 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio this morning for a CUBE conversation, talking about content marketing, attention, economy, a lot of really interesting topics. That should be top of mind for marketers that were in very interesting times on the B2C side and even more, I think, on the B side. So we're excited to have Randy Wooden. He's the CEO of Perklate. Randy, great to see you. Thanks very much for having me. A real pleasure to be here. Absolutely. So for those who aren't familiar, give us kind of the quick and dirty on Perklate. Well, Perklate was been around for about seven years. It started as a social media marketing platform, so helping people, helping brands build their brands on the social landscape and integrating campaigns to deploy across the different social channels. Over the last couple of years, it's been moving more into this space called content marketing, which is really an interesting new area that marketers are coming to terms with. How do you put together content and orchestrated across all the different channels? And it's interesting. A lot of vocabulary on the website around experiences and content, not a lot about products. So how should marketers think and how does experience and content ultimately map back to the products and services you're trying to sell? Well, I do think that's a great point in the distinction between modern brands are trying to create relationships with their consumers rather than pushing products, especially if you're B2B or technology, pushing speeds and feeds. Instead, you're trying to figure out what is going to enable you to create a brand that consumers pull through. Getting pushed at. And so I think the idea around content marketing is that people, some ways advertising isn't working anymore. People aren't paying attention to display ads, they're not clicking, they're not processing the information, but they are still buying. So the idea for marketers is how do you get the appropriate content at the right time to the right person in their purchase journey? Right, and there's so many different examples of people doing new things. There's more conversations kind of of the persona of the company of the purpose, purpose-driven things really trying to appeal to their younger employees as well as their younger customers. You have just crazy off-the-wall things which never fail to entertain like Geico who seems to break every rule of advertising by having a different theme every time you see a Geico ad. So people are trying humor, they're trying theater, they're trying a lot of things to get through because the tough thing today is getting people's attention. I think so, and that's, they talk a lot about the attention economy that we just, we live in a world of exponential fragmentation. All the information that we're processing across all these different devices and a brand trying to break through, there's a couple of challenges. One is you have to create a really authentic voice, one that resonates with who you are and how you show up. And then I think the second point is you recognize that you are co-building the brand with the consumers. It's no longer you build the Super Bowl ad and transmit it on TV and people experience your brand. You have this whole unfolding experience in real time. You've seen some of the airlines, for example, that have struggled with the social media downside of brand building. And so how do you control, not control, but sort of engage with consumers in a way that feels very authentic and it continues to build a relationship with your consumers. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of things have changed. The other thing that's changed now is you can have a direct relationship with that consumer whether you want it or not via social media touches. Maybe you were before that was hidden through your distribution or you didn't really have that direct connect. So being able to respond to this kind of micro segmentation, it's one thing to talk about micro segmentation on the marketing side. It's a whole different thing without one individual with a relatively loud voice is screaming, hey, I need help. That's right. And I think there are a couple of things on that point. One is I've been in technology for 20 years. I've been in Microsoft. I was at Salesforce. I was at Ad Ready, Avenue A, Aquantiv and now Rocket Fuel before I came to Perkley. And I've always been wrestling with two dimensions of the digital marketing challenge. One is around consumer identity and really understanding who the consumer is and where they've been and what they've done. The second piece is around the context. That is where they are in the moment and which device they're on. And so those are two dimensions of the triangle. The third is the content or in advertising, it's the creative. And that's always been the constraint. You never have enough creative to be able to really deliver on the promise of personalization of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that now is the blockade. That one now is the bottleneck and that now is what brands are really trying to come to terms with is how do we create enough content so that you can create a compelling experience for each person? And then if there's someone who's engaging in a very loud voice, how do you know and how do you engage to sort of address that but not lose connections with all your other consumers? Right. It's interesting you bringing up something in some of the research micro moments. And in the old days, I controlled all the information. You had to come for me for the information and it was a very different world. Now, as you said, the information is out there. There's too much information. Who's my trusted conduit for the information? So by the time they actually get to me or I'm going to try to leverage these micro moments, it's not about necessarily direct information exchange. What are some of these kind of micro moments and how are they game changers? Well, I think that the fact that we can make time, we can make decisions in near real time. And when I was at Rockefuel, we were making decisions in less than 20 milliseconds processing something like 200 billion bid transactions a day and so I just think people are not yet aware of the amount, the volume and the velocity of data that is being processed each and every day and to make decisions about specific moments. So the two moments I'll give you as examples are one, I'm