SDS PODCAST

EPISODE 281:

FUTUREPROOFING

YOUR DIGITAL

MARKETING

TACTICS

Kirill Eremenko: This is episode number 281 with Founder and Director

of Digital Strategy at Webfor, Kevin Getch.

Kirill Eremenko: Welcome to the SuperDataScience podcast. My name

is Kirill Eremenko, Data Science Coach and Lifestyle

Entrepreneur. Each week we bring you inspiring

people and ideas to help you build your successful

career in data science. Thanks for being here today

and now let's make the complex simple.

Hadelin: This podcast is brought to you by Bluelife AI. Bluelife

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Kirill Eremenko: That's correct. You heard it right, we are so sure about

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Hadelin: If you're interested to try out artificial intelligence in

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and we'll get back to you as quick as possible.

Kirill Eremenko: Once again, that's www.bluelife.ai and Hadelin and I

both look forward to working together with you.

Kirill Eremenko: Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, ladies

and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on

the show today. Today we're talking about marketing.

We've got the Founder and Director of Digital Strategy

at Webfor which is a marketing agency in the US.

Kevin is an expert in the space of marketing. He's also

a published author. His book, Future Proof Your

Marketing just came out a few days ago.

Kirill Eremenko: In this podcast, we won't be talking about data science

algorithms or artificial intelligence methodologies and

frameworks and things like that. If you're after that,

then this is not the podcast for that. This podcast is

specifically about marketing and where this field is

going. The reason why I wanted to invite Kevin onto

the show is because marketing is one of the fields

where data science is most heavily applied, where

artificial intelligence is making massive impacts and

it's important to know, if you're in this field or if you

want to get into this field, it's important to know where

it's going.

Kirill Eremenko: Kevin has some fantastic ideas about that. You will

find out about what the future of marketing looks like

and of course we'll touch on the surface about some of

the technologies, but overall you will need to make

your own conclusions on what you will need to study

or what you will need to incorporate in your data

science career in order to break into this field.

Kirill Eremenko: However, in terms of the marketing space itself, it's a

very valuable conversation. Here are a couple of things

that you will learn from this podcast. What digital

assistants are and where they're going with the help of

people like Ray Kurzweil at Google. Kevin's philosophy

on what gets measured gets managed and what it

means for marketing and data science. Why websites

are less and less important, how segmentation is

slowly transitioning to personalization, creating

amazing customer experiences, disk profiles, natural

language processing and computer vision and their

role in the future of marketing.

Kirill Eremenko: That's what this podcast is about. If you're into

marketing or you want to dive into this space and

apply your digital skills there, this is going to be a very

valuable podcast for you. On that note, without further

ado, I bring to you Founder and Director of Digital

Strategy at Webfor Kevin Getch.

Kirill Eremenko: Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies

and gentlemen, super excited to have you on the show

and on the other line I've got Kevin Getch calling in

from Vancouver. Kevin, how you doing today?

Kevin Getch: I'm doing very good.

Kirill Eremenko: It was so cool talking just now that you specifically

told me you're from Vancouver, Washington, not

Canada, and I still managed to make the mistake. How

often do people make that mistake that Vancouver,

Washington and not Vancouver, Canada?

Kevin Getch: Honestly, more often than not, and even in the States

when I'm talking to people in the states that are

outside of the local area here they always think it's

Vancouver, Canada. You're not alone.

Kirill Eremenko: Do you know the story behind this? Which city came

first?

Kevin Getch: Honestly, I don't know. I just know that we're the

better Vancouver. I love Vancouver BC and I travel up

there quite a bit but I do think that they came before

us. I want to say we're about 100 and... We're only

about 114 years old or something like that. I think

they came before us.

Kirill Eremenko: Okay, that's very cool. There's a city in Western

Australia that recently celebrated its 70th birthday. So

young. When you say 114 that is huge in my mind.

Because simply Australia is such a young country.

Kevin Getch: US is pretty young too. That's one of the things when

we were over there and just the European side of

things. I was really amazed at the history and how old

some of those both buildings and cities were.

Kirill Eremenko: Yes, it's crazy. I'm in Slovenia with my business

partner we were traveling through some places in...

Was it east of France? There are cities there couple

hundred, 500 years old and so on. There's cities in

more like the Middle East zone that are thousands of

years old. How crazy is that?

Kevin Getch: Yes it's pretty insane. When we were over there in

London, we stopped by Stonehenge and I'm looking at

this and they're saying... Basically it's supposed to be

about 4000 years old. I'm just like, man, it's insane. I

really love that history.

Kirill Eremenko: The thing that also gets me every time is paintings.

Some of these paintings like Leonardo, Michelangelo

painted hundreds of years ago. They're still there and

they still look the same as they did hundreds of years

ago and they'll be there when we're gone. They're

paintings. It's crazy.

Kevin Getch: It's really cool. Who knows, someday we'll be like that.

Kirill Eremenko: Maybe. Anyway, Kevin, we met at Tony Robbins

Business Mastery 2.0, well not 2.0 but part two in

Amsterdam, a couple weeks ago. How did you find the

event?

Kevin Getch: Man, it was amazing. I had been to the first business

mastery. There was some repetition, but there was a

lot of new content as well. The repetition is really

important. I brought my wife with me, she also owns

her own business. It was really... For her it was a

game changer which I knew it was going to be. I was

really excited to have her there. Her business has been

growing and I wanted to make sure she had the skills

and tools to hit that next level.

Kevin Getch: Entrepreneurs were always being pushed to grow more

and that was really eye opening for her. It was great

for me too. The group I was with was amazing and just

the speakers and the content. All the Tony Robbins

events I've been to have been just top notch.

Kirill Eremenko: Absolutely agree. I think it is five days, every single

one of those days was worth the price paid for the

whole event. Totally awesome. What business is your

wife in?

Kevin Getch: She owns a speech therapy practice.

