 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto studios to have a CUBE conversation today. Conference season's slowing down a little bit, so we're going to do CUBE conversations in the studio. So it's a little bit different format, not in the crazy madness of a conference, but we're really excited to have our next guest on. He's Matt Zilli. He's the VP of product marketing at Marketo. I think first time on theCUBE, so welcome, Matt. Thank you very much. Great to be here. Absolutely. So you're at Marketo. Marketo's been in the kind of marketing, automation, digital engagement space for a long time, but you guys are really starting to change the way you think about things, about engagement. And engagement is this elusive, I don't want to say unicorn because the term is overused, but it is, right? So how do we get that deep engagement with customers and how do companies really establish that? And that's something you guys are trying to do more work with and help enable to do better. So how do you think about when you think about engagement? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's what we've realized these days is the currency that every company needs to have, has to have because if you look back over the last 10 or 15 years, what the digital world has gotten us as companies is volume. We can go blast a message out all over the world and just hope that one small percentage point of those folks will actually engage with us and that's just not gonna work anymore. We're all too familiar with how to black out, how to ignore all of those messages. And so the real key moving forward is how do companies really deeply engage with their audience, with their customers, with their potential customers and we're trying to help companies do that. The other thing that's really changed is the avenues, the venues, the potential touch points have grown so much whether it used to be in the mailbox outside your house and it was email was so dominant for so long but now we use Snapchat and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and all these things which A are so omnichannel but B give a level of measurement opportunity that you never really had before. How's that kind of changing the way that marketers think about not only connecting with touching regarding a campaign et cetera but again engaging. Yeah, it's a great awesome opportunity on one hand and this unbelievably significant challenge on the other where on the positive side we have all of these new avenues for engagement where we can try and have a connection with somebody when they're on Facebook, when they're thinking more about how a brand might intersect with their personal life than they ever do elsewhere and that's a great opportunity for marketers because in the digital world you can measure the effectiveness of all of these things but on the flip side, as you alluded to we've got a new opportunity to do that every day some new channel, some new touch point comes up and so as organizations we have to get really good at managing this complexity one, just to make sure we're in the right places and two, to make sure that we've got a uniform, consistent story that's being told across all these places and we're not sending a message out on Snapchat that misaligns with what's on our website or who a brand is. And it's interesting we had Karen on the other day talking about the concept of adaptive engagement. She had her three A's of kind of engagement and really this concept of the context matters right, context has always mattered not only the channel but the timing and just because you can and just because you've got this massive kind of technology can and if you will that you can send a lot of things, a lot of ways, a lot of time, you can't. Just because you can't doesn't mean that you can't. So when you think about adaptive and trying to be kind of responsive and in sync with the opportunity and the offer as well as the appropriateness of the timing as well as the match with the individual at the other end of that channel, what are some of the factors that people should think about that companies should think about as they're weighing, you know, I can't just spray and pray 24 seven that's gonna just saturate and kill people. I think I'm gonna steal your technology cannon analogy because that's right, it's a cannon that could end up killing people or certainly killing a brand. And so the way we encourage companies to think about it today is you have to bring together all of these different insights you might have about a potential person, customer, potential customer and figure out how to use that to provide something of value to them. And that's gonna adapt over time. We don't have perfect visibility yet into everyone we might want to engage with. We learn over time and 10, 20 years ago the best we could do is try and understand someone's demographics and use that to make a best educated guess about what they might want. That doesn't really work all that well anymore when we can now think about all this behavioral data and when we learn what somebody's looking at on the web or on Facebook or what they're engaging with on Snapchat, that's way more insightful for us to make an educated guess about what might provide somebody value is the next thing we put in front of them. And so it really is this concept of just constantly adapting the experience we're delivering to people and it should just get better and better and better over time as we learn more about what they want and what they're looking for. Right, one of the interesting things we see over and over we go to a lot of tech events is the concept of you have your data in-house but then there's all this public data and other sources of data and really to grab that competitive advantage you need to combine the proprietary data as well as the public data and then combine them using the algorithms to get the insight that maybe your competitor doesn't have. How are you seeing this actually executed in the field? Is it easy to do, hard to do, still early innings for people trying to figure it out or is it relatively mature in terms of people using all this different data? Yeah, I think there's no question people are using data more effectively and using just more data now than ever before but it hasn't yet manifested itself in a way where they're using it to deliver the best perfect thing to every single customer. So