Leveraging Data for Restaurant Success with Lewis from Pairzon

In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, the conversation focuses on the critical role of customer data in driving brand success within the restaurant industry. Guest speaker Lewis, with a 25-year background in digital media, discusses the transition from traditional metrics like click-through rates to more effective measures linking advertising to in-store performance. He emphasizes the importance of first-party data over third-party data, especially in light of privacy concerns and the deprecation of cookies. Pairzon's approach combines AI algorithms to predict consumer behavior with a focus on real-time, actionable insights from a restaurant's own data. The dialogue covers the challenges restaurants face in capturing customer data and how solutions like loyalty programs and e-receipts can aid in better targeting and personalization. Lewis shares insights on the evolving landscape of digital advertising, the effectiveness of different platforms, and the imperative of understanding and utilizing first-party data for competitive advantage.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest Speaker
00:24 The Importance of Customer Data in the Restaurant Industry
00:48 Deep Dive into Digital Advertising and Marketing Evolution
01:13 Challenges and Solutions in Modern Marketing Metrics
02:24 The Power of AI in Predicting Consumer Behavior
02:33 Leveraging First-Party Data for Marketing Success
03:30 Understanding and Overcoming Data Challenges in Restaurants
09:04 The Role of Loyalty Programs in Data-Driven Marketing
23:11 The Future of Targeted Advertising and the Importance of First-Party Data
27:27 How Pairzon Enhances Restaurant Marketing with Data
34:53 Conclusion and How to Connect with Pairzon

Transcript

0:02

This is the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Helping you run your restaurant better.

Jeremy: 0:12

Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. I think everyone out there for joining us, as I say, each and every time you guys time is valuable and you guys have lots of choices. So thank you guys for spending time today. We are joined by somebody that's in a very growing space within our industry. And I'm excited to hear Lewis talk a little bit about this because I think. Customer data and where people are at with their data is really, really critical to brand success today. And I think we're at some of the early stages, at least in the restaurant vertical with us. But Lewis, before we jump into what you get to do for a living, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about who you are, where you came from? And then, we can talk a little bit about what you get to do for a living.

Lewis Rothkopf: 0:48

I would love to, and first off, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. I have been in the digital media industry for the past 25 years, really working through all aspects of digital media. I'm a digital advertising and marketing as it came up in the world, going back to the very late nineties. there's something that makes me very passionate. I do and makes this role at Pairzon really fun for me. and the reason is so many marketers are still measuring the campaign, the app, the success of their campaigns using old metrics or vanity metrics, right? So click through rate. People are still optimizing expensive campaigns via click through rate. what we know from learning about the industry is that the people who click are not necessarily the people who buy stuff. And some people are using, completed views in the video as a metric. we believe that these are all outdated and in some cases counterproductive. you have to once again, when the sales part of an organization to the marketing part of an organization, the metrics that actually count for retailers and hospitality orgs is how many people saw the ad online or SMS or email, and then came to the store or the hotel or the restaurant made a purchase. What did they purchase down to the ski level? And which of the advertising did they see that showed that, result in them making that action and going to the store, going to the restaurant, going to the hotel? we do that. And in a nutshell, it's one of our two superpowers. The first, of course, is tying online advertising to in store, brick and mortar performance. And the second is predicting using a I algorithms, which of your consumers as a retailer or marketer are most likely to convert. And you mentioned data a moment ago. Everything we do is based upon the retailer's first party data. So there's great third party data you can buy. there's some trouble brewing, as I'm sure you've heard in the third party data business around cookie, acceptability and deprecation. So when you are working as a retailer with your most precious and personal asset, your first party data, you get to get around many of the pitfalls that have involved, we've been involved with data targeting over the past several years. So your data is precious. Retailers, restauranteurs, hoteliers. we see that they're not in many cases making full, taking full advantage of that data. and so we're here to help them use their data, pull out the insights and sell more. That's really what we believe online advertising should be measured by, selling more stuff.

