 from our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Everyone, welcome to Palo Alto's CUBE Studios for CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We're at Kevin Akeroy, CEO of CISN. CUBE alumni's been on before, building one of the most compelling companies that's disrupting and changing the game in comms, advertising, PR, with cloud technologies. Kevin, great to see you again. Thanks for coming in. Likewise, John. It's really good to be back. So we haven't chatted in two years. You've been busy. Our last conversation was the beginning of 2017. CISN's done a lot of interesting things. You got a lot of M&A under your belt. You're putting this portfolio together with cloud technologies. Really been interesting. I really got to say, I think you cracked the code on, I think a new reality, a new economic reality and also new capabilities for comms folks. So congratulations. Thank you. It's been a fun ride. So give us the update. So two years since we talked, how many deals companies have you bought? What's the head count? What's the revenue? Give us an update. In the four years, 12 acquisitions. Seven of which have happened since I've been here. Up to 4,500 employees in over 40 countries. Customer count has grown to over 50,000 customers globally. Revenue has kind of gone from 500s to just shy of 800 million. So a lot of leadership changes. And as you just mentioned, pretty seismic change finally. We've certainly been the catalyst and the cattle prod for that seismic change around tech, data, measurement and analytics finally becoming mature and adopted inside this line of business, like the chief communication officer or media folks that to say that they were not tech savvy a few years ago would be an understatement. So a lot's been going on. Yeah, and certainly the trend is your friend at least in my opinion for you. But I think the reality is not yet upon people's general mindset and it's coming quickly. So if you look at some of the big trends out there, look at fake news, look at Facebook, look at the Google effect. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up big tech. Amazon cloud computing has, you know, in that time period that you were prior to going to SISN, you had Oracle Cloud, you've done a lot of great things on the marketing cloud side. But the timing of cloud computing, the timing of how media has changed. There's not many journalists anymore. We had Andy Cunningham, a legendary industry veteran formerly of Cunningham Communications. She did the PR for Steve Jobs. She said, there's no more journalists if you left, but you got to tell your story direct to the consumer. This is now a new marketing phenomenon. This is a tailwind for you at SISN because you guys, although put these companies together, have a unique vision around bringing brand value advertising at PR economics. What is- It's a good way to put it. Tell us the vision of SISN and specifically the shift that's happening. Why are you guys important? What wave are you riding? So there are a couple shifts, John, and you and I have talked about this in previous programs. There's this shift of the line of business having to work in a whole bunch of non-integrated point solutions. The CFO used to live in 17 different applications from 17 vendors. That's all squished together. Now I buy from one cloud platform, right? From Oracle or SAP. Same thing happened in human capital management. 22 things squished into a cloud. One from workday, right? Same thing happened. You had 25 different things for sales and service. That all squished together into one CRM in the cloud. I buy from Salesforce, right? And our last rodeo, early part of this decade, it was me and Adobe battling it out for the right to go squish the entire lumascape into a marketing cloud. So there could be one ring to rule them all for the CMO, right? So it happens in every single category. It just hasn't had over here happened in the earned media side in the chief communications officers. So bringing the tech stack so that now we are for the CCO, what Adobe is for the CMO, what Salesforce is for the CRO, what workday is for the CHRO, right? That has to happen, right? You can't do, you can't manage it this way without sophisticated tech, without automation, without integration, right? You can't do it. The second thing that had to happen is especially in marketing advertising, they all figured out how to get revenue credit, right? Advertising was a slow single digit Kager industry for 50 years. And then something happened, after 5% Kager for 50 years, and then something happened over the next 10 years, digital pay went from like $15 billion to $150 billion. And what happened is that old, I know half of my advertising's wasted on this one half, that went bye bye. Now I know immediately, down to the page, down to the ad unit, down to this, exactly what worked, right? When I was able to put pixels and ads, John, you'd go to that page, pixel would go on you, it would follow you around and if you ended up putting something in the e-commerce shop, that ad got