 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Adobe. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick from theCUBE. Our next guest, Bradley Jenkins, who's the marketing CIO and vice president at MetLife, part of the global technology and operations group. Innovative title, welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, thank you, thanks for having me. So we're here at Adobe Summit, where a lot of things are happening. It's really interesting because you have a convergence of two worlds, and it looks like a cloud world. It's the creative cloud, it's the experienced cloud now called, so whole world's changed. A lot of DevOps mindset in there, you got a platform. So the whole world's changed. Now marketing has a full-blown cloud. It's not just marketing cloud, it's a whole system. So as a marketing CIO, what does that mean? Is now a new role emerging in organizations? Is this what we're seeing? I think it's an emerging role. I think it's one of those things where in the marketing and technology space, the lines are blurring. And part of the role of people like me are the ones who can be the bridge makers between the two functions and bring in products like we see all around us here today, cloud-based solutions. How do we activate marketing tactics faster, quicker, and then combine things like experiences with tools and technologies in different ways. So I think it's a specialty skill that's coming out now in emerging. Well, one of the patterns is that marketing departments that have a technical and also IT relationship seem to be more agile, transform faster. I do. This seems to be the same thing you guys are looking at, right? Exactly, it's all about speed to market. So I think agility is one, co-looking, combining everything from creative to the developers all in one, to a product resource person all in one, and we get in and try to solve business problems as fast as possible. But you're almost kind of a personification of the story we hear all the time. We just CIOs get a seat at the table right now. They're no longer just keeping the lights on, the system's lit, but it's a fundamental way that the company goes to business, a fundamental way the company interacts with their customers. And so to actually put a marketing CIO title, that's a pretty unique thing I don't think we've ever had going on. So you come at it, no doubt about it, I'm here about customer engagement, customer experience, not keeping the light on. That's right, that's right. First one, it sounds like a unicorn. There you go. So how's it been? So tell us some of the things you're doing. I love how you're part of a global technology and operations group. You notice the word operations and tech together. Again, back to this cloud theme of DevOps, which changed the game on the IT world. It has, yeah. So we're seeing that same thing happening, playing out in the creative market, whether it's content or here, same things, playing some of the things you're doing. Yeah, it's the same thing. And everything's very cloud based today, obviously. So everything from building out content platforms and services and content services frameworks, which is key to what we want to do, but also campaign and analytics and social and what the emerging capabilities are and social and how do we tie all those together, but do it in a way where we're capturing data and insights across all of our channels in a more creative, quicker way, and then activating that across new experiences. You know, Bradley, one of the things I wanted to ask you, and I'm glad you came on, because I've been really kind of riffing on this idea and I'm trying to get a date, an actual year, kind of a before cloud, after cloud demarcation line because we're in Silicon Valley, we cover a lot of startups and literally the ones go big or go home is kind of the mantra, but if you were born before Amazon, you're pretty much either aren't around or got acquired. If you were born after Amazon, where cloud scale and all this stuff happened, you tend to thrive in a whole new kind of shift. So in Martech, which was heavily funded sector, the ecosystem map of pure play applications was pretty dense. It's very dense, yeah. Did that live up to its name? Did it shift in shape? What's your thoughts on that Martech landscape? Because certainly it's relevant when you're marking CIO, you want to put technology in place, has the platform shifted? What's going on? Tell us. Yeah, so I think as it lived up to its name, yes, and it's created challenges at the same time. So what is still in the Martech landscape is 17,000 or whatever, tens of thousands of products now. I'm not sure what's got bringers latest one shows. Every year it doubles or quadruples in there. And I think one of the biggest challenges we have now is just navigating the landscape but then being able to pick out and say, here are the five things I need to focus on. Here's how I'm going to tie them together and integrate them in. And there's a lot of noise and you have to break through a lot of that to be able to craft these solutions together. So in a lot of ways, I think it's lived up. In a lot of ways, I think it's created a lot of new challenges that things like Martech CIO need to think about and be aware of the breadth of capabilities that are out there. But not just the capabilities, how do you stitch them together? And you become more of a weaver than a specific domain. So classic early adopter proves the model and now reality as operationalizing things becomes clear. The wheat from the chaff, as they say, kind of get figured out. Yeah, exactly. Bradley, I want to get your kind of thoughts on as the relationship between the company and the customer has shifted from sitting down with an agent or maybe talking to an agent on the phone to really electronic means, how you've been able to kind of continue a certain type of brand experience. And I'm also just curious your feedback on the theme here, where it's not really the transaction, it's the experience of which the transaction is a piece of and how are you seeing that play