A Conversation With Anna Levitin of Powtoon

Anna Levitin of Powtoon is the 2nd guest to Zoom in from a bomb shelter! Anna is the super-active email face of the super-cool company Powtoon, a visual communication platform.. (Editor's note - host Matthew Dunn is a Powtoon super-user and fan :-)

Anna made her way to email from traditional media and digital marketing. Running the email arm of a global SaaS company like Powtoon has some distinct differences from consumer marketing. Powtoon has a loyal (and opinionated) customer base of over 40 million users, spanning many languages and cultures. Powtoon itself has team members in multiple countries. English, as she observes, is not a perfect solution!

That puts Anna and her colleagues at Powtoon in a funny position — at one of the leading visual communication platforms, communicating through a distinctly not-visually-centric channel: email. (Anna notes that they create a LOT of gifs!)

If your company has "a user base", and email is one of the main channels for connecting with them, you'll find this a terrific and useful conversation — one of the two best bomb-shelter conversations on The Future Of Email so far.

TRANSCRIPT

A Conversation With Anna Levitin of Powtoon

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[00:00:00]

Matthew Dunn: Good morning, this is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of The Future of Email. My guest today, Anna Levitin of Powtoon, my my buddy from conferences and Zoom, and Zoom calls and things like that. Anna, welcome.

Anna Levitin: Thank you. Thank you so much, Matthew, for inviting me and I think the last the last time I've seen you face to face, it was

Matthew Dunn: April, right?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. We bumped into each other accidentally and I said, Powtoon, I love that company. But before we talk about Powtoon and email, I just want to put a little context to this. Anna and I are talking, it's early in the morning, Pacific time, probably late in the day. But Anna, you're actually my second from a bomb bunker guest.

You told, you told me you're in the bomb proof shelter in Tel [00:01:00] Aviv, correct? Yeah, I had Dmitry Kudrenko, who you might have met at that same conference from Stripo on, on this podcast almost a year ago. And he started by apologizing because the lights might go out because bombs might start dropping.

So there you are as poised and calm as can be, despite the fact that you're in a bomb shelter. Wow.

Anna Levitin: Right. You know, they made a bomb shelter to the studio. Yeah,

Matthew Dunn: good, good, good internet connection in the bomb shelter there. How do you how do you keep your head in the, how do you keep your head in the business and in the job with, with such a, you know, horrible circumstances around your ears?

Anna Levitin: I wouldn't say that it's easy, it's quite a challenging task, but I guess it's very important to focus on what you actually like, what you enjoy doing, and in my case it's emails and marketing [00:02:00] preparation. So actually focusing on work, on events, you know, on online webinars, it helps me to stay on track.

Energized and stay and focus on the, on something more than just our

Matthew Dunn: conflict. Yeah, one of the, I mean, one of the big, it's got to be a big psychological difference. You know, you, Dimitri, it's got to be. be a big psychological difference that in the middle of that, you can have a face to face call with someone somewhere else on the, on the globe or do business and work with someone somewhere else on the globe.

Like your, your day to day is not completely defined by the circumstances just around you. In fact, your company is so global. I suspect a lot of your work focuses outside of where you are. Yes.

Anna Levitin: All right. That's true. Palton. We have headquarters here in Tel Aviv. We have office in London. We have [00:03:00] teams from South America, Brazil, Ukraine and individual contributors from.

All over the world, but I want to mention something like an, on the positive side, you know, I'm not very flexible person. So it's difficult for me to change my schedule. I like everything planned in advance. Whenever I have like a email schedule, you know, for a month, I don't like to change it. So always the current circumstances, actually, they taught me how to be more flexible and how to day by day.

Okay. I don't know what's going to be in the evening.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You said PowToon is a Tel Aviv headquarters. I, I, okay. So I get a fanboy for just a second. I have been a PowToon customer and user since I think your company actually started. I think my first PowToon was probably 2011, maybe 2012. Oh, wow.

Yeah,

Anna Levitin: yeah, yeah. It's the very beginning. ,

Matthew Dunn: the very beginning. I [00:04:00] think it was actually an incredible Flash app early on, and then I had to migrate up. She's nodding. And I had to migrate some of the content that my team had done to the new version when you guys moved away from that. Thank, thank goodness.

