Kyle Hollaway:

Dustin, you’re right. And according to industry research, now more than 80% of marketing organizations have either partially or fully shifted their data infrastructure to the cloud, that’s demonstrating the undeniable impact of this transition in the market. In this episode, we’ll delve into the benefits of cloud adoption for data-driven marketers, explore real world success stories, and uncover best practices for optimizing data management in the cloud. So with that said, I’m excited to introduce Jason Brown, general manager of cloud and platform services here at Acxiom. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Brown:

Hey guys, thanks for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the discussion today.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, well, thank you. And so, just to start off, why don’t you give our listeners a snapshot of your background, what got you into this space?

Jason Brown:

Yeah, so it’s interesting, whenever I get asked this question in today’s landscape, if you will, Kyle, I think you probably can relate to this a little bit, but I’ve been at Acxiom for a long time, 24 years, and so that’s sort of the beginning, that’s why I start with the answer to this question. And a little side thing, I enjoy observing the reaction on people’s faces when I meet them for the first time, at events or conferences or just whatever in the ecosystem, that reaction, it’s an interesting take people have on that. But yeah, that journey I’ve had here, with the company, over that period of time, it really informs how I have gotten and we have gotten to where we are. So I began my career as a technologist, I came out of school trained as a computer engineer, and I was writing code, ironically, on formerly Acxiom’s flagship identity product, AbiliTec, which now of course is a LiveRamp product.

And my career evolved from there. I went through different types of product roles, product management roles, and evolved into some of the operational side of the business, which got me closer to the clients. That led me, over time, into starting some practices, I was one of the early, I guess pioneers, I don’t want to brag, but pioneers or first people with Acxiom moving into the digital space, back in the late 00s, early 10s. And then, from there found myself ultimately running businesses and industry verticals at Acxiom, in a PnL, [inaudible], sales, client management position. So, that full spectrum of experience has me now at a point where my team and I are tasked with helping define Acxiom’s pivot into this ecosystem you guys described, becoming more of a partner led, cloud-based solution provider for our clients. So yeah, I think the experience I’ve had and the future that is out there for us is very exciting.

Kyle Hollaway:

Well, that’s awesome. And yeah, that longevity, especially in a particular, not just industry, but at a particular company is certainly unique these days. And with tech years being like dog years, you’ve been here 168 years then. That’s awesome. That’s some great knowledge there.

Jason Brown:

Yeah, don’t tell my kids you can frame my age that way, it’ll just make it worse, I promise you.

Kyle Hollaway:

Exactly. No, but it is amazing, the amount of change that does happen within the industry within technology. We all have historically talked about Moore’s Law, and just how even that is starting to be broken because the acceleration rate is even exceeding, and the miniaturization and everything is just exceeding what even that was envisioned as. So, kudos to you for just that longevity of a career and getting to this point. So, we do want to dive into what’s going on in the market and the way brands are going to be building marketing solutions looking forward, the next five to 10 years, it’s certainly going to be different, and different from how even it’s been in the last 10. So, why do you believe that cloud is such a big part of that equation going forward?

Jason Brown:

Yeah. So, first of all, I think a refrain I like to come back to whenever I talk about our business, and I think we have a tendency to over index on the technology side of it, and not focus enough on the business outcomes and the functional side of what the technology enables. And I think we, the collective we, the royal we, if you will, are doing that in spades with the cloud these days. I think we’re guilty of it at Acxiom, I think it pervades the industry in a lot of ways as well. So it’s interesting you mentioned Moore’s law. And from a technology perspective, there’s another law, and I’m not going to attempt to go deep on it because there are academic people who might hear this and think I’m a complete idiot, but there’s a law called Metcalf’s law, which relates to the benefits of the network effect.

And I actually like to think of that in terms of our business model, and the cloud as a facilitator of some of the benefits of that effect through the partners that exist in the ecosystem. And I think, if I’m selfish, I’m looking at Acxiom’s growth, that’s an avenue, but if I look at the pathway to that growth, it’s success for our clients. And our clients being able to more effectively leverage the network of partners that exist in this ecosystem today, that is enabled by the cloud, and that’s where the technology comes in. The cloud is a elastic, scalable environment, where technologies exist for sharing of data across multiple different environments without movement of data, so clients can benefit from the information security and privacy compliance control that they have had in their own data centers or in highly secure environments, like Acxiom manages in its data centers, but in a more open environment. That it takes advantage of this network effect of partners and different platforms and different technologies.

