Hear it from the source: Verizon View Time Optimisation Unveiled

Matthew Vernhout 0:31
Hello, and thanks for joining us this afternoon, I am excited for this conversation. I have with me, Marcel Becker. Marcel is the Senior Director of Product Management with horizon media. We are going to talk today about a conversation that started on LinkedIn about a little bit of both sides criticising and not criticising one of horizons, newest products, view time optimization. So this is a service that as part of that conversation on LinkedIn, there was a bit of a Why pay for this, why not just do it yourself? Why not get it direct? So as part of that, we thought it'd be great to have a conversation just to talk about, you know, what it is why it's important. You know, how it works. And, you know, really sort of think about, you know, is this the right product for you? Are there other options? And, you know, Marcel, obviously, being the guy behind this product is going to give us really good insight here. So, Marcel, do you want to just give a two seconds on who you are? I'm sure other people have seen you already this week, in other sessions?

Marcel Becker 1:42
Sure. Thank you, Matt, for the session and entro, really, for the idea of just having an open conversation. I'm certainly not one to shy away from just talking about stuff, because I think it just, it just helps us in the industry, right to talk about things and be open and transparent about what we do. Yeah, so what am I doing? So I'm on the product side, for the Verizon media consumer man team. That includes yahoo mail, as well as AOL mail and all the other instances, Verizon, and all the partners, we have Rogers, and stuff like that as well. And then I'm responsible for what we call the May of b2b side that includes anti spam, privacy, working with senators, but also in the industry, our peers, like Google and Microsoft. And I'm also working on some what I call next generation features for brands and senators, which includes things like me, a&p for email. And certainly other interesting things, like through time optimization.

Matthew Vernhout 2:53
So why don't we dive right in for those that don't know what view time optimization isn't, just give sort of that. Here's what it is, and, and what you should know about it.

Marcel Becker 3:07
So if you don't optimization is really a deliverability. Or no, that's wrong. It's a delivery mechanism. And that's important, it's actually doesn't help you with deliverability. And control, we get into that. It's really a tool we designed for senators as well as for our consumers. In essence, we just looked at what is the biggest, or one of the biggest issues and pain point or users have, and that's just a lot of email in their inbox. Right. And typically, you know, when you open over an hour, consumers open in their inbox in the morning, they have like, you know, 10, some hundreds of emails sitting there, on average, all consumers they subscribe to, in 90 brands. So over the course of a week, they get, you know, at least email from 90 different vendors. And a lot of the senators, they send daily emails and stuff like that, right? So it is already a lot of stuff happening in our users mailboxes. And we just wanted to see Is there a way where we can help our users get more value out of it and really discover and engage with the brands and the senators that they care more or most about. And then which is also you know, just research just as some other standard state, and they, they saw and we saw that, you know, the engagement with the email in the first spot is twice as high as the engagement with an email and the second spot in your inbox. And that's across the board right in our own apps, as well as, you know, what we call third party apps when you use out of a Gmail or a timid Gmail app, really reprimand and stuff like that. And we thought maybe there's something you know There, but we can combine that and help our users discover what they actually want to engage with. And also, quite frankly, turn around and provide value to sellers, and email marketers. We know that email marketers and senators pay for things like send some optimization, right? That's the same research we did. Even marketeers that and there's a reason why they came up with some optimization to, to try to find the best possible time to actually send an email to all consumers to be in that top spot there. The problem there is, and we've seen this, we're seeing this a lot as well, if you actually, if there are a lot of senators and a lot of brands using the same ESP, they might come up with the same same time. And then the user has the same problem, right? So I subscribe, obviously, for research purposes, I subscribe to a lot of brands, and I opened my inbox, you know, you know, Monday at 9am in the morning, or Tuesday at 9am in the morning, and I already have a lot of emails in there. And, you know, 80% of some of those sometimes are actually sent through centum optimization. So that is that's why we came up with the term optimization ever said, you can be able to our users, and can we help brands, which our users actually want to get more out of it.

Matthew Vernhout 6:21
So it's basing it not necessarily just on the pattern of I'm opening email regularly this time, but also when am I logging in? Right? So

Marcel Becker 6:32
that's Yeah, exactly. I mean, to me, that's the beauty of it, right? It doesn't require a tracking our users at all, right? There's no, there's no it doesn't have to guess when is the best time to send it, it doesn't have to collect data, which we actually quite frankly don't like, anyway, but it's a different topic. From the sender perspective, you should send your email as you normally would even if you want to send some optimizations you can still do that, right, we actually have seen brands use both central optimization and three time optimization still get something out of it. So you just send the email as you normally would. And then on our side, we know right when somebody is actually looking at their inbox, and somebody is opening their mailbox and that's the the the key or the cue, so to speak to actually deliver that email to the user.

