I had a conversation several weeks ago with a large data company, discussing behavior based personalization. The VP of Marketing heard me out for a few minutes, and then said “Woah, wait a minute. So it’s personalization? I already have that.”
So I said “Oh, how’s that going? What are you seeing?”
And he said, “Well, we haven’t turned it on yet.”
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Steve and I spent time together recently at both a Red Sox game but more importantly, at MarTech East in Boston. The shift in conversation was wildly fascinating: the focus seemed to be personalization, privacy, and security.
I thought I’d just capture a few thoughts on MarTech East 2019. This summary isn’t representative of the conference, it’s representative of my experience at the conference.
This was my first MarTech East. It was an excellent conference for practitioners of marketing technology arts. Kudos to Scott Brinker and the Third Door Media team. The following are my key takeaways from the conversations that I had with presenters, attendees, and vendors.
I was at the Marketing Analytics Summit a few weeks back, and talked to a lot of people who felt that:
The eternal struggle for marketers seems to be connecting marketing actions to business results. But this can’t be a reason to give up on analytics.
Last week I was asked what the biggest opportunities and gaps are in the MarTech stack. It’s an interesting question when one considers all the technology that’s available in the market. While I could opine on features and functions that I’d like to see, what really bugs me is the fact that so much of the overarching promise of marketing technology remains unfulfilled.
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As summer hits its hot, vacation-filled days the work world slows down for a minute. In these slower moments, there’s a chance to reflect on the speed of business.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had 147 conversations with B2B marketing leaders. These aren’t sales calls. I’m not pitching anything. They’re conversations about the issues that are top of mind for these professionals. I guide these discussions with questions around areas we’re interested in, but the main goal is to get a sense of the market. It turns out that personalization is a top of mind issue.
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Is martech marketing? Can you market without it? Do mature marketing organizations need to be including martech?
In a recent blog post we mentioned that 67% of B2B companies doing personalization are either entirely or mostly using manual processes for content personalization. That’s an enormous amount of people engaging in manual processes instead of automation. Why does this happen?
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“Come on. All this AI stuff, around marketing and sales, that’s all just hype, right? That’s not a real thing that matters. Maybe it’ll matter someday. But it doesn’t yet matter today.”
That’s a question I got recently, and it got Steve Zakur and I wondering where we are on the hype curve. Is it really just all hype? Maybe not — platform companies are snapping up data scientists the way early internet companies snapped up web developers.