American Eagle on the power of brand and digital experiences

Eric: Hi. I'm Eric Stine, the CEO of Sitecore, and I am thrilled to be here today with Mike Svanascini, the President of Americaneagle.com, and Jon Price, the Vice President of the Sitecore practice. Americaneagle.com has been around since 1995, is that correct? 

Mike: Since 1978. Originally Apple II software and then got into the web in 1995.

Eric: You guys have done more than 15,000 digital transformations. Tell me a little bit how you got started. You founded with your brother, right? 

Mike: In 1995, my brother ran American Eagle as a consultant company that basically did office networking, that sort of stuff. One of his customers back then was the Big 10 conference. They're like, “Hey, you're our computer guys. We need one of these worldwide web things.” At that time I was a lawyer in downtown Chicago, here at One North LaSalle. It was the first internet line in the building, and we actually hosted websites out of my law office.

Mike: So we started 30 years ago. We were all young, the web was just starting, it was so much fun and [very] exciting. [We’ve grown] it organically since then.

Eric: Americaneagle.com started with a custom CMS. Talk to me a little bit about why Sitecore, how you got into the Sitecore business, and then Jon, maybe you can talk a little bit about the practice today.

Mike: We had our own proprietary CMS ecommerce platform. We were very successful with it. We did tons of college sports teams, we did nine NFL teams and businesses all throughout the Chicago land area. And then we started the DC office, and we really didn't like other CMSs.

Mike: There weren't many CMSs around in 1999 when we built our first one. Around 2008 we started losing deals to Sitecore all the time. People didn't want proprietary anymore and it actually made our business a hundred times better. Sitecore was our first CMS partner. We met you guys at a trade show, went into an account, pitched together. That's how we started doing other platforms. 

Eric: So talk to me a little bit about how the Sitecore business has grown and evolved today. Jon, you lead the practice here at the firm. Talk a little bit about that. 

Jon: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I entered the picture in 2013. I was our first official Sitecore project manager; I learned very quickly. About five, six years ago, I took over the practice and it's one of the largest practices at AmericanEagle.com from a business standpoint. It’s definitely helping contribute to our growth and customer success.

Eric: Let's talk a little bit about brand and digital experiences, digital transformation. Talk to me a little bit about how you think about the power of brand and digital experiences today. 

Mike: Brand is everything. So we started doing radio advertising in 1998 in the Chicago area. Then we expanded to DC, then we tried other cities as well. Now we're national. Building that brand presence helped our business tremendously. Even our office building - we get tons of leads because people drive by our building every day. I think a lot of people don't understand the power of brand well enough and luckily my father's always been in marketing. He really set us up with that from the beginning when we started this company.

Eric: Jon, we've worked together on some of the most iconic brands in the world. United Airlines comes to mind as a brand with equity and narrative. When you first start working with a client, how do you set expectations on how their brand is going to translate into a digital experience, and what considerations do you ask them to think about as you launch a project?

Jon: First and foremost, when we start working with a customer, we focus on return on investment, total cost of ownership, and how we accentuate their brand across the web and across digital channels. I think one very powerful thing about Americaneagle.com is we dive in to learn a company's business. We’re not working as two separate companies – we're in it for the long run. So this is why we have so many customers for well over 10 years. We really think of ourselves as a strategic company. We're not order takers, we like to be strategic thinkers–forward thinkers who think outside the box, which I think is why companies like United Airlines have worked with us for over five years [And] why some of the larger brands around the globe prefer to work with us over others.

Eric: As we think about the future, Sitecore's mission is to simplify how marketers reach, engage, and serve their audience. You have done a lot over the years to facilitate that simplification, to make technology something that the marketer and the developer can really grasp. How do you think about the concept of simplification and how you make it easy for your clients to get their heads and their arms around a changing technology landscape? 

Mike: I think the first step is always the initial build of their platform. And when you build a platform for search engine optimization, it has to be built correctly for accessibility, for privacy, for security. If you start with that architecture and those bones from the beginning, [then] when new things come along, like AI, it makes it a lot easier to apply AI to [something] that has been built well already.

Mike: With AI today, what we're doing is looking at every silo of the funnel for the customers. How is AI going to help you in getting new customers? How is AI going to help you get [them] through the funnel? How is AI going to help you with programming the funnel? It's amazing what it's doing, especially with search engine visibility. 

Jon: To add to that, I think everything we do at Americaneagle.com is based off of future state flexibility and scalability, which is more important now than ever. 

Eric: We have a very diverse partner ecosystem that also helps us make sure that our customers are choosing best of breed when it comes to technology as well. Talk to me a little bit about how you think about simplification, Jon. 

