Is SMS Dead? Welcoming the RCS Revolution with Eric Miao, CSO of Attentive

"Design thinking isn't just about aesthetics - it's about solving the right problems with empathy." - Eric Miao In this episode of Making Sense of Martech, Jacqueline Freedman sits down with Eric Miao, Chief Strategy Officer at Attentive, to unpack the future of messaging with the rollout of RCS (Rich Communication Services) in the U.S. Together, they explore how RCS is poised to transform mobile messaging into an interactive, commerce-driven channel that merges personalization, AI, and trust at scale. If you're a marketing leader, mobile strategist, or just curious whether SMS is really dead, this episode will reshape how you think about messaging.

Highlights

• Discover why RCS is being called the "next generation of messaging" and what makes it fundamentally different from SMS.

• Learn how brands like Spanx are utilizing RCS to achieve substantial increases in engagement and revenue.

• Understand the role of AI in enabling true one-to-one personalization at scale through messaging.

• Explore how RCS could disrupt customer service, identity management, and even AdTech as we know it.

• Hear predictions on adoption hurdles, carrier dynamics, and how marketers can avoid making RCS "the next noisy channel.

Timestamps

• 2:16 – What RCS is and why it matters for marketers

• 3:22 – Game-changing features: rich media, carousels, and interactive replies

• 5:39 – How AI and personalization elevate RCS campaigns

• 7:42 – Case study: Spanx's 200% revenue lift with RCS

• 10:34 – Which industries are best positioned for RCS adoption

• 14:06 – Adoption hurdles: carriers, Google, Apple, and rollout challenges

• 19:18 – Preventing RCS from becoming "the next noisy channel"

• 23:22 – Global adoption and identity: privacy, phone numbers, and what endures

• 28:15 – Navigating privacy regulations, personalization, and zero-party data

• 38:04 – The future of SMS: fallback, governance, and avoiding bad actors

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jacqueline Freedman

What is Making Sense of Martech?

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Making Sense of MarTech podcast, where we interview leaders and put them in the hot seat. I'm Jacqueline Freedman, founder of Monarch and global head of advisory for the MarTech Weekly. Let's dove in and meet Eric Miele, the chief strategy officer at Attentive. A little bit about him first. He is the CISO at ATTENTIVE where he helped scale the platform into a leader in AI driven mobile commerce.

Speaker 1: After building the company's 400 person customer success org, he now leads strategy, including the launch of business messaging in the US. He brings experience from Twitter into commerce and holds multiple patents in mobile tech, which I definitely want to learn a bit more about. Welcome, Eric. Glad you're here.

Speaker 2: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: Of course. Well, to start us off, we'll begin with a few rapid fire questions just to kind of keep things up, get things going. What was your first MarTech tool? You ever used.

Speaker 2: Salesforce? Probably like everyone.

Speaker 1: That's fair. Which specifically within.

Speaker 2: Salesforce, whatever, they would sell things for like $99 at a startup.

Speaker 1: Fair. Understood. Okay. What is your most favorite recent campaign that blew your way? That's not attentive recently.

Speaker 2: There's a the best wine store I think, in New York is Flatiron Wines. And I got to know the head of that. And their email marketing is actually phenomenal. So if maybe that's a boring answer, but you should definitely check it out if you have not before.

Speaker 1: I will. And we already kind of, before recording, talked about how much I love Flatiron and used to live there. So I will definitely be checking it out. Okay. Fill in the blank asks will do from messaging. What? Blank. Good for e-commerce.

Speaker 2: PayPal.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So just a little bit important to say the least. All right. And last but not least, something we ask everyone who is someone you admire, whether it's professionally or personally? My wife as an excellent answer.

Speaker 2: She is amazing.

Speaker 1: Well, I have to bring her on one of these days.

Speaker 2: Fuchsia.

Speaker 1: Amazing. All right. Well, I'll take you up on that introduction. All right. Just to kind of set the stage a little bit, I know I've asked folks and the hot topic that we're going to really focus on is Arceus, but a lot of people have no idea what those three letters stand for, what it actually means. So for those less familiar, what is it exactly?

Speaker 1: And get into more details after.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's basically so there's SMS text, there's a mass, just images. Arceus is I think technically it's rich communication services basically it's the next standard. So it's the next generation messaging standard. And when you think about it, it is all of the kind of amazing functionality that you might have in an iMessage or a WhatsApp or an Instagram where you have richer media and you can swipe through things.

