>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. (techno music) >> Okay, welcome back, we're live here at the Mandalay Bay, this is theCUBE's coverage of Oracle's Modern Customer Experience event, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE and my co-host Peter Burris, Chief Researcher at Wikibon.com, and our next guest is Nick Edouard, who's the President CM of LookBookHQ, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much-- >> I was talking hockey, so I'm all distracted, I'm ruined, I'm disappointed, good to see you, before we get into it, it's all intelligent content, some of the things that are going on on this platform. But take a minute to talk about what your company does so we have some context. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're a marketing technology company based in Toronto. We are a very big part of the Oracle Marketing App Cloud. And we kind of pick out where Oracle basically leaves off, where the Marketing Cloud stops. So a lot of what happens in the Marketing Cloud is focused on generating moments of attention and orchestrating that kind of buyer's journey. We're what happens in the destination side of the click. So we focus on the intelligent use of content. How do we deliver content? We think of every moment of attention as core to a marketer, that that really is their currency, the attention. We need to actually think that marketers, B2B marketers in particular, need to think a lot more like B2C, to think more like publishers. They're obsessed with attention. We shouldn't be satisfied with clicks or form fills. We need to actually be capitalizing on those moments of attention to make sure that if Bob is really my whitepaper, then I need to know that he's actually reading it. How do I then move him to the next best content asset, or give him a choice of content assets in session? So in essence what we do, what our company does, and we help companies like Thomson Reuters and ADP, in fact ADP is speaking on about half this afternoon, Polycom, Quintiles, whole host of big Eloqua customers. What we do is to help them take their content use model from something that looks and feels like Blockbuster, one size fits all, I don't know if actually Bob watched the video that he walked out of the shop with or the DVD, rather. And hence, why Blockbuster is RIP. And we take that and make it far more like Netflix. We make it far more on demand. >> Instrumented. >> Yeah, it's very much like-- >> This is interesting, the attention to impact is interesting, and you know, attention is essentially aided awareness, which is the Holy Grail in marketing, right? I mean, getting people to have some aid to a final destination or transaction of some sort. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, very much so. I mean in the B2B side, obviously a marketer's job is to generate high quality marketing qualified leads and the real emphasis is on the Q, qualified. But companies like SiriusDecisions report that 94% of marketing qualified leads don't close. And that's a damning statistic for a B2B marketer. And our whole hypothesis is, and we're proving this to our customers is the reason why that happens is they're not qualified. Bob might have clicked on an e-mail, he might have filled in a form, et cetera, but did he read the content? We need to get an MQL to engage with five, seven, ten pieces of content to become a high quality MQL. And if we're only doing that one piece of content every engagement, that's really hard to do. No wonder our sales stat was this low. >> Well, we also need to understand that there's a progression people go through as they learn. It's not just that we want them to click on nine pieces of content-- >> Absolutely. >> As much as we want to see a pattern. So they've read this content and there was a suggestion made or an option provided and they then took the option, which is an even stronger suggestion that they've absorbed it, they've internalized it, and they're now part of a journey. So how does, I really like the idea that we're on the delivery side of the click, so you're, you know, we got all the stuff that's happening on the presenting things, the options, and then you're ensuring that when they click, whatever is being delivered is the highest quality-- >> Yeah. >> In terms of driving that customer forward in the journey, have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. So if we take, if you take something which Eloqua's done a fantastic job, for example, of teaching their community of their customers about lead nurture and the typical nurture track looks and feels something like six emails over six weeks advertising content offer A, then content offer B, content offer C. And typically they're scheduled 10:00 a.m on a Thursday. Now this would be great, if we could get Bob and the other 12,000 people that we sent the email to to click on every single one of those emails. And the reality is, if I've got low, single-digit clickthrough rate, it's not going to happen. So what we do instead is, well, if they're engaging with A, why don't we give them B in the same session? While they're here, while we've done the hard work in getting their attention. And to your point, Peter, we're tracking that, and then we can start to make some really intelligent decisions going forward, as to, oh it worked, this is what resonated with Bob. This content asset's actually performed well. So we have two basic approaches to this. One is we let the marketer curate that experience, decide what A, B, C is et cetera. Or we actually use machine learning to auto-generate. If Bob arrives at A, what should B, C, and D et cetera be? So