Jon: The number one thing we strive for is making sure our customers are able to self-service. Simplification is making sure our customers can self-serve and their customers can also self-serve. We get unique challenges every day. You mentioned United Airlines. We've helped them solve a lot of very complex challenges. If we start with simplicity, we can always work our way to more complexity. When we talk about flexibility and scalability, simplification is obviously where we start.

Eric: One of the things we like to think about when we think about the future of our platform is we are a sophisticated solution for the sophisticated marketer serving a sophisticated client. When you've got clients who are trying to communicate a level of complexity or nuance and reach that audience, what are some of the things that you have to think about working through, or what are some of the experiences that you're finding that the clients are challenged by, that you can really help them simplify?

Jon: Start with things like governance. Organizational change is extremely tricky, can be extremely hard at times. But if we break it down into what the end goals are, what the end state we're striving towards, that's where we like to start and drive our customer towards. Not necessarily starting with a technical approach [but saying] all right, what are we trying to achieve long term? And then build out a roadmap that can help them get there. Utilizing things from the Sitecore composable ecosystem has helped our customers achieve those goals and milestones. We try and build something scalable and then let each brand make it their own and make it specific. That's where composability comes in; letting them choose technologies that works for their specific brand. 

Eric: You said the magic word for me. Governance. I'm going to give this one to Mike as we think about what's next. When I think about AI, I think about data. I think about governance. I think about all these things that are ordinarily obstacles to innovation at scale. When you have a client that's struggling to navigate between good, responsible governance, and moving faster, how do you help them balance those interests? Or is it just a false choice? 

Mike: I think as a lawyer you always have to worry. The key is to use your own assets and try not to get into trouble. That sort of governance is where I start: “what are we doing here that we're going to get sued for” is how we try to look at everything. From there, no matter how complex it is, the tools [are] going to make personalization so much better. I've seen the new features, Sitecore Stream, and that sort of stuff. It's just going to make the journey for the average day-to-day person so much better because we already know what they're thinking. The AI knows where they want to go next. It's really incredible.

Jon: One thing I'll add to that as well is, it's going to be a pretty unpredictable future with how fast these technologies are accelerating. One thing that we're doing with customers is doing things like proof of concept. If we have an idea, but we don't necessarily know what the end state is going to be, let's try it out and then vet it. But I think that the term 'fail fast' is a positive one. Let's try something out, [see] if we can take it to market and then adapt from there. Adaptability is going to be extremely important in these next handful of years.

Eric: Let's talk about the intersection between content and not just community and communication but commerce. I have this concept that the distance between content and commerce is getting a lot shorter and that the purpose of engagement is transactability. When you think about the future and the future of connecting content to commerce in an AI landscape, what gets you excited about the future of creating experiences with content regardless of what the platform landscape looks like?

Jon: I think we'll start with a few challenges that we've seen organizations struggle with over the course of the past five, ten years years that are going to get solved by AI. Number one is data. Organizations have had a really tough time kind of sifting through their own data, identifying trends. I think AI is going to help drive organizations solving challenges, identifying trends, and helping organizations scale and create content extremely fast. Organizations are going to have to get their house in order. We're entering an era where individual attention span is getting shorter and shorter, and the time to actually transact with that individual is going to be shorter as well.

Eric: Let’s double-click on that. One of the things that Sitecore has historically been strong on is personalization, particularly multivariate personalization. Let's take the concept of data governance. How do we connect the concept of having quality data and that noisy landscape to deliver and to unlock the promise of a personalized experience?

Mike: From my perspective, the creation of the content is so much faster than it was in the past. It's making it cost effective. It's amazing.

Eric: I love that because I truly believe that if we are going to shorten the distance between content and commerce, it will be personalized experiences that do that. When it resonates with the audience, when you can reach that audience, despite all the noise in the landscape, if you've delivered something that feels personalized, then that connection between content and commerce gets so much shorter. What are you the proudest of?

Mike: We've built this company by providing great customer service and having great employees. We had five employees last year that celebrated 25 years with us. I think our strength is our people and making sure that the customer's always first. Henry Ford had a quote that you don't have to worry about profits. If you're focused on customer service, your worry will be that you have too much profit. That's what we try to do. It's a tough market in the digital space because people think it's easy and it's not. But I think that's what we're proudest of, what we've built, and the people around us and customers too. 

Jon: I'm going to tie it back to an earlier question you asked about brand and brand recognition. I think one thing I'm extremely proud of in being part of the journey with Mike and Tony is, we can go to a trade show [and] they do not confuse us with maybe a different Americaneagle.com. The brand recognition, the word of mouth, the ramifications of our work is extremely humbling. It's also great to see. In years past, we were seen as a mid-market agency and now we're going up against larger agencies and winning. Customers start working with us [and think] “you have the expertise of all the larger ones, but you're very easy to work with” and that's something I'm extremely proud of. 

Eric: I want to thank you for joining me today and thank you very much for the long-term partnership and the trust. Have a great day.