Modern Marketing Experience (MME) 2016, what a four-day affair! Insightful, amazing and overwhelming…that would be what MME was this year. So much great content, it really is hard to put into words how great it was. It was described by an Oracle Service Cloud Consultant that when going to the 3rd floor, which was the marketing area, that there was an energy…well think about it, we are the buzz makers!
My highlight reel would be Responsys, getting the 411 on it, even though after three classes taught by Oracle trainers, I know I didn’t grasp all that was there. There is a lot of information on this one, pretty cool technology. Next would be account based marketing (ABM), cool marketing techniques done by clients. Great to hear the panel talk about it and how it works and how to best implement it. From my perspective, remember I’m a consultant so I see things through a bit different lens, is that you can’t just hit go on this thing. It takes time, a process and platforms working together to make it happen. Next would be the new Program Canvas, I’ll get into this highlight in a bit so keep reading or skip if you like.
The keynotes were pretty good, however I have to say that Zach King and Tyra Banks were amazing. Zach King, a bit of a phenomenon in what he does…making six second videos for YouTube or Instagram and other social sites. Now I didn’t recognize the name, but I’m not in his demographic—way out of it. However, I asked my 10 year-old who Zach King was and he knew right away. Zach delivered a high-energy talk about his business, how he started, and some of the cool things that he has been able to do since he started his business. If you don’t know who he is by name, you have probably seen his work like the Pringles commercial with the cat which is pretty awesome or likely other videos of his on Facebook or Twitter.
Tyra Banks is a very successful model and business woman. She was so funny and high energy; you can see that she loves what she does. Her sit down with Andrea, VP of Oracle Marketing, was insightful into how she has built her brand, going from the runway to being a director of a successful TV show to owning her own beauty line, Tyra Beauty.
As I mentioned earlier, Program Canvas deserves the spotlight. It is currently in Controlled Availability and should be GA in the October timeframe. What is it and what can it do? It is the newly revised Program Builder. It runs faster, is prettier and, oh, it runs faster! Program Canvas runs on the Autobahn platform behind the scenes, so it truly is faster. The demo I sat in on was Program Canvas with Oracle Sales Cloud.
Historically, in order for information to get out of Eloqua and to CRM you had to run it through Program Builder, which was slow. You had to run it on specific timing either Priority Mode but you couldn’t have more than 5 programs running on it at a time; Standard Mode, which was in 15 minute increments; or Bulk, which ran every two hours. With Program Canvas, it runs in real time. As a contact comes in, it flows through the steps. The other part to this newly improved Integration App, is that you don’t have Auto Synchs or Internal Events with External Calls anymore. The App controls all the details of the inbound and outbound field mappings. The inbound runs every 15 minutes and although the timing isn’t configurable, it is faster than the Auto Synchs which currently run at minimum every 30 minutes with best practices being every 2 hours. The load on the data is much better too, 10 million contact load. Wow…who wants to try to hit that! Now the thing to keep in mind here is that Oracle started with the Oracle Sales Cloud App which is currently in Controlled Availability, so if you want either of these, you have to present your use case. The App for Oracle Sales Cloud will be GA the same time that Program Canvas becomes GA. As for other CRMs, Microsoft Dynamics is next on the roadmap, with Salesforce coming sometime in late calendar 2016 or early 2017. What does this mean for those that are using Oracle Marketing Cloud and Oracle Sales Cloud? Ask your Oracle Account Manager to get access to Program Canvas and the App, that is the first step. Then once you have access to both, there is a migration process that needs to be gone through, it isn’t a flip of a switch, but doesn’t appear difficult. As was mentioned in the demo, it is an hour’s migration verses weeks or months.
Other news, Responsys and Maxymiser are now integratable with Oracle Marketing Cloud, I won’t get into the details, just know that they are. In case you want to learn more about either Responsys or Maxymiser, information links are below on each product.
Maxymiser: https://www.maxymiser.com/products/online-testing
Responsys: https://www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/products/cross-channel-orchestration/index.html
That was MME 2016 in a nutshell. There were great sessions, the Markies were fun to watch and I had an excellent time talking to other Marketers. Hope to see you there next year, it will be a great one guaranteed!
