#pebblepost

[pebblepostus-blog]

Leading Digital-To-Direct Mail Marketing Platform

PebblePost is a digital-to-direct mail marketing platform. We capture online interest and intent data to send relevant direct mail that activates buying decisions at home and drives conversions everywhere. We invented Programmatic Direct Mail to help brands convert more shoppers into buyers using advanced targeting, algorithmic optimization, attribution, and quantitative analysis.

[thedigitalenterprise-blog]

In this interview, Celeste Giampetro, VP of Marketing at PebblePost describes the union of the “brains and brawn” for digital programmatic and direct mail and suggests why marketers need to move beyond metrics while focusing on acquisition and retention.

[mitchellharry62-blog]

Interview with Celeste Giampetro, VP of Marketing at PebblePost

In this interview, Celeste Giampetro, VP of Marketing at PebblePost describes the union of the “brains and brawn” for digital programmatic and direct mail and suggests why marketers need to move beyond metrics while focusing on acquisition and retention.

Read Interview:  https://www.thedigitalenterprise.com/interviews/cloud-apps-mobile-solutions-interview-with-celeste-giampetro-vp-of-marketing-at-pebblepost/

[lewisgersh]

They're Singing From Our Songbook

When you get a tune stuck in your head, it’s usually because it was either catchy or meaningful to you. I usually write about my business opinions here, but this time I want to share a couple of moments that really struck a chord with me. 

  Moment #1: I was at LiveRamp's RampUp 2016 conference for data driven marketing last week. The keynote transitioned to a fireside chat with three industry leaders and topic was innovation in data driven marketing.The execs all felt most of what they get pitched doesn't even qualify as a new idea, just a minor tweak that clutters up the options for a marketer without a chance of moving the needle. Joshua Lowcock, the head of digital for Universal McCann Worldwide, then said "you rarely see anything truly ground breaking, but I've seen one and it's a game changer. It's a company called PebblePost that's doing Programmatic Direct Mail." He then described the basics of what we do (very precisely) to the entire audience. I had never met Josh before that day, and after introducing myself after his panel, we had a great time discussing our platform, vision and the market .   Moment #2: I was at a Total Retail dinner event for marketers in NYC as few weeks ago. The panel had three CMO’s and the topics varied. As it turned to discussing omnichannel strategies, Shawna Hausman, VP of eCommerce and Digital Marketing at giggle, began to sing our praises as a very cool way to cross channels and producing fantastic results. This was to an audience of 100+ marketers in retail, and she very accurately went on in detail for several minutes. Later, during the Q&A, a customer prospect in the audience asked Shawna to provide more details on how giggle uses us because she was very interested in it. They went back and forth for a few minutes on our “incredible innovation”, “amazing results” and “very cool use cases.” I never met either of them before that night. It was really cool to hear us being brought up at conferences with such accolades only ~120 days from our launch announcement! I was very proud of our team, investors and advisors. Thanks to all involved for believing and supporting the vision, it truly means more to me than you will every know. Lastly, we had our first feature article covering us appear in a publication, some of you have already seen the article. You can read it below or click through the link to read it on Direct Marketing News. Will Programmatic Direct Mail Be the New Growth Channel?

Martech impresario Lewis Gersh strikes out on his own with what he envisions as a multibillion-dollar business.

Lewis Gersh is well known on the marketing technology scene as an investor, and he's placed several winning bets in that regard: Madison Logic, Indiegogo, Sailthru, and Tapad, to name a few. But the funder of startups in cross-channel marketing, personalization, and retargeting has left his full-time

VC gig

to run his own company. What breakthrough digital technology would make the 48-year-old magic-maker leave the strategy room for the battlefield? Programmatic direct mail.

