 Hello everyone, welcome to the SiliconANGLE studios of theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, your host. We are in studio for a conversation with David Eckeroi who's the CEO of Cision. Formerly with Oracle Marketing Cloud, recently took the job as CEO of Cision. Congratulations. Thanks, John. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in on the holidays, kind of winding down the year. What a year it's been. Trump's meeting with tech leaders, having them kiss the ring, get the trillion dollars offshore on site. Advertising is upside down. Data's the hottest thing on the planet. You're in the center of the action. Certainly at Oracle, we had multiple conversations, but now you're leading a company. Yeah, so Kevin Eckeroi leaving Oracle Marketing Cloud around Cision. That's way down the chart in all this change, right? No big deal. Well, as you know, we're always out front of the trends, but the marketing concepts have been around in businesses in the centuries since business was around. But now with data, as we talk, this is changing. So the biggest trend that we see happening is that marketing isn't just a marketing thing. It's a company-wide data opportunity. So it's certainly changing a lot of the game. And I know we've talked about that. So what's the change? Why did you decide to take the CEO opportunity at Cision? Was the company, what attracted you to these guys? Yeah, thanks for asking. And good to be here, by the way. I've been here with you fair amount. This is the first time I'm not wearing my Oracle Marketing Cloud uniform. So good to be seeing you in a second uniform, right? How does the blue and orange Cision uniform look, John? You look like you've been working hard. So you've been taking ass and taking names. Well, you've got to grow. You're now the executive. Everything stops with you. Well, and just to be really clear, because I know that my name with you guys, especially, has been synonymous with the Oracle Marketing Cloud. I started it. I did all the acquisitions. I grew it, you know, as kind of my baby. I didn't leave because there was anything wrong. I think Oracle Marketing Cloud is going to continue to just absolutely kick ass and take names. I think they've built the right mousetrap. You know, as you've heard me, they didn't start from CRM and go backward. They didn't start from the website and go out. They started with data, right? DataLogix, CrossWise, AddThis, the first big DMP in data marketplace. I think their data-driven strategies are going to continue to see them just absolutely survive after me. And I sure hope so, because that's why I'm here. Well, they're set up to win. I mean, the integrations are always a challenge. And I think our last interview at the Modern Marketing Experience great show, we talked about that specific thing where you want to be vertically specialized, but yet horizontally integrated, and you set that up. And I think I and they have set that up so their poise really well to see. So I didn't leave Oracle because of any lack of faith in their ability to go conquer that very big opportunity or any personal dissatisfaction. It's probably the best job I've ever had in my career. This is one of those classic cases where I saw an opportunity that was so good I had to leave something that I loved. So for everybody that's listening, I'll just say that again. Kevin didn't leave Oracle because there was anything wrong. Kevin left Oracle because of what I'm about to riff on now. It was this big opportunity. And basically, John, we can go as deep as you'd like to in today's interview, but at the highest level, this big opportunity that I saw is you just look at the data-driven and then data meets content, meets applications, meets media, the channels come together, right, the life cycles. You look at everything that's happened and it's easy to kind of now say, well, just go look at what Salesforce, Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud, right? Look at that billions and billions and billions and billions of acquisition. Look how fast and far that's come. And basically, look at the needs that drove that massive convergence. And it has fundamentally changed the industry. It's fundamentally changed the chief media, the chief marketing, the chief commerce officers' ability to go drive results that they couldn't have done without Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle doing what we did, right? But all of that has been done at paid media, right? The advertising at commerce and at owned media, right? Our websites or our mobile applications. None of that through all the tech giants in the industry and of the $20 billion in M&A Capital, OPEX and CAPEX since then, none of it's touched the third leg of this stool, which is earned media, right? Earned media, communications, good old fashioned PR. The exact same need for that data technology and measurement transformation that sales and service and commerce and paid media and owned. They've all been through that. This mission critical part called communications or in media has not been through it. As we were building this, my private equity company GTCR has very quick, quietly over the last two years put together six leading solution providers in this earned media communications world. Just like I put Eloquent Responses and Blue Chi and Maximizer, they've been doing the same thing over here, aimed at this earned media opportunity. And if anything, I think that every CEO, every CIO, every CMO would tell you, they understand, there's a lot of clarity that I can't advertise my way there. And I just can't get there by sending 300 promotional email and SMS campaigns, you know, versus 200 last year. I can't promote my way there. I can't advertise my way there. If I want to influence customer experience, customer loyalty and relationship and ultimately customer purchasing