 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern CX Show, Modern Customer Experience, the Modern Marketing Experience converted into the Modern CX Show. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my co-host, Peter Burris, day two of coverage. Our next guest is Catherine Black, a more global vice president, customer success, global customer success at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Catherine, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you so much for having me here. It's been an incredible week, just amazing. Last year we had a great conversation. I remember it was one of those customer focused conversations because at the end of the day, the customers are the ones putting the products to use, solving their problems. You were on stage at the keynote, the theme here is journeys and the heroes involved. What was the summary of the keynote? Sure, as you say, this theme has really been around heroic marketing moments and in a way, I wanted to take our marketers and the audience to an experience in a time where I think a lot of folks can either remember or certainly relate where what was the beginning of really one experience which was Superman. You think about heroism and a superhero, well Superman would come to mind, but I think what was interesting about that is that it was created at a time where most folks were not doing well, it was actually during the Great Depression and most folks wouldn't realize that Superman almost never came to be. It was an image, an icon that was created by two teenage boys, Jerry Schuster and Joe Siegel and what they did is they got audience. They understood just as two teenage boys, my parents, my family, my community is just not doing well and we see that folks are trying to escape reality and so we're going to come up with this hero of the people and in doing so, what was interesting is they really were bold, they were brave, they presented a new way to escape and as a result DC Comics took it up and they launched and they sold out every single copy and I think it's just a really strong message about being able to think about creativity and being bold, Jerry and Joe are really the heroes of that story which was around, my challenge to the audience is who's your Superman? What is your creative idea that you need to get out there? Because in many ways we need to keep moving forward at the same time they'll balance running the business. It's interesting you mentioned Superman and they got passed over and we do a lot of events in the industry, a lot of them are big data events and it's one little insight could actually change a business and most times some people get passed over because they're not the decision maker or they may be lower in the organization or they may just not be knowing what to do. So the question on the Superman theme I have to ask you kind of put you in the spot here is what is the kryptonite for the marketer? Because there's a lot of obstacles in the way and so people sometimes want to be Superman but the kryptonite paralyzes them. Where's the paralysis? It's funny that you say that I think I actually challenge the folks to avoid the kryptonite. I mean there was three things that we really talked about. Number one is modern marketing experience just an incredible opportunity for folks to think ahead, dream big, be on the bleeding edge but guess what, we're all going to go on flights, we're going to head home and Monday morning is going to roll around and we're going to be stuck in running the business and my inspiration and really challenge to the audience and to all of our marketers is how do we live modern marketing experience every day? How do we keep looking ahead and balance the business and really those heroic marketers are able to do both but it doesn't stop there. I mean we talked a lot about this week about talent, we have the right team, kryptonite is not having the right people for today and tomorrow and then in addition to that you can't just have a team, you can't just have a vision but what's your plan? You know we're actually having the right stakeholders engage, right sponsorship, that's certainly probably the ultimate kryptonite if you don't. I mean the sponsorships are interesting because the people who actually will empower or have empathy for the users and empower their people and the team have to look for the yeses, not the noes. Right, and that's the theme that we see in the cloud success stories is they're looking for the yes, they're trying to get that yes but they're challenging but they're not saying no. That's going to shut it down and we've seen that in IT, IT's been a no-no, some people say no ops but in this digital transformation with the emphasis on speed, they have to get to the yes. So the question is in your customer interactions what are some of those use cases where the getting to that yes, we could do this? What are some of the things, is it data availability? Absolutely. I want to share some color on that. You know so I actually had a wonderful time connecting with Mada Furgicino, she met with you earlier and I love her story because she really talks about the culture and placing the customer at the center of everything they're doing to the extent that they're telling these stories about why are we doing this, you know, we're trying to save lives especially in healthcare and just to have stories and images and I know some companies do an amazing job of putting the customer up on the wall