 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Okay, welcome back everyone. Day two of live coverage of theCUBE here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jet Frick. Our next guest is Nadia Stallman, Managing Director of Accenture Interactive. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. So you can't miss your booth when you walk in. Got a nice set up there. You guys got a big prominent location to show. Tell us about Accenture Interactive and what you guys are doing at the show. Oh yeah, so thanks again for having us. It's a great summit, a great conference. It's one of our big kind of showcases for the year. We've got a couple of different experiences we're demoing this year. We've got some really cool XR experiences that people are coming by the booth and putting devices on and really interacting with and having fun with. We've got some interesting topics around trends in content creation, headless content, 3D, et cetera. So some great topics around how we're disrupting marketing and content with our clients today. And content's become so important now. Not only is it you have content developers, you have creatives, you have all kinds of applications now integrating what was once kind of a cottage industry of creatives and doing some cool stuff. Now that's kind of table stakes. It's a whole nother level of cloud computing meets creative. So it's kind of an interesting growth curve right now. You're seeing a lot of adoption, a lot of the kind of tools from tech in with the creative. Talk about that dynamic because that's kind of the whole show here. It's all about not just marketing cloud and it's about creative experiences and now there's new cool stuff out there and people try to figure out how to do it. Talk about that dynamic of creative tech coming together. Yeah, and I mean, for Accenture Interactive that's really kind of where we've built our business around having that as a technology company that's really brought in a lot of specific talent to build out that creative tech kind of talent mindset. It's a different way of kind of operating and working and building those experiences. So we're kind of first and foremost an experience agency. So we're all about building experiences for our clients and it's a kind of a unique patch that we've carved out for ourselves to say, you have to consider technology as part of it and data and effectiveness and analytics but then actually how do you build experiences that are really can engage our customers and be really innovative. So certainly as Accenture Interactive that's our remit and we're working at some really exciting work with clients in that area. And it's kind of. Talk about the difference between Accenture Interactive and Accenture Proper because we've done a lot of interviews with Accenture. You guys are different. Talk about the differences that you guys have and what's your mission? So Accenture Interactive our first and foremost we are an experience agency. So again those experiences can be everything from your typical kind of website experience and how do you best engage consumers at your site to commerce to XR. So we've got as I mentioned several different applications and experiences in XR that we're demoing here and we're working on with our clients on AR, VR as well as sales tools. So in Accenture Interactive we take a creative first. Like what is the experience we really need to build? Do the right type of research and then bring in the design talent and the unique kind of optimization talent and technology talent to be able to ensure that whatever we're building for a client is actually scalable for more than just kind of that one exciting use case they've got. But how do you ensure that that's really going to be the right platform and experience they can scale for other parts of the enterprise, other parts of their business, et cetera. So we're proud of who we are. I'm curious because you guys are involved in a lot of things you keep seeing XR for extended reality and I think it's interesting because some people think it's got to be 100% immersive or not. But as you guys are pioneering there's a lot of places to kind of extend reality, blend the real and the CGI and kind of have this mixed combo experience. So where are people using that? What are some of the interesting opportunities beyond trying on address on the computer with your avatar that you guys are working on? Right, so we definitely have our share of kind of cool consumer experiences and one of the interesting things that's happening in the market is your consumers are expecting as they start to engage with AR, VR, even immersive commerce and your online configurators for shopping and kind of configuring your own products, they're expecting the same level of like high end visualization that they're getting in the programs and media that they're consuming at home. So getting that right is that's a challenge for a lot of brands and it's a challenge and technologies are changing pretty rapidly to support that. So we've got an experience here, we're demoing this week which is really on kind of that high end cost which is allowing you to design your own bathroom experience with countertops and it's so realistic that you can literally, you feel like you can touch that, you can appreciate the textures, you can touch the experience, so it's really helping to kind of give customers, give consumers back control so they don't have to rely on a contractor and other types of design services, they really have many options, they can see what that looks like in