The heart, the soul, the truest pulse of marketing is vaporizing because our profession is turning into a glorified IT function. Marketing strategy is being derived from data scientists, SEO gurus, and statisticians doing A/B testing in a back room somewhere.

We are implementing strategies and tactics based on what statistically is supposed to work, instead of what customers really want.

The answer might reside in the answer to a simple question: What do our customers love?

PCMag: Where do you think AI and ML will take MA over the next five years? What new features and opportunities will they give marketers?

Michelle Huff of Act-On: ML will act as marketers' co-pilot in their decision making and campaign execution process. AI will influence when, what, and where to engage with buyers and customers, predetermined by ML that can consume, digest, and compute mounds of data and turn it into actionable triggers and marketing activities. Essentially being able to predict and tailor outreach down to the best message, at the perfect time, and across the ideal communication channel.

AI will build on the foundation MA provides—a centralized engine for tracking, scoring, measuring, connecting, and learning from interactions with prospects and customers—and, ultimately, will give its users a way to anticipate and adapt engagement to their buyers' behaviors and actions.

"Lesson 1: Technology makes a great servant, but a lousy master.

Lesson 2: Sometimes, too much really is “too much”. 

Lesson 3: Ease of use is a crucial factor. 

Lesson 4: Patience is an essential virtue. 

Lesson 5: Reality seldom matches the promise. 

Lesson 6: Beware the shiny new object."

1. Custom APIs

2. PR Tech

3. Programmatic Advertising

4. Marketing Automation Platforms

5. Offline Tracking

6. Data Analysis

7. Celebrity Endorsement Model Going Micro

8. Conversational Interfaces

9. The Science Of Automation

10. Social Media Artificial Intelligence

11. Peer-To-Peer Marketing Outlets

12. Voice Agents

13. Creative Optimization Tech

14. Account-Based Marketing

15. The Human Side Of Martech

The obvious shift in the digital landscape reveals that marketing technology is more than a trend, and clarifies the need for a leader who can unify departments.

• Big data integration
• Customer engagement software
• Digital marketing and e-commerce
• Efficient management of technology

Key Technology Spending In Marketing:

• Marketing and analytics software (SaaS): 24.4 per cent
• Infrastructure (hosted/cloud servers, network storage): 28 per cent
• IT Cross-charges: 21.3 per cent
• External services for development, implementation, and integration of marketing applications: 25.2 per cent
• Other: 1 per cent

Have wrestled with this challenge for 7 years, I’ve sketched dozens ideas in a notebook. Almost all of them have been crap. But there’s one that I’ve been chewing on for the past year that seems promising, so I thought I’d finally share a draft of it — The 6 C’s Model for Organizing Marketing Technology shown above.

It organizes marketing technologies into 6 domains that just happen to all start with the letter C (which was a wonderful stroke of serendipity, I swear):

• Customers — all the data about customers/prosects in our universe
• Content — all the content we produce and distribute in all channels
• Community — interactions with customers as a group, e.g., social media
• Commerce — capabilities to directly sell our products and services
• CORE — our product/service and campaigns/data that cross all of marketing
• Collaboration — the tools we use for collaborating inside marketing

I’ve mapped common “categories” of martech products (e.g., the alphabet soup of CMS, DAM, CRM, CDP, ABM, MDM, SEO, etc.) into these six domains to illustrate how I see these as clusters of related technologies. But it’s important to emphasize that what really gives meaning to these domains is the shared practices and organizational capabilities that tend to blossom within each of them.

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Seven percent use more than 20 marketing technologies

A Martech Fred has the sophisticated platforms and enjoys talking about their tech stack, but struggle to fully apply that technology. They have a marketing automation platform they still use like a $49 per month batch and blast email tool. They have a powerful CMS they use to deliver a static web experience or advanced analytics technology they use to pull the same reports available from a free solution. So how do we fight Fredness?

• Writing the check is only the beginning  
• Commit to training 
• Know it won’t happen overnight 

Multichannel campaign optimization using combinatorial multi-armed bandit experimentation is a powerful, though nascent, alternative to traditional campaign attribution approaches for maximizing marketing ROI. Although performing true multichannel optimization requires significant investment and maturity in data, marketing automation technology and organizational alignment, it’s possible to get started in a more limited fashion by taking an optimization-driven approach in existing channels, and growing from there.

