 from theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. Hey, welcome back, everybody, to theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020. I'm Jeff Frick. We're in our studios in Palo Alto and this year, IBM Think is digital. So unfortunately, we're not all together at Moscone or the Sands or one of your favorite convention sites. We're bringing to you this all from people's homes and we're excited to have our very next guest. She is Marina Winans, the CMO of North America for IBM. Maria, great to see you. Yeah, great to see you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So let's jump into it. IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. You know, we've been going to so many IBM events for so many years and you used to have them. You know, you would inherit them when you brought in new companies. So there was many, many IBM events. There's a long history of IBM events. It's a really important part of your mix, but then suddenly in mid-March you wake up one day and are told, guess what? We can't do IBM Think in a physical event anymore. So give us a little background on, you know, what IBM thinks of events and how important they are and what you use them for. And then a little bit of the behind the scenes, what happened in mid-March when suddenly this thing had to go digital? Yeah, I know. Thank you for having me here again. theCUBE has been an integral part of many of our events from our conferences. Way back when. So let me start by saying that events are at the core of our marketing strategy for driving value, for driving growth. I mean, they really are about helping us build the brand. Events help us foster and nurture relationships for new and existing clients. They help us really establish that leadership to help shape business and society. And it's a great opportunity for us to showcase our best of features, our new announcements, our product, our functionality through amazing demonstrations and labs. And more importantly, it's a great opportunity for our sellers to progress conversations and to close business. And we do all kinds of a variety of events from breakfasts to what we called road shows on the road, Russian events and our premier flagship event, which is the 2020. It's when the one time of year where IBM comes together and it's a great opportunity to really showcase one IBM. And that's what 2020 is about. That's awesome. So when you guys, again, woke up mid-March, we got to change this thing, good for IBM to actually hold the date. Most of the people that we work with, which are numerous, either flat out canceled the date, postponed it to some kind of future date where maybe things are a little bit more back to normal or went with the digital, but even with the digital, they postponed. So as you think about what digital means, what a digital event kind of affords you, I think there's way too much conversation about what digital isn't vis-a-vis the physical and it just isn't. It's not the same as being together. And yet on the other hand, there's a whole lot of new things you can do in digital that you just can't do at the physical conference. So how did you guys kind of search those things out and define what a digital event is and then really getting a position to deliver on that promise? Yeah, so let me talk about that in a couple of forums. First of all, we know that our attendees perceive value or event is really heavily dependent on the in-person interaction. So as you think about that, we've had to step back and say, how do we reimagine how we deliver this meaningful one-to-one engagement that our clients know that in a value that's really now through a digital environment and really reimagine that whole interaction while still maintaining that very personalized, best-in-class experience that our clients value. And that's what really excites me about Think 2020. First of all, we are, so let me just highlight a couple of things of why I think and I'm personally excited about Think 2020. First of all, we broaden our reach. We are hosting over 50,000 attendees that's clients, partners, IBMers, influencers, and we're reaching a much broader set of roles and influencers who may have not had the ability to travel before to attend an in-person event. Second, complimentary. This will be our first event that at this size that is free. So we have many more new accounts joining us to learn about IBM for the first time. And this really opens up the doors to new business and opportunities for us. Very targeted agenda. So what we've done is we've taken an event that was gonna span over five days to now two days and we went from over 2,000 sessions that we were gonna run to really now think about how do we feature 200 sessions that are very focused, that are very targeted and very much on point and messaging of really dealing with what our clients are experiencing today with the recent world crisis. Another very exciting thing is Watson Media Platform. We are leveraging our very own media and AI platform that can host over a million users at once and really increases the opportunity for engagement. So very interactive experience. Our lab are sold out. We are completely sold out of our labs. Some of our sessions are wait-listed and we're also running the opportunity to do one-on-one meetings for these two days. So while we're not in person, we have a tremendous opportunity to really offer a very interactive experience by introducing live chat throughout the sessions and really engaging clients with each other and with their sellers during the event. And then for those that cannot attend or cannot attend all the sessions throughout the day, we are going to have what this what we're calling content on demand. The content will live on. It will live on in different platforms and we will be delivering the content to our clients, making it accessible at any time whenever it's convenient for them. So super excited about what the teams have done to really kind of step back and reimagine this whole experience, maintaining the interactivity, the personal engagement and really the value add that our clients look for. Right? You touched on so many good themes there and I just want to unpack them a little bit more. The first one that you talked about right off the bat was