Jeremy: 3:26

I think Lewis, you talked a little bit about what you guys, what you guys do. And, and, and I know that you guys have a depth of experience, I mean, a lot of retail and I would say, and I think, oftentimes when I talk with people about the use of data with an offline retail and I call it offline retail in restaurants, primarily, which is what our audiences is. Listening for their, they're really far behind grocery. They're really far behind a lot of these retailers with being able to do the things that, that general retailers and especially e commerce retailers have been doing for years. And so, and I, we, I, oftentimes when I talk to marketers, we'll, we'll do that old adage, the joke that, you know, 50 percent of marketing works. We just don't know what 50%. The funny thing is, is nowadays we can know what works. And so I'm, I'm excited to explore, How and why you guys do it the way you guys do it. But before we, before we go there, Louis, you've been around this space for a while. Talk to me about traditionally how people have thought about this. You talked about click through rates. You've talked about these vanity metrics. Why is it that people are still thinking those are valuable pieces? Because I think, all too often our retailers that we talk to, our restaurants that we talk to, They're not marketing experts. CFOs aren't marketing experts. They don't know that they have access to some of these other things. And so their CMO or their VP of marketing might come in and talk to them about these vanity metrics and, and get them all excited about the things that they're doing and how successful they are. Why is it that that's what people are have gravitated to thus far until they get with a solution like what you guys are doing?

Lewis Rothkopf: 4:58

Old habits, they do die hard. there's also this sort of intellectual fallacy that, hey, I showed an ad, the person clicked on it, so they must want to go buy the thing. and that's just not true, right? and any number of studies that have been done. The clicks are not necessarily correlated with more things being purchased. And so you've got these habits. They're very hard to break. You've got agency buyers who are incentivized to perform against metrics that just don't have anything to do with did their advertising push products through the physical location or the online location. So You know, the want to make your quote that you made, about 50 percent working 50 percent not, if you actually are a marketer today and you don't know which of your advertising is working, that is not the nature of the industry. That is your fault. There is no reason in today's world that the tools that are available to marketers to not understand which of their advertising is working. Now, more insidiously, when you do use those proxy metrics to measure your success, now you're throwing yourself false positives, right? Now you're saying, oh man, 10 percent of people opened this email, so this must be the most effective email I've ever done. Maybe, but what happened after they read that email? Did they go into the store? Did they make a reservation at the restaurant? Did they buy something? What did they buy? Did they come back? How quickly did they come back? And so leveraging all of this data that the marketer has on their own about their audience is the purest and clearest signal you can get on intent to purchase and actual purchase history. Okay.

Jeremy: 6:37

the metrics that they saw it, but talk to me a little bit about the difficulty translating from, I saw an ad, I might've even clicked an ad. I signed up for a newsletter. I got the, you know, I got the coupon, or I got this ad. Offer, whatever this offer might be translating that down to a store level and that guest, because again, there's, I mean, and I was talking with the previous guest a couple of months ago, I ultimately went to a brand and I, and I'd love to talk a little bit about this. I went to a brand cause I got, I got an advertisement in the mail and it was 10 percent off an order of 50 or more. and we chose to go there based on that, but ultimately forgot the ad. We forgot to bring the ad with us. So they, they weren't able to get attribution. I know that for a fact. And it's not like they asked at the, at the, at the checkout, Hey, did you come in because the ad that we sent in the, in the weekly flyer, but talk to me a little bit about the difficulty and why you would even make such a bold statement. You know, marketers are, are, I don't remember exactly the adjective you use, but I'm going to paraphrase it. They're being lazy if they're not attributing their advertising spend to actual spend. You know, historically it's been harder to get those things and talk to me a little bit about the advancements over the last 20 years and why you think it's something that is critical to today's consumer and to today's brands when they're doing those things. Anybody that's ever run a restaurant knows the craziness that happens during a meal period in a rush. One of our partners, Restaurant Technologies, Total Oil Management Solution, is an end to end oil management system that delivers, filters, monitors, and recycles your cooking oil, taking one of the jobs that none of your team wants to do and takes it off your hands, allowing your team members to focus on their guests. Control the kitchen chaos with Total Uh, restaurant technologies and make your kitchen safer while maximizing your staff's time. The solution can be provided at no upfront costs. If you want to learn more, please check out rti inc. com or call 888 796 4997.