But so tell people what, you know, what is PAL doing? What do you do? Do that so we can talk about it even more.

Anna Levitin: So Powtoon is a visual communication platform. In other words, we help users to create engaging animated presentation. For example, you have a new employee and probably you have like a dog, you know PDF, boring, 50 pages.

No one really gonna read it. Let's be honest. So we help to convert it to engaging five, six minutes a video. So we work with B2B, as I mentioned, like in case of onboarding, new training, offboarding, and we there [00:05:00] B2C. Whenever you need to create presentation, we have a big educational segment of users as well.

And it's subscription model, freemium. Go ahead, register, check it out.

Matthew Dunn: You're you, you did that, you did that succinctly and eloquently. And I got to say what Powtoon was revolutionary when it first showed up, because those of us sticking up my hand here who are doing animation stuff. Early digital era, like 2009, 2010, Flash was actually the only tool early on.

And, and, and it was getting pretty creaky by then. And the notion of being able to work in a browser to do this, like no inconceivable, no way. And along comes PowToon and you've got turnkey sets and characters and scenes and like, wow, this is really nicely done. Yeah. It's quite a thing. And now

Anna Levitin: we're working on our AI [00:06:00] solutions.

I figured. Yeah. It's just, you know, you would type the prompt, like I need a presentation for X, Y, Z, include this and that. Yeah. Voila. And you will be able to have like ready. Wow.

Matthew Dunn: Wow. We'll go back. We'll come back to AI because we always end up talking about AI these days and there's something gained and something lost in, in that.

But I wanted to explore first, like. Tell, tell me about your job. What do you do for Powtoon? So

Anna Levitin: I like to say that I do emails and everything around that, which is actually the truth. I joined Powtoon about two, two and a half years ago as a email marketing specialist. And now I lead a marketing operations team.

And maybe I will go a little bit back, like starting from my, you know, marketing career. Yeah. Because I started my marketing journey from working with the [00:07:00] classic media like radio and newspapers, TV commercials, you know, it's so much fun. And maybe later, yeah, we will talk about like, what is the difference between digital and like out of homeless.

And I worked in an agency. It was, again, great experience working with different And then I slightly moved to the digital and I worked in a small startup where basically you do everything marketing related like acquisition affiliate bloggers outreach. And I realized that I really like like retention.

I like to, to analyze the behavior of users. And that brought me to email marketing world. And during the pandemic, like I, I was just so like surprised in a positive way to discover that we have such a fantastic communities like email, gigs, Slack channel, [00:08:00] LinkedIn. And I just follow,

Matthew Dunn: follow. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. There is email itself is a, is a robust community. Fair statement. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that must be a bit fun since you came over from the, the traditional media side. So you mentioned tele television, you actually had your hands in the, in on the big box at some time. At some point in time you worked in television?

Anna Levitin: I was working in agency and we had some clients. Okay. Like the pharmaceutical clients Yeah. That worked on TV commercials. So we provided them with everything from the idea to the shooting and the actually, you know on the air on

channels.

Matthew Dunn: What are the biggest differences and biggest similarities between that broadcast media and the email work you're doing now?

Anna Levitin: I would say in generally, like, As I said, I like to focus on, like, user behavior, people behavior, [00:09:00] and maybe, not maybe, it comes from my education, I have a master's degree in cultural anthropology, but what I like in ML is Now it's measurable, right? I can say, Oh, I feel that way, but actually the data says approve this or not.

And in a classic media, I feel that all the metrics they're not certain. Like I remember when we worked with the advertisement, like out of house advertisement, it was like opportunity to see, and God knows how it was calculated.

Matthew Dunn: Right,

Anna Levitin: right. Probably the amount of people that could be at the same time driving on this highway.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, right, right. I mean, we, we, we think of, we think of the sort of previous wave of media as, as being more metered and measured, but [00:10:00] in truth they weren't, right? I'm thinking especially radio, right? Broadcast wave goes out. How many people are listening? Ah, who knows, right? And it was probably statistical sampling to try and get at least some measurement back.

Same for TV, although TV is a little later and you had your Nielsen households in the U. S. do that kind of measurement. Email is not entirely measurable, though. Were you in the middle of email when MPP showed up and started making life even more complicated? Yes. So your, you know, how many people opened this?

