Matt interviews Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and CMO of the FIDO Alliance. The FIDO Alliance is a non-profit association focused on eliminating the world’s dependence on passwords by driving the adoption of open standards for simpler, stronger user authentication. Today Matt and Andrew discuss the future of authentication as we shift to passkeys. Learn why they’re an improvement from the past, and why authentication is a business imperative.

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“Authentication is not just a security imperative. In fact, it's more and more a business imperative, right? So when we talk about bottom line and top line, it really hits both areas because authentication should be a competitive advantage.”

“The fact of the matter is, passwords remain a threat to the integrity of the network economy itself. We need to move beyond those and that's what FIDO is doing in conjunction with all of our partners in the broader ecosystem.”

“When we look at FIDO authentication and we look at our very audacious goal of replacing passwords with passkeys, we need to consider those advantages that they have and make sure that we're delivering the same thing with FIDO and with passkeys.”

“Pass keys now are, I would say, the most elegant, seamless solution. The best way to actually get people in a truly passwordless form of authentication that's not dependent on any sort of knowledge based credentialing or any fishable methodology. So more and more, we're seeing a very rapid adoption of passkeys, because they're so integrated into the devices and operating systems that we use on a daily basis.”

“I think two key metrics are: time to sign in and sign in success rate. Especially when compared to legacy 2FA. So, passwords plus something like SMS OTP and SMS OTP has its own flaws, but it's certainly better than a password alone. But when compared to that, we've seen companies find upwards of a 25 percent improvement of sign in success rate and over 75 percent time in reduction to sign in. Those are massive changes. Google reported four times improvement in sign in success rate versus passwords at half the sign in time.”

“Authentication is not just a security imperative. In fact, it's more and more a business imperative, right? So when we talk about bottom line and top line, it really hits both areas because authentication should be a competitive advantage. Authentication is a massive competitive disadvantage. “

“I think consumers will associate a good authentication experience with a brand that's modern, that's cutting edge, that cares about them. These are all attributes that I think I would want to have someone think about me, not old fashioned, stodgy, stuck in the past, difficult to work with.”

Time stamps:

00:52 - What’s your identity?

03:50 - Why passwords suck

05:36 - The evolution of passwordless technology

07:14 - All about passkeys

17:47 - Marketing outcomes of passkeys

20:32 - Passkeys are a competitive advantage

28:52 - Future-thinking

35:09 - Quick hits

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Matt interviews Sophie Crosby, Co-Founder of Paso Consulting, Former CMO at Ticketmaster, SVP of product at Salesforce, and VP of eCommerce at LiveNation. Paso Consulting, her current venture, builds and guides teams with marketing, insight and data expertise to improve customer experience and drive growth.

Sophie describes the possibilities of emerging technology, the power of progressive profiling, and how to establish trust as part of a modern marketing tactic.

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“A lot of people don't like change, and software and bringing in new technology is often about change. And it's often about changing people's roles quite radically, sometimes in an extraordinary way.”

“Marketing, for example, has changed arguably more in the last three years than it has in the previous 30. I'm frankly overwhelmed by the balkanization of communities and channels and platforms, you know, um, uh, what many marketers as well have relied on over the last decade, which is really third party cookies. And, you know, having to be able to stitch together data or at least understand audiences in a way that really makes large scale advertising spend much more efficiently. That's all going to go away. It's pretty terrifying right now. Customer acquisition costs are going through the roof. Everybody's being told AI is going to steal their job. So, why am I passionate about this? Because I know it's going to affect everything.”

“You enable this progressive profiling. I think that's a really important part of the marketers arsenal moving forward to start to really get deeper because as you start to look at the data processing capabilities that are now much more available to marketers, not all companies, not all IT departments are making that available to marketers, but whether it's Databricks or Snowflake or Salesforce Data Cloud, the ability to actually store quite deep, resonant, important information, you know, whether it's a star scheme or how you do it about each customer, and then to be able to really serve them, that's going to be super important, super important moving forward.”