Lewis Rothkopf: 8:34

I don't think it's laziness. I think it is, simply not knowing that there is a better way. or not evangelizing through their organization that there is a better way of doing this. and again, when you think about it, so let's say this consumer, consumed the entire video. It was 30 seconds long, it was an ad, and they consumed the whole thing. That just doesn't mean anything in terms of in store sales, right? what were they doing when that video was playing? Maybe they were in the bathroom. Maybe they were opening the front door. Maybe they're, right? without tying your advertising to actual sales, you're missing out. and one, method that a lot of retailers and restaurateurs and hoteliers use is, a loyalty program. So when you sign up for a loyalty program, you are, of course, providing information on an optimum basis to that marketer. a loyalty program allows us to much, much more fully target the consumers, across the internet who you, who we believe are most likely to convert. So again, that the superpower is taking AI. Using it to look at all of your consumer behavior, all of your transaction logs for the last couple of years, real time access to your P. O. S. So that the data is always fresh. Now we talked a lot about targeting. We should also talk about anti targeting and the importance of it. when you are in market for a pair of shoes, and everybody uses this example, but I only know the pair of shoes example, and you go shopping online, and then all of a sudden you get followed around online everywhere you go with an ad for those pair of shoes, and you said, that's it, that's great, I'm actually going to the store and I'm going to buy those pair of shoes, so you go to the store, you buy the shoes you got the ad for, Attribution happens, consumer wins, marketer wins, right? what happens next? the consumer puts their new shoes on, they go back online and they're seeing the same ad. And then they go to work the next day and they're seeing the same ad. And from the consumer perspective, this is one of the number one things that consumers say when you ask them, Yeah. is online advertising creepy, right? People don't like being followed around with the same ad across the internet, but more importantly, they really don't like to be followed around with the same ad after they already bought the product and are thus no longer in market for that product. what you're able to do as a marketer in anti targeting those who've already converted or whom you know, for whatever reason, are not going to convert. You're not ticking off consumers who bought your product and are still seeing the ad. And critically, you're not wasting money, right? You showing an ad to a consumer that's already bought that product is money down the drain. There is literally no value in doing that.

Jeremy: 11:01

Well, and I think that, that one of the things that we talk oftentimes about when we talk about, you know, this, this data and knowing who your consumer is and putting advertisements in front of them is, is certain people want certain things. I happen to not drink. I tell, you know, long time listeners, no, I haven't drank in quite some time. No problem with people drinking. My wife drinks, lots of people like no drink. I just choose not to drink. So sending me advertisements directly for the beer of the month club or the whiskey of the month club ultimately turns me off from that messaging. And I, and I ignore it, whether that message has hit me on, you know, Social platforms or it's hit me via email or it's hit me, you know, on the web. However, it's done that it's going to turn me off. Cause they don't necessarily know who, who I am. same thing on any of those different platforms. If, if, if I have already converted telling me to come in, if I, if Once every six weeks, I go into this brand to go eat food and they hit me and trying to get me every two weeks, probably not going to, it's probably going to frustrate me versus maybe hitting me and trying to get me from six weeks to five and a half weeks or four weeks or, or somewhere closer to that, to that, I guess, Louis. Talk to me about why not name a, why, how is it today that we now have the capability to see these things, even for that anti targeting, because this was news to me, I didn't even realize that you guys could now start to see through the data that I have consumed that product, or I have gone to that brand, or I have bought those shoes. I had no idea that we were at that point now where they can see the conversion, because again, I still have brands that are doing it really poorly on social. I'm like, dude, I already bought that. I did click the ad. I did go to the shop now button. I did buy that product online and, and now you're continuing to spend money on me. and I'm too lazy to put the not interested button on social, you know, maybe I should to save those guys some money, but you know, it's, it's interesting to me and I wasn't even quite sure that that happened.

Lewis Rothkopf: 12:53

Yeah, it's not your responsibility as a consumer to curate whether or not you've bought a product for the purpose of saving the marketer money, right? That is you. but that's not what consumers are all about, as and not something that should be on the consumer's, agenda of having to do when they consume content online. the thing to keep in mind, of course, about using first party data, and I know that I keep hammering away at this point, but I will continue doing so because it is so important. Using first party data gives you a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not doing so. let's go into your hypothetical, the store that's targeting you for beer. Is that a grocer? Is it a liquor store?

