In Conversation With Quimby Melton, CEO of Confection

Cloudways: Hello Quimby! It’s a pleasure to have you with us. Could you start by telling our readers a little about yourself?

Quimby: First, thanks so much for the opportunity to discuss these important topics with your audience.

I’m from a small town south of Atlanta called Griffin. After graduating from the University of Georgia in December of 2000, I moved to Las Vegas for graduate school. This may seem like a strange place to study literature, but UNLV’s English Department was an especially exciting place to be in the early 00s.

At that time, the CFO of the Mandalay Bay Corporation — which is now part of MGM Mirage — was a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which I suppose is America’s “name brand” creative writing program. Along with several faculty members and university admins, this gentleman — who was a sort of philosopher king who’d break his back for the arts — set up endowed chairs, new institutions, and other incentives that brought an extraordinary amount of literary talent from around the world to UNLV.

This social network basically used money to create a literary gravity well in the middle of the Mojave desert. And it worked brilliantly, as counterintuitive as that might seem.

As a result of this, I was fortunate to learn from so many great people, both in the classroom and during events and just wandering around on campus, honestly.

I also had the good fortune to be raised around a good bit of technology. My parents were the first small-town newspaper owners to move to desktop publishing, and we always had computers around the house.

As I made my way through graduate school, I began formalizing some of my technology interests. Outside my standard coursework and thesis writing, I completed a few certificate programs focused on design and web/application development. At the time, I thought these skills would help me find an academic job.

“Someone who can teach Modernism and manage our departmental website!” — I thought the offers would fly off the job market.

In fact, they did not.

When I graduated in May 2008, the job market was pretty uncertain so I turned from the academic track and leaned into the technology one. Since then, I’ve essentially worked as a serial entrepreneur.

Working with some really amazing teams, I’ve had the opportunity to build a diverse range of businesses and products. These included a marketing consulting agency, a logistics application for the offshore energy market, two business marketing apps, a modular housing company, and a handful of content sites and short films.

That led me to where I am now: the co-founder and CEO of Confection, which is the best job I’ve ever had. My co-founder, investing partners, and I are working hard to build a new standard by which data is collected, stored, and distributed online.

Cloudways: How and when did you come up with the idea to start Confection? What were the main motivations behind it? 

Quimby: For almost fifteen years, I ran a marketing consulting firm called Studio Hyperset. For much of this time, Confection’s co-founder was one of our key technology vendors. We mostly worked with marketing operations teams at software companies. This experience gave us a front-row perspective into the ways enterprises collect, store, and distribute data online.

In late 2019, one of our customers asked us, “Why aren’t our Marketo forms appearing in Brave?” Brave is a privacy-focused browser, and we discovered it refused to load this customer’s embedded Marketo forms because they included several Adobe ad and analytics scripts.

In early 2020, Google made their well-known announcement about the “death” of third-party cookies so we started digging deeper into the topic of “privacy first.” As we did so, we discovered just how profoundly disruptive privacy first was going to be.

The issue was much bigger than forms and browser-level data (ie., “cookies”). In privacy-first environments, cornerstone marketing tools are unable to write data to customer accounts and communicate with one another. Event tracking fails. Forms break. Ads disappear. Data stops flowing. The front end has become fragile, dysfunctional, and unreliable.

At best, traditional marketing tools like Marketo are 75-85% effective. At worst — and we have evidence for this, as difficult as it may be to believe — they’re < 12% effective. That’s a great deal of financial waste and performance loss, and it compounds every minute of every day.

Because content is their product, and because they rely on ads and engagement data to generate revenue, publishers like Digital Trends are especially impacted by this shift. (Learn more @ confection.io/impact/cloudways)

In March of 2020, we began working on what would become Confection. We originally thought of it as a cookie replacement technology, as a sort of painkiller for marketing operations teams at software companies. As we developed the product, though, it began to take on the “vitamin” qualities it has today. We gradually realized anyone with a website could benefit from it.