there's still a long way to go and some of the things that we see hold people back is we mentioned you've got all these different touch points and channels popping up. The scope of how data is expanding is still going far faster than we can even keep up with and in many organizations all of those pieces of data will sit in different silos. So even for the companies that have managed to bring it all in-house and try and get it at least inside the walls of their company, it still probably doesn't sit in one place that will allow somebody to actually gain insights from it and then use those insights to do something and so I think that's where we see the next few years are going to take us with a combination of AI technologies that can do a lot of the heavy lifting of looking at the data and gleaning insights from it to getting them at somebody's fingertip whether it's a marketer or whether it's somebody driving customer experience. So they can actually use it to do something informed for a specific customer. The other kind of concept we hear over and over and over is kind of the segmentation of one. And the industry that I think is kind of the most interesting to watch on this is insurance, car insurance, because it's easy, right? Because it used to be your age, your sex and if you were married. And then maybe, you know, did you have a red car? And maybe did you travel more than X number of miles? But now, you know, with the progressive thing you stick in the dashboard or the list of the face at your cell phone, right? They can know a lot more behavior. Do you roll through red lights? Do you spend too much time on your couch? Do you tend to drive at 2 30 a.m. on Saturday nights? You know, other things that can really determine ultimately what your rate is. On the other hand, at some point in time, if you're a big company, you know, the overhead of managing to that level and to segment your offerings to that level maybe exceed the value of doing that. So as you see kind of people narrowing in and honing in on their segmentation and execution, what are some of the lessons learned about, you know, how tight can you get that? You know, can you have, you know, infinite number of skews to provide a slightly different flavor of your service to end number of consumers? Or is there some kind of happy balance that you see the world kind of moving towards? Yeah, I think the biggest point we'd make is there's no excuse for not thinking that way today. There's no excuse for bacon strides towards delivering on an audience of one or a customer of one. I think it varies pretty wildly by business, whether you can do that in your core operations, whether insurance company can really come up with the right package, price, product, et cetera, for that audience of one. That's a big problem, certainly. But at least when we think about how we engage with our customers, there's no excuse not to think about it that way today because at the very least we all have at our fingertips the technologies that'll let us choose how to engage with someone, what channel to engage with them, what timing and cadence to engage with them. And so we can make progress even if we're not necessarily at the point of using all of this information to deliver one perfect message to one person at that exact right moment. There's a lot of work to be done today to get there. Right. The other piece that's interesting is kind of advocacy. And again, Karen talked about that as one of her three A's of measuring engagement. And it's a really different type of relationship to have with a customer that's not necessarily so transactional, but much more relationship, much less about this transaction and much more about the lifetime. Value the customer. And again, an example we shared with Karen is Harley Davidson as just an iconic brand that people have such a connection to that they will tattoo it on their body, which if you're a brand manager, you've got to say, well, you know, that's phenomenal. So as you see kind of advocacy and companies wanting to change the nature of the relationship with the people that buy and use their services, what are some of the best practices you see? What are some of the ways that people are trying to flip the bit, if you will, from a transactional to a relationship type of engagement? Yeah, I think there's certainly those iconic brands and products that do a lot of the heavy lifting for companies to do that effectively, right? Harley Davidson starts with the product, starts with the motorcycle and people love that. But for a lot of companies that maybe, you know, don't drive that level of passion around the product itself, that's marketing's opportunity to go in and capture that. And so I think what we see the most successful and forward thinking organizations do today is think about the entire lifecycle that way with an eye towards advocacy, because the thing that not everybody is capitalized on today is whether we like it or not, all of our customers have a megaphone. And that we know and in a lot of ways we've tried to manage the negative sides of that to make sure that the negative messages aren't getting out there and avoid that. But we haven't used it enough to make sure we use that to drive the positive messages out in the market. And so when companies kind of shift from the transactional approach from I've just got to acquire new customers or I've got to get these customers to buy more to a world where they're really thinking about a group of people that could really be advocates almost on behalf of the brand, almost like they're working for the brand to do that and set up a set of initiatives to drive that. It leads to 10, 20, 30 X yields down the road and ROI down the road because everybody does have that opportunity to be an influencer today and brands can really harness that. So do you think the essence of that is brands finally figuring out that they no longer have exclusive rights to control the message? I forget, it's a tweet or a meme somewhere, you know that your brand is no longer what you're telling people it is. Your brand is now what people are telling you what it is. And as you said, people didn't have the giant microphones, right? They had, you know, a letter to the editor who sees it compared to, you know, literally worldwide casting ability of a message and if you created Craftalian with a little bit of humor it might be a cup and go viral. So is it