CDPs With Martin Kihn

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In the Clouds podcast. In the Clouds is a marketing cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experienced- obsessed, and podcast hosts, Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher, have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- on- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how- tos, and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to In the Clouds podcast. This is Bobby Tichy, along with Cole Fisher with our special guest today. Well, special, that's kind of a big mountain to climb, Marty. Our guest today, Marty Kihn. We'll see if by the end-

Cole Fisher: The bar has been set in the middle.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. Maybe by the end, we can decide whether or not it was special. But thanks for joining us, Marty. If you wouldn't mind just doing a brief intro of yourself, then we'll dive into it.

Marty Kihn: Sure. Yeah, I'm Marty Kihn. I'm SVP of Market Strategy at Salesforce, working on the Marketing Cloud today. I started life as a writer and a journalist, and I ended up working at MTV Pop Up Video. I realized I couldn't make a living as a writer, so I went to business school. I became a management consultant, and then I entered the advertising business at Digitas, where I did measurement. And from that, I spent most of my career there. Then I went to Gartner. I was a Gartner Industry Analyst for five years, covering marketing clouds including Salesforce, and that's how I ended up at Salesforce, focusing mostly on the CDP, DMP, and single view of the customer.

Bobby Tichy: I think from now on when you introduce yourself, it should just be," I was at MTV and did Pop Up Video, and now I'm at Salesforce. I don't know what happened in- between."

Cole Fisher: Marty, I've been on multiple conversations with you. I always forget until you bring that up, and then the rest of our conversation, the Pop Up Video theme song is in my head." Pop Up Video," and it's always in there now.

Marty Kihn: It was very, very catchy, and the guy who wrote it got$ 500 every time it was played. So he's actually the guy who made the most money out of Pop Up Video.

Bobby Tichy: Wow.

Cole Fisher: Good for him.

Bobby Tichy: That's awesome.

Marty Kihn: Totally scored, because during the late 90s, that show was extremely popular. The trouble was it got overplayed, so it only lasted a couple years, but we were on Oprah. I mean, we were big.

Bobby Tichy: Wow. Well, thanks again for joining. The main reason that we wanted to have Marty on is Marty is an expert in all things CDPs. As we continue down this track of the CDP market and customer data platforms, the more and more that we talk to customers, the more and more we identify that they're just confused about what a CDP is, what it should do, what it shouldn't do, some common misconceptions, so we really wanted to dive into this topic with Marty to talk through a couple of key things. One, the different types of CDPs, because there's not a one size fits all CDP. What are the main functional use cases for each type of CDP? Building versus buying, having one versus multiple, which a recent report came out that over 50 percent of companies who have a CDP actually have more than one CDP. And then determining if you're ready or not for a CDP, and then some common misconceptions as well, so we'll dive into a couple of those different elements there. But Marty, why don't you start by just laying out the different types of CDPs and the landscape from all the different institutions and organizations that govern CDP?

