Ultraviolet Keynote Sessions: Martin Kihn

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This is a podcast episode titled, Ultraviolet Keynote Sessions: Martin Kihn. The summary for this episode is: <p><em>This is the fourth episode of the Ultraviolet Keynote Series where we share the recordings of our keynote sessions from our Ultraviolet conference this year.</em> In this keynote, <em>In the Clouds</em> host and RVP, Sales at Lev Bobby Tichy chats with Martin Kihn, SVP Strategy, Marketing Cloud at Salesforce to discuss how marketers can effectively utilize data to power their marketing efforts. From the value of customer data platforms, to the move to first person data, to data-driven AI strategies, to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, they'll cover everything marketers want to know about getting the most out of their data. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p>
✨The Origin of Salesforce's CDP
02:07 MIN
🔎"The single view of the customer is not an end in itself"
02:03 MIN
💻How does third party data relate to the CDP?
02:43 MIN
🌉Bridging Known and Unknown Data Together
02:33 MIN
🖇Data Accessibility vs Data Replication
01:51 MIN
🤝 What does a company need to have in place to implement a CDP?
01:44 MIN

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In the Clouds podcast. In the Clouds is a marketing cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience obsessed, and podcast host Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful, one- on- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how tos, and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to In the Clouds podcast. This is Bobby Tichy, along with Cole Fisher, and today we're continuing our recapping of the ultraviolet keynote speakers with Marty Kihn, and one of the biggest celebrities on the planet, and one of the most ignorant minds out there who interviews Marty during this session.

Cole Fisher: I'll say so. I can agree with that for sure. Yeah, so I actually, when I was listening to this, I was like, oh, this is going like, this is going really well. This is a really cool interview. And then randomly, the two of them would break into just a conversation break, where they would just go off on a tangent of something awful like Taylor Swift music, or... So, as long as you can get through those hurdles, it's a really good conversation with some good detours on the way.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. And really what we spent the half the time talking about when we were talking about pop culture was CDPs, and Marty, along with his coworker at Salesforce; Chris O'Hara wrote the book, Customer Data Platforms, which I highly recommend, even though I haven't read it. I'm just recommending it. But really talking through like the need for a CDP, what a CDP actually is, how it can help organizations to really diving into some of the details of a CDP. And then like Cole said, if you're not there for the CDP conversation, stay around for Taylor Swift. Marty was also the head writer for pop- up video on VH1. We talk about that a little bit. So, it's a good listen. It's not bad.

Cole Fisher: It really is cool, and he's got some cool stories. But it's really interesting too is anybody that's interfacing right now with Salesforce products, anybody that's working with data and integrations to said products, or anybody in the marketing space, CDP is one of those terms that over the last few years has been coming up more and more. So this is a really helpful conversation just to break down where it all started, what it means, where it's going. ReallY cool conversation.

Bobby Tichy: Great. Hope you guys enjoy this conversation with myself and Marty Kihn. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Ultraviolet Fireside Chat with Marty Kihn, the SVPVP of marketing cloud strategy at Salesforce. In preparing for these sessions, the more I found out about Marty, the more I was intrigued, so really excited for this conversation. He's got an incredible background and a wealth of wide ranging experience. So excited to dive into our main topic of CDPs based on Marty's book, Customer Data Platforms, but also some of his other career accomplishments that have nothing to do with technology. So excited to jump for those. Marty, thank you for joining us. If you wouldn't mind starting with a brief introduction of yourself and experience and we'll dive in.

Marty Kihn: Yeah. Thank you, Bobby. And thank you to Lev for inviting me. I'm very excited. Lev is a very valued partner of ours at Salesforce, and we do a lot of great work together. And so I'm really happy to be here. And I did want to, of course, mention this book. I don't know if you can see it; Customer Data Platforms, co- written with my friend, Chris, O'Hara, also at Salesforce. It's not all about Salesforce, it's really just about the category of customer data platforms. It just came out. So I commend it to all of you for your gift giving needs and also just for self- improvement. And it is my fourth book. The other ones I wrote by myself, they were memoirs, and that's my side gig as an author. My first one was called House of Lies, and that was about being a management consultant, and it was turned into a television show. The main character's named Marty Kaan. And if you've seen it, you can already tell that he's nothing like me at all. It was highly Hollywoodized. And then I wrote another one. It was a self- help book about business satire. And then another one about my dog, actually, the tender side. In my day job, I work my line with the product strategy team at Salesforce in the marketing cloud. So that's the MarTech and adtech suite of products, trying to future proof it and make sure we're going in the right direction. I've been heavily involved with the customer data platform rollout, which is our biggest announcement of recent years. And then before that, I worked at Gartner. I was an analyst for five years, covering marketing clouds, and I was in the advertising business doing measurement and so on. So, as you said, I have a varied career.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. Well, the one thing that you didn't mention was the Pop- Up Video piece on VH1.

