 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 here live in Las Vegas for Oracle's modern marketing experience. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE. It's our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host Peter Burris, chief research officer of SiliconANGLE Media and Wikibon, our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Welcome to theCUBE. John, Peter, thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. We know, it's super exciting. We see all the photos on Twitter. I saw the event stuff last night in the stream, a lot of social activity. A lot of people loved doing the tweets and the pictures are great. The Marquis were last night. Yep. Give us your take. What's going on on the ground here in Vegas? Yeah, so the Marquis honor, excellence in modern marketing. They started in 2007, and they started with very modest beginnings in a room with 160 people at the W in San Francisco. So now we're here in Las Vegas. There's over 2,500 people that attended last night. It was fantastic. We went from honoring six categories in just email marketing to 19 categories for activation, cross-channel. So Marquis is like the Oscars or the Grammys, if you will, for marketing. Great way to put it. Great way to put it. However, the statue was actually designed by the same firm that made the Emmys. Okay, all right. So we have an Emmy connection. Good, all right. So this is to highlight what? Creativity, effectiveness, what's some of the criteria that you guys look for as the bar to be considered and just give us some highlights. Yeah, so I'd say it comes down to three things. You have to have great content. You have to have great story and you have to have results. And so there's an image of me in social that we use to promote the Marquis where I'm sitting by a stack of all 350 submissions printed and it was crazy. We had 80% more submissions this year than previous. And so customers just went nuts with telling us stories, making videos, we had 60 videos accompanied to the 350 submissions. So we decided to do a best video category to celebrate all the creative that customers put together to show how they're getting value for marketing. So video is pretty key in all that, submissions. Really key. So what was the winner? Who was the winner? Give us the highlight. The winner of the video was Cisco. Yes. And so there was another customer that was actually in the lead leading up to it and right before polls closed, it changed and we knew that Cisco was going to win. Right by a nose. All right, so give us some take because we love talking about customers because right now this is a real dynamic area. I wrote a post on Forbes in 2014 about the marketing cloud. How it's got to be really easy like Amazon, but it's hard. Marketing has some legacy and some databases kind of schemas, if you will, depending on the kind of channel you're in. There's a lot of cross channel opportunities. It's total chaos right now in a good way. What are some of the success stories look like? Share some customer use cases where the pattern is trending, if you will. Yeah, so I'd say this year more than any, the marketing cloud, market winners focus more on helping their customers. I think for the past six years, I've seen a lot of stories on acquiring customers. Now it's about creating that journey and getting results. And so Juniper won last night for their lead management program and they created a digital hub that allows you to globally personalize experiences and they saw win rates and lead volume improve between 700 to 900%, ridiculous. And so that was awesome. So the personalization seems to be a big thing. Personalization is super key. The customer that won for best email was Jetstar and they used a kinetic process that allows you to dynamically populate the email based on the customer's preferences. So when you're about to book a flight, you now get a really super personalized email that allows you to cross-sell it up so, which I think is exciting. So the engagement is another key part. Is that coming out in the data you're seeing? It is. The engagement is such a big part. So we're looking at it not just in one channel but across device and through mobile and social. And so this is real. We've been talking about this for a long time with Rural Marketing Cloud. Our customers are actually doing it. So Adrian, are you starting to consider not just the results from the marketer standpoint, but every example that you've given when you talk about engagement, the winner did something that was valuable for the customer in addition to doing something that was valuable for the brand. Are you actually starting to factor in the conversations from customers about some of these programs or some of these campaigns or some of these interactions? Or is that something that might be a little bit ways off? Great question. So we actually do have it. And so there was Telstra's check-in campaign where they actually showed that their attentiveness to the customer increased rates of satisfaction. And so we had tons of customer quotes, the customers at the heart of more submissions this year than ever. So we had more stories around retention, about experience, about repairing the broken buyer experience. We had a lot of customers that had very poor shopping experiences and that all got repaired and the customers talked about it. So we got to hear through the customer in the submissions with quotes, with data, and with proof that satisfaction was on the rise. So the Markies themselves are out actually starting to reach out and do what you're telling your clients and your customers to do, reach out to the customer because that's ultimately where the real test is. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's so great that those programs continue to flourish. We're hearing how the technologies help in the customers reach their customers, but we're also getting more and customer experience and more about them making the leap to digital, which isn't easy, but our customers are doing it and they're figuring it out and they're working with us to do it. So I had a chance to stand with Mark Herd for an interview in January. And obviously he's on the cloud message. We all know marketing class, it's all cloud, it kind of fits in. So I got to ask the cloud question because this is interesting, right? Cloud is supposed to accelerate value. Okay, one, I want to get your thoughts on that. And two, in context of that, share the notion of agile. Because agile is a DevOps term around how people are building apps because you're starting to see the customer experience be driven by the user experience of software. So now you've got a softwareness, has to have a database, of course Oracle's in the database business, but you guys just aren't a database. You're a lot of different products in your portfolio. How is the cloud making you guys provide more agile capabilities in context to this notion of software experience? You know, the cloud is so strategic for us and it's important because even for me as a buyer, my preferences are fluid. And so the cloud allows you to integrate and innovate in real time. And so you can find attributes about my buying behavior, my history, and through our integrations, be able to create an experience that's worthwhile for me that will build trust, and I'm more likely to buy. And so I think that's why the cloud is important and strategic. Now, the second part of your question. The agile, the software piece. How do you be more agile, be responsive? So for instance, real time is big, right? You know, you talk about the preferences with the email program, from email to any other engagement or interaction needs data. It needs data. Is the data available? And can I integrate it? And is it real time? Is it quality? So all these things sound simple, but they're really difficult. What are you guys doing to make that easy to stand up, to integrate? Yeah, so Dell won their second marquee in the same category this year, so they defended it for their best use of audience data and audience creation. And so they do some really cool things. They recognize that they wanted to try to drive more people to a buyer portal, and they actually went out and found the profiles of the executives that came to this one portal. And it's people with travel patterns. They're frequent flyers. They found attributes that they couldn't find anywhere else that would probably take a long time to whip in. And so being programmatic and then looking at that and saying, hmm, I should actually talk to these people through my ads and display is one example of how our customers are being more agile, more programmatic. Now when you add maximizer into the mix and do the testing, you now take the risk out of having a bad buyer experience because you're able to, you take the gambling out of it. Right, we're in Vegas. You take the risk out of it and you're able to deliver on the right customer experience. You never take the risk out of Vegas. But one cool question, so you said there were 3,500 submissions. No, there were, we were 2,500 people. 3,500 people each other. And then so we had 350 submissions. 350 submissions. I was only off by a factor of 10. Oh, it doesn't matter. But 350 submissions, you and your team looked at them and then made the evaluations. When you looked at the submissions, where did they tend to come from? Did they tend to come from marketing people, from IT people, combination of both? So as you read the submissions, are you starting to see over the years the flavor of the language and the orientation and the goals and objectives? Is it starting to evolve and talk about how that may reflect some of the things that people are trying to do here? Great question. And so we saw it's still the majority were marketers. We still have some IT people submitting. But we had more senior executives submit this year than ever before. So we had more VP's of marketing submit than ever before. More senior directors, more senior leaders because they're driving the change and putting the strategy together and then telling the story of how that strategy came to life with real results and revenue. And understanding both sides of it so they feel confident and comfortable that they can speak to both the marketing and the technology side of it as well. Absolutely, absolutely. So we have a sales and marketing alignment category where they have to prove that the marketing team has built a significant relationship with sales in metrics and in culture and in process. And so you have to prove it to get to the final stage. And with 350 submissions, there are a lot of really great stories that we weren't able to tell. This was the hardest year than ever to win a Markey. She's got to put it, can you put all this on a microsite? Just stand them up so people can consume them, the videos. Yes, so they will be live on markey-awards.com. Markey-awards. Okay, so I got to ask you the question. If a folks watching, okay, hey, I should maybe want to submit or hey, I want to just get the marketing cloud up and running, what can you share is some of the patterns that you're seeing for people that are really active right now in deploying solutions? It could be use cases, it could be, you know, the omnichannel piece, anything particular in the kinds of things people are doing that you see repeating over and over again as a success. Great question, and so I see there's a lot of focus on trying to optimize the inbound experience so using ad tech to find the right customer, the right person that's likely to buy. There's also, from a customer perspective, making sure that you optimize the onboarding or that first impression where they become a customer, making sure you