After living with Confection for almost eighteen months, our more fully-formed take on Confection follows:

We think Confection’s leading a sort of exodus, one that moves from the exhausted front end to the fertile lands of privacy first and the server side. Over the past thirty years, we’ve essentially transformed client-side data into a tragedy of the commons. Everyone’s inexpensive, easy-to-access property is no one’s property. And the self-interested, uncoordinated actions of marketers and technology companies have depleted the value of this resource.

Now, we have to move on.

We want to give the web its own centralized, proprietary standard for collecting, storing, and transmitting data. And we want to give everyday web users more control over the data they share. We hope this helps rejuvenate, enhance, and preserve the value of this important social resource.

Cloudways: What privacy measures does Confection have in place when it comes to concerns regarding sharing of data to a third and in some cases, even a fourth party?

Quimby: This is a really important point.

I think rebuilding trust with everyday web users is the biggest challenge in technology today.

Confection is a new kind of product on the far left of the adoption curve so I think of this feedback as the human “immune system” trying to figure out who we are, what we do, and what we stand for. But it’s also evidence of how badly damaged cloud-enabled, data-focused companies have allowed their relationship with everyday web users to become. Even dipping a toe in the pond unleashes a tidal wave of ferocious blowback.

At a high level, though, philosophically, our goal is to help businesses thrive in privacy first and to give people better control over what they share online. We really see ourselves as a servant with two masters: business and everyday web users. People want more privacy and better control over the data they share online, and businesses need data to create value, serve customers better, and build better products.

Both are right, and it’s our job to make sure each camp gets what it wants.

Our team believes in privacy first, and we want to help companies thrive in the new reality and give people greater control over what they share online.

Specifically, “success” for us is:

• improving the ways businesses and consumers dialogue with one another
• boosting trust between people and the businesses they rely on
• improving the ROI of enterprise marketing efforts
• giving people better control over their personal data

Cloudways: How effective would Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) be, compared to what cookies have achieved when it comes to privacy?

Quimby: To answer your question, there is indeed a lot of confusing information out there about privacy first and the shift away from third-party data. We’re sort of living in the remnants of a supernova, really, and it takes time for all that debris to coalesce back into some sort of meaningful form.

I don’t think the information is always intentionally misleading. “Confused” is the label I’d use. But there’s definitely a GIGO — a garbage in/garbage out — quality to the decisions professionals are making based on what they read and the advice they receive.

I find that even very experienced marketers — these are professionals I respect and consider mentors and friends — they often don’t have what I’d describe as a holistic, actionable understanding of this issue. Ditto agencies and SaaS companies.

One of the root causes of this confusion is linguistics. Specifically, I find people tend to use “cookie” as a synecdoche — as a sort of catch-all — for all the web’s many data gathering mechanisms.

Meaning, marketers, advertisers, developers, and software companies use it to mean much, much more than just browser-level data storage. And I’m not entirely sure they’re always aware of this. To be “cookie free,” for example, or to be “post cookie” does not necessarily mean you’re immune from privacy-first disruptions.

Cookies are a part of the issue, but the larger truth is that in privacy-first environments, cornerstone marketing tools are unable to write data to customer accounts or communicate with one another.

This means event tracking fails, forms break, ads disappear, and data stops flowing. I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that privacy first is to marketers what a TCP/IP disruption would be to network IT pros. It’s a serious hiccough on the fundamental systems level.

And this is what we need to fix. We need to rethink and rebuild on a system level, not a cookie level or a product level or even a compliance level. We need a new standard protocol by which personal data is collected, stored, and distributed online.

While reception by agencies and publishers has been mixed, I think it’s fair to say Google’s Privacy Sandbox and FLoC are attempts at this. ODoH — which stands for Oblivious DNS Over HTTPS — from Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly is another kind of framework. And Tim Berners-Lee is working on Inrupt, which is a sort of anonymized data vault. Our product, Confection, is another, of course.

So there’s a lot of interesting, ambitious activity in this space. It’s an interesting zip code to work in. Over the coming years, I wonder if we might see something akin to the winner-take-all “format wars” of the 80s and 90s when Betamax and VHS and Blu-ray and HD DVD tried to assert themselves as the dominant format.

Like these earlier technologies, market adoption really is the key. And the key to that is building trust and aligning interests. Specifically, we need to find ways to rebuild trust with everyday web users and align the interests of agencies, developers, marketers, and the “product people,” that is, those of us building the proposed solutions.

