 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Oracle's modern marketing experience. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts, Peter Burris and Jeff Frick. Welcome everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas, Nevada at the MGM Grand at our first ever Oracle modern marketing experience. I think they've been doing the show for a couple of years. It's the first year that we've got theCUBE here. We're really excited to be here and to join it for this intro segment with Peter Burris from Wikibon. Welcome, Peter. Hey, Jeff, how are you today? It's good to see you. Absolutely great. So the experience series is, Oracle has a number of these. They've got sales, services, commerce. They're all collated here with the marketing experience, which is basically taking over the MGM Grand Conviction Center. So they had a great keynote last night. Kevin Ackroyd kicked it off with some kind of old school brands trying to do new school marketing. Clorox, Western Digital, as well as Sears. So we'll get a little bit into that commentary. And then they brought a new guy. They brought in Zach King, the Vine guy, the YouTube guy who really had a lot of great messages about how to connect with your audience, how to stay connected with your audience, engage, have a voice. We'll go a little bit deeper into those things as well. But what's coming up in just a few minutes is Mark Herd is going to give the big keynote. So Peter, what are some of the things you'd like to hear from Mark Herd as Oracle's on this cloud journey? I think overall the marketing question is, marketing is hard. It's really, really hard. And technology can extend the capabilities of marketing, but it's, over the years, it's had some mixed success. Now what's happened in the last few years is we focused more on this notion of customer experience and the role that marketing can play in creating better customer experience. And specifically as customers become more digital themselves, the role that technology can play in helping marketers engage their customers differently. So I think those are the two big messages. How is marketing technology actually maturing so that it is easier? And to what degree is it really satisfying that kind of crucial condition of making it easier for customers to work with a brand? Yes, it's funny, yesterday in the keynote, Kevin really went way back to the corner grocery store, the corner meat market, the corner banker, where people had an intimate knowledge of their customers, who they were, what they liked, what their preferences were, because they had a one-to-one relationship. Obviously what's changed now is scale. These are global companies with global brands. You can't just walk down to the corner market and meet Mr. Sears, right? This is not happening. And he went through an interesting progression of the technology going all the way back, I think the 86, with ACT, really just a content management database. And then to Salesforce, you know, really kind of moving that content management really kind of into the cloud and all the way through. And he went to Siebel. He kind of marched all the way through to where we are. So it's kind of back to the future. Again, you want that relationship with the customer like you had before, but now to some of the work that you're doing, it's all based on a digital communication. There is no face to, not only is there no corner store, there's really no face to face. It's mostly done through electronic touches. Yeah, that's absolutely true, Jeff. And mobile technology and social media has made customers a very deep and direct and profound participant in this process. So it used to be that all these marketing technologies, they were Africa content management, Siebel for CRM, et cetera, the business, the brand was still putting the data into the system. And the quality of the operation was contingent upon how well sales people and contact representatives and call centers did that. Now customers are an active participant as they take their mobile devices, as they participate in social media and move from place to place, they're expressing their interests. And that's throwing off an enormous amount of data that technologies like the marketing cloud is trying to aggregate and turn into observations and options that brands can present to customers more successfully. It's interesting that Eric Reynolds on from Clorox, it's just one of the rare Bay Area-based CPG companies, but 100-year-old company. And Eric talked about the challenge, he said they're in 45 million homes and then they ran an old Hidden Valley Ranch commercial which that used to be the way, everything in mass. But even in 45 million homes with great market share in the segments that they represent, Kingsford, Charcoal, et cetera, they're still trying to go through this digital transformation which he said is really hard to try to get connected with each of those households or at least as connected as they could be. Absolutely, Jeff. And Clorox is an iconic brand. It's a very well-known product. The conventions for how you use it are pretty straightforward. There's not a lot of conversation about what Clorox as that product is or is not. But nonetheless, Clorox is among the many companies that realize that if they don't understand the experience associated with using their product, it's going to make it easy for someone to step in and move them out no matter how iconic the brand is. And so by understanding how customers are doing things, why they pick up Clorox, what their state of mind is when they're using Clorox, what other things they're doing when they think of Clorox, when they use Clorox, what are they doing instead when they don't use Clorox, what's the substitute, et cetera. So there's an enormous amount of information that Clorox can use to nonetheless make that iconic, straightforward product and even better experience for their customers. Yeah, there's another great term. We'll follow up with Kevin Ackroyd, who's going to be on later, who runs the digital marketing cloud for Oracle. And he talked about kind of your digital body language, which is kind of what you just described. That's their vernacular. What is your customer doing? How are they reacting when they're not at that moment of a purchase? And how do you read that? How do you react to that? How do you engage with them? And then I think, you know, Zach King's whole message was really about, you know, having a voice, connecting with people, not always trying to sell. You're not always trying to sell, but really building a relationship through engagement, through a variety of channels, so that then, you know, ultimately, when the rubber hits the road and the CPG, when they're standing in the aisle at Safeway, you know, they pick the Clorox brand versus whatever the alternative is. Yeah, so I said, Jeff, early on, that we're looking for a couple of things here. We're looking for to the degree to which the technologies, in fact, facilitating the marketing mission, and also the degree to which customer experiences represented and these technologies make it better. If we identify the one big change to marketing, as a consequence of many of these technology changes and the new role that customers are playing with digital technologies, they engage brands, basically driving the characteristics of the engagement in ways they never did before, it means that ultimately, marketers need to think about one thing differently. Everything they do must be a source of value, everything. And so as we watch this show, I think that's one of the things to keep coming back to is the Oracle Marketing Cloud and the many partners that Oracle has here, there must be 150 companies on the floor here. Are they finding ways to make their clients, their customers, be more valuable to their customers at every step of the journey? Yeah, it's a fun time to have the modern marketer. How's the modern marketer? It's a very different challenge. It's a very different world. It's not all email based like it used to be, capture their email and do an email campaign. It's much richer, much deeper, even if you're in 45 million households. It's more like Sears, who's been around since before 1900, an old line brand who again is trying to engage your customers coming up with do-it-yourself assistance that's tied back to some of their brands. So we're excited, so we're going to be here for two days, I'm just kind of looking through, I'll give you a couple of highlights of what we're going to have on. We're definitely going to have Kevin Ackroydon, who runs the Oracle Marketing Cloud, gave a great keynote, you know, get to sit down with him personally, which is terrific, as well as Nick from Western Union, as well as Sears, as well as Clorox, who we were just talking about. So we got a full slate. We will be here all day today, all day tomorrow. So keep your eye, we're excited to be here. I'm Jeff Rake, Peter Burris, we'll be joined shortly by John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE from Las Vegas at the Oracle Modern Marketing Experience.