credit. I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's how the entire- That's how the infrastructure would have let you, allowed you to enable you to do that. And again, paid advertising, paid search, paid advertising, that thing has created massive value in South Korea. But my buyer, right? So the person that did the little ad on the Wall Street Journal Tech page got credit. My buyer, my buyer that got Bob Evans, the Cloud King, to write an article about why Microsoft is going to beat AWS. He's a credible third party influencer, right? Rating objectively, that article's worth triple platinum and it has more credibility than 20,000 Microsoft sales reps, right? We've never, until Cision, well, let's pixel that. Let's go figure out how many of those are the target audience. Let's write that all the way down to the lead form of the credit environment and basically it's super simple. Nobody's ever tracked the press releases, the articles or any of the earned media content, the way people have tracked banner ads or e-commerce emails and therefore this line of business never got revenue credit and it stayed over here on the OPEX pile where things like commerce and advertising got dumped onto the revenue pile and while you saw the crazy investment shift. So that's really the more important one is comms is finally getting quantified ROI and business was attribution like their commerce and advertising peers for the first time ever in 2018 via what Cision's rolled out. That's the exciting piece. I think, I mean, what I hear you saying is that for the first time, the PR actually can be measured similar to how advertising couldn't be measured, then be measured. Now PR or communications can be measured. They get measured the same way and then one other thing, you know, that ad that press release down to the business event, right? This one had $2 million of ad spend. This one had no ad spend, right? And then when it goes to convert in CRM or goes to convert on a website, this one came from banner ad. This one came from credible third party content. Guess which one not only did have zero ad spend instead of $2 million in ad spend. Guess which one from which source actually converts better? It's the guy that chose to read credible third party article. He's going to convert in the marketing system way better than somebody that just clicked on an ad. So all the way down the funnel, we're talking about real financial impact based on capturing earned media ID, which is pretty exciting. Well, I think that the more exciting thing is that you're basically taking a value that is unfunded quote by the advertising firm has no budget basically or thin budgets. Trying to hit an organic credible outlet which is converting a progression to a buyer or an outcome. That progression is now tracked. But let's talk about that economics because you're talking about $2 million in spend. It could be $20 million. The ratio between ad spend and conversion to this new element you mentioned is different. So you're essentially talking about the big mega trend which is organic content. Meaning connecting to sources. That flow, of course, we believe in with you the queue. Everyone's been seeing that with our business. So let's talk about that dynamic because this is not a funded operationalized piece yet. So we've been seeing in the industry PR and comms becoming more powerful. So the chief communication officer isn't just rolling out press releases although they have to do that to communicate. You've got medium posts now. You've got multiple channels. A lot of places to put the story. So the chief communication officer really is the chief storyteller officer. Not necessarily the CMO becomes a mark tech stack kind of tracking. So let's talk about that dynamic. How is the chief communication officer role change or changing? Why is that important? And what should people be thinking about if they are a chief communication officer? You know, it's interesting. There's a, I'm just going to call it an actual contradiction on this front. When you and I were getting out of undergrad seven out of 10 times that CCO, the chief communication officer worked for the CEO and 30% of the time other. Yet the role was materially narrower. The role has exploded. You just said it pretty eloquently. This role has really exploded and minded its aperture. Right now though, seven out of 10 of them actually do work for the CMO. Which is a pretty interesting contradiction. And then only 30% of them work for the CEO. So, but despite the fact that from an organizational standpoint that kind of counterintuitive org move has been made, it doesn't really matter because so much of what you just said too was in marketing's preview around brand or around reputation or around telling the story or around even owning, right, the key assets. Key assets isn't that beautiful Budweiser frog commercial that played on Super Bowl anymore. The key assets are what's getting done over here in the communications, the right part. So, from a storytelling standpoint, from an ownership of the narrative, right, from a, not just a product or a service or