Weekly Update and AMA — 10th April 2023

Our first weekly update is out, and available on our Youtube channel. As it’s the first, it’s mostly project background and vision.

Please join our discord to submit questions for these weekly videos → JOIN

Here is the full transcription. (Auto generated, so please excuse any typos. You can blame the AI).

Hi guys, and welcome to the very first , edition of our weekly updates on Cleo.

We wanna start doing this now because we actually went live. Last Monday. So we’ve been in market for just over a week. And what we think is really important is that we provide some transparency and some consistency in our communications.

So we have committed as a team to put me forward to give a weekly update to the community. On the platform, on our progress, on our customers, on our token, all those kind of things. So this is our first the objective for this is to have our community submit weekly questions during the week through our discord.

And then I’ll take this opportunity to address those questions in the form of a video and get this out across our social. Now as is our first, I haven’t really had a chance to gather many questions, so I thought I’d just make this first one, really the origin story. Tell you why we have been building Cleo why we’ve brought it to market and a little bit about the background.

So let’s do that today. Please, if you do wanna ask questions join our discord. The link is in the description of this video. There is a channel in there specifically to ask questions that we’ll cover on this weekly video update. So look forward to meeting you all in the discord, but for now, let’s just give you a bit of a background.

So like I said, my name’s Jason. I was born in 1973. I think to be frank, I, I count a lot of my working career as, as luck. I just happened to have been in the right place at the right time. 1973 was a really big year for Technology. It was the year that the Xerox Alto got launched, which was actually the first computer with a graphical user interface.

It was the year that there was the first ever cell phone call. It was the year that T C p ethernet and fiber optics all got brought to market. And those technologies, they’re combined. Essentially form what we work a lot of us in today which is web two. So the ability to communicate to post two over a global tcp i p infrastructure.

Was started back the year I was born. Now, of course, I’m not remotely have anything to do with Tim Burns Lee. I’ve not been part of that journey, but I’ve always been interested in computing and that’s formed a lot of my personal and work interests going forward. I started work. I’ll give you the brief background again.

Talk about luck. So I wanted to get into computing because I heard it was a big thing and a friend actually showed me doom running. And I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. So this was on a 3 86 SX 33, and I just thought, this is, there’s something here. Right? This is amazing.

You know, and I’d gone through my ZedX 81 and my Vic 20 and my You know, playing Elite on my home console. So I’d kind of gone through that, but this was just something completely different. The fact that you could connect this device to the internet, the fact that you had dial up the fact that you had talent, you could communicate it, it was just like an incredible obsession for me, you know, immediately.

And we only actually had one retailer in the UK at the time that was bringing these products to. It was called PC World. Very, very different to businesses today. And I, you know, lobbied them to work for ’em even though I had no experience. And I was really happy that I got my first job working in their head office in Hemal as a part of their marketing and new store opening launch team.

And the first products really that were, that we were promoting and talking about was this 4 86 ess. 25 and 33, and then we had the dx, and then we had the Pentium and all this kind of stuff. You know, it was, it was an incredible, incredible time. And what’s really interesting, all I, I think is an interesting bomb fact is our chairman at Cleo Tech.

So an amazing guy called Colin Glass was that guy that gave me my big break almost 30 years. and we sat in a room, he told me how amazing they were and what amazing training they had and stuff like that. He asked me what my experience was and I said I didn’t have any. And he said, oh, well, why should we implore you?

And I said, well, you’ve literally just spent half an hour telling me how, what amazing training and induction programs you have. Why do I need to know anything? Right? So, you know, he, he kind of took a gamble on me and we’ve actually said really good. Since I could say not good friends when he was the MD there, but we’ve kept in touch since and we’ve worked on a number of projects.

So I was kind of born in work at the birth of Modern Computing in marketing, did a various number of roles, but, you know, realized at a very young age in my twenties that I actually wanted to work for myself. So started my own marketing agency in, in 2002. I promise I’m gonna get to the point with Cleo, right?

So if you’re still bearing with me after five minutes thank you . Hopefully you maybe find the channel where there’s more videos and you can, you can drop to something a little bit more relevant. But, you know, I feel that, you know, I’ve got a platform for my first one. I’ve got zero audience, so I’m just talking to a news myself.

Giving you a little bit of a background. So 2002, launch my own agency. The aim was to help large tech c. Go to market cuz that, that was what I had experience in. So, so marketing tech companies that evolved into mobile companies. That evolved into banking, that evolved into FinTech. And of course in 2017 that evolved into blockchain projects.

So, but we’ve always been about using web two tools to help somebody go to market. So what I mean by web two tools, , we started talking about why you needed a website. Then that evolved into why you needed off. Now everyone’s got a website. You need search engine marketing. Then that evolved into social media marketing.

