Soundbytes: Acxiom, Client Command + WHB & Associates

Dustin Raney:

We all know that data is valuable, but let's be honest, not all data is created equal. And if the CMO of a major car manufacturer, for instance, is wanting to decide where do I spend my next marketing dollar, wouldn't it make sense to start with people who are actually showing intent to buy that car or their car or someone else's car? That's the holy grail of marketing insights, the in- market signal. The difference between guessing and knowing exactly where to focus your efforts. Today, we're diving deep into why intent data is a game changer for marketers. It's the thing they've been waiting for. Jonathan Lucinae, founder and CEO of Client Command and Wally Burchfield, president of WHB and Associates LLC. They're here to break down how brands can stop wasting budget and start driving real results with the power of in- market signals. So Wally, let's start with you.

Wally Burchfield :

Yeah. Thanks, Dustin and Kyle. It's great to be with you guys here today and great to be with Jonathan as well. I started in the retail car business. I grew up on the retail side turning wrenches and doing things and spent 20 years inside General Motors and another 12 inside the Nissan Infinity world. And then I ran the ad agencies for Nissan for four years and now I just do some consulting in this space. I love this part of the business, a place to be passionate about delivering great experiences for consumers. At the same time, all the people that are in the food chain of how we get from buying a car to owning a car to buying a car again, it's really important. Real important. So thanks for letting me be here.

Dustin Raney:

Thank you. Glad to have you. Jonathan, how about yourself?

Jonathan Lucenay:

Yeah, Dustin, Kyle, thanks for having me. Always love being with you guys. I started in retail as well and in the auto industry, worked for several large groups for about 10 years. And then 25 years ago, I founded Client Command and we bring marketing technology and data solutions to automotive dealers and OEMs. And that's kind of been the legacy of the company. I think we're going to talk a little today about how that created or launched the Active Shopper Network.

Kyle Hollaway:

Excited to be

Jonathan Lucenay:

With you guys.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. Again, thank you guys for making time and certainly a very dynamic industry in that it's always something new, right? Things are coming around from all of the automotive OEMs as well as the whole shift from ICE to EV and now questions on EV. Where are things going? So certainly a lot of interesting things, but really it's because of the direct touch with the consumer. I mean, everybody has a car in United States and in some cases people have mini cars, but I mean, it's just a fundamental really kind of need the way societally we're kind of structured. I live in Arkansas, a little more rural than others. And so if you're going anywhere, you kind of need a car because everything's kind of spread out. Certainly in New York City and such, it may be a little bit different dynamic, but automotive is probably touching most every household in America in some way.

So this aspect of being able to leverage technology, data, identity to specifically market to consumers at the dealer level all the way up to the OEM is really interesting. So Jonathan, yes, step into us a little bit, give us a little history lesson around like the active shopper network. Why that? How did you kind of coalesce on that and then what is it and where's it going?

Jonathan Lucenay:

Yeah. So I'll rewind all the way back to 2001 and we realized there was a serious need in auto, a big ticket purchase to get better at predictive, to do a better job of identifying who might shop. And we got better and better and better in that process. And in the mid teens of the 21st century, we realized the next step has to be collecting in- market signals

Online and doing that in a responsible way to provide the right information to consumers because 90% of the shopping journey, if not more, takes place online. So we created and patented the Active Shopper Network in 2018. And at a high level, what it does is exactly what it sounds like. It flags consumers that are shopping for various things, good services, high ticket items mainly. So in the case of cars, it would be what car they're shopping for, what their competitive set is. So what competitors are talking to that consumer? Why do they want to buy that car? What's their dominant buying motive? What's their intensity? And collects those information, scores each consumer and then allows companies to say, "Hey, I want to know when my customers are shopping again." And we can feed them a flag and an intensity score. We can also, for that company, help them identify people that are shopping for their vehicle or other goods or service that haven't purchased, haven't been to their website and said, "Hey, I'm ready to do something." And if handled responsibly, and I know this is a big passion for you guys, that creates an opportunity to build trust with a customer.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, really finding them in that moment that matters the most. Jonathan, I guess one question I have, we all go out there and we'll build a car, right having no intent to actually buy the car. I've gone out to Tesla or to Lexus or even Porsche, just dreaming my future car, kind of building that, but I'm not really in market. So are you saying that you guys have the technology that can kind of cut through some of that noise even to understand, all right, we know based on these behaviors that there's really no true intent there. So this really isn't a true end market signal. Can you kind of explain that a little

Jonathan Lucenay:

Bit? Dustin, we might categorize your poor shopping as aspirational.

