I had a conversation a while back 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.”
There’s an old joke about two guys walking through the woods. All of a sudden they see a bear, and the bear starts moving towards them. The first guy sits down, pulls a pair of running shoes out of his backpack and slides them on. The second guy says, “What are you doing? You’re not going to outrun that bear.” And the first guy says, “I don’t have to outrun that bear. I just have to outrun you.”
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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.
In high stakes competitive chess, there’s a gaming style called “Freestyle” which is just as “ditch-the-rulebook” as it sounds. The best players are called “centaurs” and although these particular centaurs aren’t half-human/half-horse, their makeup runs along the same logic.
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 while back, and I remember talking to a lot of people who felt that:
The eternal struggle for B2B marketers seems to be connecting marketing actions to business results. But this can’t be a reason to give up on marketing 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.
Ask a business executive and they’ll tell you that everything they do is for their customers. Which is all well and good, but how many B2B companies are really paying attention to the changes in what customers want?
Anyone who has kept up with me on just about any social media platforms knows I’m all about music, and my guilty pleasure – always – would be investing in a new guitar. Or, y’know, guitars. More is better. And if I were to visit a music store that collected data on visitors, they’d know I like a certain make of guitar (I do) and that, for example, I bought two last year and have only bought one so far this year. Maybe, the bright salesperson thinks, “this guy needs need another axe.”