Marty Kihn: Oh, how did you find out? I hid it on the internet. I hid it.

Bobby Tichy: But before we go there, just curious, you mentioned the other three books you've written have all been side projects on your own. Do you just really love to write, or what called you to write those books and be in publishing?

Marty Kihn: It's a long and funny story, sort of funny, not to my mother, but to me looking back. But I always wanted to be a writer. So I came to New York in the nineties and I worked in magazines and publishing and I did okay. But I realized I'd never be able to own my own apartment. So I went back to business school. And I remember when I went back to business school, this was before the dotcom crash. It was during that, the heyday, the late nineties, and then 2000. And I said, all right, I'm quitting writing now forever. It didn't work out. I could never buy an apartment, and I'm going to be a business person. And then it came out and became a consultant. And the first thing I did was start to write this memoir about consulting. And ironically enough, that was my most successful book. But I didn't get successful until I actually quit. So I don't know what the lesson is there.

Bobby Tichy: That's funny. Was it something that you wrote as you went along as a management consultant, or did you write it at the end as a kind of a almost like a memoir of your time as a management consultant?

Marty Kihn: No, it was in the moment. In fact it started as a dictionary. I don't know if I've told anyone this; consultants speak funny, and the reason they speak funny is-

Bobby Tichy: inaudible.

Marty Kihn: You do, and not Lev, but other consultants will sometimes use language in a way to obscure their lack of actual knowledge about whatever the topic is. So I was making fun of that kind of consultant and at a lesser firm. And so I thought, well, I'm going to create a consultant to English dictionary. So whenever they say something like leverage, it means use, or a hard stop means I have to leave, I'm bored or something. So I just created this consultant English dictionary, and then it turned into a memoir. It got out of control, but I would actually write it at work, so.

Bobby Tichy: We could probably spend the next hour talking about that dictionary. Is the juice worth the squeeze, or perspective? All these different buzzwords that have taken over crosstalk digital market... Yeah. There's a good one. Yeah.

Marty Kihn: I had a column in Fast Company some years ago and I actually, I took that one boiling the ocean. I said, what would it take to boil the ocean? How much energy? And it turns out there isn't enough energy on earth to do that, so it's not possible.

Bobby Tichy: Well, nobody get else gets anything else from this session. No. That boiling the ocean is probably-

Marty Kihn: Don't do that.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. It's not possible. So just don't say it anymore. But getting into the main meat of our session, and something that I'm really excited to be talking about, because it's something that our customers are always asking about. They've either implemented one or they're thinking about implementing one, or they don't really know what it means. And that's all around customer data platforms, which is the subject of your book. And so I wanted to just start with what is a CDP and what isn't a CDP?

Marty Kihn: Yeah. That's actually a harder question to answer than one might think. The truth about the customer data platform, CDP, as a category, as a MarTech category, is that it was invented by a person. It was invented in 2013 by a guy named David Raab. It wasn't invented, it was named, I should say. And he's a-

Bobby Tichy: Isn't David the founder, or the leader of the CDP Institute?

Marty Kihn: CDP Institute. That's the guy.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah.

Marty Kihn: He's still very active and a lovely man; a very well- respected independent consultant over the years. He used to help companies with their RFP process in the MarTech side like marketing automation and CRM. And he noticed in 2013, a category of software that appeared, that he called it, it was packaged software that created its own database. And he said, it's not exactly marketing automation. It's not really campaign management, and it's not an email system, what is it? So he said, I think something's happening here. And he said, there's a new category and I'll call it customer data platform. And he had in it companies like AgileOne. He did a report; Redpoint, companies that have been acquired or considered the first guard of CDP. And it evolved over time, and nobody talked about it though. And from 2013 to about 2017, no one, it was very much under the radar. And then it exploded at Gartner. I was at Gartner at the time. And in 2016,'17, and I've asked David, I interviewed him on a podcast, and I said, and for the book actually, and I said, why did it explode at that time? And he said, I really have no idea, but it just did it. It's one of these hype factors. And what a CDP does, it emerged to solve a problem that is quite common. And the problem is, can be summed up as sort of disconnected data. What has happened in particularly in the marketing suite, but not only marketing over the years is that the CMO has acquired a bunch of different applications. So there's email system and then mobile became a thing. So now there's mobile analytics and social became a thing. And then you still had your web team maybe, and you had somebody building an app. And eventually what happened was customer data, data about the same customer, could sit in 12, 15. Somebody at a consumer products company told me, they had over a hundred different places where the same customer could be represented. So the marketer realized they can't unlock and unify this data without some help. Most companies decided to build something on their own. So they spun up their own version of a single view of the customer. And then vendors appeared. And some of the vendors pivoted out of other categories. Some of them now are more purpose- built, bespoke Salesforce, we actually built one. And what it is, it's just a flexible customer database, but it has certain requirements. One is that it has to accept data, ingest data from just about any source, but probably just common marketing data sources. There has to be some way to organize the data once it's sitting in the database, and that would be through identity management and harmonization. And then there probably is some ability to do things like drag and drop segmentation, so basic dashboarding or analytics. And then it has to be able to be sent out to whatever the execution system is. So it's plumbing, it's like middleware, but it's trying to solve a disconnected customer data problem.