their own space, I can do that from the convenience of my home, et cetera. And that's kind of one end around kind of still consumer facing and how do brands create more immersive shopping experience and make that path to purchase easier, effective, faster, like, and you know, close. Other types of experiences that I think are really, really powerful and really interesting is starting to use XR for training purposes. So we just want a global actually at Mobile World Congress for a VR experience that we built to train foster care professionals on making incredibly complicated decisions around what to do with families and children and really train them. So how do you take a very subjective experience and train people for the different scenarios to make the right judgment calls? And so that's an interesting kind of application of XR. We're also doing XR in the field of service technician, so working on automotives and ensuring you're using kind of virtual technology to be able to understand is it the right part I should be working on and what are the best practices around whether it's a home technician that's going out and trying to install a complex device or working on an automotive, so. So practical use cases, and then there's also the glamorous ones like Game of Thrones. Talk about you guys, your relationship with the Game of Thrones as a dynamic there. Share, we do all love the show, so at theCUBE we call Game of Thrones fans. So you guys are involved in that, so share. Yeah, yeah, so and it's very timely obviously with the final season coming out on the 14th and for like super fans like myself, it's been an exciting year for us. So Accenture Interactive has done a very deliberate series of acquisitions over the past 10 years and last year we acquired MacAvision. So MacAvision was renowned internationally for their CGI and special effects work and one of the most exciting awards they've received is an Emmy for Outstanding Visual Effects for Game of Thrones. So it got a lot of buzz at the time saying what is Accenture Interactive, what's the kind of thought process there? Game of Thrones, Visual Effects and it really was all about this idea of, again consumers are expecting this level of visual and this level of experience in how they're interacting with you. So MacAvision was a very, we needed a way to be more innovative in how we're bringing the right talent and capabilities to building XR experiences, product configurators, et cetera. And MacAvision had a unique capability around 3D visualization, CGI, visual effects and really that, again, that whole package of kind of art and technology to create these very high-end visualization experiences. So it's been a really exciting year for us and starting to now take that model and start to bring that to marketing teams that we're working with in the brands, e-commerce teams and starting to say how do we create these type of... And it's interesting, I was looking at the MacAvision site and some of the, you know, they have some of the cool movie stuff but I was fascinated by the car stuff, right? They have these beautiful car shots for car commercials and I'm curious after hearing about, you know, A-B testing and, you know, all the things that you can do with your experience, the digital experience interactive, are you seeing that now with, I got 47 versions of that car commercial because now if I'm doing it with MacAvision, I don't have to shoot 47 versions. I can manipulate the CGI car in a very different way because, you know, as you said, super high gloss, super high glam, but it's programmable so you can do stuff with it without having to call the team together and hope for a beautiful day in Carmel to go over the bridge. Exactly, all those variables. So I mean brands right now, as they're trying to kind of create, they're trying to react and set up models to support hyper-personalization, programmatic content and that is so challenging. It's so challenging because the traditional means of going out and doing the shoots that you're talking about and doing even product shots and tons of photography, like you have to create so many versions. It's so expensive to be able to support all of your products, all the variations. When you put global into the mix and you've got different labels and different languages, et cetera. So again, it's a scale problem today. I think a lot of people think it's a technology problem but it's actually, that's a solution but it's definitely, it's a human problem. So in our practice we focus on content creation models and so this is why MacaVision acquisition was so essential is we're disrupting the way content is created, whether it's for brands and their commercial spots or it's their e-commerce content or their social media content. By using this idea of taking a digital twin of, let's say, the Mercedes or the Mercedes carb and being able to take engineering data and visualize a product digitally before it even exists. Before, I mean, literally the prototype is not available. You know this amazing flexibility to certainly configure that in many different ways digitally for these shoots. All you need is some background imagery, et cetera, to be able to roll the car through and some art and magic, but you're able to, you're now able to represent that product, get your media created and put it into market to start generating buzz, pre-sales, et cetera. I mean, that's so powerful. You're getting ahead of product launch. And how are the cost dynamics changing? Because before, as you said, it's expensive to do a shoot. Yep. But