Gabriel Garcia - Global Head of Mobile Apps Marketing @Expedia, Head of Marketing - APAC @Expedia - The Scientific Method for Marketing, Mobile App Marketing - Customer Journey Design, Mobile-First Marketing Mindset, Strategic Marketing and Channel

Guest:

Gabriel Garcia - Global Head of Mobile Apps Marketing @Expedia, Head of Marketing - APAC @Expedia

(Formerly @Newscorp, @CareerOne.com)

Guest Background:

Gabriel Garcia is Global Head of Mobile Apps Marketing for Expedia ($6/share in Nov ‘08 → $133/share yesterday). He is responsible for Expedia’s Mobile growth and Apps adoption strategy across 35+ markets and helping define Expedia’s investment plans across new app ecosystems. Besides his global remit, he leads Marketing for Asia-Pacific and is responsible for defining Expedia’s marketing channel strategy and identifying growth opportunities for Expedia in the region. Prior to this role, Gabriel was Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development.

Prior to joining Expedia, Gabriel spent six years at Newscorp in Australia holding several roles, including Product and Strategy Director, Director of Strategy, and National Sales Director for Newscorp’s joint venture with Monster.com. Prior to this, he was Managing Director of the Latin American subsidiary of Monitoring Systems Technology, a leading European technology provider for the outdoor media industry.

Originally from Mexico City, Gabriel holds an MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management; a Bachelor in Business Administration from ITAM University in Mexico City and studies at Hogeschool Voor Economische Studies (University of Amsterdam).

Outside of work, Gabriel is passionate about travel, meditation, Buddhist philosophy, surf and his family.

Guest Links:

LinkedIn

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we cover:

- The Scientific Method - Application to Marketing

- Mobile App Marketing - The Customer Journey Design

- A Mobile-First Marketing Mindset

- Strategic Marketing and Channel Partnerships

- Multiple-Stakeholder Engagement

- Marketing Budgeting & Planning Process

Full Interview Transcript:

Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest growing companies. Enjoy!

Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we've got Gabriel Garcia on the show. Gabriel is Global Head of Mobile Marketing and Apps for Expedia, who's stock price in November '08 was down to $6 per share, but has gone all the way back up to $133 per share as of today. Gabriel's responsible for Expedia's Mobile Growth and Apps Adoption Strategy across 35+ markets and helping define Expedia's investment plans across new app ecosystems. In addition to his global remit, he leads Marketing for Asia-Pacific and is responsible for defining Expedia's Marketing Channel Strategy and identifying growth opportunities for Expedia in the region. Prior to this role, Gabriel was S Director of Strategy and Business Development at Expedia. Prior to joining Expedia, Gabriel spent six years at News Corp in Australia holding several roles including Product and Strategy Director, Director of Strategy and National Sales Director for News Corp's joint venture with Monster.com. Prior to this, he was Managing Director of the Latin American subsidiary of Monitoring Systems Technology, a leading European Technology provider for the outdoor media industry. Originally from Mexico City, Gabriel holds an MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management, a Bachelor in Business Administration from ITAM University in Mexico City and studied at Hogeschool voor Economische Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Outside of work, Gabriel is passionate about travel, meditation, Buddhist Philosophy, surf, and his family. Here we go.

Naber:  Gabriel, awesome to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming.

Gabriel Garcia:  It's my absolute pleasure to be here with you today.

Naber:  Excellent. It's our absolute pleasure to hear your beautiful accent. I can see your pretty face, but everyone else can't. They can hear your accent, which is definitely not a consolation, that is first prize. You and I know each other personally. We actually know each other more personally, than professionally.

Gabriel Garcia:  We do.

Naber:  So this is one of those of those fun conversations that I get to learn a lot more about you in depth professionally and how your headspace works. But, the good news is we know each other personally, and that's been really fruitful for both of us. What I'd love to do first is go through a bit of your personal story so people can get to know you like I know you. And we'll go through a few of the things how you grew up, where you grew up, some of the things you're interested in, and where you went to school, all that fun stuff. I know that you grew up in Mexico City, Colegio Greenhill School in Magdalena Contrarez, you went to ITAM in Mexico City as well. You spent time in Amsterdam, Madrid, obviously Mexico City, Sydney, Singapore. We're going to touch on your twin brother. We're gonna touch on your beautiful family. We'll touch on your other brother, although he sounds he's third place in my mind in that category, but we won't make him that. And we can talk about a few other things that are meaningful to you as well. And then we'll hop into the professional stuff, and that'll be the bulk of what we talk about today. That sound okay with you?

Gabriel Garcia:  Sounds awesome. Feels we need six hours, but let's see how we go.

Naber:  We won't, we'll keep it finite and not brief, but we'll keep it thorough but not too long. So why don't we start for maybe five to seven minutes on, what was it growing up as Gabriel as a kid? Where'd you grow up? What was your family situation like? What were you interested in, and then take us through school as well.

Gabriel Garcia:  Sure. So I'm originally from Mexico City as as you mentioned. And it was fascinating to grow up in Mexico City, in a huge city full of opportunities and full of quite a diverse range of things to do. I'm one of four kids, so I'm in the middle of the sandwich. My twin brother and I are, so we have an older brother and a younger brother. And I was always very active, very playful, and spent a lot of time, a lot of hours playing sports at school. I remember that I loved winning. I think that's something that carried over throughout my life anyways. I'll say this humbly, but it was a maybe I see it as a gift in retrospective, where without necessarily studying too much, I was able to be top of the class more often than not, particularly in elementary school. Then things got a bit more complicated in high school. But I think also having a twin to share with made life just easier. You always had a buddy to hang out with, to share ideas with, to share concerns with. So that I think made both our lives pretty smooth at least in those early days of elementary school, and certainly through all the way through high school.

Naber:  Nice. Awesome. And what were some of your interests or hobbies when you were a kid?

Gabriel Garcia:  Football, football, and football, so played, played a lot of football. And that's soccer if we have an American audience somewhere in the world. I used to just do anything that was sports-related. I did karate for a few years. And did that to just one level short of being a black belt, which I regret not going through it, but that was just change of schools, and anyway that's a different story. But yeah, football, karate, those were certainly my hobbies. It was always very sports orientated for sure.