Kirill Eremenko: Oh wow.

Kevin Getch: She mainly works with pediatrics, so children

[inaudible 00:08:25] speech therapy.

Kirill Eremenko: Gotcha. Okay, very nice noble area to be in. You were

one of... It was so fun meeting you. I was just standing

there to get a tea, you were I think in line before me

and you are one of the most nonconforming people.

You were barefoot. You were walking around barefoot

what's up with that?

Kevin Getch: You're like, "Hey, you from Austria?" It's just funny

because I think you're standing up a lot during those

events, and you're jumping around and stuff like that.

I just find it more comfortable to take off the... I had

flip flops on that day so it was really easy. I just feel

it's more comfortable to take off the shoes. It seems it's

better for your body and posture overall. I just took it

off and was walking around barefoot. I'm like, hey,

why not?

Kirill Eremenko: That's so cool. Well, it was great to catch up. I'm glad

you could make it onto the show. So, Kevin, you've got

a lot of experience and you've done a lot of different

things and your book just come out, actually.

Congratulations on that. Tell us a bit about yourself.

You're now a published author, you're business owner,

you're in the space of digital strategy and marketing. If

somebody off the street were to ask you who is Kevin

Getch what would you say?

Kevin Getch: Well, if somebody off the street asked me I'd probably

talk more a lot about my personal life and some about

my professional life but I'd say, I'm a husband, I'm a

father, I'm very passionate about helping people,

especially focusing on my local community. I do a lot

of work with local teams in the area. I speak at

different events to help local teams like the Boys and

Girls Club or we have another rock solid community

teen center in the local area that I went out and spoke

at recently. Then I also own a creative and digital

marketing agency where we basically help small

businesses and medium sized businesses make more

money and really develop strategies that help them

grow their business by more than 30% on average.

Kevin Getch: That for me has been a huge part of just enjoyment

because my biggest driver is having a positive impact

in other people's lives. I'm able to do that and we have

now a team of 14 people where I'm not only able to

have a positive impact in our clients lives but I'm able

to have a positive impact in their lives and in turn,

they are able to have a positive impact in our clients

lives and in the community.

Kevin Getch: Beyond blessed to be where I'm at, I have two amazing

kids and a beautiful wife. If you ever hear me

complaining, slap me.

Kirill Eremenko: Love it. Thank you for [inaudible 00:11:22]. Your book

that just came out two days ago, well, as of when this

podcast is going to be released, it will be two days.

Future proof your marketing. Tell us a bit about that.

What is it about?

Kevin Getch: It was funny because I actually want to thank the

previous business mastery in Tony Robbins event for

me doing this book because when I was at business

mastery in Las Vegas, it was like, set some lofty goals

for yourself and it was like take away all the

limitations, all the excuses, all the different things that

are in your way because being a business owner and a

father and a husband and kids in sports and all that

kind of stuff, there's a lot of time there.

Kevin Getch: I've been making excuses. One of the things I wrote

down was, launch my book in the next eight months

finish and write my book. I knew it was a big task. I

didn't realize quite how big it was. I wanted to do that

for a few reasons. One, obviously, there's some self

interest in just growing our brand and all that but the

other part was really, I've seen this happen before. I've

seen when we went... When I say we, when the world

went from more of a print, marketing and it evolved

into more digital marketing, there is literally hundreds

and hundreds of businesses that just couldn't keep

up.

Kevin Getch: They didn't know how to adapt, they were still doing

the same old thing. The market was changing and it

was changing fairly quickly but not as quickly as

what's going to happen. My concern is, then a lot of

businesses that didn't evolve ended up going extinct.

Right now we're about to go through what I consider,

at least in my lifetime, the largest dramatic shift in our

lifetime. In the next five to 10 years, we're going to see

so much change, it's going to make the last century...

In comparison, it's going to make the last century look

small as far as advancements both in technology and

changes in consumer behavior and things like that.

Kevin Getch: It's going to happen very quickly. I wanted to write a

book that prepared business owners, marketing

executives, so that they understood what is currently

working, what's going to change in the future,

probably. Obviously looking at consumer behavior,

looking at some of the large tech companies where are

the consumers and tech companies pushing this

marketplace, and how do we create a strategy that's

not only successful now but creates the foundation for

what's to come. That's what really prompted me to

write this book. I'm excited to share it. I'm hoping that

a lot of people get a lot of value out of it.

Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. You said

something is going to happen in the next couple of

years? What's going to happen exactly?

Kevin Getch: Telling you exactly is hard, but I don't think predicting

the future is all that hard when it comes to consumer

behavior and tech and things like that. For me, it's

just is pretty easy to connect the dots, so to speak.

What's driving this change... I guess I'll first lay the

foundation of what I call the macro trends that help...

Because I realized there's so many different micro

things are going to happen and there's no way to really

look at all those different things and really predict all

those different things.

Kevin Getch: You can at a macro level look at what trends are going

to drive the market, and then understand what's

driving those trends. In the book, I talk about what I

call the three P's that are these macro trends. Three

P's are personalized, predictive, and proactive. In the

next five to 10 years, and I actually... In 2015, I

originally came up with these three P's as far as

driving the trends, and they have definitely held true. I

just think that we're going to continue seeing an

exponential growth in these areas.

Kevin Getch: Personalization obviously has grown substantially in

the last four or five years and for the next five to 10

years is going to increase significantly. What's driving

all of this, to a large extent is advancements in

technology like AI, machine learning, and some of the

underlying currents that we're going to see catch up

even more the next five to 10 years is going to be

advancements and computing power.

Kevin Getch: Right now there's certain things that just from a

processing standpoint, the amount of information,

whether it be audio or video, it's starting to happen

more. In the next five to 10 years, computing power is

going to see with quantum computing and a number of

other things, we're going to be able to see such a

higher level of computing power, that it's going to

make processing everyday information and being able

to take and record audio, just all day long and video all

day long make it possible. By doing that, it's going to

allow for a complete change.