and you know when we talk to our customers about how do we actually advance the digital transformation plan? How do we actually align everyone towards this concept of a connected customer experience? It starts with thinking about everyone who touches the customer every day and inspiring them around how they can be part of being a customer-centric organization and that's really important, that's the formula and that's what we see companies that they can break through and have that customer conversation. It tends to align folks. Just saying, we were talking earlier, Mark Herd's comment to both the CMO summit that was happening in a separate part of the hotel here in the Management Center as well as his keynote. You know, he was saying, look it, we have all this technology, why are we doing this 1% improvement? And he was basically saying, look it, we have to get to a model where there's no data department anymore. There never was and there shouldn't be. There shouldn't be, that department takes care of the data. That's kind of the old way of data warehousing. Everyone's a data department and to your point, that's the liberating and also enables opportunities. It does, we talked a lot actually at the CMO summit that we had as well this week. A lot of our CMOs were talking about the democratization of data. And Elizabeth from Tableau, I think you guys also talked to, we talked about how do you do that and what are those use case stories? Kristen O'Hara from Time Warner talked about it as well. And I think that's where we have to go and I think there's a lot of great examples on stages that I would like to think are marketers. And quite frankly. Which one's your favorite? Favorite story? My favorite story. Your favorite story. Wow, that's really putting me on the spot. It's like picking your favorite child out of four. I always say, well they're good at this sport, this is good school, Missouri. I guess one. Or one that you want to highlight. Well one that I mean, because we talked about it today and it was really a combination of team and plan. Just really highlighting on what Marta's driving. I mean if you think about the challenges of a multi-national, this is Philips, Royal Philips, so Marta. And what she's really, her team has been trying to accomplish both B to C and B to B. And it speaks to data. And it talks about obviously having CRM be kind of that central nervous system so that you can actually align your departments. But then being able to think about team, they've done a lot of work. Really making certain they have the team for today and the future. They're also leveraging partners. Which is also key to success. And then having a plan. I mean we spent time with Royal Philips actually at headquarters number. A week ago and they are doing this transformation, this disruptive tour with all of their top folks across, you know, around the world that are running their different departments to really help them think differently. Which is aligning them around that culture of looking out to the future. Let's talk a bit about thinking differently. And I want to use you as an example. Sure. So your title is customer success. Global vice president, global customer success. What does that mean? Sure. I know a lot of folks, I'd like to think that that's just a household name right now in terms of customer success. But I realize it's still a little new and recent. We've seen it elsewhere but it's still not crystal clear. Sure, sure. So when I think of customer success, I mean the shorter answer is we help our customers be successful. But that, you know, what does it really mean? And when I think about the evolution of what customer success, the department, the profession, the role has really come to be. It's serving a very important piece of this cloud story. Go back a decade when we were just getting started actually operationalizing SAS and thinking about how to actually grow our businesses. We found that there just needed to be a different way of managing our customers and keeping customers, quite frankly, because as easy it is to perhaps land a SAS customer and a cloud customer because it's easier to stand them up and it's easier for them to purchase, but then they can easily leave you too. And so what we found is the sales organization, while obviously understands the customer, they need to go after new customers. They need to grow share. And then in addition to that, you know, in some organizations, there are still our services, obviously to help our customers be successful. And that's really important, but that is a statement of work base. There's a start and a stop and an end to that work. And then obviously there's support that is a part of a services experience, but they tend to be Q base, ticket base, break fix. And what we found in all of this is who ultimately is going to be the advocate of the customer? Who's going to help the customer achieve ROI business value and help them ensure that they are managing what they've purchased and getting value, but also looking out towards the future and helping them see what's around the corner. Catherine, I want to ask the question. One of the themes in your keynote was live in the moment every day as a modern marketing executive. Build for your team for today and tomorrow and plan for the future. You mentioned Marta, who was on yesterday as well as Kristen O'Hara from Time Warner, but she made an interesting comment because I was trying to dig into her a little bit because