Blurred Lines: Promotion and Payments

Suppose there was a way for a retailer to insert themselves into the consumer’s transaction stream, real time, and without disrupting the checkout process? Jingit CEO Joe Rogness recently sat down with PYMNTS to explain how they do this not only without “being creepy” but also by rewarding consumers for allowing retailers to step into that very lucrative part of their shopping stream.

 

Suppose there was a way for a retailer to insert themselves into the consumer’s transaction stream, real time, and without disrupting the checkout process? Jingit is a transaction network designed to take on the increased activity that results from combining advertising and payment transactions. The company’s Co-CEO and Co-Founder Joe Rogness recently sat down with PYMNTS to explain how they do this not only without “being creepy” but also by rewarding consumers for allowing retailers to step into that very lucrative part of their shopping stream.

 

So tell us, what is a Jingit and what problems do you solve? 

JR: Jingit is what we call the first integrated transaction network. What we’re out to do is merge the world of payments and marketing into a single real-time stream. By that we mean we want to help a marketer find a consumer and connect with them, and take them from first media impression, through the journey to the transaction – and follow that consumer into the transaction in real time and continue the conversation afterwards. It’s about bringing those two worlds together, allowing for marketers to be inside the transaction and for advertising dollars to be used as currency within the transaction. That’s really what is novel.

 

Sounds interesting, but there’s no shortage of loyalty apps and rewards programs in the market — what makes you unique?

JR: To date, you’re exactly right. It’s been a noisy marketplace. What makes us unique is that we’re about real-time, real money, and real world behavior. We’ve learned a lot about the market as we’ve grown up inside it, and we place the retailer at the center. What makes us unique can be broken down into three aspects.

The first is that we let the retailer work through us to connect to a consumer, and then work within their mobile ecosystem and all of their marketing endeavors. We’re not about trying to own the direct relationship with the consumer comprehensively, we’re trying to partner with the retailer and be a platform for them.

The second component is that we deal with branded currency. Jingit is a payment platform, and we deal with real money in real-time. We can create smart currency and allow for it to be quarantined to a specific retailer. As we talk about the progression of the shopping marketing world, and the fear that retailers have of being disintermediated from their customers, our ability to create branded currency was the response. That helps us make sure all money is spent in its corresponding retail channel.

The third component is what we call Jingit Match. This is our unique ability to bring advertising dollars into the transaction. Since we deal with real money in real-time, we never over-subscribe or over-redeem a budget, and we treat those dollars as currency. When you talk about retailers on scale, we also do this in such a high-speed rate so it doesn’t add any increased time in the process of checkout.

 

The omnichannel consumer seems to be shaping the future of e-commerce as well as that of brick and mortar stores. Jingit has an omnichannel marketing platform that combines advertising and payments. How prepared are you to address the needs of merchants, advertisers and consumers all at once?

JR: We certainly didn’t know the answer to this question 4 years ago when we set out on this journey, and I think this has been an evolving space. When you have 3 constituents – the consumer, the merchant, and the advertiser – finding the win-win-win without a compromise to any of the parties is the challenge. In our first couple of chapters, we tried to work around the retail and merchant ecosystems but we learned that we weren’t as neutral to them as we wanted to be.

So what we’ve done is worked really hard to get a point of neutrality for all of those audiences, and driving very distinct value propositions for each one. For the consumer it’s about privacy, value, simplicity and elegance. For the merchant it’s about customer data, bringing synergy and connectedness for marketing efforts, and helping them to in turn provide ROI to their suppliers. So when we get downstream to the supplier, it’s about helping all three of those constituents move into a balanced conversation while respecting data, understanding, and context around the whole path of purchase.

 

Based on your expertise, what are some of the most untapped potentials of omnichannel and how is Jingit prepared to fill this gap?

JR: I think one of the largest untapped potentials is the ability to measure and drive true attribution without being creepy. And, going hand in hand with that is the ability to the ability to make an elegant handoff between marketing budgets. Right now, marketers are a bit sloppy and data gets traded around and the guideline will pass from a transparency and data usage standpoint.

We see a lot of things move around inside of exchanges and networks, and we believe that we will look back on this time of data the way we now look back on seatbelts in the 70s. We can’t believe that we drove around without seatbelts on, and I think that as consumers, and even as merchants and suppliers, we’ll look back on this time in and say “Wow, I can’t believe some of the things we did.” So the ability to allow a marketer to connect the dots from consumer intent, consideration, and purchase and checkout without compromising the data, integrity and relationship, that will provide the Holy Grail for marketers. We can then blur the lines between a national brand budget to for a trade or promo budget – when all of things can live inside a single concept and have context for the consumer, I think it will be a real eye-opener for the entire industry.


joe-rogness

Joe Rogness
Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Jingit

Joe is a passionate entrepreneur and business strategist jointly responsible for the vision and leadership at Jingit. As the Co-CEO, Joe’s day to day responsibilities are focused on the Sales, Marketing and Business Development aspects of the organization. He’s battle tested in the start up arena, having driven a number of new initiatives from concept to implementation with great success.

Prior to Jingit, Joe founded Winding Road, an active non-profit organization and founded and was an active Partner of Twofish, a business consulting company. Prior to founding Twofish, Joe spent eight years in business development at LogicBay, an enterprise learning company where he ran a discipline focusing on corporations with dealership organizations. Joe’s business development consulting spanned several Fortune 100 companies including General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Nissan, John Deere, Freightliner Trucks – among others.  Joe began his career in advertising and film production.

As a husband, father of three and a successful former recording artist, Joe’s primary focus is striving for and finding balance in the ever challenging and always colliding environments of family life, business, and community.


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