Kevin Getch: I can definitely dive into more details there as far as

the specifics, but I think for me, I think it's important

to understand that the largest or the most

fundamental shift for people is the proactive part.

We've been in a reactive marketing phase for most of

our lives. I mean if we want to go look for something, if

we want to go search for a restaurant or something

like that, we get online and we start searching for

restaurants.

Kevin Getch: If I want to learn how to fly a plane, I have to go in and

start typing in flight lessons, learning about flying, all

that kind of stuff. It's reacting to me, but in the

future... We're already starting to see this at a smaller

scale. In the future, it will be much more proactive. We

might be having a conversation and I have my digital

assistant that's in always on mode, it's there to listen.

It can take notes and be of use and value to me.

Kevin Getch: As it's always on and listening. It's basically processing

all of that data and because we're having a

conversation about saying, hey, one of my goals is to

learn how to fly a plane in the next eight years. It takes

that information and it processes and later it will pop

up and say hey, here's some information on whether

learning how to fly is right for you, and of course,

here's some ads for flight schools.

Kevin Getch: That's just a small portion of what I think, to me, I

think the large tech companies know that the Holy

Grail for them is basically proactive assistance. If they

have... If that's set up in place, it will provide so much

value obviously to the person who's using it that,

obviously, especially if they get the majority of it for

free there may be advanced features, there may be the

always on mode, maybe there's other things you have

to pay for some of this stuff.

Kevin Getch: As we go down the road, we'll see how that plays out.

Even just from a free standpoint, which I think will be

the majority of it, all of a sudden that digital assistant

becomes basically an executive who has an assistant.

They become the gateway to all the other things. Now

as you build that marketplace, you end up developing

something that could be the largest... What I call a

gateway channel to all other marketing channels,

whether it be social media, or search or email or all

these other things, you now have this gateway channel

between those things.

Kirill Eremenko: We're already seeing that I think in it's very basic

stages. For instance, I have Foursquare on my phone

which helps me like find vegan restaurants when I go

to a new city. It's really very useful tool. It's all user

generated data and people rate these places and

[inaudible 00:19:43]. Sometimes when I'm just even

driving through a new city, even before I decide I want

to have lunch, I want to find a place where to eat it, I

guess it knows through my GPS location where I am, it

knows about lunchtime and it pops up this

notification, "Hey Kirill, based on your previous... place

that you've eaten previously, you might like this place

in this city." I'm like, wow, that's so cool. I didn't have

to do anything. I just click that place and I go there

and I have lunch.

Kirill Eremenko: The recommendations are pretty outstanding there. I

think, would you agree that we're really seeing these

predictive or proactive marketing in basic forms?

Kevin Getch: Yes definitely. Actually I use almost that same example

in the book talking about some of the current ways

that we're already seeing proactive. Whether it's your

calendar, whether it's your digital assistant popping

up and saying, "Hey, based on the traffic and your

next appointment, you're going to have to leave in 10

minutes to get to your meeting on time." That's one of

the ways we're starting to see that.

Kevin Getch: The same thing with restaurants... The analogy I often

give is, if you are going to actually hire... You're going

to hire a personal assistant that was going to work for

you. It's like, would you want that personal assistant

to not really get to know you and just sit there and

wait for when you ask them to do something and

always just be waiting and then say, "Okay, yes, I'll go

get that for you." No, you're going to want them to

actually really get to understand you, understand your

needs, be proactive about serving those and taking

care of you. If they're really good, they're going to

predict your needs and offer up solutions even before

you need them.

Kevin Getch: If they do that, then they become so valuable to you.

That's what these companies want to do. They want to

create the best digital assistant you ever had. If they

provide that much value... I've been speaking to

audiences where I have a couple hundred people in the

audience and about 94% of the people, 95% of the

people would say, yes I'd definitely take that.

Obviously, if it's a free digital assistant, no question.

They're like, yes hook me up.

Kirill Eremenko: There's quite a quite a few around, right? There's Siri,

there's Google Assistant, there's Cortana I think from

Microsoft, there's Alexa, which one? Which one do you

choose?

Kevin Getch: Honestly, those are the top ones. Will.i.am, the singer,

writer, artist whatever, will.i.am is actually creating a

digital assistant called... I think it's omega. He has 300

employees at least last time I checked, which was

probably three, four months ago. He was working on

launching this digital assistant. There's not just going

to be one and honestly, they're definitely companies

that have, I guess what I'd say, they have big strategic

advantages in this marketplace.

Kevin Getch: Search is definitely the foundation of these digital

assistance. Companies with a really strong base

foundation of search can obviously come in better and

provide better results because they've already have

that huge amount of obviously data and experience in

pulling up and providing useful information and useful

answers. That is definitely a foundational element that

gives them a strategic advantage, as well as size as

well as other things.

Kevin Getch: We're truly in a position where anyone could come in

and potentially disrupt this marketplace. When I see

something like will.i.am I'm like you never know. If it

gets in the right market and finds a niche, honestly,

even Bank of America in the US has its own digital

system called Erica. Many companies are going to have

digital assistance in their different ways.

Kevin Getch: As far as the standout ones, it's funny because I look

at Apple, and Apple has so many strategic advantages,

but I feel like they've stopped innovating in the last

couple years, or at least aren't positioning themselves

as much to take advantage of the things that they

could and maybe that's purposeful. Maybe that's just

part of the direction they're going. They have a

strategic advantage in a lot of way.

Kevin Getch: In the US, iPhone has a large percentage of the

market. Whereas Google and Android operating system

globally has a larger percentage of the market. Then

obviously, Amazon has a huge advantage as well, for

people shopping patterns. In home digital assistance,

they actually have a larger footprint than a lot of

companies do with Alexa in home. Each one has its

advantages. For someone like Google who basically is

just... Part of their strategic advantage is they're the

most used search engine, and pretty much soon the

digital assistant will just be baked into everything

there. They'll have the largest, I guess, user base of

people using digital assistance.

