 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for Oracle's marketing, modern marketing experiences show. Two days of live coverage from SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Mike Coase, Peter Burris, head of research with SiliconANGLE Media and Wikibon. Our next guest is Chris Lynch, senior director, head of product marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So you don't get to talk about product positioning. So the portfolio looks very impressive. So you guys have done a great job of packaging the portfolio, best in breed components. But a lot of people who've been following you guys like us, look at it and say, hmm, a lot of acquisitions. Is it a Lego block? Does it truly fit together? That's been kind of an open question for you guys. Here we're hearing integration, keeping it real, showing real demos. Give us the update one on the portfolio. I'll see what a lot of companies, they're all mashing together. But you guys have spent a lot of time building that out. Give us the update on the integration, what's real, what's coming down the pike. I know you're a public company, you probably won't answer that one, but I'll try. Give us the update on the product. Sure, so one of the things that we were intent on really early on, as we've brought together these companies and brought in these different acquisitions from the marketing landscape was looking at what do we think a marketing cloud should foundationally have? And when we sort of developed a framework for that, it actually just brought a lot of clarity to the exercise of doing that. So on one hand, we're very intent that marketers need a place to connect all their different data and make that able to access as an audience. So that was factored into the DMP and the Oracle Blue Chi acquisition. We also believe that they need a centralized canvas by which they can orchestrate those different customer experiences. We believed that was so important that we wanted to contextualize it to both B2C and B2B audiences, which was the Oracle Responses and Oracle Eloqua acquisitions. And then we also obviously know that engagement at that moment of truth is really important. So things like Oracle Content Marketing and Oracle Maximizer to both provide really engaging content, but then be able to optimize it over time. So to answer your question, everyone loves to go to these conferences, right? And people show that chief market tech landscape with the 3,800 logos, and everyone's like, oh, it's got all this kind of, it's kind of scary. Yeah, it can be really intimidating to a marketer. And I think we've gone about it by saying, our strategy isn't necessarily that we want to be in every one of those categories. Instead, our strategy is what is sort of the foundation of this house that a marketer is trying to build. And then we know we want to be able to have an open platform that taps into the ecosystem because of all those thousands of vendors, there are some really interesting things being done from an innovation perspective. So as we innovate on the core products, we also want to be malleable to things that are happening out there. So that's what we do. You mean to go with an example of an ecosystem partner? Sure, like one example would be, one of the things we demoed this morning was around account-based marketing. And we actually showed a couple different partner integrations. We showed Mintigo, which really focused on leveraging some of the modeling they have to do predictive lead scoring. We also talked about some integrations with demand-based, which have really helped us take a lot of the account-based data that we have in Oracle Eloqua make account-based marketing a first class object that people can leverage within the platform. So that's just an example, but I think we're seeing a lot of them kind of crop up on a use case basis. And the great thing is, we don't have to think of all of them because our customers bring them to us before we can think of this. We do a lot of research in this area. Actually, we cover tech, mainly big data, cloud and enterprise tech, but we lead over into market tech because now technology's part of the conversation, certainly software. And the conversation I hear all the time from customers is, you know, I'm sick and tired of form-based lead gen. And one, because it's now digital all the way, not just analog, passing leads on the sales. So again, that's going to hang around for a while, search marketing and lead gen destination-based sites. No problem, it's going to hang around. It's not going away anytime soon. But a new era is coming on with social and data mentioned in Mintigo. And the comment that this person made was, this is a big company. Our problem is that we have all these forms we push on people and it's optimized around who do you work for? And that's not what they want. They want to know who you are. Not necessarily the company you work for. She brought up account-based. Do you see that fitting in and how does that fit into what you guys offer? Because the digital progression could be, hey, you're Chris Lynch. That's what I want to know who you are. Your persona, your interests, your graph. Oh, you work horrible. That's kind of now the new paradigm. Are you seeing that? And can you share some light on how you would solve that problem? Yeah, so I think if, and are we mainly talking like a B2B context? B2B context, yeah. So I think there's a few things that's been interesting. Another part of something we announced this morning was, we've added B2B-based data sets from an anonymous audience perspective to target folks who are at, basically a million companies across