 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 Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for Oracle's modern marketing experience. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Vic Cathuria, head of Global Agency Partners for Oracle's Marketing Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, excited to be here. So the agency world is under turmoil with the digital transformation because mainly they've been a steward for brands. B2B, B2C, C2C to bring high value, good messaging to two customers, help close business, create impressions, all that good stuff that goes on in the agency world but with cloud and some of the marketing technology stuff. You've got this really challenging time. Give us the state of the union on the agency side because there's a variety of different agencies. You've got PR agencies, up to full service agencies, conglomerates at a global scale and then the day that their customers want speed, agility and better results. That's right. What's the state of the union? So I think what's really interesting is the past view is absolutely right for the advent of the marketing cloud with a big focus on data, results of explosion of platforms in place, snapshots, Instagrams of the world. As well as the fact that you have technology and programmatic emerging very, very quickly and strongly, there's been a massive focus on accountability. As a result, you've seen a couple of key things happening. First of all, the agencies are pivoting away from the old compensation model. Remember the old data, 15%? Well, those are long gone. You're lucky to get five or three or even 1%, right? So the whole premise of getting compensation as a percent of your media spend, that's going to start to go away. Very quickly, the agencies are getting to the business of delivering relevant business outcomes. If anyone can do that, you're going to be a part of the equation. If not, there's going to be very different conversations. So accountability and ROI are two key themes that are emerging very, very quickly. And now systems integrators, traditional enterprise computing kind of paradigm is now creeping into it because it's a workflow, value chain reconstruction, rebooting, revamping, however you want to do it, re-platforming. You start to see some old line mainstream SI's get into it and also the big conglomerates are also bringing in their own systems integration capability. This is data, this is tech. That's not what the CMO wants to be. They don't want to be IT. That's right. I think what's key is funny to say there, right? To do this, our key target market is, how do you make our CMOs and CIOs join in the hip? Because at the end of the day, a lot of these decisions that are being made are completely harming the need to be, right? So to your point, absolutely, you've seen the Accentures, the PWCs, the Deloists of the World, actually running business reviews from media. We're like, wait, when did this happen? There was a foreshave of the media agencies, right? To your earlier point, it was happening as a result as the holding companies very quickly are acquiring SI-like agencies themselves to bolster their portfolio. And we've been actually quite successful now as Oracle Marketing Cloud enabling our global agency partners and the holding companies to have their skill sets so they can actually go up against the Accentures and PWCs and fight on their turf as was the fight coming on their turf, right? So we had a comment on theCUBE earlier from another guest that said, oh, CIOs and CMOs, should we be getting together? Let's get them together. And they come times in oil and water to hire a chief data officer to kind of bridge the gap. Another trend, chief data officer kind of bridging. Chief digital officer. Teach digital officer, yeah, teach CDO. Chief digital officer, it could be data too, but you know, digital really focused on that. Is that a temporal thing? Do you see that as really a catalyst? Is that just optics? Sure. What's your take on the chief digital officer? So it's funny to say that actually I used to be a chief digital officer at Group M and I was a global chief media officer. So you're talking the right person. So absolutely, that's something actually that's been going on for five or seven years. The trend though is data. Actually chief data scientist, big data, chief data officers that's absolutely the biggest thing right now in the past three years. I think it's something that's here to say because very quickly the glue that binds marketing and information together is data. So that's why my earlier comment was getting the CIOs and CMOs joining the hip. So the glue that brings them together is data and hence the advent of big data and chief data officers. I talked with Mark Hurd in January on a sit down interview, 58 minutes on YouTube, search Mark Hurd, look at the angle, but also wrote a post on Forbes in 2014 about how your marketing cloud needs to look and behave more like Amazon web services, meaning easy to stand up, some basic building blocks get started but you had a comprehensive set of services. You guys are now providing that. That's what Hurd would talk about this morning. So I got to ask you the question, with Facebook's earnings today announced, smashing results, mobile, a big part of that, points to the market trend, which is, hey, the users are engaging, this mobile there, this is bringing on this kind of Amazon web services like Effect, which is spot campaigns, a trend that we're seeing, where a marketer wants to take kind of an agile approach and say, I don't need some big investment plan, I know my audience is there, there and there, in the moment, Facebook announced their developer conference, live in the moment