 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 Prick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Oracle marketing experiences, modern marketing experiences. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, my co-host, Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE. Our next guest is industry author, president of Convince and Convert, Jay Baer, also VIP influence in our book. He's really well regarded, certainly an expert in this field. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. It's awesome to see you as well. Thanks for being here. Great, we'd love to chat. Certainly do a lot of crowd chats to see you on there, laying down some great authority. You are at a unique perspective. I want you to share with the audience what you talked on the panel here at Oracle Modern Marketing Experiences. Because they're talking about modern marketing. You look at a lot of companies, you go to a lot of other events across the industry, compare and contrast what's going on here. First, talk about the panel, what was the highlights, and then what's the aha moment out of this event? Yeah, it was a really interesting panel that they asked me to do in the general session. They called it marketizing, the principle that most brands that have been around for 10 years or longer kind of come out of a creativity-driven, advertising-centric communications model, right? Let's reach our audiences by TV, by radio, by print, outdoor, all the things we used to do, direct mail even. And now we're switching over to this very digitally-centric, data-driven marketing model. But in a lot of cases, brands are still not ready to kind of converge those even inside their own walls. You still have the brand marketers doing TV, and then you've got the digital guys, like the people here in Modern Marketing Experiences, doing the digital stuff. And there's this collision course, right? And one of the things that was interesting in the panel is that Jim Cooper, who's an editor at Adweek, said, look, this is the beginning of the end as advertising as we know it. And that's a pretty heady comment to say, look, for a guy who- Is he coming from Adweek? Exactly, I mean, I'm like, whoa, let's make sure everybody heard what he said, right? He is at Adweek and says, this is the beginning of the end of advertising as we know it. So that was a really terrific opportunity to do a panel like that. We also had Abercrombie and Fitch on the panel talking about their sort of digital transformation and how they've used a lot of the technologies featured here from Oracle Marketing Cloud to kind of level up and do a lot of just-in-time, real-time, highly targeted, personalized kind of things. And I think that's the big takeaway for me of this show in comparison to the lots of other tech shows that I'm at and that you guys are at, is look, we've been talking about integration and customer journey mapping and all that stuff for a decade now, but I think it might actually exist. Like, I think- It's like scary. Yeah, it's like, you know, I heard about this giant catfish that lived by the dam and everybody talks about the catfish and now you're like, oh my God, I actually saw the catfish, right? You know what I mean? It's like Loch Ness Monster stuff going on. Yeah, I know. I'm like, floor, knocked out of my chair. And Oracle has a lot of muscle around it too, so not only is it Marketing Cloud, and again, this is, they've done their homework. They really had a mishmash with the M&A strategy, which was a good strategy. Portfolio looks good on paper, but Kevin did a good job. Kevin, I'll call it the GM. He basically made the data layer, the interoperable, horizontally scalable component. That is a winning architecture. If they can pull that off, they can still let the apps be personalized prepackaged with big data, highly differentiated. So that, if they can pull this off, it's a winning architecture. I couldn't agree more. I think the acquisition strategy has always been sound, but they're not the only one at the Marketing Cloud that has a pretty sound acquisition strategy. But at the end of the day, it's can you integrate it across pieces, right? And if they can do it the way they demoed it, then what you're going to see is an average customer buying more and more of the different pieces of the Marketing Cloud, which then opens up all the app ecosystem. And all of a sudden now, you've got an enterprise customer for life because the switching cost gets too high. Yeah, and that's what they talk about. We just had Catherine on enterprise customer, a customer for life is their mantra of course. That's the way they price it too. So you got to give Oracle credit for that. So they're really good at pricing and keeping customers for life, whether they want it or not. But you see them being more open. But I got to get your take on the openness with the ecosystem. And I also want to get your take on how this translates into the operationalizing of it. Are people in this transformation, new world of digital, everything enabled? Who runs this stuff? Are people ready to run the catfish that we saw? It's like, oh my God, it totally exists now. Now it's a process of how do you budget for it? How do you get the cash? Who owns it? Who runs it? What's the roles? Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And we've actually, we've almost done an inversion, right? So for quite a while we fretted a lot about the software side of it. Like we want to be able to integrate, we want to be able to have one login, we want to be able to do all these things. And now we actually can do that in some cases. And now the question is, okay, great. Now what we've been promised actually is real, but who is the person pressing those buttons? And that's one of the things we've talked about on the panel, is that the skill sets required to do this, like day to day in a company, are not skill sets that a lot of marketing teams have. You're talking about serious data science, real time analytics that also has to have a layer of creativity on top of it. And a lot of marketing teams just simply don't have that in their org chart. So where do they find it? Do they, do they pull it out of their own IT people? Do they, do they cross train marketers to be data scientists? I mean, I think that's a dubious proposition in some cases. Do they go invent some new job title that says, okay, this is, these are the people who make these marketing products work? They had to grow their own. Like a webmaster was in the early days of the web. So I certainly see that, but that's going to take time to grow your own. Of course, years. But I got to get your point on this. The short-term answer would be agency. And I want to