 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 Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back. We are here live in Las Vegas for Oracle's modern marketing experiences. This is SiliconANGLES theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Jeff Frick, our next guest, Eric Reynolds. SVP and CMO of the Clorox Company. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Good morning, guys. Great to have you on theCUBE. Good to see you on stage. Great to have customers and CMOs on because you're living the dream, as they say in Silicon Valley. So what is the dream? Is it a nightmare? Are you waking up in the middle of the night? What's going on? There's a lot of great possibilities now with data. I mean, you can measure everything now. So you can potentially get everything you need for data. Big ol' stuff going on. What's the state of situation for you? Well, I tell you, it's a bit of both. It's a time of incredible excitement and euphoria and the promise, right? Because everyone's promising everything now, but also enormous fear. I mean, we've been around for over 100 years. CPG is not known for our speed. So, gosh, how do you take something that's kind of old, slow-moving, a successful model, by the way, and then shift it the way consumers are living their lives? We're always trying to catch up with consumers. So it's a bit of both. Fear and excitement. So what are some of the things that are keeping you up at night now? Honestly, you have a big budget. You have objectives. Technology's creeped its way into your world. What are some of the conversations that you're having internally? Well, we're having conversations, I think, similar to most guys like me, which is we have to deliver quarter on quarter. We have to hold and grow share. Most of our categories are slow-growing or low growth. You got to do that while changing out how you market. Very hard to do, deliver the now, prepare for the future, even before the future case isn't quite proven yet. And you know what? And we CPG guys, we love data. We love to be certain. And it's not a time for tremendous certain things. But that's the point, because CPG, you guys have been dealing with data for a long time. In fact, you guys are probably way ahead of the curve in kind of, you know, really managing business to data. That's right. But now it's a whole different set of data. Some you own, some you don't own, some you know the relevance, some maybe the relevance is less defined. And I thought it was interesting in your keynote talking about your 100 year old company, when I was at Intel, it was BKM, best known methods. You know, it was all the ways that they do it, and that worked great for kicking out microprocessors. But it wasn't necessarily built for this dynamic and really kind of changing. And as you said, unknown situation in which we find ourselves. Yeah, I mean, CPG is data rich. We always have been, we're great at retrospective insights. I can tell you exactly what a TV ad does and what they part by what. But now when the mix is changing so fast, it's not just one tactic anymore. How do you harness all that new data quickly to make informed decisions? It's hard to describe just what a seed change that is inside companies like mine, because we're used to being, we really know what we're talking about. Now we kind of know what we're talking about and we're placing bets on the future. It's a new muscle for us. So I got to ask you a question. Some of the tweets from the keynote were pretty compelling. It's some good sound bites. One of them I'd like you to get some, put some color around. You said, digital cannot only be about data and technology. It has to be about the way we work. Talk about what you mean by that. I mean, because you guys work a certain way. You can be kind of slow. You do a lot of TV advertising, a lot of advertising. So advertising is a big part of your business. How are you guys working and how is your work changing? Well, fundamentally, I stand by that comment. We came to a realization quickly that you can buy the data in tech with all respect to my friends at Oracle. It's the organizational change inside. That is the hard part. For example, you have to get people willing to experiment. Do small batch tests to work in very rapid cycles. Hey, we just responded to something on social listening. Let's have it out in two days. These are entirely new ways of working in CPG, which has these enormous long processes. So that has been really hard. So what you say is, okay, if you're committed to the vision, then you have to be committed to changing the way you work. And if you don't, then all that tech just sits in the back and essentially gathers dust. That is the hard piece. And that's quite frankly been the hardest part of it. This is not the data in tech, it's us. It's a super insightful comment. I think that really is what people look at. It's like, what's in it for me? Is there a comment we always hear? You know, hey, what's in it for me? What's for this tech? I got a job to do. So how is that culture changing? Obviously you've got people Instagramming, taking photos, the listening engines are all out there. You could spend your whole life just listening to stuff. What do you listen to? What's important? Well now, because the tech has got to a place where we can constantly listen to all these social feeds constantly, and we have ways of knowing whether this is something real, it