Kyle Hollaway:

That's a ply way to put it.

Jonathan Lucenay:

So our AI, and we've been using AI for over 10 years. Before LLMs became popular in all the rage, there was NLP, natural language processing. And we actually consume the data on each page. We compare it to your household income and other variables that we would know that would begin to tell us, "Hey, are we looking at a shopper or not? " There are also specific things that aspirational shoppers do that real shoppers don't do and vice versa is also true. And so we've learned that over years and can differentiate with an intensity score.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. So Jonathan, that was really interesting. So it looks like you're leveraging kind of a broader spectrum of behavioral signals because you're collecting all these signals through your network to look at behavioral functions, but then also tying that to more demographic and psychographic information, kind of amalgamating that together through your trained AI to be able to recognize certain patterns. So like you're saying, there's patterns for the aspirational buyer such as Dustin, or you're looking at others that may be providing very specific signals, not through a single channel necessarily, but acros the breadth of how you're collecting the data to be able to recognize like, "Oh, that's really a motion there that would lead to a purchase and there's demographic types of information that would support kind of your segmentation of those individuals and so you can target that. " And so that's pretty cool. How have you found the effectiveness of that when you guys are comparative to more traditional offline modeling that may just try to be predictive in general on a population say they're in market?

Jonathan Lucenay:

Yes, that's a great question. So we've actually run predictive audiences from most of the major companies through the Active Shopper Network. And what we find is anywhere from two to 20% of the audience of in- market shoppers are actually shopping. Another way to look at that is to flip it and say 98%, maybe as low as 80% of that is people that look like people that are shopping.

Kyle Hollaway:

And when

Jonathan Lucenay:

You start thinking about spending 80 to 98% of your media dollars on people that aren't actually shopping, that's a whole lot of money that can either be saved or redirected to drive higher results.

Kyle Hollaway:

So what do you think, and maybe this for Wally as a industry insider but kind of observant of that, what do you think is driving that different of a perspective of the modeled audience versus like an active shopper network? Is it time? Is it just the ability to collect the signal or what do you think it is?

Wally Burchfield :

Yeah, it's a great question, Kyle. I think at the end of the day from an automotive company perspective, one, there's a lot of passion around first party data for a lot of different reasons, but owning and being relational to that first party and trying to carry that through a journey and build a relationship, you have one set of data and you start to lean on predictive signals because those consumers are not going to tell you when they're shopping and the active shopper network, which is amazing to me and part of the reason to try to even help put the two organizations together, the client command team and the Acxiom team, not only when you think about the value and the trust, consent and transparency of really having passion around the data, but for an automotive company, there are a lot of things that go into not only brand opinion consideration awareness all the way down to the point of trying to do tier three marketing and conversion, but all of that journey has a lot of other tentacles to it that are not even really in the marketing space.

As Jonathan mentioned, when you start spending 70, 80% on opinion consideration, you're throwing a lot of money there and you're maybe stretching and not getting the elasticity out of your CNI budget, or you may learn that even your inventory is not in the right market. I mean, there are so many rich things in this data that are important, the enrichment of the data and how an automotive company might use it, how a big automotive vendor that supports automotive companies, as well as when you get to Jonathan's, how the company started really supporting at the tip of the spear, the dealer, right? Building trust, helping a consumer have a great experience, but it is not uncommon predictive, whether it's equity mining. I mean, dealers really want this kind of data. They spend a lot of money on leads and so trying to provide them not only with their own consumer data, but as Jonathan mentioned, having the signals of people that have not made the dealer aware they're looking at their inventory, putting those two things together kind of in a real idea, real identity, you start to raise the ability to impress the consumer, build trust with the consumer, serve up to them what they're really looking for versus what we all do.

