Transcript:

Rick Currier (00:00)

Well, Eka, nice to have you here. It's, I mean, God, it's been too long. I don't think I've seen you in like a decade. I was thinking about it earlier. It's been a long time.

Eka (00:09)

And so excited to see you. I mean, you still energetic, young, and, you know, very bright looking as I remember you always.

Rick Currier (00:19)

Are

you talking about me or yourself? Because I feel like you're describing yourself. Well, no, it's great to have you here. for our audience, obviously you and I go way back, I think 15 years now. you know, for the audience, why don't you just give a quick overview of who you are and what you do and the company you work for.

Eka (00:21)

Definitely you, definitely you. So, pleasure to be here.

Yeah, definitely. ⁓ I was an immigrant for sure. Came into United States ⁓ early on ⁓ in life. I very welcome. I went to UC Berkeley as my first stop. Get to experience San Francisco and West Coast, the best coast that they say locally. ⁓ And ⁓ I had a background in chemical engineering. ⁓

It was not just language barriers, but also there's not that many, you know, chemical engineers walking around ⁓ America at the time. So not just ⁓ very nervous, but also coming into the entire different, you know, very different industry was very nerve wracking. But I got welcome and mentored and, you know, and got into advertising early on.

after UC Berkeley. Started my career with a company called IDG where Rick, you and I met. ⁓ Worked very closely with IDC. At that time, we were counting PC boxes for a living. Compact, Gateway. If this dated us back to like a Stone Age, right? Where the PCs still have that back of the screen. ⁓

Now the screen has no back and people will be like, it used to be very thick. ⁓ And then I moved very quickly into brand and newspaper. I spent ⁓ quite some time with Wall Street Journal. ⁓ Really on the publisher side, I really in love with it because ⁓ the fact that we create quality content that is not

really the same today, right? ⁓ The wave of knowledge and content on the web at the time was very curated, crafted very carefully. Then we go into the age of user generated content. ⁓ Then now we are in the AI generated content, which I think we're going to cover. But let me wrap it up on my path. ⁓ Then I spend the next 10 years in the agency world.

where ⁓ I was a product guy, know, do a lot of work with display, viewability standards. Group was one of the best, I mean, career institutions I had the pleasure to be part of, ⁓ you know, dealing with media buying with such ricker grace and discipline, you know? It's just probably the biggest ⁓ career boost.

for me to ⁓ get through. ⁓ staying with ad tech, I moved on to ⁓ Criteo, where, as you know, ⁓ we are becoming ⁓ a commerce company rather than just pure ad tech companies. We servicing retailer, ⁓ not just advertiser anymore. We servicing marketplaces. We servicing travel clients.

We serve with sports clients and we found ourselves and say, you know, commerce is the whole truth for every industry, right? If you don't master the commerce, whatever your business you're in, you ⁓ you're going to find yourself left behind by not mastering the commerce. So that's where we are. I lead the strategy or fancy name for storytelling.

Rick Currier (04:30)

You

Eka (04:30)

I

mean, with lot of data and tell the clients what really matters from this data set and help guide them to make very prudent and ⁓ productive decisions on their media investment.

Rick Currier (04:47)

On a personal level, would love to know what pulled you towards strategy as a career path. I know that's been a constant throughout your whole career. then, you know, specifically within this role, you know, how does your focus on consumer insights play into that larger role at Criteo?

Eka (05:02)

Yep, definitely. ⁓ We are in the industry that defined by change. ⁓ If you're not really comfortable with change, you find yourself really hard to grow in this industry. So to keep up with the industry, the best place to do is to stay with the consumer behavior. That's the source of truth that I always fascinated. I would want to stay close to and...

always wanted to help translate that into actionable product ideas, solution ideas, or plans. But one thing about strategy is you get to tell the story and not just presenting fancy data on a slide. And storytelling is something that I don't think AI alone or teams alone or slide alone can do the good job. I think it's all about orchestrating.

You know, you have to have a credible and breakthrough data set. Then you have to know your audience, you know, what really keeping them up at night and don't really treat their time poorly. everyone's time is really precious and you want the time that they spend with you is valuable. And that's to me, it's a core of strategy. You, you tell the story.

that's such a valuable and, you know, could be decision changing moment for clients. And that's really give me a lot of joy and sense of purpose.

