>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is "theCUBE's" ongoing coverage, where we go out to the events, in this case, of course, virtually, to extract the signal from the noise. And now we're going to talk about the shifts in customer employee experiences and channels. The past year, obviously, has exposed gaps in both of those areas. The shift to digital channels, something that hit every industry. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So, there's huge demand for better, a.k.a. less frustrating, and hopefully superior, customer experiences. That's never been higher. It puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver. And with me to talk about these trends are two great guests. Alex Shootman, the General Manager of Adobe Workfront. Alex was CEO of Workfront, which Adobe acquired last year. And Matthew Candy, Global Managing Director of IBM iX. Gentleman, welcome. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to be here. >> Matt, let's start with you. Maybe you could talk to the shifts that I talked about earlier, in the past year, and customers' expectations, and how they changed, and how you guys responded. >> Yes, so, Dave, I mean, it's been, my goodness, what a year, right? If we'd gone back and thought, we never would have seen this coming. And certainly, I guess, for the clients, I run the digital customer experience business, the services business, here at IBM, and certainly, we have been very busy helping clients, across just about every industry, accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think what has been absolutely clear, is digital, mobile, all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels, has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going, and survived over this time. And certainly, we've seen that transformation accelerate, right? And companies shifting from face-to-face interactions from a B2B sales perspective, into a kind of online B2B commerce, et cetera. So, really it's become digital by default. And I think customers really demanding personalized experiences, and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you in how they deal with you. >> You know Matt, I mean, our business, you think about our business, it was predominantly going out to events, live events, and then overnight, our entire industry had to shift to virtual. And what it was is, you had all these physical capabilities, and people trying to shove it into virtual, and it was really hard. There was a lot of unknowns, and really different. I imagine there's some parallels within marketing organizations. And I wonder if you could talk, Matt, about what kind of barriers you saw about delivering those kind of digital interactions and experiences. >> Yes. So, I guess, we've seen kind of five core challenges that companies have been facing. So, firstly, around volume and velocity of content. So, as we're putting more demand into organizations, right, for more content at a greater pace, right, this causes challenges for companies in terms of being able to get content out there, and surface it through their digital channels, right? Whether that's kiosks, or voice, web, mobile, et cetera. And that pace is not slowing down. Second thing is this demand for personalization. So, as companies and individuals are touching through all of these touch points across marketing sales and service, the need to be able to interact in the right way, showing that you know me, using personal data to match the right offer at the right time, critically important. Thirdly, the martech stack, right. Across many of these organizations, this explosion in marketing technology over the last 10 years has been absolutely incredible. And so one of the big challenges companies have is how we tie all of these different components of the stack together, to build this seamless experience. Fourth challenge, right? Additional communication channels. So, as we need more content and personalization, and we've got to join up across all these different systems, how do we make this consistent across all of these channels, right, whether it's digital or physical, is a true test of many organizations' ability to respond. And the fifth point is the coordination needed across departments within companies. And so, how the marketing department deals with legal, with regulatory approvals, with sales. How they go out to their agency partners. And this has certainly got a lot more complex across geographies, and across boundaries, within companies and outside. And so we see, absolutely, this need to put in place, basically, the marketing system of record that helps manage this. And this is where we see huge opportunity together with Adobe. >> Yeah, so, Alex, maybe you could talk about this a little bit. I mean, you guys are well-known for deep expertise and leadership, and orchestrating marketing workflows and the like. Matt talked about the martech stack. What's your take on this? And how are IBM iX and Adobe Workfront working together? >> What has occurred in response to what Matt talked about, is that companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. You know, they looked at, if you go back in time, and you look at financials in a company, people thought, "Wow, this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials." They realized their customers were really important, so they said, "We should put a system in place to manage our customers." People are important. They bought Workday to make sure that they could manage their people. And all of this complexity that Matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization. And so they started investing in a marketing system of record, like Workfront. >> You know, that's interesting. Just a quick aside. I mean, if you think about a lot of the problems we have in data and big data, typical to talk about stovepipe. You just mentioned three examples, finance, HR, and now marketing, where we've contextualized the system. In other words, the domain experts, the people in finance, and HR, and marketing, they're the ones who know the data the best. They don't have to go, necessarily, to some big data team, and data scientist, and all this stuff. They know what they want and they know it. And that's really what you guys are serving in your streamlining. This notion, Alex, of a marketing system of record is really interesting. I mean, it's relatively new, isn't it? So, why does it matter so much to marketers? >> Yeah, if you think about it, we've been able to serve 3,000 enterprises around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands. Half of the Fortune 100. And what has created the need for the new, if you think about it, are the challenges that start arising when you implement the concepts that Matt talked about. Consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet. And you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You've got a private credit card issuer. They do business with hundreds of thousands of companies. Their account managers are interacting with those companies, and all of that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that's happening. Or consider a major medical manufacturer who's trying to get medical products out the door. And the marketing team is trying to coordinate with the product team, with the regulatory team, with the supply chain team, with the legal team. And they're trying to orchestrate all of that work, so that they can get products out the door more quickly. Or maybe a financial services organization that's also trying to get new products out the door, and they're trying to get all the approval about the content that goes with those products, and it's all about speed to market. That's what's creating the need for the new, as you phrased it, Dave. >> Yes. Excellent. Thank you. So, then Matt, paint a picture. A lot of people may not be familiar with IBM iX. Maybe how you guys... You got creators, you got deep expertise in this area. So, maybe talk about where you add value, and how you work with Adobe. >> Okay, so IBM iX, so, we sit within the services business at IBM. As you said, Dave, right, we have designers, experienced strategists, engineers, basically able to deliver kind of end-to-end digital and customer experience solution, right from the creative, all the way through to the technology platforms, and the operations. Adobe is one of our key strategic partners across IBM, and certainly within my part of the business. And so, we couldn't have been more delighted when Workfront joined Adobe, through the acquisition there. So, we already had a strong relationship with the Workfront team. And so now seeing that as part of the Adobe platform and family there, really opens up massive opportunities. We're working with several major airlines, automotive companies, retailers, using Adobe technology to transform the customer experiences that they have. Putting in place new digital platforms, and new ways of engaging with those customers. But what is absolutely clear, as Alex was talking about, this need for a marketing systems of record, as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience, and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that, organized, executing in the correct way, in an efficient way, in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical, effectively, to drive this kind of workflow improvement, the productivity improvement, and put intelligence and automation into these processes, across the organization. So there is, certainly, we believe a huge opportunity together in the market, to help clients transform, and to deliver the value in this space. >> Got it. Alex, maybe you can just, at a high level, share some examples of how Adobe, and drawing on your experiences from Workfront, how you've helped companies where they had to get content out, they had to automate the processes, and the outcomes that you saw, that you hope to share with other clients. >> You know what, what Matt's talking about is the need for intelligent workflows within a marketing organization. Because a marketing organization is trying to solve one of two challenges. Either they're trying to be more efficient because they can't get more resources to do the work that they need to do, or they're trying to operate with speed. And so what our breakthrough thinking was, Dave, in terms of solving these problems, and then I'll give an example, is the realization that while it seemed like work should be different in different enterprises, ultimately, all work has five elements to it. The first thing is, you decide to do something, or I ask you to do something. So, we have to have the strategic planning around the intake of work. Then we have to plan out the work. Then we actually have to execute the work. We have to understand who's doing what. We have to have transparency to whether or not that work is getting done, or if people need help in that work. Then that work needs to be approved by somebody. And then finally, especially in marketing, then we have to actually deliver that work to a technology like ADM, where we're going to publish it on the web. So, if you take the case of a major financial, a financial company that serves consumers, that financial company is constantly bringing new products to market. Now, if you're bringing new products to market, if you think about the United States, you have to make sure that you have supported the regulatory approval that's necessary for a product. So, that product has to be able to go to the right investor. That product, if it's in a certain state, has to have oversight to it. So, now you're a marketing team, in a financial services organization that's supporting getting new product to market, and in a particular customer, it used to take 'em 63 days to go through all of the approvals necessary to just get content out the door. Now that they are effectively intaking the work, planning the work, executing the work reviewing the work, and delivering the work digitally, that's down to eight days. >> And with the martech platform, you have the data. So, you know what content you want to get out, and you can make decisions much better. I mean, my big takeaway is, you got the art of marketing, and those with the marketing DNA, I don't have that gene, but it's intersecting with the science and automation, and the data, and the workflows, and driving efficiency, and ultimately driving results and revenue. So, that's my big takeaway from this conversation, but Alex, maybe you could give us your takeaway, and then Matt, you can bring us home. >> Yeah. I mean, my takeaway is in this new economy, marketing is a tier one corporate activity. Marketing is a peer activity to manufacturing, to distribution, to sales, and to finance. And every one of those disciplines are managed with a system. Marketing needs its own system, because it's as important as any other organization. And so to me, Dave, it's no more complicated than that. That marketing is now as important as every other function. And it needs to be managed as every other function. And Workfront is the application that marketing manages the workflows, and the business of marketing. >> All right, Matt. Give us your final thoughts, please. >> Yep, no. My final thought, building on what Alex said, so, we've put together a joint point of view with Adobe, and with Workfront, called "Intelligent Content Transformation," right. That is our strategic framework to help clients accelerate on this journey, both of delivering these amazing customer outcomes, but how we transform the processes within the marketing organization. And I think that yes, you can continue to focus on delivering amazing digital experiences for customers, and it's absolutely critical, and that's critical to revenue growth, but actually, what's also critical, is to drive efficiency in these workflows across the enterprise, right? And that is not only going to enable the revenue growth, it's going to enable you to deliver on that promise. But it's also going to result in significant cost and efficiency improvements for these companies, by focusing on marketing in the same way as we have done for procurement transformation, supply chain transformation, finance transformation, HR transformation, right? There's a lot of effort gone into the efficiency of those workflows. We've got to do the same for marketing. So, massive opportunity, Dave, massive. >> It is massive. Every company has to, in some way, shape, or form, put high-quality content in front of their customers to engage with them. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right- >> See you again. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." You're watching IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back. (bright music) ♪ Da, de, de, da, da, de, da, la ♪ (bright music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We have been covering Imagine 2019 in Vegas, all day today, talking all things eCommerce, innovation, technology, the customer experience. Jeff, one of the biggest themes, I think, that we've heard today, from all of our guests, is how strong this community is, how naturally it was developed in the last ten years, and how influential it is to delivering exceptional customer experience technology. >> In fact, Jason said without the community, there would be no Magento. So it's, it's ingrained in the culture. It's ingrained in the DNA. I think, you know, doing some of the research, you know, there was people talking about the dark days of Magento, as it went into eBay, and apparently whatever that plan was, that didn't work. And then out of eBay into private equity. Out of private equity into, now, Adobe. And it sounds like the community's kind of been following along, and maybe they were holding their breath a little bit, a year ago, but it sounds like they kind of got through that, that kind of concern knothole, if you will, and kind of popped out the other side, and realized there's a whole lot of opportunity that comes to Magento, via being part of Adobe now that they didn't have before. So I think, it sounds like they're good with it, and they're ready to go, and nothing but opportunity ahead. >> Yeah, you know, I think with any acquisition, and, you know, we cover so many technology shows, and we've been part of acquisitions before at different companies. They're challenging. There's always, I think, natural trepidation. I think it's just a natural response that anybody, probably, from an executive to an individual contributor level, is going to have. But one of the things that came up so resolutely, was how organic the Magento community has been developed over time. That, like you said, as Jason was saying, without it, there is no Magento. Not only are they influential. It's very much a symbiotic relationship, that pleasantly, surprisingly, sounds like it's been integrated very nicely, into Adobe. And to your point, they now are seeing, wow, there's a tremendous amount of technology and resources that we didn't have the opportunity to leverage before. Talking about the experience, the digital experience business of Adobe's, which is growing. Grew 20% year over year, 2017 to 2018. On a very strong trajectory this year. A lot of opportunity to enable merchants of any size to have this really 360 degree of the customer experience, and manage it with analytics, and advertising, and marketing, and add the commerce piece, so that they can take that marketing interaction and actually convert it to revenue. >> Right, right. I mean, look at Adobe. I mean, they brought in Magento, which we know, late last year. They also brought in Marketo at almost about the same time, $4.7 billion. So they're making huge moves. And I think it's a pretty unique situation, where, again, they come from the creative, and now, with the data, and a sophisticated platform, and you talk about the AB testing, again. It used to be just AB, now it's AB times literally millions and millions of customized experiences delivered to the client. And then now, again, I think really an interesting point of view is where then you bring the commerce to the point of engagement rather than trying to use the engagement as a way to drive people to commerce. I mean, they seem really well positioned, I think they're going to really enjoy people like Accenture, and some of the of the other big system integrators that now are going to be, you know, behind this platform. So it seems to be a fit, a marriage made in heaven. It almost makes you wonder why Adobe was so late to have an eCommerce platform, which is the thing that kind of surprises me, I think, the most. >> Yeah, well, it also gives them the opportunity to compete with Shopify and with Salesforce Commerce, and kind of harness this brand power. But you talked about something that we've talked about all day, and that's bringing the transaction and the commerce experience to me as a consumer wherever I am, whether it's in app shopping through Instagram. Rather than, you know, delivering me a personalized experience, leveraging the power of these technologies, to understand the right things about me as a consumer, to deliver me an experience that is frictionless. It's going to allow me to have a seamless experience. We talked about that with progressive web apps, and how that's going to enable next generation shopping for merchants of all sizes to enable. Don't just engage me on my mobile, if that's where I want to be. If you don't have the opportunity to convert me seamlessly to actually transact, there's a huge adjustable market or gap in converting that to revenue, which Jason Woolsey also talked about. Kind of thinking about next steps for Adobe and what they're going to be able to do to help those merchants capture in real time, leveraging the power of technology, emerging technologies like AI, in real-time to make that shoppable moment turn into dollars for the merchant. >> Right, lot of great things. I thought it was interesting having TJ Gamble on, and talked about coopetition. Right? Coopetition is such a fundamental part of Silicon Valley and the world in which we live in. And he said, you know, if you're making fat margin, as Jeff Bezos loves to say, your margin is my opportunity. You're going to compete with Amazon, but in the meantime, you got to compete with them. So to enable integration into the Amazon platform with your Magento store, the integration into Google Shopping, integration into Instagram purchases, in app purchases, I mean, these really opening up the opportunities for these smaller retailers, mid-sized retailers, to compete in a really complicated and super hyper-competitive world. But now they can, again, focus on their brand, which we hear over and over and over, focus on their experience, focus on their community, and leverage some of this special breed technology under the covers across platform, across different modes of buying. Because the other thing we hear over and over and over is you got to give people choice. You can't say no. So if they want to buy it through Amazon, let 'em buy it through Amazon. If they want to buy it through Instagram, let 'em buy it through Instagram. If they want to come to you eCommerce site, let 'em come to your eCommerce site But, you know, in opening up all those channels for the merchant to be able to execute their transactions regardless of how the customer got to them, or how, more importantly, they got to the customer. >> And, you know, the SMB front is really key that you brought up, because, in the last year, since the acquisition was announced, about a year ago, and completed, I think in September of 2018, there was not just concern from the community, that we talked about at the beginning of this segment, but also the small and the medium business. Like, well, Adobe has a really big presence in enterprise. Is that going to be cannibalized with this acquisition of Magento, who had such a strong presence with those smaller merchants? And you mentioned some of thee things with Amazon and Google that we heard yesterday and today. I think really assuaging some of those concerns that the smaller businesses had, but also, allowing these smaller merchants to sort of level the playing field, and have access to the power of a branded Amazon storefront that allows a smaller business to get some differentiation, whereas before they didn't have that. So I think we heard a lot about that today, and how, I think, those smaller brands are probably, maybe breathing a sign of relief, that this acquisition is really going to enable them, with a lot more tools, but not at the, you know, cannibalizing what they have been doing with Magento for so long. >> Right, right. And some other fun discussions. I really enjoyed the time with Tina, talking about influencer marketing. It's amazing how that continues to evolve at a really fast pace. Right? A derivation of professional endorsement, which is something we've known ever since Joe Namath put on stockings many moons ago. But to see it go from big influencers, to micro-influencers, you know. How do you sponsor people, give them money, engage as a brand, and still maintain that they legitimately like your product, use your product. I think it's a really fascinating space to, again, to be able to purchase within that Instagram application, I think, is really interesting. And then a lot of conversations about the post transaction engagement. You know, send them not one email confirmation that your items are coming, but send them two. And really to think about lifetime value of the customer, and engaging the customer via content, and, oh, by the way, there'll be some transactions in commerce as well. I think it's really forward-looking, and really enjoyed that conversation as well. >> I did too. I didn't know the difference between an influencer and a micro-influencer, and you kind of infer based on just the name alone. But also how brands have the opportunity to leverage data, to evaluate maybe we should actually make more investments in somebody with a thousand followers, for example, than somebody with a hundred thousand. Because the revenue attribution, or the website traffic lift that they're going to get from a micro-influencer could far outweigh the benefits, financially, than going with somebody, a celebrity or what not, that, as you said, back to, you know, Joe Namath, many decades ago. So that was interesting, but it's also a good use of using data to build brand reputation, build, increase customer lifetime value, but also get so much more targeted, and really understand how to operationalize the commerce portion of your business, and through whom, through which channels you're going to see the biggest bang for your buck. >> Yeah, it's really interesting times, you know, this idea that the apps follow you. I mean, my favorite example is Spotify. Super sophisticated app. Right? I can be listening to my phone. I get into my car. It follows me. I go into my office. It follows me on my computer. I go out on my bike. It follows me. It stays the same state. And so, for the commerce and the community to be able to follow you around is a really interesting idea. And again, it was Hillary Mason, actually, that first came up with the term that, you know, AI, and good recommendations done well are magic, and done poorly, are creepy. I think it's always going to be this interesting fine line. Again, I think the whole concept of, you know, using old data and how fast do you update it, and that's kind of the example. I've been looking at tents. I bought a tent. I don't want to see ads for tents anymore. Right? It's time to see an ad for a sleeping bag, or a camp stove. And these are really happening in real-time. You know, we've heard about Omnichannel. We've heard about 360 view of the customer, ad nauseam. You've been in this business for a long time. But it sounds like it's finally coming together, and it's finally where we have the data, we have the access to the data, the speed of the analytics, and just the raw horsepower in modeling that we can now start to apply this real-time, ML, to data, in-flight, to be able to serve up the not creepy but correct recommendations, at the right time to the right person. It's getting closer and closer to reality. >> It is getting closer, and as you were talking about that, one of the things that popped into my head is going from the creepy to the magic that is, you think, wow, is really leveraging this data and using the power of machine learning and AI, a great facilitator. Or is the bottom foundation order management? If you don't have the, or inventory management. If you don't have the inventory, it's great to have all these capabilities to transact in real time, but if you can't fulfill it, you're going to sink. >> Yeah. >> So Magento, with, you know, some of their core technology enabling this. Really enabling, not just enabling the 360 degree customer view, but being able to fulfill it. Those are table stakes, and game changers. >> Right. >> For merchants of any size. >> Right, and I think they do have to engage. I mean, they have to be brands. Right? Because a commodity item I can go get anywhere. There's got to be a reason to come. Lot of conversations, not so much here, but at the Adobe summit, in terms of the content piece, and having an ongoing dialog and an ongoing content relationship, with your client. Now you can slice and dice and serve that up lots of different ways based on who they are and the context. But if you don't have that, you can't just compete on price. You just can't compete on inventory, 'cause Amazon is going to win. Right? You can't stock, my favorite thing is, is shirt, shirt little pins in here. How do you stock those? You can't. They don't cost any money, and you don't sell that many. Amazon can. So, find you niche, you know. Engage your customers. Engage your community, and there'll be some transactions that come along with this. And I think it's really reinforced that, I think, its probably really timely for Magento to be part of Adobe, because eCommerce, just purely by itself, is going to be tougher and tougher to do unless you've got this deeper relationship with your customers, beyond simply transacting something. >> Exactly. So I enjoyed hosting, as I always do with you, Jeff. Learned a lot today, and excited to hear about what's next for this event, now that Adobe is leveraging the power of Magento. >> Well, we heard the announcements, Gary's going to make the announcement tomorrow. So hang out for the keynote tomorrow to find out more about Imagine 2020. We'll be there. >> 2020, yes. >> 2020, because we'll know everything in 2020. >> We will know. That's right. I can't wait. >> 2020 hindsight. >> I'm waiting for that. Well, Jeff, as I said, always a pleasure hosting with you. >> You too, Lisa. >> I brought the sea urchin necklace out. >> I like it. I like it. >> This is just for Jeff. It's making it's appearance on theCUBE. We want to thank you for watching, for Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE live from Imagine 19 at The Wynn Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin at Imagine, twenty nineteen from the Wynn Las Vegas. It's happy hour here, but I really wish I had a Coke. I don't have one. But I do have a gentleman from Coca Cola, please doing me and welcoming a couple of guests to the Cube. We have Enrique no great day. The director of Direct to Consumer for Coca Cola Mexico. Enrique, Thank you for joining us. >> Thanks, Lisa. Nice to meet you. >> And we have from forty for Raghu Kerala managing partner. Welcome to >> the Cube. You nailed the name. There you go. Talk >> to >> that interview. I did my best. All right, so here we are in imagine, twenty nineteen with about thirty, five hundred or so people. This show is one that has a tremendous amount of energy. It's like you gave everybody a cook when they walked in the door. Didn't really need it, But we've heard a tremendous amount of positivity people very excited for being able to leverage the power of data to deliver really impactful experiences and as consumers of any product. We want a brand to know us. We want them to help us make our lives better. Before we dig into that with Coca Cola, argue, let's start with you. Forty four is one of magenta owes partners. Give us a little bit of a history there on what you guys do, together with the Gento and four customers like Coca Cola, Mexico. >> Thank you, Lisa, and thank you for inviting us here today. Well, when we put together forty four, we ask yourself some questions like, How do we aspire to be great? And one of the things was to surround ourselves with great partners and adobes definitely been a great partner for us, because what we want to do is bring tea to our customers. A not just a sight but an experience for their consumers. They can live on and grow and invest in a platform. And what we found with Adobe and the Magenta Commerce cloud was a way that we could start building something in an array, tours greatness by using data and insights to build upon our knowledge. And luckily, way found a great partner in Coca Cola that we could aspire to be great together to the end. Consumer e commerce is still in this early days, and what we wanted to say is that a great brand could start and start looking at e commerce in a way to improve their customers. Lives be available in moments that of need and moments of want. And that's something we started doing with North America about four years ago and brought that to Western Europe. And now Lat Ham in the last year has been a great experience partnering with you. >> CocaCola is a brand that everybody knows globally. It's one of those almost feel good brands, right? I mean, you just can't help but get a smile on your face when somebody asked If you want a cup full, of course, who would say no to that? Give me a little lemon twist and I'm very happy, but something that you guys are doing together with Coca Cola. Mexico was really inspirational, and it's really helping to transform and improve people's lives. And we could talk to us about the program that you're building with forty four and how it's actually making giving people access to things that they don't just want that they actually need, like, quality of