Adopting Experience-Centric Digital Strategies with Conviva’s Keith Zubchevich

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel back here for Textron tv. Our next guest today is Keith Zvi Zvi.

Hope we got that right. Phenomen, CEO at Conviva. Keith.

Hey man. Welcome to Textron tv. I hope we did justice to your name.

I do the best we can. Gee, you nailed it. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. My pleasure. So, Keith, we're gonna jump into Conviva and, and we'll kinda what you guys are all about, but let's hear a little bit about you.

You, as I said, you're the CEO there, but, uh, give us, give us a little of the Keith story. Yeah, no, I've been in technology for 30 years. About 30 years.

Um, you know, started my early career in a integration company, learning the ropes, and then from there I moved into some bigger companies. And then about 25 years ago, 26 years ago, got into startups, which, you know, the entrepreneurial bug bit me. Uh, and I was able to be part of some really amazing, you know, pre-revenue startup opportunities and really joining some amazing teams and some amazing technologies that resulted in some really big, uh, opportunities and some very large companies that really solve some really big problems.

So that's what I've been doing for the last, like I said, 25, 26 years, really focused on entrepreneurial startup opportunities that have technologies that are differentiated in the marketplace that really change people's work or lives. And, and we're not asking you to name names if you don't want, but kinda what, what was your role in, in some of these companies? Uh, all, all roles.

I mean, everybody knows when you're in a startup, in a startup, when you're hat, you wear a lot of hats. Absolutely. I absolutely multi build hats.

My, my journey's been the same kind of thing. I, I got into startups in 19 98, 7 96, something like that. And, uh, been in startups all the way, you know, venture backed stuff.

I co-founded a few, I've been doing this, this was not venture backed, uh, Textron, right? This was, this was supposed to be my blog, but that's another story. Um, but yeah, it's similar, similar kind of backgrounds.

Um, talk to us about Conviva. Yeah, so we we're, uh, a company that started and, and people will know conviva by how, what we do. Again, I'm back to the point around my entrepreneurial spirit looking for technologies that really change either the workplace change, people's jobs, or change even, uh, people's lives.

Uh, so Conviva does what's called experience management, which measurement and management. What, what we do is we give publishers, we started in streaming media. So most of the, the, the, the listeners and the viewers on this podcast have been a conviva customer before.

Not necessarily a customer of Conviva, but a a customer of one of our partners, Disney Peacock, uh, uh, paramount Plus, uh, Hulu. So what we do is we basically measure all of the, the video players for those large publishers. And as they launch their streaming media businesses coming from television to the internet, our value proposition was you can now measure your business.

Unlike television, you can't measure that. Now. You can really measure your business and even more so, the internet is a very unstable place.

So everybody knows if you're a consumer of any digital product on the internet, the one common thing is it's a very unstable place and no one has a perfect experience. It's just not built for that. So one are the, and it always breaks from the guy when my team's playing.

Yes, yes. Always. When you need something, you go to purchase, right?

You go to buy a pair of shoes or buy a shirt, and next thing you know, that button doesn't work or you don't get the purchase completed. There's a million things that go wrong. Those are defined as digital experience.

And every business that puts anything on the internet needs to know what is hitting my consumers. I need to know that. And by the way, I need to know it in real time because it doesn't do me any good.

If Alan had a problem and I fix it three days from now, you, they need exactly right Now, your game is on and you need to watch it, and I need to fix what's hitting Alan right now. So we are a technology platform that it basically extends a digital business all the way out to the client side and gives their operations teams a real time connection to every consumer or viewer and, and gives their ops teams the ability to solve the problems that are hitting every digital consumer. Whether it's a viewer of a video or a purchaser on a retail app.

It's always the same experience issues hitting those digital products. And we, we've built a analytics data platform that basically gives, uh, uh, publishers and or businesses the ability to see and correct what's hitting their consumers to get them to faster business outcomes. Whether it's you complete the game and you watch more games, or I was able to buy that pair of shoes and I bought more shoes.

