INBOUND Bold Talks: Brian Wong "Stop Ruining & Start Rewarding Everyday Moments"

Thank you. Thanks, Laura. I know I'm between you and cocktails, so I'll make this fun. So today I'm going to talk about getting caught up in the moment. You're probably wondering why there's a 12 year old Asian kid in front of you talking about, I know I can't grow facial hair. It's, it's really difficult. But I'm actually 22 now, a little older than 19. I feel really old now. But I'm sorry and I'm going to spend some time today sharing a bit more about the moment. Now, this is actually a banner that hangs off the rafters in our offices in San Francisco. And right now this probably means nothing to you and the things below, it just again, probably don't have a lot of meaning yet. But hopefully at the end you'll understand why we hold this so true and make this actually our mantra as a company that moments in matter. Now, first, a bit about me. So those of you who recognize this screenshot, you rock. It is Counter Strike Source, a first person shooter game. Now, I was an AWP whore, which basically meant that I need to be very accurate with my mouse for sniping people in the face. And I tried to make the argument to my parents that this was helping increase my eye hand coordination in my graphic design and they did not buy that argument. Now, gaming has been a large part of my, I guess, child, which was like last year. But the whole idea of me spending all this time actually kind of gave me the idea of trying to figure out how to skip grades. So I ended up skipping four grades in elementary school and high school, grades 2, 7, 9 and 11. And I ended up, well, it's a lot of skipping to happen there. But basically I graduated college when I was 18. I ended up moving down to the Bay Area not to start a company, but rather to work for another company. It was Digg. And in my transitions, typically I show this after which is the beer fridge at Digg. Really there was an HR person who worked there who really did not like the fact that I was underage when I worked at Digg. And as you know, Digg had a big beer drinking culture and I was not allowed anywhere near it. So this is a story of moments. And so I got laid off in May of 2010. And I remember, you know, sort of, you know, being really lost. You know, being Canadian, you actually lose your visa as well. So there was other things that I had to figure out. But that's all figured out now, thank God. But I Ended up finding myself on a long haul flight from San Francisco to somewhere in Asia. I don't remember exactly where, but I remember walking up and down the aisle of the plane. I call it the aisle creep. And I remember looking to my left and to my right, noticed that every single person that was awake was playing some kind of a game on their phone. And I'm sure all of us have had this moment where we're like, whoa, so many people. And I was like, this is crazy. There's so many eyeballs concentrated on one medium. That must mean that there's a big advertising opportunity. No, that's not what my next thought was. But in general, because I had studied marketing in college, that was one of my initial thoughts about if I were to start a company, it should be somewhere where people are already doing a lot of things, which in mobile gaming it seemed to be at least anecdotally. Now I also noticed that in these moments in these games were these things we call achievement moments. And we've all experienced these. So this is when someone levels up or hits a high score or sort of beats the boss. We've all experienced this, but this was a universal trait across every single game. So it really hit me that this was a really universal trait that we should try to figure out how to leverage that. I actually know when someone is happy when looking at these achievement moments. And by the way, they were happening when a lot and were happening in games that people had already downloaded in the tens of millions of times. So there's a lot of these moments, a lot of these happy moments, these E moments, as I like to call them. And so as a company now, we see about half a billion of these E moments across many, many apps that we've integrated with. And so my question though, when we first started off was what would this moment look like? And how would we be able to interact with someone without them feeling like they're being advertised to? But unfortunately, and again, there's an animation in all these, but PowerPoint's PowerPoint is the whole idea of moments that unfortunately had been abused. So we've seen banner ads like this before where you're in the middle of an experience and something flies in your face. You get kicked out, right? No one likes it, of course, but everybody really complains about it, but really didn't have a solution. So I was like, what solution could that be? And the inspiration was quite simple. When you're happy and you feel like you've accomplished something, what's the best way to interact with someone? Well, it's through acknowledgment, through a reward, through reciprocity. So we came up with the idea within the moment of an achievement. What if you rewarded someone? So let's say leveling up in a game and getting a free latte from Starbucks was the most simple idea. But I was reading at the time a book called Predictably Irrational, which some of you may have heard of, and I believe Dan