 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now here's your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Oracle's modern marketing experience 2016. The hashtag is MME 16. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Bycoz, Peter Burris, head of research and our next guest is a fellow researcher himself, Bruce Rogers, who's the chief insight officer at Forbes Media. Welcome to theCUBE, great to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for spending the time to come on. We'd love to analyze and opine and connect the dots, provide the data, extract the signal from the noise. This marketing space is dynamic because is it an ad tech marketing show or is it a software show or both? And is it really got the platform? Does it all hang together? Certainly on paper it looks good with Oracle. People want to integrate more and more data. They want more insights. How does the CMO make sense of this show? First take. Yeah, that's a good point. So part of what I do at Forbes, having spent most of my career at Forbes running worldwide marketing, I started our research division Forbes Insights several years ago. And part of that is what I call our CMO practice, which is research editorial and events for marketing leadership. And I also write for Forbes as do you. And so I get, I have the great good fortune and privilege to talk to literally hundreds of CMOs around the world. CMOs, the whole role is undergoing one of those incredibly overused words of transformation, but it just happens to be true. The customers leading that transformation and the traditional ways of connecting with customers has been disrupted. And the ways to make those connections better, I mean technology is a solution to better connect with customers. Now it's also, it can, it's a two-edged sword, right? And technology can be the thing that can be disruptive. It can also put customers at arm length from brands as opposed to bringing them together. But hopefully with the right organizational strategy which has to come first, then technology solution. Yeah, as Jeff Frick always says, it could be either creepy or magical using the data because the measurement piece is critical. And we talk about this in theCUBE and I want to get your take on this is that with the confluence of the cloud, which is unlimited compute theoretically, Amazon Web Services shows a great path for shadow IT. Now we're seeing cloud being used for shadow marketing, standing up quick things, fast technology. And then you've got the data pieces of this that were once in silos, email marketing, destination driven, commerce transaction or sales oriented, sales person oriented. Here's a bunch of leads to B2C personalization. Now with a whole nother user experience going on with mobile, Facebook just announced their earnings, smashed the results with mobile. So you're seeing now the user's role as pretty paramount. So what's your, what do you see as the pattern for that trend around the CMO boardroom conversation because they also want to invest. There's a technology component to it. There's a couple of things. How do you reconcile those two things? Yeah, so I would say one, the thing that CMOs say to me almost invariably is please help me simplify my life. My life has gotten incredibly complicated. I have a more tech overdose universe with well over 3,000 companies. And I think what has been quite frankly brilliant about the Oracle strategy is sort of slowly pulling those pieces together. And eventually in the keynote product presentation that we saw today is now they're starting to put them together into one user interface. So the email folks don't have to just go to their email and the data and analytics folks and putting that together. So now we're starting to see the integration of technologies that is starting to make life easier for marketers. I have a question. I know Peter probably got a ton. His specialty is digital transformation, but you guys put out a piece with Oracle, the age of the brand agency and customer collaboration, how to make it work. He's out there, it's in the handouts. But that brings up the question of with cloud comes automation, making things simpler. It usually means reducing the steps it takes to do something. Agencies, hello. The automation and some of the new tech is actually shifting the role of what is going to be kind of abstracted away if you will. And so where does the value shift? So the agencies are now under a lot of pressure. Huge pressure, the bloom is off the road. The ROI is now the central conversation. It's not just nice demo and you get the big client contract. Everything's measurable. There's a couple of things happening. And actually quite frankly, that was surprising because having sort of lived in this space, agencies are under siege, right? I mean the model is broken. And so the research we did was to kind of find out what is this relationship like? And actually we found out that marketers are looking for deeper collaboration. They're looking for solutions. They don't have, the roles are changing. Marketers are bringing on skill sets that you would have previously been inside the agency. So what is the agency now? So what the agency brings is sort of the massive scale. And particularly when it comes, when the world of advertising and data is coming together under the world of artificial intelligence, machine learning and programmatic buying, right? That is happening in such a fundamental way. And that's a game about scale. Now does, maybe Procter & Gamble is somebody who can scale but can the average company scale, own that technology, have owned the relationships with hundreds of millions of consumers to have that data set, probably not. And the technological technology further complicates the equation because do the agencies have the skill set? Certainly that might have mega mergers going on with global scale and reach, but do they have the people? That is a good point. I think to your point that the agencies, the state of the art in marketing has traditionally been driven by agencies. Correct. And agencies would say, here's the state of the art in advertising. Oh, by the way, it's tied to buying ads. Here's the state of the art email. Oh, by the way, it's tied to