Soundbytes: Acxiom + Bose

Dustin Raney:

We've spent a lot of time talking to people, the brains behind new innovative ways and platforms and service providers that are responding to the disruption happening in ad tech. But today we're going to talk and hear from someone that actually has to take all these new cool concepts and be privacy centric and put them to use. We know it's one thing to talk about changes happening around us. We also know that brands are the ones that are ultimately the ones engaging with customers. The ones that are actually having to rethink viability and use of existing tech investments and discern where to place their bets in the future. And I know you and I, Kyle, often say identity isn't the thing. It's rather the thing that gets you to the theme. So what is that thing? It's delivering incredible customer experiences. That's what brands are looking to deliver.

And ultimately it's the why behind the importance of identity management across the enterprise. And speaking of customer experience, today we're going to hear from Taki Tsaklanos , Adobe Center of Excellence lead at Bose, an expert in Adobe Experience Cloud and let me tell you an absolute joy to get to know, to learn from and to cast vision with about the future of customer experience. So Taki first, let me congratulate you and your team on winning the 2021 Adobe Experience Maker Team of the Year for the Americas. To achieve that during a global pandemic must make a prestigious award like that even more special. I want to circle back around to that innovation that your team used and got recognized for. But first, why don't you start by giving the background that led you to the role you have today at Bose?

Taki Tsaklanos :

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, first of all, thanks a lot for the invitation and I like the format a lot. Also the fact that you have multiple viewpoints on what's in the end appears to be one topic. This is just so multifaceted that you really have to think holistically of it. So really well done there. And yes, the Adobe Awards team of the year was certainly a very special moment. This definitely is the result of several years of very hardworking with a lot of passion, with a lot of talented people, much more talented and smarter than I am, fortunately. I had the opportunity to be in that role. Three years ago, specifically to answer your question, Dustin, we came out of a corporate program which was all about personalization and trying to understand how both as a corporation should evolve, think, feel, act, and also become self-aware in enabling personalization at scale.

So that was a pretty big undertaking. I had a pretty interesting role there in the MarTech space. And coming out of that corporate program, I did realize that there was, I would say, sort of a gap in if we wanted to practice customer experience development at scale, then there was this sort of think tank of people specialize in the MarTech space that should enable and accelerate experience development and execution. And so just long story short, I got the opportunity to define a vision on what it should look like. It became a center of excellence and it really is an accelerator. There are people that are really smart in technology and data, but it's not a classic, I would say IT type of undertaking. It's really a business driven team thinking and also we sort of represent marketeers, e-commerce people in filling them in from a technology and data side of things.

And working with data scientists and digital IT teams, but also with people like yourself, the identity resolution and management and everything that comes with it. So it's a really broad topic, but also very, very interesting and very insightful undertaking.

Kyle Hollaway:

Wow. So interesting. And it's great to hear actually kind of the brand view of things because we spend so much time kind of in the ecosystem. So it's great to have someone here that's more of the user of the ecosystem. Can you talk a little bit about the enterprise itself? So at Bose as you kind of started on this journey, for a consumer product brand, obviously customer is important, but also this concept of identity, you don't always have a lot of signals historically coming directly into the brand. How did you navigate that with the enterprise and what was the overall reception to it? Was the enterprise receptive or did you kind of have to work your way into it?

Taki Tsaklanos :

It's a great question and it definitely was and still is a very interesting journey. It's certainly not binary like we are there or we are not there type of kind of moment or situation. But the important thing I believe is self-consciousness, self-awareness and just like individuals can be self-aware, the company can and should also be self-aware. In terms of how has this evolved, like the typical kind of obstacle that I think any company is going to deal with and this type of journey is siloed ways of working. So you absolutely must overcome that. It's an absolute must and it's also the prerequisite to think from a consumer perspective and also collect the data, map them nicely, get to know that consumers so much better and you guys of course offer an amazing service with the graphs, the different types of graphs, that's all kind of prerequisites.

But then of course that is going to enable touch points, specific kind of interactions. And from a consumer perspective, they don't care about, am I using a mobile app? Am I using the site or just like I'm interacting with a company, in this case it's called Boz and I would love if Boze knows me and I'm okay to share just like with every interaction to share more as we interact, but I also expect that you're going to do something with that. That's the very simple basic way of thinking that's also the premise of customer experiences and also identity management just comes with that. So there's quite some things that underlie what I just said. It's like self-awareness, it's the operating model, it is a touch point, but it's also at core data, consumer insights, and also making it actionable. So the activation piece of it, like that's such an important thing.