Speaker 2: There's fun and there's going to be payments. It's all of that brought into the actual messaging app because it's a new kind of standard.

Speaker 1: That's super helpful. It almost feels like the super app without having to leave your own messaging platforms that you're already leveraging. Is that fair to say?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a way better framework and template. I think the most useful way of thinking about it super helpful.

Speaker 1: What do you particularly see as like the signature features that will be complete game changers for marketers? And this is technically not a new channel, but maybe a new medium through which the channel gets to be delivered.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's the richness in terms of what you can show is sort of one side of it, and then what you can get back from people is the other side of it. And so in terms of what you can show today and mass, for anyone who's not super familiar, it's a very limiting kind of thing. It's a certain file size, which is quite small to certain sort of image dimension.

Speaker 2: Arceus can have full video, full bleed rich, beautiful video that plays for 30 seconds a minute. It's much, much, much stronger. You can also actually put a carousel. So rather than what today people do is a bunch of images as a gif, but they can't change the actual content of the words that they wanted to to accompany those images.

Speaker 2: Arceus supports a carousel and so you can actually send someone five or six messages in one and they can engage with that. So that's on the sort of the outbound side. On the inbound side, I can actually ask you what you want. So I can ask you and suggest replies back to you, but you do not have the kind of guess what I want to know from you.

Speaker 2: You can just easily tap that to reply. You can do dropdowns as well. And so you can actually make different selections. You could do something like actually taken action like an active cart potentially directly from the Arceus and then it's going to work and integrate eventually natively to things such as the wallets or purchasing. And so it really is the potential mechanism for bringing the whole commerce experience of discovery back and forth, engagement and of purchasing all into the messaging.

Speaker 1: Amazing. So for those who didn't know Arceus was hopefully they recognized that as this is the future and I would imagine also is replacing all things I'm a mess at some point.

Speaker 2: It's hard to think of what the use case would be for something like Sims when you could send Arceus. There will always be a world of things like a fallback, but it's clearly, I think, where the puck is.

Speaker 1: Going to hear that. Speaking of where the puck is going, I'm curious how it's attempted. Specifically combining AI with Arceus to predict campaign performance and also personalizing those messages, maybe even a greater scale.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think for us we've you know why we started attentive originally was we wanted to try and get a 1 to 1 relationship between a brand and people who love that brand. And so it's always been sort of focused on who are the people who actually like you and how do we get those people to engage with you directly?

Speaker 2: Right now, your ability to give that person an amazing experience. If you're the brand is super limited because at the end of the day, the template of the text message is pretty limiting, right? It's a couple of sentences. Maybe maybe there's a picture. And so, first and foremost, we've already started doing things to try and write, you know, a unique message for each person.

Speaker 2: But again, it's sort of in the template of a text when we can now create full video or we can give you multiple different options with potentially a set of recommendations in the order we think that it's best for you. And then we can ask you, do you like this? Is this is this what you actually wanted? Do you want something that's different?

Speaker 2: And you can engage directly with that. We're going to get more information about you. We're going to learn from you what you're interested in, in ways that today we can observe what you do, but we can't ask you and always expect you're going to give us something back. Now you can actually be pulling information from the brand. The brand can be learning that, and they can use that to personalize every message that they're sending out to you.

Speaker 2: And so we expect it to be a little bit of a positive for real, where the templates are going to be better, the brand is going to be able to do a better outbound to you, and then you're going to be able to sort of pull better things back from the brand.

Speaker 1: That makes sense. It's almost enriching for everyone. It's both for the customer, but also for the business. You don't have to just exactly pass through all this data, make some assumptions, hopefully do enough analysis. It's that you go directly to the individuals you're trying to get to and do provide them the experiences that they want. So it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2: That's exactly right.

Speaker 1: Speaking of those experiences, you already have a few customers that are using Arceus as of June 2025, of which include Michael's Spanx. I know I've actively sought out the companies doing Arceus so I can have my own repertoire of understanding. And as an example, I saw a 200% lift in their revenue percent. What specifically make this campaign so effective and is it relative and relatable to other brands who start leveraging Arceus?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So what we found is that, you know, Arceus has a couple of things. One actually that I forgot to mention. The actual thread itself. So it's a new kind of thing. So today a text message comes through, comes from a phone number. So it could be a long phone number, could be a short phone number. Arceus is different.