actually spoke. Did he speak? I don't know. The whole point is in the moment, rather than dangling a carrot, actually serendipitously rewarding people so you don't really know when the reward is coming. You're just doing what you're doing already and the reward kind of is there as a surprise and delight. So these are some of the brands we worked with already. We're a three year old company, so I mean we're old as old like 21 years and dog years. But that's so reciprocity was a key part of what we wanted to do as a company. We like to celebrate our wins and actually a few months ago we were named it the Fast Company's most innovative in the world list. Now we beat Microsoft. Booyah. Apparently their $8 billion R&D budget is no match for our 15 engineers. But anyways, this is one of those funny things. So we soon noticed, soon we noticed that moments were everywhere. So almost half a billion of them a month. And we don't make any of our apps or games. We leverage the ones that people are already using and you can kind of see some of the scale there. But again, in the animation, the background you would have seen raining moments. So this is going to be very fun as I animate these things while I'm dancing on stage. And I hope this is. Is this video going to play? I hope this video is going to play. If it isn't, I'm going to act it out. You guys ready to have rewards? Be a part of your everyday life was something that we really truly wanted to do since the beginning. Here at Keep, you like to feel.

Appreciated with Keep and the Keep reward, you get that feeling back. You get rewarded for being good at what you do.

Keep allowed us to create a stream of revenue that's based entirely on rewarding the players. These achievement moments or these moments that are already rewarding and it's ratcheted that up.

These everyday victories, these moments, they're everywhere. We wanted to reward everyday life and Keep finally enables us to do just that. We actually had an epiphany six months ago, as we started to build up the model more that, hey, you know, these moments don't just exist exclusively in games. So work with me here. So you look at games as a very explicit achievement moment. But what about fitness, right? You know, what about logging a run or counting your calories? What about in productivity where you finish a to do list, right? I'm the type of person who would add a to do to my to do list. Just that I've already completed, just to check it off, right? We've all done this and it's again, a very moments driven approach. And then on the far right, you've got food. And I'm not in this demographic because I have not touched my stove in a year. But the whole idea of bookmarking a recipe and favoriting a recipe and submitting a recipe, these are all very potent moments because you now have something that you're excited about cooking. And so we realized that there were tons of people doing this. And the app ecosystem continues to evolve in these series of moments. And I guess none of the examples are going to show, but there was a few examples of a to do list, like one called any do, which we've integrated into some of you actually may use it. And the whole notion of finishing a to do, you could. We actually are rewarding people with Uber credits. Now, the interesting thing is we started doing it actually based on weather, so let's say it was raining in your city. We would immediately trigger Uber credits as the reward, as a serendipitous reward because it just makes more sense when it's raining. The next example is of a exercise app where as you finished your exercises in that moment, again, you don't know that it's happening. We reward you with. And again, this is not working. But there is a propel reward, which is a fitness water brand from Pepsi. And then this is also in a recipe app, but this skipped right to the actual reward, which is when you get the recipe in your email. But I'm gonna go ahead and skip that now. What is the success of this Now? How do people actually respond to these rewards? Now, again, we realized something quite unique, which was when you are annoyed a lot, right? And you see something that's consistently a part of a screen, you immediately figure out how to tune it out. It's just how we are as humans. If I made a really annoying noise for a very long period of time, you'd figure out how to tune me out or kick me off. But the idea would be in this Moment. How could people actually not just perceive that it's not an ad, but rather actually it truly be adding value. And that was always our objective was how do we have the right reward at the right moment to the right person. And so for now, what we've seen is a staggering number of people that actually once they see the reward, actually redeem it. And about 17 and a half percent of the people who see the reward actually put in their email address to claim it. Now I'm one of like glass half empty type of guy and I go, where did the 80% go and why did not claim it? Now again, looking at traditional engagement rates and the fractions of percentages that you guys see, a lot of people don't ask that question anymore. We continue to try to push the envelope into finding what is perfect for that moment for that right person. And by effect, again with the animations, it would have been a dramatic counting effect of the numbers from the top to the bottom