So, all of that is now I think possible and able to be leveraged by brands in ways that simply haven’t been there in recent times, and are just really now becoming something that’s practical with some of the core improvements in the cloud providers themselves, when you think about infosecurity and operational robustness and ability to handle the enterprise processing. And then, data sharing technologies, like Snowflake or Databricks, or some of the cloud providers have native technologies and accomplish similar things. But those advances and those maturities in those, it really put us at a really cool inflection point. Now, the challenge is how do you actually integrate all that and make it useful to you since you’ve got these tools in the toolbox?

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, it’s super interesting times, Jason. And you mentioned on-prem server capabilities that Acxiom has always managed for clients for so many years. It was always cool to go walk down these aisles and aisles of servers sitting on our facilities near Conway, and when I came on, and I actually went out to my calculator, Kyle, and try to calculate my dog years as well, and I am somewhere around 140 years old. So, I’ve been around long enough to know the old days, when, in every contract servers were always a big part of the provisioning and the cost structure. I don’t know the last time I saw a Sun Micro… It was always Sun and IBM, that was just a big part of the contract. So, now that everything’s shifted to the cloud, it’s like that part’s kind of gone, and it’s all about elasticity and storage and how much of it do you want and what services do you want on top of it. Do you see that being a massive contributor, just the ease of contracting between clients, of why people should really just go all in in the cloud?

Jason Brown:

Yeah, it’s a great question, and I actually think it’s a bit of a misconception. I wouldn’t say that those things are going away, I’d say those things have changed, are changing. And what I mean by that is, that while… So, if you think about it, again, going back to let’s not over index on the technology, but let’s think about the solution, the functionality, and the business problems we’re solving. So, if you would, historically, contract with Acxiom, as an example to provide a solution and services to operate that for you, to build it, to operate it for you, part of that solution of course required computer processing capacity and storage. And we would articulate that in terms of the servers you described, this IBM server that, attach storage this, Oracle database over there, all those things would be part of that build to accomplish those outcomes.

Well, you still need those outcomes today, you still need the capabilities today, but you get to them in different ways today. But also, with them comes some different challenges too. So, maybe the provisioning of that environment doesn’t require an architecture and an infrastructure build of six different components from six different vendors, to put together the map of compute power and storage that you need, maybe you can get all of that with Amazon Web Services, or somebody else, as an example. But the difference is, now how you manage capacity is entirely different now. Yeah, it’s great that it’s an elastic environment and you don’t have to actively add another server or attempt to predict the growth of your environment and capacitize appropriately without becoming too inefficient, yes, you have better leverage here, but there’s another side to that. The other side is, you now have the ability to use unlimited resources that are billed per usage, by the way.

Where, before you could, hey, I’ve got my environment with Acxiom, it has enough capacity, we don’t feel as though it’s wasteful, but it’s got enough and we can use that, and Acxiom can use it on our behalf, until the server starts smoking and spitting parts out. You can use it and it doesn’t cost us anymore, it’s the same, we’ve already paid for it. It’s already baked into what we’re paying for the services, it’s there, right? Well now, you’ve got the freedom to do real damage to yourself financially if you aren’t managing it well. My analyst gets into the environment that I’m managing, or maybe Acxiom is managing for me, if I don’t have controls in place, they might start a query that runs for a weekend, and next thing I know my cloud cost for that month just doubled or tripled.

And so you’ve got a different dimension. So I think brands are going to mature with this, they’re going to mature themselves, because they obviously run large data centers, many of them, and they have… Large IT operations, I should say, and they work with cloud providers. But the type of work that providers like Acxiom do is unique and is typically not fully and well understood by those teams internally like it is by people like us, who, it’s what we do, it’s why we exist. And so, I see the need for services to manage that persisting, and I see when we contract and we account for that, all the controls and privacy, security compliance, all of that, all of those things are still going to need to be applied, and I think brands are still going to need help with that. So, I think it’s a continued partnership between Acxiom and our clients to make sure all those things are accounted for, and the brands are able to safely and effectively and efficiently take advantage of all the functionality that technology offers.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. So, you keyed in there, right on the move from CapEx to OpEx, the difference of that, and the material difference that has on the enterprise. As that move into more of the OPEX structure, one thing that does allow for is interoperability and the ability to decision differently. Do you see brands… Because in the past, you would make a big CapEx, and it would be with a brand. Justin mentioned a few, some of the big iron providers or whatever. And you were like, I’m a shop, I’m an IBM shop, I’m a Microsoft shop, I’m a this or a that. Now with the move to more OpEx and the optionality that presents, do you see brands embracing that nimbleness or do you still see a lot of, just a change, like, oh, well, I’m an Azure shop, I’m a AWS shop?