get your thoughts on this because, one, agencies are under siege, and two, boutiques are popping up, but they're popping up with the kind of like the PR perspective, the social media. Hey, I'm going to build an app for you and then pass it on to somebody else or, hey, I'm going to be a boutique video thing or I'm going to do this kind of agency work for you. And then you got the monster agencies that are monolithic and slow. Yeah, I think there's a real opportunity for specialty agencies that can operate and strategize an actual marketing cloud to say, okay, our specialty is Oracle Marketing Cloud and we can make it sing where your guys will come in, set it up for you, and then train your people how to do the basic stuff. We'll handle the mid-layer stuff. There's a huge opportunity for that kind of consultancy and not just for this cloud, but for all the different clouds. I think that's what we're going to see. Yeah, and that's going to be a new expertise. Yeah, and really developing that expertise. I just love your webmaster example because before it was like, you know, get somebody's kid, they go sit and they make it, you know, make us a catalog online. Social media management, the same thing. I mean, it wasn't like people were graduating college with a degree in Twitter. I mean, they were like, okay, you seem reasonably intelligent and reasonably trustworthy. You're the young guy in the team. Right, you grew up with this stuff. So here's the logins, right? I mean, for lack of a better option, that's what happens. Well, I think as commerce moves into this social realm and this new digital progression, is it's end-to-end now digital. So you've got legacy systems, which should be abstracted away with cloud and DevOps. Now you have the social media managers, which I believe will turn into social business analysts or SBAs, like a DBA is for database, you're going to have now a new role to administer, essentially what I call the digital airport. Planes are landing, different payloads. You got radar, listening engines. Where do we put it? We put it on Snapchat. We put it on Instagram. We create a blog post and make a video. What do we do? Where? How? How do we trigger an email? All the stuff. And then Amazon shows the way on spinning stuff up. So I think marketing will be spinning up spot campaigns, like, hey, something just went viral. Hey, fire everything at it. So I think this brings up a mindset. Like, who pulls that off one in the tech to do it? So I think Oracle's showing me that they could probably do that. The CMSs need to be re-evaluate work. But outside of that, who does that today? Yeah. And who's got the budget for it? So again, this is an operational problem. I don't think people are ready for it. Your thoughts? I completely agree. I think the budget will get solved, because it's mostly a human capital issue. And I think it will be a marketing budget. We're going to add more data-rich marketers to every marketing team. And already, we do a lot of consulting in this area for big brands on deep social strategy and marketing integration. And the ones that are the best at it today are the ones that are the most data-centric. The ones that are not saying, well, this seems like a fun piece of social content, but the ones that are using real testing, real optimization, real data to say, this is the right message at the right time and the right place to the right audience. The same kind of things that all of this makes real. What are your customers telling you? What are you guys doing? I know you do a lot of great work with some of your clients. Share some things that you're doing that are working for you, where you're winning, where you see success. Well, it's funny. You just talked about this sort of org chart problem. That's a lot of what we're doing lately is big brands come in and say, look, we've got a sales team. We have a content team. We have a social team. We have a social customer care team. We've got all these people who are kind of bumping up against one another inside the organization. How do we sort this out into a coherent team that actually can all work together? So one plus one equals three. So it's funny. We're doing a lot of sort of process and role mapping consulting for big brands to help them figure that out. And then even inside that sort of the things that we're specializing in right now is this confluence of marketing, digital marketing and digital customer service. Huge, huge question. I got to ask you a question because this brings up a good point about technology getting ahead of yourself. So I was talking to a customer, I won't say their name, big, huge multinational global company, missed the ball on a lot of opportunities because they were caught in sprinkler training. So there's a danger to training too early and sprinkler is a tool out there and that had promised a lot of stuff and it does a certain thing well but they got all trained on as the holy grail. And then they, oh my God, wait a minute. We have, now new things are popping up, new tools. So the new tool tsunami is coming out. How do you see people solving that problem? Because that's the fear. I don't want to make a commitment to have to unwind it or hey, I bought Jai, we're Yammer and I put all this investment on. Now you got to unscramble the omelette. I got to unscramble. Absolutely. Yeah, it's really hard. And what's fascinating is you've got a pretty decent set of stacks now that have good functionality up and down. But now you've got this whole, and it's like many of them just surrounding us while we're sitting here, this whole new ecosystem of what would considerably, generally speaking be called a point solution but are really good stuff that you don't have inside this general thing which is why this app environment is so interesting, right? You can actually sort of get best of both worlds in theory. Let's buy into this cloud, buy into this stack but then have access to all this cool stuff on the outside which keeps that fresh, right? So you're not bought into a legacy system that ages and decays. You're bought into a legacy system that actually grows and optimizes with you. That's really interesting and that's so different from the previous generation of CRM systems and things like that where you bought it and then it just sort of grew old in front of your eyes. Jai, you're going to be busy. President of Convince and Convert, you get a lot of, I'm sure more clients are going to be coming in, New York Times bestseller author, great guy to follow on social, great expertise. Thanks for sharing. Thanks guys, good to see you. Thanks for being here. We'll be right back with more Cube. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.