Matthew Vernhout 7:22
Right so the way that I understand the time optimization and I will say this was not a product that I was around for when it was launched with your current partner but the idea basically being I set up a campaign it can be you know, I can start it on Monday run it till Friday as an example send all the mail at once horizon then queues those messages on your mail servers, and then waits for the consumer to log in and then delivers the optimal message. So I think the concern I have and like you were saying, if everyone's using send time optimization Now, what if everyone starts using view time optimization as a consumer, I'm gonna log in I'm gonna get bombarded with view time optimization delivered messages. So how do you combat that?

Marcel Becker 8:09
That's a very good question. And that's usually the first question we get when we talk to brands and that's I think this was also a question on LinkedIn thread or online we obviously thought about that right? How can we how can we solve that so the first part or the first answer to that question is free time optimization is not a tool that you should be or would be using for all of your emails or all of the campaigns and certainly it's not a tool which is suitable probably for all senators. As you said you the sender actually decides which campaigns or which emails they want to optimise using freedom optimization. And to do this from a technical perspective by setting up a campaign and letting us know what is the indicator we should be looking for in the emails you send us and it could be many different things it could be an x hat or it could be you know, a schema script you put in there you could decide to just do it by subject line or from a trust there are many many options but we're getting a little bit into the weeds here. Then on top of that, we actually have some secret secret sauce as part of our video programme and service so we actually look at you know, how many emails do the does the user already have in the inbox right? Normally sent emails so let's say there are three four video emails waiting for you met right when you open your inbox when you do and we always see there already 10 emails in there right? Should we add the other four on top of that? Probably not. Right? We want you to actually digest what's already there. And the next time you come online, we look at Okay, now is a perfect opportunity, a perfect moment to deliver maybe only one of these four writing emails to Matt and then we look at Okay, what what do you actually like right? What did you engage with in the past like What is your preferred sender or brand, and that might play a role in what we actually plays first. And again, we let you engage with that one email, we don't want to overwhelm you with all the other stuff. And we did a tonne of experiments, and we actually found it, it really works, right? It removes the, the load, so to speak from our customers, and it helps the brands actually get in front of the consumers who want to get email from you. And the, the other there was the second part of the third quarter to the to the answer, which I'm drawing a blank on right now. Anyway, let's continue. We'll come back. I'm pretty sure we get back to that. It's, it's,

Matthew Vernhout 10:48
we do have a couple questions coming in through the chat. So we are going to get to the the one question, the first question, but we can jump into it now. And it really is, you know, how does the validity fit into this? Right? Because obviously, that is currently the only source to participate preview time optimization. So you have to be a customer there. So, you know, how was that decision made? And sort of what other future potential like would you potentially look at integrating with other espys or other vendors, beyond just your current single partner?

Marcel Becker 11:23
Yeah. And I actually remember what I wanted to say, but it's actually the questions already. So we definitely come back to that. Oh, yeah. So why don't we partner, when we piloted the pilot pilot, we started the pilot. I had too much coffee in the morning. Anyway, when we started the pilot, we actually did reach out to LA vsps. And talk with them. At the end of the day, it was really what made the most sense to us at that point in time. And that was really, we're really good at, I think, creating a nice product, and the technology, but we needed a partner who could really help us market and sell the product at scale. And really do this ideally, across a lot of ESP, because we didn't just want to implement this, like for one, ESP or we didn't want to just leverage a single technical solution, like, you know, from head or something like that. So we tried, we tried to do this in a way, which could potentially reach a large number of brands and customers. And that's why we went with validity. When we look at, you know, other options in the future. Absolutely. Right. I know, to me, I want to make this as accessible and as available as possible. From our perspective. Are we governed by a certain kind of contracts right now? uncertain commercial terms? Yes. And, quite frankly, I don't want to go into too much detail here, because I really just want to concentrate on what is the product? What does it do? And what doesn't it do?