behavior, I gotta not just advertise and promote to them. I gotta get at what's called influencers, right? Consumers, whether they're B2B consumers or B2C consumers, I am more and more being influenced and driven on who I listen to, who I respect and hold credible and ultimately who I buy from based on people I trust. That's called an influencer. Whether that's a reporter, an academic, a social person, a blogger, a community leader. Brands, no, I gotta get to the influencers if I want to get to my customers. And that's all about earned. So the opportunity to go repeat exactly what I did at Oracle Marketing Cloud for paid and owned, but do it over here and earned was simply too big an opportunity to pass up. Well, first of all, I love that we want to drill down on Cision specifically and what your plans are there, but let's stay on this mega trend for a second because I think you're hitting the nail on the head here because I think this is something that, you know, we actually, when we started SiliconANGLE Media seven years ago, this was the premise of our business. We saw that the connected network of social is fueling this new earned area where earned is truly earned, yet there's no real website, no silver bullet. It's a distributed tightly coupled network and there's pockets of it. So the word influence isn't about the most followers, it's about the relationship of the connected consumer who's also a consumer and a producer of content, their opinion there. And so this is all kind of a new behavioral thing. So you go back to, you know, the earned and, I mean, the owned and paid and search and all that stuff, the contextual and behavioral. Absolutely. Really that's two things. That's right. The behavior of the crowd. You got it. You can't look further than the Trump election to say, whoa, who saw that coming? That's an example of an earned dynamic, I would say, that caused people to go, well, what the heck? I should send him a letter for thanking him for making my point so emphatically for me. That's exactly right. A lot of people are going to suffer for that and they'll be crying in their wine in California for sure, a blue state, but this brings up the dynamic, right? This is the mega trend that now this earned media component isn't just about ads, it's software. That's right. It's about software and networks. And with cloud computing, there's an opportunity for people to participate in this. So how do you guys, I mean, we phrase it this way, how does customers, what's the current pain point? I mean, what's the top three? Obviously the advertising, I don't want to drive traffic to my site, that's an old mentality, but that's the only thing they can do right now and get clicks. So again, I think it is getting at that, the risk of being repetitive, it is okay, boy, if that's all I do is rely on the big monolithic web infrastructure I've developed, the campaign engine that just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper so I keep sending more and more. And okay, it's programmatic now so I guess I can throw more at Google and Facebook. I'm not saying those aren't important parts of the mix. You of course need to continue, but they're declining in efficacy, right? So not only are they declining in efficacy while they increase in spend, the cost, the consumer, right? Again, whether that's a B2B consumer or a BZ is becoming increasingly numb. Don't view them as credible, don't view it as trustworthy. Yeah, they've got these big lofty goals in this new digital world where, right, the fragmented influence is harder and harder to contain and they just flat out need to, they recognize that the thing that's probably going to be the most important going forward, which is solving this puzzle, is the thing they've de-invested in the most, right? It's gone from the king of the hill 20 years ago to a true second-class citizen while they got all drunk on paid advertising and more e-commerce campaigns. Well, the role of the buyer is interesting. Let me just get your thoughts on this because one of the things that we've observed with SiliconANGLE and our business model is we do really, really well with our, I don't know, we call them advertised sponsors if you will, because we're very community-driven with theCUBE, as you know, is that we have buy-in from not just the CMO, in some cases, just the head of communications. So the role of PR, public relations, is a communications function. So the thing about social is you have a dynamic of organic and everyone knows organic is the cool, right? Organic growth bottoms up. But the interesting thing is communication pros have a top-down command and control mentality. So when you blend command and control with organic growth, you can actually have both now. This seems to be the new power base. That's right. The comms person, which was, hey, get the press release out there. Go talk to 10 reporters. There's now a million people. The CMO would go to the agencies to spend a lot of dough on print ads and TV commercials. They had to work together. Well, and the chief communication officer, it's still one of the nice things. Seven out of 10 times, they're reporting directly to the CMO. The other three times, they actually appear to the CMO to report directly to the CEO. So it's not a de-empowered function. It shouldn't. It shouldn't be, right? And then I think that the modern communication organization, I'll talk about who they are and then I'll circle back on the pain point because there's some acute pain there that we're trying to address. They don't look at it as just PR. Now, to be really clear, and I would like this on record too, the traditional journalist reporter media never been more important, right? It's not like they've lacked, but even then, right? Who that reporter is on that publication website versus the print, versus the broadcast, versus their blog, versus their