video, et cetera, et cetera. So in the moment, real time, capturing those opportunities require really, really fast delivery, standing up something very fast in the moment and it could iterate. This seems to be the big trend. What's your thoughts on that? Do you agree? Any color around things you've seen with agencies and customers? I think so, you're absolutely right. It's about hyper-relevant, hyper-personalized messages, right messages, right time. So our whole premise in the working marketing cloud, to Mark's earlier point this morning, has been about delivering at scale and being agile. So that's something we sort of take quiet in and our base is our data-imagined platform. So it's about aggregation of all data sources that a marketer has, the ability to then hyper-personalize and hyper-contextualize in real time and deliver. So actually that is the premise that we hold near and dear to our heart between BlueKai and Elko responses, is the ability to integrate all of your channels and then personalize messages in real time and focus on efficiency because again, our focus has always been on one thing and one thing alone, which is the consumer experience. So we believe our cloud is sweet exactly allowing us to do that very nicely. So if you think about one of the other things we've heard is that technology has at various times fostered an increasing separation of marketing activities. And now is perhaps coming back we're starting to integrate marketing activities and make it more coherent. But we've also, you work with partners, you work with folks who know agencies and whatnot. How is the software helping a CMO and her staff to do a better job of tracking the ROI that's coming out of the agencies and not just out of the campaign. So how is software helping to bring the entire ecosystem together? Because it's clear people aren't going to hire their own people for an internal agency. Correct, I think the big focus that I said earlier was two flows, right? Accountability and relevant business results. So because we have our software, so it starts with what are the right KPIs? What's your baseline? So our software, our marketing services suite allows us to do that. The key focus here is on training the agencies or how you're implementing the software. A big part of implementing the software the right way is having the right conversation with the marketers around what are the right measurable KPIs which reach the relevant business outcomes, right? Without their conversations, you would have no idea how a marketing or media campaign is performing. So what our software allows them to do is have the right relevant conversations with the marketers, which then in turn focus on where should the media or the marketing or the strategy plays. So think of it as putting the old card before the horse. We actually are saying no, no, no, no, no. You really need to focus on the consumer experience which then goes back to the strategy which eventually then goes back to the right channels of right marketing and the right ROI. Without that, a lot of these conversations to your earlier point have been happening in silos. You've been having TV, outdoor, digital, even within digital there's a massive split happening in social and display and video. So what our software is allowing you to do in real time is do the aggregation across so you have a single lens of the customer. The moment you have a single lens of the consumer it allows you to focus on the relevant messages which then goes back to delivering relevant business results which then goes back to having the right conversation of how an agency is adding value, right? That's what it's all about. So as a CMO, am I using Oracle Marketing Cloud to manage my agency? Absolutely, I think it's a big focus because as a CMO, you are absolutely getting the right tools with the Oracle Marketing Suite which allows you to focus on the right KPIs without Oracle's marketing cloud and tools. It will be much harder for a CMO to be able to assess what is the value that's being delivered by an agency which goes back to how and well are they managing their marketing campaigns? So looking forward then, do you expect that agencies are going to embrace the marketing cloud even though it may in fact be used as a way of ensuring that they're delivering when and how and at the price points it's supposed to be delivering? How are you experiencing? What kind of adoption are you getting out of the agencies? I think it's been great to be in the learning process. My group is there for about 18 months now, year and a half. It's been a three-step process just with the awareness then from there very quickly goes into adoption and then scale. So we've seen great adoption across the big six holding companies and the big focus again is given the advent of technology data and programmatic in the past few years agencies, the big agencies have already pivoted, they've already gone ahead and started investing in data and technology themselves, a lot of them are, right? So they see us as a kindred spirit as a partner who is here to help them provide the RO and the accountability which their clients are asking for. So it actually is a partnership which is very harmonious and with something that strategically makes a lot of sense because that's where the market is headed. I got to ask you the question. I heard this from one of our customers talking about an agency and it was referring to a technology partner and said, I'd rather give my money to them than the agency because the agency provides no value. Now obviously a little bit different situation with certain context in that conversation but to that customer in that particular situation, the agency was out of step with the cadence