Kirill Eremenko: Very interesting. Basically, at this point, doesn't really

matter which one you choose. Just pick one and go

with it.

Kevin Getch: I mean, everyone has their own preferences. If you

want to get serious and be like, which one is the best, I

think people have their preferences. From an accuracy

and helpfulness standpoint, Google's digital assistant

beats all the others pretty hands down. Siri has

normally been pretty bad. Whereas Alexa is in the

middle. Cortana is even looking... It seems to me there

may be getting... They're trying to find their own niche

outside of just being a general digital assistant. We'll

see what path that they go in.

Kevin Getch: When I talked to some of my friends, people at Google

or people at Microsoft that are in the know in these

areas. It's really interesting, because they are very

much so looking at not only like digital systems, but

digital assistants that are, I guess, have emotional

awareness based on the tone of your voice. At some

point based on biometric feedback by being able to see

facial expressions and things like that.

Kevin Getch: Google actually has a patent since 2012, actually, a

patent on biometric feedback for changing their search

results. They're not using it at this point, but if at

some point, they have a visual capability to see your

face while you're doing a search, and they see, your

facial expression isn't satisfied with the result. They

could use that as feedback to determine maybe these

weren't the best results.

Kirill Eremenko: Wow. That's crazy.

Kevin Getch: They've been thinking about this for a while. It's not

something that's just came up. It's just a matter of I

think... Actually, one of the things I find really

interesting is Google hired... What's his name? Ray

Kurzweil. Are you familiar with Ray Kurzweil?

Kirill Eremenko: Yes. The predictor of the future.

Kevin Getch: Yes, he's got an 86% accuracy rate. Well, they hired

him back in... Was it 2013 I think? It was around that

time. The big thing that he was bringing to Google was

one that was obviously his... A little backstory, Ray

Kurzweil has never worked for another company. He's

always had his own business. Obviously, he doesn't

need to work for anyone.

Kirill Eremenko: Yes he created the synthesizer back in the day I think.

Kevin Getch: He's actually created so many different things and

been part of it. He's a genius. He's a futurist. He's a

genius. Why would he go to work for Google? Honestly,

it's because they have the, I guess, the most of the

foundational elements, in order for him to create what

he wants to create. In order to create a digital

assistant that really understands the information, the

people.

Kevin Getch: What I thought was really interesting was, everybody

was like, "Why is Ray Kurzweil being assigned to the

auto reply in Gmail?" He was in charge of that. It's

because of data science. Data scientists understand

that. They look at that and they go, "Okay, what is the

biggest data spot where people are having

conversations, where I could actually train a machine

learning algorithm to understand these

communications that are going on?" Then I can also

start providing responses and based on how people

select those responses, I can create reinforcement

around what was accurate and what wasn't accurate.

Kevin Getch: That's how they've been training the digital assistant

throughout this time, is looking at conversations in

Gmail and teaching. Basically learning how to have a

conversation and how to provide responses. Those are

some of the foundational elements as I look forward,

and I see how far we've come already and then what

the next five to 10 years holds. It's really... To me, it's

really exciting. I'm excited to see where we're going to

go.

Kirill Eremenko: Those predictions are getting so good. Now they're

predicting the topic of the email. I was writing up an

email earlier today. I click the subject line, and the

topic just appeared and there was exactly what I

wanted to put in there. Then I actually deleted it, tried

to come up with something better just for the sake of

my ego. I couldn't. I just left whatever the assistance...

It's crazy.

Kirill Eremenko: You mentioned data science and I think this is a good

segue to that. What's the whole role of data science,

artificial intelligence analytics in this new future of

digital systems that's coming?

Kevin Getch: Oh, man, it's... That's a really interesting question. I

think there's actually a lot of different aspects. That's a

big question because one, AI, machine learning is

driving... is going to be driving this. It's going to be one

of the key drivers for these macro trends, pushing

them forward. As far as the future, our ability to

process massive amounts of data, and be able to

intelligently at scale, provide solutions and good

answers and good assistance throughout this process.

Kevin Getch: Then it's all going to be done by obviously data

scientists, machine learning, people who are

professionals in AI and machine learning on that side

of things. That's all going to be driven by them and

there's obviously a shortage in that area. There

definitely needs to... I keep telling people if you want to

get in a growing field, a really in demand field where

people will basically pay you to go to school to some

extent, get into data science. Get into just AI, machine

learning programming area things.

Kevin Getch: To me, that's the backbone that's going to drive things.

I also think it's important to understand analytics is

going to have to change to some extent as we grow.

Our organization is very analytic driven company. We

want to make sure... We have a saying. It's actually

what gets measured gets managed. Something you

hear throughout our organization all the time.

Kevin Getch: Whatever we're doing from our marketing campaigns,

we want to have measurement in place to be able to

track what's effective and what actions are the users

taking and understanding what we want them to do

and what they want to do and finding that sweet spot

in the middle. As we move towards much more audio,

as we move towards different modes of interaction,

we're going to have to capture different things to some

extent.

Kevin Getch: Some people... We're already to the point where if

you're looking for a restaurant, someone may never

visit your website, because they might be searching on

Google or Yelp, or Foursquare, like you mentioned.

They might be looking at these different sources. They

may never end up visiting the website. It's important to

understand and have the right analytics data and be

able to pull all that information in so that you

understand what's actually effective for marketing.

What's getting us attention, what's getting... Where are

people taking the actions we want them to take.

Whether it's directions to our office, whether it's phone

calls, calling into our office, whether it's someone

filling out a form or making a purchase online.

Kevin Getch: All those things, to some extent, are trackable now.