Marty Kihn: Yeah, sure. I'm happy to. I used to work at Gartner, as I mentioned, and there's also an organization called the CDP Institute, CDPI, which is run by David Raab. He was a respected MarTech Analyst, and he's kind of a one- man shop there. He's almost like a neutral third party and everybody signs up to be part of the CDP Institute, and so he's done a lot of thought leadership around the space. And then Forrester has their own definition. Pretty much every analyst now has some view of what a CDP is, and it's changed. In fact, these views have converged. Originally, they were quite different. Forrester had five or six different kinds of CDPs they'd identified, and Gartner had a little... Actually, they didn't have a number of types of CDPs, but they divided it into three or four buckets. And we at Salesforce have decided that there are two types of CDPs. The CDP Institute have divided it into five or six. I think it's best to figure the reason is that the market is nascent, so it has been in the process of defining itself. And the truth is, no two CDPs are the same. The reason there are different definitions is not that we're all looking at different products. It's actually we are dividing up the existing products in different ways based on their strengths. When I say no two CDPs are the same, you can have a MarTech stack with three different that call themselves a CDP that are actually complementary. They don't really overlap. They work together. And so part of that is just a reflection of the fact that this is a new and emerging market. It's a kind of a land grab. It went from zero to 15 billion. 20, 25 is the latest estimate, which is fast growth. You don't see that anywhere else. So a lot of people, a lot of companies that were something else have decided they're a CDP for very good business reasons. But to answer your question directly, what does the CDP do? You have to do certain things. You have to be able to ingest data, so there are CDPs that are probably in this category, what Forrester would call them data pipes. These are vendors that are very good at prebuilt connectors to common data sources. And if it's sold into the marketing department, these would be common marketing data sources. So they make it very easy to ingest Adobe Analytics, for instance, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud data into the CDP. Then there's data organization. That's what happens after ingestion, and the organization piece contains two components. One is identity management. You're trying to figure out person A and person B, and system A and system B are the same person. How do you do that? Well, you can match their emails. That's the same common ID. That's easy, but what about if they have some common fields or some conflict or there's misspellings? They have to do various forms of fuzzy matching in AI and ML. So there are some CDPs that specialize in that piece, identity management, and they're particularly strong at it. There's also harmonization, which is related, like making sure the fields line up. The same CDPs that are good at identity management tend to be good at data harmonization. Then there is a class of CDPs that are focused on analytics. When I say analytics, this is making it easy to do segmentation. They might have built in AI and ML models. They might have a way to make decisions on what to do next. So it's not data ingestion, it's not data organization, but it's understanding, making sense of your data and doing good predictive modeling. Some CDPs don't do that at all. They have no analytics. You can pipe it out to the data science team and pipeline, but they don't have it on board, and that's valid as well. Then there's activation. There might be a CDP that is tied into an email system so that you can do easy activation into that channel. There are some CDPs that are more aligned with the engagement platforms. I would say at Salesforce, the way we look at it is we said there's two types, and we try to super simplify it. There's a system of insight, which would be just data ingestion in our organization for analytics, and then there's the system of engagement, which is closer to the actual point of contact with the customer. So it would be on the site, and we would define it as Salesforce CDP. That's the insight, and Interaction Studio, which is the engagement.

Bobby Tichy: Where does orchestration play into that? It sounds like it would fall into the latter piece of that, but I have heard of some CDPs really focusing on the orchestration and elements versus the data piece of that. And not necessarily having both of them, but we all know that there are some that do have both, or claim to have both, I should say.

Marty Kihn: Yeah, it's true. If you think of a marketing stack or any kind of tech stack, on the bottom would be the data layer. The data layer is, for want of a better term, like a database, and that's where the single view of the customer would sit. That's not really orchestration. That's just a customer data object that is reliable and that you can update and use. Orchestration would sit on top of that. I think of orchestration, there's two flavors of orchestration. There's marketer- driven. That would be rules- based, so I'm doing if, this, and that, and I can set up really complicated journeys. That was the kind of thing that ExactTarget does, Journey Builder, we would say today. Then there's where the market's going, which is ML or AI- driven orchestration, which is the machine itself trains itself and tries to figure out what to do next. And it's cross- channel, so it's not all on the website. It's not all in the mobile app, although marketers do all flavors of all these things today. So orchestration sits on top of the customer data. I think that what's core to the CDP and any definition of the CDP is the data layer. It's not the decisioning and orchestration layer. Now, that said, it's totally closely related, and a CDP has to enable orchestration. So in the Salesforce world, we would have Journey Builder and Interaction Studio for both rules- based and predictive- modeled orchestration. But it's possible to use both of those tools without using Salesforce CDP. You'd use a different database. So I think they're distinct, but that said, a lot of CDPs incorporate orchestration into their capabilities.