There's quite some things that need to be well in place. And even if you feel they're in place, it's a never ending story. You continuously evolve and you always get better like with any interaction, every relationship like individuals do. So I hope that kind of analogy makes sense.

Dustin Raney:

I love how you focused on people in your explanation of the journey. It's like a lot of times we get so focused on the technology that we lose sight of, I mean, you talked about data scientists, but even the customer, we're all people and we're all customers. We all like to engage with brands that we love. So to see you in this position of influence in your brand and to have that focus and understanding of the human nature and the importance of people and sharing experiences and their understanding to get to a better result. I think that's often overlooked. So you talked about the silos of the enterprise, right? We have to stop this process of looking at the customer differently. We're all sharing the same customer. What are some specific things, maybe hurdles that you got over or which ones are still there? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Taki Tsaklanos :

Yeah. I think it's a combination. There's not a one size fits all type of answer. It has to do with culture. It has to do with awareness of individuals that understand what we're doing, where we are evolving towards what the North Star is. There is a lot of top down support, but also direction that's required. So that's more in the soft area, but then in the hard area, if you think like McKinsey 7S terms, like more in the kind of rational and hard area of the enterprise, you're dealing with technologies, you're dealing with data systems and how all these systems do connect or don't connect. There is architecture, of course, that comes with it. And so you keep on time, of course, there's processes. So you keep on thinking about the siloed way of working versus the kind of more cross-functional and horizontal operating models and you see just so many of these elements that need to be in place.

So if your question is more about like, what have we seen is like all of it, like all of this is what you have to go through. And I think the one thing that I personally really realized in working very deeply and pretty hard in this space is the breadth and the depth of the effort that a company has to go through before you get to a point where you can see like we have really matured. We can visibly and significantly see a improvement against one or two years ago. It requires a lot of hard work, significant effort and that was for me one of the eye openers. But of course, the end result, and of course that's not an end point, but just an end result after a certain point, like you have milestones and you can see and measure what is it that we improved.

And you can see some of these experiences that come to life that give so much joy, it's worth the effort. It's worth the journey.

Kyle Hollaway:

That's great. Now obviously you're an international brand, a global brand. How have you navigated? Have you seen any significant challenges related to identity and the consumer across the globe as your presences in different geographies? Has that been something that you've been able to overcome and what are some of your strategies that you've used?

Taki Tsaklanos :

It definitely is not easy, Kyle. So if you look at US or the Americas, you look at Europe, we all know the GDPR and everything that comes with it. You also look at the APEC region, especially China, which comes with even more challenges and different type of challenges, whether it is communication methods, which is all based on say the mobile and everything that goes with mobile phone as an identifier, whether it is the Chinese firewall, it's pretty diverse. And so taking that into account and all the privacy differences that come with it and the impact on tools and technologies and systems and how that is going to help you or maybe not really help you so much in accelerating the understanding of the identity, pretty challenging. And so yes, a company like Boz is running into that is trying to of course prioritize like whatever is kind of a combination of a bigger size type of markets with an easier to handle type of privacy and data related issues like focus that first.

Obviously that's the United States, but coordinating orchestrating is certainly a important challenge that an international company is facing. I mean, I'm just looking at what's happening at both. I can testify it is not easy.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. No, I think that's a great point. Identity is not, as you said, a one size fits all. Even within the enterprise, you have to look at the different geographies in which you're operating, what are those other constraints there? And so you have to take that kind of a flexible view of identity to understand that depending on where you're operating, what the line of business is, even what are the engagement models, such as like you said, China, it's going to be very mobile centric. So there's going to be certain capabilities, but also constraints that may exist versus in the US where it may be across multiple channels simultaneously, but more freedom on how you connect those. So certainly a super interesting problem, not just across the broader ecosystem, but literally within a global enterprise like Bose. Thanks for sharing.

Dustin Raney:

Taki, let's talk a little bit more about the, I think more of a tactical approach or I want to understand maybe from you what your view is on identity. I know that we talked about Adobe being a part of the experience and a part of the capability that you bring to Verita to enable those experiences. How do you see identity playing out from a tech perspective for Bose? How are you solving for that?

Taki Tsaklanos :

Well, solving by working very closely with you guys, of course. And of course I'm jokingly talking about it, but

I think we realized how important a solid identity sort of service provider or partner is. The fact that you are dealing with multiple touch points, the fact that you're dealing with pretty complex customer data platforms, the fact that all that has to be orchestrated with activation systems and activation points, which then also might have, like we said a minute ago, differences between markets and privacy related restrictions and dos and don'ts. That is a pretty big undertaking and a lot of it has to do with, and it definitely starts with the quality of the identity service, what is it that you can understand from the consumer things like, and this might be a very simple example, but things like how big are those sizes if you think of some certain segments? Let's start with a few key segments. What is the size of some of these segments?