Matthew Vernhout 13:13
Yep, no worries. I just wanted to make sure we got that question answered. I know we were going to talk about it anyways. But it came through from the audience, I thought it'd be a good one to to look at. Another great question. I know we are going to talk about it as well. But we might as well put it up front here. So Heather's asking, you know, someone only logs into their Yahoo account once every couple of weeks, right? How does VTL fit and deal with those types of individuals?

Marcel Becker 13:37
That's a perfect, that's a perfect question. And there was also another question in here I saw which kind of which I want to answer in the same sample at the same with the same breath basically. So the v2 product and the and the platform is quite flexible. And then it supports a whole bunch of additional features. So the sender decides how they want to set up the campaign. So a standard campaign, the way you set it up is basically just you say, as you said before, you say I'm running this campaign where I want you to hold on to these emails from Monday to through, you know, Wednesday, maybe we'll Friday. So we basically wait for users to come online during that time window. If users don't show up, the default is that we just deliver the email at the end of the time window. So you know, on Thursday, we just drop them in the inbox and if the user comes on later, it just looks and works like you know, you would have sent that email normally. There are options though the sender can decide what to use and how to set up this campaign. The sender can basically say, if the campaign expired do not deliver the email, right? If you're sending timely emails or you know this is a coupon or an offer which is only valid for three days. There's no benefit for you or the our consumers when they get Add an email, which is completely non relevant, you know, on the fourth day or something like that, it just clutters the inbox, it just increases our storage cost. And it's not, you know, there is studies showing, showing that, you know, the more emails you get from the brand, like, especially these daily emails, you know, the horror of email fatigue, and the more likely you are to actually unsubscribe. So this is a, as I always say, this is a win win win situation, right, and brand wins, the consumer wins, and we win at the end of the day, you can also set up campaigns. And we have, we had a sense of do that, where you queue all the emails of sending into it, let's say you're sending a daily digest or a job offer, right, so only the last email you actually send is always relevant. So you can set up campaigns where you keep sending a daily email, and we only place the last one in the queue to the user. So let's say you have a job offer, which gets sent, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you know, on Wednesday, the one on Sunday on Monday is not relevant anymore, use only comes online on Wednesday, use only gets the one on Wednesday, it's the most relevant, and we do not deliver the one from Monday to

Matthew Vernhout 16:11
Tuesday. And then those are just deleted from the queue. They just like they never existed. They never

Marcel Becker 16:17
existed as far as the user is concerned. So it really helps to, like I said, elevate the most relevant email really to the user, help them engage with what's really what matters. And then all the other stuff, which doesn't matter anymore. It's out of the system, it doesn't even exist, right reduces the volume in the user inbox, email fatigue. And I think that's a good thing.

Matthew Vernhout 16:42
So we've talked a lot about that, right? Like these messages get placed at the top of the user's inbox? Is it one of those things that if I use veto, I'm going to go to the inbox thing? Is that, like, I paid for it right to be placed in the inbox? Or is there still other decisions and factors around where the message is going to be placed?

Marcel Becker 17:01
Yeah, that's that's an important question here as well, because there were some reversal misconceptions early on, when we actually launched a product. And there's, I think there still are. So this is in no way, a way to actually get into all our users. inboxes, right. So video is on top of everything else, on on on our deliverability and I appeal site, so you only get to the video system, so to speak, or email only gets there after it actually passed to all our spam filters. The users filter, actually, that's also important to know, if you have a filter set up that you want all your PayPal emails and your pay Paul folder, we will honour that right that the bypass wiggio if you're a spammer, and we don't think your email is as worthy to get into our users inbox, then retail is not for you. We actually did have some interesting marketeers early on they fought, you know, hey, that sounds sounds awesome, let's, let's buy video. And they did and replace those emails at the top of our inbox. And the beauty of ATL was it and enhances and amplifies our users engagement. And that's the positive and negative engagement. So if you're actually sending something or users one, you actually get like those, you know, two times increase in clicks, which you want. And if you send something our users don't want, you also get the two times increase and unsubscribe and spend votes. And again, I think that's a good thing. Right for us. And, and also for for these brands. Because, you know, ideally, you want these secrets, if you actually care about this cartoon and stuff like that.