Naber:  Nice. Awesome. So you said you have four brothers. You and your brother are the co-meat to the sandwich, if you will, or veggie burger depending on who's eating it. What were some of your first jobs, and what were some of the first ways that you made money?

Gabriel Garcia:  Oh, I was lucky enough not to have to make money at that early stage of my life, so I was privileged enough to be able to go to school, and have an education, and our parents look after us. But I remember in high school, and that's towards maybe fourth grade of high school, I was dating this girl, and her brother was selling water filters of all things. And I met him, and he was a really cool guy. And when you're 15 years old and you meet a very cool guy that is making money, you want to be him a little bit. Particularly if it's your girlfriend's brother. So that's what I started doing. I started working with him, selling water filters. And that was the first time that I earned money. The first time that I realized that I could sell something. And the first time that I realized that there were other ways of making my girlfriend happy.

Naber:  Good one, good one. Okay. That's a good answer. And so you went to school at Colegio Green Hills, southwest burbs del Mexico City. And you're going to ITAM, tell us about that journey through there.

Gabriel Garcia:  Sure. So ITAM in Mexico City is the most renowned school of business and economics in Mexico City. So, when when I finished high school, it was a tough decision actually, because I was in between studying business...And I had a clear a view that if I studied business, I would go to this school, and at least go through the process of trying to get admitted to this school...But I was in between that or studying drama. Which was very different because I was really into drama and that started in early days of high school, and become a very important part of my life. And my drama teacher and Director at that time, told me to study business because I would be able to continue to work at an independent theater company, which I did for the first years of being in school until I realized that I couldn't do everything, it was too hard. So that was the reason why I studied at ITAM because I decided to start a business because it was the top business and economic school in Mexico City. I did an admission exam, I got accepted and yeah, that's how the mid nineties started, which is a period of my life where things changed a lot - from mid to late nineties. A lot of things happen. So I started university. I stopped doing drama, so that's 95-96. My Dad unexpectedly passed away in 96. In 97 I decided to do my take my first big trip to Europe, backpacking with a few friends for a couple of months. In 99, I decided to do an exchange program from business school and go and live in Amsterdam. And I came back from Amsterdam to finish my major and take on my first real job, working for a tech startup, where I ended up being the Managing Director of that business and growing it successfully. And did that for four or five years. Soon after I joined, I was growing a business, and closing rounds of financing, and building a team, which was very unexpected that I never thought I was going to be my first gig after university, but that came as an opportunity, which I took, and I'll never regret, and that's certainly cemented what my career is today.

Naber:  Very cool. That's Monitoring Systems Technology, correct?

Gabriel Garcia:  That's right. Yep.

Naber:  So, did you bounce back and forth between Mexico City and Madrid in that role?

Gabriel Garcia:  Yeah. Great question. So I was leading the Latin America...so we started expanding Latin America, so I was leading that. And then I was going to move to Madrid because I was dating a Spanish girl, and I was going to go there and study an MBA at IE Business School. And the company owners, the shareholders that I reported into told me, hey, you want to go to Madrid not because of your MBA. You want to go to Madrid because of your girlfriend. So why don't you go and try to set up the operation of this business in central Europe. The head office of this business was in eastern Europe, in Budapest, in Hungary. But we didn't have a presence in central Europe. So they made me an offer, which I couldn't resist. So I went to Madrid, moved to Madrid, did all research, etc - put a case together. But then some of the shareholders decided not to invest, and the Mexican shareholders asked me to go back to Mexico City. This is seven months later. And I agreed, not before asking for a three month a break, which I took and I went traveling to India, Nepal, and trekking in the Himalayas, which was yet another life changing experience.

Naber:  Excellent. So, let's just briefly talk about some of the learnings you have from Monitoring Systems Technology cause that's a massive five year ride between two continents, and an amazing spectrum of early stage and then building up a business to having fully functional operations. So what are a few of the learnings you took away from that gig?

Gabriel Garcia:  Well, first of all, I've learned how to pitch to investors, which I had never done before. And I realized that everything was possible. When you find yourself as a young entrepreneur, even when it wasn't my business idea, closing rounds of financing and seeing that there's people interested in investing in the business that you're trying to, you realize everything's possible. You realize that it's all about how you, build it, presented, wrap it up, and how you pitch. So that got me really excited. I also, I learned about people, I learned a ton about people. I realized since those days that if I was going to be a successful at all, it was all about the team that I was forming around me, and that the value that others could bring to the table was going to be way more, way higher than the value that I could deliver myself as an individual contributor. So I learned very quickly to empower people, to enable people to do their best. And it comes through...you know, there were obviously hard times for sure. But it also also taught me that when you're gonna do that, you've gotta start taking into consideration cultural nuances. Particularly when you start thinking about different countries. And I was relatively inexperienced back then. So that came at a price, it was tough. But also at a perfect age where all you want to do is spend time in the office, which is not the case today. Not that I don't love my work, but I'd rather spend times somewhere else. So those perhaps were the biggest learnings. The realization that everything is possible if you are deliberate and you're determined to do it. And how powerful it can be to enable people, even if you're young and you don't have a clear view as to what you need to do. If you surround yourself with the right people, they can make things happen.

Naber:  Awesome, man. That's great. Thanks so much for that. And then MST, it comes to your time to make a move, and natural move, you move to Sydney, Australia. Classic. Tell about that move getting your MBA, and then take us through the journey of moving to Sydney get your MBA, and then takes us through News Corp and CareerOne, as well up to up to Expedia.

Gabriel Garcia:  Sure. So, I wanted to study overseas. I wanted to do an MBA, and I wanted to be overseas. And my girlfriend back then, is my wife these days, Cecilia, also wanted to study a Master's. And we were traveling in Myanmar, of all places. And I remember we both said, well, if we ever live somewhere, outside of Mexico, where would that be? And we both, we both said Australia. Don't ask me why we'd never been before. But we were both really into outdoors. We used to spend a lot of time at the beach, a lot of trekking and diving, etc. And when the opportunity, well the right time came to actually go and study overseas, we were really focused on going to a top 10 business school, and by the book sort of discerning process. And suddenly we realized that wasn't necessarily what we were, only what we're looking for. So it was actually Cecilia that said, well, why don't we do some research about universities in Australia. There might be some good ones there. And we did. And that's how we ended up in Sydney. We've never been there, then we just committed to two years of study, which turned into 11 years.