It’s no small challenge. But this is what makes it interesting and worthwhile and fun.

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Cloudways: What is one internet and data-sharing privacy related myth that would like to address and break, for the common people?

Quimby: It’s important to understand that the shift to privacy first is about more than tags and cookies and pixels and cross-domain scripts. It’s about more than just who accesses data or who processes and controls it. It’s about more than device IDs and IP addresses and anonymous email addresses (which is another Apple offering).

Privacy first is really about the end of the way marketers and developers have gathered and used online data for three decades. And this is frightening and disruptive, but it’s also a substantial opportunity to rethink the way data moves around and to build a better, more compliant web.

In my mind, the new architecture should accept that the browser side and the device level have become enormously unstable and unreliable and getting more so all the time.

You know, we talk about privacy first and the death of third-party cookies as if they’re forward-looking issues. But the truth is privacy first has impacted our productivity and spending since at least 2017. That’s when Safari and Firefox stopped supporting third-party cookies. And since 20-25% use those browsers, it’s entirely possible the investments we make in AdTech and MarTech tools are — at most — 75-80% effective.

That’s four years of waste compounding every day, which is an extraordinary amount of burn. When Chrome joins them in 2023 — if we indeed make it that long — just about every web user will be affected.

Nassim Taleb has an amazing concept he calls “antifragility.” The old ways of moving data around are incredibly fragile. Between cross domain scripts and cookie syncs and ownership confusion, it’s a sort of Rube Goldberg machine, really.

In my mind, the new data standard should be antifragile in the Taleb sense. Not only is it highly resistant to client-side disruptions, it gains in value and utility as client-side data collection, storage, and distribution reaches its end of life.

So, to sum up, the end of third-party cookies actually represents a system-level disruption that’s been playing out since at least 2017. And this disruption is having a profound impact on just about everything in the MarTech and AdTech space. You, me, just about everyone reading this — as professional marketers, there’s basically no part of our day-to-day work life that this doesn’t touch.

Cloudways: Since you’ve had a long career in the field of marketing as well, what do you feel will be the next big thing, or the next big break-through in the global marketing industry? 

Quimby: I’m a systems-oriented, marketing operations person. That’s my native professional space. And I’d argue that marketing is, arguably, the most difficult challenge any enterprise faces. Building the right messages, channels, and internal “pipes” that allow a business to command attention, bring people into the funnel, and do something meaningful with them once they arrive — there are as many solutions to that problem as there are companies in the world.

I think we’re going to see more large-scale, ambitious MarTech products that help secure data, quantify results, demonstrably fuel growth, increase automation, and, ultimately, enable the next generation of entrepreneurs and small-business owners. And that’s the economy I want to help build: one driven by blue-ocean-seeking value creators and problem solvers.

Cloudways: The ecommerce industry greatly relies on its customer data when it comes to showing products and advertisements. But with customers getting more and more worried about what data is being shared and with whom is it being shared, where and how do you think both parties will find a common ground?

Quimby: Aggregate, anonymous data can be just as useful and actionable as personally-identifying data. This kind of information can help you fine-tune audience models, spot trends, and make better decisions.

It’s important that we start building — and owning — first-party data sets. It’s important that we augment the rent we pay to search- and social-media-based audience platforms with these capital investments.

However, I’d actually say most of the decisions our team makes are informed by aggregate data sets focused on spending and engagement trends. Certainly, PII becomes more and more important as you go deeper into the funnel. But marketers can do a lot of good, tactical work with aggregate, anonymous data.

However, as we rebuild trust with everyday web users, the opportunities to collect meaningful, useful PII will blossom. Seize that opportunity, and personalization becomes quite straightforward.

To accelerate our data collection opportunities, we as marketers and product developers should focus on improving the ways businesses and consumers dialogue with one another and boost trust. I’d suggest utility — that is, creating something useful that appeals to many parties, something that works for both businesses and everyday web users — is probably the most effective way to do this.

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Cloudways: How do you do what you do? What is your unique selling point? Can you run us through your business processes?