Bobby Tichy: To your point around the bespoke solutions that have started to come out. In my own research, I found that there are different kinds of CDPs. There are different categories or different types almost, like some really focus on data management, to your point, but others might focus more on the segmentation analytics pieces of it. So I'm curious what that looks like, and how do you categorize these different CDPs?

Marty Kihn: We do. Actually, Chris O'Hara and I, when we were writing the book, we had an existential moment because there was a survey done by advertiser perceptions. That's a couple of years ago, probably 18 months ago now. And they asked, this is a research company, and they asked marketers, what vendor did you acquire your CDP from, if you're using a CDP? And we came in first; Salesforce did. We were like the winner, but at the time, we didn't actually have a CDP in the market. So we were very happy to see this. inaudible winning in a category.

Bobby Tichy: Or even trying.

Marty Kihn: And there were other actual CDPs in this. So, anyway, we had to really look in the mirror and say, what's going on here? And as a company, we said, do we already have this? Is this problem solved, or are we missing something, or does it require an acquisition? And so we looked at... We were getting RFPs; request for proposal from marketers who were saying, tell us what you have with your CDP, and these are our requirements. So we just, we read all of these things. We're like, we're not going to tell you what a CDP is, you tell us, marketers. And it was really all over the place. The feature, it was like a fishing expedition in some cases, where they listed every single feature requirement and what they were going to see what vendors checked off. But we did notice there were themes, and the types of things people wanted. One was really single view of the customer. So they wanted a persistent 360 view of customer data that they could customize to a certain extent, but it would be persistent and it could be used by the marketing team without too much hands- on from IT. That was one set of requirements, and I called that a, we called that system of insight. And there was another set of requirements that were much more about real- time personalization. So it was very much more about streaming data, event triggers and personalizing in a particular session. If somebody arrives on the site and they exhibit some behavior, you can start building up a profile right away. And then you can, like they're looking at a certain product category, why not personalize that session? So, that seemed distinct to us. There was real- time personalization and there was persistent customer data store, distinct technically, but also distinct in terms of the user. And our end hypothesis that we talk about in the book is that a enterprise CDP, a true CDP, needs both. You need the system of insight and the system of engagement, that need to be tightly coupled, but could be distinct systems. And that's where we ended up. We ended up building customer 360 audiences, system of insight and acquiring a company called Evergage to be interaction studio, which is the system of engagement.

Bobby Tichy: So as we think-

Marty Kihn: That was all last year. Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. As we think about how Salesforce is positioning their CDP, it's focusing on those two main solutions. And I think the one thing that a lot of our customers or prospects or folks that we talk to struggle with is what are the key benefits of a CDP. And I think that what you mentioned earlier is data accessibility, right? Being able to tie all of this data together, have the single view of the customer, that notion that we hear a lot. But what are some of the other benefits outside of having that single view of the customer to implementing a CDP?

Marty Kihn: Well, yeah. You hit on a really key question, which is why do you want this thing crosstalk?

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. But I think that that's what a lot of people struggle with, because we have a lot of folks who come to us and say, hey, our IT team said, we should be looking at implementing a CDP. Like, what's a CDP? And then you'll have the marketing team sometimes pushing it or you'll have a data team pushing it. So I think it's really interesting how it's broken down the wall, so to speak, within an organization, that everybody seems to be aware of this thing, but no one seems to be completely aware of how it could benefit the organization as a whole.

