 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Welcome back everyone, CUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, my co-host this week. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is Janine Falcone, who's the marketing agency lead in North America for Accenture Interactive. Yes, yes. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having me. So love having the conversation. We just talked before we came on camera around the role of the agencies. You guys are doing a lot of big work for big brands, B to C, B to B. There's a big shift going on with cloud computing. We've seen that movie, it's happening right now. Amazon, Azure, it all going on. But what the marketing world is, not just about marketing cloud, there's a lot more going on there. The impact to the marketing world and the agency relationships are impacted. What's going on? Give us the state of the market. Happy to. So at Accenture Interactive, a lot of clients come to us and they're living in this world. I'm going to talk with my hands, sorry. Living in this world of like chaos, as I like to call it, because there's so many things going on. The technology landscape that you described, it's crazy out there. Remember the landscape used to be this big, now it's this big. So there's all that sort of market buzz and chaos around, I should buy this technology and that technology and marketers and CIOs, they've all been out there doing that. So that's one piece. The second piece is the customer expectation. All that is evolving and changing. And customers always expect, I don't really care who you are, retailer, bank, whatever, they kind of have that Uber experience that they all expect, regardless of product or service or anything like that. So marketers have always tried to deal with that in the way they knew how. But then the third component is the business climate and what's happening in their worlds with either shrinking budgets or aging workforce. I don't even mean age necessarily as much as skill set, aging skill sets, things that used to matter don't. They've got that. They've got organizational silos. They've got all these things. So those three things. Plus, I'm a marketer. I still have to deliver that old brand promise that they're told to do. It's a crazy, crazy time. So all theaters are on massive change over, shifts happening. Marketers and CMOs have also relied on agencies for help. Totally. They have domain expertise in certain areas. A&A agencies isn't the other thing. But now that the value equation's shifting in the economics, underlying economics, behind it are getting some visibility around. It's digital, it's a different new ball game. Now you've got AI and machine learning has caused that shift. So the question is how should your customer or how are your customers dealing with the agency relationship because at the end of the day it's value exchange. Totally, and they'll often come ask us that. So not only do they have all those silos and all those things, they could have 17 different agencies across multiple product lines that may have been, they're doing a great job in their own silo, but who's bringing all that together? And then it's not even, am I just not spending my money right with these agencies? It's like, what are they delivering for that? So when they come to us to holistically look across all of that and help them, we start with the customer in the center. Of all those siloed, crazy areas, you've got to start with the customer and what do they expect and how do you deliver to them? So yes, we're seeing this crazy world in the agency space too, a brand agency, it's digital age, all the different kinds of agencies out there. I'll toss another piece of fruit in the blender and mix it all up. So I was talking with the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer at, no, Chief Security Officer at Microsoft and reports to the board in cybersecurity they're going through the same transformation that is happening in marketing, where now you have technology and APIs and tools, technical tools. So he's shrinking his supplier base now because he doesn't want his skills gap to get widened by having to learn new tools. So there's now a new forcing function on the tech side. And now we see that kind of creeping into the Adobe conversation where it's like, there's tech now involved. So you now have to shrink the suppliers even more. So how do you get from 17 to three? So this seems to be a discussion around the impact of tech, your thoughts. Yeah, well, absolutely. That was one of the areas I talked about. So what happens there is they'll need marketers to understand technology, which today many do. Let's be honest, right? Like 10, 15 years ago, they didn't. Today they do, but it also requires you both internally and externally to have multiple skill sets. And sometimes they'll say, should I be bringing this in house? Should I bring that in house? What do I do with this technology? And there's never one answer. There's never like you should outsource this or that. And so technology has had that massive impact on, oh, I can do this myself. And then they realize I can't. And then back to the, but do I have the right skill sets internally, externally to be able to do that? And it's often 17 different skill sets to do one thing where it used to be a lot different. Well, Jeff and I have talked on theCUBE before about the classic business school conversation around core competency should be in house. Correct, yeah. And you outsource your non-core competencies. How do you see that evolving? Because at some point there has to be core competencies around data and things of that nature. So what's your thoughts? How do you advise clients on, okay, if you're going to go in house and start putting the toe in the