And when you start thinking multi-attribute or multi-cluster, what is that comes out of it so that you understand where you have to start, where the value lies? These might be very simple examples, but I realize that some of these practices we were not able to do before and in working with Action, we saw suddenly new value that gets unlocked because we could do that. From my personal perspective and the team that I'm able to work with, there is a lot of focus on how you can get identity management nicely integrated with Adobe's experience cloud and a lot of that is understanding, deep understanding of how identity graphs can work together, how they should work together, but also in two directions from the CDP and identity management towards the activation system, but also the other way around back and how you can create those continuous loops, closed loops and that enrichment is really what it's all about.

That's what we're trying to focus on. It's a journey to take it step by step. We have to practice it. It's one of the things that I like a lot when looking at how do you handle capabilities identity management being just one of the many capabilities you need, certainly a crucial one. I strongly believe in the concept of practice, like you exercise and you practice these things, you mature, but you also mature the capability. So you get more mature the more you mature capability and there as well, it's kind of a continuous process. I know it's a bit of a combination of technical and also conceptual type of answer I gave you, Dustin, but you started seeing the picture, right?

Dustin Raney:

Oh, I love it. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Taki, you just gave a very eloquent, incredible perspective on that kind of cyclical thing and identity. Now I'd like to really talk about the future a little bit more, because I know your head's always kind of in, where are things going? Where is customer experience going? And let me tell you, I went out to Bowes and I experienced the framed, your augmented reality piece in the frames and actually, I'm not even lying, had a case last night, I walked downstairs to the kitchen wearing a new pair of glasses and my wife and my six-year-old daughter are looking at me weird. They're like, "Okay, what's going on here?" And then finally my six-year-old, she comes up and is like, "Daddy, those glasses don't really look good on you. " So it's like, ma, had I had this augmented experience, I might've seen the same thing they saw before I bought the glasses, right?

So I know the pandemic is shifting the way consumers buy and it's forcing brands to really innovate and leverage digital means to create better experiences. I just saw a very like go to bows.com and you see a very tangible example in the way you guys are presenting frames. So would love to eventually kind of maybe guide the conversation into how identity might play in this augmented reality space. But first, I know Adobe, there's all kinds of things that are driving that experience. Can you talk a little bit more about that, how you guys made that happen?

Taki Tsaklanos :

Yeah, it's absolutely one of the most interesting things I've done in recent years, if not in my entire career. It was also the virtual try-on experience you're talking about that was the sort of subject of the Adobe Awards that we were granted this year. There are a few ways to look at this and I think I want to start with just the fact that it's an immersive experience and it's definitely the type of level or the bar that customers expect nowadays. They want you to bring these type of experience to them in a very seamless way on all these touch points wherever possible. And so it's really a matter of understanding who can help us with that. In this particular case, we tried out a few, say, software vendors and we weren't really pleased from several perspectives, one of them being the flexibility we would have to apply those experiences across touchpoints, certainly not solid enough.

The other thing is flexibility in how to handle the data and collect data, but also share it out and syndicate. And that was also a very important kind of outcome that we got while going in a pretty lean way through the process of understanding, are we going to build it ourselves, buy versus build? We did realize, yeah, building is really going to deliver and it's a positive business case we see. So once we figured that out, it also became possible to think like, "Hey, maybe this experience can live on Amazon on Best Buy and some of these retailers." So suddenly your touchpoint say universe becomes so much larger and I'm telling this because a virtual tryon is of course a pretty anonymous type of experience so you're not going to collect data there, but from the consumer perspective, if we flip the view, the consumer thinks just it's an interaction with Boz.

And so it doesn't really matter whether it's on Best Buy or Amazon or Boze.com side, it's just an interaction with Boz and that's the way it should be, I think. It's a nice way to bridge the worlds of the brand with a reseller for instance. And it's a start of the journey and that's where for the consumer the journey starts, where it's going to be pleased, it's going to be open to probably consider purchase and then you get the ball rolling with the data that comes with it and getting the person know it's all related to each other like the quality of the experience, how much exposure you can give it, how much data you can get out of it and how fast you can relate to a individual. It's all one big thing and it's also showing the richness and all the capabilities that come with experience development, also the opportunities that come with it.