Jason Brown:

Yeah, it’s funny, we see probably more of the latter than the former. We see this shop, that shop, I have strong preference for AWS, or maybe in certain sectors a strong-

Kyle Hollaway:

Aversion.

Jason Brown:

… aversion to AWS. Yeah. But you see this kind of shop, and look, I think there’s some logic to it. Because it is, like I said before, the technology has changed and enabled a lot of different things, but you still have the same sort of business problems, both what you’re solving in terms of outcomes of a solution, but also in just managing the ecosystem of partners and vendors as well. So, if you think of a brand trying to manage four vendors or five vendors versus 20 or 25 vendors, there’s a point at which that becomes unmanageable and inefficient. In terms of no matter what gains might be available by optimizing through multiple brands, the sheer management of it nullifies it.

So, I do think you see that. So there’s some logic to it, but I also think there’s a little bit of muscle memory there as well, and it’s just how organizations have operated. And I think that’s really, that’s part of, I think, the value that Acxiom brings in our pivot and how we approach the marketplace. I think we, and I know my team is focused intently on this, both through our services offerings, our strategic partnerships, and the product roadmap that we’re building out, in being able to rationalize all of that and make it more consumable and manageable for clients.

So they get their lunch and they get to eat it too. They get the advantages of all the different partners in the ecosystem, and the little nuances they can provide that enhance the solution overall, while minimizing the overhead in managing it, and the complexity in managing it. So I think Acxiom as an integrator of these technologies and having the ability to fill the holes that these platforms out there don’t solve for, I think that that’s really the value that you’ll see Acxiom bringing over the next five, 10 years to our clients.

Kyle Hollaway:

So that leads to another topic along those lines, not just the platforms themselves or the ecosystems, but the concept of composability versus monolithic structures, that certainly plays into… I know that’s a key focus area for you. So talk to us a little bit about your perspective on what does it mean to be composable? What is a composable architecture versus a monolithic?

Jason Brown:

Yeah, again, so composability, and we see this, again, we’ve all spoken about our tenures and our dog years in terms of the space, and you see so many different terms come and go, and a lot of them, most of them… There’s very little that’s genuinely new in the space of terminology. It’s just a different way, maybe a slightly different spin on an earlier concept, but it continues to propagate. I see composability, it’s a very similar… It’s componentization. If you want to think of it in technical terms, go back 15 years and think of service-oriented architecture, or slightly more forward microservices. I know there’s a difference in where data is stored in those two architectures, but it’s a similar concept, of being able to distribute and break down functionality into more atomic-like, atomic level, more granular parts.

And so, composability, when I look at composability, I think of it in terms of the entirety of a solution. So every piece of the solution from the core technology to product and technical capability functionality to services that help enable and execute that functionality to achieve the outcome. And our approach to this is, it’s all composable. And I think that is how you solve the problem most scale up and scale down. And I think one of the things that Acxiom transparently has made this mistake in the past, of attempting to productize via monolith, and it hasn’t worked for us. It just hasn’t, let’s be honest about that. But part of that, there have been some constraints in the ecosystem as well, that have made true composability like we think about it now, difficult. I go back to my earlier comments about technology and how it’s evolved and there is a benefit of it.

The ability to share data, the ability which allows the integration of multiple different pieces and parts in terms of platforms or tools or data storage or compute or whatever it is, the modern ecosystem is probably more suited to composability at scale than it ever has been. So now it’s popular, and it’s good, it’s right that it’s popular, it should be. And so, when I think of that, I think of how we approach our clients and try to help them make sense of all this. We’ve got partners that are out there in the ecosystem that are the best at what they do. We have Acxiom products that help provide support in areas where partners don’t have strength capabilities. And then we have services that don’t have to be all in. We have services that are expert and adept at all the specific strategic partners we have, we have services that support the Acxiom components, and we have services that can help pull it all together, but also provide clients the ability to service themselves into, or intermix other partners.