Speaker 2: It comes to what's called an agent and that agent is branded. So, you know, it's always going to be the Spanx logo, Spanx name, etc. I as the consumer don't have to do anything. It's also verified and it will say verified. And so again, as the consumer, it's just building trust sort of like on its own. And what we're finding generally is simply those two things.

Speaker 2: If you don't do anything else that's different, you actually already see better results. And so there's the consumer trust and interest level I think is a baseline as Arceus compares to us mean it's just a better baseline. What Spanx did, which I think is interesting, is they specifically were targeting folks who were less engaged with them. And so traditionally what would happen is if I'm losing my relationship with someone over time today, what brands sort of have as their arsenal?

Speaker 2: Because again, the visual component of a message through S.M. Mass is more muted. What do you have to do? Right. It's here's an even bigger deal, here's a better sale. Like this is the super sale just for you? It's it's very heavily promotional. What Spanx was able to do was take advantage of the new template that is offered by R.C.S to be massively more visual rich and engaging in what actually went out to these people.

Speaker 2: And so what they were able to find here was that in giving people this just sort of like never seen before experience it totally reset their relationship with these people in a way that they just were not able to do previously.

Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. And I guess thinking through beyond the existing examples, what industry needs or types of brands do you think are primed for this Arceus innovation and should be looking in their investment and looking towards this channel as part of their marketing strategy is their specific revenue company eyes industry, you name it.

Speaker 2: I mean, maybe I'm biased here. I personally think and I've seen this in my own life like a ton of we work largely with e-commerce, retail, sort of sports, entertainment, those kinds of areas. But I'm seeing text become more and more just. It's a better method, right? It's a better thing. You know, it's a person, you know, they're going to read it.

Speaker 2: So I mean, like I get text from delivery services, like a text from, you know, a company that I buy something from that's ready to pick up. Like it's becoming pretty ubiquitous. I would assume that Arceus is going to be something that matters for everybody. The question will be how will different brands use it differently? I think is it maybe how we think about it for, you know, for marketers who are at brands that are today sending these kind of campaign type messages, obviously, Arceus is going to be better for those kinds of experiences.

Speaker 2: You can literally put more total content in a message, you get more signal back. There is really no disadvantage for Arceus compared to some of the best from a functionality standpoint. I think though that the kind of back and forth nature of our access where you can suggest replies and where I think for the consumer it's just going to look so nice will facilitate things that today maybe were like not worth the effort but will very quickly become worth the effort to kind of program.

Speaker 2: And so in the same way that basically everybody has some kind of customer service, I would expect that for these kind of like one or two shot conversations where I want something, the brand can give me an answer and then like three alternatives. I can pick one and then get what I want. If you can navigate that successfully, you should be moving your back and forth with people to messaging like it's better than email, it's better than on site, it stays with me.

Speaker 2: I can go back to it easily. I'm going to read it like I would expect more or less every brand to start picking those kinds of things up. And so I think like we've already seen companies like health care companies that are doing ticketing, like it's just very obvious that that experience is going to be there for people in ways that today you can go to the Ticketmaster website.

Speaker 2: I would be very surprised if people have to do that in five years.

Speaker 1: I love that prediction. I've also got a prediction that our house is going to completely transform customer support and customer success regardless of B2B, B2C, e-commerce, you name it. I think it's going to be an interesting shift in order to now. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And especially because the previous standard that people thought might do that in Apple Business Chat, I don't know that Apple Business Chat, I don't know how it will evolve, but a lot of what made that great are the same kinds of things that now will natively exist within our CEOs. And so it it will have the practical effect of making that kind of experience more accessible for everyone.

Speaker 1: And I almost imagine to that Arceus will streamline between Android users, iPhone users, the actual experience as opposed to bifurcating on if you have an Apple phone, you can receive this versus the alternative.

Speaker 2: Yeah, the operating systems will definitely interpret. I mean, anyone who's seen the Android messages and your messages app or iOS messages app, they are different. You're definitely going to see differences in how Arceus gets treated between those two apps, but the technical framework will be exactly the same. And so I totally agree with you on that point.

Speaker 1: That's exciting. From a brand standpoint, you can really ensure your design and the look and feel will be spread across every platform being the OS. So speaking of mobile phones, the carriers for about a year plus since I've been following the future of RC has slowed down the rollout and were the original blockers for every platform out there that I've spoken to, particularly looking at you have Verizon from my experience and here say what were the biggest hurdles you and the team experienced for adoption?

