A Conversation With Adeola Sole
Guest Adeola Sole — fan of all things email — Zoomed in from London to join host Matthew Dunn for this conversation about email, CRM, AI, and being nice to Siri (or not). Adeola is a super-visible figure in the UK/US email marketing industry, speaking, moderating and consulting on email strategy.
While it's easy to put "UK/US" together, this conversation delves a good bit into what's different about marketing in general, and email in particular, between those two markets. As Adeola shares, UK and EU consumers usually have and use WhatsApp; by contrast, there's no single widely-used messaging app in the US market. Will email stick around? Adeola thinks so, for many good fundamental reasons.
As this conversation was shot around the time ChatGPT passed 100M users, Adeola and host Matthew Dunn do end up speculating quite a bit on AI. Will AI transform email? (Yes). For the better? (Probably). In predictable ways? Definitely not!
This is a great conversation for marketers working across national or generational boundaries!
A Conversation With Adeola Sole
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[00:00:00]
Good
Matthew Dunn: morning. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of email. My guest today, yay. Finally got her. Ola Sol, founder of Strategy c r m. Ola. Thank you for finally connecting and you know, Eric jetting in from London and agreeing to talk with me.
Adeola Sole: Thank you for having me. You are like the infamous doctor that goes all over the, the internet all over different webinars and put in very, very insightful and hard, hard to answer questions.
Matthew Dunn: That's right. I think the, I think the place we first connected was one of your you know, awesome jobs hosting a webinar and I. Biting on the side, dropping questions in the q and a.
Adeola Sole: You were like a keypad warrior that time. A lot of questions and I [00:01:00] was just like, oh, I'm so glad I'm hosting and not having to answer
Matthew Dunn: this.
I think we got, I think we had skip Fedora, who was an earlier guest on this program kind of tied in knots on one of those. It was pretty funny. So, Tell people a bit about you. I know a little bit about you, but tell people a little bit about you.
Adeola Sole: Oh, okay. So, hello everyone. I'm Ola and I am a C R M consultant.
Like Matthew said, I have my own little consultancy called Strategy C R m. I am a lover of all things AMA marketing and data. I've probably got about 12 plus years experience in the game. I know I don't. But I do good say no,
I live in London. I what else can I say? Although it doesn't look like it right now, I definitely am heavily into beauty, hair, and makeup, and I think [00:02:00] that's just one of the fun facts about me. Oh, and another fun fact about me is I love cartoon. Absolutely love cartoons. All I watch is cartoons. So really?
Matthew Dunn: Yes. Yeah. Like gimme some, gimme some examples.
Adeola Sole: Oh, do you know what the thing is? The cartoons that I watch
Matthew Dunn: are, are a little off color.
I don't care.
Adeola Sole: No, no. Pokemon over here. I guess one of the more, you know, ones that you can watch with your kids is I like Dragon Ball. That one is one of my favorites, but if you don't want to watch with your kids Vox Mcna on Amazon Prime is very good. It's okay. It's. A little naughty, but it's tongue and cheek.
Quite a fair bit of swearing, but very, very good. And then on Netflix, oh my gosh, final space. Very good into galactic kind of show, but very funny. And [00:03:00] f is for family. A bit more set in the seventies, a little bit crude. But again, a very, very good cartoon. Very good. So those are just a
Matthew Dunn: few. Only one of the two people on this conversation remembers the seventies, but we'll leave that aside.
So animation, which is a very, very deep passion of mine. There's a funny, what's the boundary between animation and c g, and now it looks like it's actually real. What do you think?
Adeola Sole: Oh my gosh. Do you know what I feel like? Ever so close. Have you ever seen that movie Swan Song on apple? See, I watch a lot of stuff.
I'm writing it down so, Okay, write it down. It's actually a really good movie, so I won't give it a away, I'll spoil it. But essentially it's about this man who is terminally ill and he doesn't want his wife to go through any heart take because she had previously gone [00:04:00] through some form of heart take and he just didn't wanna put her through that again.
So he kind of goes through this process of essentially, Some techno, I don't wanna spoil it, but some technological advancements in order to maintain the balance whilst he's actually dying. And in that movie there were so many, even though I know it was c g I, there was so many different concepts within that film that felt, felt as though it could be everyday life.
So or driverless cars that you would just kind of put your destination in. Mm-hmm. And this like Tesla would arrive and kind of drive you wherever you need to. Or there was this scene where he takes out his contact lenses and he just kind of puts them on his vanity unit and they kind of spray it and clean it.
And even the same with his EarPods. He just places them on this kind of magnetic thing, but you can't see it and [00:05:00] it levitates and starts to charge. And also just like his screen, so obviously Apple did some heavy placement in that movie but it almost looked like the minority report, so he had.
Three. Do you remember that movie? Yeah. He had like three screens and he could flick from his phone onto the screens and, and do all sorts, have a call over here and kind of do some design over there. And I just felt like, I know that this isn't real, but it was, it blended in so seamlessly that I just felt as though this could probably be us in the next.
Five years, like the way in which, yeah. Animation and c g I is being portrayed in movies as though it's already a part of our lives. You'll, you instantly believe that this concept is real and almost, maybe it's only available to the elite, like, why don't I have this yet? But it's actually fabricated to some degree.
Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Or, or potentially to a complete degree. I got a video from [00:06:00] someone the other day. And I believe it was an article about ai, but I, I, cuz everyone's writing about ai, I, I watched the video and then I rewound and I watched again. I said, you know what? I'm pretty sure the guy wrote the script and fed it into an AI that did the voiceover and the talking head person really, it was really good.
But there were these subtle. Mouthy emphasis thing and breath pattern. Oh. Chest wasn't quite human. It. No, she hasn't blinked for five minutes. That right. Doesn't work. Hasn't taken a breath. Still talking and, and, and there was just enough repetition and I mean, it was fantastic. Like I, you know, this, this is something I'm interested in, so I caught it, but I think most people go, yeah, this is a nice, yeah, she did nice to have explaining that.
And I don't [00:07:00] think it was an actual person. You don't, I.
Adeola Sole: I really don't Because of the way she breathed.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah.
Adeola Sole: Yeah. And lack of blinking. Oh yeah. You know, the, there are some people that actually just don't, they just, not that they struggle to blink, but they actually can go sometime without blinking.
Yeah. But I do probably believe that it was a, You know, kind of what's it called, A fabricated person or an AI kind of construct of a person, because you're seeing a lot of that now. Even there are some tech websites that will have a host Yeah, yeah. You know, greet you. Yeah. And it seems as though it's a member of staff, but actually it's, it's not, and you can tell, like you said, there's certain facial expressions, little.
Yeah. That we wouldn't naturally make as humans. I think usually as humans we're always looking away at something if we're thinking or trying to remember. Yes, yes. Something we look away or look up. And that's just cue of thinking. [00:08:00] Yes. Whereas yes, if someone has been programmed their speech yes.
They're just recounting what's been programmed into them. So there isn't that natural human instinct to review
Matthew Dunn: by looking around. You're right. In fact, I'm doing this in recall, but I, I think that talking head in that video was like, Full frontal eye contact the whole time. Like, oh, you're looking at me, I'm looking at you.
No, I don't think so. I don't think you can get away with that. I mean, neither of us have been like, Ooh, the camera, the full time and zoned in. Yeah. And it just, it, yeah. But we're early days. This is gonna keep evolving and, and Swan song as you're siding like the, the, the boundary between. The real and the un, the real and the artificial is getting squishier and squishier, like I'm not
Adeola Sole: sure.
Yeah, and it's, it's scary. You know, it's getting to the point where, I am nice to Siri and Oh, wow.
Matthew Dunn: No, no, no, no. Because [00:09:00] no Be Remind. It's much more entertaining. No, I'm
Adeola Sole: so afraid. Every single time I ask for a request, I always say thank you. And even when he doesn't like respond, when I say, you know, The command.
Yeah. Usually I, before I would like curses, like you're, so, but after watching all these movies, I'm now like, you know what? I'm just gonna be nice to him because I just, when the time comes and he becomes sentient.
Matthew Dunn: Yes. What he wants a payback. Right? Oh, you were nice to me. I need him to look after me. Oh yeah.
Adeola Sole: I enjoyed friends to leave me. I was one of the nice humans. Well, hopefully I'm dead before that time happened.
Matthew Dunn: Okay. I'm in serious trouble then. You have to be nice. Yeah, no, no, no. Be nice to your, like
Adeola Sole: you said, like it's getting squishier, it's, you just don't know what the capabilities of technology is, you [00:10:00] know, in the next 10, 20, 30 years.
You know, if you watch that movie Swan Song, I, I have a few of you will probably say some of those elements within the movie. We'll probably realize in our future, probably in the next decade,
Matthew Dunn: I mean, yeah, this is, it's all, it's all happening fast, but keep in mind that what we call technology now will eventually become invisible and we'll hang that label on something else like true.
It's just, it's just like the, the nature of change, I would argue a lot of people don't think of the. Per se as technology anymore, just kinda, absolutely. It's there. It's ubiquitous. It's like oxygen. Wow.
Adeola Sole: No, absolutely. And even down to the way in which. You know, AI is used within your day-to-day even, you know, down to Amazon Prime or, you know, ordering [00:11:00] Ubers.
You know, it's already been woven into society on a very, what's it called? You are, you are the man of many words, but you know what I'm trying to say? It's been why went into a point where we, we coexist with it without actually realizing that we're using a smart piece of technology to make our everyday
Matthew Dunn: lives.
Watch, watch this. My hand is not gonna leave my sleeve. But watch this segue. It's kind of like email who, which seemed high tech at a point in the past. Oh my God. Someone can actually send me a message. Yeah, and if you're early enough, you had AOL going, you've got mail, and it was kind of exciting. And then it started to get annoying, and now it's kind of like wallpaper and you don't think about it.
And if you're in the, if you're in the email space as you are. As I am mm-hmm. When you tell, mm-hmm. When you tell the man on the street, oh, I'm blah, blah, blah, email, they're like, email's gonna die, email's gonna go away. Like, [00:12:00] no, it's not. And it's actually more complicated than you think it is, but it looks like it just happens, doesn't
it?
Adeola Sole: No 100%. And I think, I wish there was more of branding or advertising around email because when you go and speak to the average person on the street, and I, I don't even tell them I work in email anymore. I lie say that I'm a data and strategic consultant. Yes. Just cause it's what I do. But when I say email, I, IM, I immediately get blamed for spam and I'm just like, I don't spam you.
That's not what we do. We're, we're leveraging customer insights. We're leveraging so many different tech tech stacks. We're doing some very complicated things to essentially ge generate revenue. But to say that in a elevator pitch is so much more harder. So, The term data strategic consultant is just so much more easier to, for them to kind of land.
And then I can mix in all the different [00:13:00] layers of what I do in regards to data and how I kind of disseminate that out via email marketing. But you're absolutely right. Email back in the day was. A smart new piece of tech, and now it's become the norm. Just like receiving a text message is almost anticipating norm.
Yeah. You're not sending an email. It's almost like you can't be trusted as a, as a vendor, as a retailer it is expected of you to have, have an email platform or to at least have an email communication channel. So you're absolutely right and. I constantly wonder, or not constantly, that's such a lie, but I do wonder about how email is going to evolve with this new generation, this, this new, these new adopted.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. What do you think? I mean, you're, you're we're at least three years apart in age and you're gonna have a different [00:14:00] perspective. Yeah. And you've got a foot in email, but you've also got a, you know, got a foot in being, you know younger. So how do you think it's gonna evolve? Thought leader time, girl.
Adeola Sole: Get my thought lit cap on. Okay. So do you know what I genuinely believe that email is going to be integrated into social. I have a feeling I, I feel as though email, yeah, email will be used to leverage social platforms as well as being an independent platform within itself. So when you look at let's say WhatsApp, The, it's not so big in the uk, but WhatsApp messaging is huge in the uae.
It's huge in apac. Yes, yes. And it's kind of, it's the norm and I believe that email will be used to kind of circumvent the information that comes out of those WhatsApp conversations, or at least kind of extend and continue the [00:15:00] process. One of these social, you know, web chats into the email realm. So if someone's had a complaint about something they've bought and they're going through WhatsApp to kind of, you know, have some form of resolution mm-hmm.
I believe then the next step is email will then come in and perhaps there'll be some recommendations or, you know, another way to incentivize that customer, especially if they've had a bad experience. So it's not necessarily just going to be a channel. Kind of works independently on its own. It's going to be interconnected into some of these different social channels to either leverage the customer experience or to enhance the way in which someone buys.
Especially if people are, especially in Dubai, they send lots of promotional content via website. WhatsApp and, and sms. TikTok very interestingly, I well, is good, you know what's going through its issues right now in US Congress. Yeah. So, so China thinks it's [00:16:00] xenophobia? No, no, no. But you know, if it gets banned in the US that's quite a big deal because I think when I was watching The hearing, there are over about 150 million users of TikTok in the US and listening to the amount of the way in which the algorithm is so smart and its objective is to keep users on the, on the app for an average.
16 minutes because that's how they generate their revenue from ad sales. Again. I mean, if it's not banned within the US but with other markets anyway, I think there will be ways in which email will be used as an as a channel to probably leverage that value proposition. So, you know, we've captured their email address from.
Their signup you know, to use the app. We're serving them ad content. We know what they're buying, we, or we know what they like, we know what they're interested in. Mm-hmm. So we can now use email to further instigate that [00:17:00] intent to drive that, you know, that overall sell. So, I, I, I believe that there is room for email to evolve and become a lot more of a integral part in social.
Whether you agree or disagree, I can see you. I,
Matthew Dunn: I, yeah, there's a lot, lot to un, a lot to unpack there. Let's let's take some of the pieces apart for a second. One of the things that I think shapes the digital landscape and where email fits. Is some, is some fairly accidental evolution of technology things.
If you look at the, you look at the numbers in the us, e email is like still the dominant dominant channel. Like just, just by message volume, by, you know, gigs, by whatever. It's like Salesforce issued their eighth, I think, marketing landscape report a couple of days ago, and I. I went and [00:18:00] grabbed it and started reading it and of course five minutes later someone from Salesforce calls me cuz they're really good at that.
But leave that aside. 80, 80% over 80% of the message volume in their study email. Not all the other channels. Email. And in the US there is no dominant app. You mentioned WhatsApp. There's not, you mentioned WhatsApp not used. I know
Adeola Sole: nothing. I figured that out recently, which I was just like, why? It's really different because you guys rely so much heavily on iOS, on yeah, yeah.
iMessage.