So I think the whole ecosystem is composable, and I think that’s the approach that benefits our clients, and it benefits Acxiom too, helps us going back to the network effect, that gives us avenues to scale our business more. So, wrapped up this thread a little bit, you see this happening in the ecosystem and you see the embracing of composability starting to creep in, even in the bigger, what we would think of as full-stack providers. Look at Adobe, look at Salesforce. So, Salesforce is really, they’ve pulled the concept of CDP out of marketing cloud and they have data cloud now. And they’re breaking up, and they’re even reporting their earnings against data cloud separately from marketing cloud. They have commerce cloud.

So, they’re recognizing this trend and they’re adapting their business to it. Adobe is going through a rebranding right now of their components that reflects some of these trends. And these are the biggest of the big, right? These are the most successful, sophisticated, full-stack providers that exist, and you see them leaning into composability. And I think too, if you look at the 100 and whatever odd CDPs that are out there, that all have slightly different takes on what a CDP is, that just underscores the need that trying to categorize all this as a single thing, that’s not sustainable, it’s a solution, and it needs to have many composable parts.

Dustin Raney:

It’s like composability really breeds innovation, I think. So, to open up that flexibility to be able to plug and play one of the seven to 8,000 AdTech or MarTech companies that are showing up in the [inaudible], and maximize your capabilities or change, be able to plug in some new capability that didn’t exist six months ago. So that composability I think is absolutely essential to reach for new heights as an industry. And speaking of, things that need to change and be thought of is security, and how data moves. Do you believe that clients have more fear in this world where everything’s in the cloud, there’s access, the interoperability of publishers and other platforms, to the data? Or do you feel like they’re feeling like, man, I don’t know, there’s challenges here, and I’m not real comfortable putting all my data out there where it’s in some interoperable cloud-based location?

Jason Brown:

Yeah. Look, so I would say, as recently as maybe three years ago, they were in that state you just described still. And I think they’ve been in that state, and mileage varies greatly, different industries, upmarket, down market. Down market and less regulated industries have been further on the spectrum than upmarket, highly regulated. But if you just maybe try to strike somewhat of an average across that spectrum there, I’d say maybe three years ago there were still material concerns about that. But then I think, you’ve really seen in this intervening time, the infosecurity capabilities enabled within major cloud providers have evolved and matured to the point that there’s not a material definable concern there, for a brand relative to any other environment, it goes back to how you manage it. And then, data sharing technologies, which I mentioned before, enable the access of data across multiple environments without the movement of data. Which allows for obfuscation of data, protection of sensitive data, all of the things that are factors in a infosecurity risk profile calculation that a brand would have.

So, the ability to minimize the replication of data is huge because all brands and their infosecurity teams have, they have a risk calculation they keep with respect to their core data assets. And there are many factors that contribute to that, but one, that is just typically a fairly straight multiplier, is how many places is that data replicated? And whatever our risk is across the different factors, our own data center, Acxiom’s data center, Salesforce’s data cloud, whoever else, wherever I’m pushing my data out to, in fact, each one of them has their own profile, well, I’d multiply it by the number of places that exists. And they quantify it, they put a number on it, that risk profile gets into the billions of dollars, and it’s a serious thing.

So I think data sharing technologies in an environment where you have the controls and the capabilities at hand that enable you to enact the right policies to manage it well, that reduces that multiplier number dramatically and enables brands to see actually a more secure future. Now, I think, again, it has to be managed, but I think we’ve passed the point where infosecurity is a material impediment, it’s now about just the sheer weight of, what does the technological migration look like, and the business process migration? I think those are the bigger challenges, I think security can be solved for now.

Dustin Raney:

No, that’s interesting. And you started alluding to clean room capabilities, one of the major innovations that have come with the cloud. Snowflake being a place where people are super familiar with them taking the lead and allowing other companies to build UIs on top of their data cloud around data sharing. Do you believe that… Is clean room, like how Google got used as search, is clean room to data share as Google is to search? Is it the wave of the future, do you believe this is going to be something that basically all data exchanges and matches will leverage these non-movement capabilities in the future? Or do you see a need to be able to move data?

Jason Brown:

All right, so a couple of things. I’ll unpack that a little bit. So, I’ll answer the last part first and then dive into I think what was the main thrust of the question after that. So, as far as the need to move data in the future, I think for a significant amount of time we’re still going to have to practically securely move data. Because again, to mature into this technological environment that enables the non-movement of data, there’s just so much work to do there, and there’s so much complexity to solve for in the solutions that exist, it’s going to take time. So, for instance, if Acxiom’s vision is that brands have their own fully controlled and managed cloud or multi-cloud environment that they have chosen, they have established security controls, and all of their data assets reside there, and then they provision access to that via the technologies we’ve talked about here as they see fit, and they invite partners into that environment to provide services and capabilities and solutions as needed, but all the data is right there in their environment, it doesn’t go anywhere, that’s the North star, that’s the vision.