Speaker 1: Some of them was the tech itself. Was it compliant? Was it the carrier? Was it consumer trust? What was the blocker in your experience?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so attentive. As a board member, we have a board seat on something called the CTA, which is sort of the advisory body for messaging in the US. So as you know, we're friends with the carriers and we love them very dearly. I think what I would say would be there is roll rollout process where the RC as as a standard is actually owned by Google.

Speaker 2: And so Google asks is not new to the world, it's really new to America. And so they've Google has partnered really successfully with all of the kind of global carriers, hardware manufacturers, etc.. And so they have a lot of experience in rolling this out. The partnership has been in the United States ultimately just because of how things have evolved here, the carriers have to kind of let it on to the phones.

Speaker 2: And so there has been a process by which they do that. I think Verizon actually ended up going first and then T-Mobile and AT&T followed and then separately and sort of happening at the same time. iOS had to support arcs. And so this has already been a thing within the sort of Google world. iOS had to support it, and then once they did that, then people had to upgrade to the new one.

Speaker 2: And so more or less now most people in the U.S. actually can get or yes, you've probably seen this. If you have a friend who's on a different kind of phone type than you, you will see it will sometimes flip between our systems. The biggest adoption, I would say right now is getting these agents is not easy. So there's a long established process for getting a short code, getting a toll free phone number.

Speaker 2: If you want to get one, you can get one. There's an application process. It is what it is for the R.C.S agents. There's a different provisioning process. And so we've been working really closely both with the carriers and sort of the provisioning process, but also with brands to line up the brands that everyone is really excited to see adopt the technology.

Speaker 2: And so it's not the case right now that any brand can get an overseas agent if they want one still being get capped a little bit more, but that's speeding up. And so we're excited to kind of work with both sides to facilitate that. And then I think on the consumer side, consumers actually have it. They might not realize necessarily that they do have it, but most consumers on most phones actually do now have or since.

Speaker 2: What will follow is a process by which the bigger brands probably end up being the ones that lead the way. And as they do that and everyone gets comfortable with the process. So open up the floodgates a little bit for everyone else.

Speaker 1: For sure. That was one of the also the keeping moments I've heard through the carriers of it has to be a well-known brand. They have to prove it's actually worthy. And so I'm very curious how that continues to evolve through adoption. And so it was coming on board. So I'm glad you guys are in the know and also on those advisory boards or and or on the boards.

Speaker 1: And so I'm very curious just how this whole space works out. And I also kind of predict the carriers will eventually go away because Google does, to your point, own the infrastructure. And I know it's a point of tension with the folks I've spoken to behind the scenes.

Speaker 2: I don't purport to be an expert in telecommunications. You know, I think what I would say is carriers have been around for a long time. They're very powerful. They are very, very, very involved in this process. And I think the partnership between them and Google and Apple is what's going to make our this successful. But at the end of the day, I do think that sort of process here is going to be making sure that it's a consumer led process.

Speaker 2: Again, as you know, sometimes we can all lose track of the carriers. Ultimate customer is you and me paying our phone bill. That's the customer and we have to be happy. And so the carriers will ultimately do what's right for us as consumers. And so I think for that reason, they will maintain a lot of a strong perspective and a lot of influence on the process.

Speaker 1: That's very fair. So speaking of just for the industry at large, as we're really starting to see the ushering in of more brands adopting R.C.S, how can we prevent this channel from just becoming another noisy one that is leading to message fatigue, consumer burnout? What are you anticipating in that space?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So when we started a tentative in 2016, some very early prospects and customers of ours would ask us, you know, if everyone starts doing some marketing, like won't this just become email? Like, won't there be like Infinite Sims? And our answer at the time, which I stand by, is like God will and we're so successful that every person in America gets texts like that would be amazing because I think we all look at email as a channel that matters.

Speaker 2: You know, bad actors outside of brands and marketers. Now, most emails that are being sent are not by marketers, right? It's by bad actors. And so you've seen all of the mailbox providers have to shut that down. I think what happened with the masses, probably a good indication of what's going to happen with Arceus. That didn't happen really with SMS to the degree that it ever happened with email for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 2: One is cost sending a text much, you know, two orders of magnitude more expensive than sending an email. And so if I'm a spammer, it just doesn't pay. So that was good too. A lot of filtering happening because you again have a few choke points in the ecosystem. There's only a few carriers, there's only a few people who are allowed to send messages to the carriers.

