 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Hello and welcome back to the Oracle Marketing Cloud. Modern CX is the show name, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE, my co is Peter Burris. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas with two great guests here. Lawrence, who's the general manager and senior vice president of Oracle Marketing Cloud and Katie, Kristen O'Hara, chief marketing officer at Time Warner. Kristen, welcome to theCUBE. Laura, great to see you. Thank you, great to see you again. So, first of all, keynote this morning. You guys laid out the marketing future. It's a platform, it's modern customer experience, not a lot of other things in it, just a simple positioning. Tell us more. Sure, well, part of it is around the need for us to deliver things that simplify a marketer's world, not make it more complex. And at the same time, have an opportunity to onboard new innovations and do exciting things so that Time Warner can keep doing exciting things that they're doing in the world of entertainment. So, what we laid out really is a vision around the combination of both the human element and technology coming together in a powerful way to deliver on the modern marketing experience. And really about for us putting customers in the center so that our customers can put their customers in the center to create a richer customer experience. And as you know, it's about the ability to use data, real-time, predictive, use new technologies like artificial intelligence to make the companies we work with more differentiated and unique. And to take some of the pain points out of implementing so much technology so that they can focus on their customers. Christian at Time Warner, you guys obviously well established, but you have a lot of different groups within Time Warner. There's a data opportunity there. We're in a data-driven marketing world. You're the CMO, how's that working? What's the vision? Are you guys taking advantage of some of these things so that you can share some of the use cases I'm doing? So I would say that we believe the companies that create the best quality content and can unlock the power of their data are the companies that are going to own the future. And so for Time Warner, if our content is our most valuable asset, we need to make our data our most competitive advantage. So for us, we set an ambitious goal around data that we wanted to aggregate and monetize the largest set of action behavior and intent around the media and entertainment world so that we could become a better, not just marketing organization, but a better company overall, because data cuts across so many different areas of an organization that real systemic change is required to fully realize the potential of data. And the innovation on the content side is interesting because content is content, good content always wins. It's a content is king kind of model. But now you have the form factors on the consumption side that's changing very, very fast. So internally, how do you guys look at that? Because it's an opportunity to merchandise differently on the content side. Well, I think one of the things that made data rise to the forefront so quickly for us as a company is that historically data wasn't in our DNA. But as the transformation of media and entertainment is happening and we're going over the top with products, we have more direct to consumer opportunities and really digital and mobile puts all brands in direct contact with consumers. So we needed to find ways to harness that and do it at scale across our organization. We have three operating companies, right? HBO, Warner and Turner, and we operate in 200 markets. So for us, the opportunity of scale of data to deploy that across marketing, right? We're a large buyer and seller of media over billions of dollars on both sides of that spectrum. Franchise management, we manage giant franchises like DC, Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts, Game of Thrones. Distribution, as you said, was another big use case for us. How do we think about working with exhibitor partners differently or MSO partners on the television side differently, retailers in a data-driven world and ultimately content? Whether that's through content personalization, recommendation, or at some point as we get more sophisticated and kind of train our organization to think about how can content inform creative decisions that we make as an enterprise. And the organizational change, it's been a theme all morning, and certainly we heard from the keynote. We even heard it from Mark Hurd yesterday, a little bit in how he uses his examples of the persona situation and identity. But when you have to come in and shake the tree inside the organization for change, it's hard. How to give us a peek inside the world of Time Warner on some of the change, because change is hard sometimes. So you guys are talking about Journey and the Heroes. Were you the hero? Let's give us an update. Are you almost hero status yet? I think that's a terrific question and certainly a huge part of the data transformation was organizational change and it's systemic change. It's not about a department. As I said this morning, data's not the job of a department, it's everyone's job. And so we need to educate the organization. But I would say in a company like ours, which is a media and entertainment company, we start from a place where, frankly, data is not the most sexy topic for a lot of executives in our organization. Time Warner historically has not been known for internal collaboration around major initiatives. And we lacked a massive amount of the functional expertise required to realize the power of the possibility. So we knew we had to approach things differently. It could not be business as usual if we were going to get the organizational change required to realize the vision. And so we set what I'll say is three kind of guiding principles that we use. The first was it was about data portability, not centralization, right? It was about how do we get data moving from HBO to Warner, within Warner, over to Turner, et cetera, because we share audiences. The second piece was about make progress, not process. And I think when you tackle a topic as big as data transformation within a company, people get shut down or they think we have to have every answer figured out before we go on this journey together. And my point was we need to get started. The world is moving so fast, we need to just test, learn, be agile and move through the organization. And