Naber:  Nice. That's awesome. Obviously, Cecilia bringing some sense to your decision making process. Shout out to Cecilia, because she's doing that all the time in your life. All right, cool. Keep going.

Gabriel Garcia:  Yeah. So we moved to Sydney. Loved it from day one, living in Manly Beach, one of the most beautiful places in the world, I think. And after finishing our Master's, we loved it so much that we decided we would give it a go and try to find work opportunity. And we did. And I did, just a couple of consulting gigs, just very short term what I interviewing. And then this opportunity came up at News Corp. News Corp was going through a big transformation of setting up their digital business - News Digital Media it was called back then. And as part of that, a huge transformation of the classified business. So they were just growing, everything that had to do with digital media. So I started working with them in a commercial capacity, on the classified side of their business. And I did several commercial roles in a short period of time. So I was getting promoted quite frequently, which which was quite overwhelming. And I just didn't expect it that would happen that quickly. And then we ended up doing a joint venture with Monster.com, which back then was just the biggest online job board. And that was fascinating, it was a great experience. And soon after that happened, I got offered to Head Sales for the JV. And that was challenging. That was the first senior gig that I did in a Corporate environment. It was the middle of the global financial crisis. And it was hard, man. That's all I remember about that gig. It was really hard. I was just traveling around Australia and trying to keep the team afloat, and coming up with different Sales structures, and coming up with different value propositions in the market to try to, I was going to say unlock budgets, but there was nothing to be unlocked. It was just to keep the P&L afloat. And it it was great. It was tough, but it was great. And another important thing happened back then, which Cecilia was pregnant. So all this was happening while I was about to have my first kid, which was a fascinating adventure. Very quickly, a year and a bit after that, I was offered buy our CEO of the JV, a Strategy role. Which I took with so much passion because it was very different. It was very different, and suddenly I had time to whiteboard stuff. It was like, wow, I used to spend that time on planes, and talking to clients, and managing Sales Managers. So I loved that, and that grew into a Product role. So I ended up, Heading Product for the joint venture. And I did that for three and a bit years. Huge change, massive shift managing Product Managers and a couple of Dev pods, which I've had no experience whatsoever doing before. So I learned a ton out of that experience, until I realized that it was time for me to follow my dream, which was really getting into tech. And travel has always been a thing as you can see from my story here. And Expedia was always there. We'd go to conferences, and I would see people from Expedia presenting. And I had a buddy, one of my surfing buddies, that worked at Expedia, and I told him, hey, whenever something comes up, let me know. And he did. This role as Director of Business Development, heading the Partnership Business for Australia, New Zealand region came up, and I took it. And it's been a fascinating roller coaster since. Roller coaster in a good way. he downs have been amazing downs in a good way. Just learning, shaking you up, going through the company that invented online travel, to suddenly a marketplace that everyone wants to be part of with incredibly disruptive companies, and continue to try to revolutionize travel utilizing Technology, and doing that in numerous different roles. From Partnership roles in Australia and New Zealand, then covering Latin America as well, to then two and a half years later moving to Singapore to manage Business Development and our Partnerships team for Asia Pacific for a couple years before my current boss, our Chief Marketing Officer, offered me a new role, which was very different - just heading Marketing for the region, which I took. And it was a big challenge, completely outside of my comfort zone, which that's exactly the reason why I decided to take it. And that grew into what I'm doing today, which is by far the best thing of I've done, which is heading our Mobile Marketing function globally and our Apps Ecosystems, which changes every day, man, every day. It's different, and it's fascinating, and it's challenging, and I love it.

Naber:  Awesome. Man, the amount of passion that comes through when you talk about your experiences, awesome. Thanks for the chronology. Let's dive into a few of a few of the strengths and super powers that you have, as well as...let's tap into some unique experience that you have. So the first thing, probably a natural segue, is you mentioned quite a few different stakeholders that you played, and quite a different few stakeholders that you obviously had at each one of those roles. So you've been the Sales stakeholder, you've been the Marketing stakeholder, you've been the Product stakeholder, you've been the Strategy stakeholder, and you've also been customer and the stakeholder on both sides of those conversations in years and years of different roles that you've had. When you're thinking about the mindset of talking to each one of those different stakeholders, can you give us some of the best practices about how one should think about interacting with Marketing, Sales, Product, Strategy as as you're having these types of conversations?

Gabriel Garcia:  Sure. That's a, that's a great question. There's a lot there. let me start just by, by saying that, I don't have any superpowers. So I strongly believe that I don't have any skills that are unique. I think that everyone has a set of unbelievable qualities within them, it just takes longer to identify them and nurture them. So let me just get that out of the way. No superpowers here. Sorry. Apologies. But I would summarize perhaps, the pretty full-on question, with trust. I strongly believe that building trust is key when you're communicating with any of those stakeholders that you described. And you'll build by being empathetic. You'll build trust by listening. And it's not only when you gotta listen to customers, and you gotta listen to the partners that you're trying to do business with, and to other stake holders. But it's also about listening to yourself. You need to stay put and be true to yourself. And the moment that you do that I think is a moment where you let the best version of yourself shine. And if you are a leader, then that allows you to get the best out of the people that you're working with, right? And that just tends to have an incredible, incredibly positive impact on the relationships that you build with customers, on a direct basis when you're doing business to business, Marketing or Sales, the relationships that you have with with your team, with different stakeholders. So for the people that that I mentor, there is a common question that they sometimes ask, which is, how can how can I continue to build my brand? And I always tell them, look, focus on building your trust and then the rest will follow. So that's one thing that I would, I think it could summarize and those interactions. I think...less is more, right? So if we talk less, and we listen more, it's better. If we have less objectives or more meaningful ones, it's better. If we have less dependencies, and we're able to enable other stakeholders during those interactions to be able to execute whatever they need to execute. And that might be your team or maybe someone else's team, the better. So aim for less, aim for simplicity, while building trust. And that's a formula that has so far worked for me.

