 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Oracle's modern CX, modern customer experience event, part of Oracle Marketing Cloud. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co is Peter Burris, head of research at wikibond.com. Our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud, also emcee of the marquees and big part of that program. Congratulations on the success of the marquees awards, which were given out last night. Read your blog posts on the site this morning. Thank you. Great to see you again. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Always great to be here. And I love modern customer experience and that marketing is a part of it. It's really been a great transformation this year, the simplification of just narrowing it down to one simple value present, modern customer experience, which encapsulates a lot of stuff, quickly review what that is, and then let's talk about the marquees. Absolutely. So, you know, I'll start with the marquees and so we have a history of celebrating excellence in data-driven modern marketing. So this program has grown tremendously over the past 11 years. When I look at the submissions, there are customers that are focusing on acquisition, loyalty, retention, and they read these stories all the time and spend weeks preparing the submissions. So this event is all about how can we share our intent to help our customers have a good experience as part of Oracle, and then how can we help them delight their customers and deliver experiences and create value at every touch point? One of the things I really like about the change in the name from modern marketing experience to modern customer experience is you move from the process, the function to the outcome and the result. So how are the marquees reflecting that this year? Absolutely. So if you think about where we started, so again, it was six categories, celebrating excellence in BDB marketing, in reaching folks behind a single device, their laptop computer. So cut to 2017, you know, the customer's preferences, their activities are fluid. So great marketing requires you to use a series of channels to reach them everywhere. And so marketers have to balance brand with action and then also deliver on intent. So the markers have had to evolve to think about the habits. So the account-based marketing team of the year was a new award that we gave out that really represented the intent. Are people actually doing this? We had tons of great stories. So we have to balance a bit of the usage of the product and the technology and embracing the new strategies and what's current within the marketplace. So the future of marketing as it goes into data, that's been the theme here. All of our interviews day one and certainly the keynotes, even Mark Hurd was giving a great specific example. Now data is at the heart of it. Adaptive intelligence is the theme. You can see the dots are connecting, the convergence of where the marquees are showing traction are some pretty interesting use cases. Any notables you'd like to share that kind of highlight that data piece? Absolutely. So our winner for best email campaign was from Jetstar and they're an airline in Australia. What's great is they have been able to find ways to... So when you get an email about travel, sometimes you book it at one particular point and your preferences and your relationship with that airliner may change. Your travel destinations may change. So the fact that they can optimize the information at the time of send, sending the weather, curing you to maybe upsell and look at other opportunities to have a pleasant experience, that's amazing. So Laura Ibsen spent some time talking about how we at Oracle are looking to evolve preferences. So going from one to many to one to one and the hallmark which is one to you. And I think the Jetstar campaign, they use Oracle response as a perfect example of that. The first award that we gave out was to Covance for our account-based team of the year and by doing, setting up an account-based marketing strategy, putting it in place, getting all the stakeholders and sales in place, getting the discipline on the content, they were able to increase their engagement with key accounts by a significant margin and they were delighted to be among those and our partners to celebrate that achievement. HVN I want you to talk about for the folks that are watching who aren't here, the buzz in the hallways because the hallways is always a good conversation, certainly at the lunch table as well. I'll include that technically as the hallway but people are sitting down. AI has been a front and center but it's not being painted over whitewash. Oh AI it's hot so let's jump on the bandwagon. There's some real tech involved. What has been the reaction from customers and use cases that you hear in the hallways? Customers are excited about it. I think I, for a lot of our customers had the opportunity to hear Mark Hurd talk about it where he embraced it and said, if you think about AI at the core, it's computing done real fast to help people make really rich decisions about what to do next and so I think our customers are still grappling with all the technology and how to get value out of their core platforms, how do they deliver on their initial objective and then we have a subset of our most mature, most excited who are starting to put those data blocks together and start getting more predictive and allow the machine to do the work for you but in order for you to have, to even