says real spike, or just a one-off. So we have, fortunately, someone has figured out how to sift through all this stuff to get the right stuff to us at the right time. The trick is, once we know it, do we have the courage to act on it, or do some marketer who's thoughtful have to go to six layers to me to get a decision to respond? I hope not. But in the past, it was very hierarchical. So that needs to change. That's wild. So another thing that's different with the data, which is kind of an extension of what you guys already did, is the segmentation. Because, right, I'm sure you guys have phenomenal segmentation across your brands. But now, right, it's this vision of the segmentation to one. How are you guys kind of integrating that into the big machine, and how is taking it down to that level changing the way that you guys operate and the way you really look at the world? Yeah, segmentation is going to change. I don't know if CPG will ever get to one-on-one marketing, but we're going to get one to very small clusters. And that is a big journey for us. So what we've had to do is we've had to say, well, let's not try to reconcile all this. We're going to have big strategic targets like for brand positioning and stuff. And now we're comfortable with lots of tactical targets. Tactical used to be a bad word. But through using data like Oracle's BlueKai, we can create small audiences of people and we can talk to them directly. And now we're comfortable, we have something like 14 targets on Hidden Valley Ranch now where we used to talk loosely about one. It's a lot easier actually to execute on 14 than one. I bet we get down to 200 one day. And those are personas that you've identified. Yeah, different personas in the data and they want to be talked to either in a different way or in a different place. But no longer is it just one big target we sort of loosely talk about. And that's going to change a lot because it'll inform our media planning, our media buying, our creative choices, everything. So how does that impact, now that you've got this tighter, better, closer relationship with your consumer putting Hidden Valley on their salad, they still got to go buy it in Safeway or Albertsons or Kroger or whatever. So is there kind of friction in the channel? How do you leverage the tighter relationship that you have with your direct customer and either benefit the channel? How does that work with kind of a channel distribution model? Well, some of our most progressive retailers are meeting us right alongside us as we try to work this out. And not just our pure e-com players like Amazon, but like Target, Walmart. We're getting good at sharing data so that when we talk to a shopper, when they get close to the moment of purchase, we hit them with just the right message. Sometimes we're sharing data with Walmart or Target that allows us to get to their shopper before they enter the door. So we do see this as digitally enabled. The retail guys don't want to be left out and we think, again, they want to target those out. Geodata too, I mean, it's mobile experience. Incredible data. And once they get in the store and when those guys figure out how to handle all that Geodata, that's going to be another big evolution. Right, all the low-energy Bluetooth, where they are in the store and really kind of bringing the online shopping experience now into the store in terms of- Two people walk down an aisle, right? Two phones. So if we know one's a heavy Clorox user, one is not, you can target different offers to them right in the aisle when you know they're in the aisle. That's where this is probably going and it's terribly exciting. Chatbots would be great for that. I mean, chatbot technology is booming. So I got to ask you about some tactics on the marketing side. So when you get into the clustering, you mentioned, because we do something similar with our media business, we call crowd spotting. We can engage with people once you have these crowd spots, very efficient on the semantics of it. Does that change your marketing mix and your content marketing on social? Because if you have that kind of clustering, you're going to get different fidelity signaling on what they're interested in. That's right. Do you shift content to them and nurture them that way differently? Yeah, I mean, we're working on our content strategies and are more importantly, the production process behind the content. We can't make infinite numbers of pieces of content, but we are preparing for a day where we're going to have lots of, sorry, less sophisticated might be the word, pieces of content to target at different audiences. We'll do much less big production. And the trick for us is to do it quickly and to do it fast because we do have a scale issue. If we worship every piece of content, we'll go broke. I think that clustering thing is really relevant, especially with social distribution as people start talking to each other in this kind of peer-to-peer way. Really interesting phenomenon in the early days, but what's the biggest surprise? I got to ask you over the past few years, obviously you see everything. I mean, you see agencies coming in, talking to you about pitches, you're all, let's do a new ad campaign or you should be doing this. And a lot of shoulds going on in the market right now. A lot of promises, as you mentioned, what has been impressive to you? What's surprised you? What's been impressive? What's been