There's always things that I wanna do more of if you get me in and on and through your application. But there's also the risk of if you don't, I'm gonna leave. So every digital business has a fundamental strategic interest in what is the experience of my consumers.

If I don't know what's happening to my consumers, they could be having a great experience or a bad experience. That is a massive business impact, depending on which one those are. Absolutely.

You know, I mean, you mentioned some of the giants of the streaming world, right? But even a little nothing company like here at Techstrong, right? This is, this is the number one thing we hear from our sponsors who, you know, are sponsoring Textron tv or Textron Gang, or DevOps Unbound, or any of the video shows and podcasts that we do, which, and it is, who's watching this?

What's their experience? Are they happy? I mean, I, you know, people aren't registering, so I can't tell them exactly who it is that's watching, per se, but, you know, there's always this, and, and I will tell you as this PEO here, Keith, it's, it's frustrating because I could, you know, I could show you the YouTube stuff.

I could show you the, the, uh, Vimeo stats or what have you. But they're always lacking, really. They're always lacking in, in what, you know, sponsors want a right.

Other than that, maybe that top line number. But there's so much that goes on beyond that top line. How many viewers, how many impressions, whatever, how long they watch.

But they want, they want more. And I, it's, it's a hard problem. It's a, you know, why Alan?

It's a, it's a massive big data problem. People don't appreciate Yeah. How much data your iPhone throws off every day.

I mean, every device that you have that is a digital device is essentially, it's constantly throwing off data, whether it's your Fitbit, your ora ring, your, your, your phone. Nowadays, refrigerators like you, everything that's moving to a digital base interface throws off a ton of data. And that's what we measure, is we take that data and we convert it into a full picture for any business.

'cause it started in video. We started our business in video, but now we're moving into the application layer across retail travel B2B. And what we've found is it's all the same issues.

The very same things that may be hitting you, watching your, your football game is the exact same type of issues that are actually hitting Nike or United when I go to buy a pair of shoes or a plane ticket, it's not that it's specific to video, it's, it is anything that's delivered over the internet has a very volatile sort of path to get to the consumer. And every business needs to know what is, what do I need to do better so that everything my consumers wanna do, they're able to do successfully. So that, that, that's something that we see now across the entire marketplace, uh, because of the fact that it's not, no one can perfect it.

There is no such thing as a perfect internet experience. It's not possible. You have to try and achieve the best you can.

And that comes from seeing what's hitting and being able to fix it as it's happening and turning those knobs constantly so that you're able to respond. The problem goes away. And now my experience is good.

Again, the customer, the companies that die are the ones that don't know something that the consumer, they don't fix it. The consumer gets frustrated and never comes back again. That's the worst outcome.

So Canva's value proposition is we essentially tie a digital business directly and in real time to every consumer so that they're able to respond. Just like in a physical store. If you walk in a physical store and nobody comes to help you, you walk out and you're frustrated.

No one knew you were there, no one cared that you were looking to buy something. It's the same in the digital world. When a consumer comes into a product and, and something's going wrong and nothing's changing, it's just staying the same all the time.

That consumer will never come back. com app, it's all the same. You have to be able to protect and preserve your consumers, especially in this competitive world.

'cause there's a million things people can go buy and buy from. So you have to know, you have to be great at making sure your consumers have an ideal, not perfect, an ideal experience. I, I, I can't agree with you more.

I think there's another kind of complicator, and that's that the goalposts move in all the time, right? Because think about you. com days.

They started a business, I'm trying to remember, I think it was called Service Metrics. All they did, you know, this is 2000, 2001, 2000. All they did was measure whether your website was up.

Mm-hmm. And how fast it loaded. Nonsense.

I mean, in today's world, nonsense, nonsense. Yes. They sold that company.

com bubble. It was near a billion dollars. It was like a half baked idea, right?

But even back then, we were craving that kind of information. Mm-hmm. How, what was my end user experience?

Now you guys have a name for it. Experience centric digital strategies. Yeah.