then the last piece, which I said is the data's not a department. And that required a tremendous amount of education and onboarding. And frankly, that's the place where the Oracle team was really helpful with our organization. You mean not a department in the sense that everyone owns the responsibility, not someone else's job? Well, exactly. I think if you park data in IT or you create a data department, you know. It's a crutch. It's a crutch, but data isn't for data's sake. Data is for business use cases. It's to generate utility. Correct. The role, data has value when it's used. Correct. Data has very, very little value when it just sits somewhere. Right. Data forms. It has the potential to do something, but we talk about what we call data dynamics. And the idea is that there's a real correspondence between things like thermodynamics and information theory. And the idea of freeing up data so that it can be used, having it be that potential so that it could be applied, but then actually turning it, liberating it and turning it into work is really what we need to focus on. We need to focus on how we're going to turn, how we're going to create more free data that can be applied to work, but really focus on how we're going to put it to work. Would you agree with that? Yeah. And I think there's a culture shift because oftentimes people had data and knowledge and information and they felt like they were sitting on it. And you can sit on the data. It's not going to hatch and create something wonderful in terms of growth and ROI. And the same thing goes for when we were talking about heroes and marketing and heroic marketing. Lots of times in the past, if you think about that once many world, there was a hero. There was a great genius of marketing that launched campaigns and was the hero seller, hero marketer. I think one of the things that Kristin shared and also Lisa, the CMO of Tableau Software, was that heroic moments happen in many places around marketing. And it only happens because you're able to unleash the data and provide value for the people to use that in their businesses in really powerful ways and real time, which is where companies like Time Warner are moving and at global speed, it's just amazing. One of the things that comes up a lot in our CUBE interviews recently as DevOps and cloud computing because more mainstream, while these concepts are starting to hit some of the practitioners in the world, is two things, empathy, user empathy, and empowerment, which has been around for a while, but now you have a new level of empowerment to your point where in the organization, the Tableau has been great use case here where visualization and wrangling, taking it out of the hands of geeks into the real people on the front lines. That's kind of a theme we're seeing here. How do you guys see that empathy and empowerment because what you're really getting at is if you unleash the data, innovation can come from anywhere in the organization and the mindset has to be ready for that. I think that that's absolutely right. I mean, we started with marketing as use case one to prove the value proposition because we market a significant scale across our three businesses and to prove that portability worked. As soon as we started to prove that it was driving demonstrable business results, people in the organization started to wake up and take notice and then you start to say, well, what else can we be doing with data? Where our first year was just getting, trying to get people to understand why it mattered. I think as we kind of got into year two of this initiative, people would come to us with ideas and say, well, how can we work with exhibitors differently now, an AMC or a regal, or how can we work with, you know, Amazon or Google differently to kind of unlock data in ways that we hadn't done before. Change of business practice mindset. It did, and I often say that data has been a catalyst for change in so many areas of our business because people immediately see the value that it brings. So it wasn't something that was forced. It took a lot of organizational change, but once we started to get there, I think you're exactly right. People start to get excited about what's possible with data. Well, once you get people excited about data, as long as you keep coming back, at least earlier, I want to test this with you, as long as you keep coming back to that fundamental touchstone, customer. Correct. Right? Because what's really interesting about this, and we could, in many respects, we should be talking about the golden age of marketing because we are perhaps moving into this notion of the golden age market. The market actually can do an enormous amount of good. But the thing, one of the things that's so interesting is that customers are now creating enormous amounts of data. And for a company like Time Warner, that is having that continuous interaction as they're focused on your content, that has an enormous implication for getting your organization to focus on the customer that's watching the content and not just the producing of the content. Is that also now starting to happen more, Time Warner? Yes, and I think we see that in marketing as well as in other areas of the business. So, I used an example this morning with DC Entertainment, a giant franchise of ours across television, films, movies, games, comics. In the past, it was zero-based planning with every new release for us. Today, we've made a concerted effort to collect data at every consumer touch point so we can understand the action, behavior, and intent for the sole purpose of serving those customers better and giving better customer experiences. Whether that means the sequential storytelling in marketing that's as relevant to that person in terms of how they're engaged and where they are at the different life cycles in a particular franchise, or if you take something within HBO, like HBO Now, how can we do better content personalization or recommendation based on your historical patterns, which is something I think consumers are seeking and frankly getting to a place where they expect that to be so. So, the data can absolutely, it is about empowering better customer experiences across the board. How do you look at the AI trend? And I was just, we have a story on our site this morning actually about Hollywood and data because the National Association of Broadcasters show is going on here in Las Vegas at the same time. We have our Cube coverage over there, but you're seeing all aspects of the value chain, not just ticket sales for movies or other things on the merchandise side, but how movies are being made and how shows are being developed. So, back to the asset of content. So, this is kind of not just marketing, it's evolving into, so if AI does one thing, automates one thing, it will value will shift somewhere else. Are you guys there yet? Are you guys seeing that internally? Is that something that's being discussed? It's marketing informing production. I don't know that I would say marketing is informing production. I think what we're seeing is that there's a lot more intelligence we have about how consumers are engaging with our content across various distribution platforms. Laura and I talked a little bit this morning about the role of AI and the threat of machine to man. And I don't necessarily think it's about man versus machine. It's about finding the right, again, use cases for AI and cognitive systems that can actually free us up to do what we do best, which is create and what humans are great at is that creative process and intuition. And I think the more we can automate parts of the system to free up that, it makes it a more exciting proposition. And I think it's different with many companies, but at Oracle, we look at artificial intelligence really about intelligent augmentation, right? You want to augment intelligence, not replace workers, not replace creativity, but to better inform. So the strategy of building it in, not bolting it on, I do think there's a world in the future where artificial intelligence is going to help produce the next product or experience in a way that we're comfortable with, but really leveraging creativity more than anything else. And it's just a journey that we're on. And a lot of threat people feel like, well, maybe something, a machine or a bot is going to replace my job. It should just make us quicker. So if I have an issue and I'm calling into a customer service center, I'm not going to get an email at the same time with an offer saying, you must be such a happy customer. Hey, I know we had a problem. And at the same time I finished that service call and felt I didn't want to take the survey, they offered me something that makes on my loyalty. And that's where I think things are coming together. The automation will certainly do some impact on there, but it will shift. And I'm not from the school of thought that thinks that it's bad. I mean, people predicted that ATMs would replace bank tellers, yet the banks are opening up more branches than ever before. They're actually hiring more people. And they're selling more things. It's now a retail component. It could be, get my movies there, download to my phone soon, maybe possibly. Okay, but the big question now is for me is you guys are doing great. What specifically are you guys using Oracle for? How are you leveraging Oracle? And what's some of the specific examples that you could share? Sure, so as a, I mean, we have three operating companies. 200 markets that we operate in. We run hundreds, if not thousands of campaigns every year across our portfolio of brands. And so for us, we really needed a partner who could help us scale quickly in the ability to share data across business units, across geographies, across campaigns. But we also needed a partner who could help an organization that was not data first, right? We're not a data native company. And so it's not, it wasn't part of our DNA. So Oracle also played a critical role in helping to get us up running and markets onboard it. And I think over the time that we've been working with Laura and the team, you know, the data management platform has been up and running. And I'm delighted to say we've shared, you know, billions of consumer profiles across our lines of business that are informing campaigns. So it could be anything from- So you cross-pollinate data across the organization. So examples would be if we have talent in a particular movie, like Dwayne Johnson, who was in San Andreas two years ago, then he was starring two weeks after that in Ballers, and then in Central Intelligence, another Warner release last summer. Our ability to understand that audience base and move data from one part of the company to another in real time is transformational. Another example would be Gabe of Thrones fans had a high propensity to be Batman vs. Superman fans last summer. That insight allowed us to market differently both from a messaging standpoint and a media standpoint in both campaigns. And we're seeing that over and over and over again. And I think we're using first party data to launch every campaign that we're doing. And it really is- This is how it's supposed to work. So talk about how it was before because I can almost imagine you're throwing the dart at the board, I'm oversimplifying it, but the old way was kind of you gather data as fast as you can. I mean- Well, I think in our industry, there wasn't really the old way per se because we didn't operate direct-to-consumer businesses. So before the onset of digital and technology allowing us to harvest the signal at every consumer touch point, we didn't really have the means or the mechanism to action whatever data we had. That didn't connect into buying systems. So now that we have the tools, the capabilities, and we are direct-to-consumer in some of our businesses has changed that. But as I said earlier, I think the whole data transformation has really been a catalyst for a change. And a couple of senior executives said to me, that exact same question. Well, what did we do before? How did we do this before? And it was, we didn't- We talked about- And we didn't have the capability to do it even if we wanted to. But we talked about it. So in many respects, it's a back to the future, not a Time Warner property, I don't believe, but it was kind of a back to the future moment in that we talked about going back to the 1930s, the idea of putting the customer at the center of marketing. But we couldn't do it because we didn't have the data. And so it was a stylized thing, but we couldn't actually achieve it. And now because we have these sources of data, we can in fact put the customer at the center. The question is, do we as a business have the will to do so? Because it upsets a whole bunch of 80 years of other practices and routines because we couldn't put the customer at the center. So where do you think this is going to go? I do think it goes back to the business use case. And once you prove that it works, people listen. Right, it's hard to get them to pay attention before they understand. It's going