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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features John Stuckey from Mobile Digital. They deliver personalised mms and SMS for clients including Country Road, Pet Circle and Harris Farm. John, welcome to the checkout. We are going to learn five things about you, our text master. And we'll kick off with question number one. What is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
John Stuckey: I bought a car.
Nathan Bush: What kind of car?
John Stuckey: I bought my wife's Tiguan, brand new, from a company that existed at the time called Autogenie. I don't know if they exist anymore, but somehow I came across them. They gave us five quotes from five different dealers. We gave them the spec and the car arrived at the front of our house on a flatbed truck.
Nathan Bush: Beauty. Good experience.
John Stuckey: Yeah, brilliant experience. Absolutely brilliant.
Nathan Bush: There you go. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer? Might be a bit of a tricky question given your clientele, but if you could pick one, who would it be?
John Stuckey: I don't think you can go past appliances online to be really, you know, the service is ridiculous, the pricing is great. The service is ridiculous. Yeah. You know, I have bought in the last six months. I bought, I bought my mother a dryer. My mother's 84. They delivered it, packed it, set it up, took her old one away, took all the boxes. Then we ended up buying a fridge and then we bought a freezer and it's. Yeah, it's great. So they're fantastic. And my second one was, would be Pet Circle. But I don't have a pet at the moment because unfortunately we lost our dog earlier last year. But we're just in the process of buying one again, so I'm probably You know, if you've ever had a Vizsla, you'd understand.
Nathan Bush: They've probably just triggered you on their CRM now, ready to hit you up for that moment where you get. Get the new dog.
John Stuckey: Yeah. I don't know if you know my frizzle. They're a very clever operation.
Nathan Bush: Nice. All right, number three, which retail fad do you wish was history?
John Stuckey: Oh, great question. I've got two plastic gift cards. Good. Appalling. Appalling product. You know, they make all their money on you not using it, right? Yeah, of course it's appalling. And they know that's what they do. It's appalling. And then the second one is paper direct mail in my post box. Both of these products are the most environmentally unsound products available in the market. And you could do it all digitally and for. God knows why, why people don't do it. It's just amazing. I actually took a photo and was going to publish something the other day. I really hate just the amount of direct mail and all the trees people whine about in the environment and they do this stuff still.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Anyway, and it's on the gift card thing. It's weird how some things click and some things don't. Like, who would have thought QR codes would have their comeback? I'm hoping that at some point the kind of digital gift card comes back because it kind of had a bit of momentum for a while and then it's gone away.
John Stuckey: Yeah. Well, people sending them as emails, and the trouble is with email is they're not open. They love that. The card guys love that because, oh, it's got buried in your email and you didn't use it. Whereas, you know, we experimented with digital gift card that you could deliver it to a mobile, you could put a reminder on it, you could put a Geo on it. And we went to. I won't mention the name of the company in case I hope to ever deal with them. We went to them and we said, look, we've got this perfect gift card. You'll get 100% response, delivered digitally as an MMS to the phone, personalized with the amount on it, blah, blah, blah. And they went, look, that's just tremendous. Could you leave through the back door, please?
Nathan Bush: And never mention this idea ever again.
John Stuckey: Never, ever mention that you came to us with that idea because we. 15 to 20% of gift cards. Spoilage, they call it. Yeah. Anyway, so that's my. That's a very big pet. Height.
Nathan Bush: That's a good one. All Right. Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into? A book.
John Stuckey: Oh, look, I'm reading. I just read. I'm rereading a book by a guy called Tim Wang which is called Subprime Attention Crisis. And why it's good because it's byline is advertising the time bomb at the heart of the Internet. It basically says that the only thing that supports the Internet in its current form is advertising and trust in advertising. And if the trust in advertising advertising diminishes, then the Internet won't be able to pay for itself. And so what will happen in that space? And there's some people like the Internet, the, the A2Pmessaging community thinks that. I got a quote from them the other day that basically said that messaging could be the mega platform that replaces the Internet. So that's what sort of, when I read that, then I went looking for the Tim Wang stuff. Very, very interesting. It sort of goes to the subprime mortgage thing. And that's why he's grabbed his title from. Because it basically says if we lose faith in it, like you know, Fannie Mae and whatever it was, if we lose faith in the value of that asset, then does it just all implode on itself? It's a good rate.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that sounds cool. It's interesting because I remember we had Carolyn Breeze on before and she was talking about the future not being advertising, but being about being able to do micropayments. So if you think of news, people probably won't subscribe to one news source because they go, well, I get my news from everywhere. Why would I kind of lock my myself into one network or one channel? But if people could pay 5 cents an article, 10 cents, 20 cents an article, they'd be more than willing to do that if there was a way to do that efficiently.
John Stuckey: Absolutely. And so it's interesting, the Internet is effectively, it's an over the top based network where the messaging network is a point to point addressable mobile number network. So it'll be interesting to see what network survives. Is it the point to point? Because in the A2P space, point to point is far more valuable than over the top because you can guarantee delivery. So you go back, it may be a resurgence for the telco in their margins. I mean, on a good day, downhill with the Breeze, the telcos would have to know.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. All right, number five, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is personalization. Lovely. And if you want to find out about personalization within text, SMS and mms. Go back to our episode with John and he shares how to personalize text for results. Thanks for joining us John.
John Stuckey: Absolute pleasure. Nathan, thanks for having me.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from John, jump back into episode 113 where John gives his tips into the elements that make a successful text messaging campaign. He also breaks down the differences between SMS and mms, which was surprising for me, and he shares where retailers can get tripped up when starting out with sms. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