Naber:  Nice love it. That's great. And one of the things that I've seen that is a common theme in the keynotes that you're doing, the content you're putting out, a lot of the quotes that I've seen you in the media, which you've had 30, 40 plus appearances in different media, whether it's interviews or quotes or events, etc. Just tons of stuff out there that you've talked about which is, which is great stuff. One of the themes that I see is talking about transforming the data quality and data-driven Marketing methods at Expedia specifically. You mention things around leveraging big data and machine learning. You talk about scientific method and the approach, as well as using VR within the Marketing scheme, Marketing Strategy. Let's take each one of those, if you don't mind. Could you talk a little bit about your mindset as you're using data driven Marketing methods? And then take us through, maybe a couple of key points around what businesses should be doing, and how businesses should be thinking about this?

Gabriel Garcia:  Sure. So the first thing I would say is, this applies, in my experience, and at least something that encourage or push the teams to focus on. This applies not only on data driven Marketing. I think it applies in business in general. And that has to do with, the scientific method for sure. But I would, I would describe it better perhaps as just being scientific towards identifying growth opportunities. And that doesn't mean that you need to trade off creativity. That doesn't mean that it's just always a fall away formula. But it means that if you do it in a methodic way, you'll be able to discern what's meaningful versus not meaningful, faster. And once you're able to do that, you can iterate on it. And that's what drives growth. So, it just starts with an observation, or a data point. And again, this is where I said it doesn't necessarily have to be data driven Marketing, it could just start with a point of view, right? And that's fine, but once you have that, you need an overall objective or hypothesis that you can go in and test. If you don't have that, then if you're going to be very difficult to define some success. And also very important to understand within that objective what's in scope and what's out of scope. I've seen many, many times in business when there's a description of what's in scope, but there is no specific clarification of what's out of scope. And that just takes people in very, very, interesting paths where they spend most of the time trying to explain why they're not doing something as opposed to just focusing on what was supposed to be in scope in the first place. A good example of that could be, you're developing, I'm trying to be generic here, I can give you specific examples for Expedia, but if you're developing a new value proposition for your Product, and your success metric is engagement, then make sure that you perfectly articulate that driving incremental, customer growth is out of scope, right? Because when you look at your success metrics, that could be a quite normal questions, like, well are we driving incremental. It's like, well, no, because that was not the aim of this experiment, right? And have very clear key results. And if you think of the things I'm touching on right now, it's following almost a scientific method, right? But if you have key results, and you know exactly what's the expected output, then you can define what your success criteria is. Now, what are the primary and secondary measures of success or metrics of success. And that also allows you to identify what are potential risks or dependencies that that could become blockers into executing on that Marketing Strategy in this case. And of course, having an estimated business value always helps, right? When it's not only about the metric, but exactly how much value is that going to deliver to the business. So that's in general terms. Now when it comes to, more specifically, the application of that into Technology, or everything that we're doing with Marketing, or data science...Expedia went through this transformation a few years ago where there was just a focus on making data-driven observations and follow the scientific method. And the way that that allows us to operate today, has transformed the way in which we innovate in every single thing we do. Not only the Product, but Marketing, even as I said in some forums, even HR today follows the scientific method in the way they operat at Expedia. And you're pretty much taking real time information, and think of an e-commerce environment, and letting your customer tell you what they and don't in real time.

Naber:  Interesting, can you give us some examples?

Gabriel Garcia:  Well, the simplest example would be an A/B test, right? If you're a, if you're A/B testing something, what people don't realize is that you are actually getting real time feedback of whether an ad resonates more with an audience or not. How you take that feedback and how you iterate on that process is what then drives the success. But that's in the simplest example. There are obviously many other, more complex ways in which you can apply the scientific method, you can apply data science into the way that you're automating process, and learning from those data loops, and learning from your customers to improve your Product and improve your Marketing. But a few things that I would say are key to focus on, from a Marketing standpoint...if you think of how complex marketplaces have become - the multidimensional nature of the cross-channel Marketing world we live in today, there are multiple, storefronts and touchpoints, right? And I always say the same thing, which as marketers it's unacceptable to ignore the infinite amount of data that is coming our way. And everyone talks about big data, I know. But if you really take that data and ensure that the next customer interaction is being informed and dictated by the data that you've been gathering, naturally you're enhancing whatever you're putting in front of your customers, either a Product, or a Marketing message, or a value proposition, or whatever it is. And in the past, that linear path to Marketing was pretty simple, but today it doesn't work that. Today, we have different devices. Today, we have those multiple touch points. Today, we have complexities around, multi-channel attribution and cross-device attribution. And so it's a lot more complex. And the amount of customer data out there, means that the customer journey is quite fractured. So unless we find specific ways in which we can start to test with the data that we're gathering, it's very difficult to deliver on measurable results and iterate on those, which goes back to what I was saying before, right? And just following that simplistic approach to the scientific method. So what that means in practice, again, when it comes to my Marketing, when it comes to data driven Marketing and measurement, if you're truly thinking about the customer, then in order to drive sustainable growth you need to understand the value that that customer or set of customers brings in the long run, right? And I love this quote, which is from a guy from McKinsey, that I think is an Emeritus Partner now as they call them...but he says something like...I might look for you, and send it to you later....he writes a lot about capitalism, right? And the future of capitalism. And he says that the vast majority of most firms value, depends on the results three years from now, which, that's how it works. But yet Management is preoccupied with what's reportable three months from now, then capitalism has a big problem. And that happens all the time. So if I go back to what I was talking, on measurement and data-driven Marketing, we as marketers, we got to focus on the outcome, not on the metric that you're capturing, right? So some metrics like, cost per acquisition, etc, are great directional indicators. But they don't determine the value of our investments. So you need to look at what are the levers that you have in order to drive business outcomes, like customer lifetime value. And the moment that you do that, you will be challenged on your attribution models. You will be challenged on the shape of what your P&L looks like on a monthly, on a quarterly basis, even on a yearly basis. And at Expedia, we're starting to make decisions in those terms, which is, well you have one attribution model that will tell you the return on your ad spend, and you have a shadow attribution model that tells you that the mix might look slightly different if you start looking at lifetime value metrics. And not only in the 12 month basis, but even an 18 or 24 month basis. And if you're really about delivering business growth in a sustainable and future-proven manner, you cannot be looking in that short term. You gotta be, being scientific, utilizing your data and applying those metrics that look way beyond that monthly, quarterly basis. And then that keep the customer at heart. Because the moment that you do that, then customer centricity really kicks in. Because you're really delivering what the customer is interested, not only today, but 12 months from now, 24 months from now. And that drives loyalty, that drives business growth.