Marty Kihn: Yeah. And we noticed that in research process for the book. We would ask, marketers would say, well, do you want a single view of the customer? And nobody's going to say, no. They're like, of course. Of course, I want to. And I want it to be updated in real time, and I want it to be widely available. And of course you do, but then the follow- up question is, well, what would you do with it, if you had it? Say, magically, this single view of the customer appeared. And quite often there was an awkward pause at that moment, because many times people don't think past that. The single view of the customer is not an end in itself, as you rightly point out. Unified persistent data that's sitting in a database is worthless, if it doesn't do anything. Most of the original applications and David Raab makes this point frequently for a CDPR are in the realm of analytics. It does enable, having clean data is something that the data science team, finds as a significant obstacle to doing their work. They require clean data and they require as much information about customers as they can get. And what do they do with it? Well, they'll do two things. One is they'll do better segmentation or clustering. So rather than just having high value, medium value, low value customers, which is a very crude way, based on parcel data, you could have some very meaningful five, six, seven, eight or more very meaningful segments or clusters based on this data. That can help you do better marketing. You can have eight campaigns rather than three. The other thing is predictions. So doing predictive analytics. There's AI as well, so you can take that as you will. But predictive analytics in terms of something very practical, like what is the next item that I should recommend to this person? When I send out an email, don't just blast it out, or even just send it out to segments, but for this individual, what are they most likely to respond to? And doing that marketing can really increase response rates, and it is as simple as having better customer data upon which you can unleash analytics. And even if it's manual analytics, even if it's just a data science team, pulling it out, running their algorithms and putting scores back in, that's a very valid use case for a CDP. I think as we get more advanced into the more advanced realms, there can be things like real- time modeling, personalizing in a session or a specific use cases, like you want to use a CDP to make marketing and service work better together. This is a common one with Salesforce. They'll have service cloud, marketing cloud, if they have an open case, don't market to them. crosstalk. Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: On the part of bringing all of this data together and having accessible to it, obviously we want to be able to action on it. That's really the value that the CDP brings, is being able to action on all of this data. As we think about the quote that's been going around lately of the death to the third- party cookie, how does third party data come into the CDP area? Or does it? I guess is the first question. And two, does the removal of them affect the CDP in one way or another?

Marty Kihn: Well, CDP, like any technology is agnostic in a sense. So it's just storage. So if you can attach, you have to be able to link the identity. But if you have a profile of a person, say, or an account in the B2B context, and you can attach a piece of data to that identifier or whatever it is, let's just say it's an email for argument's sake. That's very common. So you have an email as an identifier and you can attach an email to some piece of data that you've acquired from a third party. You bought it, you've found it, someone gave it to you, you have scraped the web and found it. And I'm assuming there's compliance has been honored here. But anyway, that can be put into a CDP. So, CDP can indeed house third party data. I think the most common way would be, we think about... If you remember direct mail. In the old days, direct mail, there was a CRM for B2C, there'd be a database. And then people would go to companies like Equifax or Experian or Axiom even today, and they would provide some form of PII, name and address or phone number. And they would say, what do you have around this person? And you can acquire third- party data that's often from public sources, but that has been organized, and then import it into the database. And usually it's something like net worth or maybe even interest in a certain category or value of the household, or do they have children or not. This is a lot of demographic type data for that's sourced from third parties. And that data is can indeed and is put into what we would call a CDP. I think in the long run, the value of third- party data goes down for the foreseeable future. And the reason is just not that it isn't accurate, but the reason is that first party data is much more powerful, if it can be collected. And the reason I, the obvious reason for that is that third- party data is available on the open market. So if you can get it, your competitors can get it. It's not a differentiator in most cases. First party data though is, You can collect information from consumers that nobody else has. And so that could be a competitive differentiator. That's where we're seeing a big tilt these days from, as we all know, from third party to first party data.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah.

Marty Kihn: inaudible zero party. That's where-

Bobby Tichy: I love that thought though. That's a great point, that it's not a competitive differentiator. And a lot of times will have customers ask, like do you guys provide any data append services or anything like that? And we don't, because we don't really find that there's a whole lot of value in it, but to your point, I think that's a great way of saying it; if it's not a differentiation element of it, instead of trying to find some third- party data that may or may not be accurate, that everybody has access to, how could we better engage our customers or inaudible people to get more first party data from them.

Marty Kihn: Yeah. And some third- party data, for instance, the credit score or credit worthiness, or maybe credit score isn't a great idea, but it just in general, income bracket or something around like, you'll know somebody's address, but you want to acquire some information around the neighborhood, that is third party data. But this demographic data, it's also publicly available. It can be useful. You can put it into your model. Marketers can definitely find that useful. But it's not the heart of the value of a CDP. The heart of the value CDP is around information about customers and prospects that you've gathered openly with their consent, and that can give you some real umph in your marketing.

Bobby Tichy: Well, in my experience asking people the amount of money they make or their religion or political affiliation is always a great way to learn more about them. And I think-

Marty Kihn: Definitely, especially when you first-

Bobby Tichy: inaudible just ask them. Yeah, exactly.

Marty Kihn: Yeah, I agree. When people ask me my salary or how much I pay for my house, I always tell them.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, exactly.

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: inaudible. So as we think about all these different key components of a CDP, you talked about interaction studio being that real time element, where we're able to take in all these different activities, and then customer 360 audience is being that insights layer and that segmentation layer. So, we can really think about a CDP as not only bringing together our known data, but also the unknown data or anonymous folks prior to them becoming known, or making themselves known to our organization.