One of the areas that is really interesting to me in the

future, and we're seeing it right now with some of our

clients is retail locations where we can actually get

data around how many people are actually driving into

the office based on anonymized data.

Kevin Getch: There's a lot of different things we'll see I think going

forward that analytics is going to need to change to

some extent to keep up with the changes in both

consumer behavior and how they act and where they

go, and all that kind of stuff. In 10 years... I definitely

think the website is a critical component and it's one

that businesses own. They need to be very... They

definitely need to be very focused on that.

Kevin Getch: But there are some businesses, and some of these are

probably smaller businesses that may not need a

website as much in the next 10 years. They'll have

these other platforms, they'll have ways of doing it. It's

interesting, and it's becoming fragmented and that's

part of the challenge, but I don't know. To me, that's

exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of opportunity for us

to help businesses because it is getting so fragmented,

but that fragmentation offers opportunity, because it

allows us to target more effectively in some of those

areas to.

Kirill Eremenko: Got you. You mentioned in your company, what gets

measured, gets managed. Can you give us a couple of

examples? What do you measure in your company

about your clients and how does that help you manage

those relationships?

Kevin Getch: Definitely. One of the clients we just brought on

recently, they're big in the education space. They have

148 locations around in the United States. When we

first started working with them, we had seen that

there had been a downward trend in their traffic. A

downward trend in the number of conversions. People

taking actions, in this case, filling out a form on the

website.

Kevin Getch: They weren't tracking phone calls really by channel.

They didn't know which channels were driving phone

calls. They had all of their local listings. Their business

name, address, phone number for all those different

locations. They did have what are called UTM tracking

parameters on those sites, but the way they were set

up was wrong. It was actually putting everything in the

wrong bucket.

Kevin Getch: I'll give you an idea of what we did was we actually

went in there and we switched over how they're call

tracking setup so that we can see... When someone

comes to their website, we use dynamic number

insertion so it changes the phone number based on

the channel that they're coming from. Whether it's

social, or search, which search engine so we can track

and actually get data around where that information is

coming from.

Kevin Getch: Then we also know from those calls, it's integrated

with their CRM data. We know ultimately, we can

track to some extent, did those calls turn into a good

lead? Then ultimately, did they end up becoming a

client. We can close that attribution gap between leads

and conversions and actual revenue, with a good

amount of accuracy. That was one portion.

Kevin Getch: The other portion was they're setting up their on site

analytics correctly, moving them over to Google Tag

Manager. Getting just better data, and then fixing all

of their local listings, because the UTM tags... There's

little things and people don't realize that sometimes in

a UTM tracking parameter if for source, if they put in...

The traffic in this case should be coming from a search

engine, because it was all Google My Business listings.

Kevin Getch: They had something like GMB listing in there or

Google My Business or something like that. What that

does is it just throws it in other category when you

actually look at analytics. This becomes a problem

when you're trying to understand and go up say 90%

of your conversions are coming from other. We don't

really know what that is. Well, as we looked into it

more we discovered what it was.

Kevin Getch: As we started to crack that UTM tracking parameters

on their actual Google My Business listings, now

they're able to actually get real data. They see how

many conversions are coming from it. We set it up so

that they know that it was coming from each

individual location. Then that individual location pulls

into their CRM data as well. Then it's about closing

that attribution gap so they understand where are we

getting our inquiries from?

Kevin Getch: Then are those inquiries turning into customers? How

much revenue do those customers equate to so that

they can look at what's their actual return on

investment? Because most businesses unfortunately

don't know. They know half my marketing is working,

they just don't know which half, right?

Kirill Eremenko: Yes. I guess what you said about driving those

numbers all the way to the revenue and understanding

where that revenue is coming from, and how it's

distributed across possibly different challenge

channels, different types of customers, and so on.

That's a very important thing for data scientists to

consider. It's in the best interest and should be a part

of a role of data scientist.

Kirill Eremenko: I think it is it, whether it's explicitly stated or

implicitly, if a data scientist is in the marketing space,

what the business cares about is the revenue. Is the

final bottom line. Nothing else. Good intentions or just

good work and things like that. That's not good

enough. Results and specifically revenue that's what

really matters.

Kevin Getch: Well, ultimately, that supports their clients, and that

supports their team. Because if they're putting... Will

say for a company, they're putting $100,000 behind a

marketing tactic that isn't working. That's not

effective. It's actually creating more costs for their

customers, it's bloated, they can't pay their employees

as much. If they can be more effective in their actual

marketing tactics, they can better serve their

customers, both the external ones and the internal

ones.

Kirill Eremenko: Yep. What role does segmentation play in all of this?

That's a big part or one of the core value adds that

data science can offer in space through machine

learning or through other techniques on segmentation

of customers. What kind of role does segmentation

play in Modern Marketing?

Kevin Getch: Well, the role it plays right now is already really cool.

The role it's going to play in the future is going to be

even cooler. Segmentation... Right now, you can

segment by different customer types. There's different

ways to set that up, whether you have customers that

are actually coming in and logging in based off their

previous, I guess, experience with you and your

website. You can start segmenting and changing the

messaging for different audiences based on their

previous experience with you in different ways.

Kevin Getch: Maybe they visited your website, and now they come

back, you could say welcome back. If they put in,

signed up for an email form in the past and put in

their name, you could say, welcome back, Kevin, or

you could start personalizing it a little bit more to

them because you've gathered this data on them and

you now know that, hey, this person is coming back

and it's Kevin.

Kevin Getch: When you start to personalize those things, it's like if

you send out an email to someone and just say, "Hey,

you." Or don't even address them by name, the

effectiveness rate of that drop significantly, but if you

actually address it to them, personalize it to them, so

it's being sent to them, the effectiveness is much

higher.

