(energetic music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back and we are here live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Oracle's Modern C-EX, Modern Customer Experience Event. Part of Oracle Marketing Cloud, I am John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Adrian Chang, director of customer programs at Oracle Marketing Cloud, also emcee of the Markie and big part of that program. Congratulations on the success of the Markie's awards, which were given out last night. I read your blog post on the site this morning. >> Thank you >> Great to see you again and welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, always great to be here and I love Modern Customer Experience and that marketing is a part of it. >> It's really been a great transformation this year. The simplification of just now narrowing it down to one simple value president, Modern Customer Experience, which encapsulates a lot of stuff. Quickly review what that is and then let's talk about the Markies. >> Absolutely, so I start with the Markies and so we have a history of celebrating excellence in data-driven modern marketing. So, this program has grown tremendously over the past 11 years. When I look at the submissions, they're customers that are focusing on acquisition and loyalty retention. And they read these stories all the time and spend weeks preparing the submissions. So this event is all about how can we share our intent to have our customers have a good experience as part of Oracle and then how can we help them delight their customers in delivering experiences and create value at every touch point. >> One of the thing I really like about the change in the name from Modern Marketing Experience to Modern Customer Experience is you move from the process, the function, to the outcome and the result. So how are the Markies reflecting that this year? >> Absolutely. So if you think about where we started, again it was six categories celebrating excellence in B2B marketing and reaching folks behind a single device, their laptop computer. So cut to 2017, the customers' preferences, their activities are fluid. So great marketing requires you to use a series of channels to reach them everywhere. And so, marketers have to balance brand with action, and then also deliver on intent. So the Markies have had to evolve to think about the habits. So the account-based marketing team of the year was a new award that we gave out that really represented the intent. Are people actually doing this, we have tons of great stories. So we have to balance out a bit of the usage of the product and the technology and embracing the new strategies and what's current within the marketplace. >> So the future of marketing as it goes into data, that's been the theme here. All of our interviews, day one. And certainly the key notes, even Mark was giving a great specific example. Now data is at the heart of it. Adaptive intelligence is the theme. You can see the dots are connecting the convergence of where the Markies are showing traction are some pretty interesting use cases. Any notables you'd like to share that kind of highlight that data piece? >> Absolutely. So our winner for best email campaign was from Jetstar and they're an airline in Austraila. What's great is they have been able to find ways to-- so when you get an email about travel, sometimes you book at one particular point and your preferences and relationship with that airline may change. Your travel destinations may change. So the fact that they can optimize the information at the time of send, sending the weather, curing you to maybe upsell and look at other opportunities to have a pleasant experience, that's amazing. So Laura Ipsen spent some time talking about how we at Oracle are looking to evolve preferences, so going from one to many, to one to one, and the hallmark which is one to you. And I think the Jetstar campaign, they use Oracle responses as a perfect example of that. The first award that we gave out was to Covance for account-based team of the year and by doing, setting up an account-based marketing strategy, putting it in place, getting all the stakeholders in sales in place, getting the discipline on the content. They were able to increase their engagement with key accounts by a significant margin. And they were delighted to be among those that are partners to celebrate that achievement. >> Adrian, I want you to talk about, for the folks that are watching who aren't here, the buzz in the hallways, because the hallways is always a good conversation, certainly the lunch table as well. I'll include that technically at the hallway, but people sitting down. >> Absolutely. >> AI has been front and center, but it's not being painted over, white-washed, "Oh! AI! It's hot so let's jump on the bandwagon." There's some real tech involved. What has been the reaction from customers in used cases that you hear in the hallways? >> Customers are excited about it. I think for a lot of our customers had the opportunity to hear Mark Heard talk about it. Where he embraced and said, "If you think about AI at the core, it's computing done real fast to help people make really rich decisions about what to do next." And so, I think our customers are still grappling with all the technology and how to get value out of their core platforms, how do they deliver on their initial objective and then we have a subset of our most mature, most excited, who are starting to put those data plots together, and start getting more predictive and allow the machine to do the work for you. But in order for you to