Industry Leader Panel: Future of Tech

Riaz Kanani 0:58
So maybe we'll just why don't we do a sort of round the room? Hopefully we've all got the panels in the same order. Why don't we start top left with you, Dennis and introduce ourselves and then we can kick off.

Dennis Dayman 1:11
Great. Yeah. Hi everyone, my name is Dennis Dayman been in the digital marketing, digital communication space for about 2025 years now actually started in the days when it was dial up. I've worked for several different companies, one or a couple being more on the internet service provider side in the early days stopping spam viruses and other sort of nuisance communications to clients. And then flipping over to the other side of the fence, as they say to the marketing side and helping build companies such as strong male Eloqua and return path. And, you know, basically bringing all the information over, that I've learned in the last couple of years to marketers, basically been a chief privacy security officer for a number of years, and I don't see myself leaving the digital communication space anytime soon.

Riaz Kanani 1:58
Thanks to this, man.

Len Shneyder 2:01
Hey, how's it going? everyone, my name is Len Shneyder. And I'm the VP of industry relations over at Twilio came over from the sendgrid side. And we're one big happy family. I started my career over 15 years ago by heckling Dennis on stage and that's a fun story. Except we can't be at the bar for me to tell you that when I represent the company amongst a number of different communities that a lot of us are engaged with like M3AAWG, espc, etc, etc. Thank you, Jenny.

Jerry Darko 2:34
Hey all Jerry Darko, I am a technology investment banker for William Blair. I cover digital marketing, e commerce technology, and doing this for about 13 years. Prior to that, I was on the private equity side. So I was buying kind of tech media telecom businesses for a few years and before that I was a PhD in electrical engineering. So think of myself as a recovering engineer of sorts, but not quite fully recovered, spent a lot of time in the email space done. Basically every IPO in the space that has happened. Responses exacttarget Marketo, HubSpot, Ssendgrid. You know, done a lot of m&a and capital raising in the space including companies from E dialogue to mailgun last year to cost and contact a few years ago to Campaign Monitor as well. So a lot of m&a capital raising and IPOs in email specifically.

Riaz Kanani 3:42
Very cool. My name is Riaz Kanani, I am founder of radiateb2b, I've been in Mar Tech, probably almost as long as yourself doing this maybe 21 years now. far too long. I'm also a recovering electronic engineer, though I can't say I know much about electronic and I've built video advertising networks, email marketing platforms, we exited to silverpop, which some of you will know about. And build that up internationally over here in the UK, in Europe. And then I I actually said I was going to get out of the communication space and and move over to the business side. And here I am, four years later, running a b2b account based marketing platform. Trying to reinvent b2b marketing all over again. So let's get on with it. Let's get on with the panel. Okay, so, I mean, there's obviously been a tonne of things happening in the privacy landscape over the last couple of years and obviously, more recently, on your side of the pond, what do you what are you seeing as the major the drivers that are driving that change amongst the wider population? What are your takes