Quimby: As I mentioned earlier, privacy first impacts more than just cookies, that is, “browser-level data files.” It impacts just about every MarTech company, script, tracker, tag, and pixel you can think of. At Confection, we’ve counted over 800 companies and over 72,000 blocked cookies, scripts, trackers, tags, and pixels. And we add hundreds more each week.

Bottom line: Our marketing stacks are broken. And “post cookie” is about more than just cookies. It represents the end of the way marketers and developers have gathered (and used) online data for 25+ years.

So how can we rejuvenate our anemic marketing data? How can we strengthen our marketing apps, partnerships, and customer relationships in this new reality?

This is where Confection comes in.

We use an innovative architecture to collect, store, and distribute data, one that’s unaffected by client-side disruptions. And it integrates with the apps businesses and developers already use.

In privacy-first environments, cornerstone marketing resources like CRMs and DSPs are unable to write data to your account and/or communicate with one another.

Confection’s product architecture keeps marketing data flowing in privacy-first environments. “Data generators” — which is what we’re using as a category label — supercharge marketing stacks and help customers build first-party data sets they can use in any number of ways and send to any number of endpoints.

Users install Confection using one of our 30+ quick-start guides. Generally, this involves uploading some scripts to their server and adding a tag to their site header. This takes about 5-10 minutes.

Once installed, Confection begins collecting events and form data in real time. Confection tracks standard events (like pageviews) out of the box. Developers can create and start collecting their own custom events using a one-line JavaScript template.

Confection uses a blend of predictive algorithms and AI to link UUIDs that have similar traits, assign these records “likeness” scores of 1-99%, and consolidate them into single user records. There’s no need for any browser- or device-level identifiers. We help customers resolve identities without fingerprinting, cookies, or device IDs. Confection works around the clock to automatically fill in missing data. Insights get better all the time.

Once collected, Confection is ready to send data anywhere. Your programmatic ads, your CRM, your application — send data anywhere using Confection’s native API or various integration options.

There’s no need for customers to switch systems, apps, websites, or marketing partners. Confection has a time to value of about 20 minutes. No development headaches. No single-use limitations. Less friction. And less cost. Confection is free to start and just pennies after that.

You can see Confection’s real-time data flow in the iframe below. Watch as data flows in from a website or app and out to any endpoint.

Cloudways: What are some security concerns, if any, that your business is removing which other companies in the past might have failed to eliminate? 

Quimby: Reiterating some of the points I make in my answer to question three, we built Confection in such a way that it gives everyday web users a say in whether their PII is collected at all. As the fourth section of our demo illustrates, people can opt in and out at will, on a site by site basis. We’ve baked compliance into the product itself, which is a unique approach.

This feature gives our customers and everyday web users something better than all-or-nothing cookie banners. Users can opt in and out of data collecting as they see fit. And we help people know what kinds of information a site is collecting when it starts collecting it. This way, users can take action in the moment, stop collecting if/when it suits them, and fine tune settings on a site-by-site basis.

Our long-term goal is to give users centralized control over the data they share online. No more fragmented information. No more wondering, “Who has what?” No more bits and pieces of personal data spread across thousands of sites. We’re building an easy-to-use self-service portal that will allow users to make adjustments to their data, delete information, change permissions, and opt in and out.

Cloudways: If you had to convince an internet user who doesn’t want their information being shared over the internet, to trust Confection’s services, how would you do it? How would you gain their trust?

Quimby: Great question. In my opinion, we can’t talk too much about (re)building trust.

Let me break the skeptics we encounter into two groups: freethinkers and fanatics.

Freethinkers are admirable, rational “show me” personalities. They think deeply, ask questions, and demand proof before acceptance, belief, or adoption. I like these people very much, even if they periodically express themselves in vulgar ways.