promotion, but the whole company, the whole brand, the reputation, the goodwill. All of that is comms, right? And therefore you're seeing comms take the widest amount of real estate around the boardroom table than they ever have. Despite the fact that they don't sit in the chair as much. And I mentioned that just because I find it is very interesting because comms has never been more empowered, never had a wider aperture. But Budweiser, not really that loaded up with funding. And to my earlier point, it's because they couldn't show, right? Super strategic. So, showing ROI is critical. Showing ROI is not the qualitative clippings you can. It was the Maslow hark of needs. If you can just show me that I put a quarter in and I got a dollar out, like the ads in the e-commerce folks do, it simply drives the behavior. So, take us through some of those analytics because I think, you know, people who know about comms, the old school comms would be, people are doing this, they should really be thinking about what their operation is because can I get an article in the Wall Street Journal? Can SiliconANGLE write about us? I got to get more clippings and that tend to be the thing. Did we get the press release out on time? They're not really tied into some of the key marketing mixed pieces. They tend to be kind of a narrow scope. Those metrics were pretty clear. What are the new metrics? What's the new operational playbook? We call those vanity metrics. I cared about theoretical reach. You know, hey, Yahoo tells me I reached 222 billion people, so I plug in 220 billion people, right? I reached more people than they're on the planet with this PR campaign. Needed to get the basic stuff like how many people did I actually reach, right? Number one, but they don't. They're with theoretical reach. They work in things like sentiment. Well, I'm going to come up with a hundred reporters wrote about me. I'm going to come up with how many of them I thought were positive, negative, right, neutral. Sentiment analysis. They measure a number of reporters or kids versus their competitors and say, hey, we rolled out, Procter & Gamble rolled out this diaper product. Well, how did I do this five days? How much did Procter & Gamble diapers get written about versus craft diapers versus unilevers and share a voice? And, you know, not irrelevant metrics, but not metrics that the CEO and the CFO are going to invest in, right? Conversion to brand or sales, those kinds of things. Those that never existed. Those never existed. Now, when we can introduce the same exact metrics that the commerce and the ad folks do and say, I can tell you exactly how many people, right? I can tell you exactly who they were. Demographic, pharmacographic, right? Lifestyle, you name it. I can tell you exactly who the audience is you're rich in. I can tell you exactly what they do, right? When those kind of people read those kind of articles or those kind of people read those kind of press releases, they go to these destinations, they take these behaviors, right? And because I can track that all the way down to whatever that success metric is, which could be a lead form of on B2B for pipe, could be an e-commerce store if I'm a B2C. Could be a rating and review or a user generation content goer. It could be a sign up and a register if I'm trying to get database names, whatever the business metric is. That's what the commerce and the ad people do all day, every day. And that's why they are more funded than ever. The fact that press releases, articles, right? Tweets, blogs, the fact that the earned media stuff has never been able to do those things is why they just continue to suffer and have had a real lack of investment prices going on for the last 20 years. Talk about the trend around- It's a simple stuff. No, I know. If you improve the ROI, you get more budget. And that's been- It really is that simple. That's been the channel. And I think PR has certainly become in comms and becoming more powerful. People know I talk about this all the time. I think comms is the new CMO. I think command and control and organic content work and work together in the organic. We've seen it firsthand in our business. But it's an issue of tech savviness and also vision, right? A lot of people just are uncomfortable shifting to the new realities. That's for sure. Some of the tech savvy people look at when they look at, say, revamping comms platform or strategy versus, say, old school folks. Yeah, I'll give you two answers on that, John. Here's one thing that is good for us that seven out of 10 of these CCOs work for the CMO because when I was in this seat starting to light that fire under the CMO for the first time, which was not that long ago. And they were not tech savvy and they were not sophisticated, right? They didn't know how to do this stuff either, right? And that was a good 10-year journey to get the CMO from not sophisticated to very sophisticated, right? Now they're one of the more sophisticated lines of business in the world. But that was a slog. So we're going to see a comm stack, like more tech, comm