to that, it's very much like Netflix, where we kind of base our algorithm, it looks and feels very similar to Netflix's content discovery. That's great for anonymous or net new prospects in the top of your funnel, once you've figured out what they're actually interested in, then you can actually-- >> How does it work for you guys? Do you require registration, because content in these days has two flavors, free and gated. So there's always that dilemma, how much is free, you want some flow, tension, and then you go on conversion, gated, maybe premium content, how do you guys view that, is that part of or independent of what you do? >> No, it's a big part of what we do. And, one of the things, one of the capabilities that we have in our application is actually the ability to serve forms based on time and behavior. So, if they've engaged with three content assets, then maybe I actually want them to give me some more information or put up a hand. So we can make the form time-based, you can let them try before you buy, as it were, or you can hard gate it. We use Eloqua Forms in our application, so all that information flows as normal, as the work flows all get triggered, et cetera. It's very much up to the marketer how they want to use it, but one of the things, what we increasingly see amongst our customers, is the most successful do try to take the forms out of the way. Once we've got, once they are a member of our known database, how much more information do we really need them to volunteer, particularly with our ability to augment that contact record with other sources of data. Asking the marketer, I'm sorry, asking the prospect for it isn't always the most sensible thing to do. >> It's the free versus registration, but it's also new kinds of content. One of the things I like to say is software is content. Trying software, for example, is content. Or presenting an interactive experience that has a software element associated with it is a crucial part of gaging where people are. Are you able to start embedding your tooling directly into some of these more interactive elements and choose options within that interaction, or is it more options on static content? >> It could be both. So we are fundamentally content diagnostic. The best way to think about what we do is really as a very smart wrapper that goes around the content and then that can be embedded or it could be shared however you want, it could be used as a destination in its own right. So, sure if you want to kick something off with some former interactive content, absolutely. We also pull all different types of content together. So if your content is distributed or you want to use third party content, reviews, an expert in the space that's writing about something, and you pull that in and use that as a jumping off point. And what's really interesting is frequently it is the sequence of content that's the most interesting thing, not the behavior or engagement of a single asset. >> Right, and so part of the experience that sort of marketing is developing here translates into other disciplines within the business, for example, service. Come into respects, one of the things that you're presumably testing is is the prospect learning the right stuff that actually makes them more qualified. Well the same thing could be said for service, self-service. Is the person going through the right sequencing? Are you also seeing a demand for this kind of a product over on the service side and does that tie marketing back together? >> That's a great question. And one of the things that when we kind of officially launched our company in the application, three or four years ago now, we focused very much upon demand generation. Like we knew the problem that were helping themselves, but there are a handful of our customers, Cisco being one, actually, where actually at the moment, all they do is use us on the customer marketing side of things. How do I drive adoption, how do I drive cross-sell and upsell? I mean, all this is, we've got to remember that attention's what we're looking for and the way that we achieve that is using content as our primary asset as a marketer. The channels are important, the creative is important, but these really are content offers. Bob doesn't buy because he clicks on an email, Bob buys because he reads the stuff and watches the things. >> Peter: But it's attention and competence. >> Yeah. >> Right, so it's, Sy Syms used to say, I think it was Sy Syms, used to say that an informed customer is the best customer. You want a competent customer. >> Nick: Yeah. >> In many respects, the process of moving from the marketing qualified an MQL to an SQL it is, is that customer competent enough to actually engage with a sales person or somebody else to do something. >> That is spot on. So what we're seeing across our customer base is improvement in conversion rates from MQL to SAL for example. So McAfee, Intel Security, now McAfee again, they've seen a three times increase in the MQL to SAL conversion rates. Rockwell Automation has actually made a 300x return on their investment in us in nine months by passing higher qualified leads to the sales team. I think they generated $250 million in additional net-- >> Peter: Rockwell? >> Rockwell, yeah. ADP, that's doing our customer case study this afternoon, a 3x increase in marketing influence opportunities, and a 6x increase in closed won marketing opportunities. So more, but to your point here, better qualified. We know that these people are actually read our stuff, therefore the conversation is easier. They are actually generally qualified. Carrier's been proving that out by actually 2.4 