deliver on that sales process. So more than ever, I saw more submissions focusing on ideal onboarding, journeys, using data on their usage to tell the customer. So that comfort, for example, we told this story during the Marquis, the sleep number personalizes your emails, right? So there's more integrating with your systems to make that experience richer, and that's what I'm seeing from a customer perspective. So the ultimate question I had for that, for this show that I'm looking to get clarity on, is the shift from the old way the new way, not that there's anything wrong with it, it's more infrastructure driven, coded URLs, all the monitoring and the funnel, all the tools you guys have, essentially it becomes hardened infrastructure. Pretty much no debate about that, they're still relevant, it's not like it's a rip and replace, but it's moving from a destination oriented commerce transaction or sales person oriented commerce transaction to move beyond capturing a lead or form and pass it to an analog sales person to a full end to end digital experience. Absolutely. So can you share where we are in the progression of that progress of that shift? Because the nonlinear consumption of data or assets are happening, and so that's engagement, but it's coming in and in from different channels, out from different channels, and progression to a transaction is really kind of that journey of the transformation. Where are we on that spectrum of getting better, first inning, early days, how can you peg a progression? We're getting better, we're getting better, but it's still quite hard, because if you look at it, in the past 10 years, we've thrown all this technology at marketers and said, all right, you guys go figure it out. And in terms of delivering on that experience, there's two really tough things that you have to focus on, the data gathering and the analysis. So you need other skill sets to come to the table to help with that. And so that also brings other technologies, other skills to be able to understand how things work. Mobile Vita, that one best emerging, they understood how customer buying patterns predict the third buying process, right? And they sell mobile accessories. You don't land on something like that overnight. You have to try, you have to monitor, and then you have to analyze. So you have to look at buying cycles over a period of time, and not everybody has the skills or the tools to be able to do that. One of the phenomenons that's interesting is that the agency relationship to companies trying to be digital is kind of a middleman, if you will. Sometimes people are going direct to their customers with digital, that's one. The other one is that content marketing is becoming more instrumental, but it's very hard to do. You see content companies failing out there today, but you got software platforms out there, so it's hard to win the customer as a content provider. Have you seen, what's your view on that? Because people think, oh, I just hire some journalists and I'm in the content marketing business. You or I'm going to hire someone to write some good stuff, but you're still company literature. How are people winning the audiences from a content marketing standpoint? Can you share any color on that you might see? Yeah, so I think in order for you to win the content conversation, it has to be about the customer. So you can't be about you and what you provide. It has to be about them. There was one story that I read where the customer basically said, we tried to offer them products and they tested it and they said, let's talk about how you need to do your job. And they organized their web and their asset experience around the customer and took that perspective and saw increased engagement, better retention. So it's organizing around your customer and talking to them. Wine.com, that won our content marketing award, looked at your personas based on the wines that you bought and knew whether you were emerging or a mature drinker or a sparkling and your content and they use the real estate and made sure you got a personalized experience. So it can't be about you. So they maximize the impact of the content consumption based on what data they can get on the person's persona slash interest or relationship. Absolutely. And they have to have a sense as to how they want the relationship to evolve. And so they have to connect those pieces and then you have to get the organization rallied around it and say, this customer is at this phase of our relationship. They should only get this content, which is actually the hard thing to deliver on and it's why people fail. Yeah, and you miss fire in the content, you miss an opportunity to engage the customer. Adrian, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. I'll give you the final word. What is this show all about this year? So the folks watching virtually in our digital experience called theCUBE are interested in what's happening on the ground. Share some excitement. What's the big thing from last night? What are people talking about in the hallways? What's the big, big, big activities here? Customers are so excited about the close of the Marquee Awards. They loved Bastille. There's tons of people right now in the Solutions Center talking to our partners, talking to our sponsors. Inspire, they want that Marquee next year. So that's the buzz that I'm hearing and what I'm seeing on Twitter. And people are really excited about the parties tonight and the sessions and Tyra Banks on Thursday. People are excited and Marquees-Awards.com is the site. Check it out. Submit your Marquees next year. This is theCUBE. Adrian Chang here from Oracle sharing his perspective on Oracle Marketing Cloud from customer awards and customer perspective. Thanks for taking the time. We'll be right back with more live coverage of SiliconANGLES theCUBE after this short break.