life, type of sure products. >> So thanks. Thanks a lot, Lisa, for the invitations. So first of all, you know, we have a big challenge, because way No, we have a great brand way, actually have a lot of brands, and that's the challenge. So how can we create this? The solution where we can access people to this? Never. It's for life. So it's not only Coke way have a lot of different products, and Wei have in Mexico is that it's, ah, project that we are calling Coca Cola. It's Coke at home on what we do there is. We are providing the consumers a subscription model where we are enabling the access to multiple beverage products any time on everywhere. So that's that's That's the ambition we have we launched last year in the city of Monterrey. It's It's our first city. We are planning to scale this business into the whole country and probably Latin America. First on, why not probably the states on some foreseeable future. >> So this is more than on demand. I live in Silicon Valley, where we're pretty, you know, we have high expectations and I want to order something, whether it's on door dash or through Google expressed our Amazon that I wanted to show up within an hour. But that's, you know, I might be lazy, that I don't actually want to get in my car and driver walk somewhere. But what you're talking about this is this is not just I want Coca Cola products on demand. This is actually reaching people that really have a strong and need for this type of service. Talk to us about that human interaction and what you guys are really enabling there for your consumers. >> Sure, so So, yeah, United. So the thing is, what we see, the big opportunity here is way. Want to be closer to our consumers? We went to understand them. We want to to hear from them, to receive feedback directly back the way we are used to working Coca Cola in the past one hundred and thirty three years that that's a history of cardiac alights way have the customers that interact with consumers, and then we get some information from the consumers. We've been great doing marketing campaigns, you know. But right now the challenge that we're facing is we want to have direct feedback from them. So we're creating this eco system where we are getting feedback. We're getting knowledge from them, and we know exactly what what's their their needs. The pain points, their suffering, Andi the way what we can solve them and probably eventually some future products. But we can create for them with the specific necessities that they have. So that's what we're creating there. That's a big thing. >> And so we're gonna talk to us about the opportunity to work with a brand like Coca Cola that's been around for over one hundred thirty years, talk about transformation and be able to enable them to really kind of not just delight customers. But there's an emotional connection that people >> have this products. So we always say, like ideally done way can add value from the state of desire to the state of consumption, and in between is a transaction. It's fulfillment, its operations and perhaps unique to most clients of, um, Magenta and Adobe. Coca Cola in Mexico owns a full relationship, and it's a full branded piece from creating that desire in your heart in your mind in your taste buds, but then owning that all the way through the delivery trucks and the people delivering it to your door. And that's something that a CPD firm just actually, I'm not sure of any other CPV firm does in the US or in Mexico at this point. And but then what is the excellence mean? We haven't untidy of excellence of what Coke means to us, the nostalgia and what it means today. But that also raises the high bar because we're not allowed to not be excellent at any other touch point of the brand. But definitely it's fun, right? It's a challenge, you know, making money online. That's the easy part, Being really proud of what you're doing online. That's kind of what makes you go to work every day. >> Being relevant for consumers is what, yeah, >> being relevant? Absolutely, especially because there's a lot of choice with most products and services that are available to us as consumers these days. And if you think of you know, we've been talking a lot at this event about the customer experience and customer experience management, and how can Adobe Inn Magenta enable their customers to use data to understand what delivering what my customer wants to improve. Whether it's, you know, we talked to HP Inc this morning allowing me to order a new PC or printed or ink and have it delivered specifically exactly the way that I wanted to. Whether it's, you know, getting a Coca Cola. I want whoever I'm interacting with to give you a seamless experience. But use the data that you're collecting about me to make my life better. Make my life easier, more seamless. Frictionless. How are you guys at forty for helping Enrique and team utilize that data too crude to really enhance this consumer experience and maybe even create more brand loyalty? Yeah, it's >> interesting. I think data is a tool, but then your hypothesis, where you go from has to be endemic to the brand and for Coca Cola. On the internal, we think of it as a portfolio portfolio of different products in different needs states from hydration to enjoyment from special moments to everyday moments. But then that allows you to start thinking, How do I be part relevant part of more moments and then you could say, Where does data fit into that and now I can understand how there's a new moments being made because people's lives change and the youth always find different ways in different ways of living in different way from being. How can we be relevant to them through our throughout all of that, from the moment you wake up in what you need state is there to special moment of happiness, and they have a company that has products that could live up to. All of that is great and you know you need a portfolio. But you also need to being desire and wanted need all together in one thing, because one person has all of that and one company came, fulfill it if you think about it from a idea of moment. But then what data? Khun, Due to bring those to life >> so soon being relevant, continuing to be relevant is challenging. It's going to require you to really look at trends across a spectrum of, say, consumer behaviors. Enrique, what are some of the trends that you guys are seeing with this project that you've launched in Mexico, and how were you going to be using those trends to expand this globally? >> Sure, Yeah, So? So first of all, as you, as you know, probably e commerce in Mexico is is quite a small right now. So the thing is, it's growing in, you know, very aggressive rates on DH. It happens the same in the rest of Latin America countries. So what What other retailers are looking at is they want to create this this big business right now because they know that in the future it's going to be the competitive advantage for them. So So I think that's something that not many sippy jeez are looking at. There's a lot off are things that must happen inside the companies to enable this on DH. In my experience, the most challenging things and it's not a trend, but it's it's a challenge that we face us as a big city. Gee, Cos is how can we change the culture inside the company? Because this is the main barrier we have. We face when we see and I I'm going to give you the example of Mexico when we see the digital sales of the beverage in Mexico, it comes about two point five percent of the total sales that we have so its its really small if you compare it to the rest of the retail. So whenever we go to the to the rest of the corporation and the rest of the building in Mexico, we say that we want in best, and we want to do there's there's a lot of barriers, you know on the challenge, the main challenge that we face right now. The's companies that want to go direct ical Sumer is this is happen. We changed the mindset, change the culture, and I think that's the most relevant. It's no trend, but it's It's the most relevant challenge that we're facing right now, >> a big challenge because not just for for every convict, but a company with the history that Coca Cola has to be able to start leveraging that data to start to change mindsets and ship cultures. Where are you guys on that journey? And how is your partnership with forty four may be a facilitator of that cultural change? >> Yeah, sure, So it's to be really honest. We're we're beginning this journey way have some countries that are ahead of us. We have some examples in China, For example, curriculum, China's great things cortical in North America is doing very big things in Mexico and Latin America. We're starting the journey on the thing. What we realized is that we need to get together with people that know of this matter. Way are really good at marketing. We're really good at a commercial approach. Operational approach ware not the best at the commerce, but we. That's why we are partnering with guys that no one, we're partnering with platforms like Adobe Magenta, too. To achieve this, that's that's the thing, right? >> Yeah, >> Rookie will finish with you. What are some of the things that you have seen and heard at? Imagine twenty nineteen from a technology innovation perspective that give you the confidence that adobe in Magenta Technologies are going to be able to deliver, what it is that Enrique and his team need to make that barrier change internal evaporate. Yeah, >> I mean, I think when you think of technology right now, even within adobes, it's what the combination of different products that adobe has and how they're going to come together. So the roadmap is a critical piece of it. I think there's been a great announcement of Sensei's coming in and being part of the core offering to make each interaction a little smarter, but also really see the payoff and save what's the real need that trying to be solved, then back that into the products that you see to cut between the different between a press release and a road map? And I think when you come to a summit like this, you hear things from Adobe. But then you also hear the reactions from the customers. And if you hear those both at the same time, you find that great thing in the middle >> of >> what's actionable. And I think if you think of only customer opinions or the what the platform says individually, I think they're less relevant than finding that really time reaction to trends and say, Honestly, sometimes you're drowning in technology and you wantto move the business forward and react to that weak sales that month's numbers. But then you say, Well, let me take a step back and look at the road map or vice versa, and I think everybody's in different stages of where they're going. So until you get that wisdom from everybody else, anyone announcement might be might take you off course. But then you start saying other people are in my boat. Other people are filling my opportunity, sent my sense of opportunity, and other people are feeling my sense of pain. And it's great to see a community come together. It's five thousand people that all want to accomplish something different things, but they want to accomplish success. Whatever. However, they personally define it. >> And it is to your point. It's a very, very strong community here. But we thank you both so much for taking the time to share with us what you guys are doing together with Coca Cola run that everybody knows and loves. So I say we go get a cookie cola and wrap this segment. What do you think you're all right? >> Moment is coming. >> Fantastic. You're watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin from Imagine, twenty nineteen from the Wynn Las Vegas. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Magento Imagine 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, live at The Wynn Las Vegas, for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a really buzzy event. All e-commerce innovation, tech talks, with about 3,500 folks, and we're excited to welcome to The Cube Tina Mulqueen, CEO of Kindred PR Marketing Agency as well as contribute with Forbes, Digital Trends, expert on e-commerce, I would say. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> So we were talking about influencer marketing before we went live. And you have been doing, been working in that kind of before it was even a concept. We were just saying how much marketing has changed in the last few years alone, and how brands have had to to survive and be profitable, evolve with that. Give us a bit of a perspective, first on kind of Kindred PR, what you're doing, how you got involved in influencer marketing. >> Sure, so I was really fortunate to have some great mentors early in my marketing career that kind of ushered me along in the right direction and said hey, I think we should really pay attention to this whole Twitter thing and what's happening with these real, everyday people that are amassing a following on Twitter, and that's really where it started was on that platform. So I ended up on a team for CBS that did some of the influencer marketing for Vanity Fair and for their coverage of The Insider and Entertainment Tonight, and we would work with them to get event coverage to trend online. And as you mentioned, that was before, really, we knew what influencer marketing was. It wasn't really, it didn't have to a name, so to speak, at that time. And so I learned a lot from then, and we have kind of come full circle with influencer marketing, where it, I was at first working with these sort of micro influencers, as we would call them now. And then it was a lot of brands working with more of the celebrity influencers, like the Kim Kardashians of the world, and now it's gone back to brands are really interested in these micro influencers again because of the concept of authenticity, which is a big one right now, that marketers are paying attention to. >> Exactly what I was going to say. >> So how do they dance around the authenticity? It's such an interesting and knife edge, right? Because you want people to promote your products because they like them, and that's the original celebrity endorsement back in the early days, right? People actually did use the product that they endorsed. But now you get paid endorsements, and people can see through that. At the same time, it obviously has some results, or people would not continue to invest, and now it's come full circle, whereas you said because of the internet, I with some particular interest can reach a huge number of people around a really small interest set, because of the distribution of the internet. >> Right. So what's interesting is, influencer marketing, when we first really started talking about influencer marketing, we treated it as word-of-mouth marketing. And it had some incredible benefits over some more traditional kinds of marketing because it was word of mouth. And then because influencer marketing had a lot of investments, brands were investing heavily in influencer marketing, and we were dealing more with celebrity influencers, consumers became smarter as well during this time. And then they started looking at these celebrity endorsements and realizing that these are not real endorsements. And so I think that's where we're seeing this shift back to micro influencers, and people that are really using the products that these brands are touting. >> But how does a brand, how do they engage with the micro influencer? >> Actually, there's a really great case study that I always use as an example of this, and it's actually BECCA Cosmetics, which, BECCA's one of the, I think the number one, sales cosmetic line in Sephora. And they reached out, I think it was about a year ago, maybe a couple of years ago now. They reached out to an influencer because they realized that their website traffic was going up every time a certain influencer would go live on YouTube and was using their products. So BECCA reached out to this influencer that was organically using the products, and collaborated with the influencer to create a line of products of her own. And that really, I think they sold out within the first hour when they actually went live with the product line. So that's a great example of how to engage with an influencer that is organically using your brand, and making sure that you're also including their audience, in, like, the iteration of the product, because then the audience of the influencer is also invested. >> And what defines influencer versus a micro influencer? I imagine the sheer volume of followers, but there's got to be more to it than that, because there's this really cool example that you gave, what BECCA Cosmetics found was much more probably authenticity. So talk to us about not just the number drivers there, but some of the other, I mean, it's one thing to be able to blast something to 100,000 people. It's a whole other thing to actually be able to engage their followers and convert it to a transaction. >> Right. So I think that often when we hear brands talking about micro or macro influencers, they really are talking about the number of followers, but I think you bring up a really great point with respect to that level of engagement of that following and how to really tap into somebody that is engaging their following. So I think brands are going toward actual experts in their field, or actual experts in the product line in a bigger capacity now because they know that what they say is going to be more meaningful to their audience and more engaging to their audience, rather than based on number of followers alone. So there's a lot of different things that are going into play to create a better context for marketing. >> I'm curious how other metrics have evolved beyond just the transaction. So there's the followers, and then, you know, there's obviously transactions, as you said, there's website traffic. But as people, as brands are starting to realize that engagement, ongoing engagement, interaction with content is part of the relationship, separate from and a value to the actual transaction. How have their metrics changed? How are they reviewing these programs? I'm sure a lot of it at first was, "Well, we hope it works, we think it's working." But how has that matured over time? >> It definitely has matured, and there are some platforms out there that will try to quantify influencer marketing in different ways than we've seen in the past. It's gotten a lot more sophisticated. That said, marketers still have a real challenge ahead of them in terms of quantifying their efforts in a meaningful way, because it's still hard to put a number to brand sentiment. And that's a lot of what influencer marketing is. >> Right. And is it, from an investment point of view, I always think of people with a large bucket of money, right, they put a very small piece in their venture fund, which has a real low probability of a hit, but if it hits, it hits big. And when they're budgeting for the influencer program, is it kind of like that? You know, we've got this carve-out that we are not quite sure what the ROI is. We think it's important. We don't want to miss out. Versus, you know, what I'm spending on print or what I'm spending on TV, or what I'm spending on kind of traditional campaigns. How are marketers looking at that within their portfolio? >> It is a great questions, and I think that marketers know that they need to invest in influencer marketing, so we're seeing an influx of investment coming in through influencer marketing. That said, I've been in a lot of conversations with brands that are talking about, do we go the macro influencer route or do we go with the micro influencer route? And right now I think that brands are starting to realize that if you get a lot of voices or a number of voices that are sharing the same sentiment and that are able to feed off of each other with respect to the conversation and amplify each other because even if you have micro influencers with smaller following count, they're going to amplify each other's content, and that ends up in the long run, as we talked about, being more authentic. So that's where a lot of the conversations are going right now in terms of how to spend that influencer marketing budget and weighing the pros and cons of those different options. >> Well, marketing is and should be a science these days. There is so much data about all of us from everything we do every day that brands need to be able to evaluate that, leveraging platforms from Adobe Magento for example, going back to the BECCA Cosmetics and thinking well, if they evaluate these micro influencers and the lift and the traffic that they get, if they're actually using that data appropriately then that should be able to inform how they're actually carving up their investment dollars into which influencers, macro or micro, they know that is going to make the biggest impact on revenue. So it behooves marketing organizations to become scientific and actually use all this consumer data that we are all putting out through our phones, on social devices, constantly. >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point. And I hear often from clients too that they have, they've invested in these platforms that will sort of try to analyze the data, but they're not doing anything with that data. So a lot of e-commerce merchants and retailers, if you don't have a strategy on how you're going to implement that what you're learning from your consumers, then it ends up falling flat. >> What's the biggest surprise you hear from marketers today in terms of this influencer marketing? Are they confused, they're getting it, are there any, I mean you had one really good success story, are there any other, you know, kind of success stories you can share that this is a very different way to get your message into the marketplace? >> You know, one thing that I think people should do more of, that it kind of surprises me that we aren't seeing more of is using media as a channel for e-commerce merchants to have an affiliate strategy. So basically utilizing influencers in collaboration with a media channel to be able to have a new revenue stream. I think that that's something that we haven't seen very often. It's something that when I was working as the CMO for a public trading company called Grey Cloak Technologies, we worked with Sherell's, which is a company that we were acquiring at the time to consult with Marie Claire on how to incorporate influencers into their e-commerce strategy as a publisher. And that's something that I think that people could take more advantage of. >> Even just with affiliate codes or coupon codes and those types of things? They're just not really executing on it that well. >> Right, right. And I think that part of it is a technological component, like the technology isn't quite there to be able to implement, well, to be able to implement that on a wide scale. Like Marie Claire, Sherell's ended up creating the technology for them to be able to incorporate influencers into their e-commerce strategy. But I think that we're going to see more of that. >> Right, because for the influencer, that's one of many sources of revenue that they need to execute on if they're actually going to build, you know, a lifestyle business around being, you know, quote-unquote influencer. They need that affiliate revenue on top of their advertising revenue and all these other little pieces, selling t-shirts, etc. >> Right, right. And we're seeing some companies that are coming to the table to try to provide solutions. One company that I've been watching for a while is called COSIGN, and their platform basically allows influencers to integrate on the platform and link things through social media so that people can buy through a picture, on Facebook for example. So I think we're going to see more of those types of technologies as well. >> Let's talk kind of on the spirit of trends and some of the things that you are seeing. There was this big trend in the last few years of everybody wanting to be able to, we can get anything through Amazon, right? And we can get in a matter of hours. But looking at, and seeing some big box stores that did not do a good job of being able to blend physical, digital, virtual, all these storefronts. What though are you seeing in terms of companies, maybe enterprises, needing to sort of still have or offer a brick and mortar experience? Like we were talking to HP Inc. this morning, he was on stage, and this click and collect program that they launched in APEC where depending on their region, people need to be able to start and actually transact online, but actually fulfill in store. In terms of like, maybe, either reverse engineering online to brick and mortar or hybridizing the two, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that businesses really need to start paying attention to? >> Sure, so I think that omnichannel has been a buzzword for some time, and the way that marketers are looking at omnichannel now, or the way that retailers are looking at omnichannel now is a little bit different. At first, when we started talking about the concept of create this sort of seamless interplay between brick and mortar and online storefronts, it was about taking the brick and mortar experience and putting it online. And now I think marketers are getting better at realizing that those are two completely different channels, and your customer's in a different place in both of those channels. So you need to give them an experience that is relevant for the channel, and it can be totally different than what we're used to in traditional retail stores. But brick and mortar obviously does have a place. We're seeing Amazon come out with their own brick and mortar locations, and we're seeing different e-commerce startups have brick and mortar locations and be very successful with them too as an e-commerce first storefront. So there's definitely a place for brick and mortar. I think people will always have to shop in brick and mortar storefronts, although we obviously are going to get more sophisticated delivery options, and that's coming as well. But I think that it's really an interplay and it's understanding what the channels are and where your consumers are at in that space. >> And then the whole next generation of that, which we're hearing about here, like shopping inside of Instagram. So now as opposed to a destination or I'm going to some place to buy something, whether it's online or a store, now it's actually just part of experiencing the media, as you said, and oh by the way, while I'm here, that looks interesting, I'll take one of those as well. Whole different level of experience that the retailers now have to support. >> Right, absolutely. There are other technology platforms too that, like one of them is basically producing video content that you can scroll over, or let's say you were just watching a commercial on your television, or maybe it's not even a commercial. Maybe it's like real long form content, and if you scroll over a product in the image, you can purchase it out of that video. And so these things are coming as well. It's really an exciting time. But it's an exciting time to be creative as well, because you have to have some creativity behind these strategies in order to make an impression on the consumer. >> It's exciting and creepy at the same time. (Jeff laughing) I don't know if my wallet can handle that. But we'll see. But one of the things I was wondering, when you were talking about, for example, Amazon going, starting as this online mega store and now having brick and mortar stores, the acquisition of Whole Foods. I can't go in there and shop without being asked if I'm a Prime member. But what are some of the sort of foundational customer experience expectations that, because I would think personalization would be kind of a common foundation that whether I'm shopping online with whatever, I want whoever I'm buying from, especially if I have a history, I want them to know what I've bought before, maybe my average order value, to be able to kind of incentivize loyalty. But I probably want the same thing if I'm in a brick and mortar. Are you seeing some sort of key foundations that businesses, whether they do one, the other, or both, need to put in place that can span both? >> Absolutely. So I think it's a great point. I think personalization and the experience. Obviously we're hearing so much about experience in terms of e-commerce, but in brick and mortar stores in particular. But I think that the personalization piece is such an important one. But I also think that it's now getting to where we need to personalize more on the marketing for no matter what channel it is. So you need to bring that physical experience with the customer to your e-commerce efforts as well so that you can, for example, if you're going to email market to me, I want it to be relevant. I want to know that you have been paying attention to my shopping habits, and it's kind of a fine line with respect to data, but if you're going to be using my data, I want to make sure that it's useful to me and it saves me time. >> And it kind of goes back to a point Jeff and I have heard a number of times today, and that's validating me as a consumer that you understand that what I'm interested in that you have to offer, you understand it, it's important to both of us. Well Tina, I wish we had more time to keep talking with you, but we thank you so much for joining us on The Cube this afternoon and talking with us about some of the things that you're seeing, your experiences. And now I know the difference between an influencer, macro and micro, and why they can be so important to brands of any size. So thank you for your time. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching us on The Cube live from Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we are here live at Magento Imagine 2019, our second time being back here with theCUBE and we're very excited to welcome Brittany Hodak to theCUBE, entrepreneur, customer engagement speaker, writer, co-founder of the Superfan Company. Brittany it's so exciting to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. >> So, you have an incredibly impressive background and I'm like where do we start? >> Thank you. >> So, here we are talking about customer experiences and how Magento and Adobe empower a lot of customer experiences. But you've written a ton of articles, over 350, you've been published in the Huff Post, Wall Street Journal, talk to us about your experiences with customer engagement, some of the things that you as a co-founder of the Superfan have discovered working with a variety of brands from Walmart to Katy Perry? >> Well, thank you so much for saying that. I always say that the biggest problem brands and entertainers have is often one that's not even on their radar at all. I talked to a lot of small and medium sized business owners and they say, You know, my big problem is people don't know who I am. I've got an awareness problem. I'm struggling to let people know who I am. And I really think my business would change if more people knew. And I said, You know, that's not the problem. You can always fix awareness. You can always spend money to get your message out there. Your big problem is apathy. Your problem is there are people who know and don't care. And you've got to figure out how to make people care. You've got to figure out how to connect your story with their story in a way that's meaningful, and in a way that's going to mean something in their lives because that's how you really start the fan engagement process. That's how you lay the groundwork for creating a culture of super fandom amongst your customers, that's really going to help you grow not just the business but a brand. >> Is it about having a more relevant messages or is it just finding those people that have a propensity to be a fan to the services that you provide? >> Well, it's understanding your uniqueness in a way that really makes your value proposition different from anybody else is. Once you understand your uniqueness and you're able to turn it into service of others, that's when you really you position yourself to be able to make the kind of difference that makes somebody want to be a super fan. And I always say, we've had the fortune of working with tons of celebrities, some of the biggest recording artists and superstars on the planet, and a lot of times people say to me, Oh, you know, it's easy when you're talking about being a super fan of Taylor Swift or being a super fan of Katy Perry, but, you know, I'm a plumber or I'm an electrician, how can I have super fans? And I say, By providing people the kindness service that changes their lives. I have an exterminator who I am a super fan of. His name is Scott and the reason I am a super fan of him is because he makes sure there are no brown recluse spiders in my house and I am absolutely terrified about recluse spiders. They are super evil creatures if you're not familiar with them, I encourage you not to google it. They're like nastiest little bug in the world. But you know to me that's super important because he's not just killing bugs, he's helping me feel safe in my home. So that's absolutely a vital service and finding the right guy to do that and the right guy to put my mind at ease and let me know there aren't going to be brown recluse spiders in my house is invaluable and because of that, like there's no way I would ever switch exterminators because Scott's my guy. And I know you know, I can text him 50 different pictures of critters and say, Is this okay, Is this okay? And he's going to get back to me and let me know. So, it's all about points of connection and finding ways to make your audience feel really valued, and connecting your story with their story. >> So, if you look at an exterminator versus a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Walmart, are there similarities and what they need to do to deliver this service that's impacting lives? Or are there fundamental differences? >> There are some fundamental differences, but there's more overlap than you would think. And I always say, if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you've got your brand or your business, your service, your product, whatever it is that you're providing, and you've got your customers over here. Where the magic happens is that point of intersection, where your story overlaps with their story, that intersection, that's where super fandom happens. And I like to talk about something I call the four A's of super fandom. So, you can, I see a lot of people make the mistake of trying to talk to everybody the same way. So, whether somebody is encountering your brand for the very first time or has been your customer for a long time, using the same messaging for those people and that doesn't work. So, I talk a lot about the four A's. So, the first day is awareness. That's when somebody is first uncovering your brand, first interacting with your brand. The second a is action, that's when somebody is actually interacting with your brand for the first time. The third a is affinity. Those are the people who are fans of your brand. They've sort of bought into your why, these are the satisfied customers, I would say. And a lot of businesses stop there. They say, These are the people who are satisfied. These are the people who liked what I'm doing, they're buying from me. And that's a mistake that a lot of especially small and medium sized businesses make they sort of feel like, I've got these customers, I don't have to do anything else. They're not over delivering or over serving them which is a huge missed opportunity because if you do, you're able to convert people from that third A to the fourth a which is advocacy. And advocacy is where you want to get the majority of the people because those are your superfans so to speak, those are the ones who are out there sharing your story and your why with other people, helping refer new customers and new clients to you. So, I always say if you can get past the affinity, the people who are happy with you but not really talking about it and really make them feel valued. That's how you create advocates and advocacy is really the super secret sauce when you're talking about super fandom. >> So where should people get started to try to build super fandom within their client base? Is that really with the good customers that they already have, they try to get them to be advocates or I think most people spend so much time focusing on the fat end of the funnel as opposed to on the narrow end of the funnel and converting that transaction into a fan which is what it sounds like you're suggesting? >> Yeah, well, it's important to to focus on all parts of the funnel man, like I said that that awareness, that that fat of the top, you certainly need to be dealing with those people to get them further down. But the skinny part of the funnel is really where you want to make sure that people are continuing to drip out to the other side to make those referrals for you. So, absolutely focusing on everybody. One thing that I am always shocked I when I do consulting and work with small businesses and medium sized businesses, when I asked how much referral business they get, a lot of people don't know that number off the top of your head. So, if you're not tracking the amount of referrals, you absolutely need to know that as a metric, and the number one thing that you can do to increase the amount of referral business that you're getting is by asking your customers for referrals. It's so funny the amount of people who say, I hardly get any referral business at all. And I say, Well, when's the last time you asked? When's the last time that you went to one of your clients or your customers and said, I so appreciate your business. And I wonder if you know anybody in your network who could benefit from our product or service. And they say, oh I've never done that. But yeah, they wonder why they don't have any referrals so-- >> It seems like such an easy step but to your point, you're saying they're focusing on awareness, getting my brand, my service, my name out there, getting people to take action? >> Yes. >> And building that affinity and then I'm good, but that simply asking to make it a referral whether it's a yelp or something as simple as that seems like a pretty easy step. Strategically, how do you advise customers to get from that, take that if you look at it like a funnel like Jeff saying, take that group of affinity customers and convert some percentage to advocates, what's your strategy for helping a consumer brand or even a service provider, like an exterminator for actually making those conversions and then and then having that be a really kind of engine to drive referrals, to drive more leads to the top of that funnel? >> That's a great question. So, I like to talk about something I call the high five which is knowing the five most important people that have the potential to drive your business forward for the next quarter, the next year and the next five years. So, this is an actual list of five people. And any business owner hopefully can sit down and say, Here are the people that I need to really super serve in order to move my business forward. So knowing who those five people are, it could be an advisor, it could be an investor, it could be somebody you've never even met, maybe a thought leader whose thought that you really enjoy, that you think this person could really help me and open me up to a lot of people in their network if they knew who I was. Make a list of those five people, and then figure out how often you need to be doing something staying top of mind for those people. So for me, I like to make sure it's at least once every two weeks. So, sometimes it's as simple as sending an article and saying, Hey, I came across this article, I thought you would really love it, wanted to send it your way. Now and reality, did I just come across that article? No, I spent maybe an hour looking for the right article to forward that person. It's taking the time out to show them that they matter to you, so whether that's sending them a nice gift in the mail for no reason or a handwritten thank you note after they made an introduction for you. It's checking in on things, I always say, you should know what is important to the people who are important to you. You should know the teams that they follow, you should know their spouse, their children, the things that are happening in their lives so you can check in with them. And we live in an age where it's so easy to get information about anyone because all of us are putting content out there on the internet all the time about ourselves. So take the time to figure out what matters to those people who matter to you, and then stay top of mind, letting them know that they matter to you. So, like I said, for me, it's once every two weeks and I look at my list of five about every six months in terms of adding a couple of new people on maybe cycling some people off. But I've been doing this for four years. So, I have a list of 20 people. And I those are like my alums, some of the alumni of my high five, and I'm still extremely close with all of them. I still make sure that I'm trying to add value to them because having one person who's going to advocate for you could open the door for millions of dollars of revenue for you. So, it's just identifying who those people are, because to your point, it's impossible to sort of make everyone the most important person, it's impossible to take everyone at that third step and take them to the fourth step. So, rather than holistically thinking about it. I like to really drill in and say let's start with five. And if you've got 50 employees and you assign five people to each of those 50 employees to say make sure this vendor or make sure this customer, or make sure this partner feels very appreciated by you on a regular basis. You're going to, you really start to see the ROI very, very quickly in your business. >> So some of the trends, if we look at this we're all consumers of any kind of product service, we have this expectation, this growing expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it delivered in an hour or a day, or so, we want to be able to have this experience on mobile, maybe started there, maybe finish it in the store, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that you recommend that the company with any product or service needs to get on board with, for example, this morning they were talking about progressive web apps and being able to deliver an experience where the person doesn't have to leave the app, or they can transact something like through Instagram. What are some of those top tools that you recommend to your broad client base. You got to get on board with like mobile, for example, right away. >> Yes, I was going to say the PWAs are absolutely critical, because I think we've all as consumers been in the situation of trying to load something on our phone, and it's five seconds goes by six seconds, I'm like forget about it. >> We're done. >> Yeah, I'm done, I'm over it. So PWAs is super important because it's all about putting your customer first and making things simple for them. The other thing is making sure that whatever system process you're using, everything needs to be connected. You can't be managing stuff across eight different platforms and expect for things not to fall through the cracks which is I'm learning so much here at Imagine and listening to all the best practices of people who are using Magento to manage every part of their business because something is seemingly minor as sending a confirmation email twice instead of once or having eight hours go by before the customer gets that, those types of things, say to a customer on a subliminal level, I'm not important, I don't matter, they're not putting me first. >> So just fan comes from fanatic. And there's great things about fans, and some times there's less great things about fans and we've seen a little bit of that here in terms of this really passionate community around Magento. And it was independent. And then it went to eBay and then it went back out of eBay. And now it's back in Adobe. And it's funny seeing the people that have been here for the whole journey. Part of that responsibility, if you're going to invite someone to be a fan is you have to let them participate, you have to let them contribute. And often which we're seeing, I guess, in Game of Thrones, I'm not a big fan, but if you get outside of kind of the realm of where the fans want things to go, it can also cause some conflict. So, how to people manage encouraging fans, really supporting fans, but at the same time not letting them completely knock their business off or hold the business back probably from places where the entrepreneur needs to still go? >> That's a great question. There was a really fascinating study that Viacom did a couple of years ago about fans. And especially in the under 35 sets, so millennials, gen Z. And the vast majority of people felt like fans have some ownership of the thing that they're a fan of. And that's a really interesting study in psychology to think about these people who feel the ownership. But you know, it's true. You mentioned Game of Thrones, that's a great example of seeing these fan bases who come up with names for themselves, and who are tweeting in real time about things that are happening. Magento a great example because open source has been such an important part of the culture and the history of the platform. These people feel in a very real sense this ownership. And you're right, I think sometimes that scares small business owners, medium sized business owners. They say, Well, we don't want to relinquish control. We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we're upsetting people. And I would say, You're right, fan comes from the word fanatic. And that fanaticism, that passion is something you absolutely want. Because I would argue that a greater threat than that is what I was talking about earlier, which is apathy. You don't want people to be like, I don't care. And passion is of course, the opposite of apathy. And that's what you're looking for. So I would say, are you going to put yourself in a position where sometimes there could be a disagreement, you could upset somebody? Absolutely, but you those are the people, it's like if you're in a relationship with somebody and you have a fight that passion that's there is because there's care on both sides. You're both super engaged, you're both very passionate about your position. So, having a system in place to defuse that by saying, I hear you I understand where you're coming from, let's figure this out together, is part of the customer service staff that you've just got to prepare for. >> Can you using, sorry Brittany, using all this data that's available that Magento, Adobe et cetera can deliver and enable organizations to understand that and maybe even kind of marry those behaviors with apathy on one hand passion on the other and how do we get to that happy medium? >> Exactly, how do we get to the happy medium, what are the data points that matter? How are we, the idea of super fan means something different to every organization. So, part of it is uncovering what it is that really matters to you. I always say a super fan is somebody who over indexes and their affinity for a product, service, brand, entertainer, therefore increasing the chance that they're going to advocate on its behalf. So, thinking about, there could be people who are spending a lot of money with your brand who just aren't really that passionate about it. They're not going to tell people and that's fine. But those aren't the people who would be a quote unquote superfan, even though they may be spending a lot of money with you. So, it's figuring out what the markers are that are important to your brand or service. I work with a lot of brands on this because it really is different for everyone. But figuring out who those people are and then talking to them because this is something that, there's so much psychology around the why. Like why people behave the way we do that the consumer behavior, the internal and philosophical drives that are making us make the decisions that we make and the best way to uncover that is to talk to your customers because a lot of times you'll learn so much about your brand, you'll find so many things. I always love talking to recording artists about this, they put out a new song or a new album and in the fans find all these hidden messages >> Taylor is known for that. >> Always some-- >> Taylor is one of the best in the world. And a lot of times artists will say, Oh, yeah, like, I didn't do that on purpose but I'm totally going to take credit for it because these fans found it. And oh, yeah, of course, I meant to do that. So, you'll find that some of these customers understand your brand oftentimes better than you do which is a really fun thing. >> It's also just the ecosystem. You my favorite one always reference is Harley Davidson, guess how many brands get tattooed on people's arms, and just the whole ecosystem of other products that were built up around the motorcycle, and to support kind of that community they weren't getting any nickels necessarily if somebody sold a saddle bag or a leather jacket, or whatever but it was such and it still is, I think such a vibrant community again, and as evidence by you put a tattoo on your arm that it's something to strive for, not easy to get. >> Why we always say build a brand not a business because the brand are those things that people are connecting to. We were talking about NASA before we started filming. I'm a huge space geek and Lisa loves space having worked for NASA in the past and that's one of those things, I don't know this to be true but I got to believe NASA way outpaces like every other combined government agency in licensing. I mean, people walk around wearing NASA logos on everything >> I saw at least three of them this morning. >> Yeah, I mean, I bought in the last month, probably three different NASA licensed products. So I mean that's the passion that if you can connect to somebody on an emotional level and make your story part of their story. They want to represent it, they want to get that Harley tattooed on their arm. >> That emotional connection but also that personalization that's key? >> Yes. >> What's difference in from your perspective on a superfan versus an influencer? Are they one in the same? >> It's a great question. So, they a lot of times are one in the same and that same Viacom study that I mentioned earlier. Something like two thirds of people said that they consider themselves to be pop culture influencers which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, pretty much everyone is an influencer and that's because for Nielsen, the most trusted recommendation is or the most trusted form advertising is a recommendation from a friend or a family member, 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, which far outpaces every other form of advertising. So in a lot of ways, these micro influencers are the next wave of advertising. These advocates or these super fans are, I think in many ways an untapped well of resources for the fans who drill in and you mentioned Taylor Swift before. How many people listen to Taylor Swift for the first time because a friend suggested they listen to Taylor Swift. I would argue that lots and lots of people and Taylor said something to me years ago that like a former manager, or someone said to her, and that was, if you want to sell half a million albums, you're going to have to meet half a million people. That was said to her when she was like, 15, 16 years old and she thought, okay, yeah, I'm going to go meet half a million people. I'm going to be befriend them, I'm going to listen to their stories, I'm going to let them know what they say matters to me. And here we are, she sold, I don't know, 50, 60 million albums, however many she sold worldwide. And but that's really where it starts, that one to one connection. >> Seems to just kind of all go back to referral. And isn't that sort of the basic human connection? It's like, are we trying to over-complicate this with all these different tools that simply, even with hiring and tech or whatever industry, referrals are so much more important because you've got some sort of connection to a brand or a person or a product or service. >> You've got that connection, you've got somebody who's already very well qualified. And I like to talk about something that I call the wave method which the wave is a ritual hello, goodbye. How many times a day do you wave at people, countless. And virtually you say hello to tons of people everyday. People who are coming to one of your social pages, people who are engaging with your website. So I say, I encourage people to think about that hello and goodbye, that interaction. Think of a wave as an acronym and ask yourself, are you making everybody who's going to come into contact with you today feel welcomed? Is there something on your virtual site or in your real storefront. If you're a brick and mortar business that's going to make people feel welcomed? How are you making them feel like they belong? The A is appreciated, how are you letting those people know that they are appreciated by your business? I think I know I have often felt like I'm a number or I don't matter. Utility companies are notorious for this for making you feel like they don't really care if they have your business or not. Or they know perhaps that they're going to because there's not like a different water company you can you can use it your home. And that sucks, like we've all been made to feel like we weren't appreciated by somebody that we were doing a financial transaction with. So ask yourself, how can you make your potential and current customers feel appreciated? The V stands for validated, and one of the best quotes that I've ever come across is from Oprah. On her last episode, she was imparting some of the lessons that she had learned over the years of hosting her shows and she said she'd interviewed something like 30,000 people over the years, and they all wanted the same thing. And that was validation. They all want it to feel like they were important and their feelings mattered. I see you, I hear you what you're saying is important to me. So, validate your customers. One big mistake that I see people make all the time in customer service is when somebody has a complaint, having your rebuttal be like, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or it's 10,000 people haven't have had great experiences. That's absolutely the worst thing that you can ever say to somebody because you're bringing in other experiences that don't matter to them. It's a one to one conversation. It's a one to one relationship. So bringing in, that's like having a fight with your significant other and saying like, Well none of the women I dated before you ever had a problem with this, like how well is that going to go over? Like you don't want to bring in other experiences. So that V and wave validated >> And the E? >> and then the E is excited, making people feel excited because that passion, having people feel like you know you're excited that they're a customer of yours and you can bring something that's going to make their lives better is the most important key. >> Brittany, thank you so much. I could keep talking to ya. I wish we didn't end but we do, for sharing your experiences, your expertise, your recommendations on becoming any kind of brand with any product or service, generating the super fans. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you guys today. >> Ditto. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this on theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas, thanks for watching.

>> live from Las Vegas it's the cube, covering Magento Imagine 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey welcome back to the cube, Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick live at The Wynn Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019, with about 3500 people here give or take a few. We're very pleased to welcome Magento evangelist Ben Marks to the Cube, Ben welcome >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate you making time. >> And thanks for bringing the flair to our set. >> I've got to let people know where my allegiances lie, right? >> So this is the first Magento Imagine post adobe acquisition, that was announced about a year ago completed about six or seven months ago. You have a very strong history with Magento the last 10 years, Magento is very much known for their developer community, their open source history and DNA. Talk to us about, how things are now with the community and really the influence that the developers have. >> Well if it's up to me we retain this really strong influence in the business. I mean at the the core of Magento since its inception the very humble beginnings that it had back in back in 2007 has been this this developer ecosystem. And that is what takes the software basically all the output and all of the expertise and intuition that we have that we put into our products and our services, it only goes so far. Now it is a platform that tends to fit in a lot of places but it only goes so far and we have that last mile, that is the most important distance that we cross and we cannot do it without this ecosystem. They are the ones that they know, they understand the merchant requirements, they understand the vertical, they understand the region, they understand cross border concerns, whatever it may be they know our product from an expert perspective and then they take that and they make it make sense. That being the case, Adobe I think so far has shown excellent stewardship in terms of recognizing the value. A big part of that 1.7 billion price tag, they paid for the community. They knew this ecosystem was the real, has always been the x-factor in Magento and so they've been very diligent, well now that I'm an employee we've been very introspective about what that means as part of adobe, is part of this this massive set of opportunities and new addressable market that we have. And we're just all trying to make sure that we look after all of these people who are at the end of the day probably our biggest champions. >> Just curious how you've been able to maintain that culture because to be kind of open source and open source first timer, first isn't the right word but open source neutral or pro, along with your proprietary stuff and to really engage developers it's such a special town and as a special culture because by rule you're saying that there's more smart people outside of our walls than inside of our walls and embracing and loving that. But you guys have gone through all kinds of interesting kind of evolutions on the business side in terms of ownership and management. How've you been able to maintain that? And what is kind of the secret sauce? Why are the developers so passionate to continue to develop a Magento? Because let me tell you we go to a lot of conferences and a lot of people are trying really hard to get that developer to spend that next time working on their platform versus a different one. >> Yeah, well you know it's endemic to our culture that whether it's a developer, someone who's working who's an expert in administering Magento stores, just whatever someone's focus is in this ecosystem, it is interesting we've always had at the underpinning everything has been this open source ethos. So from the very beginnings of Magento, the creators Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner, they sought out as they announced this Magento thing back in the day. They intentionally made it open-source because they knew that, that had been proved by a previous open-source commerce software and they knew that that was really where they were going to win that was the force multiplier. Again the thing that would get them into markets that they couldn't address with their very small agency that they were walking out of. So through the years that grew and in large part we can thank the Doc community, especially in Germany, the Dutch community, there's just the general open source ethos there. But I learned about open source from Magento, I had someone help me out when I was first starting at my first week working with Magento as a developer there was no documentation, I had to go into a chatroom and ask for help and this guy he actually spent about a couple of hours helping me and we remain close friends to this day. But at the end of it I'm like so should I pay you? And he was this guy this guy from outside of Heidelberg he's just no this is open source, is like just as you learn give it back. And that's a perfect summation for a big part of the spirit here. It helps who are in commerce, there's money kind of flowing all around but at the end of the day we provide options, we provide flexibility where there's nothing wrong with the sass platforms there's nothing wrong with some of the the larger like API driven platforms, it's just at some point if you have a custom requirement that they can't satisfy and that happens regularly, guess what? You got to go with the platform that gives you the extensibility. So they feel a sense of ownership I think because of that and they're sort of proud to take this wherever they can. >> So with the Adobe acquisition being complete around six eight months you mentioned Adobe doing a good job of welcoming this community but you also talked about this core ethos that Magento brings. I believe in the press release, announcing the acquisition last year, Adobe said open source is in our DNA. Have you found that one to be true? And two how much has the Magento open source community been able to sort of open the eyes and maybe open the door to Adobe's ethos of embracing it? >> Let's see how much trouble can I get in to today? >> So I have a good counterpart over Alberto Dobby and it's a stretch for me to call him a counterpart. He's got his JD,he's been big in the open source world for since forever but, Matt Asay probably... >> CUBE alum >> ...if you follow tech online, you've seen this post, you've seen him as an postulating on open source and it was interesting a lot of us were asking the same question from Magento world because a lot of us remembere the eBay days and an eBay had a sort of a different plan and vision for Magento that ultimately, that whole thing they were trying to create just didn't work out. Magento survived, but we're a bit wary we all knew it was coming it's the natural progression from private equity ownership but really, where is this open source that we were told about? And Matt is a kind of a big a piece there but as it turns out he jumped on Twitter immediately when none of us was supposed to be talking about anything of course but that's in Matt's nature. Because there is a lot of open source at Adobe in fact there's a lot of open source technology that underpins even these Enterprise Solutions that they offer. I visited with with several of our team members in the Basel office and there are Apache Software Foundation board members. I mean you want to to talk about the beginnings of open source and the impact its had on the world? These are some of these people and so yes it's there I think it's not a secret to say that Adobe really hasn't done a great job of telling that story. So as I've met and kind of toured around with some of the Adobe vice presidents who've been visiting here and I love that they're engaged. They get this, they want this to expand. It's been it's been really interesting watching them and encounter this and then start to be inspired by us as much as we are inspired by again the opportunities that exist as we all come together. >> It's great, yeah and Matt's been on his Trevi a week cover, CNCF and will be a cube con I think next week and in Barcelona so we're huge advocates, but so it's such a different way of looking at the world again accepting that there's more smart people outside your four walls than are inside your four walls. Which just by rule is the way that it has to be, you can't hire all the smart people. So to use that leverage and really build this develop wrapped advocacy is a really tremendous asset. >> Better together, is what we say, and