The Cleo Origin Story.
In the Beginning.
I was born in ‘73 into a working class family in the midlands in the UK, and raised by a single, very brave mother. My world was very small. A trip to London was 6 months in the planning, and either a tent in Anglesey or narrow boat on the broads was the event of the summer.
There were a few other amazing things to be given life in 1973. It was the year the Xerox Alto (the first computer with a graphical user interface), the first cell phone call, TCP, Ethernet, and fiber optics were all created. All of those technologies have, in combination, formed a large part of my work focus, my personal interests and the wider world we live in today.
In my youth I moved to Germany and went to a school that was built on part of the old Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was ever present in my schooling. The evil that existed back then was clear and is well covered, but there also was widespread collaboration from people that were clearly not evil, but the oppressive nature of the environment at the time meant that it was difficult not to be complicit in these terrible activities at some level.
“Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” ― Yehuda Bauer
In todays modern, tiktok driven world it’s easy to be a commentator and to share how we feel about things, but it’s also important that we get on the playing field and do something when we know something is wrong, and be an active participant in this life, and on this planet that we all share (more on this later).
Getting to work.
I count myself very fortunate that I started working in marketing with the UK’s largest (and only) computer reseller at a time when the Intel 386, and then the 486 processor had just come to market. It really was the birth of modern affordable (ish) computing. Fun fact, the man that gave me my first break, is now the chairman of Cleo Tech almost 30 years later.
I went on to start my own marketing agency in 2002 with the aim of supporting large tech brands generate awareness and build demand for their solutions. Over the last 20+ years we’ve grown to have clients and offices in the UK, US and Asia working with some incredible bluechip customers across tech, banking, fintech and manufacturing.
In the last 20 years serving clients we’ve seen the shift from print to digital, and the transition from web1 to web2. We spent the first few years working with large tech brands to educate companies on why they should have a website, then that developed into why they need to have an email marketing system, then why they should do search engine marketing, then social media, and then onto things like marketing automation and lead scoring with partners like Marketo and Hubspot.
In 2017 we signed our first blockchain clients, and we have a number today that we work with from NFT platforms and decentralised social media, to the worlds largest Crypto exchange (where we’ve just finished our first quarters campaign that saw an uplift in active users by 17%, a 32% increase in transactions, and 44% increase in volume) — but although these are in the new, exciting space, we’re still essentially providing a web2 based marketing service (typically ABM awareness to lead generation using digital, email and social media marketing).
I believe the next 20 years will be dominated by innovation coming from the web3 space, and this is an opportunity to do something new, and ‘for good’, and that’s where my work experience meet my personal passion. Impact marketing but do it with a social conscience.
The agency is in very good hands — the team that have helped build the business will take it forward operationally and own a stake in its continued success. So after being the Managing Director for first 10 years, then moving to group CEO for the second, I have earned the right to pick the role that I really enjoy and thats focussing on strategy and innovation. This allows me time to focus on supporting the team, whilst bringing web3 solutions that fix real world problems to our agency clients and beyond.
What’s the biggest and most common problem to fix in Marketing?
The biggest problem in marketing today is the value exchange at point of contact request. At some point, we have to ask the prospect for an email address and permission to contact them, and that’s the single biggest pinch point in Marketing today. I can optimise impressions, I can do things to get more clicks at a lower price, but ultimately I need to present you with a form. And this is where a prospect pauses, and considers the value exchange.
My lightbulb moment came while preparing for a marketing workshop at a large event in London. I’d just re-read Dr. Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — and I wanted to test the strength of the claims that reciprocity is the strongest of all human emotions. Something so inbuilt into our DNA that the desire for fairness can override common sense.
So I did a simple game with the audience. I picked 2 people at random that didn’t know each other, and told them both I had £100 to give away, and they could have it all. But I gave participant (A) the money and they had to decide how much to keep for themselves and how much to offer participant (B).