Naber:  Yep. Oh, sorry, did you have something else to add?

Gabriel Garcia:  You were asking about data-driven Marketing, and the one thing that is important to explain is why data is so critical, right? The more informed you are, and your organisation is, the more valuable your hypothesis becomes, right? And I was referring to the scientific method before. So data democratisation, and the access to it is fundamental to drive a test and learn culture, which is what drives that excellence, that iteration, at least in our business. And having the infrastructure and data warehouses, to capture the data, is an important foundation for sure. But having the right tools, and the analytics for different people to make sense of is obviously needed. Now what really makes the difference is acknowledging that unless every single person within the organization have access to the data, and there is a culture that drives an expectation of everyone having to experiment with it, the potential is not being maximized, right? So the sooner the data supply chain can be streamlined, and the data democratised for the consumer, the end consumer, that could be your Marketing Manager, that could be your Product Manager, the sooner that data become a strategic asset. So the test and learn culture at Expedia wouldn't really exist unless every single person in the organization had access to the data tools, to the performance dashboards, to the framework. But I think most importantly they were encouraged to fail all the time and make data driven decisions knowing that you're going to fail. About 70% of our tests fail. And unless you go through that journey, and the business is ready to invest on failing, then you won't be able to really make the most out of the application of the scientific method into all the experimentation to your Product and Marketing. The core there, is to just do it fast, right? You go experiment, fail, do to it fast, learn and move on to the next thing.

Naber:  Excellent. And I want to go back to something you said before about longterm growth. Can you give us a bit of a sense for how that process works for you? So how do you define what that long-term growth looks like? What indicators you look for for longterm growth, and then reverse engineering, what leading indicators you look for in order to get to that place? Can you walk us through that process, the process, the step by step process.

Gabriel Garcia:  Sure, let me walk you through the process, and I'll try to sort of share an example

Naber:  That's what I was going to say. If you can do an example, great. If not, I understand.

Gabriel Garcia:  Let me start with the process. Well first of all, you need to define...as I said, you start with, with defining, based on on observation, coming up with a hypothesis, right? And once you have your hypothesis and it's a strong enough hypothesis that you can go and test, then you start the testing process. And in terms of metrics, and to your question of what does that look in the long-term? It depends on what your objective is, right? So if your objective is to drive, for example, the shape of your P&L would dramatically change if you drive 90 day repeat rates of your customers. And the lifetime value of your platform mix varies. It's a tangible example. So customers on Expedia app are worth more, repeat more, our most loyal customers, than customers transacting on web, right? Process wise, you got to define that your objective would be to get a customer to transact on the app. Hypothesis being that if they transact on the app, they have a higher lifetime value because you know they have a higher liftemtime value by the way, but the hypothesis is because they repeat more, they are more engaged, and there's higher attach rates. As in you go and book a flight, the likelihood or probability of booking a hotel is higher. So that a process. So you go to your metric, which is 90 day repeat rate, which determines the lifetime value. You go to your hypothesis in place and you go on you test that. Now, what's happening in the analytics world behind it, I'm going to go get into the details of that, but that's just the way that you would set up your attribution model - look at the click stream and look at if a customer clicks on a Marketing link, most likely on Google, you've all got your money. Where does that customer click before you transact? How much of those clicks can you save? You've got a customer goes direct into your platform. How does that impact your costs per acquisition? How does that bring, what do we call our Marketing contribution, and if they end up because of that journey on the on the platform preference, how then the lifetime value increases. And you test that hypothesis. What are some of the challenges of this? Well, statistical significance, reaching statistical significance when you are applying some of these tests. Particularly when you're trying to do it in a small region. If you're trying to do it globally, that's fine. If you're trying to do it in the US that's fine. If you're trying to do it in Taiwan, it's not so easy. So, there are techniques to address those challenges where you can bundle together, similar cohorts that could comparatively allow you to reach that significance faster, or make certain assumptions. So that's the process that it would take. And I tried to describe the process with a tangible example, trying to simplify it, right. But a tangible example of you come up with a hypothesis, you have the metric that you know is the driver of that lifetime value, and then what follows after doing that is, or in parallel to that, is you need a predictive model. This is where it gets complex, that will allow you to tell you that in fact that's going to be the value, the lifetime value, of that customer in 12 or 24 months.

Naber:  Right, there's a lot of art and science to that.

Gabriel Garcia:  Yes. And hopefully you're still around 12 months later, then see how accurate your predictive model was. And once you have that 12 month cohort with a predictive model, stress testing it, you adjust the predictive model. And then life becomes a lot smoother.

Naber:  Wow, that's amazing. Reverse engineering into a longterm objective from a Marketing perspective, and then testing it, stress testing. I come up with hypothesis, going through that entire process that's like, that's an amazing science and art to get right. But once you do, it sounds there's massive upside to doing it.

Gabriel Garcia:  There is, there is a massive upside for sure. And it takes time, and dedication, and takes resources for sure. If you want to manage your entire Marketing engine in that way, which at Expedia we certainly aim for. And the investment into data science is something that requires a lot of resources, as you know, but it really pays off, right? That's when Marketing transformed into Marketing Technology. And either, you not only ride the wave, we believe we need to leave the way, as Expedia, when it comes to utilizing data science into our Marketing Strategy.

Naber:  Love it. Awesome. Thanks Gabriel. So let's move it into something that's also a pretty reasonable transition from that particular topic, which is, which is Mobile Apps Marketing and Mobile First Marketing. So let's talk about Mobile First Marketing, mobile first versus desktop. And Asia is an amazing playground and bleeding edge petri dish for this particular topic. If someone's thinking about mobile first Marketing, and they want to either transform their Marketing Strategy into mobile first Strategy, or if they are currently in that model right now, but they want to optimize it, what are some best practices for a mobile first Marketing Strategy?