Cole Fisher: Is there a role in, I don't know, maybe I'm getting too future- facing, but is there a role where you see that delineation between insight versus actual engagement? Or you mentioned where they're related, but there's not really overlap right now. Do you see time in the future where a lot of that engagement may actually be handled within a CDP or be expected within just one product of suite of CDP?

Marty Kihn: Yeah, definitely. Like robotic process automation, which people, like AI, ML, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotic process, all of that stuff, is taking things that people used to have to do using drag and drop UIs and embedding it in the product. If we think of moving from, in the advertising context, you move from insertion orders and putting a campaign together and faxing the instructions to doing it more automated, so you set up rules to doing programmatic, which is basically set some rules in the machine and then it will run the option. If you look at the programmatic trading floor, there aren't that many people because it's all these machines. The first time I saw an RTB trading desk, there was like one guy. I'm like," Where are all the people?", and they aren't there. So I think that definitely the future of technology is fewer people making rules. There may be people in the organization. That's a separate conversation, but fewer people making rules for what the software does to the software itself deciding. I think that there's this idea of the data center of gravity, which is, I think it's true, which is the data itself, like customer data tends to attract more data. So the more data you have, the more engagement you can get in a marketing context, for instance. You can collect more data, and that tends to attract applications and decisioning to it because it's for latency reasons. You get faster and faster and faster, the closer you have the app to the data. So the CDPs themselves will definitely have embedded decisions. We're already seeing it, like the decision being embedded in the CDP. But it's easy for us to say that, but it's very hard to build these things. And right now, I think most companies are just wrangling very messy data and doing it the best they can.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. It's kind of similar to when we had ESPs and every channel basically had its own technology, and then the initial forethought of," Oh, having all this under one umbrella," like multi- channel, omni- channel, started using these terms. It was a long time before that road was actually paved well and actually executed within single products like Marketing Cloud and things like that. I feel like I'm excited to see that, but to your point, that's still a lot to be in one single package of a product.

Marty Kihn: Well, that's the problem with marketing, is marketing, I think all the technical disciplines is the most difficult, and it's because we deal with people and people are very hard to predict. Also, it's like the relationship of people and technology. An example would be the iPhone. Now, I was around when it was launched and people were thinking it might take off in two or three years between slow adoption. Why do you need to read emails on a phone? It's not a consumer product. It's more of a business thing. And it took off in a month. Within 30 days, everyone knew it was a huge hit. So that's something that you can't predict, but as a marketer, you got to adapt. Like all of a sudden, now we need a mobile team and we need people who know how to build apps, or agencies, and you need a mobile measurement product. And so we, as marketers, have to adapt so quickly that it's almost unfair, really, and who knows what comes next? These Facebook glasses, those could be a huge hit, the Ray- Ban thing. If they are, God help us as marketers. We're going to have to learn how to market to those.

Bobby Tichy: Well, and I think that's where this whole conversation comes from of everyone's trying to play catch- up at this point. Everyone's being told that they need a CDP. I think the other hard part too, for marketers right now, is that they don't really know, or they might want to own the CDP internally, but IT is giving them a run for their money and we'll know it really should be a data- owned entity which should live within IT. What are you seeing across some of the customers and companies that you're talking with where it's typically owned?