Then that evolved into much more advanced kind of email marketing and email nurturing and stuff like this. So I’ve spent the last 21 years deploying effectively web tool two, web two tools to allow B2B and b2c C. Generate an audience, generate demand, and sell a product to them. Now, that’s kind of the last 20 years.

The next 20 years is gonna be predominantly dominated by Web three, and if we go back to the birth when we started the agency right, we, we generally had no idea what. Would happen to the speed of communications. You know, how, how, you know, web two technology would completely, you know, change the way that we work.

The fact that I can sit today in front of a webcam, do a live stream, post a video, have a live meeting, you know, the fact that we can do this. I can send you a contract for you to sign, you know, I can send you large files, you know, I, you can FaceTime me, right? So the fact that we have all. Most of these things.

20 years ago, we couldn’t really picture what it was, and there’s a load of people saying, oh, it’s a fad, or it’ll disappear in a couple of years. But it has completely changed our whole lives. And, you know, and I guess my, my kids who are born, you know, in the you know, in the web two world, you know, they’re born in the internet, right?

So everything’s native to them. You know, it’s, they don’t even know. The symbol in word to save actually is a physical three and a half inch floppy disc. And it was an instruction. Now put the disc in, right? That was, that was stuff that, you know, that was kind of what we’ve evolved through, right? So the next 20 years is gonna be dominated by the next layer.

you know, so Web one was about being able to read information. Web two was about being able to communicate two way and, and one to many across the similar, across the same technical base. You know, web three is about being able to transact, right? So, you know that, you know, transporting value at the velocity of today’s communications is gonna change everything we do.

It’s gonna change. Literally every single facet of our life. And if you’re watching this and you’ve came here because you’re interested in crypto or you’re interested in our token or something like that, you know, you guys, you already know this, right? I, I’m, I’m preaching to the choir. But if you’re not and you’re interested in the value of the platform, I kind of will, we’ll get to the point, right?

So the, the next 20 years is gonna be dominated by that. Now I’m also got a personal passionate about trying to do some good. I mean, to be frank, marketing.

It doesn’t do much good for the environment. Right. It isn’t a, it’s not good. You know, we, we consume so much carbon, right? So if you just take digital ads, Across social channels and, and display nearly 80,000 tons of CO2 a year is required to publish those, those, those ads. And that’s just ads, right?

That’s not emails, that’s not anything else. So if you put that into context, that’s flying almost a million and a half people between London and Paris it would take almost 4 million fully grown trees one year to absorb that amount of. So if we wanted to offset the digital ad industry, we literally would have to plant 4 million trees mature trees to be able to do that.

So, We’ve, you know at the agency we’ve gone net zero. We’ve been working with projects that do that. So we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had an eye on it, but we’ve been trying to find a place to take the, you know, do more good and, and to take this to a much wider audience. And we’ve been looking for a solution that, you know, personally, I’ve been looking for a web three solution that fits both my passions, my work experience and what I wanna do for the next 20 years.

So, brief back, well, I’ll say not so brief background, right? But thanks for sticking with me for those 10 minutes. Right. So let’s talk about specifically where Cleo started. We’ve got a big problem in market. , everybody’s got the same problem, and that is the, at some point there has to be a value exchange at some point, right?

Some point I need to ask you for your contact details and permission to contact you. Now we can do really clever a b M. We can do nurturing, we can do all, all sorts of retargeting. We can do all sorts of, you know, IP or tracking. We can do stuff using intent data, and these are all things that, that we use in the agency and other agencies use, but at some point, I’ve got to ask you your permission, right?

Especially in Europe, I’m, I’m based in Europe. We have this thing called gdpr, which means we need to, we cannot unsolicitedly, unsolicitedly . We cannot reach out to you without your permission. So I’ve got to serve your form, right, and say, give us your contact details. We’d love to contact you. So that’s where our problem is.

And if I, you know, if I go back honestly, 10 years, we were getting probably 30% click through on an email, maybe 35% click through on an email we were getting. 20, 30% conversion on a landing page. If I told you today the average B2B landing page, whatever you read, to be frank, when you are selling something is probably around a percent or, or sometimes even less.

If they’re asking for a lot of data, particularly if they stick phone numbers in there, you could even be down at like 0.6, 0.7%. That’s incredible. And at the same time, clicks are getting more expensive. So my OnPage conversion is getting less, my clicks are getting more expensive. The. In a large part of the click’s getting more expensive is that there’s a lot more money come online due to things like covid.

