Building an AI-First Marketing Mindset with Tim Glomb, VP of Digital, Content, and AI at Wunderkind | Ep. 349

0:01Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. What is up? Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today, I have Tim, the VP of Digital Content and AI at Wunderkin. Excited to chat, but I'll let Tim go into a little bit of what Wunderkin does and who he is, and we'll get into a fun conversation about Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Let's do it, man. Yeah.

0:49So thanks again for having us. I'm Tim Glom, as you said, head of digital content and AI here. So I oversee all the operational AI. How are we actually using AI tools to run our business across everything from finance, HR, operations, marketing, et cetera. But Wunderkin, Wunderkin, what is Wunderkin? Wunderkin really is one of the world's largest identity graphs for consumer devices, right? All the things that consumers use to shop online, laptops, iPads, phones, et cetera. That identity graph has about 9 billion consumer devices tracked in it, which means we can oversee about 2 trillion digital click browse and purchase behaviors each year across thousands of websites.

1:28And really at the end of the day, what we do is use all of that data along with our clients, most brands, their first party data to trigger the best, most optimized messages across email, SMS, social, advertising on your website, et cetera, all in the spirit of finding the best personalized experience at the individual level. That's us in a nutshell. I'll ask you this question because we can kind of frame it in the terms of e-commerce brands. Brands are starting to deal with Black Friday, Cyber Monday now because you have to get ahead of it beforehand. So what is something like one that can do and why should you start making sure you have a platform like this before Black Friday, Cyber Monday?

2:14Yeah, good question. And look, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the Super Bowl for many brands. Some of our clients will see 50 % of the revenue generated in that period, you know, or at least from the start of Black Friday all the way through into the holiday. But what they don't realize sometimes and what they miss is maybe their ESP, you know, their email service provider has a pop-up and that's helping people opt in for marketing, right? You are going to get a flood of people looking for the best deals ever through the BFCM period, which means you're getting people coming to your website that typically don't come there all year long.

2:48Now they're in shopping mode, the moms, the whomever looking for those perfect gifts. That is a huge, huge, huge opportunity to acquire net new people in a more sophisticated way so that you can market to them all year round, right? Beyond Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and even into next one. And I think there's some great stats of like, you know, 70 % of your customers come to your website within the three months of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, right around that. So what can you do during that period to harness people? And with Wunderkin's identity network, we know so much about a given consumer that's on your website that you don't even know.

3:26So let's say John Doe, Jane Doe has never been to your site, never purchased before. There's a good, good chance that their device is in the Wunderkin identity network. And we've seen them make purchases prior. So we understand what makes them tick, what gets them to conversion. And then we can apply that technology even to the point of helping you offer the best value exchange to get them to opt in. So that's number one. Number two, 90 % or more of your traffic during BFCM is going to be anonymous to you. They might be returning customers. Maybe they're not logged in. Maybe you don't have a login or a loyalty program.

4:00So, you know, is your cookie or your ESP's first party cookie, has it been erased? Has it been ditched? Has their cash been cleared? we can help you identify your own existing, both consumers, people that have interacted with you before, and your customers, people that are in your database that have purchased. And we can unlock that the moment they come to your site. So now again, if Tim comes on a new iPad or iPhone, or I cleared my cookies and you can't recognize me, you can't personalize to me. You can't send me an email if I leave after I don't convert. And that's where Wondekin comes in and closes those gaps.

4:32So you should be thinking about how much traffic Can you identify whether they're net new and can you create the best offer to get them to opt in? No longer are the days of everyone getting 10 % off to join your mailing list. Like that's, there's table stakes. That's old school. Can you actually optimize and personalize for people and continue to create a breadcrumb trail, everything they do on your site before they become opted in or before you can recognize them? Wonderkin will track all of that. And the moment they opt in or the moment they're identified, all that intelligence is unlocked so you can create complete personalization on your website while they're in session or have the ultimate triggered message after they leave.