of. In the last 1012 minutes that I've been talking, how many people have completed a to do list? Well, 23,000 people. How many people have logged or run? How many women have logged around looking at that specific number count? Again, this is all happening. These moments are happening as we're just sitting here. And it's the most explicit form of fomo, right? Like fear of missing out. Like you just know this stuff is happening and it scares a lot of marketers. But the whole idea, we're trying to synthesize it, we want to make it really digestible, which is these moments are occurring. We're tapping into existing patterns of behavior. Realize that trying to make someone do something new is a much different process than actually just tapping into what they're doing already. And we already have the ability to peer into that. And that's the reason why we've been able to see numbers like that. So why moments? Why am I so obsessed with this moments concept? I truly believe moments is the key, primarily because mobile is a series of moments. Now we consume our phone based on our needs, right? So we let's say I'm really hungry, I'll load my seamless app, right? If I'm really bored, I'll go and play a game. If I want to check off a few things that I've just done, I'll load my to do list. And so the idea is we don't always have it out in front of us just sitting there like a TV or any type of lean back media, but rather it's something that we evoke in a time of need. Now, when you look at it, we realize, and this is how the gaming thing kind of became the DNA and helped us grow into other categories was you're not just going to play games all day, right? You're going to have other moments that you're going to be engaged in. So the idea of finding people throughout the day and the moments they're engaged in throughout the day was not really new. It's how marketers really think. But. But the question was, how do we properly identify it beyond just an activity, but into the actual moment in time? And this is actually, if you notice, all the products around this wheel are from Pepsi. And so the ability to work across different brands within a larger brand is something that we found incredibly key once you find how to identify these moments throughout the day. So we really see one of the coolest parts behind this too is actually seeing some additional data that you wouldn't otherwise see. So we're huge data junkies. And the whole idea is how do we actually know who you are or what types of things you like based on the things that you have and you're using, but not only just the apps you have downloaded, but the moments in which you're engaging with those apps. So let's say I know someone's using a to do list at 9am and a fitness app at 6pm and a recipe app at 7pm and we know the locations based on those types of moments. We can reasonably deduce, okay, maybe this is a working mom. And let's figure out what's more appropriate based on that information. And so knowing that metadata, beyond just knowing what people have installed or what types of physical demographic information you have about someone is really key. So there's a few other things that we actually can see moments in sight. So we had a theory that, okay, we see a spike in gaming activity in airports. Does that mean that there is a delay? Well, the answer is yes. So if we can see a spike in gaming activity across any major US Airport, we'll know if there's a weather pattern that's causing a delay. And so we actually last week announced an investment from Amex. And the things that we've been doing with them include, like, you know, let's say you are delayed. We know this, you're playing a game. We know you're at the airport, we know that you've been delayed because of the weather. Here's a lounge pass, right? Here's a free coffee. So the whole idea of taking what would be a negative moment, and turning it into a positive one is really quite cool. Relative achievement. This is really interesting. It's more interesting for fitness because for me, a 10k is like, I'll die if I do a 10k. But people just do it in the morning just for fun. So will that person who does the 10k every morning get better and bigger rewards? Well, we actually wanted to see how people's relative achievements matched over time. And you also see sort of this whole idea of re rewarding. So if people have claimed something, what does that indicate about them? So Georgia Pacific is a big consumer packaged goods brand. The likelihood of someone who has got Dixie, who's bought it or have redeemed it for a barbecue event they had got on the weekend will most likely want paper towels. I know it sounds very riveting, but when you think about consumer packaged goods companies, they got a turnover product. They need to figure out how to make paper towels sexy. And this is one way to do it. Velocity is also really quite an interesting one, mainly because different apps have different speeds in which people use them. So recipe apps, and this was not our idea. One of our clients came back to us and said, can we make a moment? Not when someone's just bookmarking a recipe, but what if they've left a recipe open for longer than 10 minutes? Right. So that means that they're cooking it. So we could actually start rewarding people there too. So just really interesting ideas around timing and especially when, you know, the