Gabriel Garcia:  Great question, Brandon. The first thing I would say is, be ready to make tradeoffs. There's not such thing as free lunches, and you just got to make those trade offs. But if you are not thinking and operating that way, then you'll have to pay the consequence in the future. And to be fair, I mean we're not the pioneers of Mobile Marketing, or Mobile First Marketing. A company like Facebook, really took a stand on developing for mobile first and moving their whole company in that direction. We were kind of the late comers to the party from a tech perspective. But as the first thing, the trade offs. What I mean with trade offs, is, well, you just gotta recognize and acknowledge where your customers are spending time. Once you understand where your customers are spending time, you realize that marketplaces and mobile environments, at least to date, can be more expensive. And can be more expensive because market dynamics are different, because the cost per clicks might be different, and they're going to vary tremendously from country to country, and from region to region, right? There are some more advanced regions where the Marketing mobile ecosystems are very different. If we're talking about, what my team does with environments in Japan, you got to take into consideration Line as an environment. Or in Korea, Naver as a platform. Everywhere else is going to be highly driven by Google, for sure. But you gotta make sure that, when you're designing a mobile first Marketing, you have a mobile first Product to deliver to your customer expectations. And I guess it depends on what your business is all about and which industry you are operating in. But for sure, if you are operating in the online world, and certainly if you are operating in a two sided platform ecosystem as as we do, where you have consumers at one end and hotel partners, and airlines, and cars, etc on the other end, you have to tweak that engine, and you got to tweak that engine with a mobile first approach. If you tweak one side of the engine with one lens, and the other one with another lens, then things break...they don't break. They just cost a lot of money because you're not optimizing your Marketing spend as much as you could be.

Naber:  Right, you're hedging on both sides.

Naber:  That's right. So I touched on a couple things there, which are tradeoffs and acknowledging the relationship between Marketing and Product. The third thing, and I think it's all encompassing is design, right? And I say it's all encompassing because design touches Marketing, touches Product. The message that you would deliver in a mobile platform is not necessarily different to the message, per se - when you talk about specifically Apps it might be different, right? - but, per se is not necessarily different to the message that you would deliver on desktop. But the experience will be different. The design of the customer experience will be significantly different. How you optimize those landing page experiences in order to optimize your return on ad spend, in order to optimize the delivery of your Product, of your service, will be dramatically different. And if you try to do both...so there are two things very critical for me. If you try to do both, as in you try to put the same weight into one or the other, as in, desktop and mobile, as I said, you might fail. You need to trade off. But also very importantly, you can not assume that as the world has gone mobile then delivering the same experience in a platform agnostic way is going to solve the problem. And that's what makes it challenging. You still gotta A.) acknowledge that cross device behavior, but go and develop mobile-unique experiences for your customers. And once that you have that experience designed, then the bidding, the automation, the algorithms that allow you to optimize your Marketing spend, that's the least of the concern that just takes, again, time and iteration to continue for the machine to learn, and get better at, and particularly on bidding platforms. But it's connecting the customer, depending on which part of the journey it is, with a shopping intent, with how they are going to resonate with that message, with where the experience is where they're going to land is what really drives mobile first everything. Unless you see it in that lens, you won't be able to solve a customer problem.

Naber:  Right. Okay. Got It. And as you were explaining that, one of the things...and that was great by the way. Thank you. One of the things you were explaining was creating those mobile specific journeys for the customer. When you're having those conversations, and you actually sit down in those meetings - when you're the Marketing stakeholder, sitting with the Product stakeholder, sitting with other stakeholders in the room, from Eng, or whatever orgs need to be in that conversation, or they happen chronologically back to back, whatever. What input should Marketing have, and how much input should Marketing have in those discussions around the actual customer journey creation?

Gabriel Garcia:  Yeah. Love it. We're just going through all of that right now. Well, first of all, if you're going to go talk to a customer, or set of customers, or the world about what you stand for, you're going to deliver it on your Product, right? So the world in which Product develops Product, and then we find a way to Market it I don't think it's successful anymore. So Marketing should help define what do we stand for as a company? What do we stand for as a Product? What customer problems do we solve? What benefits do we provide to the customer? And that is based on user research. That is based on being close and having a full understanding of ecosystem, and environment, and marketplace that you're braiding in. And once we fully understand that and you articulate that value proposition, then you come out with Products that will fulfill that, right? One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen is what I mentioned in the beginning. It's the opposite. It's like, well, we build this great product, Marketing go and find a way of selling. Come up with a value proposition. I'm saying that it hasn't worked. But In today's world that tends to fail.

Naber:  Right. Cool. That's good. I have like a hundred followup questions, but I think we should stick on that one because that's actually really good advice, and a good overview around the way a Marketer, and Marketing mindset, and Marketing leaders should be thinking about it. Okay. So, one last question from a Mobile Apps perspective, when you're thinking about principles or the framework that one should be using as they're thinking about mobile app Marketing in marketplaces, what are the set of principles or framework that someone should be using as they're putting together their Strategy?

Gabriel Garcia:  First of all, is your business and app only business or not? If it's an app only business, it's completely different. As in the marketplace, the ecosystem that you're going spend most of your time are the app stores. And that's the biggest lever that you have, and then how you go and promote your app. I mean there are many different ways of doing it, through paid advertising and different networks, which, I don't necessarily recommend. There's a lot of fraud out there, and that continues to be a challenge for the industry. Now if you have a business, regardless if you have a bricks and mortar side of your business, but if you have an online business, and there's an app component, then it's slightly different. Because you got to define, how are you adding value to your customer through an app ecosystem. Remember when we're talking about the scientific method and the applicability of scientific method into testing your way through, and I mentioned the lifetime value of our app customers, it might look very different in another company or another industry. So what is the benefit, or what is the customer problem that your app is trying to solve? Once you have that well defined, then if you have a significant mass or the majority of your mass is coming through the web, hands down that conversion of web customers into app customers could be the most effective with the highest return Marketing Strategy that you could apply. You are leveraging your own assets. You're monetizing the traffic that you already captured, and driving them and converting them with no extra costs into a platform that would allow you to engage with them in more meaningful ways.

