How AI Has Changed the Game in Mobile Marketing With Spike Stevens, Chief Technical Officer at LighthousePE
Spike Stevens is Chief Technical Officer at LighthousePE, a behavior-based AI platform that creates one-to-one personalized messages and experiences in real-time at scale. He boasts a rich 25-year history in the marketing and advertising sector and has steered LighthousePE's design and technology since its onset. Spike's previous endeavors in marketing tech spotlighted mobile and SaaS solutions for heavy hitters like Apple, Porsche, Boeing, and Air France. Beyond his professional life, Spike is an avid skier, mountaineer, and gifted musician based in Boulder, Colorado.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Spike Stevens explains how LighthousePE came about and how it helps clients
The secret sauce behind the brand’s capabilities
Spike shares whether he’s seen other apps that use AI to create a personal experience for marketing purposes
What is an example of a personalized push notification?
How LighthousePE uses turnaround prompts to build brand loyalty
Is there a high acceptance rate from push notifications among the brand's app users?
Spike reveals what gets him most excited about what LighthousePE is doing with AI
Why Spike regrets following advice saying that he should get serious about life at 22
What you’ll learn in this episode:
Most mobile applications are strictly available for practical purposes. You can do your banking via a mobile app or place an order at your favorite restaurant. Can a business use its mobile app to cause customers to visit even if they hadn't planned to?
According to Spike Stevens, a veteran of marketing tech, the answer is yes. Spike says through the use of AI, his company is building emotional brand loyalty with customers via mobile apps. It does this by looking at the behavioral markers of individual consumers, including location, buying trends, how often they visit a restaurant, where they live, and how often they're near a restaurant. With that data, they look for patterns, and based on those patterns, the team can generate a custom message for a specific customer in the form of a push notification. Spike says that message is almost guaranteed to be meaningful, causing the customer to take action.
On this episode of From Persona to Personal, Roger Hurni chats with Spike Stevens, Chief Technical Officer at LighthousePE, about how AI is changing the way marketers can influence behavior through mobile apps. Spike explains how LighthousePE uses AI to develop meaningful, personalized push notifications sent to individual customers at the optimum time. He says these messages give brands an advantage because of their ability to get customers to visit more often and, as a result, spend more money at your business.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
This episode’s sponsor:
Today's episode is brought to you by Lighthouse PE.
LighthousePE is an AI-powered marketing automation software for mobile apps. It creates one-to-one personalized messaging and experiences that increase brand loyalty, provide competitive intelligence, and drive substantial revenue to your business.
LighthousePE accomplishes this by analyzing your customers’ behaviors and leveraging its onboard AI to automatically generate and deliver the right message at the right time.
To learn more, visit LighthousePE.AI.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:02
This is From Persona to Personal podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by LighthousePE. LighthousePE is an AI-powered marketing automation software for mobile apps. It creates one-to-one personalized messaging and experiences that increase brand loyalty, provide competitive intelligence, and drives substantial revenue to your business. LighthousePE accomplishes this by analyzing your customers' behaviors and leveraging its onboard AI to automatically generate and deliver the right message at the right time. To learn more, visitlighthousePE.ai. Now, let's get started with the show.
Roger Hurni 0:46
Hello, everyone, I am Roger Hurni, the host of From Persona to Personal where I get to use my expertise in consumer behavior modification to engage with top business leaders telling their brands forward. Before I get to today's guest, this episode is brought to you by LighthousePE. LighthousePE is an AI-powered marketing automation software specifically for mobile apps. It creates one-to-one personalized messaging and experiences that increase brand loyalty, provide competitive intelligence, and can drive vast amounts of additional revenue to your organization. LighthousePE accomplishes this by analyzing your customers' behaviors, then its AI automatically generates and delivers the right message to each customer at the right moment. To learn more, visit LighthousePE.com. Now without further ado, speaking of LighthousePE, we actually have their chief technology officer today on the show. His name is Spike Stevens. Spike has spent more than 20 years in advertising as a creative director, where he produced work for some household brands you may know of like Porsche, AeroPress, and Comcast. With the release of the iPhone in 2007, this turned his proverbial head and led him to more challenging pastures of mobile technology. The opening of the App Store in 2008 opened his eyes to what was possible, and he quickly turned all of his attention to designing and building cutting-edge mobile experiences for the new iPhone platform. He spent several years doing that for brands such as Weber Grills, Apple, and US Army. In 2015, Spike was recruited to create a cutting-edge IP marketing platform to help challenger brands compete with the big guys. A year later, LighthousePE was born. So with that, Spike, welcome to the show.