Dennis Dayman 5:00
In terms of privacy being being applied even harder out here in the States, yeah, yeah. So interestingly enough, so I had the pleasure last year of attending to Leo's developer conference and gave a side side discussion on this. And, you know, the discussion was sort of the, the idea around the changing privacy landscape here in the US. And really, you know, what, what, you know, I've actually been talking about for a number of years, but even now, more more succinctly is, you know, you look at the amount of data that anyone company has on us today, right? We're producing quintillion bytes of data per day, mostly because of devices, you know, like, you know, our mobile phones and whatnot that we're using. And then, you know, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and all that sort of stuff that we're always engaging with. In fact, even the past week, my engagement on Facebook is even up further because of being home and, and, and socially distancing, you know, from other friends of friends of mine, but the creation of that data has has not only increased, but it's also increasing, because we're also seeing a cheaper cost of storage, you know, right. Now, you can basically buy a one terabyte USB stick for $49, even less than that, sometimes, depending on where you go. And it's because the storage has really dropped in terms of cost. But what that also does is that, you know, increases the issues around the data being misused, right? I don't want to call it any specific brands, but in the social media world, you know, you have seen misuses of data, we saw that back in the 2016 election as Len them, have you been looked at as well at Twilio, what people have been misusing the information, or if you open up your, your, your phone, or a newspaper, any you know, any morning these days, basically screams of data breaches and, and and you know, all these situations. And so now what you're seeing is because we as a country here in the United States, as I like to jokingly refer, but sort of in serious, we're a buy one, get one free nation, my wife will give away any part of her PII to get a buy one, get one free coupon. And that's just how we are. So we don't have unlike in the European region with GDPR. And then before that the EU Directive, we don't have overarching privacy legislation, we sectorial lies that buy healthcare and telecommunications and that sort of stuff. And so now what's happening, unfortunately, you know, is the states are tired of it, Attorney General's are tired of it. Consumers are tired of it. They're asking for help. They're asking for protections. And so that's why you've seen you know, this past year in California, ccpa is now out there. If it ends up coming up, we will now see a ccpa 2.0 version come to ballot in November of this year. Washington, unfortunately, has just failed their most recent attempt at a privacy bill. But you know, they continue to try. And there's two or three other states that already have bills on that have been voted on. And there's 20 other states that what am I and other folks have been sort of monitoring right now. And so what that's going to do for marketers, I think, unfortunately, is it's going to cause a lot of hoops, they're going to have to determine how they're supposed to protect that data or how they're supposed to have consent around that data. So I think it's gonna get really crazy here for us, I think it's gonna become very difficult for companies to do business, especially small businesses, as well. So

Riaz Kanani 8:07
Len, Jerry, do you have anything further to add?

Len Shneyder 8:11
Yeah, I'll just I'll just kind of touch on a lot of what Dennis said, because there was a mouthful there. So a quick note, if you guys remember the day before GDPR, in sunbirds history, that was like our second biggest mailing day of the year, if I remember correctly, two years ago, because what happened, everybody under the sun, who you've ever given your email address to send you a privacy notice update, and what that kind of made us all realise from a consumer standpoint, and I think we're having a flashback of it now, as more and more notices are coming out is that our information spread widely across the internet. And there's a distinct lack of control for consumers, for people to be able to control how much messaging they get on a regular basis. And that that's that's kind of an open question of how do we solve that? How do we as consumers take back control, and some of that is happening, at least within the United States, through the application of very sectorial privacy policies and laws and copycats, right, one state comes up with a good idea and other state copies of mixing sound tweaks. And so things I get are going to get really murky, but it doesn't address what I think is the fundamental problem is a kind of technical control within that space, to be able to moderate how engaged you want to be with companies because we all have to do it on a company by company basis.
Riaz Kanani 9:31
Yeah, that's a real challenge isn't it is whenever we, I mean, I don't know how much you guys see over that side of the pond. But you know, whenever we go to a website over here, we're immediately bombarded with barriers to, you know, you accept this, you don't accept that and it's just, you know, I don't know how many people just click go away on those things. But it feels like the the implementation tech wise, hasn't really actually solved the problem. If as you just said, Dennis, the Numbers COVID-19 emails on the hitting my inbox.

Jerry Darko 10:06
Yeah, and it's very interesting because in this time, I think one of the things that we're seeing driving a lot of company formation, kind of VC investments, m&a is the shift to a real focus on the consumer. And the real focus on customer experience. And to your point about the pop ups and all the emails and all the traffic and how people are adjusting their technology stacks to deal with this, this really has to be customer first. And things like that do have a material impact to how businesses ultimately engage and monetize and retain their customers. And so it's going to be interesting to see over the next few years, if that becomes the new normal, and people are, you know, similar to banners just blind to to that kind of an experience, or if there's innovation that actually happens around privacy and data and the notifications that you do get around this kind of information.