democratization. And as you said, there are many people that just can't get up and go to a conference whether it's just bad timing for the week, they've got to run their own business, they just can't get away. So for people to be able to attend digitally, as you said, opens up an entire kind of new palette of participation for people that maybe couldn't come before. Another thing I think that's lost is this kind of separation of content creation, content delivery and content consumption, which is consistent with how we consume a lot of things today in our media. Very few people sit down even for big television events like the Super Bowl have really appointment television. We're creating this content now. It's going to be going up in the middle of IBM Think and people might watch it on May 5th or May 6th. They might watch it on May 10th. They might watch it May 10th, 2025. So I think it's a really different way to think about it. And I'm sure as a marketer, at some point you're going to feel a little bit more freedom rather than try to force fit, say all the product groups and all the announcements and all the sessions, all this stuff that's got to line up for these what was three days in Vegas or San Francisco, now can kind of be broken up. And if it makes more sense for some information to get out earlier, it can go out earlier, it can go out later. But a conference is defined by the bounds of that physical location for three days and how much can you guys get in there? Where now suddenly you don't have those binds anymore and it really opens up a much broader kind of opportunity for you to communicate your messages, keynote messages, product information, training in a very, very different and in some ways I would bet liberating way. Yeah, I think this, what's happening here is an opportunity to really rethink in so many ways how we do marketing and what we talk about when we say digital engagement. We did a recent CMO survey, which we call our C-suite survey and we interviewed over 2,000 CMOs. And one of the big conclusions that came out of it was that digital engagement is kind of the future and the way that really what it really lands on is the fact that really digital engagement is the fair trade-off of information and the exchange of value. So when you really think about that, for us as marketers, digital engagement and value exchange comes in many forms. How we show up on our own platform like we're doing here with Watson Media, how we show up during events, whether it's webinars or third party. Even more importantly, the way that our sellers are gonna engage virtually, think about virtual selling and WebEx meetings, which is really how they're having to communicate with clients today. And then how we engage socially. And that's really for all the social channels and the work that we do with influencers. So we're gonna learn a lot. We are learning a lot. We're gonna test. We're gonna iterate. But this whole new normal has given us an opportunity as marketers to really connect the digital in the physical in new ways. And in that, we have to really consider all the multiple facets and elements when we're thinking about digital marketing. And that to me is a tremendous opportunity because digital engagement, there are many elements and it's gonna be super important for all the marketers to really kind of step back and think about what are those multiple elements that are gonna make us, as we think about, how do we stay essential? How do we stay essential with our clients? And that is providing information when they need it, how they want to consume it, and then how do we stay relevant? I think also when you think about digital engagement, is you've got to show flexibility, the ability to pivot strategically and quickly, which is really what we've done with things. We were ready to move forward on a physical event, amazing event the teams have been working on. And with everything going on, we wanted to maintain May 5th and 6th, we had made a commitment to our clients and we had to pivot very quickly and be flexible of how do we re-imagine things from physical to now digital. In a digital world, user first experience is a must. It has to be compelling. It has to be an incredible user experience and the entire experience has to be digitally connected. Content as you said before, content needs to be delivered in unique ways and where the clients are, not where you want the clients to come. So how does the content find the clients, the relationships? How do we continue to incorporate the human connection, the human connection and build those relationships with the client and interacting with them in meaningful ways. And I think one of the things that we've really over the last couple of years in IBM is grounded in leverage, really our data and analytics to better understand behaviors and determine what is that best digital investment, that best touch point at that best time. Very targeted, you know, yeah. I'm sorry. No, go ahead. I was going to say it's just, is it a hook or crook or circumstance, but just kind of ironic, right? That when you guys were forced to make this pivot and I think it's a nice statement to IBM that you were able to successfully make this pivot. Again, one of the interesting things about COVID is, right? Nobody saw it coming. Nobody really had time to prep. Nobody put in plans or was no slow transition. It was this light switch moment. But at the same moment in time, right? You just got a brand new CEO who is extremely social. And, you know, Arvind, you know, announced his, his kind of welcome to the world and his leadership changes and some promotions and stuff via a LinkedIn post, which I found, you know, really fascinating that, you know, he's leveraging the social medium in a way that wasn't necessarily done before at IBM and the leadership suite. And then the fact that you guys are making this quick switch, you took the challenge to keep that date the same, but reinvent, think again, as a testament to kind of a shift in IBM's culture and ability to move quickly in the face of this new challenge, which, you know, nobody really saw it coming to the degree and the speed in which we've had to react. So it's a very, it's a very nice statement on your visibility to execute. Yeah, and it's exciting. I