Marty Kihn: Well, it's a critical function. We're talking about customer data here, and for any... Not every company. Like obviously, there are B2B companies. They care about accounts. But in areas like retail, where you live and die by your customer and prospect data or anything consumer- facing like financial services or insurance... Not so much automotive, because they don't tend to inaudible CPG, because they don't tend to have a lot of customer data, although they're trying to remedy that. We'll probably get there. But I think in general, if this customer data is so central to the organization, there's going to be internal power battles, and also people with good faith just trying to figure out what's the right way to do this. This is a big decision. It's not like adopting a mobile measurement vendor, where if you pick the wrong one, no big deal. You just swap it out. If you're talking about transforming and collecting and managing customer data, it's a serious decision, so IT is always involved, and marketing is often in there getting sold something by a vendor and trying to push it through. And IT is often asking hard questions, not just around security, but around scalability and roadmap, and is this vendor going to be around? I think that's one thing. They tend to be slow, measured, careful, more and more careful sales cycles. The other thing is, which is not super common in marketing... It can be, but it usually isn't. And the other thing is that we're coming up against, not just us, everybody, against IT teams that are interested in building out their own, not just data lake. They probably have a data lake, but something better, like a data lake house or a data mart or their own single view of the customer, and IT wanting to own that and use some new vendors out there that can help them. They're not CDPs, and I mean people like Snowflake Databricks. They're not CDPs per se, but they give you some tools. So we're constantly being asked," We already have this thing. Why do we need a CDP?" Or," Can IT build what we need? Do we need a vendor?" And there's no single answer to that question like that.

Bobby Tichy: And I think that's the hard part too, is to your point, especially if you're in an organization that is a very developer- heavy or engineer- heavy, where we work with one particular company that they have developed a really unbelievable product that they really have no competition against. And so internally, they just believe that they can build anything that they need. And while that makes a lot of sense for product development, it really doesn't make a lot of sense for marketers, because typically if you're going to have engineers or IT build a product or build a CDP, for example, it may not be the easiest thing to use for marketers and they might put their own biases into it. Are you seeing a lot of situations where companies are trying to build their CDPs, or for the most part, are people buying them?

Marty Kihn: It does vary a lot by industry. I think in retail, they're much more open to partnering with vendors and they see the value. Because retailers, they're lower margin in general. They have big competition. They're all competing with the major e- commerce platforms, and they're used to having a lot of vendors. So I think on the retail side, they aren't really often in a position to do the build part, although there are exceptions. I think in an industry like financial services, both consumer- facing around the B2B side, like wealth management, financial services tend to be very conservative. IT tends to be quite strong. Marketing tends to be pretty weak in a lot of cases. And so when you're in that industry, it's much more of a conversation with IT around," What's feasible?" In fact, if an IT person asks me," Can I build my own CDP?", I can't say no. I mean, I don't know. Do they have a lot of extremely talented engineers in the basement? Absolutely. Let them go crazy, and they have two years of lead time to build. They can. I can't tell them they can't do it. But on the other hand, is that a good use of their internal resources? Not only can they build, but they have to maintain it, so do you want to keep up with Facebook changing its API 19 times a year, which they do? You need to dedicate someone on your staff, and once you start pointing these things out, it becomes the cost. The not that huge cost associated with an outside CDP begins to seem more reasonable as an investment.

Cole Fisher: Bobby and I were just talking the other day about how... We were talking in the vein of marketers, how we, a lot of times, conflate can I do this versus should I do this?

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Cole Fisher: A lot of the times, we get this inkling, we get the challenge, and you kind of get laser- focused on this one goal of," I think I can pull this off." Yeah, just because you can, doesn't mean you necessarily should. And to your point, there's not really a cookie cutter solution as to whether or not you should or shouldn't do this. But like we addressed in our discussion, in marketers, we kind of blur the two lines. I can do this, but does it always make the most sense? As opposed to when you really weigh this out, does it make fiscal sense? What is the long- term buy? What does the resourcing look like? What is this going to detract from in terms of other projects on our plates? Then it just becomes not a question of attainability, but feasibility, right?

Marty Kihn: I always say, I went to business school. I graduated in 2001 actually, a long time ago. When I graduated though, marketing and IT were completely different. Marketing was people who were interested in television and meeting celebrities and talking about fonts and it was not technical. There were statisticians somewhere, but it really was not a technical field at all. And over the past 20 years, that's changed a lot, where today, marketing and IT, they're not as antagonistic as they were even five years ago. The IT always sees marketing as being rogue and adopting vendors without sufficient thought, and that's because of SAS, the SAS model. You can just give them a credit card and be up and running, and IT doesn't like that. They're like," Well, what are you doing with our data?" But it's different now. Marketers are much more technically sophisticated. IT respects marketing more because it's more technical, so they've converged in a good way, usually. It's the legal team that tends to be the enemy.

