 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone, live here at the Mandalay Bay. This is theCUBE's coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Experience event. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host, Peter Burris, with chief researcher at wikibond.com. And our next guest is Nick Edward, who's the president and CEO of Lookbook HQ. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. We're just talking hockey, so I'm all distracted. I'm disappointed. Good to see you. Before we get into it, we have a lot of intelligent content, some of the things that are going on with this platform. But take a minute to talk about what your company does with some context. Yeah, absolutely. So, we're a marketing technology company based in Toronto. We are a very big part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud app cloud. And we kind of pick up where Oracle basically leaves off, where the marketing cloud stops. So, a lot of what happens in the marketing cloud is focused on generating moments of attention and orchestrating that kind of biased journey. We're what happens on the destination side of the click. So, we focus on the intelligent use of content. How do we deliver content? We think of every moment of attention as core to a marketer. Now, that really is their currency, the attention. We need to actually think that marketers, B to B marketers in particular, need to think a lot more like B to C. I think more like publishers. They're obsessed with attention. We shouldn't be satisfied with clicks or form fills. We need to actually be capitalizing on those amounts of attention to make sure that if Bob is reading my white paper, and I need to know that he's actually reading it, how do I then move him to the next best content asset or give him a choice of content assets in session? So, in essence, what we do, what our company does, and we help companies like Thompson Reuters and ADP. In fact, ADP is speaking on our behalf this afternoon. We have a lot of people, like HollyKom, Quintiles, a whole host of big, electrical customers. What we do is to help them take their content use model from something that looks and feels like blockbuster. One size fits all. I don't know if actually Bob watched the video that he walked out of the shop with all the DVD rather. And hence why Blockbuster is R.A.P. And we take that and make it far more like Netflix. We make it far more on demand. Instrumented. Yeah, very much so. So, this is interesting. The attention to impact is interesting. Intention is essentially aided awareness, which is the holy grail in marketing, right? I mean, getting people to have some aid to a final destination, a transaction of some sort. Am I getting that right? Yeah, very much so. I mean, on the B2B side, obviously, marketers' job is to generate high quality marketing qualified leads. And the real emphasis is on the Q, qualified. But companies like Sirius Decisions report that 94% of marketing qualified leads don't close. And that's a damning statistic for a B2B marketer. And our whole hypothesis, and we're proving this with our customers, the reason why that happens is they're not qualified. Bob might have clicked on an email, he might have filled in a form, et cetera, but did he read the content? We need to get an MQL to engage with five, seven, 10 pieces of content to become a high quality MQL. If we're only doing that one piece of content, every engagement, that's really hard to do. They wonder our sales cycles are slow. Well, we also need to understand that there is a progression that people go through as they learn. It's not just that we want them to click on nine pieces of content, as much as we want to see a pattern. So they've read this content and there was a suggestion made or an option provided and they then took the option, which is an even stronger suggestion that they've absorbed it, they've internalized it, and they're now part of a journey. So how does, I really like the idea that we're on the delivery side of the click. So you've got all the stuff that's happening on the presenting things to options and then you're ensuring that when they click, whatever is being delivered is the highest quality in terms of driving that customer forward in the journey. I got that right? Yeah, absolutely. So if we take something which Alec has done a fantastic job, for example, of teaching the community of their customers about lead nurture. And the typical nurture track looks and feels something like six emails over six weeks, advertising content offer A, then content offer B, content offer C, and typically they're scheduled 10 AM on a Thursday. Now this would be great if we could get Bob and the other 12,000 people that we sent the email to to click on every single one of those emails. And the reality is, if I've got low single digit click through rate, it's not going to happen. So what we do instead is, well, if they're engaging with A, why don't we give them B in the same session? Well, they're here. Well, we've done the hard working and the attention. And to your point, Peter, we're tracking that and then we can start to make some really intelligent decisions going forward as to my word. So this is what resonated with Bob. This content asset's actually performed well. So we have two basic approaches to this. One is, we let the marketer curate that experience, decide what A, B, C is, et cetera. Or we actually use machine learning to auto generate. If Bob arrives at A, what should B, C, and D, et cetera B? So that is very much like Netflix where