 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, it's our flagship program. We'll go out to the events and extract the seeds of noise, talk to the influencers, the experts, thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, anyone we can that has data will share with you. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, my co-host for the two days here. Our next guest is Jay Baer from Convince and Convert, CUBE alumni, great guy, super influential, noses, marketing stuff, perfect guest to summarize and kind of package up what the hell modern CX means here at the Oracle show. Welcome back. Good to see you. Good to see you guys, welcome. Yeah, so thank you. So you were hosting the CMO Summit that was going on in parallel. They had the Markies Awards, which is their awards dinner. Big time, 11th annual Markies Awards, man. It's like a thing. It's amazing, it looked like the Golden Globes. Yeah, it was beautiful this year. I mean, it was like legit. Is it the one with the O on the top? And they've got the, and they delivered an award with a drone. It was a really, it was a great night. It was like fun. Awesome stuff. So give us the package here. I mean, what's going on? I mean, tease out the story here. Yeah, I mean, I think the story is two-fold. One, Oracle is going to interesting take on the marketing software space because they really are trying to connect it between the overall customer experience initiative and then marketing as a piece of that. So this event in particular, the modern customer experience event has tracks, almost full conferences for marketing, for customer service, for sales and for commerce, right? So all four of those are the verticals underneath this umbrella. And that's a really unusual kind of a conference setup, but I think it reflects sort of where Oracle's head is at from a thought leadership standpoint that like, look, maybe we're going to get to a point where marketing and customer service really are kind of the same thing. Maybe we're going to get to the point where sales and marketing really are kind of the same thing. We're not there yet by any stretch of the imagination, but I think we all feel that convergence coming. And my world and the marketing side, CMOs are starting to get more and more responsibility inside organizations. And so if that happens, if we do need to start to align the software as well. So it's an interesting take on the market. And I think it's sort of prescient for where we're going to head. It's interesting you mentioned of all those different silos or different departments or different functions in a digital end-to-end fabric. Experiences are all about the customer. It's one person. They're going to have different experiences at any given time on that lifecycle or product spectrum or solution spectrum. So the CMO has to take responsibility of that. Well, I feel like somebody has to be responsible for it. Mark Hurd said this in one of his remarks over the course of the shows as CEO of Oracle. He said, look, there is no data department, right? Everybody has to be responsible for data, but somebody has to figure out what the ins and the outs are. And maybe that's the CMO, maybe it's a CXO. I don't think we've fully baked that cake yet, but we're going to have to get to the point where the sort of single record of truth about the customer and their customer journey has to exist. And somebody has to figure out how to wire all those together. So we're getting there. It was so funny. I was joking, not here on theCUBE, but in the hallways about the United Airlines snafu. And to me as a kind of developer mindset is like software should have solved that problem. They never should have been overbooked to begin with. So if you think about just these things where the reality of a consumer at any given time is based upon their situation. I need customer support. I need this, I need that. So everyone's got to be ready, customer ready with data. They can't say- It's all about relevancy. Look, relevancy is the killer app. That's it, right? And relevancy is created by technology and with people, people who actually know how to put that technology into practice in a way that the customers actually care about. So one of the other things that Mark said, he said, look, here's the issue. It's not about data, nor is it about cloud. It's not about any of that. It's about taking that data and creating understanding out of it. But he has said a really interesting thing. He said what we have to do is push those understandings out to the front lines where somebody on the front lines can do something with it that actually benefits a customer. And I think that's a really smart point because so often right now we're talking about, oh, we've got these data stores and we've got DMPs and we've got all these things. That's great, but until that gets manifested at the front lines, who cares? You just got a big pile of numbers. We just had Katrina on from the commerce side and it was funny, she was making a retail comment saying, look it, they don't care about the tech. They don't care about blockchain and all the speeds and feeds. They want to do a transaction in the speak of the consumer. And the language of the customer is not technology. No, they don't care. They just solve my problem, right? Just solve my problem. I don't care how you solve it. What sort of magic you have behind the scenes. If I want a sweater, I want this sweater and I want it right now. Okay, Jay, so share with the folks watching and us conversation hallways, you've had. That's always the best. Because you had a chance, I see you had the big stage doing the hosting thing, but also, you get approached a lot and people bend your ear a lot. What's happening? You know what's been an interesting theme this week is we've made such great advances on the technology side and I think