sending out more email. The metrics that we're using, we're going to define. It's not uncommon to go into an account, go into a large marketer and say, how are you spending your money? Discover that one third of the money they're spending with an agency, the agency is using to prove that they're getting value out of the other two thirds. One of the things that's interesting about this is the question is the conversation because of the role of data is now driving to the role that technology is going to play within marketing, especially because customers want to be engaged digitally. And the agencies are not positioned to lead that conversation. And I have a sense that they feel a little bit put out by the whole thing. What's your sense? Are the agencies ready to follow or are they ready to become more technological savvy so they can once again participate in setting the standard for the state of the art in marketing? Well, part of that whole conversation around scale is this technology arms race that's happening, particularly on the agency side. And the rise of the strategic advisory firm, all of whom now have major advertising agency divisions, Accenture, Deloitte, Deloitte's a sponsor here, Accenture's a sponsor, they are, they bring this strategy and tech integration skillset and they're just buying up talent for creative. So if you can marry creative and the strategic analysis and perspective plus the technology implementation experience, now that's a whole new world. And they're, for right now, they're tending to win the race. Now on the traditional agency side and on the traditional agency holding company side, they're moving into, they're moving in strategic advisory. Yeah, they're trying to buy little consultancies and little tech boutique shops too. Yes. So as you think about it, you do a lot of research with CMOs. What problems are they no longer worried about because technology helped them solve them four years ago? And what's keeping them up at night now that they're looking at a show like this to provide answers about? It's a great question. No longer worried about, I don't think I've ever met one that's no longer worried about. Something. I think what they're worried about is one having, do they have the skill sets and capabilities inside their organization to orchestrate the incredibly powerful and enabling technology that's available. And in two, do they have the ability to stay ahead of that curve? And are they not locking themselves into some solution that's outdated in two years and the whole world's going to go to a chat bot system and we've built an email, a world for email that no longer exists. So that keeps them up at night. I'm basically a miss on the investment thesis of some area. A miss on the investment, technology investments. I mean, they have to have a portfolio approach to their technology investments and they have to have a test and learn and experimentation and those are not skill sets that you would normally have associated with marketing leadership five years ago. Well, the whole agile thing comes up and you mentioned the scale part of the agency, cloud and big data and mobile bring us element of speed on execution. So agility is a developer concept that's moving into marketing is interesting. So scale implies bloatedness and slowness. So how do you get this critical mass of say global scale or footprint scale with agility? So that kind of brings the generic as an open question but I'd like to get your thoughts on that in context to the trend we saw on the IT side. Shadow IT was enabled by Amazon, right? Shadow IT became the forcing function for everyone to kind of get off their butts and Mark Hurd talked about this candidly with me in January. So where is that going on marketing side? Like is there a shadow marketing development? Like what are markers doing to kind of circumvent pre-existing roadblocks? Are you seeing anything like that similar dynamics? I think maybe the difference in the evolution of this whole process with the marketing side of the organization is, I don't think they're going to fall in love with the technology. I mean, on the IT side, you know, you have religious wars over technology, right? I don't, you know, because marketers are, have been forced to be technologists, not technologists by trade. You still have to have all the skill sets around communications and creating emotional bonds with customers and moving them through a decision funnel and persuasive communications. Those things are still at core of what marketers do. Technology enables it, and it doesn't happen without technology. The scale is where technology comes in because now you have to have those, those, that communication in real time, you have to have hopefully what has become in the expectation, consumer expectations, that you know me, I've come to your website, why don't you know me? So now, can you actually, because it'll go somewhere where you do. You know, why do I, you know, the first, the barrier for frustration over the friction between company services or products and buying has to be decreased tremendously or people are gone. And technology is the only way to solve that problem. Bruce, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights here about the marketing tech. I'll give you the final word for the folks watching who aren't here at the event. Share the top level pattern that you're seeing in the CMO world relative to mark tech and the complexities. You mentioned some things earlier. What's the top line trending item, that pattern you see over and over again, whether it's a solution focus or anecdotal observation? Yeah. So I think bottom line, CMOS are looking for overarching solutions that help solve their problems. And they're looking for solutions that have longer lifespans and that are open architecture that allows innovation to take place. All right, and you got the paper out there at Forbes and we're all contributing on Forbes. Check out Forbes Insight, CMO Insight, Bruce Rogers, Chief Insight Officer of Forbes Media. This is theCUBE. Extracting that insight here, sharing that with you. We'll be right back with more live from Las Vegas coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be right back after this short break.