PebblePost

, for which Gersh serves as CEO, has secured a trademark on that term. He sees his digitally reactive version of direct mail as a billion-dollar proposition, a new channel that blends the scale of digital with the efficacy of direct to lift digital marketers to stratospheric heights of engagement. “Programmatic was sweeping through display, but it was getting overdone and efficacy was falling. PebblePost was born out of that,” Gersh says. “Everybody looked at anything but direct mail as a solution. But direct mail is second only to TV in marketing expenditures, and no new products have come out in direct mail for 25 years.” PebblePost

launched

last June on a promise of 8% response rates and 15% conversion rates. After its first five customers posted rates closer to 20% and 40% in those regards, according to Gersh, he knew he was on to something. PebblePost is run on an ad server that is activated by customer-determined hierarchies such as product segments. For instance, should a customer go to a retailer website, look at some shirts and blazers, and then leave without purchasing, a 4x6 postcard with an offer on an apparel purchase could be sent out to her within 24 hours of her visit. Of course, the retailer must have her physical address on file in its database. “We've built the first server connecting digital with direct mail,” Gersh maintains.

"This was really enabled by the printing machine manufacturers. This is a cool extension of variable data printing.” Gersh now claims to have more than 100 brands engaged in real-time, reactive direct mail. One of them is Boxed, an online retailer of consumer packaged goods in bulk sizes. It is a true multichannel marketer, using Facebook, Instagram, email, and desktop and mobile display ads, as well as direct mail, for customer activation. Boxed sees itself as “Costco Online,” and since it's often easier  for customers to just stop by the warehouse club on the way home from work, the e-com has been focusing on re-engagement strategies. A good number of its customers have lapsed and it's difficult to re-engage with them.

“We started testing PebblePost targeting our unsubscribe list. Many of them have unsubscribed in the past 60 days and have come back to the website but not made a purchase,” says Nitasha Mehta, senior marketing manager at Boxed. “Prior to PebblePost, we didn't have a way to engage with them. It's been groundbreaking for us.” Mehta says that conversion rates via PebblePost have been running six times higher than those Boxed sees from emails. She says the company is still feeling its way around programmatic direct mail, but she thinks higher conversions might have something to do not only with the surprise factor of mail retargeting, but also with increased impressions for the postcards (above). “One email sent is one impression, but one postcard sent is likely to receive several impressions among members of a household,” says Mehta, who is currently preparing a March Madness themed PebblePost campaign. A big differentiator between programmatic direct mail and triggered direct mail, says Gersh, is real-time metrics and campaign management. PebblePost users get a dashboard they can check on an ongoing basis to see the volume of mail sent, response and conversion rates, and return on ad spend. “You could never do this before on direct mail,” says PebblePost CMO David Cooperstein. Both Gersh and Cooperstein say that programmatic direct mail remains in its formative stages and that more can be expected of it in years ahead, such as third-party access to physical addresses. As more customers come on board, PebblePost will continue to add breadth to the Address Cloud it's constructing and validate addresses as specific users of clients. Then programmatic mail will shed its reliance on first-part day and users will be able to mail to unknown website users without taking ownership of their names and addresses. Of course, they'll be able to capture them if they convert. “We'll have ownership of the address and won't give it to the client. It's like when someone does a search and clicks on a link for an item. The retailer doesn't know who it is, though Google may know,” Cooperstein explains. Pebblepost's reception in the marketing community far exceeded his expectations, Gersh says. Brand marketers love it, he says, because they can load it into their programmatic budgets, digital agencies see it as a natural extension of both programmatic and retargeting, and traditional direct mailers employ it as a way to eliminate some of the waste in an expensive channel. “We have a product roadmap for PebblePost that goes out five years,” says Gersh, the digital era version of Victor Kiam, the former president of Remington Products, who proclaimed in ads that he was so impressed its razors he bought the company. “We're looking at multibillions in revenue.”      

[lewisgersh]

The 7 Syllable Pitch for a Billion-Dollar Opportunity

When I introduced my new blog, Start-Up! The Musical, a couple of weeks ago I spoke about how similar start-ups and musicals really are.

They’re both a “hits” driven business with ego-charged characters whose very stage makes them think they are larger than life.  You have to pick winners from a pitch, fund a dream and practice child psychology aboard a rollercoaster of unknowns.

This is true in many more ways than you might expect, starting with the role of the angel. 