Speaker 2: So it was relatively easy for people to look at email and say, hey, let's learn from that and make sure that we do our own filtering. And we also don't give out phone numbers to anyone. So, you know, anyone can get an email address, not anyone can get a shortcode right. And so you actually have to go through this process.

Speaker 2: And so you didn't see a lot of that stuff happen on the marketing side, I think what you have seen for sure is that more and more companies have started to do it. What you have found also at the same time is that what happened with apps is happening with text where and this has been a long trend.

Speaker 2: My background before attentive was in the mobile app sort of advertising space. Most people only use like 8 to 10 apps really in a day. You might use one for a minute or so, but like really the ones you actually use and care about is a small handful. You're very discerning about where you spend your time for SMS.

Speaker 2: Same thing it's happened. Most people are not signing up for like 15 SMS programs, it's three for five. And so what I think happened with Smash is likely to play out for us, which is there's a little bit of like this kind of, you know, race to own the customer relationship and make sure that if I'm, you know, Sketchers, I know who I'm selling to and I know who else is trying to sell to my customer.

Speaker 2: I'm like, my job is to get that person engaging with me and not engaging with somebody else. And so you're going to definitely see that because I think on the consumer side, if I don't engage with you, I'm not worth reaching out to because it's you know, it's not free the way that it is for email. And so you're going to see a little bit of that kind of like just economics play out.

Speaker 2: I also think just my personal opinion, Arceus is going to make it clearer who is actually worth messaging because you're going to start to get things like read receipts, you're going to start to get additional signals coming back. And so if I'm a brand, I may not have to guess, oh, Eric, I saw him make that purchase that one time and like, maybe he's lurking.

Speaker 2: Maybe I should keep messaging him. Ask us will help us get a better understanding of like, you know, he's he's out. He should stop. And so I think you'll actually see that the signals that brands get leads to potentially smarter targeting on their behalf.

Speaker 1: I like the sound of that future. Fingers crossed. It plays out that way. We've kind of talked through how this got turned on in the U.S. finally, for not just Apple as an OS for everyone, but this has been around for a long time. How does the U.S. compare globally in terms of overseas adoption? Is there a difference?

Speaker 1: Are we way ahead behind who's who is the clear winner at the moment?

Speaker 2: I have to check, but I last I'd heard from Google, I think we actually are now a number one. So I think we went from like not doing it to pretty much having everyone be able to do it basically for like a period of six months. So and again, you're sending them to me and I'm sending them to you and like we may not even know it.

Speaker 2: I think in terms of marketing and in terms of, you know, business to consumer use cases, there's definitely sort of banking and ticketing things that have happened in other countries that have not happened here. But I think we're going to have this nice kind of like fast follow ability in the US where we'll be able to look to, you know, what were the most successful things that got done globally and be inspired to maybe not necessarily copy but be inspired quickly to build those kinds of experiences because now more or less thanks to Apple and Google, we have built the entire thing overnight to be potentially the number one market for it.

Speaker 1: That's a fascinating perspective and point of view on it because you would think differently except for right overnight over the course of six months in terms of the grand scheme of things, it completely changed the map and the areas in which the audience, the population changed. And we, of course, have been talking about the mass identity, the individual, all those types of things.

Speaker 1: I'm curious, will Sims still be considered the best gateway to identity with privacy trends forcing a shift away from maybe phone number based marketing? I'm just curious your thoughts on how we're going to view the individuals and things along those lines?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that there's been probably for the last seven or eight years a very big meta trend, pro privacy. So maybe starting with GDPR and then a significant amount of things rolled out by Apple for not tracking within apps or moving certain link tracking, adding additional sort of screening to things like private browsing in safari changes to how long cookies last.

Speaker 2: Like it's been a pretty consistent pro privacy you know, last seven or eight years.

Speaker 1: Rejoice for yeah as a consumer.

Speaker 2: I think it's a balance right because it's a reaction and so it's because as what's happened is as everything is starting to move to mobile and you can learn drastically more from mobile than you can from a laptop, there has been this explosion in data and so it's a reaction for sure. I think what we have found is that the most persistent piece of IED may be in the whole world is actually your phone number.

Speaker 2: I mean, speaking personally like my address, credit cards, in some cases, Social Security numbers like they don't last as long as your phone number. And so having something that you can. No, that's Eric and then attach information to and then persist that over time and look for it again later. That's turned out from at least from our perspective, to be pretty enduring and I think has given companies like a ton of that are leaders that, you know, sending out lots of text.