Kevin Getch: We're already starting to see that with our current

audiences. I still look at it as being a little... in its

infancy, because you might have customers who are

logged in or have accounts with you. Maybe it's an E-

commerce site, or maybe it's a educational based site,

whatever it may be. You can personalize based off that

information. Knowing they have certain experience

level with you, maybe they've reached a certain point

with you, they've been a customer for so long. You can

change your messaging. You can change your offers to

this.

Kevin Getch: I find this to be awesome but part of me is also torn

because I know what's going to happen in the future

and I already want it to be there. What I'd love to be

able to do is where segmentation is going to go is, by

utilizing machine learning is the only way I see this

possibly happening, is at scale being able to

communicate with large number of customers in a

personalized fashion that is going to be more effective

for every single individual as opposed to audience

segments.

Kevin Getch: Right now, for instance, Google, will use this audience

segments but they also personalize down to the

individual level to some extent based off of maybe

location or based off of search history and things like

that. For us, for business owners with a website, we

can start to personalize more effectively based of

location and based of previous history with the website

experience with you, and the business and the website

and things like that.

Kevin Getch: That's great but I think as Google's algorithm or

search engines algorithms become more down to the

individual level where they get to know you, we also as

businesses need to think about those three P's and

how can we be more personalized? How can we predict

the customers needs and how can we be proactive,

right?

Kevin Getch: Segmentation is going to become even more critical in

the future because it's going to have to be done at a

algorithmic level and be able to communicate

effectively. Right now, one way we do that is with

chatbots. You can create chatbots but to me, at least,

the experiences I've seen, are not as personalizes as I

would like them. They're not very...

Kevin Getch: Sometimes they're very ineffective, honestly, then

sometimes they're effective because it'... It's more of an

if this, then that kind of communication, as opposed to

a learning communication where it's had 10s, or

hundreds of thousands of conversations and it's

learned different patterns around people and how to

communicate effectively with those people based on

the words they use. We'll be able to look and

understand based on words people use, and maybe

when they start communicating with us

understanding what their disc profile is.

Kevin Getch: We might know what their personality profile's like to

some extent. We know that they prefer short, concise

communications and they like these words, or we have

someone else who might be on the far end of the

spectrum where they're very detail oriented, and they

want a lot of detail. There's going to be different ways

that we can communicate with them in the future.

That kind of segmentation is only going to be done, at

least at scale, it's only going to be done by machine

learning which is going to require data scientist to help

with that segmentation.

Kirill Eremenko: Very interesting. Basically, you're saying that

segmentation, as we see it today, where you have these

cohorts of customers, is going to be replaced with

personalization rather, where you don't try to fit

somebody into... Approximately, they fit into this

group of people, or approximately they fit into this

category of customers that we have. You find out more

and more information about them and personalize

your approach, your marketing, everything you can

towards that person.

Kevin Getch: That's exactly it. The only thing I'd say is you basically

would be drilling down farther. You'd still have the

categorization of this person is male and maybe in this

age range, or female and they tend to be... There

shopping for these general categories. You're still going

to have the affinity category that they're in and you're

still going to have what they're in market for.

[inaudible 00:45:43] those larger buckets but then,

with machine learning, with that capability, you'll be

able to drill down at the individual level, much like you

and I would be able to and actually talking to an

individual and really find out their specific needs.

Kevin Getch: What's so powerful about that is, when you find out

that individual's specific needs, what's actually

important to them, and then you deliver that, then

you're creating this amazing customer experience

rather than trying to just categorize them in this

general category, which is what we have to do now and

is more effective than not personalizing it, obviously.

That's the right way to do it. But again, we could fall

into assumptions. Not every male who's 32 years old is

going to have these preferences, right?

Kirill Eremenko: Yes. Very good. That's very [inaudible 00:46:36]. You

said that, already now, you're able to by the words

people use, create their disc profile, understand

whether there more detail or less detail, short phrases,

and so on. Are you able to disclose what kind of

technology, what kind of machine learning you use in

order to accomplish that?

Kevin Getch: Yes, there's a tool called Crystal Knows. It's C-R-Y-S-T-

A-L-K-N-O-W-S. Crystalknows.com and actually... I

utilize this and it's actually integrated with my

calendar. I also have it set up through... There's a

extension in Chrome. If I'm on someone's LinkedIn

profile, I can click the button and it will estimate their

disc profile based off of the information that's in their

social or their LinkedIn profile.

Kevin Getch: Actually, what's funny is I've done a lot... I use it for

interviews, I use it when we meet with clients.

Kirill Eremenko: Are you using it now?

Kevin Getch: Yes. I haven't used it with you, but I should have.

What's really cool about it is, it's actually really helped

me in communication because I am... In the disc

profile, I'm a very high D very high I. If I meet sit down

with someone and they're very high C, or high S, my

communication style may totally conflict with their

communication style. If I go in, and I know this person

is, say, a high C, I know they're going to be a little

more cautious. They're going to want a lot of details to

make a decision. Whereas I'm just like, "Hey, let's go,

let's move."

Kevin Getch: That's just my communication style. That's how I am.

That's fine but if I want to help them, I'm going to need

to communicate in the style that is effective for them.

I've actually asked a lot of the people, both that I've

interviewed as well as clients I've sat down with, and

I've showed them, "Hey, this is what I came up with, is

this correct?" And they're like, "Oh, wow." They're

reading it. They're like, you're not... It's pretty accurate

actually. I'd give it maybe an 80% accuracy rating

which is pretty good for just going off of LinkedIn.

Kirill Eremenko: Interesting. Basically to... This is interesting podcast

because you are obviously an expert in the space of

marketing. I'm in my head trying to convert all these

things that you're saying about the future, which is

very insightful about where we're going. I'm trying to

convert this into, alright, what does that mean for data

scientists who are listening to this. What kind of

technology should they be looking in for their future

careers, if they want to get into the space of marketing

or if they're already there and they want to be

successful?

