Mitchell Reichgut, honest ads, and the future of conversational commerce – VB Engage

This week, Stewart and Travis interview Mitchell Reichgut, CEO of Jun Group, about honesty in mobile ads, consumers and the “race to X,” and what the future holds for mobile engagement.

We talk about the latest announcements in conversational commerce, including developments in taking payments through Facebook Messenger, and the AI-driven retail landscape being created by Amazon Echo and Google Home that’s in the news this week. Because if Skynet is going to take over, it’ll be a lot easier to beat humans that have spent all their money on pizzas and movie tickets.

By listening to this episode of the VB Engage podcast, you will hear:

• Welcome to VB Engage episode 41! [00:10]
• Travis is in San Diego speaking at Distilled’s SearchLove [00:45]
• Always bring mustache wax for Rand Fishkin
• This week we talk about mobile advertising and whatnot [01:35]
• ReplyYes raised a round of funding to sell stuff via chatbots [02:05]
• Soon we will be able to buy anything from chatbots [02:20]
• Frictionless ecommerce via mobile messaging [03:15]
• Facebook Messenger is the messaging app of choice, according to VB statistics [04:10]
• Travis tried sending the pizza emoji to Dominos and purchased pizza [05:00]
• We have to try all of these technologies to be able to report back to our listeners — except for VR porn, that’s a line Stewart won’t cross [05:45]
• Chatbots are still not the first port of call for interacting with a brand [06:30]
• Google Home is now partnered with over 50 companies for automatic purchasing [07:15]
• Now you can buy from Target, Costco, Guitar Center, PetSmart, Walgreen’s [07:30]
• With AI, self-driving cars, and automated purchasing, humanity may turn out like Disney’s Wall-E [08:20]
• Bill Gates came out this week saying that we should tax robot workers [08:35]
• Looking at robots and artificial intelligence, how long until they become sentient? [09:45]
• We need to stop looking at robotics and AI through the industrial revolution lens [10:10]
• When we start getting into reward-based AI we need to be careful [11:05]
• Today’s guest is Mitchell Reichgut, CEO of The Jun Group [12:30]
• Mobile advertising costs are around half-price right now  [13:10]
• Apps exist within an enclosed space — either Apple or Android [14:00]
• $60 billion in mobile ad revenue and it grew 66% last year, while desktop only grew 5% [15:45]
• Right person. Right place. Right time. Mobile is the only device that actually delivers that [16:00]
• Cookies are a thing of the past with mobile [16:15]
• Mobile devices have unique identifiers. IDFA = ID for Advertisers, Apple’s moniker for unique id that each iPhone has [16:30]
• GFID = Google ID for Advertising, each device has a universal identifier [16:40]
• Everyone has a unique identifier, and it’s universal. Everything can be shared with the broader community [17:05]
• At AdWeek NYC, Stewart discovered this new study by MediaBrix [17:55]
• MediaBrix plugged people into machines and monitored neurometrics, heartbeats, eye-tracking, etc. to determine responses to interstitial ads vs. opt-in, embedded video ads [18:20]
• Embedded, rewarded ads were engaged with at a much higher rate than interstitials [19:20]
• Mitchell Reichgut, “Reward-based advertising is the preferred mobile ad of the future” [20:05]
• Traditional media advertising relies on reach, frequency, and editorial content adjacency [20:45]
• Apps are mostly social networking, games, and utilities [21:15]
• What about VR/AR advertising? [21:50]
• It’s going to take a while for the industry to catch up [23:00]
• Thank you to Mitchell for coming on the show! [24:05]

Next week, we interview Mark Asquith, one of the U.K.’s small business podcasting experts. We discuss growing and engaging your community and many other interesting things that you’ll have to tune in for.

If you missed last week’s episode VB 040, Travis and Stewart interviewed Itai Lahan of Cloudinary on the future of images and video. We talked about how technology can still offer up a few surprises in that area, especially as smartphones and mobile internet access expand across third-world countries.

As always, thanks for tuning in. Please go subscribe to VB Engage via your favorite podcast platform and give us a nice review. Or have your AI assistant give us a nice review. Either way works for us.