So more ad spend is going into these limited closed wall gardens like Meta or LinkedIn or Twitter, you know pre, pre virus. Enterprise tech customers we’re probably paying $4, $4 50 a click for targets. You click from LinkedIn. that could be $20 today. So if we are paying four or five times the amount of click, but our conversion is dropping on the page, imagine what this does to our cost lead.

So we have something in our brain, which is this, i is this right? Does it feel right? And my li bulb moment for Cleo came when I was presenting at a B2B event a couple of years ago. And I just reread a book called Influence the Psychology of Persuasion. And in that book it talks about the strongest human driver is reciprocity.

Reciprocity is the thing that moves. , okay. We can talk about profit, we can talk about gain, you can talk about fear, you can talk about social proof, you can talk about all, you know, there’s all these different things, but the one that’s ingrained in every single human is reciprocity. And that’s this sense of fairness.

It’s almost like, you know, built into our dna. So it’s a real simple example. What I did on stage and what, actually I should dig it out, I probably recorded it was I did this session. I’ve actually done it a few events, but this one event, it was a three day event. I would run the same exercise over the three day event, and I basically had a hundred pounds.

So I stood on stage and had a hundred quick, right? I picked two people out, the audience that didn’t know each other, and that was really important. Participant A and participant B. What I said to participant A was I’m gonna give you all the money. But you decide how much to offer or to gift to participant B, and the stickler is, if participant B refuses the money, I get all of it back, you get nothing.

And B knows how much money is in the game right now. It’s fair to say a lot of people in their brain knew they wanted to be fair, so they said, okay, 50 quid for me, 50 quid for you. Done deal shake hands, all happy. because that was the perception of fairness. Now what if you were number B? Number B? What if you were letter B in that scenario and somebody offered you 10 pounds, but they were keeping 90.

Now that came up. Somebody keeping 80 pound and offering 20 that came up. Somebody keeping 70 pound and offering 30. That came up in all of those three instances. The receiver, so the plant number B, they refused and, and when asked, why did you just refuse 10 pound or why did you refuse 20 pound or why did you refuse 30 pound?

They just said it’s not fair. They would rather punish the other person, sorry, rather punish themselves to punish the other person more. Well, it’s not fair that you get 70 pound and only get 30. So no, I’m refusing the 30 because I know that’s gonna punish you and that is reciprocity in act Now that 70 30 was a little bit about about there.

That’s where it kind of starts to change. People start to think about it a lot more, right? So 60 40, would I accept that or would I only accept 50 50? Right? So this was a lesson that people genuinely will punish themselves. if they feel like the exchange, the value exchange isn’t fair. So we came away from that from a marketing point of view and really started to think, well, what does that mean?

Right? Because one way to approach the challenge around cost per lead and that. Expensive click and low OnPage conversion is to make the content more salacious, right? So we talk about, you know, I’m a big Gary V fan, right? So if you follow people like that in marketing, you’ll hear terms like trip wires and lead magnets and all these things, right?

Those things effectively are tricks to get people to fill in a form. I’m trying to trick you to get you to fill in a form. Well, that’s great. That’s fine. Great. You’re now in my pipeline. You not gonna buy anything when sales follow up. You’re not like to say, oh yeah, great. Cause I had such a great experience being tricked to give you my email address, right?

With this in an, this thing called a trip wire or a lead magnet, right? So dumb down the content. Trick people to come in, give you details to sales, but they’re not really qualified to, nobody buys anything. Sales turn around and say, you know, Marketing leads to crap. We’re gonna try and generate our own.

And then marketing say we never get any feedback from sales, so you don’t still have sales and marketing and organization fighting, even though we should have the technology to twin people together. This is so frustrating, and it’s been the same story for the last 20 odd years right now. We took a slight different approach, which was what if we could meet value with value?

What if we could say, right, well actually what if I recognize that your. Your attention and your data is worth something. It’s worth something. So, so what is it worth? Right. Well, the first thing is I’m offering you a piece of content. So that’s usually what happens, right? It’s a pdf, it’s sent to download.

It’s a white paper, it’s a webinar to come on. It’s a video to watch, right? I want your time on that, but what is your time worth? So you’re gonna get the asset, which you want to. How can I tip the scales to get you to get, allow us to follow up with you by offering you something. The first test we did, and I’m not too proud of it, the first test we did was an Amazon gift card, hundred dollars Amazon gift card, and we haled the cost per appointment.

So we saved $300 for the client. And that included the a hundred dollars gift card. The problem with gift card is it’s, it’s a little bit dirty, right? It feels like you’re bribing somebody, but ultimately it’s not scalable. So the cost for us to buy the, the gift card to administer the gift card to send it out, then Prime provide proof to the client that we’ve done it.