I tell freethinkers what I tell everyone who sends me a colorful message or email handle:

• We’re on your side.
• Hold me personally responsible for the promises Confection makes.
• We care about collecting, storing, and distributing user data in a way that aligns with your personal preferences and complies with data protection laws like CCPA, GDPR, and LGPD. Our customers include businesses you interact with every day, and they feel the same way. Together, we’re working hard to build a better web for you.
• Like you, we’re very dissatisfied with the traditional ways data is collected, stored, and distributed online. They’re leaky, inexact, and very intrusive. As such, we rely on a new kind of architecture to generate data and resolve identities.
• Confection is quite a bit different from traditional tracking scripts, pixels, and the other things you (understandably) hate. It collects no PII without explicit user consent. It’s compliant with GDPR, CCP, and LGPD on the product level, and users can opt in and out at will.
• Our goal is to help businesses thrive in privacy first and to give people better control over what they share online. Our mission is building a new standard for data utility, compliance, and identity management, one that’s good for everyone.

I find these tend to address the concerns of most freethinkers. At least, it gets us to a point where they’ll give us a chance and the benefit of the doubt. However, we also encounter hardline privacy fanatics who see any sort of data tracking (PII or non-PII) as a loss in a binary, zero-sum war they’re waging with marketers, advertisers, and SaaS companies.

Their position is understandable enough. We’ve seen a lot of abuse over the years. However, like all fanatics, people who have these views tend to be binary and myopic. I don’t think they’ve really thought it through.

Fanatics forget that nothing that happens on the web is free. We need financial incentives to offset the overhead costs and financial penalties to establish property lines. If we had an anarchic, completely horizontal web, its usefulness would quickly deteriorate into a true tragedy of the commons.

Undermining solutions like Confection actually limits choice and strengthens entrenched players. By undermining new approaches and solutions that help small- and medium-sized businesses, we’re redistributing all that demand back to search and social-media based audience platforms. Hurting solutions like ours helps those players, which is antithetical to (what I assume is) the privacy fanatic’s goal.

We focus on compliant, first-party data sets that establish a direct relationship between our customers and their customers. We don’t share that information or sell it to third parties. Any PII we collect is willfully given. If this doesn’t happen, the user remains anonymous.

Confection lives at the center of a Venn diagram formed by identity resolution, analytics services, privacy services, and lead capture/management. These are sensitive areas, and we understand we’re going to create some friction. We just need to educate people that we have a white-hat goal (better data, more control for people), but we have to adapt what may seem like black-hat methods to give the world what it needs.

Cloudways: Being the founder and CEO of a company requires a lot of time and effort. How do you divide your time between work and leisure?

Quimby: As an entrepreneur and a dad/husband, being fully present at work and fully present at home is incredibly challenging. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of leisure time. But I do make time to read, write, and learn everyday. These are cornerstone Stoic actions, and they are incredibly sustaining.

Warren Buffet has an amazing line that “knowledge builds up like compound interest.” To build that knowledge base and to scale it, he suggests reading non-stop. It seems like a luxury. “Of course, Warren Buffet can do that.” But it’s easier to do than you might think. And the outcomes are far more rewarding than you might imagine.

Scott Fitzgerald was not a perfect man, but he was a beautiful writer. The older I get, the more attached I am to Gatsby. Sentimentality and attachment increase with age, as I’m finding out. We have a lot of good ones, but Gatsby is our novel, as Americans. Somewhere, inside the miserable marriage and the alcoholism, Fitzgerald found a way to get that novel onto the page. And I’m thankful for that. If he’d written nothing but the last two chapters, it would have been a worthwhile life.

If you’ve read the novel, you know the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock plays an important role. My wife (whose opinion I very much admire) and I see it differently: She thinks the green light symbolizes Gatsby’s destruction, all the things that brought him to ruin. I, though, think mistaken identity killed Gatsby and nothing more. The green light symbolizes his salvation.

I love what I do for a living. I love the volatility and the excitement and the ups and the downs and the chance to make something new and impactful. I love how the scenery changes and that I get to meet new people and try a lot of different ideas.

However, it’s my personal “green light” that gets me going in the morning and pushes me through the day. What, exactly, that means to me is as abstract as it is concrete. And it’s not important to your readers. What is important is that they find their own green lights and never look away.

Cloudways: Lastly Quimby, what piece of advice would you like to give to our young readers, who are just starting off in the technological world? 

Quimby: Since I’m essentially a marketer — and since marketing is so important to technology companies — I’ll address that specific niche.

