wedding is that, you know, on time and on budget,
Matthew Dunn
we did two major remodels of our house in the first project was on time and on budget. Nice. And the second one was cluster on the first one was like a year of planning. Yeah. And the second one was, oh, crap, we got to do this, but little kids, dogs, you know, all that other stuff. So. So it's like, if you're doing a home remodel, the more stims time you spend planning, the better the things gonna go. The other thing was I was working on site in this office during the first one. I mean, I was doing a corporate job and the second one and that but like, right there, hey, do you want the thing to be blue? Like no, pick the paint? bucket, put that paint on? equals, you know, more days? fewer days on the schedule?
Ada Barlatt
For sure. For sure, for sure. For sure. those are those are interesting lessons that I think can apply in lots of different ways. Yeah, terms of investing time and you know, staying on top of the job and attention to being close to it is really valuable insights.
Unknown Speaker
Well, yes.
Matthew Dunn
How much fun was this? This is a ton of fun. Matthew, I hope to come back.