sitting at home watching the Oakland Raiders with my two boys. Back on the couch and we're watching the game and Disney makes an advertisement. I'm probably open to a Disney advertisement with my boys next to me who are probably getting an advertisement at the same time by Disney. I'm a very different person in that moment or that micro moment than when I'm commuting in from Oakland to San Francisco on BART reading the New York Times. I'm not open to a Disney ad at that moment because I'm concentrating on work, I'm concentrating on the commute. And I think the thing that brands are coming to terms with is how much am I willing to pay to engage with me sitting on the couch versus me sitting on BART. And that is where the real value comes from is understanding which moments are the valuable ones. So there's so much I think we can learn from ad tech and I don't think ad tech gets enough kind of credit for operating these really large, really hyper speed, really sophisticated marketplaces that are serving up, I don't even know how many billions of transactions per unit time, a lot of activity going on. So you've been in that world for a while as you've seen the shift from kind of people driving and buyers driving to more automation. What are some of the lessons learned and what should we learn more on a B2B size from this automated marketplace? Well, a couple of things. One is the machines are not our enemies. They're there to enable or enhance our capabilities. Though I do think it's going to require people to rethink work specifically at agencies in terms of you don't need people to do media mix modeling on the front end and Excel files. Instead, you need capacity on the back end after the data has come out and to really understand the insights. So there is some retraining or re-skilling that's needed but the machines make us smarter. It's not artificial intelligence. It's augmented intelligence. I think for B2B in particular what you're finding is all the research shows that B2B purchasers spend something like 70 or 80% of their time in making a purchase decision before they even engage with a sales rep. And as a B2B company ourselves, we know how expensive our field reps are and so to make sure that they're engaging with people at the right time, understanding the information that they would have had before our sales cycle starts, super important. And I think that goes back to the content orchestration or content marketing revolution that we're seeing now. And I think that there's, when you think about it, most marketers today use PowerPoint and Excel to have their marketing calendar and run their campaigns. And we're the only function left where you don't have an automated system like a sales force for marketers or a service now for marketers where a chief of marketing or SVP of marketing has on their phone the tool of record, the system of record that they want to be able to oversee the campaigns. Although on the other hand, you're using super sophisticated AB testing across multiple, multiple data sets rather than doing that purchase price, right? You can test for colors and fonts and locations. And it's so different than trying to figure out the answer, make the investment, blast the answer than this kind of DevOps way, test, test, test, test, adjust, test, test, test, test. You're absolutely right. And that's what at RocketFuel and any real AI powered system, they're using artificial intelligence as the higher order. Underneath that you have different categories like neural networks, deep learning and machine learning. We were using a logistic regression analysis and we were running camp algorithms, 27 models a day every single day that would test multiple features. So it wasn't just AB testing, it was multivariant analysis happening in real time. Again, the volume and velocity of data is beyond human comprehension and you need the machine learning to help you make sense of all that data. Otherwise, you just get overwhelmed and you drown in the data. So I want to talk a little bit about P&G and other close and dear to your heart in the old days, but more recently, I just want to bring up, they obviously wield a ton of power in the advertising spin campaign. And they recently tried to bring a little bit more discipline and said, hey, we want tighter controls, tighter reporting, more independent, third-party reporting. There's this interesting thing going now where before, you went for a big in because then you timed it by some conversion rate and you had customers at the end. But now people, it seems like, are so focused on the in, kind of forgetting necessarily about the conversion because you can drive promoted campaigns in these social media that now there's this spectra, hmm, are we really getting what we're getting? So again, the P&G and the consumer side are really leading kind of this next revolution of audit control and really closer monitoring to what's happening in these automated ad marketplaces. Well, I think what you're finding is there's digital transformation happening across all functions, all industries. And I think that in the media space in particular, you're also having an agency business model transformation and what they used to provide for brands has to change as you move forward. P&G has really been driving that. P&G, because of how much money they spend on media has the biggest stick in the fight. Right, right. They've brought a lot of accountability. Mark Pritchard in particular has laid down these gauntlets the last couple of years in terms of saying I want more accountability, more visibility. Part of the challenge with the digital ecosystem is the propensity for fraud and lack of transparency because things are moving so quickly. So the fact that on one side, the machines are working really well for you. On the other side, it's hard to audit it. But P&G is really bringing that level of discipline there. I think the thing that P&G is also doing really well is they're really starting to rethink about how CPG brands can create relationships with their consumers and customers much like we were talking about before. Primarily in before, CPG brands would work through distributors and retailers and not really have a relationship with the end consumer. But now as they started to build up their first party profiles through clubs and loyalty programs, they're starting to better understand the soccer mom. But it's not just the soccer mom. It's the soccer mom in