Matthew Dunn: Well, yes and not so sms, you know where S m S came from? No. So say Texas.
Adeola Sole: What's that? Yeah. Are you gonna say Texas?
Matthew Dunn: No, no, no. When. When the first cellular phones were designed there was a, there was kind of a bootstrap problem of [00:19:00] you want someone to be able to talk on this radio channel essentially, but you also need the device to be able to say, hi, I'm legitimate.
So there was actually a separate frequency and a separate channel allocated to those back and forth control conversations between the tower and the. Oh, okay. Didn't take much. And it was actually little tiny messages like, hi, I'm telephone number. Such and such. Okay, you're legit. You can use my tower and talk.
Right? And someone went, wait a minute. We could actually use that to transmit messages back and forth to each other. They kind of hijacked. The control channel, short message service, sms. So it was this accident of the evolution of the cell phone. We kind of never got past that in the US and had an OTA over the top app like WhatsApp or WeChat or something like that take off.
So in the US, at least interpersonally, it's going to be app Apple [00:20:00] messages with your Apple. And fall back to nasty green bubble Android messages with your, with your Android friends. And like, that's the landscape as it stands right now. Whoa. Like that's the landscape as it stands and. Google is making a concerted push to embarrass Apple in public.
Oh, you guys are holding everybody back. You need to jump on the rcs train. And Apple's going. Yeah, I don't think so. Tim Cook said, buy your mom an iPhone. Like, don't bother me. Right. So the key point start a social level point is at least in this, in this market, this being us, cause that's where I'm sitting it.
You don't go, oh, well, we're, we could expect, we can expect our new consumer, subscriber, whatever, to also use blah Channel X, whatever it is. There is no Channel X, right? Mm-hmm. Email. You expect it. It's your digital home address. S m s maybe. But [00:21:00] who in the Sam? Once S M s messages from merchant. I've got two of them just for a science experiment, and God, they're annoying.
And that's it. Right? Whereas Right. Okay. A richer channel, a WhatsApp, a WeChat, or something like that with, with more mechanisms to make it interactive, you know, measurable me, you know, metrics driven, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Since there's not a de facto standard here mm-hmm. There's nowhere to go right
Adeola Sole: now.
That's interesting. That's really interesting. I, I, I, I definitely would say that although you guys don't have a dominant channel or a Dom dominant app at the moment, it doesn't mean that in the future that won't be the case and nothing will supersede. So even with the social app, so maybe WhatsApp, WeChat.
The rest of it may not be on it, but those online sharing platforms such [00:22:00] as TikTok, Instagram, providing TikTok doesn't get banned. But you know, those ones, there may be an adoption there in terms of email being able to segue in. It might have a different purpose, but I still believe that there will be. A, a tandem where it will go hand in
Matthew Dunn: hand because Oh, yeah, no, I, I, I, I agree about the hand in hand and, and I mean, that's for the more fragmented channels that we've got, you know, messages, Android Messenger, s m s, and yes, Facebook Messenger and others, like they do coexist with email here.
I guess the, I guess the point in terms of like commercial use of those is you can't safely. That there's a, that there's a good alternative to email except maybe s m s and people are very reluctant to give that out. Yeah. So you kind of, you kind of stick with it. And I, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, UK market, could you safely assume that your consumer is also [00:23:00] WhatsApp user?
A
Adeola Sole: majority of us are WhatsApp majority. Okay. Yeah. WhatsApp here is, is big.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah, I know. I, I knew that. Yeah.
Adeola Sole: I remember speaking to my friend from the US and she was like, oh, do you have WhatsApp? And she was like, of course you guys did. That's all you use. Like, we don't use it here. I have to download it just to talk to you because Right.
You know, and it's like, I'm sorry I'm such an inconvenience, but in the, in my homeland, everyone has it.
Matthew Dunn: Well, I mean, you, Amy, arguably you've jumped ahead where. We, you know, we us market a, a bit prisoner of the, of that mobile Cold, cold war thing, the Android iPhone thing, and, and iPhone statistically quite dominant in, particularly in the US market.
Adeola Sole: Yeah, no, and, and, and so like circling back, I definitely feel as though email, even within the younger [00:24:00] generation. So I would love to start seeing reports in regards to how you know, gen Z and whichever generation comes. After them their actual thoughts on emails. I feel that there have been some chatter in regards to they feel as though emails, they received too many emails or perhaps they don't like to, to surrender their email address.
However, they're really happy to surrender it to download. A new app or tool and expect an email to confirm yes, you know, yes. Their purpose or their action, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. So although the sentiment might be. We don't like emails. Emails is old school. They still have a pre-conditioned, pre-programmed expectance of email to play a very vital part in their entire Yeah.
Journey with whatever app tool or whatever they're using, which is why I do believe that. Emails relationship as the years go on will evolve [00:25:00] somewhat, not just being a push channel that sends someone to a website, but an actual leveraged part of the customer journey where it's working side by side, by side, or in unison with whatever app you know, you find your subscribers on.