We spend a lot of time in the digital space spinning through the noise. And so trying to get that noise out and raise that customer experience is a huge value to anybody in the food chain always pursuing a relationship with the consumer.

Jonathan Lucenay:

Yeah. And I think, Kyle, your initial question touched on results and a dealer group of about 30 stores and a large website company were running some ad campaigns with Amazon and they decided to compare AB test the audience of the active shopper network against the Amazon audience. The difference was five to one in return from actually targeting people that were already shopping and not only was the difference five to one in return, but when they got to the consumer as soon as they started shopping, the gross profit on a transactional basis was 36% higher.

Kyle Hollaway:

Wow, that's huge.

Wally Burchfield :

Those are all things that are music to a dealer's ear and music to an automotive company's ear. And it's not so much about profit. Everybody thinks it's about profit. It's really about utilizing the assets they have and every automotive company has different hills to climb, whether it's the product cycle they're facing or the segmentation they're going after, they all have different things they're chasing and we would all like to have flexibility with our resources to accomplish the results we want. And so the better you're at in this kind of thing, the more you have flexibility to really build and nurture that relationship with the consumer, it's amazing.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. Really allows you to fine tune the media spin, right? Focus those dogs- Significantly. And Wally, since we kind of have your attention, and maybe I should have done this at the beginning, this is a testament to our audience of the importance of industry events. Wally and I actually met at a Forrester conference back in this past summer, right? And that's what got through. May of

Wally Burchfield :

Last year, yep.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, May of last year. And it was obvious immediate the first time I met Wally, an incredible person, incredible leader. And some people you just meet within a minute, you're like, "Man, I just want to know everything about them." Well, we've been kind of building a relationship in the background for what, about a year now. And so Wally, what did you see between Client Command and Acxiom as a kind of one plus one equals three? What was it that you kind of saw in that relationship that could be a differentiator?

Wally Burchfield :

Yeah, that's a great question and I appreciate the kind comments. Given my background and looking at what the organizations are doing and learning how Jonathan's team approaches and values the trust element of PII and really using those shopping signals and you and I meeting and I know other folks within your organization, Theresa Gorman and others who I've known over the years in the industry, the two organizations have the value of the consumer's information really high. We want to protect that relationship and Jonathan's team, very focused many years in automotive. There are a lot of adjacent things to automotive that really in all of our lives are connected. And so as I started to see what you guys were working on, I heard your presentation at that Forrester event and I thought, "My goodness, this organization has a very similar belief system of very similar approach to the value of a consumer, the value and protection of a consumer's information and wanting to deliver high, high relational, high good experience." And sitting where I sit, kind of connecting the dots of companies, it's like, wow, they're both trying to solve a problem, but they really need to lean on each other.

The things you guys have as an organization and the breadth of your organization, not just automotive, but other functional vertical areas that are somewhat adjacent, some are not adjacent, but the behavioral signals of what somebody wants to spend time on, Jonathan's technology married to how Acxiom looks at the real ID and how you value that, it's just a natural relationship. I mean, it jumped off the page at me. I think when you and I first started talking at that event, we quickly, it did not, for the audience, it did not take us days to start to connect the dots and see how exciting that was. And as a group, I think I recall you guys went to Atlanta, which is where Client Command is based and we've been on that journey ever since and we are having fun, which should be part of what we all do.

It shouldn't just be work. We should enjoy what we do.

Kyle Hollaway:

There you go. So Jonathan, kind of playing off of that then talk a little bit about your perspective as Wally, a trusted advisor to you guys comes in and kind of introduces you to Acxiom, what was your thought processes there?

Jonathan Lucenay:

Well, so first off, we trust Wally in both his experience, but more importantly, his character. And when he says, "Hey, I've got some guys that I think are your kind of people that you need to talk to, " that means a lot because what he's saying is

These people valu people. They value the consumer, they want to serve them, they don't want to use them, they want to do things right professionally and personally. And that went a long way. And then of course from the just connecting the dots side of things, when we started talking, not only did we connect personally on some of those things, but we also realized, hey, this real ID is fantastic and it's got a ton of demographic and psychographic information that can be used in real time for clients and personalization is the way to serve a customer. But if you bring in real time signals from off of the customer's website, you can enrich it so much that you're able to take it to a whole nother level. And then that started the conversation about, "Well, what else could we do with that data in both retention and acquisition?"