We're still kind of guessing . Yeah, did,

Anna Levitin: I mean, yeah. We, we can't fully rely like on open rates, on clickthrough rates, but we can compare it to the clicks and opens. We had like yesterday, you know, last week.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Month ago. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. The audience for, for Powtoon, am I correct in assuming that it's [00:11:00] all over the globe?

Right.

Anna Levitin: Yes. We have a lot of users from United States, North America in general, Argentina, Mexico. We have big community in Brazil. Awesome. Yeah. And.

Matthew Dunn: Australia, Asia, and London, London headquarters, London office as well. You said, how do you grapple with the the multiplicity of languages that that customer base speaks?

So,

Anna Levitin: At Powtoon currently, because our platform is in English only, so the majority of communication is in English. But as I said, for example, we have a community in Brazil, so we have like a webinar in Portuguese. We have some email communication in Portuguese, something in Spanish, blog post in French.

But yeah, multilingual, this is something that interests me personally, because I like

Matthew Dunn: to say that as you're multilingual.

Anna Levitin: Yeah. And prior to Powtune, I used to work in an e commerce [00:12:00] company where we actually worked with more than like 14 languages. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. That was very interesting, like in terms of it's not about.

Like translation, but localization is much more than just translation. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a different topic.

Matthew Dunn: Well, it is, but so, so for the most part right now, what you're doing handling email campaigns is English centric. And to some extent. Is it fair to say people are a bit accustomed to that on, on internet, email, digital platforms in general, like English is kind of lingua fracca, although it's not a perfect solution.

Yeah, I

Anna Levitin: guess the, the majority of the users that get used to, okay, at the same language as I use a platform, like I will receive communication in the same language. And we are looking forward to adding like several languages to our platform, but it's a little bit.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. And Powtoon [00:13:00] UI, I know it's in English, having used it a lot, but some localization of that user interface already?

No, not yet, unfortunately. Okay. Well, not unfortunately, it's, that's a very, as you said, complicated, expensive thing to do. And it means your, your code based maintenance is, is X times as complicated. going forward. I mean, I've been around software development long enough to know how fiendishly hard it is and how nuanced it is.

To, to take something that looks trivial and actually do it well in, in a completely different character set language and so on. Yeah, not easy at all. Not easy at all. And then if, if you did it truly local for your backyard there, then you'd have to, then you'd have to grapple with a really complicated right set of character sets.

Your English is, your English is so terrific, but I, I've got to assume you speak at least two other languages. Yeah.

Anna Levitin: So I, I, I was born in a Soviet [00:14:00] Union in Russia in beautiful city, St. Petersburg. Oh, wow. Wow. My mother tongue is Russian. It's Russian. Yeah. And I lived for a while in the States. Don't ask me why I was 19, you know, young it was, it was sort of student exchange program.

I was there in Daytona beach and then the majority of the time in Boston, beautiful city. Yeah. And then at some point of my life, after graduation from the university, I moved to Israel. Yeah. Bring me actually my third language, like Hebrew and somewhere in between and the university. I studied Latin language for one year and it turns like to speak in Spanish also.

Matthew Dunn: Good, good for you. Wow. Wow. And, and Israel, how Tel Aviv, how long now? I live

Anna Levitin: in Tel Aviv for the last like six and a [00:15:00] half, seven years.

Matthew Dunn: Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So you've been there long enough to really see what the change around your ears since October is like this guy. That's, that's, that's, that's gotta be something else.

We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll come back to that. I want to go back to Powtoon for a second. Powtoon fundamentally is a, Is a SAS platform right fair software as a service. Only the unusual thing about Paltoon is it's it's a creative tool. It's not a utility tool. It's not accounting. It's you can do can do incredible animation presentation and visual communication on it.

Is that a really different thing to market and to build a community for in your job? Then then something that's more functional for lack of a better word.

Anna Levitin: Yeah, I mean, we have a great community like we receive, you know, feedback from our users. We also are like we provide a free access for some like educational institution mostly.[00:16:00]

And, you know, when you receive an email saying, wow, thanks to Powtoon, I created a presentation and I was in Lord enrolled into college or like help me pass my exams. Yeah. Wow.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. Indeed. Wow. Indeed. And it, as, as Powtoon has sort of expanded and grown in the last decade plus. Embracing that visual communication, not just the particular form of animation, seems to have become core to the mission.