“I think marketers are struggling with an enormous amount of information. Um, and often in frustration over the last 10, 15 years, they've gone off and they've got their own technology… It’s that data and all the other data from all the other platforms. That's what the marketer is desperate for. And yet they're really dependent on data engineers and data quality and data architects and teams that they don't have who are quite rightly busy doing lots of other incredibly important things for the business. And so there's a real frustration there.”

“For quite a few years, I was going, everybody wants personalization. Everyone wants personalization. It's like, well, I do, but only when I want it. So there's an interesting thing here… being able to manage that balance, I think of privacy and personal is really important, but that friction thing. And it's trust, isn't it? And so allowing marketers to build trust with progressive profiling and showing that there is a relevancy and a timeliness.”

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00:40 - What’s Your Identity?

09:16 - Building a really great product

13:25 - Taking advantage of new technology

23:39 - Avoiding data overload

35:59 - Personalization in the age of identity sprawl

44:29 - Quick hits

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Matt interviews Randy Mercer, Chief Product Officer at 1WorldSync. 1WorldSync is the leader in product content orchestration: they simplify the creation and distribution of impactful content that’s accurate, consistent and relevant everywhere commerce happens. Randy talks about using AI to power seamless, quick, and safe online interactions while maintaining transparency with your customers.

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“When you look at the aspects of keeping content current, that's really innate to what we've done as a business for many years in taking content from a brand and moving it to a retailer or distributor that needs it to run their business. And what we learned is that a lot of brands are challenged with that. They don't have some of the content or they're just not very good at managing it in such a way that it is kept fresh, accurate, complete as related to what the retailers and distributors are looking for. So, long ago, we started adding solutions to our portfolio that were very much aimed at helping the brands fill those deficiencies in terms of content creation and content management and then ultimately distribution.”

“One of the things that we continue to evolve and refine is our understanding of the demographics that, number one, that content is going to serve. But then, number two, the personas and the demographics of the folks that interact with that content in a couple of different contexts. And one of them is really that consumer interaction. When we look at the solutions that we have that produce that content that really are going to be consumer facing and empower a digital experience, we have a number of sets of analytics that relate to different areas of that content that are all intended to understand, what is the interaction rate of the consumer?”

“That's where we're finding more applications for AI: just in that reconciliation and that cross checking and the QA exercises that go along with it. So for us you don't necessarily see it and it's not that exciting to talk about but that's where we're going to get more value out of it. And give more value to our customers.”

“It's a direct interaction with the consumer, but you don't need to know very much about that guy, right? How do you make it as easy as possible for that guy to write a review, yet still understand enough about who that person is that you can do some sentiment analysis later that's going to be helpful from a demographic perspective? Those are just two varying ends of the scale in terms of how we have to think about how much or how deep we're learning about that consumer and the implications of that. And where we can just not have to go that deep and, uh, and make it a little bit easier. And as you mentioned, just frictionless for the, for the consumer.”

“As we've started to add some of these more consumer facing, uh, elements to our portfolio, it's really forced us to step back and just go all the way to the beginning and think about how can we do all of that in a different way, knowing that eventually the consumer is impacted, right? So it's just forced us to be much more consumer centric about how we think about the whole process, you know, and what, and that process we call product content orchestration, right?”

“Today I spend just a ton of my time with some of those enterprise level customers on both sides of the fence, both manufacturer and retail. And that's what I'm there to learn is, what should I be doing to service them a little bit better and just make their lives easier, which is ultimately what I'm here for.”

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00:52 - About 1WorldSync

03:27 - How to build a great digital strategy

06:19 - Building up customer profiles

07:56 - Finding applications for AI

19:46 - Maintaining a user-centric approach

21:43 - Driving innovation

23:46 - Recent tech trends

33:58 - How to drive conversions

35:27 - Quick hits

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