Dennis Dayman 11:03

Yeah. Yes, it's funny, you say that, because every time that I go to to the world, depending on which country, you know, in Europe, I laugh because every time I try to get on the hotel Wi Fi, it's, there's 50, I have to press for each cookie, but I want to accept or not accept. And then, you know, if I try to visit my home news, my local affiliate for the news that we like, I can't even see it, because they don't want to deal with the regulation. So they actually block our access. And I have to go basically, either VPN, or torrent, you know, through a different way to be able to get to, you know, to see my content here. So it becomes a little bit like, again, as a private professional, like, yes, privacy, but same time, it drives me up the wall, because I can't get my stuff done. Yeah,

Len Shneyder 11:48
that's the that's the real tension, right? The majority of I would say people in the world don't really care about their privacy or don't know about their privacy. And at the same time, that's changing the experience they have online, because there's a bunch of people telling them that they need to have greater privacy and greater access to their data. But the implementation isn't necessarily aligned with the user expectation.

Riaz Kanani 12:12
Yeah, great. Great. Do we? Do we see tech, improving things is that stuff that you're seeing happening within the startup scene, and I know, all of you are connected quite closely into that world? You know, you've seen startups address some of these challenges.

Len Shneyder 12:33
Well, I think the fact that we're all here, given what's happening in the world is a pretty remarkable thing. Right? Like, hats off to Andrew on the on the team for organising this, but let's put it this way, if this health crisis happened, 10 years ago, this would not be happening. We just be sitting in our bubbles.

Dennis Dayman 12:53
Exactly. Yeah, no, no, I think that there are some companies that are out there doing that. I mean, you know, myself being in the VC accelerator space here in Dallas, and I'm wearing capital factories t shirt, does not realise I'm wearing one of these things here. But, you know, there are some companies that are attempting to do that, you know, it's funny, with all the history that most of us have had on the anti spam side of things, we always talk about the the fuss, right, the final ultimate solution to spam or, you know, the spam problem. And we've never been able to really sort of figure that one out. Because I think we continue to, unfortunately, layer on more complications into an existing or really outdated, you know, email system. You know, we never thought and you know, that 3035 years later, we'd be using email the way that we are, nor was the system ever created this way. I mean, I remember the early days of my use, and it was about sharing with universities and governments information, but it was not really created with security and privacy or privacy in mind. But yeah, I am seeing some companies, you know, I, you know, there's a company in Austin called osano, that I'm an advisor to, and they're attempting to make this as easy as possible without having to go through, you know, buying the big enterprise solutions for your website, but to be able to say, okay, you know, this person is coming from this location, whether it's the UK, whether it's California, and hey, you know, these are the sorts of things that they should a consumer, or visitors should be given to choose about, what cookies or types of cookies that they want. So there are some that are out there. And we're going to continue to see a whole lot more of these pop up, you know, it just the, you know, there's a lot of choice there.

Jerry Darko 14:24
And I will say that, I think absolutely, probably everyone in the space right now he's doing something to address privacy, because it is the biggest thing that's affecting digital marketing and digital advertising right now, from an access to consumer perspective. And so in their own way, everyone is absolutely thinking about it. You've got, you know, the big platform businesses that are dealing with, you know, a national conversation, a global conversation, really all the way up into the political spectrum, around what they're doing with people's data. And it's clearly making changes. You're looking at the inbox providers as well, and and how they segment emails and what's that doing to deliverability. And what, you know, protocols, they're they're pushing down to senders. And that's certainly happening. But but we're seeing also a shift away from this idea of third party data, this idea of cookies, to Ward's, you know, first party data and the whole CDP craze, and how do I leverage the relationship I already have with my customers, and do things that that are in their best interest for them that are out in the public with transparency?