tech. Comm tech is the decision communication cloud. It's comm tech, right? So we did it. We've built the cloud stack. Again, like I said, just like Adobe has the tech stack for marketing, Cision has the tech stack for comms. We've replicated that. But because the CCO works for the CMO and the CMO has already been through this, right? Been through this with ad tech, been through this with martech, been through this with e-commerce, been through this with web. You know, I've got a three or four-year sophistication path this time, just because- The learnings are there. There, the company's already done it ever well. So the boss has already done it ever well. So the learnings are there from the martech. They can- So it's pretty easy leap to take. That's exactly right. It's just- And how comm techs works is shocking. Incredibly similar to how martech and ad tech work, right? A lot of it is the same technology is being applied different. So the- That's good news for me. The adoption curve for us is a fantastic thing and it's a really good thing for us that 70% of more of the CMO is the CMO is the most impatient person on the planet to get this over because the CMO is sick of doing customer journeys around the channel across just paid and owned. They really, they recognize that the most influential thing to influence you, it's not their emails, it's not their push notifications, it's not their ads. It's recognizing which credible third-party content you read getting them into that so that they're influencing you. It's kind of like Google page rank in the old days. This source is more relevant than that one. Give it more weight. And now, all of a sudden, if I have my decision ID, I can plug in the more weight stuff under your profile. I want to let them go across paid and owned and two, I materially improve the performance of the paid known because I'm putting in the really important signal versus what's sitting over there in the DMP or the CDP, which is kind of garbage. So, that's really important. I think you got a home run here. I think you really cracked the code on this. I think you are absolutely right on the money with Combs and Comstack. I see it all the time in my years of experience. It's so obvious. And again, the tailwind is that they've been through with the Martek. The question I have for you is cultural shift. That's a big one. And so, I'm out evangelizing all the time about theCUBE cloud and some of the things we're doing. And I run into the deer and the headlights on one side. What do you mean? And then, I believe, I totally understand the believers and the non-believers. What's the cultural shift? Because some Combs, chief Combs, they're very savvy, progressive. We got to make the shift. How do they get the shift, the turn? What are some of the cultural challenges? Yeah, and boy, is that right. I felt the same thing again when we were doing it with CMO. A lot of people kept their head in the sand until they got obsolete. Not only couldn't they not see the train coming, they didn't want to see the train coming. Now, you go look at the top 100 CMOs in the world today. Pretty different bunch than who those top 100 CMOs were 10 years ago, right? Really different bunch. And history's repeating itself over here too. You've got the extremely innovative CCOs that are driving change and transformation. You've got the deer and the headlight. Okay, I know I need to do this, but I'm not sure how. And you do have your tic-pocal, you know? Nope, I've got my do not disturb sign and police tape over my office. I won't even let you in my door because I don't want to hear about it, right? You've got all flavors. The good news is, we are well past the half point where the innovators are starting to actually deploy and show results. The deer and the headlights are starting to innovate and these folks are at least opening up the door and taking down some tape. Is there pressure on the agency side now? A lot of agencies charge a lot of monthly billings for these clients and it's been the old school thing and someone trying to be aggressive and do more services. Have you seen with the CISN Cloud and things that you're doing that you're enabling those agencies to be more productive? Are the clients putting pressure on those agencies to live for more value? Talk about the agency dynamic. And that's also a virtuous cycle too, right? That cycle goes from, it's a bell curve. At the beginning of the bell curve, customers have no clue about the communications. They go to their agencies right for advice, right? So you have to educate the agencies on how to say nice things about you, right? By the time you're at the bell curve, the clients know about the tech or have adopted the deck and the agencies realize, oh, I can monetize the hell out of this. They need strategy and services and content and creative and campaign, right? I can, this is yet another good old fashioned tourism. A buck for the tech means six bucks for me as a service agency, right? At the bottom over here, and I'll never forget this when we did our modern marketing experiences, Eric, the CMO