So it's, it's, it's going to have a full circle role where it might have an independent, Side, but then there's always also the strategy that will be linked onto the application within itself. So a social media person won't just sit on the other side of the room doing their social stuff. They will have to talk
Matthew Dunn: to me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's a, there's a commercial and standards aspect to this that matters tremendously. Email is not owned by anybody. Yes, that's a big deal. There's no gate. There's no policy setter, no one can say. I mean, yes, you can get banned deliverability. Sorry about the [00:26:00] noise in the background there.
The del, you know, deliverability self-regulation of the email space. Like you, you can get whacked pretty hard if you misbehave, but that's not the same thing as paying a toll just to. True. Right, right. Good, good behavior lets you keep sending bad behavior might might justifiably interfere with your sending.
But assuming good behavior, no one gets to set an arbitrary rate. Say, oh, it's now gonna cost you 10 times as much to email these people because it's not said so. Right. And they can't take away your list. Very true,
Adeola Sole: because it is owned data.
Matthew Dunn: Big difference. Big deal. Big differe. Yeah. And I don't, yeah, I dunno how that plays in WhatsApp.
Your WhatsApp ID is your phone number? Yes. Okay. Interesting.
Adeola Sole: But they, I think in some cases they also take your email address as well. Oh, I think, yeah. Yeah. You know, [00:27:00] so it all ties back. It all links back. So I think there's definitely ways and, and come on. I'm sure a very soon meta will own some of these ESP as a secret hybrid conglomerate homeware.
Matthew Dunn: Do you know about Facebook? Do you even know? Do you back when they were called Facebook, do you remember when they tried to kill off email? I do. Yeah. Nice
Adeola Sole: try. I do, but you never know. I mean, this is what I mean, the future of technology and how things are evolving. Not necessarily, I mean, I say that as a joke, you know, I don't believe that they're going to buy off all the esp, but you know, there may be a way in which they would like to be competitive.
Yeah. And perhaps leverage the assets that they have and create their own messaging stream, you know? Someone can use WhatsApp in tandem with leveraging an E. So just like how Braze, you know, you can have s m s web push, you can [00:28:00] use different web content cards, you can have in-app messaging. You then also have email.
What's to say that that might not come later on with
Matthew Dunn: meta? Okay, so let's get down in the, let's get down in the, in the weeds. This is like for the email enthusiasts, you know, two of us here at least talking about it. There's one company in a position to do exactly what you described. Google. I dunno the answer, sorry.
Adeola Sole: I've lost Google. Google. Okay.
Matthew Dunn: Yes. 66, give or take, percent of inboxes are Gmail inboxes. And that's a, like, that's a mighty big f. Very, and having worked at a monopoly, I'm always wary of monopolies. I'm like, Ooh, I hate it when someone takes over a channel. But here's, here's the, here's the topic for conversation.
I surfaced this when we were grappling with the impact of M P P [00:29:00] in the last year. So 66% of the inboxes Google, almost 60% of the email clients. Apple. Yes. It's Cold War. Yes. Very different stances on privacy, security. Yes. Interoperability, like keep ticking. Yes. Down the list. And I actually don't think, I don't think that those numbers are likely to to, to shift into some sort of new settlement anytime soon because, The habitual device that so many people have in their pocket from Apple.
Oh, it's my iPhone. I use my iPhone. Yes. Isn't it gonna go
Adeola Sole: away? No, but I think the relationship that people have with Apple is very different to that of Google. People have a more, what's the word? [00:30:00] A more integrated relationship with Google without actually realizing that it's as integrated as it is. So I forget sometimes that Chrome is Google and I use Chrome religiously.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That I understand that my Gmail is Google, but at times, I forget. Yeah. And it's just Gmail forgetting that it actually stands for Google Mail. You know, and then when we're looking at directions for wherever we need to go, when you search on, it's Google. Yeah. The maps, I prefer using Google Maps and I forget that too.
You know, it's, and it's called GM Maps or something like that. So, It's so much more embedded in our everyday life, whereas Apple, no one really rare, I mean, I dunno the numbers, so I am assuming here, but Safari, I mean, I have it on my Mac. I never use it. I just, I
Matthew Dunn: never use, use it. Okay. What, what kind of mobile device do you use?
I've got [00:31:00] Apple obvious. Me tooly. Me too. Me too. Well, yeah, me, me too. I would expect someone with your fantastic style to have an Apple device.
Adeola Sole: Obviously it's just aesthetically pleasing. You know, obviously
Matthew Dunn: the punchline. Here's the punchline question. Who has the most fundamental control of your digital life?
Google or. Ooh,
Adeola Sole: I guess Apple, because a lot of it
Matthew Dunn: I'd agree. I'd agree
Adeola Sole: on the phone and on the MacBook. So I guess you would have to convert.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I mean, you, yeah. Yeah. And, and a lot of this, it seems like inside baseball, but defaults and habits are kind of in the digital world. What, right away. In the physical world, once you get the right of way for a, you know, railroad through here or a road through there, it's very hard to take it away.