If they accepted then they both kept the money but if (B) refused, then they both get nothing. All this was done in the open, so everyone knew the amount on the table.
Take a pause for a moment and think about how much you would offer if you were (A) and how much you would accept if you were (B).
I ran this 8 times during the 3 day event, and the results were really interesting and fully supporting Cialdini’s position. Now of course, if you offer £50, it’s accepted 100% of time and it’s seen as a fair outcome — everyone is equal, and walks away happy (well, I guess I’m £100 down, but that was the price of the engagement in the workshop). But some (A)s felt that they could keep more. I mean, why not? Surely something is better than nothing? Free money is free money right?
One offered £10 and another £20 and both were firmly rejected. “That’s just not fair” — and most of the audience seemed to agree. So someone that came into a session was offered £20 for free, no strings attached and refused, and the only reason was a perception of fairness.
The lesson is that people will punish themselves if they feel that there isn't a fair transfer of value. I’d rather punish the other person (and myself) if I feel its not a fair transaction.
This is what we face in marketing every time we present a form to capture people’s data, usually in return for a piece of content. You give me your time + attention + contact details and in return we give you a piece of corporate material or content. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen landing page conversion rates drop from over 30% to below 1%, so even with a fixed cost per click that’s a x30 increase in your cost per lead (and guess what? clicks have gotten more expensive too).
A lot of people in marketing approach this by creating dumb downed content, and use tactics like FOMO, lead magnets and trip wires. This creates a fix where you can keep your CPLs low, but in reality it just fills your marketing pipeline with people with a very low propensity to buy. So when these get passed over to sales, they don’t convert.
I’ve been obsessing about this issue for over two years now and we’ve done some considerable testing on how to keep the cost to lead low but not to damage the lead quality.
The truth is the buyer is getting younger, they are much more digital savvy, and their time is more precious. Combine this with clicks becoming more expensive due to increased online activity and spend coming from recent global events, and you’ve got a perfect storm that means it’s incredibly expensive to capture somebody’s attention and it’s very easy to lose it.
This is a global problem and I think we’ve developed a unique solution that benefits everybody.
The Cleo Journey
The idea was to meet people with value for value, so when we ask them for their attention and data, one of the first things we tried was actually giving them a reward.
The easiest thing to do was to offer somebody money in the form of a gift card, so we did this with one of our USA SaaS clients. Essentially we invited the prospect to a webinar, qualified their interest and then offered a sales meeting where if they turned up — they got a gift card.
Of course the impact was instant we cut the cost per appointment generated literally in half, which had the impact of saving around $300 per appointment, even when you include the $100 gift card.
So value for attention worked, but sending out gift cards isn’t scalable and the team didn’t like the idea of giving money for somebody’s time, because we felt that didn’t really feel right and it wouldn’t be the right fit many of our clients. But it was very useful test in the mix of many other things that we tried. So we started to think about what we were passionate about as private individuals, and what we felt resonate with an audience as well.
Marketing for bad?
A career in marketing has done some measure of bad to the planet. The yearly global weighted impact of digital ad emissions is over 77k tonnes of CO2e, and this is the equivalent of flying 1.35 million passengers from London to Paris. It would take 3.7 million fully-grown trees one year to absorb this amount of carbon.
It’s also widely reported that over 15% of advertising spend is wasted on inventory that generates no value while generating excessive amounts of CO2 emissions. We need to recognise this as an industry, take stock of what we’re doing, and then implement measures to reduce waste and provide a greater balance in our campaigns. We are all responsible and need to get on the pitch and help.
Your time for good.
So the idea we landed on was about providing a benefit for good, keeping the money in the equation, but to take the money from the vendor, and instead of giving it directly to the prospect, we do some good in the world and provide that impact and value to the user.
Starting with Marketing for Good, then beyond.