Experience centric operation, right? You want, you want to have an experience centric operations. What that means is, as an operator, like you, you mentioned whether the system was up or not, whether the webpage loaded or not, those are not the metrics that should matter because most of us we're consumers.

We already know this, the things that Right. Well, we've come a long way back then. That was good.

Yes. Today, yes. Hey, if my internet isn't streaming at 30,000 feet while I'm frying home from AWS reinvent, I'm p****d.

And I'm not flying that here airline no more. Their internet stinks. Yes.

That's my point is everybody's, everybody's expectations constantly get tighter and tighter. And, and I call it the HD SD phenomenon. 'cause I know I'm not dating you, I'm not dating me, but we know what SD TD used to look like and hd, and then you see SD again, you're like, I'm never something's broken of my television.

And you and I grew up with that kind of quality, you know, Hey, go there and hold that antenna. Exactly. Nowadays, people want, I need it now.

I need it fast, and I need to do exactly what I want and get off because I only have limited time. Right. Uh, curb Simon wrote a great paper called the Attention Economy, which means the number one thing that you never get back and the thing that everybody should be competing for is not dollars and not, you know, product.

It's actually consumer's attention. 'cause I only have attention, and if you can't get and keep my attention, I'm gonna go. And the attention spans, to your point, are getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter.

What I used to wait two minutes for now, I'm waiting 10 seconds and I'm frustrated. What does that do? It requires every business to increase their touch to those consumers.

You have to move to real time. It doesn't do me any good to fix a problem tomorrow. It doesn't even do me any good to fix a problem in an hour.

I need you to fix it while I'm there. I need to know that you see me and that you know what I'm experiencing and you care and that you fix it. If you don't, I'm gonna go somewhere else.

And that, like I said, that intention span is getting shorter and shorter and shorter all the time. Yeah, no, no doubt. Now we could hit sit here and whine and moan about, you know, that it's unrealistic, but unrealistic or not, these are the people who, you know, cha-ching, make the registers.

Go. Now Keith, we've been lucky during the course of your or my career, we've seen sort of one techno technology or technological innovation after the next that has allowed us, I mean, we're almost guilty victims of our own success because we've given, we've got the ability to deliver such great experience to end users, right? Mm-hmm.

Via, you know, digitally, whether it's streaming, you know, think of streaming versus cable versus I used to have satellite, right? The digital tv, DirecTV, whenever it rained, which was again, always there in my football game, I lost my, I lost my, my, my feed there, right? Because it had a bad stop.

We keep finding digital innovation that allows us to deliver better and better experiences. And as a result, our consumers, whether they be B2B or B2C, our consumers expectations are, you know, higher and higher and higher. But is, is this a, a, a self-defeating?

Can we, can we keep the innovation rocking? Like how, you know, is there a point where we just gotta say, Hey, you gotta chill, right? You gotta be reasonable here.

We're doing everything possible. Yeah. No, I don't, I don't think that's possible because we're, you know, part of the, what I call the digital transformation, the digital revolution is that the consumers have gone digital.

That's what I mentioned. Even refrigerators now have applications on the door. So the whole mine, it, mine do, the whole world has gone digital.

You think about now, even in the last five years, the number of things you do digitally today that you didn't even do five years ago. Almost every function of the human existence these days can be done and is done through a digital interface. So the, the digital revolution is, is already happening and there's no way to stop it.

So every business has to have a digital connection to the world. The days of brick and mortar, the days of people walking in into a store, even like mailing things, those, those days are going away. So the digital revolution is well underway.

And every business, and I mean every business, whether it's a hospital, whether it's a shoe store, or whether it's a grocery store, everybody has to have a digital interface. If you don't, you'll die. Because that's how people are, are, are coming into the new business world.

So that's why there will always be innovations of new ways consumers can do things digitally. In other words, the number of devices, I mean, everything will have a digital interface. So that will continue to innovate.

