Substance Jeremy Burton 1080p

Today, I'm speaking with Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer for EMC. Please join us on this episode of Substance. Well, Jeremy, thanks for being on here. I've really been looking forward to this and looking forward to speaking with you. You came as part of a recommendation from Jonathan Becker.

Ah. Good. Good. No, great to be here. Thanks for the invite. It's close by, so convenient as well.

Good. Good. Well, let's just dive right in. You are the CMO of EMC, a $2 billion company.

$20 billion.

Sorry. Yes. The zero makes an incredible impact.

Makes a difference. Yeah. My marketing budget would be 1/10 the size.

Right. Right. So tell me a little bit about, just before we dive into you, The CMO. Tell me a little bit about you, the person. Your family, your life. What do you do in your spare time?

I think, like most people in this area, I'm an import, from the UK originally. The accent is still there, although I think over the years it's become a blend. But I came out of the UK.

How long here?

Almost 20 years.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And I was with Oracle in the UK. Moved out to California, the Emerald Towers, and was at Oracle for 10 years. And I actually started off in an engineering job and had been in and out of product management, running engineering teams. And at Oracle, Larry, back in the day, he didn't like marketing people very much. And so, he used to take people out of engineering and put them in marketing. to convince himself that he was actually not talking to a marketing person. So very common back in the day. All the marketing guys— my boss at the time, Marc Jarvis, another guy who came out of engineering. And I ended up running probably about a third of marketing at Oracle.

So it worked.

It worked. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know anything about marketing when I got into it. But the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it. And yeah, I actually enjoyed maybe talking about the products and explaining the products. much more than building them. And I went off from Oracle when I figured my boss wasn't going anywhere. And I really wanted to run a marketing team. I went down to Veritas. So that was fun. And we were acquired by Symantec. I made a move out of marketing to go run a business unit there. I ran the backup business and then the security business at Symantec. And then I had a go at running a company. for 3 years, and then I've come back around to EMC to do marketing. So I've kind of dabbled in marketing, out of marketing, in marketing again.

Wow, you sound very eclectic and like you have had a full-bodied life in your various jobs. Now, you have a family and kids?

Yeah.

How do you fit all that in?

Yeah, I've got 4 kids and a wife. Wow. I should point out. That's important. Forgive me if I didn't mention my wife.

Very important.

And look, I think number one, you know, look, she's amazing. She makes it work. Work is insanely busy. But, you know, you've got to draw certain boundaries in any job that you do, you know. And for me, at least, like Saturdays, even though I'm old now, I still like to play soccer on a Saturday. And Saturday has always been like a holy day almost for me because it's the day you relax, play sport, hang with the kids. And no matter where I am in the world, I always try and get back. for the weekend. And I could count on one hand over the number of years how many times I've been away at the weekend. Wow. So yeah, you draw some boundaries. I still coach the kids' soccer team. Now I can't play anymore, too fat and too slow. I get down there and coach the kids. So, you know, keeping those connections, I think, keeps you sane, gives you context, allows me to clear my head from work. And actually, sometimes dealing with the 10-year-old soccer team is good practice for work.

Certainly some management decisions need to be made there. Absolutely, yeah. Now, do you involve your family in the business, or do you keep things separate?

Yeah, in fact, I've tried to blend. I spend so much time at work, I figured the best way to make this work is to try and include my wife whenever I can. But I also have had the kids in a couple of work-related videos or launches. And my eldest, Edward, who's 13, when he was 10, I think, we had him as a part of one of our product launches doing the demo, because the product was pretty— it was an easy-to-use— it was a new, easy-to-use product. And, you know, EMC, for the folks that don't know, I mean, by and large we make storage arrays. I mean, that's our main product line. Storage arrays, not that interesting. Demoing a storage array, not that interesting. But, you know, a new array that's easy to manage, we figured, hey, can you manage it with a 5th grader? And at the time I thought, well, I don't have a 5th grader, but I have a 4th grader. And so I recruited Edward to do this demo of our new storage array, and he was managing it on an iPad. He went and replaced a drive and I mean, I don't know who was more worried about it, him or me, because you've got your 10-year-old son there on stage in front of 500 people doing a demo, and you just hope it doesn't go wrong. It might destroy him for life. But no, he got through it. We did it in New York. He got on the plane. We flew to Europe. We got in at 3 AM. We got up at 7. We did it again in London at 10, and then we went off to Paris and did it again at the sales kickoff. Wow. So it was just— It was such an awesome experience to include him in something like that. And as I said, I hope, I don't know, maybe he'll follow in the footsteps in years to come.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. I'm sure that left an impression on his mind. And too, I think oftentimes we try to maybe disclude our children in what we're doing because we're trying to, but this is, especially in this time and age, I think everything's kind of inclusive. We're all seeing everything, every message, everything that we're doing.

And in marketing, I think in marketing in particular, It's not like an engineering job or technical support. We get to do fun stuff. We, you know, we have a lot of crap to deal with, but we get to do fun stuff as well. And, you know, my little guy Henry, I did this show called Area 51 at SeaWorld.