Marty Kihn: Yeah. And I think there's nuance here, of course, because we sometimes draw a diagram, which I can draw with my hands here, but there's two worlds essentially. And there's the proxy, what I call the proxy world up here, and that would be the world of cookies, and other identifiers that aren't personally identifiable. So I can look at a proxy ID and not really know who the person is, but it's still, it can persist, and you could use it to link things. That's usually, that's ad tech, but it's also anonymous visitors to your website. Now, as third- party cookies go away, of course, ad tech changes a lot, but you still have first party cookies. So you can still tag somebody, if you get their consent. You can tag them on your site and recognize them when they come back using this first party identifier. But it's not PII. You could still, I could look at it and not know their name. That's why it's proxy. But that's one world and that's the unknown and that, these first party cookies, or if they log in, for instance, then they become known, there's no reason. And in fact, you can, within interaction studio, attach the email, which is PII to the first party cookie, which is unknown. So you can bridge the known and unknown. But the bulk of what a CDP focuses on would be known data; data about customers and prospects with whom you have some kind of a relationship, and they have consciously provided you some kind of information. That's not to say that the unknown pieces is blind, as you said. Rightfully, if somebody arrives on my site, for instance, or opens my app and I've never seen them before, they've started a relationship with me, hopefully; a long fruitful relationship. But that is an identifier. It's anonymous, that I can start building up a profile around. So I can start accumulating information about people even before I know their name. And hopefully then I'm personalizing... That's what interaction studio does, I'm personalizing, making it so compelling, then they'll sign up for my newsletter, they'll buy something. They'll give me their email for more information. That's the journey that we want them to go down and they become a customer. And all the time you're building up more and more of this profile by giving better and better experience. crosstalk. Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. Are there specific, in your experience, are there specific industries or sectors that seem to benefit more from a CDP than others?

Marty Kihn: Well, the obvious beneficiaries are those that have in categories where they have a fast purchase cycles, and it's not a really high consideration product. And I don't mean that if it's a high consideration product, you don't need a CDP. I think anyone could benefit from organizing their customer data. But categories like retail, for instance, or media are early adopters of CDP; financial service, like B2C, consumer facing financial services like credit card companies or insurance; auto insurance. And these are companies that deal with a lot of people, who you want to buy multiple products. And it's not a high consideration purchase, so that they can go easily to somebody else's competitor. So you have to create some kind of differentiation pretty rapidly. Those people benefit from a CDP. Also, companies that have multiple purchases, as I mentioned, can build up a better profile. So you have more information around people. If you're selling luxury cars or buildings, things like that, you don't tend to have a lot of information around people that isn't inaudible market. So, and by the way, the CDP, it's always pegged in the marketing space and I'm like, oh, it's a tool for MarTech. And it doesn't have to be. It's very useful for a service team. It's very useful in the commerce space. And there's even, I mean, there's no reason you can't put product data, for instance, that's not person data, it's product data in the CDP, and then look it up, so that you can create nice joins within the CDP, so you have more information. So I think that we're just beginning to understand how broadly a CDP can be applied across the enterprise. crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. Speaking of how broadly it can be adopted or utilized, are there typically specific people or specific teams involved in leading the evaluation of a CDP within a company?

Marty Kihn: Yeah, it will vary a lot, but it's often led by marketing and IT, like a hybrid team. And quite frequently, the analytics team will be involved as well, along with procurement and finance like the decision makers. But the core of the team is marketing and IT. It's like the business user, usually as I said, marketing- lead, sometimes service. And then IT is required as well, because there is a certain amount of boundary awareness that needs to go on in an enterprise. CDP has some components that look like master data management and at least have to be compatible with it. There's the enterprise data warehouse, and as I said before, most companies have built their own something. The single view of the customer is not a problem that appeared in 2017. Companies have been solving it somehow crosstalk. And they solve it somehow today, whether or not they have a CDP. So there's always a question of what's the overlap, What are we replacing, what are we not replacing, what are we complementing? As you know very well, you're involved in these implementations, I'm sure. So they can be quite complex.

Bobby Tichy: Well, since we're about halfway through, a complete curve ball for you here.

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: We learned shortly before we jumped on that you're a Taylor Swift fan. So, what is your favorite Taylor Swift song?

Marty Kihn: She actually, we mentioned this before we came on, that last year she really was on a roll. I think Taylor used the pandemic lockdown to be very productive. She took an introspective turn, so I think her music became a bit somber. It wasn't quite as exuberant. And she was echoing the feelings that we're all having in this past year. So she released two albums of new material. And she has one about a house that I actually saw. It's in Rhode Island. It's a house she owns on the beach. And it had been owned by somebody named Rebecca Harkness, and she loved ballet and she was a bit of a socialite, and Taylor bought this house. And she has a song about the house and about how she relates to the previous owner. And I had a marvelous time ruining everything. And so I really like that because I actually had walked by that house, and I have a picture of myself looking up at it, along with all the other many Taylor Swift fans.