water and building it out, it's an investment, and all the things you talked about, what's the core competency? I mean core competence to me or anything related specifically to your industry that people have to continue to get skilled in and expert in, and they want to do just that one thing. Sometimes people that are broader generalists in marketing and data, they might get bored doing that. But if someone is like, I want to be really good at this and I'm going to continue to hone my skills in that one thing, data analytics, whatever, then that may be, and you live in the right market, you don't live in kind of a part of the country where it'd be hard to find those skills, to be honest. I mean, some parts of the country, it's easier than others. So that is one way to look at it. But anything that requires generalist knowledge or cross-industry knowledge or things that are constantly evolving and you want someone else to pay for the training. What's the CMO conversation like for you in clients these days? Because obviously a lot of stuff going on, as we just illustrated, the game is still the same. They got to provide that brand promise. Now they got the tech stacks, they got all these new things. Hopefully the ball will move down the field faster. But what is the CMO conversation that you have? How do they stay ahead of the curve? What's their edge? How are they posturing right now? I mean, I think it's an amazing time to be in marketing. So CMOs to me that are the pioneering CMOs, the ones that are really focusing back in on the customer and delivering those relevant experiences. They're the ones that are being successful because they try to not, certainly not ignore all of that chaos that's surrounding but stay focused. And then they don't worry about, oh, this isn't in my silo, I have to kind of reach across and I have to make sure I get this person. They have to be the leaders. They have to lead the industry like knowledge and business and be the leader in the organization, whether or not they are and just be the pioneer to get that done. That makes them successful. The ones that are excited about that, they're the future, right? It's funny, we interviewed a guy from Clorox a while ago and you think of CPG has been data-driven forever, right? They're coming out of Cincinnati, they all got trained, you know, at T&G. But this is a whole different level of data-driven execution than what they've been doing for years and years and years. That's right, because potentially they were product-centric. So they dealt with their product in CPG and I'm going to sell toilet paper. And I'm going to be the best marketer there is, but the customer expectations surrounding that have changed and they expect you to know them in a relevant, non-creepy way and product marketing to customer marketing is a big shift and potentially, I know a little about a lot of industries, CPG has been very product-focused, which is difficult when you now have to be customer-centric regardless of product that your company is trying to sell. And the changing rule of distribution, especially in CPG where before they would ship the toilet paper or whatever they're doing and it goes out the door and they don't know anything else about it until the next order comes in. Correct, yes. Now, they know how the products are being used, they got a direct connection to the customer and they need to establish a relationship beyond just the actual execution of the purchase. Totally. So a very different kind of a challenge. It's crazy, I love it. I mean, I think it's a crazy time to be able to do that. And again, the blurring between marketing and commerce and sales and service, there's all sorts of debates on where marketing and commerce sales service begins because it's all clustered together now. And then there's creativity and technology and data and analytics all converging. So to me, people that understand all of those things at a high enough level and are good collaborators and orchestrators that know how to get things done, they will be successful. Do you think a lot of people tried to buy their way out of the problem? Because more technology's been around for a long time, arguably, kind of leading edge in a lot of the things in terms of a web experience, but there's so many of them and you can't buy your way out of the problem. You had to actually execute. That and buy it quickly, right? I'm going to buy it and I'm going to plug this in. I mean, I feel like that might have happened years ago and now you're right. They're seeing the, oh my God. Now that too is like its own silo. Now they have a technology silo too in addition to potentially some organizational silos that they have to break down. But the good news is that everybody sort of sees this now and kind of gets it and if people are just sort of focused on to do the right thing for the customer because if you don't, someone else will. And sometimes going back to what used to work works. Like now, if I call a company, I have no expectation they're going to answer the phone. And when they do, you're like, wow, that was a great experience. I scheduled a vacation, it ended up being non-refundable and I'm like, I'm just going to try to call. It was one of the online, it wasn't Airbnb. It was one of those like services. They answered the phone. It was seven o'clock on a Thursday night and I'm like, oh, no problem, I'm like, this is the greatest experience I've had. I'm going to use them again because I didn't expect that. So it's not like what used to work doesn't work anymore but has to work in the right context. It's so pleasant surprises. Exactly, exactly. That's the relevancy. You need help and you got it. Yeah, and then they said, I said, oh, okay, well let me, they're like, we don't need your information. You