to have demonstrable impact on your business outcomes. And once we started doing that, and it was in the early days of pilot campaigns, which sounded a lot less scary to people than us saying, this is going to be the new way. We did hundreds of pilots. And I used to joke and say, if there's a hundred and first pilot, something's wrong with our organization. We need to be operationalizing. Exactly. Which I think is important, right? That you were living in this age of pilots and everyone wants to pilot something, that's fine. Cause it's good to pilot and check out new innovations, but you have to, pilots have to have a purpose and attached to ROI. And you can't just continue to pilot all your life. So that's the process, progress, not process thing, right? Exactly. I would also say when, you know, I was reflecting a little bit about, you know, the era of dominating and marketing and advertising and the Mad Men era of the 1960s. We've really moved out of that because we have data to create personalization and moving from the one to many to the one to one to what I talked about, which is the one to you, because I can have unique experiences with Time Warner's content of materials because they'll know how much I want to watch something, what I like to watch, and they'll deliver very unique experiences to me and it may change some of what they do with content in the future. And I think that's a really exciting place. The data actually creates this new era of sort of like the, not Mad Men, but Math Men or Math Women, cause we had all women on the stage today, quite frankly. But it's exciting. And in the future. It's a modern era. Modern CX. It's modern, right? The Gold Age of Marketing. It's the job at Time Warner is for passengers to come to her. And I talked about not chasing data. So the customers come to you and the future world is going to be a U2I. Yeah, and I think she nailed the theme that's coming out in our earlier interviews so far this morning was, if you can't get the data, don't base your model around it. It's got to be gettable. You got to have the data. So Laura, I want to ask you with this use case, timetable, great transformation, great success at Time Warner. As the GM and Senior Vice President of the modern CX, the modern era of data, what's the vision for you as you look at this? Because some dots that we can connect is you see some simplification in the products. Platform is now the key. Can we get to the point where we can stand up campaigns and apps in minutes and weeks, not months? Well, I think absolutely. And companies like Time Warner and Kristen with her vision show how quickly you can move and stand things up and scale. And certainly the most important thing is to take out complexity to unleash data, to democratize it, which we've talked about, and then to implement and take our products that actually serve the purposes against a very specific use case in a business ROI. And that's what we're building and it's not limited to marketing. It's all of customer experience because you can't live in a silo from every touch point. We're cross channel, we're fully integrated. We have more data as a tech company combined with Market Cloud than anyone else. And my job is to make sure I serve customers like Kristen Well, so we can talk to her and I can cookie-cut her this and we can, some of them will follow her. It was a great transfer. How long did it take? They came in from the beginning, transformed. I think it's really been a three-year journey at Time Warner, but we didn't necessarily start with picking our technology partners. Part of the piloting process was understanding more about technology, more about the skills that were required within our organization or that we needed to outsource and the process that we needed to go through and improving the business outcomes to your point that the pilot's with purpose. And we had a use case for each pilot as it were. And I think through the end of that first year which we call kind of the pilot phase, we really started to zero in on, we needed technology at scale to really scale the initiative quickly within our organization. And we also think about partners very differently. In this world, it is about figuring out the balance of what you need to take internally and where you're going to bring on and lean on partners and kind of outsource that technology and really be in it together. I mean, Laura's team has been to 26 markets with me launching this around the world. And I think that speaks volumes because we have small territories that would never be able to do it without that scale of the enterprise-wide effort. I got to ask both of you this question because I had a chance to sit down with Mark, and talk about with Mark about this topic. And it was interesting, his response was, because he's old school CEO, is millennials. You have younger people coming into the workforce both as customers and as employees. So they don't want to work for some old shop. They want to work for something that they're used to. So they tend to have a reaction of, why are we doing that way? So can you comment about this new generation because they do kind of put a little bit more pressure to be agile, to be modern. And so they're also your customers want to consume in a new way. Talk about this new dynamic because it's forcing, is it a forcing function or how does that play into it? Any comments? In my business, it's really an olive oracle. It's really about creating spaces for people to explore and learn and to cross-pollinate, whether it's millennials and people who've been in the business for 10, 20, 30 years. That's the most important thing is that people have a willingness to learn. We talked about lifelong learning and cross-pollination and creating spaces. And I think we attract the best talent no matter what age and background. If we're doing things that are exciting and that my team sees success in companies like Time Warner that they're learning and they're excited about seeing the future of a company like Time Warner be on the cutting edge of digital and moving as quickly as they have. With all the planning, I mean, it's tremendous what Kristen and her team have accomplished and we're happy to be a small part of that. Laura, congratulations on having such a great customer. Kristen, great story. Thanks for sharing the Time Warner perspective here on theCUBE. This is theCUBE here live at the Mandalay Bay. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burst. We wrap up with more after this short break live in Las Vegas.