Bobby Tichy: That's awesome. Well, I can see people in the comments. inaudible We're by far the most excited about us bringing up Taylor Swift. I will say that before the call, when Marty and I were chatting, I let him know that I was a Belieber. I'm a big Justin Bieber fan. And he said that you couldn't even compare the two. So I'm hoping that at least someone out there will back me up on being a Belieber in the audience. But getting back to CDPs-

Marty Kihn: Are you really a Belieber?

Bobby Tichy: I really am.

Marty Kihn: Wow. That's all right. Nobody's perfect.

Bobby Tichy: We always have one hiccup, at least. So, thank you, Lindsey. I appreciate it. So, as far as companies leveraging a CDP or going down the road of evaluating one, I think the one thing, whether they're looking at a CDP or they're looking at implementing marketing cloud or anything along these lines, as we think about the MarTech stack, a big element that's come up a lot in the last month, or I'm sorry, last year or two has been data replication, versus data accessibility. Right? So if I've got a data warehouse and I decided to implement a CDP, I don't want to just take everything I have in my data warehouse and replicate it to that CDP. So I'm curious, as you guys went through the research for the book and your experience, it should certainly help with this problem, but is there a better way to think about data accessibility versus data replication?

Marty Kihn: Yeah, it's not a question that can be answered the same way for every enterprise, but I would say in general, I think anyway, this is me talking. I think the best way to think about customer data platform is that it is a highly accessible, very performant, fast, as modern as possible, store for customer data, but it's only the data that you need for the task that you're using it for. It's, I don't want to call it an abstract or a data mart or a data lake, even though it could be called those things, because those have bad connotations to some people based on past experience, but I think it is the information that you need for the task and not anymore. So it's not a data warehouse. The data warehouse is designed to store everything. It's not a data swamp or a data lake, as used to be defined, because the thought there was I would put all my data in there, and then I'll go look for it if I need it. And when I was a Gartner, we had a study that said that 80% of data put in a data lake is never looked at again. It's dark data sitting there. That's not what a CDP is for. It should all be live. It should be live data. It should be realistically accessible. And it would vary, but I think that if my use cases around personalizing my website, my email, all my customer touch points, having better content in my mobile app, and I want to focus on retention. So, having a better experience for existing customers or new customers. Then that points me in a certain direction, certain data fields that I would need, and I need access to, and because I need access... act on them. But there's a lot of data in my organization that doesn't fit any of that, any of those requirements. So that's probably the best way to think about it.

Bobby Tichy: The data lake or data swamp reference you just made, it reminds me of how marketers always say they want real- time data, and then they get it and they don't really know what to do with it, right? It's kind of like the technology leading the business or the business leading the technology. So I am not surprised to hear that 80% of that data typically goes unused.

Marty Kihn: Well, it's the same in the world of ad tech. Now, ad tech generates enormous volumes of data; more data than anyone could even imagine. I was involved in a campaign for Taxprep software. In the month of April, they executed a campaign that had four billion impressions. There's only 8 billion people on the planet, so, and each one of those is a row in a database; each impression. And the client actually said, can we have access to this data? We want the raw data. And we're like, why? Like, I don't know, we might want to look at it. And we're like, you don't want this data. It's, first of all, you can't store it. You have nowhere to put it. And then second of all, you'd have no way to even process it, so crosstalk same issue. Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: So if I'm going down this road, the marketing IT team, we've all aligned. We're going to go ahead and purchase the CDP. Let's say we went ahead and purchased it, or we're getting ready to purchase it. What should a company have in place prior to implementing a CDP? Are there certain data management or integration or customer experience strategies or other elements that are really important?

Marty Kihn: Yeah. Well, one must have is coordination. They need team coordination. And I mentioned marketing and IT, in particular, the business and the technical folks, which could be an agency. It's quite often like Lev, for instance, or an SI. Those people need to be working together in the same, not these days, not the same room, but the same zoom. It just needs to be an active working team. Not just people who crosstalk occasionally touch base. That's prerequisite one. The second thing that was underestimated is that the data itself needs to be well- documented. A lot of time is wasted saying, all right, I need to integrate the email system and, I don't know, social. And then I have my own data warehouse over here. And the process, it's not so easy in some companies because they don't know how it was set up. The data tables themselves weren't documented or whoever did it left. And so the rigor of the process around the foundational data that's going to be utilized by the CDP, that should be set up in advance. The other thing is, particularly these days, the whole idea around privacy and consent needs to be... the company needs a handle on it. So they need to have had a strategy for how they're going to gather consent. They need to know what consent they have or at least be working on it, because that's another element where you can say, you don't want to set up a CDP where you have some data that was consented in one way, some data you don't know, some data maybe gathered incorrectly to untangle that after the fact is not a good use of time. I'll put it that way.

Bobby Tichy: Sure.

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. So really having your data in a good place. I don't know if you've read Tom Siebel's book, Digital Transformation. But one of the things he mentions in there that I love, because so many people get hung up on this is that your data's never going to be perfect. It needs to be in a manageable place, but don't expect, or don't think that it's going to be perfect before you start building out these other additional initiatives that you're trying to do. So same thing here. We wanted to be in a place that's manageable, but also that we're keeping track of; the different elements that we're bringing into the CDP before we go down that road.

