Discover your archetype
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The importance of a holistic data strategy, optimizing the marketing tech stack, and being a true behaviorist are all topics we dive into with retail veteran Jesse Blount of National Vision. in this podcast episode. He shares his experiences in pulling together all the moving parts of tech investments, personalization and identity capabilities to successfully deliver seamless experiences while always maintaining a lens of increasing efficiency.
Transcript
Dustin Raney:
Hello everyone. We're on location here in the beautiful city of Chicago at Soho House. I get the honor of doing this with one of my very favorite colleagues, Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi industry expert.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Thank you, Dustin. I'm really excited to be here. Hi everyone. Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi. I look after our partner marketing at Acxiom and get to work with Dustin and many other awesome people at Acxiom.
Dustin Raney:
Yeah. So one of the favorite things that I get to do at my job is I get to meet incredible leaders across every aspect, every industry vertical that represent the brands that they serve. And over the past couple of years, I had the opportunity to get to meet Jesse Blount. He's the vice president of CRM, huge e-commerce and customer insights at National Vision. So Jesse, it's just been a real privilege to get to know you. Over the past couple of years, you're just what I would say is a servant leader. So I think it's not just the knowledge about the industry, it's how you treat people. Why don't you introduce yourself
Jesse Blount :
Who
Dustin Raney:
Are-
Jesse Blount :
Thanks, Dustin. I appreciate you guys having the invite. A little bit about myself, I've been in the retail marketing business for probably 25 years or so. Started my career actually out here in the city of Chicago. I was a business data manager for Sears back in the day and moved around from Sears to Miller Brewing to Kohl's Department stores where I built the Kohl's rewards loyalty program, really got embedded deep in there. And I started marketing before there was email and it was newspaper and television and you only had five channels to worry about. There was no such thing as digital media. I don't know if whether it was easier then or it's easier now with all the data that we have, but I went from there to Kohl's. I was the chief marketing officer for Bell's department stores in Florida. Loved that job. It was great.
But as a chief marketer, I'm a data guy. So I love looking at numbers and not necessarily into looking at ads and picking agencies. I'm a data guy. So my career has always kind of led me back to the data side of the business. From there, I went and worked at an agency for a while where I really enjoyed that because I got to see what happens across multiple different brands and got an appreciation for that. And I was recruited away to Oracle or I ran the CrowdTwist loyalty. I was the head of product for CrowdTwist, which was a scrappy litle startup in New York that was acquired by Oracle. And what I found though is as much as I love product and love building things, I love marketing more. And so when a chance came to go to National Vision and really take this brand that is well known to many people, but you don't know it as National Vision, you know it as America's best eyeglasses or you know it as Eyeglass World or Fred Meyer military brands and start to put them down a path of data and technology, which kind of led me into this conversation with you guys.
So it's a pleasure to be here.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
It's really impressive background and so much experience. And I love the thread of data because like you, I find that to be something that just connects every channel in marketing, everything that we do. You also mentioned technology and I know that National Vision has been on a journey also with their tech stack. And so I'm curious, given your breadth of expertise and experience, what do you look for when you're looking for that technology backbone to really fuel your marketing programs?
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I mean, I try to take the old adage of people, process and technology and I want to make sure that the technology and let's be honest, they're all pretty similar, whether it's Salesforce or Adobe or it's if you're going to compose a solution around and you don't go the enterprise route, they all do functionally the same thing. I think for me, it's to try to find that technology that one, it's easy for people to work in, that they can, it's intuitive. There's not a lot of point to point solutions. So when we got to the point of narrowing down, we said, "Well, we have to have an enterprise level solution. We need to find a partner that can serve our needs across many of our different channels and make it seamless in the integration." And that's how we ended up with our piece with Adobe or how we ended up with the Adobe relationship was I felt they had the best architecture internally of their platform that would really help us stitch together all of the different pieces.
So between the real-time CDP, the customer generating optimization analytics, it just seemed like that platform was the best for our solution.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Yeah. It's a great platform. Yes, to your point, lots of ease of use also. Can you talk a little bit about is Acxiom, what role did Acxiom play
Jesse Blount :
In this
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Journey?