a reaction to that or do people finally figure out that it seems so stupid to me? Obviously it's always easier to sell more to your existing clients than to get new. So why suddenly is advocacy getting the bright spotlight when this should have been something that people were executing all along? Yeah, I think it's like most things. It's not just, I think marketers, customer success, but everybody's understood the problem and the opportunity for a long time and you know, social as an area has been around long enough that I think everybody understands that it's really a question of what can be done to execute on it. And if 80% of marketing budgets are still spent on acquiring new customers, it's no surprise that they're not executing on it all that effectively. And so I think the transition we're going through right now is brands are starting to realign the dollars, leverage the new technologies and point them at this area of advocacy as much as they're pointing them to other areas versus maybe, you know, they were just of lesser importance years ago. So I think everybody's known it for a while but they're now just finally acting on it. Right, right. And of course the other thing now that's so different than it used to be in the past especially in large broadcast media and you know, people measured audience but you really couldn't measure uptake and write the classical saying I know I'm wasting 50% of my marketing budget I just don't know which 50% it is. The ability to measure now is higher than we've ever had at the ability to A-B test or A-B-Z-E-F-G test is like never before at the same time again, referencing our conversation before you still have to have a narrative. You still have to be kind of a personality as a brand or else you'll just get wiped out, right? So it's this weird dichotomy of the soft and kind of the hard elements of going to market. It's exactly, I mean if you look at what a lot of companies have done in the last 10, 12 years as digital has exploded and certainly beyond even 12 years there's been this shift from the emotive storytelling side of marketing over to the data-driven operational side of marketing. The idea of I can send out a million emails and I know 100,000 people will open them and some subset of those will click on them and that's an important piece of marketing today certainly but I'd argue that the needle has swung too far and when we think about the engagement economy we think about the core of this is being able, a brand being able to engage deeply on an emotional level with their customer and audience. It requires a brand narrative, a brand story that's relevant to them, that's rolled out appropriately to them that's shared across all these channels with them because if you don't have that and all you have is the operational side you'll never be the Harley Davidson iconic brand that has that emotional connection with their customers. Right. Okay so before I let you go I know you guys have been doing some did a research study that's going to be coming out shortly. I wonder if you can share preview and kind of the highlights in terms of what was the purpose of that first off. And what are some of the kind of preliminary findings that you can share before the actual data comes out? Yeah absolutely it's been really insightful for us what we did is we went out and surveyed a bunch of consumers and buyers and a bunch of marketers and we tried to understand is the story the same across both sides what people value, what they want what marketers are delivering what they think they're delivering and so it's been really insightful to understand what the world looks like today when it comes to engagement and while there are a lot of insights I think the thing that everybody has acknowledged is how important this is how critical it is in this economy to make sure that you do have that emotional connection with a brand if you're a consumer somebody you want to do business with and marketers and brands acknowledge how important it is to have that with their customers. Where the gaps are is how's it being actualized is it actually happening the belief from some companies that they're doing this incredibly effectively and yet the feedback from the customers that they're not. And so that divide is what we have to resolve is brands and its companies over the next few years otherwise someone will come in and disrupt us and take advantage of that. So have you found any good objective measurements that people should I mean obviously there's not one golden metric we would have already known it but what are some of the things that marketers or companies should be looking at to see if they're doing a better job or doing a good job? Yeah, I think that without question looking at your competitive landscape and talking to your customers in a way that can really get you that feedback you have to seek the answers to find out how good of a job you're doing versus looking at the efforts you're putting in place and I think that in and of itself could be a challenge for a lot of companies is to really get out there and try and get an objective understanding of whether they're doing it or not. And I think when you start there in almost every brand's case they're gonna find surprises about how their customers really feel about them how their potential customers really feel about them and identify the opportunities to close that gap and then of course wandering through the crazy landscape of technology to try and figure out the right things that'll allow them to close that gap the good news is there's no shortage of options to do that today. Yeah, and don't send a hundred question there. Oh my God, I just got one from JetBlue. It's happy to fill it out. I lasted, I don't know, a lot of questions I thought and I just ran out of gas. I'm like, you know, come on guys it's a new world order, right? So you wouldn't put that little list of engaging tactics? Little trade, right? Give me a little value. I'll give you a little info. Value trade, value trade. Don't get to the whole, you know, multivariate, you know, eight ways a Sunday. People have seconds. You can get them for seconds. You're not gonna get them for minutes or hours. All right, Matt. Well, we look forward to the research coming out and again, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Matt Zilly, he's from Arquette. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.