Spike Stevens 2:42
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Roger Hurni 2:45
Did I screw up? Anything we need to correct there?
Spike Stevens 2:48
Nope. I think you got it. You nailed it perfectly.
Roger Hurni 2:51
All right. I think the audience's first question out of the gate might be: is Spike your real name?
Spike Stevens 2:58
It is not. My parents were more practical than that. But I received the nickname Spike from my fourth-grade math teacher, Mr. Sherman, and I still have a lot of friends from way back in elementary school, and they propagated it. So here I am, as a much older guy still being called Spike.
Roger Hurni 3:15
Or, you know, just embracing your inner child. I kinda like that. Exactly. Let's seriously start, though, with a quick overview. Because I know you sponsor the show. And in full disclosure, I do some behavior strategy work for LighthousePE, but the audience doesn't really know a business like this. So can you give a quick overview of LighthousePE, maybe what started it, and really what it does?
Spike Stevens 3:42
Yeah, I mean, I think the voiceover you did that introduced it really nails it. At this point in its life, LighthousePE is marketing automation software that we built for mobile apps. And, you know, we've like with any, any software platform that has a few years under its belt, we've you know, we've had some, you know, moments of enlightenment and new ideas and things like that. But really, all the way going all the way back to when, you know, the the idea came along, and we started to build it, it was focused on mobile technology. And, you know, I guess I would say, bringing the promise of the mobile apps to life. Finally, I mean, I think when the app store opened in 2008, people rushed out to build all sorts of things, including if you remember that one word looked like you were drinking a beer from your phone, and that's the kind of stuff people drink or drink. That's kind of some people actually built and I think that around 2010, there maybe is a little bit of disappointment in 2011, perhaps about, you know, that the App Store that people weren't building the kind of apps that could be life changing or business changing. And that's really when I got interested in more a while and that's when I started focusing on, you know, really trying to to create experiences that could help businesses. My background, as you read is in advertising and marketing. And I've always been attuned to helping businesses grow and, and leverage new channels. And then when I came to Off Madison Ave, you know, they they basically said, What do you think is the, you know, what's what's what, where should we be right now in terms of technology? What should we focus on? And my first answer was, well, we should definitely be focused on mobile, because it's only going to grow and keep growing in that that's proved to be true. But the the germ of the idea really came from we had Off Madison Ave had a client that was a casino in the upper Midwest and midsize Casino. And they had done some reading or heard somewhere about beacons. And without going too down too far down the rabbit hole beacons are just little battery powered devices that can help identify the location of a mobile phone indoors. And that was kind of the seed of it was to build a platform that lets the casino understand the behavioral habits of their best players, how long they spent in restaurants, how often they visited, you know, how often they spend on the on the gaming floor. And so that's where we started. And then, you know, again, like, like most good businesses, we, we identified all kinds of other opportunities in other markets and, you know, branched out from there to really focus on you know, quick service restaurants, we focus on a vertical we call spas, salons and gyms. And in you know, I honestly struggled to find an industry where it couldn't make a difference. But those are the three that we're really focused on today.
Roger Hurni 6:55
Now, so be clear Off Madison Ave is just the company that owns LighthousePE at the moment, right? That's right. So I want to go back to the apps because you said something that was really interesting. You know, if I remember the beer drinking app, I also remember one called you are rich, what was just a glowing Ruby gem for $999. Some, some really, people with too much money didn't have brains purchased. That's what I've seen in with mobile apps, is it they feel utilitarian at best? It kind of feels like email marketing 15 years ago, where it can perform functions. But they're they're not very smart. And with AI now everywhere is, is that AI, really the secret sauce behind what LighthousePE’s capabilities are,
Spike Stevens 7:49
it is I think you you nailed it when you said that a lot of apps are utilitarian. You know, you want that in some of your apps, your banking app, you want to pay your bills, you want to see your balances you, you know, it's utilitarian minutes, it's very handy. But to your point, when people started designing apps, building apps for marketing purposes, unfortunately, they kept them very utilitarian. And they didn't, they just suffered from a lack of imagination. And so yeah, Lighthouse was really built to, you know, bridge that gap between being a, you know, a valuable utility, you know, for let's say, for a quick service restaurant, yes, you need to be able to order online, especially post COVID, or during COVID. And post-COVID. That's huge. But there's a lot of other opportunities to, you know, have that app work harder for you in the moments where a customer is not thinking about you whether or not ordering online with ordering online from you, they're engaged. When a casino player is, is in house and playing blackjack, he or she is engaged. It's the other moments that were you know, there was a big gap that we felt that we could, you know, make mobile app smarter to your point. And that, that intelligence really comes from in the case of Lighthouse, it does come from AI. And I know that that's a real buzzword right now. But we've actually been tinkering with different forms of AI for several years now. And a lot of the breakthroughs in large language models that have come out recently are you know, that a lot of that is stuff that we had been tinkering with quite a while ago in terms of pattern recognition and you know, parsing metadata and things like that. So yes, I think that they are AI engine which we call our core engine is the secret sauce behind Lighthouse. But I also think that applying a lot of the you know, the the things that you help us with in terms of behavioral science and behavioral psychology, melding now with AI I would say is truly the special sauce. I mean, AI is only as smart as as you've trained it to be and I I would say that all the you know, all the insights of Gi bring plus AI is what really makes it very unique.