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, I love that. And then this is a great story because it is based off of trust, right? Just being able to immediately connect with people in the industry at a level of trust and then be able to pursue ultimately that goal, like you said, of serving the customer. I mean, we work in very different parts of the industry in many ways, us being more on the agency holdco side of business, technology enablement, you're working directly historically with dealers that are very close to the customer, but then coming together and being able to really innovate and bring a new capability to a broader range of businesses to really advance their ability, like you said, to personalize on one side, customer engagement and then the value also to the publisher or to the advertiser, sorry, the value to the advertiser, being able to understand, "Hey, I can optimize my spend here and not lose.

I'm going to gain to Wally's point, it's not that I'm going to gain because I'm going to be able to do more advertising. I can keep spending the same amount of money. It's like I may be able to shift some of that spend into other critical areas of my business without seeing a negative impact overall of lower sales or lack of conversion and such." So that for me personally, I'm so invigorating to be able to say, "Hey, we can serve the customer by being able to really help deliver real time experiences that are tailored and really meet them where they are. " At the same time, serving the advertiser by providing economies of scale and the ability to be more targeted and more efficient and make better use of the assets that they have and then together also be able to serve each other or being able to bring a great product to market and opportunity to grow in that way.

So it is one of those cool kind of win-win-win situations in my opinion. So that's been a neat journey there.

Jonathan Lucenay:

I love how you put that, Kyle. None of us as consumers want to do more work than we have to. And when a brand can feed me the next piece of information that I need in my shopping journey, they win trust. They gain something there and that's really what we're trying to do together.

Kyle Hollaway:

Love it. So we've talked a lot about automotive and A, I think it's also hilarious that a couple of car guys can get together with a bunch of identity wonks and actually come up with something that makes sense. I love that, right? And I think it taps into the potential of stuff. Let me step back for just a minute because this has just been hitting me and just kind of a curious thing and you're seeing it kind of on the ground in spades, but the customer journey, this aspect that like a car, major purchase and a very tangible purchase, right? I mean, it's a physical thing that ultimately you have to get to and get in and drive around so much of that journey seems to have moved into the digital space. Talk to me how that's playing out. I mean, because Wally, you've been up at the OEM level looking at the tier one and Jonathan, you've been working a lot with the tier three over time and starting to meld those together.

Talk to me about the transformation of that journey, like how you've seen the people change in regard to buying a car.

Wally Burchfield :

Jonathan, I'm going to take the first round. Go ahead.

Jonathan Lucenay:

All right, from my perspective, Kyle, 50 years ago, the American consumer depended heavily on the car salesman to learn about the vehicle. 25 years ago, the consumer started to be able to access information on their own and to do their own research. So that changed the role of a car salesperson or even a car dealership at that point somewhat for the good, some for the bad, but it changed, right? And today you can do the entire transaction without ever going to a dealership. Most consumers still choose to go to a dealership, but when we look at a dealership's customer base and then we compare that to which of those consumers are shopping, what we see is about 95% of the consumers that are shopping haven't been to the dealer's website

Or the dealership as recorded in their CRM on their website with identity resolution or in their point of sale system. That's a pretty big number of people that are out there shopping that the dealer client has the brand has no way to know that they're shopping other than to engage with the active shopper network and say, "Okay, now I know they're shopping. Can I feed them information that will help them?" And so where we've seen the transition, sorry, I got my words garbled. You can edit that out. Where we've seen the transition is that we've seen the consumer take more and more responsibility for finding out what's going on. They appreciate more the ability for the brand to be omniscient to a degree and say, "Hey, here's what you might be interested in. " Just like if we were shopping for houses, we might appreciate it if a Zillow recommended a house to us that fit our criteria.

Well, imagine being able to do that without you ever going on and configuring what your criteria is, nor having to go back and change it as you change your mind during your shopping journey.That's really the way we've seen the Active Shopper Network engage with consumers and the consumer's behavior has started to change. Wally, I'll let you add to that whatever you see fit.