mean, I think when I think about marketing and I've been in marketing most of my career at IBM, it's an opportunity for us to really kind of, you know, kind of lean in and put our creative juices to work really team together and embrace, embrace the opportunity to kind of think differently. And I think when we look at how marketing will progress and the leadership that we can provide in this digital era, we're going to see a lot more opportunity to get much more personalized. We're going to see chatbot kind of being used very strategically as we're seeing them today. We're going to look at opportunities to infuse AI in the experience to augment it, to personalize it, dynamic content delivery. We're experimenting with many platforms to really do that more effectively and recommendation engines and really continue to automate the marketing process and marketing kind of experience all the way through to make it as compelling and as personalized as we can. So a huge opportunity for every marketer in the world and a huge opportunity that we've embraced in IBM. Yeah, it's just, wow, just the forcing function, right? Just automation, we've been talking about that for a long time, you know, taking away boring tasks so people can focus on higher level activities. But it all kind of comes back to something I want to kind of close on and that's leadership. And Michelle Paluso had a post a couple of days ago talking about leadership, you responded to it and we've been reaching out to a lot of the leaders in our community to get their take on from a leadership perspective, because I think, you know, the cream really rises to the top in challenging times. And this is, again, cast upon us, no preparation, ready, set, go. And it is really a call to leadership. It's leading your own people. It's really putting a voice of confidence out to your customer base, as well as just your broader community. So that's partners and all of the constituents that play. So I wonder, you know, we've been in it for a number of weeks now as you kind of think back on adjusting your own leadership style, down as well as the leadership within the IBM senior team, great example, being able to pull this thing together and completely flip it on its head, if you will. Wonder if you can share, what are you trying to do different? What are some best practices? Who are some of the folks you're looking to to give you kind of some tips and tricks to lead in, you know, basically from your home office? Yeah, no, I think challenging times like this. And I've always said it, it is with the opportunity for every leader to step up and rise to the top. Leaders are made during challenging times. Leaders become during these, turning challenges into opportunities. So for me, you know, as I think about my own leadership style, number one is you put the people first. You know, you, you know, especially during these times, act with compassion and empathy, focus on the team's help, focus on wellness, focus on making sure that you keep everybody motivated, you know, lead with energy. And this is, you know, back to Michelle's article in LinkedIn, she talked about, you know, team matters an awful lot now and connecting people and making sure that everybody's well-being, it's their mind, their wellness, their activity and they're staying connected. I think the second is productivity is we have to keep the business going. We have to make sure that the work from home, you know, environment is safe and productive and everybody's work environment differently. Everybody has their own challenges and opportunities and we have to acknowledge that. So productivity is important, but everybody is in their own and you've got to be aware as a leader of those circumstances. You can't expect everything to be the same for everyone and you've got to be ready for interruptions. You got to be ready for those kids in the background and dogs barking and, you know, certain routines that have to be adjusted to. And I think the third is around staying connected. We have various schools and we're very fortunate at IBM, especially in marketing, that we've really embraced the new as far as the way that we communicate using Slack, you know, looking at, you know, how do we leverage our tools to inform our actions in marketing? And, you know, staying connected is more important than ever and we're doing, you know, we're touching teammates more often. I know that I am doing one-on-one calls with my team more often than I would have done in otherwise. And then being agile, you know, whether it's the tools, the process of the culture, for us embracing agile has been at the core of our marketing transformation and it's more important than ever that we stay agile, that we continue to work, you know, in feedback and learning and testing and in the ways that we know best. And it's an amazing opportunity to try new things. There is, you know, no bad idea. Be open to innovation, try fast, learn, ready to pivot, you know, and really what's happening in the world is giving us an opportunity to really step out of our normal and some amazing ideas are coming forward. And, you know, at a very fast pace and we have to be agile and we have to be authentic to our environment. And I'll close with one thing. One of the things that we did as IBMers is we all specifically as leaders from Arvin to Michelle to every leader at IBM, we made a pledge, you know, a work from home pledge that we will support each other and we are each given examples of the things that we are taking forward to support each other as we're living through this new normal and digital engagement. So an incredible opportunity for every IBMer and really a prideful moment to stay strong as an IBMer and to stay strong as an individual and a leader. Well, very good. Well, it shows that you've been able to accomplish this feat and pulling off this really big event in the same time window that you had allocated and completely flip it on its mind. So it's a great testament to you as well as the leadership team and everybody executing up and down the line. So Maria, great to catch up. Thanks for your time and really a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. All right. She's Maria, I'm Jeff. It's theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.