live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Adobe summit 2019 brought to you by Adobe welcome back everyone live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe summit 2019 I'm John fry with Jeff Frick two days of wall-to-wall coverage our next guest is Josh Van Tonder group product marketing manager to Dobby thanks for joining us thanks pleasure you're managing the marketing of the products of experienced manager within the platform great event here really the keynote we have agreed a good view good review this morning it's a great platform a lot of elements to it journey it's the Holy Grail that's super interesting and I mean I think you can see the Holy Grail you know it's it's just great actually hearing from the customers right I think it comes to life when you hear the stories they're telling kind of the solutions they're bringing a market on top of it it's it's it's very exhilarating for the product teams to see it all in action and coming to life through the customers you know we cover hundreds of events a year we hear all the stories everyone talks about innovation it's really happening here is gadot bees transform to cloud years ago so now you start to see Marketo Magento coming through the mix full platform architecture open API is open data this is the beginning of a sea change we started to seeing customers having the end-to-end experience where each functional element can do its job and connect with the data this is progressive that's great stuff it's great stuff so so where where are we what's going on with the product what's what's going on how our customers dealing with this because you got Best Buy up there forty million emails personalized yep personalization at scale yep I mean I think the the crux of what's going on is I think a lot of the organizations I mean essentially the name of the game is delivering personalized experiences right I mean how do you how do you get someone to have that moment that moment of truth where they they get to see and interact with the brand in a way that's relevant to that right I mean I think we all we all respond that way I think you know even statistics show that our own statistics show that so we've done some surveys of other consumers um it's 51 percent say I'm much more likely to buy something from a if it's personalized and 49 1% are gonna say look I'm gonna be more loyal to you because it is relevant to me which makes sense I think you and I would probably agree that if it's it's the nail on the head I want to bring up a point that the in the keynote the CEO said he said people don't buy products they buy experiences okay and this is now kind of become the the kind of the mission of all companies just seeing a big frame with direct-to-consumer yeah in all verticals not just B to B to C directly consumer so now companies can go direct to the consumer so how does that change like the ite equation because the old days were you know Bill stack and rack servers load some soft yeah sell it to a customer but now you're dealing with a user experience model that's everywhere yeah that's an interesting basis I mean a the crux of the issue is under the underneath that is it takes contents and data together to kind of deliver the great experience and at the end of the day IT is front and center as the enabler strategically for how that gets delivered I think what we've been seeing is they're they're sort of I would say four key pillars elements that that they've been using to turn their portfolio to be a strategic advantage so one is how do you manage omni-channel right I mean I guess it's getting further with your message so it's if that's essentially an omni-channel thing the other is being faster about getting to market with that message so you know maybe how does cloud play into that how does how do you enable the marketing teams and then I think the last thing and this is this is one that's been a hot topic is where does where does AI simultaneously help drive that better experience so I think those are sort of the pieces we're seeing coming into play from an IT standpoint where they they have a lot of a lot of influence to advance the overall business mission you know Jeff and I were talking about our intro about how the cloud has really in changed the game with Adobe and the customer base you know the old cloud conversation around DevOps and around the building applications work waterfall processes are gonna be dismantled by agility process based processes you started to see that now with content and creative yet we're agility and feed and data are now the new thing so a Content developer is kind of like a software developer for software you guys are providing cloud tech capabilities for content developers yeah creative developers that's right kind of metaphor there what's how do you view that how do customers react to that that's interesting I mean I think you you know usually you bring up the one side is cloud agility and the corollary to that it's just overall content velocity if you will right so I think from a cloud standpoint the the model would be you know how do i how do I get to market faster and in more geographies how to get to more geographies how do I you know support rolling out new infrastructure or new products more more quickly on the cloud infrastructure and then how do I deal with growth right how do i ami system if you look at it from the content lens which i think is what you're getting at there's a similar paradigm in terms of this agility so from an IT standpoint how do you enable someone that's on the marketing team to discover their content to reuse it more effectively and then deploy it more effectively and there are many pieces to the ité equation that fundamentally empower if you will let that velocity in terms of being able to manage discover and and frankly optimize that content as you get it out there so it's an interesting thing that I think we've been doing a lot of looking at a lot of product innovation specifically from an Adobe standpoint in terms of actually enabling that that product velocity which I mean the platform out there basically is the architecture for the platform to do that yes elements so this is just a perfect storm that's come together finally in terms of capability because we've talked about 360 view of the customer ad nauseam and and we've talked about omni-channel for many many many years but I think the execution on those was was was certainly lagging behind the vision but is it now because of the integration of the platform is it because the Big Data architectures is it because now you know it's it's it's you're reading real-time data on ingest you're not going back this normal data what is it this now and abling just actually execute on the vision that we've been talking about for years yeah I mean I think there there are multiple pieces kind of coming together that are helping so I think you know as you said I think in some sense what you're getting at is there there were historically many silos of how these things have historically been managed and what we're seeing is is a trend towards centralizing that information