5:122025 has been a kind of a crazy year for e-commerce. What is the biggest change you're seeing in consumer behavior from 2024 to 2025? Because I mean, we are setting up for a lot of e-commerce markers, DTC markers, setting up a BSCM, but they might not know what's happening with how consumer behavior is changing this year? So what are some things you're seeing in the back end? Yeah, great question. I could talk for days about the tariffs. We should probably talk about tariffs. So let me talk about non-tariff things because the tariffs are impacting everybody. We've been doing research every month since the tariffs came out, starting in April, every month.

5:53In fact, we have a new one that just landed on my desk today and how that's really impacting purchase decisioning, planning, budgets, et cetera. But outside of that, AI really has stepped up. 2025, it has shown up and consumers, look, we can't fight it. 700 million weekly active users on ChatGPT. That means a giant pile of people that had no idea what AI was 12 months ago are now using it for search. They're using it to find their best outfit, to find their best next vacation, whatever it is. So AI is changing that entire consumer journey. And if your brand isn't tied into that some way in that discovery process, you're probably slipping.

6:34But also, can you create more personalized experiences using AI, right? Everybody, every marketer out there, including myself and my B2C days have done the whole like, oh, I got to send an email Friday to everybody who looked at my sweatshirts. Like that's a horrible batch and blast campaign in the age of AI. Can you truly create a bespoke experience for Daniel and for Tim based on what you know of them? I never buy during the day. I buy on my phone or my iPad at 10 PM at night after my day is done. If you have the intelligence of that data, can AI serve a better message at the right time with the right message in the right channel?

7:12That's where I think AI is coming. And a lot of brands haven't really figured that out yet, in my opinion. I want to ask a little bit deeper on that because I read one of your blogs and it said pretty much that if you use MMS versus SMS, you see an increase. And now that it's even harder to stand out because everybody has text message now and everybody has email now. So using something like multimedia messaging services, like GIFs and having images actually helps you stand out in the text message box. So what are some things that brands could do to personalize the experience, but also stand out during this period of time with that personalization journey?

7:56Yeah, good question. And look, the answer varies by vertical very, very clearly. Fashion brands, if they send MMS of actually showing accessories and things, conversion goes through the roof compared to just a traditional text like, Like, hey, get back to our site, click here. That's just a message to get you to take an action. Whereas MMS is that visual, right? And we know that people love videos. We know that they love testimonials. We know that they love reviews from other peers. So that visual in MMS works really well in those verticals. Financial services, not so much. So it really depends on your industry when it comes to MMS.

8:35The other thing is visual cues as a triggered SMS, MMS. And what I mean by that is think about cart abandonment or even category abandonment or product abandonment. Somebody came to your site, they looked at a certain, let's say shoes, then they looked at ties, then they looked at belts, then they left. Well, that MMS will be an incredible visual reminder of the belt or the shoes they looked at or they spent the most amount of time on. So can you harness that consumer behavior, time on site, the things that they actually did and looked at with a little bit of historical? Like Wunderkin understands what people have purchased on other sites.

9:13How do we bring that together to create the best bespoke MMS with the best creative, right? Should we show the shoes or the belt? Where did they spend more time? What did they buy previously? So, you know, MMS, I think, is great. We're all visual creatures, especially as you get younger in the audience that you're targeting. but it is a psychological visual reminder and it's a great tool to use, especially if you know when and what to put in it and when to put it, when to deliver it to that particular customer. Oh yeah, now with AI, you can like start separating lists better. You can start personalizing lists, but also something you said earlier, which I think a lot of people are competing during this time period.

9:55So having a platform that can identify those users, now you can start creating building offer lists promo lists launch lists start launching things throughout the year so you stay top of mind so when bfcm comes people are ready for it instead of having to capture that attendance when someone's like i'm shopping for this this this this this which is a much harder time to i mean you see uptick because people are shopping but the uptick could be exponential if you have a list built up or know who those people are and could deliver those personalized information. But I want to go into what you said earlier.

10:36I mean, the thing that is affecting all brands right now all over is that the tariffs and inflation happening. So how is that affecting B2C? What is D2C and how could brands get over this hump or do things to make sure that they ease the consumer's fearness over delivering products and stuff like that? Absolutely. Look, like I said, we've been polling hundreds of consumers each month as the tariffs started in April. A couple of things are absolute considerate. Number one, over 58 % of the US consumers are either worried, pessimistic, or outright panicked about their financial economic state in America.