we're starting to bump up against, okay, well now we've got to make some organizational changes for that technology to actually flourish. We've had a lot of conversations this week with influencers, with CMOs, with attendees about I really want to do this and I really want to sort of bring sales and marketing together or commerce and sales, et cetera. But our org chart doesn't support that. The way our company thinks, the way our people are aligned does not support this convergence. And so I think we're at an inflection point where we're going to have to break apart some silos and not data silos, but operational. Like what is your job and who manages you and what is your bonus based on? There's a lot of legacy structures, especially at the enterprise, that do not really facilitate the kind of cross-departmental circumstances that we're looking for. So a lot of people are like, oh, wow, we're going to have to do some robust organizational change and that ain't easy. And somebody's going to have to drive that, right? Your marketing practitioners, which is my world, they can't drive that. That's got to come from up here somewhere. And also people got to be ready for the change. No one like to change. But we were talking about this yesterday called add the agile process, the development, being applied to marketing, rolling smart. Oh, we're seeing all the time, so many marketing teams now are using agile and daily scrum and standups and all those kind of things as opposed to Waterfall, which everybody's used forever. I think it's fantastic. Yeah, and that's something that we're seeing. And Roland Smart kind of pointed out, he had a book, got a signed copy, Peter and I. But this is interesting, if you go agile, that's to your point, you just can't read the book. You've got to have a commit to it. The organizational impact is agile. So one of the things we had in the CMO summit, we had like 125, 150 CMOs from all around the world. And one of the things we talked about in that session yesterday was, geez, we need to try and start taking people or hiring people out of a software development world, people who have agile experience and put them as PMs on a marketing team, right? Which is going to put that group of people who have the agile background in even greater demand because they won't just be doing tech roles for project management but also marketing project management and sort of teaching everybody how agile work. I think it's really interesting. But they've been doing that for a while. Yeah. I mean, the agile started in software development but moved broader than that when it went to the web. No question, but a lot of these CMOs do not have those type of skills on their team today. They're still using a waterfall. Or they don't recognize that they have the skills. Most of them will have responsibility for websites and website development. So it's that they don't... They're not thinking about it. It goes back to the issue of do they really appreciate... The web versus the marketing, yeah. They may not, they probably have it somewhere. They just don't appreciate it and elevate it. It's siloed even within the marketing team. It's siloed within the marketing team. So there's going to be, I mean, these are consequential changes. And we'll see the degree to which it really requires a whole bunch of organizational stuff. But at the end of the day, you're right. It's a very, very important thing. What were some of the other things the CMOs were talking about? Other than just organizational? Well, actual other sort of baseline skills, right? So it wasn't that long ago that your social media teams and content marketing teams, it was manifestly a written job, right? You made things that were rooted in copy. And now we talked a lot about like, you have to have like a full video team on your marketing org chart because the corner of the realm now is video content. And while companies are getting there, it's still a struggle for a long time. Because if we have our agency do this, we get somebody else to do it, and they're like, now I got to have all these people. I got a video editors and a camera crew. And I say, oh, of course it is. Not everybody can be the cube. Well, they're trying. No, but I think video is becoming down to the camera level. And you see Facebook with VR and AR, certainly the glam and sex appeal to that. And then you got Docker containers and you got software development apps. So I call that the app culture. You got the glam apps. And then you got cloud. So those things are going on. So are the marketing departments looking to fully integrate agency-like stuff in-house? Or is the agencies picking up that? I mean, what's your take on the landscape from video and some of these services? It depends on how real time they're thinking about video, right? We're starting to see Facebook live in a public relations circumstance, right? You saw when Crayola announced the death of the blue Crayon or whatever it was a few weeks ago. I mean, they did a press release on it, but the real impetus for that announcement was a Facebook live video, right? Which puts Facebook and live video essentially as your new PR apparatus. That's really interesting. So in those kind of circumstances, the question is, okay, do we do that with the agency? Is it easier to do it in-house? I think ultimately my advice would be you have to have it in both places, right? You have to be able to do at least some things in-house because you've got to turn it quickly. And then maybe for things that you've got more of a lead time, you bring your agency. One of the things we're seeing and just a common thing while we're on this great thousand weeks of our business as well is content is hard. Good original content is what we strive for as SiliconANGLE and Wikibon and theCUBE is something that we're committed to serving the audience. At