But in practicality to get there, so many brands don’t even have their own data assets in a cloud anywhere right now. And just doing that in and of itself, it’s a multi-year project for IT team, at the enterprise level. So, the reality is, in order to avail themselves of some of the other benefits, the network [inaudible] benefits and the nuance and the innovation you mentioned available in the ecosystem, they’ll be asking partners like Acxiom to still basically receive their data assets that are moved, but operate in an environment that is cloud-based and leverages that ecosystem, rather than in a data center somewhere.

And so, I think that intermediate step is going to be there in many, if not most cases, just out of necessity. So data movement’s a thing that we’re going to have for a while, but the way I lead and coach my teams is the way I like to approach my personal bearing and work, is I always like to operate in context of that North Star. Even if we’re not there yet, you just keep driving and operating it with those expectations and it helps pull you in the right direction. So that’s the data movement piece. Now, on the clean room question, look, and I say this, I’ll start this off by stating that my organization produces and maintains a data cleaner and product, we leverage our technology of our partners like Snowflake, we build additional capabilities around that, that enable our clients to make better use of it to more elegantly solve for their use cases…

In short, a Snowflake is a tool that’s largely built for a developer. Well, Acxiom’s data clean room is built for marketers. So we wrap that technology in usability. So, we have that product, we’re proud of that product, it’s an important product. With that said, clean room is very hyped right now, and I think that’s for a lot of reasons. I don’t need to list all those reasons out, but there are reasons. Some of those are organic, if you will, and just driven by the ecosystem, some of them are maybe a little less organic. These things happen with products, we see it all the time with different platforms. So, the long run for clean room in my estimation is it’s part of the ecosystem, a valuable part, an important part, the ability to share data.

As a unique thing that is transformational into itself, I don’t see it, my personal opinion, I don’t see it. And again, it’s not to diminish the importance of an ecosystem, it’s just, if you think about the problem… Go back to the composability discussion we were having earlier. Sharing data, providing access to data, being able to control the usage of data, those are just fundamental aspects of that ecosystem, they’re not the point, they’re enablers. And I think that’s ultimately what clean room matures into.

Kyle Hollaway:

So building off of that, in particular, that last point of enablers. And as you’ve talked about the composability, we talked about the OpEx nature of the ecosystem, we talked about data, data security, not moving data, all of that wrapped together, when you look at it and you talk about the enablement of that, and where identity plays into the equation, how do you see that intersection? Where do you see identity fitting into the equation of all those aspects we’ve just been talking about?

Jason Brown:

Well, I definitely think the ease of use and ubiquity of any given identity solution, that pops right to the top. Because previous historical identity solutions, and of course, we’re all here very familiar with AbiliTec, and being foundational and industry leading in that space for multiple decades up until now. Extremely valuable, but also extremely siloed by a client. And each client could have its own very well-connected, very robust, unique and persistent view of a customer, of a consumer. That was a great advantage. So, identity still at its foundation needs to provide that ability, but how it provides that capability has changed so much. How and where, I think that’s the other thing, how and where. So, Kyle, I want to give you credit for this, Kyle, because it came up from you in a conversation you and I had, but you spoke of identity like currency.

I love that analogy. I love it. I think it’s so apt for how we should think about identity in this composable ecosystem. We should have currency, and I think we all should be aware of and embrace that there will be multiple identity solutions in the ecosystem, and there needs to be a currency and a currency exchange, if you will. And I do believe that Acxiom is, and I know you guys are near and near and near and dear to this, I think Acxiom’s taking that approach to it. I think we’re enabling a currency in the ecosystem that is highly usable and highly portable, but I also think we have technologies and tools and capabilities that help our clients rationalize multiple currencies, if you will, as needed. And that is going to… Every day you hear something new about what will or won’t happen with cookies.

I’ve almost, personally, gotten past the point of view in caring about that, I’m sure you guys probably are maybe even further down that road than I am. But I think the right identity solution, it just washes out those concerns over time as that scales and becomes more robust. So, I think brands are going to look for identity solutions that give them the benefits of that consistent persistent view of the customer, of consumers that they must have, to run their business across all the different channels that they need to interact with and all the different data sources they need to integrate, but they’re also going to require that that identity works across the use cases that allow them to not send their data places.