11:30So think about that. Less than 40 % of people are like, okay with where we are economically. And that just by default is going to make people cagey about their money, right? They're going to spend less. Women are far more worried about the economic impact of tariffs and the economic future in the next 12 months of America than men. Men are a little more bullish on spending, but not by much. The other thing is 40 % of Americans are regularly visiting websites that they've never visited before. So remember what we talked about a few minutes ago, in BFCM, you get a deluge of traffic because people are looking for deals.

12:07They don't think about you. I love Patagonia, but at the end of the day, if I've got to go buy outdoor gear as gifts for my kids. I'm going to cruise around and see who has the best deal because they all have great products. So I'm deal shopping. So Patagonia loyalty kind of goes out the window in BFCM for me because I'm deal hunting. That's happening all year right now. So it's basically the BFCM panic attack. Everybody's looking for a deal from groceries to home goods to everything. So that's a great opportunity for every small challenger brand, because you're probably seeing a little more traffic right now than you normally do.

12:44And that's because people are deal hunting. So tariffs are bringing that on. The other thing is people are getting savvy to the tactics that marketers use. For example, card abandonment. Almost everybody under the age of 35 understands what card abandonment is. You put something in your shopping cart at a brand, you leave and you wait for that offer. Now, two things are going to happen. And this is really important for brands to understand. Your ESP, if that's your cart abandonment trigger mechanism, right? Let's say I'm going to name names, Klaviyo, MailChimp. I don't care what it is. If you're solely relying on your ESP to identify who put something in a cart and left so that you can send them a message, a discount, a reminder, whatever it is, which consumers are now doing because they know brands are sending discounts to get you back to buy.

13:28And so they do it intentionally, cart abandon. Well, your ESP, like companies like Wunderkin, there's others beyond us, but identity resolution partners can sometimes 10x identify the amount of opportunities to send off emails or SMS. So as those people are browsing your site and abandoning your carts or abandoning your categories, do you have the identity resolution in there? So that's one big thing. The last thing is be clear with your pricing. People have made it very, very clear. They're willing to stick with you if they're loyal to your brand or they like your brand. If you're incredibly clear about why and when and how you're upping your prices.

14:07Over 50 % of Americans do not believe that tariffs are protecting American jobs. That's very clear. In fact, it's close to 60 % in some demographics. So they also believe, I think 60 % believe that U.S. consumers are paying for these tariffs. So that means you as a brand actually can have a real transparent conversation and say, we're sorry we had to raise our prices for 10 % because of the tariffs. You know, we're getting dinged. So we're sorry we have to pass that on to you, the consumer. But the consumer understands that. They have empathy for you. So don't try and hide it. Don't just raise your prices and expect everything to be hunky-dory.

14:47You'll get called out for it. Be clear. Say, hey, we're sorry. In fact, I'm seeing a lot of brands just send emails to their entire list saying, look, if you're shopping this year for us, prices are going up. We're sorry it's out of our control, but we're trying to be transparent. So those are just a couple of things that we're seeing as trends that you could do as a brand to connect with your consumers during troublesome economic times. I actually like that because, for example, I just had a kid a few weeks ago and we buy the baby formula and ships from Europe. and like a brand was like if you buy like you you should probably buy like more right now just in case it gets stuck in customs or something and i was more as a parent i'm like thank you for telling me that i will spend more money to buy it now and then then wait and have a risk that my baby doesn't get its food then do it now so i was really respectful of a brand telling me hey we We only have 20 in stock right now.

15:49Yes. And it will go up because we don't have the shipment that's in that we'll get here in time. So if you want to buy more right now, just do it right now. I was more happy that the brand said do that instead of buying five, coming back to the store in two weeks. And they say, I raised my price. They didn't tell me that they were going to raise their price. I didn't like give a give a bigger heads up to the consumer. And I think that's a great point. And then what you said about being able to personalize that journey and actually understand who's on your side, what they like, what are their preferred ways of communicating is.