But you'll also ask another question, Dustin, and I think it's also important to realize you have opportunity, you also of course have challenges. One of the challenges, of course, is fragmentation. And I think if you think, I mean we were talking about siloed thinking and operating before. If you think about you have multiple touch points, you can also expect maybe if you don't get things right, that you have multiple databases. So that's really something like fragmentation of consumers, consumer data and identities, really something to avoid. So yeah, with opportunity come challenge with challenge, solving challenges becomes opportunity.

Kyle Hollaway:

Yeah. So just want to kind of dive in a little bit on that aspect because you talked about extending that Boze experience to other retailers to Best Buy and Amazon and such. From an identity layer perspective or an interaction, how are you seeing that working out between yourself and that other, what we'd call at this point second party because it's a partner where the interaction's happening there, like you said, it's somewhat anonymous, but the consumer is viewing that as with Bose, just with Bose at Best Buy. And just kind of at the partnership level, are you seeing the ability to bring identities across partnerships? Is that still a real challenge? What are you experiencing?

Taki Tsaklanos :

Yeah, at this point in time, I think there are only ideas and there are visions about what could it bring us and how could it work? In all fairness, we tend to think in pretty lean terms like discover, do, fail fast, learn fast, and try to always get better and certainly never stop. So if you combine that, you can imagine that when it comes to identity, collecting identities, but also managing them accurately, correctly according to whatever, privacy rules, that's a area that's I would say still uncharted at least for us and would love to start getting more value out of that. We have to take it step by step, however, and I think step one is just ensuring that is a very qualitative, immersive experience, but then once that all that is in place, question becomes like, how can you start interacting much faster with the consumer, not just the anonymous user but the consumer.

And I'm not sure we have already very kind of specific ideas that are ready to start being tested. I personally strongly believe that it's all about being lean here and it's thinking, testing it out, maybe prototyping first. So although Kyle, I don't have a very specific answer yet as in it's going to look this or that way, I'm pretty sure it's something that will come up soon and it has to be tested like with everything in experience development, just test it out, see what you can learn from it and the data will show a direction.

Kyle Hollaway:

I think everyone is starting to embrace the aspect that this is a new territory, that we're all collectively kind of having to forge a new future and that there's not the silver bullet or the easy answer to this. And I love your kind of bringing in that lean mentality to it and especially around kind of fail, fast, learn, reiterate. That's challenging because there's a lot of expectations from the business, right? Your bosses and the shareholders or whoever are expecting certain things and so I think you're seeing collectively, especially in the MarTech ad tech ecosystem, those of us that are in it day in and day out are realizing it's like, "Hey, this is going to be an iterative process. We're going to continually grow and learn and at the same time, things are going to continue to change." So what you learned yesterday may need to be adjusted tomorrow because there's a new privacy legislation that comes out or there's some new technology opportunities that arise that you need to embrace, which does kind of open the door to the question around privacy and consent because you are now touching consumers directly, you're interacting with them, you're building that relationship.

How are you guys approaching kind of privacy and consent question?

Taki Tsaklanos :

It's a very serious matter. Bose is very, very sensitive to everything that's related to privacy, whether it is applying current legislation, whether it's respecting regional differences, whether it is also what's coming up. So trying to see one, two, three years ahead in time and trying to see what's coming and also trying to find a reasonable balance between restriction and opportunity. And the one thing that I think we can really be, I would say proud about, but also took time to get to that point is in involving the privacy office team and finding a collaborative model to work together because in the past I personally have seen often that legal is a entity that comes in that is going to ask a lot of questions that is not easy necessarily to work with because these are different mental frameworks that you typically operate in. And so finding each other, finding that connection often takes time.

What we have experienced in working together closely with each other is that they almost became part of the collaborative and cross-functional process. So in the end, they are just part of the cross-functional team and that makes things so much easier because you tend to share a mental framework. And so they do absolutely do understand the importance of enablement, legal enablement. They also do understand that if you go too far in it, then it also becomes a restriction and they also understand that I need to find some middle grounds. Of course, everyone knows that if you're going to be really too literal in understanding and interpreting legal guidance, then of course you're hardly going to be able to do anything, right? But really kind of finding each other, having that connection between all those teams and the people that think in those terms is something that I found very, very important and it's very effective.

It works very effectively right now and still respecting the very strict mindset on those legal terms.

Kyle Hollaway:

I love your statement there around being on the same mental framework. It is a cross discipline effort and that it's really important to engage all areas of the business, especially when you're talking about identity and people and because there are so many technical challenges, there's legal and just privacy related challenges and then there's the actual business execution, right, just the customer experience because this is how you interact with the consumer. And so all of that together, I love that aspect of saying it's a mental framework that you all need to be engaged in. So thanks for that little tidbit.