Dennis Dayman 15:41
You know, Jerry, that's a really good question. That's a really good thought, actually. And I don't mean to hijack the conversation here. But you know, now that what we're hearing from is that we're starting to see a revolt, if you will, or not even revolt, but sort of, you know, companies that are deciding to take over privacy for the consumers, you know, in that presentation, at the very end of it, I usually also talk about how Yes, companies like Apple, you know, for those who've been watching the last year or so, now, the commercials are basically saying, Hey, you know, this device is yours, and you know, what's on it is yours as well. And we will do everything to protect your privacy, we won't let people on to want the government onto it unless there's valid or, you know, they have the password or whatnot. But we're here for you as a, you know, as a consumer and that sort of stuff. And I'm, we've always heard privacy being one of those competitive things we did at Eloqua. In the years back where, you know, we talked about how we were certified, and, and how, again, we had all the the, you know, the the notices the consents and choices for our, our clients to be able to use to stay within law. But again, this is now even gotten further, right, Jerry, and you just want to talk about first party relationships, you know, now we're seeing in the next year, so Google Chrome is not going to allow third party cookies, period, end of story. So I'm going to be first party relationships at this point. And you know, and so a lot of us are now kind of scratching your head going, what does that mean? You know, does that mean that now Google's become the big, you know, Goliath, if you will, right? You have to go to them to be able to do all your tracking? Will we see lawsuits over that say, Hey, you know, this is not fair, you know, anymore. But how does that change, you know, what we know, as marketers in terms of how we're using all these platforms to, you know, to track and stuff and whether that's tracking also related to maybe, let's say, what sendgrid is doing, right? All platforms are using some sort of tracking URL. I don't know how that's going to impact right now. But that is sort of one of the things in my mind lately, that has me kind of going, where's this going to be going in 12 months?

Riaz Kanani 17:30
Yeah, they're completely. I mean, at Radio, we completely architected the platform, we're a network, we've got an advertising part of the platform and targeting companies. Most of the industry uses cookies, to deliver that. And we've had to architect it to not use cookies at all. And still obviously work. And that seems to be in the advertising world, they, you know, there's so much change going to happen in the advertising world, going forward, because of this cookie change. And the impact on just just little things like, you know, frequency control, or identifying the number of people who've seen an ad. And, you know, I'm guessing that's impacting also on the it doesn't, I guess it doesn't impact too much on the email marketing side of the world, because, obviously, we have an email address, we can we can track that down to the individual. But are there other things coming down the road? What's the impact on email marketing, or the relationship marketing world when it comes to the cookies switching off?

Jerry Darko 18:37
I think it's a huge positive. I think that you you had this sort of shift to social and a lot of people using multi channel to access new customers and engage with customers and in a cost effective way. And people are realising that the most valuable relationships are the ones I already have. And so when you think about owned media, it's it's people who are coming to your website in the control that you have over them and the people who have opted in to retreat receiving promotional kind of messages from you, and how you leverage that is driving kind of email growth going forward. And there's a lot of innovation happening, because of all the changes that that Google was with and going cookieless and deliverability, and things like that, that are driving innovation around email on top of the infrastructure layer, that are creating a lot of new interesting companies that are, you know, this idea of CD play plus email. I have I have my own gripes with the term CDP so we can get into that at some point. But there are email companies masquerading as CDP platforms at this point. And I think you're going to see a lot of investment in that general arena, because it is a channel that is controlled by the brand

Dennis Dayman 20:00
Yeah, you know, I'd be interested in

Riaz Kanani 20:02
go Dennis and it's good. Yeah, so

Dennis Dayman 20:05
when I'm gonna call us out age wise, especially on the email side of things, but you know, I agree with Jared, I think this is a good thing, right? You know, when, when when, and I, especially in the early days of email had to deal with things like can't spam here in the US, right? 2003 Oh, my God can't Spam is going to kill email. And all the marketers and USPS all came together, the espc was formed, the email sender provider coalition was formed. And we were going to go stop, can spam it obviously passed, and then obviously had an update in 2008. But I know most of you would definitely agree that can spam actually helped us understand, you know, what it is like to be quality over quantity, they have a true relationship, if you will, or at least attempt to have a true relationship with your consumers, and really can sort of help clean us up a little bit. But then at the same time, again, in that email time period, as well, if you think about it, it used to be years ago, where if you had an idea or technology idea, you usually work that through the IETF, right, the Internet Engineering Task Force, it was the standards group, right. And they helped us sort of figure out whether this would break the internet. Those days are gone. I mean, the IETF still exists, and they work on protocols and whatnot. But now, as Jerry just mentioned, right, there are companies that are, you know, continuing to build and, you know, on ideas to solve problems. And what we had even just two years ago, is something completely different today, I think, as well as well. So yeah, I agree with Jerry, I think this is going to be a good thing overall, because I can spam and one can jump in on this a little further. But I think it's going to help improve things quite a bit. It's just again, where it's going to be we just don't know. Thanks, Dennis.