Jeremy: 13:31

It happens to be a restaurant,

Lewis Rothkopf: 13:33

a restaurant. Great.

Jeremy: 13:34

that, that, that is a brewery, primarily, you know, they, they, 30 percent of their sales are from, from, you know, the beers that are coming out, they have a beer of the month club that you can get it sent to your house, you know, and it happens to be a brand like that, you know, that is doing it. And, and. Yeah. I think it's fantastic. And when I did drink, I actually drank their beer, but I haven't in a very long time. And I am a loyalty member, so I'll go through it. Even at that point, I am a loyalty member. I do loyalties. So they know who I am. They know what my transactions are and they know that there's never been a beer cause my wife doesn't drink beer. She drinks other things, but she doesn't drink beer. So there's never been a time in the last 14 years that it's been in my basket. and they should know that by

Lewis Rothkopf: 14:11

They should know that by now. Exactly. so that's the key, right? It is very easy once you have all the data in one place to see, huh, this guy comes to our restaurant all the time. he tips well, he spends a bunch of money on chicken tenders. But he never drinks, and so we're going to go ahead and now that signal is so strong, we're going to put him in the segment that says does not drink. And so you'll be targeted if, if the restaurant does everything right, you'll be targeted with ads for non alcoholic items. They won't be wasting money and potentially angering you. By sending you ads for alcoholic beverages when you've made it very clear in your actions that you are not interested in being rewarded or incentivized to come in and buy. That's critically important. So few companies are doing that. maybe in, in yesterday, there would be a little box you would tick on the loyalty program registration that says, I'm interested in, food, holiday parties, and then it says alcohol and I'm not going to take alcohol, right? But you don't even have to do that, right? You can use AI to see, huh, this guy has come to the restaurant seven times in the last month. He's in our absolute super user category. We love him. But in looking at the skew history. He never buys beer, so we should make the leap of logic that says this guy is probably not going to buy beer. And honestly, I'd much rather not show the ad to somebody who is not a buyer, than, spend the extra money, show you the ad and hope that, what, your behavior after 14 years is going to change? It's crazy. being able to leverage,

Jeremy: 15:46

time I do buy a beer, they should, they should signal that says, Hey, you know what? He hasn't bought a beer in 14 years. AI can tell you now there's a beer in his basket. Was the party size more than his traditional party size? Was he there? I mean, and this is the stuff that, that I really want to dig into you, Louis, because I think, I think with. You know, machine learning and AI and these logarithms, you have the capability to see what the occasion is. If I'm now taking an associate out to dinner, not just my family, I happen to have four kids and a wife and my wife drinks and my kids are all under age, so none of them drink. And so I don't drink, none of my kids drink. And my wife always drinks either a margarita or a soda. Or she drinks a martini at this place. Just, it's just what she drinks. She never drinks anything else. And so if something else shows up in my basket, was my basket size now bigger? Did I now have 10 people at the, at the party? You know, was there zero kids meals on the, on the deal? But I took and use that occasion to go take some friends out. And there was six of us and there was four beers on the check. Cause everybody else that was not my wife and I did have a beer, but it was a six top, but it was a six top all with adult entrees, not a six top with some kids meals and some Regular deal. So I do want to talk through that because I, I do, I hear from restaurant brands, Louis, all the time that they're, they're inundated with data and being able to look at these types of things and be able to make these business decisions about this is really, really hard because you're constantly getting peppered with this data that, that, you know, even that example that we just talked about, you know, my frequency for this brand, when I'm with my family, I eat one way when I'm with them. With, a business associate, I eat a different way. And when I'm traveling, I eat a different way just because I, this is a national brand and I go to it in different places and I have different, different occurrences, but I still attach my loyalty to it. And, and so they know who I am. Talk to me about the proliferation of data and really how AI and machine learning and you guys, as you, as you talked about it, your secret sauce is helping people. To surface these types of decisions, because this is really where I think the power is starting to come in is not just in the capture, but in the suggestive things that you're talking about.