Roger Hurni 10:06
Yeah, I, I think people get a lot of AI wrong, right. And I, I've, I've mentioned this before in the past, and you may disagree with me. But I've always said that all machine, all AI is machine learning, but not all machine learning is AI. That's right. Because there's a there's a difference. And we had a lot of years of machine learning, which are taxonomy based, but the AI can take things that seem unrelated and find the correlation between the two. And today, you know, I see a eyes popping up, it's like Whack a Mole out there. There's, there's sites that I've listed, like 1000s of them to do very special things. And I think the difference between a large language model, and in LighthousePE is AI, you're right, it is behaviorally based, and I know that it can look at the implicit and explicit behaviors. And I've yet to find another company that that can do that they can look at consumer behavior in that fashion, to determine what happens next. Are you seeing anybody out there close to that level of AI implementation?
Spike Stevens 11:27
I'm not. And I think you raise a really great point about, you know, there are there is a lot of, there are a lot of AI applications out there. But I haven't seen I mean, I've seen some that I would consider practical deployed in a practical matter, I mean, using ChatGPT to help plus a press release, or, you know, write a long form document about about a complicated topic, that's a great use for it. But in terms of marketing, I haven't seen anyone do anything that, you know, thus far that really uses AI, to create the personal experience, the one to one experience that we really focus on with Lighthouse. And by that I mean, you know, most marketing is done in terms of cohorts, which are just buckets of people that have, you know, might have some overlap in some of their attributes or behaviors. And that's the way that marketing has been handled for, you know, decades, we might develop three or four messages for your three cohorts. But you know, there's a lot of people in there, that's not going to read this, well, what Lighthouse does is it looks at those, you know, the behavioral markers that it makes note of, and that could be, you know, location, it could be, you know, shopping trends, buying trends, how often you visit a restaurant, let's say, where you live, you know, what, how often you're in the neighborhood of a restaurant, I mean, all kinds of things. And it, it, it takes all that data and it looks for patterns. And then based on those patterns, it can actually generate a custom message for you. And we deliver our messages via Lighthouse in the form of a push notification to a mobile device. But it can take all those and craft on the fly a message that is almost guaranteed 98% Guaranteed to, you know, be meaningful to you. And, and of course, we hope and our customers hope that, that it will be meaningful enough that you'll take action and that action is you know, you'll you'll stop by and have dinner or you'll you know, you'll you'll drop into a casino that you might not have visited. You know until Friday, maybe they'll drop it on a Wednesday evening. So there's, there's a lot of applications for it. But yes, that's, you know, that's in a nutshell how we use Lighthouse to, you know, we call it building emotional brand loyalty, but when you feel like a brand, understands you, and knows how to communicate with you and you feel like that brand really just gets you that that has that gives that particular brand or company a massive advantage in terms of bringing you in as a customer, you know, adding you know, getting you to spend more to visit more, whatever the KPI is that you know that we can tune Lighthouse to focus on that.
Roger Hurni 14:19
Yeah, I remember seeing a stat from Forrester that talked about how companies that use that kind of personalization will outsell their competitors by by 20%. Yeah, I'm certainly seeing that, you know, I think how it works. How a AI works is, is confusing at best for most people who are into it. So let's let's get down to some specific examples. It does this level of personalization, personalization at looks at those different behaviors. A lot of apps can send push notifications, and maybe they're just doing it as a big batch and blast to a cohort you know, or they're just saying, you know, go for a quick serve restaurant. This month, this kind of chicken plate is on sale for whatever price. You're, that's not personalization, even your name embedded is not personally I think personalization, behaviorally in my work has always been understanding the motivations and the needs of that person, perhaps even before they do, so that there's a recognition of themselves in the marketing, communications and messaging. So I would really like to have an example or two of what does that push notification look like? How do you personalize like, what's, what's up? What's a push notification, feel like, specifically, pick any industry, I don't care which one?