Fortunately there are a few companies which are starting to offer solutions for optimization-driven marketing and can start to help you down this path:

• Amplero Digital campaign intelligence & optimization platform based on predictive analytics & machine learning.
• Optimove Multichannel campaign automation solution, combining predictive modeling, hypertargeting and optimization
• Kahuna Mobile-focused marketing automation & optimization solution
• IgnitionOne Digital marketing platform featuring score-based message optimization; ability to activate across multiple channels
• BrightFunnel Marketing analytics platform focusing on attribution modeling
• ConversionLogic Cross-channel marketing attribution analytics platform, using a proprietary ML-based approach

Across a survey of more than 200 US marketers, Gartner found basic capabilities are now in widespread use, such as Web analytics, Web content management and email marketing platforms. Just 20 per cent of marketers surveyed aren’t currently using these solutions, and about 60 per cent are fully deployed. Interestingly, email marketing platforms had the highest penetration rate in retail (83 per cent).

Intermediate capabilities reflected more specific variations around the marketing approach. As an example, Gartner highlighted digital marketing analytics, lead management and multi-channel campaign management platforms. Less than half of marketers are currently using this trio of solutions, but more than 70 per cent are committed to deployments.


Less prevalent are advanced capabilities, but they’re rapidly being adopted. This list includes multi-touch attribution (fully deployed by 21 per cent of respondents), dynamic creative optimisation (31 per cent), A/B testing (33 per cent), and tag management systems (33 per cent). In addition, nearly one-fifth of marketers have plans to roll out personalisation, customer data or mobile marketing analytics platforms in the next two years.

• Fragmented landscape ripe for consolidation. Adobe, Google, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce have the highest number of installations in place across nearly a quarter of the categories of martech in the survey. However, some categories — mobile marketing analytics, data visualization, SEM/SEO tools, ad verification services, and retargeting — have no reported deployments completed or underway from the big five. 
• Marketers are moving quickly from the basics to sophisticated tools. More than half of the respondents have deployed the martech staples — web analytics, web content management and email marketing top the list followed by survey/customer insight tools, data management platforms and content marketing platforms not far behind. 
• Adtech and martech converge in the most advanced organisations. Advanced marketers use more specialised technologies that deliver improved insights and business results through increased data use.

The presentation covers an update on the ad tech and mar tech sectors, the growth in M&A activity, and the top five digital advertising and marketing trends.

The majority of marketers (72%) feel that the marketing technology landscape is changing either “rapidly” or at “light speed” — which is evident from the explosive growth we’ve seen in that landscape graphic over the past 5 years.

In contrast, the majority of marketers (67%) say that their company’s own use of marketing technology is evolving only “slightly” or “steadily” — or “not at all.”

This is Martec’s Law: technology is changing faster than organizations.

And while you might predict that the marketing technology landscape is bound to settle down soon, keep in mind that we’re now on the cusp on an explosion of new innovations in virtual reality, augmented reality, the Internet of Things, conversational interfaces, robotics, artificial intelligence, and so on. The next three years are likely to see more technological change than the last three. (Sorry.)

The second annual State of Marketing Technology Report from Walker Sands indicates that marketers are tackling martech complexity head on. With both budgets and attitudes toward companies’ adoption of martech increasing, the vast majority of marketers are embracing customized martech suites comprised of best-of-breed solutions rather than single-vendor suites, indicating an eagerness to choose the technologies best suited to their needs and an enormous opportunity for martech vendors.

Marketer's have allocated 12% of company revenue to the marketing expense budget to last year’s 11%.

CMOs have taken on responsibility for aspects of sales, IT and customer experience functions in 30% or more organizations.

27% of the marketing expense budget is now allocated to technology, or 3.24% of revenue in 2016 vs. CIO’s tech budget of 3.4% of revenue.

We’re also seeing a strong correlation between a CMO’s willingness to share in the risk and the size of the budget they’re able to command. 

While the majority of marketing leaders expect budget increases again next year, the percentage of marketers bracing for a cut has grown nearly 5X from this time two years ago.