Lewis Rothkopf: 17:48

Yeah. so let's think about the best way to talk about this. do you have a sense as to what these restauranteurs are doing today with this data? Or are they just inundated with it? And it it's rolling off their back.

Jeremy: 18:01

I mean, unfortunately, you know, marketing gets decent amount of budget, but so much of it goes into ad spend. And so that's the hard part is, is the data analytics and most marketers aren't data analytics people. They didn't go into marketing to go do data analytics. They went into marketing ultimately, whether it be creative or Or to truly, you know, put a brand out there and get people to, to like it and to drive that behavior. They don't want, you know, they don't want to be a data analyst. And so they struggle with that, which is quite frankly, where I think the power of AI, I mean, I look at even for myself on this podcast, I'm now doing show notes. I'm now doing show, you know, transcripts. I'm using AI to help me with all of that. Whereas before I couldn't do it. I just, I couldn't produce enough content and enough shows. In enough period of time and do all of those things. Whereas I do believe with machine learning and, AI, the capabilities are there to be able to do this. What if analysis, Hey, how many people are in this geography that drink beer on a regular basis, and it's been in their basket in the last month, that stuff would have taken a data analyst five years ago or 10 years ago, days to figure these things out. And you know, the campaign might be over. The marketer might be like, Hey, it's St. Patty's day coming up. Let's go figure out how to do a St. Patty's Day deal. And now they can go get the data to be able to talk to those people, to drive the behavior for St. Patty's Day. You know, whereas years ago they wouldn't have been able to, without having a full FP and a group that would be able to do that. So, sorry, I'll, I'll, I'll lead you into that, but I think it's where computer vision, I mean, not computer vision, but. AI and all of the different machine learning logarithms can give us the capability to micro segment people and truly know who those people are.

Lewis Rothkopf: 19:41

Absolutely. great point. we like to joke that our biggest competitor is Excel because of exactly what you just said, right? So before Pairson and before companies like ours. You would have that team of 10, 15 analysts in a room pouring through the spreadsheets, trying to pluck out learnings that they could then turn into things that will make their business run better and things that will increase sales. that is expensive. That is unsustainable. It is unscalable. and so a lot of companies, especially smaller businesses, just don't do it. And again, like you are missing out on a huge competitive differentiator when you don't use your data to understand what's going on with your consumers, predict their behavior in the future, and then close that loop between advertising and sales. So you really know, is this stuff working? And you don't have to rely on a room full of, data analysts, looking at Excel spreadsheets. There's nothing wrong with that, but you just can't do it at the scale that AI is able to do it for you.

Jeremy: 20:40

Well, and the other piece that I think is, is really critical is that you can't do it at scale and you also can't micro segment people because people historically, at least from my understanding of your industry is, is they would get put into generalized buckets. I'm a father. I'm a mom. You know, I kind of fit that, you know, upper middle, middle class income, you know, white collar neighborhood, you know, type of profile, but unfortunately, you know, the customization that a lot of e commerce brands have been able to do, they know exactly who, you know. What I'm going to buy because I'm really into soccer and I'm really into hiking and I'm really into baseball. Like those are, those are things that, you know, I don't look like the guy that, you know, that, that is next door to me who might not be into sports at all. And so being able to even, you know, micro target, his income could be exactly the same. It could be in the same geo, but because, and he could have four kids just like I do, but in, unfortunately, historically, they, they put these into very generalized buckets because it was. Almost impossible to get to that micro targeting level. Talk to me a little bit about how, how much faster that is to get there with the data access that you guys have. because I think it's critical for people to understand that you're collecting this data, but if you're not utilizing it to drive. Customer satisfaction at the end of the day and drive sales, you're missing out.