Back in the day when new technology meant “the wireless” (radio), the angel audition was already a Broadway institution.  A high net worth individual with a penchant for show biz (and, often, for chorus girls) would invite the writer and composer of a new show to perform the tunes for the new show on a piano in his apartment.  If the investor liked the tunes, and if there were enough opportunities for scantily clad chorus numbers, he’d back the show. Fast forward a century or so, and not much has changed.

Act 1, Scene 1 of

Start-Up! The Musical

Highlights from my PebblePost venture pitch.

VC: (insincere tone) Sorry I’m late.

Me: (token gesture) No problem, great to see you!

I have a seven-syllable pitch for a billion-dollar opportunity.

VC: (momentary focus, doing math) Impressive, over $140 million per syllable. Lay it on me.

Me: Programmatic Direct Mail.  We transform real-time online activity into personalized, dynamically rendered direct mail into postal hub in less than 24 hours. With real-time response path activity analytics and next day optimization. Every day, continuously.

VC: (Feeling like the visionary) Isn’t direct mail dead?

Me: (hide eye roll, educate) Direct Mail is large and growing. It’s the largest ad spend after television, has the highest response rate after telemarketing, and the highest average order value of any marketing channel, period. Yet, there has been no new product or major innovation in about 25 years, not since the advent of Zip+4 and digital printing. No technology revolution. Until now.

VC: (needing to chase a fad, can’t be direct mail) Who knew? Ok, so how exactly are you doing this?

Me: There are four key components to our Programmatic Direct Mail platform: Segmentation, Workflow Management, Analytics and Optimization. These components work seamlessly together to create a fully integrated loop. Our first product is Retargeting with Direct Mail, and we’ve started with ecommerce companies seeking to grow revenue and customer lifetime value. We’ve invented the industry’s first ad server and campaign management system, the first real-time analytics, and the first optimization of next day’s mail based on every day’s response and conversion data.

VC: (reaching for an analogy to show understanding) So, if I’m getting this, you just invented DoubleClick, MailChimp, Google Analytics and with next day optimization every day, but for Direct Mail, which is bigger than display or search?

Me: (hates the analogy game) Great analogy, yes! And we offer unlimited segmentation. Think any URL or activity within a page on an eCommerce site. We offer frequency capping, name suppression, and geo-targeting, to name a few. And we...

VC: (interrupting) How is the marketing performance?

Me: (provide Schoolhouse Rock math only) We combine the efficiency of digital with the effectiveness of direct mail, in our world 1 + 1 = 11. We are seeing response and conversion rates that are orders of magnitudes higher,  with much higher average order values.

VC: (putting his phone down) And customers? Are you selling to brands or agencies?

Me: (answer the question he should have asked) PebblePost’s business model includes both. We set this up as a SaaS model: Software, production, printing, postage and delivery to postal hub, all-inclusive on a per piece price based on monthly volume. No term, minimums, or set up fee. It’s producing a 5x-plus return on ad spend for small brands with inexpensive products!

VC: (trying to look relevant) What about fraud and ad blockers and such?

Me: (am I playing t-ball?) We are intrinsically 100% fraud free – it always gets delivered to a real person with a real postal address. Bots don’t have mailboxes. Programmatic Direct Mail is 100% transparent – anonymous cookie, known user, opt-in by brand, and postal address linked to the segmented activity and piece of collateral. There’s no ad interference with the user experience, and our Programmatic Direct Mail is immune to ad blockers.

VC: (thinking he is so clever) There’s always “return to sender”!

ME: (smiles nervously, acts impressed with the attempt at humor)

VC: (insert obligatory years old question here) So how do you cut through the clutter of all the other ad tech companies?

ME: (he’s a pocket knife in a gunfight) There are more than  2,500 ad tech companies. There are more than 3,850 direct marketing companies. But with our programmatic digital-to-direct mail technology, 99% of them don’t exist in our world for the marketer. One platform.

VC: (recalling associate’s homework) OK, there’s about $50 billion dollars in digital marketing, $50 billion in direct mail, $50 billion or so in marketing data services. What percentage of the market do you think you can get, in just direct mail?