For brands wanting to improve their marketing effectiveness our proposition is simple. They get improved engagement and a lower cost per lead. They get a ‘for good’ reward that’s actually self funded by the reduction in the cost per lead and they get an improved lead quality because in our system when the prospect claims their good, they are asked some qualifying questions that can be set by the brand.
The user hopefully benefits from the content from the brand they’re interested in, but they also feel that in return for their time they have done something good for the world, and that can be from something as small as a single tree planted all the way up to being carbon offset for life.
In Cleo they can accumulate tokens (also purchase if they like) and really put them to work on projects that they are passionate about and at the end of the day they get a nicely designed NFT that they can share to show they are carbon zero.
(here is a short video edit from our B2B partner launch, explaining the Marketing for Good story and the Cleo impact).
Since starting to sign marketing clients, we’ve also had requests come from the sports sector (where teams want to provide digital assets to sell to offset their carbon), from charities and schools, all wanting to use the blockchain for good. So as I type we are extending the functionality of the Cleo platform to allow these other markets to take advantage of our infrastructure and token.
Why Web3 and the Blockchain.
Ever since working with our first blockchain clients back in 2017, I’ve wanted to find a real world application that solves a problem in my space. And here we have the perfect place to start. We needed a global, scalable in-app currency, and a way to prove that we were not green washing.
So we will be the single most transparent platform that can provide an end to end record of where every dollar has gone and because this is a global program and many campaigns are regional and global, then it needs to be in a way that doesn’t require lots of currency conversions. So the Blockchain really empowers two things (1) full transparency of transactions, and (2) the ability to create an in app currency that can be utilised in every country, by every brand. Also, being on the Blockchain gives us the advantage of being able to provide a completion certificate to the user in the form of a really nicely designed NFT (that can be customised by the brand) that can sit in their wallet that they can use to share, accumulate or even print out and put on their wall.
We also didn’t need to build our own chain. We really wanted a platform that was interoperable, fast, scalable, and with low transaction fees because our entire Cleo platform as you would expect is carbon offset. Based on our requirements and research, we felt that Polygon is the ideal Blockchain for us to build on.
As we scale, being able to operate in different environments is going to be incredibly important. We want to take Cleo as an offering and its token into existing communities and we are in discussions already with apps that run on different chains or even have their own chain, so I feel we’ll be multi-chain in the future.
We’re really proud of our token model, where we will be in perpetual deflation (we’re taking 5% of the company turnover and buying back and burning tokens) and making community investments (we’re taking an additional 5% of our turnover and providing funding for an ongoing impact investing fund, managed by a DAO, owned and powered by the token holders). So we’re investing for the future. It’s an exciting place to be.
My immediate role and next steps.
If you happen to check me out on LinkedIn or Twitter you’ll see I have a number of roles, but they all come together to support this project, so here is my summary.
- Cleo Tech — My priority is being the CEO of Cleo Tech, but I have other roles with partners that help support our growth.
- Creation Agency and The Expandi Group — these are two large marketing agencies, Creation focussing on digital lead generation and The Expandi group on multi-channel sales and martech. For these I will advise the board on client strategy and innovation and both Creation and Expandi will help us take Cleo to a global audience.
- Co-Founder Earth 9 — A social enterprise and non-profit with no VC backing that offers the highest quality and rated carbon credits to mitigate carbon emissions, working alongside nature-based projects, we help support local communities to restore forests on a massive scale, remove plastic from the oceans, thereby creating jobs, protecting ecosystems, and helping mitigate climate change. Earth9 partners with Cleo to oversee our ‘for good’ partners.
- Hyprr Social Media — I’m currently acting CEO of a new decentralised social media application, supporting the financial backers while they recruit a team to help scale the project. We are in advanced talks to embed Cleo as an application into Hyprr, bringing users to Cleo and revenue into Hyprr. This would allow creators to provide community rewards ‘for good’ for engaging in content and providing attention in a growing consumer application.
You can learn more about Cleo at Cleo.Tech and connect with me on LinkedIn here.