it could not be true. I mean there there is no way we could know at all, we can't hope to. So what we've done actually in the last couple of years really under some brilliant leadership by Jason Woosley we've been able to double down on our open-source investment and I'd say that was a moment when we truly became an open-source company with through and through because we spun up and we took our best architects and just put them on a project called community engineering that they're dedicated to enabling contribution of fixes improvements and features from our ecosystem. So by doing that we all of a sudden we now have worldwide engineering that is that they're all experts in their individual domains so that line of code that some contributor from somewhere is contributing, he or she has become an expert let's say in something as glamorous like totals calculation like the logic that has to go into that. Because of their real-world experience we get the highest quality code that's just backed up by a lot of trial and tribulation. And from that we basically get to cover all of our bases and they tend to write things in a way that's way more extensible than probably we could ever envision. I don't know of a better formula for having a product that satisfies something so varied and challenging and just constantly evolving as e-commerce. >> Well and I think Jason mentioned this morning that the community engineering program was only launched a couple of years ago. >> Literally a two years ago February. >> So significant impacts in a very short period of time. >> Yeah we were fascinated to see that while we'd had this kind of haphazard almost ad hoc open source engagement up to that point, once we really built machinery around it We've we've managed to build something that is a model for any other company that wants to try to do this. Once we did that we very quickly got to some of our big releases where over 50% of the new lines of code were written externally. And that was cool for about a week and then we realized that that's not even the story the story is everything else I talked about which is just that degree of ownership that degree of informed engineering that we would never come up with on our own. And it was a real signal to this very patient and resilient ecosystem that hey, we're all in this together. And of course we've done that also, we've replicated that with our developer documentation, it's all open source and able to be contributed to and we sort of look at how that can expand and even to the point where our core architecture team now all of their discussions so you can go to github.com/magento, you can see our backlog, you could see where we're discussing features and kind of planning what's coming next. You can also go to our architecture repository and you see all of our core architects having their dialogue with each other in public so that the public is informed and they can be involved and that is literally the highest stage I believe of open source evolution. >> That's a great story now the other great thing though that it don't be brought to you is some really sophisticated marketing tools to drive the commerce in your engine, so I'm just curious your perspective. You've been playing in this for a long time but you guys are really kind of taken over at the transactional level now to have that front-end engagement tools, partners, methodologies, I mean you got to be excited. >> Well really so going back to my, I remember my agency days I remember why some of the Google Analytics code looks the way it does because I remember the product that it was before. Urgent analytics right and I remember when we could first do split tests and one of the first cool projects I ever worked on in Magento 1.1 was sort of parsing Google's cookies to be able to sort of change the interface of Magento and test that for conversion rights. And to think of how far we've come, now we have the power and the mandate really to absolutely know everything about the customer experience, the customer journey and then I'm sitting there in our keynotes you know in the general session yesterday, looking up and I'm looking at the slide and I'm seeing like 14 trillion transactions that are captured in our various apparatus and I think that it's tremendous responsibility, it's tremendous power. And if we if we combine, if we use this insight responsibly, what we do is we continue to do what I think Magento has done all along which has allowed us to be at not just at the forefront of where commerce evolves but really to set the standard that consumers begin to expect. And I know we've all felt it, when you have when you have that experience and it feels very full of friction I know we can do better and I will immediately go away from any website that makes it hard for me to do what I want to do any website that seems like they are kind of a partner on my journey that's where I mean that's we're going to spend my time and my money and that's really what we're trying to really lean into here. >> Which is essential, because as you mentioned if I'm doing something on my phone I expect a really fast transaction and there's friction points, I'm gone. I will be able to find another service or product that meets my need because there is so much choice and there's so much competition for almost every product and service. So being able to leverage the power of advertising, analytics, marketing and commerce to really deliver the fundamentals of the business needs to truly manage the customer experience is a game changer. >> Yap it is so what we're what we're looking to these days you know Magento, just before the acquisition was announced made a tremendous investment to start up it's completely independent trade association called the Magento Association. It's a place for our community to collect under. And and when we're here and Magento is still a big champion of ours a big source of investment and we are you know we are looking and I kind of wear both hats right because I'm a board member of that group as well as being a Magento Adobe employee. But one of the focus that we have is still that collaborative spirit where we start to carry the message and the capabilities of this tooling so that we can ensure that this ecosystem remains and powered to deliver the experiences that our customers and their customers expect. >> Absolutely, well Ben thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm and passion >> Yeah did that come through I was hoping. >> You could next time dial it up a little bit more. >> Okay good. >> Awesome and bring more flair. >> I'll bring more flair next time. [Lisa Mumbling] >> I'm still wondering what happened to the capes? >> The magician master capes yes. >> I can I can probably go grab you a couple. >> That would be awesome orange is my favorite color. >> Good to know. >> Ben it's been a pleasure having you on the program we look forward to next year. >> Likewise thank you both. >> Our pleasure. For Jeff Rick, I'm Lisa Martin and you are watching theCube live at Magento imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeatmusic)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen. Brought to You by Adobe. >> Hi, Welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick at Imagine twenty nineteen at the Wind, Los Vegas Talking all about e commerce, innovation and technology. Consumer changes. All that good stuff. Joining us next is Adam Justice, the director of product marketing for the Adobe Experience about Adam. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having me. Thank you. >> This is a really high energy event. >> It is >> all days palpable, but I think it might be partly because there's a lot of orange here. It's a pretty energizing color. People have had very interesting entrances and exits on stage, coming from above and below. We've heard a lot of great testimonials from partners, customers, Dobie, folks, the gentle folks. Customer experience is critical to any product. Any service retailer, big or small. So true. Talk to us about you've been with Adobe for a long time. Talk to us about were perspective. The essentials Really good customer experience. Management? >> Absolutely. Thank you. Thanks for the question. It's great to be here, so and don't >> be. We've really >> evolved. I think as sort of the needs and rolls of our customers have. And I think the primary motivator for their evolution has been the customer customer itself. And whereas it used to be enough for us to think about, we're going to provide winning product or a service. All of us can agree, and it's easy for us to, and it's easy for us to agree now because we're all a focus group of one. >> We know what >> we like. We like an experience that actually feels like it's worth having. It's not enough to just put a product or a service out there. It needs to feel like something that actually not only feels natural, but it feels additive to our lives in some way. And so what was once sort of ah, relatively sir straight forward product development process or promotional process now is very much about how we addressing the needs of the consumer in a way that it is holistic, that respects the channels, that they want to interact with our brand on that respects the devices through which they want to either consumer product or research. Our product so it will be, is really trying to sort >> of >> understand the dynamics of the market today and bring solutions to the customers who now have this broader sort of stewardship. And I would say the things that we're seeing that our core to that our first, you're not going to deliver a meaningful experience to a customer unless you understand that customer and understanding that customer largely now comes down to data and a lot of fix will feel like, Well, that certainly seems logical that were awash in data. How do we actually get to the point where the data is telling us the story so we can leverage that information than tell a brand story till some kind of present a compelling experience? And then you add to that the dynamics, obviously right now about and entirely justifiable concerns about my privacy and the regulations there. Adobes going directly at that. With it, it'LL be experienced platform in order to effectively coalesce a meaningful point of view or sort of representation of off the customer in a way that respects their privacy. That un experienced steward can then look at that and say, Not only do I understand who this person is, but I have context and an understanding of what it is they're looking for. What is their intent? What is the context of this interaction now? So I can present a meaningful experience that obviously gets you part of the way. And but then knowing is only half the battle, right? Maybe not even half. Then you actually have to kind of rally around. Well, what, uh, what tools and content do we have at our disposal to ultimately present a compelling experience? You know what it will be? We like to say that emotion is the currency of experience. And if you're not actually leveraging meaningful content and presenting it in context and you're not going to evoke an emotion that is worth evoking, so definitely have the data piece than the content piece. But I would also add, and you've probably had other people sitting in this seat talking about how the complexity of all that has certainly exceeded now the capacity of at least my brain to manage in a singular sort of engagement with a customer, let alone at scale millions of times a day. So the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning now is so corps I would think that it's absolutely kind of. It's sort of the gearbox that's that's turning at the center of the data on one hand, the content and elements, the assets, the offer's on the other that allows for ultimately the coalescing of those things and then the delivery of an experience worth having. So that may have been like a two dollar answer Teo Two Cent question. But really, I feel like that's sort of the component pieces that we're seeing at play and sort of adobes motivation. And going into that space that came out where we're >> to Dhobi sounded a couple weeks ago. I can't keep track of things. Couple weeks go on Guy found it really interesting, especially with adobes roots really in the content generation side, right, all the way back to the creatives and the creators of that great content. And now to be a Liza sophistication of the tools to a B tests. I think best buy was on stage and they did four million or forty million customized email. So now you know, take this great creative A be tested to the degree again using the data and the contacts and the in the knowledge of what those customers are all about. And now it seems like the magenta piece is kind of the icing on the cake. Teo actually have the ability to get the transaction. Associate it with all this other process. Teo, bring the cash register, if you will. >> You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Adobe. When we when we executed sort of what we announced our intent to to acquire, we were talking about How does it'LL be? Facilitator? Help every experience become shop a ble and every moment personal And really that was That was a claim we couldn't make without without the magenta piece. So it is absolutely, um it's a hand in glove relationship. And now, especially as we've all evolved as consumers, I mean to imagine that we would be subscribing to socks or that we could one click purchase just about anything >> you need, the >> technology that can kind of keep pace with the expectations. And that's what it's all about because so many of those experiences that Adobe is intent on enabling our customers to present s >> so many of them culminate in a transaction >> of some sort. So the magenta is absolutely not only the icing on the cake, which I think is that it's a great metaphor, but it's also so integral right now, it's becoming like a fundamental or elemental part of what >> we're trying to accomplish, right. >> So delivering this comprehensive customer experience, managing our analytics, advertising, marketing, commerce the one thing that when you were kind of describing the core components of customer experience management again thinking is time. Because as consumers, we have so much choice. And if we meet friction at any point along the way, we're gonna churn it. We're gonna find somebody else who's gonna be able to deliver this product or service right. And unless in a frictionless way. So when you were talking about a I, for example, I was thinking comment on how that Khun B. Leverage to be able to facilitate that Justin Time shop, a ble experience that converts to a sale that is able to do so in a way that's personable, personalized to the customer experience and taking that inside to go. Right now, there's an action that Lisa just took. We've gotta offer this right now, >> right? Well, you know, that's one of things that I absolutely love about customer experience management. Sieck Sam Neill here issues the acronym. In >> a way, I >> just I kind of loved the absurdity of it, right. I mean, when you think of the scale to say something like, we're going to make every experience, shop a bowl and every moment personal, it's just, uh it's scope of that. And to imagine that that's possible is almost absurd. But when you introduce the advancements that we're seeing in artificial intelligence and machine learning now, it's literally going from the absurd of from the realm of science fiction into very real. It's and that's where What what adobes looking at, like, How can we literally take some sort of statement like we're going to personalize experiences at every across the customer journey? We're going to do it at scale and in real time you think you brought up the component of of real time and really, unless you're considering how we're going to meet the needs of the customer in the moment that they're expressing that need, then it's really moved. So it and it is absolutely artificial intelligence and machine learning that we're seeing sort of expressed now across the Adobe Experience cloud that are making that happen in in multiple ways. One of the ways would be simply by shortening that span between sort of the late genius that marketers are walking around in their heads and actual execution. So how can we kind of take the work some of the friction out of the work flows that allow them to translate their ideas in tow offers? And another place would be, How do we shorten the space between a signal that we get saying behavioral data that we see show up either in a nap or on a on a website, and then turn through all of the possibilities of what we could present? Apply algorithms to kind of determine what is the next best offer next best experience, and then present that >> in a way that actually >> feels, if not really time pretty close to it? And that would not be possible without without artificial intelligence at Adobe, our product in that space that we references Adobe Sensei's So you'LL hear us talk about Adobe Sense, say, and that's it's kind of the the umbrella that stretches around the different elements that I was talking about so >> interesting how just have the expectation game has changed and actually now being enabled by the technology under the covers because they used to be right. We made decisions based on a sampling of the data after the fact. Right now, the expectation is, I want to make a decision based on all the data or is close to all those I can get in near real time, real time, defined as enough time to do something about it, which is a completely different way to attack that problem and really change the expectation Gay. But that is the expectation game now from customers who are hoping that thing shows up. That's supposed to show up because it's really what I'm interested in now. And can't you figure that out based on all my activity? That's right. >> In fact, I was I was just having conversations with my children, and it kind of blows my mind there. They literally wonder why, when we order something on Amazon, it's not there, like within an hour to didn't Didn't we just buy that? And interestingly, in some in some markets now you're almost in a point where that's actually reality and So the fact that we've witnessed in such a short time frame this this kind of realization in this new reality, it is absolutely It's absolutely fascinating to observe it. We can only kind of blame and congratulate ourselves. Right is consumers for pushing these expectations, But now brands are doing everything they can to come Teo to keep up with. But I think one of the magical things that we're >> still we're still surprised and delighted on a regular >> basis. And that's one of the things that I love about Adobe and our ability to sort of Teo. Activate the things that that marketers and people who are responsible for customer spirit experience know that they want to dio. We're giving them tools now where it's actually not only a reality to respond in these incredibly short time frames, >> but do it in a way that could be >> super creative and and breakthrough or differentiate, which is a It's a It's a meaningful requirement for brands today to be able to do all of that stuff, but do it in a way that >> is unlike their peers, exactly like we were talking about before, when you have so much choices a consumer, especially for certain types of products that are commodities. If it's not in a way that's differentiated and unique, I'm going to go somewhere else. Where I could find that experience really kind of connects with me on whatever level, whatever the product of services be able to create that creative, unique experience. And we were talking with Jason about what was announced this morning with Adobe Sales Channel on the Adobe branded storefront and being able to give merchants even within Sorry, not Adobe Alice on been talking for hours, giving them the ability, say, within an Amazon marketplace to be elevator brand a little bit, make it a little bit more unique. So they had a little bit of an edge and maybe expressed some brand creativity within that platform. >> Right? I really do appreciate that element of of of what we're doing, having come from kind of an advertising background myself, where you know that you're the mental band with you get with anyone is so limited, and the opportunity to differentiate is you have to grab it when it presents itself. And so, in order to weigh risk to becomes like overly scientific about this indefinitely. There's there's so much science involved with it now. But we can't forget the art. We can't forget the opportunity to literally tio take that those even those minor elements. And sometimes it's the signals that we get that say someone is prepared, are interested in this type of experience. But then how do we make that experience not feel surgical, but rather actually impressive and emotionally even on? So that's one of things that I love about Adobe. We really do try and embrace push forward on the science aspect. But respect the fact that a lot of brand building and a lot of meaningful experiences that we have are absolutely also rooted in the art. So >> that's a great point. It's really helping customers kind of fine tune and dialled the art with the science. Your park marketing guy. What may be a favorite customer example that shows a customer that's really been able to leverage the data, the creativity to deliver differentiated brand millionaire, their customers, anything come to mind in particular? >> Well, certainly there's, you know, there's there's so many I I feel like for me, the operative when I really feel impacted by a brand. Sometimes it's when I break out of sort of the mundane or I get to go, wanna get I get to go on vacation with my family and I feel like, interestingly just going to AA remote locale. Sometimes it can either be magical or can be like, Ah, horror show, right? But the way brands like Marriott Starwood married Bon voy. Now the way that they're there, they're embracing the opportunity to sort of bring technology in a way that that feels very additives but almost transparent to where now you're actually you, Khun, Ifyou're based on your loyalty program and you have the right app on your phone, you can walk straight to the door and unlock the room. I mean, that's that's huge. And it takes something that could've like that might have been one of the bigger friction points, like standing in a line to check in, >> and it just makes it fluid. It makes it feel >> like, you know, this is the type of experience that I want tohave, but I'm just getting things done and things feel good and the opportunity for a brand to go in and sort of think about Where are those points where I might be introducing friction rather than feel good and being able to remove those and have technology do it in a transparent way? I think is really it's really impressive. >> It could be absolutely transformational. Absolutely for sure. It's such a good >> example of just kind of twisting the lens, you know, the check in process. Who would ever think we're not going to change the check in process? It's a check in process, but for some would actually you'LL Wait a minute, That is, that is, that is of their whole experience of their time with us. You're family for a couple three, four days. You know, that is a major for friction point. You're tired. Just got in from the airport, you know, the kids were hungry. You just want to drop your bags and then the stand in line. So So they used technology to redefine that little piece of that whole week that you're spending that property is really creative. Before you even get to the technology enablement to make it so >> or or take, for example, one of the most painful things that can happen and travel when you're on a flight that's delayed or cancelled. And then not only are you dealing then with just kind of the emotional duress of of having to re calculate everything, but then >> you have to stand in line forever. But now you >> can pull out your app and at your fingertips you have potential. You have the opportunity to be recognized as I'm this passenger. I have this sort of status. Here are our alternatives and being able to sort of take control or engage in that way that that that that leverages technology to again sort of remove friction and add solution. I >> just think >> we're really at the tip of the iceberg in the way that we're going to see this type of technology infusing into things that we feel are more pure experience than just marketing in campaigns. >> Exciting, exciting times. Adam, thank you so much for joining me on the Cuban sound implosion. Look forward to hearing lots of great things to come and really helping to drive his experiences with the art and the science. Indeed. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. Thanks >> for Jeff. Rick. I'm Lisa Martin. Coming to you live from Imagine twenty nineteen at the Wynn Las Vegas. Thanks for watching

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019. (fizzing) (upbeat music) Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick at Imagine 2019, the Wynn, Las Vegas, with about 3500 customers, lots of partners, lots of developers, a lot of energy here. And speaking of energy, we have Jason Woosley, VP of commerce at Adobe. Jason, you came onto the stage this morning from the clouds suspended. Talk about energy. >> It was a lot of energy, and there was a message behind it, right? (clears throat) I mean we really are talking about our Cloud penetration and how that is the future. So, you know, I got to do something really cool and check something off the bucket list where I actually did descend from the sky onto the stage. It was the best Imagine entrance I've ever done (Lisa laughing) and really does talk about, you know, how important our Cloud Strategy is. Thanks for having me on, by the way. >> Absolutely. >> Our pleasure. >> So, a lot of energy here, again, community, community, community. We go to so many shows, so many people are desperate to engage developers. And you guys have that in your core. It's been there from day one. Continues to be such an important part of who you are as well as the road forward. >> It's the reason for why we are where we are today. I mean bar none, right? Our community, this eco system. And it's not something you can buy. It's not something you can even intentionally build. You have to nurture, you have to create a platform that speaks to a large audience, and then you've just got to make sure that you're treating those developers and your partners really, really well, empowering them to really differentiate that experience at the last mile. And, you know, it's a flywheel effect. You end up with this incredible community that's anxious to contribute back into our code base and they have made, what you see at this conference is a result of that community. It's not anything that Magento could do. It's not anything that Adobe could do. It is just something that has to organically happen, and then you have to nurture the heck out of it. And that, that's really what we've done. >> And this is a community that you say has grown organically to several hundred thousand people who I feel like to say that they're influential to Magento, the technologies is actually an understatement with how much, how, again, I think influential's the wrong word. They're stronger than that. >> They're absolutely core to it, right? I mean they're an extension of our development methodology. You know, I like to think about, you know, I run engineering as part of my organization, and everybody in my group is customer-facing. Just like everybody in out community is customer-facing. And so we've tried to tear down the walls that separate our community members from our internal core engineers, because it creates this incredible diversity of perspective that you can't find anywhere else. I mean, no matter how much I invest in broadly diverse engineering teams across the globe, 300,000 engineers, they call themselves Magento developers, don't take a paycheck from Adobe but contribute back to our code base, influence our road map and really show us the way. It's an incredible phenomenon. >> In the last year since the announcement of the Adobe acquisition and the actual completion of that six, seven months ago, how has that community reacted, strengthened? What have been some of your surprising observations about the community's strength? >> It is surprising, and I'll tell you why. I think we came into the acquisition with a lot of apprehension, right. There was a concern that, you know, Adobe's too big. They're too corporate. They don't really love Open Source. All untrue, right? Adobe has incredible Open Source initiatives already inside, but you don't here a lot about it. And so, our community, I think, is it's a little bit concerned about, you know, does the level of investment go down? Does all of our ability to promote that product, does that, do we start to back off of that? And of course, we have not done that at all, and in fact, what we've seen is that our community loves the Adobe acquisition. They see opportunity just as clearly as we do. We have more than triple-digit growth in the number of community contributions coming in to us since the acquisition last year. It is a clear sign that the ecosystem is fully on board with where we're going. >> Right. Well clearly the Adobe Suite provides so much gunpowder to power the commerce that's been at the core of Magento from the beginning. I mean it almost begs the question, why didn't this happen a long, long time ago? >> I think there's something to be said about that, and, but you know what, it took Adobe a while. They picked the right platform. We're very confident of that, and, you know, their investment in community is actually paying off on the Adobe side, right. When you think about digital experience products, they (Adobe) are now more active than ever in open source projects. We've got, you know, folks from Adobe Experience Manager that are writing code and contributing to Magento, which is, it's absolutely terrific. And they're now talking about how do we get the ability to kind of create that contribution mechanism and at least create a platform concept where, you know, everybody plays. It's an equal playing field. You can serve us small, you can serve us large. And it just brings everybody together to solve these common, complex problems that are joint merchant's face. >> I don't know how many times you've been on stage in the last few days but, a couple. But one of the things you really, you know, (pounding) you didn't pound on the table but you basically pounded on the table, is that we are still, totally, 100% behind SMB. >> Jason: Absolutely. >> It's our core. We're not giving that up. >> We built this market together, right. This was what made Magento what it is. It's where we play the best. We know it better than anybody else in the industry, and we're not retreating. We're doubling down. We've got ground to take in the mid-market, and I can't wait to do it. >> Right, but what's wild is you're enabling the mid-market, to compete with the tools of the big guys. So, announcements are on the integration with Amazon, announcements are on integration with Google. So it's kind of an interesting place for small retailers, small merchants. They've got to compete in this world, so you're really giving 'em an aid, an opportunity to both play in what might be a big competitor as well as leverage that ecosystem and assets as well as doing it within their own brick and mortar or their own site . >> And that's a terrific point. I think one of the reasons we do that is we've seen consumer expectations rising through the roof, right. I mean, everything from, you know, fast shipping is now one-day. And it wasn't very long ago that fast shipping, if you could get it within a week, that was pretty darn quick. >> Jeff: Right. >> But now fast shipping is one day, and that's across the board. Consumers are expecting frictionless payment. They're expecting, you know, buy online, pick up in-store, omni-channel capabilities. Really all of these capabilities. And a consumer, a shopper, really doesn't care