Rick Currier (06:38)

Yeah, it's funny. I almost see that as Criteo's secret sauce because I'm a big believer in, know, data is really important, but you need that human element. know, Eka, if anyone's met you, you're as human as it gets. So, you know, how important is it for companies to be following this Criteo approach where, you know, bridging the gap of two worlds between data and the human connection?

Eka (07:01)

Yeah, I think you have to understand that, you know, data too has a soul. Give you an example of what I mean. So I grew up with my grandmother in Thailand. She lived to be 106 years old and she's very, she's very, you know, a good storyteller. She always have her original kinks, the ways to make me laugh, you know, a little poke here, you make me tickles and stuff.

But she's also a masterful cook. And one thing, you know, my mom and I is always trying to capture is, grandma, could you give you some of your recipe to me? We got her to write down, you know, we really sat her down and say, oh, what's in it, right? And both my mom and I tried to replicate it, whether, you know, when I was in Thailand or whether I was here.

But we couldn't cook the same way as my grandma. And she was saying to me, she said, you know, cooking without understanding who's eating is not cooking, right? She said, you know, ⁓ every dish has a soul. Every dish, it's all about the energy that you give to help the other side, you know, understand what you're giving, whether it's...

spiciness, whether it's sweetness. And she said she doesn't cook the same way for everyone. Right? So with that example is that when you actually understand how the computational kind of world works, it comes in numericals, ⁓ zero and one, and they have ways of speaking and understanding the world. So data doesn't really understand the world. AI doesn't really understand it. We do.

The craft is on us, right? There's never been a taken away from us, but we have to understand this is that cooking, it's always, it's meant to be eaten. You know, so you want to make sure that that is the core of what you do. So when I said data has a soul, you have to find that soul. It's your job to say what, what data can tell you it just what's available.

But what you want to do with it, it's to tell people what matters, right? And I think that's the core insight. If you don't do that homework, no matter how fancy your PowerPoint is, you're always going to be the shallow ones and not the one that actually speaking to people and giving what you meant to be giving to

Rick Currier (09:49)

Now, how is Criteo helping its customers with that? Because obviously, it's a very data-driven machine. Now, how are you bringing that element into your customers' programs?

Eka (10:00)

Totally. think the best things that I drawn from ⁓ Criteo is that Criteo ⁓ understand the client business through the vertical segmentation. ⁓ For example, in commerce, everyone's going to have to sell something. ⁓ Today, retail is leading the way. So we use a lot of SKU to actually define that.

space. When we move on to travel, SKU doesn't exist, right? So we have to move that our tech construct away from SKU and create destination as the center. know, so to actually make our tech and our databases understand what are the matching keys, right?

What really the core of these buying activities or the journey at the end of the day, they're going to go from origins to destination, right? It's not about buying skew anymore. It's about traveling. It's about experiencing. So, ⁓ something like travel experience ID that helped connect tours, rental car to hotel, to airlines.

It's really the massive things that how we translate, right? Our understanding of client business into computer computational languages. And that has to start with big decision. know, ⁓ you have to want it. You have to want to solve the client problem and then you build from there.

Rick Currier (11:52)

I want to dive a little bit into AI. There was a Criteo research report. I saw that, you know, over half the shoppers out there are now utilizing chat GPT to find products. So obviously, obviously a major shift in buying behavior from your point of view, what is, what is the biggest takeaway for marketers out there with how this is changing the way people are shopping online?

Eka (12:02)

Mm-hmm. Yep. ⁓

Uh, a hundred percent. think, you know, um, um, it might be useful for me to start with our research. We, we asked a thousand consumer, um, what they think about the AI and they told us that 51 % is using chat GBT alike for shopping. Right. So the tipping point happened that validates what you, what your question, your point is now what that means. So to me first.

We believe that, ⁓ the journey doesn't start as a search box as we used to think anymore. Right. We are moving from search engine, tied up understanding of how internet is organized. We get a list of what's available. Right.

in terms of ranking, uh, uh, pages, ranking articles, ranking products into answers. Let me pause for a minute. We going from search engine to answers engine. What did that mean? First of all, that means one, the trusting need to change, right? You no longer being curators.