Matthew Vernhout 18:46
Right? Okay, so just Yeah, for clarity, you're not guaranteed inbox by buying VCO no user filter still apply regular filters still apply? Do you have to be you know, using demark? Because it's like a standard to you have to meet a certain technical requirement in order to participate. Like for me as an example, if you're not doing demark? You don't get me but if you do need something like that for VTL, or is this completely independent of all of that,

Marcel Becker 19:14
yeah, demark is not required. Although, we have been looking into actually requiring it, just because it enhances the, you know, the industry as a whole. Just you know, like the required for ANP and BB and other things. The only thing which is required is decom. Because we want to make sure that the email is actually from the domain. You claim it is from so when you're setting up a campaign, the one thing which is required for all of these is the terms you need to have decomp signature.

Matthew Vernhout 19:47
Okay, that's good. That's good. There's a question here from Jacob that says, you know, how does VTOL take into account that an open may not translate to a conversion, right, so I get the email in my inbox at 9am by I will not plan on buying anything until noon. So by then, you know, it's not the top message in my inbox, or I log back in, and maybe VTi was serving a new message at the top of my inbox. You know, what are you seeing in relation to that type of correlation? I

Marcel Becker 20:15
suppose? Yeah. I mean, we were, like I said, Before we look at other signals, or why are they you being online is certainly an important signal for us that we should place a message we, like I said, we try to find the perfect sweet spot for you and for that particular brand. So we might actually also look at engagement in general. You know, we, we look at engagement for anti abuse reasons as well to generate reputation or decide, you know, what email, we actually shut them over to the inbox and stuff like that. So that's quite similar here as well. Right? I think that's, that's the answer there.

Matthew Vernhout 21:03
Yeah. Okay, that's, that's good. Um, so Heather is asking, you know, in regards to fetching the most updated offers, and that's something that amp offers as well. So you get rid of that whole idea of, you know, don't deliver Monday's mail, because it's not going to be relevant. If I have an app, I can put the most relevant message there anyways,

Marcel Becker 21:23
I Heather's actually onto something. ANP salts for the content within the email, right. So when you actually find that email, and open it, MP, MP can make sure that you see the latest content in there, and P doesn't help you get the email at the top. So I always say, video optimises. The top of the funnel actually helps the user to discover the email and see it an a&p salts for the top of the funnel, it optimises the content in there. If you actually combine both, that makes for a very interesting product. Okay, so stay tuned.

Matthew Vernhout 22:06
Always looking at new features and services. There's another question here. Do you have any idea how many brands are using BTO today? Is that something you guess

Marcel Becker 22:17
I do? Have an I do have an idea, but I can't share that.

Matthew Vernhout 22:22
Alright, greater than one less than a million some close to that.

Marcel Becker 22:28
board? That's correct. Yeah. Now, it's quite a number of brands. And, and also there was another question in here. Like I said, it's not for everybody. It's not for every company. So a brand certainly can decide which campaigns they want to do. They can decide to video everything. We have one brand day, literally video everything. We actually reveal all our marketing emails to our users as well. Of course, it's free. And other brands, they they tried it and they decided it's not for them, because the type of emails they send, it doesn't matter. It doesn't make any difference. And then obviously also different types of communication, right? The transactional emails, their marketing marketing methods, it it really depends at the end of the day, what do you want to achieve if the email and in some cases those just play around a little bit and see what works? What doesn't?

Matthew Vernhout 23:27
Okay, as part of our conversation to get ready for this, that was actually one of the things we talked about was like, What is the ideal sender? Or is there an ideal sender or type of message? And I know you've touched on a few things around like, you know, coupons, expiry sales, expiry that type of stuff. But is there like a, an ideal sender, or maybe a sender where you've done some, you know, investigation and found like, this really isn't for you?

Marcel Becker 23:54
Yeah, certainly, like I said, certain certain marketeers, it's not for them. But we have, we have seen a lot of success with Sanders, like the daily digest one, right? Even though we delivered essentially less email, they increase the open rates and clicks by a significant significant percentage point. significant percentage points, Jesus, I really had too much coffee. But also, we also work with centres. They also send seasonal email, right, think about tax season, think about Black Friday, were you know, they typically do not send the rest of the year. And it helps them actually also stand out in in their mailbox, and we could actually leverage like historical data on our side to really help them to actually be noticed and recognised. I know validity. Our partner they actually have a case study up on our website, which I think is very interesting, and they actually shine a light on one of them. Central State as well.

Matthew Vernhout 25:02
Okay, okay, there's a there's an interesting comment here. And I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to put I'm going to put it out, you know, where someone has built a sequential journey to, you know, whether it's an onboarding journey, or some kind of trust building journey with consumers, you know, would be to not hurt this type of thing. And I think, you know, you've kind of touched on this already in regards to not every campaign should be BTO or works for VTL. Would you agree that for some sequences or journeys, it's not ideal?