whether you're big or small. What they care about is the experience that the consume when they interact with your brand. And so, bringing the tools of the enterprise to the mid-market allows them to compete on a more level playing field, and that's really where you generate all those great innovation. And that's where you see, you know, these smaller merchants that are really able to, you know, drive into something that, you know, may not have been a core target for some of the larger enterprises, but they find an niche and are able to deliver, but they have the same personalization needs. They have the same logistics needs. All of that has not changed just because they're a smaller organization. And so it's really on us to be able to provide them the tooling and the access to the capabilities that let them compete with the larger merchants. >> No, 'cause you're right. As consumers, which we are every day, we don't care if they're a big or small company, or what technologies that, well, no we do care, to a degree, that we can start something from a mobile phone, have a great seamless experience >> Jason: Yep. >> that's not gonna cause me to churn, because I'm not going to be able to find what I want. I want it to be personalized. I want them to know enough about me in a non-creepy way, as you say. >> That's right. If it's good, it's magic. (Lisa laughing) If it's bad, it's creepy! >> Right, regardless of-- >> That's fair. >> That's for recommendation engines. >> Yeah, no, that's fair. >> And expect that they have what I want. But also what you're doing now is giving these SMBs, these smaller organizations, the ability to harness this sort of symbiotic data power between Adobe and Magento for advertising, analytics, marketing, commerce, to be able to have that wealth of knowledge to make that experience exactly what that consumer expects. >> Exactly right. I mean it's about bringing behavioral data and the transactional data together to really get a 360 degree view of individual customers. And guess what? There's too much raw data there for Excel to ever be able to tell you anything. You've got to rely on things like artificial intelligence and machine learning so that things like Adobe Sensei to really derive insight out of that mass set of data. But that's the way you create those personalized experiences. You have to employ those techniques to get there. >> Right, I just wanted to unpack the Sensei down-spin a little bit, 'cause I think that's really interesting. You know, AI's been a great buzzword. We see it in a lot of places. You know, our Google email now automatically figures out what we want to reply to our email. But it's the integration of AI in applications is where we're really starting to see it come to market early, and this is a great example of, you know, using the Adobe AI inside of Sensei, on specific parts of the application to deliver a better application, a better consumer experience. >> And we've got a great roadmap for rolling out Artificial Intelligence capabilities to Magento commerce. It's one of the largest value adds that we'll do over the next 12 months, is really bringing those capabilities around recommendations, around experience personalization and experience targeting. Around A/B testing. And then you think a little bit into the future, and suddenly you're looking at an AI that can give you pricing recommendations and campaign recommendations, and, you know, that is a, that's a world we cannot wait to really explore fully in the commerce world, because I think that those are the tools, you know Amazon applies a lot of dynamic pricing techniques right now. It's a really expensive process. I don't know a lot of small merchants that have access to the tools to do that. We're bringing those tools to small merchants, and that's gonna change the game fundamentally, I believe. >> And a way that they can do it, almost themselves, rather than having to have a team of resources, which a small business doesn't have. >> And that is the name of the game for small business. You can't require them to have a data science team. You can't require them to have an IT staff or a Web development team. You gotta give them everything they need so that they can focus on retail, what they know best, merchandising to their customers and, you know, managing their inventory, driving up the correct margins and then making sure that they're able to grow the lifetime value of their customers, right? That's the Holy Grail for retail is when you can actually optimize against lifetime value. Because it's the number one thing that all merchants are chasing. >> Yeah, 'cause you had the guy on the keynote yesterday. I'm not in the demographic. I'm trying to remember the name of the-- >> Oh, Troy, Troy Brown from Zumiez! >> From Zumiez, yeah. >> Yeah. >> I thought it was just really interesting, you know, kind of re-thinking retail, right? Retail is not dead, but it's different, and you have to be different. And really to see how they have kind of taken their concept I thought it was pretty interesting, especially around the fact that he has no more fulfillment centers, he said. But basically, they're fulfilling from the store. They want to engage you in the store. It's a convenient thing. Especially now we see Amazon packages are all gettin' stolen off of doorsteps. But, you know, enabling them to be creative around their customer engagement, not necessarily worry about how to run a bunch of A/B tests. They let you do that complicated stuff. >> Let us take on all of the complexity, and then they can actually benefit from the insights derived from that. And what Zumiez have done, it's a phenomenal story, right. I mean, you're going away from this centralized warehouse concept, to really turning all of their stores into distribution centers, right? 704 or so, brick and mortar-strong where, you know, they now have merchandise close to their consumers. They have, you know, the ability to do showcasing, buy online, pick-up in store, all of the omni-channel techniques that are grabbing so much traction right now. And Zumiez has really capitalized. >> Jeff: Right. >> They've done a terrific job, and it's great seeing it come from these really innovative retailers, right? I mean, that show last night with Zumiez was absolutely, you know, fantastic. Their culture is super unique, highly energetic, but they're driving technology forward in a way that you might not expect from a skateboard apparel shop. >> Right, well, they're making Champion cool again. It came out of the Champion, and it was in the demo. I'm like, I didn't know Champion was a cool brand. >> Apparently, it is cool now. >> Jeff: It's cool now. >> You and I are both out of that demographic, (Jeff laughing) but it is a very good story. >> One of the things that we're hearing and seeing is that we talked about personalization and that this expectation, that as consumers, we bring to everything we buy, whatever it happens to be, but also, this sort of, looking at Amazon as an example, of going to brick and mortar from purely online, the acquisition of Whole Foods, people still wanting to have that human interaction. We talk about it all the time when we talk about AI, is that pretty much the common thread is yes, AI, and maybe yes, online to a degree, and then there's still that need and that demand for that personal face-to-face or maybe voice-to-voice interaction. >> Yeah, well, you know, its really for me, it's about taking that brand, you know, experience and making sure that it's resonating across all of your digital properties as well as all of the physical properties, right. It is about really leveraging. My brand experience is consistent across every place that I come encounter my customers, and I'm ready to transact anytime my customers are ready to transact. And when, you know, talking about Amazon. we've announced some really cool stuff this Ad Imagine on Amazon, a partnership. where Amazon sellers can now have a branded storefront on Magento. This is allowing folks that have done a terrific job selling in the market place, where you don't have a lot of opportunity for experience differentiation on the amazon.com site. >> Lisa: Right. >> And it's a terrific marketplace. More than 50% of product searches are starting on Amazon now. So it's a reality that retailers need to find a way to come to grips with. >> Jeff: Right. >> And what I'm really excited about is that those merchants that are doing really well on Amazon now have a new channel where they can create these branded experiences and really start differentiating themselves from their competitors. It's going to be a terrific story. It's Branded Storefronts for Amazon Sellers is the name of the offering. And its going to change the game for folks that have been exclusively Amazon, maybe thinking its too hard to go get an online presence that actually represents my brand. Now its a piece of cake. They've got a clean path to get there, and the capabilities go both ways, right? We also announced Amazon sales channel for Magento commerce that allows you as a branded merchant, to go and participate on the Amazon Marketplace and have full control over your inventory, your orders and all of your catalog. >> It's so funny, you know, we talk about experience but so much of retail execution is actually inventory execution, right? >> [Jason} That's Right. >> It's inventory management. That's where all your money sits. You can get it real upside down really quickly if you're not managing your inventory. And if you don't have the right amount of inventory, especially as you say with same-day delivery now being an expected behavior. And so to add the sophisticated tools on the back and to manage that inventory across that broad, kind of distribution plane, if you will, with all these different points of engagement is so critical to these guys to have any type of chance of success. >> Yeah, it is. It's absolutely critical, and we've also got a Magento order management product that specializes in sort of global inventory control. We've made terrific investments there to bring new capabilities to make sure that those omni-channel aspirations are not something that a merchant has to go invest a whole lot of money and change in their systems. I think it is interesting to think about when you talk about how B2C is really bleeding into B2B, right. As supply chain management, you know, 70% of our B2C merchants, self-described, actually engaged in B2B workflows, and almost all of our B2B-only merchants are really looking at how do I go B2B to C? >> Jess: Right. >> So there's this really great platform play happening, and the fact that Magento commerce and Adobe commerce Cloud can serve us B2B and B2C and all the hybrids in-between really puts us in a differentiated position and helps merchants not have to go invest in multiple platform, multiple maintainability and then find some way to reconcile the inventory between the two. >> Right, and we had a quote earlier today. I can't remember who said it, but I thought it was great where, you know, no longer is the actual transaction the destination. Right, but now you're bringing the transaction to, you know, kind of the journey. It's a very different way to think about a traditional funnel. It isn't the traditional funnel that you work your way down to the end. Now you're inserting commerce opportunities, >> Jason: Yep. >> engagement opportunities all along kind of this content flow. >> We kind of teased ourselves, right, We kinda lied to ourselves and said that, you know, this is a linear journey. And we've all bought into it, right. You know all the steps, right. It's a discovery, awareness, I mean all the way to post-purchase. Its not linear. People move in and out of each of those sections, and so being able to transact where the customer is ready to transact is critically important >> Jeff: Right. >> and then understanding that the post-sale service is the key to lifetime value. That's the other major learning that we're trying to take away from this. And it's why it's important to be at every point your customer is. >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause especially with these things, because you don't sit down to work on your phone like we sat down to work at these things. >> Jason: That's right. >> And so your attention, >> Jason: works coming to you. >> it's coming to you, and its coming in little bits. Oh, and by the way, there's a whole bunch of notifications coming on that can pull you away. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So they're very different challenges in terms of actual engagement when this is the primary vehicle. >> And increasingly, it is the primary vehicle, right? >> Jess: Absolutely. >> More than 50% of traffic to retail, e-commerce site is generated from a mobile phone, and there are emerging markets where that is the only internet-connected device, and so it's the standard. You absolutely have to take mobile very seriously. There's a great set of technologies coming online to help us get there. It's called Progressive Web Application. It's going to change the game on how mobile is treated as a device, and in fact, it gets rid of the need for discrete native applications. So instead of having an IOS app, an Android app, a desktop storefront, a mobile storefront and maybe a tablet storefront, plus your online brick and mortar, now you can actually say, my digital properties are serviced by one set of technology. And that way, when I make a change to one, it shows up in everything. I don't have all these difference code bases to maintain. It's a total cost of ownership, and really, a time-to-market play >> Lisa: I was gonna say, >> across the board. >> faster time-to market for sure. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> With far less resources. >> Well, and bringing it so that you really have to invest in allowing your merchandisers to merchandise on your digital properties, right? If there is an engineer sitting between your merchandiser and the customer, that time lag and even just trying to get it done, there's so much frustration there. So creating these self-service tools that really allow non-technical merchandisers to go in, make adjustments to how they're selling products across all those channels very, very easily and in one place, that's gonna return a ton of value to our merchants. So its another thing that we're super excited about. >> No, you deliver that consistent experience that the consumer is expecting, and then, we were talking to PayPal earlier, start to help companies close that revenue gap of getting them from mobile to, you know, wanting to transact and making that whole process seamless. >> There's a nine billion dollar opportunity in closing the mobile gap. When you think about abandoned cards and folks that begin the checkout process for whatever reason, likely they get frustrated and don't want to type in their credit card number or don't want to type in their address, and then they move to another device or another store that's doing checkout in a more frictionless way, the nine billion dollar opportunity if you close that. >> Wow, that's huge! >> So its incredibly important. >> It is incredibly important. Well Jason, we wish we had more time, but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Jeff and Me. Such an exciting time. Sounds like developers are feeling embraced. The community is happy. Customers are reacting well. So we can't wait to hear whats next, next year. >> This is the best place to be in the world in commerce. Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure, and I've enjoyed it a lot. >> Oh, our pleasure as well, Jason. >> Alright, thank you, guys. Thanks, Jason. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin at Imagine 2019 at the Wynn, Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're coming to you live from Magento Imagine 2019. Welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Gary Specter, the VP of Commerce, Sales and Customer Success at Adobe. Gary, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. >> So there's about 3,500 people here, you guys have, from 60-plus countries. >> Gary: That's right. >> I think 100 sessions, 150 speakers. People coming down from ceilings, up from the floor. >> Gary: And we're streaming live. >> First ever live stream, yes. >> On the general set, first ever. That's right. Someone tweeted out that there are 35,000 people watching. >> Marketing probably loved that and then had a heart attack at the same time. >> Yeah, I'm sure they did. Not exactly accurate but I'll take what I can get. >> Tell us about the event, the spirit of the event. This is kind of, yesterday evening things kicked off. What of some of the things you've hearing from customers, partners, developers? >> So, I think the thing that's really unique about Imagine is that it does involve partners, the community, developers, along with Magento and our customers and our prospects. And it makes it really different because the developer community and our partners are so passionate about Magento. And I think everybody feels really good about the marriage of Adobe and Magento. You had technologies that were very well aligned, not overlapping. It enables us to extend the capabilities of what we can do from both the Adobe side or the Magento side. I like to say that the color palette got a lot bigger, and I think there's a lot of excitement around that and what that means to all of these people, developers, partners, the ecosystem, customers, prospects. So the energy is really high. I think obviously people are, what's next? And what does this mean for Magento? And I think it means investment, I think it means a higher rate of agility and an expansion of what we do. Acceleration of our roadmap. So I think people are very, very positive. And this is my fourth Imagine, and it's really, I've never felt the energy higher than at this Imagine. So it's exciting for me. >> Gary, one of the interesting ways that you talked about community and everybody wants developer communities, right? And you guys also have open source as a passion. But you phrased it in a way I've never heard before, is that you like going to sleep at night knowing that there's a whole bunch of other CEOs betting their business-- >> That's right. >> On this platform. >> Yeah. >> And it's not just you guys, so it's a really different way to think about open source. We often think of the developers and there's smart people outside your four walls contributing code. But it's not often couched in terms of the business terms. >> No. >> If there's are other people betting their business, thinking about how are they gonna help grow your business by building their business on top of Magento. >> That's what drives the passion of the community. These people realize that there's a symbiotic relationship here. If Magento successful, the ability for them to be successful is very broad. And if Magento's not successful, then you have to ask yourselves did I make the right bet? So a lot of our tech partners have build these great solutions on top of Magento, and it's a partnership. And you don't have that anywhere else, and again, I sleep better at night, to your point. I don't know where you got that quote, but it's actually mine, it's phenomenal. >> No, no, I think I got it from your Argentina 2017 talk perhaps. >> Actually, it's true. I know that all of these tech partners, these CEOs, they have my back. I'd like them to know I have theirs. And I don't think Adobe has any, there's no reason or rhyme why that would ever change. I think Adobe will enhance it. And I think that's why there so much excitement here. >> Well, and it's really a validation and what we talked about before, the prior segment, was now to bring the marketing tools, and the AI and all the power that's in that big building in San Jose, free the commerce transaction, really, to your point, adds so much more horse power to the total solution. >> Like I said, color palette just got a lot bigger. There's so many more things that we can do and so many more colors we can use to create these great experience for our brands and our customers, that we could've done before but it was a lot of work, but now we've got all of the makings of a platform that will enable that and we're already pretty far along in taking the Adobe experience cloud and making that work. And I'm just really excited about the future and what this offers for our customers and our brands. >> We've heard a number of guests that talk about just what you were referring to a minute ago, and that was really this symbiosis of Adobe, the power that Adobe brings, the data that Adobe brings, along with Magento, So a new Adobe commerce buy was just launched a couple of months ago, at Adobe Summit powered by Magento Commerce, but you look at it as analytics, advertising, marketing, commerce, fundamentals for managing what is a changing and highly demand customer experience, 'cause we want more and more things accessible from right here. So some of the feedback from customers, partners, developers since that announcement and now going "Ahh, okay now I can actually touch and see and play with this two symbiosis machines coming together." >> Yeah, I think it's not a hard thing to get. I think when the acquisition first happened, there's a little let's wait and see and make sure they get it right. And I think what I feel today, or what people have given to me today is the feedback that they're believers. They know that we're gonna execute on this strategy, and this strategy is gonna allow us to extend our lead on our competitors, which in return, allows these brands and these commerce players to extend their lead on their competitors. >> Let's talk about the small/medium business folks for a minute. When the announcement was made last year, the intention, right after Imagine 2018 I believe, for Adobe to acquire Magento, and then right after they acquired Marketo, there was some concern for is Adobe gonna kind of shift what Magento has been doing, so successfully for so long, away from focusing on those smaller merchants to the enterprise folks. Yesterday and today, we heard some great, exciting announcements with what you guys are doing with Amazon Sales Channel, with Google Shopping, and it sounded like the small and medium business size folks were going "Yes, this is what we need." Talk to us a little bit about that. >> I mean, you mentioned two, along with PWA and some of the other things that we're doing. While these can be leveraged in the enterprise, they were built for the mid-market in the SMB space. And there is no doubt that Adobe and Magento both understand how important SMB and the mid-market is. And in fact, we've seen acceleration in the SMB space since the acquisition, from the Magento side of the house. And Adobe is fully committed and knows that there's market share there to be had. And the application or the business problems that we solve at the enterprise, are still applicable for the mid-market and the SMB space. They're handled in a little bit different of a manner, but they have same aspirations. And the solution's gonna be able, when you look across everything that you're gonna be able to do, it plays for both markets. And Adobe has an incredible opportunity to really drive market share in this mid-market. They don't have a big footprint there today. Even if you capture just a small portion of it, and its our plans to capture a large portion of it, but even a small portion of it is gonna make a big impact on Adobe. So I think that we will see acceleration in the mid-market and in the SMB space with what we're doing, what we're developing together, and the different types of products that we can offer to those markets that Adobe has in its broader portfolio. >> And of course on the enterprise side, what we don't see here that we saw at Adobe Summit a couple weeks back are some of the really big integrators who have huge practices built around and on top of the Adobe tool set that now you get to leverage. I'm sure you're pretty excited about as running field. There's, again, a whole nother group of people, not necessarily CEOs, but managing partners, who have bet their jobs, bet their livelihood, bet their practices on this, and now you getta take advantage of those resources as well. >> Absolutely, and I think that a lot of the large integrators and partners, I think everybody's starting to understand that commerce is very different now than it was five or 10 years ago, right? I call it bite small, chew fast. And HP is a great example, where they started in some of the smaller APAC countries and then went to Brazil, and they're looking at the US last, but they're taking it a step at a time. One country, one country, one country. And a lot of our big retailers or brands that wanna expand globally are doing the same things, or companies that have portfolios of brands, one at a time. Bite small, chew fast. Launch, be successful, launch, be successful. And I think the SIs, including the large partners, understand that and they're changing the way that they look at businesses holistically. So I think right time, right place. >> Yeah, we had Gillian Campbell from HP on right after her keynote this morning, and it was an interesting kinda POC program. And I said what was some of the market dynamics that identified APAC as the right market to start in. And part of that, I think, was that from a historical legacy perspective of using Magento on the HP Inc. side. But some of the things I found interesting to them was that leveraging the data to understand the cultural e-commerce differences snd how different cultures interact with different social media platforms or purchasing platforms differently, and how important it is to really understand those commerce patterns and start to drive conversions from there there and then go success, roll it out, rinse and repeat. >> And she nailed it right? I mean, buy online, pick up in store versus having it delivered to your home, if you live in the middle of India, what's the reality of you getting that delivered in an hour? And if you look at country like Russia, which is very spread out, right, so there's not a high density outside of a lot of their major cities and you have a lot of the same issues. If you're gonna have it ship to your home, how long is it gonna take? It might be easier just to go pick it up in the store. And I think it's different in every region. And it's good to be able to have access to that data to get a good read on what are the things our customers want specifically to drive the experience they need within that region. >> Right, key for a company whether it's something the size of an HP Inc. or not, to be able to scale globally, but also have that sort of local market adaptation where you're able to react, understand the preferences in your markets, and deliver exactly what those consumers want. So having a tool like Magento as the power to enable that global scale regional adaptation, it's a driver. >> And I think you start to add complexity when you look at do they use their phone, do they use their computer? Do they use social networks and buy buttons? I have an interesting dynamic in my own house where I've got a 13-year-old, and the way that she would shop online is different than the way that my wife would shop online, which is very different from how I would shop online. I browse and go to the store. My wife uses her computer. My daughter shops on Pinterest, or Instagram, or Facebook. Very different journeys for the three of us, and we could be buying the same thing, and we're all gonna do it differently. So it crosses generations as well. >> So, Gary, it feels like kinda the dust has settled post-Adobe acquisition where everybody feels kinda comfortable, and it's been a year and everything didn't go bananas. So as you look forward now, after things have kinda settled, what are some of your priorities over the next year, If we sit down a year from now, what are you working on? >> I can tell you that for me, the biggest priority for me is to make sure that the mid-market and the SMB flywheel is effective, the way that we go to market, the way that we target that segment. And it's not that I'm not interested in the enterprise. I'm extremely interested in the enterprise. But we have a lot of people that are working on the enterprise. And Adobe doesn't have deep domain expertise around the mid-market. But with Marketo and Magento, you now do. So for me personally, I wanna make sure that that flywheel is well-run, it's well-oiled, it's set up for success, that operationally, the things that we do to drive market share in that segment run as effectively as the rest of Adobe on the enterprise side. It's a new sales motion for Adobe. But the good news is I think Adobe understands that. We understand that as a company, and I think over the next year, for me, that's where my focus is gonna be. >> So if we keep looking out to the next year, this is your fourth Magento Imagine. >> It is. >> Is there gonna be a Magento Imagine 2020? >> So I will tell you that there will be an Imagine 2020, and I will share details around that Wednesday. I've been asked to help close Imagine out, and when I do, I will be thrilled to announce our plans for Imagine 2020. >> So can folks watch that on the livestream tomorrow, Wednesday, that 15th? >> They can. >> Are you gonna be coming up from the floor, the ceiling? >> I think I'm probably just gonna dance on out. I have been invigorated, I love being here. Imagine is the one opportunity every year where I come out of this thing just feeling really good about the opportunities that we had ahead of us. And by Wednesday, although tired, I'm usually really happy to be going back and getting in the field with my teams and just driving opportunity. And I think we had an amazing one. >> Well, we'll be all watching. Is it imagine.magento.com to watch the livestream ? Or magento.imagine.com. go to to the Magento.com site, Wednesday tomorrow in the afternoon, you're gonna be able to hear more about what's to come next year. Gary, thank you so much for giving us time today. >> Thanks for having me, enjoy it. >> Our pleasure. >> It's great to meet you all. >> Excellent >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. Tou're watching theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Live from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Jeff correctly or coming to you from Magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen with about thirty, five hundred or so folks here. Big community, big open source spirit. We're very pleased to welcome from the keynote stage. Jenny Chang, The pee at PayPal. Jennie. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, Lee. >> So really enjoyed your keynote this morning. We'Ll get into a lot of the specifics, but just looking at Magenta Oh, Adobe, This evolution of e commerce that's really driven by consumers. We want to have everything right on her phone as easily as possible. We went out lightning fast. Talk to us. About From what? You seen this evolution of e commerce and where we are today. >> Yeah, It's been a fascinating journey. Toe watch us move from point no sale, mood from brick and mortar Teo online and engaged. And I think as part of that, you know, you think about the amount of time you spend on your mobile phone. It's not surprising that most sites. Fifty percent of the visitors on that site are on their mobile devices, and they're staying longer. Maybe you're killing time, right? Waiting for your husband to finish something or your child to come out of class. And so we naturally tend to get on our mobile phones, and we look for things to do so that engagement on the mobile phone it becomes absolutely critical and what's been fascinating As part of the conference, we've been sharing some early results about mobile optimization. And what we're finding is, even though engagement is going up from a mobile phone, revenue is not there. >> The gap. >> Yeah, there's a big, big gaffe, and you look at that. And you think, Well, I need to figure out how to actually convert some of these people coming to my website. So we've been partnering with a lot of the Sai community here, really interest in trying to understand best practices, and it's been a fun process for almost the last year. Things that you would think would help conversion don't necessarily help. And then the very, interestingly enough, other things that you may have said well, that seems unnecessary or busy on my mobile phone are actually improving conversion. So we've been really just sharing our early results in really encouraging everyone to participate. It's free, and we want to do is really come up with best practices and really help everyone essentially convert more and get more revenue. >> There's two things that strike me. It is you say that one is just the behaviour of a mobile phone in interaction is so different. You said. It's often when you're waiting, waiting in the grocery store line, you're waiting to pick up your kid your weight. So it is a much more kind of frequent fast in and out which which we keep hearing right. You need to connect with people over time in both the ways. But the other thing, when you say the conversion is actually not as high as you would expect. But at the same time we're hearing now that the content is so much so important and having things that aren't directly commerce to drive your engagement with that client in the way of content and forums and other things. I wonder if maybe that's why the conversion is there. You're getting him there, which is great they're hanging out longer, which I'm sure is a terrific metric. So maybe they're not converting because they're engaging with that other content arm or engaging with the brand. A >> combination of a couple things and one of them tear point is, you know, for better, Worse. You're easily interrupted when you're on your mobile phone to >> just trip when >> we have you, how can we quickly get to you? Pass that point of check out right? And I think part of that is, as you know, it's if you're like me, I will. Fat finger. You know, I have a difficult time typing on my mobile device. So wanted things we talk a lot about is removing that friction. So how do you make it really easy? See right. So if you're able to store your credentials, if you're able to make it simple to check out right, that's ultimately the goal for a lot of our merchants here, which is when we've got you. We've got to capitalize on your attention right at that moment in time and make it super easy for you to convert one of things that's been interesting about the optimized kind of mobile optimization results we've seen is that what we're finding is that a lot of people, what they're looking for at that point of engagement is coupon codes and you get distracted. You'LL think Well, I'm going to buy that. But maybe I need to go look for a coupon. >> Go back to my email me >> on And so you know So there are a lot of interesting ideas that were having as a community to share. How can we do that? How can we make sure? Maybe you get your coupon code, but you don't click off and disappear and maybe forget to come back on. I notorious for doing that. I'm also notorious for putting something in my shopping cart getting distracted and walking away. And so I think a lot of it is looking at these various ways to make sure you are back and engaged. And I think this is a big part of where the journey will go with the Palmers going forward. I think we'LL be looking at now that we've got your eyeballs. Now that we've got your time, how do we convince you this is going from a browse mode? Teo actual shop mode, >> right, creating more shop, a ble moments as magenta is marketing, material says. But also to your point about simplicity, probably for even any any generation is its basic marketing. Don't deliver a great piece of content and have a hyperlink in the first sentence that's going to take your audience somewhere else. Keep me in the experience. Use enough money. What do you say? Enough of the data to where it's going from. Creepy Teo >> Magic, Right, Right, right, right. If it works, it should be magic, right? But I already bought the tent. Now I need it. I need a sleeping bag. Don't keeps his enemy tent ads, right? >> Right. But that simplicity is sort of in AP in experience. Consistency is really key. Otherwise, your point and your point. We're doing this often while we're doing something else. There's a lot of multitasking going on. Make it easier, but also use the data with these systems that you're integrated with to know exactly. I bought it sent. I don't need one, but I might need that these other things >> right, right. And I think that's really where things are moving with artificial intelligence and machine learning We're trying to understand us a shopper and be able to predict right What else? You know, Bond from the tents. Now, maybe it's time to get a low. You know, uh, camper, maybe that's your next step up, right? Maybe you move into an RV. Who knows? Right. So I think there are evolution's to that buying experience >> with other evolution. Which people is that the very beginning was the alternative payment methods, right? Not not just your basic credit card or cash. And I don't know. It's a lot of people know that you guys have venmo, which if you have kids, you know we don't have young kids. You don't know what Venmo is. I wonder if you've got a take on, you know, as these alternative methods by come up and then we're also surrounded with alternative financing types of platforms where they're not using traditional FICO scores. They're not using kind of a traditional apply get approved process. It's really dynamic on the financing side as well. >> Yeah, onto your point. So PayPal. One of our best kept secrets I like to say is that we have both Braintree and Venmo is part of our overall services and then even broader than that. What we've done is packaged up the ability to really think about alternative pay methods based on what region you're on as well, because depending where you are outside the U. S. You might actually use a completely different payment method. And I think for us in the U. S. Were not as familiar with some of these other payment options. And what it does is it really allows for a lot more cross border trade as well for our merchants as they would look and offer kind of what is most relevant again. Get to you to go from brows mode to actually check out mode and to get to that actual conversion piece. So that's one of them. And then I would say, just generally on the credit comment, we actually credit at PayPal as well. And what we're always looking at is what our other ways we can help people finance and really kind of worked through the evolution of payments. I think some of the statistics that you've probably heard related to savings in the US, especially it's a bit staggering that we have, on average, uh, majority people have less than four hundred dollars in savings there, one paycheck away. And the reality is, it's tough. That's a really, really tough. And so I think, to be able tio, have a source of credit where you could bridge that gap and, to your point, not have to go through the entire credit processes. Sara Lee I think having those options are always good. >> Talk to us about what you guys are doing with Walmart. He showed that you came here this morning that it was very interesting from a collaboration. A partnership standpoint. >> I'm very passionate about this because pay panelists overall has a mission of democratizing financial services, and I think we're very fortunate being in high tech and being in the situation. We are where we're able, Tio not be intimidated necessarily by all this new technology on all the different options out there. So the partnership with Walmart was at the end of last year, and it really was looking at How do we get people access to their papal dollars easier, Faster and we continuously see this divide between the digital on the physical realms of accessing money. And so we opened up an option partnering with WalMart for us, which is it's really easy to rip a pal out. You bring up a unique bar code, you can go into a Wal Mart store and essentially like a debit card. It debits it out of your PayPal account and the Wal Mart cashier hand. You're the catch, which is super convenient again and an easy way to get to your money if you need something immediately. So I'm really excited. Proud of that, >> he said. You launch that last year. Some of the data, the market data that demonstrated that this was a good direction, her paper out to go in to be able to open up. This is a CZ, the ability to give people more access to their dollars, whether they're online or in physical locations. >> Yeah, I think it's someone of those overall statistics. We look at a lot because we're really looking at continuously bridging our open two sided network. We've got this great merchant face twenty one million merchants and then we're at almost round track to be almost three hundred million consumers, and we can we look at the consumer side and you think about Venmo you think about papal? We really started as a peer to peer right now, right? Oh, I owe you twenty bucks for dinner last night. Let me pay, pal. You that money, let me venmo you that money. And at some point, the question becomes will. Then how do I easily access my money? How do I make sure that I have access to it again? Not just digitally, but physically. And I think when we're looking at those realms, we're looking at more options to give people that ability, that if they need to get to that cash quickly, that can get to it quickly. They don't need to worry about getting to a bank. Um, you know, I think the reality is it's easier to get to a lot of Wal Mart stores in the U. S. Then it is necessarily to every bank out there. And so I think we're constantly looking at where can partnerships really add value to our overall customer base? And as I mentioned this morning's keynote, I love when partners really can work together and it becomes truly, you know, a little bit of a trite saying. But no one plus one is greater than two scenario, and I think when you can do that, it adds so much value to both sides of the equation. That's was really exciting for me. That's why I love partners, >> but also giving cut consumer's choice. Where you think this morning in your keynote, you showed this cute picture daughter approved your girl's in that ten years ago and then today, and, you know, ten years ago you couldn't just go in on happened order groceries. Now you were saying, when you know your mom would have to get multiple stores to get what you want, and now we can get it so easily. But there's also this sort of interesting dynamic where people still want to have that physical interaction, depending on the type of product or service. So being able to give customers that choice of being able to transact it through the app online or being able to access their money, for example, your Walmart. I mean, oftentimes, if I'm running out running errands and I don't have my wallet, and I know all right, I know the stories I can use bright certain payment methods from my phone, and that's great because I had that choice. And that's something that seems like PayPal is working to facilitators meeting consumer demand. Where it is. >> Yeah, I think that's the reality of what? Where we live right now, which is our customers want us there at that point of engagement. So don't make me necessarily. Come, Teo, you I would like you to come to me and you know, for better. Worse. It is a little bit of the overall experience that they're looking for, which is to say, I've got my favorite places to either shop or engage on my mobile device. So make it easy for me. And I think that's ultimately what we're kind of looking for. I know is a working parent. I'm always looking for convenience than I've just said. I'm gonna write a book on convenient parenting like that gets work for me. >> That was part of that. We'd be a bestseller. I think parents of humans or canine think we could all use any inspect a >> furry child as well. So yes, >> I'm curious what we're going to see in the next year, too. With that conversion of actually enabling an organization to not just have a great mobile experience, whether it's with like progressive Web maps that they were talking about this morning. But it's one thing to have a great mobile experience. It's a whole other thing to convert that to revenue. So curious to see with partnerships of papal, for example, with Beno how merchants of any sides are actually able to start increasing conversion from visitor to revenue. >> And I mentioned it as part of what we're doing with what we're calling smart payment buttons. And I think that's smart. Payment button concept is really again focused on giving you options to check out with whatever is easier for you but also looking to say, Let's make it easy. So how do you do that without having to type everything again? Because if you're an avid online shopper like I'm not, it's It becomes tiresome to feel like you have to sign up at every website, or you have to enter all your shipping information again your payment information. And so I think it's really looking at How do we give you that digital wallet access so that you have the ability to make it easy? Yes, and I think that's ultimately What we're kind of all looking for is how do you make it convenient? Easy for me to do what I want to do and do what I have to do. >> Spend more of my money. Thank you so much for joining me on the Cuban. Talking about what you guys are doing. A papal with your partners with Gento, etcetera. It's very interesting. And we look forward to seeing great things to come and not focus by long Communion. Parenting? Yes. Watch out like an advance. Copy you? Yeah. Thank you. Pleasure. Okay. For Jeff Rick, I'm least Martin live. The Cube is alive. Magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick in Las Vegas at The Wynn, for Magento Imagine 2019. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE T.J. Gamble. Not only the CEO of Jamersan, but a Magento Master. >> That's the big one right there. >> Right? >> CEO's important, but don't forget that one. >> Well, one of the things I wish our audience could see, is that awesome orange cape that you and the other Masters were wearing this morning. >> If I had had known, I'd have brought the cape, but the cape's going to get framed and put up somewhere, so we tucked that away in the bag. (laughs) >> So you have been a Magento advocate, part of this massive community of over 300 000 that they have accumulated in the years. For a long time now, this is the first Imagine post-Adobe acquisition. What is your take on this year's event? How is this community, in the year since the acquisition was announced? >> You know, the community is a little apprehensive, a little concerned. Change is always a concern for people. You know things are going so well, Magento's growing. Everything is positive forward, and then you have Adobe come in and acquire it. Some people, they're on edge a little bit, but I think you come to conferences like this, and you see the announcement of them rolling Sensei into it, and channels, you know the Amazon channels they rolling in, and you start to see the acceleration of features and innovation that Adobe brings when they bring those level of resources. And so, I think people are starting to really, kinda, get over that nervousness and start to feel the excitement of where the platform is going, and it's just about to explode, and get even bigger. >> It's a whole bunch of resources, right? The new investment, and as you've seen it kinda change hands a couple times: isn't it a pitted company, then going to eBay, then out of eBay, private equity, and now to Adobe, and yet the community has been very , very grounded and stuck with the platform all the way around. Opensource is a huge part of this story, small, medium-sized business is a huge part of this story. There's some really big announcements today, kind of integrating into the Amazon ecommerce system, integrating into the Google shopping systems, and I still can't believe that Adobe didn't have an ecommerce platform, before they brought a Magento. It fits perfectly into this kind of funnel process. >> It could not fit any better if they had built it up from the ground themselves. You know, if you've didn't see at least the promise of it right away, then maybe you weren't paying attention. It fits into what Adobe's doing just incredibly, because Adobe's all about experience, and so Magento being the most flexible e-commerce platform in the world, it does not have the limits that some of the other platforms have. So if you can envision it, if your customers desire it, you can deliver it on the Magento platform, which is what made it just-- I mean, it's like you say, it's just the perfect fit into the Adobe ecosystem. And I don't know why they didn't have an ecommerce platform. I don't know if they've tried and failed. I didn't keep up with the history of Adobe like I have Magento, but I'm glad we're here. I'm glad it worked out that way, because it's gonna be good for everybody. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from those small and medium businesses, as Jeff was mentioning this morning, the announcement of the Amazon sales channel integration with the free extensions in the marketplace, Google shopping, aimed at squashing the fears of some of those small and medium-sized businesses may have had in the last year of being acquired by a company, Adobe, that has a very strong and oquias presence? >> Yeah, it's not so much those features are-- it's you're starting to see the investments, so that's good, but those features are more about ecommerce is getting more complicated. You're going to have to start selling in multiple channels, you're going to have to start selling on all of the social platforms. Facebook's gonna eventually roll something out. They're already doing it with WhatsApp. Instagram just announced the check-out within their site. So there's a lot of things you've got to manage, and data is difficult, so anytime a platform can out-of-the-box handle a lot of those integrations, you can now manage Amazon, you can now manage your Google products, widen your ecommerce platform, and it becomes the hub for small merchants to run their business, because most small merchants don't have a complex ERP as their hub for their data, so they can-- >> A lot of resources, right? >> Exactly, so if the ecom platform can help you manage that data, so you can focus on properly merchandising, that's great for everybody, because small merchants, the have and the have nots: the gap is widening, and so small merchants are going to have to have tools that they can leverage to keep up, because they're never going to be able to throw the money at it like somebody else can. I mean Amazon is spending eight hundred million dollars next quarter Three months, they're spending eight million hundred dollars to go from two day prime to one day prime. How is anybody supposed to keep up with that? You can't, so you compete on your own turf, but you still need tools so that you can leverage all of the available things out there, all of the available channels and stuff, that you can go out and bring ecommerce to your customers, instead of forwarding customers to your ecommerce. >> It's a great example, bringing it to the customers. I'm curious to get, kind of your take, on the small, medium ecommerce players out there, that's kind of experienced message, right? It's a big piece of the Adobe story. We were at Adobe's summit a couple weeks back, and clearly they've got a ton of resources. When they talk about this ongoing engagement with the client, be with them wherever they are, let them shop wherever they are. Like you say, that's easy if you've got a lot of resources, but I'm curious: are smaller merchants seeing that? Are they changing their way? Do they go to market where it is more of an experience, and the products come along, or a lot of them, that's just too big for them to bite? >> Both. You see both. It depends on the maturity of the merchant, what kind of resources they actually have to dedicate to it. The great thing about experience is, is once you have a platform with limitations, like an Instagram check out, that is an experience. Instagram handles the experience for you, so somebody finds a product, they one-click, and they've ordered that product, and all of the canceling that order, all of the notifications go through that platform, so they've made that very easy for a merchant to have that top-level experience. You know, if you're a small Mom-and pop, and you gain access to Instagram checkout, it's gonna be the exact same experience as the big brands that have access to it. As long as you understand your audience, and you're creating posts to engage with them, and you know how to merchandise your products, you don't have to worry about the technology stack. So I think this is going to be the great equalizer with where merchants are actually interacting with their customers. It's going to be a huge opportunity. >> What about, kind of, the competition with somebody, like an Amazon, where on one hand it's a great distribution channel for me as a small merchant. I got some specialty items-- I used to always joke, "Good news, just got an order from Walmart. Bad news is you just got an order from Walmart", right? So, you've got the scale issues, as you mentioned in Instagram. Suddenly I turn on Instagram, and my cup goes viral. How are small merchants kinda playing both sides of that coin: I wanna play with Amazon. I want to use their distribution technology, I wanna use Instagram with to pay. At the same time, I've got limited resources. Oh my God. One of these things hit and I get 100 000 orders pop up on my system tomorrow, I'm in trouble. How are people managing that? How are you helping them, kind of, strategise? >> You want to find the right tools. You need to understand your customers. You need to understand where to best engage them, and if you have limited resources, you have to be selective. You have to figure out which one is the best, like if I have all my customers on Instagram, then that makes sense, but if all my customers are on Twitter, then why am I putting resources into Instagram? So you figure out which platform is best. When it comes to Amazon, not to quote-- we don't want to quote 90s rap on here, but in the words of the Immortal Too $hort, "You should be getting it while the gettin's good". Take advantage of it while it's there, but sooner or later they're going to own your market. You understand that, you go in with eyes wide open, that sooner or later if you're successful, Amazon is going to take over your market share that you're getting from their platform. But until that happens, you have no choice but to play by their rules. These other platforms, it's a little different, because Amazon's dangerous because they own the channel, the actual medium and the platform by which transactions are happening, but they're also a competitor on that platform, which is what makes them dangerous. When you get in that situation, there just so many gray areas. We've never been in that situation before. The good thing about these other social channels, is that they're the medium but they're not also competing. Like Instagram is not selling on their platform, so it's-- somethings going to happen with Amazon. Every Juggernaut dies at some point. We maybe a 100 years from now before we see that happen, but, you know, something's gonna have to happen to stop Amazon. We can't have one platform, that is also a competitor in the space be 75, 80, 90% of all ecoomerce. We just can't have it, so something's going to happen between now and when we get there. I'm not the guide, I'm not Nostradarmus, I'm not going to prognosticate what that is, but changes are gonna happen over the next five years, because that's just not a market conducive to competition. >> Speaking of changes, there's a lot of change going on with the expectation of consumers, which we are every day, for many products and services, and we wanna have a personalized experience. We also want to be able to do everything from our smartphone, so this rise of, at least it's starting a transactional buying process on mobile is really critical. One of the things also announced today was progressive web apps. Want to get your perspective on that as a game changer in the next gen for shopping, and how might that enable a small to medium business to compete better with its competitors on Amazon itself? >> Yeah, PWA is if you don't know what a progressive web app is, you need to go do research right now. It was-- they definitely mentioned it today. It wasn't necessarily announced. It was announced, I wanna say, a year and a half, two years ago now. They've been working on PWA Studio in Magento for a while. Progressive web apps are a Google initiative, and Google usually gets what it wants. We won't talk too much about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or anything like that, but usually if Google's pushing it, it's a good thing. PWAs are interesting, because they're not a technology. They're a methodology. It's like responsive web design. It is just best practices for how you should deliver a mobile experience. It's a single page application, which means you load your app once, and then elements-- when you're moving through your site, elements that are the same don't refresh. Like if the navigation, the headers the same, when you click, it's still there. It doesn't flicker, it doesn't jump, it lazy loads things in, so it brings things in as it needs it, to save time, so that it loads faster, and to save data, because mobile usually you're on a cell network when you're doing that. It touches on all of the important aspects of ecommerce, which is why it's coming fast. Number one, you're gonna have increased conversions, because if you can browse around the website, and it's snappy, and it's fast, you're much more likely to order something. So you've got increased conversions there, that's number one. Number two, you're gonna get more traffic, because it's a Google initiative, Google rewards fast websites. So if you do it properly, and you've got the SEO right, Google's going to send you more traffic, and so it also leads to more loyalty, because you can have a more pleasant user experience, and your customers like you. Really in ecommerce there's really only three stats that really matter when it comes to how much money you're taking in: how many new customers can you get-- right, that goes back to the conversion rates, and Google sending you stuff-- how much did they order, were they more likely to order more when it's fast, and they go right through and they can browse through 1000 products really quickly, and then how frequently do they order from you? That's it. Every other stat in ecommerce trickles down to those, and PWA touches on all three of those, which is what's going to make it happen and happen really fast. Right now, if you move into PWA, it's a little bit of a risk, a little bit. That risk lowers every day, so if you watching this, two months from now the risk is a lot lower, but the technology is new, the tooling is a little new. It still needs to mature a little bit to be readliy available for the masses and affordable, especially for smaller merchants, but if you do move now, you can have a serious competitive advantage for years. If you're building a website right now, you 100% need to at least look into PWAs. If you're gonna launch it, later this year, you're gonna launch it early next year, you absolutely have to look at it, and if you're going to start the website next year some time, I really-- it's going to be an odd case that launches a website by summer of next year, or after, that is not a progressive web app. It's gonna be that fast. >> T.J. I wanna get your perspective on something else that we're talking about here at the show, and that's AI. You know, talk about AI, and machine learning for a long time, and as we kinda suspected, really the easy application flows are inside somebody else's application. We're seeing Adobe use AI on the back-end or on the marketing side, 'cause the whole idea is to get you what you want, and as somebody once said "If it's done poorly, it's creepy. If it's done well, it's magic". So I wonder if you can kind of reflect on how AI is changing what you can build, amd what you can deliver to the customer, even if you're an SMB, 'cause you're leveraging AI back in systems, way back supporting it. >> Yeah, the AI is a buzz term right now, and buzz terms are always really popular about five years before they're useful, and we're probably a couple of years into AI really being a huge buzz term, so it's starting to creep down market. With something like SenSei being added to Magento, you're going to see it creep even further down market. I'm excited about it. What AI in ecommerce-- where it's really going to play is understanding your customers in real time. Those who understand their customers, can provide a better experience. And how do you understand your customer, the differences between them, what they're looking for in real-time, while they're interacting with your website, that's really difficult to do, and it's impossible to do without something like artificial intelligence, so leveraging it for your product recommendations, for your search, for what content you're going to show to them. It's still going to be a lot of work, unless we figure out how to AI create all that content. Still going to be a lot of work, but just having the ability to understand the subtle nuances and differences between your customers and their desires, and then to be able to actually react to those in real time, is going to be incredible. >> Especially as there is not only so much noise out there, but there's so much competition, pretty much every product and service. T.J. we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE this afternoon. Next time you gotta come back with your orange-- >> I'll bring the cape. >> Magento Imagine cape. >> If they would have just told me, I'd have brought it, but-- >> Now you have to come back. >> Now I've got an excuse. I'll forget it next time so I have to come back again. >> There you go! (laughs) Allright T.J. thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. We appreciate your insights. For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas, Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome to the theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin at The Wynn, in Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019. This is a three day event. You can hear a lot of exciting folks networking behind me, talking tech, talking e-commerce innovation and we're pleased to welcome fresh off the keynote stage a couple of guests from HP. We've got Gillian Campbell, the Head of Omni-channel Strategy and Operations. Gillian, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for asking us. >> Our pleasure and Herriot Stobo, Director of Omni-channel Innovation and Solutions, also from HP. Welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So Gillian fresh off the keynote stage, enjoyed your presentation this morning. >> Gillian: Thank you. >> Everybody I think in the world knows HP. Those of us consumers going, you know what actually, that reminds me, I need a new printer. >> We can help you. >> Thank you, excellent. Whether I'm shopping online or in a store. So you gave this really interesting keynote this morning talking about what HP is doing, starting at Apache. You really transform this shopping experience. Talk to us a little bit about HP, as I think you've mentioned it as a $50 billion start up and from a digital experience perspective, what you needed to enable. >> Yeah, so as I said, HP have been around for 80 years and in 2015, we became our own entity, HP Inc., and really started looking at how do we enable digital to be pervasive through everything that we do. Our internal processes are reached to customers and identified a great opportunity to really take leading edge and our digital commerce capabilities and we already had some early proof points and APG so we launched a global initiative and we're now on that journey to enable that best in class experience through the digital platforms. >> So Herriot talk to us about, you're based in Singapore. >> Yes. >> What were some of the market dynamics that really made it obvious that this is where we want to start building out this omni-channel strategy starting in Apache? Is it, you know whether, Gillian you mentioned it before. We started retail spaces, some being expensive. Is it more mobile experience and expectations on consumer's part? >> I think we've got a mix of different starting points across Asia. We've got some mega cities like Hong Kong and Singapore rising, Tokyo. And then we've got you know emerging markets across South-East Asia. We don't necessarily have any single market place that controls the entire market as we might see in other regions and so we've had a lot of runway to go and experiment and try new things. We also have an ecosystem of branded retail in Asia. Not in all markets, predominantly in India but also in some markets in South-East Asia that allow us to really blend the experience across both offline and online and to give customers choice at the end of the day. Let them decide how they want to shop and interact with our brand. So we have been running Magento 1 since we first launched our online store businesses in Indonesia and Thailand about six years ago and then we moved into China, replatformed, lexi-platform onto Magento 1 and then that was really the foundation of what we decided to go and build upon to become a global program. so we already had some proof points under our belt with Magento so. >> And what were some of those early wins that really started to make this really obvious that this omni-channel experience, the ability to give customers choice? Whether they want to start the process online, finish it in store, vice verse, or at least have the opportunity to have a choice? What were some of those early wins and business outcomes that you started to see? >> I think even just from because we're all, customers are people. Whether you're a corporate customer, a small business, or a consumer, we're all people and we all know that we shop that way. So essentially the storyline on that back to HP was we have to enable experiences that we would want to experience as well and it was quite a shift for a tech company who were really all about the products to be thinking about, well, how do we really enable that end to end experience? And as Herriot said, the runway was open. We already had some proof points. I was new in the job so I was like all listening to, you know, what the team were telling me. We have a great opportunity here and took that formered as a new concept for the company. We got funding approval and you know the rest is the history and the journey that we're on. So I think it was just taking a different perspective and a different approach and working with a team who already had the, built some of that credibility and others proof points with the earlier deployments and I think we kind of took a risk at the time when we started the engagement with Magento. They weren't in that leadership quadrant and we took a risk to say, let's partner with an energizing company and do something a little bit different and we're still here working towards it so I think that for me was the breakthrough, was just having the tenacity to say, we're gonna drive this path forward. It may not be how we would have done things in the past, but we're a different company now. and we had much more thinner air cover to be able to do that. >> Little bit more agility and flexibility. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you guys, you talked about, Gillian about all the buyers. We are the consumers and we have this expectation, growing expectation that I want to be able to get any and transact anything that I want to buy, whether I'm a procuring person for a company and I'm traveling but I need to approve expenses or I'm a salesperson maybe sitting next to a medium-small business customer. I need to have the option at least to have this store front. What are the things that you guys launched in Apache, leverage be the power of Magento Commerce was click to collect. So tell me a little bit about from maybe an e-commerce cultural perspective, what is it that makes people want to have the ability to start online and actually complete the transaction in a physical location? >> Essentially I was in the Advisory Board yesterday and one of the other customers of Magento said, "Until we can invent a way to touch and feel online, "there's always gonna be a need to have, "outlets where you can go touch and feel." and I think with the click and collect, some of our products are, you know, high-end PCs and gaming devices and printers that is hard to get a good appreciation of what it looks and feels like online. So if you're gonna be spending you know, a significant money you may want to go in and be able to see the colors, feel the finish. You know some of our newer products with the leather portfolios is not something you can truly appreciate without touching it. So I think we have to enable again those customers who do want to experience, feel the weight, you know feel the finish, see the color scheme 'cause its usually important, again not for all customers. Some customers are quite happy to spend thousands of dollars on an online purchase without seeing it and then making sure they have a good facility to be able to, well if they wanted to, to return if they got the normal the product. >> As we look though at like we talked about, this consumerization of everything where we have this expectation and the numbers, I think you even mentioned it maybe in your keynote, Gillian, the numbers of, or somebody did this morning, like upwards of half of all transactions are starting on mobile so we got to start there. What are some of the things that you guys have seen in region in terms of mobile conversions? >> So there's still a massive gap between desktop and mobile conversions, first of all. I mean we're not anywhere near parity between the two. But obviously we're seeing a huge volume of traffic coming in as well and it's shifting that way, so you would expect it to drop as result. I think with Magento what we've seen over the, you know, past few deployments that we've been running and that were over 8% improven. But the desktop conversions are far higher. I mean in terms of improvement and actual conversion so we've still got a long way to go. There and that's a naturative process, that's a journey that probably never ends in terms of ongoing optimization and experimentation. So yeah a lot happening there. I think just on the click and collect topic as well that you were asking about people wanting to start their journey online and then come into bricks and mortar. We're seeing a huge uptake on it just by experimenting, by piloting. Over 26% of our consumer notebooks in India that we've put onto this program were being collected in store and this is in environments which are inherently chaotic on the streets. You don't want to go out there but actually I'm passing that way anyway so it's just easier for me to pick it up on the way home and probably quicker 'cause I can collect in two hours. So it's just giving people customer choice, no additional incentive and it seems to take. So now we're expanding out regionally. >> So you said there's, this morning, Gillian, in your keynote eight markets covered, mostly Apache, but also in Latin America. >> We just started in Latin America, again, the development process is not just as simple as we're switching on. So we've been doing a lot of work for this past six months with Latin America. The team there, they're super excited to get launched. There's some differences there, we've talked about the regional variation around fulfillment models that we have to adapt towards but the intent is to get Latin America deployed, leveraging some of the layer lengths from what we've done in Asia specific and then starting to move around into more the near region and then ultimately back into the US and Canada. >> So as you look forward and of course you've mentioned we're on this journey right, what are some of the key learnings that you're going to apply? You mentioned this morning, something that was very intriguing and that was, respect the integrity of the Magento platform. Talk about that in context of some of the other learnings that you'd recommend for colleagues and similar or other industries to be able to achieve what you have on a global scale. >> I think from the outset, there was this kind of like baggage of deployments of capabilities not just in commerce but deployment of capabilities across HP that we had not respected the integrity of the platform. We had adjusted the code and developed on the code to make it HP specific and with the new HP Inc. company one of the guided principles was no, when we buy the leverage software applications respect it for what it is and adjust business processes and adjust integration rather than adjust the core so that we can get the advantage of the longer term opportunity without creating such like. So it was really just a foundational, you know, let's not go in here with a mindset that we know better than the core. The core is there for a reason and then build around that and ensure the integration and I think you know with Herriot's leadership, we've been able to you know, just keep that firm is why we can be successful and be successful longer term as well. So that all the, and one of the things we talked about yesterday also is the excellent capabilities that are coming with Adobe and the integration that we talked about the recommendation of Adobe Sensei and integrate that with Magento Core. If you don't keep to the respect the integrity, those upgrades and capabilities become really hard to take benefit of so we're really excited about, you know, again, sticking with the core and enabling and growing with the core with Magento and Adobe. >> I would just build on it, I mean I think its never gonna be easy running a global commerce platform. Single instance, multiple countries, you know, 27 markets to get started with. Who knows where we're gonna end. Its always gonna be a challenge so we have to keep it as simple as possible. These upgrades are fast and furious and that's great and we all gets lots of benefit but if we start going down our own path, we've lost it. We've lost the benefit. >> And that's one of the things too that Jason Wolfsteen said this morning was that the word Magento was gonna be enabling businesses to achieve without getting in their way and it kind of sounds Herriot, like you're saying the same thing. That we've gotta be able to respect the technologies that we're building so we don't get in our own way and we keep it simple as we wanna expand globally. Ultimately at the end of the day, you're creating these personalized experiences with consumers and that personalization is so important because it's more and more not only are we transacting or wanting to on mobile but we want our brands like HP to know us. We want you to know our brand value, you know our average order value so that we can become part of the experience but also ideally get rewarded for being loyal. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, I mean just coming to mobile again but you know, 2.3 delivers the native PWA capabilities which we're super excited to get started with. You know we've got so many used cases for this straight away, right out the box but you know we've got to do it gradually, do it the right way. I think we're also aware that we're not gonna be able to run with PWA in all markets straight away 'cause not all markets are ready for it quite frankly. User behavior- >> Is that a cultural thing? >> It's purely cultural. Maybe technical and just technical ecosystems as well. Places like China in particular, where, you know, customers use app stores but they use app stores from every single phone manufacturer right there. That's where the customer is. We can't just move away from that so we need to keep some of those legacy approaches for a little while and then yeah test in other regions and then take the learnings when we're ready to adopt it. >> Exciting so here we are at, this is the first Magento Imagine since the Adobe acquisition. Gillian, let's wrap things up with you. What are your, you mentioned you were part of the Customer Advisory Board yesterday, just some of your perspectives on this years' event now that Magento is powering the Adobe commerce cloud. >> I actually attended the Adobe Summit a few weeks ago here also in Vegas and started to see the thread of commerce coming into that conference and then seeing the Adobe, the experience, coming into Magento and I just think it's a perfect combination of opportunities especially for a company like HP where we were linked in to connect, you know, marketing and sales and support across the customer journey and the capabilities with Adobe and some of the marketing stack, and then the commerce stack, and there was support bringing that together is a super exciting opportunity for us. You know the partnership that we have with both Adobe and Magento again as one as I really, they were just starting what the next journey was gonna look like. >> We feel that about so many things, we're just starting, but Gillian, Herriot, it's been a pleasure to have you on theCUBE for Magento Imagine 2019. Thank you both for your time. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from The Wynn Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2019. Thanks for watching. (light music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Accenture Interactive. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Vegas at the Adobe Summit 2019. I think there's about 17,000 people. The first time we've been here but we've been excited to be here. There's a crazy good buzz and energy and actually a ton of CUBE alumni here at Adobe. We're greeting old friends but it's always great to meet new friends. And coming off of great mention in the keynote this morning we're excited to have Santiago Aldana. He is the CDO and CTO of Avianca. Welcome. >> Thank you, John. >> So I was surprised this morning, we were watching the keynote and there's Satya Nadella and he has a shout-out for you guys. >> It was quite a surprise. It was very engaging and I'm happy to hear that. >> Yeah, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And a little fact, you guys are the second oldest commercial airline, he said. I had no idea. >> That's right, we've been flying for almost 100 years. It's our 100th anniversary this year. >> Awesome. >> So great, great. >> Well, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So air travel's a really interesting industry because it's growing like crazy in terms of the total number of passenger miles, right? More people are flying all the time. But it's got to be super competitive. You got to worry about fuel costs. A seat mile is a seat mile. So there's all kinds of interesting ways to compete. You guys are really into it, you've been successful for 100 years, so how do you differentiate what you guys are doing and continue to evolve and be successful? >> So there's several things. If you look 10 years back we used to be a domestic airline. We used to have around 30 planes, now we're around 170 planes. We're the second largest airline in Latin America. That has been a huge growth. >> Wait, how long did you do that? >> That's for the last 10 years. >> 10 years you went from 30 planes to 170. >> To 170, 180. >> And domestic to international. >> To a Latin American airline. >> That's a big move. >> That's a big move but we're shifting our emphasis, going more, rather than growth, going to profitability. And to make that profitability we have to make the strong transformation to make that happen. >> So for profitability there's all kinds of things that go in there, there's higher utilization, there's hopefully everybody buys Teslas so the gas doesn't cost as much for the airplanes. How are you focusing on profitability? 'Cause here we're at Adobe, all the talk's about experience, experience, experience. If I'm flying on your plane, I want to get a good deal and keep everything good but I'm not necessarily that worried about your profitability. >> So let me tell you a little bit about that. If you think about an airline we're just the distance between our customers and their dreams. We're just the distance. So the customer doesn't want to go to security. The customer doesn't want to go to the whole hassle of planning the trip. Our purpose is reducing that distance, reducing that effort, and when we reduce that effort we're going to self-service, we're going to personalize, to make life easier for our customers. That's the basic challenge. And that has to do with three main areas. One, knowing our customer. The other one is, making sure that the value proposal for that customer journey is proper. So that's operational work. And the other one is providing our employees with enough information to make that happen. All of those are working along data, and data to be able to provide a real value proposal to making that happen. The customer has to be in the center of our strategy and that's where we have to be working all the time. And when you do this, it's not about technology, it's about the customer. And being that, about the customer, the strongest challenge is not technology but people, making people change so we that can provide the value proposals to our customers. >> So what are some of the things that you did to enable the experience of my engagement, whether it's electronic or whether it's when I'm talking to that person at the counter, checking in or getting on my flight, how have you helped them provide me a better experience? >> You talk as if it was part of the past. To be honest, it's a journey, we're still working on that. There are several things that we did last year, a whole bunch of things. We changed our app, we changed our website, we changed our interaction with our customers with data. And regarding Adobe, we're here at Adobe, we implemented a whole set of tools. So AEM, the website is a new thing. Regarding Microsoft we implemented a CRM to know about our customers. We changed our app, and the app is like a platform with which we're transforming the customer journey. What we have to do at the end of the game is changing those touch points so that those require less effort from our customer, they're more seamless and we are able to personalize and know in advance what the customer is looking for to provide alternatives. And that makes it more seamless. So we're in that process of doing data-centered decision making to reduce that effort from our customers and make things happen. >> So as you've gone through this journey to date what are some of the surprising things that came up that you just didn't expect at all, on a positive side? And then what were some of the negative things that you didn't know, that were so negative that now you've kind of removed? >> Okay, so I've been here in this business and Avianca just for the last two years, so if you talk about surprises this is my first time in airlines. I wasn't expecting this to be so challenging. >> Well, it's good to come at it from a fresh point of view, absolutely. >> I've been in banking, I've been in telcos. Believe me, there's a huge technical depth, there's a lot of complexity, and bringing this customer information up to the table, it's been challenging. Lots of things going together. Surprises, yeah, we have to work with our employees. We have to transform that culture. We have to move towards a more testing ... Having experiments iterating and learning from that process. And that takes time and that requires a lot change of culture. The other one is being more agile and that's more easily said than done. So making the teams be more collaborative. And working with partners. We decided to choose a handful of partners to make this transformation work. And those partners, that's not one thing that you just plug and play, you have to make it work and that requires a lot of effort. Even if it's big, strong, world-wide, world-level sponsors and partners, it requires engaging and making them work together. At the end it's about people in every part. And making people work together, that's a challenge. That's a challenge. >> You've got the whole gamut too, 'cause you've got the front line people that are directly engaged with the client, whether again it be at the gate agent or on the telephone or processing those things all the way back to the senior management and the operations which I'm sure are not only regulated and very very finely detailed for safety and everything else. So that's got to be hard to try to drive transformation in what was probably a pretty rigid situation. >> It is, that's why you have to choose what to do. And probably you don't know how to do it at the beginning but you know what you want to achieve. And that requires a more iteration way of learning, experimenting and finding a way. That's regarding agility. And that's where you work with partners to also leapfrog and move faster forward unto this. That's where we choose partners as Accenture, Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, and Amadeus. And they're moving us forward unto that. >> So what are some of the ways that you're trying to measure success? What are some of the things you're tracking as you go through this transformation? >> Well, several of them. Let me talk just about a couple of them. One of the things that we have to do is make the buying process easier. We're starting way behind, strong technical depth, and we have to decouple our systems to make those steps that our customer has to do, make them fewer, easier, and changing the whole booking flow. But to do that, we don't have the answer. First we have to decouple the system, the legacy systems, and then we have to learn from our customers. We have to do a lot of A/B testing to see what works better. Test and see if the process is better accepted by our customers, learn from that, probably fail, do it again, iterate it and do it again. And that process we have to engage unto that. The other one is ... So that's one of the areas. But the other one is, how can we make sure that the operational value proposal takes place? Since we have been growing for the last 10 years so much, we started from a local airline to the second biggest airline in Latin America, but that growth is a little bit disorganized and we have to set things up to make it happen. We have to provide a lot more data and connectivity to all our employees at the airports, at the counters, at the call center, and providing them with more customer information to make it happen. >> Right, so you're on that process, so you're starting to deliver new data to the gate agents and the people on the front line? >> Sure. >> So how are they reacting to that? Do they like to be empowered, are they afraid of being empowered, are they saying, "Ah, finally I have the information "in front of me that I can take care of this traveler?" >> So there's not one answer for that. In some cases we empower them and they enjoy a lot and they say, "Hey, finally we got this." For example, we are giving our ... This is a recent project that we launched at the airport. We're providing them data through mobility, making the turnaround of our planes faster, and we're giving them much more data. Before then, they had to call everywhere to find what was happening. Now they have it at their hands, and that's different. So that changes the whole thing and they look forward to that. At other times, we sometimes do mistakes also. We provided more information through the apps to our pilots. They were finding that awesome. But then some of the information that they used to have, we didn't get it. So we have to iterate it and give it and then they start loving it. Regarding our customers, which is the other side, it's not internal employees, we do some things in which we test and sometimes they say, "Oh, that was not what we were expecting." So we have to learn from that. I mean, it's not about making a huge waterfall project. It's about learning in the process, failing, and iterating and making it happen again and again. It's a whole journey. >> We just had our last guest, he talked about trying to move this stuff to the cloud. It's like, first time didn't work, second time didn't work, third time, hey, now it's working. So you don't know until you know, right? And what we hear over and over is as you start this top-level transformation project you uncover a bunch of stuff under the covers that has to be reworked to support what you're trying to do on the front end. >> That's right. >> I assume it's a lot of the same thing that you found? >> You're exactly right, there's a lot of things in that way. On all three areas. Customer, on customer we didn't have customer information, we didn't even have a CRM. So we implemented our CRM at a huge fast pace that we did it, in a year we already had it. The app and the website, we have to totally remake it, and getting more information from that and getting personalized information regarding that. That's technical depth, I was not expecting that to be there. >> So I'm just curious, what was the catalyst of this transformation and this growth? Were you trying to put in systems to support the growth that you did from going from a relatively small domestic airline to an international, or are you trying to set the table for continued growth, to continue on that growth path? That's a pretty aggressive growth path. >> It's a little bit more simple than that and I'm going to be blunt here. Three years ago the board at Avianca was doing a search for a new CEO. That's my boss right now. He came over three years ago. He used to be the president for Microsoft in Latin America. In the interviews they told him a lot of things. And after he was questioned and doing the interview, he said, "Okay, let me say this now. "Are you asking me to make Avianca "a digital company flying airplanes?" And they said, "Yeah, that's exactly right. "That's what we want." So that was the initial pace. That was three years ago. I joined the team two years ago. There was already a vision, and that vision is making things easier and effortless for the customer. That's part of what we're trying to build. And that is before, during, and after the trip. If we are able to do that we're reducing costs, we're making it simpler. The whole process is about being simpler, taking away complexity, making sure that our operations are better, and that's taking away complexity. You can do that through technology also. But again, the biggest challenge is probably not technology. It's a cultural change and it's the leadership required to move on and make our employees, our customers, take advantage of it. >> Bold move by the board and a bold move by the CEO but we hear it all the time. Everybody's a digital company now, it's just what product or service do you happen to wrap it around? So what a great story. >> Thank you. And yeah, again, we got to go more data-centered, we have to know our customer better. If we want to do something personalized the only way is through the data. We have to know in advance what our customers are requesting and trying to make it easier for all of them, and that's the data. >> Well Santiago, thanks for sharing your story. And again congratulations on the keynote shout-out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> All right. He's Santiago, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (lively electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by Extension Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for adobe summat. Twenty nineteen. I'm John for With my Coast. Jeffrey for Yu here for two days. The wall, the wall coverage We're on day to our next guest. Marc Andre Sinclair, director of digital marketing Platform Content Strategy Export Development Canada E D. C. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. So love your channel. Digital marketing platform content strategy. That's kind of in the center of all the action. So, you know, you've been doing some transformation. Tell us your story. What do you guys do? What was what was that? What's the story? >> So I joined E. C. Exported moment Cata two years ago, really helping them out on the overall digital transformation. So I've been fortunate, joined the organization as the moment that they're our position. We wanted to change like we weren't a mandate to gain back some relevance in the market. CDC exists how occasion businesses go beyond the borders, go international. So they really wanted to be relevant to the market because we're not competing with the markets were really just like a compliment in a market. So we've been on that journey distrust, transformation For the last two years, we've are now competing the first phase of a transformation and just about two years, which normally takes four years in the industry. And we're now add midway to our overall digital transformation. We want a critical the number of customers that we have in four years, but it's a very aggressive target what we call normal, like a stretch goal that are serious put. So that's what we've been up to in the last two years. >> And what >> was the catalyst? Why the change? Because, well, what was going on kind of behind the scenes t make such an aggressive, so aggressive move. If you look at >> the interest you overall, there's a major shift in what is export. So exporting means merchandising guys ing good for most of the people. When when you look at the shipping industry to software and services, these folks are not perceiving themselves as being on exporter like really, you build a software, you sell it. You don't think about your software getting beyond the borders. So the industry, the overall market size, are the number of companies that we could help in. The country has grown, but our number of customer remained flat. So we wanted to catch back at that market reach. And there was a theater in Perth. Is that forced us to change? But basically it started. What? Our CEO Putting forward a strong paper cultured like really forced people to think differently and change. >> What's the progress Like how you happy with the progress so far? Absolutely. What are what are some of the things you've knocked down already? What was the pick us through the steps? They could screw up the plan. What was the What is the plan? What is completed were how much how much is left. >> OK, so it started for us as a strong investments and over all the marketing tech stocks which started obviously where I will be summit. So we started in the vestments with the Adobe expense manager and it was about us changing the technology that we had in terms of delivering a customer experience. So your approach we took wass people processing technology. But at the middle, we really put the customer experience at the forefront of everything at the art of every decisions. Makings. So for us were Margaret, we're finishing the migration as we speak right now. That's the first phase. And now with the partner that we have X censure. We're looking in terms ofthe archaic. How can we build capabilities back in the business? Because we've outsourced are full function to our partner. And now it's about how do we get the right level of cost tower scalability for the future so we can deliver premium customer experience. So a lot of activities have happened. We went into natural transformation at the same time, the organization has embraced our job overall and now we're really thinking about was the future data customer experience. So these are the biggest shift that their condition is looking at As we stand right now, we've done the migration and we can now start to think about personalization experimentations. These are all the cool things that we have ahead of us. >> What was the heavy lifting hard part of getting this off the ground? What, some learning or any experiences where you, you know, failed miserably and rebooted or reset means you learned through it oration. We see these successful projects. What's the key learnings? Have you had any moments like that? >> Definitely So So, First of all, I would like to talk a bit about the fail approach because this is something that wasn't obviously part of the organization. And that is something fundamental to a change in organizations. So to quote my boss fail stance or first attempt and learning, So you got to get out and you got to try things and we gotta experiment. Otherwise, you're not really pushing the boundaries. Eso I'm proud of her failure and actually won an award about failure last year at our, um, organizations. So they have a corporate awards that recognise people that do fails but move on and fell fast, like that's a spirit. So for us as, say, at the beginning, the biggest part of a project was to get the what I call the M V P. Zero. So we have to change from a nun premise toe called architectures. And when you start to do these things at an organization that has never done cloud, you uncover a lot of stuff a lot of security protocols, firewalls kicking in. So our first BP zero just to set the infrastructure has been quite a challenge. I think we went three times out, and the third time was the right one. But this is the critical one where you start to build credibility. And even though for us we're working and agile every two weeks without ever cradle to grave, everything full blown experience, this one was really a longer one. And we were really made sure that the requisition understood that this is complicated When you do the foundation. This >> is company goes cousins to say its foundational. So I'm going to take your time. You've got to get that right. Can't have any cracks in the foundation because you're building on top of it. Exactly. So that three attempts you. You said you went out for forbid, or how did three attempts of building it was >> so the throughout That's R about us deploying the full Levi's serology in the clouds. So first time we went uncover a few things. Second time, not anything pop up weren't aware. And then the third time we went out. Third time's a charm to say we went >> out. It was good >> way. Nailed it on that >> time. It's the >> price I didn't invite you on stage. I don't know if you caught that in the Kino. Towards the end of his keynote, he said, We need to have an award for people that disproved their own hypothesis. Exactly so. But you said it's interesting. He said. The people part was hard in the process, and yet it was a top down initiative from the CEO. So was it not bought in a kind of the mid tier management level? The senior management? Why, if the COC and we need to do this, was it hard to move those different party organization? Well, >> I'd say the people part was more about having the right talent on the right mind sets. So one to CEO put forward the culture paper, the stretch goals. Really the organization started to organize themselves on. Are we going to make that thing happened now? Like we need to work differently. And this is not about just more cash, more at counts. We need to re engineer a bit the way we were working, so I wouldn't say that there was an issue with with the way or the people of today was just like you start through higher scrums, you start the heart coach to start our appeal. These are skills says that you've never had. Like at the beginning of the project, we had new marketing talent. We had new partner for the ritual that every we have a new partner for agile and we also have new technology. So you start with a lot of new stuff at the same time. So I'd say these are natural things that you have to do. Is it easy? No, not necessarily. But we had a lot of support from the sea level standpoint. >> It sounds like you guys have a very Dev ops oriented culture because talking about failing fast is a cultural cloud concept. I mean agile iterating scrums. This's a dev ops mindset, infrastructure. It's code. Did you guys have that built in Or you said you started three years ago. Was that was that the core cultural mindset? >> So I wouldn't say that we're a dev ups type of culture of mentality, I would say, actually, it's probably the part that we still need to invest hard because now we build a fully whole machine that scaring and pushing the machine you start uncover that once you go that full cycle, few things are popping up, so you know, and and the in the nineties are beginning of this of two thousands. Like when you were thinking about nal ticks, people were always like, Okay, let's let's do this on our techs use case. Our position at the end. Let's do your documentation at the end. It tends to be the same thing with Dev up. Sometimes like we have a strong architectural when in terms of regression, automation and all these things, we truly need to invest a bit more so we can have a because we're playing every single two weeks that we wanted or not. So that's a lot of pressure on all the people that do, que way you waited to make sure everything >> you want to get it right first, then kind of bolted on after as more of an operational models >> way had a very strong foundation, and now we're spinning everything. >> It's all I got to ask you about the export piece of it because, obviously, um, international global competitiveness is a big force. Right now, people have to be global and data privacy. You mentioned. We talk about genie pr before we came on camera you an opinion on this. Do you have anything? You? Could you please share your view on TV? I really Well, I thought it's valuable. >> Yeah, absolutely. So what I didn't mention when we chatted about that before is Wei thought a lot about you. We need to comply to GDP. Are because this is ah, European regulation. And we headed up that Yes, a CZ. Because we have prisons internationally and erupts. Not everyone that has that opinion that they need to comply. But what we've uncovered was one, one or two weeks before the D days on May twenty fits that We needed to be compliant. So what has happened is in two weeks, we stop everything. We worked twenty four hours for two weeks to restructure the platform to make sure that we were, like, compliant to do CPR. And then after that, we fought a lot. Next few months, we'LL look into it. Are we going to make that thing right? Because people are scared of gpr, but that you want it or not? This is just a beginning way. See it with the California Act Canada as a castle. I'm pretty sure they're going to be very aggressive, so you need to make sure that you really invest in. There are privacy management and all these things. At the end of the day, if it's well done, your customers will love it. The issue is people are being a bit sneaky without the use data. But if you're being transparent and you're being honest with the way you use the data and you're being fully disclosing what you're doing, it's not an issue you need to embrace it. Actually, I think that's a commis it embrace it because it's going to be part of our journey that we >> want to do the tough work up front for you. He was forced to because you are building something new. And then, well, the deadlines here, so is the struggles. Hard works. He had to grind it out. So you and then once you get over that, prepare for it, invested it, nurture the strategy for that. What's the advice to give someone sets there has to do the GPR and might not be into the time pressure, but it's starting out and saying Okay, I got to get my arms around this. What's the core issues well, getting started, not colour, but like what's playbook? >> So the playbook and say like if you think about G p r. This is basically for the European. You If they're not giving you the right tio leverage cookies and tracking and all these things, you should not be doing it. So it's simply thinking in your implementation of a piece of software that goes at the beginning that says, Do you want to have full functional thief, full personalization or not? And don't look at GDP R. But look at the customer experience. If you put the customer once again at the forefront and you really think about what does it make sense? You know if if you and I get on the Web sites and we see that thing that is fronting A, I know what you've done last summer like it's kind of creepy. You don't want to have these things. And so you just build that customer experience around their privacy management, and then everything will fall together. >> So build it into the product. >> Yeah, platform, yeah, and do it the right way and compliance will follow. Don't do it to be compliant. Don't >> exactly do it through a customer experience, >> right? Right. So how's this success band in terms of getting into some of these new markets for you in terms of software and services and some of the other export markets? So, so >> interesting question, because two years ago a DC was focused on to court things, financial products and insurance products. So right now we've expended our product line, and we're now having this what we call knowledge business. So if you think about occasion, business or any business that wants to go beyond the borders, this's quite scary to go in the international game. So now we're capable of offering them a lot of insights on international market out the exports virus key questions that haven't her journey. So we're not helping them to our journey and also as were wet and better than the international supply chains. We're helping them with connecting with big, big companies that are leveraging or looking for some capabilities that we have in the country. So we've really skilled up the product line that we have. We're really shifting the model. We're working a lot with the banks and the way we're supporting the Cajun businesses so like it's days and nights, the type of products that have a solution, the experience that were providing, uh, from two years ago. Do we still have work? Absolutely. Like digital transformation is never such a thing that is completed. The key essence here. The key message is, it's never done, and the customer experience has to be at the forefront if you think about the customer experience. It just happened that most of the experiences digital these days so test our mission is never handing. >> I think I think it's a great mind set. I think that's so smart. It's not just about mobile first or cloud for just customer center. From the beginning, I'm gonna ask you the question. What's it like working with a century Iraq? That what role that they play with a easy to work with the good? What's the story? >> Absolutely. I'm very pleased with the team that we had. We have strong people from Accenture were fully leveraging the network that they have because they're distributed in the global business. Axe Central, for us, is doing all the delivery stuff, the the very difficult stuff behind the scene that is normally like your function that you haven't an organization. So we've been extremely pleased on DH. Actually, I think that the fighter fact that were capable of delivering every single two weeks and agile were pure, agile. You will hear in the industry that some people think they're our job, but they're actually hybrid Elijah. So we're full blown, agile the organization. And they've been strong partner with us on that journey. >> That's awesome. Well, I love the story looking for to keep it in touch. Keep us posted on When you get this transformation. I look forward to chatting. And thanks for sharing your story. And inside here in the Cube, my pleasure. Mark Andreessen, Claire customer here inside the cute telling about the journey and the struggles and GDP are get on it and make it an advantage. Great. Great line there. And digital is the future. I'm Jeffery Jeffery. More day to coverage with the Cube after the short break

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by extension for interactive. >> Hey, welcome back it when Cube live coverage here in Las Vegas are doubly. Summit twenty nineteen. I'm John Murray with Jeffrey, my coz this week. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Our next guest is Glenn Hartman. North America lied for a censure Interactive. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. Great beer. So you guys are doing some great stuff around the creativity, peace, doing great customer experience. Implement taste. We have a great walk through from a lot of the folks from your organization. You're designing up ideas and products, delivering them and then operating them. Nice model. Yeah, thanks. Is that your business model that has network, What century? Interactives business model. I mean center and >> really about one thing. It's about creating, delivering and running the best experiences on the planet. We help our clients do that for their own customers. And when >> we talk about experience, a lot of people have different definitions for that, especially at the conference here. It's not necessarily an experience of a website or a mobile app or u X is people use it. It's really anyway, a brand engages with a customer. It's not just marketing. Either it could be sales or customer service loyalty. Anything anyway. A brand promise can be delivered. Teo to customers. One of things that I've noticed with you guys is that it's a talk track and thought leaders around a new creative and new creativity. And Toby honestly with software that they haven't now the cloud you're seeing in the marketplace. We saw this at Sundance two years ago. A new kind of creative is, um, organically coming into the marketplace with more channels to direct to consumer, whether it be to be or be to see you and now have new kinds of mechanisms to take product, whether it's APS or content or movies, You start to see this democratization really starting to happen. How is that changing? How you guys helped us is because now they now have new capability. They can tell their story in a different way. They have access to new kinds of channels that weren't there before. How is that changing the business, in your opinion, die in a profound way? So I mean, everybody knows that marking is inextricably linked >> to technology and data. Everybody knows that. But when >> we are thinking about the new, creative and own ways that you can tell stories and create experiences. We look at experience very differently. I mentioned before that it was all about all the different touch points in the ways people interact with the brand. But when we look at experience, we call it the Big E. And the biggie actually stands for empathy. And it's understanding how to define what a brand experience means to that customer and defining success in terms of that customer. And you know, Jeff and John, you guys air not to find by your data set or what you bought last week. You could be very different types of people in different situations and understanding ways to empathize with you in the moment and having experiences change in the moment and having creative play, a part of that and data play. A part of that is the big hot. It's a new way of looking at things, and the last part of that, too. And the big is about emotion. So when you have a big brand that has some emotional connection, you know you love this brand for an automotive or you love this hotel chain or there's some brand a connection you have. How do you have that connection flow through every touch? Point and data and technology can enable that. But it's really empathy and emotion. That's the driver. How do you get empathy and creativity to work together? Because you now have an accelerant with data you mentioned getting to know people's empathizing with them in the moment it's contextual. I could be having a great day or a bad day or driving my kids to school of whatever's going on with me. It certainly there might be some data out. How do you get the creativity and the empathy to work together in your mind? You see that appointment? That's the nice parties. More than ever, we have different data sets that can help us do that. Just give you a couple of examples. Um, instead of understanding how to market >> to someone so they'LL buy the next product on basing. That may be on their demographic, maybe basing it on their preferences. You've hear all these terms and marketing for years, and you can understand what they bought. >> Instead of understanding that, why don't we try and look and use data which you could easily do today to understand why they bought something so it could be something as simple as like a I don't know, Cpg example. Maybe have shampoo and you could say, Well, they bought these kinds of things before, So maybe they'LL buy that champion. But if they know that, you know, maybe Jeff is equal friendly are John. Maybe you're more into things that maybe you buy that shampoo because you care about animals and they know they don't test them on animals. Or maybe it's something more about experience that that particular shampoo won't make your daughter cry when you ship your her hair. And it helps that experience that that's the reason why it actually helps me. You're empathizing in the moment with something that is meaningful that you care >> about. It's not about a better deal or >> better price or some kind of feature. It's something actually about you more meaningful, much very meaningful interaction. Data set is that because there's no data before, is it more? There's more signals, potentially to get exposed to that, because that's a hard data points to get. I mean, to find the why is a holistic kind of perspective. It's true, but I mean, I think it's more of a mind set. The date is there, but the mind set has been different. Over time, people were looking to technology every buzz word in the world use big data and personalization. Aye, aye. And then now it's a I and machine learning and like, Well, that's great. And they're all wonderful enablers, as I said, but it has to be driven by empathy first. So it all starts. >> I mean, we've been saying this forever customer, centrist city and a customer >> concerts. But really, I mean, for real. If you start to use those data sets, aunt have the mindset has to be a c M. O. R. A brand manager is someone who actually it's advocating for the customer, and they're willing to say, No, I don't need big data. I don't need all the data. I need this gold nugget part so I can speak to John. >> It's interesting plate, as you say, the emotional part of the biggie. Also, I think it is the old Coke commercial, right raw one world together, and we all cry and there's some great McDonald's commercials, right when you talk about you think beyond that to the to the empathy. I can't help but think of kind of the whole purpose. Purpose driven, mission driven companies. You know, kids coming out of college want to work for mission driven, cos we heard it over and over. And the key notes, you know, we're not a product company, not even really a service company. But we're committed to two, an ideal to the mission. Beep. Be partners with us, be our customer. Let's have a relationship that goes so much deeper and longer than any particular transaction is that kind of that tied it, that that is a part of it? >> Absolutely. Now, the interesting thing of what you said is that people are >> tied to a purpose and maybe something that's meaningful in a broad sense, absolutely. And that's a wonderful place to start. And you can start to align products and services in that way, >> the way he talked about, like, shampoo and, you know, animal testing, right? Well, >> it's a good one, but the next one is really getting a little bit Mohr down to you. So I think all that is great, but really understand what you need in the moment, because what happens is it. Some of those things may change if you are shopping at a grocery store every >> Saturday for your family and you're used to doing down your attitude. There might be different then when >> you're shopping, when your kid is sick and you got pulled out of work and you got to get there to get the prescription, you're into speed and your stress in the moment they're versus. Maybe >> on Saturday you're like all try some new coupons and try some new things and go by. The little tasting >> station is actually behaviors that you want to understand in the moment. That is a big part of that as well. But the key thing to hear is, let's think of this when you deal with empathy. It's not just getting to know all those things. Even if it gets to that level, it's actually changing the way marketers think about talking to communicating and relating to customers even the language that they use. I mean, think of it >> today. I mean, >> still, people use marketers are their marketing to people. It's, uh, that's acquire customers. Let's convert wind developers over good. We don't win their helpers over. And what was the last time you guys were real excited about getting converted? Okay, it's not a fun experience, right? So if you even changed, I might send you say, Let's market with someone or let's let's help them. You actually create experiences that are useful and helpful not about conversion and not a business metric. But success is defined by the customer. How are you guys playing this? Because this is really kind of ties on multiple threads. I mean, the whole nother community angle to people belong to communities in context to their life. And they engage. And when they engage his emotional connection to a group of this and some cohorts is the worker. Thank you. Okay, groups. But they're friends and colleagues, or whatever could be you guys were. The point is, with customers, take us through a use case day in the life of empathy, deployed into how you guys do business with the big Branson and one of the success. How do you make it happen? What's the engagement look like? How does someone do this? So they just wake up one morning, say Okay, I'm gonna have more empathy. They also call you guys up. What happens? Like what? Take us through What? Certain evidence was made in the slide. I could give you >> a little bit of it. An example of how stars we've been talking a little bit more dramatically about sick kids and testing on pets and animals and things like that. Not testing the pets. Can you imagine? I'd really be >> horrible. But single graphic of the users individual personal things is hard, right? So? Well, I mean, the whole point of this is that when you really get into the mechanics of how this works, I'll give you an >> example. It's a little bit less dramatic. OK, so it's a telecommunications company. Telco company. That's selling. You guys know what? Triple play? Yeah. Okay, So you have It's >> a cable and a phone, right? All it's it's like a commodity product writers. There's no emotional thing necessarily. But in that game, if you can just optimize certain parts of the journey, you can make a big difference, right so way got a benign request from a marketer. Teo say, Listen, we do a lot of paid search. Can you help us with this one product? Just if you move it even like one percent, it would be significant to the company. But when? So okay, we'LL do that, >> and it worked out. We go in and help them do their >> search. But because we're thinking about experience in a broader sense for so well, let's let's do it more. Let's make them be able to transact or engage in multiple ways. Well, you could. You could sign up for the service to email. Or maybe there's click to call or click to chat. Or you could even walk into a branch and do it there. Maybe through the call centre, right? It's what's all that's working together on the channel, though fun words you want easy. You're leveraging >> different technologies to do it and people, >> so the way this worked was you were coming in through search and then eventually a lot of them were converting in the call center. So it was all working. And you think that's great? Well, it wasn't great to the company at all. They were very upset. The people that we're buying the media, we're really bummed because they couldn't get the attribution of the credit for the thing was in the call center. So they came over the great idea. They said, OK, take the phone number off and take the the click to call off and will force the >> customer to convert in. Our channel, of >> course, is a brilliant company with great people and rational thinking prevailed and they didn't do that. But they said, Well, what do we do? I said, Well, you're going to eat and multi attribution model to be able to help you do that, Okay, but that's not enough because you also need a new sales incentive and commission structure inside the call center because those people are getting pit on that. But since it's such a low commodity product, that's not gonna work to change. That's that's a new sales kind of thing, then you wait. They can't talk for another three seconds to that person because you'LL bring the margins on. You got to get him back. All the turtleneck just screwed up. That's right. So there's a new business process is now a new operating model whose skills to get him back into the general. So all of a sudden it's benign. Request from a marketing team taken, you optimize my paint search becomes new business transformation. Okay, now, because that brand manager had the guts to say I'm going to advocate for this customer. This customer wants to come in through this channel. They want to convert over here, and we're gonna actually change the operating model, the sales structure to call the sales lead. I had to call the CFO on the CEO, and we're gonna make this happen, Gonna change the way we do business on behalf of that customer. That is weight world, I could tell you we see this all the time and marketers all the time that there's so married to their website analytics funnel that that's all about who gets credit coded earls and the customer experience is a brutal. It's like I'm not here on other sites are all over the place. I don't really need to go the site every day, right? Somebody only go there when Otto and the thing we were talking about before. If you're grocery shopping >> and Europe's have set on Tuesday and you want to get off >> for your kid at versus the nice leisurely thing we talked about on the weekend, there's a whole nother set of outcomes in Cape Yas you have to deal with. If you went into that supermarket on Tuesday and they figured out a way to get you in and out fast and just get those two or three autumns, you need it for your kid. That's a failed trip. According to the grocery industry. You need to be in there longer they want, so you stay in the back. That's right. Totally. That breaks the whole model, but it's wonderful for you. You'LL shop there forever because of that experience, what you're getting at the Morrises air, changing the business models of cos that's the bottom line. You're at the center. That could be a driver for the transformation. That's it. Empathy. Is the driver Absolutely no. You need to have the emotional connection to all that stuff to help also internally see emos. I don't need to just be relevant and customers that need to be relevant to the enterprise. They need to be relevant to the CEO, Doc in seconds and hear the screaming and kicking and screaming right now. Glenn, that's great. But man, that's a heavy lift way could do it. How do you How do you get it? Because now I can see a cultural reaction. The antibodies will come out and attack that notion because it's scary because now, like, whoa, yeah, well, I mean, it is hard, but the good news is, is that we see, even at this conference, and a lot of our clients are coming over to do that this incremental ways to get there. But I'll make it simple. So the advantages are we said this new technology, new data that allow you to do some of this stuff right? That's great. And you can see a lot of them consolidating, right? A lot of the stacks all now have content and analytics and commerce and all that, and in this nice ways that they come together and that consolidation can help, and there's other ones that can handle different data sets, and that helps to his automation. And but the thing is that what people miss is one of the ways to accelerate this is add a human centered approach to how you actually create the experience internally. And what I mean is, it's not enough to consolidate the data and figure out that Gold nugget and not enough to do with technology have to do with humans. It's a human centered approach, so we're bringing in integrated teams of humans that are pulling all the stuff together. It's someone who understands strategy. Maybe someone understands creative when it hit me in the club, basically their prime in the pump getting it. But they will sit together. They sent to get the analytics. People sit next to the creative people. It's in next you people. They work on it as they designed the experience. You don't do a strategy project and then do a A road map and then do an R P for technology enabled Waterfall does not work, but it's beyond even waterfall versus algebra. This is actually taking humans and consolidate that thinking New skill sets at the center in like an incubator way to do pilots to do prototyping to do things. If you want to create that new experience that we're talking about in any of these cases, you gotta hand CMO some kind of thing that can bring to the team and say, Look, here's an app that would enable this or he has a pilot We could try without boiling the ocean toe, actually create an experience that would move the needle or whatever. Lame corporate analogy. Just make more money and get some decent results in Get a beachhead, just small eatery through it. Glenn. Great Insights. This is a great time. We'd love to get you back on the Cuban girl down, and it's kind of design thinking, combined with execution on the front lines with customers. Center the value proposition. Great conversation before we and just give a quick plug for the business. What's going on with a sensor Interactive? How's the business going? What are your goals? How many people are working there? What's the geography is looked like? Give us enough. Thanks for asking So essential Interactive is enjoying its third year as being listed by at H magazine, is the largest digital agency in the world on the fastest growing Wei have coverage and a truly integrated global delivery model that hits every part of the of every market. And we're so excited. Tio have this growth because it's a way to show that the market is truly interested and being experienced lead and the way we're defining experience. We're seeing more and more clients moving from some of these incremental changes to really >> try to put the customer at the center of what they're doing. And, you know, X Ensure Interactive believes in this model it is. It's very much in some ways way. Call it a new kind of provider, like an experience agency for lack of a better term. TTO help companies drive that transformation, and it's >> done with people and technology, and we're been on a tear recently. Most are growth is organic, but we also do lots and lots of acquisitions to make these capabilities come together. All the creativity and the design and the strategy and the techniques and the run of it is all in one integrated team, and that is very, very helpful when you're trying to do some of the things we've been talking about and you're you guys. I think I'm the right way. This customer wave is really, really because with digital customers air in charge, they control their data. They're now going to shift is happening. We're starting to see some visibility into it. It was going to impact the economics process and business models, so I think it's just beginning. Congratulations really is thanks. And we're so excited because some of the >> client successes it's truly transformational somethings. You got it. Carnival or Marriott or or Subway. I >> mean, it's a whole different >> kind of way of looking at experience, and it's >> really helping people. It's not just for its good for the business, but we're really changing people's lives and helping have experiences be meaningful. It's been wonderful and fun for us. Glenn, Thanks so much for sharing this insights here in the Cube. Hey, thanks for going the data Here live adobe summat. Twenty nineteen, Jumper, jefe Rick, Stay tuned for more coverage after this short break