You don't think of it as just an animation platform.

Anna Levitin: No, it's much more than than just animation because also on the enterprise side, it's more than animation. It's opportunity to collaborate with your team. To share thirds, to see the progression, a great example, again, as I, as I shared previously, like there is, for example, security training that [00:17:00] team needs to complete and the team can be like 100 people.

So you can see actually the progress. And there can be quizzes and questions implemented and that they, so it's not only animation tool. It's like the knowledge hub, I would say the academy, like internal source.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Okay. Okay. A couple directions to go. This is the one that I think is interesting though.

And I'm not trying to pin you with this question. It's an honest one. Email is not the best visual communication platform. Can we agree on that? Oh, the look on your face is priceless. They're outlook, outlook, outlook, right? How do you grapple with that? Right? You're the visual communication company and you've got some serious handcuffs.

Doing like making email of a more visual medium. It's not good at that.

Anna Levitin: Yeah. You wouldn't believe many of you, but this is [00:18:00] like literally every week we are talking about that hour like email that are not enough, like I made it. That was enough. Like Paltuni. Yes. Yes,

Matthew Dunn: absolutely.

Anna Levitin: So I, I honestly, like, we create a lot of G gifs Yes.

At howto. Yeah. And this is what we implement in our emails again, on B2C and on B2B. Like, I love I love creating like, interesting emails for enterprise clients as well. Yeah. So yeah, gifts and like, we use our characters through all our communication, for example. Sure, sure. We have. Pop ups on their website with a specific character.

So we use the same character, the same like yeah, the same character in email and the same like person on the webinar. So we try to bring this connection, but you're totally right. Like I wish that it will be super easy to implement a video [00:19:00] or. The AMP emails will be supported by each and every inbox provider.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, and neither of us are going to hold our breath about that particular thing happening, right? And I mean, this is a bit inside baseball and probably interesting to you, you and I, and maybe not the entire world, but the reality of email technically. Is that it's, it's fairly old and it's actually fairly dumb, right?

There's no, there's no scripting. There's no language that runs universally in email clients and graphics that move very, very constrained. I mean, you mentioned GIF, JIF, whichever that's a really old format. And it's the best we've got in terms of we'll, we'll probably play almost anywhere. Wow. That's, that's a horrible set of handcuffs, isn't it?

Anna Levitin: Right. Totally agree. And I remember when I was used to work in a financial company, also like in the email [00:20:00] department and e commerce, we always thinking, okay. How it will be seen in Outlook, let's say we need to make sure that the first frame has all the information like discount dates and

Matthew Dunn: everything.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and the, the technical convolution you can try to go to, to work around that doesn't end up being worth a lot of the cost, honestly. So you end up with, let's make a GIF and live with it or GIF and live with it.

Anna Levitin: This is, this is the thing that like, I know there probably will be few people that on more development side listening to this podcast.

And again, it's possible to create like very high quality email. From the code standpoint, but when you work in a small team, like a, like our team at Powton, we basically have like two and a half people in marketing operations we don't want, like, we don't, we [00:21:00] don't have a possibility to invest.

That much time. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. You can't make it that complicated because you still got stuff to, you know, get out the door on a regular basis. So, so that puts a lot of weight back on writing, copywriting language, even for a visual communication company. Right. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Wow. Well, I mean, it's the reality of the medium and at the same time, I'm going to guess just from the fact that you've got a job, that email is a pretty critical piece of the relationship with the user base.

Anna Levitin: True. Yeah, that's, that's totally true because also we, we have about 40 million users. Wow. Wow. Of course, not all of them active, right? But still it's a huge database and we also have a lot of data about them. And I'm not talking first, last name, right? Location. No. How many patterns they created, what templates they use or did they create from [00:22:00] scratch?

Which means for me that they're more like you know Higher, like they know how to use the tool better than other users or did they use a capture? Did they like what feature they adopted? So everything of these things, it helps me actually to personalize and to segment.

