Jason Brown joins the Real Identity podcast to explore the benefits of cloud adoption for data-driven marketers. He shares real-world success and best practices from brands on the journey to shift their tech stacks to cloud computing – from clean rooms to interoperability and security. This enlightening conversation also breaks down the challenges and the integral role of identity to bring it all together – remembering it always comes back to customers and how to better engage them in the context of their lives.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-brown-17a61a5/
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Jason Brown joins the Real Identity podcast to explore the benefits of cloud adoption for data-driven marketers. He shares real-world success and best practices from brands on the journey to shift their tech stacks to cloud computing – from clean rooms to interoperability and security. This enlightening conversation also breaks down the challenges and the integral role of identity to bring it all together – remembering it always comes back to customers and how to better engage them in the context of their lives.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-brown-17a61a5/
Thanks for listening! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram or find us on Facebook.
Hello and welcome to Real Talk about real identity from Axiom. This podcast is devoted to important identity trends and the convergence of ad tech and market. I'm Kyle Holloway, your podcast host, and I'm joined by our cohost, dustin Ringey.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome back to Real Talk about real identity. So, kyle, we spend enough time talking to industry experts about ground level tactical steps that they are taking to overcome all the headwinds they're facing with ID deprecation and industry regulation. On today's episode, how about we reach for the clouds? And by that I mean the cloud. There are entire industries now redefining themselves with this word. For instance, snowflake considers itself a data cloud, salesforce considers itself a marketing cloud. Heck Axiom has even jumped into the bandwagon, and I actually love it. We're now positioning ourselves as a customer intelligence cloud. No doubt recent years have witnessed a remarkable surge in the adoption of cloud based solutions by data driven marketers, where marketers gain access to scalable computing power and storage and enabling them to handle the explosion of data assets and perform complex analytics with ease. Furthermore, cloud based platforms provide the flexibility to integrate multiple data sources and tools, allowing marketers to gain comprehensive insights across various channels. You know?
Speaker 3:Dustin, you're right and according to industry research. You know, more than 80% of marketing organizations have either partially or fully shifted their data infrastructure to the cloud. You know that's demonstrating the undeniable impact of this transition in the market. You know, 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 Axiom. Jason, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:Hey guys, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, looking forward to the discussion today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, thank you. And so, just to start off, why don't you give our listeners a snapshot of your background? You know what got you into this space.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it's interesting right. I kind of whenever, whenever I could ask 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 Axiom for a long time, I mean 20, 24 years, and so that's sort of the beginning. That's kind of why I start with the answer to this question. And a little side thing I kind of enjoy observing the reaction on people's faces when I meet them for the first time and like at events or, you know, conferences or just whatever in the ecosystem. That reaction it's kind of an interesting, interesting take people have on that. But but yeah, I mean that journey I've had here with a company over that over that period of time. It really informs kind of how I have gotten and we have gotten to where we are.
Speaker 4: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 Axiom you know formerly Axiom's, you know Black Ship, identity, product Ability, tech, which now of course is a library and product and in my career kind of evolved from there. I went through, you know, 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 you know. That led me over time into starting some practices.
Speaker 4:I was one of the early kind of, you know, I guess, pioneers I don't want to brag but like pioneers or first people you know, with Axiom kind of moving into the digital space back in the you know late OOs, early TENS, and then from there found myself ultimately running businesses and you know, industry verticals, axiom and a P&L ownership, sales, client management position. So kind of that full spectrum of experience has me now at a point where, you know, my team and I are tasked with helping define Axiom's pivot into this ecosystem you guys described right becoming more of a partner led cloud based solution provider, you know, for our clients. And so yeah, I mean I think it's, you know, the experience I've had in the future that you know that is out there for us is very exciting.
Speaker 3:That's awesome and yeah you know that that longevity, especially in a particular, not just industry, but at a particular company, is certainly unique these days. And you know, with tech years kind of being like dog years, you've been here like 168 years, then that's awesome, that's, that's some great great knowledge there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, don't, don't, don't tell, don't tell my kids you can frame my age that way. It'll just make it worse, I promise you Exactly no, but it is amazing.
