 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Adobe. Welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is Josh Van Tonder, Group Product Marketing Manager at Adobe. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, pleasure to be here. So you're managing the marketing of the products of experienced manager within the platform. Great event here, really the keynote. We have a great review this morning. It's a great platform, a lot of elements to it. Journey, it's a holy grail. I mean, for the first time, you can see the holy grail. You know, it's just great actually hearing from the customers, right? I think it comes to life when you hear the stories. They're telling kind of the solutions they're bringing to market on top of it. It's very exhilarating for the product teams to see it all in action and coming to life through the customers. You know, we cover hundreds of events a year. We hear all the stories. Everyone talks about innovation. It's really happening here. It's because Adobe's transformed to cloud years ago. So now you're starting to see Marketo, Magento coming through the mix, full platform architecture, open APIs, open data. This is the beginning of a seed change that we're starting to see in customers having the end to end experience where each functional element can do its job and connect with the data. This is progressive, I mean. It's great stuff. It's great stuff. So where are we? What's going on with the product? What's going on? How are customers dealing with this? Because you've got Best Buy up there, 40 million emails personalized, personalization at scale. Yep. I mean, I think the crux of what's going on is I think a lot of the organizations, I mean, essentially the name of the game is delivering personalized experiences, right? I mean, how do you get someone to have that moment, that moment of truth where they get to see and interact with the brand in a way that's relevant to them, right? I mean, I think we all respond that way. I think even the statistics show that, our own statistics show that. So we've done some surveys of the consumers. It's 51% say I'm much more likely to buy something from a brand if it's personalized and 49% are going to say, look, I'm going to be more loyal to you because it is relevant to me, which makes sense. I think you and I would probably agree with that if it's the nail in the head. I want to bring up a point that in the keynote, the CEO said, he said, people don't buy products, they buy experiences, okay? And this has now kind of become the, kind of the mission of all companies is seeing a big trend with direct to consumer in all verticals, not just B to C, direct to consumers. So now companies can go direct to the consumer. So how does that change like the IT equation because the old days were, build stack and rack servers, load some software, sell it to a customer, but now you're dealing with a user experience model that's everywhere. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, the crux of the issue is underneath that is it takes content and data together to kind of deliver the great experience. And at the end of the day, IT is front and center as the enabler strategically for how that gets delivered. I think what we've been seeing is there, there's sort of, I would say four key pillars, elements that they've been using to turn their portfolio to be a strategic advantage. So one is how do you manage OmniChannel, right? I mean, it's getting further with your message. So that's essentially an OmniChannel thing. The other is being faster about getting to market with that message. So maybe how does cloud play into that? How do you enable the marketing teams? And then I think the last thing, and this is one that's been a hot topic, is where does AI simultaneously help drive that better experience? So I think those are sort of the pieces we're seeing coming into play from an IT standpoint where they have a lot of influence to advance the overall business mission. Jeff and I were talking about our intro, about how the cloud has really changed the game with Adobe and the customer base. The old cloud conversations around DevOps and around the building applications where waterfall processes are going to be dismantled by agility-based processes. You're starting to see that now with content and creative. Where agility and speed and data are now the new thing. So a content developer is kind of like a software developer. When cloud was for software, you guys are providing cloud type capabilities for content developers or creative developers. They kind of metaphor there. I mean, how do you view that? How do customers react to that? That's interesting. I mean, I think you sort of, you bring up the one side is cloud agility and the corollary to that is just overall content velocity, if you will. So I think from a cloud standpoint, the model would be how do I get to market faster in more geographies? How do I get to more geographies? How do I support rolling out new infrastructure or new products more quickly on the cloud infrastructure? And then how do I deal with growth? How do I scale my system? If you look at it from the content lens, which I think is what you're getting at, there's a similar paradigm in terms of this agility. So from an IT standpoint, how do you enable someone that's on the marketing team to discover their content, to reuse it more effectively and then deploy it more effectively? And there are many pieces to the IT equation that fundamentally empower, if you will, that velocity in terms of being able to manage, discover and frankly optimize that content as you get it out there. So it's an interesting thing that I think we've been doing a lot of, looking at a lot of product innovation specifically from an Adobe standpoint in terms of actually enabling that product velocity. Which I mean, the platform out there basically is the architecture for the platform to do that. Yes, exactly. I mean you guys, you have the elements. So is it just a perfect storm that's come together finally in terms of capability? Cause we've talked about 360 view of the customer ad nauseam and we've talked about omnichannel for many, many, many years. But I think the execution on those was certainly lagging behind the vision. But is it now because of the integration of the platform? Is it because of the big data architectures? Is it because now, you know, it's your reading real-time data on Ingest, you're not going back to historical data? What is it that's now enabling us to actually execute on the vision that we've been talking about for years? Yeah, I mean I think there are multiple pieces kind of coming together that are helping. So I think, you know, as you said, I think in some sense what you're getting at is there were historically many silos of how these things have historically been managed and what we're seeing is a trend towards centralizing that information cause ultimately you can drive more insights by looking at it