Matthew Dunn: Wow. Okay. So you have, you have access to some of that data, which isn't always the case for email marketers.

Anna Levitin: Access. I mean, with the help of development team, with conversation and saying, okay, we can't leave it for quarter five in the

Matthew Dunn: year, which usually, you

Anna Levitin: know, I get this sort of deadline.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah.

Anna Levitin: Yeah. So, and again, it's, it's on the B2C side and on B2B as well. We just now been talking about like, okay, how we want to personalize our our B2B [00:23:00] emails based on the license.

Either it's like a creator or it's on the editor. It's an admin, a regular user. And of course I would like to have everything in in a ESP

Matthew Dunn: inside. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's That's a, that's a nice set of assets to have though. Like the fact that it's not just this one big blob of, of anonymous people that you've actually got at least some insight.

So most campaigns, there's some degree of. Segmentation, personalization, as much as you can do with a small team.

Anna Levitin: Right. Yeah. So the basic segmentation is like by onboarding data. And we know probably like use case department seniority or enterprise users for self serve for B2C users. We know that also like the use case or like if it's educational or it's like marketing purposes, business.

Okay. Okay. Non profit. So at least based on these, we already can at [00:24:00] least like to suggest relevant templates. Oh,

Matthew Dunn: I see. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Cause your temple library. It was big when you started. It's got to be ungodly now. I have not logged in in quite a while, but that's a, that's quite a tool set to have.

Before we go back to AI, I did want to talk about ESPs because I think you said you recently migrated your email service provider. Yes? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, yeah. You we don't, we don't have to name names, but are you happy with the new set of tools at your disposal? Yes,

Anna Levitin: I'm super happy because again, when, when I was searching for ESP that will fit our needs.

We, as I said, we need like a flexible tool for a small team that could be managed by a small team and be quite. Independent from other teams, [00:25:00] I mean, don't get me wrong. I like people, right? I like other teams. We have a great, great team at Fountoon, but I need to be able, let's say, even to create a new member attributes to, to create new fields, like On my own

Matthew Dunn: on your own.

Okay. It

Anna Levitin: was one of their like criteria. Yeah, of course, customer support, you know, UX UI friendly.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. So you ended up in that. Funny intersection that we've talked about this that funny intersection between the ESP and the CDP and it's got to do whatever, whatever is going to work. It's got to do some of both for you.

Right?

Anna Levitin: Right. Yeah. And I texted you actually preparing for this call that I might quote here, Chris Marriott.

Matthew Dunn: Yes, our buddy Chris Marriott.

Anna Levitin: Because he likes speaking about like ESP, CDP, and I mean, again, for small team, we don't have we don't have [00:26:00] like manpower, you know, to maintain two platforms. Yes.

So. Quote increase, like I think that ESP developed so much that it's more than just like delivery process. It's more than just like sand. Yeah. It's also like, it's combining working actually this data and keeping data.

Matthew Dunn: And, and, and not just, not just data in the abstract data about that complicated thing called a person at the other end of the channel, right?

Oh, so here's a conversational segue for you. I, I would predict that a lot of the difficulties we grapple with in data and managing the complexity of data. And let's just narrow it down to something like keeping track of a customer and the attributes you need about them. That seems like a great job for AI because doing it manually field by field is, it just never stops and it gets more complicated.

And you [00:27:00] end up saying, Oh my word, I'm an email department and I need a full time database person. Do you think we'll, do you think we'll get AI on that job eventually? I'm sure

Anna Levitin: we will, but yet like the first step of integration, that will be like a manual. Yeah. I think this is something we can't really you know, just give to AI tool testing, making sure that we get a proper data.

Yeah.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. I, I I ended up working with a lot of data sets in, in my various jobs, plural and I'm actually, I'm a, I'm an okay SQL guy, but I've increasingly started cheating. And getting, getting either Clod or ChatGPT to help me write really hard queries. Not, not because I need the end output from them, but sort of figuring out how to construct it, it's helpful.

To say, take a [00:28:00] shot at this AI, and then learn from what I see in the output and figure out how to do it for my particular circumstance, situation, table, set, whatever else it's AI as assistive intelligence, not as a replacement artificial. Intelligence. So I suspect your prediction about it'll be very man.