Marty Kihn: Yeah, and some companies really are very well- disciplined. They have great documentation. They had a very thoughtful strategy about how their relational database was structured. And so it's much easier in that kind of an environment to spin up a CDP, figure out how you're going to use it, figure out how to map it onto a data model, if you want to do that. That kind of environment, it's not routine, there will be hiccups, but it's a lot easier than if you're starting out and saying, all right, so where's the customer data anyway. Who knows? Does anyone know? Like, here's the manual. That's common too. crosstalk don't be too ambitious, yeah. Don't do it at a global scale before you've managed a market.

Bobby Tichy: No one size fits all for data management or data strategy.

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: And I just saw, Lauren, your comment about the book I mentioned. It's Digital Transformation by Tom Siebel. Highly recommend it. It's a really great read. And building out and starting to promote the Salesforce CDP, Customer 360, what's been the most successful use case or the most successful implementation of it that you've seen?

Marty Kihn: Yeah. That means Customer 360 Audiences, which is the name of our system of insights. So it's basic CDP. It is a new product for Salesforce. It was launched last fall, and people ask me, why did it take so long? Because CDP has been around since 2013.

Bobby Tichy: crosstalk the leader for so long too.

Marty Kihn: Yeah, we were leading. So we... But the answer to that question is that it was built... We did a build by acquire as assessment. And we realized we needed to build it on the Salesforce core platform, which to outsiders may not mean much. But what it does mean is that it uses the same data model as sales and service cloud, and it has the same front end. We use the same packaging. So we had a headstart, but it also is compatible with app exchange. So you can plug, you can develop, one can developed independent software vendors or clients can developed applications, and put them on the app exchange, make them available to others, or just use them themselves. And that makes it very extensible. And so we wanted it to be seamlessly integrated into the Salesforce world. That's not to say it only accepts data from Salesforce. It wouldn't be a CDP if that were the case, except data from anywhere, but it is definitely a Salesforce product. And that's why it took longer. We actually had to build it from scratch and they worked; the engineers worked very hard for a couple of years. And we had a V1 release and we just had the V2 release, and it's progressing very quickly. My favorite use case for it is I think it's indicative of people who are finding success early with it. There was a customer of ours who, they ran a bunch of convenience stores, think of like 7- Eleven, but not 7- Eleven. And they sold food and gas and that kind of thing. And they had a lot of data in service cloud. In a way, service cloud was their single source of truth. So they had a customer service center and they had a loyalty program that they had just launched, and they had about two million members in the loyalty program. And they sent emails to people. And their most popular product was a pizza. They sold pizza; very tasty. But their promotional emails were... they showed a pepperoni pizza, because that's the most popular. And what they wanted to do, their thought was, well, what if we could actually put an image or have a promotion for the pizza that that person, that actual person preferred, because they had different types. And this was mind blowing because, but what it would require was coordinating the loyalty data with the email system basically. And then it would have to triangulate with the customer data that sat in service cloud. And they were able to do that with Customer 360 Audiences. They pulled those data fields in and they mapped to the person. They could figure out, from the loyalty data, which pizza they bought most frequently. And then it was a matter of putting together the workflow to change the image in the email. And when they started to send out the emails of if you like the taco pizza, it would be a promotion for taco pizza. And of course their response rate went through the roof. And we say that's very simple, but on the other hand, they couldn't do it before. It required connection; a data connection inaudible make, so.

Bobby Tichy: Newsflash, personalization works.

Marty Kihn: I mean, yeah. In fact, yeah, that's a vivid example and it's almost a no- brainer. If I get a promotion for a pizza I actually like, I'm much more likely to cash it in, but.

Bobby Tichy: Which in reality like in... I shouldn't say in reality, but in theory, all these things should be easily accessible, right? But in reality, they're all on different systems, they're very difficult to sometimes stitch together or so. It's a great example or great use case for sure.

Marty Kihn: Yeah. And it's done manually. It's kluged together, and it creates a lot of headaches and overhead. And one of the other, like we had a pilot who was a inaudible medical devices. And they said, they used to generate four reports each year about a particular program. And it's because it had 12 different sources and all the data had to be imported manually to someone's laptop, and then they cut and paste it and put it in Excel. So they can only do four a year. And they were able to automate that basically. So they turned them out every week. That person had to be put on a different project.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. That's awesome.

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: So, before we get to our last section, wanted to quickly plug that Marty is the cohost of the Salesforce Marketing Cloudcast. So you can find him there, where we find your podcasts. And then also Lev has a podcast that Cole Fisher and I co- host; In the Clouds. At the end of every one of those episodes, we have a section called completely unrelated, which is where we talk about something that's completely unrelated to anything that we talked about in the episode or anything like that. So I want to do that with you here, Marty. I'm curious, especially with your wide range of experience and backgrounds, what's been the most interesting story from your career?