But the one thing that will never change is that in that world, every business has to have a way, just like they do in their store. You have a manager that watches over that store. You have to have an ability to watch over limitless.

Now endpoints now all of a sudden, when you go digital, you know, a locking you outta store can now get customers in New York. So I'm not limited to geographic anymore. So now the scale and the ability for me to see my customers anywhere in the world, I have to have technologies that connect to me, to my consumer through what will be an rapidly innovating endpoint, uh, uh, fragmentation.

But, but like I said, whether there's innovation at the end point distributions, that will always happen. The number one thing is everybody's gotta have a visibility all the way to every single one of those endpoints and then know what I have to do with that endpoint so that consumer is able to do what I need them to do for a successful business outcome. So that, that's the piece that, you know, agreed, Ben, we'll have to be keeping up with.

We'll have to, everyone will have to keep up with. I I, I'm afraid. You're right.

I mean, that, that is, and, and I, and look, let me, I'm guilty. I, I'm one of those people. Mm-hmm.

My wife yells at me all the time about it. Right? Like, I just, I expect everything to work all the time.

I'm, I'm, and I'm in technology, especially digitally. My wife calls me that all the time. She's like, you're in tech.

You should know this is hard. I still get frustrated. Yeah, absolutely.

But you, you know what else though, Keith? I wanna thank you for coming on here. So we, so one of the, you know, beyond our tech strong tv, right?

com, security Boulevard, a cloud native. Now, one of the ones we opened, it was around Covid. It was called Digital, CXL, and it was about digital transformation for leadership.

I knew exactly what it was I was aiming for when I started the site. When we designed, you know, came up with the concept for the site. It was exactly this.

That if you don't go digital, literally you're a dinosaur. And that thing in the sky that's coming down, it's gonna end your world. Yes.

Uh, yes. There are still people say, I'm not real sure what digital transformation means. I, I, you know, what's this transformation, dude, if you don't know what it means, then you are not already experiencing it.

Either you are living like off the reservation somewhere. You know where one of the, maybe in the wilds of the Amazon, but even there, I think they got connectivity. Mm-hmm.

Or, or you're missing the boat. I mean, because this is digital that Right. What you're talking about is digital transformation.

Whole digital and it's, it's transform or die is really what it comes down to. Yes. 'cause consumer's excellent stuff, consumer's lives have gone full digital.

That, that's the thing every business needs to understand is consumers are driving this. Consumers are saying, I will search for what I want to go find and I will find any business I want digitally. If you don't have a digital presence, if you don't have a digital consumer interface that's able to land me as a customer, you're done.

There's so many you're done out there that are doing it well, that are doing it well, that are actually able to capture those consumers. If you're not keeping up, it's only a matter of time. I totally agree.

Agreed. Agreed. Hey Keith, people who wanna find out more about Conviva, where did they go?

com. Www. C-O-N-C-O-N-V-I-V-A.

There you go. C-O-N-V-I-V-A. Is it just big you, you're helping not just the biggest companies, but really anyone here looking to adopt this kind of digital centric approach?

Anybody? The big, the, the big ones are investing 'cause they're trying to maintain their businesses. But we say every small business wants to become a big business.

You, you have to do this because there is no waiting. You can't wait until you're big. There is no waiting.

You have to be able to maximize your consumer experience so that you can grow and become big. Because the play, the big players are leveraging Conviva already saying, I've gotta protect a hundred million endpoints. I mean, you're really talking about scale.

Every business should know every consumer's experience in real time and respond to it so that they can grow and become a big business. And big businesses become bigger businesses because in the digital world, scale and growth are limitless. That's the beauty of the digital revolution.

You have no limits. I love it. Right.

You're right. Hey man, thank you for coming on Text Trunk tv. Come back and talk to us more about this anytime.

I find it's one of my favorite subjects. So appreciate you. We're all Absolutely.

Thanks Alan. I appreciate it. All right.

Keith Zup, Chevi, CEO. Yes. Geneva here on Tech Drug tv.

We're taking a break. We got a lot more coming for you today.