of their business. And so that was the problem. I'm not necessarily diving on the agency overall but this is the question. What is the agencies doing now to increase their billing? Because at the end of the day, they're billing driven, right? So they want some more bookings, right? So that means customers that see value. So what are the value propositions that are the agencies providing them? You see working, what are kind of being retooled and revamped? I think the big focus that the agency have made to stay relevant moving forward is one, a big investment in the talent. A big focus has been on technology, on data, understanding those. So to your other point about chief data scientist, well guess what? I can promise you, every global holding company agency has a massive data group. That's been there in the past three to five years and all of them are big data, chief data officers, right? Number one. Number two is being very, very comfortable with not only understanding but implementing and evaluating technology stacks because agencies to be successful have to be seen as agnostic providers of best of breed. So if they do their homework and partner with the best of breed and their ability to provide the right recommendation at the right time, that's what's going to make them relevant, right? Because they realize what they're good at. So as a bill or partner, where do I go? So some of you build internally, some of you partner outside. So partnering is what comes, partnering with folks like the OMC so you can provide the best of breed when it comes to making the right recommendations. So how would you rate them agencies and get them the progress bar of the evolution? Are they walking erect? Are they still in the caveman days? So this is a transformation for agencies. Now you got a technology mix in here and you still got creative. You still got some other things that got to get done. So there's still an existing business. Where are they in the progress? First inning, third inning? What metaphor can you use? I'd say, I mean, yeah, I love baseball. It's like you're based on analogy. Our sister, the early innings, they're probably in the top of the third, so to speak. So I think they have understood where the market is headed, where the business is going. They recognize the importance of data and technology. They've also recognized the importance of strategic partnerships. Now it's a question of adoption and then figuring out once you adopt it, how do I scale it and how do I, from a business model, what does this look like, right? I think that's coming. So those of you see in the second half of the game, so to speak. So you have the top of third. Okay, since you are a CDO, Chief Digital Officer in your previous life, now at Oracle, switch that hat back around and pretend that you're a Chief Digital Officer of one of these companies. What's your mandate? What's the North Star for you? What's your vision to play knowing what you know at Oracle? Coming into the agency today, what has to change? What has to be accelerated? What has to be de-emphasized? Where would you kind of knuckle down on some things? What would you do? The three key things, number one is we have to, not on the agency side, we have to break down silos. It is very, very important loads of great information, great people in silos. We need to break down them silos. Number two is gone on the days of traditional planning, media planning, forget it. It's all about real-time analytics in size implementing, very, very quickly. Last but not the least, I would say, is the focus, and we're very big at this at the Oracle Marketing Cloud, is the identity graph. So at the end of the day, given the massive explosion of channels, given the explosion of data and the fragmentation that's out there, it is so hard to establish a right relevant identity for you or me. How do we do that? So really focusing on developing in the identity graph, understanding who the consumer is, because at the end of the day, if you're not doing that, you're in big trouble. So those things- How do they do that when they're off property in the wild, not just their website? I think that's a great question. I think that's where it comes down to partnering with folks like the Oracle Marketing Cloud, where we have the right set of tools and technologies in place, such as data logic, such as crosswise, such as AdVis, right? Exactly. Very interesting with data logic. That's exactly it. So it's our old premises, connecting offline with online and building on the right identity graph. So systems of records, systems of engagement in AI is all coming onto the scene in a big way. You see those trends in the customers, those conversations happening in New York or that more of a Silicon Valley conversation. It was absolutely in New York as well. You have both AI, you have AR and VR, right? It's happening. You see Facebook making a massive place. Absolutely, these platforms are coming on strong. I think there's still more in the test phase. So very, very keenly watching them and as and when they get scale, we absolutely will find ways to track them. Vic, thanks so much for sharing your insight here and the data on theCUBE. Of course, we'd like to extract that data, share that with the audience. Thanks so much for sharing the insight on what's going on in the agency and best of luck. Thanks so much. Pleasure being here. Okay, Vic Athoriah, head of global agency, partners at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Big role, big job, a lot of action happening. I'm sure you work long hours these days. It's theCUBE. We're going long hours as well. We've got more interviews all day today and tomorrow. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break.