Marty Kihn: Well, when I was at Pop- Up Video, I used to write, those of you who don't remember, it was in the late nineties, we'll say, on MTV networks and VH1. And it was videos would play and then bubbles would appear on the video with the bloop like boop. And there would be some fact in the bubble. So I would write the facts. That was my job. And in order to gather those facts, we tried to interview the artists. And often we couldn't get the artists. Either they were dead or living under a rock somewhere, I don't know. We'd get their manager. Let me just say that it deglamorize the idea of being famous; this job, having being a one hit wonder, or being a rock star does not look like a good career. But anyway, that aside, my idol at the time and maybe still is a woman named Debbie Harry, who was in a band called Blondie, which was huge in the eighties and into the nineties. And I got to do a Blondie video. It was Rapture, like she rapped. And I got to talk to her. I was like, oh my God, this is so exciting. I'm going to interview, on the phone, I was going to interview Deborah Harry. And I was really nervous and this is like... I had her picture up when I was younger on the wall. And so I rang the number and this voice answered and like, " Hello." And I was like, oh, this must be the caretaker. I'm like, yeah, I'm calling from Pop- Up Video, I'd like to talk to Debbie Harry, please sir. " Speaking." I guess she smoked a lot or I don't know what, but she sounded like a grumpy old man. And I was like, Debbie, I really, really like you. I really think you're awesome and everything. And she's like, " Yeah, so what." inaudible, I don't know, not what I-

Bobby Tichy: We just had someone comment that Debbie Harry's better than Swift and Bieber combined, so.

Marty Kihn: Well, she was such a great singer, but I don't know what happened. She's still out there.

Bobby Tichy: How did the conversation go?

Marty Kihn: Not well. Not well. She didn't answer any of my questions. Like, I don't know. She seemed annoyed. Looking back though, I was thinking about it, maybe it wasn't her. Maybe it was a prank.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, there you go. There you go. If anybody has any questions, go ahead and throw them into the comments chat. We'll get to as many as we can. While they're putting those in, I was curious, how do I get Don Cheadle to play me in a TV show?

Marty Kihn: Oh, well, that's a good question. The development process for my book was almost comical and hilarious, and I was watching it all from the outside, because I wrote this book not... I didn't expect it to be anything about Hollywood. And it went through a whole process. And all I did was say, " Sure, yeah. Okay. I'll believe it when I see it." And one by one, all these little hoops over a number of years, and in the end, they were like, okay, we're talking to some people like Kevin Bacon, Liev Schreiber, I don't know, people who were around my age, and it seemed like they could play the part. And then eventually, like we signed Don Cheadle. I was talking to produce... I remember, I was in Manhattan at the time. I was on the street. And she's like, we signed Don Cheadle. And I was like, who? And she was like, this is a very famous actor who's very well- respected. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I haven't seen his work. I hadn't actually heard of him. And he is a great actor. He did great. He and I are very different though. I think he's from Kansas and I come from Michigan, so you have a different take on life.

Bobby Tichy: Sure. Our most important question that seem to come through is from Lauren. Dying to know if Marty prefers Folklore or Evermore.

Marty Kihn: I like Folklore. I don't want to say Evermore was the other stuff that could be on the second album, but crosstalk. Yeah. When I was a kid, some bands would have double albums. They have like two and you always knew that it could have been one really good album, but they decided they couldn't choose, so. crosstalk had a triple album and that had a lot crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, really?

Marty Kihn: Yeah.

Bobby Tichy: Shay wants to know if you heard today's surprise drop yet.

Marty Kihn: No.

Bobby Tichy: That was a quick answer.

Marty Kihn: Wow. Surprise drop. I'll look for it. Thank you. Thanks for the tip.

Bobby Tichy: I don't know. Maybe he's referring to Bieber.

Marty Kihn: Oh.

Bobby Tichy: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time, Marty. Really appreciate it. Had a blast going through CDPs and Taylor Swift as well. And really appreciate your time. Thanks again for joining us.

Marty Kihn: Yeah, thanks a lot, Bobby. Appreciate it.

Bobby Tichy: Thank you, man. Thanks everyone.

DESCRIPTION

This is the fourth episode of the Ultraviolet Keynote Series where we share the recordings of our keynote sessions from our Ultraviolet conference this year. In this keynote, In the Clouds host and RVP, Sales at Lev Bobby Tichy chats with Martin Kihn, SVP Strategy, Marketing Cloud at Salesforce to discuss how marketers can effectively utilize data to power their marketing efforts. From the value of customer data platforms, to the move to first person data, to data-driven AI strategies, to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, they'll cover everything marketers want to know about getting the most out of their data.