of Clorox said, hey, all you agencies out there, now that we're mature, we choose our agency based on their fluency around our tech stack. So it goes that violently and therefore the agencies really do need to try to get fluent. And the ones that do are really re-rewards because there is a blatant amount of need as the line of business customer tries to get from here to here. And the agency is the very first place that that customer's going to go to. So the customer has first right of refusal to go provide these services and monetize them. So the agency has to keep up, basically. They certainly do. Because if the game gets changed by speed, it's accelerated, values created, if they keep, no, they're running shoes on, they're out. If they keep up and they stay fluent, then they're going to be great, yeah. And then the last thing back on the things, we've kind of hit this, this is one of those magic points I've been talking about for 20 years. When the CFO or the CEO or the CMO walk down to the CCO's office and say, where are we on this? Because it's out in the wild now, right? There are over 1,200 big brands doing this measurement, Cision ID, ComStack stuff. It's getting written about regular fashion or media, right? Customer says, wow, I couldn't do this for 50 years. Now I am. And look what I just did to my comms program, right? That gets read, right? World's the same place as it always has been. You and I read that. We go down to our comms department and say, wow. I didn't know that was possible. Where are we on this? So the where are we on this wave is coming to communications, which is an accelerant. It's an accountability. Now it's accountability. And therefore the urgency to get fluent and to change. So now they're hiring up quant shocks and operations and statisticians and database people just like the marketers did, right? The anatomy of a communications department is starting to look half science, half art, just like happened in marketing. Whereas before that, it was 95% art and just 5% science, but it's getting to be 50, 50 now. Do you have any competition? We have just like always, right? You guys pretty much have a pretty much PR news wire. A lot of big elements there. We do, yeah. You've got a good football. You know, kind of like, this is just an example. You know, even though Marketo is part of Adobe, giant, and Aliqua is part of Oracle, giant, and Pardot is part of Salesforce. You know, you got three Goliaths in marketing automation. HubSpot's still sticking around. You know, PurePlay, market automation, right? You could just picture, right, CRM giants, Microsoft and Salesforce have eaten the world. Zendesk still kicking around. It's own little PurePlay. That equivalent exists. I have nobody that's even one fifth as big as I am, or as global or as complete, but I do have some small point-specific solution providers. They're still hanging out there. Always will. Well, the thing is, one, first of all, you are a great leader. You've seen the movie on the marketing tech side. You've got waves of experience under your belt, but I think what's interesting is, is that like the web 1.0, having websites and web pages, web 2.0, and social networks, that was about the first generation. Serve information, create affiliate programs, all kind of coded tracking, and you mentioned all that, I oversimplified it, but you get the idea. Now every company needs a new capability. They need to stand up media infrastructure. And what does that mean? They're going to throw out podcasts. They're going to take their content, put them into multiple channels. That's a comms function. So now comms is becoming the new CMO-like capability in this earned channel. So your cloud becomes that provisioning entity for companies to stand up capabilities without waiting. Is that the vision? You've nailed it. And that is one of the key reasons why you have to have a tech stack, right? That's a spot on one. Another one, you know, when I, back in early in my career, the 20 influencers that mattered, they were all newspaper reporters or TV folks, right? There was only 20 of them. I had a Rolodex, I could take each one of them out for a three martini lunch. They'd write something good about me, right? Now, now you have thousands of influencers across 52 channels and they change in real time and they're global in nature. That's another example of where, well, if you don't automate that with tech, right? And oh, by the way, if you send out digital content, they talk back to you in real time. You have to actually not only do influencer identification, outreach and curation, you've got to do real time engagement, right? There's none. Zero agility. Not exactly. Don't like DevOps mindset in there at all. And then the speed with which it's no longer okay for comms to call the agency and say, give me a clip book. I got to get it to my CEO by Friday, right? That whole start the clip book on Tuesday. I got to have the clip book, the physical clip book, you know, on the CEO as an example, right? Nope. If I'm not basically streaming my senior executives in real time, curated