Speaker 2: We've become very adept at recognizing who is on a site. I would be pretty surprised if something like this radically changes that because you're still going to be attaching all of that information back to a phone number. I think what you will find is that people will actually start to leverage the information more that you can get through a phone number.

Speaker 2: And then also want to connect that when you can get to a phone number to other pieces of identity. And so, for example, that we find all the time, as for folks who run their email programs with a ton of brands, are very excited to be able to apply information they had on a phone number to information they have on an email address.

Speaker 2: By putting that together and saying, Oh, that's actually just one person because you're taking a data poor piece of I.T, which is an email address and then adding a lot on top of it. By connecting it to a phone number, I think you'll see more things starts to try to connect to phone numbers actually for that reason.

Speaker 1: That's super interesting. I wonder how much of that will shift for B2B, which is traditionally not really leveraging. We'll say estimates and mess now RCR. But to the point of what you're referring to in terms of data both on the person and writing back to the company with zero party data, but it's much better than any other type of data, that's for sure.

Speaker 1: How do you navigate? Because it makes my privacy ears just perk up a lot when I hear more data on an individual. How are you in the attentive team? But also I think the broader industry navigating the tightening of privacy regulations such as the GDPR, the CPRA, while advancing identity driven messaging.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it comes down to just not having to guess things. And so again, what is the reason why brands are trying to collect all of this information? At the end of the day, they're just trying to help get the right thing in front of you. I might sell 10,000 things. Three of them are right for you.

Speaker 2: If I can't figure that out, I'm going to waste my money and your time. And so a lot of why people are trying to collect this data is to actually, you know, get the right thing in front of a person. You can now just ask them, what do you want? What are you shopping for? Where are you? What is your interest?

Speaker 2: And when someone actually just by the way, consumers want you to ask them and they want to tell you, because I think people have started to wake up to like I'm living in a little bit of like a surveillance state for the purpose of trying to guess something, I would be perfectly happy to just tell you myself and like get my privacy back.

Speaker 2: And so I think people want to be asked. And so I think US is going to allow you to just say, Hey, thanks for signing up to Sketchers. What are you looking for? Oh, this thing. Cool. What's your price range? Oh, this great is our most popular thing. Like, whatever it is, 80, 85% of sales still happen in person.

Speaker 2: That's what a sales associate does. Right. And so you're going to just have the same thing you do in real life. It will be a little bit easier now to just do that online, whereas today you have to kind of watch and guess. In the future you can just ask people and then give them what they want.

Speaker 1: All of a sudden, all of the years of machine learning and recommendation engines are coming to a technical depth as opposed to just asking the consumer what they want instead. Maybe fingers crossed. I don't know. I'm a little biased. How do you foresee this also impacting and disrupting? ADTECH giants and third party tracking? If you know exactly what you want, we maybe don't need that recommendation engine, you know, traversing all the different channels and platforms.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there is a, I mean our last company before starting a ton of got bought by Twitter in 2014 so I saw a little bit of the consumer side. So again, there's a few companies that have made most of the super popular apps that people use. Google, it's matter. So it's a short list and I think what we have found is that when you are an aggregator, you can more or less control the consumer.

Speaker 2: And so if I'm a brand who is just starting out and I'm trying to become known, the easiest way to become known is to go to those people and say, I have some money. Can you give me some customers? And so that's why they've become as big as they are today. I think what is probably likely to be true is their influence is not getting smaller.

Speaker 2: I think you see in things like chat, CBT like at the end of the day CHADD CBT is a really big consumer app and it is aggregating attention in the same way that Google is aggregating attention. And so does it mean one will replace the other? No, but it's another thing that it's not me as the brand getting in front of my customer.

Speaker 2: It's a thing in between me and my customer. And so I think that as a brand, it's going to become more and more and more important for me to maximize sort of every opportunity that I have to actually know my customer. And so if someone actually comes to my website, I have to really try and get the opportunity to message that person later.

Speaker 2: And so, you know, every person who comes to my site doesn't sign up for one of my programs. Like that's really, I think, going to become a more acute loss. And so you'll see brands trying harder to get folks signed up. And then when someone signs up actually learning what they want is going to be so important. I don't necessarily know that I can speculate on how will tracking change because there's a small set of companies that have a huge influence in that.

Speaker 2: What I do know is that the easiest thing to do is send out really compelling things that people like, and then they'll open them and they'll read them and then they'll engage with them again. I mentioned the Flatiron wine list. I get an email every day. I open it every day, I click on it every few days. Like I like what they send in so they don't have any difficulty recognizing me because they send me stuff that I love.