we kind of base our algorithm. It feels very similar to Netflix's content discovery. That's great for anonymous or net new prospects in the top of your funnel. Once you figure out what they're actually interested in, then you can actually speak for the program. How does it work for you guys? You work hard at registration because content in these days has two flavors, free and gated. So there's always that dilemma, how much is free, you want some, you know, flow, tension, and then you want conversion, gated, maybe premium content. How do you guys view that? Is that part of, or independent of what you do? No, it's a big part of what we do. And one of the things, one of the capabilities that we have in our application is actually the ability to serve forms based on time and behavior. So if they've engaged with three content assets, then maybe actually want them to give me some more information or put up their hands. So we can make the form time-based, you can let them try before you buy, as it were, or you can hard gate it. We use Eloqua forms in our application, so all that information flows as normal if the workflows all get triggered, et cetera. It's very much up to the market of how they want to use it. But one of the things that we increasingly see amongst our customers is the most successful do try to take the forms out of the way. Once they are a member of our known database, how much more information do we really need them to volunteer, particularly with our ability to augment that contact record with other sources of data? Asking the marketer, sorry, asking the prospect for it isn't always the most sensible thing to do. So it's the free versus registration, but it's also new kinds of content. One of the things I like to say is software is content. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trying software, for example, is content or presenting an interactive experience that has a software element associated with it. Absolutely. It's a crucial part of gauging where people are. Are you able to start embedding your tooling directly into some of these more interactive elements and choose options within that interaction or is it more options on static content? It could be both. So we're fundamentally content diagnostic. The best way to think about what we do is really as a very smart wrapper that goes around the content and then that can be embedded or it can be shared however you want. We use this destination at its own right. So sure, if you want to kick something off with some form of interactive content, absolutely. We also pull all different types of content together. So if your content is distributed or you want to use third party content, reviews, an expert in the space that's writing about something, how do you pull that in and use that as a jumping off point? And what's really interesting is frequently is the sequence of content. That's the most interesting thing, not the behavior engagement of a single asset. Right, and part of the experience that certainly marketing is developing here translates into other disciplines within the business. For example, service. In many respects, one of the things that you're presumably testing is is the prospect learning the right stuff that actually makes them more qualified. Absolutely. Well the same thing can be said for service, self-service, is the person going through the right sequencing. Are you also seeing a demand for this kind of a product over in the service side and is that tying marketing back together? Yeah, that's a great question. And one of the things that, when we kind of officially launched a company in the application three or four years ago now, we focused very much upon demand generation. Like we knew the problem that we were helping them solve but there are a handful of our customers, Cisco being one actually, but actually at the moment all they do is use us on the customer marketing side of things. How do I drive adoption? How do I drive cross-sell and upsell? I mean all this is, we've got to remember that attention is what we're looking for and the way that we achieve that is using content as our primary asset as a marketer. The channels are important, the creative is important but those really are content offers. Bob doesn't buy because he clicks on an email. Bob buys because he reads his stuff and watches the thing. But it's attention and competency. Yeah. So, you know, PsySims used to say, I think PsySims used to say that an informed customer is the best customer. You want a competent customer. That in many respects the process of moving from a marketing qualified and MQL to an SQL is that customer competent enough to actually engage with a sales person or somebody else to do something. That is spot on. So what we're seeing across our customer base is improvement in conversion rates from MQL to SAO, for example. So McAfee, in top security, now McAfee again. They've seen a three times increase in the MQL to SAO conversion rates. Rockwell Automation has actually made a 300X return on their investment in us in nine months by passing higher qualified leads to the sales team. I think they generated $250 million in additional net in pipe. Rockwell, yeah. ADP, that's doing our customer case study this afternoon. A 3X increase in marketing influence opportunities and a 6X increase in closed one marketing influence opportunities. So more, but to your point, Peter, better qualified. We know that these people are actually red our stuff. Therefore, the conversation is easier. They are actually generally qualified. Carrier