because ultimately you can drive more insights by looking at it and it's just you get more velocity for reusing it so you know to look at it from let's just take an example of the V omni-channel so if we look at it purely from delivering content what we as say an IOT device comes to market or you have these more advanced single page apps on the web page or an Alexa right what we saw is a rise of separate systems in some sense to manage those but now we're seeing a trend where gosh if we were to have all that content in one place if we had all the analytics behind that in one place we can more effectively personalize the customer journey across each of those and that's effectively what you're hearing a lot of today is can I have sort of a centralized but hybrid model that supports through api's getting that information to different touch points and then the data engine that will allow the personalization across each of that those touch points and that I think is the fundamentally the part that's unlocking a lot of value and is it the acceptance of the of the AI and and kind of the machine learning that's going to help you do it because you can't you can create 40 million emails with the people right you mean you have to have automation and you have to have some intelligence behind that you just can't do it manually so is that where we finally kind of broken through so that I can send 40 million different emails in one campaign with some intelligence and some logic behind who's got what yeah I think you hit the nail and I had that right I mean I think if personalization is the name of the game and you're interacting on more touch points with more pieces of contents how do you get it right for each audience and so that's where AI is it's just adds tremendous a tremendous velocity and help for businesses to get that right so I think you can think of it almost this pipeline to deliver the experience so on one hand how do you create that experience hey I can play a role how do you manage it internally hey I can play a role in terms of discovering the assets and we're using it delivering it it can play a role and actually getting the right content out there I'll give you some examples of that in a second but and then the final piece is it has you know the actual optimization of that right so to give you some examples what we've seen happening is you can literally use the AI the the data on interactions of how people interacting across your system and actually create interfaces on-the-fly for specific segments of audiences right so instead of say I as a marketer creating that interface you know using web development or tooling why not have the system actually recompose what is being served up you know maybe a certain layout with multiple columns works for some audiences maybe it just needs to be one banner with a certain type of image a I can actually do that for you by looking at the analytics of you know how do you react to certain things versus me and drawing corollaries so there's a lot of police places along that chain where AI is the impact is productivity obviously because you know the right to queries or figure out what's come in that's presented to you that's good that's kind of the impact of the marketer right it's about yeah it's about scaling the market or right I mean I think that's one of the big challenges from a business standpoint is you know your team's never big enough to serve every person every single customer as a marketer so that's where a I essentially unlocks that that scale it gives you a marketing team of thousands where you may only have a team of a hundred or twenty depending on the size of the order to tune that up in terms of a customer I've got an Adobe I'm Adobe customer I go the Adobe cloud experience cloud how do I tune this up I mean is there a way that you guys have figured out that allows them to kind of get it up and running fast without a lot of complexity yeah that's like that's a good question it's I mean that's actually it's really critical because that from a marketing standpoint you know IT can bring to bear a number of different technologies but unless they're easy to adopt you're not gonna go anywhere so I think the trick is almost giving marketers the easy button so I think that's that's where a lot of the magic and AI happens is you pick one specific problem you know in Adobe's case we pick a problem where we know we have a lot of intelligence about creative assets and we have visibility and how those are being used so if we bring those together we can solve specific problems about discovering content or how we deliver that optimally but the wit to answer your specific question it's almost as though we try to give an easy button for the marketer right so I feed you a bunch of say audience segments and then I plug you into my my analytics data press a button and I ideally it's gonna just figure it out for me write it and and then test if it works that's the key thing is once you get in a market test it right and and it can do that for you and I don't think there's enough you know kind of highlight on that where you know those dramatic before to do a/b testing now you can test everything you know at such scale it's such detail into your point you think you know your segments and you can create your own segments but you can actually let the Machine create segments based on actual behavior of people which I guess really is enabled by most you know so many of your interactions now with brands is digital so give you that opportunity to grab a piece of that exhaust do the analytics and get some insight out of it yeah that's exactly right I mean I you know data the scale of data I mean everybody's flooded with data right now but it's really where's the needle in the haystack and I think that's that's where AI plays a crucial role I mean it it can do things like figure out anomalies on on your interactions across a large swath of users right if something something you see in the data is it's statistically normal or not and should I pay attention to it and what should i do from it so AI starts to play a role in that it can even do simple things like we all have mobile phones we all want to watch more video on mobile phones the problem is as a business as a marketing team and and I'm sure even you know you folks have the same situation is the content that you create may not be ready to be consumed appropriately on each device right so if I pick up my mol device has it been optimized properly so you can do things like have a I pick the focal points in a video and crop out the rest and follow the focal point and only show that on the phone so well certainly gonna call you up because we have a lot of video we don't have twenty videos here today so a lot of luck but this is the norm people gonna have more velocity of videos that's that's podcasts yep blog posts so the waterfalls I was getting earlier this waterfall thing is over it's more of an agile environment so I got to ask the customer question is that reality yet grounded in the customer base or is it still early adopters or I guess the question is what's