the same time, we collaborate with marketers in this new native way. So the challenging I see in this marketing cloud is content is a great piece of data, okay? Content is data. Content is data. And it also helps you get more data because there's a lot of information exchange. So a lot of companies that I see that fail on the content marketing side, they don't punch it in the red zone. The balls on the one-yard line, all they got to do is get over the goal line and that's good content and they try to fake it. And they don't have authentic content. Another way of saying that. Another way of saying that, John. Guys, you blew it at the one-yard line. Yeah, another way of saying that is that the historically agencies have driven the notion of production value. And they have driven the notion of production value to make the content as expensive as possible because that's how they make their money. When we're talking about is when we introduce a CX orientation in this mix, now we're talking about what does the customer need in context, how can video serve that need? It's going to lead to a potentially very, very different sort of production value. You bring up a good point. I want to get Jay's reaction on this because he sees it a lot too. Context is everything. So at the end of the day, what is engaging, you can't buy engagement. It's got to be good. What serves the customer. If the customer, and that is defined by the customer, you can't, there's no silver bullet. There's no engagement bullet. Hey, I just bought engagement. Sometimes you can argue that the customer values a lower fidelity content execution because it has a greater perceived authenticity. Well, you may not know this, Jay. I'm going to promote us for a second. A piece of video that's highly produced in the tech industry generates attention for minute and a half to minute 45 seconds. The cube can keep attention for 12 or 13 minutes. Sure, right. Why? Now, if we were a digital agency. I would say the hosts, obviously. The hosts, the conversation, the fact that it informs the customer. And that's what increasing. I think these guys have to think about. So in many respects, we'll go back to your organization question. I want to test you on this. Is it in many respects that the CMO must heal by self first, starting to acknowledge that we have to focus on the customer and not creative, and not the agency. And rejigger things so that we can in fact focus on the customer and not the agency's needs for us to spend more. There was one of the great conversations in the CMO summit was this point that, like, look, we have all this technology now, and we have all these opportunities, and darn it, all we're doing is finding out other ways to send people a coupon. Like, isn't there something else that we could use this technology for? And what if we just flip this script, right? And said, what do customers genuinely want? Which is knowable and certainly inferrable today in a way that has never been historically. Why don't we use that data to give them what they want, when they want it, how they want it, instead of constantly trying to push them harder. Folks and value, and not being annoying. I mean, I wrote a whole book about it, Lou, and... Well, your key point there is they can infer and they can actually get signals that have never been named before. Chatter signals. But let's use them for good, not evil, right? I think it's the subtext there. Don't jam a coupon because that's right. But as Mark said, it's hard because CEOs are under tremendous pressure to raise top line in an environment that is not conducive to that. You're going to have to take share. The economy is not growing so fast that you can just show up and grow your company. And so CEOs have tons of pressure. They're then dropping that pressure on the CMO that says, okay, you need to grow top line revenue. So the CMO says, well, we've got all this technology. I guess we'll just send out more offers. We'll have a stronger call to action. And as opposed to using this information to inferences, the data, to be more customer focused, I think in some cases we're being less customer focused, which if anything is short-sighted and at worst is a crime shame. And so the solution there is to use the data to craft relevant things at the right time. To the right even. And it will work, but it requires two things that a lot of organizations simply don't have. Time and courage, right? It requires time and courage to purposely push less hard, right? Because you know it will pay off eventually but you've got to buy into that and that ain't easy always. And sometimes it's not even your decision. Well, what we don't want is we don't want to automate and accelerate bad practices. Right. And at the end of the day, what CMOs are learning, I think, I wonder if this conversation came out yesterday is, geez, maybe marketing really isn't that good. Maybe we have to learn ourselves from what this technology is telling us, what the data is telling us and start dramatically altering the way we think about marketing, the role the marketing plays, the techniques we use, the tactics we use, that will lead to organizational changes, blah, blah, blah. And I'm wondering, did you get a sense out of the session that they are in fact stepping back and saying we got to look in a mirror about some of this stuff. Absolutely, absolutely. And I thought it was remarkable considering he runs this company. Mark Hurd came in and did a little Q and A at the CMO Summit and he said, well, this is a guy who runs Oracle, right? Who's putting this whole thing together. He's selling tons of marketing software and he comes in and says, look guys, I'm not even sure if what we're doing here is right because we've got all this technology. We have been doing this for a long time. We've got all these smart people and still what's