Of what you're going to end up clicking and reading anymore. You get one answer and that is it. Unless you don't trust it. You go and, you know, kind of navigate through other in source of information yourself. Because of that fundamental shift, you have to think about it. The journey is no longer the funnel, right? People don't just start wandering around.

They want a quick answer. They would go for it. But people always say, this is going to destroy everything we know. So the AI is not about to destroy it. As I mentioned before, we went from institutional content to user generated content and now AI content generation. There's a lot of good and bad coming out of it, right?

Giving example as defake came out because of it, right? First fake news in user generated content. Now defake coming in and human will fight back, right? We not going to, ⁓ know, consumer is not moron, right? And David Ocovay put it, is your wife. So, so you have to treat consumer with respect for sure. Happy wife, happy life.

Rick Currier (14:56)

You

Eka (15:04)

And that's, it's, it's the, there's still the same fundamental like kind of rules today. At the end of the day, it's what customer or consumer choose. That's where they're going to dictate where it's going. Let me conclude, you know, for the list, your listener is that you're going to find yourself not try to decipher that fragmented journey, but you're going to have to understand now that.

Your first customer is now a machine. Give you a fun fact, right? 30 to 50 % of open web traffic today and this CloudFlare ⁓ research is actually run by bots. And there are probably 500

billion requests a day. Don't quote me on that. I'm trying to remember the exact number. That goes visit your website, right? And that is now the first point of entry. So if your brand and your product is not understood or be recognized, this matters to my consumer. Your brand or your product will no longer be discoverable.

Rick Currier (16:30)

So let me ask you then from the marketer's point of view, knowing the first customer should be the machine and the second customer who's buying your product is starting with a prompt, what should they be thinking about to make sure that they show up?

Eka (16:33)

Yeah.

Yeah. So you have to think like machine, right? ⁓ you're not, you know, typing articles. You are giving machine the schema, right? It's a recipe. It's a structure that help machine understand what you're trying to tell people, ⁓ you know, on the open web. And these schema is going to be so important.

It's the new SEO of your brand and your product. If your product doesn't matter to machine, your product doesn't matter to the end user. And you have to always understand that and say, is my product and my brand structure and speak to machine as well? Right. And, and doesn't mean that.

website's gonna go away. know, people get answers just like I raised two kids. ⁓ You know, Rick, can you believe it? There are 24 and there are 20. And my youngest, you met them. So you, you know how, how, how much. Absolutely. Absolutely. But they come to their parents for answers. And that conversation is very short.

Rick Currier (17:46)

I can't believe it. Makes me feel old.

They were babies when I met them though.

Eka (18:04)

But what really makes the connection is when I go for daddy-daughter date, right? That's not the answer. So the web is not about to ditch your website. know, people are going to go shopping still. People are going to want to around.

the joy of shopping is going to be there. They're not going to just shop through the AI, just the same way that not everything is going to have to go through Amazon. You're going to want to try on, you want to spend time with your loved ones. You want to go to the mall sometimes and you want to really bring the joy of shopping. Still, it's not about efficiency. Right? So with that analogy, I think you have to understand that it's one of the channels you have to take it very, very seriously.

You know, just like you have to keep the short answer to your kids, but you have to understand what you're giving them. It's a collective small talk and collective decisions that shape them to be the adult, you know, in my case, they are today. So answers has its place, but not its totality. So I think chat GBT will have very significant role when making decisions or actually save time.

Rick Currier (19:11)

Mm-hmm.

Eka (19:18)

⁓ and stay away from tedious work, but it will not gonna replace the joy of shopping and the human elements of it when we craft the experience of travel. You can have itinerary all you want, but you wanna see the place, you wanna listen to a really good video of YouTube, help you immerse into the city that you wanna go to without being there. And I think that's still going to thrive.

With AI help, those kinds of experiences are going to be more immersive. Right? So your website has to understand that don't fear the AI. It is here because it's offered the value that none of us has offered them of the consumer before. It's not an enemy. It's also friend. You're going to have to work with it. You have to understand how to speak to it and you have to understand what role it plays.

for you as a person, for you as a consumer, and for you as a marketer.