Naber:  Cool. So you're avoiding initial acquisition costs. And you're taking someone and potentially even approving their longterm value based on a few of the attributes you said before around the hypothesis around why mobile app customers could have a higher lifetime value.

Gabriel Garcia:  Correct. So, but again, you first got to define and understand, what is that customer journey? Where do they start? And depending on what your business is all about, right, the examples that I'm giving here are very e-commerce driven perhaps, and some of them very travel focused. But I think in general you have to understand the role that that your app plays. And also take into consideration when you look at the economics...and we spent years on this, even when I wasn't directly involved back then...the dynamics of the app stores are changing. So, Google and apple obviously figured out that there are ways of making tons of money out of them, as they do. So there is a lot to be said about app store optimization or ASO, as we call it, on having the right creative, the right copy when customers are searching for an app, within the industry,or whatever, they're looking for to make sure that based on that your app appears or features. So think of the SEO of app stores. But more and more so prevalence of paid ads within that ecosystem. So think of SEM, Search Engine Marketing, it's changing the rules of the game. Right? So now, now the application of data science, for example, within my team into these platforms is becoming critical to continue to optimize our spend on platforms Google, Apple, Facebook when it comes to driving app downloads. So those will be some of the fundamentals. App store optimization, and making sure that your, not only the creative on the app store, but the copy of your app store, is taken into consideration. So understand what Google is looking for or what Apple is looking for when someone is searching for an app. Understand the dynamics of that organic search result with the paid search results, so you can optimize your bidding of those ads. Take into consideration things your competitor will bid for your brand term. And that again changes dynamics, or adds challenges to those dynamics. And outside of that app store ecosystem, or organic view of the app store ecosystems is where the customers are gonna come from. And what are the different touch points that you can leverage in order to present your app? And let me say this, incentivized downloads incentivizing, incentivized installs do not work. There's a lot of fraud, and they don't drive lifetime value. So if you are a marketer, which is going to be assessed on how many downloads you drive, and that's it, you should challenge your boss. Because this is not about how many downloads you drive, this about what are the outcomes that a download is delivering, depending on what your business is all about. If it's transactions, if it's some sort of engagement, some sort of subscription, e-commerce, video games.

Naber:  Awesome. Awesome. All right. I'm going to go, I have two more topics that I want to cover, and this has been amazing so far. Thank you. First one is a jump into Marketing Partnerships and Channel Partnerships. When I'm thinking about building out strategic Marketing partnerships and strategic Channel partnerships within my business, partnering externally, what does the planning process look in order to choose the right potential partners? And what do you think is the best way to start courting and having the right discussions so that you get the accurate partnerships that you want at the end of the day? So that the results are exactly what you want, to getting the right partnerships, and then ultimately to creating a ton of mutual value together. So what's the planning process look like? The coating process? And how do you make sure that you have the right aligned initiatives so you get the right results together?

Gabriel Garcia:  So, there are a few questions there. So let me try to address one by one. First of all, unless there's the concept of value creation, there's no such thing as a partnership. So if you start identifying potential partnerships, or what you think will be apprenticeship based on the benefit that company would bring to your business, without thinking first of the benefit that you will bring to their business, you're on the wrong path. So value creation, number one. Number two, quite simplistic, but what's your objective of your Partner Marketing activity, right? Is your objective to create a marketplace that will allow you to tap into a set of customers that you cannot tap into otherwise? In our case, yes, hence I'm mentioning it. Is the objective related to a brand that will bring brand equity from a brand, from a PR perspective? That's very valid as well, thought economics and the commercial will look quite different. Is the objective to create a marketplace that you can go and monetize? And saying that in our case, we have partnerships, we call our hotels our partners, and airlines are partners. But then you have, Partner Marketing, which are companies, which is what I did for many years, and we would have a partnership with an airline in a different context. Which is the airline might want to have our hotel content for them to sell it in order to enhance their value proposition. Or a Telco that is interested in our loyalty program, in order to provide travel benefits into their customers. So, I mentioned value creation. Secondly, not only what is the potential business value, but what is the complexity on delivering to that partnership? I've seen many situations where when you go and scope out the business opportunity, it looks fantastic. And if there is an average, or not perfect, it's not only about average, it has to be perfect due diligence on what are going to be the technical requirements in order to deliver it to that partnership. Oh man, you can get into this 12 month, 18 month, 24 months project in which just the cost of delivering completely offsets any business value that that partnership was going to bring.

Naber:  Do you have any suggestions on how much due diligence to do before you actually have the conversation with a potential partner? Or how deep to get into it with the potential partner before you go have internal discussions with your technical teams? Where's that balance?

Gabriel Garcia:  Yeah. I would say starting with basic research about the company, it's important, but there's no need in my experience, unless you're thinking of an M&A opportunity, to go, incredibly, incredibly deep. You're going to learn a lot more by talking to people than what can you find publicly available. So obviously get enough information to have a meaningful discussion, and know if it's worth your time and their time. But certainly my experience engaging with a potential partner, the sooner the better. So that's one. Two, I normally or used to, coach my team on making sure that once they have that first discovery meeting, it's quickly followed by a meeting where, if you think of a pyramid you're bringing people from at least two different levels of that hierarchical structure. But more importantly that you get enough horizontal view, and you bring someone from Technology, someone from Finance, from very early days. If there's something to be flagged, or concern to be addressed, it's better that that happens early in the discussions, and these things tend to come up quite late, and they just add tremendous complexity when deal is already in progress. And thirdly, in terms of the people that you bring, just try to match them, right? There's no value of the potential partner bringing one of their engineering managers if your Biz Dev guy is not going to be able to fulfill their inquisitive nature on the tech side of the deal, right? So just match whoever is coming. Or even use as the leverage, the fact that you will bring someone, in order to get the other party to bring theirs. And then you start building relationships naturally, and organically, and accidentally, if you like. It's not accidentally, it's on purpose. But you start building relationships across organization, different levels of seniority. And suddenly that engineer will be having coffee, or more likely a beer or a spirit if they're engineers, with your engineer. And that goes a long way when it comes to getting a deal done.