It'll be a very manual process starting to move some of the Martech puzzle into the AI world. Yeah, completely agree. Your table set doesn't look anything like anybody else's after about a month. You're on a brand new ESP. I'll bet you're already have your own quirks in the model, right?

Anna Levitin: Yeah. And actually, I like your example about how you use AI to help you to write like the code part, because I personally, like, I'm not a techie person at all, but again, like in a new SP, what we use, it's a JSON code because I, let's say I get an event.

From the back end, like [00:29:00] use a register and I have several parameters, but I also want to based on these parameters to rank it somehow in my system. So I need to write the JSON code and sometimes like, you know, it doesn't work and I'm like, okay, I'll pretend to make a mistake or, okay, I have these data.

What else can I get from that data? Give me

Matthew Dunn: ideas. Okay, cool. Yeah. So the. I mean, where, where, where I see AI playing a, maybe it's an expected role, but it's sort of helping with the interface between the analog and the digital, if you will. 'cause like, you know, debugging a bunch of JSON Ah, I do it too.

It's hard. It's like, yeah. What do you mean? I missed a quote. Ah, like, just like sort it out for me. Would you? And getting, getting a silicon helper. To deal with something like that is, is a relief because doing it yourself manually gets old after a while. Wow. Interesting. So you did, you [00:30:00] did give me a little clue about your, your ESP of choice.

When you talk about Jason, Chris, Chris Marriott, again, we can quote talking about relational and non structured data and how we're going to move in the more non structured direction. Is, does your ESP itself. Cloud hosted and is it local? Is it global? Is it U. S.? Like, where, where are the bits that, that, that are Anna's kingdom right now?

So

Anna Levitin: it's global solution. And what was important actually for us, it's to receive like a customer support and CSM from the team from similar time zone.

Matthew Dunn: Oh, yeah.

Anna Levitin: It's, it's also in the North America, but also in Europe. Okay.

Matthew Dunn: Okay. Nicely done, by the way. Nicely done. We're dancing around talking, we're dancing around naming names, which I've been guilty of doing at times, but particularly since you just migrated you don't want your old ESP hacked off at you in any way, shape, or form.

Where where do you see [00:31:00] Where do you see Powtoon and your role in Powtoon going? I mean, visual communication is not going away. I would think there's a fairly exciting a future ahead for the company.

Anna Levitin: Wow, that's, that's a good question. And I would start from like AI solution. Yeah, as I said, we're planning to release few features, one of them I mean, it's like AI solution, but for, I guess, different categories of the users.

And, you know, we circle back on segmentation because we have some very like advanced users that they don't need AI to, to produce, to create a presentation for them, but they sometimes need an inspiration. So we have like a script wizard that help them to write a script. For like for for each slide and we will have a solution for like, how to say for junior users, right?

Just to add a prompt and receive a result. Yeah. And a few other [00:32:00] things. So the way I see, like, so this is one part of PowToon, like AI integration. And the second part is separating, like self search solution, B2C solution and B2B and making B2B again is like as a knowledge center, because I guess each of us like experience the situation when it's handoff or you're joining the new team and then you receive tons of links, like in G drive in email, just like PDF docs, and it's like in the random places and it's very difficult to navigate.

So yeah, Powtoon will be like one stop shop for, for these purposes and for trainings as well.

Matthew Dunn: Do you think that, do you think that someone, let's say under 30 is, is, has a more visual bias in their [00:33:00] communication preferences than someone over 30? Broad, broad question. Well,

Anna Levitin: I don't remember how it's under

Matthew Dunn: 30.

I just made that up.

Anna Levitin: Yeah, I mean,

Matthew Dunn: are we becoming more visual? Yes.

Anna Levitin: The way I guess the, the, the new generation, the more connected to the like visual content, even like myself, again, if we are just compare like the, the written article with a, with a video content and also we like diversity, we like the diversity of the content.

So for example like if we, if we release like a nurture campaign. It can be that each and every type of material of the content is like written content. No, it should be video. It should be like something like a PDF, ebook written blog post, maybe some interactions like quizzes.

Matthew Dunn: Gotcha.