Speaker 3:You know the amount of change that does happen within the industry, within technology you know, just, we all have historically, you know, talked about Moore's law and you know 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. So kudos to you for just that longevity of a career and getting to this point. So we do want to dive into you know what's going on in the market and the way brands are going to be building marketing solutions. Looking forward, you know, the next five to 10 years is 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, yeah.
Speaker 4:So first of all, I think all you know kind of a refrain I like to come back to whenever you know I talk about our business and I think we have a tendency to over, sort of overindex on the technology side of it and you know, 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 Axiom. I think it per it pervades the industry in a lot of ways as well. So it's interesting.
Speaker 4:You mentioned Moore's law, right, and from a, from a, you know, technology perspective, there's another law and I'm not going to attempt to go deep on it because there are academic people who are, you know, wouldn't might hear this and think I'm a complete idiot but there's a law called Metcalfe'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. Right, and I think you know, I look if I'm selfish and I'm looking at Axiom's growth. That's an avenue right, but if I look at the pathway to that growth is success for 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 can benefit from the sort of information security and privacy compliance control that they have had in their own data centers or in highly secure environments, like Axia manages on 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 haven't been there in recent times and are just really now becoming.
Speaker 4:You know something that's practical with the. You know some of the core improvements in the, the cloud providers themselves, when you think about infrastructure and operational robustness and the ability to handle the enterprise processing. And then you know data sharing technologies like snowflake or native bricks or some of the. You know some of the cloud providers have native technologies, accomplish similar things. But you know those, those advances and those maturities and those that really kind of 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?
Speaker 2:Yeah, super interesting times, jason, and you know you mentioned like on-prem kind of server capabilities that you know Axium has always kind of managed for clients for so many years. It was always cool to go walk down.
Speaker 2:You know these aisles and aisles of servers, you know sitting on our facilities in your Conway and you know when I came on and I actually went out to my calculator Kyle and tried to calculate my dog ears- as well and, yeah, I'm somewhere around 140 years old, so I've been around a long enough to know the old days right, when in every contract, servers were always a big part of the provisioning right and that the cost structure I don't know.
Speaker 2:The last time I saw a Sun microsit it was always Sun and you know IBM and you know they were. That was just a big part of the contract, right. So now that everything's shifted to the cloud, it's like that part is kind of gone and it's all about like elasticity and storage and how much of a do you want and what services you want on top of it. Do you see that being a, you know a massive contributor, just like the ease of contracting between clients of you know why you know people should really just go all in in the cloud yeah, it's a great question and I actually actually think it's a bit of a misconception, it's.
Speaker 4: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 right 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, you know, historically, contract with Axiom 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, right, ibm, this IBM server that you know, attached storage, this Oracle database over there, and all those things would be, would be part of that kind of 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. So today, but you know, and but also with them come some different challenges too, right? So maybe the provisioning of that environment doesn't require a, an architecture and, you know, an infrastructure build of six different components from six different vendors, you know 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, right, but but the differences you know you would manage. Now, how you manage capacity is entirely different.
Speaker 4:Now, yeah, it's great that it's an elastic environment and you don't have to actively add another server or attempt to sort of predict the growth of your environment and you know capacitors appropriately without becoming too inefficient. You know, yeah, yes, you have better levers here, but but the others? There's another side to that, right. The other side is you now have the ability to use unlimited resources that are billed per usage, by the way, right. So so now or before, you could sort of hey, I've got my environment with axiom. It has enough capacity, we don't feel as though it's wasteful, but it's got enough and we can use that and axiom can use it on our behalf, until the server, you know, starts smoking and you know spitting parts out. Right, I mean, you can use it and 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.