Cole Fisher: 100 percent.

Marty Kihn: Not the enemy. We'll say the worthy adversary.

Bobby Tichy: I like the antagonist. I thought that was a good way of describing them.

Marty Kihn: Yes.

Bobby Tichy: But to your earlier point too, and Cole just mentioned it as well, where I think that your really savvy marketers are definitely more technical marketers. You see now within organizations, there's typically a MarTech team. You typically, especially in your larger organizations are going to have a CMO, and then typically under that, you're probably going to have a VP of MarTech in addition to your more, to your point, more to the creative side of things. The technology has now become equally as important to that. I think where we work with one of the large broadcast companies in the country, and they've got three different CDPs, I think this is a prime example of that. One, they're using segment for data ingestion, just like you mentioned earlier, purely as a data pipeline, because Sigma has some really nice capabilities that are out of the box and they're not managing the Facebook API or anything like that. They're leveraging Tealium primarily as a tag management, but apparently Tealium now brands itself as CDP, which I thought was pretty funny. And then third, they leverage Lytics for more of the activation and orchestration piece of it. But they're still leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the true channel activation. So while Lytics might be the orchestration or the journey element of that contact life cycle, they're still leveraging something like a Salesforce Marketing Cloud to actually deploy those different things. It's interesting, because I'm sure you guys have seen those MarTech ecosystem slides that like 15 years ago, there was like 100 logos. 10 years ago, there's like 1, 000. Five years ago, there's 5, 000. Now there's like 100, 000, which is an exaggeration. But I can't imagine what it's going to look like in five years from now or 10 years from now, where not only are CDPs going to take hold more, but what other product or application are we not thinking about now that marketers are going to need?

Marty Kihn: Yeah, that's Scott Brinker you're referring to, the chief MarTech, and he has a logo map. Now there are 8, 000 logos. As you said, he started with a few hundred. I actually asked him. Chris O'Hara and I wrote a book called Customer Data Platforms, which I recommend to your listeners. That's the name, Customer Data Platforms. But we interviewed Scott Brinker for that, and I asked him," How many apps do you think there'll be in a couple years? Are there going to be fewer, like consolidation?" And he said," Absolutely not." He said," There's just going to be more and more and more, because no one ever complains about too much choice." And some of them aren't very good, but they probably won't have very many customers. So, that's one thing, and the other thing is he talked about a category called data ops. He's always trying to think of the big structure. He said the way the market's going, there's revenue ops, apps, and there's data ops. And the data ops ones, I think a CDP, it kind of falls in this category. And this is a category of solutions that isn't marketing- specific necessarily, because it's dealing with customer data. So it could be used by the service team, like the call center, because it's customer data, or even commerce, like the storefront. You could see it being used in different parts of the organization, the same product. I think he's right, like that's part of this bigger trend of transformation. Where in the same way, marketing is all siloed with email over here and social over here and mobile, trying to get rid of those silos. What about in the organization? Why should marketing and service be completely separate and siloed? So trying to kind of break down the barriers in the business, and that's an even bigger project over a longer term.

Bobby Tichy: How do I know if I'm ready for a CDP?