think about it, you've got to have great, you've got to fill the cup with great data and I think people are still getting there so that the machine isn't biased and you don't make the wrong decision about how to treat your customers. So just some notable trending tweets I want to just share with you and again get the reaction because this is speaking to the customer use case. One was from a partner Digitas in the panel, Mark Hiedelman wrote, according to Digitas, if you're not looking to use chatbots and AI, you're going to be out of business. Hashtag MME17, little bit of a legacy there and then hashtag modern CX and the other one is Netflix is a great example of a company creating content combined with powerful AI targeting programs. A little bit of a sample of some of the things we're seeing. Chatbots, it's a new interface, new way to use data, Netflix content, which modern marketers need content in this platform, taking a Netflix approach. So kind of begs the question, chatbots, Netflix, kind of modern email, old? So how do you get a marketer to continue to use the reliability of hard and critical infrastructure like email? Not going away anytime soon but it's going to be one dimension of Netflix content marketing, binge watching all this content out there, Netflix and then chatbots for interface, your thoughts? So my thought is I am, so I was in the room when I watched the chatbot piece and I love the fact of the, we could live in a world where you could have a fluid customer experience anywhere where you can ask a question. I also support our communities where you ask a question and know you're automatically going to get an answer to the algorithm. So that delivers on that one to use scenario. So I'm super excited about it. When I look at the Netflix example, even to get the information on what the recommendation engine should be, you still need a lot of data and you still need to know what are the habits of your customers who even land on that decision tree. So I love the fact that folks are thinking Netflix and thinking content but that chatbot thing, oh my goodness, when people start doing that, I can't wait to see those customers that win those markets. But they have to do it right. They have to do it right. Because one of the great, one of the dangers that marketing always faces is the idea that it's all about collecting information, giving, having the customer give something to me and not giving something valuable in return. Absolutely. And the challenge that I see with chatbots and I think you agree, John, is our chatbots going to be used to further automate information collection at the expense of really presenting value. The new marketing, the modern customer experience has to be focused on are we delivering value to the customer at every single interaction? Not is a customer doing more for us inside marketing. What do you think about that? So I agree, because if we do not know that we're creating value and that we're not, that we're adding friction to the problem, you pour that into your algorithm, there's going to be bias. And so you can't make a decision about how to feed information into the machine and not have the right information that says we don't have the right region, we don't understand the behavior across our products. You can't have bias in the model at all. It has to be complete for you to then look at your customer base holistically. Yeah, we don't want to better automate bad marketing processes. Absolutely. We want to use these technologies to continuously drive to use a famous person's parlance, a more perfect union between the smarketer and the buyer. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, you got a great article up on MarTech series. This year's winners have gone above and beyond, fully leveraging the most innovative marketing technology to create customer-centric campaigns that deliver outstanding results as Laurie has been Senior Vice President General. Okay, that's obviously marketing packaging for the quote, you know, from PR. But what she's getting at is customer-centric. Again, this is the theme, multitude of technologies now in the platform. Very interesting. Are customers responding well to this platform and are they seeing the need to stand up things quickly, these campaigns? Absolutely. They are finding that there's more pressure to get interim value. They are absolutely buying into the platform message. And we have quite a few customers who also were recognized for the use of multiple products and multiple partner-related applications. And so we're actually seeing a nice trend in both. To do great marketing, part of the messaging, or part of Laura's talk track from today was people are freaked out about the data, but if you find a way to harness it, you'll create experiences where you'll stop chasing the customers, they'll start chasing you because you'll find the right way to have the conversation with them. And word of mouth gets around too. I'm going to ask you to pick your favorite child of the awards. Was there one that jumps out? Without alienating all the winners, is there one that you like? This is a really, really hard question for me. Because as you know, I read all the submissions. I play a heavy role in writing the speech. So it's really, really hard. Here we go, the preamble to not picking one. Here we go. I don't like to pick my favorite child. No parent likes to do that. I don't like to pick my favorite child. This is a really, really hard thing. Okay, audience favorite. How are they different this year from last year? How about that? Or is there something general that just shows that kind of reinforces some of this customer experience or are you seeing a progress in how the marquees are evolving? Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm happy to answer that one. And so for the first time since 2012, we've brought back the dinner. And so having the marquees and our customer celebration, it shows our intent as Oracle Marketing Cloud for our customers as well, that we love them, want them to have a great week and want to celebrate their accomplishments and get other people to the winning circle. So being at a table and feeling that energy, getting an opportunity to sit with an executive or sit with a member of the team, it's really, really great lift to then come to an event with over 4,000 people and feel warm and feel included. So I think that was an important part and that was a huge feel. I mentioned that we added the account-based team of the year award. Again, you couldn't be in B2B marketing and hide from account-based marketing. It's everywhere. We also delivered a overall customer experience award. So we had two customer related awards and we created one category. And so I personally love the videos. So our best video submission category is one where the viewers got to pick and I would say the reaction of Juniper taking home two trophies last night. If I had to pick one, because that one had a bit of a vote to it, Juniper Networks, they won two awards last night. I love their reaction as well as the reaction of our folks from Brazil. You know, really, really great stories from Bibi and their use of data. We also had Chris Diaz, our leader of the year, who not only led really strong customer experience transformations across marketing, sales, and service. This is the CMO Time Warner. No, that's Kristen. Kristen, oh, Christie. That's, yeah, that's Kristen at Time Warner. I'm talking about Chris Diaz, who's also driving sustainability efforts in Africa. It's a really transformational, huge, huge advocate of Oracle's, as was the team at Kenya Airways. And so there's some really feel-good moments. They're really exciting moments. You can feel it. People were hugging each other. People were laughing. People brought their own noise cannons and sparklers. Who doesn't love an awards show? Who doesn't love an awards show? When you're giving out great trophies. We always get the comparison to the Oscars. And so this year it felt like the Golden Globe. So you handed out the wrong award. So you had a couple of times with the wrong winner. We actually did not have that. But we actually did joke about it. We embraced it. So Kayla Sullivan helped us with the award distribution. And that was fun. The trophy itself is actually made by the same designer, he makes the Emmy. And I believe I said that last year. But the feel was more like the Golden Globes. The, you know, there was refreshments and opportunity to have. He was well done. And it looked great on photos. Big crowd. You had the gyps and all the cameras. Great camera angles. Yeah. And we had a drone do with the delivery. So we played with some new drones. That's a nice one up on Amazon delivering your packages by drone. Absolutely. Drop it in. Absolutely. So we had one that was delivered via tweet. And then we had one that was delivered via drone. And so we covered all the risk management pieces in advance. And I'm just super happy that Envision, who partnered with us and hosting and producing the event, were able to get some of these things cleared. So our intent was, let's be futuristic. Let's be digital. Let's be now. And they managed to incorporate that into the show for us. Well, Adrienne, congratulations on all the great work with the Marquis and continued success. What's next, next year? What do you guys look? I know the process. And you're going to have a little fun now. Relax a little bit. But as you look forward to next year's Marquis, you're watching, you got the submission. It's kind of like the college admissions. You want to know who the judge is. Here he is. What are you looking for for next year? Have you thought about it? Any ideas, just random thoughts? Yeah, it's a great question. And so it takes us about seven months to actually plan to sit down and actually plan our calendar from submission period, the content. And so we tend to create the categories that are aspirational. So we likely will figure out what's the best way to incorporate the trend, get them out early to drive the customers to get really excited about what's next. We're talking about AI now. What will we be talking about in six months? And so I'm looking forward to hearing more customers share about the value they're getting from Marketing Cloud, the new channels that they're using, how they've overcome barriers within their organizations to do new and great things, and really focus on taking these stories and telling them all year. And speed and empowerment. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Adrian Chang here in theCUBE, back with the Markies update and great commentary, great to see you, looking great. Love the outfit, looking good, as always. Thanks for taking the time and sharing your perspective. It took me a while to figure out what that was. The flower, from here it's like. It's good, looks good on you. Adrian Chang here inside theCUBE bringing you all the marquee action, all the great coverage. It's theCUBE, back with more live coverage after this short break.