Twitter handle, versus their Facebook page, versus their Instagram account, right? Even that traditional reporter is nine different influences and nine different audiences and nine different media, right? So they haven't become less important. They've become far more fragmented. That's exactly right. And nailing that is no trivial thing that's got to get done. They really are, they're as digital and as modern and as social as everybody else. But then you also got to realize, boy, right? These communities are incredibly powerful. These mini bloggers have as much cloud as the New York Times does in this particular area, right? These social followings, these academics, these thought leaders, the definition of a digital influencer has widened quite a bit above and beyond the core journalist, but don't forget that that person's really important. So, and then you've got the consumer influencers and their user-generated content themselves, right? So the customer is their own influencer, which is really interesting. And that's a B2B dynamic as well as a B2C dynamic. So that's the world we all of a sudden find ourselves in. But I think the modern day. The digital world that you're talking about isn't a B2B versus B2C, it's digital. It's digital period. So it's one concept now. And it's no longer digital communications or digital marketing. It's just communications and marketing in a digital world, right? And that sounds simple. That's a pretty fundamental shift. Now, let's go back into though the tools that they have. So they're as savvy and as digital as their peers that are running commerce or paid advertising or the website. They've really been bereft of toolkit. So I'm gonna give you an example. We work with an extremely large, one of the four largest beauty products companies in the world. And when they do a good new product launch, right? Let's look at advertising. They will harness data. They will develop 30 different audiences, right? And they will go do discrete tonality, creative offer, you name it at 30 different, so they'll do 30 different banner ads. They'll do the same thing with social audience. They'll do 40 different data-driven audiences. They get discrete touch content. In email, they'll do 50 or 60, right? 50 or 60 different data-driven segments. And even in the website, they'll say, hey, John's profile, that's profile seven, Kevin's profile, that's profile 12, you will see a completely different website than I will based on data-driven personalization, right? What are they doing communications? One press release and one infographic goes to all 12,000 communication outlets, no data, no versioning, right? No, nothing. So this concept of the right version of the content to the right audience at the right time, I'm putting, in advertising and in commerce in the website, I'm talking to soccer moms versus sexy grandmas versus Wall Street women very different from my beauty products. In communications, I'm talking to all of them the same, which is kind of crazy because the influencers- It used to be a labor-driven market too. We used to call it arms and legs, right? Which is what it is. Yeah, yeah. And head and arms and legs and a lot of people kind of reaching out but now the trend is to have a much more sass. That's exactly right. And I don't have the platform to actually go do that, right? So as far as some of the pain we're trying to pride, now with our communication cloud, just like with the other marketing clouds, I don't have to, I can actually do data-driven intelligent messaging and content delivery to the audience, to the influencers that get out the discreet audiences, just like I do the data-driven direct communication to the end users themselves. Probably more importantly, I'll stick with my example for a sec, John. That beauty company, Fortune 500 Beauty Company, they get Rachel, who is the head fashion reporter on the fashion section, NewYorkTimes.com, right? Rachel covered and Rachel embedded my press release from my infographic. Home Run, Pop the Champagne, right? It's like, okay. But while there's two million people that went to that fashion section on NewYorkTimes.com today when she covered, right? How many of them actually read the content and picked it up? Don't know. How many of them actually engaged in it? Read the infographic, click the video, click the links, don't know. Who were they? From a demographic, psychographic, sociographic, right behavioral, don't know. And probably most importantly, what did they do after they read it? Did they go to the desired shopping cart, or the right community page, or back to the website, or was there any actual digital behavior driven from that bigger media push? So there's a lack of discovery data. It stops at, I got picked up by the reporter. And I have no idea how many of the two million people were influenced, covered, engaged, right, et cetera. And no idea about the behavior that I took. So the link between the influencer comes and the end user has never been closed. That's a second part of the pain point that we really fix is now we are fixing the gap between the influencer and the end user. And you're gonna see us call that the influencer graph, John. You'll see a press release, a targeted one that's data driven. And very rich media. Go out around the influencer graph because if we can start saying, hey, John's my end user customer. Now I know, quantitatively with data that I can optimize in real time, which influencers matter? Which reporters, which academics, which bloggers, in which channels, in which media, and which content actually doesn't pick up. And people have different influence rankings in certain contexts. You got it. And all that's a black hole, we know it. We have no idea how to measure it, make it data driven, make it contextual, and optimize it in real time with a digital platform so that this commanding control CCO who thinks