Lewis Rothkopf: 21:57

Yeah, there's another old joke in the industry that. says by the time you're done targeting, if you micro target and make the data targeting narrower and narrower, you're better off just picking up the phone and calling the 15 people who you want to buy your product. And so you don't have to do that anymore. There are tools like ours that makes you understand. How many people are there in this audience of consumers that would fit into category, and whichever method your business uses to, measure advertising effectiveness, whether it's the media mix model, recency, frequency, monetary value. We can support all those in platform. And probably my favorite is recency, frequency, monetary value because it lets you as a business owner analyze, all the segments of your customers who have come to the store, not come to the store, bought something, the category of thing they bought. And all of this, all this works in real time. So if somebody is in your, oh, we've got trouble with this person, you've only seen them once in the past year category, and they come in, right? And they come in again the following week. now they're no longer in the in trouble category. Let's move them up a little bit to opportunity category, right? And that's something that again, I just don't think you can do that without having, the benefit of machine learning algorithms and AI on your side. it would just be difficult, if not impossible.

Jeremy: 23:11

I'm going to pivot a little bit. You've talked about first party data for a while. We did have somebody on, on the show recently that was a third party company. And I think that as you said, there's value in that, but there's more value if you focus on capturing the first party data, talk to me a little bit about how Pairzon does that, especially in offline. Restaurants, you know, and I say offline restaurants, you know, still the numbers and the percentages, if you're not talking pizza are very, very low, you know, less than 50 percent and a lot of brands, less than 20%, where you do capture the guest name, the guest email address, you know, because it's, it's, it's that, or, and then you've got, you know, the advent and restaurants of third party aggregators, like, you know, third party delivery service providers like DoorDash Eats. And oftentimes you don't get that direct consumer data about those guys. So. Talk to me a little bit about your guys's philosophy in those restaurant brands, where my primary frequency is in store in person, whether it be a counter service place or table service place to be able to capture who that guest is. Cause that, that historically has been one of the biggest challenges for restaurants is while they get it and they want to see that, that guest, they can't figure out who they are without changing the guest experience so dramatically that it causes, it causes, you know, operational friction.

Lewis Rothkopf: 24:26

So you don't have to change a guest experience that dramatically and that's the secret, right? So the easiest way to be able to identify your audiences is by having a loyalty program. And, two or three points of data, like email address, first name, last name, et cetera, phone number, will enable you to find those users where they exist online. There is nothing wrong with third party data, and you should not feel bad if you were a marketer who's making use of third party data. it's valuable. but the problem with third party data, in addition to all of the sort of privacy and legislative ways that it's becoming increasingly fraught, the problem with third party data is your competitor can buy the exact same thing. I'm, Bob's Pizza, next door is Louis's Pizza. Bob's Pizza and Louis's Pizza are going after the same market, the same people, and so they're both, very qualified at buying third party data, but now there's no competitive advantage. Like, why would you choose Bob's over Louis's, right? with the power of first party data, and you don't need to have an loyalty program to collect first party data. You can do what we do for our customers who don't have loyalty programs is we can help them send out e receipts. think about it, right? You're in the store, you made the purchase, you're at the restaurant, you get the check, and they say, Oh, would you like us to email your receipt to you? Wonderful. Would you like to give us your SMS number? Would you like to give us your email address? however you want to do it. And you see this, by the way, at all the places that have those self checkout terminals or the, swipe your card here. Is it a restaurant here in U. S. In the U. S. Where they did the European style brought the reader to me. I put the tip in the right so you can collect that data in as many different ways as are legally possible and are respectful to your consumers. We see that, our marketer, customers who have loyalty programs are able to match somewhere around 85% of their consumers online. if you don't have a loyalty program, it's anywhere between 20, 30, maybe 40% match, but again, now you're matching, deterministically 20, 30, 40%, whereas previously we were matching nothing. so there's that. how do we do it in real time and how do we bring it all together? You think about Pareson as being in the center of the marketing funnel, you've got not the marketing funnel, like the stage of the funnel, but the marketing funnel in terms of the infrastructure you have and the systems you use in that place. when you connect to the cash register, the POS system, the transaction logs, That is what us permits. That's what permits us to do the grinding and churning and figure out which of those users is most likely to come in and convert. On the other side of the table, you've got the major media buying platform. It's like Google and tick tock and meta and so forth. And once those audiences are identified and created in our platform, you can push them directly into the media buying platform. For execution across their media. So we're not a demand side platform. We don't own media. We don't get involved in media. All we do is create those audiences and then those analytics and help the marketers understand what is actually working and

Jeremy: 27:29

love for you to talk a little bit about the successes that you guys have found with some restaurant brands, Louis, cause I, you know, I think it's critical for our listeners to hear people that are doing it. Well, don't have to use brand names, but what are the things that, where were they? And after they worked with Paris on how, you know, how has their brand changed? How has their online advertising changed and how have they really driven the behavior that they're looking for to drive the sales and the customer engagement that they're looking for?