Marty Kihn: Well, it's not a simple question, but I think that anyone who's been in your team, and it's a marketing and it's an IT question, and it needs someone who knows the business and knows the state of your data. But if you have a business imperative, something that you want to be able to do, number one, that you can't do, number two, and number three, it involves customer data. That's number three. And number four is if you could join the customer data, you think you could do it or at least part of it, then you probably need a CDP. One example I like to give to that is there was a company in the Midwest, who if you live in Iowa, you've heard of it, but they're called Casey's and they're like a convenience store and a gas station. They had a dream, where they sent out an email. They had a loyalty program and an email, and they sent an email to everyone in the loyalty program, offering a coupon off their pizza. They have really good pizza. And they said," What if we sent the same offer to everyone?" They're like," What if we could actually put the picture in the email of the pizza this person actually buys, their favorite flavor because people are loyal to their flavor? Would that improve response rates? We think it would. But we can't do it, because our loyalty system, our email system and our point of sale telling us what they bought are not connected in any way." You can figure out the business value of that. What's the upside? That's a financial calculation. And you'd say," If we could connect these pockets of customer data somewhere in somewhere magical, then we could realize this business value." That is a primary case for a CDP, and they were actually one of the first. They were a beta user of Salesforce CDP, and they were able to do exactly what I said, and they saw a really good response to their offers for pizza. That's almost a silly example, but any business could go through their own list of examples like that.

Bobby Tichy: And then lastly, what are some common misconceptions of CDPs? What it might do, what it might not do, or where you've seen some organizations struggle to really find the value in it?

Marty Kihn: Well, your point there at the end is the right one, the value. Not so much anymore, but it still happens where it'll be the big bang phenomenon, where a company will be either convinced by a vendor or they'll just convince themselves that adopting a CDP will solve other problems or adopting a CDP will be something that they'll do first and then they'll figure out how to use it. That's the wrong way to go. It's only successful if you take the Casey's approach, which is figure out exactly what you want to do, like scope it out. And you guys know this, because this is what you do. Scope it out, draw it out, make sure you know what you're going to do, and then go and find the technology that can help you do it. I think start with the end in mind, as they say, and one of the seven habits of highly effective people, by the way. And then the other thing I would say common misconception is that CDPs, they may have the same name, but they're all different, so don't make the mistake of thinking that they're the same.

Bobby Tichy: One thing I think about, I think about the need for a CDP, and the way I think about it, which is probably completely wrong, which I'm fine with-

Marty Kihn: Probably not.

Bobby Tichy: The way I think about it is really around two key elements. One is data availability and not having to replicate data in a number of different places, and then also being able to action on that data, which based on your definitions of CDPs, there are some that do both, some that do one or the other. But I always think about the CDP has really just basically provided the marketer with the ability to have a really well- structured and easily- integrated data warehouse. That's kind of the way I think about it. Is that a too simple of a way of thinking about it? Is that completely wrong? What do you think?

Marty Kihn: No, you're right. The other thing I'd add is easy to use, because I think that one of the key requirements, the pillars of a CDP is that it be marketer- friendly so that I can unleash my team. Because that's part of the value that you're getting out of it as a user, that you don't need to be writing SQL queries or even no SQL to get value out of this thing.

Bobby Tichy: What are all the SQL developers going to do?

Marty Kihn: Don't worry. crosstalk We say no code to pro code. They are secure. They're the only ones in the world who have a secure job.

Bobby Tichy: Well, thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Marty Kihn: Of course.

Bobby Tichy: I think we can say it was special. Cole, what do you think?

Cole Fisher: Yeah, it was inaudible special.

Marty Kihn: You'll let your listeners decide.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. Mom, I hope you thought it was special. But shifting over to completely unrelated, before we jumped on the podcast, we were talking about Marty has a podcast about ad tech history and the crosstalk-

Marty Kihn: Paleo Ad Tech. It's called Paleo Ad Tech.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, that's great. And so we were thinking through your favorite company or product that's not around anymore. Cole, I'll let you start.

Cole Fisher: I actually thought of this while Marty said, you mentioned the Facebook glass. Do you guys remember Google Glass? And this is probably like 10 years ago.

Marty Kihn: Yeah, yeah.