out in the way that you guys interact with your customers? Yeah, and I think for us, we're an evolving state too and we have agencies and brokers that we work through. And so it's a B2B model in some cases and some cases it turns and we're a B2C targeting B2B group customers as an example. And so the experience is very a bit. So for us, it's experience of the end customer and how do we service them? How do we treat them? What's the purchasing, servicing capabilities look like? What's our customer service look like? But also the experience of agents and brokers and are we providing the right service and products to them to be able to equip them to go help and resell products? So we look at it from a couple of different angles and depends a lot on context and where we're operating and servicing products at. And is it easy to maintain kind of the voice of the brand, if you will, through these alternate channels? Or how do you kind of stay true to the brand yet go to market through these immediate of channels? Yeah, it's no, it's a good question. We're literally working through the same kind of things now of what can we help provide agents and brokers with and that helps with our brand, our brand promise helps them sell better. So it's a work in progress, but it's a good challenge. Yeah, I don't know if we have all the answers. Take a minute to explain the MetLife transformation. What you guys have done, where are you now in your journey? Yeah. I see your Gobi customer you're here at their event. Where are you on that progress bar? How far along are you? It seems to be a theme of transform and continue to transform is what successful companies are doing or iterating or raising the bar, whatever term you use. Where are you guys at? Can you take us through? Yeah, so a few years ago, we refreshed our enterprise strategy. We placed customer and digital and data at the center of our enterprise strategy. And we have pillars around different transformation aspects that we're working on, everything from customer service to right products, simplifying our product messaging, a lot of the way we talk about products, especially in insurance, can be complicated. And so we're trying to get a little more concise and clear and package things differently. But at the core, our strategy now is placing digital, placing digital data at the center of it. And then how do we enact data in new and different ways, everything from not only knowing customers, but how do we use data to create better and smarter products or even de-risk different products that we have so we can be price competitive in certain market areas. So data is the lifeblood of your transformation. It is. What's the strategy? Are there people in that internally? What's some of the results can take us through some experiences? You don't have to tell us any numbers, but I'm sure it's helping. If you do it right, I mean, it's challenging though. It's not easy. It is, yeah. It's challenging and it will take a while to sort out. So I won't say we've solved everything. But I think we look at a few different things. One is knowing the customer. And so we're investing heavily and doing things like customer profiling and customer 360, whatever you want to call it in different areas. But how do we know them and how do we then enact the data and insights into different channels? So we've had a lot of good successes in there in particular markets on creating more engaging experiences and lifting customer retention and loyalty. So we've had good insights there. We're applying it to other different areas. So things like when we go to bid for new products or new customers around a new product area, what can we do for our pricing models? And how do we leverage data around where it's geographic or whatever it might be or demographics or apply it to be more price competitive. And we're starting to see a lot of fruition there and how it gets applied to win new business. One of the things that we've been talking about on theCUBE through a lot of events. And the theme that comes up all the time when you have these new shifts is new things are emerging, new capabilities, different economic points, scales different. So all good. Now the hard part is making it work. Operationalizing something new is a huge challenge. Could you share your view on that and reaction to that? Because this seems to be not about the tech, about either skills gaps or culture gap. There's a lot of things in the way of operationalizing something new. What do people do to operationalize something new? Yeah, no, it's a good question. I'm glad you brought it up because that's actually one of the things that I advocate for a lot is a lot of times we leak with the tech and then we place it and then we say, well, now what? And then everything sort of comes to a standstill. And you have to leak with the people process. So again, in for transformation, I understand exactly what it is you're trying to solve, how are you going to solve it afterwards? Do you have the skill sets in place to do it? And then follow up with the tech. And then I think a lot of companies do it a little bit reverse where they go and acquire and like, oh, we're going to solve this and bring the tech in. And then you're literally left standing at the end of the day of how do you operationalize it. So something we focus on a lot is the people process piece of enablement, training, the skills that are required, how do you turn it into a machine after you bring the tech in to really start pumping up whether it's a growth objective or cost saving, whatever the objective might be. But you have to almost produce this into a life machine of its own that can then live and breathe after you bring the tech in. What should marketing, CIOs as it becomes a product, I think it will be, in my opinion, I think it will be a role because it's really critical because of the opportunity. What should they be doing as this new persona evolves? You're pioneering it. What is the job function? What does it do? In your opinion, how does this take shape? Yeah, I think, number one, learn