Speaker 2: And so the more you can do that as a brand, I think the better it will be for you.

Speaker 1: Agreed. I have a question that's not on here, so feel free to strike it if you're like I don't want to answer it, but it makes me think of as we have more choices and we're going to hopefully be asked what our preferences are, what does that mean for the concept of a preference center? Does it now expand well beyond the original intention of email cookies and having a skimpy?

Speaker 1: Do you consider this all in one large scale preference center, or do you envision it differently?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that I mean, we added again, I'll just sort of think through it from the attentive perspective. So we have a data platform that underlies the marketing platform, right? So if I'm a marketer and I want to go make a segment to figure out who to send a message to, obviously that's all based on data that I already have in the platform.

Speaker 2: I think that every company that offers some kind of marketing service by default has to have some kind of data service. I think the and I expect more data to go into it over time. So like that's been the trend. That's why we should all, you know, own stock and snowflake like there's going to be more data I think as the consumer.

Speaker 2: How do I as a consumer use a preference center? And the answer is I don't. Right. Like practically speaking, it's a way to opt out of email marketing. That is actually what the preference center is. And then there's twists on it where the depending on sort of what the marketing team at the company thinks, they can either let you opt out or they could be like, well, well, what if you didn't opt out but you got this thing instead of that thing?

Speaker 2: And so like at the end of the day, the preference center is not practically a set of my preferences. I wonder, and this would be maybe a little bit more utopian. But, you know, the more I can say about myself without having to repeat it over and over again and get things that are good for me, the more I would like that.

Speaker 2: And so one of the things that's interesting that companies like Google actually offer is they let you download and look at like, what do they know about you? And if you look at it, it tends to be pretty right. And I think is a more interesting thought experiment would be what if that could go with me to all the different places and they could inherit from that such that they don't have to ask me something, they can just personalize my experience for me, sort of from the word go.

Speaker 2: That doesn't happen today. And so I would as a consumer, whoever wants to figure that out, like I wish that if I could just go to a site, they would know me and personalize things for my good rather than, you know, maybe what today is happening, which is they try and figure out who you are and raise the price if you're willing to pay it.

Speaker 2: Like that's not consumer friendly. Much more consumer friendly would be just knowing who I am and trying to get the right things in front of.

Speaker 1: I like this utopian future you're referring to and fingers crossed that exist. I have a feeling with AI it's much more possible than ever before, but and with MCP we will see. So taking a little bit of a step back, but still in the mobile realm, how do you also see mobile wallets fitting into this? Arceus You know, complete transformation of mobile channels.

Speaker 1: Do you see it as the work together, the work separately, the work in tandem? What do you predict there?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think that Apple and Google both have wallets. Apple and Google have the phones and run the operating systems. And so it is logical to hope that in Arceus I can go to the website, add something to a cart, leave, get a message. Hey, Eric, that thing, we'll give it to you for 10% off. Like, do you want to just buy it?

Speaker 2: And depending on the level of integration that exists between the messaging provider who sends that and the e-commerce platform like a Shopify, it shouldn't be that difficult to use the cards that already exist within the mobile wallet to just use Apple Pay or juice shop pay directly from the messaging app. And so that technology, all the pipes are there.

Speaker 2: I think it's a question of when is that going to happen? Not is that going to happen at all? I think there's a lot of incentive to get it right and make sure that there's not abuse, because you could just as easily imagine that, you know, bad actors could use that kind of stuff just as much as good actors.

Speaker 2: But if I'm a brand, like that's the ideal state is I know the right thing for you. I send it to you, you make two edits by telling me this thing or that thing from Noticias, and then I let you buy it. Like that's going to happen.

Speaker 1: I'm excited for that future, that is for sure. I think that would take the concept of browser, the intimate part of the intimate to a completely different level. And hopefully we get the access to adjust our preferences accordingly and maybe even say I am open to car abandonment messages if and only if there's a discount as opposed to just in jest.

Speaker 1: But fingers crossed. And then also I've got a question that came in like late last night where I found a friend. They like, do you have any questions or. You're welcome, Billy. Strike it. And I forgot to type it before this morning, a friend of the pod named Craig Belkin, who's been in the Sims and mobile space for a really long time, has asked a question How do you foresee this changing from short codes to do you need a shortcode and this is it.

Speaker 1: You need also your verified other number. What is maybe the short and long term answer for brands as they're navigating this?