Marcel Becker 25:34
Yeah, if you have that type of campaigns, where you have like that story driven. If that, if that's a things, but I look at this, like a story driven campaign, probably, video is not the right answer. Or maybe you read to all of them. You can even set up a video campaign, where you can actually push all of these story modes into the queue, and we start delivering them as we receive them. So you have options, right? So you can actually veto all of those story events, and make sure all of them are actually received, and all of all of them are at the top, if you then choose to choose to do so. But then, in some cases, I might even work with one senator as well, they actually change their email strategy. And not just for us, obviously, for the other receivers on the gym, and Microsoft as well. And I think for the better, they actually took a hard look at what emails Should I actually send? What should be the content? Should I send, like one on Monday, one on Wednesday, one on Friday, essentially just repeating the same stuff just trying to get our users attention? Or should I be smarter about what I said? Maybe more story driven more value to our users, right? So in that way, I think them looking at video actually also helped our users again, and then actually realise that there's another way to do email marketing, a better way.

Matthew Vernhout 27:08
Okay, so we have two related questions in the queue right now. So we kind of touched on this one a little bit at the beginning. But you know, if, if multiple brands are using the PTO, for the same recipient, obviously, their sto numbers might align the same way to say I know the user as I was on at 10am, because their own data shows them that. But if if those same four brands, they are all using VTL. Right? Or if everyone starts using GTO, doesn't it sort of limit the benefit that you currently receive? where maybe it's only a select number of brands using it?

Marcel Becker 27:45
Yeah, I think I answered that question already. So we we try to be smart about it. So like I said, we look at how many images Do you already have in your in blog? Should we actually plays the video? You might as well not? And then if we decide to play with your meds, you also look at what is in the queue for you. Specifically, you know, Matt? And which ones of the let's say there are five video emails waiting? Should we plays one of them should be plays two of them? And if it's just one, which one should it be? And we take other data into account, right? If we know that Matt really likes target versus Macy's, maybe we placed the target one first. And then the next time when there is an opportunity, we placed the Macy's one. So we want to optimise it as much as possible for the consumer first, and then the brand as well. So they actually get the value out of the programme.

Matthew Vernhout 28:37
It's like you already know my shopping preferences. So there's a another question here in regards to unsubscribe rates. I know you kind of touched about, you know, DTO seems to amplify both positive and negative metrics. Have you seen any negative increase student like additional unsubscribes or anything like that due to PTO?

Marcel Becker 28:58
Yes, Yes, certainly. Some brands have seen negative, or, you know, increased spam boats and unsubscribe rates. And I would say, rightfully so. Right. If you do send unsolicited emails to our users, we deserve that. But for for brands, we actually sent one to relevant email. We have seen engagement increase, in some cases, open rates, quadruple click rates double. And usually you don't even not see an increase in unsub rates.

Matthew Vernhout 29:38
In regards to and I know this may not fall into your your round, because your partner I think manages most of them when it comes to credits. Lauren's asking so if I don't use if a message isn't just delivered to the VTL how does that you know, do you get a refund or do you only pay when the message is delivered? So how does that credit system work?

Marcel Becker 29:57
Yeah, obviously, you know, it's been This decision on you know, how they, how they bundle and structure the deal. But typically you only pay for optimise IE delivered events. So if you if you set up a campaign, and nothing matches, for example, where everybody's following your email, you will not pay for that. If the user does not come online, and email does not get delivered, you will not pay for that. But then again, this is up to validity, what they do, but the typically that's how they should should work.

Matthew Vernhout 30:38
Their credits typically only to use when messages deliver is the ideal situation as opposed to, but your mileage may vary depending on on the actual people managing the crediting system. Got it. Got it. So one of the other things that we talked about when it comes to some of the other additional data feeds and services, right, you offer some performance data feeds already that aren't part of VTL, but offer similar things such as, you know, open metrics and performance metrics. You know, should senders be looking at those differently than GTO? Should they be looking at both options? You know, really, what's the focus when it comes to the two different data sets and send her options?