ME: (every founder should just say this) You have that question backwards. The question is how much are we going to leave for the incumbents. We are creating a market; they become incremental.

VC: (fawning for audacity) You’re pretty confident… ME: Dude, we’re going after Moby Dick, on a paddleboard and with a hibachi. You want a fish taco?

Did the pitch work? Yes, with a

seed round of $3 million from great VC and angel investor partners

. The first scene of Act 1 is a success, and we are on our way. -------

Start-Up! The Musical

will publish (roughly) every two weeks. Next installment: "

Please, Sir. I’d like some more."

[lgbtqwarriorcats]

Hi everyone, mod pebble here. I really haven't been active lately due to the fact that I've pretty much lost interest in being a mod. I think im just going to leave so someone else who has more enthusiasm takes my place. it was fun while it lasted though. love you all!!

[pebblepost]

How Brands (Should) Use Direct Mail

It never hurts to get a few big brands to help a startup navigate the product/market fit, especially for the startup’s CMO. Last week the PebblePost team had the chance to test the story of PebblePost in front of some very large CPG, auto, travel and retail brand marketers, both at Shop.org’s Digital Summit and at Brand Fusion, a more intimate event hosted by The Brandery in Cincinnati. It was great to meet leaders of marketing, eCommerce, and Innovation at a wide range of big companies, and get direct feedback about how programmatic direct mail can be additive to their marketing mix.

What we came away with was some fascinating insight. Brand managers, eCommerce leaders, and print-dependent mailers in the financial and insurance sector made it clear how connecting digital activity to direct mail in real time would help them. Digital marketers take a few minutes to think it through, then see the tight connection to a physical “impression.” A few clear themes emerged:

Capture customers that show intent but pass on the “buy” button. When customers visit a site, they don’t always raise their hand to say “please market to me”. And in our new, more sensitized ad blocking environment, retargeting ads using display only cause more angst with consumers. But brands don’t want to lose customers, and like the idea that a highly relevant and high quality piece of mail could land at the home of a prospect without the overt messaging that a poorly placed retargeting ad might deliver.

Recapture existing customers that are hard to engage online. Another brand, this one in financial services, was trying to figure out how to engage people with low digital activity, but currently come with a high cost of print mailings. With mail sent based on a login to the site or a call to the call center rather than in bulk, this print-heavy marketer could reduce or even eliminate in-house print production, and deliver a relevant and timely message to the customer to drive engagement.

Reinforce purchases with additional value. Mail sent based on customer behavior can also be done as a result of a completed transaction. A company that has business partners (say, a travel site with its car and hotel affiliates) could send an offer once a trip is booked that reminds and cajoles the customer to book with partners. The cruise industry is a natural for this, as many of the profitable add-ons are sold well after the cruise is booked.  

Use digital activity to create a personal, and physical, impression. Just because a brand has deep data on each customer doesn’t mean they have to make it obvious. Grocers, for example, have a ton of very specific product and SKU-level purchase data for each of their loyalty card holders. But if, like with the coupons one gets at checkout, an offer is sent in the mail a few days after checkout, that provides a new way for shopper marketers to engage online and in-store shoppers with some added incentive. And it doesn’t need to explicitly call out the item or price in order to be effective at recapturing the consumer’s attention.

There are many case studies and uses that we anticipate learning about as we engage customers and take them through the programmatic direct mail story. But these early ideas, the enthusiasm with which we engaged with digital and traditional leaders was a great sign of customers to come.

[lewisgersh]

Transactional Media: PebblePost™ and Programmatic Direct Mail

My name is Lewis Gersh, and I am co-founder and CEO of PebblePost™. I have been founding and investing in technology companies since the mid-90’s under the vision that I term Transactional Media. It’s been a rollercoaster of highs and lows, steeped in melodrama, much of which this blog will delve into over time. Today is one of the highs.  I have never been more excited than I am today, as we unveil PebblePost™ and Programmatic Direct Mail, a perfect application of Transactional Media.