now you can do multiple flavors within the computer. Is it just radically different economics? Because I'm sure when they come in, they say, I want, you guys are Game of Thrones, I want that kind of production value. You're like, yeah, that's really expensive. Yeah. But to do it in software is a completely different kind of approach. I mean, I don't know how brands are not going to pivot to this model because they cannot possibly, they're going to have exponential costs to be able to keep pace with, again, even just the variation of product, much less starting to now personalize that or be able to dynamically render that. So the cost model today is exorbitant and it's just growing. And so this, because you're now able to configure things digitally, and again, use the right tools to be able to represent different versions of product, change the backgrounds, change any of the factors that you need to be able to say, this is a new piece of content that I think is better targeted at this segment. I'm going to test that out a little bit. I don't want to kind of double down on that. And incur all of that cost to go do the shoot. Gives you a ton of flexibility, especially in how you're bringing talent in once to shoot it once and then not being able to swap. For example, I may change the bracelet on the talent to do five different ads at it instead of having to bring it back in. It's risk management too, as well as testing. Knowing what you're looking at, get some visibility into what success looks like, then kind of figuring it out. Exactly. One of the things I want to ask you is that in the tech business, we've always been fascinated by Moore's law, doubling the speeds of the processors. That's an intel thing. But if you look at what you guys are doing with the Game of Thrones on the high end with the CGI and all that cool stuff, the experiences that people have today become the expectations, or the expectations become the new experiences. So you've seen an accelerated user experience visually. You got gaming and culture, gaming environments. I mean, Fortnite wasn't around a couple, two years ago, right? Now half the world pretty much plays the game, or you got Game of Thrones. So these now will soon become table stakes, these kinds of experiences. I got to see where you guys are going with that. How does that change how you guys operate? Because you got to look at the expectations of the users, the consumer, that might be the new experience. How to figure out that dynamic is challenging. How do you guys do that? What's the guiding philosophy around that trend? Yeah, so we are kind of maniacal about ensuring that the experience we're designing is really well thought through with the right research and the right input from customer in the right context. While it may sound like a great idea, and it may sound like something you need, like how do we make sure we're doing the right diligence to build the right experience and represent the product in the right way? And then we also are maniacal on the backend of testing and optimizing that. So being very realistic about is it effective, is it driving, whatever the KPI is, even if it's just innovation, is it driving the KPIs that you need? And then adjusting because nothing can be stagnant these days. I mean, it's a super exciting area. I mean, there's so much opportunity and change going on. It's awesome. Final question, talk about the relationship with Adobe. You guys are here. Adobe's got a whole growth strategy in front of them that looks really strong. They got a cloud technology platform now. They're integrating data across multiple their modules and their suites. How does that impact you guys? What's your relationship with Adobe? Yeah, so we are a very big partner of Adobe. We've had a accolade throughout the years of being partner of the year. So we have a large practice dedicated to helping clients really look at how to implement the stack, how to build content and campaign delivery models on top of that. So it's both a technology and an implementation focus, but quite frankly, and I think what's unique is a process and kind of how do you operationalize that focus? Like I said, you know, everyone's talking about atomic content these days. And certainly, I mean, the Adobe Stack absolutely can support that and really power personalized and dynamic content for you as a brand. But operationalizing that is a totally different story. So we're really working with the Adobe team closely and with our customers to kind of build the model on top of the stack and say, how do you need to change your organization to really get the value out of these tools and really deliver the experiences that are going to be differentiated. We've heard that all along all week here and other events we go to, it's not the tech problem, it's these new capabilities being operationalized with older cultures as a people process problem. Yeah. That seems to be the big story. It's an, I would say it's an ongoing challenge for the brands we work with and they're constantly getting additional market demands to be able to kind of continue changing their model. Like I said, programmatic particularly and hyper personalization is really putting that into practice is challenging. Well, great practice, Nadine. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights here on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks again for having me. Live coverage here in Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, theCUBE coverage day two continues. Stay with us for more after this short break.