and it's just, you get more velocity for reusing it. So, you know, to look at it from, let's just take an example of the omnichannel. So if we look at it purely from delivering content, what we, as say an IoT device comes to market or you have these more advanced single page apps on the webpage or an Alexa, right? What we saw is a rise of separate systems in some sense to manage those but now we're seeing a trend where gosh, if we were to have all that content in one place, if we had all the analytics behind that in one place, we can more effectively personalize the customer journey across each of those and that's effectively what you're hearing a lot of today is can I have sort of a centralized but hybrid model that supports through APIs getting that information to different touch points and then the data engine that'll allow the personalization across each of those touch points and that I think is fundamentally the part that's unlocking a lot of value. And is it the acceptance of the AI and kind of the machine learning that's going to help you cause you can't create 40 million emails with people, I mean you have to have automation and you have to have some intelligence behind that, you just can't do it manually. So is that where we finally kind of broken through so that I can send 40 million different emails in one campaign with some intelligence and some logic behind who got what? Yeah, I think you hit the nail in the head there, right? I mean, I think if personalization is the name of the game and you're interacting on more touch points with more pieces of content, how do you get it right for each audience? And so that's where AI is just adds tremendous, a tremendous velocity and help for businesses to get that right. So I think you can think of it almost as this pipeline to deliver the experience. So on one hand, how do you create that experience? AI can play a role. How do you manage it internally? AI can play a role in terms of discovering the assets and reusing it. Delivering it, it can play a role in actually getting the right content out there. I'll give you some examples of that in a second, and then the final piece is the actual optimization of that. So to give you some examples, what we've seen happening is you can literally use the AI, the data on interactions of how people interacting across your system and actually create interfaces on the fly for specific segments of audiences. So instead of, say, I as a marketer creating that interface using web development or tooling, why not have the system actually recompose what is being served up? Maybe a certain layout with multiple columns works for some audiences, maybe it just needs to be one banner with a certain time of image. AI can actually do that for you by looking out of the analytics of, how do you react to certain things versus me and drawing corollaries? So there's a lot of places along that chain where AI is really critical. And the impact is productivity, obviously, because you don't have to write the queries or figure out what's come in and present it to you. That's kind of the impact of the marketer, right? Yeah, it's about scaling the marketer, right? I mean, I think that's one of the big challenges from a business standpoint is your team's never big enough to serve every person, every single customer as a marketer. So that's where AI essentially unlocks that scale. It gives you a marketing team of thousands where you may only have a team of 120, depending on the size of the organization. How hard is it to tune that up in terms of a customer? I'm an Adobe customer. I go to the Adobe Cloud Experience Cloud. How do I tune this up? I mean, is there a way that you guys have figured out that allows them to kind of get it up and running fast without a lot of complexity? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, that's actually, it's really critical because from a marketing standpoint, IT can bring to bear a number of different technologies, but unless they're easy to adopt, you're not going to go anywhere. So I think the trick is almost giving marketers the easy button. I think that's where a lot of the magic in AI happens, is you pick one specific problem. In Adobe's case, we pick a problem where we know we have a lot of intelligence about creative assets, and we have visibility in how those are being used. So if we bring those together, we can solve specific problems about discovering content or how we deliver that optimally. But to answer a specific question, it's almost as though we try to give an easy button for the marketer, right? So I feed you a bunch of, say, audience segments, and then I plug you into my analytics data, press a button, and ideally, it's going to just figure it out for me, right? And then test if it works. That's the key thing, is once you get into a market, test it, and it can do that for you. And I don't think there's enough kind of highlight on that, where it was dramatic before to do A-B testing, now you can test at such scale, at such detail, and to your point, you think you know your segments, and you can create your own segments, but you can actually let the machine create segments based on actual behavior of people. Which I guess really is enabled by so many of your interactions now with brands is digital, so it gives you that opportunity to grab a piece of that exhaust, do the analytics, and get some insight out of it. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, data, the scale of data, I mean, everybody's flooded with data right now, but it's really where's the needle in the haystack, and I think that's where AI plays a crucial role. I mean, it can do things like figure out anomalies on your interactions across a large swath of users, right? If something you see in the data is statistically normal or not, and should I pay attention to it, and what should I do from it? So AI starts to play a role in that. It can even do simple things like we all have mobile phones, we all want to watch more video on mobile phones. The problem is as a business, as a marketing team, and I'm sure even you folks have the same situation is the content that you create may not be ready to be consumed appropriately on each device, right? So if I pick up a mobile device, has it been optimized properly? So you can do things like have AI pick the focal points in a video and crop out the rest and follow the focal point and only show that on the phone. So- Well, I'm certainly going to call you up because we have a lot of video, we're doing 20 videos here today. But this is the norm. People are going to have more velocity of videos, that's in podcasts, blog posts, so the waterfalls, while I was getting earlier, this waterfall thing is over. It's more of an agile environment. So I got to ask the customer question, is that reality yet grounded in the customer base or is it still early adopters? Or I guess the question is, what's the pattern that you're seeing in customer environment? What makes a good