Oakland at four o'clock in the afternoon and she goes to Starbucks when she's picked up her kids from school. All of those are features that better help P&G understand who that person is in that context and what's the appropriate engagement to create a compelling experience. That's really hard to do at the individual level. And when you think about the myriad of brands that P&G has, they have to coordinate their stories and conversations across all those brands to drive market share. Yeah, it's really interesting transformation as we were talking earlier. I used to joke always that we should have the underground railroad from Cincinnati to Silicon Valley to get good product managers, right? Because back in the day you still were doing PRDs and MRDs and those companies have been data-driven for a long time and worked with massive shares and small shifts in mark percentages. But as you said, now they're having to transform still data-driven, but it's a completely different set of data and much more direct set of data from the people that actually consume their products. And it's been a long journey. I remember when I was at Microsoft, gosh, this would have been back in 2004, 2005, we were working with P&G and they brought their brands to Microsoft and we did digital immersions for them to help them understand how they could engage consumers across the entire Microsoft network and that would include Xbox, Hotmail at the time, MSN and the brands were just coming to terms with what their digital strategy was and how they would work with portal versus how they would work with other digital touchpoints. And I think that that has just continued to evolve with the rise of Facebook, the rise of Twitter and how do brands maintain relationships in that context is something that every brand manager of today is having to do. My father, I think we were chatting a little earlier, started his career in 1968 as a brand manager for P&G and I remember him telling the stories about the disciplined approach to brand building and the structure and the framework hasn't changed, the execution has over the last 50 years. So just to bring it full circle, before we close out, there's always a segment of marketing that's driven to just get me leads, right? Give me leads, I need barcode scans at the conference, et cetera. And then there's always been kind of a category of kind of thought leadership, which isn't necessarily tied directly back to some campaign but we want to be out front and show that we're a leading brand. Content marketing is kind of in between. So how much content marketing lean towards kind of thought leadership? How much should lead kind of towards actually lead conversions that I can track and how much of it is something completely different? That's a great question. I think this is where people are trying to come to terms with what is content, long form, short form video. I think of content as being applied across all three dimensions of marketing. One is thought leadership, number two is demand gen and number three is actualization or an enablement and the BDB for your sales folks and how do you have the right set of content along each of those dimensions? And I don't think they're necessarily, I fundamentally think the marketing funnel is broken. It's not you jump in at the top and you go all the way to the bottom and you buy. You have this sort of web touch of experiences. And so the idea is going back to our earlier conversation is who is that consumer? What do you know about them? What is the context? And what's the appropriate form of content for them where they are in their own buyer journey? So a UGC video on YouTube may be okay for one consumer in a specific moment but a short form video may be better for someone else and a white paper may be better. And I think that people don't necessarily go down the funnel and purchase because they click on a search ad. They instead may be looking at a white paper at the end of the purchase. And so the big challenge is the attribution of value. And that's one of the things that we're looking at percolate is almost around thinking about it as content insight. Which content is working for whom? Because right now you don't know and I think that really interesting thing is you have a lot of people producing a lot of content and they don't know if it's working. And I think when we talk to marketers that we hear their teams are producing content and they want to know. They don't want to create content that doesn't work. They just want a better understanding of what's working. That's the last challenge in the digital marketing transformation to solve. And how do you measure it? How do you measure it? How do you define it? How do you define it and categorize it? And so that's one of the challenges we were chatting a little bit before about what you guys are doing in a cube and your clipper technology and how you're able to disaggregate videos to these component pieces or what in an AI world you call features that then can be loaded as unstructured data and you can apply AI against it and really come up with interesting insights. So I think there is a, as much as I say the transformation of the internet has been huge. AI is going to transform our world more than we even can conceive of today. I think content eventually will be impacted materially by AI. I still can't help the thing of the original marketing quote. I waste half of my marketing budget. I'm just not sure which half, but really it's not so much the waste as we have to continue to find better ways to measure the impact of all these kind of disparate non-traditional funnel things. I think you're right. I think it was Wanamaker who said that. I think your point is spot on. It's something we've always wrestled with and as you move more into the branding media, they struggle more with the accountability. That's one of the reasons why direct response in the internet has been such a great mechanism is because it's database. You can show results. The challenge there is the attribution. But I think as we get into video and you can get to digital video assets and you can break it down into its component pieces in all the different dimensions. All of that's fair game for better understanding what's working. Randy, really enjoy the conversation and thanks for taking a minute out of your busy day. My pleasure, always enjoy it. All right, he's Randy, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching.