Experiences That Connect You with the Digital Consumer on Paid, Earned and Owned Channels: Wayin

The Silicon Review

“We live in a fragmented digital landscape and marketers need to reach people with cool interactive experiences in all these places now, not just the brand website.”

Having an extensive experience in the web content management and marketing automation industry, Richard Jones saw a schism at the heart of what marketers want from web content management systems. Traditionally Marketers seek the most effective ways to control and lock down content that is published to websites, with features such as versioning, auditing, and workflow. They also require add-ons like A/B testing and personalization to make sure consumer journeys through their site is optimized for conversion.

All of those features are suited to envisaging the website as a framework to support known buyer personas and fixed consumer journeys from hit to conversion. However, there is another side to marketer’s job. To support the continual process of creating marketing experiences for product launches, campaigns, and promotions, marketers need design flexibility, rapid time to value and marketing destinations that are creative, interactive and inspiring. Web Content Management platforms don’t have the tools to help here.

Marketing Automation platforms, don’t help to fill the void either; they are great for managing omnichannel messaging but if you want to actually build a cool marketing destination to support a new campaign, event or product launch, all you have is very simplistic landing page editors to work with.

And that’s what drove the team to establish Wayin in 2011. Wayin’s platform helps marketers to easily and quickly create embeddable marketing experiences, that are interactive, inspiring and help consumers engage with a brand. Conceived to help marketers, Wayin today works with some of the leading companies such as AT&T, HP, IBM, Reckitt Benckiser, P&G, AB InBev and many more, augmenting their web content management systems and marketing automation platforms.

The Dawn of Wayin

Marketers were experimenting with marketing destinations that lived in multiple places such as social channels and third-party destinations. So, just after the launch, Wayin quickly realized that it would need to support a much wider set of channels than just the brand website. It made sure that its platform could create embeddable experiences that were channel agnostic.

After years of hardship, Wayin today is one of the most popular firms in the industry. The marketing experiences that can be built on its platform exist in everything from a Google Double-Click ad to large in-venue screens at sports stadiums for organizations like the MLB and NHL.

The issues with data and advertising

Over the past few years, traditional ad formats have turned off consumers, best shown by the rise of ad blockers. Rather than just pump video ads at people, marketers are turning to Wayin to deliver an interactive experience through the ad unit, rewarding consumers with things like a chance to win in return for engagement and consumer data. Interactive ads help advertisers understand the consumers’ preferences for follow-on marketing and deliver better results.

The fallout of Cambridge Analytica has also helped Wayin in boosting their business, significantly. And the response by Facebook and Google and the EUs enforcement of GDPR is to clamp down on the access to data through their APIs, as well as the use of third-party data for ad targeting on their platforms.

Now, if a marketer wants to do more than just leverage the basic targeting parameters in Facebook and Google for its ads, they will need to build up their own permissioned data on customers and prospects.

Simply put, all these changes to privacy mean that first-party data now rules. Wayin’s platform allows marketers to collect first-party data at speed and scale. For this year, the company is planning to collect about 700m PII data records on behalf of it’s customers.

The Future Move

Following the mission to help marketers deliver interactive experiences that offer consumers a value exchange for engaging, Wayin believes that with social advertising, specifically Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook Sponsored Stories, there’s a big problem which Wayin can solve. A very large chunk of the adverts on these platforms have a call-to-action to drive the viewer to the brand's website. When they click on the ad, the brand's website is loaded through the social apps’ mobile browser. In most cases,there is a blank screen while the user waits 4-6 seconds for the website to load.

According to eConsultancy, 53% of people won’t even wait three seconds for the content to load, so the advert value falls at a great rate - every second of load time loses 20% of the audience.

So, to solve the pain point, Wayin is releasing a capability that will allow advertisers to have a call-to-action that instantly loads a mobile page with the look, feel and gesture controls native to the channel. With this new roll-out by Wayin, consumer connecting with a Sponsored Story Ad on Instagram, for example, can swipe up on a call-to-action and will think they are still natively interacting inside Instagram because the experience is instant and similar in behavior. Also, Marketers can further incentivize the consumer to swipe up on the call-to-action in the ad with entry into a competition, collecting marketing opt-ins, PII data and preference information through interactive features.

Meet the Chief

Richard Jones, CEO: Richard co-founded EngageSciences in 2010, a marketing SaaS company which he ran as CEO until the company was sold to Wayin in 2016. Post acquisition, he took over the role of Wayin’s CEO from Scott McNealy, the co-founder and legendary CEO of Sun Microsystems, who moved to the role of Chairman of the Board.