Spike Stevens 15:46
Yeah, I'll give you a good example, we were working on some developing some content, or at least some patterns of content for a coffee company, large coffee company. And one of the things that they were doing was introducing some new meal items to their menu. And so just as an example, like I'm a, I'm sure I don't eat breakfast, I'm terrible at eating breakfast. But let's say you can get your morning started without breakfast. And we, you know, the client knows, and then therefore Lighthouse knows that, um, you know, on a fairly regular basis, maybe not every day, but maybe two or three times a week, you get your coffee, and you also get a food item. So when this particular company was introducing a new menu, we can look at your behavioral profile and understand that, well, you know, Roger is one of those folks that, you know, he'll get a breakfast sandwich with his coffee, you know, two times out of five that he's in the store. Whereas they look at mine, they say that that guy only comes in and orders coffee or iced tea, he's never bought so much as a rich, crispy square from us. And so Lighthouse looks at that in it. And because this new menu is being introduced, it knows that you have a propensity to add a breakfast sandwich, and it can make an offer to you, you know, to try one of their new menu items. And that push notification that that makes that offer to you, hey, you know, shopping for your morning coffee. And any of our new menu items is only $1. Let's say, you know, we want to introduce you to our new menu, it's a buck, you might receive that. But at the same time, I might receive a preemptory message that says, you know, hey, you know, good morning, you know, we're excited to see you today. We've got a new, we've got some new, you know, ice tea flavors on our menu. So when you come in today, you know, let us know which one you want to try. And we'll we'll give it to you for $1. So you're doing a couple of things with those push notifications. One, you're pre empting someone to to to put that seed in their head that, oh, yeah, I need to go to this coffee company this morning. But the additional one for you is that we've got a brand new menu of breakfast sandwiches. And here's an offer to to further you know, boost your motivation to try one. Whereas I'm going to come in, and I and for me, they know that I have no interest in that. And but they're but they knew to do though, do know that I like iced tea. And then maybe I want to try one of the three new summarize tea flavors, that some pretty rudimentary example. But it gives you an idea of that one to one personalization. And how that manifests itself at a practical level for a client of ours. Yeah. So that
Roger Hurni 18:37
that's always been the holy grail of advertising marketing. How do you how do you mark it on a one to one basis? And can you do that at scale in a cost efficient, efficient way? The push notification on the on the phone? I've always said the phone is the ultimate prompting tool because it's not typically an appendage. Yeah. And I know from my research that the lag time on push notifications like that are seconds. Yes, clean the delivery and action, whereas email, and even is his days, direct mails, weeks, but even text messaging is is either hours or a day or two depending on what city you see. In the research I was doing, because I know you said you light up he does a lot with casinos. So I'm sending somebody a deal in that example. The Competitive Intelligence is a really hot topic. Is there is there a case where Lighthouse help interrupt mitigate maybe a visit to a competitor either in the casino business or the QSR business or something like that, that you could describe how that works?
Spike Stevens 19:58
Yeah, that's a great observation we call those who turn around prompts. And it depends on the industry. So they can apply to any industry, they could apply to a casino, they could apply to a restaurant, they could apply to any number of other business types, but there are some nuances between them. Yeah, there's a couple things you can do with competitive intelligence, number one, you can just observe. So for example, if you owned a large casino, in Atlantic City, let's say where it's very, very dense, there's many, many casinos that are right next to one another kind of like Vegas, and you own a casino there. And you know that you have a high value player, you could just geofence the competitive casinos that are within walking distance of yours and understand, well, you know, we call it a share of wallet, but you could, you know, basically, it's how many visits Am I losing to competitors that could I could be bringing in. So you can do that you can just observe and understand that, hey, you know, tell that guy's host is good players hosts, hey, you know, this guy is coming to Atlantic City, four days a week, and he's only coming into our place once. So it's up to you, Mr. Host, or miss host to go out in and help build that relationship to get him or to come in more. Or you can do that same geofencing or competitive locations, but you can actually let Lighthouse do some of that heavy lifting for you in terms of turning that person around. And that's why we call them turnaround prompts. So you could you know, you the minute someone pulls into the parking lot of a competitor, you could send them a push notification that says, you know, hey, we haven't seen you in a while, coming anytime in the next three hours. And you know, we'll put $100 in free play in your account, whatever the number is. But what that does is it gives them an additional motivation to come back to come over. So there might not turn around right at that moment and come to your property. But you planted that seed that, hey, we've got something special waiting for you at our property. And that that's the kind of thing that builds that emotional brand loyalty. And, you know, it's also delivered, you know, right place, right time, you know, they're in the vicinity, and you know, that they've got, you know, gaming on their mind, because they walk into a competitive property. So that's, that's one way that's very effective. Oftentimes, we'll see, you know, now, maybe 30% of the people that receive one of those turnaround prompts will come in, in the next, you know, maybe two hours. Again, it's not an immediate effect. And but, you know, we often see, we usually tell our clients that a two to three hours is a realistic window to expect someone to actually cut their visit shorted at a competitive property and come to yours. And we, you know, we see 3033 30 to 33% turnaround on those those people within a reasonable length of time.