Like finance, marketing is an endlessly fascinating blend of storytelling and math. This is why I love it.

Stories move the turbine. There’s no doubt about it. But we also need eyes on the control panels to keep everything working properly and help optimize performance. I worry that, for the most part, marketers over index on creative and neglect the data and math parts of their job.

As I mentioned, before Confection, I ran a digital agency for 13 years. This gave me a lot of exposure to the complexities and paradoxes marketing teams face. The roles are vital but often seen as disposable. Often, it’s the marketing team that gets cut first when the numbers take a turn for the worse. Members of a marketing team are seen as possessing unique skills. But, as individuals, they’re often treated as interchangeable and fungible. “Just get us another SEO person,” we might say. “We just need someone to manage the website.” There’s a weird blend of necessity and devaluation at work in these attitudes.

Back in 2019, I posted an article on Linked in called “Beyond Auteur Marketing.” In it, I tried to figure out why this is the case.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, auteur comes from film theory. It refers to the personal influence and artistic control a director has over a film. In marketing, I think branding, graphics, and content tend to dominate marketing conversations. This is true within and without the C-suite. This creative, auteur thinking locks us into the creative parts of our jobs and risks distracting us from important data models and the stark, mathematical realities we face.

I also think this helps explain why there’s so much churn on a marketing team, why there are so few CMOs on boards, and why the average lifespan of CMOs is something like 3 years. There’s a great “Deloitte Insights” article from 2018 titled “Redefining the CMO.” It outlines these stats. And any search for “average CMO lifespan” will tell you all you need to know about that particular metric.

I think the takeaway is that marketing is a tough job. And I think the subjective, opinion-driven parts of the job — the colors, the branding elements, the pictures, the design — fuel this difficulty. I mean, if you need a head to roll in the C-suite or on your team, it’s easy to make a collective decision that “the colors didn’t work for us” and then blame the marketing team. It’s much harder to do a systems analysis and see what else may have contributed to that failure so, in a lot of cases, it simply isn’t done.

Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, marketers leave themselves open to this sort of scapegoating when they primarily focus on the qualitative parts of their jobs. When they limit their contribution to colors and fonts and brands and other creative elements.

To have real, substantial conversations with finance and sales, to have a durable seat at the “adults table”, we need to be able to say to our sibling disciplines finance and sales, “I’m more than creative and raw awareness. Like you, I can answer quantitative questions.” And I’m not just talking about delivering impression counts or attractive CTRs. Here, I’m thinking about systemic, data-driven arguments that pull all funnel stages into a holistic argument about why a project or campaign did or did not work.

When it comes to digital marketing in particular, this kind of quantitative standing is really important.

So that’s the big idea I’d want to communicate to any young marketer.

From a tactical perspective, I’d also want to share one additional thing.

Echelon — our amazing investment team — and I recently held a webinar focused on metrics like the cost of customer acquisition. The thesis of this webinar is that marketing — especially for early-stage companies — is fluid dynamics and nothing more. Branding, aesthetics — these can wait. High-performing marketers control costs, generate leads for their sales team, and convert customers.

I’d encourage anyone working in marketing to spend lots of time harmonizing spending ratios between key funnel stages. Spend lots of time putting upward pressure on customer value and keeping downward pressure on CAC. Calibrate these properly, and you’ll decrease burn, increase runway, and (ultimately) grow.

In the webinar, I also try to explain that great funnels are holistically (and vertically) healthy and built across time. That is, we learn lessons, fine tune, and increase performance as we move forward in time. And we want to make sure ratios between customer value, overall marketing spending, and KPIs like click rates are in harmony.

I only mention this because I’m passionate about entrepreneurship and early-stage companies and because I care very, very much about helping marketers do their best work. I built a free spreadsheet that can take a lot of the headaches out of managing effective marketing budgets. It’s based on the work we did at GoConvert, which is the company I ran with my friend Wayne Miller before Confection started taking off.

It’s a simple tool, but if you plug data in often, I’m confident it’ll help just about anyone boost marketing performance. I think it’s especially useful for young marketers and small businesses, early-stage companies, and any other burn- and runway-sensitive enterprise.