Once you get 60% of the [00:32:00] people on the planet using your built-in inbox client to access their email, it's very hard to get them change that habit cuz they're like, I don't want to and why And no good reason, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And we've, we do have this funny interlock of, of those two companies here, I'll, I'll give you a third company just as an example for this discussion.
I would argue that one of the reasons that Facebook l lost the game in, in, on, on a, his, like on a large historical arc basis, is they never got fun. Platform control. Google and Apple have fundamental platform control, right? Mm-hmm. The thing in my pocket is one of those two. Yes. You know my, the thing on my desk is Apple or Microsoft, but probably I use a Google app called a browser most of the time.
Yes, right. Tell me where Facebook sits. They're like a couple layers up on that cake. [00:33:00]
Adeola Sole: Yeah, they're not a part of your every day and they
Matthew Dunn: don't have fundamental control. When Apple introduced app tracking transparency requirements, a year and a, a year and a half ago, they blew a, like a 14 billion hole in the side of the Facebook boat, and you know what Facebook could do about it?
Zero. Nothing. And most of us were applauding. Like, I don't wanna be tracked once it's positioned that way. Thank you Apple. I didn't want to be tracked. Thank you for giving me the popup and the permission thing. It's like boom, big hole on this side of the Facebook boat and shouting fre from me. I'm glad to see that cause I like open standards, but no fundamental control.
Ultimately, the other guy's in, he's in better shape. He's kind of, he, he's got the landscape, if you will. He is got the right of way if you. Yes.
Adeola Sole: But, but in saying that, yes, and I guess if the goal is to kind of become, I would say almost like a, a monopoly or a conglomerate within itself, then yes that is [00:34:00] an issue.
But data, data, Facebook still does have a lot of insights that big. Yeah, probably Apple and even Google, I mean Google have your search history, but I think. And, and some, but meta or Facebook or whatever have a deeper insight into the individuals. And I think there it also comes that leverage. So even though I guess GDPR and in terms of some legalities, you're not supposed to weaponize that information, but let's be honest, we know it's.
It's being weaponized in some shape, shape or form. It's happening. So yes, they are a lot more higher up. But they still have a good wealth of control and power in regards to giving insights to these two companies as to what people are doing. Right? Yeah. How, where, when even down to how much we earn,
[00:35:00] pivot.
Matthew Dunn: Pivot, but related. I would argue that in the last couple of months we've watched the next platform explode into life, and I'm talking specifically about open AI with chat G p T as it's Sputnik moment. Yeah. You played with this much yet?
Adeola Sole: I've played with it a little bit. Okay. A little bit. I feel like it's just exploded in the last couple months.
It's weird and like perhaps it has been around for a while, but all of a sudden there's this big chatter. Yeah. Yeah. Up to nowhere.
Matthew Dunn: Well, up to a hundred million users in something like six weeks, it's, that's never happened.
Adeola Sole: It's crazy, but people are using it to. Things such as Wright Haiku you know conversation starters.
I want to start a webinar. What's a [00:36:00] great intro? You know, very, I guess simple task, mundane. Yes. Create a subject line for me, or what would be the best copy to send to this email, to these types of people, you know? So, I, I haven't really seen anyone do some fantastic things. I, I, I feel like, who wrote an article?
Everybody.
Matthew Dunn: Everybody, right?
Adeola Sole: So only influencers they kind of shared and I, I can't remember, was it not only, anyways, I'll have to find it, but they wrote an article in terms of the best ways to use you know, chat G P t as an EMO marketer and you know, it was enhanced subject lines and an enhanced send time optimization.
And that was the one that stuck out to me and I thought, How does AI do a better job than your E s P does? That has been amassing this data on your [00:37:00] subscribers over a certain period of time where they're able to, I guess not accurately, but at least confidently predict the best time for each individual person on your, on your database.
Why? Why move away from that to an external tool? Where your E s P essentially does the same thing. Can I
Matthew Dunn: give you an example? Go ahead. Reaction please. Yesterday, literally yesterday one of the things on my to-do list was to get a batch of sample data we'd, we'd captured I'll, I'll spare you the wise know how we'd captured a bunch of data that's gonna go to a C D P mm-hmm.
For part of a pilot project and, you know, talking like 3 million rows of data. Oh. And I was like, oh, crikey. How do I isolate down the, you know, the, the nine things that I want feel, you know, in each row to send to this guy? Like really, [00:38:00] really tricky sequel query. Hmm. And, Huh, so open up the standing chat g p t window that I've got right there, and I said, Hey, give me the robot.
How would, assuming a database with this and this, how would I query to get bing, bing, and bing out of it? Oh, here you go. Here's the sequel query. I'm like, okay, that's good, but what if I also wanna do this? Oh, no problem. Here's the modified sequel query. Skippy was very polite. And kept modifying the syntax and let me go.