Speaker 4:If you're not managing it, well, right, I can. My analyst gets into the environment that I'm managing, or maybe axiom is managing for me. I don't have controls in place. They might start a query that runs for you know, a weekend and next thing, I know my cloud costs for that month just double or triple and so. So you've got a different dimension.
Speaker 4:So I think I think brands are gonna mature with this. They're gonna 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 you know, the type of work that you know providers like Axiom 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 I think brands are still going to need help with that Right. So I think it's it's. It's a continued partnership between Axiom and our clients to make sure all those things are accounted for and the and the Brands are able to safely and effectively and efficiently take advantage of all the functionality technology offers.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean you kind of keyed in there right on the the move from capex topics. You know the difference of that and the material difference that has on the enterprise as that kind of move into more of the OpEx structure. One thing that does allow for is Interoperability and the ability to a decision differently, right?
Speaker 3:Do you see Brands? I mean because in the past it was like you would make a big capex, right, and it would be with a brand, just to mention a few. You know some of the big iron providers or whatever, and you kind of were like I'm a shop, you know, I'm an IBM shop, I'm a Microsoft shop, I'm a this or 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 like, just a change like oh well, I'm an Azure shop, I'm a AWS shop, yeah, yeah, you know it's funny, we see, we see probably more of the latter than the former.
Speaker 4:Right, we see the this on that shop. I have a, you know, strong presence for AWS or maybe, in certain sectors, a strong Virgin.
Speaker 4:AWS, right? Yeah, so it just. But you see, you see that because of this kind of shopping look, I think there's some logic to it, right? Because I mean it is like I said before. You know, 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 and partners and vendors as well, right? So you know, if you think of a brand trying to manage, you know, for vendors, or five vendors versus 20 or 25 vendors, I mean it because there's a there's a point, there's a point at which that becomes unmanageable and inefficient, right, in terms of no matter what gains might be available by optimizing through multiple brands, the sheer management of it nullifies it, right? So? So I do think you see that. So there's some logic to it, right.
Speaker 4:But I also think there's a little bit of muscle memory there as well, and that's just how brand, how organizations, have operated, and I think that's really that's part of I think, the value that axiom brings in sort of our pivot and how we approach the marketplace is that, I Think.
Speaker 4:I think we, and I know my team is focused intently on this, both through our our services offerings, our partnerships or strategic partnerships, and the product roadmap that we're building out, in being able to rationalize all of that and make it make it more consumable and manageable for clients. So they get sort of their lunch and they get to it too right they get. 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 in the end, the complexity and managing it right. So I think axiom as an integrator of these technologies and having the ability to kind of fill the holes that these Platforms out there don't solve for I think that that's really the value that you'll see axiom bringing over the next, you know, 510 years to our clients.
Speaker 3:So that kind of leads to another kind of 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 a key focus area for you, so talk to us a little bit about your perspective on what does it mean to be composable, like what is a composable architecture versus like a monolithic?
Speaker 4:Well, yeah, I mean, again, it's a composability, right, and we see this again. We've all spoken about our 10 years and our sort of you know dog ears in terms of the space and you see so many different terms sort of come and go right, and a lot of them, most of them, there's. There's very little this genuinely new enter in, you know, in the, in the space of terminology, right, it's just different way, maybe a slightly different spin on on an earlier concept, right, but it can use prop gate. I see composability. I mean it's a very similar it's. It's it's componentization, right, if you think of, if you want to think of it in technical terms, go back 15 years and think of service-oriented architecture, right, or or slightly more, for microservices. I know there's a difference in kind of how that word data is stored in those two architectures, but it's a similar concept, right, of being able to distribute and Break down functionality into more atomic parts, more atomic like atomic level, more granular parts. It's a composability, I mean.