Wally Burchfield :

Yeah. The one thing I would add to that, and I agree with that completely because of the being able to monitor that behavior and change without the consumer having to really take action other than just their continual shopping is big because you're learning day to day what they're doing, what they're looking at. From an automotive perspective, from an OEM perspective, obviously they start at tier one and trying to drive opinion consideration their launching vehicles and they start with a really wide net of trying to get people interested in their vehicles and then help and partner with dealers to drive people into their funnel, so to speak, to kind of look at their products. But let's face it, it is a competitive world. Everybody's going to have two or three models of the same segment in their competitive set. They're going to move around over the shopping journey.

And so for the automotive companies, they've seen the consumers become more educated on their own. And so they constantly are looking at how do they advance on the digital side. At the same time, as you see most major automotive companies, they're doing big sponsorships, big partnerships and so they throw, because they are large organizations, they throw a lot against the wall. And so what I think the two companies bring to this is the ability to sit back down with those automotive clients and say, "We may have a little different product that can help you be a little sharper on the consumer experience, being able to provide more elasticity to your resources for other things that are important to you, drive better retention with the consumer." And in the case of the dealer who's their ultimate partner, at least in the US, for most of the brands except for maybe a Tesla as a direct sell, you still need them to be healthy.

They have to be healthy. And so everybody has to win in this, to your point, it has to be a win-win-win, including the partnerships of the teams like Acxiom and Client Command that bring these types of products and tools to the automotive organizations and to the dealer groups. And so I see this and back to Dustin's earlier question quickly in my mind, I started to connect those dots saying, "Oh my goodness, this is an opportunity to really leverage two organizations that have a lot of the same values, a lot of the same approach, a lot of the same trust." And I look at it from the height of the vertical, from the top of the automotive company down to the dealer, because that's where I've spent my entire career up and down that channel and it's a chance to bring that together on their behalf.

It's really exciting.

Dustin Raney:

So if I'm a marketer for an automotive company right now, I'm salivating to get my hands on this technology, right? The end market, like I want this right now, but what if I'm a marketer for a financial services company or maybe a cruise line company or travel or insurance? Does this same kind of in- market signal kind of technology that we've been talking about translate into those other industries? Jonathan, you want to take this one? Yeah.

Jonathan Lucenay:

Yeah. The technology is agnostic, Dustin. It doesn't care what industry it is, so you can apply it across any vertical. In Q1 this year, we launched home services and that's going fantastic. With you guys, we hope to touch a few more verticals.

Wally Burchfield :

Let me add one thing to it. I think one thing that's interesting too, when you think about the technology and the technology of both companies, one, be able to do the behavioral signals that Jonathan's technology brings to the table, but also the richness of attribution. Both companies have big attribution around identity. And when you start to think about all of us as human beings, families, singles, parents, all those things going through life and journeying, kind of to Kyle's earlier point, we all ultimately probably have to own a car even if you're in Manhattan, because I've had an office there at a time in my career, you still have to have a car. The peripheral, the adjacent verticals, the The insurances, the finances, home services, it is about life and it's about can we help the shopping journey really in any of those verticals in a way that makes it easier for the consumer?

They're not having to go through the noise of the data. They're not having to, one, they get to choose somebody that really they can trust with their PII with my information, which is always on top of everybody's ... Can we do that and can we have a relationship that's trusting and then bring that great experience there? So I don't really see other verticals as being that much of a challenge other than maybe pharma and things that are medical gets a litle different. But in our normal course of life, home, insurance, cars, entertainment, travel, experiential if I put my advertising world hat on, I mean, experiential budgets in all the automotive companies is huge. It's huge. And to take that to another level because of listening to the consumer based on how they do things behaviorally and bringing that to the table is a game changer.

I look at this as something exciting because it takes the industry to a different place on automotive, almost disrupting itself in a positive way to be better on behalf of the dealer, better on behalf of the consumer. That's a win-win-win.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. And I guess would you say also that really it makes sense to, especially in big ticket items, to kind of start there where the journey might be a little bit longer. It's a bigger decision. So it's more competitive in some ways. Someone's not just buying impromptu. If I'm buying a red shirt from an Amazon or whatever, I might not have even gone to Amazon intending to buy that red shirt. So it's like that signal, the intent, all those things can happen really fast. In these cases, you're talking about potentially months of deciding on a car or deciding on which cruise line to take or even what credit card has the best offer where I want

Wally Burchfield :

To

Dustin Raney:

Start doing my banking, right?

Wally Burchfield :

Yep.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. I like Wally what statement you made there I think is pretty critical and that is the aspect of listening to the consumer. I think in this day and age when there's so much going on and a lot of media hype around things in this sense of like a surveillance economy and this aspect of like, "Oh, they're watching it's bad and stuff." But again, in a trusted consented model, putting that lens on of these signals are about listening to consumer.

Yeah, some of it may be through observation, but it's understanding like this consumer's going through a journey and it may be a stressful journey. I mean, honestly, buying a car and many times that's one of your biggest purchases in your life outside of maybe your home. And so it could be a stressful time and the aspect of helping a brand empathize with that through trying to tailor their messaging and their engagement with that consumer based on where that consumer is in that journey. I think that's transformational. And again, about talking about bringing trust, I've got eight kids, so I've bought many cars in my life way more than I've ever intended to buy.

Wally Burchfield :

As

Kyle Hollaway:

An

Wally Burchfield :

Industry, we thank you for that.

Kyle Hollaway:

Well, that's for another conversation. But the aspect of when I engage with that purchasing process, the thought that somebody could actually kind of empathize with me knowing A, that I am actually looking, being able to understand based on my signals and things of what type I'm looking for, what my capacity to purchase is, what my timing is, what my location. I mean, there's so many things that could help me in that journey just by engaging me and not being like, "Oh, I've got this thing that's totally out of your price range. It's totally across the country." All these things and just being like, "Okay, that did not help me. " But if you can be like, "Hey, Kyle, I can tell you're really looking for a car right now. It looks to be this type of car. We've got great deals on this. Maybe it's number three on my consideration set, which by the way, I think your consideration set capability is off the charts advantageous to brands." But just being able to say, "Oh, I know this is in your consideration.

Maybe it's a little low on your consideration set, but here's what we can do as a brand to help you that's going to help drive that up. It's good for the brand because now I'm moving up in my consideration set." It's great for me because it's like maybe it was lower in consideration set because I felt like it was maybe priced out of my range or something, but now they're meeting me where I'm at. And so I say that's a really interesting mindset to shift to from a marketing perspective of this is not about surveilling, this is not about trying to get one up on the customer or anything. This is about listening to the customer, trying to empathize with them and then meet them where they are with this information to really drive more value. So I love that. Well, Dustin, looks like we're running out of time once again.

Unfortunately, text through our wrap up questions?

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. So Jonathan, Wally, we typically like to end with a fun question this year's question being, if you fed all the data about yourself into AI, what are the three words it would produce to describe who you are? So maybe Jonathan, maybe we start with you. What would those three words be about Jonathan?

Jonathan Lucenay:

Well, I'll tell you what I hope they would be. How about that?

Kyle Hollaway:

That'll work.

Jonathan Lucenay:

I hope they would be faith and because I have an abiding faith in God, I hope they would be people because I am motivated most by helping people reach their potential, specifically helping leaders and I hope they would be results. So faith, people and results.

Dustin Raney:

Wow. Love that. There you go. Wally.

Wally Burchfield :

Yeah. I guess if you're coming to me, I would almost say ditto. I mean, because both Jonathan and I are strong in faith and I lead through that and it takes me down the path of thinking about doing what's right for the consumer. And in my mind, for me, both of these companies to me are a consumer. You have in clients that are consumers. And so I value the opportunity and the privilege to be able to be on that journey. And so it's the people aspect as well. It's super important. And like anything, there is measurement. We want measurement and failure's not bad because I learned from failure, but I want to drive results and I want results to be positive for those partners. And so those are the things that pop out. I think that's what would show up if you did AI against me.

Kyle Hollaway:

There you go.

Dustin Raney:

I think Colin and I would agree. Those three words sum you both up very well. Incredible people. It's an honor to work with you.