the business. I think you have to speak the same language and it's been the biggest challenge is translating. So different languages across different groups and the first thing any marketing say you can do is go learn the business, speak the same language and feeling like company, you know, we're an insurance company and a risk management company. So understanding finance, understanding market objectives, your customer objectives is key and then figure out how to start mapping the solutions in. But yeah, I think it's a bridge role. We have to be able to be a navigator in a way across solution options, but always in context of understanding the business and how you can best apply it in a specific way. And a data wrangler, of course, because you're wrangling a lot of data. Yeah. I'm curious, you probably don't have a lot of intersection with kind of the actuarial side of the house, which has kind of always been data driven, right? Since the early, earliest days. But I mean, are you seeing kind of that side of the house go, hey, can we get some of these new tools, can we get some of these kind of new ways to approach the data problem than we historically did? I think now, yes, I think it's been an evolution. I think in the early days of data, it was a bit more of a scary thing. And so I feel like as advocates in the CI space, that we were pushing a little more than being pulled in. And I think lately, in the last couple of years, I know at least in my life, we've seen a shift of demand side, of requests coming in saying, we need to partner, we need ideas of how to accelerate and be competitive, which is great. Now it's almost become a supply-demand trail where you just can't keep up. Because the level of segmentation on kind of classic insurance kind of breakdown is really high, right? Sex, age, a couple of other factors. But now the amount of data that's available, the amount of real-time data that's available and changing, they got to be going bananas over on that side of the house. Yeah, yeah, that's right. One of the things that we've been seeing on the IT side, again, I want to bring a question of the marketing CIO piece is, and we've had many CIOs talk about this on theCUBE in direct interviews, is they've outsourced everything and they really had no core competency. You had all the big SIs running stuff. You had global outsourcing, development. And as cloud became important, they had to build applications internally, they didn't have the skills. So they had to quickly reset and rebuild an in-house capability. And the result of that is ongoing and you've seen the ones that have done that well with cloud are doing great. They still use outsourced stuff. Now on the marketing side, you saw that same thing happen where agencies run everything. The IT agency does this, you got the creative agency, you got a PR firm, you got all these things going on. And some say that marketing has been outsourced a lot. And so the question is, what mix of in-house skill and agency relationships, because now you can have an agency that's an application developer, no problem, but core competency becomes a super important question. And how are you funding it and what should be in-house and what should be outsourced? Yeah, yeah, and we're going through the same evolution. We had a position a few years ago where it was almost entirely outsourced and we insourced a bunch of it and now we're rightsizing what's insourced and not insourced enough. So I think one is think about what your differentiation is and how do you want to be competitively, differentiate competitively and have it and create advantage. And then insource those things and then you have to find a way, it's one of those things I think every year you start to right size and reassess. And so for us, we insourced a lot of things around first around build side, so platforms being cloud, but then how do you enact and activate them? So we brought some of those inside internally and then we started marrying those up with creative agencies, which is still outsourced by the creative, but we would marry them up and get these more agile, lean teams of cross-blended skill sets and go to market quicker with new experiences. And I think over time you'll see us start insourcing more of the agency side, maybe shedding some of the left side as we start becoming more pattern based and whatnot. So I think it's one of those things that you evolve every year as you right size, but the key is trying to tie it back to how do you want to create differentiation and what's your competitive advantage and then make sure that you have that internal, first and foremost, and don't outsource your smarts to another. I think the key point is by refactoring or resizing, that's the iteration that you get with cloud and scale. And if you don't do that, the scale can also hurt you. I can, yeah, yeah. You can come back and crash it. It's right, it's right. Broly, thanks for coming on, appreciate the insights, from great to hear from a practitioner. Love the new title, I think this is Game Changer. I think it's going to be a standard. Final question to end the segment, learnings over the past couple of years, what are some key learnings that you take away from the process that you're going to carry forward? Yeah, I think one is as a company, being a blend role between marketing and technology, one is be willing to change and adapt and be willing to bring the rest of the company with you because you can't do everything yourself. So I think you have to be a change agent for the company, figure out that everybody is in the journey with you and then how do you create that scale to get the mass moving? Because it takes a village to get things done. Bradley Jenkins making history on theCUBE as the first marketing CIO we've interviewed. Super excited, great insights. This is going to be a position we think is going to be around for a while. Of course, the CUBE coverage here at Adobe Summit. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more day one of two day coverage here in Las Vegas after this short break.