Len Shneyder 21:36
I actually think this device probably did a lot for email, because it homogenised the experience in a very significant way. I was working for pivotal veracity when we created Can you guys still hear me?

Riaz Kanani 21:56
Yeah, no. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

Len Shneyder 21:58
So what we saw was the fact that you take an internet standard like HTML, it is a standard for how you code, it is not a standard for how any ISP or mailbox provider in the world needs to display email, they can choose sport, any piece of that, that they want. So the experience is really fractured. But things like mobile phones have created very uniform experience. And what we've seen now, based on research that we did, just earlier, late last year, was the fact that users are self segmenting to tell us the fact that they want to hear from brands via email. To me it's kind of like a essentially, resurgence of, of the utility of email as really a brand based communication. Sure, personal communications over SMS, it's more direct, it's faster. It's a shorter format. We're comfortable. We don't speak in Victorian novels, you know, no matter what side of the pond you're on. But the truth is that we rely on email as a means of documenting our day. Oh, no.

Riaz Kanani 23:03
Oh, we lost the last few. I can say that again.

Len Shneyder 23:06
Yeah. Oh, I was just saying we rely on emails as a means of documenting our daily lives online. Basically, it's an accounting of everything we do and everything we see.

Dennis Dayman 23:15Yeah. Yeah, I keep I've got I've got 27 gigs of email going back.

Len Shneyder 23:21
That is terrifying. And God help you if you,

Jerry Darko 23:24
you know, that is terrifying. But yeah, you email I think email is a universal identifier. 92% of the population has it. I saw a stat that said something like 99% of individuals check their emails every single day. So when you think about access to the consumer, there's no channel that performs like that. If you go cookieless, you just have to bet that email is going to be around. And there's been surveys done that, you know, the millennials, which which everyone's worried about moving to this social or something like that? Actually, I'm more bullish on email given generations before them. And so we think around for a long time,

Len Shneyder 24:09

believe it or not, Jerry, based on the research that we did, it's not only millennials and Gen Z expects that they're going to use more email, because they're essentially looking at it as a form of matriculation. Your professional and collegiate life are going to be email based, even if you know, your early days are Snapchat and Tiktok based.

Riaz Kanani 24:27
Yep. Yeah. different things to different mediums, isn't it? Really?

Dennis Dayman 24:32
Yeah.

Riaz Kanani 24:34
Hey, Carlos asked a question about, you know, whether whether we think brands focus on privacy just enough to not get fined or sued, or do they genuinely genuinely care about consumer privacy? And I guess, especially with with regard to Apple here, how much of Apple's privacy stance is really about they've not been very good in that internet. space and so has focused on premises away to give them an edge.

Dennis Dayman 25:07
Well, I mean, this is just my opinion, but you know, but I think we all know that every company, you know, is using part of this is marketing. And some really do generally care about privacy in terms of what is happening outside of their brands. I mean, if you look at, okay, fine, I'll call it out with Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, that was not a good thing for Facebook, right. So but we also know that these companies and again, we'll go back to the Google example, who are going towards blocking first party, or sorry, third party access, right, they're going to be using the data for their own selves, I mean, let's be honest, they're going to, they're going to use the data to be able to sell more information. In fact, I wrote an article, just even yesterday on circle ID, where Apple is now pushing out their own versions of low Earth orbit satellites, which would then basically, at some point, maybe mean that they can bypass the satellite providers. And basically, this device would only connect to this, you know, low orbit satellite itself, thus keeping that walled garden even further. And we're, we're in only the apple walled garden. And Apple can control the advertising and information. And I'm sure they are selling information about us, they're just not doing it maybe at the level of identification, but saying that there is a male individual, you know, at 45, you know, who does these sorts of things or likes these sorts of things, or was at the grocery store at 6am? This morning, because he needed to get some milk, you know, because we've been out for the last week or two. But I'm sure that they're going to be doing that. So I think it is a balance. It's like, it's a perception. But I think I think thing. Sure, I think Apple does care about the privacy, but they also want to control that. And they also want to still use it their way.