the United States. But to your point, I think, yes, the company someone works at is important and then sort of parsing out where they sit in an organization because I think what, while there's been this big push to doing one-to-one marketing, what ends up happening is people are playing different roles in the buying process. Like I was looking at some research that found that the average B2B sale cycle now involves on average five and a half stakeholders, right? So there's a lot of people involved, a lot of stakeholders involved, and all of those people need something different. If it's the executive, they need an ROI-based message because they're focused on value creation. If it's a manager or director level, someone who's going to be using whatever product or service that vendor's providing, they're going to need a different experience that's probably a little bit more tactical from a content perspective. But to go back to your question, I think that B2B customers and people who are looking at B2B transactions are also consumers. And that's actually been true before we had all this digital media. You go and watch a golf tournament. There's a reason that companies are advertising for servers because a lot of their audience, this is a business buying audience, is actually on there and is ripe to consume that advertising. So I think what we're seeing is, yes, we want to know where people work and be able to target them effectively, but there are a lot of other things about us as consumers that offer a good opportunity to reach them. Well, the buying side is a community as well as the selling side. And I actually would say that that five and a half number might be the right number for unit one. But as you know, for something like a marketing cloud, the goal is not just unit one, the goal is to get the entire corporation to adopt. And there are a lot of people over an extended period of time that can have a major say about whether or not they embed Oracle, for example, into their business, or they abandon it. So it's an extremely complex interplay between, geez, it's all about getting that first sale, but then it's about sustaining the engagement over an extended period of time so the organization actually adopts it. How is the marketing cloud facilitating, or is the marketing cloud moving from sale of unit one to sale of unit one thousand to facilitate the adoption process within corporations? So I think there's a few interesting things happening there and it depends a little bit on what vertical that we're serving, but what I would say is that marketing now controls more of the funnel or customer experience process than we ever have seen before. And that needs to continue to happen where we're starting to track more of those interactions you just described digitally versus sort of haphazardly having them all happen offline and causing a scenario where people aren't coordinated. You go back to the account-based marketing piece. In that scenario, what you have, sometimes if you were just marketing to individual contacts at companies and say you sell something and then you're looking to drive a cross-sell, well, as you're looking to drive that cross-sell on that project, especially in larger enterprises, you could have multiple people inside that company that are looking to go from sales unit one to sales unit a thousand. But if you have three discreet salespeople reaching out to them, not really tracking their interactions. Salespeople like to go into CRM systems like Friday afternoon at four o'clock, like they're taking vitamin pills to update it, right? Because it was always a system that was really created for sales management, not sales users, right? So this is a tremendous opportunity for marketing. We invested a lot in sales enablement tools like with Oracle Elical Profiler and Oracle Elical Engage because it's providing the best of both worlds. Marketing can provide them with really world-class content to go out and engage with their customers. So sales is happy because they're going there with something that's really professional. They also feel empowered that they can read digital body language of their prospects and then go and engage. But it's also a win for marketing because they know now we can track these interactions that salespeople are having a little bit more organically than we had in the past. I'd say on the, what we see on the more B2C side of our business in terms of like how you grow and retain customers over time. The challenge is, is how do you move off of just sort of the transactional based way of messaging? You look at so many consumer marketing organizations, everything was just based on the, okay, like 10% off, 20% off, and you just keep going and doing all these messages. It's just all offer-based. So how do you appeal to people in a way that's a little bit more emotive? And I think that's where things like content marketing, where you're telling a different sort of narrative, not just on the product itself, but everything surrounding it is a real opportunity. So you're in product marketing. How is digital technology, two questions, how is digital technology like the marketing cloud? Altering the relationship between product marketing and product management. And product marketing historically has been kind of an outbound function. Are you more involved in capturing those customer sentiments and that emotional bond that leads to loyalty and may not be bound up solely in the features and functions of the product? So are you starting to see some fluidity in those product marketing, product management relationships? And how is the role of product marketing