To share their data, to access their data, to be able to push their data or elements of their data securely to multiple platforms, to execute whatever it is they need to execute. I think that’s the future of identity, and I see it evolving that way. I see it evolving here at Acxiom, and I know our competitors are working in a similar space. I think all of that added together is to the benefit of the brands.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah, you’re speaking our language. That’s exactly how we view the evolution of the ecosystem, where there is not one defacto fiat currency that underpins. Which, in a way, third-party cookies tried to play. It was like, that was the basis, and then everyone spent all this time trying to make it work. But the reality is, I think the interoperability of your identity components, and the ability to, like you say, exchange or to traverse from one base currency to the next is going to be critical on the ecosystem. But doing that in a fashion that minimizes the movement of the actual PII. The first party PII [inaudible] of the consumer privacy and just the reduction of data leakage, and being able to then move into a currency that is interoperable and therefore, if you’re just passing the currency, that is so much safer than actually your raw assets.

And I think that’s where we’re moving towards, and as these technologies continue to grow, cloud, interoperability, clean rooms, I think a fundamental point is they’re all dependent on identity to some scale, some degree, it’s just how well are you creating that interchange and enabling a brand to function across that interchange without loss of fidelity, loss of value. You don’t want a currency exchange that breaks the bank on one side, but that you’re able to manage that. So, that’s a great point.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. Kyle, just to step on top of that, what you’re just talking about. I do believe, and everything, Jason, you’ve been talking about from just a technical infrastructure and how the cloud is bringing all these new capabilities, I believe that it really benefits us as consumers, everyday consumers. If you think about the cloud and interoperability and the currency maybe providing, even the publisher ecosystem, the open internet, the long tail, the incredible content that we get to read every day, it’s providing them the ability to take more control in a secure and privacy-centered way to get that content in our hands.

So, like the [inaudible], they’ve always had, maybe think about the two major browsers controlled by Apple and Google, when cookies go away and these new federated IDs that are enabled in the cloud, maybe through these interoperable exchanges, start to take form and get scale, it just gives, I think, a lot more freedom to even the smaller brands, smaller publishers, who are [inaudible] their way out trying not to monetize their content. So, I think the cloud in general provides a lot of opportunity for players on all sides of the value exchange.

Jason Brown:

Yeah. Look, I agree, and I’m glad you mentioned consumers, Dustin, because that’s really, that’s the point, right? We think of our clients, and we think of ourselves and our business. We work to put our clients first, in doing that, because rightfully so. But our clients are thinking about those consumers, the consumers are who matter, that’s who matters. We’re all consumers ourselves, the businesses we run ultimately exist because people are out there consuming, whether it’s second or third hand, for providers that are B2B like us. But they’re out there and the ones consuming. And there’s a lot of really good work out there in the ecosystem in terms of evolving consumer behaviors and expectations, and if you tap into it, and I like to from time to time, tap into that, and use it as a frame of reference for the work that we do.

And that really, we talked earlier about the technology, consumer expectation is really the whole point of the technology, the cloud-based technology we’re talking about, and all this interoperability. Because consumers have a couple of really key expectations these days. One is timing, they expect everything right time. And I say right time because I don’t always want you to pound me with instantaneous real time feedback or messaging or whatever, outreach, whatever it is. But when I want it, I want it. I want it at the right time. So, an ecosystem, a marketing ecosystem has to be responsive to that. Consumers also want brands to engage with them in context of their whole lives, they don’t want that brand to get on a thread with them that only considers the brand’s interests in selling that person more things, or maybe, hey, I’ll consider your needs as a consumer in context of what I sell you, the spaces you live in that relate directly to my products.

Now, they want the brand to understand everything going on in their lives and to engage with them appropriately at the right time on their terms so that that brand becomes essentially a resource to them that fits seamlessly into their life. That’s the expectation. So, you’re not meeting that expectation as a brand with a legacy technology solution. You’re not meeting that expectation with an on-prem, walled off, compartmentalized and siloed solution. You’re only meeting that expectation if you are running a fully integrated solution that leverages all of the different partners that represent the different touchpoints, including the publisher ecosystem, to your point, and if you’re running that in cloud and edge based technology, that allows you the responsiveness to be there when you need to be there. So, that brings it all back together, that’s the consumer and their expectations, that’s the point. That’s point of all this.

