Daniel Houghton: Chapter 3: How brands win on the basics

The thing that I have found, and this is kind of a small sample, 10 or 12 companies, I've never met one that was like, "We have our data shit together." Not one. By the way, like, sorting all that shit out was really difficult.

It's Machine Yearning from Assist. We spend our time here thinking, dreaming, and asking questions about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. You wouldn't think paper guidebooks, the repositioning of a travel brand, and the future of digital creative agencies would be machine learning territory, but they are when the meeting point is Daniel Houghton. Daniel is the CEO of PYXL, that's P-Y-X-L, a Nashville-based digital marketing agency. For years, Daniel has operated right up at the edge of digital content design, build, and measurement. Before joining PYXL this year, Daniel was CEO of Lonely Planet. Under his leadership, Lonely Planet made Fast Company's 2018 Most Innovative Companies list, and he was a 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30. Now Daniel is on the agency side with Pixel and diving into a new set of challenges as a leader, digital strategist, and student of culture. When Shane from Assist sat down with Daniel, the news of his job move had just broken, and this was his first interview as Pixel CEO. This is machine learning though. So this isn't the typical arms crossed looking manly on the magazine cover CEO interview. Hang out and enjoy. Here's Shane and Daniel.

Being someone who's at the forefront of digital transformation technology in general, what are you thinking about now? What are you excited about? What do you see that you think others might not see yet that excites you?

I mean, for one, The internet has been a pretty complicated place for a long time and probably is going to be for the rest of our lives. But what I think, one of the things I think is going to happen, I think things are going to start to get a lot easier for consumers. Easier to pay your bills, easier to just check on stuff. And you can look at that as I'm just talking about AI or different bots and things that we're talking to, or you can think of it like I like to think of it, which is just The first time I ever paid my cable bill on my laptop and just scanned my fingerprint, I was like, holy shit. I've done it on my phone before too, and I'm like, that's great, that's convenient. Scan my face, pay my cable bill. But when I did it on the computer, for some reason, you're just expecting this long process where you have to enter in all this crap. You already know where I live, but here's where I live again. Here's my billing information. You miss one number in the credit card. You gotta start over, redirect back, and then just like, oh yeah, we got this for you, Apple Pay, ding, boom. Wow, I don't have to teach my mom and dad how to do that. They're just gonna do it. Oh yeah, I know Apple, boom, done, ding. Like, I just feel like that is good for consumers, it's good for the business, it's just all around good. And those types of innovations, which don't really come off as that remarkable, like, oh, you got a new laptop 'cause you scan your finger into it. It's a lot more than that. Like, when you think about what that's gonna look like a couple years down the road.

What is it gonna look like a couple years down the road? What do you think?

I think that people are going to, in a similar way that people had their favorite brands in like retail stores, like I always loved Best Buy because it was like a toy store for me, and I always loved Target because I thought even though like getting drug through there as a kid was kind of boring, there was like an electronics section. Mm-hmm. I've always kind of wrapped my mind around different brands that I like, and then I try to go all in on that. Because whether it's clothes that I know just gonna fit, or a car that's not gonna break down, or whatever it is, I think it's gonna be easier if you're building good products, and maybe you're charging more for them because of it. I just think it's gonna be even easier to have people become more and more loyal to those products. So like, for me, the couple examples are like Patagonia clothing for anything outdoor. It's just almost indestructible out of the gate, kind of lasts forever. That's their whole ethos. And then if something does go wrong with it, like, send it to them in California, they'll just sew it back together and send it back. I love that. J.Crew for like actually work clothes, and it's kind of boring and basic, but it fits, and I'm 6'4", and I'm kind of hard to find pants that fit and stuff. Or it's like a car brand or whatever, and there's all these new brands. Like, I have now 3 pairs of Allbirds shoes. Because I know they're great.

Take J.Crew. Perfect example. What would J.Crew do in a new AI voice digital world that would make your life easier?

Oh, there's a couple of things they could do. I mean, they've gotten pretty good on like commerce, Apple Pay, and they were never bad at that, but I think they got a lot better. I mean, I could throw out some different things like Warby Parker. They introduced the feature where you can try on the glasses before you ship it to yourself. Out of necessity because they had no stores. So I could, I could throw an example like that, like, how's this, these clothes gonna look on you? My biggest issue is that I often don't know when they're bringing out new stuff, and I feel like there could be some proactive way for them to be like— I mean, obviously they email me, right? But those are in some, like, spam folder. I don't really walk into the store that much anymore, but I do want to know when there's, like, I don't know. I just feel like there's something to do with content and I'm very biased towards content. And then like little things like just proactively letting me know. It sounds so stupid and so basic, but like, your order is on its way and like, yeah, you can do that in email. But like if my Google Home just said, hey, by the way, like in my daily morning, like I always get up and I say, hey, read me the news, tell me what's going on. And it'll roll off on these are your calendar appointments, blah blah blah. And it's like literally while I'm making my coffee. If it was like, oh, and by the way, your order from J.Crew should be here this afternoon. I feel like that sounds so stupid, but I'd be like, oh, they're thinking of me. Yeah, that's— it would just— it just makes you like, why would you ever buy from anyone else?

You say it sounds stupid, but I think most people forget the basics, especially in a one-to-one world, because we've been operating in a one-to-many world, and therefore the one-to-one things that are seemingly basic are very important. But didn't seem achievable at scale. And the J.Crew example, to just go back to one more time, you're a repeat buyer, right? They don't need to try on anymore. You're 6'4", you're not growing.