That's my son's name as well.

It is? Well, great name. See, I've got this lineage of kings, right? I've got an Edward, a Henry, and a William.

Nice. And I have an Emerson.

You do? So now we're complete. But Henry, he helped out with the show in Vegas, which was— we called it Area 51. It was all the secret stuff we were doing, and he was Agent H. And he didn't do much, but he dressed up in his black suit. He was on for the beginning of the show, and in his mind at least, I mean, he was part of it. And as I said, in marketing we do these fun things. I think it's a real crime not to include particularly your kids, and it can be very disarming as well. You know, people— Like, I think, to see something human. And I think the world we're moving into as well, there's a big move away from kind of the superficial to authenticity, which I think is the whole blogging and social movement.

Right. Yeah, that's actually something that I was speaking at yesterday at Oracle about how the movement is moving away from a business-to-business or a business-to-consumer and now to a human-to-human perspective. And kind of tagging on to what you're saying or talking about that a little bit, You know, it's interesting that you included your son in a message about something that really is kind of complex when you think about data and how it's being stored, into something that's so simple and easy to use. I mean, that's really— data right now is so complex when you think about structured versus unstructured. How do you deal with all this?

Yeah, insight— you know, IT systems are complex, but the insight derived has got to be simple. the craze right now around big data. Having more data is not necessarily good if you can't derive an insight that business people can act on. And business people in general have got the mild case of ADD, don't have great attention spans. And if the data is not kind of clear and actionable, you might as well not have it. So I think the real skill these days is not kind of collecting the data. It's having the expertise to be able to distill the data to a place that, A, people understand it, and, B, it's actionable. And I think the reason why folks like Tableau and a lot of the visualization companies are doing well is because they really can stratify masses of data into something that a business person would understand and take action on. And we're trying to include more of that in the marketing job as well. We've talked for years about being— running reports and ROI and being data aware. And I think marketing really— or I believe we've got to get to a point where we're truly data-driven. We're looking at the data and we're not just saying, hmm, that's good, let me do the same things I did last year and see if I can do better. It's like, no, no, let's look at the data and start doing more of the activities that we feel are driving demand. And stuff that we've been doing for years that we do, I don't know, for religious reasons or whatever, Mm-hmm. Let's not do it anymore. And I just feel like the way marketing budgets go, the way I think CMOs have been held more accountable, you can't afford not in future to be driven by the data.

So how do you run your organization? How do you manage this on your level? It's always the cobbler's kids, right? You're trying to do the same thing for yourself as you're trying to do for your customers. this kind of formality of data at EMC?

Yeah, we've come a long way the last 3 or 4 years. I've been at EMC 3 or 4 years, and we had a big overhaul of pretty much every system that was behind marketing, because I was a big believer that, look, if we don't have the right systems in place and we don't have good data, we can't drive the organization to the right endpoint. So we've done a major overhaul, and first base is, you know, tracking spend, which is You got to have it, but it's the least interesting part, I think, of data within marketing. There's then almost the nirvana: Can we track our spend to a lead, an opportunity, a deal? I've seen that movie multiple times in many companies, and you can absolutely track a dollar spent through the pipeline. But you know, you kind of lose it when it goes over to the sales team because they don't religiously track everything the way. you'd like them to track it. And as a marketer, you don't really have a whole lot of control over that. But what I've targeted my efforts more to these days is we actually created something called a marketing science lab. Hmm. And the idea was that instead of looking at what happened in the past and based on that, you know, course correcting in future, could we look at the unstructured data in the online community, the Jive community? Could we look at everything from who attended education classes to what our support calls were to what's in our web logs? And could we start to build propensity models? Could we start to market to people who wanted to be marketed to? Could we start to market to people who had a propensity to respond to certain things? I mean, there was one the other day, you know, with our user conference EMC World, and we're thinking, hey, you know, education is a big draw. Technical people want technical education. Let's do a marketing campaign telling folks that they can get certified at the show. Massive discounts. It's a real reason to come to the show. But then, you know, the data science— the marketing science guys were saying, well, hey, rather than doing that, why don't we look at the people who were certified last year and let's build a model for who are the best targets for this year. So based on the background of who got certified last year, can we target a population of people that we believe would have the propensity to want to be certified? So we're going to send out, you know, less outbound to fewer people, but we should see massively higher response rates because— Mm-hmm. It's based off a model that we know works in the past. So some of these things are not crazy difficult to do, but unless— I created a dedicated team to do it, because otherwise it wouldn't have got done.

Mm-hmm. The same— you can kind of say that the same thing applies even to this social business era. I mean, not everybody wants to be on social. Right. Not everyone wants to be social. You know, there's introverts, extroverts. You could kind of discern where, you know, they kind of fit into this whole business model. And when you look at a company at the size of yours, how do you get everyone to be social? What's your thinking on that?