Time Warner, everyone knows Time Warner. So I was kind of curious at the same time, it was a success story where there was no old way. It was only new way and she had a pilot and she had enough rope to kind of get started and do some pilots. So I was really curious in the journey that she had. And one thing she said was it was a multi-year journey. And some people just want it tomorrow. They want to go too fast. Talk through your experience with your customer success and this transformation for setting up the team, going on the transformational journey. Is there a clock? Is there a kind of order of magnitude timeframe that you've seen that works for most companies? Sure. And I actually want to bring in one more experience that I know folks had here at Modern Marketing, which was also Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He actually talked about this very thing. And I think a lot of folks related to that because what he's been doing in terms of building out this community and creating crowdsourced, I should say, I think he would want to say community-sourced content and creativity. It was about, you can't really think about going big. Like I'm not thinking about feature film. I'm thinking about short video clips and then you build. And I think everyone in the audience is like, okay, I get that. And Chris is saying it took many little moments to get to the big moment. I think folks want to do it all right at the very beginning. Big thing, Gary, just add water. Absolutely. Just add water and instant modern marketing. It is, it is. And what we have found, and this is why the planning part is so important because what you have to do, and it might not be the marketer, the marketer, that VP marketing, even that CMO may know, it's going to be a three-year journey. But sometimes it's that, you know, CEO board of director alignment that's really required to hope to mark, this is the journey. This is what your one's going to look like. This is what we're going to accomplish year two. You know, there may be some ups and downs through this because we need to transform sales. We need to transform back in operations in terms of how we're going to retire old processes and do new. And in doing so, we're going to get to this in-state. But you need all of your stakeholders to be engaged. Otherwise you do get that pressure to go big because you know what Mark was saying? You know, I've got 18 months. We need to be able to show improvement right away. We were talking about CIOs on another show that I was doing with Peter, and I think Peter made the comment that the CIO's job, usually sometimes it's in the last three years. So these transformations can't be three years. They got to get things going quicker, more parallel. So it sounds like you guys are sharing data here at the event among peers around these expectations. Is there anything in terms of the playbook? Is it parallel and not an agile going on? How do you get those little wins for that big moment? So I think this is where the, what I would call the league of justice. You got to call in that league of justice. You know, for all these supermen out there because in many ways, you know, you're really challenged with running the business and I think that's the pressure all of us are under. But when you think about speeding up that journey, it really is engaging partners, engaging Oracle Marketing Cloud our success and services team. I know you're going to be talking to Tony a little bit about some of the things we're building, but that's where we can really come in and help accelerate and really demonstrate business value along the way. Well, one more question I had for you. On the show floor, I noticed there was a lot of great traffic. Did you guys do anything different this year compared to last year when we talked to make the show a little bit more fluid because it seems to me the hallway conversation has been all about the adaptive intelligence and data is in every conversation that we have right now. What have you guys done differently? What was there, did it magically just come to you? You say, we're going to have to tighten it up this year? What was the aha moment between last year and this year? It's like night and day. I would like to think that we are our first and best customer because as we ourselves are delivering technology, we ourselves also have to live what we tell our customers to do every day. Look at the data. Look at the feedback. Understand what customers are telling you. How can you help customers achieve value? And we think of this as an important moment for our partners and our companies that are here spending money and spending time to be here achieve value. And what we've done is really create an experience where it's so much easier to have those conversations really understanding the flow of traffic and how we can actually ensure people are able to experience our partners, get to know them, get to know other customers. You know, a lot of folks too have been saying, you know, it's love keynote, love these different breakout sessions but I want to connect with other folks going through the same thing that I am so I can get some gems, get some ideas. And peer review is key and they talk to each other. Exactly, that's right, that's right. And so we've really enabled that with the way that we've laid out the experiences here. And I know it's even going to be better next year because I know we're going to collect a lot more data. Well last year we talked a lot about data being horizontally scalable. That's all people are talking about now is making that data free. The question for you is in the customer success journeys you've been involved, what's the progress bar of the customer in terms of, because we live in Silicon Valley so oh yeah, data driven marketer. I mean everyone's at, well not really. People are now putting the training wheels on to get there. Where are we on the progress bar for that data driven marketer? Where there's really, the empathy for the users is there as no one doubts that. But there's the empowerment piece in the organization. Talk about that piece. Where are we in that truly data driven marketer? Oh, we're still early days. I mean it was obvious in talking to our various CMOs and we're talking about talent and you know the change in what the team and the landscape needs to look like to respond to certainly what we've experienced in technology over the last number of years and then even what was introduced today. I mean that level of I need to have more folks that really understand data on my team but I'll tell you, I think the thing that's really interesting though about what we've been driving around technology and specifically AI. I love what Steve said by the way, which is if a company is presenting AI as magic, well the trick's on you. Because truly it's not that easy. And so I think the thing that we need to think about and we will work with our customers on is that there's certainly a need and you have to be data driven. But at the same time, we want to be innovation ready and looking and helping our customers see the future to the extent that how we think about what we're introducing is very practical and there's ways that we can help our customers achieve success and understanding their audience in a way that is, I wouldn't say it's just practical. We can help them with use cases and the way the technology is helping them do that. I think we're going to see a lot of great results this year. I mean AI is great and I'd love to promote AI hype because it just makes software more cooler and mainstream. But I always get asked the question, how do you evaluate whether something's BS and AI are real? And I go well first of all, what is AI? It's a whole nother story but it is augmented intelligence. That's my definition of it. But I always say, it's great sizzle, look for the steak. So if someone says AI, you got to look on the grill and see what's on there because if they have substance, it's okay to put a little sizzle on it. So to me, I think that's, I'm cool with that. If some people just say, oh, we have an AI magical algorithm. It's just predictive analytics. So that's not really AI. I mean, let's say you're using data. So how do you talk to customers when they say, hey, AI magic or real, how do I grok that? I think it's an important advancement but we can't be distracted by words we place on things that have probably been around for a little while. It's an important way to think about the technology and I think even Steve mentioned it on stage but I think we're helping customers be smarter and empowering them to be able to leverage data in an easier way. And that's what we have to do, help them. And I know we've talked a lot, not take the human and the people factor out because that's still required but we're going to help them be able to concentrate on what they do best, whether it's, I don't want to have to diminish my creative team by hiring a bunch of data scientists. We don't want that. We want to be able to help brands and companies still focus on really understanding customers. You know, AI may be almost as old as Superman. I think you're right. It all comes back to Turing's test of whether or not you can tell the difference between a machine and a human being and that was in 1930s. Well, Neural Networks is a computer science. It's a great concept but with compute and with data, these things really become interesting now. It feels possible. Yeah, and it's super fun. Again, but it promotes nuance things like machine learning and internet of things. These are geeky under the hood stuff that most marketers would be like, ah, what? Oh yeah, a human wearing a gadget is an internet of things device. That's important data. So then if you look at it that way, AI can be just, you know, a way to kind of mentally think about it. Yes, right, that's right. I think that's cool for me. I could deal with that. Okay, final question, Catherine, for you. What's the most important thing that you think folks should walk away from modern CX this year? What would you share from this show, given that on the keynote, CMO Summit, hallways, exhibits, breakouts, there's a theme or a catalyst or a... What should they put in the trip report? It's all about the people. I think that, if I were to distill it down, you think about that word bubble chart, that's people. I think that's the biggest word that came out of this. As much as technology is important, it's going to enable us, it's going to enable our people. It's going to put a lot of attention on our talent and our folks that are going to be able to take our customers to the next level. And the people, the ones that are generating the data too, that want experiences to them. So it is a people-centric culture. It is. Catherine Blackmore here on the side of the cube, at Modern CX is the cube with more live coverage here from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas live after the short break.