Marcel Becker 31:22
There, I mean, they're not mutually exclusive. I mean, I but I like to look at them as, you know, two products, I think, can help brands, create and send better emails, right? YuGiOh, in a way helps brands to get to the top of the inbox. But ideally, it works best if you send relevant content, right? Again, it incentivizes senders, I should do the right thing for our mutual customers, the the marketing feeds, and specifically the engagement feeds. There's a postmaster or what they call the placement feed, as well, we will change the programme a little bit. So I would say stay tuned. But the engagement feed specifically, again, I think they actually provide value to senators to get a better insight into how their email campaigns perform. I talked many times about how pixel based tracking is probably not the best measure for opens for many, many reasons. A you actually not measuring how people interact with email, you're actually measuring how machines interact with you. And with caches, prefetching of email, proxies all kinds of stuff, you basically measure how, how often your email gets fetched from all these machines. And then on top of that, we don't like it from a privacy perspective. Because, you know, I don't think there's value in having senders know that you met open the email three times, you know, once in your apartment, and the other time when you were, I don't know, out in the out and about on your iPhone. But we certainly realise there is value for brands and senators to know how their campaigns perform, right? How many people are opening how many people were actually, with, with pixel based tracking, you can just measure what you think is opens right? But with the feeds we provide on top of that you actually know how many people are storing that demon? How many people are deleting? How long do they spend on that email? What do they do with after afterwards? Right. Are they deleting without opening? Right. I think that's interesting things. I think a marketeer would want to know. So that's a product we offer, does it? Does it answer the question where the Met is opening all these emails? No. I mean, again, from a privacy perspective, there's nothing we can share, nor want to share, but I think it's at least something which helps. And it gets, it gives you real insight into your performance. And certainly if you if you actually decide to retool your campaigns, you get the same data through all partner validity as well, without any additional cost. So it's, it's part of the package.

Matthew Vernhout 34:21
Actually, that is one of the next questions we had come in from the audiences. Currently Vizio is only available through validity. You can't get it through your ESP or directly.

Marcel Becker 34:31
Right now, validity is our only partner. Yes, that was another question. I think it was important in your does meet you only work like with our apps, or at least that's how I interpreted it. No veto works across any email apps or users are using, whether they're using Apple Mac, through iMac, or outlook and stuff like that. And again, it's part of our secret sauce of retail of the video service to deliver the Email when we are certain that the users actually active. So now when you have your Apple Mail running constantly in the background downloading those emails, which are generating open pixel based, open tracking Actually, no, we will not deliberate email, we only go read when you're actually looking at the

Matthew Vernhout 35:19
right that's actually that's a good question because I just leave my desktop open it checks mail on every you know, every five minutes, that's kind of just pulling stuff down, my phone probably is doing the same. So probably looks like I'm logging into my mailbox, multiple different places multiple different times even so it's a bit more of a challenge. There is one other question here. And I think this is something to look at. So the impact of Vito on brands trying to re engage consumers? If so, let's see, how does this impact bear brand is trying to serve out more relevant or unique content to try and re engage with someone before they're gone? to an active? Will vcal make this challenge in some more challenging in some cases for senders, as an example, if Macy's wants to reengage with Matt, with a heavy promotion, but VTL serves and target only does this negatively impact Macy's chance of re engagement?

Marcel Becker 36:21
I would say it's it's positive, right? Because I mean, if again, if you send something our users one and expect, but it's usually buried, and that actually increases the risk of the user not engaging with your email, right? leveraging video ensures it's actually in, in, in your face, so to speak, right? And if it's something the user wants, and maybe you have some compelling content there, it actually ensures that the user is re engaging with the content. And we've seen this with some brands as well, they run they run reengagement campaigns with very positive results.

Matthew Vernhout 36:57
Okay, okay. Good, good.

So I think we're coming to at least a lot of our other questions, but I think there's, there's like our pre canned questions, the audience questions seem to be slowing down. But I think you know, there's a few other things that you know, you and I talked about when we were planning this, right, the whole idea of these services for whether it's your performance feeds or your VTL. Right? What was the thing sort of the reason that you started to build this? Right? we kind of talked about this in the past, over drinks ourselves. But really, what was that piece when you were sitting there saying, I want to fix this for everybody?