our conversion rate? 1%, we've got the greatest technology in the history of the world. We supposedly know all this about customer experience and customer journey mapping and our conversion rate is still 1%. Maybe something is fundamentally broken with how we think about marketing. I thought for somebody in that role to come in and just drop that on a group of CMOs, I was like, whoa. I think he's right. He's totally right. But to have a CEO of a company like this just walk in and say, here's what I think. I think people have, I think, I mean, this is a question for you and I'll ask it by saying, we try to observe progressive CMOs as a leading indicator to the comment you mentioned earlier, which is flip things upside down and see what happens. What are you seeing for those progressive CMOs that have the courage to say, you know what, we're going to flip things upside down and apply the technology and rethink it in a way that's different. What are they doing? One of the markers that we see on the consulting side of my business is CMOs who are thinking about retention first. Not only from a practical execution layer, but even from a strategic layer. Like what if we just pulled back on the steering wheel here a little bit and said, how can we make sure that everybody who's already given us money continues to give us money and more so and essentially really turn the marketing focus from a net new customer model to a customer retention and customer growth. And I'll start there, right? Start with your current customers and then use that, those insights gained and then do a better job with customer acquisition. And so as customer service and marketing in particular start to converge mostly because of online. Online customer service is very brand driven and more like marketing. So as those two things are converging, we're seeing smart CMOs say, well, what if we changed the way we look at this and took care of our own first, learned those lessons and then applied them outwardly. I think that's a really strong marking signal for professional CMOs. It's a great starting point. And it's almost risk-free from a progressive standpoint. It's not always risk-free inside the organization. Yeah, well, I mean, it's harder to get new guinea pig customers to see what works. Go to your business customers and say, we have data to work with. But wouldn't you also say that the very nature of digital which is moving the value proposition from an intrinsic statement of the values in the product and caveat and toward towards a utility orientation with the values and the use of it. And we want to sustain use of it. We're moving more to a service to do that. And digital helps us to do that. That the risk of taking your approach goes down. Because at the end of the day, when you're doing a service orientation, you have to retain the customer because the customer's constantly got an opportunity to abandon it. Yes, I mean, the ability to bail out is very, very easy these days. I completely agree. But what I find is that it makes sense to us, right? It makes sense to us on theCUBE. But in the real world, it's not. Not everybody's drinking that punch yet. So, I don't know. I'll see you in here. It's not like courage. It is definitely courage is one of them because you're essentially saying, look, I've been taught to do marketing one way for 40 years or 20 years. Yeah, we know my email marketing all day long. Yeah, I'm just going to keep pressing send. It's easy. There's almost no net cost. So there's that and also just the pressure from above, I think, from the CEO to grow top line, net new customer revenue. I think that's certainly part of it. And some of it is, I think we went back to earlier about org charting and skills and resources. There's a heck of a lot more people out there at every level of a marketing organization who are trained in customer acquisition more so than customer retention. I mean, how many MBAs are there in customer retention? Zero. How many MBAs are there in marketing and sales? There's a lot of them. 500,000. A lot of them. Right, but they were trained there. They were trained there. They didn't come in like that. So they trained them up. Jay, great to have you on the queue. Great insight as usual. And I think you're right on the money. I think the theme that I would just say for this show, we agree with you, is that if you look at Oracle, you look at IBM, what Amazon's doing, Microsoft in some way, maybe a little bit, but those three, data's at the center of the value proposition. And Oracle clearly is saying to the marketers, at least marketers, if you want to say digital and end-to-end, look, if you use data, it's good for you. This is the new direction. If you think data-driven, CMO, that seems to be the right strategy in my mind. So I think- The best quote in the CMO summit, and you guys need a cube bumper sticker that you can manufacture, was data is the new bacon. And I was like, oh, I love that. That's the best, right? I'm like, I love it. Who doesn't love bacon? Jay, great to see you. Real quick, what's up with you? Give us a quick update on your opportunities, what you're doing these days. Great, running around the country, doing fantastic events just like you guys are working on a brand new content marketing masterclass for advanced marketers on how to take their content marketing strategy to the next level. That launches in a couple of weeks. Continue to do, we're doing four or five podcasts a week and a new video show called Jay Today, where I do a little short snippets, three minutes a day. JayToday.tv, if you want to subscribe to that. Beautiful. Jay Bear, great to see you guys. Great to see you guys. Great thought leader, great practitioner, and just a great share on the net. Check them out. I'm Peter Burris here at Oracle Marketing CX. More live coverage after this short break.