Speaker 2: I think brands are going to have an agent and a number. And I think that you're going to see, you know, there are going to be times where for whatever reason, this is going to work and you're going to want to send it through some ass. Like that's probably going to happen some fraction of the time. So like just as a fallback, you're going to want to have something.

Speaker 2: You'll probably also eventually realize certain kinds of experiences, especially if there's some kind of price premium, are going to make more sense for our students then for us and some of us. And so I think what we'll find is there will eventually be some kind of bifurcation where not everything will make sense, the same way that people don't send a message to everybody because it costs more, because it's slower or whatever it might be.

Speaker 2: I think you're going to find the same type of thing will play out where some people may not actually be at the level where they're excited by need or respond well to asks and SMS will still be there in the same way that email is still there. Like email is a great channel, hasn't gone anywhere and people still make a lot of.

Speaker 1: Emails not dead.

Speaker 2: While it's alive. The funniest slide that a ton of ever made was in our very first deck in 2016. We had like a broken phone and it was like email dead. And the first person we showed that slide to was like, I'm the email marketing manager, Jerry. I mean, like I, I don't think email is dead. And we were like, did we say dead, we met.

Speaker 2: Email's awesome. And so I do think the same thing was going to happen with that SMS where it's not going anywhere. I think Arceus will be amazing. It will find its place as will not go. D0 Yeah.

Speaker 1: I'm hopeful that we're able to remove the bad actors, the spam texts and that there be more just overarching hurdles so that we can learn all of the lessons we haven't learned in the past 30 years across email, where 99% of all emails that meet the gateway are spam. And so if you're one of the not only law abiding but actually providing marketing to individuals who have consented to receive it to make it less hard for them and when you're that 1% of traffic, it is easy to fall into the spam bucket.

Speaker 1: So I'm very curious how these things are going to be governed. And when someone does something wrong and asks what will be those longer term ramifications, we don't know yet.

Speaker 2: It'll have a governing body and a gatekeeping body the same way as some as does. And so I think in the same way that for toll free numbers and for long codes, you see all of the, you know, messages you didn't necessarily want from your local politician. You don't get those from shortcuts. You have to apply to get a shortcode costs money every year costs money every month like it's not worth it and you can't get it anyway.

Speaker 2: Arceus is going to be the same deal and so I think consumers will flock to messages and respect and like those messages more because literally just by looking at it, they're going to know it's legit.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. It's going to be very interesting to see the self-governance on the political party side just for the fact that they tend to be some of the worst offenders that carve laws out for themselves. In particular.

Speaker 2: Though. No.

Speaker 1: That I will. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure. All right. And lastly, who is someone we should have on the podcast?

Speaker 2: You really should get my way. She's the CFO at a company called High Touch CDP. She was a partner at Excel is.

Speaker 1: Amazing.

Speaker 2: Both smarter and more poised than I am. So she would do great.

Speaker 1: I would love the introduction and we CUT this part. I had really she was at high touch. That's amazing.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 1: Long story short, for my own personal, they were my first client. And also I was one of their largest clients. I was at Grammarly and I've been a champion for a really long time, so.

Speaker 2: Oh, that's cool. You should talk to her. That would be great.

Speaker 1: I would love to. I actually was trying to get Josh to come on the pod because he it's always because these are pages and an agency. Yeah, I want to hear from you. He's like, no, no, that's their job. I'm like, But no one's heard your voice. And I love his product.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, she's like, there's not that. No, there's not. Unfortunately, there's just not that many like baller women who have been able to, like, break through. So you should add or she's cool.

Speaker 1: I definitely will take you up on that. And now that's really exciting because I have to add the disclaimer, preferably a senior female leader, because every man I every person almost didn't think that way. So I'm glad you went straight there. And also it's particularly relevant as well.

Speaker 2: We at attentive we we all we always have tried to even for all of our events like we had a more or less like a informal rule that we had to fix this.

Speaker 1: So well, I am grateful and also if only every company thought that way, especially that are in the marketing space because the majority of their customer base is female.

Speaker 2: So that's right.

Speaker 1: That's always fascinating when that's not the tuned to our put together. Okay, I'll end this out and then we can stay on for a few minutes if you want. But okay. Well, thank you so much, Eric, for coming on the pod work. Can folks find him?

Speaker 2: I'm pretty quiet online, but if you ever need something, just email me. Just Eric out of ten of I'll get back to you.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: Cool. Thank you for having me.