Roger Hurni 22:58
That's, that's a meet. That's amazing, though, I mean, what does that look like dead BS number of direct mails, like one to 3% response or something like that, if you're able to get 1/3 of the people that you would lose as customers on a specific day, I mean, any business if you think you're going to lose 100 customers to another restaurant or another casino, and you can mitigate that and grab 30% of those people back, though, those are massive numbers.
Spike Stevens 23:26
Yeah, they truly are, I love your comparison to you know, kind of more of the traditional channels like direct mail or even email and, you know, your point about the the phone is literally almost part of our, our hand. Now. It's so it's the channel is always there, that is immediate. And the response is generally immediate. The example I gave for casinos is a little bit different than the one I would give a restaurants, you know, restaurants, if someone goes into competitive restaurant, you're probably not going to talk them out of coming out of that restaurant to come to your restaurant, but what you can do, as you can give them a prompt and some motivation to maybe visit you the next day. Or, you know, you can also use that information, that observation that they were in a competitive restaurant, you know, the previous night, use that the next morning, or maybe around lunchtime before lunchtime, when they're thinking about going out for lunch. Use that as a pre emptive prompt to get in front of them to remind them that you know, you're close. And we'd love to see you and, you know, you know, maybe also here's an incentive to get you to come in and financial incentives. So a lot of ways to do that. And the use case is a little nuanced. But yeah, you're looking at turning around 20 to 30% of your last visits are capitalizing on them to to add an additional visit that week. That translates into a lot of revenue, as you pointed out. Is is is this is
Roger Hurni 24:52
I know you're not going to answer this question. Specifically or word to the to the dollar but hey, Weird, I actually work with a client who spent and I'm not gonna lie about this number I keep the guilty nameless here, and $7 million a year on direct mail for a one to 3% response rate, which is ridiculous. But I do know of clients who normally will have massive budgets for things like direct mail, or text messaging, or even email programs. How does LighthousePE from a cost perspective compare? Because I mean, is it? Is it a revenue driver? Or is it a cost expenditure in terms of how we can perform that kind of capital gain? I'm just trying to get the audience a sense of is it cost effective, and what does that sort of look like comparatively,
Spike Stevens 25:44
it very much is, you know, even setting aside your point earlier about the lead time on direct mail, I mean, you know, you're gonna do direct mail, you're designing, creating, printing something that by the time it hits a mailbox is three to four weeks old. So that's obviously the big advantage we have is It's instantaneous. from a cost perspective, you're obviously cutting out all those other costs, you know, printing, designing those kinds of things. We often see just just with a single, you know, creating a single or delivering a single batch of notifications, we call them signals in our language, but just delivering one of those, we'll often see our clients see a 500x ROI that month alone, just from one of those and we don't, we don't bill or meet our bill, by the by the the push notification, we don't meet or any of that stuff, it's it's kind of an all you can eat, we want you to use the platform. And we'll help you set up the platform so that you know you're you're optimizing the way that you are using it, you're not annoying people, we're not bombarding them all the time with push notifications, we help you with all that, that if you think about, you could spend five minutes creating a message or letting Lighthouse create the message using and say AI that could go to 5000 people and just one of those generates a 500x ROI on your monthly license fee for Lighthouse. Now, imagine you do 10 of those in a month. And now Now you're looking at almost a mind boggling return on investment. And in it in again, we are focused on driving additional revenue that you would have lost in man. So this isn't something like you know, back in. In my ad agency days we focused on you know, crazy KPIs like unaided brand awareness, lift and things like that, which you hope and you in your brain, you think this will translate to sales somehow, somewhere, it's all directly attributable with Lighthouse, you know that someone comes in, they can show you something on their phone to redeem, you can scan it, it's attributable additional revenue that you otherwise would not have had,
Roger Hurni 28:00
either. I don't think direct mail from lead time maybe just like far out there. I don't think that's a real fair comparison. I the way you describe this, it is far more cost effective than probably the two primary ways people think of more instantaneous or personalized messaging, that's probably SMS and email. Yeah, the thing is that both of those platforms, I know that every time you send one to somebody, as a part of a huge cohort, or a database, whatever, it costs you money, so right, every time you send an email to 5000 people, you're paying for each one of those 5000 people to get that, knowing that a huge percentage of people, while they might open, it will never take action, right? Lighthouse is like the cost isn't in how many you send it to. It's just a basic cost and an ROI on top of that, so that the platform really gets used. It sounds to me like it's probably the most cost effective channel that any brand could really adopt.