I know I'm wearing large and 32-34 pants and I'm good to go.

They should know when you need to buy again, even if it's not new. Anticipation versus automation. Like, just every 45 days or whatever it is that I go to your website. Yeah, but then they don't know you're on the website.

You know those little, you know those little buttons that always say, hey, we're out of stock, notify me when it comes back? It's Have you ever gotten a fucking email that's like, hey, it's back in stock? I haven't. I hit that button all the time. I've never gotten an email. Is it that just it was so successful they decided to not resell it again? I don't understand. I know I'm a weird size. I'm really tall and really skinny. I just like, yeah, the basics.

I don't believe any brand aspires to not communicate with you. So great. So what is it that makes it so these brands don't do that? Is it one because they don't know you or who you are in the store? I mean, even the web, the problem with the web is it's all pixels unless you're logged in and in a session tracker, they don't actually know. And so is there a new frontier where you always have identity and therefore you have to change how you approach everything with your customer?

The thing that I have found, and this is kind of a small sample pool, but like 10 or 15 companies that I've gotten to know pretty well, that you would think would have— at least as a consumer, you would think they have all this data on me. They know what I bought. They knew whether— if it's a hotel, how long did I stay there? What did I— like, have you ever been to a hotel and then like, whether it's the minibar, you're at a resort, like, in theory, they know everything you did while you were there. They know if you were at this pool or that pool. Like, they should know everything. And again, small sample size of 10 or 12 companies. I've never met one that was like, we have our data shit together. Not one. And so I think a lot of companies in theory have all of this stuff that they could put together and use to like make my customer experience better. But none of those like departments talk to one another. Those systems don't work together. You know, the commerce team hired some agency to build the e-commerce site that doesn't talk to what the sales team's using. And it's just a bunch of like internal and external. Like, by the way, like, sorting all that shit out was really difficult. And so it's certainly not easy, but I think there's so many companies walking around that's like, oh, we know, we have all this data, and they don't— literally don't even know what to start or how to craft that into something that could help them sell better or more or communicate better with you. Because you're right, no one— or maybe a few companies wake up and go, they're not going to hear from me today. Like, that's a very weird specimen of company, but some of them exist. But I, I think a lot of people have that information and they just can't even organize it to like act on it.

Okay, take your pain. You're the CEO and have been the CEO of a global company. How do you get all the systems and people to talk to each other?

If that's a problem that we— that, that I think any company's having, this is not— I don't know if this would work or not, but I mean, it's my instinct to literally just announce that as an issue to the entire, the entire team and say, okay, we have all this data, we have this from marketing, we have this from sales, like our operations team has this. I don't know the answer, which is why I'm talking to you all, our team. I'm wide open listening. Come forth. Like we have to fix this. And it is my goal for us to combine all this data by put, draw a line in the sand, whatever you want to do, however you want to do that. But I am so passionate about trying to make all those pieces work together, but it's only going to do that if like you're all excited. So one, I'm curious, like, does that sound good to you guys, or does that sound stupid, or is there any reasons you think that can't happen? Or just literally, let's open the floor for discussion because everyone's going to have an opinion. Well, Sales doesn't listen. Well, that, you know, like it's just never-ending. But if you don't throw it out there in the open, you can't tell it to your 3 like reports and go, I want this fixed. It's not gonna work because they can't be the ones doing that all the time. So I don't know, that's just, that's my kind of basic.

But I think basic things are what we need to get great things done. What are you, what are you doing here? I think this is very important from an executive level. Is it, hey, make sure that every piece of our organization knows who Daniel Houghton is. So how we do that is either his name, but it's probably too generic. We have a unique identifier now that is an ID for Daniel. And, you know, something that, uh, I think Amazon did this a long time ago where Bezos said, in 6 months, every department in this company has an API that can communicate the ID between each department and read and write it so that—

so we get that you all need your own unique things, but they're gonna have to work together.

Exactly. And I think it was a forcing function a year, decade ago probably. Is that what you're recommending? Like, is that what you do? You call out the problem as a leader and then you have to build some kind of system that allows all the different systems— like, there's not gonna be one system of record. It's that all the systems now are different. Departments use different software for their things. But the ID has to communicate across departments. Is that what you're recommending?

Yeah, I think that's fair, especially if you're at a company that has the resources to invest in something like that. I mean, there's a million solutions pretending to claim all these things and solve these problems, and maybe some of them do. I am probably guilty of having always let various departments at anything I've ever been responsible for use really what they think is the best software for what they're trying to do. Because I come from a creative background and I know that, like, this is really stupid, but if I got hired for a job and you said you have to work, you can't use a Mac, I can't do it. I literally— I mean, I could. I'm not doing it. I'll buy my own and I'll bring it, but I'm not doing it. Like, and I actually use PCs and I love them and like so much shit has changed. I have before and I can and like it's actually pretty similar. But basically the answer is I am empathetic towards different departments wanting to use the software, different things that they think is really best for their job. But then how you make all that shit work together is a very different problem. And so yeah, if you have the resources to invest in something like that, or even to invest in some other system that in theory can, can help— maybe not even all of it, but if you can get to 80% of it, or fuck it, if you can get to the 20% of the most important of it, just Do that.

Yeah.

And then we'll figure the rest out. Companies are going to spend the next several decades trying to make that happen, especially when you're operating at scale, just how hard that is to achieve. But you see companies doing it. It's working.

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