Jerry Darko 26:39
Yeah, I generally think that you're you're only as bullish on these changes as what your options are. And so you know, the companies that have the biggest plus the ability to be able to adapt and change the environment, the gatekeepers, if you will, you think Apple Google, those guys, they're very focused on what they can be doing from a public perception perspective. And from a gatekeeper perspective, in terms of, you know, they're sitting on on the fundamental currency of the internet, which is individual data. And if they can control more and more of that, in the changing environment, I think they're going to make a move to do that. It's going to hurt a lot of other companies. And we're seeing companies, you know, zoom info is a great example of a business that's going public right now that, you know, in, in, not to give too much information, but we couldn't participate in that IPO. Because, you know, ultimately, they're getting data from places that we're not sure if the consumer finds out or understands what happens to that stock fundamentally. But, you know, for the time being, there's no legislation to prevent that. And so it's core to their business model, it is their business, and people are not gonna shut down their businesses overnight. for privacy concerns, so we'll see what we'll see what happens.

Riaz Kanani 28:01
Yeah, we're seeing I don't know, if it's, if it's reached over to the pond, but he you are very much looking at ways to force the big tech companies to share and make that data available to more people. So what do you guys think about that? Is that is that something we should be pushing more on? Is it is it a bad idea? I mean, in principle, this idea of opening up the data to, for more companies to be able to consume from a decentralisation of power seems like a good idea. But that surely that goes counter then to privacy. So I don't know what do you guys think?

Len Shneyder 28:50
levelling the playing field is is a good idea. But again, that opening and exposing of data has to be done under strict controls. If you don't have privacy, by design, you don't incorporate some kind of way to withdraw the controller control the garden. It's basically just creating a free for all. Long time ago at a conference we can talk about, we still have sessions talking about Brazil, Russia, India, and China as being essentially lawless places where data was concerned. To a certain degree, India has come a long way, passing privacy legislation, and the others are, you know, getting along to Brazil's past privacy legislation. It's still a far cry from where other parts of the world are. But again, if you open everything up, yes, that's good from the standpoint of transparency. That's awful from the standpoint of what will happen to end users.

Riaz Kanani 29:48
Yeah, I agreed. I was talking to a startup a couple of weeks ago that's looking at basically collecting user data in exchange for free coffee. You know, so? Yeah, yeah. Well, they did they did they? The only question is, can they can they? Can they scale it? Really?

Jerry Darko 30:14
Yeah. I mean, every time you log into Starbucks Wi Fi, that's exactly what's going on, let me log into hotel Wi Fi, you know, with beacons, and you know, all of this is, is the idea of being able to understand every time airport Wi Fi example, that's a big data play. I personally, and this is personally now professionally think that the government needs to get involved at some point, I think the Internet has gotten to the point where it doesn't really work that without some of this happening in the background, fundamentally, people have gotten used to free. They're just only now realising that free isn't really free. Yeah, there's a cost to it. And the whole Internet's been built on this. And so in order to keep getting the things that you want, you know, there needs to be some kind of quid pro quo. And I don't see a way around it, unless people start paying for things. So I yeah, I'm not sure if I'll agree, but it's sort of where we are.