Cole Fisher: Or even more than 10 years ago. I remember I was working with some marketing agencies, and these are the guys that got the coolest tools the first time, right when they were out, before anybody else got it. And I remember seeing the Google Glass and being like," Oh my gosh. I'm going to remember where I was when this hit the market, because this is going to change everything." This guy, he was very tech- savvy, early adopter on everything, so he showed them to me inside and out. I thought it was super cool, except in all of our meetings, randomly you'd look over, and he's just looking off and to the left and reading. You could see his lips moving and stuff like that. It was like," Hey, you're clearly checking emails while the rest of us are having a meeting in here, right?" It was really sneaky, but it never took off. It was just one of those things that just you saw a few of them. You got this feeling a big build was about to happen, and then they just vanished. I don't know if it was impracticality of them or how rude everybody was when they were driving or in meetings with these things on, but-

Marty Kihn: I don't know why they disappeared. They had a camera too, didn't they?

Cole Fisher: Yeah.

Marty Kihn: It was like a little camera?

Bobby Tichy: Yeah.

Cole Fisher: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: It was pretty slick.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, I thought it was. But yeah, I don't know if it was safety issues, what was wrong with it, but-

Bobby Tichy: So is Facebook glass just the reimagined Google Glass then?

Marty Kihn: Probably better.

Bobby Tichy: I would hope so.

Marty Kihn: I think it's called Ray- Ban. They might be sunglasses. I'm not sure exactly.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, because they partnered with Ray- Ban, right?

Marty Kihn: Yeah, yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah.

Cole Fisher: inaudible styling.

Marty Kihn: It'll definitely be better- looking.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, man. Can you imagine jumping into the lake and forgetting your Facebook glasses are on? Oh, that's that's a different level of disappointment when you lose your sunglasses. Marty, how about you?

Marty Kihn: Well, I was thinking of on my podcast, I've talked to one of the co- founders of DoubleClick and some of the people who were around in the early years of DoubleClick, which is like 1995. inaudible like an ad server bought by Google. And I was reminded that there was a big competitor to DoubleClick as an ad server called Atlas, and it was back in like'98,'99, or in the early inaudible. Big companies would pick one or the other. They're like, " Oh, I use DoubleClick." " Oh, I use Atlas." Atlas was eventually acquired by Microsoft, and then it was bought by Facebook. I guess it lives on in some measurement things, but it basically disappeared as an ad server. And so it's kind of wonky, but I miss them, because they were a competitor to this thing that went on to become basically a monopoly, an ad server. So I'm like, " What happened to Atlas?" Why didn't that work out? I don't know.

Bobby Tichy: Mine is very nostalgic and of a simpler time. I really miss the AOL dial- up noise, just the-

Marty Kihn: Modem?

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, just the whole AOL in general though. I think that's why I love the movie You've Got Mail, because it really represents that whole piece. Meg Ryan has this monologue at the beginning of the movie where it's like hope. You're logging on. You hear it." Do I have any mail?" It was when it was such a foreign concept still, and the only mail you would get would be some spam from somebody who you had no idea what the brand was. But then I remember the first time I would talk to my buddies on AOL Instant Messenger, and you pick out your AOL name and all that kind of stuff. Oh, what was your guys' AOL's name? Like your first screen name?

Cole Fisher: Mine was colefisher307.

Marty Kihn: I was just my name, Marty Kihn.

Cole Fisher: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Was it because there were 306 other Cole Fishers?

Cole Fisher: crosstalk It was a really popular name at the time. That was my dorm room name. That was my dorm room.

Marty Kihn: That was the Dylan of whatever that year was.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah.

Marty Kihn: Everyone was named Cole back then. I remember that. Yeah, absolutely.

Bobby Tichy: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Marty. Really appreciate it. As always-

Marty Kihn: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Bobby Tichy: You bet. And as always, you guys can reach out to us at intheclouds@ levdigital. com. Feel free to reach out with feedback or topics or folks you'd like to hear on the podcast. Thanks, everyone.