have, to even think about it, you've got to have great, you've got to fill the cup with great data. And I think people are still getting there so that the machine isn't biased and you don't make the wrong decision about how to treat your customers. >> So just notable trending tweets I wanted to share with you, and again, get your reactions, because this is speaking to the customer in used case. One was from a part from our digitizing panel, Mark wrote "According to digitize, if you're not looking to use chatbots and AI, you're going to be out of business hashtag MME17", a little bit of that, legacy there. And then hashtag Modern CX. And the other one is, "Netflix is a great example of a company creating content combined with powerful AI targeting programs." Little bit of sample of some of the things we're seeing. Chatbots. It's a new interface. It's a new way to use data. Netflix content, which modern marketers need content in this platform. Picking a Netflix approach. So, kind of begs a question. Chatbots? Netflix? Kind of modern. Email? Old? So how do you get a marketer to get you to use the reliability of hardened critical infrastructure, like email, not going away anytime soon but, it's going to be one dimension of Netflix. Content marketing. Binge watching. All this content out there. Netflix and chatbots interface. Your thoughts? >> So my thought is I am, so I was in the room when I watched the chatbot piece and I loved the fact of the, we could live in a world where we could have a fluid customer experience anywhere. You can ask a question. I also support our communities where you ask a question and know you're automatically going to get an answer to the algorithm. So that delivers on that one to you scenario. So I'm super excited about it. When I look at the Netflix example, even to get the information on what the recommendation engine should be, you still need a lot of data. And you still need to know what are the habits of your customers who even land on that decision tree. So I love the fact that folks are thinking Netflix and thinking content, but that chatbot thing, oh my goodness. When people start doing that I can't wait to see those customers that win those Markies. >> Peter: But they have to do it right. >> They have to do it right. >> One of the dangers that marketing always faces is the idea that it's all about collecting information, having the customer give something to me and not giving something valuable in return. >> Adrian: Absolutely >> And the challenge that I see with chatbots is, and I think you agree John, is are chatbots going to be used to further automate information collection at the expense of really presenting value. The new marketing, the Modern Customer Experience, has to be focused on are we delivering value with the customer at every single interaction, not is the customer doing more for us inside of marketing. What do you think about that? >> So I agree. Cause if we do not know that we are creating value and that we're not, that we're adding friction into the problem, you pour that into your algorithm, there's going to bias. And so then, you can't make a decision about how to feed information into the machine and not have the right information that says we don't have the right region, we don't understand the behavior across all products. You can't have bias in the model at all. It has to be complete for you to then look at your customer base holistically. >> Yeah, we don't want to better automate bad marketing practices. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> We want to use these technologies to continuously drive to use a famous person's parlance a more perfect union between this marketer and the buyer. >> Adrian: Absolutely. >> John: Well you got a great article up on Martechseries, "This year has gone above and beyond, fully leverage and most innovative marketing technology to create customer centric campaigns that deliver outstanding results that Laurie has spent, Senior Vice President Chairman." Okay that's obviously marketing packaging for the quote, from PR, but what she's getting at is customer centric. Again this is the theme, multitude of technologies now in the platform. Very interesting. Are customers responding well to this platform and are they seeing the need to stand up thing quickly in these campaigns? >> Adrian: Absolutely. They are finding that there's more pressure to get interim value. They are absolutely buying into the platform message and we have quite a few customers who also were recognized for the use of multiple products and multiple partner related applications. And so we're actually seeing a nice trend in both. To do great marketing, part of the messaging, or part of Laura's talk track from today was people are freaked out about the data but if you find a way to harness it, you'll create experiences where you'll stop chasing the customers. They'll start chasing you cause you'll find the right way to have the conversation with them. >> And word of mouth gets around too. I'm going to ask you to pick your favorite child of the awards. Was there one that jumps out, without alienating all the winners. Is there one that you like? >> This is a really, really hard question for me. As you know I read all the submissions, I play a heavy role in writing the speech. So it's really hard. >> John: Here we go, the preamble, not picking one. Here we go! I don't like to pick my favorite child. No parent likes to do that. >> I don't like to pick my favorite child. This is a really, really hard thing. >> Okay, audience favorite? >> How are they different this year