Yeah, you know, people adopt at their own rate and pace. And I think that there's certainly a job of education within the company and letting people know what's out there. One of the things I've tried to do as well over the last few years is we've had a pretty aggressive college recruiting scheme. We have a program we call MDP, Marketing Development Program. And the idea is, look, we're going to bring 20 or 30 grads in every year. religiously. And we know that with those guys, we get the social gene for free. They don't need training. They grew up with it. And that over a number— think about that over 3, 4, 5 years, you end up with 100, 150 folks under the age of maybe 27 in the organization. That could be, at this point, maybe 20% of my total org. And so that's going to have a profound impact on the culture, because the way they want to communicate is using social. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, if you've got a bunch of kids in your organization out of college, and you as a manager want to relate to them, interact with them, they're going to force you onto Twitter at some point. It's just a matter of time. So I'm a big believer that we've got to put the right DNA in place. And then also, we do have a social team who can assist folks. Again, I've never quite believed in the drag people kicking and screaming to social. And I've never believed in the kind of corporate put-up. Oh, I'll write your blog for you. That's not what the world is about. Do your own tweets. Blog your own blog. If you don't want to blog, don't blog. But don't have someone else do it for you. Because again, I think that the nice thing about this social world is you can interact directly with the people. And I'm a big soccer fan, and I follow a bunch of the Premier League soccer players. And you can get to see who— Rio Ferdinand, and Gary Lineker, and all the guys from my era, they're all on there. And it's them. And as a fan, you would never have that access in the past. And I feel the same in the workplace, right? If I don't do my own tweets, I mean, who am I kidding? The people in the org, they want to interact with me. And so I think the change has got to come from within. Mm-hmm. And if the kids we're bringing in can help drive that change, more power to them.

I couldn't agree more. That is exactly what I think a lot of executives, though, struggle with, how to be communicative, not only internally, but also externally, in both ways. And we've been given the tools to be able to do it now. It's just a part of the human psyche of whether we want to take part in this.

You're right. We were all brought up, though, with— risks, communications, what's the downside, what's the exposure if you say the wrong thing, look at the downside. Yeah. The reason why I think this new world feels so threatening often to folks who didn't grow up with it is it goes against a lot of the things we were probably taught or learned from others about communicating. It's got to be managed, you got to say the right thing, you got to not say the wrong thing. But I actually think what's overtaken now is if you never say the wrong thing from time to time, and, you know, I do, but then there's no authenticity there. People don't relate. Right. And I said back on the market—

It's like if you were to throw a swear word right out randomly right now, that would be a random thing you'd never hear from Jeremy, right?

Yeah. Yeah. You would never do it in a press interview. But the thing—

I was trying.

You were fishing there for a bit. Well, you know, online people will say things that they won't I wouldn't say speaking. And I think also as well, the reason for that is on Twitter, I've got a bunch of people that are friends, personal friends, as well as work friends.

Sure.

My work life and my personal life, I try to separate them on Facebook. On Twitter, given the way it's set up, there is no separation. Sure. I'm going to respond to my brother and rip on him, and everybody's going to see it. But I think the folks who— are themselves at work and not at work, I actually feel like those make the best kind of leaders anyway. You can't be your work self and your home self and be 2 different people.

Right, right. I couldn't agree more. Just because we only have a couple more minutes left, I wanted to ask you, just as you're looking forward into the future as one of the leaders in one of the biggest organizations globally, really, what challenges you? What do you wake up in the morning and say, man, I wish I could solve this one thing? What would that be?

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of this. It could be a 20-minute conversation in itself. But quickly, I think I always worry about driving change in the organization. As we get bigger, how do you make an organization of 60,000 people in 100 different countries— how do you leverage that? Get it pointed in one direction so that you can, you know, make an impact. And so solving problems of scale is what really gets me. You know, by trade I'm an engineer, and so that's a complex problem. And what gets me going is, man, if you can, if you can draw on the right assets in the, in, in the business there and, and point them at something and get rallied behind it, man, you can make big progress really, really quickly. And, you know, I spend most of my time on do we have the right kind of people that can adapt, that can change, that can rally? Um, I, I believe most people could learn like marketing skills, for example. We've got some great marketers, but the, the adaptability, the, uh, rallying the team, uh, the people who are flexible enough to, to stay with the org as it changes, you know, these, these 10-year org structures and, uh, institutionalized parts of the business The people who have lived off of that, they're not going to be long for the corporate world because businesses are having to readjust. And so getting folks that are adaptable and can work in these kind of matrixed organizations and rally the team towards a couple of goals, I mean, that's what kind of keeps me awake at night most of the time.

Well, it sounds like a great goal, and I certainly wish you luck. You've obviously, you know, had a lot of success in and what you've done, and I'm looking forward to seeing more from you in the future and seeing what more EMC can produce.

Good.

So I appreciate you being on the show, and hopefully we get to do this again soon.

Yeah, thanks for the invite.

Yeah, you got it. Cheers.

Thanks.