16:33I think it's just like a lot of the old method of either what you said, sending that Friday email to everybody who looked at that product and say, buy again, or just sending a generic, hey, you left something in your card is way over. Yeah, it really is. that. It is. And I want to mention something you said earlier in the last question, when you said, building these lists of people who have looked at shoes and this and that and having them ready for BFCM. I mean, I'm going to call that caveman marketing right now because we do live in the age and Wunderkin has unlocked this and there's other companies doing similar things.

17:16You literally can let, if you give all of your data and an AI decisioning engine access to it, right? All your first party data in your historical. Let's just take me as an example, Tim Glom. When did I last buy? What did I look at? How many times do I come to the site? How many times do I open an app? Whatever it might be. If you take that plus Wunderkin, knowing that Tim has gone to all these other websites, looked at similar products, and then you take the historical of when Tim does, when does he activate? If you have intelligence on when does he convert most, on what device does he convert most?

17:48Like I said, I get in bed at 10 PM almost every night. And that's when I browse for 30 minutes. That's what I'll buy on Amazon or direct from a brand. When you have that kind of individual data and history on every consumer, the need for lists almost goes out the window. The batch and blast almost dies or becomes very, very less important because AI can say, Tim is ripe for this deal at this point. You just dropped stock or you just got this in inventory. This is back in stock or you just did a price drop. These are all indicators that could be match to Tim. So literally the hardest thing for marketers to understand is we're used to A, B testing.

18:24Hey, send, send the email, email A and then email B to this list and let's see what it does. In an age of AI, every single person can get a truly bespoke, unique, you know, email. You can't track A, B, C, D, E, F variations, but what AI can do is prove that it can make a better decision on when and what and how to send a message to a person that any human could ever scale. That's scary for a lot of marketers to get to, but that's what Wunderkin is doing in our autonomous marketing platform, seeing amazing results for cruise lines, increasing revenue and decision-making and upselling suites on their ships exponentially over what they've been able to do through human orchestration.

19:06So I just want that to bake in marketers' minds that AI decisioning is here. And if you're not playing with it, 2026 is your year to explore that. I feel like so many markers are just doing the touch surface AI stuff. I need to write an email with it. And then there's the next level of it is I insert data in it. They give me research answer, which would have taken hours to do. Putting customer reviews and qualitative data in and saying, what are the key pain points? which will help for like website and maybe strategies for copywriting on those text messages and stuff but what you said of mapping the next level is mapping letting ai say okay tim gets a message on his ipad at 10 p.m and it's going to offer him a new pair of shoes because he recently looked at a new pair of shoes on all these other websites, but he couldn't find the right one.

20:14And now he's in the buying mentality. So offer him a piece of shoe. That's like the next level where AI is actually kind of like the, not the campaign manager, but more of like the decision maker of like shooting out messages when audience needs it. Exactly. So now the marketers, the human marketers should set up business guidelines, right? So let's say for that pair of shoes, we're willing to discount between zero and 18 % discount, right? To win a sale. And if AI can look at Tim and his history, you know, I make good money. So discounts don't really drive me hard. It's loyalty points and other value adds that drive my decision-making.

20:51And if AI knows that, we can send Tim a 5 % discount, but tell him he's getting free shipping and he's going to double his loyalty points. Whereas, you know, Jane Doe might need that maximum 18 % discount because she's a thrifty shopper. And when AI makes those decisions in the moment at the individual level, now humans just put the guardrails in place. This creative, we're willing to give these offers, we're willing to do these discounts. And to your point, it's AI decisioning. It's not the campaign manager, but it is the decision maker on when and where to sell. And when you see the results of the machines making decisions, it's huge.

21:28And look, just a couple of years ago, all of us marketers have plotted, send time optimization. Every email platform has send time optimization. That's just machine learning and deciding to put people into certain cohorts and send it certain messages. That's close, but that's not personalization. It's still segmentation with groups of people getting messages at these different times. When you do it at the individual level, it's crazy hyper-personalized. So I'm really excited about that. Yeah. And I mean, if you technically have a brand, even those hyper personalization sometimes doesn't like doesn't even work because there's someone with a name recognition, even if they send at any time will beat someone who just sends a random time.