Jesse Blount :
Well, Acxiom initially wasn't part of our early discussion. Well, actually I should back up a litle bit and say Acxiom was actually part of our very early discussions when we were going through the selection process, but one of the things I think as we got farther down in the development process, whenever I've gone into new organizations and looked at the data needs of an organization and understanding it, one of the things I look is to say, how do we resolve identity across our platforms? And because we're partially retailer, partially medical company, we have to abide by the HIPAA rules. And so finding a partner that was HIPAA compliant acros all of our different, how we store it, how we move it, how we maintain it was key to us. And we talked to other vendors and it just came that when we talked to Acxiom, their solution made the most sense for us.
I think you are a leader in the industry when it comes to that. And then I think when we look at where we think we can grow with Acxiom, that was really the main fit. And it started with the identity conversation and it's already blossomed into-
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Music to his ears.
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. It's already blossomed into data enrichment and I think we're going to sign something soon on another project. So I think it's just we look for partners that can grow with us as we evolve our technology stack, we need partners. And honestly, we were able to consolidate three or four different vendors out to bring Acxiom in. So I think that was a plus for all of us as well.
Dustin Raney:
For one, I love hearing you say at the beginning that you kind of came back to the data in your career even. It's like that you were CMO of massive brands that everybody knows about, but still are in that arena, but you value the importance of data. And I always remember you being kind of an intentional listener. As I'd be explaining maybe an identity thing, you'd be like, "That's exactly what we need." And I remember at one point I was talking about identity in the spectrum of applications and technology and then how identity, understanding who a person is data driven versus code driven. Is that an area that you kind of saw as a key kind of decisioning factor? I mean, you already said it, but talk about that a little bit.
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that we tried to do was look at our internal data. So when I came to the organization, I always go through an exercise to say, okay, because you ask any organization, "How's your data?" And, "Oh, it's great, great, great." And then you get into it and it's never great, great, great. It's sometimes good and sometimes horrific. National Visions was really good. I mean, we had good data, we had good practices and good governance on how we aligned our customers, but I really think what we needed to have was that extra layer of identity so that we could stitch those profiles together so that as we looked to move to a technology partner, we were efficient in how we were using our asset of our customer records and that, and that was really what drove our conversations.
Dustin Raney:
Yeah, absolutely. And having that ability to basically de- silo across data sets, which is honestly a key issue. Yes, your data was super clean, but the ability to bring Dustin and Yahoo and Dustin to Gmail together across different silos kind of requires an extra help in the data world. I were to lean that into key use cases at National Vision, what are some of the primary use cases like right out the gate with Adobe and Acxiom playing a key role that you guys are looking at?
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I think for us it's really about when you start with this large bucket of data and you narrow it down and now you can identify folks and you can resolve their IDs, it becomes the personalization piece. So a lot of our key use cases are around personalization. And now that we have that unique identifier, I think whether we're driving that personalization through site personalization, whether it's through email personalization, tech, even old school direct mail personalization, I think those are the foundations that it's given us to be able to do in our use cases.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
So Jesse, given your vast expertise and experience, how have you seen things evolve in the retail industry?
Jesse Blount :
That's a great question. I go back and I think about when I was here 15, 18 years ago at conferences around Chicago and I watched the progression of how things went from newspapers to direct mail to email to social to loyalty to big data to small data to personalization, you kind of watch as you sit back as a marketer, how our industry has evolved from very little data, very few channels to all this mass amounts of data that we have in every different social piece that didn't exist 10 years ago. So I think it's amazing to watch that progression and to watch marketers change how they behave. I always looked at myself as my job as a marketer as a behaviorist. I was presenting one time when someone said to me, "Well, what do you really do? " And I said, "Well, I'm a behaviorist at heart.
I watch behaviors." Now, some people will do focus groups and watch it. I watch behaviors and data, I will be able to watch patterns or see how things are changing. And I think it's been so fun to watch the evolution of marketing from a behaviorist standpoint to see how did you create influence in 2006 to how do you create influence now and how do you grab acquisition back when it was kind of the wild west in acquisition before can't spam laws and how did you go about that to how much of a struggle it is now with first party data and third party data and cookies going away to do acquisition. So it's been a fun journey to watch how marketing has evolved and I would say the role of data has just increased every year from it. I go back and look at some of the old presentations that I saw or did or stood on stage with someone and talked about how we've changed an industry to drive that customer efforts.
Dustin Raney:
So speaking of evolution, AI is all the talk and I think everyone is, there's a little trepidation, right walking into that, just giving your relationship with your customer over to a chatbot and things, what are some things that you guys are looking at as it relates to AI? Where are you dipping your toe?
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I mean, I think because we're a conservative nature of our business, we're trying to learn what we should about AI and how do we best apply it. I think we're probably most excited about the gen AI work that'll come out of our Adobe relationship. I also think for me outside of it is having seen all the data come in and what excites me about AI is really the ability, regardless of how many analysts I have or how much machine learning exists in our platforms, what excites me about AI is having this tool that will be able to mine through data that a hundred analysts couldn't do in a year that I can do in 24 hours or 10 hours or 20 minutes that will find those pieces. I remember back looking at paper printouts and trying to spot trends and paper printouts of one person trying to do that in one division.
Now I think about that and a scope of AI saying, "We could look at a whole business model or a whole year's worth and say, what are the best customers doing? How are they behaving?" I always go back and one of the early things I always do, and I've done it at National Vision, I did it at Bells, was I try to do a decile study. I want to understand the customers and that usually takes six months to run a decile study, do the analysis. With AI, I'm hoping I can feed that in and get a decile analysis out in 20 minutes. So that's what excites me about AI is the usage of the data. I don't think anybody's gotten comfortable with it. I also don't think we've unlocked that process yet internally.
Dustin Raney:
If you think about the layers of AI, obviously it's the shiny gap object that everybody's kind of focused on, but it's only as good as the data that you feed it. And even from a creative perspective, I know Adobe's working on offering up next best offer type access to LLM, but getting that foundational data layer right, it doesn't matter if it's direct mail. It's like all the other channels are impacted by that same identity foundation as well. When did you start thinking about identity and data in your process when you decide, "Hey, we're going to go all in on an enterprise solution." Was that something that was years ahead, you're like, "I've already got this all mapped out. " Or were you talking with Adobe and others and you're like, "Oh wait, there's a gap there?"
Jesse Blount :
I think I've recognized the gap just in my experience that as you start to look at the technology platforms, you have to have your own house in order and the way to do that is to have a partner that provides that identity solution. And I think that's really where prior to even any of the conversations with the enterprise partners, it was really trying to say, "Okay, I know this is a step we'll need to take just to make sure that we have our house ready to do this process or ready to turn it over to the enterprise platform." So I think it always kind of predates the conversation with it. I can see how folks get into the situation where I'm ready to go down the path and we've done our data audit and now I need to do identity. I think when we were talking originally, it was before we even had decided it was probably our ... In fact, I think I took one of the first meetings with the partners the same day I took the meetings with you.
Oh,
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Wow.
Dustin Raney:
It's crazy.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Yeah. I've heard you describe yourself as a data shepherd. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I mean, I think as a shepherd of the data of a organization, it's really the strategy behind the data, the governance that we need to have for data and then being able to protect it and make sure it gets where it needs to be. So not that different from a shepherd with a flock is, I want to protect it, I want to make sure I get it to where it needs to be and I want to make sure I understand the sources of it so that I can do it. So I think when I think about a data shepherd, it's really that person in the organization that can see all of the data, understand the source of it, where it comes from, how do I get it, how do I move it from place to place? And in our world, am I doing that all in a privacy compliant method?
Am I storing it correctly? And then am I being able to create use cases that get the most value out of that data? Because having a ton of data is great, but having a ton of data that has no usability is worthless.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Right. It's really about quality over quantity
Jesse Blount :
Yeah,
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
For sure.
Dustin Raney:
And it seems like the days of Wild West in data acquisition you already said are kind of over, we're maturing and I think part of that maturity is that customers are actually more aware. And days in the past, it's like they didn't know what was happening with their data and they didn't even know to ask or care. But now I think because of that awareness, part of that's due to regulators, you have all the state driven regulations that are coming in. We chose to go state by state where Europe decided a federal level law. I think it's a differentiation point. So I kind of look at it like a restaurant, if you go back to the back and it's super clean, I'm going to trust the food I'm going to eat from that restaurant. So to know that you guys focus and prioritize the data privacy, how you shepherd that data is something that I think sets you apart and will set you apart.
So do you see a day where part of that becomes part of your messaging? Like from a marketing perspective, does it matter that much or is it just stay on the product itself?