Spike Stevens 29:02
I completely agree. And I'm you know, of course, I'm biased. But yeah, you do it, you raise another good point, you know, we know what it costs to send bulk email to your list of 50,000. You know, customers and SMS services are very, can be very expensive. But with Lighthouse, that's the beauty is, is that this is a channel that you as a business now own. You know, you've got your own mobile app Lighthouse integrates with your mobile app, we're not asking you to promote a Lighthouse app, we actually integrate directly with your existing mobile app. So you own that channel now and you're paying a flat fee every month to use the platform. Yeah, you don't it makes it easier for budgeting and that's why we can have crazy ROI numbers because you know, the cost is not in there's not a linear relationship between the volume you send and the cost So you have a promotion or a prompt that really resonates? You know, you could you could actually hit a, you know, an incredible homerun with just one of those. And it doesn't cost you any more, you know, any more than than it then if you send 10 others, so
Roger Hurni 30:20
Wow. Yeah, it is, it is pretty amazing. You did mention some things like, okay, Heesu, LighthousePE can send somebody an offer deal or an experience. You talked about the host going inside of casinos. So clearly you can send a person to you, yes, interact without you getting a push notification on your phone. Is there any other value that a brand can get from LighthousePE aside from those two things?
Spike Stevens 30:45
Well, yeah, we, you know, again, going back to that concept of emotional brand loyalty. We do have, there is a, an application and mobile application that is part of our ecosystem that just called LighthousePE. And it's really designed for that back of house staff. And in the casino world, that's, that's a host, that's a general manager. In the restaurant world, it could be the general manager of a restaurant, it could be your service staff. But what that does is it actually puts the, the the the important information about your guests at their fingertips. So as an example, let's say that you were a high value player at a casino, or you were a regular customer of a restaurant, we use with this back of house, after we have this LighthousePE app. As soon as you pull into the parking lot of that restaurant, or the parking lot of a casino, you can set that up to notify who you wanted to notify. So in the case of the casino, maybe it wants to buzz your host and say, you know, hey, Roger just pulled into the West parking lot. You know, he'll be me, you'll be coming to the front door in a couple of minutes. And then it also right there with that notification, it shows that that manager or that host everything he or she needs to know about you. Your favorite drink your favorite restaurant on property, your favorite game, your favorite table, all the things that would help that person build that emotional brand loyalty. Same for a restaurant, if you walked into a restaurant, and they knew you're a you know, one of the you know, regular recurring guests and your your, your tabs were, you know, on the on the larger side, you know, they can do things, you know, favorite table again, favorite cocktail. You know, they did allow it empowers them to make to create a very personal experience for you. Without, you know, again, that scale, you know, you'd never be able to do that you'd never could have a general manager restaurant that was smart enough to memorize the Yeah, the likes of everyone that they who comes in the door, who's valuable customer. But Lighthouse can do all that for you and deliver it just in time to your phone to remind you that oh, here's Roger, and he's coming in. And here's what you know, here's what he's all about. Here's the name of his wife and kids. Now greet him at the door and say, you know, great to see you all and and that's the kind of stuff that builds that emotional brand loyalty that makes people want to come back again and again and again.
Roger Hurni 33:15
Yeah, I have yet to find anyone in the world that doesn't want to be treated like a VIP, you know, that little surprise and delight. I read a stat one time if you can surprise and delight somebody, a customer, their brand loyalty increases by 71%. And so
Spike Stevens 33:32
I believe it. That's such a great point. I mean, everyone doesn't want to be treated like a VIP. No one turns that down. Yeah, everyone wants to feel special. It's it's you know, that's, that's really well put. And that's a that's a great statistic to
Roger Hurni 33:47
reveal the the other thing that I see, and I know they do the work that I do with all of you as well, some other consulting stuff is that that that behavioral data that Lighthouse is collecting is just a treasure trove for making other marketing decisions or other operational decisions. And maybe that's another interview for another time, because I know that we're getting close here. And I want to wrap up with a couple of other questions. But I know behavior data is just incredibly valuable most most people, honestly, they just they don't really love her to it. I do have one other question. You pertain to this. And I got a couple of few wrap up questions because you've been you've been great with your time. Is privacy an issue? Because I mean, I know that third party privacy stuff from Apple and Google have even been cracked down hard. How does? How does privacy sensitivity work with with Lighthouse?