Rick Currier (20:24)

No, that makes sense. I want to talk a little bit about trust as part of this equation. So how should marketers think about trust within this AI journey? Is there a risk in terms of offloading too much to the machine?

Eka (20:36)

Yeah, that's definitely, you just like, you you try to, you know, own the day of your first job. You're going to go around the office, check your hands, right? And some people will give you the wrong information and say, no, the bathroom is to your right, you know, down the hallway. And then you walk there and it's like, that's not bathroom.

You know, AI is the same way, right? You wanted to understand the fact that human makes mistakes and so is AI. I believe Elon Musk was saying that if he had a choice, he would go back and actually, you know, recreate 30 % of the internet or the history, you know, because a lot of that is garbage. We don't want that to feed our machine that help us make decisions moving forward the same way. But I don't think that is reality. The reality is

Data will be mixed just like people will be mixed. know, trust has to come from your own judgment, your own risk reward kind of, you know, ways of thinking and say what type of decision I should rely on, you know, machine to do and what type of purchases or decisions I should rely on my peer on, you know, direct source with trusted expert. And that's

going to continue to be preferential. We're to start seeing more behavior, you know, data coming out of how people using AI, right, to kind of reduce these tedious tasks. And some of them will hallucinate, both human and AI. Human can hallucinate that they're thinking AI understands the world and understand his or her emotion.

you know, develop personal relationship with the AI thinking there's actually a person on the other side. And AI could hallucinate that this person want more answer like this. So whether I give the right or wrong answer, my goal is to satisfy my consumer. And I'm going to give, you know, the, the type of answer that satisfy these person, whether it's true or not. Maybe AI doesn't care. Right. So

Think about it this, it's like a two mirror facing each other. Okay. Whatever you give your AI, it became the AI truth. What effort the AI gave you, it became your truth. Right. And we are as much responsible for the hallucination as a programmer do. That makes sense?

Rick Currier (23:29)

Yeah, it does. It's interesting because I feel like in my own personal life talking to people, there's this notion that AI has to be 100%. And when it's wrong, like they just want to throw the whole thing out the window. In my own personal life, I'm thinking about all the times, you know, the experts have told me something wrong or I've gone to websites created by humans and they've been wrong. It's like, there's a lot of wrong information out there on the human side as well, probably a lot more. So I think it's okay if there's some mistakes on the AI side.

Eka (23:57)

Absolutely. And I think, you you have to think about these from the technical point of view. ⁓ I gave one presentation, ⁓ maybe two weeks ago and I use Rapunzel as my story. And I said, Rapunzel growing up in a tower, right. And the only way she can see outside where is her window. That's one window on that tower. And you know,

her routines and the way she enhance her days is she read the same three books on a shelf. ⁓ She paints, you know, until the wall has no space to paint. She knit, she cook, she play with her chameleon friends and all that. And that's where she master. She master her tower. But she has nothing or no notion or no truth about outside world.

She starts seeing, you know, the lantern flying every time it hits her birthday. She didn't know what that means. These go back to what I call it, what the industry call it, RAGRAD, retrieval augmented generation. And it's a fancy term for data storage. When AI doesn't know, it's going to look up. And it will look up.

to the data stores that been given to it. Right. If you give the wrong data store as a reference, AI I'm going to spit out the wrong information. So this is very fundamental. If you as a marketer don't understand this rag concept, you will face these common hallucination, right?

doesn't know. And when it doesn't know, does what it's designed to do. It's not about understand the world, but predict the next world.

Rick Currier (26:08)

No, it makes sense. I want to bring this back to the Alliance standpoint as we kind of bring this home right now. going back to that Dell with Intel inside example, you know, how should, you know, Alliance's partnerships be thinking about this whole journey when maybe neither of them owns the first touch point with the customer?

Eka (26:27)

Yeah. I have to address first that this is a very unique and I applaud your, name of your podcast, right? ⁓ Partner marketers, you know, has that has this unique spot. They not, they're not, they don't belong to one brand or the other. They operate between the value creation of the two brands together.

So in my mind, they have a lot more. They have limitation about the dues. They have more plenty for double of the don'ts. You know, first that is unique. So there's no craft or system or tool designed for this, right? Because this is such a unique space. Most of tool and technology design for solaness.