horrifying to you? Share what you're seeing in the industry. Having hands down what's impressive is everyone has religion now. At least they have the awareness that everything is changing. We're an industry full of hyperbole and broken promises. But the fact is the future is changing and people are wrestling authentically with the questions from the agency side to my media partners to myself. Everyone says, okay, if the consumer is going this direction, we have tech to get them. Like everything needs to change. So what gives me hope is how serious people are taking it. What terrifies me is separating all the promises from reality. Because everyone's telling you they can do everything. They can do it easily. And that's just not the case. So I think the industry needs us some honesty and some transparency of where we are in the journey, celebrating some wins and keep advancing it. But there's just two, what terrifies me is all this stuff people promise me and they're never going to deliver. So what has changed in the agency? Because the cloud and data as it progresses and obviously as the work streams change inside the customer bases to serve their customers evolve to be compatible with the agile and the kind of dev ops, it implies abstraction away of processes. And I'm not going to say people's jobs will go away, but things will be automated and orchestrated differently. So it implies shifting of value. And obviously agencies earn a lot of pressure now on being relevant, but the value propositions certainly are changing from the promises to reality. So where do you see the value proposition changing and what's the role the agencies in this role? What do you see there? Well what we see in fact, we just went through a process and selected some new partners. Where we think the best agencies are working on now is fundamentally retooling their communications process around media and digital and then informing the creative process. So the value is definitely shifting to media and to media planning far more than ever before. The best agencies start there and then they back into the creative. Now they do it all together and they're not afraid of the data and they're not afraid of putting out lots of content that may not be as beautiful, perfect, or pretty as they're used to. But it is a significant change because it requires- It's a more iterative process. It's much more iterative. It's much more iterative for the client. We used to give a brief, they'd come back eight weeks later, show us three options, we'd pick A, B, or C. It's a little bit of an exaggeration but that's kind of how it was. Now we have to have our content people with the agency real time develop this content. What about when you look at kind of the bifurcation of media, so you still have, you know, friends involved in big broadcasting, right? And you say, you know, when you want to get a big name out there, you know, there's nothing really like big broadcast media. That's right. It's called broadcast. And you still have Super Bowl and events like that that really aggregate audience. Then you've got kind of this micro segmentation that you're talking about with the individual that tweeted something that through your sniffers you feel like you need to react to. And then you have this other thing which was represented again on the keynote with social media that when it hits can be as big or bigger than not quite the Super Bowl but pretty, you know, pretty phenomenal. So when you're looking at your kind of media planning and kind of this bifurcation between you still got the mega media, then you have the micro and then, oh my gosh, this YouTube thing went viral and it's got eight million views. You know, how are you kind of sorting all that out or you know what these things are great to see? Well, fortunately I have lots of media people stressing about it over that question. But I would say broadly is we like film. We like TV. There's some things you just can't beat the reach of TV. So, and we're going to do that. Figuring out though, it's not just do we do TV broadcastage or whatever. It's saying what is the intention of that media aperture and so that we know what we're designing for. For example, we have to just set aside a lot more free dollars for content now to deploy quickly. We used to put it all, I used to have an 18 month plan. I knew what I was going to run 14 months from now. That those days are over. But I would say that by being able to direct media very quickly to certain places and certain moments of intent. TV great for big stories, big product launches, big narratives we want to lay down. The smaller apertures are good for micro targeting and tuning the message just right. And I think to be honest, we're still, I'm always honest, we're just figuring out how to plan and execute all that. It's intoxicating at one level. But again, the reality, rubber hitting the road is where you got to see the meat on the bone or the ROI. The ROI has to be there. The ROI has to be there. Well, Eric, thanks so much for sharing your insight with us here on theCUBE. I thought I could stop by. Great date, I was like, Jeff and Jeff just saying, all the answers are on theCUBE interview. You laid down some really good insight. Thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure, guys. Thanks so much. This is theCUBE here live in Las Vegas, SiliconANGLES flagship program. We'll be back with more, you're watching theCUBE.