Speaker 4:I think when I look at composability, I think of it in terms of the entirety of a solution, right, so every piece is 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, right, and I think that is that is how you solve the problem of scale up and scale down. And I think one of the things that you know, axiom, transparently, has made this mistake in the past of attempting to productize via monolith, and it hasn't worked for us, I mean, just as let's just let's be honest about that, right, and I think but you know 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. You know, I go back to my earlier comments about technology and kind of how it's evolved, and there's a benefit of it, right, the ability to share data, the ability which which allows the integration of multiple different pieces and parts in terms of platforms or tools or or data storage or computer or whatever it is. The ecosystem is really the modern ecosystem is probably more suited to composability at scale than it ever has been, right? So now it's popular and it's good, it's right that it's popular should be, and so.
Speaker 4:So when I think of that, I think of how we approach our clients and try to help them make sense of all this. I it's. We've got partners that are out there in the ecosystem that are the best at what they do. We have Axiom 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 sort of all in. We have services that are expert and adept at all the specific strategic partners we have. We have services that support the Axiom components. 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 benefits Axiom too. It helps us kind of going back to the network effect that gives us avenues to scale our business more.
Speaker 4:So, kind of 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 like look at Adobe, look at Salesforce.
Speaker 4:So Salesforce is really, you know, they've kind of pulled the concept of CDP out of marketing cloud and they have data cloud now and they're breaking up and they're treating, they're even reporting their earnings against data cloud separately from marketing cloud. They have commerce cloud right, 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. I mean 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, you look at the, you know, you look at the hundred and hundred and whatever odd CDPs that are out there that all have slightly different takes on what a CDP is. That just sort of underscores the need that trying to categorize all this as a single thing, that's not sustainable. Right, it's a solution and it needs to have many composable parts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 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 eight thousand ad tech or more tech companies that are showing up in the Loom Escape and maximize your capabilities or change Like, be able to plug in some new capability that didn't exist six months ago. So that composability, you know, I think is absolutely essential to reach for kind of new heights as an industry. I mean, and speaking of, you know things that need to change and be thought of is like security, you know, and how data moves. Do you believe that you know clients are have more fear in this world where you know everything's in the cloud?
Speaker 2:There's, you know, access, you know the interoperability of you know publishers and other platforms to the data, or do you feel like they they're feeling kind of like man, I don't. I don't know Like there's. There's challenges here and I'm not really comfortable, you know, putting all my data out there where it's in some interoperable, you know cloud based.
Speaker 4:Look. So I would say as recently as maybe three years ago they were kind of in that state you just described, still right, and I think they've been in that state. And I mean mileage varies greatly, right. I mean different industries different, you know upmarket, downmarket. You know downmarket and less regulated industries have been Further on the spectrum then upmarket, you know highly regulated, right. So I mean, but kind of, if you look at just maybe try to strike somewhat of an average across that spectrum there, I'd say you know, maybe three years ago there were still material concerns about that. But then I think you know you've really seen, in this intervening time the info security 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, right, it kind of goes back to how you manage it.
Speaker 4:And then data sharing technologies, which I mentioned before, enable the access of data across multiple environments without the movement of data and which allows for obfuscation of data, protection of sensitive data, all of the things that are factors in a info security risk profile calculation that a brand would have, right. So you know one of the main, one of them, I mean that the ability to minimize the replication of data is huge because all, all brands and their info security teams have, they have a risk calculation they keep and with respect to their core data assets, and you know there are many factors that sort of contributed 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 that you know, our own data center, you know axioms, data center, sales forces, data cloud, whoever else, wherever I'm pushing my data out to, you know they've all got some factors. Each one of them sort of has their own profile. Well, I multiply it by the number of places that exist, right, so that number, and if they quantify it, they put a number on it. I mean that risk profile gets into the billions of dollars and you know it's a serious thing, right. 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.
Speaker 4:Now I think again, it has to be managed, but I don't think info security. I think we've kind of passed the point where info security is a material impediment. It's now about they just the sheer weight of what. What does the technological migration look like in the business process migration? I think those are the. Those are the bigger challenges. I think you know security can be solved for now.