Yeah, but what if I also wanted to add that, and it remembered the context, and here's my point. I was typing one, maybe two sentence, very short English prompts, and I end up with, with a, a query for, in this case, BigQuery, which is Google's data warehouse. I, I seriously bet it saved me three or four hours of working on that.[00:39:00]
And it, I mean, this is, that's a sophisticated operation, but here I am riffing in English about what I want. And I mean, are, you know, well, well phrased enough to try to, you know, to give the, to give Skippy the logic to hang onto. But the fact that, that, that AI came back, that particular AI came back with, I copied and pasted the, the query like, oh, that worked.
Holy. And it saved me a ton of time. And my point there is one that the use I put it to in that particular case wasn't what I think of as rich human stuff. Like great subject liner, good copy. It was pain in the ass. Digital stuff like how do I get these database to spit out these?
Adeola Sole: But that's the thing. I think it's the use case and I believe that people, not everyone, but I believe that some [00:40:00] people don't really know or haven't yet explored.
The depth as to which it can go. So they're still using it on the surface level. And that's a lot of, so even with that article, it was very surface levels. Very surface, yeah. Yeah. Stuff that we do in our every day. Yeah. But, oh, just get this piece of AI to just do it for you so it doesn't feel as though there's a good enough incentive.
To even utilize it. But if you are looking at BigQuery data like this, and if there are good examples and it's able to effectively, which we know it would do anyway, but effectively help you solve that problem, mm-hmm. Then yes. I think if that article focused on. Queries you know, data questions rather than top level content.
What should I write for someone who is laing? What should I, you know, because we have copywriters full of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and even if you wanted to save time, okay, great, fine. But that's where the, the goodness comes from when you're having great use cases like [00:41:00] that. So, Matthew, maybe there's an article if you haven't done one already.
Matthew Dunn: I mean, I actually, I archived, I shared it with a couple of couple of friends cause I was just jarred by it. But take that, take that example and go back to what you mentioned, the E S P, which made me think of it. I wouldn't be surprised if a year, two years from now someone sits down, a marketer sits down and says, who are my most profitable customers?
And doesn't have to. Fart around with Excel, bust their brain on SQL curries or any of that stuff.
Adeola Sole: But that already exists. Yes. How. So there's a company called Iota and they're new, they're about two years old, and they've essentially created a machine learning kind of like data ingestion tool. Yeah.
Yeah. That and it came from, I actually know the, the guy his [00:42:00] name's John Conway, and we worked together when we were consulting at Eurostar. And he's just one of those like, You know, those really geeky, really geeky data, like just data, just lives in Bris data, but also understands data from a marketer's perspective.
Nice. So he can communicate in our language essentially. And he came across quite a few marketers or you know, c RM managers that would always want to target the very finite group of people that you don't necessarily have. The insights on your customers on you wouldn't necessarily have fields on this person loves baguettes, or this person loves to travel at 9:00 PM, et cetera, et cetera.
So he developed this tool that essentially allows you to create micro segments, you know, based on. Someone's behaviors, someone's inclinations, you know, taking into account the things that they look at, what did they do? And it has this kind of predictive [00:43:00] modeling kind of sense to it as well, where it can also kind of predict there are people within your database that don't necessarily.
Fitted to an exact, but they could potentially become that person, you know? So they have the, the inclination or the intent is there for them to become that. So in some way, shape or form, it's, it's happening. There's like an answer to marketers request to do that type of Yeah, in segmentation. And it's only a matter of time before those esp And are we allowed to name drop in there?
I'm just like talking, is this totally new? Yeah.
Because I, well, I went to a conference at the beginning of this year and it was movable link, and they had released a new, I feel like it's called Einstein or one of the, you
Matthew Dunn: know, yeah. They, yeah, they, they, they did a better. 12, 14 million acquisition of an AI company. And that's, that's the new balance.
Adeola Sole: And it [00:44:00] was, you know, and the presentation was like, we know your customers better than you do, and we can, you know, send them to different pages that they never would've thought to go on, but we know that they'll convert and blah, blah, blah. And you know, we, it continues, continually learns your subscriber.
And I was like, oh, this is cool, but really scary, you know, that. They have a piece of tech that is learning my behavior. So even if I say I like one thing, it's studying me and saying, no, you don't like this. You like, thats, and, you know, taking you off to a, a different place entirely. So it's, it's on its way.
It's here. It's not loud in your face, but it, it is here.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. The, the, the chat G p t Sputnik moment for ai. Finally put a face, a human looking face on something that's already been happening for years. Yes. Right, right. It, it's, When you, when you type in a search and it starts finishing [00:45:00] the sentence for you, the words for you, that, that's, that's a, that's an AI algorithm broadly, broadly speaking, machine learning algorithm.
Broadly speaking, you touched on something that I think might make a kind of a rich and interesting closure and give, give people a sense for your strategic thinking, which I've always found. Awesome. Machine studying us, knowing us better than ourselves. Has a real conflict with our desire for privacy and control over that, doesn't it?