this way now actually has his or her system of record to actually go execute this way. As Maslow's argument needs is that sounds because the commerce paid and owned guys have had this for a while, this is like discovering fire here for the chief communication officer because they've never had their data and tech enablement platform to do this the way the other guys have. So that's number two. And the number three, and I think this is really important is we all know that communicate, one, I need to measure and optimize the comms function the way I just talked about it. We all know that if done right, it amplifies the bejesus out of the owned and the paid to. You shouldn't be thinking about them in silos, but there's no way to measure that if I did a really good job and earned, look at the impact it had and the efficacy on that massive paid budget. They're not usually exclusive and there's a relationship between them because in social and in communities, collaboration is a core linchpin. You cannot articulate just how important that is. And until tech vendors put the apps, the APIs, the data, and then the ID sinks together, you can't measure it, right? And as fundamental as that sounds, that's why what's happened over there in Adobe Oracle Salesforce land had to happen. And it's why what we're doing here in Cisjland has to happen so that not only can comms catch up, but comms can communicate in that data. And play an active role in that too. An active role because what's gonna happen is they're gonna realize, holy smokes, the paid performed here without the earned, the paid performed here, with the earned and quite frankly, the earned out performed the paid, right? So we're not gonna be a participant role that's going to be a, I'm going to resume my rightful place that they had of that tryout. So in our second segment, we're gonna get more into Cisjland and come to a specific solution, but we'll end this segment on kind of wrapping up the big megatron. Obviously, social and the technology and network effect of social, combined with the data, combined with the fact that comms, communications is now an active lead and important role in the creative mix of earned and integrating in the paid. So you can have a cohesive, but decoupled programs. It's not silver bullet either way. Rising tide floats all above, but earned has been underdeveloped. Underdeveloped, underinvested in, under tech enabled, under data enabled. And really that's what it gets to, is the people in charge understand that. They didn't quite have the data, the tech tools to do it. The data, the tech tools are now available. And now the industry's just got to kind of get up the sophistication curve. So final question to end the segment is, where's the progress bar on this sector? How early is it? First inning, bottom of the first, second inning? And two, there's always in these early adopter markets that certainly that you saw clearly left the Oracle for it, but this is, and I agree by the way, is a great opportunity. They're always the champions internally who see it too. Where's the progress bar and what's the advice to the folks that are inside these companies who actually have the religion saying, this is the future and have to communicate it to the rest of the company? I think unfortunately the thinking, the thought leadership bar is probably in the third inning, they get it. The doing something about it and going from good thinking to good practitionership and execution, is in the first out, the first out to the first pitch in the first inning of the first game of the season. We're literally at ground one. The good news is though, is they're not going to try to go convince the CFO from a money or the CIO from a resource or the CEO from a strategy. This whole, I keep saying this, this data tech and measurement transformation, the corporation, no matter what the corporation is, invested in it in sales, look what happened, they invested in the service, look what happened, they invested in it and paid, look what happened, they've invested in it known. So the good news is, is while they are at the very, very, very beginning of the ball game, they're literally the last function inside the corporation to actually go do it. And they don't have evangelism around the benefit of this type of transformation. It's worked in every other area. So while they're at the very beginning, they don't have to convince anybody it's a good idea. Everybody else that's down the hall and sits around the CEO's table has been through that transformation. So there's not that evangelism, it's just now his or her turn to go through the same thing. You can do some results, put some results on the table. And it's shown results in all these other lines of business. So there's not this fundamental disbelief that it won't show results in the communications line of business. There's actually quite the opposite. There's heavy belief that it will because it has shown, right, it has shown results in all these other lines of business. So in some cases it's obvious too, it's like, okay, we gotta do this. They should be able to move faster. This caterpillar should turn into a butterfly really fast because everybody's thinking about it, the tech's in place and it's worked in other places. But we are really, really, really at the very beginning. It's exciting. Kevin Ackroyd, CEO of Cision here inside our studio talking about the landscape of really digital changing and how earned media blogs and folks like SiliconANGLE and others who actually producing original content and engaging audiences now have an opportunity to convert over in this new market shift going on, big mega trend. We're back with segment two, talking about the company and the solution and technology. We're interested to get that perspective. Kevin, thanks for joining us here in the palace, thanks for watching. Thank you.