Speaker 2:No, that's that's interesting and you know you started alluding to. You know Clean room capabilities. You know one of that, the major innovations that I've kind of come with, the cloud Snowflake kind of. You know being a place where people are, you know, super familiar with. You know them kind of. You know taking the lead in and allowing other companies to kind of build you eyes on top of their. You know data cloud Around. You know data sharing. Do you believe that it's clean room Kind of like? You know how Google got kind of used as search? Is that is clean room to data share as Google is to search? Is it? Is it that the wave of the future? You believe this is going to be something that basically all Data exchanges and matches or will leverage these non movement kind of capabilities in the future? Or do you ever see, or do you see that a need to be able to move data?
Speaker 4:So couple, couple things. I'll impact that a little bit. So first I'll answer the last part first and then kind of dive into, I think, what was the main thrust of the question after that. So as far as like the need to move data in the future, I mean I Think for a significant amount of time, it's just going to practically we're still going to have to practically securely move data because, again, to mature into this technical and technological environment that enables the non movement of data, it's there's just so much work to do there and there's so much complexity to solve for and the solutions exist it's gonna take time, right.
Speaker 4:So you know, for instance, if you know, axiom division is that you have that brands have their own fully Controlled and managed multi cloud or multi cloud environment that they have chosen. They have established security controls and all of their sent, all of their data assets reside there, and then they provision access to that via the technologies we 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 sort of the North Star. That's the vision, right, but in practicality to get there.
Speaker 4:I mean, so many brands don't even have their own data assets in a cloud anywhere right now. So I mean there's, yeah, and just doing that in and of itself is some multi-year project for it team, fred, at the enterprise level. So the reality is, in order to avail themselves of some of the benefit, the other benefits, the network effect type benefits and the Nuance and the innovation you mentioned available in the ecosystem, yeah, it will be. They'll be asking partners, like axiom to you know, still basically receive their data assets, that is, that are moved but operate in an environment that is cloud based and leverages that ecosystem rather than in a data center somewhere. Right, and so I think you'll. That intermediate step is going to be there in many, if not most, cases, just out of necessity, right? So data movements, a thing that we're going to have for a while. But I mean, I love, I always love the way I like to you know kind of way I lead and coach my teams.
Speaker 4:As a way, I just approach my personal, my personal kind of bearing work is I always like to Operating context of that North Star even if, 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 that's kind of the data movement piece. Now on the clean room question Look, I mean I'm and I say this, you know I'll start this off but by stating that my organization Produces and maintains a data clean room product. We leverage our technology of our partners, like snowflake, we build, you know, additional capabilities around that that enable our, our clients, to make better use of it to, you know more, allegedly solve for their use cases. You know, in short, right, like a snowflake is a tool that's largely built for a developer, right, while we at axioms, data clean room is built for marketers, right, so we wrap that technology and usability. So you know, we have that product, we're proud of 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 it.
Speaker 4:I think that's for a lot of reasons, right? I don't. You know, don't need to list all those reasons out, but there are reasons. Some of those are organic, if you will, and 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 for clean room, in my estimation, is it's part of the ecosystem, valuable part, important part the ability to share data as A unique thing that is transformational unto itself. I don't see it, my personal opinion, I don't see it, and it's and again, it's not to diminish the importance of an ecosystem is just it's. If you think about the problem, or so go back to the composability discussion we were having earlier. Right, I mean sharing data, providing access to data, being able to control the usage of data. Those are just fundamental aspects of that ecosystem, right? They're not? They're not sort of the point, right there?
Speaker 3:Enablers, you know, and I think that's, I think that's ultimately what clean room matures into so Kind of building off of that, in particular, that last point of enablers and, as you've talked about the composability, we talked about kind of the op-ex nature of of the ecosystem, talked about data, data security, you know, not moving data, all of that wrapped together when you look at it and you talk about the Enablement of that and we're like identity Plays into the equation. How do you see that intersection, like where do you see identity fitting into the equation of all those aspects we've just been talking about?
