Episode 6 –
Protecting the Email Inbox with Keith Petri, CEO & Founder of lockr

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Episode Summary

Email is used for many different purposes, including contacting friends, communicating with professors and supervisors, requesting information, and applying for jobs, internships, and scholarships. It is also used for marketing and is a popular tool for brand-building.

But you’ve undoubtedly noticed that every website now asks for your email, and your inbox has never been more bombarded. As a result, you receive many messages that you don’t want.

Fortunately, there is a platform called lockr, and through their product lockrMail, you can take back control of your inbox. lockrMail is a public-facing email address that will help you organize and secure your inbox while helping you protect your identity.

In this episode of The Marketing Rapport, our host Cory Davis welcomes Keith Petri, the CEO & founder of lockr. Keith explains what lockr is and how it can help consumers protect their email. Keith and Cory discuss two lockr products — lockrMail and Identity lockr — and three lockr stakeholders: consumers, publishers, and partners.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Key Insights

• Challenges with the concept of self-sovereign data control and ownership. Thanks to his experience with an EU-based company, Keith has seen the early adoption of privacy legislation in the region and points out that this has created a cat-and-mouse approach domestically and abroad. As Keith says, the concept of self-sovereign data control and ownership created the perfect ruse for Apple and others to build even higher walls around their garden. He cites two challenges in using email and data control. “A – Since the introduction of various ‘privacy-enhancing features,’ all identifiers that provide the backbone of the internet are deprecated now. So publishers, brands, retailers — they’re all increasingly requiring emails. And as a result, the adoption of machine-generated emails — that’s our term for Apple’s Hide My Email, Cloaked, Firefox Relay, et cetera — they’re all growing quickly, and this shift has resulted in publishers losing upwards of 70% of their revenue due to the inability to identify site visitors. B – concurrently, users are inundated with promotional emails from brands that they don’t engage with, and the current products in the market offer privacy but no controls for inbox management.”
• lockr: a consumer and business product. lockr is a universal digital identity solution for consumers and is congruent with the internet economy. According to Keith, lockr is a consumer product first and foremost, but it is also a business product. “In conjunction, they solve for the shift in advertising and the consumer demands of privacy and control. On the consumer side, our current product, lockrMail, is a persistent public-facing email address that forwards to the user’s primary inbox, so the user can accept, block, filter messages — all based on who that sender is and who that business is. On the business side, we have a product called Identity lockr, a consumer-consented identity solution that offers free email verification for publishers. So what we do is we help the publisher weed out machine-generated emails so that they can maintain a complete profile of the consumer without being disrespectful of that consumer’s inbox.”
• lockr’s stakeholders: consumers, publishers, and partners. As the first consumer-focused platform for identity, consent, and data, lockr has many stakeholders. As Keith explains, the conversations between these stakeholders are very different, but there are three main stakeholders — consumers, publishers, and partners — who lockr talks to daily. “There’s a need to simplify this messaging and also have a very slow and methodical plan of building upon the offering that we have over time. And that’s especially true for the end user. This is not the first time that’s been said, but we need to educate the market.”

Episode Highlights

Identity lockr

“It’s a free suite of APIs that perfectly complement any publisher’s authentication efforts in the market today. So whether they’re focusing on subscriber marketing or programmatic revenue, et cetera, or whether they’re working with UID2, LiveRamp, Verisk, or any data clean room, we complement those efforts. So, we block machine-generated emails at the point of collection, and that’s when the publisher still has the ability to re-engage and collect a usable email address for that visitor. And in addition to that, we respect the right to consent and control personal data and communication preferences for our users.”

Consumers as lockr’s Stakeholders

“If you told the average internet user today that they could control their own identity, consent, and data, it probably wouldn’t resonate, and it certainly wouldn’t be an immediately understood tangible product without any further explanation; it’s a lengthy discussion. So that’s why lockr mail is positioned publicly in the market today as a straightforward email productivity tool. This purely provides an immediate utility, can be integrated in the daily life of the consumer, and proves valuable out of the gate.

It also happens to act as a very strong foundation for more important features in the future, like consent and data provisioning. This is completely controlled by the user. We don’t expose those current options on the front end today. And we don’t confuse or conflate those options to our users at all.”

Publishers as lockr’s Stakeholders

“These conversations are really straightforward based on the current market trends. Right now, the vast majority of publishers are focused on first-party data, and I focus on asking them if they’ve verified the utility of the email address they’re collecting across all the registration points today. So, if they’re collecting [email protected], that’s machine-generated email, and it’s not ‘in demand’ by any buyers. And it’s also not a valuable identifier in their data set. When they pass that email address, whether raw, hash, et cetera, to yourself or UID2 or ATS, it’s going to create a new record, but it will not match with any buyer’s audience. So there’s no premium paid to deliver an impression to this more or less anonymous visitor. Yes, there’s UID2 attached to it. Yes, there’s a RampID attached to it, but it doesn’t exist anywhere else; it hasn’t been seen anywhere else. So identifying that machine-generated email at the point of registration is akin to that publisher not allowing a visitor on their site with an active ad blocker in their browser.”

Partners as lockr’s Stakeholders

“There are a lot of partners; we’re receiving registrations from machine-generated emails. Match rates would suffer. The input lists from the buyer and the seller might appear large, but ABC@Mailinator does not match 123@LunarMail — two primary examples in the market today. And that transaction would fail even if both of those email addresses belonged to me. So we’re partnering, informally, with companies like these identity platforms to help educate the market on this new hurdle that we all face as an industry.”

Top Quotes

[05:01] “It’s over a decade of me focusing on the ever-changing environment of tracking consumers for profiling and targeting, frequency capping, and attributing all marketing efforts.”

[12:10] “We have tens of thousands of users, and we’re scaling, and our consumer product is currently, and will always be, our main priority.”

[14:41] “lockr does not own any of our consumer data today, nor in the future; we are just the mechanism to empower each individual consumer to make his or her own decisions.”

[18:54] “The consumer is always top of mind. As I like saying internally, they are our first priority, our second priority, and our third priority.”

[20:08] “We are the only solution in the market that is not at odds with publishers, brands, and retailers, and that’s why we’re going to market through partnering.”