Spike Stevens 34:42
Yeah, that's obviously very timely. I think that's going to be an ongoing question from here on out. Yeah, Apple made a few changes to their operating system. And Google followed suit a couple of years ago. And I'm sure everyone has had the experience of downloading a new app and it asks you hey, can we track you Here's what you do on here across all the other apps you use. And that basically, you know, before that no one really realized we lived in an unwalled garden where all these apps shared information. And Apple put that in place. And I'm the most famous example is, you know, that Facebook's, you know, there, that's how Facebook basically built a multibillion dollar business was using all that information and then marketing to you based on it. When Apple put that in place, you know, the, I think the opt in rate, oh, yeah, you can track me was under 10%. And that put a huge dent in Facebook's revenue and business model. That's what we call third party data. So when, when marketers are relying on data gathered by other apps that aren't theirs, and sharing that into a big pool, that's third party data. What Lighthouse does is collect blue called first party data, you as a, as a customer of, you know, of the of a restaurant or a casino or a or a gym, you have that app already on your phone, you've already opted in to the things you want to opt into. Most times you're agreeing to share some if not all of your information with that app owner. That's first party, Lighthouse in the way we build Lighthouse is all around that first party relationship as, as a customer of Lighthouse, if you're, you know, an enterprise that uses Lighthouse, you actually own all that data that's gathered in we don't we Lighthouse, we don't share that with anyone else. So we're not asking, you know, you to opt in to be you know, a number in that large pool of other numbers and have all of your behavioral data commingled it is siloed, within Lighthouse, the only people that have access to are you as the user and the, the company that you already have a relationship with. So we don't share it. We don't let anyone else look at it. We don't commingle any of it. So that's, that's a great question. And something that we're really, we're very strict about. I just think it's this, going to be the way of the world going forward. Yeah,
Roger Hurni 37:15
I gotta imagine, if you are a person who has some affinity for a brand, in you're willing to download their app, I imagine that that privacy really isn't too big of an issue, because there is probably some kind of quid pro quo, where it's like, I know, I'm giving you my information, I have 100% control over it. And therefore you're gonna give me deals and experiences and things that I really want. There's seems like that's a fair exchange. Does that, does that lead to a high acceptance rate with the brand's users of their app?
Spike Stevens 37:52
It does. You know, typically, that's kind of expressed in terms of sharing your location data with the brand owner of the app. But yeah, you're right. There's a there's a unspoken agreement made that, hey, if you let us know, your location, and you maybe let us know a few other things about you. And let us send you push notifications in return, we're really going to make it worth your while. The apps that fail are the ones that asked for that. But don't give anything back in return. We I'm sure we could all come up with a list of a dozen apps on our phone that asked for the moon in return nothing.
Roger Hurni 38:30
I can't wait, I have to stop you because I gotta tell you a story. I downloaded this app. A company that I was dead of a rewards program. And you know, I didn't want to tell you the industry because it was just so weird. But anyway, I download the app. I'm in Copenhagen. And because I download the app, like a week before, I'm in Copenhagen, and I get a notification from them in Scotts from Scottsdale, Arizona, saying like whatever's on sale this weekend. I'm like, I can't I can't participate in this. Like that push notification just annoyed me. Yeah. And I got another one when I was in Peru, like six months later, and I do a lot of global traveling. But the fact that they did that twice to me where they sent me a notification where I was unable physically, to execute on it to take advantage of it was just like, Wow, you really don't care. Yeah, Lighthouse doesn't seem to do that. Like it wouldn't. It wouldn't ever send me a signal when I'm not able to actually use it. Right. Yeah,
Spike Stevens 39:33
I mean, a that's a great point, the great. I mean, that's a really, really great illustration. Yeah, we don't you know, Lighthouse looks at things like current location and when your last visit was and all kinds of things to know when it is the right or wrong time. To send you something new. You're right and nothing erodes that trust. Nothing makes you want to, at worst, or at best turn off push notifications. At worst delete the app entirely like in like an app that just feels tone deaf. All right. And in, you know, you said something earlier about, you know, building smart applications or making making mobile apps smarter. And that's really what we strive to do. That's one of the ways that we do it. It's it doesn't seem like rocket science is not rocket science to, to not send someone an offer in Scottsdale when they're in Lima, Peru or wherever you were. But but yet 90% plus of mobile apps do that all the time.