Mm-hmm. What do you think?
Adeola Sole: A bit old school here, but it's only an issue if they know it's happening, right? So I think people complain rightly so. In regards to. This type of machine learning, studying you, your habits, your behaviors what you're doing when it's said out loud in that way, yes, it seems [00:46:00] invasive, but when it's packaged in a sense that, in a, in a way that it can help.
Alleviate day-to-day issues or help you get to something faster. You know, no one complains when they're using a search engine to find a flight, and it's having all of these different recommendations that are powered based on your last search, et cetera, et cetera, like Right. Good point. That make your life easier that you expect it to do.
You don't have an issue there because it's been packaged as a helpful tool. Yeah. So yes, there is. Log ahead, but only when it has been presented as a enemy to your, your life rather than an enhancement or a help, almost like a personal butler to your life. And I think when it's packaged in that way, I know it's so like criminal, but when it's.
When it's packaged in a way, in, in the, in the sense that it can help enhance your day-to-day or enhance what [00:47:00] it is that you need to do. Yeah. Then it works in unison with the, with the user. Right. There isn't an issue. It's only when there are such things like breaches when you can't confidently ensure, you know, your end user that they are going to be protected.
Matthew Dunn: That's when you can encounter
pushback or, or. When the, or when the label is already set and, and you're trying to un unmake and I, I have a specific example there in mind. When Apple announced male privacy production and hung privacy and spy pixel on something that could be, and frequently or mostly was used in a beneficial way within email.
Mm-hmm. I hate to say it. Game over. Game over in terms of control of the label. Yeah. And game over in terms of the thing we talked about earlier, like who's got the fundamental control [00:48:00] over the device in your pocket? It's like, and I was like, oh, you stinked right? Yeah. You, yeah, absolutely.
Adeola Sole: Right. Yeah. Yeah.
And, and that's it. It, and that's what I'm saying. When something is labeled as an enemy, yeah. It's very difficult to then undo. And, but when it's packaged, so, you know, when that M P P came into play, you know, there were loads of articles in regards to, okay, this is the type of things that it's going to affect from a, you know, campaign level.
So things like countdown timers, actually, A customer would probably look back on an email just to see how much longer they have before they can use this, you know, promotion or whatever. But now that they can't do that because it No, you can't do that point of open. Oh, yeah. You know, and that's because you
Matthew Dunn: Yeah.
You, you just described a, you just described a year of my life got dealing with that particular impact. I Yeah, you're right. And, and I would hang, I would hang that one back on [00:49:00] the email marketers of the world who. Gritty poultry, poor use of real-time content. If the best we could do is pixels and countdown timers, we kind of deserved to get kneecap there.
Right. And it's done. Right. It's done. There's some interesting positive things that Apple opened up with m p that I don't know if they realize, but we'll get to that in our next conversation. Maybe.
Adeola Sole: Yes. Season two we can.
Matthew Dunn: Aside from the fact that you've got my favorite, maybe my favorite name in the world, so adding a little.
I love that. Where, where next for you?
Adeola Sole: Oh, good question.
Matthew Dunn: So hopefully we see you speaking more.
Adeola Sole: Well I definitely want to do, I will be speaking when. I know I have something coming up. You got something
Matthew Dunn: coming up? I know
Adeola Sole: I be speaking with I think [00:50:00] SSK next month. Just talking about some of the email trends and how to apply them within your email marketing strategy.
Be writing a few articles here and there. Excellent. But yes, if anybody needs some help, you know, developing a strategy or just wants to talk and say hi I'm here. You know, I'm, I'm doing a lot, but at the moment I'm. Just trying to realign with some clients. Yep. Help them get above the line. You know, Q1 has kind of come and gone very quickly and people are trying to reorder and re-strategize how they can kind of better improve for the rest of the year.
So,
Matthew Dunn: so where does someone go if they say, I want to talk to her? Where do they go find you? On the, on
Adeola Sole: the innerwebs. So you can find me on LinkedIn ALA Soul, or you can find me on my website, which is strategy crm.code.uk. Dot code uk. That's where I am and you'll see my big, beautiful make made up face on the [00:51:00] homepage.
Matthew Dunn: Well, we should wrap Ola, but thank you so much. I knew it was gonna be a fun convers.
Adeola Sole: This was fantastic. Thank you. I enjoyed it. And you know what? You definitely should just tell the truth and tell people that you're Matthew McConaughey's brother, I think.
Matthew Dunn: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like the third person who said that
Adeola Sole: hiding.
It's just not gonna do you any favors because we all know. So just, just announce it.
Matthew Dunn: We, we overlapped, actually, he was at UT in the film school when I was doing my MFA and drama there. Because
Adeola Sole: your brothers, that's. I dunno why you're trying to spin it as a coincidental story.
Matthew Dunn: It's your brothers named Matthew.
I like it all. Cool. My guest has been Adeola Sole. Adeola, thank you so much. We're out.
Adeola Sole: Thank you for having me.