market or what makes a good organization to embrace the kind of change that's on our doorstep right now? It's a good question. And I think it takes two to tango. I think there's an IT element and a marketing element and I think we're seeing an evolution in how the two work together in this new model. So from an IT standpoint, they are the enabler, for example, to get content onto multiple different channels. From a, from a marketer's standpoint, they ultimately are the ones that define and help articulate the right message and type of content. If IT and marketers are working well together, the IT team is going to enable that marketing team to essentially iterate quickly in content. So there's a whole set of things that can be done to enable the marketing team to be agile and getting that content out there. So I think the evolution I would say is in how the two teams are working. So I think your waterfall model in past, I wouldn't say it's entirely gone, but it has been reframed in a way that's a lot more agile. That's a great point, that's a good way to test to see if IT and CIO and the CMO are working together, they're probably aligned to for change. If they're not, maybe not, right? So I mean, I'll give you a very specific example. So one thing that we've been seeing in our world is, so for example, on cloud, there's a lot of things you can do more quickly. Traditionally, there've been some waterfall development models, what we've seen is IT now has a DevOps process where they're very fast in rolling out application updates. But if you can actually standardize that, if you can create a pipeline for getting code onto the different environments, if you test it and roll it out faster, what that means for marketing and business is the time the market goes down. So for example, we've actually been baking that into our products, can we literally, here's a best in class pipeline for doing an agile development model. It's already pre-built into the infrastructure to enable IT to kind of go faster on the behalf of the company. So here's a question for you, put you on the spot. Sure. In all the major shifts, there's always gaps. There's always gaps in new markets or white spaces. So there's three areas, technology gaps, skills gaps and culture gaps. Yep. Can you talk about what you see as the key gaps that people are starting to get over on, figure out how to fill those gaps? Because they can become blockers if they're not resolved. So tech gap, skills gap, and culture gap. So just because we've been talking tech a lot, let's reverse it and talk sort of the team and organization element. I mean, I think one thing that we've definitely been seeing is if you will, the alignment of what was traditionally channel management is now moving more closely into the CDO or CMO arm, which I think is a good thing, right? I think what we see as some of our leading customers is the marketing and chief digital officers have increasingly more alignment and a seat at the table of how the individual channel line of businesses are operating. And that's a very good thing because it does help close the loop on the customer journey across those channels, which I think has traditionally been a bit of a dilemma. So I would say that's one thing we're seeing much more is the channel management actually going under directly or more alignment with the marketing arm or something like a CDO. So on the org side, that's one area. And that helps with the velocity, right? And they're rearranging the org structures to align with how does content need to be shared across these teams? Do you really own that channel? Or do we have a customer journey that is owned across all channels, right? And I think that's an important conversation that these companies have been struggling with and have evolved a lot in the last few years. And we thought of the tech gap already, but skills gap. What skills are out there that are needed? Obviously data, machine learning. Yeah, so obviously a big one, the machine learning stuff. I mean, I think Adobe's fuel horse on the races, I think we're trying to democratize some of that. So as I said earlier, the hope is for the marketing team, we give them an easy path to unlock that. There are areas where there's been big growth, so for example, the front end frameworks and development for single page applications. That's an area from an IT standpoint where we've seen a tremendous growth in that technology set and how that plays a role with the rest of the infrastructure. And simply, how does that actually align with the traditional tools they've been using for managing their websites? I think what we've seen is that they're now skill-wise and technology-wise actually taking a view that you still have one centralized platform, but ultimately you'll have IT developer resources that plug into, say, one central hybrid content management system, for example. Any new personas popping out of this shift that's going on with cloud and creativity experience cloud? Any new roles that are emerging that you see popping out? Yeah, I mean, one example we've seen, and it's been an evolution, but for example, we've seen the rise of something called journey managers, which just goes back to what I was mentioning earlier, which are people that their business and tech align, but they're interested in understanding how does a customer actually move across a specific journey? So they're mapped to, if you will, a task a customer's trying to do, and how do I optimize that? Assuming and knowing that if Josh is going to try to get some customer support, he's not just always going to call the support line, he's going to try other things, and how do I simplify that for him? And taking a very holistic view. So I think that's one thing we've seen more of, and it's a great way to approach it. Fascinating insights. Josh, thanks for coming on. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for what you're working on. Experience manager, what's new, what's happening? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm part of the experience manager team, so we're part of the organization that helps our brands deliver and manage digital experiences. So essentially, we're enabling, if you will, omnichannel delivery and management of those experiences. And a key thrusts for us are around enabling IT to get content effectively across channels and also experience intelligence. How do we deliver AI and machine learning innovation to make the marketers' job easier for getting personalized experiences to market and enabling IT to support them more efficiently? So there's a number of innovations and exciting things that we're very excited about at Summit for that. Congratulations, Josh Van Tondakrup, product marketing manager at Adobe, experience manager at his product, breaking down what's going on here at Adobe Summit and in the industry. I'm John Furrier with Jeffery. Stay with us for more coverage here at Adobe Summit after this short break.