Jesse Blount:
I don't know. That's a great question. I hope that customers who deal with us or really any healthcare provider have trust and that's really what the shepherding concept is, is about creating trust in our data, even internal to our organization and external. So I hope that that trust passes through. I don't know if we'll ever go into the marketing world to tell them that we protect your data really well. I just hope our reputation gets us there.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so also looking into the future, one year, three years, five years down the road, what's on the roadmap for National Vision?
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I mean, I think right now for me, I want to get through the implementation of our Adobe platform and start to really see the value out of that. I think that's what's most exciting for me in the short term. And I think that'll take us a little while to refine and build new journeys and really unlock the power of that. So I'm most excited about that. I think there's a huge amount of potential with the organization. So I think it's really just continuing to evolve our MarTech stacks. I think it's also looking at how do we create this approach that leverages all of our store locations along with our web properties into a seamless customer experience and how do we make shopping for eyeglasses, not a chore, but a fun, exciting experience.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Yeah. I love that combination of physical and digital and every touchpoint.
Dustin Raney:
And you represent National Vision, but you guys also represent several consumer facing brands and you're thinking about that as a holistic perspective across all your brands, right? Can you explain a little bit how you're handling identity cross brand?
Jesse Blount:
Yeah. I mean, I think when you shop in our different locations, we assign you a brand identity. So we know whether you're a national vision or whether you're an America's best shopper or eyeglass world shopper and we are able to communicate that messaging to you from the way we collect the data.
Dustin Raney:
And then from a digital perspective, we talk about the use case of someone engaging with the brand, your media properties, handling those use cases of care, whether it's site personalization. Was that one of the key drivers too in your decisioning on leveraging an identity provider to help drive that digital awareness as well?
Jesse Blount :
Yeah. I think when we resolve to a customer that we can control, we want to be able to monitor them and see their engagement across any channel, whether that be through email, click, a social connection or through a digital ad. So we want to be able to make sure we capture that so that we can refine our messaging back to them and use every piece of data that we have.
Dustin Raney:
So Jesse, one of the kind of provocative things that I've heard you say is data as an asset. You want to maybe go into a little bit more detail what you mean
Jesse Blount :
By that? Yeah, I'd love to. I think when you look at a balance sheet, you see all these tangible assets that an organization has and some intangible assets maybe under the goodwill line. I think that as we evolve from this state of little data to mass data to quality data, why don't we show on a balance sheet the tangible asset in many organizations, it's the most important asset that they have is the data or their customer records or how clean their database is. I think as a practice, we should evolve towards showing data quality or a data ledger item for data assets because in many organizations, that's the bellwether of productivity and how organizations look at it. We grant goodwill, but what about data assets as a balance sheet item?
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Maybe with the growth of AI, that will get there.
Dustin Raney:
So literally the CFO getting involved potentially and looking at it literally as asset management, part of asset management.
Jesse Blount :
Right. Fixtures, people,
Dustin Raney:
Asset data.
Lorel Wilhelm-Volpi:
Right. The data. Yeah.
Dustin Raney:
Yeah. It makes total sense. You heard it here, everyone. Data is part of asset management. One of the last things we always ask, we put Jesse Blount into ChatGPT and ask it to provide three words back that explain who you are. What do you think those three words are going
Jesse Blount :
To be? Yeah. I put a little thought into this. So I saw the question ahead of time, so I put a little thought into it. It helps. Yeah. I think there are three questions or the three responses would be dad, probably builder and mentor. Dad, because I have two young kids. I think my number one job in life is not national vision, but it's to be a dad and to raise good kids. So that's my number one thing that I think that would come out. Builder, I look at myself, whether it's been my career, I've been a builder of either teams or organizations or the Colds Rewards program, the CrowdTwist loyalty experience. On my non-professional life, I'm a tinkerer with electronics or 3D printing things. So I love to just build. And the last one is mentor. The things I'm most proud of in my career are not the things like Kohl's.
It's the people that I've built and the teams that I've developed and looking back on somebody that started as an intern or as a contract employee that now runs an organization. So that's what makes me proud. So I would hope it would be dad, builder, mentor.
Dustin Raney:
Love that. Awesome. And just so that those three things have absolutely come across in getting to know you, Jesse, and no doubt there's a lot of people out there that are super grateful. I've had the privilege to work with you, for you. I know we are.