Interesting. So it's a very [00:34:00] anthropological question, isn't it? Right. Like, and, and at the same time, and this is where this is sort of square on the, the, the business that you're a part of, visual communication is not easy, right? Like it, it, in some ways it's easier from a time perspective to bang out an intelligible sentence or paragraph.

than to convey the same thing in well constructed visual communication. Like, the investment of time and effort to do the visual communication well is not trivial, and the people who have the training and knowledge set to do it well, you know, almost everybody learns to write, almost nobody gets trained to communicate visually.

I mean, this

Anna Levitin: is the why Powtom exists. Like we had a set

Matthew Dunn: up or what

Anna Levitin: we have users to create, like really easily create, because, you know, you can write like the whole [00:35:00] page describing the situation, but you can show one slide.

Matthew Dunn: Yes. Yes. That's true. Yeah. For

Anna Levitin: example, whatever I make a presentation, like I'm speaking on a conference, I create presentation at PowToon and then like I don't talk about PowToon.

I'm just saying, look at a screen, what you see now it's PowToon.

Matthew Dunn: That's it. Yeah. Let it speak for itself. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So, hey, you get to what we say in software, eat your own dog food, use your own, use your own tool set. That's pretty powerful. If, if you could wave a magic wand and make email sort of a first class interactive environment so that you could use PowToon output and animation natively in email, would you do it?

Yeah,

Anna Levitin: yeah, definitely. I mean, it's a great demonstration of the tool, first of all, and I think it's, again, it's easy and pretty, like, cheap to create. Yeah,

Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah, [00:36:00] yeah. I mean, it'd be, it'd be remarkable to see what the, what the difference is. This is a funny sideways way to come at a different question, but Is there a, a messaging app that, that's sort of predominant, almost everybody uses in the street in Tel Aviv, WhatsApp, WeChat, et cetera, anything in that class?

We use a lot of

Anna Levitin: what's

Matthew Dunn: up. Yes, a lot of what's up. Okay, I would I kind of would have guessed that but Not having not having been there yet. I'm not sure as Messaging platforms are evolving and I'm thinking particularly of Apple announcing that they're going to jump on board with RCS rich communication system, I I think the potential for messaging to Start to start to be of first class part of that marketing and community channel that someone like you manages primarily via email now is very [00:37:00] real.

And those, those platforms have different attributes, messaging, quite a different thing than email. But I think we're, we're going to have to start grappling with it. Do you pay attention to that now in your job or is the diversity of customers too much and you've got to focus just on email? So,

Anna Levitin: Actually I don't have a lot of experience with mobile in general because like Palo Alto in particular, our application is desktop only.

It's difficult to work like even on a tablet. So we always encourage users to log in from the desktop whenever they try mobile version. And we use primarily email and like but I, I love seeing these like multi channel solutions that can, you know, that connected to the social media to messengers SMS and email and you know, dynamic landing pages.

I would love to learn more [00:38:00] about that and see, see the next step, see how it's developing.

Matthew Dunn: I, I suspect that one of the ironic things that's gonna keep email you know, email's not going away, we can have that conversation, but I suspect one of the things that's gonna keep it central is the fact that it's, it, is, it's still kind of a common solution across lots and lots of countries where messaging, for example, is already very fragmented, you know WhatsApp there, no one, almost no one uses WhatsApp in, in the U.

S., for example, surprisingly. And if you're in China, it's WeChat, not WhatsApp. So we've got this, you know, there's a United Nations, right? There's, there's a whole bunch of different platform languages, but email outside China, email, everyone's got that. And that's what you do.

Anna Levitin: It will help to add another layer of personalization.

For example, if I prefer to receive [00:39:00] messages in WhatsApp, a company that targets me, they will see it, okay, and they will communicate, I don't know, on the weekly basis for WhatsApp, and then once a month, like product update or something through the email.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was that a consideration in picking your new ESP?

What their capabilities for messaging are?

Anna Levitin: Yeah, yeah, definitely, because we want to add like a push notification at some point, maybe SMS as well and other

Matthew Dunn: channels. Yeah, okay. Is there a, is there an active online community of PowToon, PowToon's user base?

Anna Levitin: Yes. Yeah, we have a community. We have like a premium community for users with that licensed and have more options.