has been proving that out by actually 2.4 times faster through the funnel to MQL and then their ACV is 2.3 times higher. Why? Because they're not getting the pushback in the sales cycle. The prospect has self-educated and they see the value now. Nick, I want to get your thoughts on something that's involved in our business. We're an independent media company and we don't really have any ads on our site at all. We have a sponsorship model. We have data, but it's interesting. I'm reading an ad age article right now that says for the first time ever, digital has surpassed TV. I'm not going to remember back in the day. It's always this little slice and it's getting bigger and bigger. But for the first time, desktop and mobile ad revenue surpasses TV for the first time, 22% up-spring from the previous year. So digital ads, some are calling it native advertising or whatever that means, is a key part of the attention cycle. So the role that a marketer needs to take with channels is important. And a lot of content marketers are failing these days that we talk to because they're not being authentic with their message and the users can smell, you know, non-relevant content. Some are clever and make it link-bait-ish. And some are actually really super smart and actually do authentic content. But so that's kind of progression. That's an evolution of the industry. But from a data standpoint, there are platforms out there like SiliconANGLE and others that have an opportunity for impression in attention in real time. How does your system, how does your clients, and how do people deal with that? Is there a way, is there mechanisms? So we have two large publisher customers that run multiple different properties and have very large communities that are looking to monetize. And they're all part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud that use their text app. And we're helping them in two ways. Firstly, kind of from an advertising thing, like high value added. Advertising solutions, I guess, is from one of the better description. How do I help to monetize my community, not just pass to HP if they're the advertiser? Here's a list of names of people that build in the form. Here's actually people that are engaging with your content. And it's a mix of our editorial and your content's tell a story. And then one of the things that we're starting to explore with them is actually far more on the native side of things, actually, of being embedded as, essentially, as a native ad in its own right, which can kind of get launched. That's something which I'm keen to explore further. And at the heart of it is probably even a bigger problem on the ad tech side than is on the martech side. But people like Gary Vaynachev are starting to ask the ad tech industry, we need a dose of common sense here, was the marketing consumed? And that's something which I'm fascinated with. We're starting to see that we can actually identify by channels. This channel might, or this particular display provided, DSP may have generated, you say, I don't know, a thousand clicks in the last 30 days. Did it do anything? Like, was it valuable? It was not valuable. Exactly. Yeah, at the end of the day, these moaked, sustained attention, they have to be valuable. I think, John, we're talking really about a continuum from impression to attention to competence. We want to work with competent buyers. Because it cuts down the time that we spend on it, it reduces the risk that we're wasting our time. And quite frankly, it's a lot easier to work with someone who's really engaged and wants to succeed with whatever we're also. He mentioned the publisher angle. I was thinking also from the customer angle, because I'm a customer, a marketer, I'm going to be looking for mechanisms to go to. The publisher wants better monetization of their communities. So have you seen any patterns in the business that could be a use case for helping customers operationalize? And we've had great success with our business in the sense of saying, hey, we're engaging users, so that's good. You should join in with us at the right time, not, you know, try to do it six hours too late. Right? It's like being late to the party, right? Yeah, most definitely. So that real-time piece is really super important. For sure. We've just changed the way that we're integrating with Eloqua to speed that up. So now we've actually moved to using webhooks as part of the integration and using the map form processing capability. It's faster, it's more extensive, it's more scalable. It means we can get very rich in content engagement data into someone's hands faster and better. And I think, what is it, 50% of people buy from the first person that shows up. So being able to do that is critically important. Member-based communities are getting a lot of trends, traction these days. Some call subscribers to firewalls, but member-based. So something we're starting to look at is, how do we actually start to auto-generate the content experience? Yeah, around key accounts or topics, et cetera. Fascinating conversation, Nick, appreciate it coming on. My pleasure. Look, book, HQ, check them out. Doing intelligent content, scaling content, looking at data, congratulating success. Look forward to following up with you on some of the native advertising solutions that we need. Then you need, and congratulations, and Oracle's certainly taking advantage of it. See you next time. Thanks for coming on. We'll be back with more live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris after this short break.