Lewis Rothkopf: 27:55

Yeah, I'll answer that sort of philosophically and in the general sense, just to keep everyone's data to themselves. when you are a restaurateur who's collecting no information, there's really nothing we can do for you, right? If you're not collecting anything, then there's nothing to match, right? So you've got to be collecting something. So once you're collecting information, And again, even if that information is just a phone number or an email address, now you're able to take those data and use it to make smarter advertising choices. Once the advertising campaign ran, you can see which email you sent out, which SMS message you sent, which display ad, which video ad was played to this user that ultimately drove them to come to the store. And so the smart marketers are going into. This platform that we have and they see a dashboard and our customers sometimes call it their morning dashboard because it's got all the information on their business, sales, payment types, recognized consumers, non recognized consumers. There's even a feature that I think is probably my favorite called market basket analysis, which actually draws a visualization of which products tend to sell together. I see that when people come in and they order beer, they're probably ordering pizza and, I don't know, wings as well. And so let's offer an upsell to the pizza buyers to get them some wings, et cetera. now you're already retargeting your audiences and telling them, I know about the sort of thing that you're looking for and that will make you a happy consumer. that then informs your outbound advertising. You could use learnings from your first party data to better inform your acquisition, right? So acquisition is really one of two things. We consider, obviously new customer acquisition, but also customers who have become, latent customers who become dormant. And in that last category of need to fix them. that's acquisition too, right? odds are, if they come in once a year and they buy 7 worth of merchandise, They're probably gone already. So let's go ahead and reacquire them. And by, using first party data, not only for remarketing and retargeting to existing customers, but also to help, use those learnings to help make smarter decisions when advertising to net new audiences.

Jeremy: 30:06

Well, because you're so in tune with those ad buying platforms, I'd love for you to educate our listeners because they may not understand. I mean, historically, if you're not using a tool like yours or a competitor to yours, when you want to go place an ad on meta. IE Facebook or Tik TOK or any of those platforms, you've got to log into the, to that platform and go create your ad, go manage it, go measure its efficiency, all of those kinds of things. Can you talk us through what that looks like from a manual perspective? Cause you just talked through how quickly you can do it automatically through your guys's tool, but the alternative, if you're choosing to do this, and, and larger brands are, are clearly not, but the alternative The smaller brands still are oftentimes going in and placing their own ad for the one, you know, two for one, this and the, the, the holiday special, that, and they then have to go manage it all, which I think is a lot of times why people struggle with it is because they don't, they don't know another way to do that. So can you talk us through what it looks like to manually do this and then kind of what the world looks like when you guys can implement your solution on this ad buying side?

Lewis Rothkopf: 31:11

Yeah. And again, we, the media platforms, Facebook, TikTok, Google, these are not our competitors, right? We don't get involved in the actual media buying business. We simply create those audiences and push them into the media buying platforms. Now, if you're a marketer, you want to buy online advertising, those are the places you're probably most likely to go to. You're going to call Google, you're going to call, you're Meta, whoever else is on your agenda, and they'll probably tell you if you're a small business that you need to buy through a reseller of theirs, which is fine. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. You're still using the platform. It's just being supported by another company. And then similarly to how we don't care where are, where your audiences are pushed to in terms of execution. The media buying platforms don't care where those audiences come from, right? We take advantage of the APIs are in place between ourselves and the media buying platforms to push those audiences towards them and then from their perspective, to push the results towards us so that all of that data is in one place. But you're welcome to work with us. You can work with one of our competitors, but you still need to have a relationship with the media buying platforms so that they can recognize you. They can put your audiences in the right place and they can actually place your advertising and