evolving to become a little bit more inbound? Interesting question. One of the things I've learned in product marketing is that, and it's also one of the reasons it makes it a very hard profession to hire for, is that you can have product marketers who are very product and dev centric, so tend to want a message along, feature function of what a product is and what it does. Then you can have some that are really sales focused where everything is just kind of a squishy solution message. And I've probably on that spectrum, always like to stay somewhere in the middle where you want to be able to position value in the market, appeal to who your persona is. Know your customer. Know your customer, but you also want to anchor it in something that you feel is truly differentiated if you're a little bit of a purist at heart and you think great products serve customers the right way, right? And is data helping you do that? Yes, data is helping us do that. So I'd say one of the things that we do, I have a whole wing of my organization that focuses very heavily on win loss analysis and really tracking, working with our customer marketing team in terms of tracking where customers are in their life cycle. So our customer marketing and account management organizations do a lot of work, detail oriented work to make sure that we're capturing all the interactions that we have with customers, not just after we've made a first sell of one of our products, but really, what is their overall journey? They'll come to us, say, hey, here's where they're at. We think they may benefit if we could integrate another product with them. What would be the use case or story there? So we're definitely using data quite a bit. And I'd say it's a combination of, you can give the academic data, right? Where you go, okay, we want to go into a new country. What's the marketing tech spend in that country? It's sort of like you got to do it to gut check certain things, but there's the market that exists and then there's the market that you as a company have the ability to execute on. And I always think you got to kind of find that right balance. So talk about the win losses. You've got their team that evaluates. Where are you guys winning and why? Where do you guys win your big deals, why? I think we're winning large deals when people are truly trying to do something transformative with their marketing, but they're still looking for that level of simplicity that a lot of this ecosystem is trying to bring to bear. And I think it's finding that balance. I think for a long time, it was sort of one of two roads in this industry. It was either, I want to do something really sophisticated. And in addition to the technology, I'm going to have to invest in a ton of consultants. I'm going to have to invest in just a ton of resources and change management to your point to do it. And by the way, the tools that I invest in are probably going to be hard to use. And they're going to have a steep learning curve. Then on the other hand of the spectrum, you know, you have the tools where, okay, these are super simple. You just want to send an email campaign out and do a traditional kind of batch and blast approach. I think what we've tried to do is offer marketers a level of simplicity for the user in terms of what they're able to do, but do it in a really sophisticated way that doesn't allow them to rely on IT. So sort of one of our internal mantras that we have is that we want to be the platform that marketers love, but that IT trusts. Because there is this sort of friction that's happened historically between marketing and IT because marketing wants to run some more digital campaigns. IT knows, well, is this going to integrate with all those data sources you want? Is this going to scale when you go and turn it on? I mean, we work with some of the largest retailers in the world. They need to know for sure that when Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, everything, all the messaging that they're going to do is going to work just right. Right, so. Well, also too, IT's not a dynamic environment relative to the infrastructure. Right. So they want to have, say, some dynamic campaigns. Yeah. They don't have to wait eight weeks for a font to be approved or something. Right. That's more ops oriented. Right, well, I think what we're trying to do too, it's like an operating philosophy as we invest in the platforms that we've acquired is, how can we make something that used to be marketer going to IT, having to do some complex scripting to do, how can we make that a drag and drop operation inside of our products for the marketer? That's good for the marketer, and it's also really good for IT. And I think with IT, what's interesting is, they're dealing with a scenario with a lot of these, and this isn't just true with marketing. I'd say it's a lot of line of business applications that are going to be adopted in enterprises, which is, if it goes really well, the line of business user is going to take credit. If it goes very poorly, IT might get blamed. IT gets credit. Right. So, if we can kind of help sort of keep that as a solid relationship between marketing and IT, that's something that we think is like, that's a good area for us to be. All right, Chris, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your insight. Product marketing, head of product marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud, Chris Lynch. This is theCUBE bringing all the signal today and tomorrow here at Modern Marketing Experience Oracle show on marketing technology. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be right back after this short break.