Dennis Dayman 31:27
Yeah. And I agree. In fact, Matt, you know, Matthew Bernard, who's a good friend of ours is also on here. And he just made the same, you know, even the question that's come from him, obviously, is about that, you know, on test thoughts on some of the tests that people have given, you know, PII in exchange for things like free coffee and whatnot. And, you know, again, you know, not not tooting my own little horn here. But, you know, some of the things that that when I presented at at the Twilio event last year was that, we know that our economies are increasingly fueled by that free flow of data, right, and that the advertising is what's powering as Jerry is talking about the growth of the internet, right, with tools and services. And, again, that data driven advertising has subsidised that content, right. And it's what consumers, unfortunately, have expected to now rely on getting free videos. Now my sons are home from college. And they're not in school right now, because they're on you know, hiatus for a tablet, but they're watching free videos all day long. Now, all these, you know, providers are saying, hey, come watch our free movies, log in, give us your profile, and log in. And we'll give you free movies all day long, during this time, but you know, we know that that ad supported internet years ago had created around 1111 12 million jobs, million jobs a year. And I think, probably three or four years ago, it was, you know, contributing like about $1.5 trillion, just to the US economy alone, right. And for that the time was around six to 8% of what we have for a gross domestic product. So Jerry is talking about Yes, I mean, the problem is, is that we also have to find the balance in this is that consumers are expecting free, you know, content, free videos, free everything, they also have to understand that there is a value of exchange, right for that data. And great, you don't make the choice not to do it. Or, you know, maybe should Facebook will often say, Hey, we're gonna offer you a, I don't know, 995 a month plan, and we won't sell your data, right? We won't use your data for anything. But you're gonna change that for us. But I don't think consumers are willing to pay for yet. Because again, we you know, we want everything for free.

Len Shneyder 33:19
Yeah. And I think it's also kind of something Dennis called out a few months ago, who here remembers the face swap app? How many people gave away their email address and a photograph of themselves to a simple little app that just swapped faces, so that exchange, people don't even understand the value of the data? They're giving away? Literally, in the age of facial recognition? Their faces were just pushed out into the internet?

Riaz Kanani 33:48
Yeah, it's that transparency, isn't it? You've got to you've got to somehow get and that's the ultimate challenge is that I guess, the idea behind GDPR, in theory with increased transparency, but the reality is all these pop ups and overlays that hit you every time you touch a company just doesn't work. And so does it need to shift to the browser? Does it need to shift somewhere else? Does it have to be at the corporate level? What do you guys think?

Dennis Dayman 34:25
You know, I don't know if there's a there's an exact answer right now, I think that's part of the problem. Because I, you know, as everyone has either said once or twice is, hey, the government should step in. Governments are going to screw that up just as much, right? I mean, we're already seeing that now. You know, even in Minnesota, a data, it's only considered a data breach. If it's an email address, that is also attached to a driver's licence number, but if it's a driver's licence number alone or the email address, that's not considered a data breach. Are you kidding me? Like how dumb is that? They're always going to also exclude themselves. I mean, this election season here in the US has been a crazy one as we hold on. No, but I got so much crap, you know, in terms of spam texts and spam emails to address that I never opted in. Because guess what they have, you know, excluded themselves from some of these rules not texting, but but from email rules and whatnot. So it's a weird balance that we're not going to see the regulations. I think so. But I think the companies are going to have to solve, but I think, all that. And if some folks who are talking about they've taken it into their own hands, right, where they're actually building their own DNS servers in their own homes right now, to prevent the ad blockers from from going off and seeing anything about them. So there isn't a clear answer, and I don't know if there ever will be to be honest. Yeah,

Len Shneyder 35:38
I'm gonna take a slightly optimistic view on this and say that, if we have enough pain in the system, then maybe government will finally Act. The problem with the United States kind of the tension between federal and state level politics. And we we have multilayered issues, but at some point, the federal government's gonna have to step in, because it's happening too frequently. And private industry is going to do it in ways that don't align amongst the big players, right? They're always going to do it in proprietary fashions. So I think at some point, they'll have to be a forcing function, that forcing function will either be just too many data breaches, data breaches, big guys that affect way more people, or the fact that we finally get legislators that understand technology, how it works today, versus you know, how vacuum tubes work?

Jerry Darko 36:26
Yeah, I just don't know what they would do. That's, that's where I've been struggling. Is this something like Facebook or Google? Do they become a utility? Yeah, yes, they're allowed to collect your data, but they do it in a certain way. And they can't make a certain amount of money off of it, and they can't use it in certain ways. And they, but they still have it? Or is it something different than private companies? And they're broken up in some way? And they can, you know, so it's, it's gonna be interesting to see where this evolves. But I don't see a way with them being private, profit driven public traded stocks, where they will fundamentally change their business model for the consumer version. Yeah, Jerry

Dennis Dayman 37:13
Goldberg makes a really good point here and a chat, you know, basically saying that, you know, they will never really Facebook will never offer a subscription model because they make more money selling off on our data. The question is consumers, are you willing to shut off your Facebook?