Jeremy: 32:22

Well, and the other thing that I, that I heard you talk about that I'd love for you to, to kind of wrap things out with is, is the idea that you're getting back the data on this morning dashboard, as you talked about, you're seeing what's working and what's not working, and then you can evaluate it and make business decisions based on is Tik TOK, where my users are, is Facebook, where my users are, is Instagram, where my users are, is. You know, whatever those different platforms are, you're able to do that. So talk me through how impactful that is and being able to really drive that behavior back for the, the ad buying, you know, the, the people that are in marketing that are needing to take the sales data and then go buy ads, but now they need to be able to make decisions. They need to be able to pivot and decide, is this working? Is it not working as the problem? My audience is the problem. My ad is the problem. My, you know, what is it? And then make decisions, but you guys really help them do that.

Lewis Rothkopf: 33:10

Yeah, so our favorite metric and one that I will die on the hill of defending is ROAS or return on ad spend. That is. In my opinion, the one metric that any marketer, any small business needs to focus on when they're looking at the effect of their advertising. Did I sell more? And did I acquire this customer for less money than I would have otherwise? And that's it. Like that's the business. There's no trick to it. There's no, no, no hidden, agendas here. it's simply a matter of understanding. Is my advertising working now? Is it ever going to, or going back to the want to make your quote, is it ever going to be a hundred percent, understanding of where my advertising is working? No, it's just not. 85 percent is really good. And if you have a loyalty program, odds are you're going to recognize something like 80 85 percent of your customers online. If you don't have a loyalty program, 30 40 percent is still better than zero. And then you can make certain assumptions and do lookalikes on your broader audience and see how their behaviors are similar to identified audiences that you have among your own first party data

Jeremy: 34:20

It absolutely does. And again, I appreciate you educating our listeners, Lewis, because I think it, the, the amount of data that we're creating and is going out into the world continues to double, you know, week after week, month after month, and without, you know, I've said it often data, un, unevaluated data that you can't do anything with is just data and it doesn't do anything for you data that you can ultimately make business decisions really where the critical part is. Comes in and that's where, you know, you guys are able to help marketers do different things with it. And so with that, I guess if our listeners, you know, are in love with what you guys are doing and, you know, want to go figure out how to learn more, where would you send them? How do they get connected with you? How do they get connected with the team? How do they get connected and learn more about what Pairzon can do to help their business be better?

Lewis Rothkopf: 35:08

Visit us on the internet. It's Pearson, PAIRZON dot com. if you're looking to talk to me about marketing, because I love talking about this stuff, it's at Lewis L E W I S N Y C. and we'd be glad to talk to you and just talk you through, what other customers are seeing, better understand what you're seeing in your business, and if there's a fit, great. And if there's not, that's okay too. We consider it our responsibility as a player in the ecosystem to help make things better, right? And so thinking about those 25 years I've spent in advertising, Really taking what we built over the last two, two and a half decades in digital marketing and positioning it in such a way that it is better for the consumer and better for the marketer. Those are the things that really matter.

Jeremy: 35:52

Well, and ultimately if it's better for the consumer and better for the marketer, it's better for the brand that's paying the marketer to put those things in front of them. And it's growing that, that guest engagement, which is, you know, the guest experience is the most critical part in restaurants all day, every day. I say it all the time to our listeners. Technology for technology sake does nothing marketing for marketing sake does nothing. If it's enhancing the guest experience at the end of the day, that's what we're looking for. So, Louis, thank you for the education. Thank you for sharing kind of your guys's insights. That's what you guys are doing. And quite frankly, I'd never heard even where that quote from came from. So i'm gonna have to go look that up. I've, I've spouted it off a few times in my career, but I never, never had any idea where it came from. So I appreciate

Lewis Rothkopf: 36:30

Of course. I'm glad to have added value in defining the quote source and hopefully a couple other points as well, but it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.

Jeremy: 36:39

Yeah, and to our listeners guys, while you guys are out checking Pairzon out, if you haven't already subscribed to the newsletter, once a month, you'll get an email with, all of the shows for that month. Louis, thank you so much. And to our listeners, make it a great day.

36:50

Thanks for listening to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Visit www. RestaurantTechnologyGuys. com for tips, industry insights, and more to help you run your restaurant better.