times faster through the funnel to MQL, and then their ACP is 2.3 times higher. Why? Because they're not getting the pushback in the sale cycle because the prospect has self-educated and they see the value now. >> Nick, I want to get your thoughts on something that's involved in our, we're in a independent media company and we don't really have any ads on our site at all, but we have a sponsorship model, we have data. But it's interesting, I'm reading an Ad Age article right now that says for the first time ever, digital has surpassed TV. I mean, I can remember-- >> Wow. back in the days, it's always this little slice and it's getting bigger and bigger. But for the first time, desktop and mobile ad revenue surpasses TV for the first time, 22% upswing from the previous year. So, digital ads, some are calling it native advertisement, whatever the hell that means, is a key part of the attention cycle. So the role that a marketer needs to take with channels as important, and a lot of content marketers are failing these days that we talk to because they're not being authentic with their message and the users can smell-- >> Right. >> You know, non-relevant content. Some are clever and make it link-baitish and some are actually really super smart and actually do authentic content. But, so that's kind of progression. That's an evolution in the industry, but from a data standpoint, there are platforms out there, like SiliconANGLE and others, that have an opportunity for impression and attention in real time. How does your system, how does your clients, and how do people deal with that? Is there a way, is there mechanisms? >> So we have two large publisher customers that run multiple different properties and have very large communities they're looking to monetize and they're all part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, they use their tech stat, and we're helping them in two ways. Firstly, kind of from an advertising thing, like high value added, advertising solutions, for want of a better description. How do I help to monetize my community, not just pass to HP, if they're the advertiser, here's a list of names of people that filled in the form. Here's actually people that are engaging with your content. And it's a mix of our editorial and your content to tell a story. And then one of the things that we're starting to explore for them is actually far more on the native side of things, actually being embedded as... >> John: An asset? >> Essentially, as a native ad in its own right, which can kind of get launched. That's something which I'm keen to explore further. And at the heart of it is, it's probably an even bigger problem on the ad tech side that it is on the martech side, but people like Gary Vaynerchuk are starting to ask the ad tech industry, we need a dose of common sense here, was the marketing consumed? And that's something which I am fascinated with, we're starting to see that we can actually identify by channels. This channel might, well this particular display provide the SP may have generated, you say, oh I don't know, 1,000 clicks in the last 30 days. Did it do anything? Did my-- >> A lot of times valuable. >> Exactly. >> You know at the end of the day, to sustain attention, you have to be valuable. I think John, we're talking really about a continuum from impression to attention to competence. We want to work with competent buyers because it cuts down the time that we spend on it, it reduces the risk that we're wasting our time, and quite frankly, it's a lot easier to work with someone who's really engaged and wants to succeed with whatever we're offering. >> It's also, he mentioned the publisher angle, I was thinking also from the customer angle, because I'm a customer and a marketer, I'm going to be looking for mechanisms to go to. The publisher wants better monetization of their communities, so have you seen any patterns in the business that could be a use case for helping customers operationalize, and we had great success with our business in the sense of saying, hey, we're engaging users, so that's good, you should join in with us at the right time not, you know, try to do it six hours too late, right, it's like being late to the party, right. So that real time piece is really super important. >> For sure. We've actually just changed the way that we're integrating with Eloqua to speed that up. So now we've actually moved to using web hooks as part of the integration and using their map form processing capabilities. Because it's faster, it's more extensive, it's more scalable. It means we can get very rich in content engagement data into someone's hands faster and better. And, I think, what is it? 50% of people buy from the first person that shows up, so being able to do that is critically important. >> Member-based communities are getting a lot of trends, traction these days. Some call, you know, subscribers, buyer walls, but member-based. >> So something we're starting to look at is how do we actually start to auto-generate the content experience, yeah, around kind of key accounts or topics, et cetera. >> Fascinating conversation, Nick, appreciate it, coming on. >> Nick: My pleasure. >> LookBookHQ, check 'em out, doing intelligent content, scaling content, looking at data, congratulations on your success, look forward to following up with you on some of the native advertising solutions that we, me need, that you need and congratulations, Oracle's certainly taking advantage of it. >> See you next time. Cheers. >> Thanks for coming out. Be back with more live coverage, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris after this short break. (techno music)