Speaker 4:well, I definitely think you know the ease of use and Ubiquity of any given identity solution. I mean it that that pops right to the top, you know. And it because, because you know previous you historical identity solutions, of course, we're all here very familiar with the bill of tech and you know being foundational and industry leading in that space for, you know, multiple decades up till now, extremely valuable but also extremely siloed by client right. I mean that, and it was you know, each client could have its own Very well connected, very robust, unique and persistent view of a customer, of consumer right, I mean that was great advantage right in it. So identity, still at its foundation, needs to provide that ability. But how it provides that capability has has changed so much. How and where, right, I think that's the other thing, how and where. So it and Kyle and I, you know I want to give you credit for this, kyle, because you it came up in a you know from you, in a conversation you know I had, but you spoke of identity like currency. I love that analogy, I love it. I think it's, I think it's so apt for how we should think about Identity in this composable ecosystem. Right, we, we should have currency and I think we all should be aware of and embrace that.
Speaker 4:There will be multiple identity solutions in the ecosystem and you know they. You know there needs to be a currency and a currency exchange, if you will, right, I think, and I do believe that axiom isn't I know you guys are close, near and near and near and do this I think axiom is taking that approach to it. Right. 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. I mean, you know there's, you know every, every day, you hear something new about what will or won't happen with cookies.
Speaker 4:I've almost kind of personally gotten past the point of even caring about that.
Speaker 4:I'm sure you guys probably are, you know, maybe even further down that road than I am, but I Think the right and entity solution.
Speaker 4:It just sort of washes out those concerns over time as that scales and becomes more robust, right. So you know, 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, that they, 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 or elements of their data securely to multiple platforms, to execute whatever it is I need to execute, right? I think that's the future of identity and and I See it evolving that way. I see it evolving here at axiom, and I know our competitors are working in a similar space, right? I think all of that added together is to the benefit of the brands.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're speaking our language right. I mean that that's exactly kind of how we view the evolution of the ecosystem. Where there is not one de facto fiat currency, you know that underpins, which, in a way, third-party cookies kind of tried to play right. It was kind of like that was the basis and then everyone spent all this time trying to Kind of make it work. But the reality is, I think the, the interoperability of your identity components and the ability to, like you say, kind of exchange or to Traverse from, from one kind of base currency to the next, is going to be critical on the ecosystem.
Speaker 3:But doing that in a fashion that minimizes the movement of the actual PII I right, the the first party PII you know, in veins 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, right, and and I think that's where we're moving towards, and and as these technologies continue to grow cloud interoperability, clean rooms, you know, I think a fundamental point is like they're all dependent on Identity to some scale, some degree. It's just how well are you creating that interchange, you know, and in enabling a brand to function across that interchange without I loss of fidelity, loss of value?
Speaker 3:you know you don't want a currency exchange that breaks the bank, you know, on one side you know, but that you're able to manage that, so that's a great point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kyle, just a step on top of that, what you're just talking about.
Speaker 2:I do believe you know, in everything Jason, you've been talking about, from just a technical infrastructure and how the cloud is bringing all these new kind of capabilities, I believe that it really benefits us as consumers, everyday consumers, if you think about you know, the cloud and interoperability and the currency maybe providing.