Kirill Eremenko: Sounds like to me that a massive role is going to be

played by natural language processing. Not only just a

massive role, but in order to accomplish this

segmentation to personalization transition, we are

going to have to move away from algorithms like

sessions. K means clustering, K nearest neighbors and

other ways of creating these segmentations to

something that creates personalization. That is

predominantly natural language processing.

Kevin Getch: Computer vision, natural language processing, I think

are probably two areas that are going to grow a lot.

Obviously, natural language processing is more of the

foundation because everything starts from that

language. Actually part of Ray Kurzweil coming to

Google was understanding the... Coming up with

semantic search. He was big with semantic search and

understanding word vectors and creating an actual

framework for understanding the semantics,

understanding the intent behind a user's query.

Kevin Getch: There's a lot that he came up with. That's the

foundation. What I think is interesting is I think, we'll

see a lot more in computer vision as well because part

of the problem there is just processing power. It's

grown a lot so we've seen a lot. Again, you take

something like Google Photos, gives you unlimited

ability to upload your photos. It's the one of the things

I really like about what Google does is they're like,

"Hey, let me give you this free tool that's just massive

value, because now my phone's not clogged up with all

these videos and all these photos."

Kevin Getch: Then they're like, "Do you want the ability to be able to

tag and sort and view and search all your images." I'm

like, yes, I want that ability. I'm sitting here looking to

sell this elliptical machine. It's in the garage behind a

bunch of stuff. I'm like, I think I might have a picture

of it somewhere. I just go on Google Photos and I

search for elliptical and a photo pops up with the

elliptical machine that's in the garage only in half the

picture but it still found it.

Kevin Getch: That's the power of computer vision. That's why they

have such... They're getting this large data set of

everyone's photos and then they're using that to train

it, and then based off your interactions with it, if it's

actually working, all that kind of stuff. As processing

power improves, computer vision is going to come in a

lot more. I think, always on video will be something

that we'll see in the future. Maybe farther down the

road, but, and the ability to process all that

information and see everything as we go. Tie that in

with augmented reality and some of the other things

and the ability to process and record that.

Kevin Getch: There's definitely going to be a lot in both those fields.

I agree 100% that natural language processing is

foundational for all of this.

Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. Natural language processing, and computer

vision technologies. If you want to get into this space

of marketing in the way that is going to be in the

future. Any other trends in marketing that involve

technology or data science that you're witnessing

currently that you're anticipating?

Kevin Getch: It coincides but I think there's still some delineation

between chatbots and digital systems. I do think

chatbots are definitely something that is going to

continue growing significantly. Again, it's one of those

things where there's definitely a close relation between

chatbots and assistance to some extent. They're still

very clearly delineated in a lot of ways as well. I think

right now, as I been utilizing chatbots a little bit more

and working with them and testing them out for

clients and things like that, I think there's a lot of

different methods.

Kevin Getch: One of my friends and colleagues, Larry Kim, created a

company called Mobile Monkey. One of the things that

they've done is basically created a chatbot that is

integrated with Facebook Messenger. While that

doesn't seem... Okay, there's a lot of chatbots,

Facebook Messenger and all that, what I found really

interesting is the ability to then tie it in Facebook itself

and when you have a post... You might post on

Facebook, and you put in something called a comment

guard.

Kevin Getch: When someone goes in and comments on that post,

whether it's being pushed out, boosted or by an ad, or

whether it's just an organic post, a comment, you can

automatically have your chatbot, send them a quick

message saying, "Hey, thanks for commenting." You

can actually start developing that conversation

automated. Then it has a whole funnel that you can

bring them down and say, "Hey..." And start gathering

more information. Are you a CEO? Are you an

executive, marketing manager or a business owner

maybe? You might ask that. They say that, then you

can take them down this path.

Kevin Getch: To me, I honestly think that there's so much value in

that right now. My concern is it can come across

intrusive in some areas. You have to be really careful

as a business to not just go out there and be like oh,

let me do this. Let me actually test this. If you go out

to all your customers all of a sudden, and you have a

chatbot that's messaging them all these different

things and it's going through Facebook Messenger,

some people may feel like Facebook Messenger is not

the place to do that.

Kevin Getch: That's the problem when you have segmentation. All

those fragmentation, you have all these different

marketing channels and all these different tactics. You

have to not only understand what's appropriate there

and what's going to be effective but how is my

customer going to respond to this? Possibly starting

out with a smaller test and starting to see how that

works. Because I've had people message me through

Facebook Messenger and I'm like, "Why are they..." I

felt a little violated.

Kevin Getch: I'm like why are you calling me through Facebook

Messenger on the weekend. I don't get it. I barely know

you. Why are you calling on Facebook Messenger? I

think that's big. There's a lot of things that I'm really

excited about in the area of... I guess, just overall. One

of my main areas is just search. Organic search.

Search engine optimization as well as paid search.

Kevin Getch: We have a team of specialists that do all this but for

me, I think it's really exciting to see where that is

going. Machine learning is being used in search

algorithms for quite a while. The technology, the ability

to have better answers and questions. Some of the

stuff is fundamental. When I say fundamental, it's

more I think in its infancy. In the past, if you would

ask... You would go online, and you would search for

the Statue of Liberty, say, "Where's the Statue of

Liberty?" Then you would do another search

afterwards and you would say, "How tall is it?" It

wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Kevin Getch: It would just look for the words, how tall is it in a

bunch of documents. This is where semantics changes

it because you have this history. You have their search

history, you know, they just searched for the Statue of

Liberty. When you say how tall is it, it knows that

you're referencing the Statue of Liberty and will

actually tell you how tall the Statue of Liberty is.

That's just a small example of some of the changes.

Kevin Getch: In the US at least, you can search for a hotel. If you're

using Google Assistant search for a hotel and it will

ask you, "Do you know what dates you are going?" You

can say I'm going these dates. Then it will say, "Would

you like to narrow the things by amenities or pricing or

ratings. Things like that." You can start to narrow it.