moments, it gets really, really interesting. You can actually see throughout the day when the peak happiness happens. So, like at noon, obviously, when people are dicking off for lunch and playing games, that's when a lot of happiness is happening. So you can see this quite cool as a macro view across the day. But as marketers, I like to say, you know, with. With great power comes great responsibility. Yes. I just quoted Spider Man's uncle. And the whole idea is you have this great power. And right now, the billions of dollars that's being spent on marketing is being spent on, unfortunately, ways to tune people out. Like, essentially, you're paying money to train people to not look at it. Which is kind of unfortunate, but we've all seen this dialogue before of like, hey, would you like to pay money to remove ads? Now, we're all very talented people in this industry, and I'm not saying all of us are in advertising, but I'm talking about you guys, the ones in advertising. There are millions of people every day actually paying money to remove you as an industry. And it's quite frightening and it's quite a crisis, especially on mobile. And what we want to say is, with that power in that moment, rather than annoying, why not actually delight and create an entirely different type of relationship? This looks jank, but it looked a lot prettier in the original deck, where you have moments in the middle, which is the atom essentially describing visually what the moment looks like. But if you see from the top to the bottom, you've got the media component, which is just the eyeballs. We're all very aware of this. It's very obvious that in a moment in which someone logged a run, that's an eyeball that's worth something to a brand. But if you look through the rest of it, there's a lot more that can be done in that moment. You've got the ability to convert someone, you've got loyalty value, you've got data, you've got social media, you've got content creation. So when you look at this concept of a moment now, you see a lot more than just reaching someone just to tell them about who you are, what product you have, but you have the ability to connect. So I want to talk about moments off the device very quickly. So we talk about mobile being in mobile, but what about actually redeeming things off mobile? So we did a thing with 711 where if you were in a city and playing games where the temperatures had risen above 70 degrees, you could potentially get a free Slurpee. So it was quite fun. And again, leveraging moments not just on the phone, but that are happening off the phone, that your environment is leading you to perceive a certain thing. And perhaps what's interesting is when you look at mobile, the biggest challenges are how do we optimize our page for mobile devices or whatever it may be. But the interesting thing is most people don't want to browse the content that you're serving to them then and there. They want to do it on their own terms. So they want to be able to claim it at home, on the couch, when they're on their desktop, when they're on their iPads. And we actually found a fascinating stat where 20% of the people that claimed their rewards opened these rewards on their desktops. Again, looked a lot prettier. But we also realized that there are moments off the device that are actually quite forward thinking. So you guys are familiar with Nest, the WI fi enabled thermostat. You can basically change your. I can change my temperature at my home from here. Back in San Francisco. But imagine you hit your energy consumption Savings goals, right? ConEd could reward you and your family with a certificate to amc. You've got so many opportunities to take moments that again, don't just exist on the phone, but exist in other moments that you can actually reward. So last but not least, doing it right. As marketers, we have huge responsibility, as I mentioned, but you want to do it as, wow, a few things just got cut off. I'll just continue to riff on. So the moment has to be something that as you are rewarded, serendipitous and surprise and delight. Now, I cannot stress that enough. Like we are humans, we're not Pavlovian dogs. It's very tempting to do short term metric driving by dangling a carrot. And so we feel that to do it right is to respect the user, to do something almost gentlemanly, right, and to realize that it's very human. When I get a gift from a friend, I don't question how I earn that gift and try to game the system. It's thank you. It's a great gesture. I'm really appreciative of that. And that reciprocity then begins. You begin to reciprocate and you build a relationship. So at the end of the day, advertising was never about just showing a picture or showing a billboard. It was always about creating a relationship between the brand and the consumer. And the most visceral way we felt to do that was through reciprocity. So the question I will leave you with is what is your moment as a brand, as a marketer, as someone who's got your own brand? You want to figure out that moment that you want to own, that you want to align yourself with. Many companies already know this about their products. They design their products around a moment to serve. And so the question is finding those moments and then respectfully owning them and to respect the customer ultimately and to do something meaningful for them. Thank you very much.