Naber:  Absolutely. I love the tactical guidance you just gave. I think that's gold around both encouraging, enticing and incentivizing, the other group to come to the table with the right cross departmental expertise. And making sure that you plan ahead for that in the first place. That is excellent tactical guidance.Love it. Okay. Hey, last one, Gabriel. So Marketing Budget and Planning process. You've gone through, you don't have enough fingers to count. I know, that's not a hint at you being old, but you're old. But the number of budgeting and planning processes cycles that you've been through is high volume, and you've got ton of experience. Do you have a process that you go through every single year in order to make sure you get that right?

Gabriel Garcia:  Yes. Although the process has changed at Expedia, which makes everyone's life easier. If you're gonna utilize Technology and algorithms to predict a certain behaviors, why wouldn't you use it to predict what business cycles and financials would look like, right? So we do that these days, which very cool has changed dramatically the amount of effort and hours that we will put into. Having said that, once you have that initial view, it doesn't matter if it came from Finance, if it came from an algo, if you have the time, and your teams have the time, a bottoms up approach is always very helpful. Not in a level of granularity that would just kill your day, and weeks and months. But just to see ballpark, if the trend and the business trend, which the business thinks they'll be heading, actually make sense. And also, and the reason why I've done this over over the years, it gets your teams involved in the process, makes them accountable for delivering the number, and if they have any concerns, they will raise those concerns many, many times with incredibly valid business justifications. As opposed to that becoming a potential friction once the budgets are rolled out. So those are couple of things there. And I would say more often than not, when you get into the weeds of those P&L's, and try to make marginal changes, and put things up and down a notch, and convince other teams to be more aggressive or negotiate with your CFO why you shouldn't be that aggressive, or ask for more money...There's always, in my experience, a moment of oh, which is did a 360 here. So, over the years, whenever I'm realizing that I'm about to go into that moment, I go like, stop, just stop and drop it. It's easy to say because at Expedia, we go through those cycles every quarter. Every quarter we run our forecast, we adjust. Not our plan, our plan is our plan for the year. But we adjust our forecast, we change our Marketing mix. we manage it at a super granular level every quarter to bring into consideration market dynamics, the shape of the industry, competitors, geographical challenges, headwinds, tail winds, etc. So yeah, those would be the things I would leave the audience with. Bottoms-up if you can to get people to be a part of the journey. Don't get deep into the weeds, if you've done it before and you know that the change or adjustment is going to be marginal, it doesn't make a difference. It all normalizes in 12 months, more often than not.

Naber:  Yeah. Good one. Good advice. All right. Amazing. Thank you so much, Gabriel. I've got two rapid fire questions for you.

Gabriel Garcia:  Bring them on.

Naber:  Okay. First one, best travel booking advice that you have? You work at Expedia, you've have to have said this 400 times. We've got a lot of travelers in the audience, so that'd be good.

Gabriel Garcia:  Well, book in advance. Seriously. We do an air survey every year, and that's really we'll documented with a bunch of data points that we bring to look at different patterns, and what are the price differences in different times of the year in order to get the better price points, and be able to serve those to our customers, and give advice for customers. So rule of thumb, the earlier you book, the better, for sure. If you're going to travel economy, business is slightly different, but if you're travelling economy, more often than not you will find the better deals at least three months in advance to your trip. And I'm talking flights obviously. And better prices at least the last year, because it does vary year by year, not tremendously, but it does vary. Saturday or Sunday tends to be the best day of the week to book. That's what our data shows, right? Just looking at pricing trends. When it comes to hotels, and maybe this just sounds an Expedia pitch here, but hotels provide us with different types of hotel rates, right? And there's some that are called package rates. So the moment that you book a flight, that package rate is unlocked. So if you're going to book a flight and hotel, if you book the flight on Expedia, you're unlocking a hotel rate which is very unlikely you'll be able to find somewhere else. And that combo might actually result in significant savings. And that is big part of our value proposition to our customers. So those would be my top tips.

Naber:  Gabriel, am I correct in that the unlocking of savings you get from the hotel bookings is actually valid for, not just right when you book the flight, but as also residual until a certain time after that ?

Gabriel Garcia:  It is residual the day of your trip. So if you book a flight today, and your flight departs in three months, that preferred rate is valid until the day of departure.

Naber:  Awesome. So cool. Okay, that's great. Thank you for that. And last one. I tell the audience this every single time, but I ask this question with people's birthdays. Actually, I've asked this question to you on your birthday. I think we were having a couple of drinks. What is the most important lesson you've learned professionally in the last 12 months? Usually I ask personal, but we'll go with professional right now.

Naber:  In the last 12 months. Hmm, I have to say, and t's not new. I didn't learn this the last of months, but the last 12 months has been a good platform to put it in practice. And not only that, to share it with others...Is that things like empathy, and well being, and overall happiness are trainable skills. And the mind is trainable. So the reason why I say that in the context of the last 12 months is because this is something that I've been coaching and delivering a couple of courses, well some of the teams here, but also some of the people within my team in the US when I was recently in San Francisco, and some of the engineering teams there...on mindfulness, meditation, and the benefits of it. And the more that I bring into the workplace, and again following that scientific method, the more empirical evidence I have that that is factual. That it's true.

Naber:  Very cool. Love it. I have to actually sneak in a bonus one here because you are very passionate about meditation. If someone's just getting started with meditation, can you give a couple of tips in order for them to get through some of the tougher times in the very beginning? When they don't think they're very good at it, inherently.

Gabriel Garcia:  The fact that you are realizing that you're not very good at it, it means that you're on the right path. Because when you're trying to meditate and you realize that you're distracted, that's meditation. Meditation...normally the three very, very basic steps is that - you are trying to tame your mind...So the three steps are that you focus on something - and that could be your breath and then you will get distracted, you acknowledge that distraction, and you come back to that object or focus of your meditation. So if you're realizing that you're distracted, simply come back. Every single time you're doing that, that's in its basic form what meditation is all about.

Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciated and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love The Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five-star review on iTunes. Until next time - go get it.