Right? Single brand, single marketing. ⁓ they understand each other very well. The brand value is the same. Now, when you operate in that intersection, ⁓ you cannot be the performers. What I mean by that is you're not just a drummer. You're not just a guitarist, right? You orchestrate something that required two sides of it, you know, ⁓ two or more elements and you become

producer rather than performer. That makes sense? So you have to understand that nature and say, all right, I'm operating in the share value, the intersections of these co-creation, right? There's more limitation to me. How can I be successful in this? My first point is that AI going to help you a lot.

You know, ⁓ because once they understand the value of the drum and the value of the guitar, they can actually help harmonize. And that's where I believe the key of success is, ability to harmonize and be able to build something, you know, one plus one equal three or greater. And that's it's case by case basis. Right. You move on to.

you know, from HP Intel to Dell Intel to Apple and Intel, ⁓ you know, you're to have to compose different music at that point. Now to identify the framework and to actually do your job. Well, one thing I know AI won't do for you. AI won't make bad marketers better. Right.

Rick Currier (29:21)

You

Eka (29:23)

AI will make good marketers faster. And I think that is fundamentally different. Now that partner, you know, marketer used to be bogged down by these learnings, right? Identify the intersections, how to, how to, ⁓ fuse the journeys, the touch point, the lead, who lead belong to us and all that together. Now you can delegate a lot of that.

to AI, a lot, right? Now you can find commonalities and touch point in Excel spreadsheet. There are new tools coming out from Cloth for financial services just a week or two ago. And it has this ability to fuse two data set, provide recommendations, and also create investment recommendation in two minutes.

Think about that power that...

partner marketers can do all you have to begin to do is to teach your AI these unique space, right? And repeatedly create these simulations after simulations, after simulation. One thing that AI won't do is getting tired.

You can try so many, like Ricky, you can try so many scenarios of how these partnerships can go right, how these partnerships can go wrong, what are the holes, what are the things. Let that machine do machine things. And you, responsible for harmonizing. And I think that is the key.

Rick Currier (31:17)

Yeah, I love that. mean, I think, I mean, what a great quote, know, AI is not going to make bad marketers better, but it's going to make good marketers faster. So I think that's, it's a great summary. I I could, Pat, I feel like we're just scratching the surface here. There's, there's so much, I mean, I've learned so much. know the audience will, you know, where should people go for more information? If they want to learn, go a lot deeper in terms of what Critio is doing, the value your team is bringing. Where should people go? Do you guys have insights series? What can you lead people with?

Eka (31:47)

Absolutely. ⁓ you know, the ⁓ best place to go definitely is creedio.com. We have, ⁓ you know, thousands and thousands of pages and content that speak to different facets of our customers. But also, you know, ⁓ we're very active on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. So I post a lot of ⁓ my views.

And recently, I created these thinking models called Predictive Moment of Truth, or PMOD. ⁓ And really, I'm feeling it out there in terms of how people frame the impact of AI onto customer journey. And that's my first kind of touch point and wanted to gather a thinker alike and wanted to collaborate. ⁓

If you type in ECAPAD, I don't think that the sort of result will be that many ⁓ on LinkedIn. So you probably will find me very easily.

Rick Currier (32:49)

Well, we'll definitely drop some links to in the show notes. And, you know, I think this whole conversation, you know, exemplifies what this show is all about. Right. So, you know, a yeah, it's geared towards partner marketers, two companies together to sell. Right. But, you know, it's tech marketing and the human connection. And I think, you know, what you're doing at Criteo, you know, who you are, you know, you're you're a connector. And I know, you know, not just professionally, but personally, I mean, you've been you've been a partner with me for many years, you know.

by my side, supporting me, big supporter in many ways. So just wanna thank you for always being there and for coming on the show. It's been a lot of fun and we are overdue to get a beer in person, way overdue.

Eka (33:29)

Absolutely, absolutely. It's such a such a joy, you know, reuniting with you for sure. think we have a lot to talk about. have, you know, ideas that we definitely I'm curious for you more of your point of view for sure. So beers are in order.

Rick Currier (33:46)

All right, Eka, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

Eka (33:49)

Thank you very much for having me.