Riaz Kanani 37:30
The numbers speak for themselves? I don't think Really?

Jerry Darko 37:33
Yeah, I mean, I right now, I'm not sure I could. I'm, I was just thinking about it. We live in a world where we need to communicate with people. I use WhatsApp globally, at this point, Whatsapp is a Facebook product. I don't think I could communicate with my family overseas without it. Right now, and so. And you're not going to create a new WhatsApp tomorrow. Great. Right. And so yeah, it's it's it's a conundrum that we're in right now that the government needs to step in on and you know, what they do will be very, very, very interesting, because they'll say a lot about what our values are a society. And so it's, it's it's a bigger question than then sort of the future of tech. It's kind of the future policy and politics and the society and things like that. Yeah.

Riaz Kanani 38:29
Well, I think Well, great. Great point, Jerry. I think we're out of time. So well. Oh, there we go. We've got a few more minutes. So. Yeah, thank you. The last three hours. Oh, no. With any other questions that we we sort of missed going sort of back.

Riaz Kanani 39:10
Um, well, I mean, we've got a few more minutes. I've got one last question. If there's nothing from either the three of you that you want to cover off, which is we've talked a lot about the consumer side. Is the b2b side the same as b2c? Or should we be thinking about it differently?

Jerry Darko 39:26
Maybe I'll just jump in because the the zoom info argument is that b2b data is not regulated. The way b2c data is because it's fundamental to the economy and you know, business card is that PII, you know, you need people to know how to contact you for, you know, and, and I agree with a lot of that, so I think it's going to be a lot tougher. I think b2b is a little bit shielded from the conversation that we were just discussing right now. I do think that with the consumerization of enterprise, that people are going to want to expect the same kinds of things that they do as consumers in the business world to a certain extent. So it's a matter of time where I bring up zoom info, do not pick on them just because they're the top go because they're going public. But I don't know if people realise that not only are they tracking every email that you send, but every email that gets sent to you. And the sender has no idea that their email and information is being resold to other companies for their targeting. And, and from our perspective, we just needed time to get comfortable with that. And we didn't think that everyone knew and understood that. So I think that is a transparency that has to be, you know, available in b2b, over time, that people will demand at some point.

Riaz Kanani 41:04
Yeah, yeah. Great. We sort of covered it off a little bit earlier, in terms of future of the channel of the email channel itself. I think I think we all agreed it was going to be more email. But that's that's where we sort of ended up

Jerry Darko 41:20
more email for sure. I think pricing maybe when you get in Dennis, you can talk to pricing. But we've seen pricing be come under pressure, given the advances in technology from a compute and processing and all that infrastructure perspective. But be curious what folks think, will happen on pricing, if that's a steady decline, or or, or there's ways to curb that.

Riaz Kanani 41:47
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, email in the b2b world remains absolutely critical. That the number of emails you're having to send to get responses is obviously rising, which which makes makes life harder. But at the end of the day, you're still building relationships a lot by email, obviously, alongside things like things like this and zoom in and zoom video conferencing.

Dennis Dayman 42:12
Yeah, man, I'm interested to hear about the ROI stuff that you've been studying, or you've seen in the last couple of years to run email. What is still the most profitable channel?

Len Shneyder 42:21
Yeah, I mean, I think what we have to realise is that the channel got commodified A long time ago, but we're seeing a lot of other technologies moving to event based pricing, right? Because it's all about volume, being able to scale it. So it's not necessarily just about the value pricing, but also just about how much traffic you're going to drive. So it scales up and scales down. As businesses grow, they can expect pricing to grow with them. And also to go down right, because more is better for the providers. Great.

Riaz Kanani 42:53
Okay. I suspect we are overwhelmed a little bit. I can't quite see Andrew telling us to leave. I think we probably should wrap up at this point. That the rest of the show go on. Nice.

Jerry Darko 43:10
Morning, Good afternoon. Good evening. And good night.

Riaz Kanani 43:15
Yes. Thank you.