know, I have your cell phone and I'm like, oh, and I wasn't creeped out by that. I'm like, oh, thank God, now I don't have to fill out a form. Yeah. Didn't have to do mother's maiden name like six different times. And then you know what I said? How do you guys make money? Like I was so fascinated by this that I just had to sort of figure out the business model because I'm a marketer. My point is that was, I don't know how much it costs them to do that but that was a positive experience. They probably don't have a lot of people calling. They probably had nobody to call it. And I don't know how much. They probably ran the company for all I know. So I got to ask you, I got to ask you with all these new changes you mentioned in one of this great example of how the world's changing. KPIs also change around what's real and what's relevant because these new things are going on where may or may not have KPIs. So how does the CMO get out in front of that and how do they evolve their skillset to either grok that understand all this new KPI potential? Yeah. And have that front and center and working through the marketing mix. Yeah, I know you can have KPI overload too, right? So remember, old school still works, brand matters. Brand, no one worried about measuring that stuff years ago and part of that is still relevant. I had a session earlier today and people talked about CPIs, like customer related influence and things like that because that matters. And some things you absolutely, I know this is Adobe, I might get in trouble, you maybe can't necessarily measure but you know what matters to your brand. And some of that matters too. Now how much you spend on that, how you sort of track that and maybe track, I'm all about like mixing gray and mixing qualitative and quantitative stuff. That's part of the trick of being a marketer. And these signals, they're data signals. Totally, yes. So I got to ask you a question on the agency front and go back to the agency for a second because with SaaS apps and these new things people add to the phone which is blended kind of channels. Yeah. Is there a new agency model emerging around cloud and SaaS applications that doesn't feel like an agency but acts like an agency because if you're an agency and you're providing a service you have software as a service models out there self-service. Yeah. Is there an evolution or change over on how new agencies look like and how does a CMO know if someone's a new agency is going to be relevant or not? I mean, it totally depends on the kind of agency and I would tell CMO to not necessarily worry about that. I wouldn't worry about, do I need a new kind of agency at all? It's like, what am I getting? What are they delivering for me? I would go back to the first question and what do I need to keep as a core competency inside versus outside? I wouldn't worry about, it might be the technology question right now I'm going to have even these other crazy agencies. What I would worry about is what do I know I need to outsource and have people help me with that are going to come up with the best ideas. And I mean, agencies still do that today because to come up with a creative idea you need that expertise that is outside of your industry. So I don't see that ever changing. I mean, I could be right. I would ask you in terms of, because you said because brand matters and I always look at Harley Davidson as kind of the extreme brand loyalty where people tattoo it on their bodies and there's a whole ecosystem outside of the motorcycle that's a real passionate group of people. Should everybody strive for that? Can everybody? I mean, they can't get quite to where everybody's tattooing brands on their arm but where kind of the limits and is it kind of appropriate based on what the product is? How do people think about that spectrum? I might be a little biased on that. I always think brand matters. I always think that when you think of something if you don't in your head know what that stands for whether or not it's a positive or negative is not really relevant. It's yes, I think it does. Now, should they strive to be that? No, but they have to be differentiated and they have to have people know what they do quickly because if you have to figure it out like, I mean people struggle with that today in terms of knowing where to go for what so without a clear value proposition differentiation and a brand that matches that and a brand you can live up to with every experience it's going to be rough. You might have some early success but it won't, I don't know that it'll last over time and strong brands kind of carry you through some tough times too. If sales are down or the market changes, things like that. Well, we'll keep doing our interviews at events and getting the smart people. So what is your brand? We interview smart people and all the answers come out. That's right. We're the community. Janine, thanks so much for coming on and sharing these awesome insights. Thank you guys. Final question, what's going on in the show for you? What are some of the hallway conversations you're speaking? What's the top storyline for you here at the show? It's two things. It's what's going on in the market with our clients as we just talked about and it's what's going on in our own industry. I mean, there's craziness in our own industry which is kind of fun. You know, what players do what and who's going to do what and where's this all going and it's fun. I mean, it's really, really fun and exciting to be a part of this industry. Well, thanks for coming on. It's the queue where we're extracting the signal from the noise at this event. Adobe Summit 2019, talking to the smartest people, bringing it to you, bringing that data to you. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.