22:13So it's like people say use that as a strategy instead of building brand at the same time as well. So those are like little things that people do. I want to go into a question of, I know a lot of marketers during this time, like you said, are setting up lists. They're over-relying on paid media. They are doing last-minute scrambles of offer landing pages and complete offers. But what are some ways that brands could avoid making costly mistakes now before BFCM? And also, I would still ask the question, like during BFCM, how could they make sure they're gathering the right things, this BFCM, to set up for a successful 2026 BFCM?

23:03Yeah, absolutely. So number one, the acquisition, right? We start to see around Halloween in America, a lot of people are signing up for deals. So that's the acquisition play. Make sure you have the most optimized acquisition tools out there. And I challenge you, go talk to someone like Wunderkin who has identity, and we'll show you how we're going to greatly increase over your ESP's acquisition tool. That's number one. Number two, urgency always wins. So collect the data that you need. But when your promotions are going out, use urgency. you'd be blown away. And I did a webinar on this last year in our BFCM insights.

23:40You know, we generated billions and billions of clicks and like$5 billion in BFCM period. People, whenever you sent a message that said, Hey, this is going to end at, you know, 1159 or midnight tonight, you'd be blown away in the last 10 minutes, how many people actually activate, especially as you get closer to shipping deadlines for holidays. But BFCM is where it's all start. So in your campaigns, think about putting urgency in there. You know, make sure that's top of mind. When you talk about collecting data, this is a great time, again, to look at and measure how much traffic did you have come in through the period?

24:16You picked the period, whether that's Halloween or just a week of BFCM or whatever you want. How much traffic could I not identify? It came and it left. And to your point, I reached into my checkbook and I wrote a check to Alpha, Alphabet, and meta and I retargeted these people with third-party pixels. I don't know who they were, but I paid to get them back. Think about that anonymous pile. What if you could shrink that anonymous pile in half and identify that other half so that you could use email and SMS to reach them for pennies on the dollar instead of paying this paid media funnel and tornado of insanity?

24:55I would collect all that data and then get through BFCM and talk to an identity resolution partner in December, January and say, here's my metrics. I'm very frustrated. I had good traffic, but I couldn't identify. I was only able to send 10 % of that traffic, a message to get them back and only 10 % converted. How can I lift this next year? Collect that data this year, give it to someone like Wunderkin and challenge us to say, how can you guarantee revenue is going to lift next year if I bring an identity resolution? That would be my advice. I think the crazy thing that you said right there is how many people don't realize that they're marketing to the same person and they're getting the same cat cause for someone that they already have over and over and over through like Facebook and Ometa and Google just because they don't understand who they are.

25:49I used to work at a company called Chow Now, but our messaging for Chow Now was that like DoorDash, you're like basically if someone repeats order on doordash it's a marketing tool so you basically keep keep on paying for the same order and marketing over and over and over when they're ordering so it's the same thing as meta and phase i meta and google when you're doing that and one thing i wanted to add too is my wife she's queen of d2c so she knows all all about this But she talks a lot about people needing to set up a mobile-first experience for this time, and a lot of people still not doing that, especially for Cyber Monday and Black Friday Cyber Monday.

26:36And they do things like put widgets on their phone that block – they offer pop-ups that block CTAs, call-to-actions. They block copy. So what are some things that people should be thinking about for mobile first experience? Even though we've been talking about mobile first for years, I think still brands aren't realizing how many people in BFCM are shopping mobile first these days. Yeah, I mean especially that younger generation. I think there's huge, huge power in being able to personalize an actual experience in the moment. What I mean by that is if you're lucky enough to get somebody to come to your digital property, let's call it your website, whether they're coming on mobile or in your app, especially if you have an app and you're lucky enough to get them to download.

27:26We'll leave that to the side because most people that have consumers logging into their app, they're pretty connected and they know everything that's going on because it's a logged in state. So let's talk about people mobile shopping, but on your website. If you could personalize that, to your point, if you've got all these pop-ups and technology that's being blocked by millennials who don't want that stuff on their phone, you're missing a huge opportunity. But with lightweight SDKs from, say, like an identity partner, you could literally understand who's there and personalize that experience without having third-party pop-ups and all these restricted and ad blockers and whatnot.