Speaker 2:You know, even like the publisher ecosystem, the open internet, the long tail, the incredible content that we get to read every day. It's like providing them the ability to take more control right in a secure and privacy centered way to get that content in our hands. So you know, as like the wallet gardens, you know they've always had, and maybe think about the two major browsers controlled by Apple and Google. You know when cookies go away and these new federated kind of IDs that are enabled, you know in the cloud, maybe through these interoperable exchanges kind of start to take form and get scale. It just gives, I think, a lot more freedom to you know, even the smaller brands, smaller publishers, who are you can, you can their way out trying 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.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I agree, and you mentioned I'm glad you mentioned consumers, dustin, because that's really like that's the point, right? I mean we think of our clients and we think of ourselves and our business. We, you know, we work to put our clients first in doing that, because, rightfully, so right, but our clients are thinking about those consumers. The consumers are who matter. That's who matters. I mean, we're all consumers ourselves. The businesses we run ultimately exist because people are out there consuming. You know, whether it's second or third hand for providers or B2B like us, but I mean, you know they're out there the ones consuming. And, if you, there's a lot of really good work out there in the ecosystem in terms of, like, evolving consumer behaviors and expectations. And if you tap into and I like to, I like to from time to time, you know, tap into that and kind of use it as a frame of reference for the work that we do and that really kind of. You know we talked earlier about the technology, right, consumer expectation is really kind of the whole point of the technology, like the cloud-based technology we're talking about and all this interoperability, because, you know, consumers have a couple of really key expectations these days. One is timing. They expect everything right time. And I say right time, right Because I don't always want, like you, to pound me with instantaneous real time. You know, feedback or messaging or whatever it outreach, whatever it is right, but when I want it, I want it. I want it at the right time, right. So an ecosystem, a marketing ecosystem, has to be responsive to that.
Speaker 4:I also consumers also want brands to engage with them in context of their whole lives. They don't want that brand to sort of get on a thread with them that only considers the brand's interests in selling that person more things. Or maybe you know, hey, I'll consider your needs as a consumer in context of what I sell. You know 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.
Speaker 4: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're 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, right, so that kind of brings it all back together. That's the consumer and their expectations. That's the point, right, that's the point of all this.
Speaker 2:Man, can that just? I'll just call that out. I was Jason's mic drop moment. I mean I don't know that we actually need to say anything after that. Well said, jason. Now 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?
Speaker 4:Boy, a single biggest change. All right, I'm taking it as a single biggest change because we've just talked about a ton of change right in the aggregate here today, like all day so all this hour. So I would say the biggest change in marketing solutions I think we're going through right now. I think this move because if you think about like there've been I've seen in our careers we've seen three sort of major shifts under PIN, by technology. You've had sort of mainframe.
Speaker 4:Way back in the day, right 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 a sort of encapsulated solution-driven ecosystem to a truly distributed and integrated ecosystem, I think it changes everything about how all of this work in the biggest ways I've seen in my career.
Speaker 2:Nice. So infrastructure that's 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.
Speaker 4:I think the pace of this transformation. I think that's the biggest unknown. I'll qualify that. I think I 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 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 come together with that. I think that's the biggest. There's so much right, 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.
Speaker 3:All right, and so then a third final question here on the Lightning Round. It takes a lot of effort to teach an old dog new tricks 168 dog years, technology years here. How do you shake off the stress of a workday? Because so much change generates stress.
Speaker 4:All right. Well, so yeah, it's actually at least on a daily basis. I mean, we all need our good vacations and getaways or whatever it is, everyone's all right, but I think on a daily basis it's a fairly simple formula for me. I am not getting any younger, to the point well made many times in this podcast, so a good workout is increasingly important. I love to get a good workout at the end of the day and sweat a little bit and 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, nice poor bourbon and a good cigar. Other things that sort of get me back to a good place.
Speaker 3:A place of zen. All right, that's awesome. So a wrap up question what has you most excited about?
Speaker 4:the next 12 months.
Speaker 3:So not the five year view, and just like literally next 12 months. What is energizing you?
Speaker 4:What's energizing me now is converging the capability set that we offer our clients to accomplish all these things we're talking about.
Speaker 4:I see the evolution in our strategic partnerships that we have with the sales forces and the adobes and the snowflakes and the Amazon, and it just, you know, go down the least.
Speaker 4: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.
Speaker 4:All of that is going to come together and what Axiom is able to go offer its clients and 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 also a service consumer. So the fact that we're at the point where I can sort of see that we're going to do it right and we're you know, obviously there's a lot of work to get there from point A to point B, but the effect that I can see, that that excites me and that you know it gets me out of bed each morning. Right, it gives me something to look forward to.
Speaker 2: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 our listeners did the same for our listeners. You can find all of our real identity podcast episodes at axiomcom, slash, real talk or find us on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you.