And we have like a weekly, not weekly monthly webinars. Yes. Where we announce new features and just to like show how to work. With PowToon. Yeah. We have LinkedIn, [00:40:00] Instagram TikTok.

Matthew Dunn: Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot to keep track of for a relatively small team. Yeah.

Anna Levitin: Yeah. I mean, we have a social media team, it's not on a marketing co ops plate.

Okay. Okay. Cool. We are not, we are not huge marketing team anyways.

Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's, that's still, that's a, that's a, that's a lot to juggle. And I've got to bet you've got some incredibly passionate, picky, opinionated users, which, which is the best kind. We

Anna Levitin: have users that actually build their business on PowToon.

Like, for example, we have language teachers that create all their trainings at PowToon. They teach several languages. We have, I think, math teacher, like literally their YouTube channel. Like every single video is a PowToon.

Matthew Dunn: Is a PowToon. Wow. That's, I mean, it makes sense to me, right? Just cause I, just cause I know [00:41:00] how flexible and and sort of constantly evolving the tool is and how hard it is to do similar caliber work in almost any other.

Environment. I mean, I haven't touched animation tools from Adobe whatnot in a while, but it was hard. Paltoon made it easy. So you landed at a great place. Okay, what are we, what are we going to wrap on? What did we not cover from your awesome organized agenda? What did we not talk about that you were thinking we might talk about?

Anna Levitin: We talked about migration, about the classic media, yes, about my love to, to anthropology. And maybe we can touch a little bit about the, like the future. We, we, we slightly mentioned like ESP, CDP, but in general, like. I just want to say one more time that the way how I see the future, like, first of all email, I would love to see more email marketers [00:42:00] joining, you know, our geek community.

And I think actually with help of AI, it will be easier because when I talk to people. Oh the just graduated, they think that, okay, Oh, email marketing. It's only about writing, creating content. What if, if I don't like it? So I think AI can influence also in that way to give more like interest, you know, to, to help juniors to to join these.

This career and also like on ESP CDP side, I think the platforms will be more more a focus on, on marketers and it became more like easier to, to operate rather than something like sophisticated that requires implementation, you know and like two weeks of dev team work, right? So, yeah. And it will be more like [00:43:00] the main idea of ESP, CDP, CSP platform, whatever you call it.

It's like to, to be able to deliver and analyze, like, right now in real time.

Matthew Dunn: Wow. Wow, I like that idea. Yeah, because Blimming. Right, because you only have so much time to sort of make sense of what what happened with last last week's campaign or or the new customers and then you've got to get on to the next one, which is kind of the reality.

The cadence of of email marketing and you touched on what you just said, but. And I think we both have observed this in the, in the world of, of hardcore email folks that we get to be around. It's not a career someone plans for. They tend to fall into it sideways somehow. And, and then you go, wow, this is actually really interesting, diverse, challenging, all that other stuff.

You have to wear a lot of hats to do the job you do. Right.

Anna Levitin: [00:44:00] Yeah. I just, I was working in a travel startup when I was firstly like exposed to email and the CEO was like, Oh, by the way, we need to send email, like, can I, can you handle this? And I'm like, of course. Why not? Let me Google

Matthew Dunn: it. Yeah. How to send email.

And, and now here you are years later, sending, sending stuff globally to, you know, 40 million people. That's pretty darn cool. Yeah. I love that. Well, Anna, it's been a gas. I knew we'd have fun. I so appreciate you making the time calling in from the bomb shelter.

Anna Levitin: Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me.

I like, I love talking about emails and my journey in marketing, you know,

Matthew Dunn: Israel. It's a fast, it's a fascinating one. And, you know, to, to focus as you do in the middle of, you know, quite, quite literally explosions around your ears. It's a pretty big deal. If someone gets interested in Powtoon from our conversation, we send them to powtoon.

[00:45:00] com. Correct. And then if someone says, Ooh, email marketing, what a, what an interesting career, maybe I should pursue that. Then we're going to send them to only influencers and email geeks, right? What else?

Anna Levitin: Yeah, true. They can always, people can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Anna Levitin. I'm very happy, like to chat with

Matthew Dunn: everyone.

That's terrific. Well, my guest today has been Anna Levitin from Powtoon. Thank you, Anna. We're out. Thank you.

Anna Levitin: Bye bye.