It's all voice. This is all done by voice or prompts on

your screen like a text message almost. Then it will

provide you personalized results.

Kevin Getch: That's already happening. I mean, to me, a lot of the

stuff I'm talking about is already here, it's just to the

level. It's growing at a different extent. To me, I think

some of the areas in search that I think businesses

can take advantage of is a lot of the searches. What

Google's trying to do is they move to at one point

becoming more of what they call an answer engine

where they come up with answers.

Kevin Getch: I think they're moving away from answer engine and

becoming more of a... They're moving towards

becoming an assistant. That's the direction that

they're going. You can still take advantage of that by

making sure that you're creating the right kind of

content. If you know what questions your customers

are asking, you know what they're interested in. If you

really understand your customer really deeply, then

you can provide better content and better solutions for

those customers.

Kevin Getch: One of the, I guess, assertions that I make in my book

is that customer experience will become one of the

largest ranking factors in the next 10 years. The

simple analogy I use is, if you were referring your

friends to a business and they weren't having a good

experience, how long would you do that for?

Probably... Not very long, right?

Kirill Eremenko: Yes, of course.

Kevin Getch: This is the same with a search engine, their business

is dependent on how well they do at referring people to

your business. They're looking, understanding the

customer understanding who they're referring to and

is this going to provide value for them? Is this going to

meet their needs, the intent of what they're searching

for? The better you can do at providing that the better.

Customer experience, whether it be when someone

comes to your website, does it load quickly? Do they

find what they're looking for? Is the website laid out in

a mobile friendly fashion?

Kevin Getch: All those different factors come into play, as well as

how's the content laid out and does it answer the

question specifically or is it buried in a bunch of other

information on the site, there's so much that comes

into play there.

Kirill Eremenko: Very interesting that you mentioned where Google is

going because this actually echoes something that one

of my previous guests, Khai Pham, on two podcasts

before this one mentioned and he was talking about,

in the 20th century, we lived in a world of information

and hence that's where the search engines came from.

The 21st century, we live in an age of knowledge and

therefore the next step from search engine is a

reasoning engine.

Kirill Eremenko: Something that you ask a question... You can ask a

question not just get like you said one short answer,

but something that will do the reasoning for you and

do the research and give you the appropriate

descriptions, experiences, and whatever it is that

you're after to understand you much better. Sounds

like the Google Assistant that it's moving towards

might be exactly that.

Kevin Getch: Yes I would agree with that 100%. The assistant is

basically an advanced version that is, again, not even

just reasoning, but personalized. They're going to

know if my... When we look for a restaurant, my wife

likes to go to gluten free places, food preferences. If

you've seen anything about Google duplex, it can call

up and make reservations.

Kevin Getch: I could say, "Hey, find me some good restaurants.

Some place I haven't been to that you think we're

going to like." It could go out there and search and

say, "Based on people who have reviewed restaurants

like you have in the past that like those, have also

reviewed this highly." They could use that information.

They could say they have gluten free information and

items on their menu for your wife. Would you like me

to call make reservations? The system calls up and

actually makes the reservation for you as well.

Kevin Getch: It's little beyond reasoning and that's why I like to call

it assistance because it's going to actually do actions

on your behalf as well. You can ask it to go purchase

something. You can tell it to call and make you a

reservation. There's a lot of things that's actually going

to do much like an assistant would.

Kirill Eremenko: Got you. Well, thank you very much for sharing that.

This actually brings us to the close of this podcast.

Just to recap, you shared the three main piece of

marketing, where it's going, personalized, predictive,

proactive, and that's all going to be enabled by

technology. That's where data scientists come in and

they need to look out for trends that will facilitate this

transition and will facilitate the future marketing.

Kirill Eremenko: That's the best bet to be successful in the world of

marketing that's coming. Is to work on these skills,

work on these technologies, such as we identified

computer vision and natural language processing as a

couple in order to be most prepared for the future

that's coming. Is that all right?

Kevin Getch: That sounds great.

Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. Well, once again, thank you so much, Kevin,

for coming. If anybody wants to grab your book it's

called Future Proof Your Marketing. Just came out.

Apart from that, where else can people find you,

connect with you?

Kevin Getch: I love to connect with people on LinkedIn, our

company website, webfor.com. We have a blog on there

consistently and put up new information and

resources and stories. As well as my own website,

Kevingetch.com.

Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kevin,

appreciate you coming on the show today and talk to

you later.

Kevin Getch: Thank you, Kirill, I appreciate you having me on.

Kirill Eremenko: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for tuning in to the

podcast today and spending this hour with us. I hope

you enjoyed our conversation with Kevin and got some

valuable insights from what we discussed. My favorite

takeaway was the whole idea behind digital assistants.

Very interesting where the world is going. Possibly very

soon our search will actually be... Not just search but

a conversation with a digital assistant.

Kirill Eremenko: I think Kevin did a great job portraying what that will

look like in terms of how we're going to want our

personal assistance or digital assistance to be

personalized and therefore understand us better. Even

though we all have these privacy considerations and

we don't want our data to be leaked or anything like

that. At the same time, we will want our digital

assistants to know us better so they can help serve

our needs better.

Kirill Eremenko: That'll be a very interesting future we're heading into.

As you can imagine, data scientists and artificial

intelligence experts, machine learning engineers are all

going to have a massive role in that. Hopefully, this

podcast outlined what to look out for. Kevin's book is

called Future Proof Your Marketing. It just came out

recently. Two days ago as of when this podcast is

launched, two days before that. You can go and pick it

up and learn more about Kevin's perspective on

marketing and where this whole field is going.

Kirill Eremenko: Of course, as always, you can get the show notes for

this episode at www.superdatascience.com/281 where

you will also get any of the materials mentioned on

this episode plus the transcript. On that note, thank

you so much for being here. I look forward to seeing

you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.