the pattern that you're seeing in customers Bart what makes a good market or what makes a good organization to embrace the kind of change that's on our doorstep right now it's a good that's a good question and it I think it takes two to tango I think there's a an IT elements and a marketing elements and I think we're seeing an evolution and how how the two work together in this new model so from an IT standpoint they are the enabler for example to get content onto multiple multiple different channels from a from our marketers standpoint they ultimately are the ones that define and help articulate the right message and type of content if IT and marketers are working well together the more the the IT team is going to enable that market or T marketing team to essentially iterate quickly in content so there's a whole set of things that can be done to enable the marketing team to be agile and getting that content out there so I think you know the evolution I would say is is in in how the two teams are working so I think your waterfall model and past I'd say it's entirely gone but it has been reframed in a ways exploring it that's a good way to test to see if if IT and CM a CIO and the CMO working together yeah probably aligned to four change right they're not maybe not it's so I mean I'll give you a very specific example so one thing that we've been seeing in our world is so for example on cloud you know there's a lot of things you can do more quickly traditionally there have been some waterfall development models what we've seen is IT now has a DevOps process where they're very fast and rolling out application updates but if you can actually standardize that if you can create a pipeline for Creek getting code onto the onto the different environments if you test it and roll it out faster what that means for marketing and business is the time to market goes down so for example we've actually been baking that into our products can we literally here's a best-in-class pipeline for doing an agile development model it's already pre-built into the the infrastructure to enable IT to kind of go faster on the behalf of so here's a question for you put you on the spot sure in all the stores major shifts is always gaps there's always gaps in new markets or white spaces so there's three areas technology gaps skills gaps and culture gaps yep can you talk about what you see as the key gaps that people are starting to get over on figure out how to fill those gaps because they can become direct walkers if they're not resolved so tech gap skills gap and culture gap so just because we talking tech a lot let's reverse it and talk you know sort of the the team and organization elements I mean you think one thing that we've we've definitely been seeing is is if you will the the alignment of what was traditionally a channel management is now moving more closely into the CDO or CMO arm which I think is a good thing right I think what we see as some of our leading customers is the marketing and and chief digital officer x' have increasingly more alignment and a seat at the table of how the individual channel line of businesses are operating and that's a very good thing because it does help close the loop on the customer journey across those channels which I think it's traditionally been a bit of a dilemma so I would say that's one thing we're seeing much more is that the channels the channel management actually going under directly or more alignment with the marketing arm or something like a CDO so on the org side that's one area and that helps with the velocity right and they're rearranging the org structures to align with how does content me to be shared across these teams do you really own that channel is it is it do we do we have a customer journey that is owned across all channels right and I think that's an important conversation that these companies have been struggling with in our and I've evolved a lot in the last few years and we talked about the tech gap already but skills gap what skills are out there that are needed obviously day the machine learning yeah a big one date the machine learning stuff I mean I think Adobe's fuel horse on the races I think we're trying to democratize some of that so as I said earlier the hope is for the marketing team we we give them a neat easy path to to unlock that there are areas where there's been big growth like so for example the front and frameworks and development for single page applications that's an area from an IT standpoint where we've seen a tremendous growth in that technology set and and how that plays a role with the rest of the infrastructure yeah and and and simply how does that actually align with the traditional tools they've been using for managing their websites I think what we've seen is that they're now skill wise and technology wise actually taking of you that you you still have one centralized platform but ultimately you'll have IT developer resources that plug in to say one central hybrid content management system for example any new personas popping out of this just shift that's going on with cloud and and creativity experience cloud any new roles that are emerging that you see popping out yeah I mean I so I mean one example we've seen and it's it's it's been an evolution but you know for example we've seen the rise of something called journey managers right which just goes back to what I was mentioning earlier which are our people that their business and tack align but they're interested in understanding how does a customer actually move across a specific journey so they're mapped to if you will a task a customer's trying to do and how do i optimize that you know assuming and knowing that you know if Josh is going to try and get some customer support he's not just always going to call the support line he's going to try other things and how do I simplify that for him and taking a very holistic view so I think that's that's one thing we've seen more of and it's it's a you know a great way to approach it fascinating insights Josh thanks for coming on I'll give you the final word I put a plug in for what you're working on experience manager what's new what's happening yeah absolutely so we're I'm part of the experience manager team so we're part of the organization that that helps our brands deliver and manage digital experiences so essentially we're enabling if you will omni channel delivery and management of those experiences and a key thrusts for us are around enabling IT to get content effectively across channels and also experience intelligence how do we how do we deliver AI and machine learning innovation to make the marketers job easier for getting personalized experiences to market and enabling IT to support them more efficiently so there's a number of innovations and exciting things that we're very excited about it someone for the congratulations Josh van Tonder group product marketing manager at adobe experience manager his product breaking down what's going on here at Adobe summit and in the industry I'm Jennifer Jeff rick stay with us for more coverage here at adobe summit after this short break