from last year? How about that? Or is there something general that shows, that kind of reinforces some of this customer experience or are you seeing a progress in how the Markies are evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm happy to answer that one. And so for the first time since 2012, we brought back the dinner. And so having the Markies and our customer celebration, it shows our intent as Oracle Marketing Cloud, for our customers as well. That we love and want them to have a great week and want to celebrate their accomplishments and get other people to the winning circle. So being at a table and feeling that energy, getting that opportunity to sit with an executive or sit with a member of a team is a really, really great lift to then come to an event with over 4,000 people and feel warm and feel included. So I think that was an important part, that was a huge feel. I mentioned that we added a account-based team of the year award. Again, you couldn't be in B2B marketing and hide from account-based marketing. It's everywhere. We also delivered an overall customer experience award, so we had two customer-related awards and we created one category. I personally the videos, so our best video submission categories won where the viewers got to pick. And I would say the reaction of Juniper taking home two trophies last night, if I had to pick one, because that one had bit of a go to it. >> Peter: Juniper? >> Juniper Networks. >> Really? >> John: Two awards. >> They won two awards last night. I loved their reaction as well as the reaction of our folks from Brazil. You know, really, really great stories from their use of data. We also had Chris Diaz, our leader of the year, who not only led really strong customer experience transformations across marketing, sales, and service. >> This is the CMO of Time Warner? >> Uh no, that's Kristin. >> Kristi? >> Uh yeah, that's Kristin at Time Warner. I'm talking about Chris Diaz who is also driving sustainability efforts in Africa. It's really transformational. Huge, huge advocate of Oracle. As is the team at Kenya Airways. There's some really feel good moments. There are really exciting moments, you can feel it. People were hugging each other. People were laughing. People brought their own noise cannons and sparklers. >> Who doesn't love an awards show? When you're giving out great trophies? >> You know, we always get the comparison to the Oscars, and so this year it felt like the Golden Globes. >> So you handed out the wrong award. >> So you had a couple of times when the winner, when the wrong winner was >> We actually did not have that but we actually did joke about it. We embraced it. So Kayla Sullivan helped us with the awards distribution. And that was fun. The trophy itself is actually made by the same designer who makes the Emmy. And I believe I said that last year. But the feel was more like the Golden Globes. There was refreshments and opportunity to have there. >> John: It was well done. It looked great on photos. Big crowd. You had the jibs and all the cameras. Great camera angles. >> We had a drone do the delivery so we played with some new drone deliveries >> John: That's the next one up on Amazon delivering your packages by drone, you know, dropping in. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So we had one delivered via tweet and then we had one that was delivered via drone and so we covered all their risk management pieces in advance. And I'm just super happy that InVision, who partnered with us in hosting and producing the event, were able to get some of these things cleared. So our intent was let's be futuristic, let's be digital, let's be now. And they managed to incorporate that into the show for us. >> Well, Adrian. Congratulations on all the great work with the Markies and continued success. What's next next year? What do you guys look, I know, processing, you got to have a little fun now. Relax a little bit. But as you look forward to next year's Markies, you're watching, you've got your submission. It's kind of like the college admissions. You want to know who the judge is. Here he is. What are you looking for for next year? Have you though about it, any ideas? Random thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a great question. It takes us about seven months to actually plan. To sit down and actually plan our calendar from submission peer, the content. And so, we tend to create the categories that are aspirational. So we likely will figure out what's the best way to incorporate the trend. Get them out early to drive customers to get really excited about what's next. We're talking about AI now. What will we be talking about in six months? I'm looking forward to to hearing more customers share about the value their getting from Marketing Cloud, the new channels that they're using, how they've overcome barriers within their organizations to do new and great things. And really focus on taking these stories and telling them all year. >> And that's speed and empowerment. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Adrian Chang. Here in theCUBE back with Markies update with great commentary. Great to see you. Looking great, love the outfit. Lookin' good, as always. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> Peter: Took me a while to figure out what that was though The flower. What is that thing? From here it's like >> It's good. Looks good on you. Adrian Chang, here inside theCUBE bringing all the Markie action, all the great coverage. It's theCUBE. We'll have more live coverage after the short break. (energetic music)