Dustin Raney:

Man, I’ll just call that out, that’s Jason’s mic drop moment. I don’t know that we actually need to say anything after that. Well said, Jason. And I do know we’re actually running, unfortunately low on time, we could continue this conversation for hours upon hours. So, real quick lightning round, Jason. First question, high level, biggest change you’ve seen in marketing solutions during your career?

Jason Brown:

Boy, single biggest change. All right, I’m taking it as a single biggest change because we’ve just talked about a ton of change in the aggregate here today, all this hour, so. I would say, the biggest change in marketing solutions, I think what we’re going through right now. I think this move, because if you think about, in our careers we’ve seen three major shifts underpinned by technology. You’ve had the mainframe, way back in the day, when we all started our careers, we were moving out of that world into a client server world.

And now we’re going from a client server world into a cloud, into a truly distributed elastic computing world. The first two in those were essentially versions of the same thing from a business perspective, they were just better, faster ways to deliver it. This change we’re going through now fundamentally changes how we deliver solutions, how brands interact with consumers, as we just talked about. So, I think this change from an encapsulated solution driven ecosystem to a truly distributed and integrated ecosystem, I think it changes everything about how all of us work, in the biggest ways I’ve seen in my career.

Dustin Raney:

Nice. So, infrastructure, in order to breed change, infrastructure has to be there to do that, and absolutely we’re seeing that shift with the cloud. All right, second question, the biggest unknown facing our industry in the next five years?

Jason Brown:

I think the pace of this transformation, I think that’s the biggest unknown. I’ll qualify that. I think I sort of know how that’s going to go, I think expectations are going to be in one spot and reality is going to be in a different spot, as it often is. And so, how we all manage our businesses through that time, I think that’s probably… Maybe I’m answering your unknown with more of what’s the biggest challenge. But I think that’s an area of uncertainty, how quickly we can make that change, and how well and how fast the ecosystem evolves to that, and evolves to come together with that. There’s so much, and just the rationalization of it and how quickly we’re all collectively able to accomplish that, I think that’s the biggest unknown I see right now.

Kyle Hollaway:

All right. And so then, a third final question here on the lightening round, it takes a lot of effort to teach an old dog new tricks, 168 dog year technology years here, how do you shake off the stress of a workday? Because so much change generates stress.

Jason Brown:

All right, well, so yeah, it’s actually, at least on a daily basis, we all need our good vacations and getaways or whatever it is every once in a while, but I think on a daily basis it’s a fairly simple formula for me. One, I am not getting any younger, to the point well-made many times in this podcast, so a good workout is increasingly important, and I love to get a good workout at the end of the day and sweat a little bit, get the muscles moving. And then after the workout’s done, if the family and whatever else is going on in the world allows the time for it, really love a nice pour of bourbon and a good cigar. Those are things that get me back to a good place.

Kyle Hollaway:

A place of zen. All right. Well, that’s awesome. So, a wrap up question, what has you most excited about the next 12 months? So not the five-year view, just literally next 12 months. What is energizing you?

Jason Brown:

What’s energizing me now is converging the capability set that we offer our clients to accomplish all these things we’re talking about. I see the evolution in our strategic partnerships that we have with the Salesforces, and the Adobes, and the Snowflakes, and Amazons, and… You just go down the list, I don’t want to leave any out. We have a lot of strategic partners that are extremely important to our business, and the evolution in those relationships, coupled with the really complete overhaul and the revolutionizing of the capabilities that we bring to bear around those partners, in conjunction with the emerging identity solutions that we talked about earlier, over the next 12 months, all of that is going to come together. All of that is going to come together, and what Acxiom is able to go offer its clients in ways to benefit them in running their businesses, we’re going to get there in terms of powering that for them in the next 12 months.

And that excites me, because then we can really truly meaningfully set about that journey with the clients of making that transformation and ultimately service consumers. So, the fact that we’re at the point where I can see that we’re going to do it, and obviously, there’s a lot of work to get there, from point A to point B, but the fact that I can see that, that excites me. And it gets me out of bed each morning, it gives me something to look forward to.

Dustin Raney:

Thanks so much for joining us, Jason. And I know that Kyle and I got a ton out of today’s conversation, just in the context of the cloud, and I know our listeners did the same. For our listeners, you can find all of our Real Identity podcast episodes at acxiom.com/realtalk or find us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.