Taki Tsaklanos :

Here's an interesting anecdote on what you just said, Kyle a few weeks ago I was talking to the legal team and I told them like, "Look, we are talking with action. We are brainstorming about some concepts on how to operate in the cookieless future when third party cookies go away." And I told them like, "Look, I just need a little bit of time to get a nice presentation to you and get everything explained and all that. " And they were, "No, no, stop. Don't do that. Just let's just talk." And that was really an eye-opener, very interesting moment because you tend to go to a legal team where everything is perfectly clear and have that conversation. Here they understood like, "No, we don't have to do it. We are going to discover and explore those new opportunities but also new challenges together. And so please involve us and we just start a conversation together." That was a really interesting moment and that's in the end how you want to be operating.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. It seems like there's so much disruption happening, especially with what Google and Apple are doing, obfuscating IDs that it's really forcing everyone to come together and say, "Okay, how are we going to as like Bose as an enterprise handle these massive topics?" So it's forcing the conversation to open up and everyone kind of be on the same page, like how are we as a brand going to move forward now that those things that the industry's just, it's been like the easy button, right? I kind of consider third party cookies like it was like the easy button for the ad tech industry just to use those things to do syncs and go find new customers. Well, that's huge disruption when that goes away. So now Oz as an enterprise still has to grow and you want to find new customers doing that now is just going to be different.

Now it's going to be very much customer privacy centric and it's going to be more about your first party engagements and maintaining those relationships and things like that. So it's really neat that, like Al said, just talking about even the league Legal team being a part of the whole process from soup to nuts. It's all a conversation. It's all give and take and figuring out, fail fast, but do it in a way that's transparent, that the customer we're taking their thoughts and feelings and their privacy. It's always at the forefront of our minds.

Taki Tsaklanos :

Exactly, Dustin. And I always try to simplify things as much as possible to try to get to the understanding of some concepts, especially new concepts, but what you just said about privacy and things becoming more strict also with the third party cookie going away. Whenever something similar would happen in your individual's life, you probably are going to be more careful and cautious in getting more quality out of individual relationships. If for whatever reason there are limitations with privacy in your relations, you're probably going to just take so much more care with individuals one-on-one, or maybe some groups, networks that you're interacting with. And the same I think can be said about a company. They just have to be so much more focused on the individual relationship and that's where first party data comes up. So if you're going to simplify it and then going to apply the principle again to a corporation, you get to the first party data as the important kind of solution, especially in the third party cookieless world.

So that's a simple way to think of maybe more complex and futuristic concepts.

Dustin Raney:

Awesome. So Taki, we always like to wrap up. I know we're running out of time here. We like to wrap up with a pretty standard question. So it's the year 2030. It's actually not that far away, but what does customer consumer engagement look like in the year 2030? Do you see a scarier or whalian type future or do you see brighter days ahead?

Taki Tsaklanos :

I would expect 2030 to be what I was thinking 2020 would have been 20 years ago or 10 years ago. And really seriously, I'm really amazed about how long it took and what type of event accelerated kind of this whole digitization of society. We had to wait until a global pandemic,

Pretty painful type of event until we see that acceleration. I was thinking that these type of things would happen in 2015 or 2010 and that was my thinking early 2000s when I started kind of rolling into this beautiful industry. I think personally that in 2030 or whatever in some 10 years that everything is going to be just so seamless. And in the end, if you think about it, the last 10 years, we haven't really had net new kind of technology innovation. I mean AR, VR, blockchain, data, identity, like all of these concepts, they are there for many years. I think what we will finally start seeing is a convergence. A convergence where these things in a seamless way get together and experience and where they're really kind of really relevant for whatever moment, whatever need you have. So I personally think that finally technology is going to really help solve problems for consumers and the brands that are able to solve more problems and deeper problems are just going to be so much kind of more appreciated and they of course will be so much more successful.

So I know it's maybe not the most kind of exciting type of answer, but it's definitely the way I'm thinking of it for the next 10 years.

Kyle Hollaway:

Well, that's awesome. Yeah. I love it. And yeah, that aspect of just bringing all those things together that have been here, but they've kind of been nascent and now starting to have a catalyst that brings it together in that seamless aspect. That's a great view of the future and certainly do hope that we are on that journey. It definitely looks to be that way. So Taki, thank you so much. Super insightful. I love hearing from a well seasoned practitioner like yourself that is really doing it. You are making that seamless reality come true. So thank you for letting us kind of walk with you on that journey and so excited for what the future holds.

Taki Tsaklanos :

Thank you for the invitation. It was really fun and I always love these conversations, always insightful. So thanks. I really, it's my pleasure.