Marcel Becker 37:44
Yeah, I really agree start with is most of these do we really just look at? How can we increase or improve the user experience for consumers? How can we solve problems like emo fatigue? How can we solve problems like actually finding what's relevant to our users, right? So everything we're doing in our consumer apps as well, you know, when we talk about extractions, leveraging schema is all about bubbling up important information, we think the user needs to at the top, in one way or the other, right? If you really look at a traditional, the traditional email experience, I would actually argue that sorting emails by when you receive them, is hardly the right thing to do, especially with the content you have in your inbox today. 97% of all the emails our users receive is commercial, right? And the importance of the relevance of an email is somewhere buried within the email itself. It's easy to explain like with trouble reservation, you do not need the flight details or the hotel details. When the email actually gets sent to you, right? You need it. When you actually travel, similarity of like deals and offers and stuff like that coupons, you don't necessarily need them when they're sent to you, you might need them when you're actually ready to engage with that brand. So all of these things we're building into our consumer product. When you look at Yahoo mail and mobile specifically, right, they're really consumer focused. And we're trying to help our users discover and interact with relevant information from the emails with trying to have different solution for different verticals, right. So there's the travel experience, there's the deal experience, there's maybe a grocery experience, and other things. And BTO was born out of the same vision, so to speak, right? How can we solve that for other humans where we don't extract things? How can we, you know, help our users discover these. Even on apps we do not necessarily control like Apple Mail right? Can we provide value there as well. So that's where this really comes from its consumer first. But then we also think about, okay. And specifically, I have said that many times, I just don't want to solve things in a vacuum, right? I want to work with brands, I want to work with centres, and actually provide value to them as well, you know, you as an email market here, you go to an email marketing company, you go to other companies and buy services to improve your email marketing programme, right? Why shouldn't you be able to actually go to us as well and buy additional services? On top of just being able to send an email to us? To me, that just makes sense.

Matthew Vernhout 40:41
Right, right. Does that there's an actually interesting question that came in the chat. I actually liked this question. You know, and I think we've kind of touched on it. But from a video point of view, how do you look at transactional messaging versus marketing messages? And and then in what sense should VTL apply to the two different types of messaging?

Marcel Becker 41:05
Yeah. Again, very good point comes back to the issue of all your campaigns, probably not No, definitely not. And for transactional emails, that's something the user, if they're really triggered, or the users asking for it, depending on what type of transaction email, right, or something like password resets emails, or really triggered emails, video, probably doesn't make a lot of sense, because they're triggered based on something to use the date, the user probably already expects them in their inbox, maybe even looking for them, like a notification, something like that. video probably doesn't help there or more, should you use it maybe other emails, blog emails, you know, newsletter kind of emails deals, as I said before, probably a good idea to use with you.

Matthew Vernhout 41:54
Okay, okay. And there's a question from de Fowler. And I do think we touched on this a little bit. But just for clarification, you know, in future, are you open to more partners? If so, do you have a timeline as to when that would be? I know, you may not be able to answer or talk about exactly those types of things, but maybe in some generalities are open to more partners, and if so, what would an ideal partner maybe look like?

Marcel Becker 42:18
The very short answer is yes. The longer answer is it depends. And as as far as the timeline is concerned, can't talk about that.

Matthew Vernhout 42:30
Figure. Any closing thoughts around you know, the CTO or the performance feeds or anything like that, that you want to share with the audience? Before we we had our one minute countdown here?

Marcel Becker 42:45
No, really goes back to what I said very early on, right? I want to communicate with the with the, the sending side of the house with this be with the brands and the marketeers. I don't like I said, I don't want to do this in a vacuum. I want to collaborate with everybody. So if you do have questions as toughest they might be, or if you say this is a, you know, load of crap. Again, I welcome that conversation and come to me talk about it. Let's figure out what works. Because I'm learning as well, I want to understand what the market tears, one write what they think what they see is a value to them. And as an end of the day, I want to tie these two knots together and basically say, this is what we think is the best for our consumers. And how can we combine what you think is the best for your business? Because at the end of the day, I think we can create a better product and a better ecosystem and a better platform for everybody.

Matthew Vernhout 43:42
Great, thanks very much, Marcel, for coming on sharing your knowledge. I think it's clear that you know Vito is great for some people, maybe not for everybody, but it's one more tool in the shed for you to kind of look at your email programme and pay attention to you know, sto might be your thing. Performance feeds might be your thing. Performance feeds, you can get directly from the postmaster website. There is information there. So, do visit the postmaster website for Verizon media. And Marcel thanks again for agreeing to come and have this conversation with me and being part of the Netcore Inbox Expo.

Marcel Becker 44:18
Thank you.

Matthew Vernhout 44:18
Thanks.