and analyzed as to what's important and what it means, I can't do that without a tech stack. This whole thing has been forced to get modernized by cloud technology transformation. You can't do a job without it. Andy Cunningham, a legend in the comms business who did all Steve Jobs comms legend. She basically said on the cube, it's not about waiting for the clips to create the clip book, create your own clip book and get it out there, then evaluate and engage. This is the new command and control with digital assets. Now it's become the real time curated feed that never stops. Sure as hell, better not. As comms is in trouble if it does. Well, this is a great topic. I'd like to have you in the skin. I can go deep on this. This is, I think, a really important shift. And you guys are only ones that are on it at this level. And I don't think the Salesforce and Adobe's yet are, I don't think they're nimble enough to go after this wave. I think they're stuck in their wave and they're making a lot of money. Yeah, you know, John, they're paid media and owned media, that's right. The Google marketing cloud, the SAP marketing cloud, Adobe Oracle Salesforce marketing clouds, they don't do anything and earned, nothing. This is one of the reasons I jumped because I knew this needed to happen. But they're also chasing much bigger pots of money, right? Marketing and advertising is still a lot more money. We're working on it to grow the pie for comms. But bottom line is they're chasing the big markets as I was at Oracle. And they're still pretty much in a violent arms race against each other. You know, like Salesforce is still way more focused on what Adobe's doing than what I'm doing. You're just on a different wave. So we're just over here doing this, building a billion dollar cloud leader that is mission critical to every one of their customers. And they're going to end up being some pretty important partners to us because they've been too focused on the big arms race against each other, in paid known, and have not had the luxury to even go here. Well, I think this wave that you're on is going to be really big. I think they don't yet see it in my opinion or can't get there with the right surfboard to use the serving analogy. It's going to be a big wave. Thanks for sharing your insights. Absolutely. While you're here, get the plug in for Sysn. What's going on? What's next? What's the big momentum? Put the plug in for the company. What are you guys going to do? Plug in for the company. The company has acquired a couple of companies in January. You might see one of which is Falcon. And basically Falcon is one of the big four in the land of Hootsuite, Sprinkler, right spread fast. So your cloud companies do this, right? Adobe has creative cloud, document cloud, marketing cloud, right? Salesforce has sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud, right? Sysn has just become a multi-cloud company. We now have the Sysn social cloud and the Sysn communications cloud. And we're going to go grab a couple hundred million dollars of stuff away from Sprinkler, Hootsuite and collapse social into this, right? Because most of social is earned as well. So look for a wing spread, right? Into another adjacent market. I think that's number one. And then look for publishing of the data. That's probably going to be the most exciting thing because we just talked about, again, our metrics and capabilities you couldn't buy. But, you know, little teaser. If we can say in two months, well, here's the average click-through on a Google ad, a YouTube ad, a banner ad. Let me show it to you for a blog, a press release, an article, right? Apple's dapples, right? Here's the conversion, right? Here's the, right? If I can literally start becoming almost like an e-marketer publisher on what happens when people read earned, right? There's going to be some unbelievable stats and they're going to be incredibly telling and it's going to drive that, where are we on that? Well, this is going to be the year. It's a new digital advertising format. It's a new format. That's exactly right. It's a new digital advertising format. And it's one when the CEO understands that he or she can have it for earned now the way he's had it from marketing advertising. That little conversation walking down the hall in thousands of companies where the CCO or the VP of PR looks up and the CEO's going, where are we on that? That's the year that that inflection slips switches, which I'm talking about. Every siloed function is now horizontally connected with data, now measured, fully instrumented. The value will be there. And whoever can bring the value gets the budget. That's the new model. Kevin Acroy, CEO of CISN, changing the game and then Newton the shift around the chief communication officer and how that is becoming more tech savvy. Really disrupting the business by measuring earned media. A big wave is coming, of course, it's early, but this is going to be a big one. Kevin, thanks for coming on. Yeah, my question, thank you. It's a CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. Thanks, John.