It was at least $150 to give away a hundred dollars, right? So, it, it, it proved that if we meet value for value and give you ti your time for money, it proved that that got us leads and got us good leads cuz people are, oh, it’s nice that somebody recognized my time’s worth something. Right? But it’s not scalable and it’s not something that we want to take to our, you know, larger brand clients.

Right. So we wanted. Take the genesis of the idea and to make it about something else, which was if you can give us your time on an asset, what’s a bigger cause than an Amazon gift card? And that’s where our passions met with our needs as a business. And that is where we came up with the idea of your time for good, in fact, marketing for good.

So you give us your time, you give us your attention, and we’ll do something good in the world. So our objective and what the platform does is it helps brands to improve their marketing effectiveness, to improve their engagement, and they get a lower cost per lead and the recipient of the content gets a nice reward for good.

That’s simple. Now, we believe through our testing, the, the good is actually funded by the reduced cost per lead, so it doesn’t actually cost the vendor. It doesn’t cost you anymore because you know, instead of paying $80 per lead, you’re now paying $80 per lead in total. But that includes some good being done in the world and our platform allows you to offer a good from as low as 65 cents.

which is planting a tree all the way up to $850, which is carbon offset for life, which I’ll talk about in a whole other video because I’m really excited about how we do that. But, oh, you know, somebody that wants to come in and use a platform, it doesn’t need to be expensive. It can be six 5 cents. or it can be all the way up.

So it can be do this thing and we plant a tree. It can be do this thing and we carbon offset your computer for the rest of the year. It could be we make you net zero for life. It could be that we take a thousand plastic bottles from the ocean, but the user gets a really nicely designed N F T. That’s their proof of completion.

So effectively it’s a, it’s using. Blockchain technology to have a digital certificate of completion that sits in their wallet and it will total up all of the good they’ve done in the year by effectively just consuming B B2B and b2c you know, awareness or middle funnel type of content. So we’ve taken this out to customers and they’re incredibly excited.

So we’ve been live for just over. First campaign went live with Lenovo. We had 30 days and our objective was to generate 95 leads. Well, we’ve actually generated 55 already in our first five days of being live, so we’re really happy that it works. We’ve actually had, I believe, a hundred percent redemption on the good.

So it proved that the good generated the leads. But we’ll do a campaign, washup report and we have our next customer start. A week after the Easter break and we’ve got a pipeline of about 10 customers to onboard. So we’re incredibly excited about the proposition. Now we’re not gonna stop at Marketing for Good.

We also have a team talking to sports organizations who want to go net Zero. So the idea is that they’ll be creating digital collectibles to sell to their audience. And they will then go towards making their business net zero. And interestingly, we’ve had a approach by a group of schools as well that want to use innovative technologies to fundraise, to go Carbon Net Zero too.

So those two are in development, but marketing for good is live and in market. Now, it would be remiss of me not to mention the fact that we do have a token. It’s called the CLEO Token. Now, we haven’t brought the token to market for public consumption yet. We’re in plans as to when we’re gonna do that, and that’s probably gonna be within the next six.

I would imagine, but that the the blockchain team are working on that. So we’ll give you an update as in when it happens. But the important thing from our point of view is that we want it to be live. We want to be a real project. We want real customers. We want real revenue, even before the token goes live.

So the token raise isn’t to build the platform. We’re not selling an idea, right? We are a functioning business with customers and revenue. The token raise actually will perform two parts. A will allow us to bring to community into the platform. And b, it will give us funds to scale globally because we do have a lot of demand.

In Asia and the us. And that means that we need to translate and all that kind of stuff. So, so really the token is about scaling and building value, not building the application. So we’ve completely bootstrapped it from day one. We’re completely live we are built on the polygon network because we feel now in 2023 we didn’t need to build our own.

There are some incredibly fast, efficient blockchains that we can utilize to manage our token and our nf. And our token model we think is really, really simple. So we will talk about the token model on a later video. I have written a blog on the token model in our medium. So if you want to go and actually get ahead of the videos and go read, you can do that.

Also in our medium we go through, A client example, you can go and see the NFT that the Lenovo participants will get. So, you know, please make sure that you are checking out our medium and our socials for ongoing updates. So hopefully that gives you a bit of a flavors to the background, a little bit of an introduction to me.

Please, please, please join our discord. We’ve got lots going on at the moment, so I think the next video will give you a bit of an update on the marketing traction on the first campaign with our client as we look to gather some questions to come back to you guys. So if you made it through that 20 odd minutes, thank you so much.

Like I said, please join Discord, come chat to us and we promise to keep you updated each week on our progress. Take care.