Roger Hurni 40:28
And that's just this, this that I always I have this line I use with clients all the time that you have a smartphone, make sure you have a smart app. And that seems to be a good way of taking your dumb app and making it smart. I know, we're pressed for time, I got two, two glass questions for you. And I'd really appreciate the conversation. The first one is what are you excited about right now? With all that's happening? What's the thing that gets you up in the morning that you look forward to?
Spike Stevens 40:56
I think it just the advances in artificial intelligence and why you know, when applied for good. And I kind of chuckled because you know, I think the big under underlying fears that AI will not be applied for good, but when applied for good. It has it can deliver tremendous value and tremendous positive feelings. For everyone, so I'm very excited about that. I think that the other thing I'm really excited about is I feel like you know, we were doing this stuff years ago. And you know, we always used to turn to each other and say, Yeah, mate, are we just a couple of years ahead of the market. And which is not a great place to be, you know, you want to time that so that you're selling something, you know, you're providing a service that people understand. And so I'm really excited right now about the fact that I think people are finally getting a glimpse of what AI can do. And everyone is familiar with the concept of a mobile app. But if you think about merging those two things together to deliver these custom experiences, personalized experiences, that gets me really excited. I'm excited that people are starting to recognize the value and almost the kind of unlimited potential of that, that marriage. Wow.
Roger Hurni 42:15
That's, that's great. I have one last question. I asked this of every guest. I've always felt like, we're always given advice. And sometimes we make some really bad decisions based on on advice. So I'm kind of curious as to what's the worst advice you've ever gotten that you would? No, I'm not going to do that.
Spike Stevens 42:37
That's a good one. Um, when I just had just graduated college, which is a while ago, now, I had two job offers two options. One of them was to go work for a local bank. And, you know, start your career. And mind you, I was 22. And which at the time seemed really old. But looking back, I think, you know, 22, you're just a pup go enjoy yourself. So the other option I had, I'm a musician. And the other option I had was to go play in a band on a on a cruise ship Royal Caribbean and offered me a job to be in a cruise ship band. And I asked a lot of people what they thought, but the worst advice I got was, don't waste your time doing the cruise ship thing, starting your career as soon as you can. And looking back I of course I not it almost not a day goes by when I don't wish that I had taken the other option gone to work for Royal Caribbean. But even if it just for a year would have been an amazing opportunity to meet people and see the world and new knows whether the doors would have open. But instead I took the other more conservative approach or a conservative path of starting my career. I worked for that bank for six months and left because it wasn't a good fit. And anyway, that's I think that's the worst advice I got was to get serious about life at the age of 22.
Roger Hurni 44:08
Yeah, I have kids that are teenagers now and I I've been telling him like the 20s at the time to make the stakes have a lifetime ahead of you to correct them and and learn from them. And advice I never took I was I was like yeah, I got into my career. My first ad agency job was was 19 years old. And I regret it. I mean, it's worked out for me. Career wise, certainly financially as well. But yeah, I never had those college experiences. I'd never had the those kinds of mistakes. And I do regret that a little bit. But yeah, there's something new enjoying life while you're young and allowing yourself the freedom to make those mistakes.
Spike Stevens 44:51
Yeah, when you're 22 and you think a whole year I do read a play in a band for a whole year. It seems like a big chunk of your life but when you're older, twice as old Let's say and you look back say, Man, that would have been such a great time. So I would that's his my advice is I'm gonna get, yeah, take take the path less traveled. I mean, that's not new advice from anyone but there's my story of it. Alright,
Roger Hurni 45:14
I like it. Thank you again for your time. I had been speaking with Spike Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer at LighthousePE. Spike, where can people learn more about LighthousePE and yourself if you want?
Spike Stevens 45:28
I think the best place is to visit our website, which is lighthousepe.ai. We've got several case studies up there for different kinds of industries, you can read some ideas of how to apply LighthousePE for your particular industry. And it's a great place to just sort of, you know, get a bird's eye view of what we're doing and how it could work for you. So that's where I recommend everyone starts.
Roger Hurni 45:53
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, again, thank you so much for your time. And everyone. I am Roger Hurni, the host From Persona to Personal and we'll catch you next time.
Outro 46:03
Thanks for listening to From Persona to Personal. The podcast that takes a closer look into how organizations personalized their marketing. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.