The vision of Transactional Media focuses on how information is exchanged between parties and across media, a ‘communication transaction.” This is often between brands and consumers in the form of content and/or commerce. Within these transactions, innovation seeks to drive greater efficiency and efficacy, often by increasing and leveraging relevancy. Think of Google search results with ads - intent data, efficient and effective, relevant.  

I founded two ventures incorporating Transactional Media in the late 90’s in partnership with AOL and Omnicom’s Organic Online. One was a store and one was content. Both leveraged user-driven segmentation, connecting consumers with brands, and the results were highly effective.

In 2002, in our leftover office space, I started one of the first angel investment accelerators. In 2006, it became one of the earliest seed funds in the country, Gersh Venture Partners.  I used a Transactional Media investment strategy focused on B2B start-ups to take advantage of the nascent advent of Ad Exchanges, Real-Time Bidding, APIs with reliability and ubiquity, and Big Data.

The portfolio grew to 12 companies, enjoyed 3 very successful exits (FetchBack, Industrybrains, Tranvia), with other winners like Madison Logic and Bombora growing strong. Transactional Media was working very well as an investment strategy and it was time to grow the opportunity.

I changed GVP’s name to Metamorphic Ventures, then added a first and later a second partner, and under my Transactional Media strategy we built the largest portfolio of B2B targeting companies including Chango, ThinkNear, Tapad, Sailthru, Moveable Ink, 33Across, RetailNext, iSocket, Mass Relevance, BuzzPoints, Qualia, Boost Media, Indiegogo, and others. This petri dish of Transactional Media investments was fascinating to me, and here’s why.

Each CEO could not believe what the other CEOs were doing to make their version of targeting work and how much they varied from each other. The nuances across both data inputs and the outputs they were applying it to all behaved very differently. Every aspect is a variable and use-case dependent. Each company had to find its own equilibrium of efficiency and efficacy in a communication transaction between a brand and consumer. The common thread is finding relevancy, and relevancy changes based on virtually limitless variables.

After 10 years and ~50 deals as the founder and CEO of Metamorphic Ventures, this ‘accidental VC’ has gone back to the operating side to apply Transactional Media in the biggest manner yet.

Rob Victor and I have co-founded PebblePost™ to enable Programmatic Direct Marketing using the world’s intent data.

We are thrilled to announce the world’s first Programmatic Direct Mail platform that transforms real-time online activity into personalized direct mail. We are connecting the power of Digital’s real-time intent data with the efficacy of Direct Mail. Direct Mail is the largest marketing channel next to TV with the highest performance after telemarketing.

Our integrated Programmatic Direct Mail™ platform includes Segmentation, Workflow, Analytics and Optimization, creating a highly efficient closed-loop system.

Our platform encompasses the world’s first:

Ad server for direct mail

Workflow management system for end-to-end digital-to-direct mail campaign management, production and mailing

Real-time analytics on response path and conversion activity

Continuous, daily optimization of dynamically rendered direct mail.

Our first product offering is Retargeting with Direct Mail. Customers who visit one of our customer’s sites will be sent an open-faced mail piece (aka a postcard) about 3 days later based on the parts of the site they visited.

An enormous amount of innovation was required to make this work efficiently, effectively, and economically. Several issues seemed insurmountable on functionality alone. The data inputs and outputs behave very differently than anything experienced before in either the online or direct mail environments. It took significant, necessary learning and tuning to achieve a successful result that is all now baked into our platform. 

We, and the customers on our platform, have discovered that Programmatic Direct Mail greatly enhances the relationship between brands and consumers. Response and conversion rates are outperforming targeted digital and direct mail channels by orders of magnitude, with significantly higher average order value and extremely high ROI. We solve several of the biggest plagues on the digital advertising landscape: viewability, fraud, and ad blocking. We are 100% privacy compliant with complete 1:1 transparency. And it doesn’t interfere with the user experience.

With Programmatic Direct Mail the efficiency of digital meets the effectiveness of direct mail, and the relevancy of the communication transaction between brand and consumer is truly Transactional Media harmony.

And we’re just getting started.